Letters
Hypocrites
Recently we have seen articles from both Tony Greenstein and Chris Williamson that accurately describe Corbyn’s capitulation to the right of the Labour Party and the Zionist organisations that make up the Israel lobby.
Tony Greenstein calls for Corbyn to break from the Labour Party. This was followed by a video from Ken Loach, who makes the case that Labour is a lost cause and cannot be reformed. In other words, Labour can’t be changed internally and moved to the left.
Ken suggests former Labour members could stand against Labour. The problem is, like many on the left, Ken tells half a story. He describes what the right of the party did, but nothing about how Corbyn and McDonnell responded to the attacks and, just as important, nothing about what is fundamentally wrong with the Labour left.
Only 40 Labour MPs didn’t vote no confidence in Corbyn. Corbyn and McDonnell’s priority was to stop rightwing Labour MPs from leaving because that would have split the party. They always surrender to the right of the party for “unity”. Their unity effectively means siding with the right of the party and against socialist members. In fact Corbyn and McDonnell preferred to see the victims expelled to keep the culprits in the party.
Does Ken think they won’t attack their supporters and accuse them of anti-Semitism again in the same way? They made their choice and sided with the wrong people. Because of their past response they have painted themselves into a corner.
This is not something Labour MPs can hide from, ignore or make any half-hearted response to. It would mean doing a complete U-turn. It would mean lining up alongside people they condemned as anti-Semites; saying those they said were reasonable people who have a point are dishonest bullies; admitting they took entirely the wrong approach and reinforced rather than challenged a lie.
I can’t see them doing it. If they did they would be destroyed as hypocrites. How would they respond when their allies are accused of anti-Semitism? Or when they are asked about Labour Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputies?
Roger Day
Gravesend
Only workers
Peter Manson, editor of Weekly Worker writes, in its ‘About’ section:
… Week in, week out, the Weekly Worker hammers home this message - in order for our class to make any kind of advance, let-alone become the ruling class, it needs a single, united Marxist party. … There is no objective reason why comrades across the left cannot come together to forge the beginnings of the party we need. (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/about)
The objective reason why the existing left cannot come together is that it consists of sectarian parties that are not workers’ parties, but parties of intellectuals. These parties attract more students and more intellectuals, rather than correcting this adverse class composition, and recruiting from among the lowest-paid workers.
The problem was addressed head-on by Leon Trotsky in a 1935 discussion titled ‘Underground work in Nazi Germany’:
Intellectuals must give much more attention to self-discipline. They usually learn strict compliance only slowly and through a series of serious crises. At a certain stage, even the best intentions are no longer enough. One must be able to relinquish one’s ego, then one becomes far more tolerant towards others.
Trotsky’s insistence on party intellectuals needing to relinquish their ego fits in with the views of Anna Freud in her 1937 book, Ego and the mechanisms of defence. Trotsky points out that party-intellectuals retaining their ego are likely to be arrogant, obstinate, intolerant of others and self-indulgent, ie, basically lacking in self-discipline.
Though Marx and Engels, in The German ideology, argued that Marxists should not get involved in general moralizing against egoism in society, it is however necessary that the Marxist party does not allow itself to suffer from the egos of its intellectuals giving rise to the effects of numerous ego-defence mechanisms, which, very often, are unconsciously employed by the ego of the intellectual.
During the faction-fight in 1939‑40 within the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky returned to the question of the class-composition of the party, largely documented in In defence of Marxism. In his January 1940 article ‘From a scratch - to the danger of gangrene’, he quotes from his October 3 1937 letter:
I have remarked hundreds of times, that the worker who remains unnoticed in the ‘normal’ conditions of party life reveals remarkable qualities in a change of the situation, when general formulas and fluent pens are not sufficient, where acquaintance with the life of workers and practical capacities are necessary. Under such conditions, a gifted worker reveals a sureness of himself, and reveals also his general political capabilities.
Predominance, in the organization, of intellectuals is inevitable in the first period of the development of the organization. It is, at the same time, a big handicap to the political education of the more gifted workers. ... It is absolutely necessary, at the next convention [of the American SWP], to introduce, in the local and central committees, as many workers as possible.
Trotsky considered university students as one of the subclasses of the petty bourgeoisie. They progress to become intellectuals. In the concluding section of his January 1940 ‘An Open Letter to Burnham’, Trotsky writes:
The Fourth International needs only those emigrants from the petty bourgeoisie who have broken completely with their social past and who have come over decisively to the standpoint of the proletariat.
This theoretical and political transit must be accompanied by an actual break with the old environment, and the establishment of intimate ties with workers, in particular, by participation in the recruitment and education of proletarians for their party. Emigrants from the petty-bourgeois milieu who prove incapable of settling in the proletarian milieu must, after the lapse of a certain period of time, be transferred from membership in the party, to the status of sympathizers. …. The class-composition of the party must correspond to its class programme.
The United Kingdom today, as a result of the post-war boom and since, is a rich country that has bought-off a substantial labour aristocracy that includes numerous intellectual workers. But Lenin’s words from 1915, though referring to the labour aristocracy of that time, nevertheless still apply, in relation to building a Marxist party today. He wrote:
The epoch of imperialism cannot permit the existence, in a single party, of the revolutionary proletariat’s vanguard and the semi-petty bourgeois aristocracy of the working class, who enjoy morsels of privileges of their ‘own’ nation’s ‘great-power’ status. (‘The collapse of the Second International’, May-June 1915, CW Vol 21).
