Letters

Machover rejected

Comrade GG makes a number of important errors, basic misreadings and misinterpretations in his August 29 letter responding to mine (August 22). Among other things, I slated Moshé Machover’s article (‘Promise myth as template’, July 25), criticised the Weekly Worker’s reliance on Machover and Tony Greenstein as supposed ‘experts’ on Palestinian liberation and also the complete absence of the Palestinian communist and Marxist-Leninist perspectives in the Weekly Worker. None of this, I think, is accidental.

I take GG’s points in order.

Machover in his article completely and deliberately fails to critique Judaism as a religion and as an ideological underpinning for the Israeli state. Simply copying and pasting vast quotations from the Old Testament with no accompanying analysis, let alone critique, is to do the precise opposite. I do not oppose “criticism of religious barbarism”, I opposed the uncritical regurgitation of such barbarism from the Old Testament with no supporting analysis or criticism by Machover.

One might have thought some sort of counter-narrative to the violent mythology of the Bible, setting out on the basis of historical evidence our best understanding of movements of peoples in the region at that time and the true histories of various peoples, might have been appropriate in an article in a paper claiming to be Marxist, and which would have effectively demolished most of the myths, lies and ‘justifications’ for mass murder contained in such quotes. But I don’t think that was Machover’s aim at all.

A “broad socialist revolution in the Middle East” would, of course, be a wonderful thing and we would all be very much in favour of it, but Machover is deliberately counterposing such a region-wide revolution to any efforts by the Palestinian people to liberate themselves, primarily through a national democratic revolution - and, yes, ideally through transforming it in a socialist direction. This is my point about Machover rejecting the capacity of the Palestinian people to liberate themselves: he thinks they have to be liberated via the efforts of other Arabs throughout the region. Hardly a ‘pro-Palestinian’ perspective.

By saying a region-wide socialist revolution has to take place in order to liberate the Palestinian people, Machover is, I think, deliberately kicking the prospect of any form of liberationary revolution into the far-distant long grass. So a region-wide socialist revolution is more likely in countries which, yes, are component parts of world imperialism, but also contain very significant feudal elements, such as monarchies, warlords, peasant agricultures and large peasant populations, than in a fairly well developed western-type capitalist state, with a developed working class (ie, Israel)?

We are not into prediction games (unlike Machover, who loves to boast how many predictions he gets right), but it seems to me that - given the Palestinian people’s direct oppression by the Israeli state, their decades-long heroic resistance against colonisation, occupation and violent repression, their proven capacity for organisation, the many formations within the Palestinian resistance, including significant ones aligned within the communist and Marxist-Leninist traditions, the development of independent structures and organisations during mass democratic resistance (including and especially in the intifadas), the fact the Israeli economy and society is a relatively advanced capitalist economy, the fact Israel is so heavily dependent on western imperialism for survival, etc, etc - revolutionary upheavals are significantly more likely here than in either the feudal Arab monarchies or those more advanced Arab countries, which have been deliberately devastated by imperialist wars and imperialist-fostered ethnic divisions.

Machover’s advocacy of region-wide socialist revolution - as opposed to the self-liberation by and of the Palestinian people - reminds me of that great ultra-left bourgeois ‘communist’, Grigori Zinoviev, prating on about “world proletarian revolution” in the abstract in the Communist International in the early 1920s. Yet, when faced with a very specific, concrete, immediate and local example of a real proletarian revolution - in Russia in October 1917 - he, along with his bourgeois pal, Kamenev, not only voted against it, but published their opposition and the very plans for the Bolshevik armed rising (no less!) to their class enemies! Yes, Lenin, inexplicably ‘forgave’ them, but their subsequent treacherous factional behaviour - first, denying the possibility of socialist revolution, denying the possibility of actually building socialism in Soviet Russia, and, second, doing their damnedest to undermine it, as it was being constructed in front of their eyes and indeed the working masses of the world - ensured they eventually obtained their just deserts.

GG makes the absurd assertion that I think there are “no Marxist, pro-Palestinian” writers! No, I don’t - that was not my point at all. It was why, given there is a vast wealth of socialist, communist, Marxist-Leninist literature, analyses, etc, with a strong track record of organisation, actions and resistance within the Palestinian resistance and liberation movement itself, why does the Weekly Worker make no use of this whatsoever? Why the extreme reluctance to use any Palestinian sources? Relying instead on two oddball writers, both Jewish living in Britain (the former colonial power), and with highly individual views on Palestine/Israel, shared by very few others.

