Letters

IDpol

GG (Letters, May 18) takes exception to my representation of the Combahee River Collective when I quoted their famous saying that “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.”

The Combahee River Collective was a group of black feminist lesbians who had parted company with the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization. The name originated with Barbara Smith, who named them after an action on the Combahee river that was organised by Harriet Tubman in June 1863, freeing more than 750 slaves. It is the only military campaign I know that was planned and led by a woman.

The statement from which this quote is taken was the expression of a group of black feminists trying to come to terms both with their own oppression and then the racism they had found in white feminism circles, plus the sexism in black nationalist groups. Barbara Smith explained that by ‘identity politics’, “we meant simply this: we have a right as black women in the 1970s to formulate our own political agendas”.

It is true that many people are radicalised by their own experiences of oppression, but to then go on to counterpose that to ending someone else’s oppression is precisely the problem with identity politics. This may not have been obvious to a black feminist group that took its inspiration from anti-imperialist struggles abroad and anti-racist struggles at home. However, in the hands of the Zionist feminists, who, in Spare Rib in the early 1980s, countered support for the Palestinians with their own ‘oppression’, it was starkly obvious.

Likewise the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign that was used to attack the left in the Labour Party. What was this if not an example of identity politics, whereby Jews (or some Jews) had the right to define anti-Semitism in such a way as to negate the oppression of the Palestinians? That is precisely the problem with ‘IDpol’. The rich and reactionary also have an identity - something the fascists also took up with their appeals to white working class identity, as did Generation ID.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor admitted this, when she said that “Any concept, once it is released into the world, can take on new meanings when confronted with new problems. Identity politics has become so untethered from its original usage that it has lost much of its original explanatory power.”

I would argue that, although the intentions were fine, identity politics were flawed from the beginning. How do you differentiate between different forms of identity if all identities are equally valid? Without class being the central means of understanding oppression you are lost in a sea of subjectivity - complete conceptual chaos.

Not only did the Combahee River statement help give birth to identity politics: it also helped seed the birth of intersectionality, whereby different identities were held to make up the totality of someone’s experience. The problem with this is that class became just one more identity.

GG says: “The genius of the women’s movement of the 60s and 70s in the US, despite its pitfalls, was its distinctive concepts: ie, ‘The personal is political’.” I’m not sure that “genius” is the right word. The problem is that the personal isn’t always political and indeed usually runs counter to the political.

We make choices in our personal life that not only have no general political applicability, but which, in many respects, run counter to our wider political beliefs. We favour our own children within the confines of the nuclear family, yet it is difficult to reconcile this with a more generalised solidarity. A woman choosing an abortion goes to a private clinic to obtain it, yet we are opposed to private healthcare (likewise someone paying for a life-saving operation).

So, when GG says that “personal identity struggles within a socialist movement can only strengthen that movement”, this is simply not true. Many of the things we do in the struggle to live and survive run counter to the solidarity that is needed for the overthrow of capitalism.

The fight to survive all too often results in divisions among the poor and oppressed. Many homeless people that we encounter on Palestine solidarity stalls in the town centre blame not the rich and powerful or the market economy for their plight, but refugees and migrants.

In many ways, ‘The personal is political’ was one of the worst by-products of second-wave feminism. It prioritised personal selfishness over collective solidarity.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

First casualty

I’ve just finished reading (at last!) The first casualty: the war correspondent as hero and myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo by Philip Knightly. The casualty is, of course, truth; and Knightly looks at the history of how difficult it is to get that out. Unlike in 1975, when the book was written, we now have mobile phones and the internet, of course, but there are still plenty of surviving problems.

One problem for war correspondents is the military - they want their ‘truth’ (and only their ‘truth’) to get out. They have many advantages, including access to the battlefields, protection (from both sides), supplies of food, sleeping provision, access to both senior officers and more lowly warriors and, until recently, access to communications.

The military have their interests, which usually coincide with those of establishment politicians, and they resort almost always to straight censorship. But this is not only the military and politicians; correspondents have also to deal with their editorial people and, quite often, with their readers, who in many - perhaps most - cases want ‘patriotism’.

What are the military and politicians trying to hide? Quite a lot: retreats and other setbacks, incompetence, cowardice and - very strikingly - atrocities! The latter are there in every war, on all sides. They include rape, torture, murder and massacre. Knightly covers all of this and, in each war and in great detail, explains how some correspondents rose to the occasion, but most fell before it.

