Letters

Nuclear fascism

Is the state of Israel fascist? The formal answer is ‘no’. Is it becoming a fascist state? The answer should be ‘yes’. Of course, it is important not to bandy around the term, ‘fascist’, and misuse it. But the case that Israel is becoming a fascist state is about direction of travel, not the final outcome. The importance of understanding this process is to arm the democratic forces and highlight the danger. It is a call for the working class to expose and resist Israeli fascism.

Of course, the Netanyahu government contains neo-fascists in the cabinet. This does not by itself make the state fascist. Yet it is an obvious warning of a state that can tolerate fascist politicians in government. Before the war the state adopted racially discriminatory laws within Israel and in the West Bank, where the rule of law was described as a form of apartheid. Since the insurrection in Gaza, the Zionist state has de facto annexed both Gaza and the West Bank. Is the state of Greater Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ a kind of fascism?

Today in Gaza there is no democracy, rule of law, civil liberties or rights. The Zionist state is carrying out genocide by terrorising the population with bombings, military occupation, assassination and torture. The state has made starvation and the spread of disease a weapon of war and a means of genocide. In the West Bank, fascist gangs armed by the state are carrying out pogroms with the support of the Israel Defence Forces. There are no rights, no democracy, no civil liberties, arbitrary arrests, imprisonment without trial, torture, etc. The treatment of Palestinians by the Zionist state is fascism in practice.

Before October 7 2023 Israel was a racist state with colonial ambitions, but not fascist. Free elections, rule of law, civil liberties and trade unions still existed. Netanyahu was seen by liberal Israelis as a corrupt, rightwing, populist politician, kept in power by neo-fascists. He was trying to change the constitution to remain in power and out of jail. A mass liberal, democratic opposition took to the streets, with strikes and mutinous soldiers. Many Israelis were aware of the danger of fascism.

Since October 7 2023 the Israeli state has been operating under a “special state of emergency” (Israeli Democracy Institute, October 16 2023). Ministers announced further ‘state of emergency’ measures for September 2024 in response to the situation in Lebanon. The IDF was given special powers to issue instructions to the Israeli public, to ban gatherings, limit studies and issue additional instructions. The expansion of state power into Gaza and in the West Bank brings the Palestinian population under conditions of barbaric fascism.

The contradiction exists between Israel as a ‘liberal democracy’ and a ‘fascist state’. It is being resolved by a policy of war. The liberal opposition is calling for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages and calling on Netanyahu to account for his corruption and failures. The Palestinian resistance is not yet defeated, but suffering all the brutality of fascism. An imperialist war with Iran will propel the fascist forces. It should be concluded that the Israeli state is now semi-fascist and moving further down that road.

In summary, Israel is becoming a fascist state. Fascism is the policy in Gaza and the West Bank. Liberal democracy is not abolished in Israel, but it is restricted by the war with no ending in sight. We may discuss how close it is to a fascist state. I have deliberately steered clear of using the term, ‘Nazi’, because of the historical experience of the Jewish people. The left is at ease with describing Israel as racist and settler-colonialist and, since October 7 2023, as genocidal.

We must now put our finger on the nuclear button by saying the unsayable: that Israel faces a real and present danger of becoming a fascist state.

Steve Freeman
London

Ultra-dogmatist

Steve Bloom suffers the wrath of Mike Macnair because of “the way in which comrade Bloom’s (and that of the organised far left in general) fetishism of the revolutionary moment is an alternative to Marx’s and Engels’s strategic conception. In the far left (Bloom included) the wager is on ‘mass action’. In Marx and Engels, in contrast, it is the organised movement of the working class (warts and all) that offers the possibility of hope of escape from the infernal machine of capitalism” (‘Formulations, fetishes and failures’, October 10). And what’s wrong with “the mass action of the organised working class”?

This mechanical counterposition is so hostile to the Marxist dialectic as to be risible. Furthermore, the rest of the article sets out to prove that socialism in a single country is impossible (we know - Trotsky was the first and main opponent of this anti-internationalist Stalinist dogma), because revolution in a single country is wrong, as the international capitalists will crush it in a short time, and so it should not be attempted.