Lenin’s term “semi-petty bourgeois” refers to the individualistic outlook typical of many petty bourgeois, today’s labour aristocracy, and the intellectuals who lead today’s sectarian parties. They thus carry an incurable disease of sectarianism, which alone constitutes the “objective reason why comrades across the left cannot come together”. A proletarian Marxist party is needed, not a party of intellectuals.
Jack Bernard
email
Horror show
Britain’s youngsters stab and shoot each other to severe injury or even death in disputes that are nonetheless entirely trivial, at root in a search for empowerment through identity - for recognition and respect. Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis continue under brutalising occupation: the former of their lands; the latter of their minds, with militarisation as a design for life now stranding them in permanent civil war in place of a ‘promised’ paradise.
A courtroom in California convicts Harvey Weinstein on accusations from one complainant but not from others, yet another dropping out when facts come to light which dismantle her account of events. In different ‘sex’ trials, juries find Kevin Spacey and other men not guilty after balancing up the evidence presented in prosecution and defence; #MeToo loyalists are utterly outraged; and, after halcyon times in the company of ‘successful’ financiers and royals, Ghislaine Maxwell shuffles her hidden money despite 20 years or so ahead in jail.
Drowned migrants wash up on European shores, many of them children or even babies, with untold others succumbing to death by desert in North Africa and Mexico.
Undiminished consumption is maintained as the natural order by a corporate-captured media - affluence fetishised to seem glorious, and then sold as compatible with the ecological/oh so very ‘green’. Fast fashion is worn on average only once or twice or even not at all, with the fashionable who buy it absolutely ‘dying’ for the next batch to arrive, while the women who slave making it all yearn for liberation, dying to break free.
But also, of course, there’s this: how time and time again organisations of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist hard-leftwing prove themselves incapable of presenting a consolidated platform for our side of the global class-war equation, with the inevitable outcome of remaining largely or even wholly ineffectual; in a sense, none of them either fully or truly taking seriously the potential rewards available from revolution.
Surely no real surprise, then, how for some like me a feeling has developed over a period of time that things must change; where despite core ideology remaining solid and pukka, the same can’t be said about a prevailing mentality. Far easier said than done, of course, but here’s hoping all those involved are willing to learn, to grow, to evolve; to thrive where the prize on offer is an eradication of this disease called capitalism. That combination of horror show and vicious circus which otherwise will continue in its demonic mission of making both dehumanised victim and complicit enabler out of us all.
Bruno Kretzschmar
email
One-state
The Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism has changed its name to One Democratic Palestine. The change springs from a desire to do more for the Palestinian people than campaign purely against the misinformation and slander at which the Zionists excel. We want to focus on supporting a single-state solution for Palestine that reflects the reality that the two-state option is dead.
There is no other UK organisation that we know of that is committed to seeing the end of Israel - but surveys show that this is what the majority of Palestinians want. Palestinian groups in the UK such as the PSC are aligned with the Palestine Authority (PA), who have chosen to recognise Israel and therefore de facto they support a two-state solution.
Furthermore, all major UK political parties favour the two-state option; even Israel has said, until recently, that it works towards this. But since the Oslo Accords of the mid-90s, when the PLO moved to recognise Israel in return for the promise of a state of their own, Israel has worked to prevent such a thing.
One Democratic Palestine favours the peaceful dissolution of the settler colony that is Israel, leading to a new single-state of Palestine where all citizens are equal - Jews, Arabs and Christians - where all have equal voting rights - and where UN resolution 194 on the right to return is honoured.
We are clear that we are not calling for a fatwa on Jews, even if they are Zionist Jews. We need to get our MPs in Westminster to start reflecting the fact that there is little support for Israel in the UK; our Government must recognise a single-state solution as the only realistic one. Many MPs privately realise that the two-state solution is dead; Israel has killed it.
For decades, the UK and the US have pushed for and failed to broker a two-state solution - where Israel and Palestine exist as separate countries. Now the only solution is Israel’s dissolution, as that illegal state will never willingly give up an inch of the land it has stolen. Israel has made any other kind of peace impossible. Palestinians numerically equal Zionists in the land that Israel governs yet most of them have no vote. Israel falsely calls itself a democracy whilst excluding so many non-Jews from power.
Survey results in May of this year observed that 33% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank wanted a single state. However, when the views of the wider diaspora of Palestinians is included, there is a clear majority in favour of a single state: a democratic secular state of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
We at One Democratic Palestine will support Palestinians in this campaign. The UK, as the mother of Israel, bears the greatest responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past 100 years in Palestine.
We must do that by now calling for the dissolution of Israel, which is born from our anti-Semitism and our imperial desire for a colonial outpost in the heart of Arabia. Israel pays the greatest heed to what the UK thinks; we must now exploit that respect by telling our racist colony that its time is over.
We align ourselves to the One Democratic State Campaign, whose manifesto (onestatecampaign.org) contends: “that the only way to achieve justice and permanent peace is dismantling the colonial apartheid regime in historic Palestine and the establishment of a new political system based on full civil equality, and on full implementation of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and the building of the required mechanisms to correct the historical grievances of the Palestinian people as a result of the Zionist colonialist project.”
Pete Gregson (Chair)
One Democratic Palestine