Letters

End is nigh

Jack Conrad’s ‘Say it loud, say it proud’ (September 4) is an article in two parts - one good, one bad (very bad).

I have no major quarrel with the first part, but the number of Palestinians expelled in 1967 was 300,000, not 500,000. Also the demolition of the Al Aqsa mosque and its replacement by a ‘Third Temple’ may be a prelude for the second coming of Jesus amongst certain sections of Christianity, particularly within some eschatological traditions, but it is not universal.

However, that is not where the threat comes from, but from Israel’s crazy settler messianic fundamentalists, who certainly don’t want to see Jesus on their patch! Their desire is for the return of the Messiah, not Jesus. Nor is it true that these messianic fundamentalists are a ‘fringe’ movement. On the contrary, they are the heart of rightwing Zionism.

I also disagree with Conrad’s differentiation between ideological and military Zionism - the former applying to Lebanon and Syria and the latter to the West Bank. In fact the initial justification for colonising the West Bank was also strategic and military: the so-called “Auschwitz borders” of Abba Eban.

But my main criticism of Conrad’s article is over the second half, ‘Organised racism’, where he says that “Working class politics in Israel - that is, Israeli-Jewish working class politics - barely exists now as an effective collectivity.” That begs the question: when has it ever existed? The role of the Histadrut has never been to represent the Israeli working class. It operated according to the slogan, ‘From class to nation’, whereby the Arabs were their class enemy.

Palestine and Zionism provide the purest example of exclusionary or exterminatory colonisation and Jewish society consists of a full range of classes, from a big bourgeoisie to the working class. But the Israeli working class has never had an organisation representing its political and economic interests separate from its own bourgeoisie.

It’s not true that the Zionists exercised “no coercive power over the indigenous population”. From 1909 there was a settler force, Hashomer, and, from 1920 onwards, Haganah. During the Arab Revolt from 1936-39 Haganah was extensively deployed with the British army and took part in its counter-insurgency operations. From 1938 there was formed Orde Wingate’s Night Squads and out of them developed the Palmach shock troops. The Jewish Settlement Police were also formed.

The Zionists might not have had fully developed militias, as was the case in South Africa, but they were nonetheless well armed in comparison with the Palestinians. The Irgun, of course, had formed its own militia and these were active in attacking the Palestinians.

Conrad describes the ‘two-state solution’ as “economistic Zionism”. I think a better description would be ‘utopian Zionism’. However, we agree that the idea of Israel living alongside a Palestinian state is wishful thinking. He says that economic or trade union politics are always trumped by “higher politics” of war and security. But why? Because the Israeli Jewish working class has grown up within an apartheid state, where it is taken for granted that, being Jewish, they will have economic and political privileges which Arabs will not have. In other words, they identify with the state in all its aspects, when it comes to the Palestinians.

I also agree that the Socialist Workers Party poses the question of a democratic, secular state in the abstract. However, it is a very concrete demand, first adopted by the Palestinian national movement before it was seduced by talk of two states and neo-colonial solutions. But where Conrad goes wrong is where he deems the Israeli working class capable of fulfilling any positive class role. He bemoans that supporters of a democratic, secular state will not cede collective national rights and, even worse, deny their right to self-determination “in perpetuity”. If Conrad is serious, he is suggesting that, in the event of the Israeli state deZionising its Jewish population, it should then be allowed to begin the process of forming a Zionist state again.

I do not accept that the Jews of Israel form an oppressed nation. Self-determination therefore is out of the question. Self-determination applies to oppressed, not oppressor, nations. It is the right to be free from national oppression. The Israeli Jewish nation defines itself against the indigenous Palestinian population - it has little else to hold it together. But for the Palestinians, secular and religious Israelis might well have fallen on each other. The conflict between Jewish fundamentalists and secular Israelis is a very real one, but it is one that the former are winning. The messianic Zionists have been gaining in strength for over half a century and, together with the ultra-orthodox Haredi population, form a ruling block.

It is my belief that we are seeing the beginning of the end of Zionism, which was born in blood and fire and will undoubtedly end the same way - In this I agree with professor Ilan Pappe. Israel’s seeming strength today is really the strength of the United States’s empire, and that is waning. Without the USA Israel would be nothing.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Non-functional?

