Letters
Not a nation
Jack Conrad argues that Israel is a nation on the basis of the right of a people to self-determination (‘The Israel-Palestine issue once again’, August 6).
As he mentions, Trotsky came around to the view that Jews might form a nation. However, Trotsky did not condone that nation being formed in Palestine by force. That was because he shared Lenin’s view that workers do not support the right of oppressor nations to self-determination. Such is not to exercise a right to self-determination but, as in the case in point, to deny the right of Palestinians to self-determination. For Lenin, the distinction between oppressor and oppressed nation was fundamental in the imperialist epoch and guided the programme of workers.
Today Jews could still, if they chose, form a nation without oppressing any other nation. Workers could support this right because it shows Jewish workers that their class brothers and sisters do not oppress them and are their real class allies, not their would-be national bourgeoisie.
But this can not be a demand that we raise in Palestine today. To argue that Jews in Israel should have the right to self-determination in a Palestine “granted by workers” - ie, a workers’ state - is to put a condition on the right to self-determination of Palestinians now and in the future. It is to tell Palestinian workers that we workers support their national independence, but only on condition that they recognise the equal national right of Jews in Palestine.
Sorry, mate, but your position is anti-Leninist. It is not made right by saying that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is like many other colonial occupations, where occupying populations have since become ‘nations’. By comparison, Israel was formed yesterday and survives only by an armed occupation against a resisting population. In New Zealand, we recognise the right to self-determination of Maori, but the people raising this demand are not a majority of workers, but a would-be Maori bourgeoisie who want a larger share of the surplus produced in New Zealand.
Nothing about Lenin’s position on the right to self-determination assumes that the workers in the imperialist countries must be the enemies of those in the semi-colonies and colonies. In fact, unconditional support for the right to self-determination of oppressed countries was a demand that was designed to prove that workers in the oppressor countries were prepared to forgo the privileges of super-profits to fight alongside those super-exploited workers in their national struggle to break from the oppressor states.
This is not “third-world economism”, but Bolshevism.
Dave Brown
Communist Workers Group, New Zealand
Zionist string
Jack Conrad’s reply to Tony Greenstein is a long string of pro-Zionist positions from the British left that is almost as bad as the propaganda of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Like the writers of the AWL, he turns a political debate into personal attacks, such as: “what comrade Greenstein writes is a complete muddle”. Worse, he actually uses in his polemics very big hints that Tony Greenstein is motivated by anti-Semitism. It is a similar tactic to that used by the white colonial settlers in South Africa and their supporters in the world in calling those who wanted to destroy the apartheid regime through socialist revolution anti-white racists.
Instead of relating to the reality of Israeli society as an imperialist state formed by settler colonialists and examining closely whether a working class of a colonialist settler society can become a conscious revolutionary class through the struggles to better the condition of selling its labour-power, he called Tony Greenstein’s position “third-worldist economism” that had lost faith in the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. If Jack Conrad had taken his time to think, he would have answered the question: did the white working class in South Africa, Algeria and the former Rhodesia fight for socialist revolution or support until the end the racist regimes and states? What is the evidence to prove that most Israeli Jewish workers will struggle to overthrow the Israeli imperialist state apparatus?
Anyone who knows history is familiar with the fact that the Histadrut was born as a colonialist enterprise to expel Arab workers; that the Zionist labour movement stood with the British and crushed the anti-imperialist struggle of 1936-39; that the Jewish workers supported the mass expulsion of the Arab workers in 1947-48; that the economic struggles of the Israeli Jewish employees are carried under the banner of what is good for the Israeli state; and that, following the recent defeats of Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, the chauvinism among Israeli workers is higher than ever.
This does not mean that a minority of Israeli workers cannot join the revolutionary struggle of the working class in the region and, most importantly, the Arabs and in particular the Palestinians. However, this can happen only when these workers understand that Zionism and the Zionist state is their class enemy.
To argue that those who do not think that the majority of the Jewish workers in Israel can gain revolutionary consciousness because they want to protect their position as labour aristocracy is to lose faith in the working class in the imperialist states and a misuse of the terms “third-worldist” and “economism”. It is as good as claiming that those who did not see the revolutionary potential of the majority of white workers in South Africa, Algeria or Rhodesia were “third-worldist economists”.
