Letters

Same bracket

Despite his correct position of opposing the left calling for state bans on racists and fascists, there is a serious problem with Eddie Ford’s article, ‘Dieudonné’s calculated anti-Semitism’ (January 30), in which he denounces the French comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, for anti-Semitism and seeks to put him in the same bracket as fascists, about whom it is legitimate to debate such tactics.

To put it as simply as possible, Dieudonné is a prominent black man and political figure of part-African origin in France - a racist, colonialist, imperialist power that still regularly rampages around parts of Africa even today. It has done so in alliance with Israel for many decades (Suez!). In this context, even to talk about someone like Dieudonné as any kind of fascist threat, to talk even hypothetically about using tactics like ‘no platform’ that may legitimately be used against a real fascist threat, is utterly surreal.

What is even more surreal is that the Weekly Worker does not have a no-platform position in principle regarding openly avowed fascists in any case. It rejects this position, and its polemic on this question is expressed in its occasionally being prepared to publish letters from avowed fascists in its letters page. This is arguable: in my view the position of refusing to debate in all circumstances with avowed fascists is not practical and was never adhered to in practice by the left. In particular, when the left is competing with fascists for the allegiance of currently backward but militant layers of the working class, such a ‘principle’ is tantamount to abandoning such layers to the fascists, though such interaction is a difficult, problematic undertaking, with considerable political and physical risks.

For anyone on the left to project elements from currently oppressed ethnic minorities as fascist threats in imperialist societies is to display zero understanding of racism and racial oppression. Black fascism is not possible in France, the United States or any other imperialist country because, for all the CPGB’s tendentious extrapolations of some aspects of bourgeois liberal rhetoric into a supposedly coherent policy and practice, these societies are still deeply racist in practice, particularly towards minorities - mainly but not exclusively non-whites - whose origins are in the ex-colonies and semi-colonies. Blacks and other non-whites of ‘immigrant’ descent will be the first victims of fascism in these societies, not its agents.

The CPGB is in the habit of pooh-poohing allegations of racism against the bourgeois state in favour of an overblown analysis that says that the official bourgeois position is ‘official anti-racism’ - despite the fact that in practice, despite the rhetoric, little has changed. Yet it is quick to brand Dieudonné and Anelka as outright racists and equate them with the nativist white far right, who are again defined according to this outlook primarily by their anti-Semitism.

What is unique about the question of anti-Semitism is that the one formerly oppressed minority in 20th century capitalist society which has managed to escape from racial oppression and find its way across the line between oppressor and oppressed in these societies are the Jews. This was because anti-Semitism, and the oppression of Jews, was distinct from virtually all other kinds of racial oppression in the earlier period of capitalism, in that it was not linked to any imperial-colonial question. It rather came from a cocktail of demonology derived from a religious-sectarian persecution in pre-capitalist western societies, giving rise to a struggle for emancipation from that oppression that was a component of bourgeois revolutions, notably the French, and the beginnings of proletarian revolutions against capitalism, most notably in Russia.

This produced a bourgeois-reactionary demonology about the Jews, transmuted into ‘racial’ terms as per the late 19th/early 20th century norm, that led to genocide at the hands of crisis-ridden capitalism in Europe in the 1930s - possibly the most extreme form of ‘racial’ oppression yet seen under advanced capitalism. Yet by a dialectical inversion, the oppression of the Jews was the most problematic and irrational from a bourgeois point of view, the form of oppression that most easily dissipated and turned into its opposite.

