WeeklyWorker

Letters

Vote … er

I listened to Jack Conrad’s arguments regarding the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. As a resident of Camden, he’s got an inside edge and raised some good points, with the deciding issue in this case to be Gaza.

I very much appreciate the difficulties the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Camden is having trying to get the local council to disinvest, but the brush-off is no worse than that given by other Labour councils. Bexley, where I live, is a no-hoper in this regard, being a Tory council (along with so much more that’s wrong with it). I tried. I haven’t checked, but I’m sure we’d have heard if the Green-run Lewisham council has made any progress, but somehow I doubt it.

Of the two individual candidates in Holborn, both, I think, are chancers and careerists, singing very similar tunes. Polanski is all over the place with respect to Zionism. I have no idea what he means by saying he is anti-Zionist and yet also saying that Zionism means different things to different people:

(1) He is sort of correct. Zionism cannot be reduced to whatever shit is carried out for and by Israel. Its roots are way back to the time of Abraham and the covenant with Yahweh. In Genesis, god makes a unilateral and eternal promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to give their descendants the land of Canaan. While the ownership of the land was viewed as an eternal divine promise, the right to live in it was conditional on keeping god’s laws (the Torah). When the people failed to do so, the prophets explicitly warned that god would cast them out, which happened during the Babylonian exile and later under the Romans.

When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the Jewish people entered the long exile (Galut). For 1,900 years, scriptural Zionism was maintained entirely through prayer, memory and ritual. It was not an activist political movement: it was a daily spiritual posture. The defining feature of scriptural Zionism, and the reason it clashed so severely with Theodor Herzl later on, is its radical passivity. Scriptural Zionism is entirely metaphysical. It views the Jewish connection to the land not as a right of national self-defence, but as a holy, conditional lease granted by god. In this framework, the only legitimate ‘return’ is one initiated by divine miracles and accompanied by universal spiritual redemption, not by secular parliaments, passports or treaties.

Polanski is correct when he says that Zionism means different things to different people and that what the Israeli government is carrying out in the name of Zionism - the genocide and displacement of Palestinians - is racist.

(2) I was convinced by Lubna Speitan, the Palestinian author of the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, that, other than a two-state solution, it would be more appropriate for Palestinians that there be a single Palestinian state instead. It was telling that she stated it wasn’t necessarily to be a secular country, but a form decided by Palestinians. Polanski goes further and, in my view, correctly states that the British government or a British political party such as the Greens should not imperialistically decide what type of state the people in the region will have. It’s up to them.

(3) His bit about Jewish supporters of Palestine in Zionist-identifying synagogues is a bit strange. I figure that if I was in disagreement with the synagogue elders, I’d leave it and join another. But maybe that’s not so easy.

With respect to Zionism, the issue I have with Polanski is his timing. Why didn’t he say all this earlier this year? It’s quite likely that he’s trying to appease possible Jewish voters as well as Palestine supporters in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, chancer that he is.

If there was another Green Party member running in the by-election I might have a different view. Furthermore, Polanski will be insufferable if he wins, as would his party, and undoubtedly will go so far as saying they are the left’s best hope.

Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali is certainly a careerist, but I do like the fact that she is a Muslim woman from Somalia, rather than a former actor and hypnotist (boob whisperer). If she wins, the boat won’t be rocked and the status quo will be maintained - though I wouldn’t vote for her either.

Stephanie David
email

Vote Galloway

It’s a long way from ‘Victory to the IRA’ to calling for a vote for the Nato-supporting friend of Israel, the ‘end coal, gas and oil’ cult of the Green Party. It’s both sickening and tragic. It marks the total absorption of the CPGB PCC into the liberal lefty London swamp.

Then there’s the Sparts’ abandonment of even a mild defence of secularism and individual liberty with their support for the niqab, the burka and the hijab. For most women and girls in Islamic communities these are not voluntary choices, but socially compulsive straightjackets. The Sparts too have travelled a long way from defence of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, even sending their comrades into the fray to defend Afghan women from the medievalist, theocratic tribesmen of the Mujahidin.

