Letters

Tit for tat?

A hallmark of bad faith in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is glossing over its essence: an ongoing colonial conflict between the Zionist predatory settler state and the colonised Palestinian people. Instead, the conflict is represented in false symmetry as a clash between two nationalisms and, in equivalence, as a ‘circle of violence’, in which both sides suffer equally.

Daniel Lazare’s article, ‘Barking at the moon’ (February 2), is a case in point. It makes no mention of colonisation, colonial oppression, resistance to colonisation or the struggle for national liberation. Instead, it uses the false language of equal suffering. Here are some examples (with my emphases):

“[T]he new [Israeli] government is doing to a growing portion of the Jewish population what Zionists have been doing to Palestinians for generations on end.” In fact, “[U]ltra-right Zionism is targeting ordinary Israelis no less than Palestinians.” Really? Is the new government murdering hundreds of Jews? Stealing their land? Bombing their cities? Destroying their homes?

And here is a real gem: “The Israeli crisis is rapidly growing. Tit-for-tat violence is exploding inside Israel and the occupied territories … ” So the massive, brutal assaults of one of the world’s most powerful armies are the “tat” equated with the “tit” of pathetic acts of armed resistance.

And writing against boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) - the worldwide campaign of solidarity with the colonised and oppressed Palestinian people - he uses the favourite sneaky trope of hasbara (Israeli propaganda). He tells us that BDS is supported by “such reactionary anti-Semites as Hamas and Islamic Jihad”. This is a thoroughly demagogic argument. BDS is supported by virtually all Palestinian organisations, including trade unions, women’s groups, etc, etc. Besides, should we oppose whatever Hamas and Islamic Jihad support? This would lead to very bizarre positions. For example, it would mean we must oppose lifting the siege of Gaza!

Again echoing Israeli hasbara, Lazare goes on to accuse the BDS campaign of turning “a blind eye to the problem of anti-Semitism”. And he ends up with some programmatic platitudes that ignore the task of decolonising Palestine.

There is no point debating with such stuff. A socialist programme for the Middle East makes no sense without incorporating the decolonisation of Palestine. Conversely, the decolonisation of Palestine cannot be divorced from socialism in the region. The two tasks are intertwined. I have explained this in some detail in several Weekly Worker articles: for example, ‘Belling the cat’ (December 12 2013) and ‘The decolonisation of Palestine’ (June 23 2016).

Moshé Machover
London

Single state

I was very surprised to read one perspective amongst the 41 CPGB theses on the Arab awakening in your last issue (‘Class, nation and religion’ February 2). These were adopted in 2011, but I can’t understand the position on Palestine, on a single-state solution. Would any of the Weekly Worker readers be able to clarify?

Point 34 declares: “The immediate call for a single Palestinian state, within which the Jewish Israeli nationality is given citizenship and religious, but not national rights, is, in present circumstances, to perpetuate division. Israeli Jews will not accept such a solution - the whole of the 20th century since 1933 militates against that. Israeli Jews would desperately fight with all means at their disposal ... and at huge cost in terms of human suffering and lives.” The point dismisses the idea of a single state as being too deadly to contemplate.

Obviously, this was drafted before Israel’s 2018 Nation State law, that essentially divided residents into those with national rights (for those declaring themselves Jews) and citizen rights (for everyone else). Establishing these rights exposes the fact that Israel is now, unashamedly, an apartheid state. The law was a response to the Vision Documents published by Palestinians in Israel in 2006-07, which advocated a radical liberal form of democracy, elevating the ideal of absolute equality among all groups. As Avi Dichter - the Likud Knesset member who first proposed the bill and was one of its main sponsors - made clear in the Knesset, “We are enshrining this important bill into a law today to prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizens.”

I don’t understand why the CPGB posits a directly opposite approach for a single-state remedy. One where Israelis declaring themselves Jews are given citizenship and religious, but not national, rights? There are 6.8 million people in Israel/Palestine that self-define as Jews. Do the CPGB really think a future single state, stretching from the river to the sea, might conceivably exclude these 6.8 million people from having ‘national’ rights?

It may be that the 2018 law has muddied the water for what the CPGB were thinking back in 2011, but I would welcome a clarification. Are they really suggesting that those who moved there since 1947, who have reared their families there, whose children were born there (who may consider themselves Jewish immigrants in a single Palestine) should be excluded from having the right to vote for their own national representatives in a future democratic Palestinian government? I don’t think even Hamas supports this position.

