What thirty years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland brought?
It was a great day at Stormont. The great and the good from many countries were there including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Centre stage, of course, were Ian Paisley, yesterday’s ‘Never-Never’ man, now grinning like death in the apocalypse, and Martin McGuinness, yesterday’s IRA commander, expensively tailored and replete with effusive grin.
The event was generally acknowledged to be the formal end of Northern Ireland’s infamous thirty years of internecine warfare in which nearly 4,000 people were killed and some 60/70,000 injured.
In the vicious world of capitalist competition, opinion polling finds a
vital and profitable niche not for the laudable purpose of discerning
or complying with the public interest but with the manipulation of
public opinion in the interest of profit.
One MP who won’t be going back to Westminster is the Reverend Paisley.
Attempts to reform capitalism, whether through parliament or dictatorship, have failed. This leaves conscious majority revolution as the only way forward.
Long before capitalism had emerged as the dominant social order and imposed its exploitive social conditions on the working class that it had created there arose within the minds of human beings the dream of a life beyond mere survival. The dream of a freedom and dignity beyond that of some category of slave to a privileged hierarchy that controlled their means of life.
In one respect this war is just like the last. It has shown once more the simple truth that the maintenance of life depends on production, and that production depends on human labour. To most of the men and women who normally get their living by expending energy in mental and physical work—the miners, landworkers, …
Read more “War and Work”
Would you like someone always by your side, there just to take out any would-be assailants or even take a bullet for you? Fortunately, most of us don’t have the kind of life where we’re likely to need this, even if we were in a position to hire someone. However, it’s different for the senior …
Read more “Proper Gander: Guarded Bodies”