The letter by Parker McQueeney (August 21) advising those of us here in Britain to move towards greater unity deserves a further clarification and explanation of the ‘situation on the ground’.

First, a correction and clarification on Forging Communist Unity. The early initiative came from a proposal from Why Marx? to run a series of events, probably outside London, on questions of party and organisation. They approached Prometheus, the CPGB-PCC, Talking About Socialism and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21) to encourage an initial call. Those of us involved in RS21 encouraged someone from our elected leadership to attend, in part because at the time the popular ‘Party Time?’ events were occurring in London and it seemed there was a moment to, as McQueeney says, “take the initiative”, facilitating such conversations outside London. At the first meeting, both the CPGB-PCC and TAS suddenly argued that we should forget any events, be bolder, and instead begin a process of organisational fusion.

As Alex from Prometheus contributed from the floor during the opening panel of Communist University, that was politically naive. Of course, if you are the CPGB-PCC and TAS, whose memberships are between 10 and 20 and around three at the start of FCU (happy to be corrected in this regard), such decisions can be made quickly. For RS21 (an organisation of between 400 and 500) this was not going to happen - there is an ‘apples and oranges’ organisational problem here. Never mind the fact that no trust had been built through joint work - something the CPGB-PCC perhaps should have recognised as a barrier, given that founding RS21 comrades share much of the existing left’s hostility to the CPGB-PCC and its younger cadre are put off by the repeated transphobic dog-whistling of its members.

Even after this, I argued against collective participation from those of us in Prometheus, (and to clarify for McQueeney, the caucus in RS21 have never been involved collectively). Why was this? It is worth laying out my reasons for the clarification of those interested - and particularly those internationally who consider themselves of this tendency, especially given it has bearing on how we act in ‘Your Party’.

The reasons are twofold. Firstly, the numbers involved made it a non-starter. It is important to have an organisational-numerical floor to the question of programmatic unity, especially when it comes to mergers, otherwise time is exhausted on negotiations between ‘organisations’ that do not have the forces to meaningfully further the politics. Of the larger force in FCU, the CPGB-PCC, its failure to recruit and declining numbers are well established. This is also visible in its activity and lack of clear strategy to use what numbers it has. For example, it is clear in their reporting on the initial We Demand Change event that the CPGB-PCC couldn’t even get a member to go to this space of several thousand people, despite the months of notice, and make the argument for their politics.

It is my view that TAS is capable of intervening merely as a set of individuals based in Manchester and the CPGB-PCC is 10-20 older comrades spread across Britain unable to intervene beyond producing the paper. Both have passed through an organisational floor, which means they cannot meaningfully propagandise, never mind agitate, for these politics here in Britain.

The argument against this, raised by members involved in FCU, is that mergers become greater than the sum of their parts and it was worth the roll of the dice. However, I was unconvinced by this. To sufficiently popularise this politics, we also must win a layer of the rank and file of the membership of the British left, both inside and outside organised groups, but the position the CPGB-PCC are in makes them unlikely to do this. In my view the opposite is true: I believe the CPGB-PCC actually make popularising this politics harder. There is the longstanding cross-group hostility to the CPGB-PCC, which we can decry as unfair, but is real and which the organisation seemingly has no solution to overcoming, other than defending ‘robust polemic’ in the corner like a sad child left out of a birthday party.

In addition to this, the younger generation who do not share the left’s existing hostility are hardly going to be convinced either. Here is a group which has no meaningful activity beyond producing and distributing the paper, which has repeatedly pushed transphobic talking points, and which has already churned out what few younger members it brought in. If FCU had succeeded, my estimation is it would be the case of uniting 25 old allies, with the effect of alienating a possible few hundred new ones.

For those of us who find much in Revolutionary strategy and in the wider arguments about programmatic unity, there is a significant lacuna which must be answered in practice. How do you actually move from the number of smaller, isolated groups towards agreement around a programme? On this question, the story of the CPGB-PCC is a slow and painful failure, of which the collapse of FCU seems to be a final sad note.

With regard to operation in Your Party then, we have the immediate struggle for democracy around the founding conference, as well as the need to cohere Marxists to argue for our politics in the long run. The same assessment around FCU in my view also applies in regard to McQueeney’s proposals around agreeing a platform for work in Your Party - whilst those involved in FCU are welcome to intervene and we certainly should coordinate, it is a mistake to treat groups like the CPGB-PCC as functional organisations.