Pete Gregson
One Democratic Palestine

Proudest moment

I was surprised when I read thesis 26 of ‘Class, nation and religion’. It opens with an attack on the Trotskyist left and then homes in on the Workers Revolutionary Party “under Gerry Healy” - an attack on the Trotskyist left, centred on a party that had split many times, into continuing irrelevance, just over 25 years before the theses were written. I know there is an introduction that says, “Though obviously dated in this or that respect”, but I would have thought that even in 2011 there might have been more obvious targets.

We further have: “WRP’s colour daily paper Newsline pumped out an endless stream of foul anti-Semitic propaganda”. I was a member of the WRP from 1975 until the end - it tailed off into 1986 - and I don’t recall this “endless stream”. I checked with a friend - also an ex-member, who is Jewish - and she can’t remember it either. She also pointed out that there were several other Jewish members, some in relatively high positions, who would have raised objections - even against WRP leader Gerry Healy. Non-Jewish members, especially the journalists ‘pumping out the stream’, would have objected too.

The WRP did take money from some unsavoury sources, including the Middle Eastern regimes of Iraq, Iran and Libya (we also, by the way, did a lot of under-priced printing for them). Healy had to choose between Iran and Iraq in 1980 because of the war - he chose Iran.

However, my proudest moment in the WRP was when I joined the movement to oust Healy - there were plenty of reasons to do that. But, again, why go for them 25 years after their significance had ended and what is this “endless stream”? Some evidence might help.

I had never heard of the Weekly Worker in 2011, but now I am a strong supporter and proud to be a member of the CPGB. But I’m still surprised by thesis 26.

Jim Nelson
email

Distilled venom

I think I have worked out what the CPGB aggregate meant when it credited News Line with pumping out “an endless stream of foul anti-Semitic propaganda” under Gerry Healy between 1973 and 1985. The paper did appear daily and in colour and it did support the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The WRP marched and petitioned for recognition of the PLO as the Palestinian people’s sole legitimate representative. The paper interviewed PLO leaders and produced on-the-spot reports about the civil war in Lebanon. We were conscious of a responsibility arising from the Balfour declaration, which opened Palestine to Zionist colonisation against the wishes of the majority of the country’s population and in violation of their national right to self-determination. One can only assume that the anti-Semitism detected by the CPGB lies in News Line’s support for the PLO. In fact the paper is a proxy for the PLO, which the CPGB dare not openly denounce. It is the Palestinian resistance in its most heroic period that really sticks in the CPGB’s throat.

Thesis 26 is distilled venom, loaded with innuendo and crudely misrepresenting the paper’s position. The thesis takes particular exception to the idea of a secular, democratic Palestine, for which the PLO fought until about 1977. This “perverted” notion amounts to “the immediate abolition of Israel”, according to the CPGB. It “blurs into anti-Semitism”. It seems as if the CPGB has adopted the IHRA definition and its pro-Zionist examples avant la lettre.

The phrase about “a politically correct codeword” is intended to mean the WRP campaign was really aimed at Jews! And to cap it all they were only in it for the money. What a surprise! Any objective observer can clearly see that the CPGB’s method of amalgamating support for the PLO with anti-Semitism is straight out of the hasbara playbook. An uncanny parallel with the approach of that Zionist without qualification - Sir Keir Starmer KC.

John Spencer
London

Anti-Zionism

Taking together the theses on Israel-Palestine and the discussion in last Sunday’s Online Communist Forum with Moshé Machover, the nub of the issue seems to be the question of self-determination.

If we accept the proposition that the Israeli people are a nation and therefore have a right to self-determination, then any limiting of this can be seen as an attack on their existence amounting to anti-Semitism. But Palestine did exist, and the Palestinians have their own right to self-determination. The only path out of this contradiction would seem to be to work through it (in a negation of the negation) by opposing not the Jewish people, but the ethno-nationalism of Zionism.

For self-determination doesn’t include the racist domination of another people. Otherwise, the British empire would have been justified as the right of the English nation. This anti-Zionism would include convincing Jews, and everyone else, of the pernicious politics of Zionism, its history of repression (of secular Jews too) and its provocation of war. It would also involve encouraging socialist revolution against the Arab regimes and opposing the export of arms by the imperial ally in Washington to the Israeli ruling class.

