This discussion forum took place on Zoom on 5th July. The presentation and discussion is available as a podcast here. The presentation notes are below:

This is a crucial question for understanding the wars of today, though ironically this paradigm of imperialist war, which has been pretty much dominant since the collapse of the USSR, may have reached a significant watershed. It is clear now that the US and Israel have been defeated in their joint conflict with Iran. But they had different reasons for engaging in that conflict in the first place.

Israel has a very straightforward regional project in the West Asia/North East Africa region, traditionally known, partly in colonial terms, as the Middle East. It is an entirely artificial, transplanted, but at the same time advanced capitalist, imperialist entity. Its ruling class is very aware that its whole territory was taken by force from a Palestinian population that has a more coherent national consciousness than Zionism because it is truly indigenous and organic. Palestinians also have huge sympathy from fellow Arabs and often other particularly, but not exclusively, Muslim peoples in the region.

Islam has become increasingly important because previous Western-influenced forms of bourgeois Arab nationalism that had roots the region in previous decades, have declined particularly in the last half century or so, as Zionist expansionism has repeatedly humiliated them, and exposed their inadequacy and often servility. Islam has achieved great authority among the masses in this region in part because it is seen as ‘pure’ – despite the fact that servile and venal comprador and in some cases Royal dictatorships mar the region, still no imperialist country has an Islamic culture. It is therefore seen as untainted, uncontaminated and admirable by many oppressed peoples, from Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen to Iran. Particularly the Shia variant, which as a result of the Iranian revolution in 1979, has gained a revolutionary fervour that resonates deeply. Most Palestinian Muslims – a minority are orthodox Christian – are Sunni, not Shia, but the Sunni Muslim radical movement (mainly Hamas) that has the ear of the Palestinian masses is considerably influenced by that same revolutionary fervour.

As revolutionary Marxists we consider such beliefs to be profoundly illusory, but we also understand their deep roots in the oppression of the masses of the region, a reaction to imperialist oppression and in particular Zionist conquest and brigandage. We note what Karl Marx said about religion in his essay A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, from 1844, one of his earliest works:

“This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Evoking this dialectical understanding of religion is not any way a dismissal of its followers, particularly in a situation of the most severe oppression imaginable in Greater West Asia.

Zionism is an artificial construct built on land taken by force from the Palestinian Arabs. Its claim to any organic role in the region is mythological. As Shlomo Sand pointed out in The Invention of the Jewish People, it is the Palestinians who are the descendants of Ancient Hebrews, who converted to Islam and Christianity in large numbers during the first millennium CE, in the main. The Ashkenazi Jews, the core of the Zionist movement are the descendants of converts to Judaism from the Eastern fringe of Europe, also during the first millennium CE. They certainly were subjected to persecution in the late period of feudalism in both West and East Europe in late medieval and early capitalist times, and as a terrible knock-on in the early period of imperialist capitalism.  

But the Zionist project was always a myth, and right from the start it had a genocidal logic. It necessarily required the dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, which implies their destruction. It is an unusual phenomenon, whose origins go back to the very beginnings of the modern phenomenon of imperialism. Lenin called this Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in a famous pamphlet. For him, capitalism had ceased to be a progressive social system, and definitively became reactionary. He considered it the eve of the socialist revolution. He agreed with Rosa Luxemburg, if socialism failed to happen, it would lead to barbarism. A choice we still face today. Competition had been transformed into monopoly in the advanced countries, to a considerable extent capital had fused with the state, and rival imperialist powers, centrally those in Western Europe – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Holland and Belgium but also the United States, emerged, aiming to divide the world between them. This process really got going in the last two decades of the 19^th Century, and accelerated to the point that in 1898 an armed standoff between Britain and France took place at Fashoda, in Sudan, that was the first instance of the kind of inter-imperialist conflict that erupted in 1914. Lenin dated 1900 as the dawn of the imperialist epoch, but in my view, he erred slightly as it was the 1880s “scramble for Africa” where a qualitative change happened.

The Jewish question is an anomaly in this. There was a significant, mainly Ashkenazi Jewish bourgeoisie, that existed in the advanced countries in the period we are talking about, which had much of its origins in the role of Jews as traders and middlemen, later usurers, in pre-capitalist Europe. Though in France and even more Holland, to complicate matters, many Jews had a different origin, Sephardic, from Muslim Spain in the inquisition period when capitalist development was well underway. When feudalism went into decline, the largely Ashkenazi Jews, who had a special social role, as a pre-capitalist trading class (“People Class” – as Abram Leon described them), were rendered obsolete by the rise of native capitalism, and were seen as insidious rivals by the early native bourgeois layers. They were thus persecuted in late feudal society.

Yet Jews were emancipated by the French revolution and similar events, and for the first time achieved equal status in a capitalist society. Yet the very unevenness of the bourgeois revolution produced enormous contradictions. There was a social and partly temporal gap of centuries between the emancipation of the Jews in Western Europe, and the final crisis of feudalism in East Europe, centrally Russia. And an enormous Jewish population were caught up in the decline of feudalism in the East in the late 19^th Century, and there was a big impetus to flee from persecution westwards. This threatened to disturb the emancipated position of the Jewish bourgeoisie in the Western countries, at the same time as xenophobic and in time, racist fear of the Jewish masses from the East, was radicalising many Jews to look for solutions.

As is well known, many non-bourgeois Jews looked to progressive, socialist solutions, and saw the workers movement as the road out of poverty and persecution. But there was also a layer of nationalists, part of the bourgeoisie, and many petty-bourgeois nationalist radicals particularly from the East. They cohered in the late 19^th Century with the rise of Zionism. Theodore Herzl, who came to be its chief ideologue, saw the British colonialism of Cecil Rhodes in Africa as a model of how a state for the Jews could be created. This was not a strategy of emancipation in unison with the rest of progressive humanity, but envisaged the creation of a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Palestine – the only realistic suggestion as to the location of such a state – others were considered. That was the dawn of the idea of Zionism as a realistic programme. It was to be built on the imperialist model and would involve the Jews, as a formerly oppressed population, taking their place among the dominant peoples in the creation of such a state. This could only be conceived of because of the social structure of the Jewish population, which as a result of its earlier role as a trading people-class, had a disproportionately large layer of businesspeople, and comparatively few workers.

Yet this was only achieved as a by-product of the most savage persecution of the Jews – the extermination of millions by the Nazis in the mid-20^th Century. That genocide allowed another genocidal programme to be implemented after WWII. It was the contradictions caused by the massively uneven disintegration of feudalism in the East, setting in motion millions of Jewish refugees, that created the conditions where imperialist capitalism, in exterminating millions of that oppressed population, could nevertheless create the conditions where an imperialist, ethnocratic Jewish state could come into existence in the latter half of the 20^th Century, which has now become a menace comparable to the Third Reich. Today, many who previously would have admired Hitler, admire Israel. As I’m sure we are all aware. The only explanation for this is that the root cause of the seemingly intractable oppression of the Jews was not, as Abram Leon mistakenly believed, the capitalist system itself, but the unevenness of the disintegration of feudalism between East and West, and the extreme anomalies that created.

But coming off this, we have to deal with Israel as an imperialist power today. That Jewish bourgeoisie, that was added to by radicalised petty bourgeois nationalists, created a transplanted Jewish imperialist state that in terms of strict size, ought to be minor, comparable to Denmark. But Israel is much more powerful than Denmark. Because that national-imperialist project gained a large bourgeois following in the diaspora. Not immediately – much of the Jewish bourgeoisie was originally sceptical or even hostile to it. But over time, with the impact of events (including two World War, then Hitler and genocide), the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois nationalist Zionists won over the bulk of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and many of the surviving masses, to the project of Israel as ‘national refuge’ for the Jews. This does not mean everyone has to live there. But they do regard it as their state.

The Israeli Law of Return says that every born Jew around the world is entitled to Israeli citizenship. This consolidated that quasi-national ethos and sentiment. So, the diaspora-Jewish bourgeoisie were eventually overwhelmingly won to Zionism. That gave them a material connection to the Israeli bourgeois state. As with other bourgeois states, both imperialist and non-imperialist, where a kind of ‘ownership’ of the state rests with the bourgeoisie who are citizens of that state. Combined with the exilic ideology of Zionism itself, this has the effect – and it was clearly designed that way – of creating a partly internationalised Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, based mainly, but not only, in the imperialist West. And as noted, that bourgeoisie was, and is, disproportionately massive in comparison with the size of the Jewish population generally. That means that Israel punches very much above its weight, far above Denmark, because its ruling class overlaps with the imperialist bourgeoisie of major Western countries, particularly the US.

Another important factor in bolstering this influence was the switch from Keynesian economics to Neoliberalism in the 1970s, in a major crisis. This was popularised and driven by Jewish-Zionist bourgeois ideologues like Friedman, Sherman, Joseph, Kissinger. That has created a deference among the imperialist bourgeoisie to this Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layer or caste, seen as their most class-conscious section. A kind of political cult.

Israel is an artificial, transplanted, illegitimate, imperialist formation in the Middle East. It has had to fight wars to defend that illegitimacy for the whole of its existence. It has had a project of seeking to pre-emptively defeat any Arab or Muslim country in the region that in any way was capable of becoming a champion of the Palestinians. In the earlier period, it managed to do this on its own, albeit with help from other imperialist powers. We saw this briefly in 1956, then decisively in 1967 against Egypt and Syria, and again in 1973. But after that it had problems. It got bogged down repeatedly in losing conflicts in Lebanon, from 1978 and 1982 and later. It faced Palestinian intifadas at home. But it also faced enemies that became too strong for it to defeat itself: Iraq, Russian-backed Syria, Libya and Iran.

All of these governments showed clearly that, left to themselves, and without having to deal with Israel, they would happily be US/Western clients. Saddam’s Iraq was a Western client in the Iran-Iraq war. Libya attempted to join the Western camp during the 2000s. Syria fought in the US backed coalition against Saddam’s Iraq in 1991. And even Iran was not purely anti-imperialist, as the murky 1987 Iran-Contra affair shows. The US interest in the region rationally, is mainly for oil and other raw materials. Most of these apparently willing clients are oil-rich and keen to trade, unlike Israel. Yet they were all attacked, both by force of arms and by proxy, by the US and its Western allies, since 1991. It is clear that this was done on Israel’s behalf.

