WeeklyWorker

Letters

Meat, two veg

I find Lionel Sims’s article, ‘Primitive communism, barbarism and the origins of class society’, very interesting and thought-provoking (February 9). Not being an anthropologist, I cannot judge how much of it is well established and how much is speculation; but it looks quite plausible.

Yet it seems to me that something is missing in his description of the economic-sexual relationships in ‘primitive’ communist society. According to Sims and the Radical Anthropology Group, in early human society women bargained collectively manipulated sexual availability in exchange for meat obtained by men by collective big-game hunting. What is missing in this description is mention of any food other than the meat of big animals, and any food-production process other than big-game hunting.

But surely, in a hunting-gathering society, there was a division of labour, whereby men were the expert hunters and women were the expert gatherers. Moreover, even where there was abundance of big game, the staple human diet was not big-game meat, but the product of gathering, including some meat of small animals such as insects and water creatures. Meat of big animals is, of course, important - but as a valuable extra, an addition to the staple diet. (This is true also in all present surviving hunting-gathering societies in tropical and sub-tropical regions, though not among the Inuits, who are surely an exceptional adaptation to an extremely cold, barren environment.) It is virtually certain, and evident from our human dentition, that the original humans in Africa were omnivorous rather than carnivorous. Besides, even where big game is abundant, hunting is still chancy and many hunting expeditions end with a very meagre catch, if any. Gathering, done by experts, is much more secure.

So in the original human bargain between the two sexes, women had rather more than sexual availability to bargain with; namely, the staple food they gathered.

Meat, two veg
Meat, two veg

Denying denial

I was not altogether surprised to read Tony Greenstein’s quotations-stuffed, pointlessly rambling and highly condescending letter, in which he resorts to his usual ‘defence mechanism’ by claiming that his opponent’s letter is a good example of political muddle riddled with non-sequitur arguments and is totally incoherent (February 9).

The purpose of my original reply (February 2) to Tony’s initial letter (January 19) and my submission to the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign’s executive, as seconder of Gill’s motion, was to point out that the crusade (should I say vendetta?) against alleged holocaust deniers has some dubious basis in reality and would only tear PSC apart and detract from its main objectives and actions. This is why I felt that it was important to amend the mission statement/aims on the PSC website to include a line which refers to one of the PCS’s core principles - that is: “Equally PSC should endeavour to combat attempts of (mis)using the holocaust in order to fend off criticism against Israel’s policies and in employing the holocaust’s emotive narrative for defending Israel’s racist actions and apartheid practices.”

I do not consider myself, or Gill Kaffash, to be an anti-Semite or a holocaust denier - although Zionist supporters regard the PSC, the highly-effective anti-Veolia campaign, the boycott movement against Israel, anti-occupation actions and even Tony’s views as anti-Semitic. No wonder the pro-Zionist camp applies constant pressures on the PSC, hoping that we will call off our campaign activities - especially our boycott of the Israeli/Jewish state. Having read the derisory accusations against the PSC and myself on the Harry’s Place website, I am quite certain that those behind these accusations now have a sense of great victory - for which Tony is given credit. Indeed, a comment posted by the current affairs officer of the Board of Deputies of British Jews gives Tony his due credit: “I stumbled across Tony Greenstein’s blog this morning. Tony is an anti-Zionist, Jewish member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Whilst his views on the situation in the Middle East are a complete anathema to me, to his credit, he has led the opposition within the PSC against rising levels of anti-Semitism” (www.bod.org.uk/live/content.php?Item_ID=130&Blog_ID=323).

Such approval may give further support to my argument that it is wrong to treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it was between two equal sides, as much as it is a mistake to regard Islamophobia - a phenomenon which is gaining pace all over Europe and the States - as equal to pro-Zionist claims of anti-Semitism. Such claims seem to have become the hobby horse of many public bodies, including the EU’s working party against anti-Semitism, the British all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism and the Jewish Community Security Trust. Their singular purpose is to search for anti-Semitism in every corner of the world and take the alleged ‘perpetrators’ to court (as members of the Scottish PSC experienced last year, when they won a court case in which they were accused by the pro-Zionist side of racism and anti-Semitism).

Tony seems to cite the horrors of the holocaust in his defence, while pointing an accusative finger against my attempt to challenge the PSC’s publicly declared policy against alleged holocaust deniers. He argues that “it is irrelevant whether five or seven million died”, and offers a working definition of a holocaust denier: “What makes one a holocaust denier is if you deny that there was systematic extermination and intentionality, coupled with the use of poisonous gas to aid this task”. My original reply letter, as well as my submission to PSC executive, made it clear that as a Jewish person, part of whose family perished in the holocaust, I have the right to ask questions and revisit or challenge the narrative of the holocaust (as much as the Israeli new historians had the right to challenge Israel’s official version of the events which led to the creation of the Israeli/Jewish state by unravelling some of the closely guarded evidence of the extent of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine). It is also quite evident that it is not me who plays the “numbers game”, but rather the pro-Zionists who virtually hijacked the narrative of the holocaust, as if the millions of non-Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis simply do not count. That misuse (or abuse) of the narrative helped support the ‘victimhood syndrome’, by which Israel justifies both its foundation and uniqueness as a Jewish state which practises rampant apartheid policies.

Tony’s claim that “the decision of Camden PSC to remove Gill Kaffash as secretary, in the light of her consistent support for Paul Eisen, an open holocaust denier ... was the decision of the local group”, and that it “had nothing to do with national PSC”, is quite extraordinary. It implies that PSC branches have nothing to do with the mission statement/aims communicated by the executive. That, in my experience, could not be further from the truth.

I would like, once again, to emphasise that Gill’s proposed motion (to which Tony, in his usual mode of intellectual supremacy, refers as being “a stupid motion of the stupid”) was adopted and adapted from Wikipedia to include Islamophobia and prejudices against Jews. (That stands in a stark contrast to Tony’s repeated arguments that the definition does not seem to apply to Muslims or to modern-day Islamophobia.) Gill sent her arguments in support of the proposed definition to the PSC executive, adding that she (as well as myself) is well aware that it is only an initial base for a working definition which should have been debated by members of PSC at the AGM.

My hope is that PSC executive would realise the long-term implications of its declared crusading against alleged holocaust deniers or purported anti-Semites. It ought, in the first instance, to amend its mission statement along the lines I suggested. That is, equally stating PSC’s endeavour to combating attempts to (mis)use the holocaust in order to fend off criticism against Israel’s policies and in employing the holocaust’s emotive narrative for defending Israel’s racist actions and apartheid practices.

My point has already gained some recognition by people of the left. It would also resonate, I believe, with Omar Barghouti - the founder of the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement - who asserted at the PCS AGM in January that “BDS is a universalist movement that categorically opposes all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. This is not negotiable. We should never welcome racists in our midst, no matter what. Equating Israel with ‘the Jews’ is unacceptable and is, in fact, anti-Semitic … Claiming that a boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic because it is equivalent to a boycott of ‘the Jews’ assumes that Israel and ‘the Jews’ are one and the same. This implies that Jews are one monolithic sum who think alike and are all collectively equivalent to Israel and responsible for Israel. If this is not anti-Semitic, I am not sure what is! … Many of the leaders of the BDS movement in the west are Jewish ... Many of them support the struggle for Palestinian rights through BDS not just out of a deep-rooted sense of international solidarity and moral obligation, but also based on their insistence that Israel, a colonial apartheid state, does not and should not speak in their names.”

Is the PSC to ignore the BDS movement call for unity through diversion and difference of opinions for the pursuit of those who asking some self-searching questions and dare confronting a sacredly-held narrative which underpins the creation (and justification) of an exclusive and select Jewish state?

Denying denial
Denying denial

Stupid?

Tony Greenstein, while obviously correct in his laying out of the evidence for the historical truth of the holocaust, persists in missing the point of this issue in ascribing the erroneous views of people like Paul Eisen and Francis Lowdes-Clarke to racism.