While I was reading this recently, not surprisingly the war in Ukraine came to mind. The mainstream media has a lot of coverage of the war, of course. We see pictures of bombed buildings and towns, destroyed tanks, world leaders hugging Zelensky - well, there is a war on.

No atrocities committed by Ukrainian forces? If there are any, then correspondents would face these same obstacles, including (especially?) from their own editorial team, and probably readers too - such is the unremitting, pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia bombardment.

But “the main enemy is at home” - as is often reiterated in the Weekly Worker - and to get a taste of that you need to look at some of the left online sources. One of the first and most obvious was the banning of 11 opposition parties in Ukraine. Further, there have been many anti-union laws passed - opening the way to longer hours and many fewer rights.

‘The main enemy is at home’ gives us the question of just why and for whom Ukrainians are fighting and dying. The same applies obviously to Russian victims as well. It is a proxy war on behalf of the US and offers nothing for the future of Ukrainians. It’s obviously no surprise, however, that they want to drive the Russians out.

Jim Nelson
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Central issues

Anton Johanssen tosses in everything but the kitchen sink in his 2,000-plus-word letter slamming me for my coverage of the Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny case (May 25). Vigilantism, the National Rifle Association, a rightwing feminist named Rebecca Latimer Felton, the martyred civil-rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman - all make an appearance. But the result of this informational overload is to confuse an incident that is difficult enough to begin with. So let’s clear away the dross and concentrate on the problem at hand.

A host of issues are involved: self-defence, due process, race, deteriorating conditions on the New York City subways and, above all, class. I was very careful in my article to avoid drawing firm conclusions concerning Penny’s guilt or innocence: “It will be up to a jury to determine if Penny went too far,” I wrote (‘Blame the system’, May 11). But I added that “so far the evidence is on his side” - a statement that still holds true. Based on what we know so far, Penny’s intention was not to kill Neely, but to hold him until help arrived. (Neely was alive and moving about when Penny let him go after several minutes, even though the police were not yet on hand.) Two passengers, one of them black, helped him subdue Neely, an indication that the act was not racially motivated and that he was not alone in perceiving Neely as a threat. We know from passenger accounts that Neely appeared to be highly agitated when he entered the subway train, yelling that he was hungry and thirsty, and screaming, “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die” - words that at least some took as a threat.

We know how other passengers reacted. One recalled how Neely took off his jacket, “bundled it up and just threw it on the floor, very violently” and said that “people who were sitting around him stood up and moved away”. Another said in an interview: “... the other people who were there, who had already grasped what was going on, were like, ‘This guy [Penny] is protecting us’ ... there was consensus that this was the right thing to do.”

Finally, we know something about Neely himself: ie, that a social worker wrote a few weeks earlier that he “could be a harm to others or himself if left untreated” and that he had been charged in relation to at least four violent incidents - including one in November 2021, in which he punched a 67-year-old woman in the face, as she was exiting a subway station on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, breaking her nose and an orbital bone.

So where does that leave us? Simply with an abundance of evidence that Neely was dangerous, that Penny’s intervention was appropriate in the view of at least some bystanders, that his intent was not to kill, but to restrain, and that there is no indication of racial animus. Of course, prosecutors may know something that the rest of us don’t. But based on the available evidence so far, it appears that fault does not lie with Penny or the other two riders who held Neely down, but with the city agencies responsible for such horrendous conditions in the first place. By all appearances, all three were ordinary people thrust into a dangerous situation, who felt compelled to act.

In response, Anton Johanssen lets loose with a tirade to the effect that Penny must be a racist because he’s white and Neely is black and that he must be an imperialist because he served in the Marines. Both are ridiculous. As any true anti-racist knows, false accusations benefit the real racists among us by making a mockery of the very idea of an anti-racist movement. A false accusation based solely on the racial identity of the accused is worse, since it’s racist in itself. An integrated workers’ movement is the only force capable of combating racism, yet the upside-down racism of pseudo-leftists like Johanssen helps undermine it before it can get off the ground.