In 1991 Iraq was misled into an unwise invasion of Kuwait, who were stealing Iraqi oil, by a mendacious US ambassador, April Glaspie. This was done because Iraq had acquired an effective ‘supergun’ weapon that threatened Israeli power. In 2007 Wesley Clark, in (perhaps mock) horror, revealed Bush’s ‘shopping list’, which included Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and finally Iran. These were all Israel’s enemies, not particularly the West’s. This chain of wars for Israel happened since. I will spare the details. There is no need for them. They are too recent and well known.

And now we have Iran. The US has been defeated, in a manner that Foreign Policy, the in-house journal of the US geopolitical establishment, says is worse than the defeat in Vietnam. That is embodied in the Memoradum of Understanding (MOU) that the US signed. Yet the Vietnam defeat was against a real social revolution, and took more than two decades. There was no social revolution involved in Iran’s war effort. Iran’s Shia regime is not leading a social revolution, whatever utopian religious ideas some of its adherents may harbour. And yet that war was lost in four months. For straightforward military/economic reasons. The US was warned it was unwise before they started it.

The US is still vacillating despite its defeat with Vance warning Israel that the US is its only remaining ally, and it is universally hated. Meanwhile Rubio is arranging the doomed Israeli/US stooge deal in Lebanon. The MOU the US signed with Iran says that Israel must stop its butchery in Lebanon immediately. But Netanyahu would be ejected from power if he did. Israel is committing atrocities in Lebanon, but still losing.

This is the latest episode in a saga. Iraq was ultimately a long-drawn-out defeat. Libya and Syria are chaotic and of little value to the US as clients. Only Israel benefits from the chaos. And Iran has been a completely unnecessary strategic defeat for the US. They didn’t have to attack. They did it for Israel, as Rubio admitted, as does Vance – and Trump blusters. The US is in decline, that is clear.  But without fighting this war for Israel – and losing it – such a major, strategic defeat would still be several years away.

It is possible that this may drive a major wedge between Israel and the US. But that would be a huge convulsion in the ruling class, because the ruling classes overlap. In that context, you get section 224 of the National Defence Authorisation Act, which integrates US and Israeli military intelligence. This appears to be designed to counteract threats to the overlap of the ruling classes, i.e., to reinforce Israeli influence over the US at the level of bourgeois state power.

We are now entering a new historical period after the biggest US defeat in its history, that threatens its world hegemony. This will cause huge changes in the world. Our job as Marxists is to struggle to understand this new reality, as a guide to action. Without understanding the past, we will not be able to do this.

What are the implications for anti-imperialist struggles?

On Zoom, Sunday 5^th July at 4pm

The recent signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Iran and the US has been recognised by the US State Department’s inhouse journal Foreign Policy as a more severe defeat than the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet Trump is still blowing hot and cold, and engaging in sporadic firefights with Iran around the Strait of Hormuz. What are the implications for the working class and those under the gun of US, Western and Zionist imperialism?

Registration link https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/J2Rstgr8RUy8fOh51htf0Q

Genuine Marxists are being excluded from left-wing movements in and around Your Party, to defend perpetrators and inspirers of Zionist genocide, while those responsible make spurious allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to justify censorship of Marxist criticism.  This is a classic behaviour of capitulators to Zionism, and is a hugely damaging blow to the left.

Our comrade Ian Donovan was excluded from ALDA’s discussion list on 25th May for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ (the entire transcript of the WhatsApp debate that triggered this is included as an Appendix below). He was then excluded from the Member’s Charter/Socialist Federation pre-conference on 31st May simply because of his views. Both exclusions took place without any form of hearing. Yet those who excluded him cannot point to any hostility or discriminatory behaviour against Jews by him at all. Anti-Semitism has a pretty straightforward meaning in the dictionary – a characteristic definition is the one in the Cambridge Dictionary:

“Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”

No such hostility or discrimination can be substantiated against him. The sole reason for his exclusion was that he characterised, in a manner that is provably factually accurate, Zionist Jews within the imperialist bourgeoisie of the Western powers, the US and Western Europe primarily, as the driving force of systematic racism and genocide against Palestinians in West Asia, and as working together with the Israeli ruling class internationally on the basis of common reactionary, national-bourgeois, class interests to implement this programme. His opponents were actually forced to concede that he had got his facts correct, but this led to them becoming more virulent in their attacks, and desperately seeking to stop debate and discussion on the supposed grounds that he had an ‘anti-Semitic’ worldview and therefore should not be debated with or allowed to argue. But their definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ does not conform to the definition above. This was completely fraudulent, and signified that they knew that they were already losing this debate, and were desperate to stop it and hide their defeat.

If real hostility, racialised caricatures of Jews for example, or any kind of discrimination, are encountered, they should be challenged. This conforms with the dictionary definition of anti-Semitism cited above. Hostility against Jewish people for being Jewish, and discrimination against them for that, are anti-Semitic. Any allegation of anti-Semitism against any comrade for beliefs and activities that do not fit that definition, is by definition a lie. In the context of today’s genocide and sustained attempts to supress discussion of Zionism’s crimes by precisely these means, any such allegation that does not fit that definition is a racist crime. This is a serious matter – those who falsely accuse others of discrimination and bigoted hostility to Jews to protect genociders should be punished just as severely as someone who abuses or victimises a Jewish person simply for being Jewish.

The behaviour of those who attempted to smear him were subtle forms of racism, both against him, for being non-Jewish and daring to criticise racist Jewish bourgeois, and much more importantly by association, as the racism he was originally criticising was not against him, but against the Palestinian people who are the prime victims of those racist bourgeois Zionist Jews. His accusers’ behaviour was racist either in the primary, or the secondary, vicarious sense, depending obviously on the origin of the person carrying out the abuse. We don’t know the origin of everyone involved, but either variant is reprehensible.

He was smeared by people who do not believe that any non-Jew has the right to an opinion on some important questions of fact. These facts are directly relevant to the oppression and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, which is now being extended to the West Bank, and the mechanism by which democratic rights of Palestinians and Palestine supporters are being attacked in countries like Britain, France and the United States.

In virtually all cases. Palestinians are also not Jewish. Therefore, if his being non-Jewish means he has no right to acknowledge these clearly factual points, and draw conclusions about their impact, logically Palestinians have no such right either. But Palestinians are savagely oppressed by Israel, which defines itself as a state for Jews only. Since October 2023 Palestinians have been victims of a genocide, carried out and planned by the same exclusivist Jewish state with mass support from the Israeli-Jewish population, aimed at exterminating them as a people. So according to this kind of thinking, Palestinians also have no right to an opinion on key aspects of the social forces that are attempting their extermination.  This is a very reactionary, chauvinist position, and those who hold these views are Jewish chauvinists or even racists, or vicariously so (depending on who is promulgating such smears).

The Marxist Views of the LCFI

The factual points concerned are the following, and relate to the agreed positions of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI), the Marxist trend whose politics we support. These are simply orthodox Marxism, Leninism-Trotskyism. This is from the Draft Programme of the LCFI, written in 2021:

 “One other crucial post World War II development is the creation of Israel, a new transplanted imperialist formation in the Middle East, that expropriated the Palestinian Arab people of their homeland and through mass expulsion and sporadic massacres, turned around three quarters of them into stateless refugees. The reactionary role of Zionism today is completely at odds with the progressive, vanguard role that Jewish intellectuals and militants played in revolutionary and democratic movements against feudalism in Europe, and in the early socialist and communist movements, which was itself a product of the universal ethos of the Jews as a qualitatively more internationalised population than any of their contemporaries in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the early period of the workers movement. This progressive history was negated by the extermination of many of the progressive, anti-Zionist and revolutionary Jews by Nazi anti-Semitism in WWII, which allowed Zionism, as a reactionary, imperialist solution to the historical oppression of the Jews, to become dominant.  The Palestinian Arab question is one of the most explosive and crucial national questions on the planet. The slow-motion Zionist genocide of the Palestinians, which could easily escalate, is symbolised by the repeated butchery of the people of Gaza and the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Paradoxically, this has much in common with the persecution of the Jews by anti-Semites in Europe that the Zionists exploited and made use of many desperate European Jews as cannon fodder for their racist colonial endeavour at the time of Israel’s foundation.  The demand for the full right to return of the Palestinian Arabs and the replacement of Israel with a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine ruled by the Arab majority is a basic democratic demand and the concrete expression of the Permanent Revolution. It can only be achieved with the revolutionary aid of the Arab, Persian, Turkish and other working classes of the whole Middle Eastern region.

“Israel has a unique relationship with the traditional imperialist powers particularly in North America and Europe, by virtue of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the bourgeoisies of those countries. The overrepresentation of Jews among the bourgeoisie in the diaspora imperialist countries, a product of their long pre-capitalist role as a commodity- and money-trading people-class under the natural, non-commodity based economy of feudalism, gave birth through a convulsive and contradictory process in the 20th Century, to powerful Zionist factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie in those countries that regard Israel as their own imperialist state, just as much as the state of the countries in which they reside. This is a unique, though fragile and unwieldy, imperialist formation that gives Israel much more clout than its size and population relative to its imperialist allies, such as the US, would seem to indicate. This has produced an additional complexity in the politics of the Middle East, and because of its relationships with imperialism in general, to the struggle against imperialism itself. This has particularly become important since the collapse of Stalinism, though perhaps its importance was not fully appreciated prior to that.

“Zionism also has played a deeply reactionary role in attacking the workers movement in the old imperialist countries. A case in point is the Zionist-led campaign in Britain to bring down the left Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn between 2015 and 2019 with a massive McCarthy style media-based witchhunt based on phoney accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, which the weak Corbyn leadership capitulated to. It is a matter of basic self-defence of the workers movement that Marxists should fight for the exclusion of supporters of political Zionism from all working-class organisations. The labour movement should be educated to regard political Zionists as fundamentally similar to Neo-Nazis.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/lcfi-draft-programme/)

The paragraph highlighted is the most relevant one, where it talks about the overrepresentation of Jews in the ruling classes of North America and Europe. This is explored in more depth in an article in Red Partisan no 1, which relates the following facts:

“Jews have an unusual, top-heavy social structure. On a world scale, in 2025 there were 3038 billionaires in the world according to the Fortune 500¹ whereas the number of Jewish billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Israel, in 2025 was 276². This means that, taking 2025 (last year) as the time of analysis, over 9% of billionaires in the world are Jewish, 9.055% to be more precise. Yet the number of Jews in the world is 15.8 million, which is 0.2% of the world’s population. This is approximately 45 times overrepresentation. The overwhelming majority of those Jewish billionaires live in the United States (163), Israel (39) and other imperialist countries of Western Europe, Canada and Australia (35) and a smattering elsewhere, including Russia, where a relatively lower number live (21). They are overwhelmingly concentrated in the imperialist West.