Mike Belbin
London

Nonsensical

I thought the article by Ardeshir Mehrdad on the current situation in Iran was absolutely excellent (‘The future is being made today’, January 19). In effect, it was almost a mini-programme for taking the current protests in Iran to the next potentially revolutionary stage - intensifying, unifying and deepening struggles across an increasingly wide front, and identifying the next political, ideological, organisational and practical tasks necessary to be developed. And, crucially, how the popular mass democratic forces might not only effect the overthrow of the current regime, but be able to exercise a leading role in any post-regime Iran.

Although the history, stage of development, situation and circumstances of Iran are clearly very different to (say) the UK, there are, I think, significant parts of the article of relevance to a revolutionary programme and developing the mass struggle here in Britain.

Gerry Downing claims that Ardeshir’s article is completely “useless” - it doesn’t discuss the role of soviets (or mass organs of revolutionary popular power), it doesn’t learn or apply the lessons of 1979, etc (Letters, January 26). Clearly he didn’t actually read the article (the most charitable explanation). A significant part of it is precisely about learning the lessons from 1979 - there is even a section in which he asks: “How do they prevent the experience of the 1979 revolution recurring, albeit in a different form?” (!)

The majority of the article is a detailed and careful analysis and understanding of Iran in 2023, the complexity and range of forces at play and their current and potential interplay and actions. There is considerable detail, for example, on how alternative local structures, links, networks and organisations are being and should be formed, and how these ultimately could become the basis of an alternative, people’s democratic regime (my term, not AM’s).

I could provide extensive quotations to prove all my points, but I would try the patience of the editorial board and it is far preferable for people to read and study the article in full for themselves.

Yassamine Mather has rightly made clear that ideally a mass, influential, democratic-centralist Communist Party would make a power of positive difference in being able to help direct, organise and unify the wide range of struggles and protests taking place - integrating the struggles of the working class with the wider demands for democracy and human rights, developing the tactics and strategies necessary to advance the position of the working masses as a whole. But, given the absence of any such mass formation (and there is no such mass formation in the UK either, so we are in no position to lecture) and without ‘bowing to the spontaneity of the masses’, I think it is possible to be more optimistic that the more progressive, radical and pro-working class forces might nonetheless win through.

Ardeshir’s article outlines in some detail how militants, socialists and communists can and should work constructively within the mass movement, help develop it politically, practically and organisationally, and help take it up to the next level. I must admit a lot of the article did remind me of the subject matter of Lenin’s What is to be done? (although, obviously, pre-revolutionary Russia is different from today’s Iran).

Gerry Downing’s ridiculous “solution” for 1979 was that the Iranian masses should have placed their trust and confidence in some ultra-obscure Trotskyist sect who 99.999% of Iranian people would never have heard of - that is beyond absurd. Which of the numerous micro fake ‘Fourth Internationals’ was it affiliated to? Which imperialist-based Trot group was it an offshoot of? Did it have any workers as members or were they all university ‘intellectuals’? I would bet some money it was formed in a western university and not in Iran. Was its total membership greater or less than Socialist Fight?! (Can you have a membership of less than two?!)

I suspect Downing is not a real Trotskyist at all. He is a comic parody of the most ludicrous and absurd Trotskyist notions, designed to discredit and ridicule any concept of Trotskyism as a revolutionary doctrine - which, of course, it never was. Any genuine Trotskyist will be highly embarrassed by Downing with his nonsensical and ridiculous output.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Opportunist duo

In recent months, we have seen a heated conflict between the CPGB and the Communist Platform (CP) in the Netherlands. The former accused the latter of a “headlong collapse into the most abject centrism - that is, the opportunism of the post-August 1914 Kautsky sort”. The reason for this claim was the CP having supposedly “brushed over” the war in Ukraine to build ‘unity at all costs’ with the social-imperialist SAP-Grenzeloos within the larger De Socialisten project. More context for this discussion can be found in Weekly Worker letters published on October 20 and 27 2022.

After the letter from the CPGB’s Ollie Hughes on November 24, which ended with calls for a “defensive purge” in De Socialisten and the promise of “biting polemic”, the discussion went silent and relations grew cold. There were no more publications on the matter, pending an official talk between the boards of the CPGB and the CP. This talk took place in late January 2023. Shortly after, in the Weekly Worker of February 2, there suddenly was a joint statement regarding the war in Ukraine, and members are told that the conflict has been resolved in a “comradely” fashion.

