Letters

Brink of defeat

There can be no doubt that the soft coup against Corbyn will be reaching its conclusion in the next few months. Its aim is to bring down Corbyn and bring about a halt to the anti-austerity movement that his leadership represents.

Individuals who are playing a central role in this episode are Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, the unelected, barely elected and crookedly elected bureaucrats of the rightwing trade unions, and the owner of Momentum, John Lansman, and his acolytes. The central issues are the bogus anti-Semitism smear campaign against Corbyn and his supporters, and the second referendum, dressed up as people’s vote - which fools nobody and will be seen as an affront to democracy. Other key components in the mix have been and are the useful idiots and self-seeking bureaucrats who are supposed to be on Corbyn’s side, and - potentially the deciding factor - the rank-and-file membership of the Labour Party.

The constant apologies for a problem that hardly exists, by those who should know better, have given credibility to the false impression that the Labour Party is a cesspit of anti-Semitism. The ridiculous pursuit of unity at all costs with those who are seeking to undermine and topple Corbyn is proving to be nothing but the unity of the graveyard.

The concession that these same ‘friends’ of Jeremy Corbyn have given to the second referendum/people’s vote campaign virtually guarantees defeat, if and when a general election is called. Even if parliament does not vote for a second referendum, the fact that Labour is seen as supporting such a move plays into the hands of the right and destroys what credibility Corbyn still has.

How the final stages of the coup to topple Corbyn play out is, of course, conjecture at this stage. However, experience of how rightwing trade union bureaucracies have operated in the past would suggest that the scenario we are about to outline is a distinct possibility. At a certain stage there will be a move to have Jeremy suspended, based on bogus anti-Semitism allegations. We know that prominent anti-racist activists have been suspended and expelled based on such spurious allegations in the past. The adoption of the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, including the 11 examples, makes it far easier to legitimise such allegations - easier to conflate legitimate criticism of the Israeli state’s murderous actions against the Palestinian people with anti-Semitism.

Even if he were to be found innocent of all charges following an investigation, that is irrelevant to the strategy of the coup plotters. While the investigation was taking place, he would have to be on suspension. Who would then take over as leader? None other than the deputy leader, Tom Watson. Who would have to approve this course of action? None other than the Labour national executive - the same body which unanimously accepted the full IHRA definition on September 4 last year.

The fifth column is determined to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government. They are prepared to split the party and destroy the hopes of millions, who desperately need the reforms that only a socialist-led Labour government will attempt to bring about. They couldn’t care two hoots about the inevitable dramatic decline in membership that would follow a successful coup against Corbyn. Not to mention the fact that the Labour Party would be out of office for a generation.

The status quo would return - albeit temporarily - for yesterday’s men and women. Their control over the party would be reasserted. Back to the old days, when we knew our place as her majesty’s loyal opposition. Their main objective would have been achieved - the Corbyn project would be over and the establishment’s fear of a Corbyn-led Labour government would no longer exist.

There is one thing and one thing only that can prevent this, or another tactical manifestation of the coup, being successful. That is if the half a million members become a movement, if Corbyn supporters come out of their comfort zones and start taking responsibility and facing reality. Constituency Labour Parties like Hackney, Hastings and Hallam in Sheffield, passing resolutions of support for Chris Williamson, set a fantastic example last week. This has to happen in every CLP in the country and every one of us has a responsibility to make sure it happens. Petitions and letters to the general secretary are also very important, as will be attending the lobby in support of comrades like Jackie Walker, and other victims of this spurious witch-hunt.

It’s time to stand up and fight back. Appeasement and apology in pursuit of unity at all costs has been an abject failure that has brought the entire Corbyn project to the brink of defeat. Jeremy Corbyn needs our help. It is time to deal with the bullies who have been making his life hell for the last three and a half years.

Steve McKenzie
email

Indifference

I agree with Ted Hankin on one thing and one thing only (Letters, February 28): Peter Gregson’s suggestion that western guilt over the holocaust is responsible for the establishment’s support for the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is worthless (February 14). He mistakes their rationale for the actual reason.

The rest of Gregson’s letter is equally trite. His suggestion that the Allies might have dropped food or leaflets over Auschwitz is, of course, absurd, but Hankin’s explanation for their indifference to the holocaust as it was happening is equally absurd. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the “atrocity propaganda” of World War I. The Allies didn’t go to war with Hitler over his Jewish policy, but because of his threats to their interests in Europe. The Allies were concentrating on a military defeat of Hitler in concert with Stalin. Saving Jews was irrelevant.