The overwhelmingly dominant ideology among bourgeois Jews is Political Zionism, an exilic ideology centred on Israel as a supposed refuge. Israel’s racist citizenship law, which gives those born Jewish anywhere in the world the right to citizenship, has the effect of creating a partially internationalised imperialist bourgeoisie loyal to Israel, who are massively and disproportionately represented in the US and West European ruling classes. The 2025 Forbes list puts the number of US billionaires in that year as 902³. As stated earlier, the number of US Jewish billionaires in 2025 was 163. Which means that 18% of billionaires in the US are Jewish, as compared to the proportion of Jewish people in the US population, which is 2%.  But that is not all – because as you go up the rankings of billionaires by wealth, the disproportionate representation of Jews increases dramatically. Of the top 10 billionaires by wealth in the US, 6 of them are Jewish – Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell. The other four – non-Jewish – are Elon Musk (the wealthiest), Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jensen Huang. This can be determined by comparison of Forbes Israel with mundane US sources on billionaire wealth that do not distinguish ethnicity.

For Marxists, who understand that power in capitalist society, exercised from above, stems from capitalist wealth, this is the basis of the disproportionate power of Israel and Zionism in the US. The law of return gives Jewish bourgeois a direct interest through citizenship – in bourgeois terms a form of ownership — any bourgeois state is the de facto collective property of its bourgeois citizens – in the Israeli bourgeois state. There is no mystery about where this power comes from. No ‘conspiracy theory’ is needed to explain this, only Marxism – historical materialism – applied to today’s circumstances. 

[….]

Zionists vilify anyone who makes these points as ‘anti-Semitic’. Quite a number of leftists who claim to be opposed to Zionism echo them and even join in the vilification, claiming that it is racist to even mention facts about this that are solidly based, and that a couple of hours of research using primary sources can easily unearth and prove. But Marxism is founded on fact; as John Adams once said, and Marxism echoes, “facts are stubborn things”. If some trend, even of those that claim to be Marxist, denounce other Marxist trends for not ignoring important material facts, that is a clear sign that their views are not really Marxist.

(https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/)

The facts here are quite clear. And it is obvious that the reason why supporters of Israel have the power to dictate to capitalist-imperialist governments in countries that are quite distant from Israel, like Britain and the US, where Jews are a tiny percentage of the population, is that wealthy billionaire Jews, who are in nearly all cases politically supporters of Israel and Zionism, are much more proportionately numerous and powerful in the ruling classes of those countries because of their wealth.

In the early 20^th Century, long before Israel was created and thus before the Israel lobby existed, it was widely known that Jews had an unusual social structure that had proportionately many more businessman than workers. The Labour Zionist Ber Borochov was the early mentor of Abram Leon, before he was won to Trotskyism. Leon’s major work The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation (1942), is a seminal work of classical Marxism that we critically endorse and regard as a stepping stone to our own analysis. Ber Borochov made some relevant observations on the class structure of the Jewish population at that time, which Leon built on and modified. These were addressed in an introductory essay about Leon’s life by Ernest Mandel to the 2^nd Edition of Leon’s work:

“Borochov maintained that the Jewish question was rooted in the fact that the Jews, and above all the Jewish workers, played no important role in the vital sectors of the economy (heavy industry, metallurgy, coal and so on) but instead occupied important positions solely in the peripheral spheres of economic life. The social position of other peoples resembled a pyramid having as its base hundreds of thousands of miners, metal workers, railroad workers, etc., topped off by ever thinner strata of businessmen, industrialists, and bankers. But the social composition of the Jewish people resembled an ‘inverted pyramid’ in which large handicraft strata rested on narrow layers of workers – who were moreover engaged in nonvital sectors of industry – and had to bear the full weight of an enormous mass of businessmen.” (A Biographical Sketch of Abram Leon, by Ernest Mandel, in The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon, Second Edition, 15^th printing [2012], Pathfinder Press).

This alone is enough to establish that the question of the social structure of the Jews, and its implications for politics, in whatever period in history, is a completely normal field for political enquiry and analysis.

The fact that in the pre-WWII period racist demagogues, Nazis, made use of this feature of the Jewish population for sinister and reactionary purposes, ultimately as part of an agitation that led to genocide, does not negate historical materialism. Social being determines social consciousness, and material facts determine the nature of any given society; the relations between classes and even factions or fragments of classes are determined by material factors. This is true in the current reality just as much as in the past. The whole point of Marxists studying historical questions like this is not history for its own sake, but to understand the present, in order to act politically in a way that is effective and takes account of social reality.

Anti-Marxist Ziophiles excoriate … the facts!

One pathetic example of the slurs from left-wing Ziophiles that have been thrown at our political trend in the past, was an attack on comrade Ian in the Weekly Worker in 2014, when he first produced his Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism. Incredibly, for self-proclaimed Marxists, they tried to pretend that facts don’t matter and concern for factual accuracy on this is ‘anti-Semitic’:

“[Quoting Ian’s 2014 Theses] “Of all the advanced capitalist/imperialist countries today, Israel is second only to the United States in the threat it poses to the future of humanity.” But the huge ruling class support Israel receives in the west has “a material basis”, over and above imperialism’s own interests. It is “explained by one salient fact: Jewish overrepresentation in the US and other ruling classes”. For example, in the US, “informed Jewish sources” claim that “between 40% and 48%” of billionaires are Jews.

“In my opinion, such ‘statistics’ say far more about the person quoting them than the people they claim to study. Even if we accept that those figures are accurate (a big ‘if’), then why would anyone consider them to be pertinent?” (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1026/no-place-for-anti-semitism/)

This has to be competition for the most stupid statement ever made by anyone pretending to be any sort of Marxist, ever! ‘Who cares about the facts?’ it says, ‘Anyone who cares about these facts, that get in the way of my Ziophile prejudices, must be an anti-Semite’. How is it “pertinent”, either way whether these facts are true or false?

One thing is obvious – the author of those lines doesn’t care two hoots about the oppression of the Palestinians, who if the hypothesis in the 2014 Theses were shown to be correct, face a much more powerful, directly communal enemy than if it were shown to be incorrect. The author of those lines, Peter Manson, thus exposed himself as a complacent Jewish chauvinist who doesn’t give a damn about the oppression, and potentially the extermination, of the Palestinians. He does not care why Israel is able to procure attacks on the democratic rights of those who defend Palestinians in more powerful countries like the US and Britain that arm their direct, communal oppressors to the teeth. But why should Manson care about that? He is not facing Israeli firepower. He is a pseudo-Marxist whose ‘Marxism’ is mixed with Ziophilia – that is, deep-seated political prejudice in favour of Zionism that completely contradicts his pretence of Marxism and anti-Zionism.

The same is true of those in the witchhunt in the ALDA WhatsApp group on 25th May, that prompted Ian’s removal from that discussion group for ‘anti-Semitism’. They didn’t like these facts either. Yet they went further than Peter Manson in conceding that these facts were correct. When Ian pointed out that in 2025, six out of the ten wealthiest billionaires in the United States were Jewish and Zionist, even his most hostile denouncer, Simon Hannah of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, had to concede that:

“The fact isn’t disputed – it’s what you politically imply about it which no one agrees on.”

Likewise, Ruth Appleton, who was backing up Hannah, said it was:

“Twisted factual. What is your point?”

But Ian had already explained his point, which is simply:

“…in a capitalist society, disproportionate capitalist wealth brings disproportionate social power.”

This is clearly the explanation for the extraordinary power of Zionists in the ruling class of the United States, and to a lesser extent, other older imperialist powers, such as Britain and France. That capitalist social power is derived from bourgeois property and can be wielded against any opponent, even other bourgeois (e.g., in intra-bourgeois factional conflicts), is not a ‘conspiracy theory’, as was repeatedly said by ignorant social democrats in this discussion. Or if it is so deemed, then historical materialism and Marxism itself is being deemed a ‘conspiracy theory’.

The term “Ziophilia” requires some explanation. Many of those leftists who it applies to are not formally Zionists, and would be upset, and vehemently deny it, if they were called Zionists. They do not defend the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – and would be shocked if someone were to accuse them of this as it would be a terrible smear and calumny. Yet they are replete with liberal prejudices (if they are not Jewish) or communal prejudices (if they are Jewish) in favour of Jews against non-Jews, and consider Jews’ victimisation under the Nazis and earlier anti-Semites has somehow sanctified Jews generally.

As Marxists, we oppose notions of collective guilt of entire peoples. We do not hold all Germans, let alone all non-Jews, responsible for the Nazi holocaust. Nor do we hold all Jews responsible for the crimes of Zionism. But many on the left hold that Jews’ history as victims of genocide, combined with the progressive role that many Jews have historically played in the workers movement, have rendered Jews as a progressive population, who are collectively innocent of any real crimes, and that to say that any Jews have real agency in the crimes of Zionism, or that Zionism is in any way Jewish, is ‘anti-Semitic’. This does carry the implication that all non-Jews bear some responsibility for the past persecution of Jews and therefore should be restricted or even condemned if they criticise any Jews today as racist, even when they clearly are. These are deep-seated, liberal-Zionist prejudices that are built into the Western body politic that are simply reactionary, that Marxists should utterly reject.

For example, you get the ridiculous assertion, that repeatedly surfaces on the left, that to say that Zionism is in any way Jewish, amounts to ‘anti-Semitism’. It is ridiculous, as political Zionism is the movement for an exclusivist Jewish state. No one has the right to Israeli citizenship if they are not Jewish. Some non-Jews may be granted citizenship through family connections with Jews, but only in numbers that do not threaten the Jewish character of the state. Palestinians who were victims of ethnic cleansing do not have the right to Israeli citizenship because they are not Jewish, even though the territory on which Israel exists is clearly their homeland. There are a minority of “Israeli Arabs” in Israel, Palestinians who avoided the Nakba expulsion, who have a kind of Israeli citizenship that is second class and insecure. There is a central population register that holds details of every citizen as either Jew, Arab, Druze or ‘other’ and both the original Israeli Basic Law, which defined Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”, and the more recent Nation State law, which says Israel is the “Nation-State of the Jewish People” clearly mean Israel belongs to the Jewish population, which are therefore primary.

To deny that political Zionism is in any way Jewish is thus a flat denial of reality. Saying that political Zionism is Jewish does not imply that it is the only Jewish trend. There are many Jewish trends. Nor does it imply thus that all Jews are Zionist. Those on the left who smear anyone who refuses to say that Zionism is simply, flatly non-Jewish are therefore enacting pro-Zionist prejudices, even if they are not conscious of this.

