Socialist Voice review
January 2025
Once again, Socialist Voice starts a new year with no change in its presentation or direction. Around twenty articles offer a mix of good, bad, and downright ugly.
It is an organ that depends on randomly submitted material – and it shows. It also looks like an entity that has no functioning or competent editor, which is a shame considering both its potential and necessity for distributing left-wing points of view.
With no more than twenty articles a month and sometimes not much more than half that volume, it really should not be that hard to get some basics right. For its own credibility it needs to be consistently accurate and reliable.
While it might appear that we are just nitpicking, the following example illustrates the lack of effective editing: Sajeev Kumar asks “Who is the threat for the world peace: is it the US, …….which has over 800 military bases around the world?” Meanwhile, in the next article Nicola Lawlor writes “An extremely conservative account of US military bases outside of US territory is 128 (based on a narrow definition), while a more accurate count is certainly over 300.”
Neither is wrong, but the description and method of making the determination, when shown together cause an unnecessary and avoidable contradiction and a questioning of the authenticity of the information.
Ever since the CPI’s unexplained pivot towards China, contributors to Socialist Voice have lined up to offer their uncritical approval of all things Chinese.
It is interesting to see how ducks line up in an orderly fashion despite the lack of direction.
Just like in the capitalist press, the journalists/contributors know what to do and do it – every time.
Alan Farrell writes: “This is where China’s strategy could become truly clever. China could use its US dollars to help Belt & Road countries pay off their dollar debts to Western lenders. But here’s the key: in exchange for helping these countries clear their dollar debts, China could arrange to be repaid in yuan, or in strategic resources, or through other bilateral arrangements.”
Sajeev Kumar writes: “Or is it a country whose president Xi Jinping says, “[i]n pursuing modernisation, China will not tread the old path of war, colonisation and plunder, taken by some countries.”
And, going back to the December Socialist Voice the usually reliable Tommy McKearney writes: “In reality, the competitive advantage enjoyed by China is not due to unfair trading practices but is the result of its economic system. In other words, a planned socialist economy under the guidance of the Communist Party of China.”
Critical thinking? Be damned! Reads just like the capitalist press regularly and apparently randomly throwing out morsels of wisdom like ‘socialism doesn’t work’ without having to expand in any way on the contention.
In “On the Labour Party” Matthew O’Brien also throws critical thinking aside with: “For anyone genuinely interested in creating a 32-county socialist republic they should join the Communist Party of Ireland. While Labour will bend over backwards to betray its principles just so its TDs can get a nice pension, the Communist Party will never abandon the ideas of genuine socialism.” Hmmm…
We are getting close to the ugly but first, we have to grapple with the questions raised by Jimmy Corcoran in an article headed “What do we mean by socialism?”
He asks, “What do we mean by socialism and how do we achieve it?” Naturally, he does not answer either of his own questions so we will return to this little matter in our next post.
There are plenty of reasons to have a go at Sinn Féin but Aisling Each in “Banning trans healthcare: a murderous act of class treachery” takes fundamentalism, dogmatism, and intolerance to new lows. First, you should read her article HERE to get the full flavour of the abject nonsense contained therein.
The use of puberty blockers on children for anything other than diagnosed medical reasons is a very serious issue. Medical and other experts, on both sides of the argument regarding their use on children, treat the matter seriously and scientifically in the full knowledge that there is much left to be discovered.
However, Socialist Voice treats us to an entirely one-sided and mostly irrational approach. Let’s start at the beginning, “The recent enaction of a permanent ban on puberty blockers for transgender children by the Stormont government in the north of this country is emblematic of a dark trend of transphobia in recent years.”
What dark trend of transphobia? The concerns regarding puberty blockers have nothing to do with transphobia but with medical and psychological and physiological matters.
Then, “In this article I will give a brief overview of how gender affirming care works in Ireland and Britain’s two-tiered healthcare systems, the deeper gender determinants of class, and how Sinn Féin’s collaboration with the British Labour government weaponizes children’s health to protect capitalist interests.”
So, Sinn Féin or any other entity expressing concerns about the use of puberty blockers on children “weaponizes children’s health to protect capitalist interests” but promoting and demanding their use is perfectly ok and is entirely unrelated to capitalist interests? What about the life-long drug dependency that results for the various degrees of all the transformation processes? With no mention of this aspect, it can only be deduced that the capitalist drug companies have only a benign interest in the whole thing and that any benefit to drug companies resulting from the promotion of such drugs is purely incidental and unintentional.
To classify the promoters of puberty blockers as only serving capitalist interests (the interests of drug companies and private health ‘providers’) would not be fair, rational or accurate, but it would be no less unethical than the claim made above.
“The current system of gender affirming care (GAC) in Ireland and Britain is based on a model of “pathologisation….. The basic premise is that trans people must be referred to a specialised clinic and be “diagnosed” as transgender by a panel of mental health professionals before being given care that cisgender people can get from their GP. “What does that mean? What sort of care can heterosexual people get from their GP that is related in any way to the diagnosis and treatment of transgender issues in children or adults?
“The use of puberty blockers in pubescent transgender children and adolescents is long established and prevents them from going through a traumatic puberty”. At the very least, this assertion is widely contested.
Stop! Our instinct is to analyse and comment on each aspect of this article but, frankly, it’s not worth it. Read the article yourself and you will see what we mean.
However, we will finish with one last attempt to figure out what is going on:
“A materialist feminist approach to gender would highlight that women are exploited in similar ways to men (i.e. through wage labour) as well as being uniquely exploited through uncompensated reproductive labour and emotional labour.”
“These strict categorisations of gender allow capitalism to “double dip” with their exploitation. If someone is assigned the gender of woman, she may be expected to both provide wage and reproductive labour. Therefore, breaking this strict binary or demanding to be recategorised appropriately threatens the labour pool capitalism requires of its proletariat.”
There you have it – meaningless nonsense. It is just one dastardly capitalist conspiracy and Sinn Féin is up to its neck in it.
The real problem here is not some dogmatic author, or Sinn Féin’s alleged conspiracy with capitalism in this particular instance. The problem is Socialist Voice and its editor. Printing drivel, masquerading as rational, scientific analysis camouflaged under another layer of pseudo-Marxist analysis is too much.
The leadership of the Party has been, and remains, terrified of a handful of LGBTQ IA+++ members and influencers to the point where it will print anything rather than demand at least some level of evidence and some standards of journalistic ethics.
Footnotes may seem impressive but it is the content that is important. The footnotes provided with this article are clearly partisan and selective.
It is unfair to other contributors who provide accurate and well-reasoned articles to have to occupy the same space as somebody who uses a powerhouse of distractions to hide the dubious nature of her argument.
For indeed that is what the article is – a distraction from the class politics she pretends to espouse. The same can be said of Socialist Voice for publishing it.
Regarding the note from the editor: it deserves – and will get – due attention in due course.