Ireland: Republicanism and Revolution

Description

The national liberation movement in Ireland stands once more at a crossroads. For thirty years, the Provisional IRA fought an armed struggle to eject British imperialism, without bringing Ireland one step closer to unification. Now, decades after the IRA declared a ceasefire and Sinn Féin politicians took up ministerial portfolios in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Good Friday Agreement is tattered and failing.The armed struggle and the constitutional road to a United Ireland have both landed in dead ends. The question is now posed before socialist Republicans: in a period of unprecedented capitalist crisis, when all the old contradictions are bursting violently to the surface – where next?For more than 200 years, generation after generation of Irish men and women have fought for national liberation from British imperialism under the banner of the Irish Republic. In studying this rich revolutionary heritage, one lesson shines through, bought at an enormous cost of life and suffering: only through the socialist revolution is the attainment of complete national liberation and reunification of Ireland possible.

About Alan Woods

Alan Woods was born in Swansea, South Wales, in 1944 into a working-class family with strong communist traditions. At the age of 16, he joined the Young Socialists and became a Marxist. He studied Russian at Sussex University and later in Sofia (Bulgaria) and the Moscow State University (MGU). He has a wide experience of the international labour movement and played an active role in building the Marxist tendency in Spain, where he participated in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. He was later active in Pakistan, Mexico and other countries, including Venezuela, where he developed a close relationship with the late Hugo Chavez, and founded the international campaign, Hands off Venezuela. Alan Woods is the author of many works covering a wide spectrum of issues, including politics, economics, history, philosophy, art, music and science. He is also the political editor of the popular website In Defence of Marxism (marxist.com) and a leading member of the International Marxist Tendency.Highlights of the books he has authored are: Lenin and Trotsky: What they Really Stood For and Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science, both in conjunction with the late Ted Grant; Marxism and the United States; Reformism or Revolution; The Venezuelan Revolution: A Marxist Perspective, The Ideas of Karl Marx and Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. He also edited and completed Trotsky’s last unfinished work, the biography of Stalin, which had remained incomplete for seventy years.His books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Urdu, Danish, Portuguese, Russian and Bahasa Indonesian.