This is deeply embedded in British social democracy, as can be easily illustrated by a telling episode from the history of the Labour Party. In the period of Clement Attlee’s Labour leadership, even before the National Health Service was created with the ‘cradle-to-grave’ welfare state, and the nationalisations of steel, coal and other important industries, the Labour Party passed an international resolution that anticipated the Nakba about Palestine calling for “…transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in.” (https://electronicintifada.net/content/when-israels-friends-labour-advocated-genocide/21176).  The Labour Party was thus calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine four years before it happened!

Even the most left-wing figures in the Labour Party, for much of the post-war period, were ‘Friends of Israel’ including such revered figures as Tony Benn. That only seriously began to change after 1982 with Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon. Zionism is thus deeply in the bloodstream of British social democracy. And most of the British left is saturated with pro-Zionist prejudice to the extent that even those who claim to be anti-Zionists are weak, pusillanimous and when Zionists say “jump”, the British left say “how high”. This weakness is so all-encompassing that it even affects some West Asian leftists who have been assimilated into British social-democratic mores. There are examples of this that are worth highlighting here. Examples of political cowardice in those involved in seeking to stop this debate and those attempting to police it and limit what can be said to criticise bourgeois Jewish-Zionist racism.

Political Cowardice

So, Simon Hannah commented “This kind of language is wrecking the left”

And Syrian YP comrade Maher echoed that with “This kind of stuff is why we get questioned”

They were attacking references to Jewish supremacism and holding super-rich Zionist Jews in the West who support Israeli crimes, responsible for those crimes. What is actually wrecking the left is moral and political cowardice in the face of Zionist witchhunting.

Other examples of such moral cowardice were James Kulmer saying:

“We all clearly agree that the system of oppression and genocide in Israel, and the ideology that legitimises it – Zionism -is pernicious and to be totally opposed. The problems here are derived from ambiguity around the term ‘Jewish’. In my view, given how ambiguous it is, it should be done away with.”

The word “Jewish” should be “done away with” when describing the racist supremacism of super-rich Jewish capitalists in supporting a state that describes itself as a “Jewish and democratic state” and “the nation-state of the Jewish people”! Why? Because it is objectively wrong? Obviously not. Because of the political cowardice of those, like James Kulmer, with social-democratic politics who react with pathological fear of the bourgeois-Zionist inquisition and their ‘left’ tails, and won’t fight them ideologically.

This is why Kulmer visibly capitulated on the question of democracy in this discussion. At one point towards the end, he said that:

“I would recommend we instead share some long form content that exposes our views, rebuking them in that format if needed, and if necessary we ought to schedule a debate on the topic in person, if anyone wants to. I don’t want to stifle a conversation as its happening, but I’m not certain this one is going anywhere productive, comrades.”

So, we should have a debate on the subject, he says. A good, principled idea. But then the various USFI sympathisers played the “Ian has an anti-Semitic worldview” card, without actually demonstrating what that was. They were unprepared for this nonsense to be debated – simply because they were already losing the debate! When these people started howling, he capitulated on the question of democracy:

“This conversation has to cease now. I am going to put a pause to this channel to allow the organising committee to review the conversation and collectively decide how to proceed.”

And then, when Ian pointed out that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were defamatory and quoted actual definitions in a dictionary that have legal force, he stated:

“I have not had a chance to review all of the messages in this chat, but as there are now accusations of both antisemitism and defamatory statements I think it’s in everyone’s interest that we take a pause here to assess the way forwards. Thank you all for understanding.”

And so, he closed down the discussion, after an outcry from people who libellously stated that Ian has an “anti-Semitic worldview” in order to stop the debate, because they couldn’t think of any other reply. He bureaucratically shut down the debate to “assess” it. And then he wrote to Ian on behalf of the AOC saying:

“We believe that whatever your intentions, opinions or feelings, your repeated claim that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in the ruling class is by definition antisemitic. We cannot tolerate racism in our online community”

The AOC evidently have their own definition of anti-Semitism which says that acknowledging material facts that even Ian’s opponents in this discussion acknowledge are correct – is “anti-Semitic”. If Jews are only 2% of the US population, but taking 2025 as the base point, 18% of US billionaires, then Jews are statistically overrepresented among billionaires 9 times over. Likewise, 6 of the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the US are Jewish. I.e., in this particular wealth-bracket, the most powerful and influential people in the most powerful imperialist country, 60% are Jewish. That means they are 30 times overrepresented vis-à-vis the 2% of Jews generally. These are neither “intentions”, “opinions” nor “feelings” but statistical, mathematical facts. Simon Hannah and Ruth Appleton accepted that these are facts, as quoted, and their partners in crime ‘Susan’ and “benwwk” have not contradicted their co-thinkers’ acceptance of this being accurate. This is thus solidly demonstrated material fact, not a ‘claim’.  The AOC’s position seems to be that anyone who does not deny mathematically proven facts is ‘anti-Semitic’. By that logic, Simon Hannah, Ruth Appleton, ‘Susan’ and “benwwk’ who acknowledged explicitly or implicitly that Ian’s facts were correct and that therefore Jews indeed are overrepresented in the ruling class, are ‘anti-Semitic’ also.

This anti-Science nonsense is as absurd as the Catholic Church trying to force Galileo to recant his discovery that Earth orbits the Sun. It has nothing in common with the dictionary definition of anti-Semitism quoted above. These people have their own pseudo-definition that is not in the dictionary, and certainly has no legal authority or status.

Of course, what they really mean is that we draw conclusions from those facts that they don’t like, but they don’t even have the courage to say that, so cowardly are they, so desperately afraid of being drawn into any debate about the implications of these facts. ‘Susan’ and ‘benwwk’ are among the most pathetic of the anti-Marxists in this discussion, as confronted with a coherent theoretical understanding of the social role of the overrepresented Jewish-Zionist layer in the imperialist bourgeoisies of the older imperialist countries, that it acts as a specialised caste within those ruling classes with a material, quasi-property interest in the Israeli state by means of its racist extra-territorial citizenship law, they feebly raised as a counter-argument the greater number of (less wealthy) Christian Zionist bourgeois in the US. But they lost their tempers when it was pointed out that Christian Zionist bourgeois do not have hereditary citizenship rights in Israel, and therefore that quasi-property relationship with the Israeli bourgeois state does not exist. Rather than formulate a counter-argument in Marxist terms – they were incapable of doing so because really there isn’t one – they declared that this is an ‘anti-Semitic worldview’ that no one should be allowed to argue.

But they cannot substantiate such a contention either – they cannot find a way to argue, for instance, that accepting the facts about the social weight of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoises of Western countries constitutes ‘hostility or discrimination’ directed against Jews. That contention is simply absurd, anti-materialist and hence anti-communist Ziophilia – lying to excuse the genocidal Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste and protect it from Marxist criticism and analysis.

The Bund as a Source of Ziophilia

But what threw considerable light on what they mean by an “anti-Semitic worldview”, i.e., on their intellectual bankruptcy and anti-Marxism, was the contribution from Matt Goldbaum, a Jewish leftist who appears sympathetic to the same approach. The USFI has a long history of substituting capitulation to various kinds of identity politics for Marxist analysis and criticism of all types of oppression, in the model of Lenin’s call for the working-class movement to champion the oppressed:

“…the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm)

Despite themselves, the USFI’s capitulation to identity politics can, at times, lead to approximately correct positions in the context of a correct struggle of the rights of an oppressed group, such as the ACR’s correct defence of LGBTQ rights, one of the few parts of their politics for which they should be commended.

But Goldbaum objected very strongly to the contention of the LCFI that Zionist strategy has, as a reactionary ‘solution’ to the oppression of Jews, led to the ascent of Jews as a people from the ranks of the oppressed, to that of the oppressor peoples, as defined by Lenin in his famous analysis of this distinction in his discussion of imperialism and colonialism after the Russian revolution. This exchange is worth quoting:

“Matt GoldB. (Walthamstow) quotes Ian D

“He was mainly talking about European Jews. I am talking about the reason why Jews have a very top heavy class structure, which is elaborated in the link I posted earlier. Obviously in a capitalist society, disproportionate capitalist wealth brings disproportionate social power. Leon’s work in lar…”

So please let me get this argument, I am a European Jew, UK citizen by birth, and retired worker, and by virtue of the racist law of a foreign country I have a material interest in upholding that same foreign country? Whether I like it or not. Before the creation of this foreign country in 1948, classic Jew hatred could only claim this as ‘World wide conspiracy’ but now it is an actual fact that all Jews have these interests. in maintaining and supporting this foreign power! To me completely classically Jew hatred in 2026 writ large. I have absolutely no interest in this foreign country and will always stand with the oppressed and NEVER with the oppressor.

To which Ian replied:

“Er no. Unless you are a capitalist.

You do understand that the capitalist state is effectively the property of the capitalist class, don’t you? That is the Marxist understanding of the state.

And which capitalist state such bourgeois ‘own’ is determined by their bourgeois citizenship.

Why are you identifying yourself with part of the capitalist class? I made no such equation of you as a socialist with any part of the capitalist class. In fact, I said the opposite. I defined my argument in class terms, about the bourgeoisie.

You made that identification with your question. I’m making such basic class distinctions. Your question completely buries those distinctions. And it’s spontaneous and automatic.

That’s the unconscious influence of Zionism on the left. It’s similar to what Kaiser Bill said in 1914: “I see no parties or classes – I see only Germans”.

Everything I said was qualified in class terms. If you “always stand with the oppressed and not with the oppressor” that is fine.

But if that is the case you should also point out, name and condemn the imperialist bourgeois caste whose existence is easy to demonstrate, which is the prime mover of Zionism’s crimes, and which is now actively seeking to destroy the Palestinian movement in the West.

The Israeli Law of Return is DESIGNED to create this identification. It appears to create an identification of all Jews with that ‘foreign’ bourgeois state. But in fact, it creates such a material interest for overseas-born Jewish CAPITALISTS. It’s the usual bourgeois con trick, but given an extra-territorial twist. The same one that works on the idiots putting flags on lampposts here.

No, you don’t have such an interest. That’s the whole point! But the Jewish bourgeoisie (by birth, overseas), DOES!

And if you look at the statistics, that layer is proportionately massively greater than the proportion of Jews in the general population. In the US, six of the 10 wealthiest billionaires last year were/are Jewish bourgeois. I can name them.

You don’t have their power. If you criticise them, even implicitly, for this they’ll treat you like they treat Zack Polanski.

