Róisín McAleer
In recent years, a familiar refrain has echoed across social media and activist chambers. We must centre the voices of people from countries targeted by US foreign policy. On the surface, the call appears principled, even humane. Who could object to listening to those most directly affected by genocide, sanctions, covert operations, invasion and the looming threat of war? Yet beneath this liberal formulation lies a dangerous theoretical error that replaces materialist analysis with moral sentiment and flattens complex societies into a single undifferentiated voice.
The problem is not listening to people. The problem is abandoning class analysis. When discourse treats entire nations, whether Iran, Cuba, Syria or Venezuela as homogeneous political subjects, it obscures the fundamental reality that every society is structured by internal contradictions. Nations are not choirs singing in unison. They are terrains of struggle.
We must begin from a simple but often neglected premise, that society is divided into classes with distinct material interests. This does not dissolve at the level of the nation-state. On the contrary, the nation is one of the primary sites where class struggle unfolds.
Within any given country, there exist:
- A bourgeoisie tied to domestic and international capital
- A petty bourgeois or professional-managerial stratum
- A working class with varying degrees of organisation
- Rural and urban poor
- Political, religious, and ideological currents that cross over these material divisions
To say “listen to Iranians” or “listen to Cubans” without specifying which class forces are speaking is to engage in abstraction. The comprador bourgeoisie, whose fortunes depend on integration into Zionist controlled capital markets, does not share the same material interests as a worker whose livelihood depends on state-subsidised infrastructure or nationalised industries. Nor does a member of the diaspora living in the imperial core occupy the same position as someone enduring sanctions within the country itself.
The liberal framework of “centering voices” erases these distinctions. It implies that a population forms a unified moral community, internally coherent and politically aligned. Surely we should realise that a nation is not a moral unit, it is a structured field of antagonisms. Just because Micheal Martin has an Irish passport does not mean that he speaks for all Irish people.
Much of the discourse demanding that we “centre voices” originates in diasporic communities residing in the imperial core, particularly in the United States and Europe. Diaspora politics are not inherently reactionary. In fact, they can play vital roles in anti-imperialist solidarity. However, their class location must be examined and understood.
Many diaspora communities in the US and Europe are disproportionately composed of middle-class or professional strata who had the means to migrate. Their integration into the Western workforce, educational institutions, and media ecosystems shapes their political outlook. They are embedded in an ideological environment structured by Western hegemony.
This does not invalidate their experience. It situates it. Our approach should also ask what material conditions shape this viewpoint? How does proximity to imperial institutions influence political framing? When diaspora voices align neatly with the Zionist entity and US foreign policy objectives, calling for sanctions, regime change, or humanitarian intervention, the alignment cannot just be dismissed as coincidence. It must be analysed.
The problem is not that diaspora individuals speak. It is that liberal discourse elevates selected testimonies as the authentic voice of an entire nation while ignoring class antagonisms and geopolitical context.
The contemporary social media ecosystem intensifies this dynamic. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok reward emotionally charged, easily digestible narratives. Algorithms privilege personal testimony over structural explanation. A tearful video recounting repression travels much further than a sober analysis of sanctions regimes. Believe me, compare our anti-imperialist videos last Christmas with Sile Seoige crying into Insta about her feelings on Palestine.
This algorithmic logic mirrors liberal tendencies. In liberalism, individual experience is treated as self-justifying truth. In our material world, individual experience is real but not self-explanatory. It must be located within broader material conditions.
The shift from materialist analysis to testimonial politics has consequences. Instead of asking:
- What is the class composition of opposition movements?
- What role do sanctions play in exacerbating economic crises?
- How does imperial pressure reshape internal political contradictions?
We are encouraged to ask:
- Who is suffering?
- Whose voice has been platformed?
- Which narrative feels morally compelling?
But moral immediacey is not political clarity. Imperialism thrives in moments where sentiment overrules analysis of the capitalist system.
The US is not just a nation-state amongst others. It is the core of the most technologically sophisticated imperial apparatus in history. Its intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, have long histories of covert operations, regime destabilisation, and psychological warfare. Allied intelligence services such as Mossad and MI6 operate within overlapping geopolitical theatres.