The outcome of World War II militarily crushed those sections of the bourgeoisie that staked all on persecution of the Jews. But, more than crushing them, it politically defeated them, and defeated the bourgeois false consciousness they represented. Because the oppression of the Jews was not rooted in the imperial-colonial paradigm, it was uniquely able to be turned into its opposite. The advent of Israel as a colonial-settler state, effectively a new imperialist power transplanted into the Middle East with the, at first tacit, later fervent, support of major imperialist powers like the United States (as well as, paradoxically, the early weak Stalinist-USSR imperialism) led to the transformation of the Jews from (in the main) an oppressed people in the early 20th century to an oppressor people by the late 20th century.This shift in role is true not merely of Israeli Jews themselves, but of the mainstream of Jewish organisations in the major imperialist countries, which reconstituted themselves in the latter 20th century, on the basis of the Ersatz form of nationalism known as Zionism, into ‘border guards’ for Israeli imperialism, in a manner somewhat analogous to the manner that Trotsky observed was true of the Stalinised Comintern with regard to the interests of the Soviet nomenklatura. Thus the Jews, as a people in the later imperialist epoch, became part of the imperialist oppressor camp, albeit outside Israel somewhat by proxy. The crucial difference being that Israeli imperialism is not some anomalous regency regime in class terms, but a strategically crucial part of the world imperialist order that is unlikely to be shifted short of conscious proletarian revolution.

In this context, anti-Semitism, from being an important if problematic ideology of racist imperialism in the early 20th century, has become a marginal ideology of those themselves subject to racist oppression in the late 20th century, and the same in spades in the early 21st century - particularly in the context of the ‘war on terror’. In fact, in the context that Dieudonné has ‘crossed’ French imperialism’s Israeli imperialist ally, Israel, and its French Jewish supporters, the witch-hunt against Dieudonné has a racist character, in the same sense as a similar witch-hunt against another problematic, in some ways reactionary, figure, just over a century ago. I speak of captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the general staff, falsely accused of treason against the French republic, and defended by sections of the left who did not capitulate to the then-dominant anti-Semitism.

Dieudonné’s fraternisation with the racist, anti-Semitic political fossil, Jean- Marie Le Pen, should be condemned above all as dangerous to black people in France. Just as should the speech by the Nation of Islam patriarch, Louis Farrakhan, in the United States, where he testified as to the ‘greatness’ of Adolf Hitler as a nationalist leader. As with Farrakhan in the United States, however, anyone who argues that Dieudonné should be equated with the imperialist far right is capitulating to imperialist racism.

But serious political analysts should note that Len Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, the current and politically ambitious leader of the Front National, has condemned Dieudonné and called for the enforcement of France’s anti-hate crime laws against him. The modern Front National, a highly sophisticated ‘post’-fascist machine that increasingly trades on its ‘modernisation’ - including an attempt to appeal to Jewish voters on the basis of pro-Zionism and Islamophobia - represents the real far-right threat in France - pro-Zionist, racist-in-practice and quite committed to the formal/fictitious ‘anti-racism’ that is the hallmark of the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie in this period.

In joining in the demonisation of Dieudonné, Eddie Ford finds himself with an unexpected co-thinker, which is not entirely unexpected for observers of the unthinking, reflexive capitulation to Zionism that is widespread and so far largely unchallenged ideology of left Zionism on much of the far left.

Same bracket
Same bracket

Free rider

In your January 16 issue, a letter from ‘Peter’ was allowed to promote Mosleyite policies, even claiming some positions were shared with the CPGB. I was surprised, even dismayed, that his ideas went unchallenged by the Weekly Worker’s editors.

Mosley was a leading Labour politician who broke away to form his New Party, initially joined by John Strachey, who was generally seen as a prominent Marxist writer. Mosley soon adopted a calculated anti-Semitic platform, mixed with hostility to international finance capital (portrayed as Jewish). The result was the British Union of Fascists, a bunch of street thugs whom Peter generously portrays as democrats, but whose real objective was attacking the organised working class.

Defenders of capitalism are quite capable of presenting popular and radical measures in order to save the system from itself. Trotsky once observed that the Nazis expropriated the bourgeoisie politically in order to save it economically.

Certainly, finance capital will have to be attacked, but radical-sounding, even socialist, measures are of little value when presented in isolation or in the wrong context. Perspective is crucial. The credit system and the mountains of fictitious capital that bear down on the world economy are an outgrowth of capital accumulation. The only perspective to challenge this is that of uniting the working class internationally to take power and control the means of production. Anything short of that - defence of the nation-state, the national economy, or collapse into the politics of identity - opens the door to dangerous reactionary developments.

