Tagged: Communism
Racism, Jews and Palestinians: Uncut letter from Weekly Worker:
The following letter, in a severely cut form, was published in the current issue of the Weekly Worker.
I am not necessarily complaining about it being cut, as hard-copy publications have limits on space that hardly exist in online publications. However, there are substantial arguments missing from the cut version that obviously have an impact on the debate, such that it is, that is supposed to be taking place on racism, Jews, and Palestinians.
I will say no more at this point, as the arguments speak for themselves.
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Tony Greenstein is still peddling the racist pseudo-definition of ‘racism’ against Jews that is used by the bourgeois mainstream to suppress criticisms of Jewish behaviour which would be unquestionable if they were directed at any other people. He states that ‘anti-semitism’ always was concerned with the ‘social role’ of Jews, but fails to explain how criticism of the ‘social role’ of any section of society can in itself be racist. It cannot: except when combined with an ideology that racialises that role, so that the racist element supersedes social criticism. This happened in the late 19th Century when the term ‘anti-Semitism’ was coined by … biological racists as an obviously ‘racial’ term. This was then extended back in time by these racists. In fact, the entire concept of ‘race’ was absent from earlier conflicts.
Imperialist Hands off Syria, Iran, Iraq and Islamic State
Obama, Cameron and Hollande’s latest war, with the support of the elite oil-exploiting Arab monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, is yet another act of barbarism against the mainly Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East. Indeed, the recent neocon-inspired wars have led to barbarism on top of barbarism, with the demolition of Iraq in 2003 leading straight to the effective collapse of the country.
The political weakness of the Arab Spring – a spontaneous upsurge beginning in 2011 against the degenerate nationalist dictatorships that dominate the region, with its lack of a coherent ideology or revolutionary centre, enabled its enemies to exploit its spontaneity and the illusions of the masses in forms of Islamic and pan-Islamic nationalism. They either cemented in place new dictatorships out of the failure of such movements, as in Egypt, or used their armed power to give a degree of self-serving support to the upsurges, manipulating them with the use of selective military intervention or the supply of arms to settle old scores with the more ‘radical’ dictators: Qadaafi and Assad. Not coincidentally, these were the only two Arab regimes left that, for all their own capitulations to imperialism, had not run up the white flag of open collaboration with Israel.
Such campaigns, which led to the collapse of Libya into chaos, and the funding of the same Al Qaeda-related forces in Syria via Saudi Arabia, in effect attempted to manipulate radicalised, angry young Muslims into doing the West’s bidding in Syria as they did in Libya. This has backfired spectacularly as the Syrian insurgency ultra-radicalised through the agency of the former Al Qaeda in Iraq – now Islamic State. This established sufficient synergy between the insurgencies in the two countries to overwhelm the crucial imperialist-created Sykes-Picot line. This was something the imperialist puppet-masters did not expect to happen. Oops – they fucked it up in a big way!
Scottish separation panacea fails to materialise
The narrow defeat of the Scottish independence referendum was seen as a relief by the core of the British ruling class. But in a sense, it is a relief for partisans of the working class also. To the superficially minded, this may seem illogical or incongruous. How can what seems like a victory for the core of the ruling class not be a defeat for the working class? A pointer to this is contained in a salient point once made by the Russian Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky:
“In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat.” (Learn To Think: A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists, May 1938)
The British ruling class, in its dotage in terms of capitalist de-development and decline, is no longer able to guarantee the coherence of its own national state in the face of centrifugal nationalist forces, including some within its own class, and faces a real possibility of state fragmentation. This might be true, but that does not make it a progressive development.
Jack Conrad’s Anti-Communist Witchhunt over Gaza
Some of the arguments used to justify the recent witchhunt in the Communist Platform of Left Unity by the Provisional Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker are a dead give-away about the anti-communist nature of the purge. They also show pathetic ignorance of the tradition of classical Marxism on the Jewish question. For instance, the assertion in the PCC’s anathema that “The claim that Jews do not constitute a nation within Israel but they form a ‘semi-national identity’ globally is false and it is indeed what Zionist ideology claims” can only be interpreted as a brazen attack on both Leon Trotsky, who was writing prior to the formation of the state of Israel, and also Isaac Deutscher, who wrote post-1947. Both of these classical Marxist figures, whose boots the leaders of the Weekly Worker trend are not fit to lick, went rather further than considering the Jews as a ‘semi-nation’. Both of them considered the Jews to be a fully-fledged nation.
