There have been articles in Socialist Voice recently on China and Laos. While I hope to write in the future on North Korea and Viet Nam, there are some points to make on the Asian models, especially their use of market relations in order to build socialism. It should be […]
International
Venezuela survives
The corporate media denounced the recent election in Venezuela in advance as “fraudulent” and a “sham”—not the elections in Honduras, Colombia, or Mexico, whose subservient governments joined with the United States in demanding that the Venezuelan elections not be held. Also at the instigation of the United States, the main […]
Laos: Building the foundations of socialism
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is a country of less than 7 million people in south-east Asia. It has been officially under the leadership of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party since 1975. Article 13 of the country’s constitution states that “all types of enterprises are equal before the law and […]
A continuation of subversion
In late March 2018 the president of the United States, Donald Trump, authorised a $20 million fund to support subversive actions against Cuba. The move, which is part of the permanent anti-Cuba policy, came after Trump himself had proposed eliminating such funds in May 2017. The money is specifically for […]
Cuba: Continuation of the revolutionary process
On 11 March last just short of 4.7 million people—or almost 86 per cent of the registered electorate here—turned out to vote in the second and final stage of Cuba’s general election. It is noteworthy that, although well organised, supervised, and encouraged, voting is by no means obligatory. This remarkably […]
Creating a bogeyman in the East
Four days before the British general election of October 1924 the Daily Mail published a letter purporting to have been written by the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev. The paper claimed that the correspondence revealed a Bolshevik plot to plunge Britain into civil war, and […]
Where is China heading?
One of the lessons of the fall of the Soviet Union is that Marxists should seek to look critically at states that are attempting to build socialism, while also not being over-simplistic. Most views of China today write the country off as simply selling out and having fully embraced capitalism, […]
A crucial election in Venezuela
There is no doubt that Venezuela is the main target of the United States in Latin America, which it sees as the principal obstacle to its domination of the continent—its God-given right, as stated by numerous presidents, from Monroe to Reagan, Obama, and Trump. Of all the countries of America, […]
Letter from Cuba
Trump’s State Department has just announced the initiation of a “Cuban Internet Task Force”—another illegal, offensive and typical act of interference in the internal affairs of a nation lining up to conclude its general election process. It makes a bit of a mockery of their indignation at what Russia was […]
Catalan elections Workers’ kamikaze revenge!
A growing international tendency that should concern political activists is the rightward turn of working-class voters. In the United States, workers’ support determined the election of the ultra-rightist Donald Trump, presenting himself as fighting neo-liberalism and the globalisation policies of the ruling Democratic Party, seen as driving American industry overseas. […]
Even more US bombs dropped on Afghanistan (with a lot of help from Ireland)
At the end of last year the US Air Force had dropped about three times as many bombs on Afghanistan as in 2016. New statistics show that by the end of October there had already been 3,554 “fired weapons.” Over the past year they had registered 1,337 munitions drops. The […]
National Day of Action against US Wars at Home and Abroad
Resolution of the Conference on US Foreign Military Bases, held at Learning Commons Town Hall, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, 12–14 January 2018 WHEREAS the United States has been in a state of perpetual war and has been using its unrivalled military might in every corner of the world to […]
The EU driving privatisation
The crisis in health services is Europe-wide. The pace of market-driven health “reform” has speeded up since capitalism’s 2008 crash as neo- liberal governments—with both conservative and social democratic labels—have imposed the costs of saving the banks on working people. Public health services, with their massive property holdings, substantial staff […]
Beyond the National Health Service
With the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the United States beginning to get behind Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” policy, it brings a sharp focus to how this sort of policy is financed. That such a policy could be gaining traction in the United States, especially in its current […]
Macron: shiny teeth don’t mask a vicious bite
It’s almost eight months since Emmanuel Macron took up residence in the Élysée Palace after a second-round “victory” over Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale. This “victory” was accompanied by a historic vote for Le Pen, dwarfing that of her father’s in 2002 against Chirac. Macron did not have the support […]
The American way of war
Lenin wrote Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 to address an issue that had been raised by J. A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding in their works about the changing nature of capitalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin recognised that the war then taking place was […]