Letters

Expelled

I have now been expelled from the Labour Representation Committee for anti-Semitism. I found out via the tweets posted on April 2 by Andrew Coates and David Osland.

As I pointed out in my letter to LRC secretary Norrette Moore, this was conducted in flagrant disregard for the LRC constitution: “A capitalist employer - eg, a bus company in a bourgeois democracy - would afford me full rights of hearing and representation if I had killed a pedestrian by reckless driving when I worked as a bus driver. You have given me no rights at all in flagrant disregard for your own constitution. Do you think that you have acted in the manner appropriate to the functioning of the socialist society to which you claim to aspire? Is 1984 still to come for you?”

But the charge as reported in the tweets is anti-Semitism - a charge accepted by Tony Greenstein, only to find himself up on the same charge, suspended from the Labour Party and treated only a little better in democratic terms than I was. But he is totally innocent of this charge, whereas Ian Donovan and Gerry Downing are not, he thinks. He has had several goes at explaining why we are guilty, such as, “their politics leads inexorably in an anti-Semitic direction” (Letters, March 31) and on Facebook to me: “Although I’ve made it clear that I don’t consider you to be personally anti-Semitic, this crackpot theory cannot but have anti-Semitic implications.” And, best of all, to Ian and Gilad Atzmon: “Never said you hated Jews. Never said Atzmon hates Jews. Enoch Powell wasn’t personally racist” in a tweet. So we are all not anti-Semitic like Powell wasn’t a racist - ie, we are guilty as charged.

So what is anti-Semitism? It is a very politically charged concept, the reader will have realised by now. Typical definitions are, “prejudice against, hatred of or discrimination against Jews as an ethnic, religious or racial group”. So we are not that type of anti-Semites, are we? No, just people whose ideas might lead to that if we were to draw the wrong conclusions from them. And there are plenty of Zionists ready to draw such conclusions at a moment’s notice. But the CPGB’s Notes for Action directs us to the Zionist ex-minister Eric Pickles’ government site which has a more pro-Zionist definition: “Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel, taking into account the overall context, could include: denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination - eg, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour … Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Greenstein is definitively guilty here, as are all anti-Zionist activists.

And what does our political positions lead to “inexorably”? “That we should campaign against the Jewish bourgeoisie separately from its non-Jewish counterpart,” Tony says. But we don’t do that and will not do that. We are definitely not going down the road of Esther Kaplan and “hang the Jewish capitalists”. But we do recognise the unique position that Zionism holds in the USA and western Europe in particular. Witness today how it is being used to discipline and tame the leftism of the Corbyn leadership to prepare it to be a reliable second line of defence for British and global imperialism in the very likely event of the Tories collapsing in disarray over Brexit.

Tony, in his article ‘Weapon of choice’ (March 24), attempts to deal with the analysis of the Belgian Trotskyist, Abram Leon, who died in Auschwitz in 1944, of the Jews as a “people-class” - the seminal text on the Jewish question for all Trotskyists. Turns out he was not so great, because Tony profoundly disagrees with him and only makes a bow in his direction and then proceeds to ignore everything he wrote on the subject. Jewish bankers were not any more influential in the Middle Ages than any others, he says, and: “What is certain is that a separate Jewish bourgeoisie, whose most famous representative was the Jewish financier and philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore, disappeared in the 19th century.” But, no, he has gone too far there, he thinks, and contradicts himself in his blog of March 28: “Downing’s stupidity is less excusable. The French revolution resolved the Jewish question, the place of Jews in European society, over 200 years ago.”

So Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx were wasting their time in 1843 and Abram Leon likewise in 1942 when they wrote on the Jewish question. It was solved either by the French revolution or by the death of Montefiore almost a hundred years later in 1885. He tells us how was it ‘solved’:

“In the words of Stanislas Marie Adélaïde, the count of Clermont-Tonnerre, ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. Only the Zionists and the anti-Semites rejected the emancipation of the Jews’.” And: “As Leon noted, ‘the economic process from which the modern nations issued laid the foundations for integration of the Jewish bourgeoisie into the bourgeois nation’.”

