Letters

Single state

Yet again someone - John-Jo Sidwell in this instance - has simply made the assertion that, “within the framework of Israel/Palestine alone”, a single state would tend towards a reversal of the current poles of oppression (Letters, March 5).

I have visited South Africa many times in the period where formal apartheid became more like a type of economic apartheid. Of course, the major capitalist players remained the same during this time. Of course, those poor people from Soweto are not now imposing terribly degrading working conditions on the previous white heads of companies.

Single state
Single state

Concrete

In response to the various contributions on how we should approach the Middle East, I asked myself: what then is ‘square one’? Where do we start? With the self-determination of nations or of one nation, Arab or Jewish - or is this the dead end of an eternally deferred future?

To the extent that we in Europe can influence anyone, including the Israeli and Arab peoples, we are mostly left with the task of renouncing the right to exist not of the Jewish community but of Zionism: that is, colonialist expansion, meaning the settlement and occupation of Arab Palestinian territories. We can insist that the ruling class here, the state and institutions (academic and cultural, for example), are prevented from supporting Zionist colonialism.

That’s concrete international solidarity. End the aggression of settlement and the repression of occupation.

Concrete
Concrete

Stop the War

The Weekly Worker has noted that those on the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee who were successful in booting their erstwhile leader, John Rees, off of their sect’s leading body are unlikely to be happy that Rees and his closest allies in the SWP (Lindsey German and Chris Nineham) remain in leading positions within the Stop the War Coalition.

The STWC is by far the most successful of all of the ‘united front’ campaigns that the SWP has thrown itself into over the past decade and it remains of considerable importance to the group. It is also unlikely that Rees and his allies will simply accept their demotion within the SWP, or give up their leadership positions in the STWC without some kind of a struggle.

It is clear that at present the Rees faction has far more allies outside, rather than inside the SWP - where he is widely loathed at present. It is probable, however, that within the SWP those members that have the most sympathy (or should that be least antipathy?) for Rees are likely to be those local STWC organisers who have worked more closely with him and German in this campaign, which can at least claim some success.

Could it be for this reason that the standing orders of the STWC officers group (so far dominated by Rees and co) for the upcoming STWC AGM contain a significant change in contrast to the last one? In 2007 all ‘individual members’ of STWC could attend conference as voting delegates; this year they can only be observers. Delegates must come from local groups and affiliated bodies, which can select four each.

Many local groups do not even meet, so how many of these ‘delegates’ will be elected is difficult to fathom. Where they are, most will be the local stalwarts. Could it be that Rees is attempting to influence the conference make-up in order to strengthen his bargaining position in relation to the SWP leadership, which he has agreed to loyally serve? It would certainly make it more difficult for the SWP - who are notoriously able to pack meetings when needs must - to flood the meeting with loyal hacks at the last minute.

The war inside the SWP is not over. Whether it spreads into STWC we shall have to see.

Stop the War
Stop the War

Communist vote

Standing as the Communist Students candidate for president of Sheffield University students union, I received 298 first-preference votes, or 6%, under the alternative voting system. Over 5,000 votes were cast - more than twice the turnout of last year.

Rightwing or apolitical (in NUS, rightwing by default) candidates won every post. Their campaigns consisted of the usual mixture of uncontroversial, token policies, appalling slogans and embarrassing gimmicks. Nods toward the environment and the starving millions were supplemented with promises to negate the effects of the financial crisis on students at Sheffield. How this is to be achieved was naturally left open, apart from one candidate’s aim of expanding postgraduate programmes, so if there are no jobs, at least we can just keep on studying forever!

During my campaign we distributed hundreds of leaflets, fly-posted around campus several times and held a stall where we gave out the new issue of Communist Student. It has been evident that the crisis of capitalism is making some students think about alternatives, but there has not been a significant change in the generally cynical and apolitical mood we have encountered in previous years. This is not all that surprising, given the failure of the left to fight for a radical alternative to bourgeois politics. But we have had many interesting discussions with students, including new comrades in Socialist Students and unaligned leftists.

The other candidates for president were Angharad Evans, who is very close to the Conservatives, and Paul Tobin of Labour Students, the eventual winner. The third presidential candidate, Aqib Jamil, is a former member of Respect, but his manifesto was far weaker than even the populist mish-mash of his old organisation. It included token calls for lobbying on arms investments and a greener campus, and a vague commitment to “voice justice and equality at national level”.

