pról

Now that the dust is settling on the European and Local elections, I am reposting this piece from my Facebook page, with some minor changes. A lot of dedicated, principled socialists ran in both, many of whom I know personally. There’s a tendency for electoral socialists to take personally criticism of electoralism from anarchists who have been comrades on campaigns, but we aren’t saying you’re…

Scolding Green Voters Won’t Hulk Smash the System

Since last night’s exit poll in relation to elections for the European Parliament in Ireland, there has been a wave of revulsion from left activists towards an electorate who has surged towards the Green Party. Those of us who remember them in power could get angry and wallow in recrimination, or we can look at ways we can turn people’s fears about climate catastrophe into action.

Yes of course…

Durrty Words – New Anarchist Themed Anthology

I’m delighted to have a piece in this wonderfully designed book, put together by Kate O’Shea and Victoria Brunetta. This is a limited first edition. I believe there’s another run in the works.

The Darkest Hour is A Moment of Hope – A Winter Solstice Sermon

The Winter Solstice is the darkest day of the year, but it’s also the shortest. In the morning a shaft of light will shine through the window box at Newgrange (a six thousand year old Neolithic ‘passage tomb’ in County Meath, Ireland), creep up a passage lined by decorated ancient stone slabs and illuminate the main chamber, where the ashes of some of our ancestors were deposited. Exactly what…

The Anarchist Case Against Borders – A response to Angela Nagle’s ahistorical revisionism

Refugees from the Spanish Civil War at the French state concentration camp in Argelès-sur-Mer, 1939.

Argelès-sur-Mer is a pleasant little seaside town in the south of France. Today it is a magnet for sun worshiping holiday makers, but in 1939 it was the site of a refugee camp for Spanish anti-fascists and civilians who fled General Franco’s forces at the end of the civil war. There was little…

He Thought of Cars – The Motorway and Official Reality

“The motorways will all merge soon, Lottery winner buys the moon,” He thought of cars, Blur, 1995

You’ve come to a full stop but you can’t get out of the car. You can’t turn around and go back the way you came either. You’re stuck. Over the course of the last decade you moved further and further away from where you work and where your social life happened. Now you’re at rest in a sea of…

The bigots who walk among us – Peter Casey, the 21%, and fighting the far-right

No one should be surprised surprised that 21% voted for Casey in the presidential election. 34% voted no in the referendum on the 8th amendment. 38% voted against marriage equality. They had much larger turnouts. The 21% for Casey, if that is accurate only represents around 280,000 votes out of an electorate of 3,336,255 (based on the total registered electorate for the May referendum and the…

Abdication Through Awareness – World Mental Health Day 2018

It’s #WorldMentalHealthDay2018, the day when employers and states pretend to care about our mental health all the while maintaining the social conditions that give rise to a lot of our mental illnesses. You might have got an email at work to tell you about it.

Your email will probably be the zenith of your employers efforts to mark the day. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get free muffins, but World…

Neuro-Anarchy: ADHD, Neurodiversity, and Libertarian Communism

Where’s my head at? Well at the moment I have nine other unfinished blog posts in my drafts folder, a rake of unfinished short stories and two unfinished novels, but I decided to start writing this instead of finishing any of them. Why? Because this topic is what I feel particularly passionate about right now and when I feel passionate about writing something, the words flow as if being passed to…

  It’s Mayday, the traditional holiday for workers – though our actual holiday here in Ireland is not until Monday, but there’ll be no holiday this year. I haven’t written in a while because as you may have noticed, everyone is a wee bit busy with the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment.

For those of you reading this from abroad who don’t know, the 8th amendment, voted into the constitution…

The Paisley Abbey ‘Xenomorph’ Gargoyle (Mark Harkin, Creative Commons) The Fermi Paradox isn’t really a paradox is it? You know when you can’t find the remote control, but you know no one brought it out of the house? You can spend an hour looking for it and still can’t find it, you know it is in the house though, you don’t consider it a paradox. The Fermi Paradox, basically stated, is the…

Sin on a sunny day – Folk Memory against Wage Labour

  Ogma Grianainech Sin is something we used to take quite seriously in Ireland. The shadow of the Bishop’s cloak is not as long as it used to be, they have political sway, but their ideological grip on the minds of the Irish has been weakened considerably. When I was a gossin though, you’d still hear people talking about sin in an earnest manner. Being shacked up with your significant other out…

Follow the Yellow Brick Road – Socialism and the British Labour Party (Part 2)

  1939 was a notable year for quite a few reasons, the most obvious being the outbreak of the second world war. After the solemn vows following the last war in Europe that such a conflict would never break out again, a storm blew through central Europe in the form of the Nazi Blitzkrieg sweeping through Poland on one side and the Red Army on the other. Back in Blighty, Labour had been out of…