Abject nonsense!
Another New Year message from the Communist Party of Ireland and more of the same nonsense regurgitated from previous messages. It really is too much.
Every year, the claims and pronouncements just get more outrageous and nonsensical. This year its “We in the Communist Party of Ireland are ready to play our part in building the movement which will lead to the re-conquest of Ireland and the emancipation of all humankind.”
Read that again. Then read what was said in 2011: “Make 2011 the year of resistance! Let us make 2011 the year of struggle and resistance. Let us build the forces that will defeat the arbitrary rule and diktat of the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Let us begin to reclaim the destiny of our country and that of future generations from the grip of monopoly capitalism and from domination by imperialism.”
It’s all nonsense! All of it. Each year the great drive forward is hinged on some activity or slogan that has caused people to mobilise on some important issue. This year its Palestine: “The pro-Palestinian demonstrations have shown once again that an organised movement, with a clear political position can bring about change.”
In 2011, it was “The forces for change have been slowly gathering pace, with more than 100,000 working people taking part in a mass demonstration in late November (2010).” Now it’s Progressive Neutrality. In other years it has been Claiming our Future, Repudiate the Debt to mention a few, and more recently, the Transformative Strategy. Remember how all those campaigns worked out?
The most striking, if not amusing feature of the Transformative Strategy was that the word strategy inadvertently worked its way into the lexicon of CPI speak. It did not find a home there, however.
Strategy? Here’s Eugene McCartan in 2010: “…if the argument could be won by slogans we would have won a long time ago – our problem is that we have been short on strategy.” What was done to address that accurate assessment of a serious shortcoming? Nothing was done. Worse still, when a proposal was put to the Dublin Branch more than ten years later in 2021 that the Branch would recommend to the NEC the establishment of an advisory strategy group, the Dublin Branch members overwhelmingly voted against the proposal. They would not even support a recommendation! Many of those members were also members of the NEC and of the then Southern Area Committee.
When the proposal was presented directly to the NEC (on a number of occasions) the proposer and the proposal did not receive as much as an acknowledgement. And, who led the charge to prevent any such proposal from getting a hearing? The same Eugene McCartan who identified the problem in 2010 led the charge.
Perhaps the CPI does have a strategy for “building the movement which will lead to the re-conquest of Ireland and the emancipation of all humankind”? Well??
Another gem from this year’s message: “The Communist Party of Ireland reiterates our demands for the government to campaign for a ceasefire, end all diplomatic, economic, and cultural links with Israel, and cease all US military use of Shannon Airport.”
Once again, we have to ask the CPI to whom and by what means were the above “demands” delivered to any intended recipients?
An outfit that can’t even manage a tiny political party insists on telling us how to relieve “future generations from the grip of monopoly capitalism and from domination by imperialism” and how to build “the movement which will lead to the re-conquest of Ireland and the emancipation of all humankind.”
An outfit that can’t even manage a tiny political party insists on telling us how to relieve “future generations from the grip of monopoly capitalism and from domination by imperialism” and how to build “the movement which will lead to the re-conquest of Ireland and the emancipation of all humankind.”
Stop it.
Stop treating people like they are idiots.
Stop making a laughing stock of yourselves.
It’s all abject nonsense.
If it was only themselves who had to bear all the consequences of its cultish make-believe, we would not even waste one breath on it. It is not all about the CPI – there is a need for a genuine communist party in Ireland and its history proves that the CPI is not up to the task and shows no signs of ever being a communist party.
We leave the last word on this to the CPI itself: “The pro-Palestinian demonstrations have shown once again that an organised movement, with a clear political position can bring about change.”
The CPI needs to look in its own mirror and repeat, over and over again, the words “organised movement” and “clear political position.” Garnish with a little strategy and you never know what might happen.
Season’s greetings.