31.10.2024
Racists against racism
Marching with Zionists in opposition to racism in general and marching against Zionism over Israeli state racism is a circle that cannot be squared. Beset by internal divisions, the central committee is under increasing pressure, reports Paul Demarty
In his leading essay in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser proposed a distinctive technique: the “symptomatic reading” - a practice of listening for, as it were, the silences between the propositions of a text, and drawing out what was implied in them. He proposed this not as his own idea, but that of Marx, taking as his example Marx’s account of how Aristotle could have come so close to understanding human labour, but could not in the end read it into the phenomena he studied; thus Marx had to appear in order to, as it were, fill in the gaps.
As an account of Marx’s method, this is (it is fair to say in retrospect) an invention out of wholecloth. But that is, in the end, because Marx places everything on the table, however much work that leaves us in discerning what exactly is there in front of us, and how well it all fits together. Not everyone does that, and among those who do not we find the Socialist Workers Party. One often has to listen out for telling silences to work out what is going on with them.
Seasoned SWP-watchers will detect the outlines of an internal dispute at the moment. We are in the short annual period in which SWP members are allowed to have opinions about things, and those opinions are gathered in three successive editions of the Pre-Conference Bulletin. Ordinary members are entitled to 3,000 words for their contributions; the central committee is entitled to apparently infinite logorrhoea. Both the members and the CC, however, point oddly to what they are not talking about.
Maximally
How so? The SWP is presently engaged in two main lines of activity. The first is Palestine solidarity, which needs no justification, and the organisation has rightly thrown itself energetically into the work. We have disagreements on its overall strategic perspectives, but that need not detain us here: in the face of the abject inhumanity inflicted, day after day, on the Palestinian people by Israel, it is enough for now that we march together to denounce it, and to denounce our rulers’ complicity in it.
The second is anti-racism, in the form of its Stand Up to Racism. This is the latest in a string of such fronts the SWP has run over the years, including most notably the Anti-Nazi League, which achieved some notoriety in the 1970s and 80s, when the enemy was the National Front, and then Unite Against Fascism in the 2000s, whose primary adversary was the British National Party. The tendency over time has been for the political basis to corrode, in the name of gathering a maximally broad “united front”. Thus, in the UAF days, the SWP became a cheerleader for bourgeois multiculturalism, albeit “multiculturalism from below”, whatever that means; and today, it cheerfully adopts the strange nostrums of the liberal anti-racism presently popular among bourgeois professionals.
How broad is too broad? That is the question before the SWP comrades in their first Pre-Conference Bulletin.1 A long contribution from “CC” - the central committee - on “Fascism, the far right and building a movement against racism”, after congratulating the SWP and SUtR for channelling the anger around Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza into broader anti-racist activity, nonetheless specifically cautions against excluding Zionists from the movement:
[We] also recognise that SUtR is right not to make anti-Zionism a ticket of entry into the movement.
Tommy Robinson and the fascist forces we are seeing in Europe won’t be beaten as a by-product of the anti-imperialist movement. What is required is an explicitly anti-fascist movement that draws in the broadest possible forces, on the unity of the sole question of anti-fascism, to mobilise the biggest numbers.
The characterisation of Tommy Robinson as a Zionist “footsoldier” or “poster boy” are not only wide of the mark [sic!], but fails to identify what is the key driver of Robinson, Le Pen, Meloni, the AfD and all the different forms of the far right. That is Islamophobia and anti-migrant racism, and SUtR is right to make opposition to these the only ticket of entry (pp55-56).
Similar concerns appear in the contributions from “Rob” from Dorset, “Talat” from Edinburgh, “Alex and James” from Glasgow and “Mike” from Walthamstow (security theatre and a strange aversion to the use of cadre names means that one only gets first names in PCBs). The contributions from Glasgow and Dorset both repeat the “ticket of entry” phrase, giving a very strong impression - if the sheer weight of numbers were not enough - that there is a full-court press on this question coming from the leadership. So, for example, Alex and James mention that
these arguments [over the presence of Zionists] are not new to SUtR in Glasgow, and at the UN anti-racism day demonstration in March this year there had been significant difficulties with making the argument within the movement. However, in the face of the far right mobilising, the argument was more clear than ever to those in our periphery about the need to gain the broadest movement to ensure we outnumbered the far right. It also shows that if these issues are fought for by comrades in a political way, the majority can be won to the necessity of a “united front” that does not require anti-Zionism to be a ticket of entry (p86).
