Dublin City Councillor John Lyons (Artane-Whitehall) and supporters
Independent Left candidate Councillor John Lyons topped the poll in Artane-Whitehall 2024 for first preferences in the local government elections of 7 June 2024. This was a terrific result for our small party and above all is a recognition of the consistent, empathetic and determined work carried out by John for individuals and groups in the community he represents on Dublin City Council. The high vote might also be connected to the values and priorities of Independent Left and this deserves some reflection.
Before getting to that, however, what happened in the bigger picture? What do the results tell us about Irish politics in the snapshot provided by the election?
1. Fine Gael turned public concern onto the question of immigration.
It’s an old and, unfortunately, successful tactic by conservative and governing parties that to deflect from how they have facilitated the rich getting richer, they focus public anxiety on immigrants. In the run up to the election, Fine Gael, and their Fianna Fáil and Green partners in government, forced refugees into homelessness then arranged performances such as bulldozing tents to generate attention to the issue. This worked to put a spotlight on Sinn Féin’s response.
2. The Centre Held?
Ever since COVID restrictions gave fascists a focus to organise around, they’ve been growing in Ireland. By mobilising against refugee centres, they gained a following beyond a fringe. Encouraging people to be angry against immigrants plays right into the hands of these fascists. Fine Gael took a calculated risk on this: they chose to give fascism a boost rather than face the electorate on their record in government. After the election they breathed a sigh of relief and pundits everywhere said that the centre held. The reality, unfortunately, is that fascists did make significant gains. Not the gains that they themselves and their US funders hoped for, but about 5% of the electorate voted far-right in the European elections and in the local elections they got five seats, coming very close to a sixth in Artane-Whitehall.
This article comes with a strong recommendation from Joan McKiernan :
“This terrific article should be widely circulated….
“I must say that with all the classes I had long ago in the IS (International Socialists) on the Russian Revolution, I have no recollection of discussions of Ukraine. So the author’s discussion of that history is important for all of us involved in supporting Ukraine now.”
Paul Le Blanc is launching a new book in Dublin on Tuesday November 7 (the anniversary of the October revolution) in the New Theatre, behind Connolly Books in Temple Bar. Doors open at 7pm, with Paul Le Blanc giving a short talk on Lenin’s politics and theories starting at 7:30. This will be followed by an interview including opportunity for some questions from the crowd.
Paul Le Blanc reviews a critical thread of Marxist theory and history on the right of national self-determination, and the question of Ukraine, concluding that revolutionaries today need to defend the current resistance to the Russian invasion including its rights to seek arms.
In his critique of ultra-left sectarianism, Lenin denounced a tendency to present quotes from Marx as the basis for settling on a tactical orientation to guide us through the complexities of our own time. He insisted that “what is most important, that which constitutes the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism” is “a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” That is certainly the case when we are considering realities so complex as the Russian-Ukrainian War.
I have attempted such a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation” in an 8900-word article entitled “Making Sense of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine” for the online publication Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal. In the final 2400 words of the article, I seek to relate the larger analysis of the invasion to previous Marxist theory and lessons from revolutionary history. I urge readers to consult the first 6500 words of the larger article. At the same time, I am hopeful that my review here of some of the relevant history and theory will be useful for those working to sort things out regarding these momentous developments.
Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West, People Before Profit) has issued a deeply mistaken public response, consistent with his party’s previously stated opposition to any military anti-imperialist solidarity action in support of the Ukrainian masses’ fight against a genocidal Russian invasion. Source :
Remember when Micheal Martin called us puppets of Putin?
That was because I was asking for guarantee that Irish soldiers would only be involved in de-mining training.
In light of today's news that they are providing weapons training, his outburst makes a lot more sense. pic.twitter.com/xUK3c4yRwf
This is a grim PBP Left-Evasionist chapter, part of the shocking story: failure to show anti-imperialist solidarity with the masses of Ukraine who are resisting a genocidal Russian invasion.
On July 29 2023 the PBP helped to organise a well-supported anti-racist rally in Dún Laoghaire, a town which proudly hosts a magnificent statue honouring the Irish anti-imperialist gun-runner and human rights activist Roger Casement.
PBP speakers drew attention to the many reasons we honour Casement today : but they overlooked a vital fact : this Easter 1916 rebel imported weapons from Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire in order to strike a blow against the then mighty British Empire.