The real question in this debate is whether Marxists can support the right of self-determination of all nations, oppressed nations as well of imperialist states, or only of oppressed nations, where the non-proletarian masses can be allies of the working class in these states and part of the world working class revolution.
Jack Conrad mentioned Marx. Thus it is only proper to ask what Marx’s method on the national question was. Did he and Engels support the right of self-determination for all nations?
To understand Marx’s method on the right of self termination - a democratic right that is not absolute but, like any democratic right, subordinate to the working class struggle against imperialism (the arch-enemy of the world socialist revolution), we should begin by asking whether Marx supported the right of self-determination for all nations or only the struggle of those nations directed against the reactionary powers in his time.
The best-known case was the case of the United States’ southern states - the confederation that demanded this right of separation on the ground of having this democratic right of self-determination. Marx, as I hope everyone knows, supported the north in crushing the slave-masters and their confederate army.
Less known but illuminating is Marx’s and Engels’ position on the southern Slavs, whom they said had been “taken in tow by the Germans and the Magyars” and in 1848 “represented the counterrevolution” when they rose up to achieve their national independence. (MECW Vol 8, p227).
It is not enough that a nation exists and demands the right of self-determination for Marxists to support this right. It is necessary that this struggle should be progressive and in our day anti-imperialist. The position of recognising this democratic right for imperialist states is leading to the same position that the Second International took in August 1914 - defence of the imperialist motherland. The same position as the reformists took during World War II in supporting one camp of imperialism against another.
France was occupied during World War II by German imperialism. Could Marxists support the struggle for independent imperialist France? Those who answered in the affirmative stood in reality with the oppression of the Vietnamese and the Algerians. Those who stood with British imperialism stood with the oppression of the Indians and the Arabs. All the imperialist states during these wars fought for the same thing: the super-exploitation of the working class in the colonies.
But what about the right of self-determination for the Israelis after the Arab working class revolution? Those who call for such a position in the real world stand for organising a base for imperialist attack on the workers’ states of the Middle East. The only solution is a Palestinian workers’ state from the river to the sea as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East.
Yossi Schwartz
International Socialist League, Israel
Sectarian
I very much enjoyed Mike Macnair’s recent articles on the Labour Party and agree with much of what he said (‘Making and unmaking Labour’, July 30; ‘Labour Party blues’, July 23).
I am a communist who has not voted Labour since 1992. I just about forced myself to vote Labour in that general election about 20 minutes before polls closed, but was still seriously concerned that a Kinnock premiership would be a complete disaster for the left and the labour movement.
The election of Blair as leader in 1994 and the sadistic pleasure exhibited by his clique in systematically destroying any relationship and commitment of the Labour Party to working class politics and interests meant I could not stomach turning out to vote for that party and have not done so since 1992. I have voted in every election since then by writing “For a world communist society” across every ballot paper.
However, Mike is right that the Labour Party still represents the idea and the vision of an independent political party of the working class, initially fighting to press the interests of the working class within capitalism, but potentially expressing the need for the working class to establish its own rule nationally and internationally, to liberate itself and the whole of humanity.
He is right that voting for even the shadow of the name of the Labour Party means a vote in principle for a mass party of labour and a vote against those who seek to liquidate the concept of independent working class representation.
It is also correct that we should be trying to create a mass, class, democratic, republican and socialist alternative to the parties of capitalism and seeking the maximum unity on that basis. He is further correct that key to that is the unity of Marxists and communists within one revolutionary political party organised on the basis of democratic centralism. These aims are not the same, but neither are they in contradiction.
There are surely limits to how far we can establish a mass socialist party under capitalism. The mass end of the pole is far more likely to be social democratic than revolutionary. An alliance between social democrats, socialists, trade unionists and greens is exactly what we need for the radical breakthrough required in British politics, and it is a shame the Weekly Worker always finds itself in sectarian opposition to efforts in this direction.
Andrew Northall
Kettering
Polarisers
For once I can agree with Mike Macnair on something: the question of the Labour Party: Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party. Those who argue that the Labour Party has nothing to do with the working class any more are deceiving themselves and other people to justify their campaign for a more leftwing Labour Party mark two.