Machover does not, in my view, advocate the self-liberation of the Palestinian people. Indeed, his contempt for the Palestinian people comes through time and time again in his writings - this on top of his recent escapade uncritically publishing vast tracts of the Old Testament to ‘explain’ current Israeli ideology and policy. Greenstein advocates the “destruction of the state of Israel”. By who or what and with what consequences to the present Israeli people? I suspect we know the answers ... This is no ‘socialism’ I recognise (1930s national socialism possibly).

Of course, western Marxists and revolutionaries can express their independent thoughts, analyses and perspectives on how revolutionary changes may happen in the Middle East region, Palestine-Israel in particular, while, more importantly, providing full 100% solidarity to the current struggles of the Palestinian people for their liberation. My point was that it is inappropriate, and indeed pointless, for westerners to be prescribing in detail what should happen, even to the extent of attempting to write detailed constitutional outcomes of any such revolutionary changes. That is indeed to get the relationship between oppressor and oppressed completely wrong, is the opposite of providing true solidarity and of the concept of oppressed peoples being able to resist and liberate themselves in ways they choose or have no choice.

I want the Weekly Worker to be a better Marxist and communist paper than it currently is. That means being genuinely internationalist in its perspectives and approach and engaging more productively and effectively with the genuine communist tradition.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Lazare goes

Firstly let me congratulate the Weekly Worker on having dispensed with the services of Daniel Lazare. Although he wrote many penetrating articles on politics in the United States, his obstinate equation of Hamas with the genocidal Israeli state was beyond the pale.

The Palestinians are most definitely experiencing genocide. The political mood amongst the vast majority of Israeli Jews is exterminationist. A state where 65% of Israeli Jews support or see nothing wrong in sodomising and raping prisoners and engaging in the most horrendous of tortures is one that should be condemned unequivocally by socialists. To compare the victims with the oppressor is obscene.

That Lazare could equate Hamas and the Palestinians with these Zionist barbarians shows how deep Jewish chauvinism has penetrated into his soul. October 7 was not some anti-Jewish pogrom, as he makes out, nor an orgy of murder.

Let me quote from a Times of Israel article on October 8, before Israel’s propaganda narrative had got off the ground. Reut Karp, told of “an alarming testimony from her children about the murder of their father, Dvir Karp, and his partner Stav in Kibbutz Re’im”. She described how both the father and his partner were killed when a Hamas gunman broke into their house.

Her two children were there. If the ‘beheaded babies’ atrocity propaganda by Israel was true, then the Hamas gunman would have done what Israel’s soldiers have done in Gaza and that is murder the children too. Not a bit of it. The Times of Israel describes how “The terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder children.’”

There you have the difference between the genocidal racist and the oppressed. In fact two babies were killed on October 7, both accidentally. Compare that to the orgy of child-killing by imperialism’s bastard state.

On a personal level I have a friend, who I worked with in the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain, who voluntarily went back after October 7 to be with her family. I worry every day about the genocidal maniacs who are trying to kill her, her sick mother and the rest of their family. She tells me how tired she is having to constantly flee from one area to another, as Israel hunts them down. To read, in a Marxist paper, that the oppressed and oppressor are no different is really too much. Would someone who had compared the Warsaw Ghetto fighters to SS General Jürgen Stroop, who commanded the Nazi forces be tolerated in a socialist paper?

I am, however, flattered to be called an “appalling individual with appalling views” by the arid Stalinist, Andrew Northall. I must have done something right in my life!

Northall is nothing if not a Philistine! Moshé Machover’s highly interesting article, ‘Promise myth as template’ (July 25), was clearly beyond his comprehension. He should stick to the Morning Star or possibly Socialist Worker and avoid anything too challenging!

Anyone who has any understanding of Zionism will know how the Bible has been plundered in order to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. As GG explained last week, these biblical verses are being used, often out of context, in order to justify the barbarities we see today.

