Letters

Oppression

It’s very unfortunate that Daniel Lazare chooses to besmirch the memory of two important and influential figures who came out of the milieu of the 1960s-70s feminist rebellion in the United States: Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich (‘Not equality to compete’, January 19). My criticisms of Firestone remain, from decades past - however, the remark quoted, “maternity is at the heart of a woman’s oppression”, is spot-on and reflects the brilliance of the Second Wave. He quotes Adrienne Rich as saying that she envies “the barren woman who has the luxury of regrets, but lives a life of privacy and freedom”, which I find brutally honest: the revelatory words of the poet and I honour them.

Childbirth and monogamy are symbiotic, inseparable concepts in the conventional social system. It’s a longstanding Marxist view that the monogamous nuclear family, which is the common setting for childbirth and raising of offspring, is the major root cause of women’s (gender) oppression. Friedrich Engels said: “Monogamy was the world historical defeat of the female sex.” Women without children are some of the least oppressed members of capitalist society. Upper class women are not oppressed by capitalism, but all women (and trans, gender non-conforming, etc) are oppressed by patriarchy. That is my view.

Engels disagreed with August Bebel and Karl Kautsky that women’s oppression existed from the beginning of human social organisation. Engels’ great contribution in his seminal book Origin of the family, private property and the state, influenced by Karl Marx, Lewis Morgan and others, was to show that gender roles is a relatively new, artificial phenomenon in human history, based on class divisions, and male private-property rights regarding inheritance. The social disease of women’s powerlessness and oppression - nothing natural, universal or biological - can therefore be uprooted and destroyed. Engels demonstrated, using the methods of historical materialism, the existence and origin of patriarchy - he didn’t focus on how it manifested based on class, but described the double oppression of working class women in capitalism: the sexual division of labour both in the workplace and household (working class women of colour are triply oppressed in my view).

The book has stood the test of time despite its limitations and shortcomings. Engels in his humility said his work is incomplete and expected future anthropological studies to expand on his theories.

Daniel Lazare indicates that there are differences between bourgeois feminists, radical feminists and socialists in regards to how they view the right to abortion and the right to bear children. I don’t see how significant distinctions are made, necessarily, except in the realm of imagination, in which case a political wedge is created between women, and serves the status quo. Women of all classes and groupings can be mobilised to fight for certain issues in common, in solidarity - within an organisation with revolutionary, socialist, proletarian leadership. (Clara Zetkin’s quote found in Lazare’s article is apt: “The proletarian woman ... agrees with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfilment of these demands simply as a means to enable that movement to enter the battle, equipped with the same weapons, alongside the proletariat.”)

Lazare talks about what women “want”, which is to have children. Given it’s true (and I would question the premise), he doesn’t discuss the heartbreaking trade-off that women in capitalism confront: they must basically trade their sexuality, and private labour-power (working class women are forced, additionally, to provide public labour-power) - in essence to succumb to domestic slavery - for the family security required for procreation: a kind of quintessential Faustian bargain indeed! This is a situation which predates capitalism, according to Engels.

During the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s leftist women activists were accused of not being in support of a woman’s choice to have children - an outrageous slander and without merit. Many of the struggles within and outside the parliamentary system were fundamental to the issues of motherhood. There were many breakthroughs as a result of fierce struggle. The bottom line was support for sexual and bodily autonomy and choice: when, whether, under what circumstances, to bear children.

What women theoretically “want” and whatever level of political awareness is extant at a particular time doesn’t speak to the conditions and reality of inferiority and subordination, which inherently characterise women’s role (and in effect oppress men as well) in capitalist patriarchy. Without enough political, social and economic options, under threat of capitalist extortion and blackmail (if you don’t conform to gender roles you and your potential offspring may not survive), what is the meaning of what one ‘wants’?

Daniel Lazare’s view is that the “needs of society” and the needs of a political movement are satisfied by motherhood. Really? Simplicity can dovetail with delusion; women strive to be autonomous and can decide through free, uncoerced will to contribute to a movement by having more offspring, but not through powers of suggestion, manipulation or indoctrination - reminiscent of the sexism of Nazi Germany (Kinder, Küche, Kirche). The concern of women is not to accommodate the needs of bourgeois society and rapacious capitalism.

The capitalist system is about the increase of surplus wealth and the exploitation therein to secure it. Capitalism needs to control sexuality, fertility and reproduction in a nuclear-family structure, with the help of ideology, whose purpose it is to produce the future labour and military forces for the perpetuation of class society and the state. The class system and private property are the most formidable enemies of the idea of gender emancipation - Marxism is its greatest friend.