This campaign aims utilise the understandable disgust many people feel towards the rightwing trajectory of Blairism (i.e. New Labour). However, Blairism was simply the rightist response in the Labour Party to neoliberalism, which is now in retreat on a global scale and will probably never recover. Blairism made it more difficult for some people, who had a limited perspective on history and a weak grasp of dialectics, to maintain the dialectical conception of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party, so it was argued that this contradiction of a party which was both worker and bourgeois had finally been resolved in favour of the bourgeoisie.
This type of argument fails to take into consideration that previous classes in history, during their struggle for political power and beyond, tended to polarise into a left and right, a revolutionary and a reformist wing, with the latter seeking a compromise with the old regime. This was the case with the progressive bourgeois struggle against feudalism, as both the English revolutions of the 1640s and the French revolution in the 18th century testify. Further back, when Rome dominated, there is also evidence of a struggle between left and right. For instance, Caesar rose to power with the support of the popularis faction, although opposed by the more conservative members of the senate, but his dictatorial ambitions, viewed as a threat to the republic, cost him his life in 44BC.
Macnair is also correct to argue that imperialism doesn’t explain the existence of bourgeois workers’ parties in the imperialist countries and elsewhere, although some dogmatists on the left still defend this myth. Imperialism or not, classes will tend to polarise between reformist and revolutionary wings for various reasons. The working class is no exception to this general rule. However, having polarised, one side will usually gain the ascendancy. It is this ascendancy which must be explained.
Tony Clark
London
Neutralisers
It saddens me to see the CPGB - probably the least weird and introverted of all the far-left sects - defending its decision to advocate a Labour vote in the European elections. Labour has historically been a party of class treachery. Labourism has been an obstacle to truly radical working class political development. Even Unison general secretary Dave Prentis has recognised that his members cannot continue to “feed the hand that bites it”.
Can we please start searching for a political strategy that might begin to galvanise working class radicalism instead of giving support to a party that neutralises it?
Jeff Steel
email
Shock-horror
Despite Mike Macnair’s attempt to defend the politics of “bourgeois workers’ party” and apply it to Democratic-like parties such as New Labour, David Miliband’s recent article in The Guardian already talks about the attempt to liquidate Labour as an actual party by means of “open primaries” (August 7).
If there is no room whatsoever for “halfway house” parties, why then does Die Linke exist? Yes, there is room for a “bourgeois workers’ party”. It isn’t social-corporatist Labour, though.
More important, however, there is room for a proletarian party that is not necessarily a communist party (as discussed in a past letter of mine), but nevertheless meets the key criteria which “bourgeois workers’ parties” do not meet: “formation of the proletariat into a class [for itself], overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat”. This is the approach that Dave Craig takes, comparable to the Lassalleans, Eisenachers and even the short-lived USPD (not the split-happy, ultra-left KPD), which was praised by a Die Linke official.
There is even room for a “communitarian populist front” controlled by that party, inspired by the Paris Commune’s political measures and key economic measures (including - shock-horror - “producer cooperatives with state aid”).
Jacob Richter
email
Old battles
Both Bob Potter (Letters, July 30) and Ben Lewis (Letters, August 6) draw attention to the significance of the events in Germany in the early 1930s in teaching lessons on how to fight the growing menace of fascism in an effective manner.
It was entirely correct for Communist Party (KPD) members, especially the young unemployed, to attend Nazi meetings and demand an opportunity to speak from the platform. Dimitrov, in his speech in reply to discussion at the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935, describes just such an event: “A communist rose and asked for the floor. The chairman at first refused but under the pressure of the audience, which wanted to hear a communist, he had to let him speak.”
There is no evidence that the KPD and Nazis held “joint” meetings (unless we are to accept as valid the accusations voiced in the SPD press). What often happened is that KPD and NSDAP members would stand on picket lines together during ‘unofficial’ strikes held in defiance of the SPD-led trade unions - most notably in the Berliner Verkehrsgesellschaft public transport strike of November 1932. These ‘flying pickets’ were mostly made up of unemployed workers and the violence that ensued led to three workers being shot dead and a further eight seriously wounded.
If any comrade wishes to read further about the situation in Germany, then I recommend the chapter on the KPD and the third period by Norman LaPorte in Matthew Worley’s book In search of revolution (IB Tauris 2004). His article in the July edition of the BBC History Magazine is well worth reading.