It’s amazing how Amerocentric Campism enables some extremely well educated people in the west – as well as many of the profoundly ignorant – to declare their positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (part 2) without knowing even the basics of the socio-political realities which precipitated the invasion.
Someone like Mandel has to ignore everything which has happened from Kazakhstan to Moldova, and from 1999 to 2023 – as well as Putin’s rule over the Russian people itself and how it has affected civic, minority, and labour rights – in favour of narrowing his narrative on the “causes” of the Russian invasion to what happened in the Donbas and Crimea between February 2014 and February 2022… and even then he cannot make this argument in good faith, instead following an epistemology based on ignoring easily provable factual events in favour of bald reductio-ad-NATO absurdism.
Murray Smith is a member of the leadership of déi Lénk (“The Left”) in Luxembourg and is one of its representatives on the Executive Board of the Party of the European Left. Article Source : http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article67205
The war in Ukraine has cast a harsh light on the radical left in Europe, revealing the best and the worst. On the one hand, an internationalist response of solidarity with Ukraine. On the other, a “peace camp” where you find pacifists, but especially sectarians, for whom the main enemy is always US imperialism. Rather than a movement for peace, it is above all a movement of non-solidarity with Ukraine. We will come back to that.
Let’s start with some thoughts on war. We can be against war in general. We can consider that we must overcome this barbaric way of settling conflicts. We can think that it is possible to do it in the existing capitalist society, or that to put an end to war it is necessary to finish with capitalism. But historically, and again today, the left is never confronted with war in general, but with real existing wars, specific wars, which succeed each other and do not always have the same nature. So, each war must be analyzed in its specificity. There are no slogans outside of time and space, which are valid for all wars. It is not because Lenin or Luxemburg or Liebknecht spoke of revolutionary defeatism or said that the enemy was in one’s own country, that we can trot out these slogans for any war, independently of the context.
World War I was an inter-imperialist conflict over the distribution of territories, resources and markets. Those who refused to support their own imperialism were right. And history proved them right. The activity of the small minority of internationalist circles of 1914 led to strikes, mutinies, mass parties and revolutions. Yet since 1914 no war has been a simple repetition of World War I, and a simple repetition of the slogans of 1914 has not been enough. In all the wars of national liberation against the colonial empires, it was clear that it was necessary to support the insurgents who fought for the independence of their countries. The same applies to attacks on independent countries by imperialist powers. So, in the 1930s, the left supported China against Japan and Ethiopia against Italy. And, closer to the present day, Iraq against the United States. This despite the fact that these countries were ruled by regimes that the left could not support.
Jim Denham writes a useful article about cluster bombs controversy and Russia’s genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine.
Jim’s text (reprinted in full below) is recommended reading, especially for unfortunate, misled, and baffled readers who saw a slogan circulated by the Irish radical left organization, People Before Profit (PBP) : “Cluster Bombs Shouldn’t Exist – Never Mind Be Used”. Did these people raise the issue of cluster bombs when the Russian military was using them to kill Ukrainians? We have been over this PBP ground already, and a key point needs repetition here and in the future :
The only mentions of what might be the wishes and intentions of the people of Ukraine, in an article devoid of any reference to Russian war crimes are, “In Ukraine, there are even demands for cluster bombs and phosphorus weapons”and “We stand in solidarity with all those protesting, and with those in Ukraine and Russia who are bravely raising their voices against war.” Who in Ukraine is bravely raising their voices against the heroic resistance of the mass of the Ukrainian people? There is not a word of solidarity for those in Ukraine raising their bodies and weapons against Russia’s war upon their lives, their homes and their freedoms.
Above: a cluster bomb capsule on the ground amid the Russia-Ukraine war in Avdiivka, Ukraine, on March 23, 2023 [GETTY IMAGES]
Cluster munitions are horrible weapons that can be delivered by rockets, missiles, and aircraft. They open in mid-air and disperse dozens and even hundreds of smaller submunitions, also called capsules or bomblets, over an area the size of a city block. Many submunitions fail to explode on impact, leaving duds that act like landmines, posing a deadly threat to civilians for years and even decades.
Many certainties about global politics were transformed on February 24 2022 when the Russian Federation began a genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine, a country in the heart of Europe with a population of 44 million people. The imperialist invaders have forced at least seven million people out of their homeland. This was a seismic shock to many parts of the existing international anti-war movement, which failed to see this catastrophe on the horizon. In itself, that is not a problem. The future cannot be foretold with perfect accuracy, we only have 20-20 vision about the past.
