Letters

Symmetrical

Once more unto the breach with Moshé Machover …

I’ve been pursuing Machover for some time, because he advances a nationalist, anti-socialist and hence reactionary analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is all too characteristic of the so-called radical left in Britain, the US and numerous other countries too.

The latest exchange began six weeks ago, when Machover presented a relentlessly bleak assessment of the Israeli situation under the new Netanyahu government (‘Escalation on every front’ January 19). I criticised him in ‘Barking at the moon’ (February 2) for failing to discuss proletarian internationalism as a way out. Machover then fired off an angry letter on February 8, denouncing my suggestion that Hebrew and Arab workers are finding themselves in the same boat as an example of a “false symmetry” that seeks to portray the conflict “as a clash between two nationalisms and, in equivalence, as a ‘circle of violence,’ in which both sides suffer equally.”

My statement that “Tit-for-tat violence is exploding inside Israel and the occupied territories” was particularly irksome for him, because it implied that “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.” When I then quoted (Letters, February 16) a 1948 statement by the Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine, the local Trotskyist affiliate, that bourgeois nationalists on both sides were engaging in a “tit-for-tat of murder and provocation”, Machover acknowledged in the following issue that I had “dug up a couple of quotes from the distant past that used similar symmetric language”.

But he added: “He apparently expects his readers not to observe that what could charitably be excused as myopia back then is inexcusable gross error now, after more than seven decades of Zionist expansion, ethnic cleansing, rampant Jewish supremacy, armed land robbery, settler gangsterism and massive, merciless military brutality. Lazare is satisfied to reuse the old facile formulas as if nothing has happened since the 1940s.”

So I’m guilty of living in the past, apparently. Nonetheless, I think this latest tit-for-tat has been productive. The reason: Machover essentially concedes in his latest letter that he sees no solution to the crisis, which was exactly my point to begin with.

As he puts it, “A necessary condition under which Arab and Hebrew (aka Israeli Jewish) workers can possibly unite in revolutionary political action is through joint uncompromising opposition to Zionism and joint support for the decolonisation of Palestine and for Palestinian national liberation. The Hebrew working class would have to give up its relatively vastly privileged position as part of the oppressor colonising nation” (emphasis in the original).

Given that Israeli workers are unlikely to do so, “It is therefore obvious why such unity would be extraordinarily hard to achieve, and is unlikely to be forged under present regional and international conditions … Hence my pessimism of the intellect, which Lazare derides.”

But Machover is wrong. I don’t deride “pessimism of the intellect”. On the contrary, I would merely remind him of the second part of the slogan commonly attributed to Antonio Gramsci (but which was actually coined by Romain Rolland) - which is to say, “optimism of the will”. Together, what the two halves add up to is this: while it’s important to face up to the facts, no matter how unpleasant they may be, it’s equally important to strive for a revolutionary solution to the crisis and wrong to reject a priori any possibility that such a solution may exist.

There is a solution, and it lies with the very symmetry that Machover rejects. Yes, the “correlation of forces”, to use the old Soviet term, has grown increasingly lopsided since the 1940s. Yes, imperialism is ultimately the cause - not only due to the military aid that the US has poured into the Jewish state, but to the debilitating effects of oil imperialism on Arab politics. By propping up reactionary governments from north Africa to the Persian Gulf, the post-war oil regime that America has engineered from top to bottom has spread not just tyranny and corruption, but all the other rentier-capitalist dreck that goes with it: incompetence, patronage, religious sectarianism, the hideous oppression of women, and so forth.

This is what has allowed Zionism to triumph again and again - not only Israel’s own strength, but Arab weakness in all avenues of life. Hence, Zionism can’t be overthrown until (a) Arab workers mobilise against institutionalised backwardness in their own backyard and (b) join with Hebrew workers in combatting forces that are dragging them backwards as well. They must engage in joint struggle against capitalist governments that are jointly spreading oppression throughout the region.