Steve has answered this by correctly asserting that revolutionary situations arise in single countries and waiting for a neighbouring regional uprising would lose the opportunity, given that revolutionary situations last for a few months at most. Lenin was fearful in September 1917 that waiting for the Petrograd soviet (in particular) to support the revolution would lose the opportunity, which Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin failed to recognise existed. The point is that the global working class radicalises globally, its class-consciousness advances on a world scale, within which individual countries have their own time scale of revolution. It is true that in some countries pre-revolutionary situations arise and do not develop because of the absence or weakness of revolutionary leadership, but none can doubt the fact that these periods have existed; eg, post-World War I and II, the early to mid-1930s, the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.

I think comrade Bloom bent over backwards to keep alive the prospect of Trotskyists participating in the CPGB’s regroupment perspectives and I can’t help feeling that the 16-page supplement by Lars T Lih was published to scupper his efforts. When I say ‘bent over backwards’, I refer to his agreement with Mike that ‘extreme democracy’ was the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The phrase, ‘extreme democracy’, always seemed to me to be simply an extension of bourgeois democracy, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat was the rule of workers’ councils/soviets, which not only does not give fascists the right to free speech (as the CPGB does), but denies to the capitalist class the right to organise, to publish their press and even the right to vote.

And he was also wrong to concede that Trotsky’s 1938 transitional programme was mistaken because capitalism did not collapse post-World War II, as he predicted. The point is that Trotsky was not a soothsayer predicting the future, but he was promoting a programme for revolution to enable revolutionaries to take advantage of the situations that arose at the end of the war and lead them to victory. The outcome was frustrated because the capitalists, Stalinists and the Nazis murdered those revolutionaries in the Warsaw uprising (Stalin and Hitler collaborated there), in Czechoslovakia, in northern Italy, in Greece and in Vietnam, and Stalinists in government in many European countries prevented pre-revolutionary situations developing to full situations by supporting de Gaulle in France, for instance, and dissolving the militias they led, which had played such a leading role in defeating the Nazis at the end of the war.

Lastly, I repudiate Mike’s assertion during Communist University that Trotsky was wrong about Abyssinia in 1935 and Brazil in 1938. Abyssinia is the only African country that does not have a national holiday celebrating its independence from a colonising European power, because it was never colonised. Even if Haile Selassie did take refuge in London after the Italian invasion, that did not make Abyssinia a colony of Britain, or even a semi-colony. And in 1938 it was already clear that the US had eclipsed Britain as the global hegemonic power, even if that was not acknowledged everywhere until after the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. The putative invasion of Brazil would have been supported by the US; the Falklands/Malvinas invasion was supported by them in 1982.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Timing stinks

I have to admit I was a bit irritated to see a four-page spread on the origins of the Jewish religion and its alleged claims about the origins of the Jewish people, the Jewish nation and the likelihood or otherwise that an historical Israel ever existed (Jack Conrad, ‘They worshipped many gods’, October 3). This at a time when the present-day Israeli state is conducting a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in particular, but seems hell-bent (literally) on plunging the whole region into catastrophic war, in which millions of people would die, using quotations from the Jewish bible to try and justify this.

I don’t know whether this is fully in line with the Marxist view of human nature, but leading Israeli leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, just seem to me to ooze pure evil in their smirking hatred of Palestinians and neighbouring Arab and other peoples - gloating over their pathological genocidal state terrorism in massacring hundreds and thousands on an almost continuous daily basis. If anyone has human-like coating over evil, hideous, slimy, alien creatures, it is these.

I am not sure that even Goebbels or Himmler would have had the nerves or chutzpah to stand before press cameras or the United Nations and smirk and gloss about the ongoing mass murder of thousands of those who they consider ‘sub-human’.

I just cannot believe these people are genuinely motivated by religion of any description, that they believe any of the quotations they take from the bible are based on any form of reality or that they are somehow acting on behalf of any god.