Confusion on these issues is rife among the radical left, where campaigning on single issues, without relating them to an analysis of capitalism and the perspective of the working class overthrowing it, is the norm.

So when a Mosleyite seeks to add to the confusion, why does CPGB give him a free ride?

Free rider
Free rider

Delusion

In my article, ‘Belling the cat’ (December 12 2013), I suggested that the Hebrew majority of the Israeli working class “will … have not only the ability, but also an incentive to overthrow the capitalist Zionist regime, if that would mean becoming part of a dominant working class in a socialist context. The context would have to be regional, encompassing at the very least the entire Arab east … So potentially the Hebrew working class can be mobilised for the revolutionary overthrow of the Zionist regime, and for exchanging its position as an exploited and dominated class with national privileges for the position of partnership in a dominant class with no more (and, of course, no less) than equal national rights.”

In his response, ‘Collectivising the mice’ (January 30), comrade Tony Greenstein denies that this scenario is possible. Some of his counterarguments are quite baffling. For example: “Why then did [the Jewish Israeli working class] not overthrow Zionism when most Palestinians supported Oslo and the two-state solution?” The obvious answer to this rhetorical question is: first, because the scenario I outlined assumes, quite explicitly, the context of a regional socialist revolution; and second, because the Oslo accords and the two-state solution posit the continued existence of Israel’s Zionist regime, not its overthrow. Anyway, for now let me leave aside the disagreement between Tony and me regarding the scenario outlined above.

However, Tony and I do agree on at least one major point: in the absence of a regional socialist context, the Hebrew masses will not overthrow the Zionist regime for the sake of dissolving the state of Israel into a unitary, secular-democratic state in the entire territory of pre-1948 Palestine. But the project of creating such a state, upheld by many radical Palestinian nationalists, is exactly what Tony supports. Let me emphasise: this project does not presuppose a socialist Arab east, but envisions a bourgeois democratic, hence capitalist, Palestine. (Indeed, the paradigm cited by advocates of this project is the ending of apartheid in South Africa - a democratic transformation that left capitalism intact.)

But, as Tony and I agree, the Hebrew masses are not going to welcome this project; on the contrary, they are likely to be mobilised against it. In this crucial respect Israel is quite different from apartheid South Africa, where the vast majority of the population, including almost the entire working class, actively opposed apartheid. So achieving a unitary bourgeois, secular, democratic Palestine would require an external force that would overpower and topple Israel militarily or at the very least pose a realistic threat of doing so. As I argued in my article, this scenario, far from being credible, is a dangerous delusion.

Delusion
Delusion

United front

I am a member of the International Socialist Network and supporter of the Republican Socialist Platform within Left Unity. I am also a long-time Weekly Worker reader, regular CPGB podcast listener and first-time individual letter writer.

As Daniel Harvey writes (Letters, January 30), we were both members of the Commune, and I too remember him as one of the more serious and thoughtful members of the group. I also remember him as the kind of writer who would never use the phrase, “Dear oh dear”. The letter that comrade Harvey responded to, that I co-signed the week before, raised a question about the usage of the phrase “redolent of … Stalinism”, to describe the way that the statement from the Republican Socialist Platform on Left Unity was changed by the editors.

The editing of the statement - an exercise in what Daniel calls the “prerogative of the editors of Weekly Worker”, certainly isn’t the first time that this paper has sought to minimise the political challenge of the Republican Socialist Platform intervention in Left Unity. The first time, as far as I recall, the Republican Socialist Platform was mentioned in Weekly Worker it was referred to as “Steve Freeman’s Republican Socialist Platform”, a clear attempt to dodge discussion of the content of our position within Left Unity; by reducing our politics to one name, the CPGB/Weekly Worker sought to paint us as some kind of individual project.

