Letters

Confusion

I appreciate comrade Macnair’s report on the 2023 Platypus International Convention (‘History and anti-history’, April 20). In part, however, the report reads like a ‘notes to self’, and Macnair seems to have misheard what was said when he writes: “Later DL Jacobs from Platypus argued that the spectacular rise of the DSA was merely a result of the left being frightened by the ‘Tea Party’ and circling the wagons round the Democrats.”

Macnair is confusing two different things. I said: “The Tea Party and the 2010 midterms frightened the left to circling the wagons around the Democrats. In 2009, Newt Gingrich spoke of Obama’s ‘European socialism transplanted to Washington’. [The left] merely wished this was true.”

The anti-war left had collapsed into the Obama presidency and, when they saw the Tea Party, treated it as driven by racism against the first black US president - in fact, even in retrospect, that is still assumed. This is not the same as the ‘Trump Bump’, which, in retrospect, is treated as a phenomenon of Bernie. Thus, as was said later in the same remarks: “For the doldrums of the present would have likely happened if Clinton won in 2016. While Sanders was called a ‘socialist gift from the gods’, it really was Trump that delivered the goods. People joined DSA because of the promise that Bernie would have defeated Trump, after they were promised this by the ‘pragmatic, ‘progressive’ Hillary Clinton.”

DSA national director Maria Svart said of the new members: “You could literally see the moment when Trump was declared the winner.” In 2017, Joseph Schwartz acknowledged this in his retrospective of the history of DSA: “DSA veterans and national staff were shocked to see that on the day after Trump’s victory one thousand people joined DSA (in our best past year maybe 1,200 new members joined over 12 months). From November 9 2016 to July 1 2017, over 13,000 people - mostly between the ages of 18 and 35 - joined DSA.”

Trump did speak at Tea Party rallies, but the Tea Party was truly dead before Trump ran in 2016. Trump was able to connect up the demands of both Occupy and the Tea Party, whereas Ted Cruz, for instance, simply thought one could not draw a “starker contrast between Occupy and the Tea Party”. The left shared Cruz’s opinion.

Trump and Sanders were a dual phenomenon of the crisis in capitalist politics and their affinity was not accidental. Trump would say that Sanders had “some very good material” and welcomed Sanders supporters with open arms (one in 10 Sanders voters accepted the invitation, according to Paul H Jossey, writing in Politico on August 14 2016). Collapsing Trump into the Tea Party loses the qualitative change in capitalist politics he represented.

“The good intentions of being a socialist do not rule out a bourgeois-democratic essence,” Lenin once remarked. It should not be surprising that I stated capitalist politics is socialist. For, as I continued in my opening remarks, what made socialism potentially emancipatory was proletarian socialism (hence, the Kautsky ‘fusion’ formula!). It is not the what, but the how. Only proletarian socialism could potentially overcome the self-contradiction of labour by taking the poles (labour and capital) to their extreme.

What gave rise to the modern idea of communism was this self-contradiction. Engels would later recount that Marx and his views had converged in the early 1840s precisely on the point that communism “now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat” (‘On the history of the Communist League’, October 5 1885). The proletariat struggles just as much with the unconscious socialisation of society as it does with private property.

The same necessity impresses itself on capitalist politics, not just in the recent government enforced socialisation of banks, but also with democracy. Marx’s image of Louis Bonaparte hobbling together different classes to build a railroad shows just how effective democratic and socialist demands can be to weld the masses to the capitalist state. The classic characterisation of capitalist production as the contradiction of private property and socialised production means that the problem cannot be reduced to ‘free markets’; one is mistaken in believing that state interference is any more anti-capitalist than the other side of the contradiction!

Indeed, Rosa Luxemburg responded to Eduard Bernstein well over a century ago that the further socialisation of society and the extension of democracy can be the means to further strengthen “private property” and the “open capitalist exploitation of the labour of others”. Why? The socialisation of production, set in motion by bourgeois property relations after the industrial revolution, is also the cause of proletarianisation or the destruction of bourgeois social relations. ‘Private property’ is really demanded by the resultant industrial reserve, who seek to be recognised by society - whether through exchange of their labour power or the exercise of their rights as citizens to demand the state find a stopgap. This only further sets in motion the self-contradictory dynamic, retarding both the possibility of completely realising either labour or capital.

