Letters

Identity politics

I am shocked by the flippant tone and dismissive attitude of Kevin Bean to the Diane Abbott affair and the resulting fallout (‘Race, prejudice and stupidity’, April 27).

I am bemused by why Kevin thinks that the fault lies in Diane’s “version of identity politics”. Indeed it would be helpful if Kevin were to define what he means by identity politics because it is in danger of becoming an all-purpose explanation for every political ill.

According to the Combahee River Collective, “The most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression.” In other words, identity politics looks inwards, rejecting social or political change, counterposing one oppression to another. Identity politics locates one’s oppression in the personal, as opposed to the political; in ideas, as opposed to material circumstances; in the subjective rather than the objective. What matters is changing the individual, not society.

The world can be viewed and understood via the prism of one’s own oppression rather than through a class analysis, collective struggle or an understanding of the way different forms of oppression relate to each other. Identity politics have the effect - if not purpose - of preventing change and maintaining the status quo.

Identity politics creates false oppressions where none existed before - as in the case of Zionist feminism and the ‘new anti-Semitism’. Capitalists and the rich too can claim to be oppressed. Siobhain McDonagh MP went even further when she said, “anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-Semitism”. In response to a question from John Humphreys, McDonagh confirmed that “to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-Semitic” - the clear implication being that all Jews were capitalists.

I don’t believe that Diane’s main problem was her identity politics, so much as her essentialist view of racism. Despite the clumsy wording of her letter, Diane was correct in arguing for a distinction between prejudice and racism. Where she went wrong was in saying that only black people could be victims of racism. According to her, being black is not political so much as a question of skin colour. Hence, despite the well-known state discrimination against travellers, to Diane they are white and therefore possess ‘white privilege’.

Slavery was not, according to Diane, a consequence of colonialism - it was the product of skin colour alone. Hence Irish people, who were portrayed as being no better than chimpanzees in Victorian magazines, have, according to Diane, always been white.

Kevin says that Diane’s “comments on the racist oppression and persecution of Jewish people are historically ignorant and border on the unhinged”. Except that she was referring to pre-civil rights America and apartheid South Africa, not Hitler’s Germany.

I was though amazed that Kevin dismissed racism against black youth with the suggestion that racial profiling and stop and search is the consequence of the fight against street crime rather than anything to do with racism. This is like saying that the Nazi persecution of Roma gypsies was because of their asocial behaviour rather than the threat to racial purity that they posed. Why is it that rape and burglary (to say nothing of fraud) is so low down on the police’s list of priorities? Street crime is the pretext, not the reason.

Kevin goes on to contradict himself by saying that what young black males experience today is similar to what Jewish and Irish males experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is true, but is Kevin saying that young Jews and Irish people weren’t then the victims of racism?

Racism and identity politics are not one and the same. Unfortunately Kevin conflates the two and obscures our understanding of both.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Israel and class

I was tempted to just ignore Tony Greenstein’s rather typically intemperate and abusive rant in response to some of my previous correspondence (Letters, May 4), but I would like to make three points.

First, he abusively refers to my use of “Marxist slogans devoid of all meaning” and “crude sloganeering with a veneer of Marxism”, but everyone can read for themselves and see that all I describe are basic principles of Marxism. Greenstein simply confirms he is no Marxist and probably no socialist either.

In spraying around the dreaded label, “Stalinist”, he just acts like many brainless ultra-left sectarians, who use it to describe anything remotely ‘communist’. I actually disagree that the term ‘Stalinist’ in any way describe my politics, but when that word is liberally banded about by the likes of Greenstein or the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty against literally anything to do with communism or the Communist Party, it loses all content and meaning, and neither informs nor offends.

I do question again such an obvious non-Marxist being allowed to write lengthy articles in an explicitly self-described Marxist newspaper, and always on the same subject matter: Israel, Zionism, Nazism and the Jews. There seems to be some form of author’s mental tic, where he can’t use the word ‘Israel’ without automatically triggering other words like ‘Nazis’, ‘Zionists’, ‘Jews’, ‘collaboration’, etc. The only ‘socialism’ that seems ever to appear in Greenstein’s articles seems to be of the ‘national’ variety.

Second, Greenstein continuously fails to articulate any strategy or even vague conception of how he would see a positive resolution of the Israel/Palestine issue. He appeared to have shifted his stance slightly with regard to the Israeli working class, saying last week that “it is unlikely to be a partner of the exploited and oppressed of other countries” (my emphasis), I suspect this is just sloppy wording on his part, as just weeks earlier he was adamant that “the Israeli working class has lost its potential for revolutionary change” - a much more damning and certainly an anti-Marxist position.

