Letters

Persistent denial

On March 27, Binyamin Netanyahu made a deal with Itamar Ben-Gvir, his ultra-racist minister of national security. In exchange for the latter’s consent to a temporary suspension of the raft of regressive and repressive legislation, he would be allowed to form a sizeable armed ‘national guard’ under his personal control.

Daniel Lazare claims that “it is an entirely sterile debate as to whom the new militia threatens most. Israeli Arabs are clearly in the line of fire, as are Palestinians in the occupied territories, along with leftists, gays, women, etc on both sides of the divide” (Letters, April 6).

In fact, as everyone in Israel knows, and as Ben-Gvir himself made quite clear, the National Guard will act principally against Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. This was also stated explicitly by Amihai Eliahu, minister of [Jewish] heritage and member of Ben-Gvir’s party: “The division of powers must be such that the police will handle ordinary crime and issues of law and order among rank-and-file citizens, whereas the National Guard will handle [Arab] nationalist crime.” The National Guard’s mission is violent imposition and amplification of Jewish supremacy within Israel’s pre-1967 borders - an officially sanctioned Jewish KKK.

Ben-Gvir had already been given control of another armed force - the Border Guard - for assaulting the Palestinian population of the post-1967 occupied territories. And he leaves dealing with Jewish gays, women, etc to other perverted minds in the ruling coalition.

As a means of opposing Ben-Gvir, Lazare proposes calling for “a united front of the working class - Israeli and Palestinian - in all areas under Israeli control. This is the only force capable of overcoming nationalist divisions and nipping fascism in the bud.”

He studiously glosses over the fact that the “divisions” are not merely nationalist, but colonial. For a united front to be fit for purpose, its programme must therefore include overthrowing the Zionist colonial regime of Jewish supremacy, and supporting Palestinian national liberation. Otherwise, Palestinian workers will treat it with justified contempt. But if it does have such a programme, then under present circumstances, only a tiny minority of Jewish workers will join up. The great majority see no point in giving up ‘their’ Jewish supremacy and putting themselves in Ben-Gvir’s line of fire. They will rather vote for him. This attitude may change, but it would take a major regional transformation to make it possible.

Lazare slithers out of these complexities with his symmetric formulations of the problem and its resolution. He is in persistent denial of the colonial nature of the conflict - a clear indication of prejudice in favour of the colonisers and against the colonised.

Moshé Machover
London

Zionist workers

For someone who deprecates insults, Daniel Lazare is a pretty good master of these dark arts.

Far from “denouncing the Jewish state as eternally and unalterably fascist”, as he states (Letters, April 6), I am trying to explain that Israel is a settler-colonial state, not just another bourgeois democracy. And, as many readers of the Weekly Worker will know, far from writing from “the comfort and security of Brighton”, I am currently ensconced in Wolverhampton, Enoch Powell’s old stomping ground, where I am on trial for having taken part in a Palestine Action protest at Elbit’s Shenstone factory. Indeed I may well be enjoying the “comfort and security” of one of His Majesty’s penal institutions before too long!

I challenge Lazare to point to even one solitary reference by me to ‘the Jewish state’ as fascist. I have consistently argued against such an analysis. Settler colonialism is not the same thing as fascism and it is a sloppy and lazy Marxist who considers that it is (settler colonialism for an indigenous population can indeed be far worse than fascism). Fascism arises as a product of a petty bourgeois counterrevolutionary movement, aimed at destroying the organisations of the working class. There is no evidence that this is the purpose of Ben-Gvir’s proposed militia and therein lies the problem with Lazare’s analysis.

Israel “crossed a Rubicon” not last week, but in 1948, when it expelled over three-quarters of a million Palestinians in order to create a ‘Jewish’ state and it did this with the very same organisations of the Israeli Jewish working class that Lazare now imagines are going to join in his anti-fascist united front. Haganah, the main Zionist militia, was a creation of the Jewish ‘trade union’, Histadrut, as were the Palmach shock troops. It was they above all who carried out the ethnic cleansing and who then presided over the military government that ruled Israeli Arabs until 1966.

I am well aware of Ben-Gvir’s neo-Nazi credentials, but the purpose of his militia is not to destroy Histadrut or cow the Jewish working class. It is something far more sinister: to effect a new Nakba and a campaign of terror against Israel’s two million Palestinian citizens. His aim is the recolonisation of Israel’s mixed cities and the Galilee, Negev and east Jerusalem.

