Letters

Two-stages?

Comrade Conrad neatly sums up the CPGB viewpoint with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a letter on November 15: “We recognise Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, etc identities, but we also recognise the wider Arab nation based on a common territory, language, economy and mass consciousness,” he writes.

“This matters strategically. Alone the Palestinians cannot possibly free themselves from Zionist ethnic cleansing and oppression. But in a wider, working class-led movement for national unity they have a chance. A pan-Arab socialist republic would be well advised to offer the Israeli-Jewish working class some sort of federal arrangement. That could, conceivably, split Israeli society along class lines and result in a rapprochement between the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian populations.”

Revolution, according to Conrad, is thus a two-stage process, in which Arabs first engage in a process of national consolidation and only then set about repairing relations with non-Arab minorities within.

But this raises a number of questions. One concerns pan-Arabism itself: why should Marxists view it any less negatively than, say, pan-Slavism or pan-Germanism in the 1930s? Conrad will no doubt reply that, since Marx and Engels supported German and Italian unification in the 1850s and 60s, we should support unification too. But this is mechanistic and ahistorical. Globalisation has advanced so powerfully since the 1960s as to leave pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism and all other such grandiose third-world movements in the dust. Millions of Latin American migrants making their way north to the United States have no interest in pan-this or pan-that. Neither do millions of Africans fighting to make their way into Europe. Rather, they want freedom of emigration first and foremost, which implies integration into the international proletariat as a whole rather than national consolidation back home.

Another question concerns the role of the Israeli proletariat. Conrad’s conception relegates Israeli workers to the status of passive bystanders. First “a pan-Arab socialist republic” takes power and only then does it “offer the Israeli-Jewish working class some sort of federal arrangement” that he says Jews would be well advised to accept. Even though minorities were in the forefront in the Russian Revolution, he sees them as no more than pulling up the rear in the Middle East.

Yet Israeli workers are not some sort of comprador class. Together with Palestinian workers, they comprise the most advanced proletariat in the region - the best educated, the most technologically sophisticated, the most productive, the most democratic and the most integrated too. Admittedly, ethno-religious relations have been a bit fraught of late. But they were also fraught under the tsars. Rather than seeing such problems as an impediment to revolution, the Bolsheviks saw them as a by-product of a growing crisis of tsarism and hence the revolutionary fuel that would drive the process forward. We should see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as revolutionary fuel as well.

“The German revolution is world revolution.” So Karl Liebknecht once declared. A group of heroic young Trotskyists were so impressed with the statement that they put it over the masthead of Arbeiter und Soldat, a revolutionary newspaper they distributed among soldiers of the Wehrmacht in occupied France in 1943. With equal justice, we might say today that the Israeli-Palestinian revolution is the revolution of the Middle East.

Conrad thus gets it backwards. Rather than ending with a Jewish-Arab settlement, the revolution will begin with it.

Daniel Lazare
New York

SUtR democracy

Stand up to Racism membership has exploded, including with their drive into the unions, since the August far-right racist riots. But this influx has brought a drive for internal democracy. It’s a confused drive, not a coherent movement (initially around the SUtR refusal to take a position on the assault on Palestine), but rapidly challenging the way decisions are made more generally.

There are several issues here. The debates on Palestine have included some important disagreements or uncertainties on Hamas, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, conspiracy thinking, etc. People feel passionately, but arguments are often comradely. Other issues have come up, from the stewarding of demos to looking at Starmer, from definitions of fascism to how or whether SUtR can promote policies to undercut racism and offer an alternative beyond ‘Racism and the far right are nasty and divisive’.

In these circumstances I would argue for positive involvement in local SUtR branches and trade union groups, where much of the debate is taking place.

Liam Byster
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Fake Koreans

Jack Conrad in his ‘Notes on the war’ (November 28) glibly and uncritically repeats the assertions of the imperialist mainstream media, such as “the presence of those 12,000 Korean People’s Army soldiers” - and even this wild claim: “There are some 12,000 of them there at the moment and it is suggested that their numbers could eventually rise to 100,000.”