Machover’s call for the Israeli working class to “give up its relatively vastly privileged position” is particularly reactionary. What privileged position is he talking about? While Israel has unquestionably achieved ‘first world’ economic status as a whole, wealth polarisation is off the charts and conditions are increasingly stagnant for a growing portion of the proletariat. Among 22 OECD countries, the Jewish state is second only to the US in terms of income inequality. Even when the Haredim (ie, ultra-orthodox Jews) and Israeli Arabs are excluded, inequality is still greater than in all OECD countries minus the US and UK - 23% of Israelis live below the poverty line, along with 31.7% of all children. Half of the food industry is in the hands of just five corporations that are merciless in jacking up prices.

What would Machover have Israeli workers do? Atone for their sins by agreeing to more poverty and less income? It’s a slander on socialism to say that its goal is a decline in material conditions for Jewish workers. On the contrary, its goal is to increase living standards for Jews no less than Arabs. Currently, Israelis live in a state of siege that is the source of the Zionist regime’s strength. They can’t set foot in neighbouring countries, they’re culturally cut off and they’re surrounded by war, violence and religious fundamentalism on every side. One moment Hamas is handing out candy to celebrate the murder of seven Jews in East Jerusalem, while the next moment Israeli settlers are doing the same to celebrate the murder of six Palestinians in Nablus.

The purpose of socialism is to abolish borders, to allow for free travel and free exchange, to permit people to live and work wherever they please and, above all, to put an end to such disgusting violence. The goal is to enable Israelis to take part in the socialist reconstruction of the Middle East, to develop transportation and communications links across the region and to help integrate the Mediterranean into a single economic whole - something that hasn’t existed since ancient Rome. Instead of viewing Israeli workers as enemies, the aim is for the Middle East masses to see them as comrades and to recognise, moreover, that there’s no way out of the impasse until they do. Yet Machover’s view of the Israeli proletariat as part of an “oppressor colonising nation” implies the opposite, which is that Israeli workers must pay and pay for the crimes of their own ruling class.

This is not socialism, but petty-bourgeois nationalism. Today’s Middle East is as much a prison house of nations as the old tsarist empire. Dozens of minorities - Berbers, Kurds, Christians, Alawites, Shi’ites, etc - groan under the yoke of religion and nationalism, and now Jews do also. The increasingly symmetrical nature of their condition is what makes a socialist victory possible. Yet Moshé Machover rejects it out of hand.

Daniel Lazare
New York

Unconditional

When in 1916 the future Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek, wrote in the continental Marxist press that the Easter Rising in Dublin was a petty bourgeois putsch, having nothing to do with socialism, Lenin famously replied: “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices … is to repudiate social revolution” (original emphasis).

It is obvious that, in taking the side of the Easter Rising against British imperialism, Lenin did not intend to promote the petty bourgeois nationalist prejudices of most of its leaders, but to declare his solidarity with the rebellion of an oppressed nation against the world’s then leading colonial power despite the class position and politics of its leaders and popular base. Arguably Lenin’s greatest achievement, second to the October Revolution, was to place Comintern squarely on the side of the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century - a position far from unanimous even among revolutionary socialists of the time.

Lenin’s contribution on the national question appears to have escaped Daniel Lazare. He seems to believe that the Marxist answer to national and racial oppression is simply to advocate class struggle across national/racial lines, and condemn nationalism/chauvinism on all sides as equally pernicious. To the slogan, ‘Black lives matter!’, which arose in response to the electronically captured 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Lazare counterposed the slogan, ‘All lives matter’ - chanted at rightwing counter-demonstrations - missing by a mile the protestors’ point that black lives in America past and present have mattered much less than white ones. In his more recent exchanges with Moshé Machover on Israel/Palestine, he argues that Marxists must equally condemn both Zionism and the Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

National/racial oppression denies the full humanity not of any one class or segment of the population, but of all members of the subject group (although its plebeian majorities invariably get the worst of things). It is therefore a common - almost spontaneous - reaction of the oppressed to respond with an inverted mirror image of the ascendant group’s ideology. In answer to the dehumanisation of all classes in their community, there arises a nationalist politics, which promotes the unity of all classes therein as the key to emancipation.

