What are you reading?

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blindpig
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 24, 2022 1:55 pm

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| The Return of Nature | MR Online
‘The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology’
Originally published: New Books Network by Stephen Dozeman (March 23, 2022 ) | - Posted Mar 23, 2022

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for.

In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecologyleft off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation.

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible.

https://mronline.org/2022/03/23/the-ret ... ecology-2/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Tue May 31, 2022 2:25 pm

"Predatory things of the century"
05/29/2022
Essay with deep meaning

Just now I read the story of the Strugatsky brothers "The Predatory Things of the Century" . In general, I consider Arkady and Boris one of the best writers of the science fiction genre, their works and the characters described in them are somehow especially close, understandable and interesting to me. “It's Hard to Be a God” , “The Land of Crimson Clouds” are my favorite works that have settled in my heart for a long time. So this story firmly grabbed my soul, forcing me to comprehend, remember, reason. Therefore, I decided to write an essay in the style of "we talk about what we read." Not the first in my life, of course, but the first, coming from my will and a sense of necessity. So how are things going in the "country of the coming abundance" ? Let's figure it out.

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Formulation of the problem

Let's describe the plot a bit. The core of the work, around which the main events develop, is the use by the inhabitants of the city of a certain new drug, the effect of which after a while brings those who use it to death. The threat is gaining momentum, and it must be eliminated. So, the key point of the book is: who is the distributor of the drug and why are more people using it?
In the process of reading, we study the environmental conditions in a fictional city somewhere in Europe. Let's clarify that the events of the book take place in the future. Here, as the authors describe, the time of abundance has come - scientific and technological progress has reduced the working day to 4 hours, the production of food and other goods has become much cheaper, which contributed to general prosperity. There are no beggars in the city or there are so few of them that these are rather exceptions. At the same time, as it becomes clear from the story, commodity-money relations were preserved, i.e. abundance is incomplete. So, a consumer society, brought to perfection - something like this can describe the world of this city. This is confirmed by some other factors.
The consequence of this “local abundance”, of course, was to make life easier for the overwhelming number of residents: after all, they now do not have to plow 10-12 hours a day, do not have to fight for a piece of bread or pay a mortgage. Residents have a lot of free time, which they could use with benefit. It would be enough for fun and self-development, but ... boring! The whole work, like a thread, is permeated with the idea that the inhabitants of this city are incredibly boring to live. But how!? There are so many possibilities open to them! And is it really so?

Public consciousness and who forms it

The sociocultural environment in which we live shapes us. And it was beautifully shown in the story. What do we see?

Local media are collections of vulgarity and nonsense, where local opinion leaders are broadcasting calls to get away from worries, “to be like children” and to see waking dreams with the help of psychotechnics (“drozhki”), and hatred is cultivated against intellectuals who periodically disrupt the sessions of these dreams.

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Throughout the work, the inhabitants of the city for the most part demonstrate contempt for books, disinterest in them, considering them unnecessary, existing only for beauty. For the most part, the townspeople are uneducated and do not think that this is necessary, on the contrary, they look at the readers with bewilderment, irony and distrust.
Why is that?
In the work, it was never described how any of the townspeople performed work that was important throughout the country, society. When describing great achievements, it is clear that they occur somewhere abroad, while the described country and its citizens do not appear anywhere. On the contrary, the media of this city exalt and reproduce the tradesman.
What for then to be formed if nobody needs it?
And this is politics. The presence or absence of censorship in the media is politics. Unfortunately, the authors have allocated criminally little space for describing the political component of the work, describing the structure of power in the city. However, the mayor of the city is mentioned a couple of times and it is possible to understand that he is elected in the elections for a certain period. It turns out that the city is governed not by a collective, elected and regularly replaced body, but by an official who can be replaced only once every few years at a polling station. This is what the whole political life of the townspeople boils down to.

