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Tommy McKearney ☭ The presence of the far right in Ireland has not gone unnoticed to date, yet some further analysis is required.

6-June-2025

Several recent developments need our attention. There is, for example, the spreading of meetings and rallies to areas not previously centres of such public displays. Disturbing too is the presence at these marches of many young people and others not previously known as sympathetic to reactionary movements. While it is correct to condemn this behaviour, more is needed than moral outrage, no matter how justified or well-intentioned. It is important that we understand the conditions giving rise to this phenomenon and identify a meaningful response.


Let us first explore the material conditions. Capitalism by its nature is subject to cyclical crises, the last major one occurring in years 2008-2010 with the economic crash. This was largely due to a move away from manufacturing and towards a concentration on the financial sector. As part of this departure, free-market dominated states, the Republic included, had embarked on a widespread policy of privatisation including, significantly, in housing and health.

Following the crash and in order to preserve the capitalist system (and the class that benefited from it), the Republic’s government bailed out the financial system. The cost for doing so was at the expense of citizens through the imposition of austerity. What was ever a flawed system became still worse. Profit driven house builders and medical corporations made access to a home or health care prohibitively expensive for most and beyond the reach of many.

The underlying cause of this situation was and is the prevailing capitalist economic system. However, for the establishment to admit that would be to undermine the viability of the system, leading obviously to the search for a suitable replacement. At which point there arises that spectre so disturbing to the minority benefitting from the free-market. A spectre epitomised currently by the Peoples Republic of China.

Because, as Carlos Martinez poignantly explained recently during a presentation at the Connolly Festival in Dublin that, unlike his experience in our capital city, there are no unfortunate people sleeping in the streets of Beijing or elsewhere in the PRC. Nor indeed is there an issue in China with access to state provided health care, something available to all. In short, a concrete example of how to address a major cause of misery, not only in this country but across much of the free-market West.

Therein lies the real raison d’être for the latest spread of the far-right. There is a housing and health crisis in the Republic and the fascists are attempting to lay the blame on our immigrant population. So they don’t find fault with the capitalist system and most certainly don’t look East for a solution, but instead demand the expulsion of our recently arrived neighbours.

To what extent this dangerous campaign is an organic movement coming from the grass-roots up is a moot point. There is evidence of input from fascist organisations in Britain and funding being provided by sources in the USA. While it is not possible at present to prove a link between these elements and their states’ intelligence agencies, such a connection is a distinct possibility if not an actual probability. British and US spooks are not renowned for their tolerance of threat to their hegemony or a reluctance to intervene subversively. Anyone doubting the lengths to which Britain’s deep state will go need only read the recently published Kincora: Britain’s Shame.

Ireland, although no longer the vital strategic asset to Britain, retains the potential to become an example to many others if it solved its social problems through adoption of a socialist model. The old Tory nightmare of a Cuba in Europe. And is such a scenario remotely possible? There is in Ireland a history of passively accepting maltreatment for decades before suddenly resisting. Moreover, as for the establishment here and overseas, there are now disturbing signs of stirrings among the young, let’s call it the Kneecap generation.

While it is important to recognise the very likely input from these guardians of imperialism at its highest stage, it is equally essential to identify a pathway to overcome the threat posed.

As a first step it is necessary to understand that the problems presenting fascists with this opening must be addressed. Housing and health are the principal issues impacting many working people attracted to the far-right message. Public housing and a national health service are the only answers to these problems. Not social and affordable houses but an intense programme of well-designed public housing. Not expanding access to healthcare abroad through the Cross Border Directive (CBD), but by providing an extensive health service domestically.

Of course, making people aware of the danger posed by fascism is also vital, but that could be done in the course of a campaign to remedy the problems highlighted above. Perhaps it may be possible to persuade the trade union movement, or at least a significant part of it, to lead the fight as happened through the anti-water charges campaign.

Failing that, what about asking Kneecap to lead off?

Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist. 
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney

Far Right Propping Up The System

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Seven Hundred And Eight

Dr John Coulter✍ Next to North Korea, the current political regime in Iran is one of the most dangerous and volatile leaderships in the world - and both need to be toppled to maintain global peace.

North Korea is already a nuclear power, and had not Israel and the United States attacked Iran, the latter was well on its way to acquiring ‘The Bomb’.

The delicate military action which the Western powers must implement is not a case of wiping Iran off the face of the Middle East, but simply doing enough damage to the existing radical leadership that it sparks a rebellion of the people against those militants.

Put bluntly, this must become a people’s revolution in Iran where democratic moderate Islam replaces the current extremist theology of the fundamentalist radicals.

Such fundamentalist Islamic radicals have a very warped interpretation of the Koran and even the most politically liberal person with any titter of wit would recognise that should they gain the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, it would most certainly be used against Israel.

In global terms, there are two facts people need to know about Israel. Firstly, it doesn’t give a hoot about world opinion. It will do whatever is necessary to destroy the terror group Hamas in Gaza, or the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.

Secondly, it is not afraid to indulge in a ‘first strike’ military option if it feels there is a threat to the survival of its existence. The current extremist Islamic leadership in Iran is one such regime which wants, like Hamas and Hezbollah, to see Israel eradicated as a nation.

Even since the Shab of Persia was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has become a thorn in the flesh of Western powers and even many of its Middle East neighbours.

But the Western powers need to tread carefully in dealing with Iran militarily in case the Russians, Chinese and even the North Koreans see any Iran/Israel conflict as an opportunity to embarrass the United States.

Is it any wonder we witnessed some colourful language from US President Donald Trump when he clearly demonstrated his frustration with both states over their respective definitions of what is a ceasefire, a secession of violence - and more importantly, when it should start.