Well, that has not happened and cannot happen because of the emergence of the state of Israel. The development of Lenin’s and the Left Opposition’s position on the national question understands that it will not happen this side of the world revolution. We do not seek the assimilation of ‘the Jews’ in a mechanical fashion, we do not think that the national question is an unfortunate diversion from the struggle for socialism - as the Second International and the Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky did until about 1920 and Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin from 1921-23. Here he asserted the right of Georgia to self-determination as an integral part of the struggle to mobilise the masses for the world revolution. Stalin saw it as a bureaucratic nuisance to be crushed as soon as possible. Therefore, Trotsky’s estimation of the Jewish question in 1937 was the same as Trotskyist Abraham Leon’s position in 1942:

“And how, you ask me, can socialism solve this question? On this point I can but offer hypotheses. Once socialism has become master of our planet or at least of its most important sections, it will have unimaginable resources in all domains … The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of the planned economy. This is the grand historical perspective that I envisage. To work for international socialism means also to work for the solution of the Jewish question.”

Nothing could be further from the current state of Israel with its monstrous racist laws and regular slaughter of defenceless Palestinians. And this ‘solution’ is definitely not assimilation either.

Tony Greenstein’s lack of understanding of the Jewish question is the same as his lack of understanding of global imperialism itself. He cannot understand that the USA is the central enemy of all humanity because the social relations of production imposed on the entire planet under the leadership of Wall Street leaves the vast majority in penury and a whole section starving in the midst of humanity’s technical and economic ability to produce everything for everyone to have a full and happy life from cradle to grave.

Tony says I am wrong that “those who are fighting imperialism right now are by definition anti-imperialist”. None of those fighting or who have fought imperialism, apart from the Bolsheviks, from the left ‘progressive’ Stalinists and bourgeois nationalists to the monstrous barbarians of the Taliban and Islamic State, are consistently anti-imperialists. From Castro to Saddam, to Gaddafi and IS, they sought or seek only a better accommodation with imperialism. It really is immaterial how barbaric they are or how they came into being; once we concede that we must condone US bombing them - and apparently they have now bombed them up to 20,000 times - we are then accepting the ‘civilising mission’ of imperialism and that there is a greater enemy.

Tony is in error about the Khmer Rouge: US imperialism, and China on behalf of imperialism, supported them against the progressive invasion of Vietnam, backed by the USSR. And he is wrong about the Kurds. They still have a right to self-determination, but are the main allies of imperialism today against IS; that cannot end in any kind of revolution. They will be betrayed by their own leaders because of this.

“I suggest we take our lead from the masses rather than Gerry Downing’s bankrupt theories,” says Tony - a very silly thing for a self-professed Marxist to say. He ‘forgets’, for instance, how the befuddled Egyptian ‘masses’ overthrew a democratically elected Morsi and replaced him with a bloody army dictator, al Sisi. He cannot forge any path for human liberation that does not rely on a section of ‘liberal’ imperialism. He just gives up: “Some groups are neither fish nor fowl. They defy political description”.

So in the end Tony rejects my plea for a united front against reaction: “What I don’t want to do is entangle my own fight with your case because it is not the same. That is not cowardice. I can hardly say that anti-Semitism is a pretext for attacking anti-Zionism if you come along and give them what they want.” In my humble opinion that is political cowardice - bred of political confusion on what is the path for human liberation and who the main enemy is in achieving it.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Irrational

Tony Greenstein is correct when he says that neither Gerry Downing nor Ian Donovan “are anti-Semitic in a personal sense”, but I have to say that his corollary - that “their politics leads inexorably in an anti-Semitic direction” - is, unfortunately, understated.

Socialist Fight, of which the two are leading comrades, has adopted wholesale Donovan’s ‘Draft theses on the Jews and modern imperialism’, which can still be viewed on the website he ran before joining SF, Communist Explorations. The argument it contains runs like this:

“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.” But the huge ruling class support Israel receives in the west has “a material basis”. It is “explained by one salient fact: Jewish overrepresentation in the US and other ruling classes”. For example, in the USA, “informed Jewish sources” claim that “between 40% and 48%” of billionaires are Jews (http://commexplor.com/2014/09/06/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism).

In other words, if you are looking for an explanation for imperialism’s consistent support for Zionist Israel, you need look no further: ‘It’s the Jews, stupid!’ This support is undertaken not because the US bourgeoisie believes such a policy furthers the interests of US capital, but simply because the Jews within its ranks are ‘overrepresented’. The implication is clear: but for the influence of these Jews, the US would not offer such consistent support to Israel.

As with all examples of racially or ethnically based discriminatory politics, this ‘theory’ is totally irrational. First of all, it assumes that all Jews - or, shall we say, the overwhelming majority of Jews within the ruling class - are outright Zionists. Even if we accept that the statistics Donovan quotes regarding Jewish “overrepresentation” are correct (a big ‘if’), why does it follow that Jew = Zionist? There is a specific anti Zionist trend within Judaism - amongst orthodox Jews, for instance. The most you can say is that Jews are morelikely than not to be sympathetic to Israel - they certainly do not act as a powerful, disciplined, homogeneous force.

More than that, there is a further assumption that the Zionist ideology of ruling class Jews actually takes precedence over the bourgeois drive amongst them to reproduce capital and generate surplus value - why else would they promote a policy that is not in the interests of US capital and US imperialism? It makes you wonder how they became “billionaires”.

You also have to ask how the Zionism of this ruling class minority is able to hold sway. What does this ‘theory’ say about the ruling class majority? Why are they so stupid as to permit a policy which is not in their interests? Of course, if it is argued that support for Zionism is in the interests of US capital, then the presence within it of specifically Jewish pro-Zionists becomes irrelevant, except as part of a particular lobby (the actual situation).

None of this leads me to conclude that Gerry Downing’s expulsion from the Labour Party should be supported: it is part of a concerted campaign to smear the entire anti-Zionist left as ‘anti-Semitic’, and all those currently being targeted in this way must be defended. But it has to be said that the politics Socialist Fight has recently adopted has in no small way played into the right’s hands.

Peter Manson
South London

Failing badly

Well done to both Ian Donovan and Tony Greenstein for spotting the allusion in my choice of pseudonym, but I would have been more pleased had they actually adumbrated the full intent of the pun (Letters, March 31). It’s been said that anatomising a joke is a bit like dissecting a frog in the biology classroom: whether or not one learns anything from the exercise, the frog dies. So just to ensure this particular frog is not just very nearly dead but really most sincerely dead: the name is meant as a tweak to those who disingenuously slap a happy face on modern anti-Semitism, as if children’s author Dr Seuss had illustrated Nazi propaganda movies about The Jew. Hence Judd Seuss. I suppose that in choosing it I had particularly in mind Gilad Atzmon’s Jew-hating clown and clowning Jew-hater - a charlatan Tony Greenstein can see through, but Ian Donovan cannot.

Yes, certainly, Cameron’s troupe - when not out stealing crutches from the elderly in the name of austerity - will now make as much anti-Labour noise on the anti-Semitism issue as they can. In doing so they give a convenient excuse for those in Labour who would rather not examine Labour’s own troubles on the topic too closely, for there is no better reason not to clean house than to note that your opponent says you should.

There is a comparison to be made with the Black Lives Matter movement, a protest driven by the wildly disproportionate death rate of blacks at the hands of US police. Very early on, the movement’s opponents adopted as their reflexive response ‘All lives matter’. It sounds high-minded, but really is intended by its generality to bung up specific criticism of a specific fact - in this case, the use of unreasonable, and needlessly fatal, force. ‘Oh, let us not entangle ourselves deep in the weeds by harping on specific cases of a specific race,’ BLM’s opponents say disingenuously; ‘by saying Black Lives Matter you’ve implicitly denied that all lives matter and isn’t that racist in itself?’

What Corbyn doesn’t understand is that his response on the anti-Semitism issue is cut essentially from the same cloth: ‘All bigotries are bad, and to call the party to focus on just one, isn’t that racist in itself? Many, many times I have said all bigotries are bad, and somewhere in there I suspect I almost certainly included anti-Semitism. But it is not all ethnicities winning the ‘ah, look, another Labour functionary ousted for hating our ethnicity a little too publicly’ lottery now apparently being held weekly. It is not all ethnicities targeted by, eg, the holocaust-denier, Paul Eisen. It is not all ethnicities making for the Labour exits.

Corbyn is not being looked to for a general statement on the general problem of generalised bigotry, but a specific statement reflecting that he understands in his gut the urgency of the moment; that he understands - in his kishkes - the concerns of the Jewish community are not pro forma, and, should he continue to brush them aside so ineptly with his pro forma bromides, he risks sundering for a generation the bond between Labour and the Jewish voter. It is a matter not of cerebrum, but of heart, and to my great disappointment Corbyn is failing it badly.

Judd Seuss
email

Superb

What a supremely desirable and superbly revealing debate in your letters page surrounding anti-Zionism being deliberately, scurrilously and indeed perniciously conflated with anti-Semitism. In my opinion Tony Greenstein has the matter 100% sorted out in his head, and fortunately shares those proper understandings of his with the rest of us.

Of course, all such calculated disinformation - aka carefully crafted ‘psyops’ manipulation of public perception - originates from the bowels of both the CIA and the Pentagon, which in turn owe a great deal to Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine (see www.psywarrior.com/psyhist.html).