So, given his rejection of a Marxist, class-based approach, how does Greenstein see positive progress coming about? He clearly hates the state of Israel and its people with a passion. One might reasonably conclude he is in favour of the destruction of that state - he is on record as admitting that. I suspect he would not dare openly admit he is also in favour of the destruction of the Israeli people, but that would be a probable corollary of any destruction of the state of Israel.

What are the forces which would or might be capable of overthrowing and destroying Israel, assuming Greenstein’s rejection of any concept of class struggle and transformation within Israel? The Arab states? Presumably not Egypt, Jordan or Iraq. Iran perhaps? Saudi Arabia, given its emerging realignment away from US imperialism? Hezbollah? The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Hamas?

Should any of these individually or in combination have the military capacity and capability to defeat the state of Israel, the fate of any remaining Israeli population under any of their rule and subjection would frankly be dire. In truth, given that Israel is so well armed, including with nuclear weapons, and is so passionately supported by the vast majority of its population, such a situation is unlikely to arise.

I haven’t included any Palestinian forces in the above and this leads to my third point. Greenstein’s whole implied strategic approach and attitude to the state of Israel and the Israeli people is not shared in any degree by any democratic or progressive Palestinian group, tendency or movement of any size or credibility that I am aware of.

So, with Greenstein absolutely rejecting any class differentiation, class struggle or class politics within the existing state of Israel, one has to conclude he is in favour of some form of regional interstate war to defeat and destroy that state. Given this is certainly not the view of any progressive element of the Palestine national movement, and probably not the view of many of the Arab states in the region, or of many of their subsidiary paramilitary formations, we should probably conclude these are the views of one bitter, angry, fractious, individual resident on the sunny south coast of England (albeit apparently temporarily in Birmingham, and possibly soon at one of His Majesty’s institutions), who represents no-one but himself.

Needless to say, Greenstein’s desires and designs for the destruction of Israel have absolutely nothing in common with the philosophy and conception of Marxism - which is based on the emancipation of exploited and oppressed people everywhere, and enshrines the leading and guiding role of the international working class in revolutionary social change. Certainly not the implied genocidal destruction of any of its national groups.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Over-touchy

John Davidson is over-touchy about any comparison between extreme rightwing tendencies in Israel - indeed, about Israel in general - and the Third Reich (Letters, May 4).

I know that the draft headline, rejected by the editor (no complaint here), of my last letter (April 20) was a comparison with the Azov Battalion - now perhaps approaching the status of an army corps rather than a mere brigade or division (the Waffen, rather than the Allgemeine, SS is the reference here - or would have been if I had mentioned the SS at all!).

Perhaps this was too pointed - but surely such pointedness is preferable to Davidson’s evasive blather invoking obscure and unsuccessful fascist militias. Their known failure is evidence that Davidson is blithely confident in the power of the feeble Israeli believers in the second (pious) bit of their ‘constitution’ (sidelining the first, operative, racist-chauvinist bit) to prevent or even just slow down the drive of the Israeli right to outright, and fully empowered, fascism.

He deceives himself, but who on the left can join him - except, of course, the vast horde of Zionisant opportunists?

Sobel Carolson
email

Stop supplies

On May 9 the Israeli occupation bombarded densely populated areas of Gaza, murdering 13 Palestinians, including four children. Not willing to tolerate British complicity in these sort of abuses, Palestine Action retaliated on May 10 by driving a car through the inner perimeter of Leicester’s Israeli drone factory, UAV Tactical Systems (U-TacS), blockading the only entrance to the site.

Two activists used a lock-on device to maintain the block in place, which immediately stopped a delivery from entering the premises. The action was completed despite enhanced security by the company and a permanent police operation put in place to protect the factory.

This came on day 10 of Palestine Action’s declared siege, which has seen U-TacS operations undermined and severely disrupted. The lock-on, the second such action in one week, has compounded the disruption for the Leicester subsidiary of Israel’s largest weapons company. Last week, four activists blockaded the factory, using lock-on devices to connect themselves to each other - lying across the factory’s access roads, they put their bodies on the line to keep the factory shut down.

The May 9 action, and the continued mass action in Leicester generally, has seen hundreds turn up to mobilise against the weapons factory, with dedicated actionists maintaining a camp outside the factory since May 1. They have persisted despite police desperation to shut down the siege, through measures including the forceful removal of tents, mass arrests and the seizure of property. Since the beginning of the siege, police have arrested over 41 people using disproportionate measures, and we remain defiant, and the siege is continuing to cause disruption to Elbit operations.

