Tadhg Hickey, Direct Action And Lenin’s Birthday

Last week, comedian and social media activist Tadhg Hickey announced that 22nd April would be a “Global Day of Civil Disobedience”. Tadhg is a leading supporter of Palestine. He successfully translates the complexities of geopolitics into short, accessible video clips.

This is important work. For example, his video “The US empire but it’s a school reunion” shows the psychopathy of the US and Israel in terms everyone can understand: “you’re a bully, you are a tyrant, you [US] and that psycho [Israel]”.

Tadhg’s videos are perfectly pitched for social media. They are entertaining and informative and they last less than 2 minutes - so the call for civil disobedience will have been easily understood. His content has global reach so his call will have been heard far and wide.

The day of civil disobedience comes from and speaks to a growing sense of frustration and anger in the Palestine solidarity movement, though. The enthusiasm and mass protests of the earlier stages of the Palestine solidarity movement is being replaced by seething anger.

No wonder: the Israeli genocide on Palestine has been going on for 18 months. 60,000 dead and every day a new atrocity is streamed onto our social media feeds. The Irish government has not lifted a finger to sanction Israel, stop the US military using Shannon airport, stop overflights of weapons, stop the Central bank selling war bonds.

The Gardaí showed their true colours as the licensed thugs of the capitalist system when they recently abused activists from the Mothers Against Genocide group.

Rage is powerful. Especially when informed by knowledge of injustice. It is good that people are enraged by what the imperialist proxy, Israel is doing. It is good to be enraged by the complicity of our state and the relentless propaganda cover for Israel spewed out by RTE.

However, rage needs a plan, and it needs an organisation. But days of civil disobedience cannot become an end in itself. Direct action can help to promote mass protest. It’s the involvement of the mass of working people in social movements that forces governments to act. Direct action must not just be a letting off of steam. The energy of all that rage must be stored, harnessed and released like a battery of revolution.

The 22nd April is also the birthday of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. If you want to know about how to harness popular rage to build a revolution there is no better example than Lenin’s.

Lenin spent decades building a revolutionary socialist party that enabled the working class to lead the masses of peasants to overthrow the Tsar and capitalism. The 1917 Revolution was decades in the making. The key was building the movement of organised, determined, enraged and enlightened workers.

Lenin endured exile, the death of his brother, setbacks, persecution but it paid off in the end. It was only after that work of organisation that he made it look easy: “In the space of a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal of monarchies”

One of the most satisfying moments of the day of disobedience on 22nd April saw Tadhg Hickey occupy RTE and call them out for their pro-imperialist lies. I suspect there are frustrated RTE workers who have to have to clock in and out every day in that organisation and have to endure the stench of the obscene pro-Israel, pro-NATO doublespeak being slurried out about the country.

They owe Tadhg an enormous thank you. Now, following Lenin, it is time for the workers and their unions to step up. Organise. Harness that rage. Protest. Take industrial action. To hell with the 1990 Industrial Relations Act.

Returning to Tadhg’s video “The US empire but it’s a school reunion”. It captures important features of the capitalist/imperialist system that is behind the genocide in Palestine. The Palestine movement has only taken the first step in challenging that powerful system.

The next step is Lenin.

Lenin wrote in great detail about this in his book “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism”. For Lenin, imperialism was the process whereby corporations outgrew their domestic markets and extended their operations overseas in the form of the export of finance capital.

European and American capitalists sought cheaper labour, cheaper raw materials and new markets, especially in poorer, less developed parts of the world. This expansion of capitalism was enforced by war and this kind of competition between European powers is precisely how World War 1 broke out.

Lenin helps us understand that similar processes are underway today.

The stakes have never been higher for US and European corporations, especially in the context of the rise of China. Protection and expansion of western capital investment may require the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, of 60,000 Palestinians, of more than one million Iraqis, but that is a price that Biden, Trump, Von Der Leyen and Starmer are willing to pay.

Once you understand that global capitalism, enforced by US and EU imperialism, is embedded in Ireland then you begin to understand why it is that our political leaders and media bow and scrape to the US and its proxies.

