Letters

Colonialist

I do not intend to address the several falsehoods and distortions in Daniel Lazare’s letter (‘Hamas to blame’, January 16). It would be a waste of time, so long as he persists in refusing to accept that the conflict in Palestine/Israel is a colonial one, and that a democratic resolution of this conflict must involve decolonisation.

His studious avoidance of this fact is made worse by his use of what by present-day standards is colonialist language, describing Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as “backward and primitive”.

Moshé Machover
London

Blame CPGB?

There is a letter in the January 16 Weekly Worker titled ‘Hamas to blame’, written by Daniel Lazare. Comrades may remember that he used to write useful articles in this paper, especially on US politics.

In this letter, however, he has several digs at Moshé Machover and the CPGB - now, it seems, a favourite pastime of his. After a long account of the crystal-ball failures since October 7 2023, he calls for a conference, at which the CPGB leadership can hang their heads in shame and account to the working class how they allowed the Israelis to murder several thousand Palestinians.

He claims: “Any socialist party worth its salt would have immediately warned Palestinian workers of the horrors that Hamas was bringing down upon their heads”. So the main fault was the failure to identify how useless Hamas was and how murderous the Israeli government could be, especially given the unstinting support of the US.

So the Palestinians shouldn’t fight back - they’re too weak. They follow in a long tradition: Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, Vietnam, the Comanches in the US, slave revolts that led to mass slaughter; the peasants’ revolt or the Kett rebellion in England. They should live in peaceful resignation until a saviour arrives - that worked for the Cherokees?

I get the impression from this, and other communications from Lazare, that the real criminals are Hamas. They are not communists (true), they are not ideologically pure. Perhaps if they were just democratic centralists that would be OK? But then who in the tradition of rebellion against the ruling class - a long, long tradition - has had the necessary purity of thought, the necessary communist organisation or any other qualities that Lazare thinks necessary?

Given the dire shortage of these qualities, whose side should we be on? I think victims, despite shortcomings, deserve more support than mass murderers.

Jim Nelson
email

Renegade Lazare

The renegade, Daniel Lazare, includes outlandish attacks against a wide swathe of people in his letter last week: the steadfast ‘Axis of Resistance’, Weekly Worker analysts, the CPGB, and others. None of it is justified, in my opinion.

There’s nothing about the regional anti-colonial movements that Lazare has any respect for. The Houthis are “backward and primitive”. The Axis of Resistance is a “paper tiger” and Hezbollah is “imploding”. Moreover, the CPGB is a “disgrace” (I’m reminded of Trump): the CPGB is to blame for everything. Conrad, Mather and Machover are specifically singled out for scorn for their positions regarding Palestine. Frankly, I’ve found the CP/Weekly Worker to be exceptionally good on the Palestine question, but coherent, Marxist analysis about Palestine is above Lazare’s pay grade.

Lazare’s rantings seem to be those of a rightist ideologue. He hardly says a thing about the Zionist terror machine, which is constantly on autopilot (“It goes without saying ...”, etc.). As far as I’m aware, he’s said nothing about the Jewish organisations in the United States - his neck of the woods - most of whom have kept their mouths shut in the public sphere, while the genocide was knowingly ongoing.

His statement, “The Leninist strategy of uniting the proletariat against nationalist oppression thus went out the window”, is added to his claim that the Weekly Worker “specifically rejected joint working class action in Israel-Palestine as a way out of the impasse”. Firstly, this mischaracterises the Weekly Worker. And, furthermore, it has been hard, if not impossible, for any organised Palestinian working class organisation to function under a barrage of bombs. And the vast majority of Israelis are, by all accounts, captive to the racist national chauvinism of Zionism, and that includes the Israeli working class. What’s crucially important is the growing Palestinian resistance movement, which needs our unconditional support for its self-defence: this is a socialist imperative.

To be a dialectical materialist is to see things as they are, not the way Daniel Lazare wishes them to be. Lenin understood the relationship of forces in a deep and broad way and didn’t see the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements as static phenomena, frozen in time. He looked at each individual situation, based on the material conditions and class divisions at play.