Trotsky wrote in 1937:
“… the Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument of modern culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. Now the nation cannot normally exist without a common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question…” (Interview with Jewish correspondents in Mexico, January 18 1937, in Leon Trotsky on the Jewish Question, Pathfinder 1970)
According to Jack Conrad/Moshe Machover ‘logic’, Trotsky must have either been a Zionist, an anti-Semite, or both.
Then there is Isaac Deutscher. He had a slightly different position, which appears to have been developed after the foundation of Israel. Writing sometime around 1966, he wrote:
“It is a tragic and macabre truth that the greatest ‘re-definer’ of the Jewish identity has been Hitler; and this is one of his minor posthumous triumphs. Auschwitz was the terrible cradle of the new Jewish consciousness and the new Jewish nation…. For those who have always stressed Jewishness and its continuity, it is strange and bitter to think that the extermination of six million Jews should have given such a new lease of life to Jewry. I would have preferred the six million men, women and children to survive and Jewry to perish. It was from the ashes of six million Jews that the phoenix of Jewry has risen. What a resurrection!” (Who is a Jew?, from The Non-Jewish Jew and other Essays, Oxford 1968, p50).
Deutscher not only considered Jews to be a nation, he credits the Jewish ‘national resurrection’ to Hitler! And to boot, he makes it quite clear that he would rather that Jewish identity cease to exist. Evidently he must be a vile anti-Semite, and were he to have had the misfortune to be in the CPGB, he would have been excommunicated by its junior-Matgamna understudies as an inveterate Jew-hater.
Centrism and fear over Gaza: “Communists” vote down equality of peoples
Reacting in fear of being falsely branded as ‘anti-semitic‘ by the political mainstream that stood aloof in August in silence while more than 2000 Arabs were butchered in four weeks of carnage by the so-called Israeli Defence Force, on September 14, one small fraction of the British far left showed its lack of revolutionary politics. The Communist Platform, a tiny grouping within ‘Left Unity’ run by the publishers of the Weekly Worker, the almost-as-tiny Communist Party of Great Britain, disgraced itself by voting, in fear of the wrath of the overwhelmingly Israel-loyal British ruling class and no doubt some of its small-scale lackeys on the left, against a key aspect of communist politics: equal opposition to all forms of racism.
This point may at first glance seem subtle or even arcane. but it is not at all. It is a crucial ideological means of manufacturing consent, to steal a phrase from Noam Chomsky, for Israel’s brutality in Western societies. This concept says that Jews are a special people, eternally the victims of racism even when their fellows in the Middle East are the ones doing the overwhelming amount of the killing, and that if anyone protests too loud about this or points the finger at Israel’s supporters in the West, they are guilty of ‘anti-semitism’ – an ultimate form of evil associated of course with Hitler. This facile smear against serious critics is a key method of social control in Western countries today.
Racist philo-semitism, not anti-Jewish racism, is dominant in the West today, and acts as massive social pressure on anyone who tries to meaningfully oppose Israeli crimes. It needs to be opposed, by decent and progressive-minded people, by a firm anti-racism. This should not need saying. But this needs to be a different kind of anti-racism, with the same basic message: the equality of all peoples, but a somewhat different emphasis than in the past. In fact today, this kind of anti-racism is the only genuine kind of anti-racism.
Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism
This set of theses will be presented for discussion at the meeting on 14th September of the Communist Platform of Left Unity
1. Of all the advanced capitalist/imperialist countries today, Israel is second only to the United States in the threat it poses to the future of humanity. It is an artificial imperialist entity introduced into the Middle East from without, and consolidated though the expulsion of the bulk of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. As a result it is in a state of permanent conflict with the Palestinians, who have a dual national consciousness both as Palestinians and as part of the national aspirations of the Arab peoples of the entire Middle East.
Israel is built entirely on territory stolen by force from a native population that is on a much higher cultural level than the indigenous victims of earlier settler states associated with European colonialism, such as the United States and Australia. Its conflict is with Arabs who have a modern national consciousness and greater cohesion than virtually any dispossessed indigenous people. Israel has therefore armed itself to the teeth and become a garrison state, stockpiling likely hundreds of nuclear weapons, and threatens the population of the semi-colonial Arab states that surround it with destruction should it fear loss of supremacy.
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.
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.
Communist Explorations 