Letters

BDS wars

I lack the detailed research of Daniel Lazare or of Mike Macnair but I would like to comment on the dispute over the BDS campaign. BDS was initiated by Palestinians and was, and is, a call to Boycott, Divest and Sanction the businesses and products of the Israeli regime.

The BDS website lists three demands on Israel:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the wall.
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

What’s wrong with that?

Last week Lazare noted his “six major arguments” (‘Path to nowhere’ Weekly Worker January 20 2022) including, “BDS is based on a false and misleading premise that Israel is singularly evil, when in fact Saudi Arabia - America’s other great ally in the Middle East - is without equal “when it comes to sheer bloody repression”. Hence, BDS serves to distract attention “from Riyadh’s reactionary influence”.

As I understand it, BDS came from a call from Palestinians, which makes it, I believe, quite unusual in the sanctions world. It was a call from black South Africans which led to boycotts of apartheid South Africa. I find it hard to imagine that any group of Saudis would call for a worldwide campaign of sanctions against their country - in part because what would you boycott - transport all over the world that uses Saudi oil? But also because of the risk of torture and death - not that Israel isn’t up to that too.

Further: “Calling on the US to impose sanctions on the Jewish state makes little sense, since American imperialism, whose power dwarfs that of Zionism, is the real source of the problem.” I would guess that the movers of BDS are aware of this and that a call to sanction the US would be somewhat unrealistic: what would you have left unboycotted? How do you know what is ultimately linked to US money?

I’m not aware of any other oppressed people who are calling for sanctions - maybe I’m missing something. Most sanctions are, after all, aimed by the strong against the weak.

But BDS does seem to have an effect. Yes, it’s a pinprick, but the Zionists don’t like it and, while screaming ‘anti-Semitism’ they do all they can to suppress it: for instance, by passing laws, especially in Germany and several US states. And then we have the witch-hunts in the UK: against socialists in the Labour Party, academics and, more recently, the BBC of all people!

Later in his article Lazare goes on to say: “So if Israel is bad, then boycotts, divestment and sanctions must be good, because their goal is to isolate the Jewish state from the mainstream of global culture and commerce, and cast it off as far as possible away from civilised society. But this assumes that global society is civilised, which, of course, it is not.”

I would suggest that this rather overrates the aims of the BDS folk. It is rather to draw attention of people all over the world to what ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ is up to and to thereby ramp up some outrage and maybe gain some support.

Lazare objects to the impact on Israeli academics and the arts. There may well be some errors in some of the BDS calls, and they can be raised - but do any such errors come anywhere near to the sadistic malice of the Israeli state, which has the enthusiastic support of the bulk of its Jewish citizens as well as that of Zionists all over the world?

As I say, the achievements of the BDS movement are pinpricks: SodaStream had to move from the West Bank to Israel itself, Ben and Jerry ice creams have raised a little fuss, there is the occasional news of a singer, band or actor refusing to perform in Israel. Not much impact on Israel but I’d guess that many Palestinians would see that as better than nothing.

Lazare mentions some academics. He hasn’t mentioned Palestinian academics who can’t get to conferences or can’t get to their students. Then there is Palestinian education: children in jail, without charge, for months on end. Other children shot dead by Israeli soldiers or settlers. Children deprived, with their families, of food, shelter, electricity … I’m sure that Lazare is aware of all these things and is as disgusted about them as any of us.

Even pinpricks are better than nothing, and we should give whole hearted support to BDS and any other resistance that Palestinians put up to oppose their oppressors. We certainly shouldn’t attack any resistance since that can only benefit the oppressors. Helpful criticism maybe, but we know whose side we’re on.

Jim Nelson
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Lassallean

Comrade Lazare (‘Path to nowhere’ January 20) is flatly wrong to claim that there is an abandonment of class politics when comrade Machover argues for BDS winning a battle in progressive public opinion, grassroots support, etc.

Comrade Lazare counters that: “Socialism does not seek to mobilise the public. To the contrary, it seeks to mobilise the workers and, in the process, draw as sharp a line as possible between them and all other social classes.”

