Socialist Democracy

On Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism

04/10/24 (Monthly Review)

Adam Hanieh’s new book, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso, 2024) could not be timelier. As all eyes turn to Baku for COP29, the capitalist world heads to yet another performance of misdirection. In contrast to that monumental deception, we need to see things as they really stand and take action accordingly. (read more)

Labour and the unions

11/10/24

The TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak, has made great claims for the new Workers’ Rights Bill being introduced this week. The deal is linked to a public sector pay deal which was the minimum that would get through a union vote and has not been accepted in many areas, especially in the NHS.  According to Nowak, the Bill will turn the tables on the  Conservatives’ “low rights  low pay economy” and will “make work pay again”.    (read more)


The Excitement of the Stuff

10/10/24  (London Review of Books)

In the later decades​ of the last century, a new wave of ideas broke across the study of literature throughout the world. Known simply as ‘theory’, it ranged from structuralism to feminism, semiotics to hermeneutics, Marxism to deconstruction. All this was formidably abstract stuff, but it managed to be sexy as well.   (read more)

What the Butler didn’t see – book review

10/10/24 (Counterfire)

‘Is biology woman’s destiny?’ was the title of an essay by the US Marxist anthropologist Evelyn Reed, written more than fifty years ago at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It chimed with the feeling of many women that their role as mothers should not prevent them from fighting for very different roles within society from those normally allotted to them. Reed made the point that biology and anthropology, as academic disciplines under capitalism, were themselves full of loaded social assumptions about sex roles and of women’s supposed ‘inferiority’.  (read more)


Report on the most recent national Palestine Solidarity demonstration in Dublin

08/10/24

On October 5th, as Israel pounded both Gaza and Lebanon, up to 50,000 people marched through the streets of Dublin to protest against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the expansion of the war to Lebanon and what may be the beginning of a genocide there.   The march started off from Parnell Square and went to Molesworth St.  There was some sense of routine about the march, despite the swell in numbers due to what is happening in Lebanon.   (read more)

Budget 2025

07/10/24

Budget 2025 had been trailed in the media for a long period so its content didn’t come as a surprise. The expectation of a budget filled with pre-election sweeteners was duly fulfilled. If anything, the speculation surrounding the various one-off give-aways were underestimated. For example, the value of the so-called cost of living package that accompanied the regular budget, was significantly higher than what had been trailed.   (read more)

Videos

Gender identity ideology

Presentation by Orla Ni Chomhrai on why socialists should oppose a dogma which undermines women's rights, gay rights, free speech, and science.

18 October 2021