Author Archives: Gavin Mendel-Gleason

About Gavin Mendel-Gleason

An ex-patriate American living in Ireland. Former anarchist, present mass partyist, but always committed socialist.

Working Class Hero

There is a fairly widespread argument concerning the working class that goes something like this: The Working class is now only a small fragment of the population. The old class politics is therefore permanently dead and can not be resuscitated. … Continue reading

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What is Historical Materialism?

When we are born we see the world without preconceptions. The sense data from the world flows into our brains without systematic categorisation. For this reason the world seems a nonsense. We can not understand it and we can hardly … Continue reading

Posted in History, Philosophy | 2 Comments

Disrupting Democracy

In that last few years there have been numerous mass demonstrations which lead to changes of government, including in Egypt and the Ukraine. During this period the United States has been a major player in attempting to destabilise democratically elected … Continue reading

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The Transition

The period of transition between our current capitalist economic and social system and a socialist economy is a very controversial subject among socialists. Maintaining an active dialogue and critique of this period is absolutely critical to our strategic and tactical … Continue reading

Posted in Economics, Politics | 4 Comments

Is Dialectics Nonsense?

In classical philosophy, the dialectic was a method of interrogating truth in its full complexity. Rather than collapse questions into a stark binary resolution of propositions into true or false, we would take a more nuanced view. The Socratic dialogues … Continue reading

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Review and Analysis: Patterns of Betrayal

In 1992, the Workers’ Party published a pamphlet: “Patterns of Betrayal: the flight from Socialism”. The pamphlet details the events leading up to the split in the Workers’ Party, including several primary source documents. The contemporary Left in Ireland is … Continue reading

Posted in Proletarian politics | 2 Comments

The European Monetary Union and the Left

Recently a 45 page report written by Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas was issued by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, “The systemic crisis of the euro – true causes and effective therapies”. They later popularised their report in a Guardian article. The … Continue reading

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Why I am no longer an anarchist

What follows is an outline of my personal process of ideological formation. The process of changing ones world view is in my experience a gradual one. All world views will have places in which they do not match up quite … Continue reading

Posted in Critique of the Left, Politics, Proletarian politics | 2 Comments

Tendency of the rate of profit to exasperate

A few years back Deloitte issued a report that had a long term analysis of the rate of return on various measure, investment capital, equity and assets. In all three cases there was a fairly clear downward trend. Deloitte come … Continue reading

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European Left Summer University

The European Left Summer University was held between July 3rd and 6th. Organised by Bloco de Esquerda of Portugal, the University was a three-day series of lectures and seminars on the key issues facing the European Left, the party of … Continue reading

Posted in Proletarian politics | 1 Comment

The Philosophy of Science

As we saw in Part I, scientific progress is used by the capitalist class as a tool for the expulsion of labour from the workforce by way of technological improvements, which enables them to increase profits. This fact was immortalised … Continue reading

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Science and Socialism

“Soviets plus electrification,” proclaimed Lenin, “equals communism”. Even allowing for the simplifications inherent in sloganeering, Lenin’s quip does capture a version of the optimism, even faith, that his generation of socialists had in science and its essential compatibility with the socialist … Continue reading

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An Uncritical Critique of The Critical Net Critic

Recently a friend in a reading group suggested that we read The Critical Net Critic. While the piece is somewhat long and meandering it is also very good at helping to answer some of those fundamental questions about what is … Continue reading

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Hypermodern Political Strategy

Aron Nimzowitsch was a brilliant chess theorist who broke new ground in the 1920s with his treatise: My System. The system he proposed has become the most famous exposition of what is known as the Hypermodern school. Positional play, the … Continue reading

Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 5 Comments