So why the high dudgeon about them being criticised and pointed out as the bearers of Greater Israel? Surely for socialists of Jewish origin they are your enemies, because you stand with the oppressed, as you say.

The contradiction is in your head, not mine.”

He came back with the following:

“Dress this argument up as much as you like with “Marxist” verbiage, I asked a simple question about me as a working class Jew, and you patronised me, with your version of Jew hatred, essentially repeating that Jews are disproportionately rich and have a vested interest in maintaining capitalism in general and foreign country in particular.”

To which Ian responded:

“You are simply choosing to ignore everything I said. I did answer the question. My answer was clearly “no”.

In fact “no” was the second word in my reply. That no means …. ‘no’. The rest is explanation of that “no”.

What this exchange reveals is that the USFI’s accommodation to identity politics, in this case the left, Bundist-type version of Jewish identity politics, leads to reactionary, anti-communist conclusions. The key phrase in Goldbaum’s argument is that he “will always stand with the oppressed and NEVER with the oppressor”. What is key to understanding this is that this is not the same as Lenin’s call for the workers movement to be the tribune of the oppressed. Rather it comes from the Jewish Bund, it is a paraphrase of the well-known phrase of Marek Edelman, one of the leading activists and resistance leaders of the Jewish Bund in Poland before and during WWII, incluiding in the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising. His political watchword was “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” (https://www.azquotes.com/quote/933351)

Although it appears superficially similar to Lenin’s “tribune of the oppressed”, it does not say that the working-class movement is the tribune of the oppressed, but the “Jew”. It is not universal therefore, but a quasi-national concept. This is why Goldbaum regards our Marxist analysis of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste as anathema – he cannot accept that Jews, any Jews, of whatever class, can be ‘real’ oppressors. Marek’s remark, which he paraphrases, applies to Jews of all classes. This is precisely why Lenin, as is well known, was harshly critical of the ideology of the Bund for dividing the working class along national lines, and leading logically to class collaboration among Jews. Goldbaum’s contention that Ian was attacking ‘Jewish workers’ was entirely disingenuous as he clearly made no such attack. He was really objecting to Ian’s characterisation of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste as an oppressor formation. For he adheres to an ideology that sees “Jews”, not the working-class movement, as the tribune of the oppressed. This is bourgeois nationalism, not socialism, and itself akin to Zionism, as Lenin noted:

“That is precisely what the Jewish problem amounts to: assimilation or isolation?—and the idea of a Jewish “nationality” is definitely reactionary not only when expounded by its consistent advocates (the Zionists), but likewise on the lips of those who try to combine it with the ideas of Social-Democracy (the Bundists). The idea of a Jewish nationality runs counter to the interests of the Jewish proletariat, for it fosters among them, directly or indirectly, a spirit hostile to assimilation, the spirit of the ‘ghetto’” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/oct/22a.htm)

Goldbaum thus here provides the key to the bourgeois ideology being espoused by ‘Susan’ and ‘benwwk’ when they say that Ian has an ‘anti-Semitic worldview’. They don’t mean a worldview that is in any way related to the definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the dictionary, quoted earlier, but one that contradicts the view of the Bund leader Edelman, that “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” According to this, no Jew can ever be an oppressor. This is clearly not a Marxist view, as it encompasses Jews of all classes, including the wealthiest bourgeois. Parenthetically, the other version of this idea is when the adherents of this argue that such oppressors are not “real” Jews. But in any case, it is clear from this exploration that the worldview of these people, who try to condemn our ‘worldview’ as ‘anti-Semitic’ without making the slightest effort to demonstrate how that assertion is compatible with the definition in the dictionary, is not socialist at all, but a form of bourgeois nationalism. Matt Goldbaum let the cat out of the bag when he evoked Edelman, who stated that the “Jew” irrespective of class, and not the working class, is the tribune of the oppressed.

Underrepresentation and overrepresentation

The pretence that such facts about the overrepresentation of Zionist Jews in the ruling class, and fact-based analyses based on that, are of no relevance, is insulting to the intelligence of the public and the membership, so the AOC’s letter is intended to imply the facts are not true, but not to say so explicitly. And to therefore forbid discussion of these facts. The idea that these rather startling facts have no significance is not sustainable for anyone who pretends to be a Marxist. The real-world effect of denial of these facts is to cover up for racism, not to fight it, shorn of liberal guilt-trips and social-democratic obscurantism.

This can easily be demonstrated by looking at the converse case, underrepresentation of oppressed populations in the ruling class of the US. This is a classic sign of the fact that such populations are oppressed, and excluded from the benefits of the society they inhabit. US blacks are approximately 14% of the US population. In 2025 there were 14 US black billionaires, out of 902, approximately 1.5%. That out of a black population that makes up 14% of the total US population. But among those billionaires, seven of them are entertainers or sports performers, and are certainly not among the commanders of the US economy therefore. Such entertainers are very minor among the bourgeoisie – they are not owners of substantial capital – their income derives from performance revenue, not surplus value. With half of them being in his category, it is correct to say that the real representation of the US black population in the ruling class is just under 0.8%.  They certainly do not intrude into the domain of the real, dominant forces in US capitalism. So black people are underrepresented by a factor of more than 15 in the US ruling class.  

Similar things are true elsewhere but the US case is simpler to investigate because there is no complicating question of immigration involved with US blacks, whose existence in the US is as long standing as the white population. This signifies that black Americans are an oppressed population that is at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that is characteristic of imperialist capitalism in the US at least. It is also clear that the question of representation in the ruling class is intimately linked to questions involving ethnic/racial inequality in such societies. Seeking to forbid discussion of this is seeking to forbid discussion of oppression vs. privilege, which is itself racist.

This underrepresentation of black people – by a factor of 15 – in the US ruling class logically and mathematically means that white people are considerably overrepresented in the same ruling class. This is elementary arithmetic. This is an indication that white supremacy is not just a phrase, but a material reality. Logically therefore, the AOC should accuse anyone who acknowledges these facts of ‘anti-white racism’. But consistency is not the strong point of social-democrats and liberal leftists when their prejudices are in play. The same applies, necessarily, to questions involving Jewish overrepresentation, which is likewise completely factual. It does not really matter how this state of affairs came into being, the effect is the same for Palestinians and their supporters in the United States, and other places where Zionist Jews are materially overrepresented in the ruling class. Palestinians and their supporters are correspondingly massively underrepresented in the ruling class. The fact that this Jewish overrepresentation is the product of a long history that we as Marxists have sought to address by the Marxist method, by incorporating and extending the seminal Marxist work on the Jewish Question, does not make this Jewish-Zionist material advantage one iota less severe for Palestinians and their supporters.

Hannah’s degenerate abuse of Marxists to Defend Genociders

In this context, it is clear that Simon Hannah’s repeated Nazi-baiting – attempting to smear as Nazis anyone who dares to speak of ‘Jewish supremacism’ – is a form of anti-Palestinian racist abuse by proxy. There are several examples of this:

“What is this obsession with “Jewish supremacy”?

“Zionism exists as a form of Jewish nationalism which by the fact of its colonialism of historic Palestine is genocidal.

“But the framing of it constantly as “Jewish supremacy” smacks of a sly form of anti-semitism”

This was his preamble, directed against David Miller. Apparently, it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to refer to Zionism’s “colonialism of historic Palestine” which he admits is “genocidal” as “Jewish supremacy” or “Jewish supremacism”.  He then denounces Miller, without context, for making “constant” references to ”genocidal, bloodthirsty Jewish supremacists”.

But the context is simple – in October 2023, Israel began a genocide, the mass extermination of the people of Gaza. There is nothing more bloodthirsty and supremacist than genocide and the extermination that has been practiced by Netanyahu’s troops since October 2023. If anything, these remarks are too mild. Why?  Because ANY mere verbal remarks must necessarily be too mild compared to the real-world extermination of hundreds of thousands that has happened. The massive torture, the rapes, the barbarism that has ensured cannot be adequately captured in words, just as is also true of the Warsaw Ghetto massacre, or other Nazi crimes. Any form of condemnation would therefore not be enough. By these standards, Miller’s quoted words are mild indeed.

Then we have Simon Hannah as the soft racist, Ziophile caricature of Andrei Vyshinsky, the prosecutor of the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, who branded Trotskyists as fascists because of their opposition to Stalin. Hannah tries this on David Miller, but he reveals his own softness on Zionism when he asks:

“Who said the British state has been ‘totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists’

A) David Miller

B) Britain First”

The correct answer to that is “Who cares – is it true?”. Why are Britain First worse than the kind of people who are persecuting Palestine Action for opposing the genocide that the four main bourgeois parties, Labour, Tories, Reform and Lib Dems, all support? Such supremacists have indeed, by whatever means, taken over British politics, and the recent Filton 6 fraudulent retrial and Palestine Action appeal show that they control much of the judiciary also. Their control of the police is shown by the activities of Mark Rowley in London, and their forcing out of the West Midlands chief constable for stopping genocidal Tel Aviv Maccabees fans from coming to Birmingham for a pogrom against Aston’s mixed-ethnicity population last November.

So how are these monsters worse than the neo-Nazi Britain First? By his posing of the question, he really does show that he thinks Netanyahu’s racist murderers are not so bad. Without that concept in mind, he would not ask that question in the first place! What that question really means is that he thinks Zionist genocide is preferable to Nazi genocide and that anyone who does not agree is anti-Semitic. That clearly indicates that Simon Hannah has racist, Ziophile, supremacist views even if he has not fully thought through the logic of them.

He repeats the point when he says:

“I just think that socialists should stay away from being anti-Semitic and constantly talking about “Jews” and “Jewish supremacy” – Sounds quite fascist.”

This just reveals that he thinks Jewish Supremacy and Zionist genocide are not ‘fascist’, and that ‘fascism’ is something far worse. But it isn’t. What is happening in Gaza is a holocaust, hidden by banning of media and the large-scale murder of journalists who try to cover the Nazi-like crimes of Israel.

And then we have Hannah’s Nazi-baiting Ian for correcting a factual error about the ethnic origin and ethnic politics of Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-billionaire owner of Meta. The factual error in this discussion was made by Laurence, the delegate from Bromley, who Ian describes as “a pleasant but naïve left social democrat”, who said, in response to the point in the Red Partisan article that laid out the facts, that 6 out of the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the US are Jewish and purveyors of Zionist ethnic politics:

“Laurence

On the numbers, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are not Jewish.

So that’s at least 5 who aren’t

Ian D

Zuckerberg certainly is

Laurence

Larry Page and Zuckerberg are both atheist

I think this entire narrative is silly. Its drawing lines where they don’t exist.

