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 […]
Tag: Capitalism
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 […]
Statement on Dublin Riots
First and foremost, the Communist Party of Ireland extends our deepest sympathies and well wishes to all the victims and their families of the horrendous stabbing and the subsequent violence in Dublin on 23rd November, and in the strongest possible terms, denounces the riots on the city centre’s streets later […]
The degrowth debate
Degrowth has arguably become the most common idea in the coverage of post-capitalist visions of the world in tackling climate change. Monthly Review dedicated an issue to degrowth, while Kohei Saito’s Degrowth Manifesto had record sales in Japan. Inevitably, degrowth is interpreted in different ways in the public conversations. In […]
Blackshirts & Reds
■ Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) In the thirty-two years since the Soviet Union was dissolved and Fukuyama’s “end of history” began, more and more young people are becoming communists. Multiple failures of capitalism—runaway rent and housing costs, and unabated climate disaster—are bringing young […]
Confronting the climate crisis without confronting capitalism
On 13 July, An Taisce hosted Kevin Anderson’s talk “A Velvet or Violent Climate Revolution: Which Will We Choose?” in the Tailors’ Hall in Dublin. Anderson was introduced as a climate scientist “telling it as it is,” a tagline reinforced by his opening slide, in which he warned the audience […]
Climate crisis
The dystopia that awaits our children, and their children The ladder has been well and truly pulled up on younger generations—and not just that, but the earth around them has been set on fire. Not everyone shares equal blame for this; and not every state shares equal blame. It is […]
Innovative activism: Learning with the people
To my eternal embarrassment, it’s only in very recent times that I realised that, in the scale of human existence, capitalism was actually a very young system of living—or existing. For some reason, I never thought to see it in terms of age. It would seem obvious now, but it […]