Slandering an ex-serviceman as an imperialist is similarly despicable. Marxists distinguish officers and the ranks in the same way that we distinguish between bosses and the working class. This is why the Bolsheviks helped organise workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets: because they saw soldiers as workers in uniform and hence as class allies. This doesn’t mean that Penny is necessarily progressive in terms of his personal views. But saddling him with the crimes of the ruling class before the facts are in is as unMarxist as you can get.

Finally, Johanssen makes an utter hash of the issue of vigilantism and self-defence - both of which he opposes or at least views as highly suspect. But Marxists view both through a class lens. We support a worker’s right of self-defence - but not that of a capitalist, since defending his class interests means slashing wages and throwing people out of work. As for vigilantism, we certainly don’t approve of the Ku Klux Klan racist lynch mobs or Latin American death squads. But we support a workers’ militia, anti-fascist defence units, and roving picket squads - all of which are tagged as ‘vigilantism’ from time to time, because they lack the official sanction of the bourgeois state.

Needless to say, Marxists do not rely on bourgeois legality to tell what’s justified and what’s not.

Daniel Lazare
New York

UK modernity?

Dan Lazare writes that “Delaware is a rotten borough straight out of the 18th century. Where Britain set about eliminating such relics beginning in 1832, America’s supposedly more modern system has allowed them to fester and grow” (‘14th amendment threat’, May 25)

But, of course, the US Senate is not the equivalent of the British House of Commons, but of the House of Lords. This is composed of 778 members: 25 senior Church of England bishops; 92 hereditary peers, elected in 1999 by and from among the roughly 750 hereditary peers who were entitled to sit in the Lords before the reform of 1999, in proportion to the 1999 party affiliations of the hereditary peers: two Labour, three Liberal Democrat, 28 ‘crossbench’ (independent), 42 Conservative, 15 willing to serve as officers of the House; and the remaining 661 life peers appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the government of the day, or (a cause of recent scandals) that of the retiring prime minister.

This hardly makes the UK look like a model of modernity relative to the US …

Mike Macnair
Oxford

More wokism?

I considered not bothering responding to Steve Cousins’ letter (May 25) attacking my response to Michael Roberts on inflation (Letters, May 18), because, to be honest, it was such an ill-educated rant that it doesn’t deserve a response. But let me say why it doesn’t.

Firstly, Cousins says that instead of analysing current data, events and history, I instead refer to “a 19th century economist” - I presume by that he means Marx, who, he claims, I distort completely. The first claim is palpably false, because on my blog I have analysed the current data, events and history at length, on numerous occasions. In my letter, I pointed out that I had predicted, on the basis of that, that US inflation would be, between June 2021 and June 2022, 9.6% - not the 3% predicted by Roberts. Secondly, to simply examine the current data, etc without a theoretical framework, such as that provided by Marx, is to work without a compass - something that Cousins seems to do all the time. Thirdly, Cousins as has been his wont on previous occasions, does not say in what way I am supposed to have distorted Marx “completely”, or provide any examples. If he would care to do so, we might be able to rationally discuss that claim.

Moreover, my letter was not a dissertation on inflation - anyone who wants to see my view on that can read my numerous blog posts on the question. Rather it was a response specifically to the points made by Michael Roberts in his Weekly Worker article (‘Rates up, economy down’, May 11).

Cousins says that Marx did not have a completed theory of inflation for all time, but, if he understood Marx’s explanation of inflation as a monetary phenomenon arising from an excess of liquidity, he would know that is not true. Cousins confuses Marx’s explanation of that inflation with his analysis of value, and of rising costs of production, for which an examination of the boycott of Russian energy and food supplies, the increase in global trade friction, etc would be relevant - and which, again, I have examined in detail on my blog. I won’t be distracted by considering his apologism for the Beijing Stalinists and their stewardship of the Chinese capitalist state.

Cousins’ claim that the asset price inflation of the last 40 years is all down to “financialisation” is also left as just an assertion. It ignores Marx’s and Engels’ explanation of asset prices derived from capitalisation; it fails to ask why the financialisation occurred at that time, and what drove, therefore, people to take the £100 from their bank account to put into overpriced bonds and shares, or houses; it fails to ask where this £100 of revenue in bank accounts was coming from each year, if potential capital, let alone actual existing capital, was being used for that purpose, rather than real capital accumulation, or even consumption; it ignores the fact that from 1987 onwards, central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, pumped additional liquidity into circulation, whenever financial markets sneezed, and even directly channelled that liquidity, via quantitative easing, etc, into the purchase of financial assets, so as to inflate their prices!

