I did have a Redbreast 27 year old. I don’t care for whiskey so I felt bad drinking it. I could tell it was good though.
Marxist grounded in solidarity, anti-imperialism, and decolonization. Fighting for Eco-socialism, liberation, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights. Guided by evidence, committed to collective power: Ní neart go cur le chéile | Cumhacht don Lucht Oibre! 26+6=1
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I did have a Redbreast 27 year old. I don’t care for whiskey so I felt bad drinking it. I could tell it was good though.
Tequila
Just imagine 10-30 communist doing this. It could be our 1917.
I’d take it as an honour to be a gremlin tearing about in a Furby mask and a morph suit.
I’d give whatever labour I have to see that happen. It’s genuinely a good idea; not for the sake of Bluesky, but for the idea itself.
This Thursday!
I hope he makes an even bigger disgrace of himself in court on Thursday, though christ knows he’s a standing disgrace as it is.
Your Party must suspend MP Adnan Hussain immediately for his transphobic comments. Failure to do so makes them complicit in the destruction of trans rights in the UK.
Housing can exist outside the circuits of speculation and rent extraction? Extraordinary discovery. Next week the Times will reveal that bread can be baked without Goldman Sachs and water can be drunk without Nestlé. Delighted they’re covering it of course, but you’ll forgive me a touch of sarcasm.
That’s a fair position. But I do see potential in trying and convince the left to flood the Green Party with genuine eco-socialists. I’m disgusted at the carry-on of people calling themselves socialists yet refusing to stand with trans folk, like oppression is something you can pick and choose.
Socialism that excludes the most vulnerable and exploited is no socialism at all, but a hollow mask worn to soothe the comfortable.
It’s deeply disappointing that he’s in “your party” at all. Either he’s shown the door and they’re upfront about the mistake, or else I’d seriously question whether Zack tying the Greens to them is a sound political move. Let’s hope for good news on Tuesday with Zack.
Fred Hampton was such a force at an incredibly young age...the FBI assassinated him out of abject fear that he would galvanize the people across class, race, and gender lines. I have no doubt that he would have indeed done so ✊
Voices being paid with undisclosed money with contracts specifying what they can speak on is a problem. It’s a problem even if the reporter is problematic. It’s a problem even if the reporter was also taking dark money. None of that materially changes the evidence presented.
It’s also totally reasonable to not trust the journalist and just leave it at that. I’m personally interested in the content of the story and the evidence presented. It’s pretty low on my interests level with all I have to work on in my own backyard but it is interesting to me.
You know her reporting better than I do, I’m not judging you for holding and recognizing that bias you’ve formed. The primary source material is the most important piece and we can throw away the narrative part entirely right? It’s still the same story at the end of the day.
I also believe it’s good that the liberal dark money issue is being discussed.
That’s totally fair. I think it’s easy to get caught up in political spectacles over material suffering and real centers of exploitation. That doesn’t make this kind of criticism unimportant but it’s reasonable to just be over it. I respect you and your thoughts on this.
I agree that simply making the funding transparent doesn’t really solve the problem. But are you attempting to defend the people she provided evidence against in this article? Even if she isn’t aligned with socialist goals. The primary source material alone seems damning for the liberals involved.
The problem is liberals only agree with this selectively. We should investigate and scrutinize her connections to capital interests. But it shouldn’t be done as a reaction to a valid criticism at decidedly center-center right liberals and their connections to dark money.
Congratulations! The fact that group dislikes you is a sure sign you’re on the right path.
Better yet let’s build an internationalist workers democracy! If we don’t exit capitalism it will destroy us! The choice remains Socialism or barbarism!
If you are okay with this, if you think this is justified, if you think people living on the street have brought this upon themselves, if you think this is good leadership, you may be able to fool yourself that you care about others but you don’t fool me
I believe you. It’s really difficult to find any widely distributed journalism that isn’t filtered through liberal individualism, moral panic, and sensationalism rather than through a structural critique of exploitation and class power. I can only ever judge articles on their content.
