“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 1
If there is ever a time for Gramsci’s prophecy to re-emerge, it is now. Far gone are the days of neoliberal pontifications on “the end of history.” War once again rears its ugly head in Europe––this time between an aggressive Russian power and an equally interventionist and opportunistic NATO coalition, with Ukrainians fed through the unrelenting meat-grinder. Conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, the Congo, and across Africa boil up and churn on without an end in sight, fueled and funded by states and corporations who benefit from the chronic instability and the extraction (re: pillaging) of gold, uranium, oil, and rare earth minerals from these bloodied lands. Genocide––the crime of all crimes––on Palestinians is met with thunderous applause and hefty military assistance to Israel2 from the highest halls of the West. And inside the Empire itself, neofascists and reactionaries ascend to power, crushing dissent, smothering free speech, stripping worker power and protections, violating the sovereignty of nations, threatening invasions, deportations, arrests, and executions. They know their time is short: the smashing of the neoliberal status-quo is an all-or-nothing gamble. The old world is thrashing on its deathbed, swinging its cyclopean arms, grasping with its dying fingers at anything it can hold on to, determined to take down everything it can as it enters its terminal decline.
New worlds struggle to emerge in the shadow of this flailing beast. They are confused, disarranged––they enter an unknown future. But they are not without a blueprint. Behind them are the anti-imperial struggles of the past: the liberation efforts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the resistance by Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial and franchise colonial states; the Communist revolutions and struggles across the world; the feminist movements; the labor movements; the queer and trans rights movements; the anti-war movements; the alter-globalization movements; the civil rights movements; the environmentalist movements––all of these, and more, are united, like a tapestry, in one struggle against the violence, exploitation, and marginalization of the status-quo, and for a more liberatory world.
This is the kind of world that we wish for our One Struggle! zine to represent. The poems and art pieces in this edition of The Irish Radical are simultaneously a resistance to the old world––the capitalist, Eurocentric, colonial, patriarchal, racist, hierarchical world––and an articulation and gesture into a new one; one that, far from being a utopian impossibility, grounds itself in the plurality of lived experiences and unfolding contradictions of the now. These poems and art reach into the past for lessons, guidance, language; they synthesize new ways of being, knowing, and experiencing the world. It is a world of collective liberation, of harmony with ourselves and with nature, of solidarity.
We hope that you enjoy reading this zine as much as we enjoyed creating it. We want to sincerely thank all of the poets and artists who contributed their time and effort to make this publication a reality.
Peace!
- Italian Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci wrote what is often interpreted as the above quote (the translation from the Italian is quite charitable) from his prison cell in 1930, at the advent of Mussolini’s rise to power, of fascism, of the Second World War. ↩︎
- It should not be forgotten that at the same time as this genocide is being carried out in Gaza, Israel has invaded and occupied Lebanese and Syrian territories, as well as displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, and killed hundreds more. ↩︎