Just as Israel Shahak brought his erudition and scholarship to bear in what he wrote, so too does Moshé. I disagree with him on certain things, notably the question of the Israeli Jewish nation, but to disparage him in the way Northall does just illustrates how little the latter has to say.

Northall counterposes a Palestinian perspective to a Jewish anti-Zionist one, as if these are somehow counterposed. I work with Palestinians all the time in the solidarity movement. We discuss all the questions that Northall mentions, such as what type of state will enable a permanent solution. There is no one Palestinian or Jewish perspective - it depends on your politics.

Indeed Palestinians expect anti-Zionist Jews to speak out. We are the living proof that what is happening in Palestine is not a sectarian or communal struggle, but a question of settler-colonialism. We are the proof that support for the Palestinians is not anti-Jewish.

I’m sorry that Northall does not understand these most basic of points. Perhaps that is because of the Stalinist tradition of firstly supporting the Zionists in the Nakba and then indulging in an orgy of anti-Semitism culminating in the Slansky trial and Stalin’s ‘Doctors Plot’.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Lazare parting

I’m glad to read the letter in last week’s Weekly Worker that a decision was made to part company with Daniel Lazare (August 29).

As the letter says, he did write many interesting articles, but on the issue of Gaza he never showed the least heart for the people being massacred by the Zionist war machine. He could by accepting their tremendous suffering have gained sympathy for those murdered on October 7, but instead he closed that possibility down and hardened hearts.

There is room to discuss why many genuine socialists of Jewish origin have not the least sympathy for the Palestinian people who had been wiped out in their consciousness long before October 7 - and have been wiped out physically since then in vast and ever growing numbers. Why are such vast numbers of Jews in Israel and around the world not only supporting the determined mass murder of fellow human beings in Gaza and the West Bank, but are not in the least troubled by this ongoing extermination and destruction of all infrastructure?

And the other clear fact is that the European and US governments are doing everything in their power to feed this unholy hate war with arms and complete media machinery backing. It proves everything said by communists and socialists about these former colonial powers. All of them should be removed, as they are an ideological plague. Only communism has the answers and the practical and organisational ideology to achieve the human necessity of peace and unity the world over.

Elijah Traven
Hull

Lazare replies

I’m glad that the CPGB has decided to make public my correspondence with Jack Conrad on the genocide question. If it sparks further discussion, then I’m all for it, since that has been my goal all along.

But I must take exception to Jack’s statement in his August 29 letter accusing me of “dismissing the whole notion of genocide in Gaza/Palestine as ‘garbage’”. This makes it seem that I am dismissing the Palestinian plight, which is entirely untrue. The only time I used the word “garbage” was in my original June 14 article in which I stated: “But, based on the gigo principle of ‘garbage in, garbage out’, a meaningless term can only lead to further confusion.”

Plainly, “garbage” in this instance refers to the theoretical problems associated with the genocide concept, not to the all too real suffering of those on the ground. Indeed, I described Gaza elsewhere in our correspondence as a “nightmare”, a war that “has done nothing but bring down ruin on the Palestinian masses”, and a conflict that at best will reduce Gazans to “a state of slavery, as they try to eke out an existence amid the ruins”. It is my sympathy with the Palestinian masses that causes me to see red whenever people like Conrad equivocate over Hamas’s role.

For those interested, I’ve posted a copy of the original June 14 article at daniellazare.com.

Daniel Lazare
New York

Being upfront

Mike Macnair has indirectly posed an important question about the democratic-republican conception of socialism to the comrades of the Marxist Unity Group, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation and The Partyist (‘Solidarity, not sectionalism’ August 29). The economic demands of the minimum programme are “generally aimed at strengthening the position of the working class as a class in a society that remains” (under workers’ political rule) “either capitalist or a ‘mixed economy’”.

Comrade Macnair is “less than entirely clear” that there is common ground between these organisations and the CPGB on this question, as it is not made explicit in their texts. The Draft programme of the CPGB, however, is explicit: “Socialism is not a mode of production. It is the transition from capitalism to communism. Socialism is communism which emerges from capitalist society. It begins as capitalism with a workers’ state.”