It seemed both Iran and Israel wanted to make the final point with one more missile before the actual supposed firing stopped.

Likewise, America does not want to rush into putting boots on the ground in Iran like it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both wars, the United States left with its tail between its legs militarily, leaving the opponents in charge.

After American pulled out of Vietnam in the Seventies, the communists took over. In recent years, the Islamic radical Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan. Even the old Soviet Union could not defeat the Taliban when it invaded the country a few decades ago.

The Donald is also walking a very high political and military tightrope. He must deploy enough military action against Iran to stop Israel using its nuclear weapons against Iran.

Likewise, he does not want the United States, or the West, to be drawn into a war of attrition on the ground in Iran. But The Donald must juggle both clubs - diplomacy and military - to ensure the current Islamic fundamentalist leadership in Iran either gives a cast iron guarantee it will never develop nuclear weapons, or is totally toppled in a new 1979-style revolution of the people.

With many European nations facing problems around immigration, including the UK and Ireland, there is the real danger that Iran could sneak terrorists into the British Isles to carry out attacks in both the UK and the Republic.

After all, during the Troubles, the Provisional IRA and the INLA carried out bombing campaigns in mainland Britain. And Southern Ireland need not wave the flag of so-called neutrality. The United States uses airports in the Republic to land its planes. In Iranian fundamentalist eyes, that makes Southern Ireland a so-called legitimate target.

Even Southern Ireland’s military reputation of providing United Nations peace keeping troops would not be enough to save it from a pro-Iranian Islamic terror attack. Southern Ireland is no stranger to such terrorist murder and mayhem given the 1974 no-warning bombs which the UVF detonated in Dublin and Monaghan during the Troubles.

So what is the solution to preventing the West from being dragged into a potential all-out war in the Middle East between Iran and Israel?

The US and the UK will have to deploy its elite respective special forces to eliminate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard leadership in the same way as Osama Bin Laden was hunted after 9/11.

At the same time, the US and UK must identify moderate Muslims who could transform Iran into a stable Western-style democracy with genuine human rights, especially for women.

The people who could compromise such a moderate leadership may currently be in jail in Iran, in hiding in Iran, or even in exile. Surely the entire population of Iran is not as extreme as the Revolutionary Guard leadership? There must be a sizeable number of moderate Muslims in Iran who could support a democratically run state.

Just as the UK became a haven for exiled governments during the Second World War, the UK and US need to politically also establish a moderate ‘government in waiting’ in exile when - not if - the current Revolutionary Guard leadership is finally and permanently deposed.

What is abundantly clear is that the West cannot allow a situation whereby the Revolutionary Guard is removed, only for it to return a few years later with even more savagery. The military mistakes of Vietnam and Afghanistan cannot be repeated with Iran.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Militant Regime Running Iran Must Be Toppled To Guarantee Real Peace

 

A Morning Thought @ 2712

 

A Morning Thought @ 2711

People And Nature 🔖Review by Simon Pirani of A Socialist Activist in Industrial Workplaces under Ukrainian bourgeois democracy 1998-2003 (Sotsialistichnii aktivist na promislovome pidpriemstv v umovakh Ukrainskoi burzhuaznoi demokratii 1999-2003, “Ekologia”: Odesa, 2025).

Republished with thanks from Commons.com.ua.


In April 2000, Oleg Dubrovsky managed to sign on at the Dnepropetrovsk Rolled Products Works or DZPV. A month earlier he had quit his job at Dneprotyazhbummash before they could sack him for shop-floor organising; another two years before that he had instigated a protest strike over unpaid wages at the nearby precision pipe works, where he was also dismissed and blacklisted.


At the age of 45, Dubrovsky, who had worked previously as a rolling-mill operator and boiler-house maintenance fitter, had to learn a brand-new profession: metal pourer in the foundry , coaxing still-molten steel into a machine that cast it into balls. When the machine was down, he filled in with the physically demanding tasks of a castings dresser, cutting and manoeuvring the still red-hot steel castings, and a ditcher “whose basic tools were the shovel, crowbar and sledgehammer”.

In the “flames, dust, smoke and din” of the smoke-blackened foundry with its leaking roof, Dubrovsky got talking with his new colleagues and asked them what they knew of its history. Having rebelled against Brezhnev-era discipline in the 1970s, been inspired by Polish Solidarnosc, and gorged on anarcho-syndicalist and Trotskyist literature as it became available prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he had for many years read everything he could lay his hands on about the past of the local workers’ movement.

DZPV began in 1896 as Sirius, a machine builder, and in 1913 shifted to rolling steel products. During the 1905 revolution, the factory director had been “killed by anarchists for his cruelty towards workers”, which had opened a “heroic saga of anarchist revolutionary terror” in Yekaterinoslav, which was renamed Dnepropetrovsk in 1926 and renamed Dnipro in 2016. But Dubrovsky’s new colleagues knew nothing of this drama, or even of the revolutionary convulsions of 1917-21, he found. Some of them knew the factory had been occupied by the German army between September 1941 and October 1943, but not of the fate of its workers when the Soviet army retook Dnepropetrovsk:

No legends, no memories, remained; no knowledge of the revolutionary events or the Sirius workers’ participation in them, of the formation of trade union organisations and a factory committee, of the factory Red Guards and [food] procurement brigades. No-one was interested in the factory museum, whose doors were closed, and nobody demanded that they be opened.

The example of the DZPV convinced me, once again, that the revolutionary traditions of our proletariat were a myth, a soap bubble, that had been inflated by CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] propaganda solely with the aim of endowing the CPSU with some sort of right of revolutionary succession.

This didn’t mean, though, that the social memory of the DZPV workers was completely dead. It had preserved a loyalty, but a very different type of loyalty: to some sort of pre-revolutionary tough-but-fair paternal capitalist. The longing for a real boss, for a really “just” boss’s whip, could clearly be heard in this wage slaves’ loyalty.

