Political exclusionism is becoming part of the furniture among a certain element on the ‘left’ fringe of Your Party. The key target, though not the only one, has been the Consistent Democrats, and myself as the individual most identified with their anti-Zionist, Russia- and China-defencist politics. We really are not popular with the kaleidoscopic array of reformists and centrists, often members and ex-members of a variety of Stalinophobic/Russophobic and often Islamophobic/Ziophile sects, who were attracted to the left of Your Party and to the Grassroots Left in particular. We are not complaining about that – it is a given that the British left is a fractious and incoherent mess even though, in many contradictory ways, many of its members aspire to some kind of working-class politics. It’s a mess that needs to be sorted out through sustained and rigorous programmatic debate, as well as collaboration to build a party. The problem is that many of these people fear debate, even when they claim to be for it, and they fear us above all because of our political coherence and refusal to compromise principles like defence of Russia against imperialism, and consistent anti-Zionism, as well as basic working-class positions at home.
Evidence of their fear of debate was their exclusion of myself from the ALDA What’s App discussion group because I argued, in a completely political and non-abusive manner, for our position on Zionism’s international dimension. Argued into a hole logically, the only answer some of the supporters and sympathisers of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and its British group, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, could come up with, was that our political positions represented an ‘anti-Semitic worldview’, for not agreeing that Jewish-capitalists with Zionist politics, in imperialist Israel and the wider imperialist West, are not the driving force of the oppression and genocide of Palestinians. The discussion was also laced with Stalinist-style cop-baiting and Nazi-baiting against ourselves. We will not reproduce this discussion here, as the transcript is available on-line already as an appendix of this previous article (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/usfi-ziophiles-bundists-in-alda-lose-debate-so-try-to-proscribe-leninist-trotskyists/) As a direct consequence of this piece of political cowardice and political censorship of Marxist criticism, I was then excluded by like-minded people in the Members Charter, of which I was one of the first few signatories (number 6 on the list), because of the same political views.
a) SEDA – the Liberal/Old-Spart Hybrid Project that Failed
But the next chapter of this violation of principle came from the Socialist Education and Discussion Association (SEDA), which was founded by Alex Green and Tony Collins, former Spartacists whose activity had revived suddenly as a result of Your Party, having been largely inactive since the 1990s. They decided on their own account that our positions on Zionism are ‘anti-Semitic’, which appears hardly that surprising in retrospect, as unlike the current Spartacists in their post-2021 evolution, they have not gone through their leftward evolution on Zionism (the old Spartacists often had a strange, chummy sort of relationship with the Alliance for Workers Liberty, despite huge differences on the ‘Russian Question’, because of shared Shachtmanite elements in their politics). So, Green and Collins decided to proscribe the Consistent Democrats from SEDA, but were initially too much consumed by political cowardice to produce any kind of written justification of this. They took their opportunity in one of the earliest discussions in SEDA, when someone, in a discussion on historical questions, quoted a letter by Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels from 1862 when Marx described Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish n****r”, and read out the racist epithet in full. The person appears to have been mortified at having done so, and immediately apologised.
Then Green and Collins put a motion to ban the quotation or citation in full of racial epithets from historical documents in discussions, and threw in a motion to proscribe the CD group for our ‘anti-semitism’. There was no reason for the first motion – the person who slipped up immediately apologised – but that first motion was just ballast to try to make an amalgam between ourselves and the hapless person who made the original mistake. We do not have the full text of these two motions, but we do have a SEDA document, by Alex Green and Tony Collins, dated 5th July, that makes clear this is what happened:
“We would truly hope that any group considering themselves to be a socialist or a communist would instead support the policy expressed in the draft motion [Ie. The one on the citing in full of racial epithet that occur in historical correspondence, etc]. Less attention was paid to the motion on the so-called “Consistent Democrats” (CD), signed by the same five, although in a long post a supporter of the pro-Spartacist ISA (Revolutionary), a breakaway from the International Socialist Alternative, defended the participation of the CD group. A CPGB member also opposed this motion as a “terrible” way of starting an educational and debating association.”
This exposes that Green and Collins are appalling hypocrites, and unreconstructed old Spartacists from the days when the ICL smeared political opponents as police agents and fascists, which the new ICL publicly retracted and repudiated two years ago (https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/bt).
The difference is, in Green’s case, if not Collins’ (and their collaboration would make little sense if they were not of one mind on this) is that Green seems to have broken with those elements of even the old SL that at least pointed in a revolutionary direction. He has made a point of speaking on various platforms denouncing both Russia and China as ‘imperialist’ countries, which really places him in the same political zone as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. It appears this pair’s politics is now characterised by vulgar third-campism that has nothing to do with Trotskyism. This view that Russia, which for 74 years was the main component of the USSR workers state, or China (which in reality is still a deformed workers’ state), have somehow become ‘imperialist’ in the modern sense espoused by Lenin, is liberal nonsense, very far from Trotskyism. This is supposed to have occurred after many decades each of economic development under central planning, and then, in the Chinese case, centrally planned ‘market socialism’. China has risen in its seven decades since 1949 from rampant poverty and warlordism comparable to contemporary Somalia, to the ‘workshop of the world’. This position effectively says that imperialism is a dynamic system that rises from the ashes whenever a proletarian revolution, or a deformed social revolution like China’s, is overthrown (or supposedly overthrown).
For us as genuine Trotskyists, imperialism is the epoch of capitalist decay. There have been no completely new imperialist powers since the late 19th Century. Lenin dated the transformation of capitalism into imperialism from the turn of the 20th Century, but it clear in hindsight that the European ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s was the moment of qualitative change. Even the apparent newest, Israel, began to be created with the beginning of Zionist colonisation in the 1880s, though it was finally completed in 1948. This is a complex case, but not fundamentally different to the others. Green’s position on Russia and China echoes the anti-communist sneer after 1989 that communism is “the slowest and most painful route between capitalism and capitalism”. But it gives it a further twist, saying that a social revolution that is overthrown after many decades, in an important country at least, is the midwife of a new imperialist power. This echoes the followers of Tony Cliff who maintain that the entire sum of social revolutions since 1917 have registered zero gains for the world proletariat. We completely reject such anti-Marxist, liberal nonsense. If any new imperialist power did emerge, in a vacuum caused by the loss of US hegemony, for example, it would be in a country which had not been removed from capitalism for decades by elements of a higher, socialist mode of production which, however stunted, points towards developed socialism, not an imperialist revival.
