Essays, reports and notes from a working class perspective
Much of the meaning of the Second World War can be found in the logic of the suffering that Enola Gay and Bockscar unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: shattering the childish illusion that it was a war of "good" vs "evil". Ernest Mandel described the the Bomb as the "climax... of barbarism" and "the epitome... Continue Reading →
All technological or scientific breakthroughs have "pros and cons". The cons are unfortunate, but, we are told, they must be accepted as an inevitable consequence of human progress. For example, the Industrial Revolution advanced science, transportation and communications, which are positive, but it also brought about the horrors of factory life, massive pollution and industrialised... Continue Reading →
"Prophet Song" by Paul Lynch is a Booker Prize-winning novel set in a new ultra-nationalist Ireland. The story follows Eilish as she copes with her husband's disappearance in a terrifying political atmosphere. The novel explores themes of power, capitalism, and the limitations on human freedom. It implicitly raises the need for a revolutionary working-class organization to challenge oppressive regimes.
The Complete Paintings: Bruegel, by Jurgen Muller, published by Taschen A few notes on Bruegel from the Taschen publication The Complete Paintings: Bruegel by Jurgen Muller. Grotesque Realism Bruegel's paintings use a "drastic narrative mode"; they tell a story in an "extreme" sense. Overweight people are often extremely so, "while thin people appear as skinny... Continue Reading →
The Climate Book is a collection of 102 essays written by various experts regarding different scientific aspects of climate change. Greta Thunberg is credited with creating the book and has written several pieces, although most of the essays were not written by Thunberg. The book was published last year (2022) by Allen Lane. Introduction Let's put The... Continue Reading →
Is Ireland an island of two nations? Peter Hadden attempted to answer this question in his work Troubled Times, originally published in the mid-1990s. For the past century, of course, Ireland has been an island of two states: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. But do the separate states, which "mirror" each other in many ways, constitute separate nations?
In part 1, the circumstances inside Russia and internationally that led to a bureaucratic layer (or bureaucratic class or "clique") were examined, based on a piece by Ernest Mandel. How Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks - notably Trotsky - started to struggle against the clique is examined below and is based on the same piece.... Continue Reading →
Why did Soviet Russia descend into a totalitarian dictatorship instead rising to become the socialist democracy it initially promised to be? For socialists, this is among the most pertinent questions to examine.
David Harvey highlights the similarities between Marx's description of the development of 'seasonal' production and the contemporary concept of 'just-in-time' production. Harvey writes, 'One of the reasons I find Capital such a prescient book is that Marx often identifies tendencies at work in the capitalism of his time which are all too easy to identify... Continue Reading →
Proletarian Perspective 