This bitter conclusion, on the effect of the Soviet experience on the consciousness of the industrial workers it claimed to represent, runs through Dubrovsky’s unique and fascinating memoir, which recounts in detail a five-year stretch in his decades-long efforts to organise, and propagandise socialist ideas among, his fellow industrial workers.

This review is not by a neutral observer. I met Dubrovsky in Moscow in the early 1990s, visited Dnepropetrovsk as his guest in 1996, then published a pamphlet based on extended interview with him,[1] and have been in touch with him on and off since then. Living the relatively comfortable existence of a UK-based journalist and researcher, I shared (and share) his affinity with socialism and admire his conviction of the need both to do and to write.

The shadow of the USSR

Dubrovsky’s book, published this year in Odesa, is laced with his awareness of the disconnect between how workers actually lived, and the motive force of change that socialists of Dubrovsky’s generation – our generation – had often assumed, or hoped, them to be. He shows how the Soviet experience – the revolutionary transformations in the early 20th century, the nightmare of Stalinism, and the stifling, bureaucratic authoritarianism under which he began his political activity – cast a long shadow over post-Soviet Ukraine.

The “Communist” rulers perfected the art of emasculating and gutting all memories of collective working-class action. In the 1970s and early 1980s, protests came in short, isolated outbursts. Workers’ survival strategies could be by turns indifferent, individualist, cynical. As repression eased in the late 1980s, workplace organising reappeared[2] – but still, the numbing effect of Soviet “socialism” left Dnepropetrovsk’s industrial workers ill-prepared for the onslaught on living standards and workplace conditions that followed the transition to independent Ukraine in 1991.

Self-serving managers adapted to the “wild east” markets of the 1990s and trade union bureaucrats found new depths of servility: Dubrovsky was perpetually at war with them. But he worked to understand not only the external enemies of the industrial working class, but also the internal damage done to it.

In the DZPV foundry, he writes, it would be no exaggeration to say that the workers were “completely apolitical”. They had no interest in the “Gongadze affair” (the scandal caused by a journalist’s murder by police in late 2000) or the “Ukraine without Kuchma” movement directed against the president. Such “indifference to bourgeois politics” might have had a positive side if workers sought a political alternative, but they didn’t, Dubrovsky writes. The ideologies that came up in discussion in the foundry were authoritarianism (some workers said “a Stalin is needed” to restore order) and the purposes of Christian orthodox religion.

Much more vigorous debates raged about how best to make use of the garden plots, that stretched geographically right up to the factory gates, and on which many Dnepropetrovsk workers depended for food supplies and income. (Dubrovsky describes the luxurious plot, with 57 chickens (!) and an orchard with 40 fruit trees, owned by one of the city’s “former people” – party officials who converted minor Soviet privileges into material wealth in the 1990s.)
Oleg Dubrovsky

Daily life in the workshop was also shaped by the consumption of alcohol (in context, most likely vodka) “practically every day”. Management did nothing to combat this “social evil”, “because workers who drink, sooner or later, succumb to various forms of informal dependence on that management”.

Another war that management did little to fight, and never won, was with theft – an “assault on bourgeois property” of a “systemic, solidary” character, in Dubrovsky’s eyes. Building materials such as firebricks and metal scrap were shipped out in quantities. Metal additives for steel alloys, e.g. nickel, chrome or molybdenum, were the most sought after. Workers converted these valuables into cash by selling them to informal networks of unlawful traders.

Workplace organising

Dubrovsky’s book covers his time at three workplaces: Dneprotyazhbummash, where he found work in 1998 soon after his dismissal from the Dnepropetrovsk Precision Pipe Works for organising a strike; the above-mentioned Dnepropetrovsk Rolled Products Works (DZPV), where he survived just nine months, from April 2000; and the precision pipe works (also called the Experimental Pipe Works), to which he returned in 2001.

At Dneprotyazhbummash, a machine building works with strong links to the timber and paper industries, Dubrovsky worked in the steam-power shop. The works suffered from the epidemic of late payment of wages that spread across most former Soviet countries in the 1990s. When Dubrovsky arrived, payments were a year behind. Most debts were paid off – surprise surprise – just before the 1999 presidential elections, at which the incumbent Leonid Kuchma, who started his political career in Dnepropetrovsk, successfully sought re-election.

By January 2000, there were five months’ worth of wages outstanding (May to September 1999). Not a word of explanation from management; not a word of protest by the collaborationist “official” trade union. Four-fifths of the steam-power shop workers signed a letter, drafted by Dubrovsky, asking management for an explanation: they coughed up more money – but also singled him out as a troublemaker.

Far less successful than such shop-floor organising were Dubrovsky’s attempts to establish a library of socialist literature in the remains of the factory’s “red corner”, which had been used in the CPSU’s times for its propaganda. The library stock was repeatedly vandalised, and flyers informing workers of its existence torn down. He had hoped that the communist and anarchist literature in the library would win around his fellow workers to socialist ideas; “at the next stage, educational circles (above all, studying political economy) must be formed, which could then work outside the factory”. But none of this came to pass.

Dubrovsky recounts that this pattern – partial success on industrial issues, failure to convince his colleagues of socialist ideas – was repeated at DZPV and the precision pipe works. In his extended account of his activity at the precision pipe works between 2001 and 2003, he fills out more of the details: the dynamics between factory owners, a succession of managers with varying degrees of corruption, security personnel, old “official” trade unions and different sections of the workforce.

The crowning success of his trade-union organising was a three-week boycott of 12-hour working that he initiated there in October 2002: workers “successfully counterposed to the bosses’ arbitrary diktats their will, their class solidarity” , and re-imposed the 40 hour week.