Given this liberal, anti-Trotskyist rubbish, it is hardly surprising that Green’s and Collins’ response to our materialist analysis of the Israel lobby/J-Z caste should be liberal Zionist outrage. As history shows, liberal-lefts have no real problem with Stalinism and slander; the Webbs, who hated Bolshevism, but adulated Stalinism and its attacks on Trotsky, are a prime example. Nor do such liberal ‘anti-imperialists’ [of the supposed Russian/Chinese variety, that is] have to make a very big step to embrace the Zionist version of ‘Nazi’ smears against the genuine Trotskyist left. But Green and Collins are still grotesque hypocrites, when they write:
“We’re not interested in creating, or leading, or centrally sustaining a forum or association that has any problem observing the following principles and practices:
● No use of racist epithets/slurs, including in historical references or citations
● No anti-semitism (which means no “Consistent Democrats”)
● No cop-baiting (insinuations or allegations without cast-iron proof that left groups or individuals are agents, agitators, trolls or provocateurs paid or otherwise acting for the police, intelligence services or capitalist interests)
● No “lawfare on the left” (no appeals to or use of the police, the courts or regulators like ICO, EHRC to adjudicate political or politically-related disputes or complaints between left organizations and/or individual socialists: better to lose a point than to allow the bourgeois state to interfere and dictate)
● No violence on the left.”
Why is this hypocritical? Because the classic accompaniment of cop-baiting is accusations of Nazi sympathies. The most classic and sustained example of this in the history of the working-class movement is the Moscow Purge trials from 1936-8. Cop-baiting could not be separated from Nazi-baiting. The idea that cop-baiting is somehow separable from Nazi/fascist baiting, with the first being forbidden but the second allowed, and not mentioned as being a no-no, would have Stalin and Vyshinsky scratching their heads, that’s for sure.
In the ALDA WhatsApp discussion on Zionism I was both cop-baited directly by someone called ‘Phillip’ and fascist-baited by Simon Hannah. This was for charging genocide supporters in the US/Israeli ruling class like Mark Zuckerberg with being “Jewish supremacists”, and for correcting a mundane error by someone else in the discussion about Zuckerberg’s Jewish ethnic origin. Apparently to correct someone’s factual error is ‘fascist’ and playing ‘spot the Jew’ according to Hannah. These are clearly libellous statements, and fit the criteria given in the list above of “insinuations or allegations without cast-iron proof that left groups or individuals are agents, agitators, trolls or provocateurs paid or otherwise acting for the police, intelligence services, or capitalist interests”. One presumes that Green and Collins understand that baiting someone as having fascist politics means “insinuations or allegations without cast-iron proof [or any evidence at all, actually] that left groups or individuals are agents … paid or otherwise … acting for capitalist interests”. Obviously, fascists represent … “capitalist interests”. Having “fascist” politics means acting for “capitalist interests”. Our USFI and SEDA slanderers seem undecided as to whether the Consistent Democrats are “acting for [fascist] capitalist interests” or whether we are “fascists” ourselves. But of course, the difference is immaterial, as the whole point of being a fascist is to work for capitalist interests. This is why Stalin and Vyshinsky would scratch their heads as to why cop baiting and fascist-baiting are not both banned, according to Green-Collins’ rules, even though they are functionally the same thing. The reason is simple – because Green-Collins cannot be seen to openly endorse cop baiting on the left, but they are all in favour of fascist-baiting our CD group.
Let’s be very clear what this passage represents:
“CD are proponents of a ‘Marxist’ cover version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleges that an extension of the Israeli bourgeoisie, like a cuckoo in the nest, sits in the ruling class of the United States, Britain and presumably France, causing these countries to operate against ‘their own imperialist interests’ by making wars in the Middle East to the exclusive benefit of Israel. This modern update on the trope of a global cabal of Jewish capitalists running the world is as obnoxiously anti-Semitic as the original, and has no place in a socialist grouping.”
It’s very clear what this is – an accusation of Hitlerite politics. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was Hitler’s ‘Bible’, a ‘warrant’ for the genocide of Jews, all classes of whom, capitalists and workers, bourgeois and communists, were said to be working together to enslave all of non-Jewish humanity. Hitler, as is well-known, considered that supposed ‘enslavement’ was to … communism, and that Jews were therefore organically Bolshevik and communist.
The combination of these two motions evidently sank SEDA as a project. They produced a repulsive effect on the 60 people or so who initially wanted to participate in the project, reducing it down to around 20 – a grievous blow that will no doubt demoralise the rest in due course. Given the strange combination of liberal third campism and the approach of the old Spartacist League animating this crew, it seems to have somewhat resembled the hysterical campaign against supposed ‘racism’ that wrecked the Spartacist League/Britain at the end of 1982. This produced not a split, but a demoralised haemorrhage of members, reducing them from around 90 members to 40ish by the end of that year. Green and Collins evidently thought their liberal anti-Russian/Chinese ‘anti-imperialism’ and Ziophilia would allow them to build a strange new opportunist liberal/old-Spart hybrid sect out of the heterogenous elements in YP’s broader left. But their old Spart training and lack of political rationality sank it. Unfortunately, all this produced an equally irrational response from Jack Conrad’s CPGB, and between them they produced a terribly destructive and strange furore.
In order to avoid clearly libelling us in their effort to equate our understanding of how the bourgeois Israel lobbies work, and for what purposes (Greater Israel – the expanded genocide of the Arab peoples of the West Asia region) with the Protocols, Green and Collins would have to demonstrate that we also believe that Jews of all classes and ideological persuasions are seeking to enslave all non-Jewish humanity. Unfortunately for them, the Consistent Democrats and LCFI have published voluminous writings on this subject for the last 12 years. It is quite clear that our analysis is about Jews of one class only, that is, Jews who are part of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and not even all of them, but only those who embrace political Zionism as an exilic, nationalist ideology. As we have pointed out, there are exceptions – occasionally you find a wealthy Jewish bourgeois who is not a Zionist and therefore not part of the bourgeois layer/caste we are referring to. One example we previously cited is George Soros. In any case, that caste’s endeavour is not enslavement of non-Jewish humanity, but to nail down and continue their oppression/genocide of the Palestinian people. And to expand that oppression through the Greater Israel project which clearly aims to annex land currently inhabited by neighbouring Arab peoples.
This is a matter of public record, as maps of ‘Greater Israel’ have been published by some in the current Israeli government, extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. Some prominent Zionists openly acknowledge that the two blue stripes in the Israeli flag represent those two rivers. And the Christian-Zionist extremist, Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee (many say his pronouncements sound more like those of an Israeli Ambassador to the US!) has said openly that as far as he is concerned Israel is welcome to conquer all of this territory.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903, like most racist tracts, is a malicious, racist caricature of something real. It is actually a caricature of what in those days was called the Zionist Organisation — in 1960 changed to World Zionist Organisation (https://www.wzo.org.il/en). Its first chair (1897-1904) was Theodore Herzl. It existed to promote the Zionist project in many countries. The caricature was based on forged documents that claimed to be some kind of written record of the decisions of something designed to dubiously resemble this body. It was published by a reactionary Russian mystic called Sergei Nilus who likely worked for the Tsarist Okhrana and may, or may not, be the real author.