This persistence of the capitalist mode of production is challenging territory, because we are not just opposed to the political rule of the capitalist class through their state, but also their economic rule through their enterprises: the ordering of daily life in workplaces through managerial control - a practice which spills over into the functioning of the workers’ movement. Yet, while we do not want to leave relations at the point of production unchanged in the short term, a rapid and forced collectivisation of petty proprietors has proven to cause immense dislocation.

Some disruption is an inevitable part of proletarian revolution - the old regime has to be replaced and a new ruling class, the working class, has to come to power. And the threat exists of trade barriers being put up against the new workers’ republic, creating a state of siege and the eventual reassertion of bourgeois rule.

How then can a workers’ republic avoid its economy being thrown into depression by external pressure? Spreading the revolution only gets it so far: the working class will have to sustain itself where it has already taken power.

The ‘commanding heights of the economy’ - the largest firms and banks which exert monopoly power over the petty proprietors - are surely targets for rapid socialisation. But legislation of the new workers’ republic, the market power of its state-owned enterprises and the operation of a free and independent trade union movement across the whole economy will have to condition a remaining capitalist sector. The challenge will be to prevent the collapse or short-term decline of these small and medium-sized enterprises, while at the same time ensuring that the terms and conditions of their workers do not fall behind the rest of the class.

If this is the reality of the situation. as the minimum programme is implemented in future, then we need to be upfront about it today.

Ansell Eade
Balham

Climate hysteria

I must confess my heart sank when I read Jack Conrad’s piece, ‘Nuclear power’s useful idiots’ (August 29). You’ve bit by bit been reflecting the hysterical contagion of climate panic, which has infected the left and now is fully absorbed in the Weekly Worker/CPGB PCC too.

The logic of this hysteria is that we stop production of coal, steel, oil and gas and that consequently we stop the use of everything made by that use. Which basically means we give up life, at least for the majority of us on the planet. I’m sure that a few tiny communes of small groups reviving a sort of hunter-gathering, primitive existence might survive, but for the mass of humanity it means devastation. No power, consistent heat, medicine, sanitation, transport.

No more will communists be the defenders of the proletariat - the architects of the future with their power to build and produce and make the necessities of life, to invent new methods and discoveries. Will you be standing with the steelworkers demanding continuation of the steel we use daily? Will you be standing with oil and gas onshore and offshore, demanding that their vital work continue, as you once stood with miners demanding no pit closures? Or will you be in the ranks of those eccentric flat-earthers trying to undo the progress we have made and the miles we have come?

The idiocy of the slogan, ‘Just Stop Oil’, is clear, when the people who declare it haven’t the slightest intention of trying to live without oil. Do you seriously think that steel production, or the raw steel we use every day, is going to end with the closure of British blast furnaces? Of course not. The wind turbine foolishness will only be possible by their importation from China and elsewhere, where they are made, as are all others, by use of the blast furnace and coal made into coke. The propeller blades will be made by use of petro-chemicals, and thousands of tons of concrete and cement (made, by the way, with coal) - the bloody things won’t operate without thousands of litres of oil. What product of nasty fossil fuel you close down here we will replace by nasty fossil fuel extracted elsewhere by imports. What patently hypocritical posturing.

I am reminded of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology”, as he embarked on his pit closure plan - which closed more mines than Margaret Thatcher did! He said we shouldn’t be sending men down the pit, working in cramped, small places with water dripping on their backs. No, we would change all of that with nuclear power - clean, safe and modern. Because Wilson clearly thought nuclear power grew on trees, he obviously didn’t know there were Namibian miners working in conditions 10 times worse than ours with radioactive water dripping through on them.

While I thought Emil Jacobs was trying to apply some much-needed common sense (‘Nature’s gift to humanity’, August 22), he misses the point that uranium needs mining, and that mining requires heavy plant, steel, digging equipment and, of course, oil. Jack too cites a host of alternative sources of power, but all of them depend for their existence on coal, oil and gas. There are no - none, zilch - renewables which don’t require fossil fuels to exist. When one thinks of the steel and concrete that goes into a nuclear plant, would it be done without coal mining and steel making? I’m sorry to have to raise some fairly basic facts, but we don’t grow it: we mine it.

The panic over climate change is just that: it’s the way you choose to tell the story, to contextualise it, put it in perspective and proportion. The climate is warming, slightly - in a historic context that’s not so unusual, but, even if it were, we will adapt. That’s what we do, and we are able to do this at this juncture precisely because of fossil fuels.