Similarly in order to put things in the widest possible perspective, might I suggest everyone involved takes proper note of professor Norman Finkelstein’s books, The holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering and Image and reality of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Those being works from an avidly anti-Israel Jewish man, who, as a direct result, was hounded out of his USA academic positions and career.

Further might I suggest that everyone reminds themself about the existence of extremely well-funded and highly organised outfits such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in USA and a plethora of ‘Friends of Israel’-styled outfits in many other countries. Moreover, about the existence of teams of Israel-based but globally-linked internet ghosts who make it their business to ‘correct’ Wikipedia entries and covertly challenge and thereby pervert other online items that they deem to undermine either the Zionist project or the state and government of Israel.

In all of these contexts, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept (incidentally himself Jewish) produces articles containing pristine and detailed evidence about Israeli/Zionist interference in and thereby partial control of both the media and government policy in USA plus elsewhere. The most recent example is via his article dated March 30 entitled: ‘Complying with Israeli censorship order - NYT conceals name of soldier who shot wounded Palestinian’.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Super

Michael Roberts salutes John Smith’s book Imperialism in the 21st century for exposing and analysing “the exploitation of billions of people in what used to be called the ‘third world’”. But he then disputes some of Smith’s main theoretical arguments (‘North and south’, March 31). I would like to take issue with Roberts over a few of these.

He questions the division between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ nations, which was fundamental to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, as well as to Smith’s. Some nations oppressed by imperialists are also oppressors of others in their own right, Roberts observes. That fact is undeniable, and the world in this respect is more complex than in Lenin’s day. But the distinction is still valid.

As Roberts points out, “imperialist domination means the appropriation of wealth and surplus value from other national economies”. Indeed, a useful economic indicator is the balance of surplus value, imported vs exported. China, for example, invests capital abroad and exploits workers in south-east Asia and Africa, importing the surplus value they produce. But many more millions of Chinese workers are superexploited by foreign imperialist corporations, either directly or through intermediate contractors. China undoubtedly exports more surplus value to the global north than it imports from the global south. By this criterion - a key aspect of oppression - it is an exploited more than an exploiting country.

A couple of the countries that Roberts suggests cannot be classified easily (South Korea and Taiwan) indeed do not fall clearly on the downside of the balance of surplus value indicator. But others do - eg, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia. On the world scale they remain oppressed. There has been a valuable discussion, especially among Latin American and South African Marxists, suggesting that some of these countries - for example, Brazil and India - should be labelled as ‘sub-imperialist’: in brief, imperialised globally, but imperialist locally, through military as well as economic muscle. Developing such a category makes more sense than throwing up one’s hands in indecision, as Roberts appears to do.

Roberts doubts that superexploitation is the predominant method by which imperialism extracts surplus value from the ‘global south’ today. He gives several reasons, none convincing. One is that superexploitation has always existed under capitalism, while other forms of increasing exploitation - namely raising absolute and relative surplus value - continue to operate. True, but the intermingling of multiple techniques that increase exploitation does not refute the claim that superexploitation is predominant today.

Then Roberts observes that low wages are not enough to prove that workers are superexploited. Low-waged workers could be so unproductive that they produce little surplus value. Yes, that is conceivable, but not dominant today. If productivity in the south is half of what it is in the north, but wages are only one-tenth or less (as is common), that means that capitalists can wring more value out of southern workers than northern. Moreover, again as Roberts points out, companies like Foxconn employ the latest technology, so the productivity gap is small. That’s why capitalists are ‘offshoring’ so much industry to the south.

Third, Roberts says there is no a single world value of labour-power, so poorly paid southern workers might not be as badly off as their low wage would seem to suggest. Again, the fact is true: many consumption goods cost less in the south, so even if southern workers are paid much less, they can buy more use-values with their wage than could northern workers if paid the same pittance. But capitalists move industries to the south to take advantage of lower wages and other costs based on international rates of exchange, not on purchasing power parity. From their angle, the reason they move southward is the opportunity to take advantage of the lower value of labour-power - in a word, superexploitation.

Fourth and finally on this point, Roberts astonishingly writes: “[W]hen wages are forced below the value of labour-power and are held there for some time, that can change the value of labour-power itself (which, remember, is a socially as well as physically defined category). When wages fall below the value of labour-power and are each time in the succeeding production process kept lower than the value of labour-power, this eventually becomes the new standard of living for labour and so the value of labour-power falls. The lower wage becomes the money manifestation of the new value of labour-power and ‘superexploitation’ disappears!”