In any case, Green and Collins, for motives connected to their own political background in the Shachtmanism of James Robertson and the old Spartacists (see part 1), have replicated this technique of caricature, this time of a Marxist analysis based firmly on demonstrable material facts, trying to libel us as in some way pro-Nazi. In this contemptible endeavour, they are not even original – having plagiarised the smear of the self-confessed “coward” (and grotesque liar) Jack Conrad, of the CPGB, from 2014 (see later). All of them in propagating this libel are worthy of a real racist, totalitarian organisation that is currently active in British politics persecuting opponents of the genocide – the so-called ‘Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’. This outfit makes propitious use of today’s analogue of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the IHRA pseudo-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, today’s ‘warrant for genocide’ (of the Palestinians). This was used as the means to lay the basis for the Labour Party under Keir Starmer supporting the genocide in Gaza, as well as for Trump to terrorise and try to deport non-citizens in the US who dared to speak against the genocide.
Then there is the ridiculous statement that people in Your Party who complain about being deliberately libelled, in Your Party or in the workers movement generally, are engaging in ‘lawfare’. This is a disgusting allegation. Lawfare is a technique used, and devised, by Zionists to persecute Palestinians and their supporters in the Western countries. The prime example of lawfare in Britain today is the fraudulent and outrageous proscription of Palestine Action, and the mass arrests of people protesting against the proscription and the genocide. That is lawfare. Smears of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anti-racist, socialist opponents of Zionism are a means of terrorism – they often result in personal victimisation similar to that under McCarthyism. Anyone who threatens, or embarks upon, legal action against such smears is not engaging in ‘lawfare’ but defending themselves against racist monsters. Political Zionism is a monstrous, genocidal, racist threat to democratic rights, centred upon a genocidal imperialist state that is not only founded on ethnic cleansing, but engaged today in full blown genocide.
Those complicit in its crimes include those pseudo-leftists who make fake allegations of anti-Semitism, that do not conform to the definition of anti-Semitism in the dictionary, which is “hostility and discrimination directed against Jews”, against people who criticise aspects of the criminality of Zionists. This is not merely a ”difference of opinion”. Such people are consciously, deliberately, smearing opponents of racism and genocide to protect those who are actively involved in support for the genocide, from criticism. This was the case when Simon Hannah described me as in some way ‘fascist’ and engaging in ‘spot the Jew’ for correcting an error made by someone who mistakenly said that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, was not Jewish. Meta, under his leadership has carried out 94% of requests from Israel for ‘takedowns’ of material on Facebook and Instagram depicting Israel’s genocide. That clearly makes him an active supporter of the genocide, and the ideological basis for this is a form of ethnic bigotry to which the information I corrected was directly relevant. The smears against me for pointing out Zuckerberg’s ethnic politics and his social role are as pure a libel as can be found anywhere.
Which in turn brings up the nature of Zionism’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smears, which are at bottom a product of a bourgeois state formation whose concrete manifestations today are comparable with Nazism, and qualitatively worse, in class terms, than even the activities of Stalinists in the 1930s. Stalinism was not actually genocidal. The nonsense about ‘lawfare’ notwithstanding, there was no ‘principle’ in the past of not defending ourselves legally against Stalinist crimes.
Outfits like Labour Friends of Israel¸ the Jewish Labour Movement, etc, are bourgeois racist organisations that have infiltrated the workers movement and systematically lie about opponents of Zionist crimes in order to politically and personally destroy them. The chief lie they use is that critics of Zionism are ‘anti-Semitic’. Such smears often lead to people losing jobs, being expelled from professional bodies, being expelled from educational institutions, etc, or even targeted by the cops like Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, in the manner of the blacklists of the McCarthy period. Even the Labour Party was aware of the abusive nature of these smears, and the potential legal dangers of such activities to itself, which is why it generally included advice on contacting the Samaritans to people subjected to disciplinary action for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. It is basic that those who are targeted by such smears have the right to fight back by all means at their disposal, including legal action. This is an elementary democratic right. And that is also true when opportunist leftists who claim to be opposed to Zionism indulge in similar smears for sectarian reasons knowing full well that such allegations are only effective because of the broader witchhunt in society created by the influence of Zionism. Such activities are just as reprehensible as the same smears from the Zionists themselves.
Whether or not to use the libel laws is a tactical question. David Miller has now definitively won, in the Employment Appeals Tribunal, the legal point that anti-Zionist views – including his own views that in some ways are quite similar to ours, are a protected belief under the Equality Act. It is thus conceivable that those who are smeared as ‘anti-Semitic’ and excluded from socialist organisations for their anti-Zionist views, which clearly do not fit the definition of anti-Semitism, would be able to use the Equality Act to defend themselves. That is also a legal option, and potentially much less expensive than resorting to Libel law.
There are so many absurdities in the Green/Collins document quoted above, as to make it ridiculous:
“No ‘lawfare on the left’ (no appeals to or use of the police, the courts or regulators like ICO, EHRC to adjudicate political or politically-related disputes or complaints between left organizations and/or individual socialists: better to lose a point than to allow the bourgeois state to interfere and dictate)”
What do these people mean by ‘losing a point’? They make it sound like a game of tennis, or something like that! Outrageous light-mindedness about very serious matters! There are several such examples – one was the outrageous false allegation that the membership portal for Your Party set up by Zarah Sultana, with approval of a key committee charged with setting up the party, on 18th September 2025, was fraudulent. The portal set up that day recruited 20,000 new members in two hours. At that rate of recruitment, it could have conceivably recruited half-a-million in a week. That was a couple of weeks or so after Zarah Sultana publicly criticised Corbyn’s former leadership of the Labour Party for capitulating to Zionism. The letter denouncing it as fraudulent was signed by Jeremy Corbyn and four other Independent MPs. It turned out that the majority of these, arguably even including Corbyn himself, did not want a new party to be built at all, and certainly feared that such a rapid growth of members would lead to something too big and too radical for them to control.
When Zarah Sultana, understandably angered by the smear and the flagrant sabotage of the attempt to recruit a mass membership, threatened legal action against the smearers, she was denounced for breaching a ‘principle’ by threatening libel action, when she clearly had been flagrantly libelled. This is simply ridiculous. The shrill denunciations of her by prominent individuals like Alex Green, and in the Weekly Worker, and regrettably then also by the new Spartacists, were completely out of place and struck a very discordant note regarding the duty of solidarity with someone who was doing their best to carry out a supportable endeavour. The point is, she had been libelled, quite clearly, in a very serious way that amounted to a flagrant sabotage of the party project. Defending yourself against such a smear is not ‘lawfare’, as Green and co say. That statement itself is a smear.