Economic sanctions function as collective punishment. They restrict access to medicine, food imports, financial systems, and development capital. Look at Cuba. Decades of blockade have aimed explicitly at producing scarcity severe enough to generate political unrest. In Venezuela, financial strangulation has constrained the state’s ability to stabilise its currency and import essential goods. In Iran, sanctions and military threats form part of a strategy of coercive containment.
Narratives that equate sanctioned states with genocidal imperial powers operate as ideological leveling mechanisms. They collapse asymmetry. They treat the aggressor and the besieged as morally interchangeable.
Of course no government is beyond criticism. Internal repression, corruption, or bureaucratic stagnation can and do exist. But criticism divorced from the imperial context risks functioning objectively as propaganda for regime change.
The question is not whether contradictions exist within these societies. The question is which contradiction is primary, and why don’t the liberal left call for regime chsnge at home.
When a country faces active economic warfare and military threat, the principal contradiction is between imperial domination and national sovereignty. Internal political contradictions between state and opposition, between bureaucratic strata and working masses remain real but secondary in relation to the external assault.
Liberal discourse often insists on a “third position”: one can oppose BOTH the domestic government and US intervention simultaneously, treating them as equivalent threats. In abstract moral terms, this appears “balanced”. In material terms, it totally obscures power.
The US possesses unmatched military reach, global financial leverage, and media dominance. Sanctioned states operate under siege conditions. To treat these actors as symmetrical is to ignore the structure of Zionist controlled imperialism.
Look, of course our strategy does not require silence about internal flaws. It requires strategic clarity about hierarchy of contradictions. Sovereignty is by no means the end of struggle, but it is a precondition for meaningful transformation. A nation cannot resolve its internal class antagonisms while strangled by external, Zionist managed coercion.
A recurring rhetorical move in liberal anti-imperial discourse is to suggest that the targeted government is “just as bad” as imperial powers implicated in wars, occupations, and systemic violence. This moral flattening performs a political function.
By declaring all actors equally bad, equally illegitimate, is to disarm anti-imperialist solidarity. If every state is equally oppressive, then there is no reason to oppose sanctions or military threats. The geopolitical field dissolves into a haze of universal condemnation.
Yet history demonstrates asymmetry. The US has maintained a global network of military bases, orchestrated coups, and imposed economic blockades affecting millions and millions of innocent people across the world. Sanctioned states, whatever their internal problems, do not command comparable global machinery.
We must insist on concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Equivalence must never be assumed.
Ironically, the call to “centre voices” is often presented as a demand for nuance. But when nuance is reduced to amplifying selective testimonies without class analysis, it becomes anti-intellectual.
True nuance requires examining:
- The material interests of those speaking
- The geopolitical context shaping events
- The role of imperialist media and funding networks
- The historical trajectory of imperial intervention
Without this, discourse devolves into sentiment-driven alignment with imperial and Zionist narratives. The language of social justice is mobilised in ways that obscure rather than illuminate structural power.
We are not arguing against empathy here. We are against substituting empathy for analysis.
We must reject the myth of national homogeneity. No people are politically uniform. No diaspora speaks for an entire homeland. No viral testimony can substitute for class analysis.
Solidarity with nations under imperial pressure does not mean endorsing every policy of their governments. It means recognising the asymmetry of global power and prioritising opposition to imperial aggression. It means understanding that internal transformation must emerge from the material conditions of those societies and not from sanctions, covert operations, or external destabilisation.
The task of the left in the imperial core is not to adjudicate which foreign opposition figure feels most authentic. It is to confront the machinery of its own ruling class. It is to oppose sanctions that strangle economies, military threats that endanger civilians, and intelligence operations that undermine sovereignty.
When the left abandons materialism for algorithmic emotionalism, it disarms itself. When it treats nations as homogeneous moral collectives, it erases class struggle. When it collapses imperial aggressors and besieged states into moral equivalence, it serves the ideological needs of empire.
That is why we always demand clarity about class. Clarity about power. Clarity about primary contradictions.
Above all, we have to always remember that a nation is not a voice. It is a battlefield.
No war but class war!