The trade unions

Dubrovsky’s stubborn efforts to disrupt managers’ control over workforces make him uniquely well placed to explain the role of the old trade union structures, inherited largely unchanged from Soviet times and integrated closely into management. In some Ukrainian workplaces – for example, much of the coal industry – these unions had in the late 1980s and 1990s been challenged and even replaced by unions that were named “independent” and to various degrees were really independent. In these cases, the automatic deduction of union subscriptions from wages, for direct transfer to union bureaucrats, ended; membership once again became a relationship between workers and their own organisations.

But Dubrovsky conducted his independent organising activity often with the help of colleagues, but without successfully breaking the hold of the old unions’ membership structures.

In 1997-98, during the brief all-out strike at the precision pipe works, he had been chairman of the rank-and-file strike committee, which led to his victimisation and dismissal. In 2001, he returned to the works, regarded with some combination of respect and suspicion as the leader of an ultimately unsuccessful struggle. But in the intervening three years, labour conditions had deteriorated drastically:

The rolling mill operators, who comprised the main type of skilled labour in the factory, had worked for those three years without being paid. And they had without resistance surrendered the eight-hour day, and in 2001 were all working 12 hours per day in two shifts, 7.00am-7.00pm, and 7.00pm-7.00am.

Dubrovsky explains the trade union officials’ complicity in excruciating detail. Soon after his return to the works in April, a meeting of shop delegates was held to discuss the annual renewal of the collective agreement governing wages and conditions. One manager tore into a delegate who, following a conversation with Dubrovsky, dared to question the 12-hour shift (which would only be reduced to 8 hours after the boycott in October 2002, mentioned above); another manager, just before the new draft agreement was to be read out, leaped up to announce that part of the previous month’s pay was being paid out in the shops, causing many of the delegates to depart.

The official trade union representatives not only failed to question this farce, but allowed “voluntary” Saturday working, which had been scrapped in 1989-91 in the face of worker protest, to be reinstated. When Dubrovsky tried simply to obtain a copy of the collective agreement for display in his shop, he ran into a wall of obfuscation.

Dubrovsky witnessed two serious accidents, causing life-changing head and facial injuries, and describes how managers effectively bribed the victims not to enter a report. “In neither case did the ‘official’, formally-existent trade union put in an appearance, while the factory managers responsible for worker safety tried, as they always do, to put the responsibility for the accidents on the victims.”

Discussion and conclusions

Dubrovsky concludes that his efforts at socialist propaganda failed almost completely, but his organising around wages, hours and workplace conditions had some success. His workmates at the precision pipe works were obsessed with the tabloid press – a striking contrast with the thirst for socialist and other political literature in 1989-91 – and had no more interest in the socialist books and newspapers he offered than workers at Dneprotyazhbummash had had. In the 2004 elections, support for Viktor Yanukovich, the president who would be overthrown by the Maidan uprising of 2013-14, was overwhelming, Dubrovsky writes. There were rumblings among workers about the need for punitive violence against the 2004 “Orange revolution” that challenged Yanukovich’s ballot-rigging.

Drawing up a balance sheet of his activism, Dubrovsky writes: “Given the current extremely low level of development of class consciousness among workers, and their alienation from socialist ideas, my trade-union activism seemed much more dangerous to the bosses than ‘ideological subversion’.” Actions such as the strike Dubrovsky organised in 1997, and the boycott of 12-hour working in 2002, had hit the company hard.

The Dneprotyazhbummash factory

Further: “How to overcome the yawning gap between [industrial workers] and socialist ideas? How to infect them with the virus of class solidarity? How to draw their attention to their general class interests? My practice, described above, did not give answers to these questions.”

I want to say to Dubrovsky (and I expect that, thanks to the translators!, he is reading this) that this is not only about his practice. By bringing it to a wider audience, he has done a service to our generation and those that follow. But the problems on which he almost broke his teeth were very widely shared. A relevant example is a recent article by another old comrade of mine, Bob Myers, who, like Dubrovsky, spent decades as a committed, well-read socialist in industrial workplaces, in the very different political environment of the UK.[3] He wrote:

‘The Workers United will never be defeated!’This slogan was chanted on the many mass demonstrations […]. And what a meaningless slogan it was. The working class had united behind the imprisoned dockers [in 1972], but when the miners went on strike for a year [1984-85] no-one struck in solidarity, despite massive sympathy. What had changed? We were all defeated. Maybe it wouldn’t be very catchy, but if only someone would chant ‘The workers have been defeated, let’s think why?’

Today, writes Myers, still hopeful despite the horrors of Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and the looming threat of climate change, he asks: “Can we find a way out of this terrible situation? I look back at my younger naivety that thought social transformation was within reach and relatively straightforward. Our ‘Party’ would lead the masses to power. Today things do not look so simple.”

For Dubrovsky, it is not “party”, but “socialist propaganda” that is the necessary instrument for changing the working class. My own view is that neither of these levers are sufficient. Our many attempts, collectively, to use both of them were weak, in part, because of the fragility of our understanding of the late 20th and early 21st century circumstances in which we made our efforts. We refused, quite rightly, to abandon the socialist principles we learned. But in many different ways we often collectively turned them into dogma, empty slogans that Myers compares to religion:

Collective attempts to understand the present? Ha! What we have on the ground is a multitude of little sects, who champion their tablets of stone in fierce competition with all the other tablets. The ‘debate’ more resembles the archaic quarrelling between different schools of theology than anything that might usefully contribute to a real understanding of where we are.

Dubrovsky is no less scathing than Myers about sections of the “left” in which we all worked, and excoriates “revolutionary radical fantasists” who “float in the geopolitical firmament” and look down their noses at workers’ day-to-day struggles, dismissing them as “economistic”.

