Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
A hundred years have passed since the death of Lenin, the name used by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov since 1901. A hundred years is not a long period in historical sense, but a lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the meantime. The Russian Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the rise […]
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 […]
The documentary Reds na hÉireann (dir. Kevin Brannigan, 2023), shown on TG4 on 24th May 2023, probably served as a bit of an eye-opener for many people whose ideas of communism and communists have been shaped by a century of relentless, hostile propaganda from the apologists and defenders of capitalism […]
Part 2 Last month I wrote an article on the importance of political theory. In that article I explained that it is not enough to read the Communist Manifesto to learn about Marxism properly but that you must examine different points of Marxism. In this article I will examine the […]
Comrade Carroll (Socialist Voice, April) provides an excellent analysis of the role of theory. However, a few points of addition. The concern with Marxism is perhaps not so much theory but science. A central claim of Marxism is that it is scientific. Characterising science is its method: the systematic study […]
The list of groups in Ireland, even today, that campaign, pressure, expose, support or oppose an endless list of issues is mind-boggling. In a lot of cases it is an industry grant-aided by the state – the so-called “third sector” of society. Community groups, social groups, pressure groups, protest movements, […]
Séamus Ó Riain was born into poverty on 2 September 1937 to Katherine Ryan in Dublin. When Katherine married Tom Ryan, Séamus was fostered out to a family called Corbally; unfortunately, he was to end up in Daingean children’s detention centre in Co. Offaly. Daingean treated the children more like […]
There have been articles in Socialist Voice recently on China and Laos. While I hope to write in the future on North Korea and Viet Nam, there are some points to make on the Asian models, especially their use of market relations in order to build socialism. It should be […]
Comrade Robert Navan’s letter in the May issue of Socialist Voice raises some interesting questions that go to the core of Marxism. It is appropriate that he raised them in the month of the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier in Germany. The agricultural question was one that […]
Over the weekend of the 12th and 13th of May the CPI and the Connolly Youth Movement celebrated the lives of two great thinkers and activists, Karl Marx and James Connolly. On Saturday the 12th Dr Stephen Nolan gave this year’s James Connolly Memorial Lecture, under the title “The Continued […]
Marx’s theories are the key to understanding the Irish housing crisis. It may seem that the situation we find ourselves in is a uniquely modern one, but nothing could be further from the truth. What has happened is a gradual shift from battles at the “point of production” (where value […]