We remember that the full-scale counterrevolution started when the PDPA abolished the ‘veil price’ - the deposit paid by rich men to secure the purchase of young girls, after which their lives in terms of education, social freedom and relationships end. The PDPA wanted to guarantee education for women and girls, but the niqab ensured they would have none. Since their victory, the mujahidin and the Taliban have degenerated further - the lives of females are a living hell of torture and repression. In Iran we have seen teenage girls die or face brutality and jail for resisting the hijab. Communists stand with this progressive force rather than reactionary rules and practices.

Of course, as an anarchist, I defend the right to believe in any daft pixie or god you want, so long as the rest of us don’t have to. Neither should we be called upon to respect such beliefs. I defend in general your right to wear whatever you wish, if you have a choice, but there must be no ‘right’ to impose it upon your kids or young adults.

The hall of mirrors that is the largely the London liberal left see only themselves. The working class is no longer visible to them. The working class is now the London liberal left itself. You think when you talk to yourselves that you’re addressing the class; you think the responses are from the class. They’re not - it’s still only yourselves.

Truly hopeless - at a time when we all have to mount a defence against the war they are determined to push us into. We need serious opposition now, and ‘Gorgeous George’ is the only credible candidate on the list standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

David Douglass
South Shields

DSA democracy

Something I’ve found mysterious, since joining the Democratic Socialists of America, is that the national leadership seems wildly out of step with the membership as a whole. Admittedly, this belief rests on an assumption on my part, because the national leadership has opposed non-binding polls of its membership, but I think it’s reasonable. As someone who believes in the DSA’s big-tent, internally-democratic model, I’d like to figure out the reasons for its failure.

For context, one of the organisation’s two co-chairs belongs to the Red Star caucus, which identifies as Marxist-Leninist. The label, in case readers are unfamiliar, refers to those who support Stalinism and its authoritarian, descendant ideologies, like Maoism. In contrast, my guess is the average member of the DSA, for better or worse, is essentially a New Deal Democrat. They were likely inspired by candidates like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani and don’t even believe in the long-term, fully democratic socialist programme I’d like.

So how did this incongruence arise? Part of the problem seems to be that caucuses have a level of power within the DSA that is absurdly disproportionate to the number of members they actually represent. Caucuses effectively call all of the shots in the organisation. And yet, when I asked those who might know what percentage of DSA members were caucused, the estimates were in the range of one to five percent. Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be hard numbers here.

The information is kept secret for whatever reason, but individual caucuses are widely assumed to have membership in the low hundreds. In July of this year, the DSA as a whole had more than 120,000 members! To be clear, I’m not saying caucuses shouldn’t exist. Rather, I think the level of influence this small minority has reflects a significant degree of democratic insufficiency that members should take steps to rectify. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, but I believe the organisation’s governing structure plays a role in this.

First of all, the DSA does not operate on the principle of ‘one member, one vote’. Different chapters have different rules, but frequently, those who have a say in the organisation’s directions are those who can attend specific meetings at specific times. For example, as someone with three kids, attendance is a struggle for me and, while I can make some meetings, I can’t make them all. Some of those who oppose ‘one member, one vote’, like members of the Red Star caucus, cite technological or financial limitations for their stance.

I’m open to the idea that internet voting is insecure or mail voting is too expensive, but what I’ve found, while debating the issue on the DSA’s internal forums, is that many opponents of ‘one member, one vote’ actually think it’s a good thing that so-called ‘paper members’ aren’t given a voice, regardless of initially stated technological or financial concerns. They believe that keeping members who don’t know enough or aren’t able to donate a requisite amount of time from voting separates the wheat from the chaff.

Beyond this, the national leadership isn’t voted on directly. Local chapters elect delegates to a biennial convention, which then selects the national leadership. All of these barriers to straightforwardly assessing the will of the membership seem to work together to empower disciplined, minoritarian caucuses. This is how I believe the DSA has come to have a co-chair representing a faction that lauds China and other authoritarian countries as positive examples of real-world ‘socialism’.

Jon Hochschartner
Connecticut

Cynical sideliner

I leave it up to any Weekly Worker readers, following my exchange with Lawrence Parker in these columns lately, to decide where they think the “barrage balloon of waffle”, as he puts it, is emanating from (Letters, September 24). But I do want to offer an apology to the comrade that I recently encouraged to read the paper and who faced facile denigration from Parker in the same letter: Darko Suvin.

