Letters

Kautsky’s turn

In his letter of March 29, Mike Macnair objects more strenuously to my introductory comments about Karl Kautsky than to my critical appraisal of Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin magazine - the main subject of my article, ‘Walking the tightrope’ (March 22).

He says I err by following the historian, Karl Schorske - author of German social democracy, 1905-1917 - in suggesting that Kautsky’s 1914 renegacy was prefigured by his role in the Prussian suffrage campaign of 1910. For those less than thoroughly versed in the history of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), a little background may come in handy.

The year of 1910 saw the greatest upsurge of German working class radicalism since 1905-06, when half a million workers went on strike for both economic and political reasons, emboldened by the Russian revolution of 1905. The events of five years later were largely triggered by the collapse of legislative efforts to reform the unequal and anti-popular Prussian electoral system. The SPD championed equal, universal, direct suffrage for municipal councils - an elementary democratic demand - as opposed to the three-class voting system then in effect. The demonstration of more than 100,000 workers in Berlin’s Tiergarten cited in my article was only the largest and most spectacular of the demonstrations and clashes with police that occurred not only in Prussia, but in most major German cities, as well as many provincial towns, in a spontaneous outpouring of proletarian anger.

Things were coming to a boil on the economic front as well, as workers pushed for wage increases. The army was dispatched to the Mansfeld coalfields to contain unrest surrounding a miners’ strike, and the national building owners’ association locked out about 175,000 union workers. Against this background, the idea of a national political strike began to percolate through the Social Democratic ranks.

Comrade Macnair sets up and knocks down a straw man by suggesting that Rosa Luxemburg, who broached the possibility of a mass strike in these circumstances, was attempting to push workers into a hopeless contest for state power, on the order of the Spartacus rising of 1918-19 or the March Action of 1921. Anyone in the least acquainted with Luxemburg’s thought is aware that she saw revolution as impossible without the adhesion of an overwhelming working class majority. It was precisely the absence of majority support that led her to oppose the 1918-19 rising as premature (supporting it only once the die had been cast); she would a fortiori have been against the even more ill-conceived ‘March action’ of two years later.

What Luxemburg did, in fact, argue in 1910 was that the spontaneous movement that had arisen around the suffrage question would either have to move forward or stagnate and die. She proposed that the SPD examine ways to take the lead in advancing the struggle to the next step, including time-limited ‘demonstration strikes’ designed to gauge the level of working class combativeness. A strong response could have sparked a mass strike, which may have led in turn to a contest for state power, but the outcome would have depended in part upon the will of the workers to fight until victory, which could not be conjured from on high, and could not be completely known in advance.

The cohesiveness of the ruling class could not be precisely calculated in advance either. Macnair argues that one of Lenin’s famous preconditions for revolution - that the ruling class cannot continue governing in the old way - was missing from the equation. But the suffrage crisis took place in the aftermath of the break-up of the conservative-liberal bloc that had ruled the country since the turn of the century. Sometimes, a determined working class offensive can aggravate divisions within the ruling class and precipitate a crisis of governance. The possibilities of the situation can only be tested in action. A proletarian offensive is never without risks, and the tactics Luxemburg proposed left room for retreat in any case. ‘Impatient’, ‘adventurist’ and ‘romantic’ are adjectives the SPD right and centre used to caricature Luxemburg’s position - a caricature that comrade Macnair seems to accept uncritically.

If this dispute involved nothing more than differing estimates of the balance of class forces, the matter could have been resolved by the vigorous inner-party discussion that Luxemburg also pushed for; similar questions were debated at length among the Bolsheviks between March and November of 1917. However, by refusing to publish Luxemburg’s article, ‘What next?’, in either the party’s newspaper, Vorwärts, or its theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky and the SPD executive showed their determination to keep any such questions from even being raised, let alone democratically resolved. The SPD leadership, the Bernsteinian revisionists and the conservative trade union bureaucrats - now joined by Kautsky - showed no interest in adjusting the tactics of the mass movement to the possibilities of the situation. They wanted the movement to go away. They were determined to channel the energies it had unleashed into future elections to the Reichstag, in which they hoped for a socialist majority in the next several years. “Such a victory”, Kautsky wrote, “would signify nothing less than a catastrophe for the whole ruling system” (quoted in CE Schorske German Social Democracy 1905-1917 London 1983, p184).