Ben-Gvir is indeed a follower of Meir Kahane, who was elected to the knesset in 1984, arguing that Israel could either be a democratic or a Jewish state, but not both. Unfortunately he was right. The claim by the Israeli Labor Party that Israel could be both a democratic and a Jewish state was a clear and obvious lie. It was either one or the other, and Kahane and now Ben-Gvir were able to capitalise on this.

Far from being a sterile debate as to who Ben-Gvir’s new militia threatens most, it is of the utmost importance. Lazare’s suggestion that Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and their supporters are recreating the conditions of the Third Reich is a product of his failure to understand the dynamic of Zionism and its bastard creation. The German working class till the very end opposed Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Israeli Jewish working class unfortunately voted in large numbers for the present ruling coalition, including Religious Zionism.

It is not at all clear that Ben-Gvir’s proposed militia will have an operational independence from Israel’s armed forces and police. In his infatuation with the ‘Jewish’ state, Lazare forgets that there are already militias, such as the border police, who are devoted to harassment and violence against the Palestinians - especially in, but not confined to, east Jerusalem. It was, after all, the Israeli army which collaborated with the settler pogromists in their attack on Huwara recently.

Israel is not the Germany of 1929‑33. A united Israeli working class - Jewish and non-Jewish - is not possible whilst the Jewish working class sees its Arab counterparts as its competitor and enemy. Zionism represents a division of the working class and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the national question at the heart of Israeli and Palestinian politics. It is because Lazare so comprehensively fails to understand the dynamics of Zionism or the rise of the Zionist far right that his proposed solution, which involves completely ignoring the division between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, is a non-starter. Yes Stalin’s undermining of German anti-fascism was a historic betrayal, but Lazare is like a tape recorder stuck in a loop.

I will ignore Lazare’s infantile suggestion that I welcome Ben-Gvir’s proposed militia. However, there is no comparison with Hitler’s SS and police battalions, which were indeed aimed at supplanting the German armed forces. Unfortunately Lazare’s thinking runs like a tram - in straight lines - unable to perceive the contours of Zionist politics playing out.

I have long predicted the rise of far-right Zionism, because it represents the fulfilment of the Zionist project. Unlike Labor Zionism, the Zionist far right represents the logic of Zionism in its search for a racially pure ‘Jewish’ state, in which Arabs are completely marginalised - if not removed altogether. But unfortunately the Israeli working class will play little or no part in opposing the completion of the Zionist project. It is also unfortunate that Lazare cannot understand that the settler-colonial dynamic is what is driving Israel’s far-right.

Yes, Israel is a role model for ethno-nationalists the world over. However, except in the case of India, it is unlikely to be replicated, since even Poland and Hungary do not occupy the territory of another people.

Tony Greenstein
Wolverhampton

Post-feminist?

I feel I’ve just alighted from a time capsule and I’m surprised to witness the unexpected: the word ‘feminism’ has become a mark of dishonour. The term ‘feminist’ - even ‘leftist feminism’ - has been subsumed into liberal or bourgeois politics.

I’ve never associated feminism solely with liberal politics or separatism. Moreover, I am fine with the organisation of women qua women in an autonomous, non-exclusive women’s movement. The sine qua non concept is an organisation with revolutionary, socialist ethos and direction. Sisterhood is not class-consciousness, but is it an ingredient in the formation of political consciousness? I submit: yes, it is (a term I can relate to is ‘socialist/feminist’ and there is relevance in ‘post-feminist’). Feminism is analogous with full human liberation, beyond equality. Feminism is fully feminist if it’s revolutionary; it’s fully revolutionary if it’s socialist.

I might be the only one around who professes these views, which I’m sure are not welcome in certain leftist circles. I’m ready to be tarred and feathered for my principles until I’m convinced of my political heresy if that’s the case.

Someone in the Why Marx? discussion series said recently that communism and feminism are necessarily opposed. In my mind, it is politically myopic - a backslide to the 1950s - to view feminism as meaningless, irrelevant and unsupportable. For starters, he needs to fully define what he means by ‘feminism’ - that would be eminently constructive. It’s the case at times that someone with white, male privilege presumes that a subordinate, oppressed group (ie, women) have no interest, for example, in fighting on their own behalf to uplift their situation out of the downtrodden position that they find themselves in. Do I detect a bit of arrogance?

Another speaker in the video was similarly negative about feminism and indicated that Rosa Luxemburg didn’t support women’s self-organisation; so far I’ve found nothing in Luxemburg’s politics that rejects women’s self-organisation. On the contrary, Luxemburg supported the work of Clara Zetkin. However, I don’t take it for granted in her limited writings on the subject that she was totally correct about women’s rights: she might have been wrong on the national and Jewish questions. I can’t always look to the past - ie, the experience of Bolshevik women - for guidance about current conditions.