Well what a delightful thing! I will be sure to read it. Thanks Aaron.
Thanks Aaron. I had a feeling you weren’t. Unsolicited old man advice though: The American empire is a confusing and dangerous beast, conditions in your country are not likely to improve. Be careful that in trying to prevent divisions you don’t act as a wedge rather then a bridge.
Even if you’re wrong about her though I will not be taking any stars from your leftist card! Coherent disagreement in good faith is a big part of how we resolve the contradictions in our thinking.
That may be so! This is, to my knowledge, the first thing I’ve read from her. It seemed well researched and relevant to the issue of transparency in political funding. I’m sure though that there’s a lot of nuance I miss not being rooted in the American political landscape.
You can count on it! That’s pretty coo! I’ve heard of it but haven’t read it. I’ll have to give it a read!
I also didn’t call you a “lib”. The belittling and infantilizing language, towards a person disagreeing with you, was what I described as liberal posturing. I’m not going to attempt to build a totalizing narrative of your ideology based on this discussion.
I don’t think disagreeing with this article has anything to do with being a leftist or not I never said anything about that. If your instinct is to punch left, at people taking the criticisms levied in this article seriously, you’re obviously going to get push back.
Writing off my entire political/philosophical frame work and life experience as trying to prove I’m left enough isn’t a disagreement lad.
Yeah I get that but that’s a completely separate issue that this article isn’t addressing directly. One is what we typically call dark money and one isn’t. Transparency is at the heart of the criticism so ignoring that doesn’t make sense to me.
I have spent most of my life committed to the fight for socialism and Irish reunification. I have nothing to prove to you. I’m used to this flavor of liberal posturing from many years under the British boot. I’m happy to discuss, but your ideas and views are not beyond reproach anymore than my own.
I understand the instinct though! And it probably is justified to look into any ultra wealthy person spending so much to influence politics. But in this context it comes across as deflection away from the valid criticisms rather than good faith counter critique.
Receiving support from a transparent fund is not the same as benefiting from a dark money operation, even if a wealthy donor’s money shows up in both places. The issue isn’t whether the donor exists, it’s whether the funding is structured to hide political influence.
Well because she criticized the nature and management of the fund not the all the individuals contributing to it. It’s not wrong to benefit from a transparently funded residency in most people’s minds. Even if there’s people funding that experience who you disagree with on some level.
My hope on the internet is that good faith discussion based in coherent frameworks of analysis will lead to better outcomes for all people involved. But that would require that you not assume that I’m trying to test you or put you in some preconceived box. I don’t know you beyond this thread.
I’m not an American so I won’t pretend to have wrapped my head around the confusing and contradictory use of terms in your current political environment. Im not attacking you as a person. I’m just saying the residency this writer participated in doesn’t meet the definition of dark money.
The article lays out well documented evidence and testimonies about how these funds were managed. Wired is a reputable publication with editor and no correction has been issued. I don’t understand what part of this qualifies as a purity test or is hypocritical.
How is it dark money? If the sources of funding are transparent, which they were for the residency, then it isn’t dark money. Even if a funder also separately gives to dark money fund doesn’t make the other unrelated fund dark money.
Though I would amend his statement to say global capital, domestic capital and England now play equal roles in the domination of the Irish working class.
As a James Connolly said without a Socialist Republic. England would rule us. She would rule through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individual institutions she has planted in Ireland. Connolly was clearly correct.
Thanks to the immortal science of dialectical and historical materialism I have never once been confused by the Democratic Party’s actions. I suggest people try that instead of scratching their heads every day
Exactly. It just makes it easier for actual antisemites to hide.
What Connolly prescribed over a century ago remains the only path to break England’s rule: the establishment of a Socialist Republic, where kindness, equality, and solidarity can flourish beyond exploitation and greed.
England rules us through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individual institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
She also unleashed shoot-to-kill squads and mass internment across the Six Counties in the North of Ireland.