According to Bipan Chandra’s account, Lenin saw the national liberation movement as an “anti-imperialist united front” (B Chandra Lenin on national liberation movements 1971). In any case, Lenin said that the “class interests of the militant proletariat” are primary over demands for national independence (1903 article by Lenin in Iskra on the national question).

However, “Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But, insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation” (VI Lenin The right of nations to self-determination chapter 4, 1914).

The struggle for national self-determination in Palestine will ultimately be resolved if it is subordinated to a socialist class struggle, but not with Lazarean rote formulas superimposed on the Palestinian street.

There’s presently a ceasefire; the unbroken Palestinian people endure, their leadership remains, and thousands of Palestinian prisoners will probably be released. This is a historic victory which comes at a high cost and unimaginable suffering. The current battle has been won, within a continuing, long and just resistance to colonial occupation; the battle for worldwide political consciousness about the plight of the Palestinians has also been won. But the dismantling of the US/Zionist colony cannot happen soon enough.

GG
USA

Term limits

I want to say from the outset that it is wonderful to see the CPGB, Talking About Socialism and Prometheus (and perhaps at some stage a faction of Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) engaged in fusion talks. It has lifted my spirits, and the approach being taken so far seems to be correct. I can only imagine what an actual, healthy fusion would do to lift spirits, hopefully across a wider part of the left than our immediate circles.

Anyway, I have two disagreements with Mike Macnair in his article last week, titled ‘Anti-partyist partyism’. The first and most important is with the claim that Jack Conrad’s long, 44-year tenure is “a reflection of our weakness; not the cause of it”. If this is merely trying to say that it isn’t the sole cause of weakness, and that it reflects an existing, separate weakness (isolation?), then I agree.

If it is saying that this (and others’) long tenure is exclusively explained by the organisation’s weakness, and that because it is a reflection of a weakness it cannot also be a cause of weakness, I disagree. I think it would be better to say that this long tenure is a reflection and a cause of weakness.

Long tenures have all kinds of inherent problems, which have nothing at all to do with the personal traits of the individuals involved - though, of course, particular cases cause particular problems. It is why I support term limits for every elected position, though go back and forth on whether one should advocate them for a very small organisation like the CPGB. I leave to one side specific details like consecutive versus lifetime limits, length of required sitting-out time, and so on.

With mandatory regular elections it’s true that members can choose to impose a term limit on an elected comrade, if they thought it was appropriate, but this misses some pernicious and likely effects long tenures have, which make members choosing to vote in such a way increasingly unlikely, the longer someone is in a role. To name just what comes to mind: information-hoarding, skill-hoarding, cliques and other buttressing social networks both in and outside the organisation, and increasing conservatism in members’ willingness and ability to critically engage with the leadership and other senior bureaucratic elements. Needless to say, all of this has its own knock-on effects. None of this (hoarding, social networks, member conservatism) needs to be deliberately created: it is a natural outcome. The ‘us versus them’ dynamic between the bureaucracy and ‘the members’ or ‘the general public’ is also typical, though probably unlikely to become especially significant in an organisation as small as the CPGB.

Mandatory term limits prevent the build-up of these structural defects, and regularly prove and reprove to the membership that changing one’s leadership is not the end of the world. And if you want someone outside the current leadership to attend some important event (as spokesperson, or whatever), it is easy enough to just elect delegate(s) rather than defaulting to sending whoever is amongst the most formally senior in the organisation. If I were a member, I would probably vote to send Jack Conrad as a delegate to these fusion talks, even if his time on the PCC had expired last year.

The second more minor disagreement is with what seems to be an equivocation on the word ‘hardness’. I only skim-read the recent articles on Lawrence Parker’s blog and I don’t want to pretend to be able to speak for him, but I took him to be bemoaning (in general, but also suggesting some of this applies to specific individuals past and present) mainly bravado and arrogance - perhaps also browbeating, escalating disagreement, etc - in the perceived style of historical figures. Sure, we should aspire to be ‘hard’ in the sense of resilience, determination, self-discipline, and refuse to be afraid to offend, as long as we are expressing our views honestly and without malice. We should also aspire for resilience as a collective capacity, which will mean sometimes using softer gloves with people. And I totally agree that speaking sharply can be appropriate when we feel the need to jolt someone out of their complacency or routinism, but I would emphasise can be.