Why learn self-management if “from above” everything will be decided for you?
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And this is also politics - the politics of the arrangement of state and local authorities. Same policy as very vaguely described elements of the education system in this country. It is not known what and how is studied in schools, but the child described in the story stubbornly refuses to go there: he skips classes and tries to stay at home. But it is known that if a child does not attend school, parents can be fined. It is known that young people who are still studying in schools or have just completed them do not differ in any way from adults in their worldview and attitude towards education.
Is it because this is the attitude they are taught in schools?
There is a cultural decline. Instead of a comprehensive development, people are deliberately hooked on animal instincts, cultivating them, urging them to leave reality in dreams with the help of a droshky. It is important to note that after these dreams, in which they see only what they want to see, people want to get out of reality again as soon as possible. Because of this, in the morning they wake up angry, dissatisfied and therefore drink alcohol from the very morning to “brighten up” their boring life. Alcohol accompanies them everywhere: at home, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, at work, during the day at dinner, in the evening at the bar. Drunks accompany the protagonist for almost the entire story. I have an assumption (without a hint of this in the story) why alcohol occupies such a significant place in the work, but this will be discussed in the conclusion.
We combine the above. Behind the shell of commodity abundance and the seeming scope for human development, oppression was hidden: people were deliberately deprived of the opportunity to participate in politics on a daily basis, deprived of the opportunity to fulfill themselves through destruction, or a special setting for fooling through the media, the education system and, most importantly, through the substitution of reality for a virtual world in a dream . "Have fun, fool, the main thing is not to think about anything!" From this it is clear why for the inhabitants their real life has become boring, because they themselves have become empty consumers who have found a way out in escapism, be it alcohol or a new drug that affects the subconscious.
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A mess in the minds or political illiteracy

The culmination of the work is, of course, the conversation of the protagonist and his comrades about what they managed to learn about this city and the spread of drugs among the townspeople. And this is where the main "plugging" of the story begins.

After the heroes' attempts to determine the true state of things in the city, a natural question arises: what should be done to eliminate the drug threat? But here the heroes (according to the authors' intention, educated and experienced people) begin to wander in the dark, trying to find a solution. And they find it! Each is his own. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Let's take a closer look.
“The centenary plan for the restoration of worldview” - such a solution to the problem is brought out by the protagonist of the book, Ivan. And this is absolutely correct! People in the city have lost their ideological orientations - they see no point in anything other than fun (which their existence seems to them) and the substitution of life for virtual reality. Therefore, they need to return, instill a creative worldview. But this is only a half-truth, only one side of the coin. And the second, that the townspeople were deprived of their worldview, that they were not given the opportunity not to be empty philistines, Ivan could not discern. Probably by chance, the authors put into Ivan's words the idea that the townspeople themselves are to blame for everything: they themselves destroyed the education system, they took away political freedom from themselves, they lowered themselves to the level of animals through the media.
And the more ridiculous look Ivan's reasoning that the local faction of intellectuals - here they are, normal people, tired of this dominance of stupidity. But what do these same “intellects” do? Struggling with symptoms: interrupting group trance sessions, causing the hatred of the townspeople. They do not offer an alternative - they are preparing a putsch. Instead of qualitative changes, they only offer to change the faces in power, and everything, apparently, should become fine. But will the masses who are accustomed to drinking and living in a dream, and not in reality, need them? Did "intel" work among these citizens, did they show them how it could be otherwise? No.
"We need a solution! Not talk, but a decision!” - answers Ivan his comrade, who did not agree with the restoration of the worldview alone. He probably also realized that the restoration of the worldview is a consequence of the decisions taken on the problem, and not the solution itself. But what does he offer?
And he turned out to be no less blind than the main character in this matter - instead of eliminating the very boredom that pushes people into the arms of the drug, he decided to fight the drug distributor. And failing to realize that there was no distributor, that the drug is just an achievement of science in the field of psychotechnics, available to everyone in the nearest store, he makes a strange decision to isolate the city.

I think it is quite obvious that this will not lead to anything good: people both existed and will continue to exist, deprived of the opportunity to fully live, and the emergence of a new drug that replaces their boring reality (whether a drug or a religious cult) is only a matter of time .

The mistake of the authors or a reflection of the prevailing reality?

Based on the foregoing, the most offensive thing when reading was to realize that the authors position the protagonist as a communist! And not just because of his convictions, but who came from a progressive country striving for the future, where the hour of the onset of full communism is already close. And this same communist Ivan failed to see behind the good intention to restore the worldview the reason for the loss of this worldview? Being determines consciousness - this is one of the main theses of Marxist political economy. And Ivan looks at this very being only superficially, not paying attention to the socio-political superstructure and the economic basis of this society. Woe to such communists!
The tragic consideration of the Soviet Union showed the danger of forgetting, obscuring, and distorting the basic ideas of Marx and Lenin. Therefore, it is worth considering the unfortunate communists from the work in the perspective of reflecting the contemporary political reality of the authors.
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The collapse of the hopes and labors of millions