In general, we do not seek to involve the courts and the state in matters within the workers movement. Not because of indulgence of those responsible for abuses, but because the bourgeois courts are often treacherous themselves. We don’t seek to promote illusions in the courts. But sometimes avoiding their use is more disastrous than utilising them. Like in the 2011 ‘Delta’ case in the SWP, when the then National Secretary of the SWP was accused of rape by two female members. The SWP undertook to investigate this themselves, but they do not have the power or the means to investigate such a serious criminal matter. Entirely predictably, they messed it up terribly, and the misfired attempt damaged the reputation of the SWP for years. One wonders whether, if the SWP had called in the police to investigate these alleged rapes (which they should have done), Green and Collins would have joined with Delta in denouncing the SWP for involving the state in disputes within the workers movement? Then there is a case that we know of where a well-known leftist individual stole thousands of pounds from a left-wing organisation that they had recently left, because they disapproved of the politics of those who remained, and even publicly boasted of taking the money. One wonders if Green and co would campaign alongside the thief to denounce those who reported the theft? And whether they would be so sanguine if it were their money this person stole?
There is more that could be said. Regarding the ‘principle’ of not seeking the aid of the bourgeois state to defend basic rights when people in the workers movement engage in scandalous, corrupt and anti-democratic behaviour, one can quote Lenin in saying: “there is no such thing as abstract truth – truth is always concrete.” If these people had the slightest intention of solving such questions according to the norms of workers democracy, by initiating genuine working-class enquiries, etc., then perhaps they might have a point. But they don’t give a damn about that – this is clear by their use of Vyshinsky-style Nazi smears and the related smear that people seeking to defend themselves against deliberate libels and fraud are engaged in ‘lawfare’. The politics involved in this is just another syphilis of the workers movement, vilifying the most consistent opponents of today’s genocide to defend the social layer that is its driving force. In fact, even Stalinism was not as grotesque as that, except perhaps during the short-lived period of the Stalin-Hitler pact when it soft-peddled criticism of the Nazis!
b) CPGB Racist Backwardness and Cant about ‘Democracy’
The response of the CPGB/Weekly Worker, and particularly its leader Jack Conrad, to the amalgam from Green/Collins’s SEDA, was to start a campaign for the right to use racial epithets in full when they occur in historical material. But it’s obvious that the real purpose of this was to excuse their own previous witchhunting of ourselves while at the same time trying to dissociate themselves from the outrageous and anti-democratic nature of the current witchhunting. The problem is that what went on that was considered acceptable in their own closed circles a decade or so ago, before the eruption of outright genocide of the Palestinians by Israel, does not appear acceptable to many on the left today. The primary role of Israeli agencies, mainstream Jewish organisations with Zionist politics, ‘Friends of Israel’ and the like in seeking to suppress opposition to the genocide is blatantly obvious. While denouncing and witchhunting people on the left for criticising these forces might give the CPGB kudos among Zionists, it doesn’t go down well among those radicalised by the Zionist genocide. The CPGB urgently need to find a way to dissociate themselves from the same anti-democratic behaviour, when carried out by the USFI social imperialists and the likes of Richard Gerard and SEDA, as they carried out themselves in Left Unity, and in Labour Against the Witchhunt in the mid-to-late 20-teens. They thus tax and strain themselves enormously trying to explain the difference in a manner which appears coherent. Instead of saying openly, as any genuine exponent of workers democracy would, that bans and proscriptions against us are wrong as would be the case regarding any anti-imperialist/anti-Zionist communist or socialist group, they quibble and pretend that their past involvement in exclusionism was just fine but what is being indulged in today is somehow wrong.
But they have dug themselves into a bigger hole than this. In order to justify excluding us from SEDA, Green/Collins constructed an amalgam (see above) between a hapless individual who read out in full a racist epithet that appeared in an old piece of personal correspondence between Marx and Engels, and ourselves for our supposedly ‘anti-Semitic’ views. Which are not anti-Semitic at all, but too anti-Zionist for the Ziophile, Shachtmanoid prejudices of Green and Collins. Not wanting to wantonly repeat such language, we refer readers who may have missed this to what we wrote earlier. But the CPGB were unable, because of their previous anti-democratic transgressions against us, to wage a principled campaign against the Ziophiles who banned us, including previous allies such as the social-imperialist Anti-Capitalist Resistance group (whose cadre now organise protests outside Stop the War Coalition events denouncing STW for not supporting NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine).
Because the CPGB could not denounce our exclusion in a principled manner, as did supporters of the new Spartacists, instead they decided to wage a public campaign over the other ‘prong’ of Green and Collins’s contrived amalgam, that is, a campaign for the ‘democratic right’ to repeat unexpurgated racist epithets, and not use the usual sanitised versions that are generally used when there is no choice but to refer to their usage. The CPGB thus held two ‘Communist Forums’, one on the 5th July, and one on the 19th, where Jack Conrad pontificated at length on the right to use such epithets in political discussion, and repeatedly used racially abusive terms – not only the one commonly used for black people, but also the racist term used for Jews, the y** word. We see no reason to use such language in full here, and even less reason to prodigiously repeat it. There can be no absolute prohibition on use of such language, but someone who prodigiously repeats such language can be legitimately criticised. Obviously, there are important historical materials where such language occurs frequently, which can pose a difficult problem. But a campaign to ram it down people’s throats at supposedly left-wing events just shows that the people responsible for this don’t have a clue about, or care about, racial oppression and its psychological effects.
The CPGB certainly don’t have a clue about racism in capitalist society. They have had a long-standing polemic against the notion that the British ruling class is racist. This has been on the back-burner recently due to the rise of racist populism and the ‘respectable’ far right, but in slightly less severe times the CPGB was outspoken in its attack on those on the left who believe that capitalism is fundamentally racist. The WW editor wrote in those times:
“Much of the left continues to experience a great deal of difficulty in coming to terms with the British state’s now highly developed official anti-racism…. The fact is that the state has colonised the left’s anti-racism and turned it into its dialectical opposite – anti-racist national chauvinism
“Since 1965, with the passing of the tentative measures contained in the first Race Relations Act – which outlawed discrimination in (some, but not all) “places of public resort” – not only have many overt manifestations of racism been made illegal, but numerous state and media-backed campaigns have stressed a new definition of Britishness, incorporating citizens of every ethnicity.
[…]
“The left’s difficulty arises from its well entrenched dogma that racism and capitalism go hand in hand. Each bourgeois state must, to a greater or lesser degree, rely on racism in order to divide the working class. The state – or so we are told – cannot achieve the same end through different, opposing, means.”
(https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/768/racism-or-nationalism/)
It appears that while the British bourgeoisie and its state have been exonerated of ‘racism’ in the past by the CPGB, leftists such as ourselves who criticise not only British bourgeois racism but also that of the Israeli-Jewish bourgeoisie and its international extensions, are accused of racism for criticising the latter. That, for anyone who thinks clearly, along with their campaign in defence of the use of racial epithets, is clear evidence of who is soft on racism. It ain’t us!
Jack Conrad in introducing the part of his report on 19th July, at the second of the two Communist Forums where he spoke about this issue, began:
“Okay, now going to come finally to the N word. And anyone who, you know, wants to look at our commitment to free speech, which we are… Oh, by the way, anyone who’s going to be offended by the use of language, switch off now. You know, if you’re so tender, go! So fair enough if you don’t want to participate if you’re going to get upset. I don’t want to upset anybody but okay much better to switch off than jangle your nerves, okay.”
This is pretty outrageous. Because we are talking about racial abuse here. Many people have been traumatised by racial abuse because racial abuse is almost invariably an accompaniment to racist victimisation and racist violence, sometimes extreme violence. The preamble is itself derogatory and dismissive of such lived experience. Incidentally, that is also true of racial abuse directed against Jewish people. This person accuses us of ‘anti-Semitism’ for criticism of genocidal racist violence directed by part of the ruling class, and then repeats gutter-racist epithets about Jews and Blacks as if they were simply ‘rude words’ that might offend someone with a Mary Whitehouse type mentality. That kind of dressing-down might conceivably be appropriate directed at a prude; it is quite outrageous when you are dealing with racial oppression. We are not going to go into his speech in more detail about the racial abuse; but he does try to make a case, given the fact that some black performers have ‘reclaimed’ racially abusive epithets, as have some Jews around Tottenham Hotspur FC in North London (though that had its own contradictions), and the epithet ‘queer’ has been definitively ‘reclaimed’ by the LGBT+ movement, to imply that it is not so bad to repeat these epithets.
Really that just shows why this trend, which has existed since 1981 when the Leninist was first published, has always been pretty much lily-white. The character and prejudices of its leaders have a huge influence on its politics, and when the leader has serious flaws in his attitude to racism, as is evident here, this can be quite ruinous. I don’t want to exaggerate Jack Conrad’s weaknesses; he is not some slavering fascist or anything like that. But he is backward on the question of racial oppression.
For a (relatively) brief period in the 2000s, after becoming very demoralised by the apparent political default of both the Spartacists, and then the International Bolshevik Tendency, which at the time I considered to be pretty close to Trotskyist orthodoxy, I joined the CPGB-WW and even was on its Provisional Central Committee for a couple of years. I had been sufficiently disillusioned and confused as to consider that the Spartacists’ historic positions on the Russian question, and not their views on Ireland/Palestine etc, were the source of the political problems with them. That was my worst political mistake, and I accepted the CPGB’s developing Third Campism – for a relatively short while. But then I was re-radicalised by the Iraq War and soon came into conflict with the CPGB’s Islamophobia, which led me to leave the organisation in 2004 after considerable conflict with Jack Conrad and his followers.
One rather strange and unsavoury experience I had was with allocated pseudonyms. I was one of a team of writers working on the Weekly Worker, and since writers often needed to write more than one article per issue, it was standard practice for the leadership to allocate an alternative pseudonym for this. Mine was ‘Roger Dark’. Articles by me using that name still exist on the CPGB website, for instance (https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/351/nader-builds-third-force/). I thought nothing of it, and saw it as completely innocuous. Until later in my period as a member when I started to believe that the organisation was Islamophobic and held some unsavoury attitudes. By way of background, in late 1999, before I joined the CPGB, I married a black African wife, and remained in that marriage for over a decade. It did occur to me, when my trust in the anti-racism of the CPGB had been shaken, that this might be a cryptic, smutty racial slur. But since that seemed impossible to prove, I told them that I no longer liked the name and no longer wanted to use it. I was given the name ‘Kit Robinson’ instead. An example of such an article, written by me, is here: (https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/486/jews-v-zionism/). And then, after a while using this second pseudonym, Jack Conrad made it clear that he had devised it, and that it contained a subtle reference to my history in the Spartacist League (“Kit Robinson” being “Kid Robertson”). Which increased my suspicions still more about the earlier name and the chauvinist proclivities of the CPGB.
I regret joining the CPGB, it was a political mistake. I did however play a role in thwarting Jack Conrad’s quest for a merger with the AWL, because I wrote some very strong denunciations in WW of their ‘anti-Semitism’ smears against anti-Zionists, which caused them great anger: Sean Matgamna in particular responded with crude abuse. Struggling against the CPGB’s Islamophobia over the Iraq war, when they refused to explicitly defend Iraq, and refused to support the Iraqi resistance after Iraq was invaded, while they still held a ‘two-states’ position defending Israel’s “right to self-determination” set me on a course leftwards. When I left them, to get properly involved in RESPECT, which they regarded with contempt, I raised the question of ‘Roger Dark’ and its (by now obvious) meaning on left-wing Yahoo discussion groups such as ‘UK Left Network’. The CPGB went apoplectic, saying it was a ‘sick fantasy’. But they could not refute it – the chances of it being an accident/coincidence are microscopic. WW Editor Peter Manson claimed that he was responsible for the ‘Roger Dark’ pseudonym and that it was completely innocent, but given Jack Conrad’s boasting about the meaning of the ‘Kit Robinson’ pseudonym, this utterly strains credulity.
Jack Conrad is a Debsian style ‘colour-blind’ socialist. This refers to Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the US Socialist Party, who correctly opposed the First World War, and was imprisoned for it, but who notoriously also said that the Socialist Party had “nothing special” to offer to the oppressed US Black population. The ‘Roger Dark’ pseudonym is racist, public-school smut – worthy of an adult comic like Viz, or perhaps one of Boris Johnson’s tawdry novels, not a communist organisation. There are too many former public schoolboys in this whole affair playing fast-and-loose with questions of oppression for their own cynical purposes – that applies to leading elements in the Socialist Federation and SEDA, as well as Conrad. Those on the other side, such as Gerard and Green, exploiting the CPGB’s terrible flaws on racial oppression to try to make themselves look good even as they defend the authors of the Gaza genocide. Both sides are using this row over racial epithets to cover up their real motivations, to excuse the witchhunting of the Consistent Democrats for Marxist, anti-racist analysis and criticism of the racist bourgeois formation that is clearly the driving force of the holocaust still underway in the Palestinian territories.
However, there was a point in 2014, a decade after I left the CPGB because of its Islamophobia, when the CPGB appeared to move to the left on a crucial question and I joined a block with them. Within Left Unity, which was another attempt to build a new working-class party in conflict with Labour, there was widely held criticism that LU was not overtly socialist enough. Out of this, the Socialist Platform was created, with a range of ostensibly left-wing groups participating. I was not happy with the makeup of this, in particular with the participation of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and I moved a motion at the first significant gathering of the Socialist Platform to exclude the Alliance for Workers Liberty, because of their open Zionism and pro-imperialism. Somewhat to my surprise, the CPGB supported my motion, and when it failed, we formed another oppositional block, the Communist Platform, based on explicit opposition to Zionism. That was in my view a principled bloc because it appeared that the CPGB had swung significantly leftward. In that period, I had rejected the third campism of the CPGB and was on the route back to Trotskyist orthodoxy via the very left-Third Camp analysis of Walter Daum and the US League for the Revolutionary Party, who I had some contact with. That was a way-station before re-embracing a better orthodoxy on the Russian question which I later began to do in Socialist Fight.