I submit that the suffrage controversy of 1910 gave clear definition to two competing visions of the transition to socialism that had been implicit in party debates for a number of years. Kautsky conceived the transformation as a more or less linear parliamentary process, to which mass mobilisations were at best an auxiliary and at worst an obstacle. Luxemburg viewed the transition as the culmination of a succession of initiatives from below, whose value lay, in the words of Luxemburg’s ally, Clara Zetkin, “not in the positive result, but rather in the ever-greater unification of the labouring masses - a unification which prepares the ultimate victory” (ibid p185).

Comrade Macnair argues that Kautsky’s “original sin” was committed not in 1910, but a year later, during the Moroccan crisis of 1911. Then, Kautsky abandoned his earlier view that growing military competition and war were endemic to imperialism, in favour of the reformist notion that it was in the interest of rival capitalist powers to resolve their differences peacefully. But every major scholar I am acquainted with - Luxemburg’s two biographers, JP Nettl and Paul Frölich, in addition to Carl Schorske, and including Day and Gaido, whom Macnair cites - regard Kautsky’s 1911 shift as another step on a road already taken in 1910. It was then that the SPD left emerged as a distinct current, and when the centre, represented by Kautsky, began increasingly to align itself with the reformist right against the Luxemburgist left.

Comrade Macnair alludes to the fact that Lenin attached little importance to the 1910 dispute, and that Trotsky explicitly supported Kautsky against Luxemburg. These are just two instances of the failure of Russian revolutionaries to grasp the significance of anti-reformist struggles in the German party, just as Luxemburg had misunderstood the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in the Russian party in 1903, and added her voice to the anti-Lenin Menshevik expatriate chorus. This history of mutual misunderstanding was to be largely overcome in 1914.

As for the relevance of all of the above to contemporary US left politics, I think few would dispute comrade Macnair’s assertions that the DSA, with its 30,000 (mostly new) members, is no position to take on the American imperial state, or that time will be needed before anyone can hope to do so. The question is rather what kind of movement will be required - essentially the same question the German SPD faced at the crossroads of 1910. Should its locus be principally at the polls or in streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces?

I must say I find Macnair’s remark that gradualism was only an important issue when it was promoted by social democracy during the cold war a little on the bizarre side. Parliamentary gradualism has been deep in the DNA of bourgeois democracy since its birth; it pulled the masses in a direction opposite to revolution in the time of Kautsky/Luxemburg, and continues to do so. Today, most DSA leaders are telling their members - and many members also naively believe - that their grievances can be redressed by electing politicians who will restore the halcyon days of the 1950s-60s welfare state and enact ‘progressive’ legislation. Marxists, in my view, must combat this illusion with a politics conceived in the revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg in relation to all issues and struggles, domestic as well as foreign.

Jim Creegan
New York

Demonisation

When Channel 4 News reported a statement made by Theresa May concerning the recent nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, it concluded: “The Kremlin is the highly-likely culprit.” Where there is no clear evidence, it is often useful to invoke a principle from Roman law, namely, cui bono or cui prodest. Both of these terms mean ‘Who does it profit?’ ‘Who benefits?’

When Channel 4 News first reported the nerve-agent attack, earlier in March, some interesting information was provided. It suggested an alternative explanation to the definite accusation that has now been made by the British government. It seems that Skripal had most likely turned from being a double-agent, into a triple-agent. Apparently, he had met with a Russian secret service agent, on more than one occasion, in the period prior to having been attacked with the nerve agent, novichok.

A more likely culprit is the British secret service. The British state benefits most from the attack. If this is true, it is likely that Theresa May has been informed about it. If Jeremy Corbyn had been prime minister, it is far less likely that he would have been told.

