Football, or as it’s known here, soccer, is known as “the beautiful game”. A sport that unites young and old! But the truth is that football does anything but unite, it separates men from women, white people from people of colour, homosexual people from heterosexual people. It isn’t just the far-right leaning section of fans either, this is deeply ingrained in the history of the sport with its governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA.
The rise of racist attacks against East Asians in the West is not due to individual hatred or fringe populists like Donald Trump. In reality, this rise in racism is due to centuries of white supremacist ideology, which is perpetuated by Western hegemony and its imperialist interests. Reading this article, one may take away that only the far-right is to worry about, but when you look at how the majority of leftists, centrists, and centre-right individuals perpetuate these ideas about China, especially through the media, it is clear that liberals enable and accentuate the fascist narratives around China.
“In Ireland, one cannot have socialism without republicanism. The socialist-republican cause is both the cause of labour and the cause of country. The liberation of the working people of this Island can only be achieved through anti-imperialism and active class struggle. But first we must analyse what is to be done, understand the flaws in non-republican socialism and pseudo-republicanism.”
In this piece Donald Trump’s Presidency and its relationship to the deep-state will be elaborated on further as many of his supporters still cling to the idea that the deep-state is a structure that is almost exclusively anti-Trump. This conception is too narrow, and like other attempts at dissecting the history of the deep-state it cannot explain where it came from. By focusing their arguments around a figure like Trump the right reduces what are broader political discussions into simplistic word salads that lack the required historical perspective.
The deep-state, as described by the far-right, is one that functions independently of the will of the people and whose purpose it is to instigate and oversee political agendas that are, by design, malign, nefarious, and anti-Trump… As with most issues co-opted by the far-right their obsession with the shadowy cabal running Washington is too narrow and as we will see lacks the type of analysis necessary to properly elucidate important political subjects like the deep-state and what its purpose came to be as it evolved as a phenomenon peculiar to the American capitalist system.
When conspiracy theorists try to boil power relations down to one or two individuals who control daily events, Marxists instead point to the economic structure which produces these roles and how they function in a class dynamic which allows political control to be maintained. With power over the process of wealth accumulation via the exploitation of labour playing a key part in how this is achieved. This is contrasted with the rather story-like narrative that conspiracies tend to weave. The convenience that conspiracy theorists enjoy is in not having to engage in a radical critique of society but instead to use an almost atavistic fear to whip the public into a frenzy.
This “Super League” shows the consequences that out-of-control, deregulated capitalism has on a working-class sport. The news, which had so many football fans up in arms, should be seen in the context of the consequences of capitalism that will commercialise anything in society, even sports.
“I must be honest and say that, like many others, I disagree with what I read as an unfairly generous appraisal of an anti-communist republican.
If the provisionals talked in any sense of ‘socialism’ it was a socialism of defending the Irish working class from capitalism’s excesses perhaps, but quite separate to Marxist socialism as we would understand it, with its agenda of seizing the means of production and the eradication of class distinction.”
The far-right has taken the initiative in trying to claim our republican history for their own, but the history couldn’t be further from the truth. To look at the reality, there is no better example than to look at Seán Mac Stíofáin, the English-born Irishman who fought not only for the liberation of Ireland, but of all peoples.
The misconception is that Marxist Feminists see Gender as a very narrow, binary concept, that doesn’t take into account any deviation from the old dichotomy of male and female. Marxist Feminists can accept that trans people exist and ought to be supported, just in the same way that Liberal Feminists can. It is true that…