In conclusion

In conclusion, let me suggest how the world of the Predatory Things of the Century could be built if we approach the issue more realistically. And this is how it went:

“Continuing scientific and technological progress has made it possible to reduce the cost of production of many goods many times over, reduce the working day to 4 hours and increase labor productivity. The financial situation of all citizens strives for universal prosperity. However, a further increase in well-being called into question the need for market commodity-money relations. And then the government of country N, the officials who were afraid of losing their posts, decided:
“If it is no longer possible to increase profits and maintain the dominance of owners and officials through the exploitation of labor power, then we will exploit human instincts. We will arouse in people their animal nature, we will indulge in stupidity and will not let them think beyond their bodies. We will exploit their bad habits.”
Manufacturers of all stripes began to directly become government officials. “Now we are all one!” they said to the people. “We are all equally happy and having the same fun!” And oppression hid behind a screen of abundance: some sat above everyone, continuing to maintain the commodity-money system, while others were bored from the inability to realize themselves, moving further and more often from reality. And they were all equal in their ignorance.

This happened in one of the cities of country N, where the general director of the local distillery became the mayor of the city, his deputy was the treasurer, and so on. First, according to the state program, all “unnecessary” items were removed from schools, they stopped reading books, but it was told how to have fun in the city. Then, a broad campaign was launched in the media to promote fun, sex and psychotechnics, demagogues were specially hired, calling for more and more waking dreams, “to be children” and discussing the benefits of this action; political life was limited to elections every 4 years. In the end, the townspeople began to drink alcohol more and more often, which means they buy it more often. Group sleep sessions only spurred drinking. And the emergence of a new drug was just an accident, but it did not in the least harm the turnover of alcohol in the city - on the contrary, it even increased sales of products in household appliances, pharmaceuticals and chemistry ... However, people increasingly left reality and, ultimately, died. No one needed children anymore, the birth rate was falling, and drunken people roamed the streets day and night.

The protagonist of the story came to this city, he has to figure out how to cope with the drug problem ... "


Whether my version is more appropriate and logical, everyone will decide for himself by reading The Predatory Things of the Age and comparing them with this text, although I do not oppose them to each other.

I want to say that the work of the Strugatskys definitely provides food for thought not only with an interesting plot, but also with a striking similarity of the phenomena described in the book with our modern times. The consumer society was shown admirably by them. For which many thanks to them.
Be healthy, dear readers!
https://www.rotfront.su/hishhnye-veshhi-veka/

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 09, 2023 3:00 pm

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Siblings

A masterpiece of Socialist Realism
Originally published: Morning Star Online on February 2023 by Bruni de la Motte (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Feb 08, 2023)

Siblings
by Brigitte Reimann
Penguin, £12.99


IN ITS series of classic international literature Penguin has recently published a novel by one of the most inspiring and talented writers of the GDR, Brigitte Reimann.

Siblings (first published in 1963 and here in an excellent translation by Lucy Jones) is set in Berlin in the 1950s and its vivid style, characteristic of Reimann, captures the atmosphere of the young GDR when it was attempting to create a new kind of society based on the ideals of socialism in the wake of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

This is the time when Berlin was divided between Eastern and Western sectors with no hard border but two different currencies.

At that time, around 40,000 people living in the East crossed to work in the Western sector every day.

This created an economic conflict and was a constant source of tension as many were attracted to live in the West because of more lucrative material opportunities and, at the same time, benefitted from the cheaper cost of living in the East.

The novel captures both the difficulties and opportunities offered during this period of building of a new society after the horrors of fascism.

Reimann depicts both the challenges and the excitement, such as the building of a completely new steel production plant in the middle of nowhere in which she gives us close-up portraits of the workers each of whom had different histories and experiences during the fascist period.

These people at first seem tight-lipped but gradually reveal the sensitivity and depth of character that pulses through the work teams.

The main character, Elizabeth, is an artist who also works in the steel plant. Why? This was the result of an initiative by the GDR government to bring workers and artists into closer contact: for artists to obtain better insights into the workplace and its demands, and for workers to come into contact with artists and an appreciation of their labour.

The novel centres around the close relationship Elizabeth and her younger brother Uli. Elizabeth feels passionate about the new state while her brother is increasingly disillusioned. It is this close relationship that gives the political arguments emotional colour.