Although we are genuinely happy to see a return of camaraderie between our like-minded organisations, this abrupt and mysterious ending has left British and Dutch comrades alike puzzled. Onlookers are left to wonder: what happened? What about the allegations of “abject centrism”, “opportunism”, “dropping principle”, etc? Which new arguments arose in the talk between the boards that convinced the PCC to drop its attack on the CP? The minutes of the talk indicate that there are still unspecified “real political differences” - what are they? And, finally, what caused the shift in the CPGB’s position, as indicated by the phrase, “While it is a tactical question whether or not to work in the same organisations as the social-imperialists …”, in the joint statement?

To truly wrap up the conflict between the CPGB and the CP it would be important to spell out the politics and reveal which shifts took place. As Lenin once said, “For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built.”

We hope to get the answer to our questions and we are eager to move on together as comrades once again.

Ryan Frost (CPGB), Andries Stroper (CP)

Class lines

In response to point 9 in your joint statement, I am afraid it is you who have crossed class lines and abandoned working class internationalism (‘Social-imperialism is betrayal’, February 2).

It is the ABC of Marxism that you side with the oppressed against the oppressor, irrespective of the nature of the oppressor - ie, irrespective of whether the oppressor falls within the imperialist or anti-imperialist camp (and Russia is on most counts imperialist).

To refuse to support the right of the Ukrainian people to defend themselves against the Russian invasion by whatever means necessary puts you firmly on the wrong side of the class divide.

Fred Kingdom
email

Social republic

I enjoyed listening to the Winter Communist University’s series of presentations, particularly Marc Mulholland’s discussion on the dictatorship of the proletariat. This letter is in response to that presentation and specifically a comment Marc makes at the end regarding Marx’s conception of a future state.

After bringing up a political sociologist’s interpretation of Marx’s conception of the state, Marc explains: “I don’t think Marx ever systematically got his head around how the state, so long as it exists, is to be both subordinated to the interests of the proletariat and, on the other hand, doesn’t become a dominant leviathan state that suffocates society.”

I’m curious about Marc’s take on the work of Bruno Leipold, Gil Schaeffer and to some extent Mike Macnair (in his emphasis on a future democratic republic) as advocates of the importance of radical republicanism in Marx’s thought. My reading of these thinkers (along with a dash of Hal Draper, Richard N Hunt and, of course, the writings of Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune) leads me to conclude the following: Marx did have an idea of how the state can both work for and remain subordinate to the proletariat during the transition period to communism, and that idea is a workers’ state modelled in the form of a social republic (to use Leipold’s phrase taken from the 1848 revolutionaries).

In theory, it’s this state form of radical democracy, seen in embryo in the Paris Commune, that allows the working class to take and hold power. I look forward to any responses on this topic.

Luke Pickrell
USA

Coal power

Jack Conrad’s piece on nuclear fusion was interesting and illuminating (‘Fusion is no solution’, January 26).

However, I have to take issue with him on the statement that “Solar and wind power is, of course, much cheaper than coal, oil or gas-generated power”. Just to set the backdrop to energy prices, there is no ‘free market’, when it comes to energy in the UK: the market is rigged and controlled to conform to government energy policy, which, “of course”, is hostile to coal in particular for reasons too obvious to me at least.

Actually coal and gas are the cheapest operating fuels per megawatt hour (MWh), but coal has a carbon penalty of two thirds of the selling price imposed upon it. It was doubled after the general election of 2015, with the added penalty that this carbon tax would be paid not when the coal was burned, but when it was bought, thus punishing the consumer for buying rather than using it. That was an extra twist of the knife, because the last big coal consumer was Drax and they had millions of tonnes on the ground, so they could carry on generating the same emissions, but with only a third penalty tax rather than the new two thirds one.

The desired effect was achieved. The last three mines, including my own colliery, were closed, as Drax stopped buying new coal and burned its stocks. So, while coal has a two-thirds tax, wind receives a two-thirds subsidy. Offshore wind has an average subsidy of £120 per MWh, with some giant turbines receiving a lot more. Two thirds of your energy bill and most of the standing charge you pay, whether you use any actual power or not, goes to ‘renewables’. Then there is the fact that over a 20-year period the government closed 200 coalmines and took 200 million tonnes off the market. Coupled with the war in Ukraine and the dearth of gas supplied, this sent coal into a rising price spiral. US coal is currently around £149 per tonne, while Hatfield Main was selling coal to Drax at £38 per tonne.

