Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Ireland’s mental health crisis was already in a bad way before covid; now it’s getting even worse. Covid has not caused the crisis, it has only made it even more serious.
As quarantine conditions worsen, it’s becoming more apparent that isolation and alienation are a serious danger to human beings. Yet alienation is a central component of capitalism as a system.
At the end of 2020 the water “futures” of California, the largest state in the United States in population and economy, were floated on Wall Street for the first time, under the banner of Nasdaq Veles California Water Index.1 It was the first flotation of its kind, offering potential investors the opportunity to hedge against the future availability of water in California: in simple terms, to get rich from the scarcity of the most important substance for all human, animal and plant life to survive.
You don’t need to have an ideological position to recognise that capitalism is rotten to the core. It is a massive lie from start to finish; but, like any lie that is repeated time and time again, the lies become “truth.”
Whether you are in the middle of a supermarket or the middle of a war, you are surrounded by a cushion of lies, designed to both confuse you and comfort you and always aimed to make you believe that you have no power.
As 2020 comes to an end—a year that many would like to forget— sadly, despite the world pandemic, there is no good will from global capitalism towards the peoples of the global south in their battle against covid-19.
The TRIPS Council of the World Trade Organization, which deals with intellectual property rights, debated a proposal tabled by India and South Africa, supported by Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Kenya,
Over recent years a discernible pattern has been emerging in many of those countries that the BBC likes to describe as “parliamentary democracies.” Long-established precedents are being flouted by elected power-brokers in the leading capitalist states. While those who govern on behalf of capitalism have never been reluctant to subvert […]
About 66,500 companies received a total of €2. 9 billion from the now-expired temporary wage subsidy scheme. The state paid out €2.9 billion of public money to mostly private companies to pay the wages of 664,000 employees; and that extraordinary news made the headlines for about eighteen hours. After that […]
A central goal of socialism is to transition into an economy without commodity production for profit. A socialist economy would co-operatively create goods and services for their use values rather than their exchange values, with production planned by the producers themselves. The question that we want to ask readers to […]
The economist John Smith of the University of Sheffield caused a lot of debate with his recent article “Why coronavirus could spark a capitalist supernova,” in which he offered a powerful rejection of mainstream and Keynesian analysis of the bond market. For years now, “core” capitalist economies have been suffering […]
HIS QUESTION Is often posed to those who even dare suggest the possibility of a socialist future.
In today’s marketised business world we’ve been conditioned into nihilism, a belief in Man’s inherent evil, and to expect nothing more than what we get; it’s essentially Christianity without Heaven at the end. “Socialism” and “revolution” are merely idealistic dreams from the past. But the cynics do ask a fair question: When will the working class take ownership of the state and society?
WHATEVER WAY one looks at it, the reality is that this crisis, and its four forms— environmental, health, economic, and political—will prove to be worse than 2008. The fact that China’s economy has slowed down, for the first time in decades, only shows that this crisis will be a global affair, rather than a Western financial crisis, as happened in 2008. The 2020 crash will be a
The capitalist mode of destruction – Eoghan O’NeillDownload The great global crises (they come in threes) On Thursday 12 March many of us watched Leo Varadkar announce (in Washington) “the closure of schools, pre-schools and further and higher education settings for a period until 29 March 2020, to support efforts […]
Dictatorship: Who decides? – Seán Ó MaoltuileDownload The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Karl Marx (1845) Once from the pulpit, now from the mass media, the elite of society have always sought to ingrain within us an acceptance of our own subjugation. The […]
The origins of the climate crisis – Joe FlemingDownload Out of the green fields of southern England, in the same century in which Shakespeare penned his pastoral comedies and the Tudors initiated a new phase of Ireland’s conquest, a novel form of economics arose. A terrible force, only nascent, long […]
It’s hard not to believe the end is nigh when the buying and selling of blood turns out to be one of America’s booming industries. The life-saving act of blood donation in Ireland operates on a voluntary basis, besides the odd celebratory pin, and people are expected to give out […]
Over the past two months we’ve been reminded constantly about the supposed health of our economy. Unfortunately, things are not as healthy as cherry-picked statistics might suggest—as anybody looking for a hospital bed or a home can clearly see. We’re highly vulnerable as a small, open economy to the vagaries […]
THIS IS OUR democracy. It boils down to political parties arguing over semantics on policy without having any real substantive choice on policies. I see, hear and read about the hopes of many people for a political change, where many believe that we are on the precipice of a fundamental change in the political landscape, not seen since the days of the Irish Revolution.