Glasgow
Indeed, they certainly are not new in Glasgow, and indeed were not new in March. As long ago as 2018, the participation of the Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland (Cofis) in SUtR’s annual UN day of action activities in the city has been the source of controversy. This has been documented over the years by local activists from the Revolutionary Communist Group, who attempted to prevent Cofis from participating in the first place, and then organised a militant counter-demonstration that succeeded in preventing the small Cofis contingent from joining the main demonstration.2
Controversy continues to rage in the city. When an anti-fascist counter-demonstration was organised by SUtR on September 7 (this is the main topic in the contribution of Alex and James), there was again a split in the local movement, as reported by anonymous members of Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21), a breakaway from the SWP. So, alongside the SUtR rally, there was an “autonomous” counter-demo organised by those “wary of their collaboration with police and Zionists”, including RS21, a Palestine bloc, and - later on - a group of Celtic ultras. According to RS21, things got tense at times:
At multiple points, SUtR stewards clashed with autonomous stewards, sided with cops to push them back, and at one point identified an anti-fascist to the police who had thrown something over the barrier. When confronted by witnesses about their collusion, SUtR stewards lied; an established pattern of behaviour … The reason the Palestine bloc was separate was due to SUtR’s insistence on working with Zionists amidst an ongoing genocide - which raises questions for how low we need to stoop for united front work when the fascists are so small. Principles don’t set us back.3
So long as the previous holding pattern in Israel’s occupation of Gaza - essentially walling the place off and periodically, as they say, ‘mowing the lawn’ with a bombing campaign - this was merely an irritant to the SWP tops, who could get on with the real work of, er, marking some meaningless UN awareness-raising exercise. Under present circumstances, that is a rather harder sell. Several of the individual contributions note that this has been a very divisive issue out in the provinces. It is hard to tell, but surely disquiet has spread into the core of the organisation too. At least one regular Socialist Worker contributor on the Palestine question - Sophie Squire - has gone mysteriously missing from the paper’s pages, when there has surely been plenty for her to write about.
On the face of it, the SWP is in a real pickle here. After all, it wants to stand up to racism (doesn’t it?). Zionism equals support for a settler-colonial project, and we think the SWP would agree with us in considering settler-colonialism inherently and irreducibly racist. The present behaviour of the state of Israel, quite obviously seeking to wipe out the Palestinian population in Gaza, is not only racist, but exactly the sort of doomsday scenario that anti-racism points to for its moral basis. If you cannot exclude from the anti-racist movement people currently supporting or running cover for actual genocide, in what sense is the movement actually anti-racist? SWP members and contacts are clearly asking these questions - and they are quite right to do so.
Fortifications
What are the answers? The SWP leadership primarily seeks to get around this by changing the terms of the discussion. The real point of SUtR is to fight fascism (as opposed to racism per se). In an interesting phrase, comrade Rob writes that the replacement of UAF by SUtR “was not a ‘dilution’ of the focus against fascism, but the widening of the fortifications against its rise” (p68). Once we have seen SUtR ‘correctly’ as really addressed to fascism, there is no problem with unity with Zionists against the fascists, it seems.
This is an ingenious move, but one flatly belied by SUtR’s actual record of activity, anchored in these UN days of action and encompassing campaigns against individuals and groups (Nigel Farage and Ukip, for example) to whom the SWP does not apply the label “fascist’, however ludicrously expansive its definition is in SWP circles. It looks like an anti-racist campaign, and quacks like an anti-racist campaign.
In reality, SUtR’s object activity is neither fascism nor racism as such, but a rotating cast of devil-figures, who are each painted as a uniquely dangerous threat. (”We are closer to the 1930s than we have ever been,” the CC document begins (p44) - closer, even, than in the actual 1930s?) This infantile morality is well suited to rousing its drowsy membership, in a contemporary culture saturated with comic-book movies. The current ‘Big Bad’, as they used to call such supervillains on Buffy the vampire slayer, is Tommy Robinson. It is in the name of facing down such a character that SWP members are supposed to swallow their objections and unite with Zionists.
Robinson
But, as we argued last week,4 Robinson is not in fact a uniquely dangerous figure, but merely a somewhat prominent far-right celebrity figure more or less interchangeable with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of others. Even though he has been packed off to jail for 18 months for contempt of court, his fans will not be lost and utterly demobilised. Someone else will step into the breach, if he does not manage to keep his platform in jail. The threat of a new wave of senseless rioting, or some other pattern of racist violence, will remain, because it has far deeper roots than merely the maleficence of particular individuals. (The SWP acknowledges this in theory, but the actual practice of its anti-racist campaigning belies that acknowledgement.)
Though the SWP’s bureaucratic heavy-handedness and anti-intellectualism makes things worse than they need to be, it should be said that nobody committed to the project of building a broad anti-racist movement could actually solve it. After all, the Zionists present themselves as anti-racists, defenders of the Jews from the predations of anti-Semites, and many of them truly believe it. Theirs is not the only such case: merely the most egregious - think of black anti-Semitic organisations like the Nation of Islam. An anti-racist organisation capacious enough to include both is merely paralysed: the trouble with widening the fortifications, beyond a certain point, is that the line gets too thin to defend.
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revolutionarycommunist.org/branches/scotland-branch/gsu-190318.↩︎
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‘Nine lives of Manifesto man’, Weekly Worker October 24: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1512/nine-lives-of-manifesto-man.↩︎