against the stream

Writings on the struggle for workers unity and socialism

Category: Reviews

The IRA’s Long War

March 23, 2024 /

A Review of “The Provisional IRA: from insurrection to parliament”, author Tommy McKearney. Published by Pluto Press, 2011

Review first published by Socialist Party, 2013

Tommy McKearney’s “The Provisional IRA, From Insurrection to Parliament” is a serious attempts to explain the genesis of the Provisional IRA and its subsequent trajectory over four decades. The author is not a bystander or commentator from afar but was a key Irish Republican Army activist in the 1970s and a participant in the 1980 hunger-strike. Since that time he has emerged as an articulate critic of the mainstream republican movement. Recently he spoke at the Socialist Party’s Socialism 2012 event in Belfast.

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A man who asked questions: A review of “Frantz Fanon — A Life” by David Macey

February 9, 2024 /

First published by Socialist Party, April 30th, 2002

In the late 1960s, the name of Frantz Fanon became associated with the idea of an armed revolution in the ’Third World’. In the words of his biographer, David Macey, in his new book, ’Frantz Fanon: A life’, “Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism”, and “the spokesman of a Third Worldism which held that the future of socialism — or even the world — was no longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth”.

Review of ‘Frantz Fanon: A Life’, by David Macey. Published by Granta Books, London, 2000 (paperback edition, 2001).

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