These people forget that:

We need to deal with a new proletariat, which has not completed the process of its formation, has not yet broken all its ties with the countryside, which, in developing its consciousness of itself, has no revolutionary traditions, has nothing with which to connect with that class which, on the territory of the former Russian empire, at the beginning of the twentieth century, carried three revolutions on its shoulders. We need to start all over again from the beginning. …

That we are talking about class formation is an important insight. But let us consider further how we understand that process. I think it will unfold in the 21st century in ways that have far less in common with the revolutions of the 20th century than Dubrovsky seems to assume.

For a start, the working class we are dealing with will not look much like the one that spearheaded the 1917-21 revolutions – nor even, in my view, the important but narrow section of workers among which Dubrovsky has conducted his political work. Even in Ukraine at the time at which he was writing, ten years out from the collapse of the USSR, there had been huge changes outside the industrial workplaces. Millions of Ukrainians had begun to live as migrant workers in western Europe; millions more were employed in the service and IT sectors that had hardly existed in Soviet times. Ukraine, like most countries, has seen a huge expansion of precarious labour. And there are aspects of working-class experience, as real in Dnipro as anywhere else, that Dubrovsky barely touches on, in particular the domestic (reproductive) labour, mostly by women, that goes together with wage labour.

The chronological framework for Dubrovsky’s book (1998-2003) means that he does not address the sharp changes in working-class life, and consciousness, brought about by the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the all-out war since 2022. Dubrovsky participated in voluntary defence units based in Dnipro in 2014-21, and again in 2022-25, and from the outset argued for the need to unite to defeat Russian aggression.[4] In the article “How Not to Lose this War”, included in this book as an Appendix, he puts the case for widespread nationalisation, a state monopoly of foreign trade and state control over strategic sections of the economy as the best way for the (capitalist) Ukrainian state to defend itself.

I hope that in future, he will be able to tell us how labour and life has changed in Dnipro in wartime, and join the discussion about this among younger socialist activists in Ukraine, to which the recent book by Daria Saburova, Women Workers in the Resistance,[5] is an important contribution. My point, for the purposes of this review, is that a fully-rounded understanding of working-class experience will include not only the industrial labour about which Dubrovsky writes so insightfully, but also the disruption and shocks brought about by war and migration, the changes in household (reproductive) labour, the consequences of “globalisation” and the transformation of economies beyond the factory gates, and so on.

Dubrovsky’s experience, and that of other militants, needs to be set in a wider context, not only in the sense that the working class is a demographically wider phenomenon, but in terms of our understanding of the working class as the motive force of social change. What does the “class formation”, to which Dubrovsky draws attention, mean today?

One thing that Dubrovsky is telling us, I think, is that the need to “start all over again from the beginning” is rooted in Stalinist nightmare and the whole Soviet experience, which so completely buried the changes brought about by the early 20th century revolutions in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Russian empire. And we know from our experience of working-class movements in western Europe that the consequences of this are by no means limited to the former Soviet territories.

In my view it is worth going back to basics here, to consider what Karl Marx meant – writing at a time when at a time when the working class was demographically an insignificant minority – when he envisaged that “communist consciousness” would in future be produced “on a mass scale”. This would amount to “the alteration of men [sic] on a mass scale” – and that, in turn, could “only take place in a practical movement, a revolution”. In other words, changing minds and changing the world were one and the same process. For Marx, revolution was necessary “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”.[6]

I think that the “starting all over again” that Dubrovsky advocates should not be seen narrowly. Propagandising socialist ideas is only one aspect of a much bigger, deeper, more complicated task. Bob Myers, addressing fundamentally the same questions, writes:

It would be idealistic to imagine that people from a culture subjugated by a hierarchical society for many thousands of years, who have been ousted from any meaningful control over the most basic human activity will somehow emerge overnight as rational, co-operative beings, like a butterfly from a chrysalis.

Here Myers is talking about the working class in the early 21st century doing what Marx called “ridding itself of the muck of ages”. Myers goes on:

If we are somehow lucky enough to avoid the total destruction of humanity it may take generations for truly co-operative people to develop. But humans lived as co-operative beings for hundreds of thousands of years and have experienced class divided oppression for only a few thousand. We are fundamentally a co-operative, social, caring species. Our brains, our language, our capabilities all became what they are today in co-operative relations. Class society briefly, hopefully, submerged this real human spirit into the selfish, inhuman world of slaves and slave owners, Kings and serfs, bosses and wage labour.

And:

[…] If we are agreed that the route out of human extinction lies in the advancement of true, international co-operation and production rationally organised to meet human needs, then even now in our political and social activities we need to try to begin to develop an ethos, a culture that points in the direction of that future. How in our modern times can we create the culture of the Greek City state, but with the slaves and women now leading the debate?

It is on this level, I think, that the selfless contribution of militants such as Dubrovsky can be understood. His battles with two-faced politicians, brutal managers and cynical trade union officials; his sensitive understanding of, and oftentimes frustration with, his colleagues; his difficulties in stirring interest in his deeply-held socialist convictions – all this is best seen in the context of the crisis that drives 21st century capitalism to find new ways to degrade, dehumanise and alienate workers, the overwhelming majority of human beings who depend on the sale of labour power for their livelihoods. The Russian war on Ukraine is one of the ultimate, destructive manifestations of capitalism’s crisis.

For socialism to mean anything in these times, it has to imagine and inspire a complete remaking of society, a complete remaking of us as people. I do not have any easy formulae as to how this will happen, or how it plays out in practice, but I hope that – despite war and the geography that separates us – we will continue discussion of it. Dubrovsky’s book is an essential contribution to that.