U-TacS is majority-owned by Israel’s largest arms firm, Elbit Systems. In Leicester and across Elbit’s other seven remaining sites in Britain, military technologies are manufactured for export directly to Israel. The U-TacS site regularly sends drones and technology to Israel, where Elbit’s products brutally enforce the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Its flagship drone, the Watchkeeper, has been used by the British military in Iraq, Afghanistan and the English Channel - but is itself modelled on the notorious and deadly Hermes drone, after it was ‘battle-tested’ on Palestinians.

This Watchkeeper programme, through being funded by the British army, effectively funnels British taxpayer money to the development of the occupation’s military power. This is because profits made here are sent, as dividends, to Elbit’s parent company in Israel. Even in years when a loss is declared, their financial reporting reveals that this site sends millions to Elbit’s other arms through purchases. Elbit supplies 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based weaponry. Its products, including the Hermes, have been linked to documented atrocities by the Israeli military occupation.

Palestine Action
email

Mass resistance

The truly odious positions adopted by ‘the Militant’ on the national independence struggle in Ireland during the thick of the fighting in the 70s is the darkest page of their history. Most of them today choose not to mention it, and try to leave it in the past.

That’s why, when I read the letter by John Smithee (May 4), I thought someone was taking the piss. Here was someone not only defending that reactionary, counterrevolutionary position, but reasserting it. One would have to have been politically blind, deaf and dumb not to see the nature of the mass working class resistance in the occupied Six Counties by the republican communities - there were 20,000 British troops with tanks and armoured cars on the streets; barbed wire entanglements, daily and nightly raids, armed sectarian loyalist police and militia assassination squads; mass internment into concentration camps without trial and without charge; abolition of juries in the high court; special forces murder squads and undercover, non-accountable gangs operating under the guise of loyalist militias.

The struggle for ‘One person, one vote’ in all elections, the struggle for non-sectarian employment, housing and education, the right to religious and cultural freedom and to walk to school without fear of sectarian violence and murder - all of this passed them by. The armed struggle by the Provisional IRA - formed of solidly working class men and women, boys and girls of the republican ghettos - Smithee calls “acts of individual terrorism” and supports the absurdly insulting comparison made by Eddie Ford with Extinction Rebellion and other eco death cults, composed of tiny numbers of well-heeled, middle class folk who will never be without oil or anything else.

Just what Smithee thinks would qualify as genuine working class resistance rather than describing it as individual terrorism we can’t guess. Certainly he would have to apply the same yardstick to the miners ‘hit squads’ and proto-armed militant teams. Both were directly accountable to the communities they came from; both were composed directly of members of that community with whom they lived cheek by jowl, of course. Doubtless Militant would have called the rioting police and the army occupation forces ‘workers in uniform’. God knows, they condemned the IRA and the anti-imperialist forces more than they did imperialism.

Smithee’s conclusion that the Provos could never have won is also patent nonsense and at various stages of the 70s the British state was looking for ways to walk away and leave the loyalist four counties to sink or swim. The same was true of the miners’ strike in 1984-85, which three times was on the cusp of all-out victory. In both cases, although she wobbled very severely, it was the personal obsessions of Margaret Thatcher which dictated the hardest of responses. Her attempted assassination, had it been successful, would have been hailed to the rafters in the coal-mining and working class communities across industrial Britain and Ireland. In my view it would have knocked the bottom out of her government and policies of class confrontation.

Not all the miners supported the struggle of the IRA when we started out, but, as the year of bitter struggle went on, many saw the two causes as linked - their slogans became our slogans. “Harry Roberts was our friend,” we sang (he kills coppers). When I took a party of Durham and Doncaster miners over to Belfast on May Day 2015 as guests of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, I took the opportunity to introduce them to Patrick Ryan, the Brighton Thatcher bomber. One of the lads, speaking for the rest really, stuck his hand out to shake Pat’s, saying, “You useless fucking bastard! You had one job to do …!” Getting rid of her would indeed have altered the course of history and represented class justice.

The current manifestation of Sinn Féin has nothing in common with the socialist republicanism of the IRA and the movement at that time - when the lads and lasses on the streets taking on the might of the British state were working class heroes right enough.

The position of Militant at that time is best forgotten and John Smithee has done them no service by reminding us all just how appalling it was.