This may seem harsh, but I think it is important to communicate to those in the USA, Australia, Poland, Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere just how dysfunctional, isolated and spent the CPGB-PCC is in practice. Sadly, a platform would likely succeed more without them - nor are they necessary for a partyist platform to be put forward.

To counteract this, Prometheus has been refounded and established itself. Organisationally members of Marxist Unity Caucus now already exceed other ‘partyists’, we are working towards participating in Your Party and are intervening to push this politics forward (see also Joe Carman’s contribution at CU on this question). We shouldn’t exhaust ourselves by placing what is clearly an albatross around our necks.

Harry H
Prometheus

YP pro-sortition

Carla Roberts quotes Jack Conrad as saying that “if I broke my leg, the last thing I’d do is hobble out the door, pick the first random person I came across and ask them to fix it. I would try to get the best possible medical treatment. And that applies to politics” (‘Don’t put off democracy’, September 4).

This is apparently intended as an argument against sortition and in favour of election. But it’s an odd one, because doctors and nurses are not in fact elected. They are appointed, on the basis that they possess the appropriate skills and have undergone the appropriate training. And that doesn’t apply to politics. In setting a broken leg, everybody agrees what the desired outcome is: we want the leg fixed, with no nasty complications, so that pretty soon comrade Conrad is running about on it again as good as new. But in politics we don’t all agree. On the contrary, politics necessarily involves a struggle between different material interests, different philosophies, different programmes, different principles. It can’t be reduced to a matter of professional competence, like surgery - at least democrats, whether their preferred mechanism is sortition, election or anything else, have always insisted it couldn’t.

I don’t want to put too much weight on an argument that comrade Conrad may only have made in passing (certainly not until the fracture has fully healed!). Arguing against sortition is slippery ground, I’m afraid: you put one foot wrong and before you know it you’re arguing against democracy in general (or else against trial by jury in particular).

But the real kick of comrade Conrad’s objection to sortition, in the debate reported by comrade Roberts and in his two recent articles on the subject (‘Make Your Party now!’, August 21; ‘Put politics in command’, August 28), is not this. Essentially, he is worried that sortition would not give the left groups enough votes. Assuming their members make up about one 80th of the total pool (10,000 out of 800,000), they would only get something like one delegate in 80 at a sortitionist conference. I can’t deny it.

But do these groups exert no influence at all, political or intellectual, beyond their paid-up membership? Does nobody read their papers? Do their members not make the arguments in the wider movement? Just take the organisation that publishes the Weekly Worker. There are people out there who have never set eyes on a CPGB membership card - even, perhaps, on somebody who holds one - but whose thinking on issues like a minimum-maximum programme has nonetheless been shaped by the CPGB’s.

In a democratic political culture, that is how you set about gaining influence for your ideas. You make the argument - in print, in meetings, and, yes, on social media - and you win people round. You don’t go gossiping behind closed doors with invisible leaders or the bourgeois press. You don’t spend your time stacking little selection meetings. You make the argument, and you persuade people, and you educate people: and then, when a random subset of the rank and file are picked out by sortition, your ideas will be in the mix. And if you keep doing it, and other people with other ideas keep doing it too, and everyone keeps gaining experience through regular sortition and rotation, then the political level of ‘the average’ rises. You get that bit closer to a society in which, as the saying goes, every cook can govern.

Does election achieve the same? A bit; not much. Any attempt to elect conference delegates through crypto/quasi/proto-branches would certainly involve a lot of stacking of small meetings. And under present circumstances it would also mean more than a little backroom gossip with invisible leaders: because, once I’ve proclaimed myself the South Oxford branch and elected myself and my mates as delegates, I will still need to sweet-talk somebody at the top into issuing us our voting cards. Delegate elections when there is no recognised branch structure would in reality mean a conference hand-picked by whichever committee got to approve the delegates’ credentials.

“Logistically,” comrade Conrad writes in his article of August 28, “sortition is more than feasible”. It’s a hell of a concession, given that most other proposals - apart from appointment by the leadership - aren’t really feasible at all. But, luckily enough, sortition is more than just feasible: it is the organisational form we ought to prefer anyway, if we want our politics to be educational, consciousness-raising and genuinely democratic.

Opting instead for elections might not result in any broken bones, but it would be a definite misstep.

Edmund Griffiths
Oxford

YP anti-sortition

Starting with an email list of supporters is probably not the ideal way to launch a new party that is meant to be a real political vehicle. But, in Sam Gindin’s words, “Creating a socialist party is a voluntarist act.” The founding conference that the as-yet-informal Your Party leaders have committed to is an opportunity to build on the enthusiasm of so many sign-ups and to set things in motion officially. For those who have any number of various opinions on what sort of party it should be, the lead-up to the conference and its proceedings are incredibly important.

The immediate question that follows from the announcement of the intention to hold a conference is: “Who gets to be there?” The possible extremes range from everyone who has shared their email address to only hand-picked attendees.

So far, I have basically seen two options in circulation: ‘one member, one vote’ and sortition. Both are lacking for reasons that have been laid out in the Weekly Worker.

‘One member, one vote’ in this context might mean that everyone who signed up as a supporter gets to participate (or maybe everyone who pays dues). So many people in so many places without pre-existing structures in which people can form their opinions means that in reality there will be a very one-way process of communication by existing leaders and that virtual voters will be asked to rubber-stamp slogans. Here in the USA a similar type of proposal was recently defeated at the convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. There is no automatic way to ensure that people make good decisions by going over them. Everyone could vote, but this does not guarantee that any of them would actually participate in productive campaigns in the 3D world.

Sortition - choosing participants randomly in the hope of getting a good enough sample - is suited for classless communism, but not now. We should not leave the direction of the movement for democracy and socialism up to chance. You can’t wish away - or hope to box out - the sects or bureaucrats by flipping a coin: they have to be self-consciously argued against by large numbers. Sortition gets at the need to develop in many people the attributes of leadership. But, contrary to proponent Edmund Griffith’s claim that it’s what the “grassroots” want, most people likely don’t know what the word means.

Griffin Mahon
DSA

Elect YP delegates

Approximately 40 comrades attended a recent Redcar gathering of the Your Party movement. Set up by a pre-existing network of former Labour-era Corbyn supporters, the meeting was cordial, if slightly ad hoc. Whilst the bulk of the audience fitted into a ‘Labour left outside the Labour Party’ bracket, members of the Socialist Party, CPGB and other non-aligned Marxists were also present.

Eric Barnes from the Social Justice Party made some reasonable points about community/party building - some positive, others overly reliant on direction from the centre. Whilst far from rebellion, limitations of the leadership in galvanising the party movement were acknowledged by most.

Some suggestion that the meeting had not been widely enough advertised had some validity and, whilst there seemed to be confusion about what the current transitional arrangement represented, promises of a steering group and roadmap to conference were made for next time. Positively, in a wandering exchange about decision-making, an overwhelming majority - possibly everyone present - favoured delegate-based mechanisms for any foundation conference, with clear scepticism with regards to Zoomocracy evident.

Paul Cooper
email

YP Glasgow

On September 5, the first large gathering of Glasgow Your Party supporters took place in a packed-out venue with a capacity of 200 people. The format of the meeting was of a workshop with around 20 break-out groups. There was no top-table and no guest speakers and, as an alternative to a founding statement crafted by the self-selected organisers, they solicited and compiled thoughts from attendees on the need for and hopes for the party, and interviewed people in person on the day.

I’m very sceptical of the workshop meeting format - which always ends up feeling rather rushed, unfocused, shallow and unclarifying. But as a way to kick off the proto-branch with such a broad range of political and life backgrounds present, you could certainly do worse. I was definitely happier attending this than some top-table-dominated succession of speeches from left celebs, filled with socialistic pablum and vague promises.

It was wrongly reported by The National as if it were an official launch (two journalists attended - the other from The Herald - who were asked to leave after the opening introduction), which led to complaints from some that it was unadvertised and therefore undemocratic. Jim Monaghan, who sits on the ‘Scottish secretariat’, has reported online that there are around 20,000 sign-ups in Glasgow alone. The vast majority of that 20k will not have been aware of the meeting beforehand, which required coming across the WhatsApp group or Instagram page by chance or by word of mouth. Of course, it wasn’t advertised to Your Party sign-ups because it is unofficially organised, but it could have been if the local groups were given the contact information of those signed up. ‘Data protection concerns’ is no excuse.

As for the politics of the meeting, it would be fair to say that the most common themes were the connectedness of society’s most serious, acute and chronic problems to capitalism, and the need for the party to be democratic.

Scott Evans
Glasgow

YP and SPEW

Northampton’s Socialist Party in England and Wales comrades will no doubt be disappointed with the turnout at their public meeting to discuss ‘What next in the fight for a new workers’ party?’ Only eight were at the venue, including SPEW regional organiser and the evening’s main speaker, Steve Score.

Revealing the limited ambitions SPEW has for the new formation, comrade Score stated that it would be progress if YP stood on the pinched, sub-reformist manifesto Labour stood on in 2017. It clearly yearns for a re‑run of the pre-Kinnock Labour Party, where its Militant predecessor enjoyed a degree of notoriety and success.

Warming to his theme, the comrade stated the new party should be based on the “organised working class” - by which he meant the trade unions, which “were key to the formation of the Labour Party”. And affiliated unions should “have a say in the new party, which reflects the size of their memberships”: ie, granting millions of votes to the trade union bureaucracy - the politics of the bourgeoisie inside the workers’ movement.

Local SPEW branch chair Katie Simpson called for YP to be a revolutionary socialist party. However, she went on to describe the 2017 Labour offering as a “socialist manifesto”.

From the floor I challenged the idea that we should be limiting ourselves to recreating the Labour Party. It was not, and never had been, a vehicle for socialist transformation. The creation of Labour by the trade unions had been an outlier; the reverse of what had happened elsewhere in Europe, where Marxists, socialists and anarchists had created the trade unions.

As for Syriza, its mistake was to take power in a situation where it did not have majority support and had neither the intention nor the ability to implement a Marxist minimum programme. And going it alone in the hope others might follow was a poor strategy.

Andy Hannah
email

YP Majority

On September 6 I attended the annual conference in Newcastle of ‘Majority UK’ (set up by former North East mayor Jamie Driscoll, who resigned from Labour after being prevented from standing for re-election in 2023). Having had no involvement with Majority before, I attended as Zarah Sultana was speaking and I wanted to see if there was much rumble or organising to do with Your Party.

Zarah did well to openly say the party will not compromise on trans rights, but I found most of the conference very disappointing. Jamie spoke about how Labour has carried on the same as the Tories, rhetorically asking why - before explaining that it was all a “political choice”, and saying that all we need to do is to get the right person (presumably that’s him) elected in Newcastle, and then all the correct “political choices” would be made.

The whole “political choices” rhetoric seems to completely ignore any understanding of how capitalism and the state actually works, as if everything that happens is just because of bad people making bad decisions, and we simply need to replace the bad people with good ones. It feels extremely individualist and utopian to me.

I don’t know why Jamie and other figures on the left like him continue to ignore this plain reality. You don’t have to have read all of Marx to see this - experiences like that of Syriza in 2015 show without a doubt where the real power lies in society, yet Jamie apparently refuses to learn from this.

It always seems to be the figures that pick up some local traction like Jamie who are stuck on this kind of politics and it’s extremely frustrating: you have a whole room full of regular people who want some positive change, you hold an authority over them and you stand and feed them things that are blatantly incorrect. It’s genuinely sad, feeling like I’m seeing all of these people being misled and fed the ‘same old same old’.

Matt Hutch
Email

CPGB clarification

Just to clarify in response to comrade Carla Roberts’ letter (September 4): obviously the Provisional Central Committee is keen on growing the CPGB. What I wrote in my aggregate report was a reference to the illusions of comrade Roberts, who is convinced that those inspired by Mike Macnair’s book, Revolutionary strategy, would join the CPGB if only we changed our “culture” (‘Political clarity vital’, August 28).

I was trying to explain the position put forward by comrade Macnair on such issues. Unfortunately her illusions on such matters lead to frustration and any attempt at explaining the problem with such false hopes fails to convince her.

As for the alleged inaccuracies regarding “movementism”, I am sure that, in reading the Zoom transcript, the comrade must have seen her own comment defining herself as part of a “faction for action”. I cannot find a better definition of movementism.

Farzad Kamangar
email