The Party and the Ballot Box

The role of elections in socialist strategy

The Legacy of the Republican Congress

In 1934, in the shadow of a rising fascist threat in Europe, the Republican Congress was convened. This congress brought together the main elements of socialists, communists and progressives, largely drawn from the republican movement. In the few years of its existence, the Republican Congress was surprisingly successful in organising political rallies, pickets, and trade union support, especially given the condition of Ireland as a young post-colonial and underdeveloped state in which it arose. 

Ireland was highly socially conservative, had a relatively small working class, the socialist movement was young and the workers’ movement had yet to achieve the kind of mass successes it had won in mainland Europe and in the UK. It would be fair to say that the terrain of struggle was difficult.

The Congress constituted itself as a federation of groups which attempted to work together towards a common cause. However, a motion was put forward that it should constitute itself instead as a political party. This motion was voted down fairly narrowly in favour of remaining as a broad front united against reactionary forces and the rise of fascism. Within a few years, the Congress itself dispersed, breaking up into constituent groups with many participants simply drifting away.  Continue reading

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On The Decline and Fall of The American Empire and Socialism

The Balance of forces domestically: contradictions among the people and intra-elite competition.

“…the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent.” Engels to Marx in an October 1858 letter, on the English proletariat. (1)

Socialists in the United States have their work cut out for them. Though conditions for socialist construction materially exist as a highly developed means of production and a large wage earning class the balance of class forces is decisively poised against any real or actually existing powers of conscious proletarian revolution. This is largely due to the colonial, settler and imperialist history of the country and its status as the world’s chief oppressor nation and global linchpin of world imperialism since the end of WWII. It is only natural for a country that has been the center of world imperialism for almost an entire century for bourgeois polity to be firmly entrenched domestically. Continue reading

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What is Dogmatism and Why Does It Matter?

Introduction

There has been a revival of the working class movement across the world. But if we want to seize this moment, we need to re-embrace scientific analysis. We have to avoid the errors that led us to the weakened state that we find ourselves in.

The fall of the Soviet Union began a crisis for all socialists, even the anti-Leninists. Gone was the largest sources of funding for the worker’s and anti-colonial movements. Gone was the rationale for the existence of left-wing social democrats. The Social Democrats had served as the final bulwark against Communism. Gone was an organic workers’ movement for the Trotskyists to latch onto. The rotting corpses of the trade unions are all they had left. The Anarchists, who ascended during the anti-globalization movement, devoured themselves with lifestyle politics. There was no longer a social basis for the worker-centric politics of classical Anarchism. Class-struggle Anarchism defined itself through opposition to Revolutionary Marxism. It still does, if the anti-Bolshevik smear-jobs still put out by AK Press are anything to go by, . The anarchists were Pharisees denouncing the Priesthood of the communist movement.

The Official Communists were distraught. At least one leader of the CPUSA had a heart attack after learning about the fall of the USSR. They dedicated their lives to what they believed was the most advanced mode of life to ever exist. Allowing for modifications to national particularities. That system had shown itself to be a rotten sham. They had two choices, either deny their official Marxism-Leninism or deny reality. Those that chose the former had long discredited any Marxist alternative through polemic. All they had left was opposition to the far right without any positive beliefs of their own. Those that chose the latter retreated into their ideological bunkers. Their views reinforced by hack historians like Grover Furr.

The Maoists, for their part, kept guerilla struggles alive in many parts of the world. But outside isolated instances, they lacked connection with the workers movement. The Maoists instead based their struggle on rural peasants. While heroic, these struggles too have ended in failure. The Shining Path collapsed. The Naxalite’s have declined. And the Nepalese Maoists have capitulated to developmentalist capitalism. Success is establishing a proletarian dictatorship. Nowhere has the Protracted People’s War thesis demonstrated success outside of China. And that success was in the context of the second world war with the support of the Soviet Union.
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The Case of Comrade Dallas

By Sylvia Smith

The working class movement is divided into many different trends. Oftentimes these differences are contradictions that have big implications for how to organize and must be struggled out. Whether to support a left wing populist candidate (or even organize against them), how to relate to the trade unions, and other issues of strategy are questions that in the process of organizing can’t simply be brushed aside in the name of unprincipled “left unity”. Conversely, historical interpretation, political jargon, and other features that define “tendencies” on the Left are unimportant from the perspective of class struggle. Far too often, the latter are confused with the former. But, none of these tactical or strategic questions changes the fact of class struggle. Our goal is the destruction of the wage-system, not a particular strategy being the true means to do so. Anyone who is committed to the emancipation of humanity through the victory of the working class over the exploiting class, by overturning capitalist society, is a genuine revolutionary.

