Letters
Hatchet man
Harley Filben claims that apart from football I know next to nothing about sport (‘Overachieving at last’, July 25).
Perhaps his viewpoint is affected by his description of myself as a “Eurocommunist hatchet man”, referring to events all of 22 years ago - if the Weekly Worker has any younger readers this is likely to be before some of them were born.
Or perhaps it is the writer’s fantasy that my writing for the Morning Star represents some kind of unification project between ageing Euros and tankies. No, it’s simply that the paper has an excellent sports section and is open to my occasional contributions.
Strip away the prejudices and the author does make some interesting points, though on the specifics of his criticism of me it is your correspondent who reveals his ignorance of sport, not me.
First, the Lions. It was precisely the make-up of this team - not only the ‘home’ nations, but Ireland too - that challenged the traditional nation-state nationalism of most of the major team sports, football most obviously. And it was the fact that this was the first Lions tour victory since 1997 that made the 2013 series win such big news.
Second, Andy Murray. Actually, in the absence of a British men’s singles champion for 77 years, the likes of Federer and Nadal in recent years, Becker, McEnroe, Sampras and others before them, have been warmly embraced by the British sporting public. Murray’s victory changes that, but it hasn’t immediately replaced it with a tennis version of brutish sports nationalism.
Third, the sporting summer. I have no idea what planet your correspondent lives on, but from Euro 96 to the World Cup 2012 this was absolutely dominated every other summer by England at a World Cup or Euro. With the possible exception of the summer Ashes victories in 2005 and 2009, nothing came remotely close in terms of popular English interest and English sports nationalism.
The failure at the 2010 World Cup in such spectacular fashion - London 2012, Wiggins and Froome, Murray have all begun to offset that. Football remains a huge sport, of course. Its hegemonic ability to dominate sports culture, however, is no longer as certain as it once was. Any failure by England to qualify for World Cup 2014 is likely to dent the appeal of the England team still further and may be irrecoverable.
As for Philosophy Football no longer being modish, unlike the Weekly Worker we can happily report dynamic growth and continue to sell T-shirts in ever increasing numbers. The misnamed CPGB (sic), on the other hand, is still around the same pitiful size as they were 22 years ago, when I may or may not have been taking my Eurocommunist hatchet to them.
Hatchet man
Hatchet man
Golden ages
Chris Knight derides me as a “patriarchal fantasist” for referring to “an archaic society of woman-dominance”, but I don’t know how else to describe his vision of prehistory.
In his recent piece Chris talks of “female strategies of early human solidarity” and that it was “women’s solidarity” which “underpinned early human gender egalitarianism” (‘Genetic evidence is richer than the stale party line’, July 11).
In a previous article, ‘Sex and the human revolution’, he calls this the “human revolution” where early hunter gatherer bands evolved from animal primate society by “reverse dominance” (Weekly Worker September 24 2009).
This concept, quoted from Christopher Boehm, describes the epoch when rule by one dominant male as in the ape horde was replaced by the human collective: that is, primitive communism.
For Engels this meant collective sexual reproduction or “group marriage” with “sexual promiscuity” (The origin of the family, private property and the state). The Knight hypothesis though is that this new bond was achieved by “concealed ovulation”, a female strategy “to make the males earn their keep. Instead of having sex and going off, the females aimed to get something out of them in terms of investment …” So the women confused the men as to which child they’d fathered and “the men think of themselves as having a share in several children” and there is “mutual toleration.” This, says Chris, was achieved by the women concealing the evidence of any particular woman’s fertility cycle, menstruation, through the use of “red cosmetics” by all.
For Chris the “discovery of red ochre in Africa - some pieces carefully shaped like lipstick, clearly designed with the intention of being applied to the body - was evidence that my prediction had been correct” (ibid). This was the human revolution: “reverse dominance” by a “female strategy” - revolution by blusher. Now actually my letter took this seriously enough not to reject it as unproven, but simply to ask what effect such passionate advocacy and assumed consensus might have on organising in a revolutionary party.
I thought it more useful to ask questions about possible political forms, prohibition of technology and the relevance of hunter-gatherer clans to global communism. Of course, I leave it to the CPGB to determine whether its organisation should have some form of affirmative action, whether as women’s committees, black sections, gay caucuses, etc.
I have been a member of such organisations, but, if asked, I would argue that such structures be set up due to the needs of the present, and only if considered to be the right way of maximising participation now, rather than to serve the vision of a golden age which we must urgently recreate.
