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The debate on socialist strategy and the Irish Left – Part 3
“Marxists see the state as a form of class rule. It is not a free floating entity above the messy reality of class conflict but rather a tool for suppressing the exploited, that is, an organisational...
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The debate on socialist strategy and the Irish Left – Part 4
As part of the Mendel-Gleason and O’Brien argument that the state is not essentially a capitalist one they state that society is more complicated than it once was. Implicitly they must be arguing...
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The debate on socialist strategy and the Irish Left – Part 6
Again and again the socialism of Mendel-Gleason and O’Brien rests not on the initiative of the workers but dependence on the state and the support of its bureaucracy – “Only a mass party with roots...
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Workers’ Cooperatives as an alternative to capitalism – 1
In October I was invited to speak at a meeting organised by the Glasgow South branch of Left Unity on the subject of workers’ cooperatives. The post below is the first part of the text on which the...
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The gap in the strategy of a Left Government
In the first part of this post on a left Government I stated that I did not believe that it was going to happen in the coming elections and also that this left a strategic gap in the perspectives of...
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Remembering the Rising part 1- the men of 1916
When British Army reinforcements arrived in Kingstown to put down the Easter Rising in 1916 many of the soldiers thought they had been sent to France and one Cockney soldier ‘wondered...
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Remembering the Rising part 4 – revolution and counter-revolution?
NGI 1236 In the last post I stated the view of the Irish establishment that the 1916 Rising was the foundational act of the formation of the current Irish State. This is not the view of many on the...
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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 10 – crises and contradictions iV
In 1921 Leon Trotsky argued that “If the further development of productive forces was conceivable within the framework of bourgeois society, then revolution would generally be impossible. But since the...
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Socialist and the elections in the North of Ireland part 1
It is often argued in parts of the Irish and British left that the Northern Ireland state is irreformable. Not in the sense that all capitalist states cannot be reformed to become instruments of...
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The 17th World Congress of the Fourth International (6) – the opposition...
Given the circumstances as set out in the opposition document, the key question for revolutionary politics would seem to be how working class political consciousness can be advanced. And the authors...
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