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Review: Do Religions Evolve?

York Cathedral ceiling. Lots of lovely arches.David Sloan Wilson describes himself as an atheist, but, he insists, he is a “nice atheist”. The proviso is made necessary by the often acrimonious nature of evolution’s forays into religious study. In contrast to writers such as Richard Dawkins who views religion as ‘a kind of mental illness’, Sloan Wilson thinks that the spiritual world has much to teach us about our grubby origins.

For most critics of religions, the operative concern is the truth or not of religious beliefs. For Sloan Wilson, however, that is not the point. The interesting questions centre on the roles that such belief systems play in human societies, and how they make human groups behave. In evolutionary terms, “even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world” [pp41].
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Fake News: The Epistemology of Media

Post-truth, or post-irony?

“What is truth?” said Pontius Pilate to Jesus. Or at least this is what we are told he said in the Gospel of John. Can we trust John to have related accurately the words of Pontius Pilate? Most scholars date the book of John as two generations after Pilate’s death. And yet, despite the dubious provenance of the quote, it is a very important question. Indeed it is the central question we concern ourselves with here.

On November 24, 2016 the Washington Post ran a story entitled: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”. The article claimed that Russia had been involved in a concerted effort to sway the election in favour of Trump through a sophisticated propaganda war. But perhaps even more significant than the central claim, is that it launched the phrase “fake news” into the media discourse.
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Officials and Provisionals

Martin McGuinness, Political Strategy and the Civil Rights Movement

A Provisional Sinn Féin poster featuring Joe McCann and other Official IRA members (via Irish Political Ephemera)

The death of Martin McGuinness has inevitably prompted reflection on his career, with the reactions varying according to one’s political ideology. For the mainstream, McGuinness’s oeuvre is sharply divided into two halves, that of paramilitary godfather and political statesman, with the dichotomy arising from their view on the Provisional IRA’s (PIRA) long running campaign.

For Sinn Féin and a wider body of sympathisers, that division is an artificial construct; the two eras – military leader and peacemaker — are different forms of the same struggle. The change in strategy by no means entails an admission that the Provisionals’ military campaign was misconceived, only that it could no longer sustain progress towards their goal.

Interestingly, much of the online commentary sympathetic to Sinn Féin has revolved around how the Provisionals’ armed campaign was a fight for civil rights in Northern Ireland; the military campaign being an inevitable response to the brutality of British State and the loyalist mobs that the campaign’s progress elicited.

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Interview with Cathal Goulding

cathal_gouldingThis introduction and interview is from “On Our Knees: Ireland 1972” by Rosita Sweetman

Introduction

The Irish Republican Army officially came into being when Padraic Pearse read the Proclamation of Irish Independence from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter morning, 1916. The IRA traces its roots right back through all the physical force resistance groups that at various times throughout 700 years of British domination of Ireland had risen up to try and get them out. Its recognised father figure is Theobald Wolfe Tone, of the United Irishmen, and his grave is the scene of an annual re-affirmation of Republicanism.

The IRA was the army of the people during the War of Independence (1919-1921). They secured military victory for the Irish people in that they forced the British to the conference table, but were sold down the Swanee by political leaders who divided on the Treaty offered by Britain. The compromise reached was that Republicans would have a 26 Country “Free State” to run as they wished in theory (in practice of course it was to be run as the British wished as they still held the purse strings), and the 6 remaining counties were to be jointly controlled by the Unionists in Stormont, and Westminster. In the absence of the British enemy the Irish turned on each other and the resulting Civil War saw the IRA defeated, the Free Staters in control and building bourgeois Ireland under President Cosgrave. Thousands of IRA men were imprisoned and interned and Ireland settled down temporarily to trying to become a nation of grocers and big farmers.
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Trump, Russia and the CIA

trump-and-putin_zpspfthamxrIn 2012, there was substantial outrage about Russia placing restriction on foreign financing of NGOs and unions which was spurred by the fact that there was significant funding by the United States. The Western media were almost uniformly appalled that such restrictions would be placed. I remember reflecting at the time on what the media angle might be were the roles reversed. What if Russia had tried to interfere in US politics by funding opposition forces? I surmised there would be immediate calls of treason and the response would be at least as intense as the one for which Russia was being condemned.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t wrong in this prediction. The current scenario demonstrates the asymmetry nicely. Russia is currently being accused of hacking the US to subvert the election. This claim is being made by both the power centre of the Democratic Party and by the CIA and is now being featured as a media headline in the Washington Post, the Guardian and other major media outlets.
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Why is my rent so high?