Ian D

So were Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky. [i.e., atheists]”

Then further down, we get:

“Simon H quotes Ian D

“Zuckerberg certainly is”

Are we playing “spot the Jew” now? I don’t think this is good or right”

Correcting a factual error about the communal identity of Mark Zuckerberg is supposedly anti-Semitic, fascist or Nazi-like, according to Simon Hannah. This is racist Ziophilia – another manifestation of an attempt to defend Zionist criminality through fake innuendo that the person correctly stating the facts about who they are, is stating facts for ‘anti-Semitic’ reasons. It amounts to the same innuendo: someone who insists on correct facts on this is some kind of racist. It’s insulting to the intelligence of any normal person. As Zuckerberg is clearly deeply supportive of, and involved in Israel’s genocide.

When Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, recently proposed the creation of a database of British citizens who had fought for the IDF, the Zionist Daily Telegraph published an article by infamous Jewish Chronicle racist Stephen Pollard headlined “Zack Polanski wants a Jew register. What could be more sinister than that?” It then went on “The Green leader’s demand for a database of British-Israeli citizens who have fought for Israel is breathtakingly blatant”. The innuendo of ‘anti-Semitism” in this is identical to Hannah’s smear that to correct a mistake about who Zuckerberg is, means playing “spot the Jew”. Both are in defence of criminals of the current genocide. Those British citizens who fight for in the IDF will almost certainly also have Israeli citizenship, and they will virtually always be Jewish. So what? They are racist criminals who willingly left to fight in a genocidal army! (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/05/zack-polanski-jew-register-more-sinister/)

Zuckerberg is also a criminal. He is probably the most powerful social media baron in the world, the head of Meta which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and also WhatsApp, the most used mobile messenger app in the world. According to Drop Site News, in April 2025:

“A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorship-meta)

That tells you all you need to know about Mark Zuckerberg. He is a primary member of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste – Israel’s international dimension. Indeed, Drop Site News makes this clear when it writes:

“Government requests for takedowns generally focus on posts made by citizens inside that government’s borders, Meta insiders said. What makes Israel’s campaign unique is its success in censoring speech in many countries outside of Israel. What’s more, Israel’s censorship project will echo well into the future, insiders said, as the AI program Meta is currently training how to moderate content will base future decisions on the successful takedown of content critical of Israel’s genocide.” (ibid)

This is truly sinister. Under Zuckerberg, Meta has complied with 94% of requests for censorship from the state perpetrating the genocide – that is, trying to cover up for this genocide like a latter-day David Irving on acid. At least Irving wrote his awful apologias years after Hitler was dead and the Nazi holocaust was over. Whereas the genocide in Gaza is still going on, and is being extended to the West Bank, Lebanon, and to a degree even Iran – and every act of censorship and suppression of news about these events makes it easier for Israel to continue its mass-murdering.

Another example of Zuckerberg’s censorship of the internet has been the banning of Track AIPAC, an initiative on the fringe of the US Democrats that aimed to monitor and counter AIPAC interference in US elections. AIPAC’s interference aims to force out anyone sympathetic to the Palestinians in any party. Zuckerberg is thus directly involved in trying to suppress opposition to genocide in US politics (see https://thedemlabs.org/2026/02/12/why-meta-banned-track-aipac-joel-kaplan/)

By any objective standard, all these make Mark Zuckerberg’s current activities far worse than Irving’s literary denial of the Nazi holocaust years after it was over. Irving’s work had no impact on the course of the actual Nazi holocaust either way, but Zuckerberg’s genocide-denying censorship means he is not merely a genocide denier, but a genocide accomplice and indirect perpetrator in the current, ongoing genocide. And that’s not even touching on any military role that Meta’s many software arms are likely to be playing in this genocide.

So, when Simon Hannah accuses Ian of playing ‘spot the Jew’ for correcting a factual error about Zuckerberg’s Jewish origin to note that he is part of the 60% of the 10 richest US billionaires who are part of the Jewish-Zionist caste, he is race-baiting Ian for not being Jewish, in order to defend a genocide denier/perpetrator who is demonstrably much worse than the Nazi genocide denier, David Irving. This is a pretty disgusting level for a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ to sink to. Similar to Stephen Pollard. No one with integrity would engage in this kind of disgusting behaviour.

Hannah’s argument: ‘Zionist Genocide is less bad than Nazi Genocide – Anyone who disagrees is anti-Semitic’. Also, Bad Faith and Ignorance regarding Abram Leon’s work.

It is a reflection of a huge contradiction in Hannah’s politics, and that of the USFI. He professes to believe that “Zionism exists as a form of Jewish nationalism which by the fact of its colonialism of historic Palestine is genocidal.” He said that Zionism is genocidal Jewish nationalism. One would think that nothing could be worse than being genocidal. But naming the diaspora super-rich perpetrators of that foul form of “Jewish nationalism” is apparently worse than “genocidal”.  He holds that anyone who names such bourgeois adherents of this genocidal ethnic nationalism should be excluded from party and working-class democracy. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that his professed antipathy to “genocidal” Zionism is insincere, and he prefers said genocidal Zionism to meaningful left-wing criticism of it. Hannah is therefore a fraud; his anti-Zionism is not sincere. He is anti-Zionist in words, Zionist in deeds, anti-racist in words, racist in deeds.

His antics, and that of the ACR, around the work of Abram Leon, evidence lack of education and contempt for Leon’s work, while attempting to pay lip service to it. Hannah’s comrade Jessica M was not aware of Leon’s people-class understanding of Jewish history at all, or that Leon, as well as being a martyr in Auschwitz, was a close associate of Ernest Mandel, the historic leader of the USFI until his death in 1995.. But Hannah feebly distorted Leon’s views as part of his smear, and revealed his own ignorance also.

There was an extended exchange on Abram Leon’s book where Simon Hannah tried to make out that this work was akin to a bourgeois, Zionist tract arguing (as such people do) that Jews have always been oppressed throughout history. And that any dissent from this is akin to the Protocols of Zion:

“Ian D quotes Simon H

“Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as bankers”

Yes indeed. But he never lived to see the creation of Israel as a transplanted imperialist oppressor state. Some of the things that he analysed made that possible.

Israel is not Liberia or Sierra Leone.

[…]

Ian D quotes Simon H

“Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as ban

Actually Leon’s position was that Jews became oppressed when the people-class was rendered obsolete by the beginnings of capitalism, as feudalism declined. He did NOT say that the people-class came into existence because of some prior oppression of Jews. In the early period of feudalism – he talked about Charlemagne – the Jews were a privileged, intermediary layer. The view that you are echoing here, that Jews were always oppressed, is a liberal or even liberal-Zionist view, not a Marxist one.

There is a passage in that work where Leon explicitly attacks the notion that the people-class was created by a prior oppression of the Jews.

Simon H

So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?

Ian D

No, Jews today are not a class. They are a multi-class population with a top-heavy social structure that is partly a product of their earlier role before capitalism, and accentuated by the genocide in Hitler’s day when the more working class, radical Jews were disproportionately wiped out. With the collaboration of the Zionists in some notorious instances – like Hungary

Ian D quoting Simon H

“So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?”

And the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layer I am talking about is not a class either. It’s a distinct caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie with a material interest in Israel through the racist Law of Return.

A caste is PART of a class with a special interest or purpose. The caste I am talking about has some similarities with labour bureaucracies within the working class movement. A layer within our class movement with it’s own special interests that are not those of the rest of the class.

That bourgeois caste/layer is trying to suppress the Palestine movement in the West. There is nothing racist about pointing this out. The caste being criticised though is genocidal in its racism.

Ian D quoting Simon H

“So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?”

And there is no global trans-national bourgeoisie in any case. The bourgeoisie can not abolish the nation state. The only layer within the bourgeoisie that PARTLY transcends that, is the Jewish-Zionist caste I am talking about. But only partly – they may exist in an organised way across some borders but their real loyalty is to Israel. So they are not fully transnational either.

Only the international proletariat, objectively, has no country. That is orthodox Marxism.

This obvious hackery caused him to be criticised by the other Simon for not arguing in good faith and distorting Ian’s views:

“Simon (not Simon H)

@Simon H I think there are some wrong things in lan’s argumentation. But I think it’s better to have good faith debates. Your last response there was quite bad. May I suggest that you try to prove your argument better? You can’t just keep repeating the charge and then try twist his words.”

Though Simon (not Simon H)’s limitations are shown by his remark that Jewish supremacism could only exist in Israel, “NOT IN BRITAIN”, which exposes his own liberal/social-democratic social conditioning and bias in favour of excepting Jewish-Zionist racist bourgeois in the West from Marxist criticism for their material interest in Israel, racism and supremacism.  Despite such prejudice, Simon (not Simon H) evidenced a flash of recognition of Simon Hannah’s mendacity and arguing in bad faith.

What is incredible is Simon Hannah’s assertion that in citing Leon’s own views on the origin of the people-class in the early medieval period, Ian was echoing ‘anti-Semitic tropes:

“Ian D quotes Simon H

‘Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as bankers”

Actually Leon’s position was that Jews became oppressed when the people-class was rendered obsolete by the beginnings of capitalism, as feudalism declined. He did NOT say that the people-class came into existence because of some prior oppression of Jews. In the early period of feudalism – he talked about Charlemagne – the Jews were a privileged, intermediary layer. The view that you are echoing here, that Jews were always oppressed, is a liberal or even liberal-Zionist view, not a Marxist one.

There is a passage in that work where Leon explicitly attacks the notion that the people-class was created by a prior oppression of the Jews.

Simon H

So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?