With that said, I do think it’s correct to criticise an excessive focus on ‘hardness’ as if it were a major source of a lot of the left’s problems.

Scott Evans
Glasgow

US apologist

Paul Demarty’s article, ‘Rise of lifeboat imperialism’, cites my essay published in Compact magazine (January 9) on the prospects of US expansion into Greenland, disputing my assertion that the US has treated its opponents as “slave states” (repetitions of the fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War).

Demarty raises Cambodia as a disproving counterexample. But the US did not simply “carpet-bomb Cambodia”, but targeted Vietnamese communist forces operating there during a larger war. The Cambodian government was not the opponent of the US, nor, of course, were the people of Cambodia - or of Vietnam: certainly: they were not the enemies of the people of America. The US did not demand “unconditional surrender” of them, but a negotiated settlement. That says something.

Even so, the US war in south-east Asia was a crime, and one that was opposed by many people and for many good reasons - including vociferously and notably by the original ‘containment’ cold war strategist himself, George F Kennan. Still, the communists committed many crimes of their own against the people of Vietnam, Laos and, needless to say, Cambodia.

It’s long past time for us to remember this history differently, and no longer somehow as still a live issue, when it is not. The cold war is over, for over a generation now. After suffering millions of deaths and the permanent poisoning of its territory to last through the generations as an effect of its war, Vietnam now depends for security on a military and economic alliance with the US against threats from its ancient neighbour and enemy, China.

There was a broad Anti-Imperialist League that was formed to oppose the US governing, let alone fighting a horrific counterinsurgency, in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war, on entirely liberal and democratic grounds, and in the name of American freedom. As Mark Twain indelibly wrote, “Shall we give those poor things a rest?” But Aguinaldo, the great Filipino nationalist, admitted that their historic choice was not actually independence, but dependence on either Japan or the US.

Socialists in the US have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of US government actions, but for the future course of society and politics - a long-term task for which we only have the barest rudiments of resources with which to begin building today.

As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living - not the dead, who have no claim on us. As Fanon said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed before we were born.

We must, as Thaddeus Stevens said, transform the heritage of slavery (and worse) to free the world - and thus honour the sacrifices that have brought us to the place and opportunity we inhabit now, and only now. We must wake from what Marx called the “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living” and heed the “poetry of the future.” It’s long past time.

There will be a future for capitalism. Will there be for socialism?

Chris Cutrone
email

Returned to prison

In a hearing at the Old Bailey, London, on January 17, nine of the ‘Filton 18’ political prisoners entered ‘not guilty’ pleas on all charges put before them, while supporters amassed in solidarity outside the court.

The first nine activists were called to court to plea to charges after an action in August 2024 at the Filton, Bristol site of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems. All 18 face charges of aggravated burglary, criminal damage, with some of the 18 additionally facing charges of violent disorder. Six activists were arrested for action that saw them breach the site using a modified van, before dismantling weapons of genocide inside, including ‘quadcopter’ drone models. Twelve further people were later arrested and remanded to prison for their alleged involvement. Police have justified their continued detention by alleging that their actions have a “terrorism connection”.

The rest of the 18 are expected to enter not guilty pleas later this year. A spokesperson for Palestine Action said: “We refuse to bow to this continued police intimidation and harassment. It is Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, that is the guilty party: those resisting the UK’s complicity in genocide are not.”

The activists were returned to prison by the judge and are currently awaiting appeal hearings for bail, which have thus far been rejected. Of the 18, 10 have spent over five months in prison since August, with an additional eight detained since November.

At the January 17 hearing, the judge confirmed that their case shall be seen with the 18 split across three trial dates - the first taking place in November 2025, the second in May 2026, while the final date is currently unknown. An additional date is yet to be set in March of this year, when the defence will seek to challenge and dismiss the application of a “terror connection” in this case.