But no doubt Cousins can simply claim that pointing out his irrationalism is just another example of wokism!

Arthur Bough
email

Democracy

The renaming of Allende Avenue in Harlow at the behest of local Conservatives dishonours the memory of the thousands of people forced into exile, the thousands of people tortured, and the thousands of people murdered by the military dictatorship that replaced Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in 1973.

If the aim was simply to honour Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine, then Harlow Conservatives could have chosen to rename Second Avenue, Third Avenue or Fourth Avenue. However, they wanted an excuse to remove the name, ‘Salvador Allende’ - a democratically elected president overthrown in a military coup.

Chile was once known as the ‘England of South America’ on account of its tradition of democracy. Salvador Allende was elected as its first socialist president in 1970. But the Chilean armed forces, with the assistance, encouragement, and support of the USA, overthrew his government and installed a junta that ruled for 17 years.

Harlow Conservatives are practising a form of denialism. Augusto Pinochet, the tyrannical military dictator of Chile, was a friend of Margaret Thatcher and they seem intent on erasing his crimes from the historical record.

Pinochet’s regime “disappeared’ thousands of people and, in attempting to ‘disappear’ the memory of a democratic politician overthrown in a military coup, Harlow Conservatives have taken the side of dictatorship against democracy.

John Wake
Harlow

Workers’ list

John Smithee suggests that for Marxists, the best outcome for the next election would be a hung parliament and a minority Labour government dependent on the Liberal Democrats, leading to the introduction of proportional representation (Letters, May 25).

The fact that this scenario would benefit the left by allowing a new workers’ party to mount a viable challenge to Labour under a new electoral system is grounds for being sceptical of it as a possibility. Most of Labour’s membership and affiliated trade unions might be in favour of PR, but Starmer is dead against it. As for the Liberal Democrats making electoral reform a deal-breaker, they did not push for PR as a precondition for entering a coalition with the Conservatives, when the opportunity arose in 2010 - accepting instead a referendum on ‘the Alternative Vote’, in which the Tories and many Labour MPs united to defend the current system.

Marxists today cannot follow in the footsteps of the Eurocommunists, who liquidated independent electoral intervention by the Communist Party into unsuccessful tactical voting campaigns and ultimate inactivity - from the ‘road to socialism’ to the road to nowhere. Of course, at every election now there are tactical voting websites, which allow users to work out how best to “Stop the Tories” - one such effort in the local elections in England claimed hundreds of thousands of visitors. Who knows, it may have had an impact on the results.

The argument for a “workers’ list” of election candidates is not that it would substantially alter the outcome in terms of seats, but that it could give coherence to the left as a voter bloc and connect industrial battles over pay cuts to the politics of the next parliament. The workers’ list could say what the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs will not - that Labour’s leadership now stands ‘for the few, not the many’. And by only standing against rightwing Labour candidates in seats where ‘vote-splitting’ could not be seen to either ‘let the Tories in’ or stop them losing, it could campaign on a principled basis.

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Zionist defeat

Anti-Semitism and the holocaust are the weapons of choice for the Friends of Israel in their determination to preserve their favourite racist colony. They will do and say anything to silence criticism of Israel and prevent the exploration of alternatives to the occupation state they have created in Palestine. But they and their political ideology can be beaten.

I have faced their wrath several times over the past five years. The first was when I promoted a petition entitled ‘Israel is a racist endeavour’, calling upon Labour Party members to sign and show our disgust at the imposition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘working definition of anti-Semitism’ upon our party. It is clear that the Zionists want to stifle any free and open discussion of the entity they have created and now sustain; people must not even dare to think about criticising it.

The IHRA definition was cooked up in 2009. Even the lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, has since warned that it has been weaponised in an attempt to silence critics of Zionism. Nevertheless, from 2013 British Zionists have worked to have it adopted by our trade unions, political parties, schools and universities. Not to do so, they claim, is to make all Jews vulnerable to verbal and physical abuse. They have been phenomenally successful in this. Public criticism of Israel’s apartheid state is likely to see you expelled from your union, political party or university. The media knows that this is nonsensical - anti-Semitism is a crime, and rightly so, but criticism of the political ideology upon which Israel is built is surely legitimate freedom of thought and speech - but is scared of exposing it. Any major publication taking the risk will face threats of boycotts, public condemnation and calls for defunding.