The Rent is Too Damn High!After a quick perusal of Daft.ie, it’s clear that the rental situation in Dublin is an absolute catastrophe. Rental prices have gone through the roof. Literally, garden sheds and one-car garages are now going for 900 Euro per month and more. Prices are up more than 30% from their lowest point, and they are now higher than they have ever been, even during the Celtic Tiger. To add insult to injury, you would be hard pressed to find a place to rent even if you could afford one, perhaps by packing in like sardines. The recent saville report says that vacancies are now below 1.5%.

Economists are fond of telling us that it’s all about supply and demand. And of course they are right, but if one is to believe the story of the invisible hand, efficient markets and all the rest, increases in price are supposed to create supply to meet the demand. So why is it that the rental market is so tight, new housing units are not being built, and we’re not only finding things unaffordable, but unavailable in the first place?
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Review of Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis by Anwar ShaikhFor a long time, neo-classical economics has been the economic orthodoxy. Neo-classical economics is a patchwork of theories all with a general aim of demonstrating how production and distribution takes place under mediation of supply and demand.

The theory came to prominence in the late 1800s, displacing the previous classical economics, a research programme which was initiated by Adam Smith most famously in his great work, “The Wealth of Nations”. This programme was continued by David Ricardo in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation among other works, and later by none other than Karl Marx in his seminal work Das Kapital.

Marx made deeply important contributions to classical economic research. In fact his contributions were so important that they poisoned the well of classical economic theory completely, leaving no room for more conservative theorists to wiggle out of the implications which are brought forward in Das Kapital. To put the central problematic in a nutshell, there was an unresolvable antagonism between wage labourers and capital over value. Yet despite the importance of his additions, Marx’s theories are firmly rooted in the tradition of classical political economy.
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Electoralism vs Abstentionism (Or: Why You Should Run For Office)

vote communistThis article is a response to an article posted on The North Star by Sophia Burns, a comrade and fellow member of the Communist Labor Party titled Don’t Run for Office. It can be found here: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12742

The tradition of movements commonly grouped under the umbrella “the left” is diverse. It includes movements rooted in ecology, labor struggles, women’s’ struggles, fights against racism and many other currents. Likewise, the tactics employed by these groups have varied across time and space.

One of these tactics, standing candidates for government offices is perhaps the most divisive. In the early years of the socialist movement, the Marxists, and others, argued decisively in favor of using the popular assemblies conceded by the ruling coalition of classes to further the cause of the workers’ movement against the anarchists. The electoral socialists would create the movement known historically as “social democracy” which is distinct from the modern ideology using that name. Many communists, including those in the Marxist tradition, have argued since these days that the failure of social democracy in the early 20th century to achieve revolution is proof that the tactic of standing candidates for democratic assemblies in capitalist society is either outdated or was never correct to begin with.

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Centrism extremism: how horseshoe-politics silences brutality

2048px-Imperial_Federation,_Map_of_the_World_Showing_the_Extent_of_the_British_Empire_in_1886_(levelled)Extremism as a concept is central to current popular political discourse. In its common definition, however, it is also a highly flawed. Its use shows a bias towards centrist politics that silences a history of extremism. Centrists are just as well capable of committing extremist acts upon populations, and violently exclude them from basic rights. The concept extremist should be re-purposed to highlight centrist extremism, and expose the fundamental inclusion-exclusion divide of modern politics.

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Of Tankies, Trots and Social Democrats

The uncomfortable questions of formerly existing something-or-other

Hammer and Sickle, 1976 - Andy Warhol

Hammer and Sickle, 1976 – Andy Warhol

On the left, there can be no subject more divisive than the question of unity. There are approximately three times as many opinions on the question as there are socialists. I probably hold at least four of those opinions myself.

One of the fissures rent by the “unity question” is provided by the debate on “formerly-existing socialism” – which is in quotes, of course, because somebody wants to emphasise that they don’t think it was socialism. This major dividing line has allowed the various Trotskyists to define themselves in relation to each other, and in relation to their “Stalinist” enemies who are naive enough to think these states represent something historically positive, but also between these and the Social Democrats, who think it proves that socialism doesn’t work.
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