We should expect that his forthcoming biography on Ernst Thalmann will enlighten us much more on the specific events in Germany. We cannot simply accept everything that Trotsky wrote in Ernest Mandel’s collection of articles, The struggle against fascism in Germany, as the gospel truth to be followed regardless of the circumstances in Britain today. There are too many Colonel Blimps on the left who want to refight the battles of the last war rather than analysing the current situation and responding accordingly.
Robert Wilkinson
Reading
Debatable
Fascists don’t have to call themselves fascists. They don’t always wear brown shirts and black boots to help us identify them. I think that is true of the British National Party as well.
In 1961 I heckled Sir Oswald Mosley when he was holding street corner meetings in Brixton. At that time he no longer called himself a fascist. One day in the middle of a rainstorm, he cancelled and I found myself under an awning with two of Mosley’s henchmen. A discussion ensued in which they claimed they were really Marxists but were using the race card to reach backward workers. A central task of Marxists is uniting the exploited rather than dividing them up. While they may have been trying to win me over by attempting to agree with me, it was clear they were capable of arguing the opposite.
In the United States, we have the LaRouchites, who claim to be anti-fascist. But they are now allied with rightwing Republicans mobs opposed to Obama’s healthcare plan simply because LaRouche apparently thinks he can take leadership of the movement. Although politically incoherent, the LaRouchites are more coherent than the rightwing Republicans. I think it is preferable, whenever possible, to debate them.
Earl Gilman
email
Defend benefits
Claimants have just 75 days to prevent their disability living allowance and attendance allowance being abolished. A government green paper has revealed proposals to stop paying these benefits and hand the cash over to social services instead. Under the plan, current claimants would have their disability benefits converted to a ‘personal budget’ administered by local authorities and used to pay for services, not to spend as they wish.
Once the green paper consultation period ends, if an almighty row has not been raised, it is likely that both major political parties will see the lack of outrage as a green light to end both disability living allowance and attendance allowance. Many people will take false comfort from the fact that, unlike AA, DLA is not specifically named as being for the axe. But if the government was planning only to abolish AA, it is extremely unlikely that they would refer constantly throughout the green paper to ‘disability benefits’ - a term which includes not just AA, but also DLA.
Political parties are desperately looking for the softest targets as the victims of cuts. Dismissing the green paper proposals as hot air and not worth worrying about could be the costliest mistake people in receipt of DLA or AA ever make.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
Why he left
I read David Douglass’s account of my father, Lawrence Daly, with interest (‘Worker-intellectual who fell prey to the right’, July 2).
As Mr Douglass himself indicates, some of what he was told by others was untrue. My mother did not return to Scotland. She moved to Hertfordshire when Lawrence became general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1968. She has lived in Hertfordshire ever since.
In addition, I can clarify for Mr Douglass when and why Lawrence left the Communist Party of Great Britain. He left in early 1956, at least six months before the Hungarian uprising. When Khrushchev made his speech to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he denounced the excesses of Stalinism, there was much discussion in the communist parties of western Europe about what line to take. The CPGB sat on the fence to await developments in Moscow. My father took the view that sitting waiting for Moscow to chop and change was a form of “voluntary mental servitude”, which ill-suited the needs of the left in Britain. He thought the CPGB had become overly dependent on the Moscow line. Lawrence held public meetings in Fife in early 1956 to explain these reasons for his resignation from the CPGB.
Mr Douglass suggests that the NUM were unaware of Lawrence’s whereabouts and his condition in his later years. This is not so. Lawrence had a pension from the NUM that was paid to him each month, initially at the house in Hertfordshire and then at the nursing home. When, due to Alzheimer’s disease, Lawrence became too ill to manage this income himself, my brother did so on his behalf.
As Mr Douglass records, the funeral service on June 5 was a family event. A memorial service to celebrate my father’s life and achievements was organised by the NUM at Dunfermline Abbey on Thursday August 20. The family attended and participated.
Rannoch Daly
email
Cop-out
West Ham United played Millwall at Upton Park on the evening of August 25, an occasion which police must have known had the potential for trouble. With the possible exception of Cardiff v Swansea, no fixture in British football has such a history of organised violence as West Ham v Millwall. That is why, when the two played in the same league a few years ago, games were scheduled for 12 noon on Sundays. But even that precaution didn’t stop massive disorder at both fixtures in 2004, with the game at Upton Park seeing over 1,000 police present and the match at the New Den marred by widespread destruction of seats by the away fans.