The term ‘feminist’ (as well as other terminology) and historiography are wrought with disagreements and controversy. For example, the victory of the birth-control movement in the US (1914‑20), which was to a great extent initiated by socialists: common sense tells me that it was a great advance for working class women, yet there’s surprising disagreement about how much they really benefited by having smaller families and from the prospects of joining the public labour force.

Another example: the controversy about whether women’s issues are to wait for a socialist revolution or whether a ‘non-reductionist’ movement is needed now to fight for women’s rights. Friedrich Engels had an opinion about this, which continues to be debated. In addition, he had various views which were clearly incorrect and proven wrong: ie, he said the working class family would disappear, because there are no assets, property and inheritance involved. Heather Brown makes a valid argument that we have to look to Marx, not Engels, for an understanding about women’s oppression. She says Engels was too economically deterministic and points to the overriding importance of using Marx’s dialectical method as the crucial tool to study women and gender. And the controversies continue ...

I don’t think that socialists compromise their values by trying to win over radical feminists and bourgeois feminists, although both groups have done much to vitiate and destroy any movement for socialism during the second wave in the US and since. But, by only focusing on their negative policies and actions without a revolutionary objective attitude, any opportunities to win these people over are lost, in my opinion. The crowning achievement of bourgeois feminism in the US was Roe v Wade (1973). The achievement of radical feminism (from the 1960s on) was the positing of theories about the ‘sex-gender’ system, and the effective work in combating violence against women. Socialists were engaged in all of these struggles and more. In my view, they had a monumental impact in increasing the awareness about women’s position in society and the family on an international level.

A crypto-sectarianism can set in, which is the enemy of struggle par excellence: ie, hostility to the various tendencies of feminism or women’s rights per se. A united front maintains independence, but tries to bring everyone into the socialist fraternity, without the compromise of principles or the loss of a socialist programme. A united front is an effort to appeal to potential allies: ie, workers who are waverers, centrists, doubters, reformists, etc. The politically avant-garde section of the working class may have enough numbers to make a revolution without these outliers, but the essential role of education is obvious: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator: it is also a collective organiser” (Lenin What is to be done? 1902).

A unité de rupture is long overdue to destroy the institutionalised oppression and exploitation of capitalism. We need a reordering of society to follow, which will lead to socialism - the social and material basis for human liberation.

GG
USA

Slurs

I don’t think allowing Gerry Downing to just slur people as “macho-sexist” helps your paper (Letters, April 6).

Lawrence Parker does have a bit of a confrontational manner in his writing, but I don’t see any difference in how he approaches women. At least he doesn’t patronise women by talking gently or babying them. Mr Downing, on the other hand, reminds me of those strange men who used to prowl the back of the disco looking for distraught girls to comfort and walk home. His attempt to support wronged women in your pages is patronising and some might say sexist - maybe Anne McShane is capable of fighting her own battles.

I also find the idea of ‘Gerry Downing, feminist,’ difficult to swallow. Only a few years ago he was promoting anti-Semitism that he later had to apologise for. With that record, I’m not sure that women, or anyone else, need him as an ally.

Sara Penny
email

‘Official’ tradition

We welcome comrade Ansell Eade’s constructive criticism of our programme (Letters, March 30). It is exactly this level of serious and positive engagement that we are seeking - we encourage such contributions, here and on our website (communist-reconstruction.co.uk).

We certainly consider ourselves to be Marxist-Leninists in the tradition of ‘official communist’ parties, including those of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, as well as the USSR and the people’s democracies of 1945-89 Europe.

We believe, following Lenin, that there must be a vanguard party of committed communists, ready and able to lead the proletariat in revolutionary struggle, armed if necessary, when the time comes that capitalism can no longer govern and the working class is ready to seize power.

This does not conflict with comrade Eade’s desire for a mass workers’ party. Both will no doubt be necessary parts of the eventual rise of the workers’ dictatorship. Communists are dedicated and committed activists, guided by dialectical and historical materialism. It would be unrealistic to suppose that a great mass party of such activists could be created within bourgeois democratic structures. Rather the communists should seek to be an affiliated part of that movement, providing analysis, organisation and agitation within it.

As far as the question of Trotskyism is concerned, we feel strongly that Stalin and Trotsky have been dead for a long time. We recognise that comrades in the Trotskyist tradition have made, and continue to make, useful and significant contributions to the workers’ movement and we believe and hope that they will find a place within a united Marxist-Leninist party.

Disunity harms us all. We owe it to the workers’ movement to seek unity through open debate and discussion, alongside disciplined action. Let us go forward together.