So, no, operationally wind is not actually cheaper: it’s subsidised and its competitors had their knee caps broken at the start post. But the point is that wind - or solar for that matter - do not supply base load: ie, the power which is available any time of the day or night, no matter what the weather is doing. That only comes from gas (which supplies about a third of all power to the grid), coal and nuclear. Gas is relatively scarce in the UK: when it was primarily a domestic fuel, there was a safe supply, but, deployed to drive coal off the market in the ‘dash for gas’, these supplies were and are rapidly diminishing. Clean coal power should be brought back on stream, allowing gas to return to a mainly domestic and specialist market.

Renewables are being adopted on an ever increasing scale, but not because they provide more efficient or actually cheaper supplies of energy. The idea that solar will out-supply coal fire generation on a world scale in two years time is frankly absurd. The latest figures I have show worldwide energy supply: coal 36.7%, gas 23.5%, nukes 10.4%, wind 5.3%, solar 2.7%. Jack tells us about a very windy May in California, when they managed to run the system mainly on wind. The truth is, the baby incubators, heart monitors and operating theatre lights can’t depend on a windy day - and they don’t. Last year energy supply in the US was petrol 36%, gas 32%, nuclear 12%, coal 11% and nukes 8%. So your average American electric car is about 70% fossil fuel driven, along with everything else electrical.

One average-size wind turbine (not the massive giants in the North Sea) requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic! So, if Jack wants to see the world energy supply dominated by turbines, we need to keep those coal mines working and dig some deep holes for the propeller blades (which are non-recyclable, of course). In fact only the wind is actually renewable, not the turbine.

Depending on the size of the turbine and the gear box, wind turbines require between 200 and 800 gallons of oil per annum to operate. So if you’re going to ‘just stop oil’, you will need some other solution to energy supply rather than ‘renewables’ - all of which require coal, oil and steel.

The ‘net zero’ idiocy applied to the UK comes down to this: steel manufacture produces 2% of UK emissions. So a hostile environment is created to tax and punish British steel manufacturers and make their products dearer than imports . Half of the steel-makers come out of primary steel production and the rest are wobbly. Half of them now simply recycle existing steel, previously made with coke and coal. So to comply with the net-zero target we could close down British steel manufacture entirely. Would that actually lower emissions? Unless you stop using the products - ie, the steel we previously produced - of course not. Someone else will produce it and make the emissions elsewhere and we will import their steel here. So the idea that we can create ‘net zero’ in a hermetically sealed atmosphere in the UK is puerile nonsense. We don’t actually manufacture the wind turbines here: they require coal and coke, as stated. So to be net zero let China produce them, and we will simply erect them, but the emissions will still have been made, of course. So the real solution to green steel is we don’t make any: we let someone else do it.

We have seen this social madness in the shape of energy suppliers, whose green solution is ‘Don’t use energy: we will pay you not to’! That reminds me of poor, desperate people selling their organs to private hospitals in exchange for money to eat. Sit in the cold, don’t cook or put the lights on - ‘net zero’: cracked it! That’s not exactly a socialist programme for industry, is it?

David John Douglass
South Shields

Kimist Korea

I am sending this letter to you, as other publications (with one notable exception) have not published it.

On the January 16, it was announced that the US will spend $50 million dollars on an effort by the so-called US Agency for Global Media to allegedly “expose the regime” (as they call it) of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The US is not investing millions of US taxpayer’s dollars to “expose the regime” to North Koreans, but to create more lies and propaganda against People’s Korea. Ultimately the real motive is to overthrow the socialist system and turn the northern part of Korea into a colony of US and world imperialism.

The US Agency for Global Media, which runs ‘Radio Free Asia’ and other propaganda stations, is a state propaganda tool of US imperialism - a means for the US to force its views and values on the rest of the world. In fact, it is a weapon of psychological warfare and ‘information terrorism’.

Some of the $50 million will be used to fund espionage, terrorism and subversion against People’s Korea. No doubt some of the money will find its way to ‘celebrity defectors’, who will use it to fund their lavish lifestyles and spend it on more plastic surgery and makeup. Some of the funds will be channelled to the CIA disinfo front, NK News, in south Korea and its staff will enjoy slap-up dinners in Seoul at the expense of the US taxpayer!

US and world imperialism’s silent war against People’s Korea should not be overlooked by the British left. But the US scenario for regime change will fail, because the DPRK will not make the mistake that former socialist countries made in opening their doors to imperialist ideology and culture!

Dermot Hudson
London