The logic of this exchange is that Simon Hannah considers that Abram Leon’s work itself was anti-Semitic. Because Ian was correctly relating Leon’s views about the medieval period, even as late as the 11^th and 12^th Century, i.e., considerably after Charlemagne, who lived in the 8^th/9^th Century. Two passages quoted below:

“This false conception of Jewish historians finds its counterpart in the proposition according to which the Jews has to abandon their ‘agricultural profession’ because of legal bans. It is incorrect ‘to assert that the Jews were forbidden to own land. Wherever we find Jews doing business in the medieval cities, they are likewise the owners of their own houses.  Moreover they often possessed larger pieces of land in the territory of the city. Truthfully speaking, it does not appear that they cultivated these lands anywhere. As soon as land came into their hands as security, they tried to sell it. It was not because they were forbidden to keep it but simply because they had no desire to do so.  We often find in the records, however, that vineyards, orchards, flax fields, etc., belonged to Jews. The products of these lands could easily be sold.’ Cunow, Allgemeine Wirtschaftgeschichte, vol 3, p 112.” (Leon op cit, footnote 13, p 140)

And then:

“As it is infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the ‘predispositions of the Jews’ just so it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persecutions and of legal bans against exercising other professions than commerce or usury. ‘In numerous writings on the economic life of the Jews in the Middle Ages, it is stated that they were excluded, from the beginning, from artisanry, from traffic in goods, and that they were prohibited from possessing land property. This is only a fable. In fact, in the twelfth century and in the thirteenth century, living in practically all of the great cities of Western Germany, they dwelt among the Christians and enjoyed the same civil rights as the latter… at Cologne, during an entire period, the Jews even possessed the right to compel a Christian, who had a claim to make against a Jew, to appear before Jewish judges in order to have the matter judged according to Hebraic law… it is just as false to assert that Jews could not be admitted into the artisan guilds. True, several guilds did not admit what were termed ‘Jewish children’ as apprentices but this was not the case for all the guilds. The existence of Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths, even in the period when the guild rules became far more severe, is sufficient proof of this. There were certainly few Jewish blacksmiths, masons and carpenters among the artisans of the Middle Ages, but Jewish parents who gave their children into apprenticeship in these trades were very rare. Even the guilds which excluded the Jews did not do so out of religious animosity or racial hatred but because the trades of usury and peddling were reputedly ‘dishonest’…. The guilds excluded the children of Jewish businesspeople engaged in usury or peddling, in the same way that they did not accept the sons of simple labourers, carters and boatsmen, barbers and weavers of linen into their ranks.’)” (Leon op cit, p142-143)

You can agree with this, or disagree with it. But to attack Ian as ‘anti-Semitic’ for referring to it in this discussion implies that Leon’s own work was ‘anti-Semitic’. Quite a leap for supporters of the USFI.

The USFI – A Stinking Corpse

The USFI is not a Marxist or Trotskyist organisation, but an indicator of how the Trotskyist movement has been destroyed and degraded since the real Fourth International, the revolutionary international party founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, collapsed and splintered into fragments in the early 1950s. The USFI emerged by the early 1960s as the largest fragment but went from cheerleaders for ‘radical’ Stalinism – Castro and Ho Chi Minh in the 1960 and 1970s to cheerleaders for capitalist restoration in the guise of ‘democracy’ in the 1980 and 1990s, to cheerleaders for imperialist “colour revolutions” and aggression like the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, Obama and Cameron’s 2011 invasion of Libya in 2011, NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine today, and the US/Israeli attempt at a Maidan type ‘uprising’ at the beginning of 2026 in Iran, which was an integral part of the preparation for the US/Israeli attack on Iran on 28^th February. In Britain, ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’ is the latest name for the USFI’s British section, earlier it was called ‘Socialist Resistance’, which acquired the nickname “Resisting Socialism” by more revolutionary-minded elements on the British left. They really are hardly better than the openly Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty, who defend the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the IHRA Pseudo-Definition of ‘Anti-Semitism’, and have maintained a decades-long smear campaign saying that anyone on the left who does not accept the Nakba outcome, and Israel’s existence through ethnic cleansing, is ‘anti-Semitic’.

The AWL is the Trojan Horse within the broad ‘Your Party’ movement that would be the source of a ‘Friends of Israel’ faction, which would be the kiss of death to such a party. The USFI/ACR are their barely ‘left’ protectors. They are not the Fourth International; they are nothing like the international party that the left needs. They are a small-scale version of what Rosa Luxemburg said about German Social Democracy after its historic betrayal in 1914 – a social-imperialist, poisonous, stinking corpse. They are a right-wing sectarian threat to genuinely left-wing, revolutionary trends within the Your Party milieu. And while organisational unity of left trends is vital, without programmatic struggle, including and especially against Zionist influence, the party project would be sabotaged.

 It is no accident either that this witchhunt kicked off shortly after our comrades, supporters of the Consistent Democrats, British Section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, put a motion to the Members Charter conference on party democracy that proposed the proscription of Zionist trends. The USFI would be bound to react in a hostile manner to this proposal, as they are the left-wing of the genocide machine, as shown by Hannah’s outrageous defence of the Zionist genocidaire oligarch Zuckerberg against being identified as part of the genocidal Jewish-Zionist caste.  

Those who witchhunt and abuse genuine socialists for their anti-Zionist views should be aware that anti-Zionist views are now a protected characteristic of philosophical belief in British law, and it opens them to legal claims. Working class militants should be prepared to defend their democratic rights by legal means, including against elements in the workers movement who overstep the bounds of bourgeois legality to attack the democratic rights of others on the left. There is nothing in Ian’s views that imply any attack on anyone for their Jewish origin, and the implication otherwise is simply a lie, and potentially actionable also.

Appendix: Transcript of a witchhunt – laid out in full, in flagrante…

Forwarded (comment by Simon – not Simon H)

David Miller can do some good journalism. But the real problems with him are his politics. His critique of Zionism is not socialist.

Ian D Quotes Simon

“David Miller can do some good journalism. But the real problems with him are his politics. His critique of Zionism is not socialist.”

He clearly does regard himself as a Marist and thereby a socialist in that interview, and criticises much of the left for adopting liberalism and the approach of Karl Popper. Whether or not he is correct on every detail, he is basing himself on facts, and that interview is crammed with facts.

Facts may be disturbing, but the Zionist movement is disturbing. Indeed, there is plenty about the Zionist movement that is even more disturbing than some of those things. Like Netanyahu’s threatened lawsuit against the NYT for reporting on Israel’s use of dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This is so well-known in Israel that ‘comedians’ make ‘jokes’ about it on TV.

Then there is the $32 million that AIPAC and other opponents just spent outing the dissenting GOP representative Thomas Massie, in Kentucky, who has moved to have AIPAC treated as a foreign agent, and was one of the authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

1 don’t see David Miller equating Zionism with all Jews. What he seems to be critical of is that much on the left regards a focus on those facts as being so damning that anyone doing so must be in some way anti-Semitic.

The Zionist movement has considerable power in the world. Whether it is powerful enough to create a Jewish empire is seriously doubtful. Simply because the population base it would have to base that on is far too small. I see Zionism being the project of an ethnic caste within the bourgeoisie that has made Israel a unique imperialist power that punches way above what ought to be its weight internationally. I don’t see them as creating a worldwide Empire so much as overextending themselves and heading for a fall. Le hubris, heading for nemesis. But these are legitimate questions to debate. Strong stuff, but Zionist conduct and crimes are even stronger stuff.

Carlos quotes Ian D:

“He clearly does regard himself as a Marist and thereby a socialist in that interview, and criticises much of the left for adopting liberalism and the approach of Karl Popper. Whether or not he is correct on every detail, he is basing himself on facts, and that interview is crammed with facts….”

That is very well said and written

Simon quotes Ian D

“He clearly does regard himself as a Marxist and thereby a socialist in that interview, and criticises much of the left for adopting liberalism and the approach of Karl Popper. Whether or not he is correct on every detail, he is basing himself on facts, and that interview is crammed with facts…”

He does not outline his theoretical framework in this interview.

Ian D quotes Simon

“He does not outline his theoretical framework in this interview.”

True. He’s more of a journalist and activist than a theorist. It would be better if he did.

Simon

He believes in ‘jewish surpremacy’ as in the liberal ‘white surpremacy’ theory which is popular in the US. I was trying to find this one polemic against him. but its not coming up right now

Ian D

White supremacy certainly exists as a programme and ideology. Jewish supremacy appears likewise to be a major trend. They are forms of racist ideology. I don‘t see anything wrong with saying that exists and plays an important role today.

Simon

They treat it more as a material fact, rather than the ideological conviction.

Carlos quotes Ian D

“True. He’s more of a journalist and activist than a theorist. It would be better if he did.”

He is an academic foremost. Turned activist and then journalist due to change in circumstances. Most well known for making anti-Zionism a protected characteristic

Ian D

Surely its both in some situations

Simon quotes Ian D

“Surely its both in some situations”

Yes, in Palestine and Israel.

NOT IN BRITAIN

Carlos quotes Ian D

“White supremacy certainly exists as a programme and ideology. Jewish supremacy appears likewise to be a major trend. They are forms of racist ideology. I don’t see anything wrong with saying that exists and plays an important role today.”

Jewish supremacy is at the core of the apartheid system in Israel. This is undeniable. Arguably Jewish exeptionalism is more of an issue in the West given the numbers needed to really make any type of supremacy work effectively IMO

Ian D provides link to article headlined “US Hegemony Drains Away Through Israeli Achilles Heel – Consistent Democrats – LCFI” “Trump and Netanyahu’s war-escapade is burying US world hegemony. it has backfired and they haven’t got a clue how to defeat Iran.” www consistent democrats org

Well, the repression against the Palestine movement outside Israel makes no sense without elements of that likewise outside Israel. Some ideas on that here:

hitps://www.consistent-democrats. org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/

Simon

Its imperialism

Ian D

Indeed it is. And relations within imperialism can be complex

Floyd Codlin

If Miller is a “Marxist” then fts bastardisation is complete.

Maher

Miller is nowhere near a socialist, let alone a Marxist. He fully supports Iran and Hezbollah, he’s absolutely pathetic.

Floyd Codlin quotes Maher

“Miller is nowhere near a socialist, let alone a Marist. He fully supports Iran and Hezbollah, he’s absolutely pathetic”

If he said he supported the resistance than I’d be ok with that, as the resistance also includes Doctors, teachers, nurses, fathers, mothers, sibling, ambulance workers, historians, bakers, neighbours, etc. Hamas and Iran/Yemen are but part of the resistance who get the main focus because of their armed responses to the US/Isreal/regional powers. In tun this makes it more difficult for democracy and civil society to develop as fighting the war is the demand made that supersedes all

Carlos quotes Maher

“Miller is nowhere near a socialist, let alone a Marxist. He fully supports Iran and Hezbollah, he’s absolutely pathetic”

Are you a Pahlavist Maher?

Ian D quotes Floyd Codlin

“If he said he supported the resistance than I’d be ok with that, as the resistance also includes Doctors, teachers, nurses, fathers, mothers, sibling, ambulance workers, historians, bakers, neighbours, etc. Hamas and Iran/ Yemen are but part of the resistance who get the main focus because o…”

Well, there is support and support. These societies are being targeted by genocidal wars where entire populations are the target. More like the Eastern front in WW2 than the Western Front. That tends to undermine much political space and render nuances less relevant. It’s correct to back popular resistance toward a genocidal war almost irrespective of the dominant banner. Its a comprehensible thing

Simon H quotes Ian D

“White supremacy certainly exists as a programme and ideology. Jewish supremacy appears likewise to be a major trend. They are forms of racist ideology. I don’t see anything wrong with saying that exists and plays an important role today.”