Because the trouble with golden ages, like utopianism, is that by adopting them as a yardstick you tend to become disappointed with actual people, irate and convinced that there must be something congenitally wrong with them for resisting your vision of original humanity - leading to an authoritarianism which the CPGB has often declared it is trying to avoid.
Golden ages
Golden ages
Male force
Christ Knight, for whatever reason, is right to dismiss the myths of an archaic society of female dominance (Letters, July 25). Since men were the hunters and the main providers of food, it is hard to see how female dominance could have occurred. Also people must stop confusing gender equality with feminism. Feminists don’t understand the important role of males. They don’t realise that if modern civilisation collapses we would all suffer, but women would suffer the most. And the only force which can stop civilisation from collapsing is men.
Male force
Male force
Special pleading
Unsurprisingly, Gilbert Achcar takes exception to Sarah McDonald’s description of him as a “social-imperialist” (Letters, July 18). However, the question is not whether Achcar is offended, but whether the description is true.
Many a Labour politician believed they were Marxists and socialists, whereas their politics led them down the path of class-collaboration and worse: eg, Ramsay McDonald.
Where objectively do Achcar’s politics lead? The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and no-one doubts that Gilbert Achcar is well-intentioned). The accusations concerning Achcar have crystallised over his support for the French and British bombing of Libya and his calls for outside military support for the Syrian opposition.
However, it was clear to me when I read his book The Arabs and the holocaust that Achcar was not a revolutionary socialist. The methodology that he applied to understanding Zionism was the same as he adopted for Libya, Mali and Syria. In my review, published in the Journal of Holy Land Studies (Vol 1, 2011), I wrote that his suggestion that the Palestinian national movement made a “major historical error” in not supporting the 1939 white paper was “essentially a call for the Palestinians to have accepted a slimmed-down Zionist state.
It fails to understand the expansionist nature of Zionism.” Achcar argued that Nasser’s “fundamental error” was in failing to recognise “Zionism’s success in forging an Israeli Jewish nation” (The Arabs and the holocaust pp190-91, 215). Integral to Israeli Jewish identity is the creation of a racially exclusive state, so Achcar is really arguing that Palestinians should have accepted, in advance, the legitimacy of their own dispossession.
Achcar’s problem is that he doesn’t have an overview of either Zionism, the holocaust or settler colonialism. Elsewhere he has suggested that Zionism was as “morally excusable as the reactive racism of blacks to white racism”. If Zionism had remained confined to Europe dreaming about the Promised Land this would undoubtedly have been true. It would have been yet another utopian movement. But Zionism’s reaction to anti-Semitism was integrally linked to colonisation and state power in Palestine.
From the beginning one form of oppression justified another. Achcar described “statist Zionism” as a Janus-type movement - “one face turned towards the holocaust, the other towards the nakba” and contends that the “obstinate insistence with which both sides fix their gaze on only one face is the source of their inability to communicate” (ibid p275). This implies an equality between oppressed and oppressor, and, worse still, suggests that at the root of the problem was an inability to communicate. If the Palestinians were to focus on the holocaust then a solution would be possible.
In Europe Zionism sought an alliance with the tsarist regime and various anti-Semitic rulers. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, assumed that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies”. Integral to this was the fact that “we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties”. When Achcar compared the use of the label ‘fascist’ to describe the “socialist leaders” of “socialist Zionism” to the Stalinist description of social democracy as ‘social fascism’ (p56), he betrayed a lack of understanding of the nature of Zionism. Fascism destroyed social democracy. Labour and revisionist Zionism both agreed on the goal of a Jewish state. Their disagreements were tactical - how to achieve it. The revisionists were members of the Zionist Organisation until 1935. Hashomer Hatzair, the ‘Marxist’ Zionists of Kibbutz Artzi Federation, formed the backbone of the Palmach shock troops who perpetrated the expulsions and massacres of the nakba.
Achcar believes that the problem with the equation ‘Zionism = racism’ is that “we can hardly treat all Zionists … as birds of the same racist feather” (p274). He makes a common mistake - confusing a movement with its adherents. According to Ian Kershaw, a majority of Nazi Party members opposed the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. Even among party members “a third of his sample gave no evidence of anti-Semitism” (Popular opinion and political dissent in the Third Reich pp260-71). Yet who could deny that the Nazi Party was anti-Semitic?