David Douglass
South Shields

Hammer and anvil

On April 19 the Morning Star had an excellent article by David Rosenberg on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that began 80 years ago on that day. He makes it clear that the Jewish Bund were central to that epic struggle, with Bundist Marek Edelman a central leader. In the same issue Simon Renton commented on anti-Soviet activities exposed 80 years ago and told us that the Polish government in exile had a “grandiose scheme for a vastly enlarged post-war Poland and [was driven by] a racialised hatred of Russians”. He went on to supply the names of the alleged main perpetrators of those anti-Soviet activities from the Daily Worker of that day: Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich.

After the outbreak of World War II, Ehrlich made his way to the part of Poland that had come under Soviet control. He was arrested in Brest in October 1939. In August 1940, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to 10 years in the gulag. Countless Polish Jewish communists, nationalists and Trotskyists were assassinated or sent to the gulag by Stalin’s NKVD from eastern Poland during the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, up until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the USSR.

After the invasion Ehrlich was released in 1942 as part of the agreement between the Polish government in exile and the Soviet Union. The Bund never politically capitulated to the right-nationalist government in exile, who were nevertheless fully entitled to defend Poland’s right to self-determination against both Hitler and Stalin (Lenin had made this point in great detail against Rosa Luxemburg in his reply to her Junius pamphlet in 1915). Both Alter and Ehrlich were socialist leaders of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund and the International Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee headed by Solomon Mikhoels, who was murdered by Stalin’s secret police in January 1948. Two weeks after Mikhoels’ death, his assassin, Lavrentiy Tsanava, was secretly given the Order of Lenin “for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government”.

Alter and Ehrlich were charged with “spying for Hitler”. Their fate was probably sealed when their private conversations on the Katyn Forest massacre were taped and reported to Stalin. When they were re-arrested in December 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein pleaded for them directly to Stalin. But both men were murdered by the NKVD, although the precise details of their deaths are unknown.

“Between the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin, the path was a narrow one for those of us who still believed in the revolution.”, Leopold Trepper observed in his book, The great game. He also wrote: “But who then, at that time, protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists are able to claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated. Their conduct in the camps was dignified and even exemplary. But their voice was lost in the tundra.

“Today the Trotskyists have the right to accuse those who once howled with the wolves for their death. May they not forget, however, that they possessed the immense advantage over us of having a coherent political system which was likely to replace Stalinism, and to which they could cling in the profound distress of the revolution betrayed. They would not ‘confess’, because they knew their confessions would serve neither the party nor socialism.”

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Homeless

For the last 30 years I have written letters to my local paper, almost every week giving a socialist analysis and perspectives on local, national and international politics. From time to time correspondents have replied to my letters, asking: ‘What planet do I live on?’

Well, Fenland is in another universe when it came to the local elections on May 4. In contrast to the drubbing the Tories got nationally, the Tories on Fenland District Council increased their majority to 27 by gaining 35 seats, with the other eight going to six ex-Tory independents plus two Liberal Democrats. North East Cambs parliamentary constituency - more commonly known as Fenland - is the home to Tory health secretary Stephen Barclay, whose majority at the last general election was 29,997.

The Tory win in Fenland in last week’s local elections shows that Starmer is not set for a 1997-style landslide in the 2024 general election - in 1995 Labour won 21 seats out of 40, giving them control of Fenland District Council. Last week Labour in Fenland came a poor third, with independents in second place.

Over 300,000 members of the Labour Party have cancelled their membership direct debits since Sir Keir Starmer became leader in 2020. Like me, they are politically homeless. Some have joined the Greens. Some have become independent candidates and councillors. Some have become involved in trades councils or in charity work, such as food banks. Others have got involved in Counterfire’s People’s Assembly.

I recently joined Resist and the Socialist Labour Party. I now know that is a dead end. Neither ex-Labour MP Chris Williamson nor Resist chair Sian Bloor have replied to my emails. Resist steering committee chair Jurgen Wolf has resigned, citing the differences caused by the conditions Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party put on Resist when the two merged.

Each week the Weekly Worker in its ‘What we fight for’ column calls for a mass Communist Party, but does little to bring it about. For several years now, the Weekly Worker has not had a column asking people to join the CPGB. This contrasts with the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in England and Wales, which each week calls on people to “join the socialists”.

To get out of this rabbit hole, I suggest that the CPGB registers the name ‘Communist Alternative’ with the Electoral Commission. This would allow readers and supporters of the Weekly Worker to use that name on ballot papers in local elections - which now only need a proposer and seconder to sign a candidate’s nomination papers, in contrast to the 10 needed previously.

The Weekly Worker/CPGB should be planning ahead for a Labour/Lib Dem coalition government. Part of that preparation should be the standing of ‘Communist Alternative’ candidates in local and national elections.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire