Letters

IHRA definition

In the Daily Mirror (April 27) Tony Greenstein alleges the anti-Semitism claims were manufactured by CIA spies and Israel. I think Tony missed the target when he aimed at the CIA - all the evidence points towards Israel.

I have been figuring this stuff out for the last year. This is an Israeli security-run operation aimed at removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. To understand it you need to go back to the beginning - not to 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, but 10 years earlier to 2005. This was just before the launch of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.

Several supporters of Israel met to draft a new working definition of anti-Semitism. One of the groups attending was the Community Security Trust (CST), a ‘charity’ (really it is a political lobby group for Israel) from Britain. BDS is very big in Britain and Israel sees Britain as a key battleground in the fight against it.

The working definition of anti-Semitism - which I will call the Israeli definition (or fake definition), as opposed to the English Oxford Dictionary definition - was posted on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EMCRX). The Israeli definition is cleverly constructed in two parts: the first part is harmless enough, talking about hatred of Jews and Jewish community institutions, but the sting is in the tail. The second part is a ‘helpful guide’, giving examples of anti-Semitism. It becomes very clear that this definition has one particular Jewish community institution in mind: Israel. Implicitly, criticising Israel is defined to be anti-Semitic, although, explicitly, the definition denies this is the case.

BDS was launched in 2006 and in the same year the Israeli government founded the ministry of strategic affairs (MSA), whose purpose is to counter BDS - regarded as a propaganda war.

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council launched the Fair Play campaign to oppose BDS. The Community Security Trust was the third member of Fair Play, but kept a low profile. They don’t want to be known as an Israeli lobby organisation and they have to be careful because they are a registered charity (ie, not political!).

Unfortunately for the Israeli security forces, the EMCRX removed the working definition from their website, as they had never adopted it as an official document. Then the EMCRX was replaced by the Fundamental Rights Agency, which showed no interest in defining anti-Semitism. Maybe they realised they were being used.

In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party - a long-time supporter of the Palestinians’ fight for justice. In 2016 the US and Israel put forward the Israeli definition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which adopted it. It has since been recommended by the European parliament and accepted by the UK government and other governments around the world.

The Al Jazeera report The Lobby shows how the Israeli embassy supports and tries to coordinate these groups. The MSA runs events in Israel and around the world, bringing all these groups together for training and to exchange advice. When an event was held in London, security was provided by the CST.

Clearly the Tories, the Blairite Labour MPs and the media are happy to jump on this bandwagon, which is owned and controlled by Israel. Remember, being a Tory or in the Labour Party is not incompatible with being a supporter of Israel.

Did Ruth Smeeth lie because she was a professional Israeli lobbyist or because she is a rightwing Labour MP who hates Jeremy Corbyn? I think it is a meaningless question: she did it because she is both. The same could be said of those who are both Conservatives and supporters of Israel. The British establishment, both Conservative and Labour, has supported Zionism for 100 years.

Joe Green
email

Privilege

Comrade Yassamine Mather’s letter (July 12) on my article, ‘Getting beyond capitalism’ (July 5), makes some helpful points.

The first point - that in the UK identity politics was not promoted by the Maoists, who were numerically insignificant, but by (some) Trotskyists and the Eurocommunists - is basically right. I should certainly have qualified what I wrote to make clear that in talking about soft-Maoist influence I was referring to US developments, which were later copied elsewhere.

I add that the British story is a little more complicated. Initially, it was only the proto-Eurocommunists, the International Marxist Group and some smaller groups around the student left who went for ‘identity politics’. The other main Trotskyist groups at first clung to an ‘economist’ approach like that defended by Adolph Reed (discussed and criticised in my June 26 article, ‘Race and class’). This approach is actually untenable, and as a result they all subsequently collapsed into one or another version of identity politics. The proto-Eurocommunists were the main drivers of full ‘identitarianism’, for the obvious reason that this approach appeared to offer a stronger argument for subordinating working class interests to a ‘broad democratic alliance’ than did suggestions that Britain had in some sense an ‘uncompleted bourgeois revolution’.