Communist Reconstruction
email

Enjoy the change

‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’ - so the saying goes, because you can do just about anything with figures, depending how you set the sum out and what you put into it or leave out.

Thus, we had the screaming front-page image in the Weekly Worker and Eddie Ford’s piece on ‘global warming’ (March 30), saying there was presumably ‘only’ a 50-50 chance of hitting a maximum climate temperature increase of 1.5°C. But how is the calculation done to arrive at that rise in the first place? We are told that’s the maximum temperature rise the earth can stand. This is based on the calculation of 150 years since what is described as the post-industrial period. But why 150 years? Why not a much broader sweep of, say, the last 10,000 years?

If we look at the rise in temperature over this period, it is only half a degree rise overall. 10,000 years is, of course, the period of the end of the Ice Age, when rising temperatures began. The reason for the 150 years is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change set off to prove the rapidly rising warming that was its conclusion at the start of its enquiry. They chose 150 years, because it is the only way you can reach a figure of 1.5°C and rising; 150 years was the coldest point in 10,000 years, so, as Neil Kinnock might have said, after that the only way was up. The scale rises sharply from that point - do it any other way, using any other starting point in that period, and you won’t get 1.5°C.

If we are going to start panicking, we should perhaps look at the relentless march to world war - and very probably nuclear war - rather than some dodgy calculations by a vested group of scientists. The chances of being incinerated by a Russian missile fired under provocation (and probably calculated provocation by the US and Nato) is far, far higher than being burned to a crisp by returning to the days of a slightly warmer planet, which we previously enjoyed.

David John Douglass
South Shields

Rehabilitation

A letter was received by the Weekly Worker last October from a prisoner in the north of England, asking for help and guidance in setting up a group that would “promote rehabilitation of offenders through Marxist philosophy”.

He went on to say: “Most of the key components are there: the criminal element of the working class who want to reform, and a reformed offender who wants to teach.” He asked for help in finding books, in looking at curricula, and explained what he thought:

“It has to be in the interest of the people, that rehabilitation has, so far, been failing, and recidivism in the working class has been growing at an exponential rate for the last 20+ years. It’s not the bourgeoisie behind these walls … It’s just us - the poor working class - who mostly inherited the criminal element from our fathers before us, or it manifested from our environment … I propose that communist philosophy … could rectify the affected mind of the offender. Who knows? Who’s tried?”

The job of communicating with the writer was given to me, and we began a correspondence, which is turning into a very interesting one. He is an eloquent writer, which surprised even himself. Of course, as a prisoner he cannot use email, so he types his with an old manual typewriter, while I print mine out on my computer and we use these old-fashioned items called stamps and envelopes.

He is a relatively young man - 37 - and has been in the prison system since he was 13. He described it this way: “I left school at 13 ... because I received a prison sentence. I was given a total of nine years ... By the time I was 18 years old, I had found myself … in a high-security prison, which housed both high-risk young offenders and adults. I used the initiative whilst there to read books. I guess that was the only education I ever received. I was released at the age of 19 ... having spent the fundamental teenage years kicking 10 bells out of other, violent, young offenders in various prisons, all of which were miles away from where we lived. Young Offenders Institutes, then as now, are nothing more than testosterone-filled gladiatorial arenas ... If you’re not violent, then you’re in trouble.”

We sent him a few books to start with, and his response was nothing short of ecstatic. He wrote: “I’m only a few chapters in and already I feel resonant enthusiasm … This book will raise the spirits of the men, as the few chapters have done for me.”

I will, of course, continue to correspond with him, and to help him develop a programme for the group he is trying to form. It will be educational for me as well as interesting.

I taught in a prison for a short period of time (after the previous teacher was caught taking a letter from a prisoner to the outside without permission, and fired), and I have my own ideas about how educationally this could go forward, but I would be very grateful for any ideas comrades might have about developing a curriculum, or suggestions for readings.

I am going to send him The ragged-trousered philanthropists very soon, on the grounds that every burgeoning communist (at least of the British persuasion) should read it. Any other suggestions for leisure reading would also be gratefully accepted.

You can always slip a piece of paper surreptitiously into my hand, or send an anonymous letter in disguised writing to me via the editor. Or, on the other hand, just write a letter to the Weekly Worker. It would make both the editor and myself happy people.

Gaby Rubin
London

Elect Assange

As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British general election. We hope that he will do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Keir Starmer.

We hope that he will be elected and we hope that the neighbouring constituency of Islington North will return its member of parliament since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn.

David Lindsay
Lanchester