Letters

Stop boring

As a relatively new reader of the Weekly Worker, I can’t help noticing the long, and seemingly interminable, letters about Jews in the bourgeoisie. It seems that Socialist Fight (whoever they are) feel that there is a preponderance of Jews in the bourgeoisie, especially in the United States.

One reaction might be, if true, so what? After all, we need to fight the bourgeoisie whoever they are. Another reaction might be, how do they know? Has Socialist Fight done a scientific, statistical analysis of the weight of different ethnic groups in our ruling classes?

What about the Chinese? They’re everywhere - Indonesia, Thailand (San Francisco?). And then there are the Hindus - Gupta brothers, anyone? Tata Steel? If Jews are to be given a special place in the world’s elites, then there must surely be a bit of research on similar groupings.

It seems to me, after several years of reading, that there is a preponderance of Jews in the field of opposition to Zionism. They may be outnumbered in Arabic - I’ve no idea - but readers of the Weekly Worker are obviously aware of Moshé Machover and Tony Greenstein and, as well as them, we have Shlomo Sand, Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal and many more. Further statistical research might discover that Jewish socialists and anti-Zionists provide an exact counterweight to Jewish bourgeois.

Yes, Israel has a powerful lobby in the US: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been diligent in weeding out anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians in US politics. Another powerful lobby is the National Rifle Association and I would suggest that there are probably even more rifle-owners in the world than there are Jews (though I haven’t done the necessary research). Both of these lobbies fight hard for their particular interests, but they are both, I believe, dwarfed by the energy industry, the American Chamber of Commerce and the banking and arms industries.

If one were looking for conspiracies, then the Koch brothers alone would provide plenty of grist to the mill, but I assume, given their father’s and their own early interest in the John Birch Society, that neither of them is Jewish.

Ian Donovan raises the attempt to ‘take down’ Alan Duncan. Again, so what? Why wouldn’t they? I wonder which ethnic group was responsible for accusing Ed Miliband’s father of being “the man who hated Britain”? And who worked up a smear campaign to reveal Jeremy Corbyn as a Russian spy?

The Zionist lobby is strong in the US and that is not surprising. Israel was founded as an imperialist outpost of European capital and the USA has taken over as main backer and mentor. Israel holds a strategic position in the Middle East and especially in the oil-bearing areas. It has further been very useful as a test bed, and creator, of weapons for use on civilian populations - something that the USA too is very keen on.

Israel has had almost unquestioning support from Jews all over the world since 1948 - what a surprise. But now, even some Israeli newspapers are starting to worry about a loss of support in diaspora Jews. They don’t like the rightwing religious nutters who have such a grip there; they don’t like the way that African refugees are treated; and they don’t like the way that Palestinians have been treated either, especially since the last ‘mowing of the lawn’ in Gaza.

This long-running nonsense is at best a diversion from a real ‘socialist fight’ and no amount of quotes from Marx are going to change that. Let’s get on with the real battles - and stop boring Weekly Worker readers.

Jim Cook
Reading

Figure it out

I thought I had said enough to debunk Ian Donovan’s flimsy theory, according to which all Jewish capitalists in the US and other western countries are part of the Israeli ruling class - simply by virtue of the Law of Return, that grants them the option of immigrating to Israel and acquiring its citizenship. But, no, he seems to imagine he has won the argument and indulges in triumphal ad hominem unpleasantness (Letters, March 1).

So let me spell it out in very elementary terms. Consider Jacob Goldman, a Jewish capitalist of Miami, who has a vast portfolio of investments in the US and other places around the globe, including Qatar, the UAE, Malaysia and Indonesia … but zilch in Israel. Apparently his financial advisor reminded him of the Jewish joke that in order to make a small fortune in Israel one should go there with a large fortune. He is quite happy to stay in Miami and has no intention of going to live in Israel. But, according to Ian, Mr Goldman is still a member of the Israeli ruling class, since the Law of Return gives him part ownership of Israel.

Now consider Rebecca Kuperstein, a Jewish schoolteacher in Brooklyn. She has no investments to speak of except her modest pension fund. The Law of Return applies to her too. Actually, to her it makes potentially more difference than to Mr Goldman, because unlike him she cannot afford to buy citizenship of any other foreign country (including the UK). But just like him she too has no intention of going to live in Israel - especially because, like about half of US Jews of her age-group (including Mr Goldman’s son), she is married to a non-Jew. But still, according to Ian’s logic, Ms Kuperstein belongs to the Israeli ruling class because the said law gives her part ownership of Israel.