There are almost nine billion of us on this planet. We survive and live to the standards we do, albeit with gross inequalities which are totally unnecessary, because of fossil fuels. In time, yes, we will not need blast furnaces - that will be when we stop using steel and move on to some other substance, which is harder and more adaptable - probably micro-biotic. I’m sure both oil and gas or coal will be used in smaller and smaller quantities, but it will be when we already have alternative products which suit our purposes equally efficiently, not because of moral objection. Likewise, we can’t uninvent our discoveries and progress, and go back to primitive, inefficient methods.

Perhaps only in this decade and on this shell-shocked island, where the proletariat has been all but decimated, would self-declared communists advocate covering the whole of the country with giant windmills!

David Douglass
South Shields

My trauma

I find myself quite disappointed with the standard of the CPGB’s replies to my recent letters (July 25 and August 22). Comrade Macnair’s article (‘Solidarity, not sectionalism’, August 29), fails to fundamentally understand the unique nature of the struggle for trans liberation, I feel - both in an abstract, global sense and in a practical, local sense within the British Isles. Whilst other comrades will raise issues with the ideological and philosophical principles with which you agitate, I will restrict myself to some smaller-level critiques.

The first issue that I take umbrage with is Macnair’s framing of the fundamental trauma that comes from transitioning and the political responses which emerge from that. He argues against those “who argue that gender transition is in itself an act of resistance against the capitalist patriarchy regime”. He continues: “This is a mistaken idea, like 1970s arguments that homosexuality was in itself an act of resistance, or the arguments of Pat Califia in the 1981 book Samois that BDSM activity could be in itself an act of resistance.”

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the socio-cultural shift that is transitioning. The act of changing one’s gender is by its own nature fundamentally a rejection of the capitalist paradigm of social reproduction. I have spent lots of time rejecting the role society expects of me as someone born as a ‘bloke’, and this by necessity has required the rejection of the position I hold in capital’s social reproductive hierarchy.

Furthermore the insanely high costs of medical transitioning only further reinforces my position in society, as an ‘other’ within the capitalist gender hierarchy. As such by necessity I have been excluded from the capitalist centre of politics, with the right wing calling me a child-rapist, blood-drinking degenerate, hellbent on destroying the west (as an aside I will say that the last claim is true!).

I and my many siblings of varied genders are forced into revolutionary politics. Now, of course, many remain in the illusory farce of the ‘left’ - their politics being nothing more than vague moralising and that godforsaken phrase of ‘eat the rich’. Yet many turn towards genuinely revolutionary politics, I am one of them, and in the fight for a Communist Party, we will win over more.

The crucial role that communists play in the fight against capitalism must by necessity require the intervention into arenas not directly related to the class struggle, and winning them over to a basis of class politics. This will include ethnic and religious minorities, as well as sexual and gender ones. This fight must emphasise the fundamental nature of the notion that the negation of class oppression will not in and of itself negate their oppression, but the negation of capitalism is the only way for total human liberation.

I do not call for the dissolution of the communist movement into a broad coalition of interest groups oppressed by capitalism, united under the farce of the hammer and sickle (if were to do that, I would join the Revolutionary Communist International). But I do call for communists to take the revolutionary leadership that history pushes us into, in every arena of struggle.

Brynhilda Olding
Australia

Labour vote

At Ilford South, the Labour Party removed Sam Tarry as its parliamentary candidate because he had supported a strike, and replaced him with Jas Athwal, who rented out flats with black mould and with ant infestations. Athwal was the leader of the local council, so it is inconceivable that no-one knew that he was also a slum landlord. It seems the Labour Party actively preferred a slum landlord to a trade unionist.

Meanwhile, Jess Phillips has made the ridiculous and offensive claim that she had been given priority in hospital treatment because of her support for a ceasefire in Gaza. As much as anything else, far from her being known for such support, that issue very nearly cost her her seat. Her latest remarks give aid and succour to the recent rioters. She should be sacked as a minister.

Phillips and Athwal should both lose the Labour whip, and Athwal, at least, should be expelled from the Labour Party for having brought it into disrepute. Obviously, none of those things is going to happen. Do not vote Labour.

David Lindsay
Lanchester