The stern lecture he also gives to Ruth Tenne, who, like Paul Eisen, is Jewish, does not manage to really explain how it is that prominent Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, such as Tenne, a relative of holocaust victims, or Gilad Atzmon, who, if he were politically ‘mainstream’, would be rightly claimed as a cultural icon by Jewish people in general, can be induced to defend people who make such an egregious error as to doubt or even deny the truth of the holocaust. Perhaps Tony G would like to argue that Ruth Tenne is motivated by anti-Jewish racism for opposing him on this?

This error has nothing to do with being “stupid and reactionary”, as Tony G asserts, but does not come close to proving. If these people are so stupid and reactionary, how come they have spent in many cases decades in working for solidarity with the Palestinians? If the Palestine solidarity movement is so progressive in its aims, how come it can generate an organic current among veteran, often Jewish members who are “stupid and reactionary” enough to question that the Nazi genocide took place? Does the Palestine solidarity movement really have a pattern of attracting apparently the strangest kind of Jewish supporters, the kind who at the drop of a hat embrace Nazi sympathies, or is there something more profound, subtle, difficult to analyse and of considerable psychological and political interest going on?

Tony cannot give a coherent, convincing and political explanation why a not-inconsiderable number of people of Jewish origin, and people influenced by them, are prepared to expose themselves to public ridicule and hatred for expressing such a view, or why other Jews who do not actually appear to share their views on the holocaust, such as Ruth Tenne and Gilad Atzmon himself, are prepared to defend those who do.

Could it be that the motives of these people are not “stupid and reactionary” at all, but a misguided, emotionally driven and incoherent response to decades of Israeli crimes and mendacity and the anti-democratic actions of the Israel-Jewish lobby in the west today? That this is a witch-hunt is attested to by the fact that not only those who hold these positions, but those who do not hold them yet defend their right to argue their views on democratic grounds, are coming under attack in the Palestine solidarity movement and elsewhere on the left.

Stupid?
Stupid?

Huge bias

Moshé Machover, as expected, ignores the fact that the majority of Israelis support the two-state solution, as shown in numerous polls (‘Netanyahu’s war wish’, February 9). Even Netanyahu publicly proclaimed his support for that solution, being the first Likud prime minister to do so. Even Liberman expressed his support this week.

Politicians like Livni, Olmert, Meridor and others who grew up in the revisionist camp now support the two-state solution. The border between the two states will be determined in direct negotiations between the parties, as stated in resolution 242. And if the Palestinians continue to refuse to negotiate, it is very possible that Israel will have to consider unilateral withdrawal.

As for Iran, a few days ago, the supreme leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said to a cheering crowd in Teheran: “The Zionist regime is really the cancerous tumour of this region and it needs to be removed and will be removed.” Hours later Iran’s latest domestically designed and made satellite was successfully launched into orbit. That means Iran can use that technology to fire ballistic rockets not only at Israel, but also at the United States. But it is only Israel that Iran has promised to destroy. That is why placing a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime pledged to the eradication of the Jewish state is a different order of threat than Khamenei’s usual bluster aimed at the US.

Because of its small size and concentrated population, one or two nuclear explosions would mean another holocaust. So when Khamenei repeats the Islamist regime’s pledge to make good on its threat to destroy “the Zionist regime” in the same context as its vow to satisfy its nuclear ambitions, this is no minor rhetorical point. It is, instead, tangible evidence that Israel’s alarm about Iran is justified and that the question of what to do about this threat is a matter of life and death for millions in the Jewish state.

Discussing the nature of the Iranian nuclear project, while ignoring the regime's murderous intentions toward Israel, demonstrates a huge anti-Israel bias by Machover.

Huge bias
Huge bias

Save them

Bina Darabzand, a leading member of the Consistency Committee to Establish Workers’ Organisations in Iran (CCEWOI), and his son Oktai, a journalist and blogger, have recently fled Iran due to threats by the Islamic Republic regime against their lives and security. They have sought refugee status in Turkey; however, they remain under threat from the Turkish authorities to return them to Iran. Given the serious and continuing risk to their lives, we urge the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to expedite the processing of their cases, grant them refugee status as a matter of urgency, and quickly facilitate their resettlement to a safe third country.

Bina Darabzand is a prominent activist who has been politically active from the age of 15 - first against the shah’s dictatorship, and then against the Islamic Republic regime. In addition to being a leading member of the CCEWOI, he has also restarted his political blog: http://salam-democrat.com.

Numerous labour activists with the CCEWOI have faced persecution and imprisonment for exercising their fundamental rights to organise, and for demanding workers’ rights, including unpaid back wages, fair pay, and benefits. Behnam Ebrahimzadeh is a political prisoner serving a 20-year sentence for his membership of this organisation. Nearly all members of the committee have been arrested, beaten or persecuted by regime authorities in Iran. Shahrokh Zamani and Muhammad Jarahi are now serving 11- and 10-year prison sentences, respectively, in Tabriz prison. Others have been released temporarily, but only on the basis of having paid hundreds of millions of tomans in bail.

Bina’s son, Oktai Darabzand, is a journalist with a focus on political and human rights issues. Six years ago, Oktai established a weblog called Aseman Daily News, which published news of political prisoners as well as other human rights violations by the Islamic Republic regime. The blog also included social, economic and foreign news sections. Journalists and bloggers covering human rights news in Iran are routinely persecuted, tortured, sentenced to lengthy prison terms and even execution.

During the 2009 uprising, Oktai’s weblog was blocked on the orders of the judicial power. Immediately, with funding from his father, Oktai opened a website with the same name (http://asemandailynews.com), continuing with his activities. However, in April 2011, Oktai’s website was designated by the regime as “a PMOI site”. Many members of the PMOI (People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or Mojahedin-e Khalgh) - and those accused of affiliation - are condemned to brutally harsh prison sentences and execution. Jafar Kazemi, Ali Saremi and Mohammad Ali Haj Aghaei are only three recent and well known examples of those accused of PMOI membership who have been executed on that basis.

Although Oktai has no political affiliation or contact with any organised group, because of his journalistic activities, and because the Islamic Republic has designated his site as being linked to PMOI, his life is at clear and unquestionable risk in Iran.

Bina and Oktai entered Turkey and registered with the UNHCR. However, they were soon informed by the Ankara police that the Turkish interior ministry had refused to recognise their status as asylum-seekers; they were given until February 8 to leave Turkey and return to Iran. Thanks to pressure from Iranian and European supporters, UNHCR accelerated the interview process and requested that the ministry and police respect Bina’s and Oktai’s status as asylum-seekers whose case is pending review.

The Turkish police demonstrated their anger at the pressure that had been exerted on them and Bina and Oktai were required to leave Ankara and go to a small town that has no facilities, not even a bus terminal, three hours from any city. They remain at high risk of deportation at any moment. Should they be illegally deported to Iran by the Turkish authorities, not only would they face certain imprisonment and torture, but their lives would be at risk.

There is an urgent need for people to write to UNHCR in Turkey and request that UNHCR expedite the processing of the Darabzands’ cases, grant them refugee status as a matter of urgency, and quickly facilitate their resettlement to a safe third country. We ask everyone to write to UNHCR in Turkey (turan@unhcr.org), with copies to the interior ministry (mustesarlik@icisleri.gov.tr), asking UNHCR to take urgent action, given the threat to the Darabzands’ lives and their current insecure situation in Turkey.

Save them
Save them

UCS myth

Can I just debunk another of Arthur Bough’s historical myths, this one on the nature of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders ‘work-in’?

The point of the exercise was to keep the workforce and the four yards together as a viable, ongoing concern, and to demonstrate that the yards were open for business. The occupation ensured that equipment wouldn’t be sold off, the yards degraded or split up and the workforce dispersed, while a new buyer was sought. The workers went into work and did their normal work without wages.

The receiver was in from the first day of the occupation and worked from the management offices, conducting potential buyers around the yards with the full support and engagement of the stewards and the workers. They thought this demonstrated the good faith of the workers for a new owner, not some symbol of soviet socialist Glasgow. While the occupation was of immense symbolic importance to us on the far left, as a demonstration that workers could take over and run industry directly, this was never meant to be either the creation of a workers’ cooperative, or a long-term attempt at workers’ control of the yards.