If being a beneficiary of this law is sufficient to make Mr Goldman a member of Israel’s ruling class, even though he has no capital invested there, then surely the same must apply to Ms Kuperstein. Both of them stand in exactly the same relationship to Israel. In fact, according to this bizarre logic, all Jews outside Israel belong to its ruling class, although obviously only the capitalists among them belong to the ruling classes of their own countries.

Go figure it out.

Moshé Machover
email

Keep it up, Ian

In my letter of February 22 I reminded readers of Ian Donovan’s claim that bourgeois Jews, by virtue of their ‘overrepresentation’ in the ruling class, “have the power not only to force American governments to adopt the most slavish support for very brutal actions of Israel, but also to destroy the careers of politicians who speak out against such actions”.

I asked him to provide us with a list of occasions when bourgeois Jews did indeed “force” the US government to support Israeli actions or “destroy the careers” of politicians who opposed them - I requested “the names of the Jewish individuals or organisations who made the demands, quoting what they actually said, and the concrete effect it had on named US politicians”. Not surprisingly, he was unable to provide such details, merely recalling examples of opposition by the Jewish lobby to politicians who were seen as anti-Israel (or insufficiently pro-Israel).

A couple of those examples concerned people targeted for trying to engage with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which is an interesting case. The bourgeoisie as a whole was at first largely opposed to this proposition, while later both Jews and non-Jews argued for and against such an engagement - although, according to comrade Donovan’s narrative, bourgeois Jews in general should have been hard at work ‘forcing’ the US government not to entertain it, at pain of having their careers ‘destroyed’. And yet not only was the PLO engaged with: it was successfully brought under the influence of US hegemony in the Middle East. Strange that, isn’t it?

Just about everyone outside Socialist Fight now agrees that comrade Donovan’s ‘theory’ is plain nonsense. But don’t expect Ian to give it up as a lost cause - after all, someone has to keep us on our toes by reminding us what those dastardly Jews are getting up to, don’t they?

Peter Manson
London

Keep it up, Ian

Peter Manson
London

Sixes and sevens

In the February 15 of the Weekly Worker editor Peter Manson headlined ‘Break with multimillionaires’ to analyse Jacob Zuma’s resignation as president of South Africa.

It was a very third-campist article at first glance - Zuma was an exceedingly corrupt individual who had to go. Peter had indicated strong disagreement with Socialist Fight’s article, ‘No to the ouster of Zuma,' produced during the CPGB’s Communist University in August 2017. But the target of his contempt in this article is not Socialist Fight, but Dominic and James Tweedie:

“Despite the fact that the entire NEC had eventually fallen into line with the Ramaphosa leadership (and no doubt with the sentiments of a large majority of ANC members across the country too), incredibly a section of the South African Communist Party was still opposing the SACP’s own call for Zuma to resign. Foremost among them was Dominic Tweedie, who runs several SACP-influenced email lists. On February 13 he circulated the ANC statement quoted above to WhatsApp and various discussion and information lists, but just below that he included a touching photograph of Jacob Zuma, under the words, ‘Thank you, Nxamalala’ - the great man’s affectionate nickname, derived from his Zulu clan and home village. Last week I reported how Tweedie’s son, who happens to be the Morning Star’s foreign editor, had been claiming it was all a matter of the hostile media. Since then James Tweedie has continued in that same inane manner.”

A truly shocking, “inane” and opportunist stance by the Tweedies, who were quickly slapped down by Morning Star political editor John Haylett, Peter was pleased to report:

“But all this was clearly becoming too much for former editor John Haylett ... and on February 8 he wrote a feature headed: ‘With Zuma still holding on, the ANC is in trouble’. The online version of his article was even more explicit: ‘As long as Zuma remains, the only way for the ANC is down,’ read its headline.”

But Peter feared that John may not have gone far enough: “‘The policy of black economic empowerment (BEE) transformed comrades of modest means almost overnight into multimillionaires,’ writes Haylett. ‘Comrades previously committed to serving the people now saw their priority, acknowledged or not, as serving themselves.’ And he added pointedly: ‘Both Zuma and Ramaphosa are implicated in this.’ But what comrade Haylett stops short of admitting is that the SACP alliance with the pro-capitalist ANC is totally and utterly unprincipled. What is needed is the independence of the working class.”

Well, now it seems as if Ramaphosa might be as bad as Zuma. But, no, the great majority of those who were for the ouster of Zuma were for the victory of Ramaphosa, apart from those third-campists who advocated the traditional cover of being for “the independence of the working class” - or indeed ‘One solution - revolution’, which has the benefit of tying you do doing nothing either and sounds far more radical. All very correct, but pious phrase-mongering if you do not propose any solution to the problems in terms of what concrete steps to take next; and do not bear in mind that those who are not able to defend old gains will never make new ones.