Hence, the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a means to master this self-undermining dynamic, so that it does not continue in an obscure and estranged manner. So, yes, capitalist politics is socialist, but only proletarian socialism could be emancipatory.

DL Jacobs
USA

Decisive shift?

Anne McShane’s review of People Before Profit’s pamphlet, The case for a left government, suggests that in Ireland there is now a decisive theoretical shift in the Socialist Workers Network towards coalitionism, perhaps even ‘ministerialism’ (‘Chasing after cabinet seats’, April 27).

However, unlike comrade McShane, I think this is a welcome development. It at least confirms that a significant force on the Irish left is committed to a road to socialism which runs through a democratic republic, in which a revolutionary party contends in elections, as well as through the more traditional arenas of struggle.

This commitment will force comrades in and around PBP to contend with the history of social democracy, from the debates within the Second International on ministerialism to the experience of the constituent assembly in Russia, post-war revisionism, Eurocommunism.

And this political shift is of relevance to revolutionary politics in Britain, given the dominance within the PBP of the Socialist Workers Party’s sister organisation. It cannot be the case that PBP has published this document without broad agreement within the SWN. Thus the approach of the SWN is perhaps a break with the syndicalism and movementism of the SWP.

Given their continued affiliation with the British SWP as part of the International Socialist Tendency, it is not be unreasonable to assume a high degree of agreement on their direction of travel. To prove their commitment to PBP, the Socialist Workers Party in Ireland has become the Socialist Workers Network. Does this set a precedent for the British SWP?

Certainly, when the question of a new workers’ party is raised, leading figures in the SWP won’t rule out participation. But will they go as far as the SWN?

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Spider-writing

Anne McShane writes: “… SF’s vice-president and leader in Northern Ireland has just announced that she will be attending the coronation of Charles III and Camilla on May 6.”

At least the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, proposed a ‘dual monarchy’ à la Austria-Hungary, but SF now bends the knee to the murderous foul rag, the royal standard, and the spider-writing power behind ‘British democracy’.

Meanwhile, the tame British ‘republicans’ prudently praise modern presidencies ... Frankly, give me today’s Woman’s hour anecdote, claiming that, since Elizabeth I, the monarchist Brits are not so much ‘regalists’ as ‘reginalists’ (all feminists now). They quote a little Brit boy: “Does the coronation of Charles mean that now a man can be queen?”

Jack Fogarty
email

Terrorism

David Douglass uncritically supports the strategy and tactics of the Provisional IRA in their fight against the British state (Letters, April 27).

I will refer to the pamphlet, Marxism opposes individual terrorism, produced by Militant in the early 80s, which opposed the strategy and tactics of the Provos. It refers to the famous saying by Leon Trotsky that “terrorists are just liberals with bombs”. Terrorists believe, like the liberals, that a change of personnel at the top of the capitalist state is all that is necessary to bring about change. Just supposing Margaret Thatcher was killed by the Brighton bomb - an equally vicious politician would’ve been put in her place.

As Eddie Ford correctly points out, the Provos, like the leaders of Extinction Rebellion, were accountable to nobody, apart from themselves. In the early 1990s they realised that their acts of individual terrorism against the British state would never work. The result was that the Provos replaced the gun and the bomb with the comfort of ministerial cars in a power-sharing Northern Ireland assembly, which institutionalised sectarian divisions.

The 1960s civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was influenced by members of the Communist Party, who had a policy of popular frontism rather than a class approach, which could unite both the nationalist and unionist working class in a struggle for socialism in the island of Ireland and in Britain. Its members were influenced by the Maoists, whose policies of individual terrorism were a dead end in 1960s Latin America and Africa.

In an advanced capitalist state, such as Northern Ireland, the methods of individual terrorism could never overcome the far greater forces of the British state. A guerrilla struggle cannot work in an advanced capitalist state - Northern Ireland is not Cuba. The policy of individual terrorism by the Provos was shown to be a dead end, leading to death and injury and the incarceration of the flower of the working class in Northern Ireland

David Douglass would be well advised to read Bolshevism - the road to revolution, where the author, Alan Woods, explains that Lenin’s Bolsheviks came to prominence through a long theoretical battle against the Narodniks, who practised individual terrorism in tsarist Russia in the same way that the Provos did in Northern Ireland and the mainland. Lenin’s brother was hung for an act of individual terrorism against the tsarist state.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks came to power by winning the leadership of the workers, soldiers and peasants, through working class politics, and not through the policy of individual terror.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Settler-colonial

Andrew Northall, the Weekly Worker’s resident Stalinist letter-writer, tells us that “we can all join up the dots” - and then demonstrates why the last thing he is capable of is joined-up thinking (April 20).