The stewards ran the site and occupation with an iron grip and there was little in the way of revolutionary dissention and debate. It was always the intention to “give it back”, in Arthur’s words. While the far left outside the yards, and usually down in England, advocated that the workers should keep it, such ‘an ultra-leftist adventure’, as Jimmy Reid would have denounced it (as he frequently, very publicly did, sometimes on TV), was never the plan of the stewards or the workers.

Interestingly, a far more militant occupation was taking place down the road at Plessey’s. Here the workers had banged closed and barricaded the gates to the yards, refusing to allow anyone in or out without their permission. Their occupation was popularly supported by the community, who kept the workers fed and the perimeter fences patrolled. The whole community turned out in weekly mass demonstrations in their support. The place was alive with debate and argument. Every item large and small was argued over and discussed and voted on. Reid and the CPGB of the period called them ‘the anarchists’ but actually it was their intention too that the whole plant and yard be sold to a new buyer - although in their case they were escorted through the gates by a team of workers, who stayed with them throughout, and then escorted them off again.

The significance of UCS was tremendously important in putting occupations and work-ins on the agenda of the workers’ movement in Britain, where it had previously scarcely ever featured. After the spark was struck in Glasgow, occupations and work-ins exploded across the whole of Britain and, in at least two cases, workers continued production and sold their produce, and remained in operation for two years in one case. UCS itself had not been trying to achieve that. That’s not to say they shouldn’t have done, of course, but the truth is that it was only a spin the far left put on it.

I had the privilege of being part of the radical group, Cinema Action, which was commissioned by the UCS joint shop stewards committee to make their ‘UCS film’. It’s still around and still highly inspirational and ground-breaking. If comrades want to order it, I think Chris Reeves and Platform Films now distribute it. I also have a chapter (‘Clydeside, Bogside, the miners’ side’) in my book The wheel’s still in spin, written contemporaneously during this period, if readers wish to see more on this (available from me for £10, including postage).

UCS myth
UCS myth

Snippet

I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Douglass’s review of The 1984-1985 miners strike in Nottingham: if spirits alone won battles - the diary of John Lowe (‘Forgotten heroism’, February 9).

This snippet of the massive miners’ strike, the Notts area, has never really been thoroughly parsed in a work dedicated to it. It’s great someone deemed it a point to remember this important aspect of this great strike. I look forward to reading it.

Snippet
Snippet

Quick questions

“What sort of reform proposals should the workers’ movement propose?” asks comrade Mike Macnair (‘Promoting the national economy divides workers’, February 9).

Indeed, class-based political action (aka genuine class struggle) and social revolution are things that must be programmed. Perhaps the framework for answering the question above lies in these following questions:

I hope the proposals in the next article satisfy these questions.

Quick questions
Quick questions

Stop quibbling

Recent editions of the Weekly Worker have sought to question the right of the Scottish people to national self-determination. It should be pointed out that communists have always supported the right of all nations to national self-determination, up to and including the right to full independence.

In Scotland’s case, the communist party in that country - the Communist Party of Scotland - supports full independence. The CPGB should support the principle of national self-determination for Scotland and stop quibbling.

Stop quibbling
Stop quibbling

Ground them

The Ryanair Don’t Care campaign, supported by Solidarity Federation, is calling for an international week of action against exploitation and recruitment-scamming by Ryanair, starting on March 12.

Ryanair Don’t Care was started by John Foley when his daughter was sacked as a flight attendant mid-flight and abandoned abroad, penniless. This led to the exposure of a cynical and highly exploitative recruitment scam by the airline.

Ryanair’s current policy of recruitment-for-termination is part of the massive exploitation of people who apply to work for the company. As it stands, potential cabin crew have to pay a fee of €3,000 through an agency to undergo training for Ryanair. As many as 60 people are sacked at any one time after this initial training period - up to 200 people a month. Those who survive are put on a 12-month probationary period on a lower rate of pay than normal cabin crew and Ryanair pocket the difference - as much as £20 million a year.

We call on those who support the struggle of workers against exploitative employers to take the following action:

You can find more information on the Facebook event page at www.facebook.com/events/309679105736928.

Ground them
Ground them