Both have very different personal ambitions and a contrasting view of the futures and problems they face. Their older brother, Konrad, an engineer, had left the GDR for West Berlin because “he does not want his freedom to be limited.”

The younger siblings see this as a betrayal, not just of them as a family but of the new state. It causes a painful rupture within the family.

Elizabeth criticises Konrad, pointing out that his studies were paid for by the state and yet he now selfishly wants to use those qualifications to land a better-paid job in the West.

This was a huge problem in the GDR during the 1950s, when many academics and others with higher qualifications left the GDR in their thousands for a more comfortable life in the West at a time when the GDR urgently needed skilled labour, and this was one of the reasons the wall was built in 1961.

Elizabeth eventually breaks off contact with her older brother.

When Uli also suggests that he is thinking of leaving the country the tone of the novel changes into a spirited conversation and a playful, emotional reflection of the siblings’ childhood and their parents’ and grandparents’ lives.

The novel demonstrates the constant temptation and enormous pressure people were living through in the early days of the GDR and what makes it so effective is the way the stormy relationship between brother and sister gives an emotional dimension to the political problems of the day.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/08/a-maste ... t-realism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 05, 2023 2:48 pm

‘The situation in the North of Ireland remains a colonial one’: An interview with Odrán de Bhaldraithe
19-06-2023
Odrán de Bhaldraithe and Louis Allday

Ahead of its publication on the 22nd of June, Louis Allday spoke to Odrán de Bhaldraithe about Neglect in the North of Ireland, a book that details the manifest neglect in the North’s economy, its politics, housing, and healthcare, the root of which is clear: British rule.

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Louis Allday: Odrán, firstly let me congratulate you on the book. It is a brilliant and important read. One thing that struck me as I read it is that despite its relative brevity, it is a very rich book and the depth of your knowledge shines through consistently. Could you perhaps introduce yourself briefly and explain how you are in a position to have written such an authoritative and informed account?

Odrán de Bhaldraithe: Thank you very much, Louis. I was delighted when Ebb asked me to write the book last year and am now delighted to get it out there in the world.

I suppose I am in a position to do this firstly because of the family I had the good fortune to be born into; my mother is from south Derry, a republican stronghold, and my father’s family were republicans too. Anyone who can understand Irish will see at the start of the book that it is dedicated to ancestors on both sides of my family who participated in various stages of the Irish revolutionary struggle, from the Tan War that ended with partition to the latest stage known as the Troubles. I was born in 1994, so I am too young to remember the days of soldiers and checkpoints, even if I was alive during the last of them, but my older siblings remember them on our constant trips back to Derry.

Our parents made sure that we understood from birth that the difference between where we lived in Kilkenny and where our cousins and grandparents lived was not a natural thing, that it was an illegitimate separation of a country by a foreign power. In our house, we were raised to understand that Ireland is all of Ireland, no matter what anyone says, that nobody could tell us – and people did constantly do this in the South – that we were somehow less Irish since all of us had been born in the North, and that we should never allow the partition of our country to become normalised in our own minds by doing things like using the imperial nomenclature of the Northern state or accepting the Southern argument that the 26-county state is ‘Ireland’. I don’t by any means think that all of my siblings would agree with every word in the book, but we are all principled republicans in one form or another thanks to our parents. That we all managed to come through being raised in the South, where republican opinions and Northern affiliations were often met with hostility, and hold onto those principles, is no mean feat on their parts.

Because of this upbringing, I would say that I actually came to the intellectualisation of my republicanism quite late. I had never really read much of the writers I do now and cite in the book because I felt that I knew my principles, I felt that I knew what being a republican was and meant to me and so I was better served reading other things, things I didn’t know. I would say that I became a Marxist in my early 20s and it was only really when I wondered how to fuse these two ideologies I subscribed to – Marxism and Irish republicanism – that I began to realise the breadth and depth of material out there doing just that.

In terms of having the authority to cover the day-to-day running of the North as I do in the economic and political chapters of the book, I am a full-time journalist in my day job and I cover both governments in Ireland. What is in the book is the bread and butter of what I deal with every day when covering the North; I chose to focus on healthcare, education, and housing in the sectoral analysis but from month to month, I could be covering anything such as environmental policy, planning, infrastructure, etc. Because of my job, I am minutely aware of how every sector of public life in the North is failing the people here. Of course, the latest budget unveiled by the British Government will only worsen that; every department but two saw funding cuts in cash terms and every department was given a funding cut in real terms.