Our letter replying to this was labelled “No platform”. Contrary to comrade Harvey’s account, we are still organising within Left Unity, so his idea that “No platform” alluded to the dissolution of the platform doesn’t make any sense. It is clear, especially in the light of the personalisation of our politics, that this was an attempt to minimise, and thus not engage with, the politics of the Republican Socialist Platform.

I support the Republican Socialist Platform for a number of reasons, but I will take one in particular as pertinent to opening a debate with CPGB comrades. The Left Unity initiative is not an attempt to build a communist organisation; that is one of the things the ISNetwrok is attempting with the opening up of its regroupment initiatives. It is in fact an attempt to open up a united front of working class struggle between reformists, socialists and communists, amongst others.

As such, the politics the CPGB should be arguing for within Left Unity are the politics of their minimum programme, as these are the programmatic politics that help to ensure the class political independence of the working class and its political organisations, and so the politics on which a united front should be built. As supporters of republican socialism we have opened a debate to try and pull Left Unity to the very building blocks of working class political independence that the CPGB should be fighting for: extreme democracy, republicanism and internationalism.

CPGB comrades have not engaged honestly with Left Unity. Instead they have wanted to feed their collective libido - all ritual strutting and empty self-aggrandisement. Comrades, wilfully misunderstanding the political basis of the Left Unity project to advance a shared narrative of your own persecution is not principle: it’s a collective neurosis.

How else can we understand the behaviour of CPGB comrades at the founding conference? Rather than participating fully in the debate - for instance, talking to people who expressed interest in their politics - we were treated to the sight of some leading members of the ‘only principled communists in the room’ strutting around with the kind of misplaced sense of self-importance that, to be fair, is generally as strenuous to sustain as it is to find outside of the upper layers of the trade union bureaucracy.

Which is to say nothing of the Communist Platform’s ‘defence’ by comrade Jack Conrad. His schmaltzy, overplayed, karaoke Brecht turn was more a private pantomime than a political intervention. The only way to explain this peculiar behaviour, or the particular form in which the editors of Weekly Worker have chosen to exercise the sense of prerogative that they so clearly feel entitled to is that the CPGB are acting in an entirely dishonest way in Left Unity; more interested in building their own myth than in setting up a democratic and politically independent united front of the working class.

With comrades of the calibre they have, I am sure this situation will not continue, and so I look forward to talking to them more seriously about the situation within Left Unity, and the regroupment process of communist organisations that the ISN has started in earnest, as much as I look forward to further editions of the Weekly Worker and your podcast.

United front
United front

US left

I found Dan Harvey’s article on the history of the CPGB’s participation in the Socialist Alliance to be a very interesting read, and possibly a useful reference point when thinking about recent developments in US left politics. Since the 2012 general election and the strong showing by Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant for a state legislature seat in Washington, the possibility of united electoral action by different socialist groups has been broached in a much stronger and more concrete way than the topic has been discussed in several decades.

That said, caution and thoughtfulness should be the order of the day, particularly if the example of the Socialist Alliance serves as any sort of guide as to what may happen in the US. It should be noted, after all, that the initiating groups of each electoral project are their own country’s sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International, and there is some tendency for the tactics of an international to have a large degree of consistency across its sections.

If I was to wager a guess on how developments in the US would proceed, the process of building local socialist electoral alliances would gain varying degrees of support among a decent-sized section of the left, though there would be little coordinating presence outside of Socialist Alternative and whatever organisations with a national reach supported such efforts. While local autonomy is definitely desirable, a lack of central organisation would probably mean the politics of such alliances would vary greatly from place to place, and the unified efforts wouldn’t have much life outside of elections.

Nevertheless, like the case of Left Unity in the UK (and the Socialist Alliance 15 years ago), it means there’s an opportunity for developing a larger space, where Marxist politics can be effectively put forward. Any unity efforts are still in their embryonic stages at best, but there is some reason to be at least cautiously optimistic. Hopefully I will be able to inform Weekly Worker readers of positive developments as they arise!