The Allies knew almost from the start of the holocaust in June 1941 what was happening. At Bletchley Park, the SS code had been broken early in the war, allowing access to communications with the extermination camps. During the summer of 1941 reports of mass shootings in occupied Russia were deciphered. For example, an SS cavalry report of August 17 1941 reported 7,819 executions in the Minsk area (see Raul Hilberg Destruction of European Jews p1191).

The Allies issued a declaration condemning the ‘final solution’ on December 17 1942. This was preceded by the Zionist declaration on November 23. Both the Allies and the Zionists had been fully aware of the holocaust in August 1942 after receipt of the Riegner memorandum from Geneva. However, the Zionists - in the form of Stephen Wise - sat on the memorandum for three months, at the request of Sumner Welles of the US state department. This coincided with the most intensive period of the holocaust, when nearly two million Jews were exterminated. But the Zionists’ political and diplomatic goals took precedence over the plight of the European Jews.

Hankin is hopelessly confused when he suggests that the only source that suggests that ordinary Germans knew nothing of the extermination camps was Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s willing executioners. His book is worthless, which is why it was rapturously received by the New York Times and most of the bourgeois press. Goldhagen’s thesis was that the holocaust was the product of German eliminationist anti-Semitism. According to him, it had nothing to do with German fascism or imperialism. Indeed, reading his book, one would think that for ordinary Germans the country under the Nazis was a benevolent and benign society that operated on the basis of consensus over the Jews. There is no mention of the destruction of the working class organisations, the thousands of non-Jewish Germans murdered in the concentration camps - it was communists and socialists, not Jews, who filled the first concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

Goldhagen attacked Christopher Browning’s seminal Ordinary men - police battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland for describing the murderous activities of Unit 101 of the Order Police, who participated in the final solution in Poland, as “ordinary men”, yet that was precisely what Hannah Arendt had argued in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann was not a sadistic monster or motivated solely by anti-Semitism, but a desk bureaucrat who followed orders. Hence the banality of evil.

Goldhagen’s book was savaged by virtually all holocaust historians and academics. Norman Finkelstein wrote a brilliant essay - ‘Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “crazy” thesis: a critique of Hitler’s willing executioners’ in the New Left Review, which led to Goldhagen threatening Finkelstein with legal action, such was his discomfort. I suggest Ted Hankin reads it.

Goldhagen’s racist thesis suggests that it was the peculiar sadism of the German people, not fascism, which was responsible for the holocaust. Anyone who is aware of the role of the Hungarian gendarmes, Romanian legionnaires, the Croatian Ustashe, the Slovakian Hlinka Guard or the Ukrainian and Latvian fascists knows that this thesis is unsustainable.

If Hankin were to take the trouble of consulting historians such as Ian Kershaw, he would know that most Germans were unaware of the holocaust, as were most of the Jews who were deported. Ordinary Germans were aware that German Jews had been deported to places that were not very pleasant and, of course, they feared the worst, but they couldn’t know the details. News certainly came back from ordinary soldiers about the mass shootings in the early stages of the holocaust following Operation Barbarossa, but there is little reason to believe that Germans were aware of the extermination camps.

These were built in Poland, not Germany. In Germany there were concentration camps, not extermination camps (although thousands died in them). The death camps were a state secret and a whole series of euphemisms, such as ‘special measures’ - and ‘final solution’ - were devised to deceive people.

If Jews entered the trains ignorant of where they were going, it is hardly likely that ordinary Germans were any wiser. But, even if Germans had known of the camps, there is nothing they could have done about them. Contrary to Goldhagen, Germany was a police state and mention of the fate of the Jews could have had dire consequences.

Both the Allies and the Zionists were uninterested in finding out what was happening to Europe’s Jews and where. There is no doubt that the rail lines to the extermination camps could have been bombed and indeed the camps themselves. However, that was simply not a military priority. The British and American governments resisted any attempt to bomb the gas chambers (although Auschwitz, a major industrial centre, was bombed by accident).

What is also true is that the Allies could have done far more to rescue those Jews who were able to escape. The problem was that the British and American governments were hostile to any suggestion that they open their doors to refugees able to escape - ‘What would we do with them?’ was the cry from the foreign office. No attempt was made to open up avenues of escape, such as via the Pyrenees.