Neither the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea nor Russian Federation have formally confirmed that troops of the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army are in Russia. Of course, there has been a marked improvement in DPRK-Russia relations - largely because Putin learned the hard way that the US imperialists, Britain, the EU and Nato cannot be trusted, so has turned to the DPRK. There is military cooperation between the DPRK and Russia. There is also an agreement for the DPRK to assist in the reconstruction of the anti-fascist people’s republics of the Donbass, which would involve DPRK construction workers, engineers and specialists.

The figure of 12,000 troops is ludicrous and, needless to say, can never be substantiated or verified. At no point in its history has that number of troops ever been deployed outside the country, simply because the DPRK itself is a frontline state - on the front line against US imperialism. It faces the threat of the US ensconced in south Korea, as well as the south Korean puppets and Japan. Moreover the US is trying to drag countries, such as Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Canada, into a potential war against the DPRK. There is no way that the DPRK would send such a large number of troops abroad, as they are needed at home.

Of course, in the past the DPRK did give internationalist assistance to Cuba, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Zimbabwe and other countries, which involved some military support. During the Vietnam war the DPRK sent airforce pilots, as well as artillery and anti-aircraft units, to Vietnam. During the 1973 October war against the Israeli Zionists, DPRK airforce pilots assisted Egypt and Syria. Interestingly, there is a story that its special forces troops in the People’s Republic of Benin actually foiled a coup by French mercenaries in 1977. However, none of these operations by the KPA involved “12,000 troops”.

So far the evidence offered by the mainstream media for the presence of large numbers of KPA troops in Russia has been shown to be based on clumsy fakes, which have been traced back to south Korea. Initially the rumour about troops in Russia was spread by the south Korean puppets and by the fascist Ukraine regime, but later whipped into a furore by the mainstream media in the west. For Zelensky the stories were another chance to play the victim and corner more military and financial aid from his masters in the US and EU.

The stories about large numbers of Korean troops in Russia are being used to further escalate the conflict and to put more sanctions on both the DPRK and Russia.

Dermot Hudson
London

Back in Berkeley

Back around 2015 we had a big problem in Berkeley, California, with fascist scum on the loose, and they were joined by outsiders.

The Revolutionary Communist Party was respected and appreciated for being in the forefront of the anti-fascist struggles. They were prominent at every demonstration (I wrote a few poems about those!). They were quite resourceful in protesting any fascist speaker on campus and I witnessed their extreme militancy; it’s no wonder they were admired. Berkeley could be very proud, in that we dealt effectively with the issue of these terrorists who came with knives, baseball bats and steel knuckles. They were neutralised or driven out.

The RCP was being attacked by these fascist marauders, who would vandalise their bookstore, Revolution Books. The comrades had installed special locks, but it felt far from safe to be at the store. I felt sorry for their situation, so I volunteered when they urgently needed help moving to another space.

I would get into discussions with them about the Russian Revolution and Trotsky; I was studying him at the time - a few theories that he developed or expanded on - but the few people I talked to didn’t seem to know much about him. They knew more about Mao and Stalin - a big portrait of Stalin hugged their wall! And, of course, Bob Avakian was their leader, whose colloquial, down-home style and articulation seemed to me in stark contrast with his heady writings.

A comrade called Aaron - a long-time personal connection of mine who passed away recently - would occasionally stop by the bookstore and get into a political discourse with them. He had commented to me that he no longer saw the working class as necessarily the force to make fundamental change in the west. The RCP view is that it’s the students and youth who should primarily be organised for a revolutionary movement. When I had mentioned the working class as the primary change agent, the RCP comrades offered no real response. It was hard work to help them move. But their personalities made things more than pleasant.

The RCP remains a strong presence in some areas and there are so many more stories to tell - so many traumas and struggles we all experienced or were affected by in the 1960s and 70s, from the Free Speech movement to lesbian and gay rights, Angela Davis, the Young Socialist Alliance, and on and on. This was life in Berkeley.

GG
USA

Veganuary

This is my annual call to encourage comrades to go Vegan for January 2025 (known as Veganuary).

There is no such thing as a humane slaughterhouse. They are a living nightmare for the animals, not to mention the workers who have to work harder and harder to disassociate from their labour. You don’t have to take my word for it - just watch Hogwood: a modern horror story on Netflix, or Pignorant on Prime.

A better future awaits.

Tom Taylor
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