LA: Another thing that struck me repeatedly while reading the book was the very thing that had already formed a significant part of Ebb's motivation in publishing something like this about Ireland: the extent to which that, despite its (literal) closeness to home, the issue has often been – and continues to be – largely ignored, or worse, by much of the UK left. Is this gap something that you had in mind while writing it? And beyond that, who do you see as its audience? Who do you think should read this book?

OB: I am a constant critic of Irish people who angle their work – be it political, artistic, or otherwise – toward either Britain or America and so I would be both lying and hypocritical if I said that I had the British left in mind while writing the book. This, of course, isn’t to say that I don’t want members of the British left to read my work, having such an attitude would be odd for someone publishing with an English publisher. I can’t remember who said it but I remember once reading a writer stating his belief that Irish literature should be a conversation amongst ourselves, and if others wanted to listen in, then all the better. That’s how I approached the writing of this book. I aimed at Ireland and if that helps anyone in or out of Ireland, then I’m delighted to be of some use.

While the book is obviously aimed at Ireland, I don’t see its audience as strictly Irish. I think in one sense or another, many left movements are left to grapple with the kind of issues that are identified and criticised within the book and so I think it can be of use to anyone looking to develop a critical framework for dealing with once-revolutionary movements lurching towards reformism and, inevitably, the status quo.

I do, however, hope that the book is read by people within the British and American left because something I have found in leftist Anglophone media is the complacent assumption that Sinn Féin is the same Sinn Féin of the 1980s and that their recent electoral surges are some harbingers of revolution in Ireland. I think this book, and many of the books cited in it, could be good guides for those who are mistakenly of that belief.

LA: I very much liked your notes around terminology and framing at the opening of the book, especially your clear explanation with regards to the fact that the situation in the North of Ireland remains a colonial one. Could you perhaps outline your position on that point briefly, because I think it is a vital one.

OB: In the most basic sense, a colony is defined as ‘a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country’; this accurately describes the situation in the North. Everything in the North is ultimately under the control of the Westminster government; there is a constituent Assembly but it’s basically a glorified local council with no tax-raising powers. All public funding here comes from the annual block grant given by Westminster. Recent Ministry of Defence figures show there to be 3,520 British Army personnel here, one for every 539 people here. People often recoil at the description of modern-day unionists as settlers due to their distance from the 17th century Plantation of Ulster, but these are people whose political project is entirely dedicated to maintaining the political hegemony that the plantation and, latterly, partition created, so I think it’s still a fair description. They are, at best, the political descendants of settlers.

There have been those such as Brendan O’Leary who support reunification that have tried to argue that the Good Friday Agreement and its provision for a border poll represents the end of colonial rule in Ireland, but this isn’t true. Under the Good Friday Agreement, the only person who can call a border poll in Ireland is the British Secretary of State. There are no defined criteria for them being compelled to do so. In the end, Ireland’s political future remains firmly in British hands.

LA: In May 2022, you wrote an excellent article for Ebb in response to Sinn Féin becoming the dominant political party in both the North and South of Ireland for the first time. A development that in some quarters was greeted jubilantly in what I swiftly realised upon reading your piece was based on simplistic or disingenuous analysis. In some ways, this book feels like a continuation of the arguments that you began to make in that essay. In the year that has passed since you wrote that article, has anything surprised you in what has transpired in the North politically, whether Sinn Féin's manoeuvrings or anything else?

OB: I wouldn’t say that anything has particularly surprised me because the road that Sinn Féin are travelling is one that is well-worn in both Irish and global history, and they were already quite far down that road by the time of that article. Things haven’t really moved much since that article was written, Sinn Féin are still in opposition in the South and imploring the DUP to return to government in the North but I will say that I was particularly disappointed to see the party leader Mary Lou McDonald saying that, were she to be Taoiseach after the next election, she would not attend commemorations for Provisional IRA volunteers following a manufactured controversy about the party’s MP John Finucane speaking at such a commemoration in Armagh recently.

While I would stress a lack of surprise, it just seemed to me to be despicable; these volunteers were the revolutionaries who fought and died for the achievement of a united Ireland and in doing so created the modern day Sinn Féin, and so for the leader of the party to just discard them and the families they left behind as she readies herself to really enter the halls of power only proves true once again the words of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, that you ‘have to do things according to their rules’ once you enter their system.