Achcar’s belief that the comparison between Zionism and Nazism is understandable when coming from Palestinian or Jewish anti-Zionists, but potentially anti-Semitic when coming from non-Jewish Europeans, because Europeans are “citizens of countries that were actively or passively responsible for the holocaust” (pp224-25) is collective guilt and chauvinistic. When Anwar Kamil, an Egyptian Trotskyite, compared the Zionist use of the term, ‘chosen people’, to the Nazi concept of a master race, Achcar ascribes this to an Islamic critique of Zionism (p60). Yet, when professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University says of the children of the Hebron settlers that “they are exactly like the Hitler Youth” (p234), to Achcar this is a “terrible comparison”. Despite formally repudiating it, Achcar still clings to the Zionist nostrum of holocaust’s uniqueness (p228).
Achcar concludes that Israel “owes its creation to the holocaust” (p19). Clearly Hitlerism gave the ‘Jewish state’ its critical mass, but it is wrong to suggest that but for the holocaust it would not have existed. British imperialism would not have been so decisively weakened in the Middle East by 1948 but for war. Like the other white dominions, the Jewish settlers would have achieved independence, probably around the mid-1950s.
Achcar describes Zionist opposition to Jewish immigration to the west as a mere “lack of enthusiasm”, citing Zionist historian Francis Nicosia, who suggests that an understanding of National Socialism “eluded” the Zionist leadership well into the war (p23). Nicosia does his best to exculpate the Zionist movement (see my review of Nicosia, ‘Zionist collaborators with Nazism revealed’ Weekly Worker November 5 2011), yet as early as January 1934 Ben-Gurion predicted that “Hitler’s regime puts the entire Jewish people in danger”. In December 1938 he described Hitler’s goal as the destruction of the Jews worldwide. It was not ignorance, but the logic of Zionism, that paved the road to obstruction and collaboration.
At the heart of Achcar’s ambivalence is his description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “exceptional” (p31) because the Zionists were “fleeing a form of persecution as long-standing and brutal as European anti-Semitism”. Were the Scottish Presbyterians not fleeing persecution or the Pilgrim Fathers? Achcar’s argument seems like special pleading.
Special pleading
Special pleading
Pathetic
The Socialist Workers Party has finally told its membership that Martin Smith, SWP national secretary until 2011 and central committee member until the beginning of this year, has left the organisation. The internal Party Notes (which is now also published on the SWP website) carries this brief statement: “There has been a lot of online comment about Martin Smith. We can confirm he has resigned from the party for reasons that he wishes to keep confidential, but that he has shared with the central committee and the disputes committee.” So, almost two weeks after the rumours of his departure began to appear on leftwing blogs, the CC has deigned to officially inform its comrades about this hardly trivial matter. Pathetic!
Pathetic
Pathetic
Vote-rigging
I have twice attempted a citizen’s arrest of president Robert Mugabe on charges of torture - in 1999 in London and again in Brussels in 2001. In the latter attempt I was beaten unconscious by Mugabe’s henchmen. So I am not surprised that the presidential and parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe are not free or fair.
Mugabe’s supporters orchestrated voter registration irregularities, media bias and harassment, threats and the beating of opposition supporters. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch confirm large-scale intimidation in the run-up to the July 31 poll.
The independent Research and Advocacy Unit alleges that the voter’s roll includes around one million dead voters or people who have moved abroad and 100,000 people aged more than 100 years old. Sixty-three constituencies have more registered voters than inhabitants. Nearly one million people under 30 were still unregistered to vote at the start of this month.
Mugabe controls all levers of power, from the election commission and the electoral roll to the media, police, judiciary, intelligence services and the military. Tragically, the African Union, the Southern African Development Community and South Africa are ignoring much of the evidence of industrial-scale electoral violations that have been going on for months.
This election looks like being a rerun of the rigged ballot in 2008. Read the Amnesty International report, ‘Walk the talk’, which details how the police has conducted systematic raids on NGO offices, arbitrarily arrested human rights defenders and seized equipment to intimidate and disrupt the work of organisations carrying out election-related human rights work. Read the Human Rights Watch report, ‘The elephant in the room: reforming the security sector ahead of Zimbabwe’s elections’, on how the military and security forces in Zimbabwe have interfered in the country’s political and electoral affairs in support of Mugabe.
It found that the Zimbabwe national army has deployed soldiers across the country, intimidating, beating and abusing perceived supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change and those critical of the government. At times, these soldiers have manipulated food distribution for partisan pro-Mugabe political advantage. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has claimed that 70,000 pro-MDC ballots, cast in early voting, have disappeared. He’s also criticised the leader of the African Union observer team for playing down the scale of the election fraud.
