Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.
The International's rationale was to construct new mass revolutionary parties able to lead successful workers' revolutions. It saw these arising from a revolutionary wave which would develop alongside and as a result of the coming world war. The founding conference adopted the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution as the International's political platform.
O'Riordan was born at 37 Pope's Quay, Cork City, on 11 November 1917. He was the youngest of five children. His parents came from the West Cork Gaeltacht of Ballingeary-Gougane Barra. Despite his parents being native speakers of the Irish language, it was not until O'Riordan was interned in the Curragh camp during the Second World War that he learnt Irish, being taught by fellow internee Máirtín Ó Cadhain who went on to lecture in Trinity College, Dublin.
As a teenager, he joined the republican youth movement, Fianna Éireann, and then the Irish Republican Army. The IRA at the time was inclined towards left wing politics and socialism. Much of its activity at the time concerned street fighting with the quasi-fascistBlueshirt movement and O'Riordan fought Blueshirt fascism on the streets of Cork City in 1933–34. O'Riordan was friends with left-wing inclined republicans such as Peadar O'Donnell and Frank Ryan, and in 1934, he followed them into the Republican Congress – a short-lived socialist republican party.
O'Riordan joined the Communist Party of Ireland in 1935 while still in the IRA and worked on the communist newspaper Socialist Voice. In 1937, following the urgings of Peadar O'Donnell, several hundred Irishmen, mostly IRA or ex-IRA men, went to fight for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War with the XVth International Brigade. They were motivated in part by enmity towards the 800 or so Blueshirts, led by Eoin O'Duffy who went to Spain to fight on the "nationalist" side in the Irish Brigade. O'Riordan accompanied a party led by Frank Ryan. In the Republic's final offensive of 25 July 1938, O'Riordan carried the flag of Catalonia across the River Ebro. On 1 August, he was severely injured by shrapnel on the Ebro front. He was repatriated to Ireland the following month, after the International Brigades were disbanded.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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Together with this inquestionable increase in the number of workers occupied in industry, we are also confronted in Soviet Russia with an increase in the number of unemployed registered on the Labour Exchange. The number of unemployed has attained about a million. There have been months when the number of unemployed has even exceeded that amount.
Unemployment is one of the most distressing phenomena in Russia at the present time, and we must take every measure to abolish it. Of the entire number of unemployed about one fourth, or 25%, are industrial workers, and the remainder is made up of the intelligentzia, the professions, office workers and unskilled labourers. I must admit that I personally do not place complete confidence in the official statistics of the Labour Exchange, because of that fact that all kinds of people are registered on the exchange for the sake of receiving those priveleges for the unemployed and those conditions of hire which are guaranteed by the laws of the Soviet Republic, and which are inflexibly carried out. Here are registered not only those who are looking for work, but also those who would not accept work, and are merely looking for the priveleges and exemptions which are connected with the category of unemployment. We have constantly discovered cases where people who have been arrested and sentenced to Pechora (a place of exile-to Archangel) on the charge of speculation, have been registered on the Labour Exchange as unemployed. Therefore in my opinion the official figures probably exceed the actual number of unemployed. But in general we must take cognizance of the growth of number of unemployed, which goes parallel with the growth of the number of workers occupied in industry.
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