I also think that, for anyone who perhaps says to themselves that Sinn Féin will sell out their republican ideals but will deliver on the housing reform to tackle the housing crisis in the South, it shows an incredible weakness. All it took was one week of columnists confecting outrage and McDonald undercut one of her party colleagues and discarded the people whose blood built her party. That doesn’t exactly bode well for the idea that she will have the strength to tackle the private interests that have made Southern housing so unaffordable.

LA: The book is full of memorable lines and one that has stayed with me since I read it is the concept of the North of Ireland acting as a ‘call centre for Britain’ – some might scoff at such a comparison, but you demonstrate clearly why it is an apt one, could you summarise here why that’s the case?

OB: I think this would have immediately become the case after deindustrialisation had it not been for the Troubles, but the recent passage of the Protocol has made this a more attractive prospect than ever for private companies. Everything is cheaper in the North as compared to Britain: wages, rent for offices, housing, anything you can think of, it is cheaper for a multinational in Belfast. The Protocol just makes this process all the more certain in my view; for cheaper wages, cheaper rent, and the same corporation tax as they would pay in London, companies can now have unfettered access to both the British and European markets.

The peace process era has seen an uptick in literal call centres in the North but this isn’t just what I mean. The North also has plenty of universities and the younger generations are very well educated, but even those doing better paying jobs for companies like KPMG, Citi, and Accenture will still be structured on the call centre model, outsourced abroad to somewhere where the workforce speak English and it is cheaper to do business. The median wage in the North is £29,000 per annum and the median UK wage is £31,000, which the North contributes to, so take out the North’s weighing down of that UK median and you begin to understand just how much lower wages are here when compared to Britain. At the time that I was writing the book, house prices had risen by 50% from 2015 and they’ve only risen further since, but it is still much cheaper here than say London or Dublin. Unlike most places, the cities have the lower house prices in the North and so Belfast is ripe for the type of gentrification the inevitable influx of FDI will bring with it. It is still a small city without the infrastructure capable of taking on much new housing, and so they’ll still have Derry to ruin if they run out of space here.

LA: During a despicably sycophantic interview with Alastair Campbell in October 2019, the Labour MP John McDonnell stated that he hoped Tony Blair would be remembered for his achievements in Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement and ‘not for Iraq’. A particularly egregious example perhaps, but what would you say to those on the Left who extoll the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘peace process’? What has been their real impact for the people in the North?

OB: I would say that people should not mistake the absence of everyday violence for peace. What has been arrived at here has not been some noble all-together-now initiative to lift a war-torn area out of immiseration, it has been a concerted effort to bring the North into the neoliberal order that Britain and the rest of Ireland had been implementing throughout the period of the Troubles.

The impact of the ‘peace process’ in the political sense has been what Liam Ó Ruairc calls a ‘pacification process’ whereby the republican opposition to British involvement in Ireland, which used to encompass opposition to the economic policies that were central to that presence, has been watered down to the point where so-called republicans are chomping at the bit to enter the halls of power in Belfast as we speak so they can take the top spot in the institutions that administer British power here and continue to implement the disastrous economic policies that they have put in place, hand in hand with the British and the unionists, since 1998. What this process has meant is that, while the bombing and shooting has for the most part stopped, the lives of the people of the North haven’t improved by any measure, and, if anything, have gotten worse, certainly since 2008. Throughout the process, agreements have been drawn up to shore up the powersharing arrangement at Stormont – usually because Sinn Féin and the DUP have come to another inevitable impasse and these agreements, such as Fresh Start, have been used to bring the North further into the neoliberal modus operandi. This has been described by the economist Conor McCabe as a ‘double transition’, the transition to both peace and the en vogue neoliberal economics of the time. While, originally, there was a peace dividend whereby the Northern economy improved after the Agreement – it would have been difficult for it not to – the economic crash in 2008 finished that.

The public sector has been slashed and slashed again; local hospitals have been closed, waiting lists in healthcare are a seemingly-permanent scandal, social housing waiting lists continue to balloon, education targets and needs are missed annually. In the private sector, wages are lower than Britain or the South, disposable income is considerably lower, and employment has shifted from the manufacturing jobs of the 60s to transient, zero-hour call centre and service industry jobs. Economic inactivity, ill health, and suicide have all been at extraordinarily high levels since 1998. In 2016, it was reported that more people had died by suicide from 1999-2016 than had been killed in the Troubles. 18% of the North lives in poverty and our homelessness figures rise with each count. I don’t know how anyone could argue that this is a place experiencing anything akin to ‘peace’. In the 1960s, people organised into the civil rights marches and when they were violently repressed by the state, they organised into paramilitaries to fight the state. The idea of either of these things being possible at this moment in time is beyond remote.