GG
USA

Popular militia

In the past, I have been critical of some articles by Kevin Bean, so in fairness I should be equally upfront in saying where his articles were excellent, as was the case with ‘Taking the next step’ (Weekly Worker January 12), in which Kevin really helpfully outlined some of the necessary next political, ideological and organisational steps the labour, trade union and working class movement should be taking in order to move the class struggle onto the next phase.

I would like to highlight in particular his comments about health service workers (in this example) taking direct control over what emergency and essential service cover should continue to be provided, and linking this very strongly to the strategic concept of the working class as a whole seeking to rule and govern society.

I would draw Kevin’s and other readers’ attention to an article in the Morning Star (January 17) by Gawain Little of the National Education Union, where he outlined three common principles in that union’s approach to rebuild membership and activism: “First, a focus on the workplace. Members face the challenges caused by the government’s relentless war on teachers most sharply in the workplace. Second, while building at the workplace is key, the union has linked this industrial work to political and ideological struggle. Third, effective renewal has relied on the development of collective leadership, from the workplace up.” So a fair amount in common with Kevin’s arguments.

I do have to pick up on Kevin’s swipe at the Communist Party of Britain, when he claims that “there is a ban on even talking about a popular militia demand”. Not true - as far as I am aware. There is a sensible caution about members publicly identifying themselves with armed groups, which may be classed as ‘terrorist’ by the UK and other states, in order to try and prevent members falling foul of draconian Prevention of Terrorism legislation. Clearly, where such groups are not ‘terrorist’, have progressive aims and should be supported, the party and its members do campaign in support of them and for such groups and organisations to be unbanned - but in ways which try to avoid individuals being unnecessarily victimised by state agencies. Interestingly, in the same edition of the Weekly Worker there is a discussion by Eddie Ford on “individual terrorism”, with which I mostly agree (‘Strategy, turns and dangers’, January 12).

On the specific issue of the popular militia, the CPB’s programme, Britain’s road to socialism, notes, with specific reference to what happened in Chile in 1973, the “importance of developing a military policy that relies on the mass of the people. The popular movement - with the organised working class at its core - and the left government would need to be organised and ready to counter and overcome all covert and overt counterrevolutionary activities.” (All editions of the BRS have been pretty upfront - sometimes brutal - about what will happen to classes and people who try and subvert a left or a socialist government by force. The notion that these are “peaceful, parliamentary roads to socialism” is risible.)

Further, talking about “taking control of the administrative and political apparatus, restructuring and then replacing it with one designed to dismantle capitalism and construct a system that serves the interests of society as a whole”, the BRS refers to the fact that “the state’s corps of military reservists would have to be expanded and, linked with large workplaces and local working class communities, the balance of resources will tilt away from a full-time selective professional army towards popular military reservists with specialised professional units” and under the democratic control of the labour and working class movement.

I accept this doesn’t actually use the term ‘popular militia’, but it is pretty clear and unambiguous what these sections of the BRS are describing.

After the two most appalling cases of criminality against women recently uncovered in the London Metropolitan Police and with thousands more being investigated, criminality and attitudes which appear endemic and inherent to its role as an oppressive, coercive arm of the state, who could possibly be against the abolition of the Met and similar forces and their replacement by people, structures and formations based on and grounded in the working class and working class communities?

I am all in favour of being clear and precise in our use of language, and sometimes nuances are important, but let’s not assert major differences where these do not exist.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Hypocritical

Keir Starmer will face a huge moral challenge to his authority this week when a holocaust survivor speaks about his experiences in World War II for a group proscribed by the Labour Party.

Stephen Kapos, who survived the Budapest ghetto and the Nyilas/Arrow Cross fascists that the Nazis imposed on Hungary after October 1944, as well as the extermination of nearly half a million Jews in Hungary, is a Labour member in Starmer’s constituency and is speaking at a Zoom event being held by the Socialist Labour Network. The SLN was formed from two groups which have been proscribed by the Labour Party and under the party’s rules any members who attended its meetings are automatically expelled.

Tony Greenstein, one of the organisers of the meeting, said: “This will be a real challenge to Starmer’s authority as leader of the Labour Party. Under his leadership, the party has been expelling huge numbers of members on totally bogus charges of anti-Semitism - but will he really expel a Jewish child survivor of the holocaust?” He added: “I suspect Starmer won’t dare expel him for fear of the bad publicity, but this will only prove how hypocritical and two-faced the man is.”

The aim of the meeting will be to discuss ‘reclaiming the memory’ of all who died in the holocaust. Greenstein, author of the recently published Zionism during the holocaust, said: “We are holding this to remember all the victims and challenge the Zionist narrative that only Jews died in the holocaust - forgetting the disabled, Roma Gypsies, gays and all the others who were targeted by the Nazis.”