References

[1] Oleg Dubrovskii with Simon Pirani, Fighting Back in Ukraine: a worker who took on the bureaucrats and bosses (Index Books, 1997). Available as a pdf here

[2] Dubrovsky has compiled a document collection (unpublished) about this period: Demokratizatsiia I glasnost’ ot KPSS na promyshlennyom predpriatii 1986-1990. Sbornik dokumentov

[3] Bob Myers, “From Anaximander to Marx, or how I spent half my life in a ‘revolutionary’ cult and the other half working out why”, April 2025. Now published in three parts on the Hardcrackers web site, here, here and here

[4] Dubrovsky’s wartime activity is described in the presentation of his book on the Proletar Ukrainy web site, and his wider view of the war set out e.g. in his article “Ukrainski sotsialysti natsional’no-vizvol’na borot’ba” (June 2024)

[5] The book is published in French. Daria Saburova, Travailleuses de la résistance. Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre (Editions de Croquant, 2024). See also an interview with Daria and Denys Gorbach here

[6] Karl Marx, The German Ideology, chapter 1 on “Feuerbach: opposition of the materialist and idealist outlook”. See here.

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Ukraine 📚 The Ups And Downs Of Workplace Organising

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Seven Hundred Seven

Atheist Ireland 🕳 Atheist Ireland has sent the following submission to the Oireachtas Education Committee on the need for freedom of conscience, religion, and belief in Irish schools

Executive Summary

This submission addresses the right to freedom of conscience, religion, and belief in the Irish education system. It highlights how current practices fail to respect and protect the philosophical convictions of nonreligious parents, children, and teachers. We ask the Committee to support statutory guidelines that would ensure respect for all belief systems in publicly funded schools, in line with constitutional and international human rights obligations.

1. Purpose of this Submission
2. Constitutional Rights
3. International Human Rights Obligations
4. Gaps in Domestic Law and Practice
5. Equality Law and Definitions of Belief
6. Our Recommendations

1. Purpose of this Submission

We are asking the Committee to examine how the education system reflects the right to respect all parents’ convictions, as guaranteed by the Irish Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and EU Directive 2000/78/EC which prohibits discrimination on the basis of either religion or belief.

In principle, the state recognises that it has a duty under the Constitution to respect all parents’ convictions when providing education. Section 15-2(e) of the Education Act 1998 obliges Boards of Management to respect the beliefs of all parents in a democratic society.

However, in practice, there is no definition of the word ‘beliefs’ in the Education Act 1998, nor are there any statutory guidelines on what respecting parents’ beliefs means on the ground in schools or how a school gives practical application to this right.

The Supreme Court has already found that children will be influenced ‘to some degree’ by the ethos of schools outside of the religious instruction class if their parents ‘choose’ to send them to that school (although it did not define ‘to some degree’ or what constitutes real choice of school they can send their child to).

The ethos of schools in the general atmosphere is not something passive. It is integrated into the curriculum, it is reflected in symbols and religious festivals and practice, on school uniforms and the daily life of the school. There are no statutory guidelines of what ‘influence to some degree’ means on the ground in state aided schools.

Nobody is claiming that a school ethos does not influence all children. What we are told is that this is essential to uphold the right to freedom of religion of some parents. It seems that the rest of us are expected to accept the indoctrination of our children as they exercise their constitutional right to education.

Our key recommendation is the introduction of statutory guidelines to give practical effect to this Constitutional and human right to respect for all parents’ beliefs in the education system be they religious or philosophical.

2. Constitutional Rights

Article 44.2.1 of the Constitution guarantees:

“Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen.”

The 1995 Constitutional Review Group stated that this right probably also extends to includes nonreligious philosophical beliefs, such as humanism and veganism, and they recommended no change in this Article.

They stated that:

“In ordinary speech, freedom of conscience is not synonymous with freedom of religion. Because the drafters of the Constitution must be presumed to have intended that every word and phrase should carry a specific and separate meaning, ‘freedom of conscience’ must be taken to import something additional to the guarantee of free practice and profession of religion.

The Review Group considers that the guarantee probably also extends to philosophical beliefs such as humanism and may possibly also extend to other moral and ethical belief systems (for example vegetarianism). Article 44.2.1° broadly corresponds to the guarantees contained in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Review Group considers that the extent of the present guarantee is satisfactory and that no change is required.”

This interpretation is reinforced by Article 42.1 of the Constitution:

“The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide… for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children.”

Despite these guarantees, state aided schools frequently fail to ‘respect’ the convictions of families with philosophical beliefs.

Under the European Convention failure to respect parents’ religious and philosophical convictions is viewed as indoctrination. In Ireland indoctrination is viewed as using ‘force’, in other words forcing a child to recite prayers or go to mass. That is not the definition under the European Convention, indoctrination means not respecting parents‘ convictions, the term ‘respect’ is viewed as a verb and is not something passive.

This is directly relevant to Article 42.1 of the Constitution which obliges the state to respect the inalienable right of all parents in relation to the education of their children. Justice O’Donnell in the recent Supreme Court case in relation to covid and the leaving certificate stated that:

“It is, in any event, part of the right and duty of parents to provide (and therefore the right of their children to receive) education under Article 42.1, which right the State has guaranteed to respect.

The Irish text of Article 42.1 provides an important flavour in this regard: “… ráthaíonn [An Stát] gan cur isteach ar cheart doshannta ná ar dhualgas doshannta tuistí chun oideachas … a chur ar fáil dá gclainn” which conveys the sense that the State cannot interfere with (cur isteach ar) the right of parents subject to the Constitution to provide education under Article 42.1, a right which Article 42.2 contemplates may take place at home”.

Under Article 42.2 that education may also take place in private schools or schools recognised or established by the state. There are no schools in Ireland that have a secular ethos (see Forum on Patronage and Pluralism report).