There should be no sympathy for Putin’s active support of the Syrian government. However, the disturbing reports concerning Syrian government actions, conducted with Russian help, are no better, nor worse, than those carried out by the forces that invaded Iraq and Libya in recent years.

Channel 4 News has recently shown some harrowing footage taken in eastern Ghouta, Syria. A difference is, British TV did not present similar footage when reporting the 2003 Iraq war. US, UK, Australian and Polish forces invaded Iraq, and there was so-called collateral damage, which, of course, was deemed to have been unavoidable.

When a Nato-led coalition invaded Libya in 2011, there was also so-called collateral damage that wasn’t detailed on TV. Doubtless, the present-day Syrian government, backed by its Russian ally, argues that there is unavoidable collateral damage in Syria.

The wars in both Iraq and Libya were essentially wars between governments. However, there were forces, in Iraq and Libya, that were opposed to their own government. They worked according to the principle of dealing with the foreign invader first and then, subsequently, continue the struggle against one’s own government.

British TV shows much footage of recent Syrian-government atrocities, but it didn’t show similar footage at the time of the wars in Iraq and Libya. In other words, what is now taking place, is an orchestrated demonisation of Russia and its allies.

Callum Martin
email

Lumps in

I barely know where to begin with the incoherent rant of Andrew Northall (Letters, March 29). It would be absurd to try and deal with all of his non-sequiturs, misunderstandings and factual errors. I will try to rebut some of the more glaring absurdities of this Stalinist apologist.

1. Yes it would indeed be anti-Semitic to assert that what Israel does to the Palestinians is on account of the ‘Jewishness’ of the perpetrators. I can only assume that Northall is confusing me with Gilad Atzmon, whom I have frequently criticised for just this nonsense. I say Israel does what it does because it is a settler-colonial state and behaves no differently to the indigenous population than did similar states: for example, South Africa.

2. Northall lumps me in with Ian Donovan and Gerry Downing, oblivious to the fact that I played a part in their exclusion from Labour Against the Witchhunt because their politics led in an anti-Semitic direction I’m sorry that the subtleties of our debate confused him.

3. The comparison between anti-Zionism and paedophilia is particularly disgusting and reprehensible.

4. The world and his wife (clearly Andrew belongs to the 19th century in terms of relations between men and women) may know that anti-Semitism is going through the roof, but I’m not aware of this ‘fact’. Nor are most Jews.

5. Yes, I advocate the overthrow or the destruction of the Israeli state. However only a fascist conflates a state with the people living within it. I certainly want an end to the apartheid state of Israel, but, of course, those Jews who are living there should be able to continue doing so.

6. Yes, Zionism collaborated with Nazism. It even shared certain goals: namely the emigration of Germany’s Jews. However, I do not say and never have said that Zionism willingly collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of the Jews. Zionists clearly didn’t want to see the Jews of Europe murdered. The problem was, as they themselves admitted, that they gave priority to building the state of Israel over saving the Jews. If Northall had actually bothered to acquaint himself with some of the literature on the subject, then he would know all of these things. I suggest he read the last chapter, ‘Disaster means strength’, of the official biography of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.

7. Northall says he can no longer distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. That is precisely what the fascists do - say there is no difference.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Nazi-baiting

Andrew Northall’s psychotic, Nazi-baiting rant against Gerry Downing, Tony Greenstein and myself is a bizarre example of projection of his own sadistic, anti-Semitic and totalitarian proclivities onto others.

As Trotskyists, comrade Downing, myself and Socialist Fight (we cannot speak for Tony) uphold the historic position of the Fourth International, of defence of the USSR and other deformed workers’ states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. But we have no truck with Stalinism and called for the working class to overthrow the Stalinist regimes, which murdered countless communists.

Northall was all in favour of this murder of communists. Looking back through his past contributions to the Weekly Worker, he regards the terror of Yezhov, whose atrocities were so brutal that Stalin eventually realised they were counterproductive and had him shot, as no big deal: “… the so-called Yezhovschina between 1937 and 38 affected only a miniscule proportion of the population (1.5 million arrested; 700,000 shot), was based on genuine concerns and evidence about Gestapo and other foreign intelligence activity on Soviet soil” (Letters, September 18 2008).

