The Wholesome Photo of the Month Thu May 09, 2024 11:01 | Anti-Empire
In 3 War Years Russia Will Have Spent $3... Thu May 09, 2024 02:17 | Anti-Empire
UK Sending Missiles to Be Fired Into Rus... Tue May 07, 2024 14:17 | Marko Marjanović
US Gives Weapons to Taiwan for Free, The... Fri May 03, 2024 03:55 | Anti-Empire
Russia Has 17 Percent More Defense Jobs ... Tue Apr 30, 2024 11:56 | Marko Marjanović
Anti-Empire >>
Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Julian Assange is finally free ! Tue Jun 25, 2024 21:11 | indy
Stand With Palestine: Workplace Day of Action on Naksa Day Thu May 30, 2024 21:55 | indy
It is Chemtrails Month and Time to Visit this Topic Thu May 30, 2024 00:01 | indy
Hamburg 14.05. "Rote" Flora Reoccupied By Internationalists Wed May 15, 2024 15:49 | Internationalist left
Eddie Hobbs Breaks the Silence Exposing the Hidden Agenda Behind the WHO Treaty Sat May 11, 2024 22:41 | indy
Human Rights in Ireland >>
The BBC Has ?Fact-Checked? Labour?s Claim that Renewables are Cheaper than Fossil Fuels and Declared... Tue Jul 23, 2024 07:00 | Paul Homewood
The BBC has ?fact-checked? Labour's claim that a unit of power from a new solar or wind project is cheaper than the cost from a new gas generator and found it to be true. But it's false, says Paul Homewood.
The post The BBC Has ?Fact-Checked? Labour?s Claim that Renewables are Cheaper than Fossil Fuels and Declared it to be True. But it?s False appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
News Round-Up Tue Jul 23, 2024 01:16 | Richard Eldred
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Will Trump Ever Admit Lockdown Was a Mistake? Mon Jul 22, 2024 19:35 | Jeffrey A. Tucker
Will Trump ever admit he was wrong to back lockdown in March 2020 ? a decision that doomed America to years of crisis and sank his re-election hopes that year? Jeffrey Tucker is hopeful that truth will finally prevail.
The post Will Trump Ever Admit Lockdown Was a Mistake? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Joe Biden Out in Apparent Palace Coup Mon Jul 22, 2024 17:30 | Eugyppius
Biden's team was still obliviously tweeting his resolve to fight on hours after he had decided to step down. So was the matter taken out of his hands? It has all the signs of an opportunistic palace coup, says Eugyppius.
The post Joe Biden Out in Apparent Palace Coup appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Who Will Guard Us Against the Guardian?s ?Fact Checks?? Mon Jul 22, 2024 15:34 | David Craig
The Guardian has published a 'fact check' of Donald Trump's claims about inflation and immigration. Just one problem, says David Craig: the 'fact check' gets its facts wrong. Who will guard us against the Guardian?
The post Who Will Guard Us Against the Guardian’s ‘Fact Checks’? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Lockdown Skeptics >>
Voltaire, international edition
Netanyahu soon to appear before the US Congress? It will be decisive for the suc... Thu Jul 04, 2024 04:44 | en
Voltaire, International Newsletter N°93 Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:49 | en
Will Israel succeed in attacking Lebanon and pushing the United States to nuke I... Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:40 | en
Will Netanyahu launch tactical nuclear bombs (sic) against Hezbollah, with US su... Thu Jun 27, 2024 12:09 | en
Will Israel provoke a cataclysm?, by Thierry Meyssan Tue Jun 25, 2024 06:59 | en
Voltaire Network >>
View Comments Titles Only
save preference
Comments (6 of 6)
Jump To Comment: 6 5 4 3 2 1You are partly correct 'individual voter'. The gap beween the left and a 'mass' following is a wide gulf and the recognition of this is the beginning of political wisdom. You are being over negative about collective action and revolution. A glance across North Africa and the Middle East at this very moment shows that mass movements are not a delusion.
There have been more recent large manifestations since the tax marches and the anti-war march. Several large ICTU, union and community marches since the beginning of the slump and a whole series of local marches last year, in defence of hospitals, which brought out almost entire town populations.
Interestingly both the tax marches (the Trades Councils) and the anti-war march (IAWM, Richard Boyd Barrett, etc.) had radical left people at their centre. The other organising factors you mention were crucial, sure, (and your point about consistent work on the ground being essential for successful election candidates is well made) but the people at the organising centre, and those who spoke on the platforms at both occasions, were key as well.
You are right to sedate delusions of revolutionary grandeur but your pseudonym of 'individual voter' denotes the isolated powerlessness that can be and continually is overcome by large numbers of people acting together.
The only regular masses found around Ireland are sports supporters pouring out of stadia after weekend events. Once in a blue moon 100 thousand or more people have joined tax protests (in 1980) or demonstrations against the US-British decision to attack Iraq (February 2003). It wasn't the revolutionary stalwarts in fringe groupings who 'mobilised the masses' on such occasions, but widespread trans-class feelings among citizens that the taxation system was inequitable or the attack on Iraq based on false premises. Television, radio and newspaper commentary by centrist and a few left-leaning journalists helped to get the crowds out, not the doctrinaire newssheets produced by the militant groups.
Mass action is always temporary as emotions simmer down and people get back to their daily routines. People don't want to, and cannot, live in a continuing state of hyped up political and economic emotional tension.