Student Broad Left (Socialist Action’s front) ran two candidates. James Williamson stood for education officer, on a centrist platform of “fair” rather than “free” education, amongst other bland platitudes about equality and “strengthened representation”. International officer candidate Al-Hussein Abutaleb ran on a platform of bourgeois multiculturalism, which called for a democratic union, but did not say how this could be achieved. Unsurprisingly, neither was elected.

Then there was Gemma Short of the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty and Education Not for Sale, but not running under either banner. Although she claims to be a Marxist, her manifesto, headlined “Socialist, feminist, activist”, was dishonest and entirely minimalist. What demands and politics there were would fit quite nicely on the spectrum of liberal and radical feminism - there was no class content and nowhere was capitalism mentioned

Nor was there mention of the necessity of women joining men in the fight for a communist party to struggle for communism - human emancipation without distinction of race or sex, to paraphrase Charlie Marx. As it was, comrade Short failed to get elected, though her inoffensive left bureaucrat platform got her a substantial 1,130 votes.

Given the period we are entering into and the historical challenges we are facing, it is high time that the left ceases to treat the politics of Marxism as some kind of conspiracy, break with the failed projects of ‘broad frontism’ and organise around the politics they purportedly uphold: revolutionary Marxism. Given the challenges we face, manifestos such as Gemma’s are next to meaningless. They are the political equivalent of throwing paper planes at the approaching tsunami - ducking the necessity of Marxism as the guiding light of our fightback in the hope of ‘making a difference’ by getting a foothold in the bureaucracy.

CS stands for Marxism as the politics to make our fightback effective. We wish to overcome the organisational and theoretical weaknesses of the left by promoting the teaching, discussion and study of Marxism, by forging genuine unity of Marxists currently dispersed into a myriad of groups on campus, and patiently building roots for the party our class needs to point the way forward out of the rotting of the capitalist system.

For a longer version of this report, go to www.communiststudents.org.uk

Communist vote
Communist vote

Rival NUS?

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty student group, like the organisation more generally, appears to be somewhat at a loose end. Their chauvinistic rightism on the question of Israel and ‘Zionism’ is accompanied by increasingly irrational lurches to the ‘left’ - not least in terms of the debacle around the ‘British jobs for British workers’ - where the group seemed to adopt more positions than many have had hot dinners.

Take the National Union of Students, where the Brownite ‘governance review’ recently passed led the AWL to call a meeting to discuss the future of the NUS. Their statement declares that the review allows for “almost no possibility of serious control from below by its members”.

So “Student union officers and student activists who are appalled by this stitch-up and oppose NUS’s disastrous trajectory need to discuss the way forward.” Not that the pre-governance-review NUS offered much by way of “serious control from below”, mind - but it did allow small Trotskyist groups to manipulate the bureaucracy and gain this or that position of influence in certain committees or local union structures (the whole history of the AWL’s recruitment amongst students).

Doubtless to underline the new, radical, fresh thinking that the comrades are looking to imbue the student movement with, they invited a “speaker who was involved in the late 80s and early 90s”, who turned out (Quelle surprise!) to be no other than leading AWLer Mark “Israel has a point” Osborn - someone steeled in the AWL’s policy of manoeuvring within the ‘left’ of the NUS bureaucracy over the last 30 years.

Apparently he spoke of the ‘good old days’ in Manchester, but I presume he did not talk about the ‘clerical fascism’ of the impressive Manchester student occupations in solidarity with Gaza … According to one comrade present at the meeting, some AWLers were even bemoaning the fact that the Gaza occupations, whilst showing how students can organise, had in a sense distracted from some of the ‘class struggle’ issues students should be fighting around, like fees.

Not that many people were listening, mind. A grand total of 12 people turned up - five AWLers (over an hour late apparently!), five members of Revolution and two others. None of the left bureaucrats the AWL cherishes so dearly bothered to turn up. And who can blame them? This is not exactly much of a basis for disaffiliation and forming a new “organising centre”. Unsurprisingly, neither the AWL nor Revo have reported the meeting.

