SOCIALIST VOICE

The May issue of Socialist Voice is online @ https://socialistvoice.ie/category/article/latest/

Content:

Trump re-focusses US strategy on China  Nicola Lawlor

China’s economy is now 23% larger than the US according to the IMF. China is the largest trading partner with Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Japan and third largest to the EU. The Belt and Road Initiative has gone from strength to strength since 2013 and is the centrepiece […]

Trickle down tyranny by Niall Cullinane

Marxists know well the state is not a neutral arbiter but a mechanism for managing the affairs of the capitalist class. While the state may exhibit relative autonomy, that is, it can act independently from capital, it functions, in the last instance, to reproduce the conditions for accumulation, whether state […]

British Whitewashing of its Dirty Colonial War  by Tommy McKearney

What lies behind the British Government’s announcement last month that it intends to commission the production of what is being described in Westminster as an “official history of UK government policy towards Northern Ireland during The Troubles”? Due to the nature of the commissioning process and the fact that this […]

Article 5: The Science of Planning: Revisiting the Economic Calculation Debate by Eoghan O'Neill

In last month’s article1, we argued that public ownership is not enough, but that it must be combined with democratic planning to truly serve the working class. Planning is the linchpin of socialism: the conscious, collective organisation of economic life for the common good. This article takes that argument further […]

Food, profits and chemicals  by barry murray

When you mention “the politics of food”, most people look at you askance. Through no fault of their own, they have never been told about the crucial links of consumerism, politics or economics to food and its production.  They certainly know about the Thatcherite “hand-bag” economics. The ever-rising cost of […]

James Connolly Festival 2025 by Aaron Nolan

This year’s James Connolly Festival runs from Tuesday 6th to Sunday 11th May 2025 with almost all events taking place at Connolly House and The New Theatre.  It will include a week-long James Connolly Art Exhibition. Seven artists have been invited to prepare prints and paintings that will be available […]

The Settler Colonialism Mentality – to eradicate their Existence by Eoghan O'Neill

In Gaza today, we are witnessing an atrocity: an attempt not merely to kill a people but to erase them. Whole families exterminated, hospitals turned to rubble, libraries turned to ash. This is not simply military conquest, it is the logic of settler colonialism: the logic of elimination. The goal […]

Ireland as the laboratory of Empire, Part 1  by Graham Harrington

1800s British colonialism’s “hierarchy of races” saw white Europeans as superior peoples, followed by east Asians, with the Irish tied with Africans, coming just ahead of the Australian aborigines, who placed bottom of the ladder. This grotesque “race science” would be taken up and furthered by the Nazis later on, […]

South Korea’s Political Crisis  by Jenny Farrell

As South Korea faces political turmoil – an impeached president, public outrage, and a pivotal election – recent events reveal deeper systemic fractures rooted in imperialism, authoritarianism, and comprador capitalism.  Historical Foundations: Colonialism and Cold War Repression  South Korea’s modern political economy was forged under Japanese colonialism (1910–1945), which exploited […]

All Roads Lead to Beijing  by Sami Kupiszewski (Social Rights Ireland)

By the end of China’s civil war in 1949, the country was severely damaged: its agriculture decimated, most transport routes destroyed, the industrial infrastructure looted by the Japanese. Despite chaos, poverty, and hunger, Mao Zedong successfully built a centrally planned economy and a self-reliant military.   The first Five-Year Plan in […]

China’s Environment Code  by Richard Mullen

At the end of April, the first draft of China’s Environment Code was presented. The second large legislative undertaking in this decade for the Chinese legislators after the introduction of the Civil Code, the Environment Code harmonises the corpus of over 30 environment laws, amounting for 10% of the overall […]

Communist Party of Ireland May Day Message 2025 by Communist Party of Ireland

The Communist Party of Ireland sends May Day greetings to the working class of Ireland, to all anti-imperialist and progressive organisations, to the international Communist movement, to all those struggling against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and native capitalism, and to those actively struggling to build socialism in their workplaces and communities. […]

Book Review: The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 by Padraig Mac Oscair

Diarmaid Ferriter, who has come to be something resembling the public face of “History” in the respectable Irish media, has cannily inverted the title of his popular 2004 work  The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 in his latest book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, which represents a sequel of sorts outlining […]

Book Review: Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic by Ilan Pappé by Pádraig Mac Oscair

Ilan Pappé, as readers may know, is one of the most controversial of Israel’s “new historians” after having sacrificed his academic career there by publishing extensively on the buried history of the Nakba and challenging official Zionist accounts of the colonisation of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism […]

The German Peasants’ War  by Jenny Farrell

The German Peasants’ War (1524–1525) was a large-scale social and political uprising in early modern Europe, where peasants, who constituted the majority of the population, revolted against the oppressive feudal system. Trapped in servitude, the peasants were burdened with labour and levies to the nobility while a growing bourgeois class […]

Book Review: Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, by Domenico Losurdo  by Sajeev Kumar

Western Marxism (WM) by Dominico Losurdo, translated into English and published recently by Monthly Review, is an important work exposing the idealism, pro-imperialism and eurocentrism (i.e. the paternalistic approach towards struggles in the periphery) of western Marxists. In the introduction, the book explains that WM is not a geographical orientation […]