Northall implies that, because I have written extensively on Zionist relations with Nazi Germany, I am therefore implying that the Israeli state is a Nazi state. Why? The fact that the Zionist movement collaborated (and worse) with the Nazi state, and anti-Semitic forces more widely, does not imply that Zionism itself was a Nazi entity. Using the same ‘logic’, the fact that Stalin collaborated with Hitler as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact should also make Stalin a Nazi.

The Zionist movement and its leaders collaborated with the Nazi state because they saw that this was in their interest. There was certainly an ideological congruity between the two, but they remained distinct political phenomena. One of the problems with Stalinism has always been its ideological crudity and Northall is certainly an adept practitioner in this regard.

His main beef is with the characterisation of Israel as a settler-colonial state by Moshé Machover and myself. This analysis, pioneered by Matzpen, is now largely accepted by anti-Zionists and Palestine solidarity supporters the world over. However, if you are trapped into defending the twists and turns of Uncle Joe, then the ability to see beyond crude slogans is indeed a Herculean effort.

Zionism from the start was a colonial movement and, because it sought to settle the land with its own people, as opposed to merely exploiting the indigenous population, it was a settler-colonial movement. The fact that most Israelis today are born in Israel does not change that fact. Settler-colonialism describes the society that Zionism created, which is why the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law defined Jewish settlement as a “national value”.

Instead of a society based on equality, regardless of ethnicity, one section - Jews - are encouraged to settle areas of the state where Arabs form a majority or a large minority. It is settler-colonialism, the most racist form of colonialism, which defines Israel’s character as an apartheid state, where your most important characteristic is whether or not you are Jewish.

Northall is nothing if not a crude ‘Marxist’, whose economism blurs issues of race and class. That is why he understands nothing of the Israeli Jewish working class or why it has failed to form even its own social democratic Labour Party. It is difficult enough to see the revolutionary potential of the European working class, let alone that of Israel. Its trade union confederation, Histadrut, is now led by members of Likud, which is a capitalist and free-market party!

It is a sad fact that the settler working class, everywhere it is formed, identifies first and foremost with its own ruling class, as Ireland and South Africa demonstrated. It is why the Israeli working class votes predominantly for parties of the right: ie, against its own class interests. What Northall calls “the basic class contradictions between working people and capital” are subsumed by the national question: ie, the oppression of the Palestinians, in which the Israeli Jewish working class actively participates. One of the reasons why Israel has become one of the most unequal western economies is precisely because of the political weakness of the Jewish working class and its identification with its own ruling class.

Obscuring as he does the settler-colonial nature of the Israeli state, Northall substitutes pious wishful thinking for the present-day reality. As Israeli society heads even further towards an openly pogromist state led by fascists, Northall simply relies on slogans devoid of all meaning.

Stalinism never opposed Zionism. On the contrary it was the Soviet Union which was responsible for the adoption by the United Nations of resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine and in the process weakened the communist parties of the whole region, as communists were seen to side with those who had created the Israeli state by transferring 85% of the Palestinians across the borders and massacring thousands in the process.

Even within the settler population there are, as the present-day demonstrations show, irreconcilable differences between religious Zionism and secular Zionism. Of this Northall neither knows nor understands anything. Crude sloganeering with a veneer of Marxism is his only explanation.

Yes, we all want maximum unity of the working class across the Middle East. However, in allying with its own ruling class, the Israeli Jewish working class is unlikely to be a partner of the exploited and oppressed of other countries.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Not Nazi

When your correspondents (particularly the anti-Israel trifecta) reference the Ben-Gvir proposed Israeli National Guard, a very particular terminology is used: ‘SA’ or ‘SS’ (Letters, April 20).

They could have used ‘Blackshirts’ (Britain, Italy or Albania), ‘Blueshirts’ or ‘Greenshirts’ (Ireland), ‘Iron Guard’ (Romania), ‘Red Shirts’ or ‘Silvershirts’ (United States), and many other disreputable organisations.

But, in spite of there being such a large choice, somehow it is always linked to Nazi Germany. Peculiar? Or maybe not so peculiar.

John Davidson
email

Class rump

Daniel Lazare’s reply to Moshé Machover and Tony Greenstein betrays his own political origins in the Spartacist cult (the International Communist League) of James Robertson in the US (Letters, April 27).

Robertson developed a unique theory about ‘interpenetrated peoples’ as a universal ‘Marxist’ principle covering initially the conflict in the north of Ireland and then Israel/Palestine. The entire ‘Spart family’ continue to defend this capitulation to imperialism, where ‘communal conflicts’ were described as where different racial/ethnic/nationalist groups got mixed up together in the same space and the problem was to be solved by simply explaining to them that they have to stop being ‘sectarian’, recognise their common interests as workers and join up together against their capitalist oppressors. Tellingly their 1977 ‘Theses on Ireland’ outlining this approach designated the conflict as between Catholics and Protestants - not between anti-imperialist nationalists and pro-imperialist loyalists/unionists.

Those old reformists, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, sharply differentiated between the nationalism of the oppressors and the nationalism of the oppressed - between imperialism and anti-imperialism. Marx and Engels did so after their famous ‘Irish turn’, as seen clearly in Marx’s letter to Engels in 1867. This ‘Irish turn’ followed Engels’ visit to the west of Ireland in 1866 and the absolute devastation he saw there following the Great Famine (or genocide, as it is more properly termed). Previously they had seen colonialism as somewhat progressive in transferring advanced technologies, industries, railways, etc to them. Now Engels saw the brutal reality - confirmed the following year in the Sepoy Mutiny, India’s first war of independence from 1857-59. Marx and Engels went on the give unconditional, but critical, support to the Fenian movement - always trying to unite it in struggle with the English radicalising workers.

Contained in the Oath of Allegiance to the Orange Order was the pledge to “counter revolution”. It was a cross-class alliance between privileged workers against the far more oppressed nationalist workers. Similarly, as applied to Israel/Palestine and the conflict there: Robertson designated it simply as a disagreement between interpenetrated peoples; we had to knock their heads together and get them to see their common interests.

The working class only really operates as a class for itself when its strongest, best organised sections, the ‘aristocracy of labour’, defend its weakest and more oppressed. The current demonstrators against the far-right Israeli government are overwhelmingly white, Ashkenazi, secular and middle class - a privileged section of society, which does not include or fight for the rights of the two million Palestinian Israeli citizens, let alone those appallingly oppressed in the West Bank and Gaza, nor indeed the diverse Sephardi Jews, who comprise some 55% of Israeli Jews.

Comrade Lazare writes many excellent articles, but he has this appalling blind spot and is a victim of his own early political miseducation, which he has not yet overcome; he is orienting to the rump of the working class, those under the influence of a supremacist ideology, as in the north of Ireland, South Africa and the US Jim Crow Deep South ‘poor whites’. We have to direct our propaganda to the natural vanguard of the class to win leadership and advance class consciousness.

Look at where the Sparts have ended up now; supporting the neo-fascist Canadian Truckers ‘Freedom Convoy’ just over a year ago, along with Donald Trump, Fox News and every Nazi in Canada and the US.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Either-or

The monarchist and the republican cases are both rubbish, but the monarchy is what we have. Monarchists claim that the monarchy embodies things that they spend the rest of their time complaining are not there, backed up by fanciful suggestions about tourism and soft power. Republicans claim that a republic would be a step towards the classless incorruption that characterised no existing republic in the world, backed up by a fatuous remark about hereditary surgeons, as if there would be elected surgeons. The case for the status quo is weak, but the case for change has not been made.

The last person to win a general election was Boris Johnson, so republicans must want him as head of state. There would have to be a nomination process. Candidates would certainly require nomination by one 10th of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that house - 130 MPs. Even in the first instance, in the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the house would whittle them down to the two, who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the presidency between them.

Nor should those of us who strived for economic equality and for international peace wish to abolish the royal prerogative. Rather, we should be working for someone of our mind to exercise it, and to do so in its fullness. No-one like that would ever make it onto the ballot paper for president.

David Lindsay
County Durham