Superexploitation disappears? No, in Roberts’ scenario it has been made universal. Roberts interprets a massive defeat for the working class, south and north, as the elimination of superexploitation because, by current standards, all workers have become superexploited! This is a legalistic argument aimed at making not just superexploitation, but also its theoretical significance, disappear.

Theory aside, what makes Smith’s case so persuasive is his demonstration that the great majority of the world’s industrial workforce is located today in the south. In 1950, two-thirds of industrial workers were in the north. By 1975 it was half and half. And in 2010 almost 80% were in the south. Why? Because southern wages cost capitalists so much less. If we add the fact that underpaid migrant workers form an increasing proportion of the labour force in the north, it is hard to argue that world capitalism in the present century is not dependent on superexploitation.

Roberts criticises Smith for saying that the cause of the global financial crisis and the resultant great depression was “overproduction” rather than a falling rate of profit. In fact Smith says both, referring to the “twin crises of declining profitability and overproduction that resurfaced in the 1970s in the form of stagflation and synchronised global recession”. I think Smith’s “twin crises” could be made sharper by noting that crises of overproduction are cyclical, whereas the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is a long-term one. The two are, of course, interrelated. The secular tendency deepens the effects of the cyclical crises, while capitalism’s efforts to overcome crises without a massive and potentially disastrous devaluation of existing capital create a build-up of fictitious values that in turn exacerbates the falling-rate-of-profit tendency.

That said, I agree with Roberts - and Smith surely does too - that there are limits to imperialism’s ability to increase the rate of exploitation and thereby offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As Roberts says, “the struggle of the burgeoning proletariat in the south is key”. From this one hopes to see the emergence of an internationalist working class fighting to overcome capitalism everywhere.

Walter Daum
New York

Two-faced

I am at a loss to understand why the CPGB are supporting Bernie Sanders as some kind of socialist. In Eddie Ford’s article he places the description of Sanders as a capitalist politician by another of your correspondents in quotation marks, as if this was somehow a matter of opinion (‘Tactical flexibility, political principle’, March 31).

Sanders’ political record as an independent liberal capitalist politician, who has consistently supported the capitalist Democratic Party even before he decided to stand to be their presidential candidate, is not a secret. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see which side of the class line he actually stands on - see, for instance, www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/15/a-socialist-in-the-senate.

Why are the CPGB pretending that this quite clearly capitalist politician is any kind of socialist. Reading the responses to the various letters arguing that your support to Sanders is a betrayal of the idea of working class independence, it seems that the CPGB believe that supporting liberal capitalist politicians is consistent with saying that working class independence is a core political principle.

Frankly this is an absurd idea and Marxism has a term for this kind of two-faced, abstractly correct ‘principles’, combined with doing the exact opposite in concrete politics - opportunism.

Steve Johnson
email

Basic income

As they would say in Glasgow, I ‘would like to agree’ with comrade Jacob Richter in his letter (March 31), but unfortunately he has missed the point completely in two respects.

1. Nobody is arguing that basic income would deal with structural and cyclical unemployment. It is not by any means a panacea.

2. On the subject of the desirability of work, the key question is: at what rate should the basic income be set (particularly in relation to any minimum wage)? It should not be so low as to be derisory, nor so high as to extinguish the desire to seek employment. It is not true that people in receipt of it would not be “doing anything” - they would spontaneously raise the level of effective demand. But we also all desire work, because it brings status and fellowship in a joint enterprise; a properly calculated basic income would not obstruct that.

Comrade Richter’s other points are more substantial. Yes, there would be downward pressure on wages: this would have to be opposed politically, via trade union action and in other ways. Yes, there needs to be a fight for extended welfare provision, as well as a state-led expansion of employment. Thanks very much for the accompanying references.

Thanks also to Paul Smith for his comments. It may well be that such a scheme would “act as a means of stabilising commodity relations in a declining and crisis-ridden capitalism”. However, such a forecast abstracts from our own activities to advance socialism. We cannot expect people to support socialism, and support us, merely by outlining the advantages of it, SPGB style. We need to campaign for the rectification of specific grievances, and having no monetary means of support constitutes a whopping grievance.

Basic income is a simple idea which, as Paul Smith concedes, could be a popular measure. We need to put forward a series of specific reforms whose rationale can be easily grasped. The idea is not to give advice to the ruling class, but to generate a demand for reform from below, so that we can win some effective changes to the system. It should be a cumulative process.

As Peter Sellers put it in the film The millionairess, “You are suffering from a dire disease, called money. The only known cure is a revolution.”

Chris Gray
London