Letters

Sectionalism

I welcome Mike Macnair’s clarification of how to relate to ‘group rights’ (including ‘trans rights’) in this diverse, divided time. Cis women and trans women do have common interests, along with the working class as a whole.

However, as he argues in his current series of articles, we should be opposed to sectionalism. Social fractions can organise, but they need have no official standing, no right to veto or threaten others’ freedom of speech. Though it is perfectly understandable, writes Macnair, why trans people should imagine that gender recognition on the basis self-identification works against the bureaucratic regulation of marriage and divorce, it is reformist: “like gay marriage, it leaves the core principles of state regulation intact” (‘Gender, class and capitalism’, February 22).

Social constructionism and the denial of biology are anti-materialist, and making self-identification the basis of special rights colludes with this. A policy against sectionalism, though with freedom to caucus, would mean opposition to organisations like Stonewall, which some gay and trans people have criticised and which has supported medical services in ‘gender reassignment’ that can include the chemical blocking of puberty. How many young gay males will survive the promotion of a sex change because they show ‘feminine’ inclinations like sexual attraction to males?

In the transitional period to a more equal society, it may be necessary for some element of risk assessment of self-identifiers in facilities like prisons and changing rooms, while evaluating the consequences of opening up some sports may be needed for the morale of working class female participants.

In Manchester 2022, black-clad trans activists disrupted a rally around a statue of Moss Side suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Objectors to open meetings like these cannot count on our support. Oppose sectionalism and separatism; equality for all consent-aimed sexual differences.

Mike Belbin
London

New nadir

Daniel Lazare’s letter achieves a new nadir in his refusal to see the colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (March 2).

In my letter of February 23, I pointed out that a necessary condition for the Arab and Hebrew workers to unite in revolutionary political action is “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.”

In response to this, Lazare goes to some lengths to lecture me about the underprivileged material position of Israeli workers … relative to their Israeli exploiters. This is an irrelevant diversion, as it is quite clear that what I wrote referred to the vastly privileged position of Hebrew workers relative to Palestinian workers! Is he just pretending to be unable to grasp a plain and obvious factual statement? I don’t think so. His persistent denial of the colonial nature of the conflict really blinds him to the glaring huge disparity in status and condition between Hebrew workers, “as part of the oppressor colonising nation”, and Palestinian workers, members of the oppressed nation, subject to cruel colonial tyranny.

Even within the pre-1967 Green Line, Jewish supremacy translates into a wide gulf in privilege, employment opportunities, pay and conditions between Hebrew and Palestinian Arab workers.

And in the West Bank: day in, day out, young working-class Israelis, in intimidating military gear and heavily armed, bully Palestinian workers, herded like cattle in checkpoints. Every night, in the small hours, working class Israeli soldiers raid and wreck homes of Palestinian workers. The former exercise the oppressive power and privilege of official Jewish supremacy; the latter are humiliated, powerless, in mortal danger.

And Lazare has the chutzpah to write: “Machover’s call for the Israeli working class to ‘give up its relatively vastly privileged position’ is particularly reactionary.” To address the enormous disparity in power and privilege, Palestine must be decolonised, Israel deZionised. As Matzpen has pointed out since the mid-1960s, and as I have explained repeatedly in Weekly Worker articles, this cannot come about without the consent and participation of the Hebrew working class; and this in turn requires a regional socialist revolution, and an Arab working class willing to extend a hand to its Hebrew counterpart.

But, to repeat: decolonisation/de-Zionisation is an essential part of the deal. The Hebrew working class cannot expect to retain its superior status relative to its Arab counterpart. Symmetric calls to ‘both sides’ to give up their nationalist ideologies are sanctimonious cant.

Moshé Machover
London

Confusion

Daniel Lazare says that he has been “pursuing Moshé Machover for some time”. Not only has he been unable to lay a glove on him, but he has succeeded only in making a fool of himself.

Lazare uses what he calls “proletarian internationalism” as a device for obscuring and minimising the exploitation and oppression of the Israeli Arab working class. What he does is to ask them to accept their status as a super-oppressed minority, economically and racially, in order to assuage and win over the Israeli Jewish working class.

To put it bluntly, Lazare is asking Arab workers to accept the chauvinism of their Hebrew counterparts as the price of joint working class unity. Not only is this a concession to the Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state, but it is fundamentally racist and in any event will not be successful, because Israeli Jewish workers feel no need for such joint action.

A settler-colonial state is a particular political formation which, as long as it survives, prevents any but the most basic joint economic struggles. As soon as the political nature of the Arab workers’ oppression is raised, then Jewish workers refuse to work alongside them.

In a settler-colonial state - be it South Africa, Northern Ireland or Israel - the settler working class sees as its main political enemy not its own ruling class, but the working class of the oppressed or indigenous working class.

The most ardent anti-Catholic unionists throughout the history of the Northern Irish statelet were the Protestant working class, who consistently supported the reactionary unionist parties that in turn supported the British Conservative and Unionist party.

In South Africa the white working class benefited from a colour bar that operated to protect their privileges and conditions. Much the same applies in Israel, where Jewish workers only were employed in security-related industries, and bars were placed on Arab employment in many industries, through devices such as requiring service in the Israeli army. The Israeli Histadrut labour federation, which was also a major employer, systematically refused to invest in Arab towns.

It is no accident that the Israeli Jewish working class is politically on the right of Israeli politics. They rightly understand that their privileges and perks are threatened by the demand for equality. It is in towns with a high percentage of Mizrahi Jewish workers that hostility to Arab Israelis is highest.

Yes, of course, Israel is one of the most unequal societies in the western world. But, if poverty stalks the Israeli Jewish working class, how much more does it affect Arab workers? Data from the National Insurance Institute for 2020 shows that 55.7% of Arab families in Israel were deemed poor compared with 39.7% of Jewish families. A 2016 NII survey found that 42.4% of Arab families faced food insecurity, compared with 13.5% of Jewish families. Among Arab children, the situation was even worse - 50.6% suffered from that.

In 2018, the education ministry admitted that there was a shortfall of more than 2,300 classrooms in Arab communities. As a Haaretz article put it, “The infrastructure gap in Arab schools isn’t only about funding, but about the difficulties that Arab local authorities face in land-use planning and public spaces.” This is a not too subtle way of saying that Arab local authorities have no land, because it has been confiscated for Jewish settlement and there are no master plans for Arab local authorities unlike Jewish communities. In other words, it is Israeli land apartheid at work.

Lazare pretends that Israel is a normal bourgeois democratic state, in which joint struggles can take place against racism, with all the difficulties involved. That simply is not the case. The Israeli Jewish working class has never - not once - engaged in joint political action with their Arab counterparts. It was with difficulty that the most overt racist discrimination against black British workers - eg, the Bristol bus dispute of 1963 - was overcome, so that now joint white-black working class action is common in Britain. Such a thing would be out of the question in Israel.

The rest of Lazare’s letter is a melange of nonsense and reactionary confusion. Political backwardness in the oil states is caused by the imposition of dictatorial regimes by the United States and British imperialism. The Israeli state, with the Abraham Accords, has acted to reinforce the alliance between these regimes and Israel. Lazare deliberately ignores the alliance between the Israeli state and reactionary Arab regimes. I have no doubt that the precondition for the overthrow of Zionism is the overthrow of the Arab regimes - which is why Binyamin Netanyahu reacted so fearfully to the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt in 2011.

I do not share the confidence of Moshé Machover that the Israeli Jewish working class can be won to joint struggle with the Arab working class. I suspect that, as in South Africa, the removal of political apartheid in Israel will happen when the west realises that the game is up and it withdraws support from Israeli apartheid. What Zionism has done is to make any two-state solution impossible with its colonisation of the West Bank.

What I am convinced of is that Hebrew workers will not give up their privileged position, both economically and politically. There is no precedent for this. As Martin Luther King observed in his letter from jail, “It is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but … groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

It is a lesson that Daniel Lazare, in all his righteousness, has yet to learn.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Oppressed nation

I have no hesitation in giving overwhelming support to the line of Moshé Machover and Jim Creegan against Daniel Lazare on the vital question of the nationalism of the oppressed (Letters, March 2).

Daniel writes some excellent articles, but there is a nuance here that we must be careful to deal with correctly. He charges Moshé with pessimism on the revolutionary potential of the Jewish Israeli working class. Jim writes of “unconditional support for the oppressed nation/people against the colonisers”, but GG correctly states (Letters, March 2): “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”.

The nuance that slightly favours Daniel is the fact that the Marxist term, from the early, Lenin/Trotsky Bolshevik Comintern, was “unconditional but critical support” to oppressed nations - and by extension to all the oppressed, when capitalism seeks to weaken and divide them in this way. Jim makes the wider points here very well. In the current war in Ukraine to demand that the soldiers on both sides turn their guns against their officers, unite with their fellow workers in the opposing army and fight for the socialist revolution now is simply ultra-left nonsense, concealing the failure to seek the defeat of the US/Nato and the victory of Russia in this proxy war.

Mixing up the pressing, immediate tactical demands with the ultimate strategic goal and substituting one for the other, as the Sparts (International Communist League) and others do, is a cardinal ultra-left error, designed to hide a capitulation to their own ruling class in that war. Lenin’s “fraternise with the enemy” in World War I was in conditions where this was happening - as in the 1914 Christmas truce, where an unofficial ceasefire broke out across the western front and then we had those football matches. There are no such reports now in Ukraine, nor in Israel. Moshé is correct on this; it will surely take big victories for the working class elsewhere to revive international class-consciousness in the Israeli and Ukraine working class, and there is nothing wrong with making that observation. No, we take the principled anti-imperialist stance of seeking the defeat of the US, the global hegemonic imperialist power, even if in decline.

Trotsky’s 1938 advocacy of the victory of “semi-fascist” Brazil over a putative British invasion was precisely based on an estimation of the level of class-consciousness of the Brazilian and British working class: a defeat for Britain would advance that in Brazil and, more importantly, in Britain itself, just as a Russian victory would advance the cause of revolution in the US and Britain by puncturing illusions in the invincibility of western imperialism itself.

To reinforce this message, Morning Star editor Ben Chacko has produced a review of Edmund Griffiths’ book, Aleksandr Prokhanov and post-Soviet esotericism, which has upset many true-blue Stalinists by exposing the political basis for much of Putin’s support in Russia - the thinking behind the growing nostalgia for the USSR. Of course, much of that support arises from the correct perception that the US and Nato seek regime change in Russia in order to allow its transnational corporations to take control of its oil, gas and other natural resources.

Ukraine is another ‘great patriotic war’ which requires the support of the Orthodox Church and the encouragement of religious illusions and Ben writes: “If you’re one of those puzzled by the juxtaposition of Soviet and tsarist iconography on Russian demonstrations, you need to read this book: as Griffiths observes, when finding Stalin depicted on an icon of the Virgin Mary no longer surprises us, ‘we shall have gained a valuable perspective on Russia’s contemporary political culture’.”

And he tells us how this nostalgia finds its expression today: “The ‘second cult of Stalin’ differs strikingly from his depiction in Soviet times. An example is the Russian protest chant, ‘Here’s how we’ll complete the reforms: Stalin, Beria, Gulag! ...’ For all its utterly different presentation, Putin’s Russia is Yeltsin’s Russia, with its hyper-presidential political system, its unfair elections, its oligarchs, and its rampant poverty. Widespread Soviet nostalgia has not brought back socialism or anything resembling it. Collapsing living standards, corrupt, untrustworthy authorities, social catastrophe, can give birth to bizarre conspiracy theories and reactionary, dead-end politics. And all those factors are at play in Britain today.”

Ben has a problem with the Young Communist League and their oft repeated slogan on demos: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Che Guevara! Stalin!” But his demolition of the politics of Putin and Stalin shows us that the secondary enemy in the Ukraine war is indeed “nothing resembling socialism” and we must not reduce our political orientation to a simple campism of good man (or woman) political struggle. Nor lose touch with our pressing tactical orientation, based on the current class-consciousness of the masses.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

DSA’s future

Daniel Lazare’s article, ‘Ohio’s perfect storm‘ (March 2), paints a devastating picture of American society dominated by capital and the market.

Occasionally, events take place with a bit of (morbidly) coincidental timing. Of course, it was not ‘fate’, ‘the stars’ or God that placed a ticking time-bomb in the middle of East Palestine. Lazare notes that the entirely avoidable disaster came just a few months after the Biden administration, with support from supposedly ‘socialist’ politicians, squelched a potential railroad strike (after decades of deregulation). As Malcolm X might have put it, this was a case of the chickens coming home to roost. As so often is the case, those who took the fallout from decisions made in an undemocratic political system were the working class.

The events in Flint, Michigan between 2014 and 2019 immediately come to mind. A predominantly black community of at least 100,000 residents (including 6,000-12,000 children) was exposed to lead via contaminated drinking water. Reportedly, a local GM car manufacturing plant, noticing the polluted nature of the water, had switched to a different source. Residents were, of course, left to drink the contaminated water. Then-president Barack Obama made a journey to Flint, in which he took the most tepid of sips from a glass of water to calm residents’ nerves. For several months, the hot topic of conversation was lead pipes and contamination. It turns out (shocker) that strong public infrastructure is not a priority.

As Lazare explains, the working class must be built into a force capable of taking matters into its own hands. Towards this end, socialists must be the ones denouncing the state’s complicity in East Palestine. Denunciations from the left must drown out the snake-oil peddling of Donald Trump and other cynics and manipulators. This being the case, the Democratic Socialists of America must endeavour to hold its members accountable to the organisation’s newly-created platform. Three DSA members - Representatives Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - voted to break a potentially massive rail worker’s strike last December. In so doing, they demonstrated the present ineptitude of the DSA as an organised political force.

My initial response to their actions was to put my name to an expulsion proposal. Many, like myself, felt that firm lines should be set and examples made of these ‘socialist’ swindlers. I’ve since been won over to the idea that expulsion without substance means little. Representatives Bush, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez don’t need the DSA, but the DSA seems to think it needs them, regardless of how they vote. Unless the DSA is built into a democratic-centralist, socialist political party, it will continue to trail Democrats and court betrayals. An endorsement from the DSA should carry weight. Until it does, we can’t say these politicians are ‘our electeds’ in any meaningful sense.

Ideally, the DSA will find itself in a position to run its candidates for office as tribunes of the people, who will denounce capitalism and the capitalist state for events like the one in East Palestine. The DSA national convention is in August: this will be an important event for determining the organisation’s direction. Will it begin to stand on its own as a political force independent of the Democratic Party and the capitalist state? Will the DSA endeavour to become the socialist party so desperately needed? Time will tell.

Luke Pickrell
USA

SWP and Zionism

Tony Greenstein claims members of the Socialist Workers Party are opportunists when it comes to criticism of Zionism (‘Not a minor issue’, March 2). He cites as evidence their refusal, in Stand Up To Racism, to shun the support of groups which are both supportive of Israel and willing to march in opposition to racism.

The consequences of applying a policy of ‘no platform’ to Zionists are worth considering. Sadly, little thought is given to this in his article, which instead focuses on aspects of history to prove the inadequacy of the SWP.

It’s true that the aim of the SWP’s Stand Up To Racism front is not only to demonstrate consistently on the streets that there is a vocal majority against racial prejudice. This activity also allows the party to expand its reach by encountering new contacts and potential recruits - it is an organisation on a trajectory of terminal decline and it has used SUTR as a life raft. The problem with the SWP isn’t its opportunism, but something shared by a number of organisations on the left: a practice of democratic centralism in which centralism outweighs the democratic process, allowing an unaccountable leadership to shut down dissent rather than be open about differences of opinion.

But this is beside the point. Let us imagine that in future the participation of Israel-supporting groups in anti-racist activities is prohibited. Tony does not explain how this would work, but he says that, for Palestinians, “the Israeli flag is like the swastika for Jews”. The logic of this statement is that, since the Star of David is featured on the Israeli flag, anyone displaying a symbol of their Jewish faith could be turned away from joining an anti-racist march.

Even if this were not the intention of a ‘no platform’ policy, it would create the spectacle of a group of people being prevented from joining meetings or marches against racism because of their faith - and effectively equate them with fascists, for whom the ‘no platform’ policy was devised. If this is not enough of an argument against it, in the media storm that this policy would generate, certain facts would be raised prominently in opposition: the most significant is that, although there has apparently been a decline in the percentage, a clear majority of Jewish people in Britain identify as Zionist. And this is by no means understood to relate to support for the occupation or opposition to Palestinian statehood. Rather this identity persists because of the fear that it may be necessary to escape from history repeating itself in Europe.

Of the groups Tony mentions, the Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland has charitable status - meaning any ban on the expression of Zionist ideology in this context would involve banning a Jewish charity. And, since recent street stalls of Glasgow Friends of Israel have been decorated with both Palestinian and Israeli flags, it would become obvious to the general public that these groups advocate a ‘two state’ peace process and do not act as uncritical loyalists.

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Majority, not 3.5%

Four climate activists from the campaign ‘Insulate Britain’ have just been found guilty of “public nuisance” by a jury after blockading a London street in 2021. Their sentence is yet to be announced by the judge, Silas Reid. Outrageously, he had already jailed two of the protestors for seven weeks after they ignored his ruling not to mention “climate change”, “fuel poverty” or “other motivations” for their actions. Last month, another Insulate Britain protestor was given an eight-week prison sentence for defying similar orders.

As Marx explained, the economic base creates its own superstructure that serves to protect, maintain and reproduce it - and these judges are very much part of that. A custodial sentence for holding such a protest - and for daring to explain why you did so - is an outrage all socialists must condemn.

Having said that, the fact that it was a jury which found the protestors guilty should give us pause for thought. Of course, these guilty verdicts reflect the immense power a judge has over an allegedly ‘independent’ jury. The judge is not some kind of independent arbiter who simply follows ‘the rule of law’: justice is not blind. Judges interpret the law from their own political perspective (which more often than not reflects that of the ruling class, from which most judges and barristers stem). It is the very reason why socialists ought to be careful about the possibility of using the courts to get ‘justice’ - the (very expensive) system is stacked against us.

But this jury verdict probably also reflects the fact that the tactics of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, etc leave a lot to be desired. These campaigns have either been set up directly by Roger Hallam or have been inspired by him. Hallam continues to follow his well-documented strategy of seeking to convince only a small group of people - namely 3.5%. This is how Extinction Rebellion explains it on their website: “We’ve got a plan - it’s called Project 3.5. The idea is a simple one: to build a movement that is too big for the government and the fossil fuel industry to ignore, and to do it one door at a time.” Hallam claims that he has studied protests throughout history and has found that it takes 3.5% of the population in support of a campaign to achieve change. “Simple” as that.

This strategic outlook leads to tactics that are designed to get those campaigns into the news - not convince the majority of people of the need to fight. In fact, blocking a motorway or walking slowly through London often achieves the exact opposite of what is needed: these actions piss off many working class people who need to get to work, attend a hospital appointment or get their kids to school. While the police mostly watch the protests, it tends to be angry ‘normal’ people who try to drag them off the roads. A very troubling sight. XR at least have now “paused” their disruptive actions, though it is unclear if they have abandoned them.

It is understandable that a lot of particularly young people are impatient in the face of the impeding climate catastrophe. Traditional organisations and demonstrations don’t seem to achieve very much and even two million people on the streets could not stop the war on Iraq. The Corbyn movement has been brutally defeated, for which its leadership was partially responsible. Today’s left is splintered into a number of competing sects, often with a near-identical programme of motherhood and apple pie. All the while, the planet faces eradication, which only urgent global action will halt. It is not surprising that many people look at groups like XR - they want to do ‘something - anything’.

Socialists are, of course, not opposed to direct action, which by definition is carried out by a small group of people, often in a clandestine way. The liberal campaign group, Republic, shows that a well-targeted PR campaign with a few bright yellow placards can also get you in the news (which seems Hallam’s main target). And organisations like Palestine Action focus on the visible structures of our enemy, when they sabotage and target projects and factories run by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.

But direct action - particularly on climate change - has to be part of a strategy of winning over the mass of the working class, if it is to be effective. If only 3.5% of the population are with us, we will never achieve more than small tweaks around the edges of capitalism. But all the solar panels and local energy production schemes in the world cannot stop the climate catastrophe. Quite the opposite: some are opening up a welcome new revenue stream for a struggling global capitalism in decline - from the ‘eco travel’ industry via materials to insulate homes to producing more electric cars. None of these challenge the basis of capitalism in the slightest, which by its own logic has to continuously grow and expand.

Instead of 3.5%, we need to win over the vast majority of the working class to make the radical revolutionary changes we need to save humanity and the planet. That takes time and, contrary to XR’s mantra, it is not “simple” - for a start, it requires the building of a mass, democratic Communist Party around a Marxist programme.

Carla Roberts
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