During that bloc I continued to criticise the CPGB leadership in front of their members and at one important early meeting I defeated the leadership of Jack Conrad and Mike McNair, managing to convince many CPGB members to vote for an amendment to the proposed Communist Platform document which said that the Platform stood “on the historic examples of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Bolshevik-led revolution in October 1917 as the first attempts of the working class to dispossess the capitalists and begin the construction of socialism”. Conrad and co were not happy about that – they were well embarked on their Kautskyan trajectory by that time, and said this issue would have to be discussed again. I also tried, but failed to, to amend the platform to contain a commitment to defend Middle Eastern countries like Iraq against imperialist attack, as opposed to their neutrality. One particular piece of discussion material by me from this period openly re-raised many previous differences of the CPGB’s own Islamophobia and failure to take the side of oppressed peoples, and their failure to properly orient to RESPECT, and this document is still on the CPGB’s website. See (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1001/debate-not-a-matter-of-style). Given the limitations of my politics at that time, my intervention as an individual with something close to genuine Trotskyist politics, in such a principled bloc which was in no sense a non-aggression pact, was correct and exemplary. By agreeing to support my motion to exclude the openly Zionist, pro-imperialist AWL, the centrist CPGB had zig-zagged to the left and made themselves politically vulnerable to a revolutionary intervention.
But then Operation Protective Edge began – the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza of July-August 2014. At a CPGB forum I made some sharp criticisms of the Labour leadership, and Ed Miliband’s statement in particular supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, his association with Labour Friends of Israel, and of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’s role in promoting Israel’s interests in the West particularly during such atrocities. Jack Conrad was frightened of this criticism and accused me of anti-Semitism at the forum. I had been studying the question of the Israel lobby and what it represented in class terms, and I saw this massacre and Conrad’s obviously being unnerved by the ferocity of my response to Protective Edge, which was a ‘taster’ for the current genocide, as a spur to formulate a set of theses on imperialism and the Jewish question. To explain in Marxist terms what Zionism and the Jewish question actually was. This brought Conrad’s left-wing zigzag to a sudden halt, and he swung hard rightward, back towards Zionism, and began a campaign to purge me as ‘anti-Semitic’ right in the middle of a genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians. It was pure political cowardice that drove him to purge me during a massacre driven by those he was defending from Marxist criticism.
He even admitted this about a week before the purge meeting, in a private conversation in the Calthorpe Arms pub in Kings Cross, where he said that there was nothing anti-Semitic about my views on Zionism, that they were just a novel analysis of a specific national question. He also said that the CPGB could not be associated with it, because they would be witchhunted for being seen to tolerate it. So, I should recant it, otherwise I would have to go. He actually said “call me a coward, if you like” when I pointed out how outrageous this was. This was said in front of Daniel Harvey, a young comrade who was then a CPGB member.
What also corroborates this being driven by cowardice is that the Zionist slaughter found a very sinister expression domestically. Then-60-year-old RESPECT MP George Galloway was violently attacked near the Notting Hill Carnival on 29th August 2014 by a 40-year-old Zionist convert to Judaism, Neil Masterson. George sustained some pretty nasty injuries, and had to be treated in hospital. The response of Parliamentarians was a deathly silence, either from hatred of Galloway for his anti-Zionism, or from cowardice. Only one MP in the whole House of Commons, the sole Green MP Caroline Lucas, had the courage to condemn the very violent attack. Even Jeremy Corbyn did not issue a public statement, but merely sent a private message of sympathy to George Galloway. But the CPGB also refused to condemn the assault on Galloway, despite being pushed very hard by me, to do so (see https://commexplor.com/2015/04/05/weekly-worker-still-refuses-to-condemn-galloway-assault-bans-criticism/). No statement ever appeared in their press condemning it.
Unfortunately, this Zionist assault, and the almost total betrayal of him by parliamentarians including those on the Labour left, appears to have fundamentally demoralised Galloway, and set him on a course of adaptation to right-wing populism. There was a clear political change in the years after this attack. Galloway, who was once the most radical MP in Parliament, and boasted about being the most pro-immigrant politician in Britain, ceased to be so, and his Workers Party (formed a while after this event) has sometimes engaged in anti-migrant, xenophobic behaviour that George previously would have been repulsed by. Such Zionist thuggery is aimed to demoralise and destroy, and in this case they succeeded. With the help of the CPGB in a small way.
After being thrown out of the Communist Platform, I continued to fight for my positions on Zionism, creating the journal and website Communist Explorations for this purpose, and then manged to convince Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight that my positions were correct. We worked together within the Labour Party during the Corbyn period. I continued to move back towards a better Trotskyist orthodoxy as part of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, which I have been involved in for 11 years now, nearly five of those working closely with Gerry Downing in Socialist Fight. Although Gerry Downing became politically demoralised when the Corbyn project collapsed, and capitulated to Zionism under severe social pressure. This in the context of a ferocious Zionist-led witchhunting and wrecking campaign against Corbyn also utilising Brexit, which we now know, thanks to Paul Holden and his book The Fraud, was orchestrated by Israel lobbyists and their allies with a secretive organisation, Labour Together, organising the whole operation. In this context, our still-very-small organisation splintered. Which is no great surprise.
Conrad’s claim to be some kind of partisan of working-class democracy is fraudulent. He, and his Shactmanoid political sect, is the original author of the Vyshinsky-like amalgam addressed earlier, that our analysis of Zionism is a version of the Protocols of Zion. He is also the author of the CPGB’s racist blips in its practice, including the racist smut I documented, and the fact that, instead of waging a principled defence of our right under workers democracy to argue a consistently anti-Zionist Marxist analysis in SEDA and the Socialist Federation, they incredibly waged a campaign for the right to cite racial abuse in old documents and basically taunt people who might be traumatised by such language as being over-sensitive. That’s ridiculous, and makes a mockery of communism.
Let’s examine some of the untruths Jack Conrad recently spouted to justify his obsessive denunciations of us. He pretends to be concerned about racism, but that is somewhat at odds with his current view that he can ‘reclaim’ racist epithets so that there really is nothing wrong with repeatedly using them, and that anyone who is offended by that has something wrong with them. Then there is the ‘Roger Dark’ smut, which clearly indicates where he really stands on racism – that being some sort of accident is so unlikely as to be an absurd idea. He says of me:
“I’ll call him an anti-Semite, he is an anti-Semite, not in terms of personal relations with Jews, but in terms of his world outlook. He’s an anti-Semite.”