On this topic, I would say nobody should be so naïve or show such little understanding of politics to say that Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, or anyone else involved in the Good Friday Agreement should be thanked for the cessation of violence here. The cessation of violence is thanks to the republican working class, who agreed to disarm. You can say that they were duped into doing so – and I do think that if you could show people in 1998 what 2023 would like that a lot of republicans would change their minds, maybe not about the cessation of 30 years of violence, but certainly about backing the forthcoming political settlement. But the republican working class still took that decision and it is upon that decision that the ‘peace process’ rests. It is not equivalent for loyalist working class paramilitaries, who were for the most part operating as intelligence assets for one form of British or RUC intelligence or another, and whose weaponry and operational ability was thus derived from government power. If John McDonnell or anyone else wants to credit someone for the ‘peace process’ and the cessation of violence, let it be the people most affected by that violence, the republican working class of places like Belfast, Derry, Armagh, and Newry.

LA: Your analysis of the ‘peace process’ in Ireland reminded me at times of the ‘peace process’ in Palestine, an indefinite and deliberately veiled means to continue colonial domination (and neo-liberal economic policies) under the spurious guise of achieving ‘peace’. With a small elite of the colonised population often benefitting in both cases. Are the parallels between Ireland and Palestine something that you think about?

OB: I am aware that this story sounds made up but I swear it’s true: I was in Palestine in 2018, walking through the old city of Nablus and our tour guide stopped and spoke in Arabic with a man who had been standing in his front garden, beneath an orange tree. Clearly, the man had been asking about us, because once he got his answer, he turned to us and said: ‘Irish will always be welcome here. Tiocfaidh ár lá.’ It turned out that he had lived in Belfast in the 90s. This is to say that despite some liberals hand wringing about Irish people ‘centring’ themselves by finding common cause with the Palestinians, it is impossible not to. The Palestinians themselves see it and I would suggest that those here who would presume to speak on their behalf should instead speak to a Palestinian.

In terms of our respective peace processes, there are certainly similarities in the aims. However, if we are to follow the Liam Ó Ruairc line of peace processes actually being pacification processes, then I think the one here has been much more successful than the one in Palestine. I think this is the case because the Zionist settler colonial project is still in expansion mode, as we see in the constant battles for new settlements in places like Sheikh Jarrah last year. This is not the case in Ireland, where, if anything, the colonial project has been contracting at least since partition was implemented. While the PLO is analogous to Sinn Féin in terms of their participation in the peace process and their incorporation into the colonial system that has displaced and brutalised their people, I think the difference is that there is still a significant resistance to that in Palestine. I don’t think anyone could look at the emergence of recent groups like the Lion’s Den or Jenin Brigades and say the Palestinian people have been pacified. I spoke of not mistaking a lack of violence for peace but every day we see reports of how the Palestinians aren’t afforded that lack of violence; I myself saw the IDF and their guns, the checkpoints, the Palestinian only roads. Their peace process has been a failure of pacification, ours has been a success ­– that’s the difference.

LA: I found your chapter on the cultural element especially fascinating and thought-provoking. Are the Irish language and traditional Irish sports important to you personally? What do you see their role as being within the broader political struggle?

OB: My mother tells two stories of me as an infant: that I was able to hit a sliotar with a hurl before I could stand, and that I would speak sentences that alternated between English and Irish, whichever language had the easier word to pronounce. Again, it is the luck of the family that I was born into but a huge portion of my life has been dedicated to the Irish sport hurling, our national game that is over 2,000 years old, and the Irish language. We were raised speaking Irish and playing hurling, there has never been a time when I did neither. I refer to myself as a native speaker, although I probably don’t meet the academic threshold for that, I figure that I am an Irishman who has spoken Irish as his first language for his entire life; what am I if not a native speaker? In terms of the sport, it has only been hurling that I have played and I come from Kilkenny, the stronghold of hurling in Ireland. There isn’t a day goes by where I don’t have my hurl in my hand and this is thanks to my father, who coached me and every other child in our parish for years upon years. There is a stereotype in places like Kilkenny of a ‘good hurling man’; my father is a good hurling man and in turn made good hurling men of me and my brothers.