Plenty of people love to flatten history, lad, but you can’t equate the violence of an occupying army with the resistance of the occupied. Britain’s grip shaped the whole terrain. Don’t mistake the scars of colonization for some homegrown cruelty floating free of empire.
Why are comedians doing a better job of cutting through the bullshit of politicians in their desperate attempt to justify a genocide than any journalists?
I’d be tickled if they challenged this definition, in good faith, and started a discussion. It’s very clear they aren’t interested in that though.
I’ve been pasting this under posts calling trump a socialist/communist. They all block me. Liberals have a tendency to collapse everything into the immediate. Their political imagination is colonized, their role is to keep it that way, blocking any horizon beyond crisis management and caricature.
Is it transferring control of the means of production from private capital into the hands of the working class organized in its own political power? If the answer is no, then it is not socialism or communism.
Yeah, I’m sure the FBI didn’t jointly run David Rupert with MI5 to infiltrate the IRA from 1990-2003. And if they did they were just deeply concerned about democracy, not about keeping Ireland safe as a tax shelter for American capital.
I think this a really important video, honestly: youtu.be/QwpanShgOp4?...
Do it! It’s a genius pfp, my favorite on this site.
Israel have bombed another hospital. Waited for medics to arrive - and then bombed again. Britain keeps selling arms to this genocidal regime. Starmer & Lammy say they're "horrified". They condemn. But they do nothing. All the war criminals must face justice.
At Forwards Festival with @zarahsultana.bsky.social. Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
Is it transferring control of the means of production from private capital into the hands of the working class organized in its own political power? If the answer is no, then it is not socialism or communism.
He will not beat Farage. His brand of hollow technocratic centrism breeds only nihilism, confusion, and disengagement among workers, creating the vacuum that Farage’s reactionary populism thrives on. The only path I see is Polanski leading the greens in an alliance with Sultana and Corbyn.
Keir Starmer is a loyal servant of British capital, purging the left and restoring Labour as a tool of ruling-class stability. In that role he has defended Israel’s colonial project, backed its genocidal wars of extermination, and criminalized solidarity with Palestinian resistance.
Keir Starmer and David Lammy belong in The Hague.
I hope one thing leftists all take away from Mamdani’s campaign though is that it doesn’t matter how chill and wholesome you are, the dinguses are going to smear and trash you in increasingly unhinged ways anyway, so you might as well shoot for the moon and campaign on what makes your heart sing
I’m using a photo and reposting because they blocked me.
I’m honing in on this post because I see far too many third-way and status quo Labour supporters wheeling out these same muddled lines, as the increasingly right-wing Labour sinks in popularity. For the love of God, drop the American liberal playbook. All it’s bringing us is more political nihilism.
If u take a cop's cowboy hat, u get to keep it
I just don’t believe for a second that a majority of you genuinely don’t want healthcare as a basic right, a decent free education, proper paid leave, affordable childcare, a roof over your head that doesn’t cost the earth, and a good bit of security if you lose your job.
“Here lad, just hop on this bus going a couple of hundred kilometres the wrong way. It’s the only way we’ll be able to turn it around.”
Meanwhile as their media mates swarm around us and their police publicly open a meaningless investigation after Glastonbury on us (only to drop it silently)... They are complicit in war crimes.
Is he really any different from your average social democrat anywhere else? Whats the difference? It’s just mad to think America’s that much further to the right than the rest of us, that Bernie Sanders gets called far left.
It always throws me a bit when I hear Americans call Bernie Sanders “far left.” he doesn’t sound much different to your average social democrat anywhere else. Nothing I’ve heard from him would be out of place for a Labour TD in Ireland.
Is it transferring control of the means of production from private capital into the hands of the working class organized in its own political power? If the answer is no then it is not socialism or communism (in the opinion of most socialist/communists).
Maybe the real road to serfdom was the friends we made along the way.
Ha! there’s few plants with shade quite as sweet!