This is a contradiction in terms. This sentence says that I am not an anti-Semite “in terms of personal relations with Jews”. But that is what anti-semitism is – someone who is hostile to, and/or discriminates against Jews. No one can have non-hostile, or non-discriminatory relations with Jews, if they are an anti-Semite. The Consistent Democrats have Jewish members and people who regularly engage in political dialogues with us, in agreement on some questions, agnostic on others, who are Jewish. Such people regularly attend our weekly internal meetings, and/or our fortnightly open discussion meetings. They would not be inclined to do so if they were to be subjected to racist hostility or discrimination if they did. The idea is ridiculous! Conrad is simply a sophist and an obvious liar and is using a completely different definition of anti-Semitism to the one in the dictionary.
Conrad is cynically manipulating superficial logical patterns in reality in a manner rather similar to … the original author or authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As I pointed out earlier, the Protocols was a malicious, racist, literary caricature of the Zionist Organisation (ZO), which certainly worked and operated across national lines. Which is why it eventually renamed itself the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). However, it did so, not to enslave non-Jewish humanity, but to promote the Jewish colonisation of Palestine. Far from being a joint project of Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists, it had only the support of a minority of actual Jewish capitalists initially, and the Communists regarded it as reactionary. It had the support of a larger layer of petty-bourgeois nationalists who, as is usual, constituted an aspiring capitalist ruling class, but it was far from the sick fantasy of the author of the Protocols. Conrad is doing similar work to the author of the Protocols – producing a caricature. To excuse turning the mother of all blind eyes to the actual evidence that exists, and which can easily be proven to exist, about the social weight of Jewish bourgeois with Zionist politics in, mainly, the US ruling class. See earlier – the facts are clear and even witchhunters like Simon Hannah do not dispute them.
But the argument is that the bulk of the super-rich billionaire Jewish bourgeoisie with Zionist politics play no role in the oppression, and now the genocide, of the Palestinians. That is like denying that the British bourgeoisie ever oppressed Ireland. “Somebody else did it, guv!” That’s the argument. It doesn’t make sense. Israel is not working for the benefit of US imperialism, it is not an asset or a guard-dog, but a strategic liability. It has just dragged the US, by means of its erratic hireling Trump, into a strategic defeat more serious than the loss in Vietnam, in a war that is clearly not ‘for oil’ – the oil is cut off – but for the Greater Israel project that is an attempt to extend of Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs to the entire region. Only a bribed crank like Trump could profess to believe that this is in any sense in US interests strategically.
All Conrad’s logical manipulations are feeble, and are aimed at alibiing Israel, alibiing its ruling class, alibiing AIPAC, and the various Friends of Israel, … in short alibiing Zionism, and pretending that the Jewish bourgeoisie, or rather the overwhelming bulk of it with Zionist politics, are not the real authors of the crimes of the Zionist state. Apparently, the real authors and prime movers of such things were always simply US imperialism, and Israel was their strategic asset. Which is a bit strange if that is the case because US imperialism has just engineered its own strategic defeat, for no good reason, as it was not fighting a social revolution for decades as in Vietnam, but blew things in a few months without any such revolutionary threat. This makes no logical sense in the real world. It’s a complete denial of reality, but it does correspond with Jack Conrad’s political softness on Zionism. Which is evident if you recall that he previously wanted to merge the CPGB with the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and now plays Little Sir Echo for its notorious ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaigns.
There are two obvious falsehoods in his narrative of events about the various purges that have been directed at me in the first instance, in 2014 and afterwards, when Conrad says:
“We expelled him. I always remember one of the official spokespersons of Left Unity coming up to me and saying, why didn’t you inform us about Ian Donovan? I said, we wrote a double-page article about it in the Weekly Worker. What do you want us to do? But no, we didn’t stand for his expulsion.”
Conrad lies by omission here. Anyone reading this would deduce, as intended, that I was also expelled from Left Unity as a result of the CPGB’s smear. But embarrassingly for Conrad, the opposite is the case. I was indeed ‘investigated’ by Left Unity because of Conrad’s smear – and exonerated by Left Unity’s Disputes Committee. Their Disputes Committee wrote to me about this on 6th August 2015, saying:
“Hello, Ian,
You may be aware that Left Unity’s National Council referred to the Disputes Committee for investigation and recommendation, in accordance with Clause 18(f) of the Party’s Constitution, a complaint that your Communist Explorations article entitled “Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism” contained antisemitic views.
The functions and powers of the DC in dealing with such a reference are defined in the Committee’s Standing Orders which were approved by the Party Conference in November 2014, viz :
“Where situations are grave or there is evidence of grave breaches of the constitution or evidence of intimidation or behaviour judged prejudicial under any of the equality strands (age, sexuality, gender, race, religion, pregnancy, religion, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership) {the Disputes Committee} shall have the power to recommend suspension or termination of membership”.
After study and discussion of the article, the Disputes Committee found that there is insufficient specific evidence to warrant our making a recommendation to the NC either for your expulsion or suspension, nor did we deem it appropriate to recommend any other form of disciplinary action.
If you have any questions about the process which was followed, please let me know.
In comradeship,
Janet Gifford,
On behalf of the Left Unity Disputes Committee.”
The entire correspondence is published here (https://commexplor.com/2015/08/06/left-unity-disputes-committee-exonerates-ian-donovan-of-anti-semitism-smear/), and it was also addressed in the letters page of the Weekly Worker here, (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1071/letters/). Their then-member Sarah McDonald was assigned the difficult job of explaining why a proper investigation by a bona-fide left organisation, one that (unlike the CPGB) no-one was likely to suspect of being having any cult-like practices, could find no evidence of racism in my Draft Theses, which were at that time the most comprehensive exposition of my views. Conrad doesn’t mention this exoneration, which is embarrassing for him, and the audience for his podcast is left with the impression that I must have been thrown out of Left Unity also, which is obviously a deliberate lie of omission.
The other pathetic lie is when he claims this about the expulsion of Socialist Fight in early 2018:
“But the point I’m making is we expelled those two also for Ian Donovan’s and Gerry’s anti-Semitism. We didn’t want Labour Against the Witch Hunt, which we were being witch hunted for being anti-Semites. We felt that that would weaken us politically if we had genuine anti-Semites amongst us.
“It took two meetings for us to achieve that. The first time we didn’t succeed. Second time we mobilised our own membership and we did succeed.”
