Archive for the ‘People Before Profit’ Category
Confronting the Irish Far Right – Solidarity with Paul Murphy TD and Jess Spear – “this was a new low and should never happen again”
On Monday April 24 2023 a serious incident occurred outside the family home of Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit, Dublin South-West) and his partner Jess Spear.
Our friends at the Cedar Lounge Blog have highlighted the story :
Fair play to Seán Crowe TD (Sinn Féin), a constituency colleague of Paul Murphy, who issued a strong solidarity statement. All other left wing deputies, elected representatives, activists etc should endorse Crowe’s statement. That is a minimum. Paul and his partner Jess Spear must be unconditionally supported, and the left should move forward, openly organising and marginalising far-right anti-civilization thugs.



Statement Issued by Seán Crowe TD (Sinn Féin, Dublin South-West) :
Read the rest of this entry »Family home of Paul Murphy TD targeted by protesters – “Far right protesting outside our home right now. We were literally preparing to give our newborn baby a bath”
April 24 2023 at 8pm – Far-Right protesters in Ireland’s capital city Dublin protested outside the house of an elected member of the Dáil (parliament), the People Before Profit Deputy Paul Murphy. This is a sinister escalation. Solidarity with Paul Murphy TD and his partner Jess Spear.

Irish Far-Right Threatens Dublin Mid-West TD Gino Kenny (People Before Profit)
This story was published in the Irish Examiner newspaper.

Gino Kenny says he ‘will not be intimidated’ by far-right threats to his home
PAUL HOSFORD, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, Irish Examiner, January 17 2023
The Dublin Mid-West TD says he has received threats after he joined a counter-demonstration at a temporary centre for asylum seekers in Clondalkin.
The far-right has been targeting me and my family,’ says People Before Profit TD Gino Kenny.
People Before Profit TD Gino Kenny says he “will not be intimidated” by members of Ireland’s far-right who have threatened to come to his home.
Read the rest of this entry »Einde O’Callaghan’s Tribute to John Molyneux; Helena Sheehan Describes a Funeral in Dublin
Einde O’Callaghan, who is one of the administrators of the Marxists International Archive has already created a rudimentary archive for John Molyneux’s writings, which will be added to regularly over the coming weeks and months.
Source : https://www.theleftberlin.com/john-molyneux-1948-2022/
I was shocked and dismayed to hear last Sunday morning that my friend and comrade, the socialist activist and Marxist theoretician John Molyneux, had died of a heart attack the previous afternoon. It was all the more poignant because on that Saturday I had had an email exchange with John, something that we had increasingly done over recent years.
John was one of that generation of socialist activists that had been aroused by the events of 1968 in London and Paris, In an interview for a recently published book called “We Fought the Law” John graphically described how he had been both shocked and radicalised by the confrontation with the police in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy during the massive demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968. Another formative event was a visit to France during May 1968. Shortly afterwards he became a revolutionary socialist and joined the International Socialists, a commitment that he maintained until his death last weekend.
Within the IS and its successor the Socialist Workers Party, John quickly established himself as a significant theoretician. His first major work was Marxism and the Party, a study of the Marxist tradition of revolutionary organisation from Marx and Engels through Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci. The book emphasised the necessity of a democratically organised activist interventionist party rooted in the working class to prepare for the overthrow of capitalism and lay the basis for socialism.
John not only produced major theoretical works such as What Is the Real Marxist Tradition? and Is Marxism Deterministic? but also a huge amount of material aimed at providing a basic introduction to Marxist ideas in the form of regular newspaper columns in British and later Irish Socialist Worker. These articles also appeared in a number of papers associated with the International Socialist Tendency. Many of them were reproduced as popular pamphlets such as The Future Socialist Society, Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism and “Is Human Nature a Barrier to Socialism?”.
However, John wasn’t just a populariser of a Marxist orthodoxy, he was also prepared to raise awkward questions that sometimes brought him into conflict with many members of his own organisation. A case in point was his second major theoretical work, “Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution”. John was a great admirer of Trotsky, but in this work he raised serious questions about some of Trotsky’s weaknesses, such as his tendency to make sweeping predictions about future developments – some of these resulted in powerful and valuable analyses such as his treatment of the rise of fascism and the fate of the Spanish Revolution, but after his death his predictions about the outcome of World War II led to serious disorientation of many of his followers in the post-war period.
Other bones of contention were his orientation during a major debate in the SWP about women’s oppression and the nature of democracy in a revolutionary organisation. But despite such differences John remained a committed and loyal member of his organisation.
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