Well done ya! Great to see the spectre of socialism alive and well down under. There’s been a fair revival of explicitly socialist politics here in Ireland too. May we keep growing the tree whose shade we might never sit under comrade!
I remember in 2016 you had the Hollywood handbook boys on your podcast (I think the episode was called Aquarium?) and I knew then you were good craic. Happy to see you’re exactly who I hoped you were. Sláinte chugat, a chara!
You’re right, thanks mate. had a couple pints. I’ve been getting my hopes up for electoral politics again. The greens are a strange beast though. If leftist work their way in and turned the party to transformative policy they can be powerful. Ah see I’m at it again.
Thank god! You tricked me. Lol
MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.
I’m not willing to abandon the foundations of our philosophy for labour why would I for what ever the fak this is.
Jesus Christ! the carry-on of these people. Utterly vulgar in their understanding of intersectional solidarity, and class struggle. Ignoring a major fulcrum of exploitation and oppression is exactly what labour would do…
Research from 2022 that every Democrat apologist should chew on: “We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.“ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Oh yeah I 100% agree with that. We just don’t want to ignore the real valves of class struggle that exist in France. It’s why they have any of the rights they currently have. Neoliberalism, and really any liberalism with commitments to capitalism, are dead ends at this stage.
I’m not sure what you mean by influence government policies. If you mean agreements require legal extensions to cover whole sectors then thats true. But it’s a routine process and is not typically drawn out or denied.
Now they have even further representation. Since 2017 all companies in France with at least 11 employees must set up a Comité Social et Économique (CSE). A body through which workers elect representatives who are very often union-backed candidates.
The ministry of labour does take into account Economic harm, law violations, representativeness, and procedural flaws.they also consult the National Collective Bargaining Commission before making a final decision. But the vast majority of agreements are approved and extended to a sector.
Once unions sign a company or sector agreement with an employer federation the ministry of labour extends it to all workers in that sector, even non-members. That’s why about 95% of workers are covered despite low union membership.
the british colonise half of the world and have the audacity to complain about immigration
I’m not shocked by that. They feel overly mechanical and consultant driven. They’ve abandoned all but a thin veneer of labor militancy, continued material supported of a genocidal state, and treat many of their most vulnerable constituents rights as negotiable. It’s a recipe for political nihilism.
If I were American I’d be screaming for proportional representation. Having center right and left leaning people all shoved in one party is obviously going to cause incoherent infighting. It also seems very undemocratic to an outsider.
Outsider perspective (not American) why should we think he would win nationally? It seems like the strategy of siding with candidates who mobilize donor networks but fail to mobilize the working class has failed for democrats.
Another legal mandate is that every company with more than 11 employees must hold elections where all workers, union and non-union, can vote for representatives. These representatives are usually backed by unions. So it’s not at all that they have fewer valves collective action.
The result is low density but very militant unions with a high level of public support. union leaders often command popularity ratings higher than most politicians, and have successfully mobilized mass protests; including bringing out more than 1 million demonstrators multiple times since 2023.
Their collective bargaining system works a little differently. Collective agreements negotiated by unions apply to all workers in a sector, whether or not they’re members. So around 95% of French workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements.
*Adam Smith
Based on Lincoln’s other writings we can only really say that he agreed with the orthodox political economy theory of the time. From his words, and policies under his leadership, it seems like he was more influenced by Adams than Marx.
The labor theory of value was the orthodox theory of value in Marx’s and Lincoln’s time. Classical political economist, like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others, held that labor was the source of value. Marx expanded that value theory into a critique of surplus value and capitalist exploitation.
“The dialectic reverses its valence; swap places with the nearest player.”
“You mistake the cultural dominant for a style; pay 200 in ideological reification fees.”
Western media has succeeded in erasing the memory of socialism while keeping alive the lie that today’s capitalist, oligarchic Russia is “communist,”. it’s a distortion that lets capital blame communism for capitalism’s crimes and keeps people ideologically chained to imperialist narratives.