Hankin’s support for the bombing of civilian centres does not merit a response. Arthur Bomber Harris was a war criminal, who murdered thousands of German civilians in Dresden and Hamburg - a campaign that had little or no military justification.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Communist value

Let me recapitulate my response to Moshé Machover (Letters, February 28) in order that we can clear up any ambiguities.

Machover claimed: “As for the bare term, ‘value’, I believe that the situation is not quite so clear. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there may be some ambiguity or lack of consistency in the way Marx and Engels used it on various occasions” (Letters, February 14).

Even if this was the case, which I don’t think it is, Marx put to bed any doubts in his response to Adolph Wagner’s own confusion over how Marx used these terms (see Marx’s ‘Notes on Wagner’). Now we can agree or disagree if Marx’s value theory is correct or not, but I don’t see where the confusion is over what he said.

Machover continued: “Here again there is no doubt that ‘exchange value’ is applicable only to a product that is also a commodity, object of sale and purchase. As for ‘value’, I think it is perfectly reasonable to apply it to any product ... This definition makes sense, whether or not the product in question is a commodity; it is applicable under any mode of production, including communism.”

Machover treats exchange value as a substance rather than a form. As Marx says, exchange value is simply the form of appearance of value. So it is wrong to say that “‘exchange value’ is applicable only to a product that is also a commodity”, because exchange value is not applicable to anything - we can only speak of exchange values. And value has no meaning outside this form, which is why a primitive commune had no concept of value and it only arose sporadically in exchange, reaching its maturity under capitalism and seeing its demise, as we transition from socialism to communism.

Machover says: “... here Engels is arguing against use of ‘value’ in relation to products of a communist society. But unless we are resigned to reading Engels uncritically, we should ask whether what he says here is convincing, especially from the perspective of the 21st century.”

I am saying Engels’ argument is convincing, because value will have no meaning in a communist society. Communism will be a society that produces for need and not profit, and in a communist society there will be effectively no exchange or demand, at least not any that require the planning department to calculate.

So the plan is set according to agreed needs and priorities, the input and output calculations are done, which includes a time dimension, and a feedback mechanism adjusts the plan where necessary. Plan is updated periodically. So where is the need for ‘value’? And what is this ‘value’ being compared to and for what purpose?

Maren Clarke
email

Well done

I was surprised while scrolling through Twitter at a moment of leisure to see that Corbynista bright young thing, Laura Murray, sharing the front page of last week’s paper, accompanied by a tweet beginning, “Well done, Weekly Worker.” Alas, it transpired from reading the full text that comrade Murray was not as positive as first appeared: her message actually consisting of trenchant criticism of the front cover (February 28).

Now, I may not myself have chosen to run that front page if I was the editor. It is clearly a provocative thing to do, given the link between the original poem by Martin Niemöller and the holocaust - although surely no-one could believe the Weekly Worker seeks to equate the witch-hunt of Jeremy Corbyn with the elimination of six million Jews and others.

One of the features of the Weekly Worker is its provocative front pages - some go too far, no doubt. Personally I share some of the criticisms of the coverage of Zionism in the paper made by Alec Carnovic at CPGB aggregates and reported (with a far greater sense of democracy than any other left group) in the paper. The front page in question could rightly be criticised as insensitive and open to misinterpretation by our class enemies. Fine - labour activists interested in what the paper says can make those criticisms by writing to the paper and seeing a letter published.

Laura Murray chose not to do that, but instead to attack the paper in front of her thousands of social media followers. What is instructive about this is when she chose to do it. She did it while herself under enormous attack on Twitter for having criticised centrist ‘celebrity’ Rachel Riley for appearing to endorse a violent attack on Jeremy Corbyn outside a mosque. Further, comrade Murray’s attack came on the same morning that rightwing Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh went on Radio 4’s Today programme and heavily suggested that to be anti-capitalist at all is to be anti-Semitic - thus providing further evidence that the witch-hunt of Corbyn and his supporters will only continue to escalate, effectively making the Weekly Worker’s point for them.

I appreciate that many readers, as serious labour movement activists, may not even know who Laura Murray is (nor Aaron Bastani, Ash Sarkar or any of the other young Corbynistas making a name for themselves on social media). But they are close to the Labour leadership and do wield a certain influence. It is fascinating to see - even in the midst of battle, as comrade Murray was at the time of her Weekly Worker attack - that the first instinct of these people is always to triangulate, never to simply defend their principles clearly, without obfuscating, backsliding or attacking parts of the established left.