To the long-entrenched American racist belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, many prominent, self-appointed black spokespersons argue that police brutality and mass incarceration are merely contemporary variations on a timeless and immutable Caucasian animus against African Americans. Sexism is said by some feminists to be rooted not in history or institutions, but in an inborn ‘toxic masculinity’. It should then come as no surprise that many Palestinians, few of whom have ever met a non-Zionist Israeli Jew, should take at face value Zionism’s claim to represent all Jews, and thus see all of them as the enemy.

Such beliefs can, as Lazare points out, lead to tragic, random - sometimes lethal - attacks upon Jewish civilians. Similarly, the fight for Ireland’s independence a century ago was marred by several sectarian murders of Protestants, and the post-World War II Algerian national struggle was punctuated by indiscriminate bombings, and a couple of gruesome massacres, of French colons. At issue, however, is whether nationalist leadership, and the unsavoury excesses for which it may have been responsible, invalidated the struggles of these nations for self-determination, and whether today the presence of Islamists and anti-Semites in certain leading Palestinian bodies invalidates the wider struggle against Israeli occupation and apartheid.

The question is not whether to oppose the nationalism/chauvinism of the oppressed, but how. Lenin was emphatic that the workers’ movement must take the lead in the fight for all democratic rights - prominent among them the right of national self-determination. Where it is denied, criticism of the leaders of national emancipation struggles must take place within the framework of unconditional support for the oppressed nation/people against the colonisers. This revolutionary stance goes back further than Lenin. Marx and Engels insisted that the First International champion Ireland’s right to independence as the key to overcoming the antagonism between Irish and British workers.

It is this framework of support for Palestinian rights that is absent, or at best ambiguous, in Daniel Lazare’s articles and letters. While conceding that Palestinians are unequal to Israelis, the major thrust of his writing suggests that support for Palestine against the Zionist state be made conditional upon renunciation of support from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nor does he insist, as Marx and Lenin would have, that any Jewish working class opposition to the Israeli government make Palestinian self-determination foremost among its demands.

It is highly unlikely that any section of the Jewish Israeli working class would be receptive to such a demand at present, or in the immediate future. Israel is indeed a fragile society, roiled by conflicts among different Jewish groups, and made even more unstable by the extreme-right coalition now in power. But it is also a US imperialist-backed settler state, based upon the dispossession and persecution of the area’s original population.

The fact is that, whatever their mutual antagonisms, anti-Palestinian solidarity among Israeli Jews of all persuasions and classes is stronger than ever. The liberal Zionist ‘Peace Now’ movement, which once enjoyed significant middle class support, has been relegated to the outer margins. A Marxist class-struggle programme is almost impossible to put into practice in certain situations. Demanding, however, that oppressed peoples adopt such a programme as a precondition for siding with them against their oppressors is a sure guarantee that Marxists will never get a hearing - not only among Palestinians, but among the world’s many victims of national/ethnic domination.

Jim Creegan
New York

Women’s role

It is necessary to respond to the misguided politics of one Daniel Lazare, who purports to be someone with ‘socialist credentials’ (my term).

Firstly, he was approaching the issues of feminism (not a pejorative word in my book) with the eyes of a backward ‘new left’ activist - there was huge pushback from women against male chauvinism in the US, which directly spawned the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. Women’s issues had been marginalised, if they were considered at all. And that was across the political spectrum - Elaine Brown, for example, left the Black Panther Party in the late 1970s because, when a woman got beaten up by men who were distraught about taking ‘orders’ from a woman, Huey Newton refused to defend her, taking the side of the men.

Someone who focuses inordinately on the circumstances of motherhood (‘Not equality to compete’, January 19) I have no issue with - except by not offering political balance and a socialist perspective in the way of talking about the oppressive, traditional role of motherhood in the patriarchal system - it effectively reinforces that oppression and takes a reactionary stance; my opinion. A socialist should not support, by obscurantist or negligent politics, the reality of inferiority which the role of motherhood represents.

I can’t help wondering how this pitiful tract made it into the Weekly Worker - there’s probably something redeeming about it which I’m missing. He mistakenly refers to Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich as women who didn’t support a woman’s choice of motherhood: in fact they didn’t support the social, economic and political role of motherhood in class society - there’s a difference.