Ben Lewis
London

Rival NUS?
Rival NUS?

Even wors

Referring to the upcoming Public and Commercial Services union elections for deputy general secretary, Alan Fox asks if voting for an “SP-type opportunist” would not be better than voting for John Moloney of the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (Letters, February 26).

Whilst John Moloney’s opponent has the support of the Socialist Party and plenty of other opportunists, his own politics are worse than that even. Hugh Lanning, the SP-backed candidate, was better described by Mark Fischer back in 2002 as “the defeated Membership First Blairite candidate for the general secretaryship” (Weekly Worker June 27 2002).

It seems PCS members are faced with a non-choice in this election.

David Harney
email

Even wors
Even wors

Class character

We, the Internationalist Socialist League, a group of revolutionary Marxists from Israel, read with interest the report on the debate you had over the question of the solution to the national question in Palestine, and we would like to contribute our position to it (‘Two nations and the Arab revolution’, March 5).

The previous position you held, advocating a two-state solution, is very problematic, as you yourself concluded. As a matter of fact, not only is this position the official position of US imperialism, including Bush, but it is not very different from the apartheid regime’s solution of an imperialist state for the whites and Bantustans for the majority black population.

We agree with your observation that “a solution cannot be achieved in the absence of a movement beyond Israel-Palestine”. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for that: on the one hand, the Israeli population, including the Israeli Jewish working class, remains loyal to the Zionist state, due to the privileges it receives from it and their status as colonialist settlers. On the other hand, the Palestinians do not have the strength to defeat the Zionist military.

Yet you do not address the key question: what is the class character of this movement, which must challenge not only the Zionist state, but also the other pro-imperialist Arab regimes and the imperialist states themselves? This is a key question for Marxists, and in particular those who reject the two-stage theory of the Mensheviks and the Stalinists, and hold to the theory of permanent revolution.

We believe that it is the Arab, Kurdish, Iranian and Turkish working class alone that can fulfil the tasks of creating a Palestinian state and freeing the Middle East from imperialism. The Palestinian workers and other exploited classes can and will play a leading role in such a movement. The best Jewish workers will also be able to join it.

But, once the working class overthrows the treacherous bourgeois regimes and the Zionist state, why should we form a nation-state for the Israelis rather than a Palestinian workers’ state from the river to the sea, where Israeli Jews who are willing to live in such a state will have safety and the chance to develop their own progressive culture?

You argue that the Israelis constitute a nation. We do not think so. The Israelis have the objective requirements of becoming a nation (territory, unified economy, language, common psychology), yet the majority of Israeli Jews do not recognise themselves as a separate nation and see themselves as part of a world Jewish nation. They see Israel not as an Israeli state, but as the Jewish state of all Jews. Without this element of national consciousness, a nation does not exist. But even if the Israelis were a nation, we as Leninists would not support its right to self-determination. We only support the right to self-determination of oppressed nations. The defence of this right for imperialist nations is the role of the imperialist state.

Israel essentially is not very different from South Africa under apartheid. Toward the end of the apartheid regime, the whites claimed that they were a separate nation and deserved the right to self-determination. This was a reactionary demand which had to be opposed. History indeed opposed it in practice.

Trotsky, himself a revolutionary Jew, opposed the idea of a Zionist state. He wrote four articles on this question expressing the view that a nation-state for Jews would be possible only after a world revolution.

Had history developed differently, and the Zionist state never come into being, Trotsky’s perspective of a separate nation for Jews might have been a feasible and progressive demand under a socialist federation of the Middle East. This could still be the case in the future socialist society. However, today, to suggest the right of territorial autonomy for Jews under the Palestinian state would merely serve as a window through which Zionism could sneak back into the Middle East. Therefore, our position is - for a Palestinian workers’ state from the river Jordan to the sea, as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East, where Jews could live without oppression!

Many on the left today tell us that such a position is ‘unrealistic’. Indeed, as a great part of the left feels the whole perspective of a socialist revolution is ‘unrealistic’, it obviously has no reason to see any possibility of our position becoming a reality. But we are revolutionaries, and we have seen where 60 years of the ‘realism’ of the two-state position have led - to more bloodshed, death and oppression for the Palestinians. We therefore conclude that our position is the only realistic and revolutionary one.

Class character
Class character