However, I have to say I found Jack’s article really interesting, informative and actually enjoyable - although I still think its timing stinks.

I found the “Ugaritic pantheon” or hierarch of gods absolutely fascinating, including that ‘Yahweh’ was just one of 70 “divine children”, and that there are still hints of other gods even in the Christian bible. Also fascinating, because this appears to mirror the ancient Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses, and no doubt others will be able to point to very similar things in other ancient religions, perhaps the Babylonian?

I don’t subscribe to the ‘ancient alien’ theses - although I am open-minded - but the descriptions of all these various gods and goddesses, their stories, exploits and behaviours, do sound awfully like people, rather than genuinely divine beings. I would expect the latter to behave and conduct themselves a whole lot better!

I was struck by the ‘life-death-return to life’ cycle described for Baal. I had thought Baal was some form of god of evil and hadn’t been aware of that specific life-death story. This is in fact extremely similar to that attributed to the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld and death, Osiris. And, of course, the semi-divine Jesus of the Christian religion also died and came back to life. Jack mentions a layer of semi-divine, half-god, half-human beings in the Ugaritic pantheon. Some see a similar caste of beings in the Old Testament being the Nephilim, also in Babylonian legends. The Egyptian god, Horus, was regarded as half-god, half-human, born of immaculate conception between husband and wife, (and brother and sister!), Osiris and Isis, and providing a semi-divine link between the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt and the more earthly pharaohs. Jesus himself was regarded as half-divine, providing a link between God and human beings. Immaculate conceptions producing remarkable human beings are a common feature of other cultures, religions and legends.

That Yahweh emerged from the same caste of 70 ‘divine children’ as Baal is also fascinating. Stephen Knight, writing about the cult origins of Freemasonry in the 1970s, claimed Masons worshipped an entity called ‘Yah-Bul-On’, being a composite of Yahweh, the god of the Christians and Jews (these are surely very different?), Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, and Baal, who the Israelites identified with the devil. Knight claimed that, while Masons were not devil worshippers in the strict sense, they worshipped an entity which was in part diabolical.

However, it seems that if Baal and Yahweh were two of 70 ‘divine children’, sent out to rule the world in 70 different regions, identifying one as ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ seems crude and false. Both clearly had complex and contradictory characters and Yahweh at many times in the Jewish bible seems a diabolically evil genocidal bastard.

While Knight may have been onto something about the hidden nature of the ‘divine being’ or ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ that Freemasons really worship, his depiction of its composition as a mix of thirds of good and evil seems a bit mechanical rather than dialectical. It seems to me Freemasonry may have in fact simply traced back the history of various dominant gods and goddesses in ancient religions (including, apparently, the Jewish and Christian) right back to ancient Egypt, identifying their common sources as being the gods and goddesses in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. Perhaps deliberately including Yahweh, Baal and some others into that entity as a means of making those connections, and showing they all came from the same source.

There was one original ‘divine pantheon’, one original ‘life-death-resurrection’ cycle, one ‘immaculate conception’ producing a ‘divine’ half-god, half-human being, one flood/destruction of much of the world, etc. The characters and stories were just replicated or duplicated for different religions in different settings. There is one ultimate source and one ultimate truth - according to Freemasonry.

So, in a classic masonic technique, re-integrating the personalities, characters, behaviours and values of all the various gods and goddesses in various pantheons across different religions and cultures - which all do look remarkably similar - back into one collective entity. They are all interconnected elements within one overall whole.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Viva coal!

If I might be allowed to reply to Eddie Ford’s vision of the death of what he calls “fossil fuel capitalism” (‘Nothing clean about it’, October 10). This phrase has suddenly gained frequency among the lefty greens and, always wishing to be down with the kids, the Socialist Workers Party - and now it seems the CPGB-PCC have adopted it.

As I understand it, in order to attach the anti-capitalist sentiment and endeavours of the workers’ movement to the thoroughly reactionary anti-industry, anti-progressive greens, they link capitalism with the current dominant fuel. Meaning that in order to defend oneself against the former and develop a working class alternative, one must also oppose oil, gas, coal, etc. Quite some trick, considering the workers extract all three, make a million and one by-products from it, process it and distribute it.

Apart from which, unless one envisages socialism - no matter how one defines it - as some back-to-nature trek back to some golden preindustrial past which never existed, we, the workers, will also need this fossil fuel to construct the basic needs of modern society. Some whizz-kid union functionary has hit on the plan of, instead of seeing oil, gas workers and miners pitted against the cry of the middle class greens to ‘Just Stop Oil’ or gas, having them join in a campaign with those workers. That cry being: ‘No ban [on oil/gas] without a plan’.

So we see oil workers, steel workers and it would have been miners too, they hope, plus Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, on joint demonstrations demanding a ‘just transition’. Well, on the face of it the slogan of no ban without an alternative plan isn’t bad in itself. But there is no plan to save the communities which will be destroyed, as the mining communities were (I doubt very much that there will be before the oil and gas reserves are exhausted anyway).

Let’s take it further and demand all reserves of oil and gas (and, I would add, coal) are developed, while they’re thinking of what replaces those jobs (what replaces the substances is another matter that we shall leave for the moment). However, the tactic is a lie, and anyway isn’t working. The joint demonstrations instead are dominated by the anti-industry, anti-fossil fuel lobby. These seek to present oil and gas rig workers as being against oil and gas extraction - about as likely as coal miners being against coal mining. It will surprise Eddie and his ilk, but rig workers, steel workers and miners believe in what they do - believe that their labour is valuable not just as labour, but for the progress and level of society we are able to achieve with it.

The carbon capture and storage (CCS) system they plan to roll out was first developed by Richard Budge at Hatfield Main Colliery (where I worked for 30 years). It was to build an entirely clean-coal power station: no CO₂ would enter the atmosphere, we would build an exhaust system which would carry the captured carbon along to the Humber and pump it into disused oil and gas wells in the North Sea. Far from Eddie’s dismissive heading about there being nothing clean about it, oh yes it was - and is - as the CO₂ is ‘captured’ and not let loose into the atmosphere. These wells are already empty, and it was estimated that, just using a small amount of them, we could store all the CO₂ emissions from all of western Europe for at least two centuries if we so wished.

Alarm bells began to ring in Whitehall, because even a blind man could see a forthcoming ‘dash back to coal’: new pits, new clean-coal power stations and the horror of the National Union of Mineworkers riding back from the jaws of hell with a regrowth of the industry. What happened? Need you ask? The plug was pulled, the government refused to pay their share, the scheme was dropped.

It’s true to say the ‘back to the Stone Age’ advocates hated the idea of CCS - not because it doesn’t work, but because it does: they don’t want us to mine - gas, oil, coal - anything really. I won’t even try and explain why such a prescription is a programme for starvation, regression and deprivation on a world scale. But this is a good thing: we get the fuel without the emissions. I’d prefer we owned and operated all mineral extraction for the good of the world’s population, but that isn’t the question we’re being faced with.

Eddie gives the impression that CCS is just a big con. Sorry, Eddie, it simply isn’t - as you state - used as a means of driving out small quantities of oil and gas which otherwise couldn’t be extracted (though that is sometimes an added bonus). We more often than not target empty or virtually empty wells for the process. The concept is only now gaining momentum because of the clamour over emissions.

As for the strange sum we are given of the marginal oil driven out by CCS processes producing more CO₂ than is being stored, your calculator must have a logic mine doesn’t (and like much of this fear-mongering was probably made up on the spot). Likewise, he tells us the damn stuff leaks out - I really think he should take time to explain this. We are pumping the CO₂ at great depth, where it becomes solid, or at least not a gas. It isn’t fluttering about like a flock of wild seagulls waiting to escape. Just where would it escape from? For millions and millions of years the oil or gas has been captive in its solid-rock tomb. If it could leak, it would have done so long before we got here. Supposing a small quantity could defy its nature and learn to fly despite its weight and density, so what? It would be a tiny part of the amount which would have been in the atmosphere otherwise.

