The Centrist Politics of Tony Greenstein

I recently received a missive from Tony Greenstein, who is trying to fill in for the failure of Moshe Machover to refute the Marxist character of the views I have been arguing on the Jewish Question. Greenstein spends comparatively little time criticising my own views, though this is an improvement on Moshe, who spent none at all. Then he launches into another tirade against me for daring to engage politically with Gilad Atzmon. However, despite the mind-bending nonsense he comes out with on this, that will surely give anyone who attempts to read it a headache, he does make a couple of political criticisms of myself that are worth responding to, and hence gives me an opportunity to elaborate my views in more depth.

Actually, a meeting is in preparation at which these questions will be discussed in the Communist Platform. At that meeting, I intend to move a set of preliminary theses on the Jewish Question today, based on an extension of the insights of Karl Marx and Abram Leon into that very important question. It will be something of a challenge for those who are currently reacting to social pressures of the same kind that led to the criminal, violent assault on George Galloway, to argue that my views are not Marxist and in some way incompatible with Communism. I would contend that, to the contrary, the views of my opponents are incompatible with Communism and a capitulation to the pressures of modern imperialism, of which the Jewish/Zionist bourgeois layers in the advanced capitalist countries are a vanguard layer.

Continue reading →

Early 20th Century Communism v Imperialism: Some strengths and weaknesses

In this article I will first of all address the question of the early Comintern’s ‘Anti-Imperialist United Front’ (AIUF), its rights and wrongs, and its application by the Comintern both in its revolutionary period and later. Later I will also address related weaknesses and inconsistencies in the early Comintern’s approach to imperialism, how those weaknesses have impacted on the left since, and how they can be corrected in our practice today. This will actually be quite a wide-ranging critique of some weaknesses in orthodox ‘Leninist’ theory, and will not abstain from criticising (when necessary) even people with the highest authority in the early 20th Century Communist movement: Lenin and Trotsky. But this is done from the standpoint of acceptance of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism, and an attempt to deal with some important, but secondary, flaws in that understanding.

The AIUF was put forward in the Theses on the Eastern Question at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922.  It was an attempt to extend the concept of the United Front[1] developed by the Comintern for the workers movement of the advanced countries, to the very different circumstances of backward colonial and semi/ex-colonial countries. The concept of the United Front is pretty simple – though the devil is in the detail as we shall touch upon here. Communists are the part of the working class movement that represents its historic interests, both in immediate struggles and ultimately in those struggles that pose the need for the working class to take power. But in all countries where the working class is the decisive section of the population, the workers movement is dominated by pro-capitalist bureaucracies and misleaders, who act as a brake on the movement and systematically betray struggles that threaten the capitalist system.

Continue reading →