Editorial
Welcome
to the first issue of Irish Marxist Review, a new journal of socialist ideas
published in association with the Socialist Workers Party. Our principle aim is
to provide serious socialist and Marxist analysis of political, economic and
social developments in Ireland and internationally. We will also be interested
in working class and socialist history, in Marxist theory and in matters of
culture.
Intellectually
this journal will stand in what can be called the International Socialist
tradition, characterised by broad, but not uncritical, adherence to the
'classical' Marxism of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci combined with an emphasis on socialism from below
and working class self-emancipation pioneered by Tony Cliff. However we will
also be very open to contributions from other perspectives on the left and to
serious critical debate.
This
issue appears as the most severe crisis of world capitalism since the Great
Depression of the 1930s enters its fourth year with no sign of resolution and
with Ireland among its most serious casualties. The crisis is global and so too
is resistance. 2011 began with the extraordinary events of the Tunisian and
Egyptian Revolutions culminating in the fall of Mubarak on 11 February; it
continued with uprisings in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. As we know the
struggle has not developed smoothly: in Bahrain the revolution was crushed by
the Saudis (with clear western complicity) and NATO intervention in Libya,
hijacking the revolution, was a negative turning point; in Yemen there has been
some advance but no decisive breakthrough and in Syria there is horrendous
repression occurring as I write but the outcome is not yet clear. Meanwhile the
struggle for full democracy, workers rights and social justice continues in
Egypt. In May the spirit of Tahrir Square crossed the Mediterranean to Spain
and the Indignados, and then in the autumn arrived in
the USA with Occupy Wall St which in turn spread across the country and to some
extent round the world. At the same time in Greece both the crisis and the
struggle were escalating steadily in a heady combination of strikes and street
fighting. Even in Ireland, which lagged behind in 2011, there are now serious
signs (workers' occupations at Vita Cortex and La Senza,
the Household Tax Campaign, DEIS schools etc) of mounting resistance, and big
struggles keep breaking out in other parts of the world such as Russia, China,
Kazakhstan and India. To put this in some perspective it is worth pointing out
that on 28 February something approaching 100 million Indian workers went on
strike in what is probably the largest one-day strike in world history. This is
many times more workers out on strike in one country than existed on the face
of the earth when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and issued his historic
call 'Workers of the World, Unite!’ If the numerous local strikes, riots and
struggles rumbling in China were to coalesce into a national movement both the
Egyptian Revolution and the Indian strike would be dwarfed in scale. But, of
course, these stirring prospects must be counterbalanced by an awareness of the
serious rise of the far right and neo-Nazis in a number of countries,
including, most dangerously the hideous Jobbik Party
in Hungary. The dominant trend over the last year has been leftwards but this
is not set in stone.
In this
situation anyone who tries to view events from an exclusively Irish standpoint
will undoubtedly fail. Nevertheless we are in Ireland and it our responsibility
as socialists and internationalists to focus on the struggle here. This
combination of international perspective and national focus is not easy to
achieve but we shall try.
In this
issue we lead with a fascinating study by Anne Alexander of a hugely under
reported and under emphasised aspect of the ongoing revolution in the Egypt,
the development of embryonic forms of workers' democracy in the struggle
against survivals of the Mubarak regime and the rule of the army in Egypt.
This is
followed by a review from John Molyneux of the Marxist tradition and its
application today to an issue of considerable importance on the Irish left: the
role of trade unions and the trade union bureaucracy.
One
important aspect of the attack on working people embodied in the Irish
government's austerity programme is a major assault on the rights of working
class women. This is analysed by Deirdre Cronin.
Another
particular feature of austerity is the peculiar dual role of Sinn Fein,
opposing it in the South while imposing it in the North. Sean McVeigh provides
a trenchant critique of Sinn Fein in government.
Moving
back to the international picture, Andy Durgan and Joel Sans, comrades from the
Spanish state, provide an update on the M-15 Indignados movement which, though
no longer in the headlines, continues in various forms. Something that
threatens us all no matter what country we are in is the problem of climate
change. Owen McCormack shows a) that climate change has developed qualitatively
over the last year or so, b) that it is deeply bound up with the development
and crisis of capitalism, and c) that it makes the need for socialism more
urgent than ever.
Finally
we present three poems by Connor Kelly, the talented young poet/musician from
Derry, which among other things take us back to the Egyptian Revolution.