Where do women fit in with Lazare’s retrograde, utopian “needs of society”? (Will capitalism satisfy my needs in a kind of reformist modus vivendi?) His idea of the societal, abstract “needs” gives me flashbacks to a dystopian fantasy world. The “needs of society” require not as many mothers as possible, as he implicitly advocates; they require a revolutionary, socialist overthrow of the dire material and cultural conditions which create the sexual and gender roles that enslave us all and that preempt the free, independent choice of anyone to be a mother.

GG
USA

Core party?

Both Carla Roberts and Talal Hangari suggest the Socialist Campaign Group is entirely self-interested (‘Open for business’ and ‘A study in betrayal’, February 23). But is there not a logic to what they are doing, which is comparable to the continued affiliation of trade unions to Labour? Some unions have scaled back their funding for Labour under Starmer, but they aren’t going to quit entirely, because they might get some reforms under a new government.

Perhaps it makes sense for the SCG MPs to hang in there, even if the stitched-up selections for winnable Labour seats mean that they are unlikely to grow their faction. In future they may get to vote - or crucially not vote - for legislation brought forward by a Starmer administration. I am not suggesting here that the SCG strategy is the correct one - or that we should refrain from criticism. I am merely pointing out that there’s more to it than careerism.

The fear of those around Starmer is that the party will not win a sufficient parliamentary majority to completely dilute the bargaining power of the SCG. Any manifesto commitments Starmer makes to the unions in exchange for funding will be harder to abandon in such circumstances, as the SCG MPs could then potentially hold out on supporting other parts of the government’s legislative agenda in exchange for reforms.

The bourgeois press has reported that Blair has advised Starmer - at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places - to completely purge the SCG. But this would be a high-risk move at this stage. It remains an option for the future, but the threat of individuals being treated like Corbyn may be enough to enforce the silence and submission which Starmer demands.

Certainly for most pro-Corbyn party members, this has been viewed as an intolerable situation and they have quit. But, for the SCG, quitting wouldn’t just deprive them of a continued career in parliament - it would deprive the most militant sections of the proletariat of a bloc of MPs which might form the core of a new workers’ party.

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Russia’s won

The rouble rises, as European economies crumble. Has Biden bitten off more than he and Nato can swallow? Is it really one year already? Did anyone say it would be over by Christmas, like they did in 1914? Well, Christmas has come and gone and, very much like the trenches of World War I, ground lost and won can sometimes be measured in single-digit kilometres.

To be fair, Russia is doing most of the winning and Ukraine is doing much of the losing. How did this ever come to pass? Well, context and history will show that American leaders promised Russian leaders that Nato would not expand one inch east towards the Russian borders after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They lied. Since 1991 Nato, in tandem with the European Union, has marched steadily towards Russia’s borders and many of the ex-Soviet satellite states are now de facto EU and Nato members, with American/Nato nuclear bases now within strike range of Russian cities, military infrastructure and the Kremlin.

As part of this encroachment policy, each country which borders the Russian Federation is a geopolitical target for American/Nato/EU recruitment. If they can hoodwink the populations of the targeted states with promises of a land of milk and honey within the European Union, while compliant state establishments and political leaders encourage a ‘yes’ vote for accession into the Nato-dominated EU, then another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of a new Russophobic Europe is complete.

If, however, the targeted state - in this case Ukraine - does not toe the line of American client states, then unpopular coups are the orders of the day. Witness Maidan Square in 2014 - the fascist stormtroopers of American imperialism led the violent, murderous insurrection of a western-financed and armed coup and voilà, as the French might say - a country opposed to joining Nato and the EU, whose leaders had planned that Ukraine would remain a neutral sovereign state, were forced to flee for their lives from the fascist lynch mob and Ukraine became a de facto fascist armed camp, whose political policies were being dictated by the Democratic Party leaders in the USA and not the undemocratic, unelected coup leaders in Kiev.