This argument is straightforwardly Lassallean (the other classes are “one reactionary mass”), not Marxist. The Marxist position - also argued at some length in Lenin’s What is to be done - is that the workers have to organise themselves in a political party, and attempt to lead the society as a whole. In this context, yes, winning a battle for public opinion in support of some working class interest is a task of the workers’ movement - here, the struggle to defeat our own imperialist state’s war effort through building a mass anti-war movement.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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Hub

The new group, Socialist Labour Network (LAW and LIEN), plans to be the hub of a grassroots labour movement. Formed by the merger of the two leading organisations opposed to what they claim is a ruthless, undemocratic purge of the left in Labour - Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour in Exile Network. In July 2021 both were proscribed. The new group is pledged to continue supporting the fightback against the forces of the right.

Since he became leader, Keir Starmer has been engaged in a dictatorial witch-hunt of members on the left of the party on an industrial scale - the biggest purge in British political history. Democracy has been undermined, destroyed, and free speech suppressed. But while he may expel individual activists from the party, Starmer will never destroy the movement of people who came together under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Since he became leader Keir Starmer has pushed Labour to the right. His admission of the Tory, Christian Wakeford, into the parliamentary party is only the latest of his moves in that direction and points to him intensifying his attack on socialism and socialists in the party. The need for a leftwing fightback outside and inside the party has never been more urgent.

The new group believes it has a critical role in linking up ‘shadow’ local Labour parties and activists in a fightback for a new way forward for the left. It is calling on anyone, inside or outside Labour, interested in being part of a network of socialist organisations to get in touch at 07989 070843.

Across the country leftwing groups are springing up, often to replace local Labour parties which have been broken or paralysed by the Starmer regime. We believe in socialism, for the many and not the few. As a movement we are unstoppable.

Norman Thomas
SLN spokesperson

Galled

Whilst it always thrilling to be mentioned in the Weekly Worker letters, I feel a correction is due on Ian Donovan’s comment that I was expelled from Labour Against the Witchhunt for supposed anti-Semitism (‘Liquidation sale’ January 20). I was expelled, at Tony Greenstein’s behest, because I had not acceded to his demand that I delete a link on an update I’d posted on Change.org. This was on a petition for Labourists to sign, declaring that Israel was a racist endeavour, and calling on the executive to abandon the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism (see tinyurl.com/israelihra).

What Tony objected to was a link I has posted to a very long article by Ian Fantom about Herzl, the architect of the Jewish state. That article of some 6,000 words had a small mention to another article which questioned the execution of a million Jews at Auschwitz. I had warned readers of the link to this second piece, describing it as “toxic”, but I thought the article on Herzl was of wider interest. What particularly galled me was the manner of Tony’s approach: he had emailed me and copied in LAW, demanding the deletion of the reference to the Herzl piece. So I refused.

Now, what I like about the Weekly Worker is that it believes in freedom of expression, but sadly LAW does not. With that obsessive absolutism that cripples so many initiatives of the left (‘If you don’t fit the mould 100%, you must be banished’), I was expelled. I guess you could say I was kicked out for obliquely referencing holocaust denial.

Whilst I’m here, I also wanted to take Tony to task for his letter in the previous Weekly Worker (‘Hanging man’ January 13) where he ridiculed “Ian Donovan’s theory that US foreign policy towards Israel was a product of an ethnic Jewish subset of the US ruling class.” I believe Tony to be extremely well-informed on all matters pertaining to Palestine, but I was taken aback by this view. How on earth does Tony think Israel continues to avoid sanctions for its racist treatment of the Palestinians, if it were not for the support of wealthy US Jews? Why does the US show such unstinting support for Israel at the UN? Back in 1940 under president Truman the situation was the opposite, with the US primarily concerned with Arab rights. The Zionist lobby then made it clear that organised American Jewry would withdraw its support for any politician that did not support Ben-Gurion and his plans for Eretz Israel. I refer Tony to Alan Hart’s excellent book Zionism - the real enemy of the Jews to get the full story. And AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, continues the Zionist’s work to this day, supported by an overwhelming majority of Republican Jews - and a fair number of Democrat ones.

It is said that 70% of Jews support Israel. We must address our campaign to these Jews, for it is only when we convince them that equality with the Palestinians in one single state will not lead to a second holocaust, that we may one day see peace and justice there.

Pete Gregson
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Broad church

When I read the letters page of Weekly Worker I find inspiration, encouragement and education. Yet I am also filled with despair.

It is writ large that we on the left have no idea how to do practical politics. To make change, to get things done, it is necessary to form a coalition around core values and ideas. When that coalescence occurs there is the opportunity to make things happen.

