Socialist Voice Review:
November – 2022
Oh dear!
As is often the case, what is not said in a publication is more telling than what is. Once again, there is not much wrong with Socialist Voice and there is not much right with it either.
However, time to get to the core, yet missing issue – the role of women in the Party.
Socialist Voice has not a word to say about the recent 22nd International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Havana, attended by two Party representatives.
In Havana, apart from making some highly questionable claims about the strength of the Party and its range of activities (perhaps a little bit understandable at such gatherings), a Party delegate declared that:
“Finally, with our growth we have seen more women joining us, women who have brought with them their own expertise and experience. It is through these women that true change comes to our party and country, and through women that lasting social change happens in our society.
“The new world we build will be shaped with their hands and by their hearts and minds. It is their strength and dedication that leads us and will bring others to us. It is through them that capitalist and patriarchal thought will be pulled down alongside the economic structures that bind us.
“Our liberation will not be given to us, we must take it and we will. Let us build the unity of the international working class revolutionary movement.
Unity is our strength, division is our enemy. Solidarity with the workers of the world. Victory to the working class.”
Imagine a man substituting the word men for women in that official statement and the reaction that would provoke! Calling for unity when you have just opened up a massive chasm in human interactions! Where to start in the analysis of those few paragraphs? In a few words, it is sexist, discriminatory, sectarian, divisive and therefore essentially anti-communist. Could this really be the actual position of the new dynamic leadership? Whatever the position, it is a new low.
Furthermore, how is it that in Havana the Party describes women as women and in Dublin as persons who can get pregnant?
The event did not merit a mention in Socialist Voice nor ion the Party website. The only mention is in a well-disguised tweet – tweets from @irelandcp. The website does contain the text of the Party address to the 2021 meeting but, not to the 2022 meeting. Hmmm.
As usual, we will be happy to publish any response we get from the Party.
As to what was in Socialist Voice: there’s lots of interesting material – most of which you will have read before. And lots about unity of the left. Unity of the left while creating unnecessary divisions within the Party itself? Perhaps they have a cunning plan?