US left
US left

Faking it

“Those attending political meetings that tend to be breeding grounds for interventions from the Spartacist League could traditionally only sing a tune with their fingers in their ears,” writes Corey Ansel (Letters, January 30). Well, annoying and wrong as they may be, at least the Spartacists push a somewhat coherent political line.

It’s not for me to answer Ansel’s labyrinthine criticism of Workers Power’s supposedly “opportunist”, “reformist” and “anti-Marxist” activity. And I’ll overlook why he chose to publish this battle cry against “online politics” and “sects” in a newspaper explicitly dedicated to bringing its niche readers the latest in curious sectariana and hot-off-the-press ‘leftist trainspotting’.

However, one passing invective in the ‘Sparts on crack’-like storm that was Ansel’s letter stood out as particularly amusing: a modern-day Holden Caulfield, Ansel labels the League for the Fifth International (L5I) as simply “phoney”.

As an L5I member myself, until now I had no idea my organisation is actually fake - all a figment of my imagination. Indeed, congratulations are in order to the editors for bringing us this scoop.

Faking it
Faking it

Blame Maoism

Paul Demarty’s claim that “privilege theory is every inch a product of American Maoism, and all its basic discursive features - Manichean presentations of minor disputes, strident moralism and the idea that the privileged need to be ‘educated’ by the oppressed - are deflected products of the worship of the Cultural Revolution” is too sweeping and unsupported to be buried in the penultimate paragraph of an otherwise excellent piece (‘Bondage and bigotry’, January 30).

This is not the first time comrade Demarty has traced current left woes to the failings of bygone American Maoists. I know enough of American Maoism’s history and sorry end to accept that his claim is true in many respects - an obvious example being the ‘white skin privilege’ theory developed by the Sojourner Truth Organisation and then midwifed into academia by leading member Noel Ignatin/Ignatiev when he entered grad school after the STO’s collapse. There is a connection.

But merely identifying this connection is insufficient, as it leaves out the political degradation that accompanied it. The failure of the New Communist Movement, the conversion of radical ideas into academic theorising and social work jargon, the lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution learned or misunderstood by western leftists - are all too important to dismiss in a single paragraph (of an article about the post-post-Trotskyist International Socialist Network, no less). It would be good to see a more thorough treatment of these issues in a future Weekly Worker.

Blame Maoism
Blame Maoism

Laughing matter

Thanks should go to Pete McLaren of Rugby Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition for providing a useful summary of pro-migration killer facts to be used the next time comrades encounter the rightwing pub bore (Letters, January 23). Of course, it would be pretty useless to use when campaigning on the doorstep and perfectly sums up why the left is currently losing this argument.

The white working class are unlikely to be swayed by GDP statistics or history lessons about net migration in the 1800s. Their politics are shaped by what they see: overcrowded, adjacent non-British areas of deprivation, just like their own neglected estates, with the rightwing commentariat and politicians fuelling the view that money spent on these communities would be diverted to them if immigration was reversed. Add this to a genuine sense of the country being ‘full’ (I notice comrade McLaren didn’t include any population density stats in his letter) and it’s easy for the likes of the UK Independence Party and the English Defence League to make hay.

Until we start to engage in the arguments around our limited resources and sensibly discuss, say, how big the UK (and world) population could become and still support a decent standard of living for all, we will struggle to build support. Yes, it should be a Marxist argument, but one that acknowledges unlimited growth and spread is untenable. I’m certainly not capable of packaging up such messages succinctly, but I do know one thing: saying we should just open up all borders because ‘figures will average out over time’ will continue to get us laughed out of town.

Laughing matter
Laughing matter

Peripheral?

Comrade Zurowski’s introduction to ‘Animal liberation and Marxism’ (January 23) initially sets out the accepted Marxist view of what is loosely termed animal liberationism. However, in his concluding remarks, he points to a real contradiction in such a position: “... the customary explanation as to why Marxists are anthropocentric ... rarely amounts to more than ‘That’s just the way it is’: ie, the very first phrase that historical materialists ought to abandon.”