As I read more, my appreciation for Irish culture like the language and hurling began to make more sense in my head. In the pre-Marx era, Friedrich Schiller wrote of form (reason and rational) and sense (physical sense) being combined to create a third sublime state of humanity, whereby mankind would be able to experience ‘complete intuition of his humanity’. Without something like Marx’s materialism to guide him, Schiller eventually lost faith in this idea, but he did recognise that labour was estranged from enjoyment. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx grounded these ideas in materialism, identified our alienation from our own labour, and recognised that we could only reach the Schiller’s exalted state – aesthetic freedom – through controlling our lives, our labour, and what our labour produces. I see Irish culture as being central to that for Irish people. Even if we were to get Britain out of Ireland tomorrow, I think the achievement of aesthetic freedom for Irish people is impossible using foreign modes such as the English language, soccer, or pop music. These are modes that we can never hope to control, but we can control our own games, language, and music. This is something that necessarily comes after a political and economic revolution but is central, in my opinion, to achieving the full vision of the Reconquest of Ireland as was espoused by people like James Connolly and Máirtín Ó Cadhain.

In the present day, I think of these struggles for things like language rights in the sense that Connolly did, as ‘the echo of the battle’ when the real battle is control of industry. This doesn’t, however, lessen the importance and battling for language rights can be a great avenue by which people understand their power to bend the state to their will. The problem with the current struggle for Irish language rights in the North, as discussed in the book, seems to me to be that the demands are less the bending of the state to the will of the people, and more the demand that the state open up, accommodate, and institutionalise the people.

LA: In addition to your own work, who or what else would you recommend people to read on this topic if they are keen to know more? And what to avoid perhaps also...

OB: The problem is that the people to read and to avoid are quite often the same people! Case in point being Henry McDonald. If you want to know what was happening in both republican and loyalist paramilitaries during the Troubles you have to read his books, but I would advise disregarding any of his analysis. It always puzzled me how a man could lay out, repeatedly, how deeply tied to the British intelligence state all loyalist paramilitaries were and then criticise republicans for not reckoning with loyalism as something separate from Britain. Brendan O’Leary is another in that camp; his three-volume history of the North that is cited repeatedly in my book is essential reading as a meticulous material overview of how the state came into being and how it functioned thereafter, but then his opinions are the most boring milquetoast liberal ones imaginable.

Former revolutionaries whose works are especially worth reading include Connolly – I myself use Shaun Harkin’s James Connolly Reader – Bobby Sands, Peadar O’Donnell, Pádraig Pearse, and Séamus Costello. Former revolutionaries still with us whose analysis remains sharp include Tommy McKearney and Anthony McIntyre. I don’t believe that anyone has ever written a better book on unionism than Geoffrey Bell’s The Protestants of Ulster. In terms of Troubles histories, you have Anne Cadwallader, Ed Moloney, Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Farrell, Gearóid Ó Faoileán, and Brian Hanley. Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh writes both good histories, usually local to his native Tyrone, and good analysis on his blog. For broader Irish history, FSL Lyons, TA Jackson, and C. Desmond Greaves. Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh: Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston has become a go-to since it came out too. When it comes to the fusion of culture, history, and the politics of their times, few were better than Ó Cadhain and Tomás Mac Síomóin. An eventual goal of mine is to translate Ó Cadhain political works around both republicanism and the language question into English for a new audience.

Of course, I would recommend basically every work cited in my own book – other than the Alastair Campbell and Frank Kitson ones.

LA: Thanks again for writing such an excellent and informative book. I learnt a lot from reading it. Is there anything else you would like to add?

OB: I am aware that there are people who may roll their eyes at my citation of Mark Fisher, but I believe that the quote of his I included in the book is one that bears repeating: ‘A culture which takes place only in museums is already exhausted. A culture of commemoration is a cemetery.’ That was my mission statement for the writing of this book. I feel as if republicanism has been allowed to wither on the vine in Ireland all while Sinn Féin has become the biggest political party in the country. Theirs is a movement with too much momentum for it to stop, but I want to help spark something else, a return to a politics that is not alien to the people of Belfast, a return to self-organisation and self-reliance. The best way to commemorate our dead is to take their ideas, modernise them for the present day, and implement them.

LA: What a brilliant line and sentiment for us to end on. Thanks again, Odrán.

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