This is a confession of opportunism, as he has already confessed that our views did not involve any kind of problem with Jews. Which is the definition of racism, actually. If anyone has a problem with minorities, it is Jack Conrad… though we will come to that shortly. But the stupid lie in this is the one that says that the CPGB mobilised their own membership nationally to outvote us. That is nonsense, because the original majority at the LAW meeting before Christmas 2017, that refused to purge us, was not composed of primarily of either Socialist Fight members, or CPGB members. They could not get agreement from the non-aligned. The CPGB do not have a significant national membership; the way they succeeded in mobilising a majority at the second meeting, in early January 2018, is that they got reinforcements from what was then called Socialist Resistance, and is now called Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the British Section of the USFI. The people who initiated my purge from the ALDA discussion forum. Prominent in that meeting were Roland Rance, and Pete Firmin, well-known SR/USFI cadre. The CPGB now call them social-imperialists, because they actually demand that Western imperialism send more arms to Nazi-Maidan Ukraine for the NATO proxy war. But these were their allies in purging Socialist Fight at that time.
Jack Conrad does not have the courage of his convictions. All the verbiage about how he doesn’t call for the Labour Party, or Left Unity, or Your Party, to purge us for ‘racism’ (which is what ‘anti-Semitism’ means) is just duplicity. Our political positions were investigated by Left Unity and they found no evidence of racism. If he had evidence that a political trend has racist politics, he should be calling for our expulsion and proscription from all these parties. If we knew of an organised trend that was really systematically racist against Jews, or Blacks, or any other ethnic group, we would call for their expulsion from all these bodies. In fact, we do just that with Zionists.
In 2014, the CPGB supported me when I called for the openly Zionist, pro-imperialist AWL to be thrown out of the Socialist Platform of Left Unity. That was the zig to the left. They then zagged back to the right by purging me for nailing the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie as the source of Zionist crimes. One symptom of Gerry Downing’s retreat from real anti-Zionism at the end of Socialist Fight was he objected to my proposed demand for Israel supporters to be thrown out of Labour. At the Members Charter conference on 31st May, we moved a motion that called for the proscription of Zionists from that body. The people who purged us for so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ voted that down even though Zionists are even now engaged in genocide against Palestinians. All these people are hypocrites who don’t really care about racism, they just care about appeasing Zionism and not declaring all-out political war against it.
The definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘hostility and or/discrimination against Jewish people”. The same (and in fact much more) can be said about black people. Which brings us back to Jack Conrad’s speech on 5th July where he boasts that he is about to use racial epithets about black people. He said, to recap:
“Okay, now going to come finally to the N word. And anyone who, you know, wants to look at our commitment to free speech, which we are… Oh, by the way, anyone who’s going to be offended by the use of language, switch off now. You know, if you’re so tender, go! So fair enough if you don’t want to participate if you’re going to get upset. I don’t want to upset anybody but okay much better to switch off than jangle your nerves, okay.”
It is not difficult to see that the people most likely to be ‘offended’, or most likely traumatised if they have been subjected to racial abuse previously, by hearing a litany of racial epithets, will be non-whites, though he also briefly used an epithet about Jews. This is mockery, arguably hostility, and certainly since it would most likely affect non-whites, it appears discriminatory. Jack Conrad could credibly be accused of racism for this speech alone. If you take this together with the obvious facts about the ‘Roger Dark’ pseudonym he came up with for me when I was married to a black African female partner, when I was a member admittedly a quarter of a century ago, this does appear to be evidence that if anyone has a problem with racism, it is Jack Conrad!
That does not mean that the CPGB/WW trend should be purged as racists. They do not mobilise for racist objectives any more than we do. They are soft on Zionism, but not actually Zionists – they do not use smears to defend the actual ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or its results, as the AWL do. Their antipathy to those like us who call out the JZ caste is a more subtle backward manifestation, unfortunately widely shared today. There are more obvious elements of racist backwardness among them, which is why they have always had an overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, white membership, for decades. It would be worth others on the left suggesting to the CPGB that they should do something about Jack Conrad’s racist backwardness and take steps to rectify the situation.
c) Conclusion
To summarise: the whole farcical polemic between SEDA and the CPGB was the result of both sides using the same amalgam. Karl Marx, as a pioneer scientific communist with, unfortunately, a limited understanding of oppression, used a foul racial epithet in some private correspondence which was posthumously published, which did nevertheless shed some real light on the early communist movement. SEDA’s Green and Collins started a demented witchhunt against some hapless individual who tripped over this literary fragment and read the epithet out in full, but immediately apologised for the mistake. Their reason for doing so was to construct an amalgam, to vilify and try to associate the Consistent Democrats with racial abuse, even though we were completely absent from the whole discussion (they excluded us but didn’t have the guts to try to justify this openly!) This flows from the Shactmanoid softness on Zionism that this duo learned from the old Sparts. And then the CPGB saw an opportunity to attack Green and Collins over their flagrantly anti-democratic behaviour and introducing bans and proscriptions against part of the Marxist left, which the whole ethos of the left of Your Party, inspired by the pronouncements of Zarah Sultana, was seen to oppose. But they had a problem, as they also have a long record of witchhunting the Consistent Democrats, as devotees of Hal Draper et. al. themselves. So, while they made some noises about how banning us did not appear good, they chose to wage a ridiculous ‘democracy’ campaign about the unlimited ‘right’ to use unexpurgated racial epithets in discussions about history. All that exposed was their complete ineptitude and lack of the slightest understanding of racial oppression. They managed to get into conflict with a number of prominent black activists in YP who rightly found their behaviour execrable.
All in all, the smears of anti-semitism against the Consistent Democrats and our predecessors have no substance, they are the work of leftists who are soft on Zionism, in one form or another, including Bundism, which Lenin considered to be akin to Zionism and reactionary. Our critique of Zionism, and the Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie – the material foundation of the Israel lobby – is solidly based on facts, which even some of those who witchhunt us have had to concede are accurate. We are not partisans of special definitions of anti-semitism, we do not, for instance, support the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, which was conceived of as an alternative to the IHRA, to be less anti-democratic. But one particular passage stands out as an example of views that they say, are not anti-Semitic:
“11. Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.” (https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/, our emphases)
Note the highlighted parts. That is what our analysis concerns, how Israel influences events in the world. It does so primarily by the social weight and political authority of the international dimension of its ruling class, that is, the aforementioned Jewish-Zionist caste. Even our opponents, including witchhunters such as Simon Hannah, have had to concede that we have our facts right on this. According then to the Jerusalem Declaration, clearly our views are not anti-Semitic. Left Unity’s properly constituted Disputes Committee looked at our key founding document on Zionism and concluded it was not anti-Semitic. David Miller’s views on Zionism, which are similar in many ways to our own (though not identical), have just been vindicated by the Employment Appeals Tribunal, and now constitute a protected belief in British law under the Equality Act. That protection clearly also applies to us. And our views bear no resemblance whatsoever to the dictionary definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, as pointed out earlier. All in all, this is convincing evidence that those who accuse us of anti-Semitism are liars and dishonest people with (on some level) a pro-Zionist political agenda. We will not tolerate such smears, we will fight back, and we will defeat the purveyors of such smears.