In other words, Marxism is not a static view of the world, but a dynamic one, where all ideas and experience in bourgeois society are scrutinised and not merely uncritically accepted as an historical given. Perhaps comrade Adams (Letters, January 30) should have taken a little more note of this before denouncing animal rights - and, presumably “its allied environmentalism” - as “petty bourgeois, irrationalist hogwash”. Marxism, as a dynamic world view, critiques the real, material conditions as they presently exist. The material conditions which pertained in Marx’s day - an abundance of natural resources, most notably energy, and a global population estimated at less than two billion - were very different to those which we confront.

Socialism, unlike capitalism, is based upon a rational use of resources in a planned economy. The question, then, is how are we - should we ever seize power - to deal with a material world which has increasingly depleted natural resources and a predicted population of approximately eight billion in 20 years’ time? Clearly food, and the water required to produce it, will be a major and pressing issue.

The United Nations Environment Programme report of 2010 stated that the pressure from agriculture on water resources will increase due to population growth and a rising demand for meat. In its view, “A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change away from animal products.”

But what of meat consumption? As the data shows, it is an inefficient use of resources and if it were abolished, as comrade Wittgen of the Assoziation Dämmerung (AD) succinctly puts it, “this would massively increase our potential to supply food for everybody ... abandoning the meat industry under a proletarian dictatorship would actually make progress to communism easier”. What is so “irrational” about that? It will, of course, be easier said than done, given that resistance to the idea of not eating animal products is so deeply entrenched in nearly all societies. Indeed, it seems to be one of the issues where Marxists are entirely at one with mainstream thought and practice. The reasons for this were addressed by both comrade Zurowski and AD comrades, who fully acknowledge that the “lifestylism” of some (perhaps the majority) of animal rights proponents is hardly a recipe for a revolutionary change in the system of social relations.

That having been said, this is only a partial explanation and is obviously not the nub of the matter, as the responses from comrades Adams and Masters attest. For comrade Masters, it seems that the pleasure of the palate is his main reason for not giving up meat and he then goes on to correctly point out that trials have been conducted to develop in vitro meat. However, this is not without its contradictions. Firstly, from an animal rights perspective, it still involves taking animal tissue, which is then grown using the medium of foetal calf serum; in theory, it should be possible to then carry on production without the continued use of animals, but this is by no means proven. Secondly, as a high-end technology it is very expensive and could only become commercially viable if the mega-corporations could make the huge profits which they currently enjoy from the existing vertical integration of the meat industry, and it is open to question whether this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future. Meat at the centre of food consumption.

This, of course, raises the whole ethical and moral dimension of the relationship of human to non-human animals, a dimension which most Marxists prefer not to discuss. Is a concern for animals, as comrade Zurowski put it, “garish moralising” or is it more the case, as comrade Bernhold states, that “we have arrived at a stage where there is no longer a necessity for socially produced suffering”? One thing is certain. If Marxists do not engage with what have hitherto been regarded as peripheral issues, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to present a vision of a future progressive, socialist society. In fact, it could be argued that we are denying that human beings have a capacity for change.

Peripheral?
Peripheral?

Animal rights

One wonders why the discussion on animal rights has arisen. Communists follow Marx and Engels to the letter and, as Engels was a fox hunter, I would have thought that was an end to the matter.

Animal rights
Animal rights

Proof at last

Working my way through Weekly Worker 995, one of your really excellent editions, one could be forgiven for feeling a wry sympathy for the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, following the well-deserved ridicule they received from Ben Lewis (Letters, January 30), only to imagine them all having orgasms of delight when they stumble across the obvious typo in Mike Macnair’s “edited version” of his input to the Hands Off the People of Iran day school (‘Changed and unchanged’). I refer to where Mike is quoted as saying that “The US backed Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war”.

Maybe the AWL will print this paragraph as ‘proof’ of the Weekly Worker’s ‘falsification of history’, in the true Stalinist tradition?

Proof at last
Proof at last