I believe it is mainly a lack of political training: many of the older Labour members flooding back into the party since 2015 are doubtless veterans of the far left - or of the Labour Party itself, when it was much further left than today. Many of them are the better for it - they know how to fight, to defend a line, to stand their ground. The hegemony of Momentum in the pro-Corbyn Labour left is an ongoing disaster, partly because it sees these older returners as an embarrassment and promotes only the young, the untested, the untrained. What is happening now in the party suggests that the CPGB’s perspectives are broadly correct: unite the existing left as the best trained Marxist class fighters we have, and persuade them that the most effective place to fight is in the Labour Party.

Sean Carter
South London

Spot on

The front cover of the February 28 Weekly Worker was spot on. This poem comes to mind so often in these times, but I think it is worth noting that the original version (as far as I’m aware) and certainly the chronologically correct version opened with “First they came for the communists”. Of course they did: first they came for the hardest political opposition - they needed to clear them out before they moved on to more vulnerable targets.

But this was Hitler and his party - they came for the communists. If we face a racist, nationalist movement with political heft in the years and months ahead, then some of the strongest and most dedicated political opponents will have been cleared out of the biggest working class organisation in the country by Labour Party MPs - second time farce perhaps?

Like in the 30s, we have the financial collapse with massive unemployment, especially of youth, worldwide. In the early part of the 20th century there were millions of Jews fleeing eastern Europe. Now we have millions of Muslims and Africans fleeing the chaos and ruin largely brought about by US and European policymakers and these refugees provide the raw material that opportunist, racist politicians need.

Refugees are always easy to demonise, whether they’re Jewish, Muslim or anything else: they tend to be dishevelled and impoverished - no matching luggage and designer clothes there. And these more modern refugees are easier to identify. Fascists will go for black and brown people first, but they will go for Jews too: it’s part of their backward ideology.

We live in dangerous times and these witch-hunters are adding to the dangers - a sort of sawing off the branch you’re sitting on?

Jim Cook
Reading

‘Holistic’ Macron

President Emmanuel Macron of France has made a direct appeal to the citizenry of the EU, doing so via an ‘open letter’ sent to multiple mainland European as well as UK newspapers. To that extent, this is an attempt by Macron at non-partisan engagement.

In a similar sense, Macron is providing down-to-earth, organisational guidance, combined with elements of a far more spiritual nature - all rising above formulaic political thinking and practices. In a nutshell, Macron seems to have recognised both the urgent need and burning desirability of adopting a ‘holistic’ attitude to things.

Of course, in his particular case Macron arrived at this point as a result of formidable pressures generated from the gilets jaunes movement, as well as a brewing crisis of confidence being created by Brexit. Nonetheless, this development is something all comrades at the Weekly Worker/CPGB plus Labour Party Marxists need to take note of - indeed, that all communists on a global basis need to recognise and then fulsomely embrace. Unless we wish to remain self-importantly aloof to the political methodologies of our modern world, that is - as well as isolated from a more generalised Zeitgeist.

Although full of the contradictions already alluded to (indeed, riven by chasm-like flaws of the capitalist system itself!), nonetheless Macron provides an exemplary lesson in the value of ‘inspirational’ calls being made. In other words, appeals above and beyond a grinding/churning manifestation of politics. Communication of ideas made in a manner shiningly superior to the suicidal pedestrianism currently prevalent on the left.

As difficult to swallow as it may be, we must take a leaf from Macron’s book, surely? That is, if we wish to become meaningful players in this 21st-century marketplace, which is dominated and driven by psycho-emotional techniques; by almost borderless geo-political/socio-economic forces; by aesthetico-cultural and (notable above all else) by innately humanistic dynamism.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Vibrant Russia

I’ve just read the article on Russia and I wouldn’t at all agree with its content (‘A convenient enemy’, February 21). Mind you, there have been precious few articles on Russia in the Weekly Worker.

Russia is a much more colourful nation and people than grasped in this article. It does have a big economy and culture and multi-million-size diaspora, which is injecting vibrantly into the world culture. Russia has a powerful diplomatic service and its armed forces have helped rid Syria of its terrorist forces. It has a strategic alliance with the two most populous countries in the world: India and China. Its trade with China is worth $100 billion. Its foreign media is exceptionally truthful and effective in a world ruled by lies. It is one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world.

Russia is open for business.

Elijah Traven
Hull