What is more, perusing his past contributions to the letters page, you get the following gem about the Nazi holocaust: “lf [an interlocutor] is implicitly arguing, through omission, that the Zionist claim that six million Jews died in the gas chambers is arithmetically incoherent and demonstrably false, then I would tend to agree with that” (Letters, October 16 2008 - actually, the person he was replying to said nothing of the sort).

But it is my understanding that neither Zionists, nor anyone else, claim that all the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide died in gas chambers. A huge number, probably many more than were gassed, died on the eastern front at the hands of mobile SS death squads, being shot or hanged.

The Zionist narrative of the holocaust is not about exaggerating the numbers, as implied by this gem, but in systematically writing out of history the non-Jews who were also murdered: Poles, other Slavs, gypsies and communists - both Jewish and non-Jewish. Only gays get some acknowledgement and for cynical reasons connected with pink-washing. That is why Norman Finkelstein in his work Beyond chutzpah distinguishes sharply between the Nazi holocaust as a historical fact and ‘the Holocaust’ as a quasi-religious concept that is used above all to justify the dispossession of the Palestinians.

It is because of this abuse of the holocaust to justify crimes today that a number of strongly anti-racist Jews have come to doubt or deny the historical truth of the Nazi genocide itself. Paul Eisen is the classic case. They are driven by a mistaken expression of disgust at the racism that drives this misuse. But Northall is not. He is just soft on ultra-authoritarian politics in general, on Stalin and Yezhov, and it seems Nazism also.

Now, in continuing that awful method, he has decided that Zionism is okay. He writes: “I don’t think the progressive, decent, pro-human left can any longer try and distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.” In other words, he is a Zionist now and regards anti-Zionism as being the same as anti-Semitism. Much as he claims that anti-Stalinism is the same as anti-communism. Of course, he is not part of any “decent, pro-human left”.

Except maybe this is his application to join the pro-imperialist, pro-Zionist ‘decent left’ that another ultra-Stalinist freak, Simon Evans (aka ‘Harry Steele’), the founder of the racist, anti-Muslim, Zionist hate-blog Harry’s Place, made before him. He too was an ultra-Stalinist who grooved on Stalin’s crimes; he too came to groove on the crimes of Zionism and imperialism, including obscenities like Abu Ghraib, when he became a renegade from Stalinism.

But it is no big leap from being a Stalinist thug to being a Zionist thug, when you consider that it was Stalin, and his protégé Czech Stalinists, who armed the Haganah to expel more than two-thirds of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948-49 and thus who bears a considerable amount of responsibility, along with imperialism and its Balfour declaration, for the suffering of the Palestinians today.

Northall is a totalitarian oddball who approves of brutal, openly expressed nationalism. It should be embarrassing to those who accused Socialist Fight of ‘anti-Semitism’ for criticising the openly expressed, ferocious Jewish communalism of the Zionists, that he is chiming in to support them (though also slandering Tony Greenstein). To him, to criticise and highlight the open use of Jewish symbols by the Israelis, and thus to attack flag-waving Jewish jingoism and the Jewish state is ‘anti-Semitic’. Stalin fought World War II using Russian nationalist symbols, and during the Stalin-Hitler pact German nationalist symbols were approved by the Stalinists and some communists even handed over to the Nazis by Stalin. Now our ultra-Stalinist friend says he is a Zionist and condemns criticism of Jewish nationalist symbols and Jewish ethnic politics as ‘anti-Semitic’.

Northall’s depraved letter has drawn a round of applause from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Jim Denham, who runs the Harry’s Place understudy blog Shiraz Socialist. Denham excoriates anyone who supports the right to return of Palestinian victims of the massive naqba pogrom as ‘Jew-haters’. Logically, he cannot condemn the current massacre.

By your friends shall you be known.

Ian Donovan
Socialist Fight