Comrade Darko is a 96-year-old Marxist polymath from Yugoslavia who took part in Communist University this year and is a driving force behind our plans for a Diderot Gesellschaft Movement. He is perhaps best known for his theory of cognitive estrangement in relation to science fiction literature. This theory is closely drawn from the philosophy of another great Marxist cultural figure of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht. I make no bones about honouring both Suvin and Brecht by applying their essential usefulness to what we are attempting today in seeking forms of communist culture.

Far from all the charges levelled by Parker, such as “putting on a pedestal” and “a ‘groovy gang’ method of clique-building”, we have been finding ways to work with the Brecht/Suvin Marxist treasure trove in the here and now. The latest example of this will take Suvin’s adaptation and translation of Brecht’s poetic version of the Communist manifesto to the Historical Materialism conference in London in November. That will include the world premiere of a live performance with music on the art radio station, Resonance FM, alongside the talks and discussions on it that Esther Leslie and I are planning.

Last week Parker even contradicts what he wrote in his own Communist Party of Great Britain History blog interview with me, where it’s he who labels Ewan MacColl a “great artist”, whereas I assert him as the greatest communist artist this country has produced (and indeed still stick to that), whilst recognising the contradictions inherent in working within the nationalist CPGB of the time.

In that same interview, far from me “naively” claiming Brecht’s learning plays and sketches from the time are still “valid, period”, I look to the form of them and explain how we learnt from and adapted them as rewrites for now. I’ve no idea what it might take to get through to Parker that he’s spouting - to quote his own, now apt, phrase - “the worst type of shite” and can only wonder what happened to the comrade who wrote in that blog that our Workers Theatre Movement was “an excellent thing” and “that the WTM’s appearance among the bedraggled revolutionary left of the late 1980s was a minor miracle”.

I’d suggest that, in these even more bedraggled times for the left, what we are producing now and are determined to develop is an effort that deserves solidarity, engagement and genuine critique, not ill-informed carping from the cynical sidelines.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

Lenin thinking

All the top economists are talking about the next economic crisis, which could be as close as this December. Who knows, but could this next crisis realign the dialectical axis and repoliticise the working class? Marxists will say ‘Where are the strikes? Where are the working class breaking down the doors to a communist party, demanding to be called “comrade”?’ Working class politics now is backwards and reactionary - no chance!

Over these last four decades things have been so tough for the left we have retreated into narrow, everyday thinking. The strategic political plan of the writers of the Weekly Worker, and dealing with running a party and writing a paper, has turned them cock-eyed. Where’s the smell of blood in the water from the constant turnover of prime ministers?

The crisis of expectation is that no-one has any expectations any more of having a job or house, a future. So why hasn’t the CPGB picked up on that? To go back to a salient essay of Lenin on the collapse of the Second International, he says: “... it is usually insufficient” [if] “the lower classes [do] not to want to live in the old ways; it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way”- a fissure must open up from the ruling class, in other words.

Lenin gives three explanations for these events, but Marxists today will say we aren’t even close - and that’s ultra-left thinking! I say that’s because they are cynical and lack any sentient feeling for the next class struggle in the near future.

Revolution in five years might be a tad over-optimistic, but, as Tony Cliff once said, “Marxists in general are ahead of the working class, but in revolutionary times it is the working class that are ahead of the Marxists.”

Frank Kavanagh
email

Straightjacket, ja

How deliciously emblematic - how utterly, neurotically predictably CPGB-PCC - that comrade Carla Roberts, writhing in the self-administered, lint-choked straitjacket of her own dialectical impotency, should emit yet another ex-cathedra decree in the Weekly Worker. “No,” she informs us (her prose carrying the musty, formaldehyde-steeped gravitas of a Victorian phrenologist evaluating a turnip), “Better, far better, to be a principled party of opposition” (‘A chink of light’, September 24). That’s her authoritative riposte to the quelle horreur notion of Die Linke taking up civic duties on the back of Berlin-based electoral success. How very dare they!