Amnesty International has stated that the Filton case demonstrates “terrorism powers being misused” to “circumvent normal legal protections, such as justifying holding people in excessively-lengthy pre-charge detention”. The Filton 18 political prisoners have been subjected to arbitrary and repressive treatment while inside prison - including the withholding of phone calls and mail, prohibitions on communicating with other prisoners, and denials of religious practices and medical privacy.

Palestine Action
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Defining China

Understandably, the question of China came up a number of times during the course of our Winter Communist University. It is, after all, a hugely important country and a hugely complex one too.

I thought that Marcus Strom adopted the right sort of approach in his Aukus talk: basically: ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ (from Alexander Pope’s Essay on criticism, 1711).

Instead of bestowing some trite label such as ‘state capitalism’, with the idea that modern China conforms to the profoundly wrong theoretical model advanced by Tony Cliff in his State capitalism in Russia (1974), he displayed angelic caution.

Note, Tony Cliff recognised that the law of value did not operate in the Soviet Union. Indeed, he judged that accumulation was not internally driven by profit, but driven by external international competition (part right, part wrong).

Either way, the idea that today’s China in anyway mirrors what Tony Cliff had to say about the Soviet Union is hard to credit.

Of course, the undoubted success of the ‘socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics’ must be scientifically explained by Marxists. Those who don’t recognise that can hardly be called Marxists.

China tells us much about our current era of the failed transition from a visibly decaying capitalism to the objectively required socialist world. It tells us much less, however, about China’s road to socialism and the brilliance of leaders such as Mao, Deng and Xi (worshipped nowadays in the pages of the Morning Star by the likes of Andrew Murray, Robert Griffiths and Kenny Coyle).

Despite China’s spectacular economic rise since 1978, a few sobering facts are worth bearing in mind. Throughout the existence of the people’s republic, the masses - ie, workers and peasants - belying the state title, have remained politically disempowered. Therefore, they could be supplied, in huge numbers, to domestic and foreign capitalists as a low paid, largely rightless and highly regimented labour force.

Ending the agricultural communes - and, alongside that, the ‘iron rice bowl’ social security system - were vital in that respect too. However, China’s economic ‘miracle’ fundamentally relied on the US regarding the country as a strategic asset against the Soviet Union - the Mao-Nixon meeting in 1972 setting the stage.

In 1980 the US granted Most Favoured Nation status (since rescinded). The widespread belief was of ‘convergence’ and China retreating from the Maoist target-allocation system and adopting a ‘mixed market model’. Entry into the World Trade Organisation in December 2001 certainly seemed, not least to western experts, to be a prelude for US, European and Japanese transnationals taking over the commanding heights of the Chinese economy. Something, however, repeatedly blocked by the authorities in Beijing and thus eventually leading to the US-China cold war.

The world’s second largest economy, is, as a result, an extraordinarily strange hybrid. China has wage labour, stock markets, unemployment, some real competition when it comes to final goods and services, a vastly overblown speculative real-estate sector, hundreds of billionaires, agriculture is effectively privatised, Chinese transnationals traverse the world, not least through the Belt and Road Initiative, and together domestic and foreign capitalist firms account for some 60% of GDP.

And yet, according to article 15 of the protocol under which China joined the WTO, it is a “non-market economy”. The Communist Party of China regime - the result of a rural-based, party-army, revolution - exercises very considerable power over all areas of society - not just through nationalised industry and finance, but, crucially, the state machine itself. Meanwhile, of course, capitalists are welcomed into the ranks of the Communist Party and the regime itself is in good part subordinate to the needs of capital accumulation, not least because that is what China’s rise has relied upon.

So what really matters is not bestowing trite labels. Trite because serious study is rarely if ever put in, eg, Chinese proto-socialism, deformed Chinese workers’ state, bureaucratic collectivist pre-socialism, bureaucratic state capitalism, party-state capitalism, venture state capitalism, authoritarian capitalism.

No, Marxists are obliged to specifically locate complex internal contradictions, social laws and trends that ought to be expected in the global transitionary period between capitalism and socialism.

Jack Conrad
London