The second point is that it was not just the left’s mistakes which led to identity politics becoming an instrument of neoliberalism, and ultimately leading to ‘white identity’ and ‘Christian identity’ politics, but also conscious initiatives of pro-capitalist forces. This is again clearly correct (and, in fact, was part of the point of my article, referring to the foundation of the Libertarian Party and so on). As comrade Yassamine says, her article, ‘Out of the mainstream, into the revolution’ (April 18 2013), rightly makes the point that ‘capitalist feminism’ allowed the bourgeoisie economic as well as political benefits.

I add a more general instance of the same point. The capitalist class is a ruling class, which actively manages the lower classes; and, though it is prisoner of objective laws, it is not so completely such a prisoner that it will stand still to be shot at by any particular left strategy.

The third point is that “when the US Maoists and Marxists in the third world raised the issue” of the labour aristocracy, “it was an accurate assessment of the conditions of the international working class”.

On this last point, I don’t agree; and it needs more than an exchange of letters to discuss the issue properly. The problem is, I think, that “labour aristocracy” theory supposes that particular sections of the working class who have won most gains are most disposed to support the capitalists’ international projects. The Liberal-led British ‘craft’ trade unions of the 1880s, and George Meany’s leadership of the US AFL-CIO union confederation in the 1950s-70s, make such an idea attractive. But at other periods strongly organised skilled workers have been at the core of the radical left wing of the workers’ movement, and the pro-capitalist right wing has been based on the less skilled and less organised.

The theoretical issue posed thus needs work. It matters to the ‘intersectionality’ issue because ‘check your privilege’ arguments are based on generalising from the argument that the pro-imperialist right wing of the labour movement grows out of sectional privilege. These arguments, however, turn out in practice to call for women, black people or whatever particular oppressed group to unite with the boss, or his or her political representatives, against fellow workers who have one or another advantage.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Stimulating

May I associate myself with Yassamine Mather’s letter of criticism (July 12) of Mike Macnair’s article on intersectionality (‘Getting beyond capitalism’, July 5).

And for once I also agree with Steve Freeman, when he argues that an attitude which is generally hostile to referenda need not invariably be against them. As an example, the view of European social democrats prior to World War I was that the matter of Alsace-Lorraine should be resolved by a plebiscite. Of course, it never was: the Germans in 1870 and 1940 and the French in 1919 and 1945 both thought it was theirs by right of conquest and no damned democratic nonsense.

Your letters section is so good and stimulating even to a broken-down old Trot like myself that in some ways it is the strongest part of your paper.

Ted Crawford
London

Slaughter

Mike Macnair asks why the Stalinists were able to marginalise the Trotskyists (‘Irrational optimism’, July 12). He acknowledges that there were NKVD secret police operations, but contrasts the situation in the 1930s with the pre-1917 period, when the Bolsheviks worked under the burden of the Okhrana. The implication seems to be that Stalinist repression was merely comparable to that of routine police work under tsarism and Trotsky never had much support. I think Mike underestimates the role of repression, in which many thousands of old Bolsheviks and supporters of the Left Opposition were killed and many more exiled.

The Marxist historian, Vadim Z Rogovin comments: “The logic of this [inner-party] struggle, in which the ideological strength of each of these political tendencies was inversely proportional to its material might, led not only to the physical extermination of the adherents of the Left Opposition, but also to the liquidation of at least two generations of Bolsheviks who had prepared and defended the October Revolution”. Perhaps the extent of actual and potential opposition to Stalin explains the ferocity of the repression.

While Rogovin dismisses the more fanciful and arbitrary figures from those rightwing writers who speak glibly of many millions of dead in the repression, he does show that the numbers shot rose dramatically in the years 1937-38. In 1936, 1,118 were shot on political charges, rising to 353,074 in 1937 and 328,618 in 1938, and down again sharply to 4,201 in 1939-40 combined. These were mostly communists, not luckless people picked off the streets at random. Stalinism required the destruction of the Bolsheviks.

Mike Martin
Sheffield

Ridicule

It is a case of déjà vu! Once again the question of another referendum is raised and Jack Conrad dutifully condemns it, finishing up with another attack on “post-1945 Trotskyism”, (‘Oppose siren calls’, July 5).

He is determined to smear Trotsky’s Transitional programme by comparing it to the sins and omissions of his “heirs”, but he appears to have no concept of degeneration and its causes. Yet we need such a concept to understand what happened to the Soviet regime itself, post-1917 (see my last article, ‘Trotskyism and May 1968’, June 14, where I painstakingly apply this concept to post-war Trotskyism, as well as explaining the reasons why).