It would take too much space to list the factions and sects represented in Weekly Worker’s letters page. Suffice to say they are all at each other’s throats when they should be standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity against the capitalist bastards ... Pettifogging philosophical differences foment division - grist to the mill of the ruling class.

Surely we can agree to differ whilst joining together in the cause of a better future. If we can’t then it will be forever a pipe dream ...

In solidarity. 

Robbie Leslie
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Assange

As a British, Irish or Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British general election. He ought to do so against his persecutor, Keir Starmer. Furthermore, Starmer supported the prosecution of the Colston Four, whose actions have been found to have been a prevention of crime, since the statue of Edward Colston was itself a breach both of Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and of Section 1 of the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981. The jury accepted those arguments. The Colston Four should support Assange in his parliamentary candidacy against Starmer. We ourselves would certainly do so.

David Lindsay
North West Durham

Cry murder?

Last week I broke free of my Covid-cocoon, braved the trams and trains, and headed down to Liverpool for the Bloody Sunday march.

Small at less than 300, but considering that this was very much a locally organised event it is certainly nothing to be scoffed at. What I was disappointed with, however, was the dismal effort of the so-called ‘left’. By my count we had a stall from the SWP and two small clusters of IMTers and ISAers handing out their party newspapers. Of course numbers are one thing, but politics are another.

As ever with the SWP, a gazeebo clad in the usual slogans; “No to Islamophobia”, “No to racism”, “Tories out! Out! Out!” etc. Likewise, come in the same postcode of the stall and you’ll be met with the usual “Are you a student? Have you heard about this important strike?” You know the drill. Speaking to comrades running the stall I heard plenty about state capitalism and Soviet imperialism and the like, but nothing to do with that small tangential point … Ireland and British imperialism.

It is the utmost duty of the British working class to show solidarity with the oppressed and call for the defeat of ‘our own’ bourgeoisie, to show workers have no nation and we ourselves can never be free whilst we enslave and brutalise another, to equip the working class with a proletarian foreign policy. Hence Ireland, England’s first colony, is the key acid test of internationalism for Marxists in Britain. Comparing the showing I got last week to the days of old (see The Leninist archive), it seems that internationalism ended with the armed struggle.

So what of the march itself? A small brigade of the Parkhead faithful parading the tricolour through Liverpool city centre to the tune of a few choice Provo lullabies. We reached the end of our route - an alley of sorts - and promptly scattered to pubs in all directions. Not even one speaker! All this left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Has nothing really happened in the last 50 years that is worth mentioning? The armed struggle, the imperialist “peace” that simply replaced barricades with “peace walls” and froze society in a new sectarian order, Brexit, the rise of Sinn Fein south of the border … Not a peep.

All of which points to a very strange picture. Is this just a case for ceremony? Another one to tick off the ‘decade of anniversaries’ calendar? What of the left, how do we take the cause of Irish national liberation and unity forward? What about the struggle for democracy, the constitution and the republic? Where is the programme? Where is the strategy?

Ollie Douglas
Manchester

Dick Gregory

With respect to the review of Nigger (‘Callouses on our souls’ January 13), the bravery of Dick Gregory has appeared again in a small paragraph in the definitive biography of Malcolm X by the late Manning Marable, a Black, left historian who was, I am told, a member of the CPUSA.

It seems to me that Black American history and its major actors are much neglected outside of the United States, apart from Martin Luther King and slavery. Some work is done in academia, but for the most part, even in schools in the US, treatment of black history only skirts the surface. So, at the risk of teaching grandmothers about eggs, what is written about Malcolm X deserves some retelling.

Many speakers of English (and those languages into which the book is translated) have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written jointly with Alex Haley. Others may have seen the movie made by Spike Lee, with Malcolm X played by Denzel Washington, who, by the way, does a magnificent job. In the Autobiography and in the movie, Malcolm’s life seems a smooth transition from poverty to petty criminal; from prison to the Nation of Islam (who believed in strict separation of the races, and some bizarre myths about their leader, Elijah Muhammad); from NOI to orthodox Islam - and thus moving closer to Martin Luther King’s view of the civil rights movement, which included working with white activists - following which the fanatical adherents of the NOI assassinated him.

