What has the question of the rights of transgender people, trans women and trans men, got to do with socialism?
Actually it relates to two very fundamental socialist principles. The first is opposition to all forms of oppression in society. Our goal is a society of real equality in which all oppression of human beings by other human beings is ended. We believe that it is the struggle of the working class that is the […]
Käthe Kollwitz, one of the 20th century’s greatest socialist artists, has an exhibition of 40 prints and drawings at the National Gallery until 10 December.
6 September – 10 December 2017, National Gallery of Ireland |, Free admission By John Molyneux It is a wonderful show but be prepared to be moved almost to the point of hurt. Kollwitz was born in Koningsberg in Prussia in 1867 into a Social Democratic family. In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor […]
The struggle for Catalan independence which has been raging all this autumn has proved controversial on the left.
By John Molyneux There have been those like the present writer, and People Before Profit , who have given full support to this struggle. There have been others who have said socialists and the left should be wary of supporting any form of nationalism. It has also been argued that the left should not support […]
Crowds of young people at Glastonbury this year have been spontaneously erupting into chants of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’
Nothing so symbolises the political earthquake brought about by Jeremy Corbyn’s dramatic campaign in the recent British general election. Crowds of young people at a music festival chanting the name of a sixty eight year old white male Labour politician! This is unprecedented – more normal would be to be booed or ignored. Indeed there […]
It is not easy to write about Grenfell. The sheer horror of it: the burning tower in the night, people jumping to their deaths; the babies thrown from windows in desperation; families on their mobile phones knowing they wont get out.
To write about it you have to think about it and the thinking hurts. The matter is made worse by the fact that as I write, ten days after the fire, we still don’t know how many died. The official figure – and it has been slowly but inexorably rising – is now 79. It […]
The new exhibition at the National Gallery, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, which runs till 17 September, is well worth a visit. This is both for the art in itself – Vermeer is a wonderful painter and many of the other artists featured are also very good – and for what it tells […]
We do not yet know how many have died in the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower block in North Kensington in London. But we do know that behind this tragedy lies a scandal that must be investigated. Residents of the block had been campaigning about the dreadful danger they were being forced to […]
How they speak to us The 1% who run this society, the capitalist ruling class, speak to the rest of us i.e. the general public, a majority of whom are working class, mainly through the media, that is via a series of intermediaries – politicians, TV producers and presenters, news readers, newspaper editors, […]
One of the key ideas, tenaciously defended by the entire political establishment and ALL the mainstream media is that the law courts, the judges and the police are neutral.
One of the key ideas, tenaciously defended by the entire political establishment and ALL the mainstream media is that the law courts, the judges and the police are neutral. By ‘neutral’ they mean above or independent of politics, above or independent of social classes and above or independent of all interest groups. They simply enforce […]
Two recent reports cast a revealing light on what’s really happening with inequality in Ireland – its getting wider.
(picture: Denis O’Brien: down to his last super-yacht. Yours to hire at €326,000 a week.) The first was from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published on 28 February. It showed that the pay gap between men and women in Ireland is now 6.5 percentage points wider than it was in 2012, according to new […]