The forthcoming General Election takes place in the context of multiple crises, such as rising prices, rising rents, and homelessness. The health system is operating beyond all capacity, with excessive waiting times for GP appointments, in A&E departments, over-crowded hospitals, and people waiting years to be referred to a specialist. […]
Tag: Capitalism
Mental health and alienation under capitalism
The discourse around mental health has long been dominated by the psy disciplines, particularly psychiatry which has been influential in determining our understanding of “mental illness”. To do so it relies on the DSM – The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM is used to diagnose and […]
Migration
Migration has become an issue in Irish politics, although the extent to which it influences voting preference is moot. Much of the discourse around migration consists of liberals condemning working class communities for questioning the effects of migration on their communities, the racist right blaming migrants for the social and […]
Foreign investment, the productive forces and Ireland
Our understanding of foreign direct investment (FDI) is heavily influenced by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, where FDI is seen as the export of capital from the advanced capitalist core, led by monopolists, to peripheral countries. The motive behind this is clear: to secure higher rates of surplus value no longer […]
Book Review – Techno Feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis
The M-C-C’-M’ circuit means Money (M) which is exchanged for Commodities (C) – including labor power which also becomes a commodity in a capitalist society – involved in the production process to produce a value-added commodity (C’) which is sold for more Money (M’), and thus the accumulation of capital […]
Lord Alderdice and the North
Two rival positions are circulating regarding the British and the North. The first is the British have no interest in maintaining the North. Lord Alderdice recently revived this argument in an interview online, claiming the Irish government, not the British, block unity. The second is that the British want to […]
Capitalism’s “good name” is being damaged!
The Tory Housing Secretary Michael Gove has said that Kingspan Insulation in Cavan is “giving capitalism a bad name.” (Irish News, Sat 20th January 2024). Really! He went on to say that Kingspan is trying to “minimise their involvement” in regards to their insulation materials being used in the cladding […]
Footsteps of Fascism
“It will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed”: these are the words of Joseph Goebbels, the man in charge of propaganda in Nazi Germany. Nazis came to power democratically through elections and then subverted […]
2024 – A Year for Change
Make the new year a year of resistance of hope and of solidarity. Capitalism is dragging human development backwards. The appalling videos and images of death and suffering coming out of Palestine, in particular from Gaza and the West Bank, have shocked billions of people across the world. Our TV […]
Alienation in Marxist theory
CPI released a statement condemning the Dublin riots which contained the word “alienation”. How is alienation connected to the riots? Alienation is a concept put forward by Hegel, and was also mentioned by William Thompson who according to James Connolly was the first Irish socialist. Alienation literally means separation, and […]
Big Tech Redundancies
From the end of 2022 to the middle of 2023, Big Tech employers laid off 300,000 workers globally. Between January and May 2023 alone, there were approximately 2,300 redundancies in the Irish tech sector, including at companies like Google, Meta (Facebook), Stripe, Salesforce, Microsoft, X (formerly Twitter) and Zendesk. For […]
A Socialist Programme For Change
In notebook no. 4 from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, “The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis”, Marxist economists, E. Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran state that the present state of capitalism can best be described as a Great Depression starting in 2008. They point out that […]
Climate, Degrowth and Ardnacrusha
In a speech delivered in November 1920, Lenin exclaimed the famous line: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” In the sentences that followed, Lenin goes on to explain how such a plan has to be long-term, lasting at least a decade, with an army of […]
On Democracy
The word “democracy” comes from Greek and means “rule of the common people”. We are told that we in the Western world are democratic. But it is hard to see choices being given to the workers with their input as the rule of the common people, or the common people […]
Dublin Riots
In its recent statement, the Communist Party of Ireland condemned in the strongest possible manner the Dublin riots and extended its deepest sympathies and well wishes to the victims and families of the stabbing and the subsequent violence that erupted on the 23rd of November. However, the CPI also correctly […]
International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
On this International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the CPI stands in unwavering solidarity with the women and children of Gaza, who courageously endure the harrowing reality of state-orchestrated oppression. Palestinian women find themselves at the forefront of a relentless genocide. They witness the very people they […]