Lenin reminds us that if we want to change the system that demands obscenities like the genocide in Palestine, then we have to start in our own country. Lenin calls this “revolutionary defeatism": In time of war (and we live in a time of war today in 2025) working class people should know that the true enemy is not working class people from other countries.

The true enemy is the class enemy right here at home: the bosses, developers, investors, land hoarders and legal, accountancy, financial professionals servicing the needs of global capital who make up “our” Irish ruling classes. And the governments that serve them.

Lenin is useful to us too, for explaining the operation of the state and the Gardaí. The Gardaí didn’t abuse the Mothers against Genocide because they are nasty people. They did it because, as Lenin pointed out in his “State and Revolution” the police are those “special bodies of armed men” whose job it is to protect the state. The state, in turn, is not an impartial entity. It arises as a primary “instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class”.

The day of disobedience had real life actions in real life places. But the actions were small and it was one day. It needs to become a mass movement. And a movement cannot be built on disobedience alone. It needs a destination. It needs a guiding programme.

Lenin wrote in “A Draft of our Party Programme”:

“It goes without saying that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes,” as Karl Marx said. But neither Marx nor any other theoretician or practical worker in the Social-Democratic [Social Democratic means Communist in this context] movement has ever denied the tremendous importance of a programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party….

At the present time the urgent question of our movement is no longer that of developing the former scattered “amateur” activities, but of uniting—of organisation. This is a step for which a programme is a necessity. The programme must formulate our basic views; precisely establish our immediate political tasks; point out the immediate demands that must show the area of agitational activity; give unity to the agitational work, expand and deepen it, thus raising it from fragmentary partial agitation for petty, isolated demands to the status of agitation for the sum total of Social-Democratic demands."

Lenin learned very early in his career the political limitations of isolated acts of civil disobedience. The so called Narodniki terrorists never bothered to build a working class movement and contented themselves with carrying out isolated terrorist acts. Without an organised, disciplined and ideologically coherent movement to support them, random acts such as the assasination of Alexander II in 1881 resulted only in imprisonment and punishment of individuals and the system carried on unaffected.

A modern day example of this was the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The suspect, Luigi Mangione has been feted but without an organised movement driven by a coherent political programme, his sacrifice will not change the inhuman system of for-profit healthcare in the US.

So what can we do about it?

First and foremost, working class people must organise. Lenin, in his “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” wrote “in its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation.” Working class people produce all the wealth under capitalism. That wealth is accumulated by capitalists who will stop at nothing to defend their wealth.

The best case scenario for a worker is that you get a wage. Organisation in trade unions is of enormous benefit to workers. Lenin argues that trade unions are just the beginning. Sure, we must fight on the day to day challenges that face workers but to truly overcome capitalism we must organise in a revolutionary socialist party.

Many of those engaging in the day of civil disobedience may not think that they need revolutionary consciousness, that all we need is to stop the genocide of the Palestinians.

However, Lenin helps us to understand that if you campaign only stop the genocide in Gaza without at the same time taking on the system that gives rise to that genocide then the best you can hope for is that the murder shifts to another location.

Besides, mass murder is no exception. It is what happens because of imperialism. It is a defining characteristic of US imperialism. One million dead in Iraq. 6 million dead in Congo since 1996. Hundreds of thousands dead in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan.

Business as usual under capitalism is even more lethal. Oxfam estimates that 8 million people die every year because of tax evasion and wealth extraction by western corporations from the global south. And this is the very system that our Irish ruling class directly operate and that our politicians and commentariat defend.

I believe that Lenin would see potential in the day of civil disobedience. In his essay “What is to be done?” he describes such “spontaneous” acts as “an embryonic form” of revolutionary consciousness. But there is a force in Irish society and across the world, the working class, that can actually shut down the system.

To connect to the working class activists need to mobilise on every issue that hits the working class, from housing to healthcare, connecting the fight at home to the fight abroad.

There is a lot of work to be done. If you have taken part in “A Day of Civil Disobedience” - The real work is the revolution.

If you agree join the Red Network.