But, what to do?
Readers of this blog will be aware of activities sponsored by Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU) and the heroic work of Ukrainian activist and academic Yuliya Yurchenko.
This is her take on the behaviour of the British “Stop the War Coalition”, which has parallels in Ireland and other parts of the globe :
Yuliya Yurchenko, a Ukrainian senior lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Greenwich, described the attitude of the ‘anti-war’ left, “who somehow manage to simultaneously recognise Russia’s right to ‘defend its interests’ while denying the right of Ukrainians to defend their very lives or assert their national self-determination”, summing this up memorably as “the anti-imperialism of amoral idiots”.
These issues have erupted inside a British trade union, the University and College Union (UCU) which has a reported membership of about 120,000 people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_and_College_Union . The report below makes for often ghastly reading. All the same, effective left-wing solidarity with Ukraine is essential – we urge readers to engage.
Joan McKiernan, who has been a socialist activist in both the United States and Ireland, reports. Joan also writes for Against the Currenthttps://againstthecurrent.org/joan-mckiernan/
When I was teaching college sociology, I used to do a session on the bizarre things that Americans believe or don’t believe. Like, only 60% of Americans believe in evolution. 10% believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, to mention a few notable examples. Long ago, Mark Twain remarked, “It is easier to trick the average person, than it is to convince them that they have been tricked.”
I should not have been surprised then during the Trump era and the pandemic, we saw so many Americans accepting untruths, refusing masks and vaccines, refusing to believe that Covid was real, even as they went to their deaths. And during these years after Trump’s defeat, so many still refuse to accept facts, electoral counts, data. We are told there are alternative versions of facts!
So now we have the same lack of truth applied to support for Ukrainians resistance against the Russian invasion and destruction of their country. Recently, this was seen in this article, The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems, in which independent presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer, RFK Jr., Green Party candidate Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine. Rather than looking at capitalist exploitation, the Trump tax cuts, unemployment and low wages for the majority, they are blaming the Ukrainian support for all of the US social problems. https://newrepublic.com/article/173902/ukraine-war-cost-russian-propaganda-rfk-jr-greenwald
The reliance on untruths, twisted thinking and re-writing of history is no longer just an American characteristic. This week Irish member of the European Parliament, Clare Daly, came out with her own bizarre explanation of how to deal with the Ukraine war. She says, “The US sat down with the Taliban.” praised the role of United States in the Irish Good Friday Peace Agreement and said the international community should try and do something similar in Ukraine. She accuses the West of giving arms in order to keep the war in Ukraine going!
We thank Joan McKiernan for drawing our attention to a very useful article. The issues it raises also affect political dialogue in other parts of the world, including Ireland. Sections of the left repeat, in many cases unwittingly, pro-Putin populist propaganda currently promoted by North American celebrities who sometimes dress in left-wing clothes. The author (Alaric DeArment) demolishes the apparently plausible claim below :
A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
Read on, to see what is fundamentally wrong with the above approach. Article Source :
The article below highlights a big problem the Ukraine solidarity movement faces. These influencers who are pitting Ukrainians against Americans have far more reach than we do. Glenn Greenwald has 300,000 substack subscribers. Jimmy Dore has 1.2 million YouTube subscribers. RFK Jr’ s celebrity status reaches millions.
Dore and these anti-Left influencers give expression to a conspiracist-minded populism that explains social problems as caused primarily by evil elite cabals rather than social structures. Their audiences are very susceptible to the conspiracist themes in Russian propaganda that these influencers amplify.
The anti-Left “populist” influencers are also proudly “anti-woke,” which is to say hostile to anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, saying that they divide the working class, which in their mind is white male when in fact it is majority women and people of color. It is their anti-woke rants that divide workers by race, gender, and sexual orientation. For example, see this ignorant denigration of Juneteenth by Jimmy Dore and his sidekick.
I don’t have any easy recommendations for us to deal with this phenomenon other than to keep organizing, speaking up, and building our own media.
The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems
RFK Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine.
A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
The video , on TikTok, is but one of the countlesspostsacross social media that convey the same underlying message: By helping Ukraine defend itself from bloody subjugation by Russia, the U.S. is depriving its own citizens of critical aid. This pernicious narrative has spread in part thanks to fringe yet popular media and political figures who already had a history of littering the discourse with Kremlinesque talking points, and who now have weaponized and monetized the perception that the U.S. has been too generous to Ukraine and too stingy to its own people.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 