We must take issue with another of Eddie’s sleights of hand. CCS applied to the Tata Steel company would have meant it could continue producing primary steel. So-called ‘green steel’ is actually recycled scrap steel. This is useless for all heavy steel production, wind turbines, high-rise flats, bridges, etc. And emissions will still be made, but they’ll be in someone else’s country. So we’re not net zero at all.

Eddie appears to think on behalf of the workers that we don’t want oil, gas, steel or coal producers. I don’t know when we had that debate or how we decided to live without them. He tells us that the resolution in support of the oil, gas and steel workers’ jobs at this year’s TUC only looks at workers in a narrow, trade union way, and not as actual human beings. What kind of human being do we become, when stripped of our work (and meaningful, important work, at that), and rendered unemployed in a bombed-out, once thriving community, rotten with anti-social crime?

Let me assure Eddie that killing fossil fuel like coal did not allow the miners time to meditate on ‘How green is my valley?’ and reach some profound understandings. Quite the contrary: they fell into a spiral of deprivation, generational poverty and neglect. To compare the size and depth of the mining industry and its loss with that of the charcoal-burning industry shows how much he understands of what is going on here - not very much, to say the least. What about quoting the green spokesman for nuclear power, George Monbiot, that such schemes have failed time and again? Really? They are in fact in operation in various phases in many parts of the world. Of course, they’ve never been used on a commercial level in the UK - it’s a new technology. But I thought we were looking for groundbreaking new systems to help manage climate change.

Eddie tasks us with “saving the planet”. I wouldn’t have put it in such catastrophic terms, at least when talking of climate change - we have a far more imminent danger of nuclear war and a World War III. The target of maintaining an abstract level of temperature was always based upon a global proscription of stopping third world development - that’s the long and short of it, China, India, Indochina - to say nothing of Africa - must stop their development, while we in the west start the journey back.

For him the answer is blowing in the wind, but there are no renewables without coal - none. Turbines are made from steel produced by coke from coal (using a blast furnace, not an electric arc). They are constructed using cement and concrete produced by coal. They are serviced with thousands of litres of oil and rely on rare earth metals mined with heavy plant and steel tools made from coal. That’s the reality. Sure, you can live without any of this, but the global population of eight billion people can’t - not with our modern standards of life, including sanitation and medicine.

The final illusion - that the world is turning from fossil fuels and taking to renewables - is just patently not true. There is indeed expansion of renewables - mainly wind power, and that is mainly in China. But this is expanded capacity, not alternative capacity. The growth of world coal production and consumption is continuing to rise and is now at 8.7 billion tonnes, while oil is continuing to expand, with a growth of 2.4% on last year.

David Douglass
South Shields

Revolving door

It seems the newly launched Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly Socialist Appeal) is finding the going a bit tougher than it expected.

Back in May this year, when it was launched, it called its “next milestone” to be the recruitment of an additional 8,850 members to bring it up to 10,000. Now, it has set its sights on getting to 1,500 members by the end of this year - presumably mainly through student recruitment - and to 2,000 members by its next conference in May 2025.

Subsequent to this, a post on the RCP website entitled ‘Autumn growth campaign: RCP reaches record membership’ (October 2) declared: “In the past two weeks, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s autumn growth campaign has taken party membership to record highs”. However, the only recruitment figures specifically cited were those of seven in Cardiff.

Compared to earlier reports, no overall total membership figures were offered. We know from other similar organisations that members are like revolving doors - as some come in, some also leave.

None of this is said with any glee, for, unfortunately, it indicates that there is still a significant gap between the identification of subjectively arrived at ‘opportunities’ professed by the far left (and its newest ‘kid on the block’, the RCP), on the one hand, and the objective situation of leftward-moving dissatisfaction but, not yet discontent, with Labour and neoliberalism, on the other.

Gregor Gall
Glasgow