Category: Communist Party Ireland
Homeless in Dublin: The Communist Party of Ireland says “we need homes, not prison cells”
worker | December 19, 2017 | 7:01 pm | Communist Party Ireland, Ireland | Comments closed

Monday, December 18, 2017

Homeless in Dublin: The Communist Party of Ireland says “we need homes, not prison cells”

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/12/homeless-in-dublin-communist-party-of.html
Dublin City Council is considering using a section of the Mountjoy prison campus to help deal with the capital’s homeless problem. The Department of Justice has offered the training unit of Dublin’s largest prison to the local authority, which is now considering it to house homeless people. The training unit is separated from the main section of the jail and was closed earlier this year.
At the time of its closure the unit had a capacity of 96 beds. Independent councillor Mannix Flynn said the council was considering using the facility to alleviate the city’s current homelessness crisis. […] The latest figures show there are 8,500 people without a home, 3,500 of whom are children, but there are fears the number could increase as the country heads into Christmas week, as the figures were compiled in October.
Dublin City deputy Chief Executive Brendan Kenny said that the Mountjoy training centre “isn’t being ruled out”, but that the Council’s immediate focus is to have 200 permanent beds ready by next week.
Source: independent.ie.
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
16 December 2017 
The Communist Party of Ireland condemns the proposal announced in news reports this morning to house rough sleepers and homeless people in the Training Unit of Mountjoy Prison. 
The Mountjoy Training Unit is already being decommissioned, after it was found to be unfit for purpose. Even if it was, in principle, acceptable to house homeless people in prisons, the facility lacks in-cell sanitation. It is an insult to those who are forced to sleep on Ireland’s streets as a result of decades of failed housing policy to suggest that incarceration—no matter how well-meaning—is the answer. 
Ireland’s long legacy of institutional answers to tough social questions was never more evident than in this issue. Whether it be Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, psychiatric institutional abuse, or the long dark stain of other institutions, the first option is to lock up anyone who falls victim to the social pressures visited on our country by its failed economic and social order. 
The CPI calls on the Government to immediately recognise that we are in a housing emergency, and to launch a programme of public house-building. 
A new system of universally accessible public housing, with rents based on ability to pay, is the only mechanism by which this blight on our society can be fought. It is time to grasp the nettle. We need a referendum to insert an unambiguous right to public housing in the Constitution. 
In addition to calls for public housing there must be an immediate ban on economic evictions by banks and private landlords, to stop the increase in the number of rough sleepers on our streets. We also need a tenants’ bill of rights to protect tenants in the private rental sector and to stop precariousness in the housing sector generally. 
This weekend twenty-one events are taking place nationally as part of the Campaign for Public Housing, of which the Communist Party of Ireland is a member, as part of the Weekend of Solidarity and Protest for Public Housing. 
There is a demand for widely accessible and affordable public housing. We need homes, not prison cells.
Toward a Socialist Ireland
worker | June 16, 2017 | 8:15 pm | Communist Party Ireland, Ireland, Marxism-Leninism Today (MLToday.com) | Comments closed

Toward a Socialist Ireland

– from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Irish history shows one what a misfortune it is for a nation to have subjugated another nation. All the abominations of the English have their origin in the Irish Pale. F. Engels to Marx, 10-24-1869

If Britain was the template for colonial imperialism, then Ireland was, along with aboriginal inhabitants of the New World, its first victims and, assuredly, its longest suffering. When British elites once proudly proclaimed that the sun never set on the British Empire, they neglected to mention that it first cast the ugly shadow of colonial oppression over Ireland.
But there, once things are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition of the landed aristocracy… will be infinitely easier… It is not only a simple economic question, but at the same time a national question, since the landlords there… [are]… the mortally hated oppressors of the nation… K. Marx to L. Kugelmann 11-29-1869
Thanks to an invitation to participate in the annual James Connolly Festival (May 8-14) in Dublin, Ireland, my MLT colleague Joe Jamison and I had the pleasure of the better part of a week of education and comradeship with a number of friends of Marxism-Leninism Today. The annual festival is seven days of music, art, film, theater, poetry, and politics, concluding with a ceremonial wreath-laying at the Arbour Hill Cemetery in honor of James Connolly and the other martyrs of the 1916 Easter Uprising. Organized by the Communist Party of Ireland and its friends, the annual festival welds culture with politics in a way that is both entertaining and educational.
The festival stresses the long history of Irish struggle against imperialism, a struggle that continues today against British colonial influence over the northern six counties, against the supranational reign of the European Union, and against the economic exploitation of US multinational corporations that, for example, use Ireland as a tax haven.
Understandably, James Connolly occupies a central place of honor and inspiration for Irish Communists and their allies. Connolly’s grasp of the dialectics of national liberation and socialism was unparalleled for his time. As few others did, he saw the struggle for an independent Irish state as organically linked to the emancipation of Irish workers. As he wrote with great eloquence in 1897:
 
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
The clarity of Connolly’s understanding of imperialism and his prescient grasp of neo-colonialism anticipates Lenin and the Bolsheviks in many respects.
Our comrades and friends advised us of the Communist and left support for the demands of the Right2water campaign for free and clear public ownership and use of Ireland’s water resources by all of its citizens, a campaign that included a national demonstration in Dublin in April.
We learned of the role of Irish Communist leaders and allied militants in support of striking employees of the national bus service, Bus Éireann. Irish Communists are militantly active in the country’s trade union movement.
We met comrades who physically shut down Shannon International Airport in order to deter US imperialism’s affront to Irish sovereignty. When US planes land with troops, supplies or captives, to deliver torture, death, and destruction to other parts of the world, these dedicated militants attempt to block runways and accept arrest as a result.
On the ideological front, the Communist Party offers a fine monthly paper– Socialist Voice, maintains an excellent bookstore in the heart of Dublin– Connolly Books, publishes numerous books and pamphlets, and operates a multimedia operation, Connolly Media Group.
The bookstore regularly hosts a series of public discussions and debates on questions relevant to socialism and the working-class movement, a series dubbed Connolly Conversations.
In addition, the Communist Party has sparked a fruitful conversation with the left wing of the Irish Republican movement, a conversation that seeks to restore socialism to its place in the tradition of radical Republican thought. Organized as the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum, it pays tribute to a man who was a socialist, union organizer, IRA leader, editor, author, and internationalist– once described as “the greatest agitator of his generation.” Forums are held throughout Ireland.
One of the leaders of the Forum, Tommy McKearney, spoke passionately on May 14 at the solemn ceremony held in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol where James Connolly was executed on May 12, 1916. The event was sponsored by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions. In his address, McKearney stressed the unity of Republicanism and socialism. Having spent 16 years in prison as a leader of the struggle against British imperialism and participating in the 1980 prison hunger strike, he is a most suitable spokesperson for the Republican cause. McKearney is one of Ireland’s leading Marxists as well. His book, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament is an indispensable analysis of the dynamics of the late-twentieth-century struggles against injustice in the six counties.
We concluded our visit that afternoon by participating in the Communist Party’s commemoration of James Connolly’s execution at Arbour Hill Cemetery, where the martyrs of the 1916 rebellion are buried. Jimmy Doran, Dublin District Chairperson of the Communist Party, gave an inspirational oration:
 
Lots of political parties and groups claim James Connolly as their inspiration. James Connolly was a socialist—a Marxist, an anti-imperialist, an internationalist, and a trade union organiser. James Connolly would have had no hand, act or part in the 1990 Industrial Relations Act, or “social partnership.” He certainly would have nothing to do with the prosecution of children for peaceful protest. Connolly was always on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor.
 
He would be down on the runway in Shannon with the anti-war movement, defending our neutrality and stopping the American war machine turning Shannon into an aircraft carrier for their genocidal wars.
He would have no truck with the imperialism of the European Union, and he would laugh at the deluded suggestion of using Brexit and membership of the European Union as a means of uniting the country by surrendering our national sovereignty and democracy to the imperialism of the European Union.
 
James Connolly fought and died for a socialist republic, not for the gombeen [a gombeen is a small-time wheeler dealer, a con man] partitioned country with a divided people that the counter-revolution installed.
Doran concluded:
 
What would James Connolly say? James Connolly would say that if humanity is to survive in Ireland and the world, there is no alternative to the common good. There is no alternative to public housing. There is no alternative to public health care. There is no alternative to peace. There is no alternative to ending world poverty. There is no alternative to this environment. There is no alternative to decency and dignity for our people.
 
Comrades, there is no alternative.
It’s socialism or barbarism.
 
We only want the earth!
We thank Eugene McCartan, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, for inviting us to share the warm, generous hospitality of the Irish comrades.
 
Greg Godels (Zoltan Zigedy)
James Connolly’s vision never realised
worker | March 9, 2016 | 10:39 pm | Analysis, Communist Party Ireland, political struggle | Comments closed

Connolly’s tragedy was that his vision of a workers’ republic largely died with him in 1916, as the new independent Ireland became shaped by nationalist and conservative forces

Portrait of James Connolly by Mick O’DeaPortrait of James Connolly by Mick O’Dea

At the heart of the 1916 rising was a Marxist revolutionary socialist, James Connolly. This inconvenient truth was largely hidden from the Irish population for many decades. Nationalist Ireland preferred to portray Connolly as a Vincent de Paul-type figure who was “concerned” about poverty.

The distortion of Connolly’s beliefs began soon after his execution. Countess Markievicz, for example, wrote a pamphlet (James Connolly and Catholic Doctrine) in which she stated that “Socialism is what he stood for but it was the socialism of James Connolly and nobody else”.

The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which Connolly founded, suppressed some of his writings, including those celebrating British working class solidarity during 1913. Even as late as 1968, when left-wing ideas were in vogue across Europe, the historian Owen Dudley Edwards made the astounding claim that Connolly was “one of the best and most enlightened apologists the Catholic Church has since the industrial revolution”.

Connolly was born into a working class family and grew up in an Irish slum in Cowgate, Edinburgh. Poverty drove him into the British army at the age of 14 and he was sent to serve in Ireland. When he heard that his regiment was being transferred to India, he deserted and returned to Scotland. There he became active in the socialist movement and from a very early stage stood on its revolutionary wing.

When the miners’ leader, Keir Hardie, was forming the British Labour Party, Connolly argued that: “It’s not a Labour party the workers need. It’s a revolutionary party pledged to overthrow the capitalist class in the only way it can be done by putting up barricades and taking over factories by force. There is no other way.”

When he stood for election in 1894, Connolly dismissed talk of trying to reform the system from within. On the contrary, he wrote that “the election of a socialist to any public body is only valuable insofar as it is the return of a disturber of the public peace”.

In 1896, he responded to an advertisement seeking a socialist organiser in Dublin and took up the position. He then set about forming the Irish Socialist Republican Party.

Throughout his life, Connolly kept in touch with the international Marxist movement. This was organised through the Second International, a grouping of socialist parties mainly based in Europe.

By the early 20th century, the seeds of a social democratic strategy of reforming rather than overthrowing capitalism was growing within it. Overall, the Second International had a mechanical view of how society was transformed, believing that changes in the economic base of society made socialism inevitable. Socialist activity was, therefore, primarily about propaganda and preparation for elections rather than instigating militant working class action.

Connolly was a rebel who stood on the left of the Second International. He opposed the participation of French socialist Alexandre Millerand in a coalition government with right-wing forces. He also took a more revolutionary attitude towards parliamentary democracy.

Connolly argued that the “democracy of parliament is in short the democracy of capitalism. Capitalism gives the worker the right to choose his master but insists that the fact of mastership shall remain unquestioned: parliamentary democracy gives to the worker the right to a voice in the selection of his rulers but insists that he shall bend as a subject to be ruled.”

He insisted that socialism did not simply mean state ownership, but suggested that “it implies above all things the co-operative control of workers of the machinery of production”. Without this grassroots workers’ control, “the public ownership by the state is not socialism – it is only state capitalism”.

These views initially led Connolly to engage with a narrow-minded version of revolutionary socialism that he encountered in De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party in America. Connolly had emigrated to the US after the collapse of the small Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1903.

However, he soon broke with this insular organisation and became an organiser with the Industrial Workers of the World, which was a militant union. This was inspired by syndicalist ideas that had developed in a number of countries in the aftermath of the first Russian Revolution of 1905. The IWW believed a general strike was the best way to end capitalism and usher in socialism. Connolly embraced this outlook and sought to create “One Big Union” which would impose workers’ control over the capitalist class in each factory where they gained strength. It would then, he hoped, organise a general strike to lock out the employers.

In his 1909 pamphlet, Socialism Made Easy, he explained what would happen next: “Would you confiscate the property of the capitalist class and rob men of that which they have, perhaps, worked a whole life to accumulate?

“Yes sir, and certainly not. We would certainly confiscate the property of the capitalist class but we do not propose to rob anyone. On the contrary, we propose to establish honesty once and forever as the basis of our social relations. The socialist movement is indeed worthy to be entitled The Great Anti-Theft Movement of the Twentieth Century.”

Connolly later came to believe in the need for a broad left socialist party. When Home Rule for Ireland appeared to be in sight, he proposed the formation of a Labour Party– but he died before this project came to full fruition.

Connolly also broke from the orthodoxy on the Second International in his approach to Irish national freedom. The dominant grouping within it suggested that as the working class movement in the colonies was weak – mainly due to the lack of industrial development – they would have wait until the socialist movement in the metropolitan countries would bring change.

Connolly disputed this and boldly proclaimed that Irish freedom and socialism were interlinked. He wrote his classic book, Labour in Irish History (1910), to illustrate this principle by showing how the wealthy Irish “were tied by a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism”.

The working class, he argued, were the “incorruptible inheritors of the fight for Irish freedom”.

He opposed the idea of a “union of classes” which would unite rich and poor in a fight for Irish independence. This would, its nationalist advocates suggested, bring about an Irish republic in which socio-economic relations would remain the same.

Instead, Connolly argued that the struggle for Irish freedom needed to culminate in a workers’ republic, and he advanced two main reasons why was necessary.

If the working class were to really mobilise for Irish independence, Connolly suggested that they would not stop, having achieved a capitalist republic. They would go further and fight for social as well as national freedom.

To the objection that a fight for a socialist republic would frighten off potential allies, he made the following reply:

“It may be pleaded that the ideal of a Socialist Republic, implying, as it does, a complete political and economic revolution would be sure to alienate all our middle-class and aristocratic supporters, who would dread the loss of their property and privileges.

“What does this objection mean? That we must conciliate the privileged classes in Ireland! But you can only disarm their hostility by assuring them that in a free Ireland their privileges’ will not be interfered with. That is to say, you must guarantee that when Ireland is free of foreign domination, the green-coated Irish soldiers will guard the fraudulent gains of capitalist and landlord from ‘the thin hands of the poor’ just as remorselessly and just as effectually as the scarlet-coated emissaries of England do today.

“On no other basis will the classes unite with you. Do you expect the masses to fight for this ideal?”

The other reason Connolly advocated a socialist solution to Ireland’s national question was because of the sectarian divisions inside the working class itself.

Connolly witnessed these divisions firsthand in July 1912, when Carson’s violent opposition to Home Rule led to pogroms in Belfast. Three thousand workers were expelled from their jobs, a fifth of them dubbed “rotten Prods” because of their socialist or Liberal sympathies.

Connolly vigorously opposed Orange supremacism and was adamant in defending the right of Ireland to Home Rule.

He also warned against partition arguing that it would produce “a carnival of reaction” that would help “the home rule and orange capitalists and clerics to keep their rallying cries before the public as the political watch cries of the day.”

But while opposing loyalism and the partition of Ireland, Connolly wanted to openly appeal to Protestant workers.

The way to do this, he thought, was not to placate the reactionary sentiments of the Orange Order but to show how its sectarianism divided workers. He thought that only the prospect of a socialist Ireland could hold any appeal to Protestant workers. There was, quite simply, no future for Protestant workers in a capitalist Ireland under the green flag,

“When the Sinn Feiner,” he wrote, “speaks to men who are fighting against low wages and tells them that the Sinn Féin body has promised lots of Irish labour at low wages to any foreign capitalist who wished to establish in Ireland, what wonder if they come to believe that a change from Toryism to Sinn Feinism would simply be a change from the devil they do know to the devil they do not.”

In August 1914, the first World War broke out and eventually led to 17 million deaths. Connolly saw the war as a product of an imperialist order that had grown out of a profit-driven system.

He was resolutely opposed to the way the future leaders of Europe’s labour parties supported their own respective country’s war efforts. He summed up his own attitude by stating that “the signal of war ought to have been the signal of rebellion . . . when the bugle sounded the first note for actual war, their notes should have been taken as the tocsin for social revolution”.

He was determined to act, to foment an insurrection. He wanted to strike a blow both for Irish freedom and to undermine the imperialist and capitalist world order. He thought that a revolt in Ireland against the British Empire would have a ripple effect around the world. Connolly’s problem was that the labour movement had been crushed in the 1913 Lockout and had neither the political or organisational coherence to embrace his vision.

His impatience led him to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He became one of main instigators of an uprising. He cajoled, mocked and urged the IRB to take on the road of insurrection.

Eventually, after an apparent “kidnapping”, he reached agreement with its leaders on practical plans.

In Connolly’s mind, there was not the slightest intention of taking part in a “blood sacrifice”. He regarded all such talk as that of a “blithering idiot” and regarded the first World War as the field where this talk was acted out.

Even while joining with his IRB allies, Connolly urged his supporters to “hold on to their guns” because they were fighting for a different Ireland.

Connolly was executed with British guns, but it is often forgotten that Ireland’s employer class also wanted rid of their most dangerous enemy.

Connolly was one of the last to be executed, and there were cries for clemency. But William Martin Murphy’s press campaigned for his execution warning that “too great a leniency” would be taken as evidence of government weakness.

Connolly’s brilliance as a revolutionary was to link the fight for Irish freedom with a plan to uproot capitalism – to strive not just for a republic, but a Workers’ Republic.

His tragedy was that his vision largely died with him, and the newly independent Ireland was shaped more by the ideas of Arthur Griffith.

Griffith opposed the rising, but his concept of a free-market society that showed little concern for trade union rights won out after the counter-revolution of 1922. Connolly’s vision has yet to be realised.

Kieran Allen teaches in the school of sociology at University College Dublin and is the author of 1916: Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition

Statement from the Communist Party of Ireland.
worker | February 21, 2015 | 8:27 pm | Analysis, Announcements, Communist Party Ireland, Economy, Greece, International, Party Voices, political struggle | Comments closed

21st February

The crowing from the establishment and its tame media about forcing a climb-down by SYRIZA over the Greek debt and the continuing austerity programme barely disguises the complete contempt that they have for the people.

It matters little whether one thought that SYRIZA would inevitability have surrendered to the demands of the European Union or had hoped they would stand up and challenge it and defend the Greek people and blaze an alternative direction from within the European Union and oppose the IMF. Those who are anxious to advance the people’s interests need to reflect more seriously about what these past few weeks have demonstrated.

One of the lessons must be that the treaties governing European Union have in effect outlawed not only a radical people-centred solution but have effectually outlawed even tame Keynesian policies, and that the controlling forces are determined to solve the crisis of capitalism at the expense of the working people.

A second thing is clear: that people can vote at the national level for whoever they like, but this is not decisive, as the European Union will impose TINA (“There is no alternative”) and the economic and political straitjacket of what is in the interests of capitalism.

The debt is still the weapon of choice to be used against the people; democracy has been trumped by the overriding needs of European monopolies and the big finance houses and banks.

Those in Ireland who still labour under the illusion that the European Union can be transformed into something that it is not, need to look long and hard at the events of the last few weeks. The blocking minority that is built in to the EU decision-making process means that the big powers—those with real economic power and therefore real political power—can block anything that is not in the interests of the monopolies and finance houses.

The Irish government, once again demonstrating its abject servility towards imperialist powers, did nothing to support the Greek people apart from expressing a vacuous sympathy, and voted to defend the interests of the ruling class.

Those who continue to peddle the illusion, whether here in Ireland, in Greece or in Spain, that they can solve the people’s problems within the confines of the European Union and controlling mechanisms such as the euro are only leading our people down a blind alley. There are simply no solutions to be found to debt or austerity within the European Union.

The struggles of the Greek people have exposed the true class nature of the EU and its institutions. They have shown that it can be resisted – a lesson that needs to be learnt by working people throughout Europe.