We are left with no choice but to send our children to the schools that are provided by the state for the education of our children (Article 42.4). These schools are registered with the Department of Education as denominational, interdenominational or multi-denominational. There are no non-denominational schools in Ireland at primary or second level with a secular ethos.

In the O’Keeffe v Ireland case at the European Court, the court stated that:

“151.  Finally, the Government appeared to suggest that the State was released from its Convention obligations since the applicant chose to go to Dunderrow National School.

However, the Court considers that the applicant had no “realistic and acceptable alternative” other than attendance, along with the vast majority of children of primary-school-going age, at her local national school (see Campbell and Cosans v. the United Kingdom, 25 February 1982, § 8, Series A no. 48).

Primary education was obligatory (sections 4 and 17 of the School Attendance Act 1926) and few parents had the resources to use the two other schooling options (home schooling or travelling to attend the rare fee-paying primary schools), whereas national schools were free and the national-school network was extensive”.

Parents with philosophical beliefs are left with a choice between denominational, interdenominational or multi-denominational education on a take it or leave it basis. If the state ‘provides for’ the education of our children in these schools, they are obliged to respect our philosophical beliefs by ensuring that the curriculum is objective, critical and pluralistic. The state can’t absolve itself of that responsibility.

The High Court in the Campaign to Separate Church and State case in 1996 recognised that the Irish Constitution has developed the significance of parental rights and has imposed obligations on the State in relation to them. They didn’t say that this was confined to religious parents. The court said:

“The parties to the First Protocol of the European Convention for the Protection of human rights and Fundamental Freedoms agreed that States when assuming functions in relation to education “shall respect the rights of parents to ensure such education and teaching in accordance with their own religious and philosophical convictions” (Article 2).

The Irish Constitution has developed the significance of these parental rights and in addition has imposed obligations on the State in relation to them. It declares (in sub paragraph 2 of this Article) that parents are to be free to provide for the education of their children in their homes, or in private schools or in schools recognised or established by the State, that the State shall not oblige parents in violation of their conscience to send their children to schools established or designated by the Stare, and that the State shall require (in view of actual conditions) that children receive a certain minimum education, moral, intellectual and social…”

Similarly, in AB v. Children’s Hospital Temple Street (2011), Justice Hogan affirmed:

“35. There is thus no doubt at all but that parents have the constitutional right to raise their children by reference to their own religious and philosophical views.”

“27. Along with the guarantee of free speech in Article 40.6.i, Article 44.2.1 guarantees freedom of conscience and the free practice of religion. Taken together, these constitutional provisions ensure that, subject to limited exceptions, all citizens have complete freedom of philosophical and religious thought, along with the freedom to speak their mind and to say what they please in all such matters….”(AB v Children’s Hospital Temple Street & CD & EF –January 2011)

As mentioned above, the state recognises that it has a duty under the Constitution to respect all parents’ convictions when providing education. Section 15-2(e) of the Education Act 1998 obliges Boards of Management to respect the beliefs of all parents in a democratic society.

However, there is no definition of the word ‘beliefs’ in the Education Act 1998, nor are there any statutory guidelines on what respecting parents’ beliefs means on the ground in schools or how a school gives practical application to this right.

Justice Barrington in the Campaign case at the Supreme Court in 1998 said that children will be influenced ‘to some degree’ by the ethos of schools outside the religious instruction class, because their parents have chosen that school for them.

There is not a patron body that says that they support or even recognise secularism as a belief, worthy of respect in a democratic society. Children from families with philosophical beliefs do not have access to an education that is objective, critical and pluralistic.

An example of this is SPHE at primary and second level. These courses have recently been updated and were meant to be objective and suitable for all students.

However, the Catholic Church has developed resources to compliment SPHE at primary and second level. Schools can integrate these resources into the State curriculum on SPHE and not inform parents that this is happening. It seems that many children are back where they started, a choice between Catholic sex education or no sex education at all.

Here are the links to those resources.
Flourish at primary level
Living Love, which was developed in harmony with the NCCA’s draft SPHE (incorporating RSE) junior-cycle short-course curriculum specification.

Another example of the disrespect the state has for the beliefs of non-religious families is Section 62-7(n) of the Education Admission to Schools Act 2018. The purpose of this section of the Act was to oblige schools to put in their Admission Policies details of the arrangements for not attending religious instruction.

Schools just ignored this section of the Act. We examined 100 Admission Policies and sent a report on them to the then Minister, Norma Foley and also sent that Report to the previous Oireachtas Education Committee. Nothing happened and schools just continued to ignore this section of the Act.

We updated the Report and sent that to the Minister. There was still no change. Schools continue to refuse to comply with this section of the Act. There are no consequences for ignoring legislation when it involves any respect for the rights of families with philosophical beliefs.

Here is a link to our Report of 100 schools that fail to put in their Admission policies details of the arrangements for not attending religious instruction. Here is the updated report.

3. International Human Rights Obligations

In the O’Keeffe v Ireland judgement at the European court the court found that Ireland could not avoid its Convention protective obligations by delegating them to private bodies.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Oireachtas has done in relation to parents’ right to respect for their philosophical beliefs.

The European Court in the O’Keeffe case stated:

“124.  Education was a national obligation (McEneaney and Crowley, cited above), as it was in any advanced democracy. Article 42 of the Constitution was permissive so that the State could and should have chosen to provide education itself. Even if the State outsourced that obligation to non-State entities, the national-school model could and should have accommodated greater child-protection regulations.

One way or the other, a State could not avoid its Convention protective obligations by delegating primary education to a private entity (see Costello-Roberts v. the United Kingdom[, 25 March 1993, Series A no. 247-C]). Finally, the State could not absolve itself by saying that the applicant had had other educational options which, in any event, she had not.”

