[Tá leagan Gaeilge le fáil anseo]
In 2004, just before becoming Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke described what he called "the great moderation": a period since the early 1980s that saw reduced economic volatility and stable growth, inflation, and unemployment. A similar moderation had occurred politically, as the threat of socialism was declared defeated and the political spectrum narrowed around a consensus of liberal parliamentary democracy, the so-called "market economy," and a modest commitment to redistribution.
Over these decades, the politics of democratic contention was replaced by technocratic governance. Who needs democracy, when we can leave it to the experts? Who needs socialism, when the "miracle of the market" promises to lift all boats?
That era is over. While many remain unwilling to accept this, the 2008 financial crash and the years that have followed have shattered illusions in the technocratic centrism of the 1990s, which promised growth, rising living standards, a functioning welfare state, peace, human rights, and political stability. Instead, over the last 30 years, Western Europe has seen low growth, stagnant or falling living standards, and states unable to provide even basic services. Endless war in the Middle East, the resurgence of fascism, and now the spectacle of so-called human rights defenders cheering on genocide in Gaza have shattered these promises. All this, without even mentioning the accelerating prospect of ecological collapse.
Centrists may still sit in office, but their politics is rotting from within. Years of failure have shattered their credibility and extinguished any sense of future relevance.
The 20th century was a century of social conflict. Despite the illusions peddled by 1990s liberals, the 21st century is already proving to be the same.
Centrists want us to forget how we got here. They present liberal democracy and the capitalist economy as conjoined twins, inseparable and born together, thereby erasing the violent struggles that won democratic rights, trade union power, and workers’ representation. They portray democracy as a mere institutional form: if you vote for a government - no matter how powerless in the face of capital and supranational bodies - you are told you live in a democracy.
Within this political imagination, republicanism is watered down to a variety of liberalism: liberalism without a monarch. But in doing so, liberal centrists deny the essence of the republican tradition: the idea of people self-governing, free from domination. This vision remains as radical as ever.
Of course, the international socialist movement may have been defeated in the 1980s and 1990s, but the target of its antagonism - the capitalist mode of production - remains firmly intact. Today, we continue to live under a global system in which the capitalist class rules, and society is organised to serve their interests.
These terms - "capitalism," "ruling class" - are often thrown around but rarely explained. Let us be clear. The vast majority of people own no productive property and rely on a wage to survive. They are dependent on a minority who own and invest in the means of production, employing others to produce goods and services for sale at a profit. These investors compete with one another to reduce costs and increase returns. If they fail, they go under. This pressure compels constant increases in productivity, so that humanity’s productive capacity grows endlessly. Yet this capacity is directed not toward meeting human needs, but toward the pursuit of profit.
The result? Those whose work produces the wealth of society have no control over what is produced, how, or for whom. Control lies with those who own capital. Deprivation persists amidst abundance. The cause is clear: society's productive resources are controlled by a small minority. The solution is equally clear: the working majority must seize control of the means of production and use them to serve human need.
Put simply: capitalism must be abolished and replaced with socialism - a socialism rooted in workers' democratic control over production.
This is not a new idea. Some may wish to move past the language of class and struggle, but the rule of the capitalist class remains. It is a reality that cannot be ignored. It must be ended.
At the heart of socialism is a simple republican proposition: replace class rule with democracy, move from a society in which power is concentrated in the hands of the few, to one where we govern ourselves.
Yet since the “end of history”, for the last few decades, this ambition, once taken up by millions, has been excised from political discourse. In its place is the insistence that the economy must serve profit, that the role of politics is merely to mitigate the effects of inequality. Governance is increasingly ceded to unaccountable supranational institutions. “Democracy” is reduced to the ritual of voting for governments that offer no path to a better post-capitalist future.
In this hollowed-out democracy, a dark nostalgia has taken root. Longing for a return to a mid-century order anchored in the nation-state, a new right has emerged - its ambition not to expand democratic power, but to ethnically purify the nation. At the core of this new right is Islamophobia, transphobia, misogyny and - centrally - extreme anti-immigrant politics. Shamefully, some on the left have failed to confront this, or worse, have echoed its anti-immigrant sentiments.
Despite their attempts to cloak themselves in the tradition of Irish nationalism, the new far-right in Ireland have nothing in common with the Irish republican tradition, which has never been about creating an ethnically pure country. Indeed, Irish republicanism emerged precisely as an attempt to unite the different ethnic traditions in Ireland. Famously, Wolfe Tone’s project was “to unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.” In contrast to the far-right’s obsession with race and conspiracy, Irish republicans have always understood that the question of property, and control over production, is fundamental to building a society in which people govern their own lives.
Tone’s comrade, the United Irishman Jemmy Hope, emphasised the centrality of “the conditions of the labouring class.” He wrote: “As a people, we were excluded from any share in framing the laws by which we were governed ... By force the poor were subdued and dispossessed of their interests in the soil; by fiction, the titles of the spoilers were established; and by fraud on the productive industry of future generations, the usurpation was continued.”
Property relations’ importance for Irish republicanism could also be found in Fintan Lalor’s 1848 call for a socialist peasant republic, where “the entire soil” of Ireland would be publicly owned and rented to a free peasantry. Fenianism carried this tradition forward. As global capitalism consolidated in the late 19th century, the Fenians’ 1867 Proclamation of the Irish Republic made the connection between property and republicanism explicit, while also calling for international class solidarity, a vision later advanced by Connolly’s socialist republicanism.
Since the 1930s, socialist republicanism has been the dominant intellectual current within Irish republicanism. By the mid-1960s, every wing of the movement had, in principle at least, committed to the goal of a 32-county democratic socialist republic.
But while Irish republicanism made significant progress over the 20th century, it failed to realise the republic it aspired to. The country was partitioned along sectarian lines and, as Connolly predicted, this produced “a carnival of reaction both North and South.”
The six counties became a reactionary Protestant state, propped up by the British military, as the southern state became a conservative Catholic state and spent much of the past century in Britain’s shadow. A history of the southern state could be summarised in one sentence: whatever Britain did, it copied. The few exceptions - military neutrality and the absence of an NHS - stand out precisely because they are so rare. One ironic result of this mimicry is that, a century after partition, reunification might prove to be relatively straightforward as the states are so strikingly similar.
Today, Britain is a failing state. To set Ireland’s ambitions no higher than to imitate Britain is to aim for failure. Outside of London, the country is mired in economic decline, with parts of northern England experiencing some of the lowest living standards in Western Europe. Politically, it veers toward far-right nationalism: Tory authoritarianism, the irrationalism of Faragism, and a Labour Party that has abandoned any ambition beyond careerism. Culturally, it regresses into reaction, gleefully repressing trans rights, vilifying immigrants and severely limiting democratic rights of protest. Bafflingly, some republicans seem to believe Ireland has something to learn from British transphobia. But we are no longer John Bull’s other island. Our future lies elsewhere.
One outcome of Ireland’s post-2008 economic trajectory has been the renewed mass emigration of young people. While earlier generations fled the dole queues of a religiously dominated country, today’s youth leave a liberalised, economically developed one that is still deeply dysfunctional. Unlike their predecessors, they carry no shame in their Irishness. Instead, they take pride in it. And as they live and work abroad, they encounter functioning healthcare systems, public transport, and public housing, and ask, rightly: why can’t we have that at home?
Emmet famously said, “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.” Ireland’s young people already see themselves as equal “among the nations of the earth.” But Irish politics hasn’t caught up.
In the North, politicians cling to the final symbols of Orange rule - denying language rights to Irish speakers and celebrating the triumph of a Dutch Protestant king over an English Catholic king in 1690. In the South, the government is paralysed by deference, terrified of embarrassing itself before its betters in Washington or Brussels, but eager to join the march to war by joining NATO.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the government’s response to the genocide in Gaza. While the coalition in Dublin acknowledges the reality, it only pays lip service. Ignoring the will of the people, it refuses to legislate for sanctions against Israel, unwilling to upset multinationals while giggling at Trump’s side. Above all, they believe that Ireland doesn’t really have a right to govern itself.
Kant defined Enlightenment as “man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Republicanism, as an Enlightenment tradition, echoes this in the political realm: the call to maturity is the call to self-government. This is not merely a question of institutions or elections. We need a culture and politics grounded in self-government, where we are not afraid to take control of our collective future.
The question of control is central. As Connolly explained in relation to socialism: “Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism … state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, would all be Socialist functionaries”
In an era when power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of global investors, unelected EU bureaucrats, militarised police forces, tech oligarchs, media monopolists, arms dealers, and even genocidaires, the republican dream seems so far out of reach.
Marx described how capitalism tears down old certainties and forces us to face the real challenge of controlling our own lives: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
But how can socialists and republicans face, with sober senses, the real conditions of our lives? Sapere aude: we cannot rest on received wisdom. Let’s not limit ourselves to questions we already know how to answer.
We cannot remain sequestered in our small revolutionary groups, accepting the role assigned to us by liberal politics - as merely a politics of protest. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote: “the daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers … the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal – the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour.” We must find ways to win reforms that lay the foundations for further advance toward socialism.
Nor can we adopt the complacency of many on the centre-left, who argue that reformist demands are more “realistic” than calls for socialism itself. Reforms to capitalism are not simply items to be selected off the shelf in the marketplace of ideas. Improvements to workers’ living conditions, expansions of democratic powers, and protection of the environment are always resisted by those who would see their wealth and power reduced by these changes.
Nor can we simply declare our aim to unite the country, drive out imperialists, and realise the Republic of 1916 and the Democratic Programme of 1919. We won’t get close to a democratic socialist Irish republic if we don’t even ask ourselves: what would such a republic look like in the 21st-century world order?
The era of centrism is over. The right is ascendant across the west. But socialist and republican politics is making a return. Never since the civil war has the left in Ireland been stronger, or the prospect of ending the sectarian partition of the country closer.
Yet while opportunities for the left are greater than they have been in decades, there are few spaces for socialists to engage in meaningful discussion, debate, and analysis.
You hold in your hands the inaugural issue of An Clogán. We are launching this magazine with the aim of facilitating the debates and discussions that most urgently need to happen. We hope to foster this dialogue through our website, through public forums, and in an annual themed magazine.
This first issue is devoted to the theme of “The Republic”, a topic of central importance to the Irish left, but rarely addressed directly.
Fintan Lalor once wrote: “Without agreement as to our objects, we cannot agree on the course we should follow.” We hope An Clogán can play a small role in clarifying our shared objects and helping chart a course toward the socialist republic.