The rivalry between the clubs goes way back to the history of two sets of east London dockers, on opposite sides of the Thames, battling for the same contracts, who each founded a football club. In the general strike of 1926, things turned really nasty when the West Ham dockers came out and Millwall scabbed. Violence between ‘firms’ of fans from each club hit a peak in the 1970s and 80s, when West Ham had the dubious honour of being associated with the most infamous firm in the country, the ICF (Inter City Firm).
As demographic changes saw predominantly white fans move out of the East End in great numbers, “the core values of traditional East End culture still feature prominently in the collective identity and behaviour of the hooligans”, according to sociologist Ramon Spaaij (Understanding football hooliganism Amsterdam 2006, p154). The age profile of West Ham hooligans is known to be older than that of many other clubs - as people’s lives have become more domesticated, bourgeois and less focused on a settled sense of community, they look to West Ham as somewhere where ‘traditional values’, such as aggressive working class masculinity, can be reinforced. Sometimes this reinforcement needs to be bolstered by a big set-piece row, and the old enemy of Millwall provides this; hence why I personally believe it is entirely hypocritical, not to mention naive, of journalists like well-known West Ham fan Martin Samuel to claim that he went to the game hoping for a great old fashioned rowdy atmosphere but no violence (Daily Mail August 26). Pull the other one, Martin.
The previous night, in a move that was probably pre-planned, Millwall fans - many without tickets and thus with no incentive to at least see the game before attempting to start trouble, due to the Football League’s idiotic limiting of their allocation - arrived en masse about 7.15pm and began to push through the flimsy line of cops which was supposed to be ferrying them towards the ground. In the tradition of ‘casuals’ (hooligans-by-trade) the group attacked a pub - the Queens - known for being the home of many of West Ham’s toughest fans, who responded by piling into the opposition.
The media reacted in a highly hysterical way, as did the police in their statements, but actually there is no clear evidence that any ‘scarfers’ (non-hooligan fans) were targeted, although doubtless they were terrified by the scenes. The much-hyped ‘trouble’ inside the ground consisted of some pushing of stewards by both sets of fans, and some West Ham fans dancing for joy on the pitch when their team scored. While the police released a statement full of the usual over-the-top bombast, they actually only arrested 13 people, suggesting the real policy after their pathetic lines were broken was more or less: ‘They’re all big boys - let them get on with it’.
Another possible reason for relative police inaction was lack of numbers - they had to call for reinforcements at one point and certainly began the evening with less officers than the 1,000-plus they used to put on for the Sunday morning games. Why? Could it have anything to do with the 500 extra cops being drafted in specifically for Climate Camp, perchance? We shall have to wait and see how that event is policed this year after the new promises of ‘humane policing’ made by the Met after the G20 protests in April.
Sean Carter
South London
Vestas fights on
Earlier this month a courageous occupation to save the Vestas factory in Newport, Isle of Wight ended when the owners sent in the bailiffs. A few days later, a rooftop occupation of another Vestas plant, in Cowes, also ended.
Local left support for the Vestas workers came from the small Labour Party, including its prospective parliamentary candidate, Mark Chiverton, who spoke at campaign rallies. Bob Crow, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, visited the picket line at the factory more than once; his RMT provided facilities to the occupation and managed to unionise some of the Vestas workers.
Contingents were literally ferried in by the Socialist Workers Party as well as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - operating under its Workers’ Climate Action front. The SWP’s Jonathan Neale and the AWL’s Martin Thomas were on the spot marshalling supporters. Most Vestas workers appreciated the physical presence of and solidarity expressed by left groups and trade unions.
However, despite the sterling support garnered locally by the workers’ campaign, the factory still closed and its owners have already started shipping parts to the USA, where it had wanted to shift production all along. Campaigners have appealed to Southampton dockworkers to frustrate the sending of these consignments, which are worth up to £250,000, but so far without effect. Just after the expulsion of the workers, a national day of action saw demonstrations in more than two dozen towns and cities across the country. Unfortunately, none of them was very large.
But Vestas workers and supporters fight on. Thursday September 17 is the Save Vestas national day of action: aiming to save Vestas and press for green jobs like those sacrificed by Vestas bosses. Send support messages to savevestas@googlemail.com or post on the blog at savevestas.wordpress.com.
Jim Moody
Isle of Wight