The European Court in the Folgero v Norway case in 2007 stated the following; this is now a General Principle of the European Court:

“(a)  The two sentences of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 must be interpreted not only in the light of each other but also, in particular, of Articles 8, 9 and 10 of the Convention (see Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen, cited above, § 52).

(b)  It is on to the fundamental right to education that is grafted the right of parents to respect for their religious and philosophical convictions, and the first sentence does not distinguish, any more than the second, between State and private teaching”.

The European Convention on Human Rights and the ICCPR both require that education must be delivered in a manner that respects parents’ convictions. They have defined what respect means on the ground in schools. The Education Act 1998 does not reflect this and there are no statutory guidelines in place.

We are left in a position that we must accept one or other of the ideological positions of Patron bodies in order for our children to exercise their right to education. Our children are indoctrinated into a religious view of the world, they leave their Constitutional and human rights at the schools gate because of the failure of the state to take sufficient care that any education and teaching must be objective, critical and pluralistic.

There is no distinction between religious instruction and other subjects under the European Convention.

The European Court has stated:

“(c)  Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 does not permit a distinction to be drawn between religious instruction and other subjects. It enjoins the State to respect parents’ convictions, be they religious or philosophical, throughout the entire State education programme (see Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen, cited above, § 51). That duty is broad in its extent as it applies not only to the content of education and the manner of its provision but also to the performance of all the “functions” assumed by the State.

The verb “respect” means more than “acknowledge” or “take into account”. In addition to a primarily negative undertaking, it implies some positive obligation on the part of the State. The term “conviction”, taken on its own, is not synonymous with the words “opinions” and “ideas”. It denotes views that attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance (see Valsamis, cited above, §§ 25 and 27, and Campbell and Cosans, cited above, §§ 36-37)

h)  The second sentence of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 implies on the other hand that the State, in fulfilling the functions assumed by it in regard to education and teaching, must take care that information or knowledge included in the curriculum is conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralistic manner. The State is forbidden to pursue an aim of indoctrination that might be considered as not respecting parents’ religious and philosophical convictions. That is the limit that must not be exceeded.”

In Burke v. Minister for Education (2023), Justice Whelan of the Court of Appeal confirmed that the Education Act 1998 must be interpreted compatibly with Convention obligations. Justice Whelan stated that:

“2.(1) In interpreting and applying any statutory provision or rule of law, a court shall, in so far as possible, subject to the rules of law relating to such interpretation and application, do so in a manner compatible with the State’s obligations under the Convention provisions. Thus in interpreting the obligations of the Board pursuant to the Education Act 1998 (as amended) regard must be had to the terms of the Convention.”

Respect is a verb under the European Convention, not a noun. The word ‘respect’ just sits in Section 15–2 (e) of the Education Act 1998 because the state has no statutory guidelines in place that define the word in order to give it practical application on the ground.

Schools decide for themselves what respecting all parents’ convictions means on the ground in schools.

4. Gaps in Domestic Law and Practice

Section 15(2)(e) of the Education Act 1998 requires school boards to:

“Have regard to the principles and requirements of a democratic society and have respect and promote respect for the diversity of values, beliefs, traditions, languages and ways of life in society.”

However, the Act does not define “beliefs,” and there are no statutory guidelines on how to uphold this obligation. In practice, Boards of Management prioritise the ethos of the Patron, even when it conflicts with constitutional and international human rights standards. The principles and requirements of a democratic society seem to mean whatever a particular patron body claim they mean.

Currently, the only detailed guidelines in place are those issued by the Catholic Church. These assert that atheism and humanism are not “beliefs,” directly contradicting EU and international law. We do not see how that could be regarded as respecting parents’ convictions.

5. Equality Law and Definitions of Belief

Ireland’s Equal Status Act and Employment Equality Act define discrimination on the “religion ground” narrowly. They do not refer explicitly to “beliefs” as protected grounds. By contrast, EU Directive 2000/78/EC prohibits discrimination on the basis of both “religion or belief.”

The European Court of Human Rights recognises the following as protected beliefs:

  • Pacifism (Arrowsmith v. the United Kingdom, Commission report of 12 October 1978, § 69; Kanatli v. Türkiye, 2024, § 45);
  • Principled opposition to military service (Bayatyan v. Armenia [GC], 2011)
  • Veganism and opposition to the manipulation of products of animal origin or tested on animals (W. v. the United Kingdom, Commission decision of 10 February 1993)
  • Opposition to abortion (Knudsen v. Norway, Commission decision of 8 March 1985; Van Schijndel and Others v. the Netherlands, Commission decision of 10 September 1997)
  • A doctor’s opinions on alternative medicine, constituting a form of manifestation of medical philosophy (Nyyssönen v. Finland, Commission decision of 15 January 1998)
  • The conviction that marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman and rejection of homosexual unions (Eweida and Others v. the United Kingdom, 2013)
  • Attachment to secularism (Lautsi and Others v. Italy [GC], 2011, § 58; Hamidović v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2017, § 35).

6. Our Recommendations

We urge the Committee to:

1. Recognise that nonreligious philosophical beliefs are protected under the Constitution and international law.

2. Recommend the introduction of statutory guidelines to ensure that publicly funded schools respect the beliefs of all families and in accordance with our international obligations.

3. Ensure that these guidelines:

Define “beliefs” to include atheist, secular, humanist, and other nonreligious worldviews;

Legally require schools to provide objective, critical, and pluralistic education and teaching.

These changes would support a more inclusive and rights-respecting education system and guarantee that all parents’ religious and philosophical beliefs are respected.

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How Irish Schools Do Not Respect Freedom Of Conscience, Religion, And Belief

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