The fascists now in charge in Ukraine began the systematic repression of the Russian language, Russian culture and the Russian-speaking peoples of Crimea and Donbas. Political opposition was banned, and the militarily occupation of Luhansk and Donetsk began. The seeds of Ukraine’s implosion may have been sown during World War II, when many Ukrainian fascists joined the German army and committed heinous war crimes against their fellow Ukrainians, including Jews, communists, socialists and those they considered racially impure. Those seeds were then watered, nurtured and harvested by the imperialist, hegemonic west in 2014.

The result? Two breakaway Ukrainian Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are now members of the Russian Federation. The Crimea is now also a part of it. We have witnessed the deaths of over 14,000 eastern Ukrainians, murdered by their own government between 2014 and 2022, two broken agreements (Minsk 1 and Minsk 2), the duplicitous clown of a president in Kiev and a stumbling, bumbling, mumbling, forgetful clown of a president in Washington - both intent on fighting Russia to the last 16-year-old Ukrainian boy or girl.

As part of the American/Nato strategy to put boots on the ground, planes in the air and nuclear missiles within a few minutes reach of Moscow, their brinkmanship has led us to the cusp of a global engulfment with potential nuclear escalation. The west’s combined greed - coupled with its need to remain the dominant world superpowers, backed by American military superiority - has created a false sense of invincibility and a level of brinkmanship that defies logic.

From instigating a regime-change coup in 2014, to being signatories of the internationally recognised Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 accords, the west - including leaders in Berlin, Paris and Kiev - have blatantly lied, and signed agreements they had no intention of implementing. They have now stated publicly that those accords were simply used to misdirect Moscow away from their true intentions, which included the reorganisation and rearmament of the Ukraine fascist-led forces, the reoccupation and possible attendant massacres in the now independent republics of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.

The Russian special military operation to deNazify Ukraine began in February 2022. Its sole purpose was to defend the new republics from a fascist-led pogrom, the possible massacre and brutal repression of local Russian-speaking citizens, many of whom have memories of the German/Ukrainian brutal Nazi occupation and war crimes committed against them by the Ukraine Banderite fascists in 1941.

America started this war with its fascist-led coup in 2014. Many people refused to live under an unelected fascist junta and they resisted. The threatened Ukrainian invasion, reoccupation and possible massacre of civilians in the breakaway republics forced Moscow to intervene to protect the populace - an intervention that was eight years too late. Russia believed Germany and France, when they said they would guarantee that Kiev would comply with the Minsk agreements. They lied, Russia was deceived, Kiev was rearmed and the Russian Federation given no choice but to conceive of a plan to defend the innocent from slaughter. The outcome is a de facto Nato/American-Russian war in eastern Ukraine.

The sanctions imposed by the west have backfired. Germany is being deindustrialised. The collective western imperialist countries, the empires of old, are heading into recession. The rest of the global south, Asia, Africa and others, which account for 87% of the world’s population, are now focusing on a multipolar world, where respect, tolerance, acceptance and mutually compatible interests combine to the benefit of all parties.

Countries that believe in observing international law are coming together to form a new world order. The threat of mutual nuclear destruction is being replaced with the promise of mutual cooperation. Uncle Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s war on Russia has spectacularly backfired. Mishandled and misjudged from the very start, the dream of balkanising Russia for the benefit of American and European capital has failed. The hope of fragmenting the Russian Federation for profit and plunder is over. American hegemony is failing.

It is only in writing this piece that I now realise the true hope that lays before us. Hope in humanity, hope in a better more equal world and hope for future generations, born into a more progressive, tolerant multipolar world. I have visited Donetsk and Luhansk and have many friends there.

Russia has won the war both within and without Ukraine on the political, ethical and military battlefields. What we must all do now is demand Zelensky goes. After all, he was elected on a mandate of seeking peace with the people of eastern Ukraine, not butchering them. A negotiated, comprehensive peace deal must be concluded - although, going by the sad shenanigans of the west, how could Russia possibly believe anything Kiev and others might sign?

I am content to let others describe the depth of the war and how it has progressed on the battlefield. I see the bigger prize: global peace secured by mutual, honourable advocates for multipolarism; the end of western imperialist hegemony, which invades and destroys its targeted enemies, causing millions of deaths, displacements and refugees.

Haven’t the poor of the world been occupied, exploited and mistreated enough?

Fra Hughes
Belfast