She declares this, no doubt, on behalf of the entire Provisional Central Committee. And herein lies a wholly consistent absence of proof, but a surplus of conjecture - a veritable panoply of repeated assertion. Oh, indeed! Far better for others to inhabit the tranquil, unsoiled monastery of absolute irrelevance that you yourselves wallow in. How convenient is this perpetual retreat into the pristine, ethereal sanctuary of permanent refusal. It is an exquisite psychological defence mechanism, is it not? By declaring power itself to be a priori contaminated - a bourgeois booby trap designed explicitly to sully the immaculate, virginal purity of your precious ‘programme’ - you grant yourselves eternal absolution from ever having to actually do anything. It is political agoraphobia, elevated to the level of high theology: a heroic, self-congratulatory crouch in the corner of history.

And what, pray tell, of das Deutsche Proletariat? That vast, sullen, industrial phalanx, currently navigating the grim, post-industrial twilight of the Ruhrgebiet and the alienated suburbs of Berlin - were they quivering in breathless anticipation for the latest dispatched encyclical from London? Were the steelworkers of Duisburg or the software engineers of Leipzig pacing their cramped Plattenbauten, wringing their calloused hands, desperately imploring the cosmos, ‘Ach, if only the colossal-brained theoreticians of the Weekly Worker would deign to grant us their sublime, oracular counsel on Die Linke’s latest municipal coalition protocol!’ Alas, no. One searches in vain across the entire Teutonic landscape for a single soul aching to be illuminated by the CPGB PCC’s endless, navel-gazing post-mortems. A tragic attainment of levels of comedic delusion so dizzying, so profoundly, beautifully pathetic, that it borders on the sublime.

“De Linke must take the fight to high politics”, concludes comrade Roberts - who shows her devotion to ideological hygiene has reached such a pitch of rarefied, Hermetic purity that the mere prospect of actual civic engagement - of contaminating her pristine Marxist credentials by, say, standing for election or taking up the grim, unglamorous burden of municipal representation - is recoiled from, as if it were a direct invitation to contract advanced tertiary syphilis. Instead, she prefers the sterile, airless sanctuary of the Weekly Worker aggregate. From this unassailable fortress of total impotence, she issues her maximalist manifesto for her German comrades - a baroque, Byzantine scroll of ultra-revolutionary demands, designed with exquisite precision not to advance the class struggle, but to reinforce her position atop the cumulonimbus of revolutionary theory and strategy. Consider the splendid, dizzying absurdity of her list of demands. It reads like the frantic, fever-dream marginalia of a 19th century seminary student who has ingested too much ergot and too little dialectical materialism

One is compelled to ask: from whence comes this pathological terror of agency? Is it merely the cowardice of the professional critic, terrified that contact with the messy, friction-ridden apparatus of real politics might expose a total lack of traction? Or is there a darker, more insidious symbiosis at play? For 45 agonising years, your sect has spun a grand, labyrinthine web of scholastic jargon - a dense, suffocating, sesquipedalian fog of ‘minimum-maximum programmes’, ‘rapprochement’ and pedantic historical exegesis.

Carla Roberts and her Weekly Worker comrades know how to call for the building of a mass communist party: you just don’t know how to build the mass communist party. And that’s really the most important part: the building. Anybody can just call for one!

Stuart Leigh
Shrewsbury

Strategic insights

Hans Hautmann’s History of the Austrian council movement 1918-1924 (which Brill brought out this summer as part of the Historical Materialism book series) is an extraordinary work of Marxist historiography on a subject that has received far less attention than it deserves. Originally published in German in 1987, it is a thorough and gripping history of the Austrian workers’ and soldiers’ councils that emerged in the aftermath of World War I. I translated the book into English, and can say without exaggeration that it is one of the greatest history books I have ever read.

Hautmann’s account avoids both fetishising the councils and downplaying their significance. He examines in genuinely dialectical fashion the different forces that intersected and collided within the movement: revolutionary and reformist tendencies, grassroots militancy and labour-bureaucratic control, as well as the different levels of political consciousness within the working class. He acknowledges the councils’ considerable democratic potential, while carefully examining the contradictions between their form and their actual political content.

The Austrian councils were a profoundly contradictory movement. They were often radical and democratic at their base, yet remained under the ideological domination of the reformist/gradualist Social Democratic Workers Party. They were proletarian and anti-bourgeois, yet ultimately became an appendage of the SDAP’s strategy of peaceful class collaboration. They demanded greater working class participation in the administration of public life, yet never attempted to replace the existing bourgeois state apparatus, even when circumstances could have made such a course possible.