Several of the ULA candidates have worked steadily in their various localities for many years campaigning on unemployment, bureaucratic neglect, corruption and other issues. Much of their work has had nothing to do with platform speeches aimed at 'galvanising the masses'; in fact it is one-to-one communication on doorsteps, in street corners and at meetings of residents associations in people's sitting rooms that has gained the respect and following for activists who now hope that voters will remember their painstaking commitment.
Theoreticians and platform orators who believe that the masses are living lives of false consciousness and that the masses will eventually snap out of it and follow the true leaders-in-waiting are living in clouds of deluded grandeur. Revolutionists pander mass delusions.
John, give the ULA a chance will yah! Calm down. The ULA is less than four months old. It has flung open a window to be sure and quicker than old campaigners ever envisaged. It has an election to fight. It is as yet formally only an electoral alliance.
Left sectarianism is not just about division and conflict within the left. It is also about isolation from the class and the real world. Living in a sect, a bit like living in a religious sect, living an illusion. You have a proud record of opposition to the former side of sectarianism, a record that makes your welcome for the ULA warmly welcome to these eyes.
Yet as regards programme, strategy and tactics you seem to mix sound advice with hopeless ultra leftism. You are perfectly perceptive to identify the need people feel for a concrete answer to the question 'if we default, burn the bondholders, where will we get the money to pay for nurses wages and the petrol to run ambulances?' The left needs money answers or concrete steps to propose for what happens the morning after - or better still, the month before - refusal to adhere to the IMF/EU deal. You do not - nor would I expect you to from a distance - give detailed, costed, alternatives, but you should know that the Irish left is feeling its way towards them. Or perhaps towards refusing to play the media's game of 'where would you get the €19 billion?'
You wish the ULA to move rapidly from the election and then from propaganda to providing the active leadership for resistance. Are you aware of the experience of 2010 and the fact that the left has sought by all kinds of devices, campaigns and initiatives - often in the face of sobre reason - to bring the masses out on to the street in the absence of such a lead from the trade unions leadership? That the Irish people are undergoing the severest and most shocking drop from boom to bust in Europe? That the only body so far capable of mobilising tens of thousands has been the trade union leadership and that that leadership is, coincidentally, the weakest and most compromised in Europe? That as yet the left, with all the progress it is making, is as far from taking the place of that leadership as you are from where I am now typing?
Direct action? You should know that the incidents to date have sometimes been counter productive, sometimes a heartening spectacle and always a firelighter that has not lit the fire. Are you really proposing that the four or five TDs that might get elected for the ULA, along with some other leading ULA supporters, occupy a bank as the main way forward and chief activity for the ULA and the left in the short term? You speak of "mass direct action". That would be a good thing: MASS direct action. To urge Joe Higgins, Richard Boyd Barrett, Seamus Healy and Joan Collins to lead two dozen others in direct action in the coming months is substitutionism of the first order. There is a power of work to be done, on the ground, in the communities, in the workplaces, in the unions, in the meeting rooms, on the media, on the internet, in discussion, on the streets, over the long haul before the left on its own is near to commanding a call for mass direct action, or even a MASS demonstration.
You seem to go further, urging that "we break with capitalism entirely. That is we break with the IMF, the EU, the entire profit system. This is what has to be spelled out. It is a weakness of the ULA that they are not sufficiently spelling this out." The first shakey steps to breaking out of decades of divided isolation have been taken and already you are sounding the clarion call to revolution! Do you know that the ULA has yet to agree, and may not do so for some time, to use the word 'socialism'? The ULA is the beginning of a process. You hold up the example of the Egyptian revolution. It is indeed a thrilling example. But even here you are running ahead. The Egyptian revolution has as yet removed a dictator whose place has been taken by a military junta for, hopefully, the time being.
Cairo may not be as far from a "break with capitalism entirely" as Dublin is but, on the other hand, so far it is taking for itself the democratic freedoms and capacities that we - however imperfectly and precariously - already have in Dublin.
What do you think of this piece on the election, particularly its critique of the ULA's reformism?
Allowing the state to monitor bank accounts of the people, and take action based on that information.
The rich will move their money offshore. The poor will suffer at home. God knows what the powerful will do with the infomation.
How can such authoritarianism benefit the poor. It would restrict personal freedom, and cement personal circumstances. It would not even benefit the wealthy, with the exception of the ultra rich who can play at the highest level. Ultimately it would only benefit the authoritarians themselves.
Have you not seen the state people have made of the country, and of the world, when decisions are made by the super rich, self important minority. Granting more power to an even more self important minority won't help. We need a more functional democracy - we need to have more people making the decisions that effect us all. Maybe we need to have a better informed and better educated public for that, but we have plenty to go on right now. Standard of education is only going downhill from here. There could be an open access assessment exam in order to progress to a further level of democratic involvement. Voluntary of course - financial incentives are counter productive to the proper running of the country.
ULA aren't really convincing me. All I'm hearing is "we will get rid of this and that bad things", but I haven't really heard plans that I think will work.
Sinn Fein make more sense tbh, but can you trust em?
"all bank accounts to be looked at and those of the rich taxed at a much higher rate than the smaller accounts and all accounts examined to see where the money came from"
I'd agree with the thrust of the aspirations you put forward but would like to know what your programme is regarding the state - both in terms of the repressive apparatus and the government.
In my opinion the platform of ULA is completely deficient in these areas and is limited to an implicit reformist fantasy that the fundamental social change necessary can be achieved through the capitalist parliamentary framework and it has nothing to say about the repressive apparatus of the state, though I understand that its components all share the illusion of some kind of "community control".
Do you agree with the ULA's reformist approach or do you have an alternative?