Jack delights in ridiculing the title of the TP, because it uses the phrase, “death agony of capitalism”. May I point out that capitalism was only saved by Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’ and ‘peaceful coexistence with imperialism’. It also paved the way for the victory of Nazism in 1933, as an excrescence of capitalism. As for the war itself, whilst the Soviet masses bore the brunt of it, it was the most destructive war in history; which also explains why Stalinism survived and why capitalism was able to start the long post-war boom.

Jack should go back and read the TP again. Therein he might discover that the transitional method, as outlined in its pages, offers a more concrete means to introduce the revolutionary programme, at both the minimum and maximum level - especially when the Stalinist counterrevolution and the threat of a new imperialist war was in the ascendency (compare this to the rise of Trump today, economic nationalism, on the left as well as the right, which is a response to neoliberalism - it is a question of which is worse). Jack relies on a more abstract method, whereby he is dangerously close to fetishising his cherished demands, be they minimal or maximum ones, such as “replacing the standing army with a popular militia”, etc.

Laugh at Trotsky’s characteris-ation of the period as “the transitional epoch” (viz his conviction that war and revolution in the first part of the 20th century could be repeated) if you want to. Nevertheless, contrary to Jack, I believe that a new version of the TP, which is adapted to present conditions, would be a huge step forward for revolutionaries today and in the future.

Consider the following résumé: In the section on ‘Trade unions’, it says: “... the Fourth International resolutely … condemns trade union fetishism [eg, by the syndicalists] … In time of war and revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers, [whereas revolutionaries] should strive to renew the top leadership of the trade unions [both left and right, and also] create in all possible circumstances independent militant organisations, corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society” (compare this to the CPGB’s demand that those trade unions which are still ‘outside’ should affiliate to the Labour Party, despite the betrayals of the Corbyn leadership so far, which the left bureaucrats in the unions have yet to break with. Don’t hold your breath!).

Commenting on the sit-down strikes in the late 1930s (eg, in the USA and France), the TP calls for factory committees to give them “organisational expression. Elected by all the factory employees, the factory committee immediately creates a counterweight to the administration.” One of their tasks would be to demand that “business secrets” be published, along with “workers’ control of industry”. Such demands are just as relevant today.

As for Jack’s particular favourite, the demand for disbanding the standing army, to be replaced by workers’ militias, once again the TP refers to the situation in the USA: ie, during “peaceful times”, wherein striking workers are being shot by the bourgeoisie’s own private armies. The TP goes on to talk about “the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self defence [and that this should be written into the programme for] the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organise groups for self-defence, and drill them with the use of arms.”

In the section entitled ‘The struggle against imperialism and war’, The TP reminds everyone that “The Second international repeats its infamous policies of 1914 with all the greater assurance, since today it is the Comintern which play second fiddle in chauvinism ... The Bolshevik-Leninist tendency [the name given to the FI’s precursor] preserves all of its force today … A correct policy is composed of two elements: an uncompromising attitude on imperialism and its wars; and the ability to base its programme on the experience of the masses themselves … the fact that … the fate of the people is left in the hands of the imperialists, their governing staffs, their diplomacy, the generals, with all their intrigues and plots against the people. The Fourth International rejects with abhorrence all such abstractions, which play the same role in the democratic camp as in fascist: ‘honour’, ‘blood’, ‘race’.” Today it would be expressed slightly differently: eg, after ‘honour’ would come ‘defence of democracy’, etc.

The TP also raises the question of a referendum on war in the United States, circa 1938, which no doubt Jack would vigorously oppose. Here he is probably right, whereas Trotsky was wrong to go along with the American section’s demand for one. But this error is more than compensated for by the following slogans: “workers’ control of war industries … a tax on military profit and expropriation of the traffickers in war industries. Where military industry is ‘nationalised’, as in France, the slogan of workers’ control preserves its full strength.”

Not only is this an appropriate approach to the situation today, but American tech workers are already ahead of us: eg, the ‘Tech Workers Coalition’ in the US: “Tech should not be in the business of war … Say no to tech warfare”. Ditto with most of the rest of the TP!

Rex Dunn
London