Vote-rigging
Vote-rigging
Boycott
The elections of July 31, though not a fundamental national development, will point to the trajectory to be taken in the implementation of capitalist exploitation and state brutality on the workers and the poor masses. Whichever party wins will without doubt and despite all election rhetoric go full swing to impose massive austerity, as demanded by imperialism.
The events in Egypt prove that democracy is not enough to cater for the needs of the poor. Workers and the poor should mobilise and organise now to be able to defeat such moves and protect their livelihood and interests.
Internationally capitalism is experiencing its worst crisis since the 1930s depression, which acted as the material basis for the eruption of World War II. Since 2008 capitalist strategists and politicians have failed to come up with a viable solution to the recession that has wiped out so much value created over decades in order to save a system that thrives on the exploitation and the impoverishment of the poor masses and semi-colonial countries. The capitalists have been forced to place the burden on the workers and masses through an unprecedented attack on working conditions and also attacking the living conditions of the masses, especially the most vulnerable.
Here in Zimbabwe the workers and poor masses are still tied to the popular front leash of the reformist MDC and the pseudo-nationalist Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu-PF) primarily because of a lack of a tested and viable alternative that offers real solutions for the fight for jobs, wages and protection of work and savings. Behind these two parties is a whole host of trade union leaders, civic groups and social movement leaders who one way or the other help to tie the masses to the two wings of imperialism.
There are also some socialists calling for support for the MDC as the lesser evil that will, in their revolutionary wisdom, be easier to remove from power - a clear sign of a Menshevik, two-stage approach that substitutes the primary goal of building an independent alternative to the tailing of reformist parties. Both Zanu-PF and the two MDC parties issued basically common manifestos with differences of emphasis and priorities, but all within the capitalist framework, as demanded by the various imperialist wings.
All the issues of employment creation, devolution and empowerment fit well into the grand strategy of ensuring the continued plunder of national resources by capitalists and their local agents, whilst the majority wallow in poverty. The western countries have indicated that they will endorse any winner in a ‘peaceful’ election. thereby discarding earlier talk of a ‘free and fair’ poll.
We have no illusions about the immense tasks that await the workers, youths and the toiling masses nationally and internationally and we stand guided by the best Marxist experience and programme in our efforts to break the popular-front jinx and pose the imperative of independent mobilisation of the workers and ordinary poor.
For us the elections and their result offers us the opportunity to develop our tactics within the broader and fundamental strategy of fighting for a socialist society through the mobilisation and organising of the workers and the poor here in Zimbabwe as part of an international struggle.
We therefore called on all workers and the poor masses to boycott the poll that was meant to legitimise their exploitation and oppression and instead work towards building an independent worker and poor masses’ agenda.
Workers and the poor, form action committees to fight the growing and coming attacks on the wages and conditions of the poor and the livelihood of the majority!
Workers and poor masses, break with the MDC and Zanu-PF and form a workers’ party that champions the interests of the workers and the poor masses!
Form rank-and-file committees in our movements to lead action and break with the reformist leadership!
For a workers’ state that defends workers and peasants against the local and foreign capitalists on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit the workers and the poor!
For an African socialist revolution as part of an international revolution, that alone can guarantee a better life for all!
For a new world party of socialist revolution based on the Transitional programme of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!
Boycott
Boycott
Solidarity
As you know, the Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece has started a legal action against the EEK and myself, its general secretary.
I am accused of “defamation”, “instigation of violence” and “disruption of the civil peace”.
At the same time, the Nazis have intensified their non-stop, vicious, anti-Semitic and anti-communist campaign accusing me of being “the instrument of a world Jewish conspiracy to foment civil war, so as to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece”.
The Greek state has endorsed this action by Golden Dawn by bringing charges against myself, together with the former dean of the National Technical University of Athens, Mr Constantine Moutzouris (accused of permitting the operation of the alternative website, Athens Indymedia, from within the university).
The trial will begin on September 3 2013. Already about 2,000 signatures of solidarity have been collected internationally and nationally, and more are coming in every day. Many political and trade union organisations in Greece and internationally have expressed their solidarity. On August 29, a press conference will be held in the headquarters of the Union of Journalists in Athens. We want to set out our case, as well as reporting on the solidarity we have received.
We want to ask you to kindly send messages of solidarity, signatures, motions, etc, to eek@eek.gr, in time to be presented both to the press and to the court.
Solidarity
Solidarity