Anyone sticking his or her head above the parapet is a target. When I launched my petition in September 2018, I was immediately in the firing line. I was incensed that my freedom of speech was being taken away from me. My petition attracted 2,700 signatures but led to my getting expelled from my union. In the process, I uttered the second most forbidden IHRA phrase to my union bosses: “Israel exaggerates the holocaust for political ends.” I was always clear that I was using the word “exaggerates” to mean “overemphasises”, but this nuance was lost by a media looking for scandal. As far as the Zionists were concerned, I had said that the holocaust was exaggerated. But I didn’t. I am now described by Zionists as a notorious anti-Semite and holocaust denier.

The Friends of Israel and UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) decided to go on the offensive again this year, when they learnt of the ‘Muslim and Jew: Beyond Israel’ tour I organised, which set out to visit 15 British cities in April and May, calling for the peaceful dissolution of the occupation state. The main speakers were Palestinian author and broadcaster Dr Azzam Tamimi and rabbi Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta USA - Jews Against Zionism. They had worked together in the past and agree that Islam and Judaism are faiths that have never historically been at odds with each other. They are proud of the fact that for 1,500 years Muslims had lived amicably alongside Jews and had frequently given them shelter in the face of persecution by Christians. Both agree that Israel has no right to exist in its Zionist form. Both feel that Zionists have abused religion to serve colonial ends. By claiming that Jews are at risk of annihilation by Muslims if Israel is attacked, for example, the state of Israel get $4 billion of military aid from the US every year, which is used to suppress opposition and seize more Palestinian land.

UKLFI thought that it would scupper the tour by keeping rabbi Weiss out of Britain. In March, it called upon the home secretary to exclude rabbi Weiss from the country, claiming that “his entry into the UK would not be conducive to the public good”; that he was coming to create division; and that he would “stir up religious and racial hatred against British Jews and serve to promote extremism and encourage terrorism”. In response, I organised a campaign that led to 200 people writing to the home secretary declaring that the rabbi would reduce anti-Semitism as a very obviously practising Jew who holds a sympathetic view of the Palestinians. The letters explained that rabbi Weiss was a peaceful, devoutly religious man who knew only too well the crime of anti-Semitism, given the awful murder of his grandparents in Auschwitz. We pointed out that there were many Jewish people who share his religious views, and that his visit would bring Jews and Muslims together. He duly entered the UK from New York on the day that our tour began with no problems whatsoever.

Zionist groups also set about trying to sabotage the tour by telling our venues to cancel the bookings. I have no doubt that UK Lawyers for Israel (and probably the Israeli embassy) were operating in tandem with Scottish Friends of Israel, as both made exactly the same arguments against the tour. Politicians in whose constituencies events were due to take place were copied into the Zionists’ threats. Presumably it was hoped that public funding would be cut, or planning applications would be turned down. At least one of the venues pulled out fearing the latter.

The Friends of Israel are scared of rabbi Weiss, “Although he claims to speak for religious Jews, he is regarded by the overwhelming majority of Jews, religious or not, as a renegade who gives encouragement to their worst enemies.” This exposed the anomaly of non-religious Jews claiming that the god they don’t believe in (or don’t believe in enough to practise Judaism) gave them the land in Palestine.

The assumption is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of religious Jews support Israel, when that is clearly not the case. As rabbi Weiss pointed out in his talks, amongst the religious Jewish communities in London or New York, and even in Jerusalem, Israeli flags and symbols are noticeable by their absence.

UK Lawyers for Israel, meanwhile, wrote to venues declaring that our events were possibly “illegal”. This had some success. Some councillors were drawn into the fray, and venues cancelled in Coventry, Edinburgh, Manchester and London. Nevertheless, the events went ahead in all four cities. Alternative venues were found, and in Coventry we simply held the event in a local park. The Zionists thus failed in their objective of getting our tour cancelled. In this sense alone, we beat their pernicious ideology.

That Israel lies behind all this while barely hiding behind the facade of a two-state solution is a contradiction that our tour was intent on exposing. We declared that a single state - where Jews, Muslims, Christians and people of no faith live and elect the government - is the only way forward. And that is the one thing that the Zionist state of Israel fears the most.

Peter Gregson
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