The following opening remarks by Ciarraí Ó’Curnaín were delivered at the Madge Davison Memorial Lecture in Belfast in 2026.
I want to kick off by introducing some themes into the discussion. Like many I am trying to make sense of world around us and work out how best I can intervene and make a contrition to lift my class and push us towards that better world that we all know is possible. When I say a better world I do not mean tinkering around the edge of capitalism to make it more palatable, I mean system change, I mean building socialism.
Maintaining the confidence that a socialist world is possible is not easy at the moment.
We live in dark times and dangerous times we are faced with war mongering, genocide, permanent austerity, hatred & division being pushed from the far right, the rise of authoritarianism and fascism. People are suffering our class is suffering.
At home we have seen how these problems are playing out, just weeks ago bringing racist pogroms onto our streets as far right groups seeks to exploit the ashes of sectarian division to push the narrow politics of hate.
These grim developments however have confirmed to me 100% that our movement and I mean – the workers & people’s movement in its broadest sense – is the best hope for the world. We must keep fighting and doing so in knowledge that there are opportunities developing to build and reasons to be optimistic. As social democracy has disintegrated the mask has slipped and many can see the contradictions of the system in which we live laid bare:
The economic 2008 collapse, austerity, covid, a live streamed genocide has opened the eyes and minds of many millions across the world, and they are mobilizing. The campaigns for Palestine, against war and for the planet, are activating young people across the world. There has also been a sense of trade union renewal as people turn to the organised working class as a last line of defence. We say just a couple of years ago coordinated action by Unions in the North to delivering 180,000 people taking industrial action on the same day in the historic January ‘MegaStrike.’
The appetite for change is there – we need to capture this, to galvanise it into a broad based platform for change, and we need that platform to be internationalist in outlook and we need it to be class conscious.
We need an anti-war movement and we need it now.
It is not enough to simply be aware of what is going on in world, the people who control levers of power and wealth do not care what we know, (we have just witnessed a genocide live streamed into our phones) – they don’t care if we are aware they only care if we act. Awareness alone is not a threat – only organisation and class conscious mobilisation are. So we must move people from awareness to action.
We must pull together all the groups that are already organising in Unions, in tenants associations, in women’s groups, youth, students, solidarity and antiracist groups all organisations right across the spectrum of people who are playing any role in defending people and communities and across all those engaged in anti-imperialist struggles.
For me I believe the key to doing that is to rebuild a sense of class consciousness, solidarity and to focus on what unites us. When I say working class, I mean of course all people who do not own or directly benefit from owning the means of production, those who are locked out of the wealth of the planet. I am not seeking to exclude anyone when I use that phrase – working class. In our terms it is all encapsulating.
Working class solidarity and Unity have never been more important, as at all times in history the bosses and the rich seek to divide us as it serves their interests to do so. Racism is a core part of how a capitalist economy functions not merely an unintended by-product. It is baked into the system because capitalism recognises that every division in our class weakens our resistance and opens opportunity for them to leech more from us by lowering wages, terms and conditions and creating a global race to the bottom. We know in Belfast all to well how often employers and government have been able to play the sectarian card and hamper unified workers struggles.
Pitting us against each other is key to their strategy – the only counter to is movement that is solidarity, internationalism driven by class consciousness. That will no easy task and we cannot rely on spontaneity to deliver such a movement. Those spontaneous moments where anger and upset drives people onto the streets is not the answer because history has shown us that those moments do not have longevity.
Without a foundation of organisation underpinning such moments they ebb away just as fast as they appear – if we look at reactions to the 2008 collapse – Occupy, Arab Spring, Student Riots in England etc it bubbled up and ebbed away again very quickly, because they were lacking two things – an underlaying organisation and a cohesive political outlook. Occupy was really a rejection of politics, in retrospect it was going nowhere. However like many of these moments, it demonstrates that there is an appetite for change, many of those involved became politicised and learned from that experience to come back and fight again another day. As Lenin taught us workers learn – even in defeat.
We cannot rely on spontaneity and empty mantras or rhetoric to take us to that place where we can change society. It is something that will happen by degrees only when we build organisation below, from every angle and direction and that means the painstaking task of daily practical political work on the ground, in communities and workplaces – wherever our class is to be found.
But that practical activity must also go hand in glove with a political outlook which requires considering political theory.
I believe the left in a broad sense needs to better engage in political discourse among ourselves. Obviously as a communist I will be coming at that from a Marxist position – a Marxist Leninist and a Connollyist position, I do not expect everyone on the left to be the same many do and should draw on other thinkers. Diversity in this field can be revealing and helpful. But the point is we should not shy away from debating political theory among ourselves as it is a guide to action, it can provide us with a framework for engaging effectively in the moment we find ourselves in.
Many of the great anti war campaigners – James Connolly, Rosa Luxemborg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, John McLean (and many others) also gave time to political thought, theory and education. They and others left us a treasure trove of knowledge. I’m not saying everyone must become a theoretician but that our movement must have weapons in both its hands. Theory and practice.
We should not use theory to brow beat, to talk down to people from rarified ivory towers, not to win narrow arguments and engender division in our own ranks but debating theory collectively, looking for understanding, inspiration, hope and ideological resilience in the face of the horrors and chaos we are being faced with.
To not utilise the knowledge of the people who fought fascism and war before us is madness and it is negligent.
Antiono Gramsci – for instance – I believe offers us many conceptual tools in this moment, his quote on the interregnum – the place between the dying world and the new one waiting to be born, is much used at the moment and rightly so. We are faced with monsters that much is clear.
But he has many other concepts of relevance to us, his thoughts on cultural hegemony in the face of this world of ‘tech bros’ where algorithms are pushing the ideas of ruling classes into the psyche or our class to ensure they internalise ideas which are against their own interests, is of use in this moment.
His concepts of the war of position and war of movement are ever useful when thinking about the battle we are presently in and how we define and shift tactics as conditions change.
If we truly hope to build a global movement for a socialism we need to draw on the political discourse bequeathed to us by those who came before, develop our own and apply it to real world practical activism. We need dialectical thinking amongst our ranks.
When the Italian Fascist Regime jailed Gramsci the prosecutor famously said, ‘We must stop this brain from functioning for 20 years’.
Gramsci’s enemies, who are our enemies still, understood the power and the danger of political thinking. And of course they stopped his brain from working permanently as they eventually murdered him. But his enemies understood the danger of political thought and organised working class. The people who risked their lives to smuggle his writings out of jail and who published his works understood the importance of political thought.
We in this historical moment and conditions in which we find ourselves have a responsibility to keep the collective brain of our movement functioning.
We cannot shy away from what is necessary work in both practical and theoretical fields – that praxis is crucial for our impending victory the victory of the international working class which will surely come if we organise with hope, conviction and solidarity.