Speakers will include another Jewish holocaust survivor, Suzanne Weiss, as well as Ali Abunimah, editor of the Electronic Intifada and Dr Adrian Marsh, an expert on Roma holocaust.

The meeting will be held at 6.30pm on Friday January 27 - Holocaust Memorial Day. For registration details visit the SLN Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SocialistLabourNetwork.

Norman Thomas
email

Truth and lies

I’ve just finished Tony Greenstein’s book, Zionism during the holocaust: the weaponisation of holocaust memory in the service of state and nation, and it is well worth the read. What is immediately striking is the sheer volume of footnotes, and most of them are citations, not comments. There is an extensive list at the end of ‘Journals and articles’, followed by many pages of bibliography.

It is striking and clearly necessary. In our home-grown witch-hunt we have had comments, speeches and articles from, for instance (just a small sample), Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and not forgetting Jeremy Corbyn, who said: “the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”. Pretty innocuous stuff, but enough for Starmer to kick him out of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The point is, I would suggest, that the first question to ask is not ‘Is this anti-Semitic?’, but ‘Is this true?’ The Israeli and Zionist leadership clearly feel that the truth is irrelevant and so the witch-hunt goes on. Such is the confidence of these leaders that we have the continuing triumphal hunt in the Labour Party, but also in academia, in the BBC and, quite recently, the ejection of the president of the National Union of Students, Shaima Dallali. The campaign against support for Palestinians and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions has been going full throttle all over the place - especially in Germany and the USA.

So Tony has a major armoury of back-up for his account. There are citations from respected historians (even Zionist ones), accounts from holocaust survivors and fighters against Nazism and, tellingly, words out of the mouths of the criminals he’s charging, such as the founding fathers of Zionism, like Theodor Herzl, and their leader during much of this period, David Ben-Gurion.

I’ve looked online for reviews of this book and, not surprisingly, found very few. We have The Middle East Monitor, The Palestine Chronicle and our own Weekly Worker - with a review by Gaby Rubin (‘Collaboration with Nazism’ Weekly Worker August 11 2022). The Zionists clearly think that silence is the best policy on their part - perhaps because even they can recognise the truth when they see it.

Tony has reported that an attempt to get one of his book-launch events cancelled actually failed, but I’m guessing that there have been many more, as they don’t want to just keep their own silence, but to silence all criticisms. However, Tony is a long-term fighter, as this book and his blog both show, and the Zionist leaders must hate his guts - something that I’m sure he appreciates. He deserves our support and I would urge others to get and read this book.

Jim Nelson
email

Vitriol

The current hatred for Russia encouraged in the UK media must be viewed as an element in a wider strategy. This international strategy is founded on expansion of Nato and the wider growth of capital. Poland and Ukraine have devious intent in their current strategy. Both countries act like puppets of international capital.

When young Russian soldiers are portrayed as human rights abusers we must stop and consider. Who defeated the greatest human rights abuser of the 20th century? The Third Reich led by Hitler effectively met its death in the broken streets and buildings of Stalingrad. Many so-called ‘civilised European’ nations, such as Croatia, Hungary, Holland, Finland, Spain and Norway, contributed ‘volunteers’ to the barbaric Nazi onslaught against the territory of the USSR.

The Red Army forces and partisans displayed courage at Stalingrad that defies belief. The young Red Army soldiers effectively liberated London and Paris as well as the ruins of Stalingrad. Communists must remind British workers of the honest intent and progressive nature of the USSR.

The role of Britain in Ireland, in India and Africa was not essentially benign. Huge loss of human life, as well as a profound distortion of national destiny, accompanied the British empire. Lenin correctly wrote at length about the malign influence of imperialism, which tends to emphasise the so-called ‘superiority complex’ of Britain and America.

The surge of anti-Russian propaganda vilifies the entire Russian people and includes bizarre bans on classical composers and literary giants, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky. American provocation underlined the previous coup in Ukraine and funds the current abuse of Donbass and Crimea. Are the Donbass and Crimean regions not permitted to identify with and celebrate their general Russian cultural heritage?

The ‘war of lies’ has distorted the daily perspectives of English workers. My mother’s generation admired and respected the crucial military assistance provided by the USSR to Britain in World War II. This sense of gratitude has gradually been assaulted by media careerists determined to win favour with capitalist politicians and business leaders.

Did the same media forces denounce the civilian death toll in the American invasion of Iraq in 1991? (This figure is conservatively estimated to exceed 200,000) Did Tony Blair and George Bush face such an onslaught of vitriol that now taunts Russia? Did the destiny of Vietnam, Nicaragua and Chile, as well as Cuba, deserve the vindictive interference of the American imperialistic war machine?