Malcolm’s assassins were feared by many, as they had been responsible for fire bombings of homes (including Malcolm’s own home, with his family inside), murders, and frightful beatings. For that reason most churches in West Harlem refused to allow Malcolm’s funeral to be held on their premises, and many Harlemites, where Malcolm had worked and spoken throughout his life, refused to take part in the proceedings.

Only the tiny Faith Temple Church allowed its premises to be used for the purpose. And then only a small number of people in the civil rights movement dared to attend. Among them were Bayard Rustin, co-organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, at which MLK spoke; James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality which led the first Freedom Rides to desegregate transport; the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s John Lewis and James Forman; and Dick Gregory.

It is interesting that these four who attended were all acolytes in some way of Martin Luther King, and yet they attended the funeral of a controversial figure, seen at the time as an enemy of MLK’s philosophy.

In his book, Nigger, Dick Gregory says he was scared to death of being involved in the civil rights movement - but proceeded anyway. Once again he more than proved his mettle by this later demonstration of bravery and commitment.

Gaby Rubin
London

Hail McCluskey

Prior to the 2019 British general election, there was a realistic possibility of a socialist government in Britain that would close the shameful racist chapter of British history, and begin making global preparations for Cop26 to stop the ice caps melting so that people of all races may look forward to enjoying their convivial recreation on Earth until its natural predictable destruction without prejudice.

The leader who did most to make a socialist government a possibility was Len McCluskey, because it was his threat to launch a working class party to rival Labour in 2014 that spurred enough Labour MPs to select an anti-racist leader who might win enough working-class votes for them to continue as MPs. Despite McCluskey’s staunch championing of the leader they selected, we now have a racist government of bare-faced liars and self-serving swindlers, and a pandemic that is heralding our premature extinction.

If we are to change the course of British history, we need to recall how racism was institutionalised by the masters of philosophy at Britain’s oldest universities, who taught their exclusively wealthy, white male students that people from Africa were expendable merchandise like cattle, and that women were not capable of degree-level scholarship because, like Africans, they are innately intellectually inferior, in arrogant mercenary self-serving defiance of all critical reason, ethical philosophy and scientific evidence.

It is self-evident that none of the socialist parties in Britain are teaching their members what in the revolutionary nature of the historically unconscious proletariat will make it the self-conscious instrument of history, because their leaders are all demonstrating their unconsciousness of it by their sectarian refusal to collaboratively champion it. What Marx and Engels called ‘the revolutionary nature of the proletariat’ is its instinctively compassionate solidarity, its spontaneous practice of linking arms against whoever uses armed force to coerce or subjugate it, whatever race, colour or creed they are.

According to the 1848 Communist manifesto,

“The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Although capitalism’s unconscious grave-diggers naturally reproduce an abundant supply of themselves, it continues to predate on them because the world-wide unity necessary for its fall and their victory has yet to be achieved, and the global unity of the working class is self-evidently not being consciously championed by any of the socialist parties currently existing in Britain (or anywhere else).

McCluskey was elected as Unite’s general secretary in 2010. His 2014 intervention in Westminster affairs was not his first or his last in that capacity.

In 2011, he appealed for millions of working people to prepare for a national campaign of “civil disobedience” and co-ordinated strikes in protest at coalition cuts to pensions and public services. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) failed to collaboratively champion this courageous act of political defiance, or offer to jointly organise a campaign of civil disobedience to protect state pensions. If LRC had, the Tories might have been prevented from cutting state pensions.

In 2012, McCluskey was instrumental in the founding of and the funding for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) to shape and champion left analysis and policy debates.

In 2015, career anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party (though he wasn’t McCluskey’s preferred candidate), and Labour Party membership doubled.

In 2016, McCluskey declared his internationalist working class opposition to Brexit. International solidarity is a long-standing working class principle that has been upheld by socialists throughout the world. Again, all British socialist parties failed to collaboratively champion that international socialist principle as the pre-condition to the working class changing the course of history, and so did CLASS and LRC. If they had all championed internationalism on that basis, Corbyn might have been persuaded to oppose Brexit, and the referendum outcome might have been significantly different.

Steve Ballard
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Correction

While most of your article ‘An uncertain situation’ (Weekly Worker January 20) on the protests in Kazakhstan was well written, I feel obligated to point out that Aum Shinrikyo is not an Islamist group and I hope that this error will be corrected in a timely manner.

Ben Brown
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