Voice of Revolution (Marxist–Leninist Weekly), Vol. 8, No. 5
| Date: | 6th June 1984 |
|---|---|
| Organisation: | Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) |
| Publication: | Voice of Revolution |
| Issue: | Volume 8, Number 5 |
| Type: | Publication Issue |
| View: | View Document |
| Discuss: | Comments on this document |
| Subjects: | Ronald Reagan Visit to Ireland, 1984 |
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Commentary From The Cedar Lounge Revolution
2nd June 2025
Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive. This edition of Voice of Revolution, Marxist-Leninist Weekly from the Community Party of Ireland focuses on a range of issues. However forty one years later this week, a piece on the Reagan ‘Homecoming’, that is the visit of then US President Ronald Reagan to Ireland that year, is perhaps most interesting. This argues that the visit was ‘reduced to a fiasco’ and is accompanied by a photograph of ‘a massive Demonstrations Against Reagan in Dublin’. It continues: ‘Reagan’s visit, whatever his claimed Irish antecedents, was entirely orchestrated by U.S. Imperialism as an act of calculated aggression and provocation to demonstrate to the Irish people the ‘majesty’ of an overlord’.
There is also a three page article including the centre pages complete with photographs of various protests against Reagan.
This argues that ‘The bellicose and condescending visit of Reagan has boom a fiasco for US Imperialism and for the national traitors because the Irish people have seen through both the blandishments and the trances off this foreign imperialist warmonger. For the last 15 years now today’s generation of Irish mean nd women have taken up once more the heroic struggle of our forbears of literally generations. Blood has been shed in torrents and the lives of hundreds and thousands blighted by the barbed wire of concentration camps and prisons. Here is a claimed expatriate, Reagan, who is proud to actually boast of his friendship with the national aggressor, British imperialism… ‘
The piece concludes:
IMPERIALIST WARMONGER, KEEP OUT OF IRELAND!
DEATH TO BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND TO BOTH SUPERPOWERS, U.S. IMPERIALISM AND SOVIET SOCIAL IMPERIALISM!
Another front page article argues ‘There can never be justice under British Imperialism’. This examines the acquittal of ‘British colonial RUC men quite patently guilty of murdering patriotic Irish people in cold blood’.
A further piece examines the ‘London Economic Summit’ and its ‘Futile Attempt to Resuscitate Moribund System’.
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By: Colm B Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:23:22
I went to the demo in Galway on a bus organised by UCD SU, I think. There were heavy showers of rain and we used a painted banner as a temp shelter which resulted in watery black paint staining our clothes. I remember laughing at the wee CPI-ML contingent and their raucous chanting “No to NATO and the Warsaw Pact!”
Them were the days eh?
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By: WorldbyStorm Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:57:57
In reply to Colm B.
I got to know a fair few of them CPI-ML in the mid to late 1980s and on a personal level almost all were – despite very different politics – sound but very very intense and I know some who were deeply put off by that. I was always fascinated by the identification with Albania, it seemed so implausible even in Ireland during that period.
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By: Colm B Tue, 03 Jun 2025 09:11:06
Yes, that’s one of the things that always struck me at the time, that despite having it’s share of those types, the WP at that time, unlike the smaller left groups, was mainly made up of people who didn’t eat sleep and drink politics, what the right wingers would call “normies”. Although we put on a public front, there was a certain self awareness which allowed us to take the piss out of ourselves and the party which I don’t think would have been tolerated in other groups.
The few interactions I had with CPI-ML types had me categorising them, perhaps unfairly, as total head-the-balls. Strangely enough, my interactions with people from the mainstream CPI was very different, always found them quite pragmatic, much more “normie” than the other groups. And I say that as someone who is deeply hostile to their Stalinist politics.
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By: WorldbyStorm Tue, 03 Jun 2025 09:39:28
In reply to Colm B.
The WP had a very strong working class base, that made a real difference and the thing is it had pulled in a lot of people (ironically) from that base during the late 60s and 70s who were I’d think actually underneath it while all pretty much left and perhaps vaguely Marxist but who would have fit quite comfortably into the left of the British Labour Party, at least that was my experience. So there was a hinterland, people who had actual interests outside of politics alone – sport, pigeon keeping, films, family etc. There were activists who were consumed but they struck me as the exception rather than the norm, or maybe a split of 70:30 more normal folk and then others. And yeah, definitely a fair bit of taking the piss.
Again the CPI-ML were intense, but very very genuine. There was a hint, maybe more than a hint, of a performative style about them. They were very very good on denunciationary stuff in student politics, but… it was student politics so the stakes weren’t that high. Mentioned this before, a friend of mine had an English partner at the time and they’d been trying to recruit him, anyhow after numerous visits to his flat he finally asked them to not trouble him any longer because of the sheer vehemence of their denunciation of the English. But those I knew then and knew after actually wound up with some reasonably good politics (IMHO). Perhaps there’s something to be said to being in smaller quite strongly directed left formations early on in order to get a broader sense of things later? Worked for us with the WP!
Always liked CPI people I met. Hard workers but also as you say mostly able to step back a ways from the politics. A few UK CPGB people thought I found a little less like that. Again very intense.
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By: 6to5against Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:23:58
I knew a few CPI-ML types and I would genuinely have to credit them with a lot of my political education. I was never even remotely sold on the Albania stuff, or the imminence of the revolution, but I found their analysis of the economic situation as it stood then (and more or less stands now) slowly seeping into my own thoughts.
Two things were alienating. One was the almost total lack of humour (which I think is true of true-believer types across the political spectrum.)
The other was encapsulated by an incident at a meeting I went to, of an Internationalist political conference, in TCD. I was making polite conversation with an English delegate and mentioned some vague hope that by the time I graduated the dire economic situation might have improved enough for me to get a job – only to be subjected to a long harangue about the inevitable breakdown of capitalism and how this meant that there would be, and could be, no such improvement.
I didn’t really mind the strong emotion with which this was expressed, but I found it unsettling that she seemed to relish the coming breakdown of society, and didn’t seem to want things to get better. I really didn’t feel that wanting to get a job and maybe some small amount of economic security amounted to class treachery on my behalf!
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By: WorldbyStorm Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:54:00
In reply to 6to5against.
I wonder if we encountered some of the same people. I was studying(!) in a place more or less directly up the road from TCD where there were a handful of members who would find their numbers supported by those from TCD. It was very impressive to see them at full flow in a debate or SU meeting.
Think you’re right about a lot of their analysis. The solutions were not so great. And they were a bit humourless at the time.
That’s something that I think is a real problem with some left analyses. Most of us, myself included, do not want societal breakdown, and revolution looks fairly distant, so improvement of the present situation does not equal adherence to capitalism so much as wanting things to be a bit less bleak.
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By: LeftAtTheCross Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:10:38
In reply to WorldbyStorm.
+1 to that. Case in point, pension funds. I have a private pension, and am approaching retirement age, contemplating early retirement in fact, so every so often I look online at the value of my pension, which is invested mostly in the stock market of course. The value dropped by around 15% a couple of months ago, due to all the tariff nonsense from Trump etc. So, part of me delights in the prospect of capitalism taking a beating and the vastly overinflated financial bubble going pop, but the bigger part of me is concerned about relative impoverishment in my dotage. Just as well I’m not a CPI-ML member or I’d never be able to square that circle.
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