The result is not simply a history of an important episode in the European workers’ movement, but a book rich in insights into political strategy - including some very important lessons about the errors that the left should avoid repeating. Hautmann’s treatment of the conditions of the Austrian working class on the ‘home front’, in the cities and factories during World War I, is particularly powerful; at its best, its narrative force approaches Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in Capital.

As a translator, I learn something from every book I work on, but it is exceptionally rare for me to find myself in such close agreement with an author’s political analysis. This was one of those rare cases.

The only obstacle to the book reaching a wider readership is the price of Brill’s hardcover edition. Haymarket is likely to publish a more affordable paperback edition at some point down the line, but in the meantime I would strongly encourage readers to ask their local libraries to acquire the book and make it available to their readers.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy

Rosenberg fund

In 1991 Robert Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, founded an organisation called the Rosenberg Fund for Children. Both Robert and his brother, Michael, were clearly scarred by losing their parents at the ages of 10 and six, being shunted into a children’s home and shunned by their mother’s family. Their father’s family was unable to care for them, and they were eventually adopted by the songwriters and activists, Abel and Anne Meeropol (Abel wrote ‘To you, beloved comrade’ - one of the songs played at Phil Railston’s commemoration during Communist University).

The RFC exists to help children of people in any country whose parents are in prison or being “harassed, injured, lost jobs or died in the course of their progressive activities and who, therefore, are no longer able to provide fully for their children. The RFC provides grants for the educational and emotional needs of targeted activist youth.”

To mark 35 years of this activism, and 70 years since the state murder of the Rosenbergs, a celebration of music, poetry reading and speeches was held in Massachusetts earlier this year. Had she not gotten ill, Angela Y Davis would have spoken - the RFC has a proud history of connection with many famous and not so famous Americans with a left background.

The brothers have continued their campaign to have their mother exonerated - so much so that an American Congressman, Jim McGovern, apologised on the floor of Congress for her wrongful conviction. Not that this prompted the government to take steps to exonerate her legally. But the campaign continues.

The list of how children are helped makes both lovely and sad reading. Under categories such as ‘Immigrants’ rights’ (a clear target of the present president and his brutal henchmen), ‘Labor and economic justice’, ‘Peace’, ‘Prisoners’ rights/US political prisoners’, ‘Human rights’, the list of those helped (names and locations not specified) reads like a litany of how children should be able to live. Over 35 years funds received by individuals and organisations pledging hard-earned money have amounted to over $10 million.

Examples:

Every month contributors (one of which I am proud to say I have been for many years) receive a newsletter with pages of descriptions like these. And, of course, with the present government, the numbers will only increase.

The executive director of the RFC is Jennifer Meeropol, one of the grandchildren of the Rosenbergs. As she wrote in the most recent newsletter, “… we renew our pledge to continue to provide vital support, as we stand with the children of resistance. $10 million awarded, more to come!”

Long may they carry on their work for children of the oppressed.

 

Gaby Rubin
Email

Maoist revolution?

The British made Portugal and its colonies a vassal empire when the Duke of Wellington conquered the Iberian peninsula, defeating Napoleon. In the 1960s, apartheid South Africa and racist Rhodesia had protection: from the west due to Portuguese Angola, and the east via Portuguese control of Mozambique.

The Maoist revolution in Portugal meant liberation for the Portuguese colonies, exposing Rhodesia to African liberation forces. The fall of Rhodesia was then a preamble for the loss (for the western powers) of South Africa. However, due to the return of 1.1 million vile colonial people to the homeland, revolution in Portugal itself was averted and Labour Party/Menshevik-style government prevailed.

Britain, like the Portuguese elite, has allowed white racists from Zimbabwe and South Africa to freely enter and live in Britain - 100,000-plus bigots and racists to add to the vile fascists of Kent and Essex (and their fascist buddies in Belfast).

The story of Mandela and the ANC triumph is thus a complex tale. Let’s help our African comrades (women and men) continue the liberation of their continent - from Ethiopia to Ghana, from Cape Town to Cairo.

K Sean
Bolshevik Tendency