We must insist on repeating these important questions. I am unsure, however. if honest answers will punctuate the silence.

David Lesley
email

Soviets

Soviets and shoras led by a Bolshevik-type leadership is the road to socialist revolution.

However, in 3,800 words Iranian socialist Ardeshir Mehrdad gives us his perspectives for the Iranian revolution in the Weekly Worker (‘The future is being made today’, January 19), without analysing what went wrong with the original revolution in 1979, without mentioning the shoras (soviets) or the politics of either ayatollah Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism, or evaluating any of the leftist political currents that participated. Without that such a piece is useless: those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

Mike Macnair attempts to clarify the programmatic necessities for revolution in his ‘Shoras, party and programme’ in the same issue. “Illusions in so-called bourgeois democracy persist - as do illusions in workers’ councils,” he tells us, making a false equation between the two. He then goes on to stress the necessity of a mass party without specifying the type of party needed. In assessing the situation in Germany and Austria in 1918-19 he identifies the banning of political parties as the reason for the failure of the workers’ councils (soviets), which enabled the rightwing Majority Social Democrats to crush the revolution: “… the ‘German lesson’ is, then, that councils without a mass workers’ political party become an agency of whatever actually existing mass political force is available to take the lead.”

Had the mass workers’ party called the Social Democrats participated, then oppositionists there may well have been able to make more progress, but the Social Democrat leader in government, Friedrich Ebert, sent the proto-Nazi Freikorps to murder the revolutionary leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, on January 15 1919, cutting off the head of the German revolutionary leadership. Really by then it was obvious that the party as a whole was not revolutionary: the great betrayal of August 4 1914, when they voted for war credits to the kaiser to wage World War I, was a long time in the making. The bifurcation of its programme between the minimum and the maximum meant that there were no transitional demands in those soviets to take them forward from industrial militancy to socialist revolution. So not just any old mass workers’ party was needed.

As Mike correctly points out, the “Bolshevik Party at the time of the revolution of February 1917, although held down by repression in the war, had been the majority party of the Russian working class” previously, but the Bolsheviks were in a minority in the soviets up to September 1917. He scoffs at the notion that “‘party’ in far-leftist views is to be a little group that is the ‘general staff of revolution’. It is to be a little cog, which drives the larger wheel (the councils), and the councils in turn are to be the big wheel which drives mass mobilisations.” In fact, the fate of the Russian Revolution in September 1917 hung on the unyielding insistence of Lenin and Trotskyists within the Bolshevik central committee that the hour was at hand to storm the Winter Palace and seize political power - against Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin, who were opposed to such an extent that the first two went to the Menshevik press to denounce the plan. Had Lenin and Trotsky been wrong about the revolutionary situation, this would have led to mass arrests and the execution of all the Bolshevik leaders, which is why Lenin proposed to expel Kamenev and Zinoviev on October 10 1917.

And why pour scorn on those youth who flocked to the banner of Trotskyism in the “1960s-70s reading Lenin’s State and revolution in the cheap Beijing or Moscow editions then available”? Was it shocking that poor youth and students might have the opportunity to read Marxist theory rather than it being the terrain of bourgeois academics and hard-bound expensive editions?

He does not point out that Lenin and Trotsky had to fight a very sharp internal battle in the party against those who sought to conciliate with the Provisional Government and to win support for their revolutionary orientation of ‘All power to the soviets’. We might well draw a parallel with those in the Iranian shoras, Stalinists and self-declared Trotskyists, who placed their faith (and fate) in ayatollah Khomeini and guerrillaism. Could Ardeshir Mehrdad be good enough to tell us where he stands regarding all these groups?

So, in conclusion, we must assert that to make the socialist revolution workers’ councils of the soviet type are absolutely necessary - bourgeois democracy cannot facilitate this task. And only a Bolshevik-type party can win these soviets over to make the revolution. As we have asserted elsewhere, only the Iranian Socialist Workers’ Party (Hezb-e Kargaran-e Socialist - HKS) had that orientation, small though it was. It suffered the fate of genuine revolutionaries when reaction began to gather pace in Iran from 1980 on: assassinations and exile. But socialist revolution without these soviet-type shoras led by a Bolshevik-type party is impossible.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Private schools

Keir Starmer has said that a Labour government will end tax breaks for private schools. Let us hope he keeps his promise. It would mean that private school fees would become liable for VAT. The average cost of boarding a sixth former at a private school is now £39,000 per annum. If the cost of VAT is passed on to parents, it will lead to an increase in fees of 20%.

Private education remains a key part of the class system. Only 6% of school children are at private schools, yet 30% of Oxbridge admissions are from the private sector - and two thirds of the current cabinet were privately educated.

Alan Stewart
Wakefield