But comrade Manson was strangely silent on the issue in the February 22 edition, because John Haylett had clarified his position in the Morning Star (‘Hope revived in South Africa’, February 22):

“South Africa’s people have experienced such a collective upswing of confidence over the past fortnight that former public protector Thuli Madonsela says Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as state president has ‘put the country as a whole on the pedestal of hope’ ... Ramaphosa’s insistence on negotiating has seen Zuma go quietly, his supporters have understood the need for change and rowed in behind the president and the opposition appears willing to wait and see what the new administration has to offer. A pedestal of hope indeed.”

So, no third-campism there for comrade Manson. Ramaphosa is certainly not as bad as Zuma in John’s view: on the contrary, he is a “pedestal of hope” - for the careers of the SACPers, that is, if not for Dominic Tweedie. In fact, the phenomenon of populist “hope” he has engendered is referred to as ‘Ramaphoria’ and it has caused deep divisions within the opposition Democratic Alliance, because he has stolen their thunder.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Liberal left

Sandy McBurney, like many of the gushing European Union supporters on the liberal left, seems to think it is some philanthropic organisation aimed at the betterment of the European working class, rather than seeing the whole rotten structure as part of the globalisation scheme which seeks to grind down workers to their lowest common denominator - driving down wages and conditions, and wrecking union cultures and traditions (Letters, March 1).

The aim is to break regional and national working class identities and traditions, union and socialist cultures and heritage in a drive to render us one hapless, rootless mass with scant interest in fighting for lasting improvements and union organisation. Why any self-declared communist would defend such a backward and reactionary structure I don’t get - unless it is in the belief that, once we are all busted to the cobbles, with no other identities than that of one of a faceless mass we will have no option but to recognise each other as one class and thereby bring about some internationalist class identity without historic national skill or regional distractions. I have to say, such an outlook, if true, is deeply cynical and anti-social.

All that aside, my main point is to challenge comrade McBurney’s designation of the anti-EU MPs within Labour as “rightwing”! Actually anyone with a passing knowledge of the Labour anti-EU forces will know them to be the traditional Bennite wing of the party, composed originally of those round Tony Benn, George Galloway, Dennis Skinner, Ronnie Campbell and, for most of his political life, Jeremy Corbyn.

Sorry, mate, but Blair, Brown, Kinnock and two-thirds of the Parliamentary Labour Party have not in fact joined the left because they are rabidly pro-EU. Neither are the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, whose scheme this is, part of a revolutionary socialist endeavour.

David Douglass
South Shields

Disgraceful rise

It beggars belief that at a time of austerity, with apparently no money available to protect public services or the wages of public-sector workers, MPs will get a 1.8% pay rise.

MPs are already very well paid. The £77,379pa salary they will now receive is just the basic rate of pay - they get paid more for some jobs, such as chairing select committees. MPs will now be paid £1,488 per week: the average worker earns £512 per week before tax, according to the Office for National Statistics, nurses £421. MPs’ pay has risen every single year for the past seven years - a total increase of £11,641. That is a 17.6% pay rise since 2010 - whilst other public-sector workers have suffered seven years of austerity.

Public-sector pay was actually frozen from 2010 to 2013, since when there has been a 1% pay cap. This year’s 1.8% pay rise for MPs is nearly double that. Prime minister Theresa May announced the end of this 1% pay cap last year, but public-sector workers are still waiting to hear how much their pay will rise - and there is no guarantee it will be by as much as the 1.8% MPs will get.

Direct comparisons of MPs’ pay with specific jobs in the public sector are illuminating. Since 2010, an MP’s pay has gone up from £65,738 to £77,379 - an increase of 17.7%, or £11,641. In contrast, a nurse’s pay over the same period has gone up just 3.5% - a pay cut, in real terms, of 12%. Teachers have seen their pay fall by 10%, as have firefighters and ambulance drivers, according to TUC research. Average weekly pay for public-sector workers fell by 7% between 2010 and 2016. How can any government justify increasing the pay of one group of workers (MPs) by 17.7%, whilst cutting the pay of every other public-sector worker?

Taking inflation into account, public-sector workers are thousands of pounds worse off today, compared to 2010 - for paramedics, NHS dieticians and prison officers the figure is £4,000pa, for firefighters £3,000, for teachers £2,400 and for lifeguards £2,200. This is an absolute disgrace, and will further alienate ordinary working people from their representatives in parliament. There is already a serious distrust of politicians, and the fact that austerity - unnecessary as it is - is not being distributed equally will fuel the contempt people have for their MPs.

Pete McLaren
Rugby Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition