Letters
Chauvinist
Daniel Lazare is an unreconstructed Jewish chauvinist, and a social-imperialist for good measure. He repeats the slogan of Zionist colonialism that “Arab nationalism will never drive Israeli Jews into the sea” (Letters, March 16).
Similar fears were expressed by white settlers in southern Africa. I can well remember one Rhodesian woman, on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence, stating that the blacks would now murder her and her children in the night. Having butchered and massacred the black population in their thousands, these settlers feared that the same would happen to them. Fortunately the oppressed have always had a greater compassion and humanity than those who came to murder and exploit them. The same is true of the Palestinians. Their compassion and humanity stands in stark contrast to the genocidal mentality of Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and their Judeo-Nazi rabbis.
For Lazare’s information the only people who were driven into the sea were the Palestinians of Haifa in 1948, who, in their desperate rush to escape the barrel bombs and artillery being fired at them, rushed to the boats in Haifa harbour and in their panic many drowned.
This contempt for the sufferings of the oppressed contrasts with Lazare’s touching concern for Israel’s settler working class. A concern for the most racist and bigoted section of Israel’s population. Lazare’s belief that the privileges of Israeli workers are ‘spurious’ contrasts with his ignorance and disdain for Palestinian workers, who are forced to work under a permit system that turns them into little more than indentured labour - facing long hours queuing to get to work, having to pay brokers to obtain work and utterly dependent on Israel’s security forces - staffed by the very same Israeli working class that Lazare worships at the feet of.
I do not believe that the settler working class, be it Protestant in Northern Ireland - white in the deep south or southern Africa or Jewish in Israel - will voluntarily give up their ‘spurious’ privileges or has ever done so. Martin Luther King understood this better than the ‘Marxist’, Lazare. The reason for this is that these privileges - material, psychological and ideological - derive from their sense of belonging to the ‘superior’ race. Their day-to-day experiences of superiority are all too real. If Palestinians had risen up like the Jewish demonstrators in Israel one can only imagine how many would have been killed by now. This is the racism that Lazare is unable to understand. Even when, as in the case of Northern Ireland with the Protestants, the working class has only marginal privileges economically, their identification with a state that gives them a sense of power over the Untermenschen prevents all but the most basic economic alliances, and often not even that.
Marx held that the working class would be the gravedigger of capitalism. Unfortunately that has not yet come to pass. There are, I believe, reasons for that, but at least the working class in the west is a potentially revolutionary class. In settler-colonial societies where the working class identifies first and foremost on racial/ethnic lines with its ruling class, the idea that they will voluntarily give up their privileges and ally with the oppressed is a flight of fancy that in practice means that ‘Marxists’ such as Lazare are telling the oppressed to accept their position.
Such a position is utterly reactionary. Socialists support the working class for itself, not in itself. There is nothing sacred about the working class itself. In certain situations it can be revolutionary, but, where the form of the state is such that a section identifies with its own ruling class, it has lost its potential for revolutionary change. Lazare is one in a line of mechanistic Marxists who forget that Marx also said that a nation that oppresses another will not itself be free.
Lazare echoes the position of Militant and other reformist political currents, who preach workers’ unity, but fail to understand what it is that prevents that unity. Lazare tells the most exploited and oppressed sections of the working class to accept their lot in order that they can unite with their oppressors! He understands nothing and learns nothing from the current struggles against judicial reform in Israel. The mass protests have been conspicuous for the absence of the Arab working class. Perhaps Lazare - sectarian chauvinist that he is - might ponder why. Gideon Levy in Ha’aretz is a better Marxist than him - correct when he sees this as a struggle within the Jewish settler community. That is why there has been an adamant refusal of the demonstrators, apart from a small minority, to understand that Israeli Arabs have never experienced the democracy that Israeli Jews are fighting for.
As Gideon Levy wrote in Ha’aretz, “To most Israelis, real democracy is tantamount to ‘the destruction of Israel’. They’re right. True democracy will bring an end to the Jewish supremacism they call Zionism, and an end to the state they call Jewish and democratic. Therefore the threat of democracy is the existential threat, against which all Jewish Israelis unite …
“Therefore, the leaders of the protest make sure to steer clear of any true contact with democracy, lest the entire thing collapse like a house of cards. It is not due to racism or hatred of Arabs that they don’t want Palestinian flags or protestors … but only due to the understanding that raising the question of apartheid will render their struggle ludicrous ….
“When democracy is shouted with pathos by hoarse throats, while a half-hour drive away from the demonstration soldiers snatch civilians from their beds night after night with no judicial warrant; a town is under curfew because it fell victim to a pogrom; a thousand people are in prison without trial and rock-throwing teens are shot to death as a matter of course, the hypocrisy is impossible to stomach” (March 23).
As Ahmed Tibi remarked, Israel is democratic toward the Jews and Jewish towards the Arabs. Lazare, however, understands none of this. I do not know how Zionism will be brought to an end, but I am convinced we are seeing the beginning of the end with a fierce struggle within the Jewish settlers. Yes, Israel has overwhelming military strength in the region, but that is dependent on the support of the United States. If the US comes to the conclusion that the price of continued support for the Israeli state is not worth paying, then the end will beckon.
However, that depends on the Arab working class being able to overthrow their own regimes. Whether or when that happens I do not know. I do not have a crystal ball, but I am confident that the Israeli settler state is inherently unstable and that it is facing insurmountable contradictions even between its own Jewish citizens.
It is unfortunate that Lazare is unable to rise above his Jewish chauvinism - which sees the Palestinians, together with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as his main enemy.
Tony Greenstein
Brighton
Which unity?
Communist Reconstruction’s ‘core platform’ indicates that the journal will be worth reading (Letters, March 23). The comrades are to be congratulated on the spirit of their endeavour.
However, the aim of “achieving the convergence of all communists in Britain into a single Marxist-Leninist party” imposes a serious limitation on the project. The description ‘Marxist-Leninist’ was used by ‘official communist’ and then Maoist traditions to distinguish themselves from each other and from the Trotskyists. A focus on establishing a narrowly-defined party might rule out engagement with those comrades schooled in revolutionary socialist traditions which broke from the mainstream of the British communist movement in the course of the 20th century.
The goal surely has to be unity within a mass workers’ party rather than unity within a party of adherents of any one of the various political traditions of the workers’ movement.
Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire
Proxy war
I would be grateful if in future Anne McShane didn’t use me as a proxy through which to conduct her wars with the CPGB leadership (Letters, March 24).
Unlike her, I don’t make any fundamental division between those individuals who take the nuclear option to unilaterally close down Discord groups and those like McShane who are part of what Jack Conrad classifies as the ‘free speech, but …’ camp. While they differ in tactics and rhetoric, all these individuals seem to have political issues of one sort or another with the CPGB leadership’s admirably clear statement on the principle of free speech.
McShane says we need to consider the “effect of socialisation on people’s ability to straightforwardly argue their politics” and she’s angling for a softer form of dialogue that’s about listening to people. But this is just ‘safe spaces’ through the back door; it’s ‘free speech, but …’ and this is exactly how censorship and bad politics begins. It is utterly patronising towards the people one is addressing to think of their limitations prior to any utterance. I don’t give a fuck about my (utterly miniscule) audience on any platform, because I’ve found, bizarrely, only bothering with the gnomic and obtuse things that you really care about gets you … an audience of sorts. Sometimes that goes completely to shit, and you end up overshooting the mark. But who cares? I sincerely don’t.
McShane complains about being ignored by others. Well, this is something like an ever-present existential condition for most humans. I expect to be ignored by thousands of people this week in a variety of social settings, given that I accept my life isn’t some kind of gladiatorial stage. How would we actually stop people being ignored, even in less dense social settings? Are we going to have rules, whereby we have to pay decorous homage to certain ‘special’ comrades, lest we upset them? The very idea is monstrous.
Earlier this year, I noticed that the CPGB rightly warned its comrades of the inadvisability of being caught in the ‘rabbit hole’ of social-media debates. All this angst around ‘being ignored’ is a rather beautiful illustration of the consequences of falling down such a ‘rabbit hole’.
Lawrence Parker
London
To be done
Let us set out a few Marxist principles before we turn to the specifics of comrade Marc Mulholland’s political outlook, as set out in his two articles in the Weekly Worker (March 9 and 16).
All states are instruments of class rule. Only revolutions can replace the rule of one class by another, more progressive class. This includes Bonapartist state regimes and similar administrations which were/are dictatorial and seem to arise above society’s conflicting classes as an independent force seeking compromises. However, they, like all states, fundamentally prevent the rising revolutionary class from overthrowing its oppressors.
Fascist states are those where all the organisations of the working class have been eliminated as a prelude to the elimination of all political parties bar the ruling dictator’s own one. This describes Italy after Mussolini triumphed in October1922, and Franco in Spain in April 1939, and Germany after Hitler came to power in January 1933. It is threatening in Italy and the US today. Israel under Netanyahu’s far-right government with neo-Nazi ministers is clearly moving in that direction, as is the US/Nato client state in Ukraine. Fascism resolves the contradictions within a bourgeois state in a counterrevolutionary way as the complete triumph of the bourgeoisie.
Genuine social revolutionary situations are won or lost over a very short period of at most a few months, when the rising class wins the allegiance of the masses to its cause and consolidates that support in violent revolutionary actions, which consigns the reactionary class to the dustbin of history. Without decisive action in the brief period of a revolutionary situation, the masses lose hope and the opportunity is also lost. Oliver Cromwell cut off the head of King Charles I on January 30 1649 and this remains the single most revolutionary act in English history. It meant that the semi-feudal absolutist state was consigned to the dustbin of history, while parliament, representing the mercantile capitalists, ruled from then with a more or less constitutional monarchy.
The French revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in 1789, but that revolutionary process reached its day of reckoning in September 1793. Now revolutionary France faced an entire-world alliance of counterrevolutionaries, internal and external - five invading armies were closing in on Paris. But Maximilien Robespierre wheeled out Madame Guillotine and the reign of terror began. Revolutionary France executed first the Girondin compromisers, then the aristocrats and their supporters.
The Russian Revolution began in February 1917 and the women’s uprising drew to their banner great forces, which forced the tsar to resign within a week. Vladimir Lenin - later in 1917 politically reinforced by Leon Trotsky - fought for the ideology to make the socialist revolution: ‘All power to the soviets’, as against those who were giving critical support to the war and the Provisional government - primarily Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. With the support of the masses in the soviets secured (particularly the Petrograd one led by Trotsky), the storming of the Winter Palace with the support of the army ranks won that revolution. It was then militarily secured in the civil war by the Red Army, created and led by Trotsky in a revolutionary way, which was dedicated programmatically to the world revolution.
Once the Russian workers’ state was won after October 1917 and the dictatorship of the proletariat was established to suppress the inevitable counterrevolution, the centrally planned economy was democratically decided from the point of production. Its plan was to produce for human need and not for profit. Then, following Marx’s The German ideology, the super-abundance of wealth produced will manifest its superiority over the previous crisis-ridden system and the state will gradually begin to wither away, as suppression will no longer be needed. But this does depend on the victory of the world revolution, where production is based on the global division of labour and free international trade and culture is exchanged to the benefit of all humanity.
This vital constituent part of permanent revolution, as elaborated by Trotsky - its internationalism - is completely ignored by comrade Marc. This perspective of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks was directly contradicted by the theory of socialism in a single country, which is even more impossible than capitalism in a single country and is the prime identifying feature of Stalinism and its apologists.
All classes rule, via their states, primarily ideologically. The mailed fist in the velvet glove is powerfully wielded with full force only on those very rare occasions when their rule is fundamentally threatened. The velvet glove today is bourgeois democracy via universal suffrage and parliaments, and it is now progressively peeling off, as new laws against strikes and demonstrations for living standards, against women’s rights and against immigrants and human rights in general are increasingly wielded by the ruling class, as the crisis of capitalism and imperialism grows.
Comrade Mulholland perpetrates profoundly erroneous anti-Marxist positions on the state, revolution and the closely related question of what socialism and communism are - and what programme we need to advance the consciousness of the masses. He is wrong on the great French Revolution of 1789-94 and on the Paris Commune of 1871, because he treats ‘democracy’ as a non-class, abstract concept (or ‘extreme democracy’ as the CPGB likes to mask this confusion-mongering) - implicitly condemning the use of direct workers’ democracy via the soviets in the failed revolution in Russia of 1905 and the successful one of October 1917. It is the preserve of Stalinism and its apologists to propose that Marx saw socialism in England coming via parliament, as in the Stalin-imposed British road to socialism (1951), and they are forever seeking to replace the revolutionary Marx with a reformist Marx more like themselves.
Comrade Marc’s opening section on March 9 is very good and supportable. In fact, when he correctly designates the approach of Hal Draper and Lars T Lih to the dictatorship of the proletariat as “having an element of a liberal kind of bias - or ‘whitewashing’ if you like - of what Marx wrote”, we might think he is absolutely on the right lines. But he backtracks on this in the rest of the two articles and employs a type of Orwellian 1984 doublethink - the ability to hold two completely contradictory beliefs at the same time and to believe both are true. He says: “The dictatorship of the proletariat stage, whereby a revolutionary party takes power and consolidates it against its enemies, could well be quite prolonged as part of one of the succession of stages presented here in a schematic fashion. As such, it should be quite closely linked to ‘revolution in permanence’ in the sense that Marx used it. So, what does it mean when we say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is part of this process of revolution in permanence? What Marx seems to be talking about is how the proletariat, the wage-earning class, forcibly subordinates the state and other classes to its will (so long as the state and those other classes remain in existence).”
We can see from this passage that comrade Marc sees revolution as a national event only. He mistakes the historical raising of class-consciousness of the masses - through a series of victories won in struggle, which happens on a global scale - for the actual revolution itself and wrongly calls this process the “revolution in permanence”. This is essentially a reformist, and not a revolutionary, outlook.
From here on comrade Marc adapts to the political views of ‘red republicanism’, which sees the possibility of achieving socialism gradually through parliament. It is true that Marx made concessions to this viewpoint and did not clarify his views on the seizure of power by the working class via the dictatorship of the proletariat in his writings, including in the Communist manifesto of 1848. But he did clarify this point in his reaction to the lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871, which caused him and Engels to introduce their only amendment to the Communist manifesto.
There were major differences between the Russian Revolution and the Paris Commune. The prime difference was the existence of the Bolshevik Party, with its long history of class struggle, in which the revolutionary masses had put their confidence. Unfortunately, the Communards had no such leadership and that brief, though very inspiring, workers’ state was drowned - some 25,000 were massacred in May 1871. Lenin explains what revolutionaries needed to learn from the Commune in 1908 by quoting Marx. Lenin wrote: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune: viz, that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’.”
And in State and revolution (1917) Lenin again sets the record straight for Kautskyites back then and today: “... it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar ‘interpretation’ of Marx’s famous statement ... is that Marx here allegedly emphasises the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power ...”
Lenin tells us that in April 1871 - ie, just at the time of the Commune - Marx wrote to Kugelmann: “If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution on the continent. And this is what our heroic party comrades in Paris are attempting.” Lenin goes on: “The words, ‘to smash the bureaucratic-military machine’, briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the proletariat during a revolution in relation to the state. And this is the lesson that has been not only completely ignored, but positively distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite, ‘interpretation’ of Marxism!”
These words of Marx and Lenin directly contradict the political line of comrade Marc’s articles. He endorses Marx’s comments in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849: “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that is the way of revolutionary terror.”
Having endorsed this no-nonsense approach, at last he is on the right track, you would have thought. But no, immediately comes the backtracking, with comrade Marc equating the revolutionary Reign of Terror with the Thermidorian Reaction, which began with the execution of Robespierre and other leading revolutionaries in 1794, and with the ‘White Terror’, which led to the overthrow of the French Republic and the reign of Napoleon I. In contrast, Trotsky compared this counterrevolution in France to Stalin’s counterrevolution in Russia, which abolished the internal democracy of the soviets and the Communist Party. If you get the impression that comrade Marc, in order not to contradict Marx, is attempting to equate two opposite conceptions of revolution here - the violent uprising to overthrow the state and the gradual, legislative transformation of it peacefully - then you are correct.
And his confusion leads him to advocate federalism to avoid the dictatorship of the central state located in Paris and he wrongly asserts that this was Marx’s position. The growing emphasis on the federalism of US states from the central government is certainly not leading to enhanced civil liberties. With the push from Trump’s Republicans we see the complete opposite: attacks on women’s abortion rights, the LGBTQ+ communities and voting rights, to name but a few.
The initial soviet norms of directly elected and instantly recallable delegates is the correct mantra for the workers’ state - from the local to the regional, to the central supreme soviet. The very democratic Chartist demand for yearly elections to parliament is insufficient, although it does approach the notion of instant recallability.
Comrade Marc goes on to speculate on how the state could become a capitalist enterprise itself (state capitalism like China today, anyone?) and could then “simply cream off their profits” and would “no longer be reliant on income tax”, which unfortunately “ultimately encourages the preservation of the wealthy”. Oh dear - maybe not such a good idea, after all! Despite this being “an interesting approach”, it would make “the state interested in a profitable capitalist economy, even as that economy shrinks in weight”. If only those accursed laws of capitalism, like the falling rate of profit, could be abolished, then comrade Marc’s understanding of the ‘revolution in permanence’ and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could operate fine.
Having piled confusion on top of confusion, comrade Marc thinks that perhaps a way out can be found by employing the ultimate non-class, above-class, CPGB term, ‘extreme democracy’ - which thankfully no-one understands anyway. And then he concludes his two articles by saying: “There are, of course, problems in this which I do not think Marx resolved and which have not been resolved since. Work to be done!”
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and many Trotskyists since have tackled these problems and resolved them in far better detail than Marc in his articles. Study their classic works, comrade Marc - this is your “work to be done”!
Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight