Eamon Ryan has been leaking internal information to apply pressure to his fellow party members to go into coalition. Green Party councillors have supported Fianna Fáil candidates in local areas. Green Party councillors voted to privatise O’Devaney Gardens social housing.
Ireland has among the strongest property rights recognition in the world. Imagine if, instead of protecting the right to property, the Constitution protected the right to housing. If the might of the government vindicated every individual’s right to shelter.
Faced with the establishment of workers’ democracy across the globe, alongside growing socialist movements in their own countries, the West took drastic measures. It redistributed a tiny portion of its super-profits, amassed through bloody imperialist exploitation, to smother the class interests of the Western working class with moderate material concessions.
Social democracy relies on Imperialism to generate profits and export poverty to the developing world while reaping the rewards gained from exploiting entire nations.
Some are calling the crisis a ‘cleanse’ of the planet, that because it disproportionately affects older people, it’s the Earth’s revenge against ‘boomers’ and that humanity really needed to ‘check itself’ or let the planet breathe.
It exists almost as if to affirm that capitalism is the only viable option, and feeds into the western idea of restricting socialism to its most minimal form. Furthermore, the Nordic welfare model cannot be presented as an alternative to both socialism and capitalism, it works mainly as a form of appeasement, keeping the working class quiet while still supporting free market capitalism.
Complex subjects, particularly those of a scientific or political nature, are most commonly sensationalised. So much so that we end up with a Media Who Cried Wolf situation. When every trending disease around winter time is looking to wipe out humanity, one that actually could, would be impossible to ever believe.
Basic functions of a state, such as public investment, have been restricted to an unprecedented degree. Karl Marx saw that national debt is the means by which the modern state is sold to the capitalist class, determining which section of that class will be in control.
The state intervention required to avoid a complete climate catastrophe, such as enforcing reduced energy consumption, the rejection of the fossil fuel industry and better management of natural resources, are all fundamentally incompatible with laissez faire, free market principles.