What is this obsession with “Jewish supremacy”?

Zionism exists as a form of Jewish nationalism which by the fact of its colonialism of historic Palestine is genocidal.

But the framing of it constantly as “Jewish supremacy” smacks of a sly form of anti semtism

It reminds me of certain people who talk about a “Jewish subculture” – the kind of comment that fascists might make about insidious forces “corroding * a society from within which is a classic anti semetic trope.

If David Miller used Zionism to refer to the political project of Israeli nationalism that is one thing but his constant reference to “genocidal, bloodthirsty Jewish supremacists” and so on reveals a man who is obsessed with the image of The Jew in a way that any anti semite would be.

Who said it the British star has been “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists”

A) David Miller

B) Britain First

Ian D

The Daily Mail supported Hitler in his day and now supports Zionism with equal ferocity. Both Zionism and Hitlerism have similar elements of bloodthirsty supremacism.

This is why Zionists get the plaudits that used to be given to Nazis. A minority of the far right adhere to the old version, but the bulk of them support Zionism.

The latest Zionist patter is that to accuse Israel of genocide is ‘anti-Semitic’. The repression currently carried out in the West against the Palestine movement is not rational from the standpoint of those imperialist countries where it is happening.

That method of argument has a bad history if you remember the Moscow trials. But a Zionist genocidal state did not exist then. This potentially makes for worse variants of that.

Simon H

Yeah that’s all a load of Whataboutery though.

David Miller fixates not on Zionism but on Jews and Jewish supremacy because he is fixated on Jewish people as a problem and some people on the left support him because they can’t tell the difference between anti Zionism and anti semitism

Ian D quotes Simon H

“Yeah that’s all a load of Whataboutery though”

I don’t see any evidence he is driven by anything other than rage at Zionist crimes.

Simon H

Yes but ian, weren’t you expelled from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for anti semitism? Was that to do with your view that there is some kind of global Jewish trans national bourgeoisie?

hitps://www.palestinecampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/Membership-Appeal-2021.pdf

Carlos quotes Simon H

“What is this obsession with “Jewish supremacy”?”

Zionism goes beyond nationalism. Apartheid cannot exist without some sort of supremacy at its core. The UN Human Rights Council has concluded that Israel’s control over the Palestinian territories is tantamount to apartheid. So are many of the laws governing Palestinians inside ‘Israel’ including the latest execution law. You can call it what you wish, but supremacy it certainly is as far as the evidence shows.

Ian D

It’s not ‘whataboutery’ It’s about the same subject matter. Whataboutery is when Zionists start talking about Xinjiang.

Simon H

I just thing that socialists should stay away from being anti semitic and constantly talking about “Jews” and “Jewish supremecy” – Sounds quite fascist.

Ian D quoting Simon H

“Yes but ian, weren’t you expelled from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for anti semitism? Was that to do with your view that there is some kind of global Jewish trans national bourgeoisie?”

My views are very well known on this. I was also cleared of this smear by Left Unity.

1 suggest you read the Red Partisan article I linked to above and try to demonstrate that any of its factually untrue.

Is it not true that your political trend support the NATO/Nazi Maidan proxy war against Russia in the Donbass, and also supported the imperialist attack on Libya in 2011

Ian D quoting Simon H

“I just think that socialists should stay away from being anti semitic and constantly talking about “Jews” and “Jewish supremecy” – Sounds quite fascist.”

Those who do are attacking racial supremacism, not Jews. Just as those who attack white supremacism are attacking … racial supremacism, not white people generally. This is liberalism, not Marxism.

Simon H

Do you still believe in a “pan-national Jewish bourgeoisie”?

Ian D

Is that a quote?

I referred to a pan-imperialist Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, in the US and much of Western Europe. Which has a material interest in Israel through Israel’s racist citizenship laws. It’s an extension of the Israeli ruling class. Today itis trying to crush the Palestine movement in the West

Do you deny your support for Nazi terrorists in Ukraine

Carlos quoting Simon H

“I just thing that socialists should stay away from being anti semitic and constantly talking about “Jews and “Jewish supremecy” – Sounds quite fascist.”

No one here has been talking about “Jews” and painting a whole group of people with the same brush. Of course we oppose anti-semitism in all its forms and racism towards all semites. Would you be happy to label the apartheid system in Israel Zionist supremacy’?

Ian D

It is a caste within the bourgeoisie with a special interest in Israel. Somewhat analogous to the labour bureaucracy in the workers movement that has a special interest in class collaboration with employers.

Simon H quoting Carlos

“No one here has been talking about “Jews” and painting a whole group of people with the same brush. Of course we oppose anti-semitism in all its forms and racism towards all semites. Would you be happy to label the apartheid system in Israel Zionist supremacy?”

This is what David Miller does. That’s why I wanted to challenge this support for him as some kind of anti Zionist champion

Carlos quoting Simon H

“This is what David Miler does. That’s why I wanted to challenge this support for him as some kind of anti Zionist champion”

Who here has shown this kind of support? Why are you so obsessed with him anyway? This conversation was about TCFS and its presenter.

Simon H quoting Ian D

“It is a caste within the bourgeoisie with a special interest in Israel. Somewhat analogous to the labour bureaucracy in the workers movement that has a special interest in class collaboration with employers.”

And the Jews are the main part of it? Why say Jewish if you just mean Zionist? Do you think the Jewish trans national bourgeise (?) are some kind of vanguard for reaction?

How is this any different to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Simon H quoting Carlos

“Who here has shown this kind of support? Why are you so obsessed with him anyway? This conversation was about TCFS and its presenter…”

Scroll up and read the comments from lan supporting him and then you chiming in with the “Jewish supremecy” stuff

Carlos quoting Simon H

“And the Jews are the main part of it? Why say Jewish if you just mean Zionist? Do you think the Jewish trans national bourgeoise (2) are some kind of vanguard for reaction?”

Do you have the same problem when people use the label Christian Zionist” or ‘Islamic supremacist’. Do you spend the same amount of time telling people not to use these terms? –

Simon H

This kind of language is wrecking the left.

We need clear anti Zionism that doesn’t equivocate into this fixation on Jewish people. End of story.

Carlos quoting Simon H

“This kind of language is wrecking the left”

Sorry, but the only one ‘fixated’ here seems to be you!

Simon H quoting Carlos

“Do you have the same problem when people use the label ‘Christian Zionist” or ‘Islamic supremacist’. Do you spend the same amount of time telling people not to use these terms?”

Because Christianity and Islam are religions but Jewish people are – in large part – an ethnic group, not primarily a religion so I hope you can appreciate the difference.

Ian D quoting Simon H

“And the Jews are the main part of it? Why say Jewish if you just mean Zionist? Do you think the Jewish trans national bourgeoise (2) are some kind of vanguard for reaction?”

Er.. because the project of Zionism is, and always has been, that of an exclusivist Jewish state. Zionism is the dominant Jewish trend.

It’s far from the only Jewish trend but it is the dominant bourgeois Jewish trend.

Pretending to oppose Zionism without attacking Jewish racial supremacism is like pretending to oppose the Ku Klux Klan while refusing to attack white supremacism.

Carlos quoting Simon H

“Because Christianity and Islam are religions but Jewish people are – in large part – an ethnic group, not primarily a religion so I hope you can appreciate the difference.”

Don’t go there….there are Jews of many and varied ethnicities. Black, Arab, Chinese, you name it..this is not what this chat is about

Philip quoting Ian D

“I referred to a pan-imperialist Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, in the US and much of Western Europe. Which has a material interest in Israel through Israel’s racist citizenship laws. It is an extension of the Israeli ruling class. Today itis trying to crush the Palestine movement in the West”

Who ARE you? I mean ‘My views on this are well known. Get you. What a sense of your own importance. & I ‘suggest you read the Red Partisan article’ too. JHC. What is a Red Partisan? Is it some sort of lettuce you saw in Waitrose? And then ‘Do you deny your supportfor Nazi terrorists in Ukraine? That’s NOT a question or a chess move. It’s a line from a self-satisfied smart arse.

Either all of the above or you’re one of those awful people who are paid to cause havoc in nascent socialist movements by starting rows and causing dissension.

My views on that sort of thing are not as well known as your views it seems (lets me and you …contact a mathematician, we could have come up with a way of dividing 0…that would have some utility) but if you are as it seems to me a deliberate state sanctioned low level security operative go and fill in a report saying you and your ilk would be much better spending their time ‘thwarting the greedy rich power hungry pigs who have fucked this country (eg your bosses) than pissing about with people who just want to improve the world – most of us.

Or Do you deny your obvious support for the ruling class of this country?”

See, what a dick I sound?

That’s you that is

Maher quotes Carlos

“Are you a Pahlavist Maher?”

No, I’m someone who supports the Iranian people like Anahita does. We want democracy and secular rule.

Ian D quotes Simon H

“Because Christianity and Islam are religions but Jewish people are – in large part – an ethnic group, not primarily a religion so I hope you can appreciate the difference.”

Jews are in a way an ethnoreligious group but they are also the descendants … or remnants … of a pre-capitalist commodity trading class. As described at length by Abram Leon, the Trotskyist leader murdered by the Nazis in WW2. Which is even more crucial for a Marxist to explain what is happening now.

Maher

Yeah, you lot are doing way too much here.

Ian quotes Philip

Who ARE you? I mean ‘My views on this are well known. Get you. What a sense of your own importance. & I suggest you read the Red Partisan article’ too. JHC. What is a Red Partisan? Is it some sort of lettuce you saw in Waitrose? And then ‘Do you deny your support for Nazi terrorists i…”

This is a space for political debate.

Jessica quotes Ian D

“Jews are in a way an ethnoreligious group but they are also the descendants .. or remnants … of a pre-capitalist commodity trading class. As described at length by Abram Leon, the Trotskyist leader murdered by the Nazis in WW2. Which is even more crucial for a Marxist to explain wha…”

I’m sorry Ian, I know I’ve worked with you productively, but you think pre-WW2 Jews were a “pre-capitalist commodity trading class”..??? Unto themselves? Pretty sure my ancestors were peasants and farm labourers lol

Carlos quoting Maher

“No, I’m someone who supports the Iranian people like Anahita does. We want democracy and secular rule.”

Glad to hear that

Simon H quotes Carlos

“Don’t go there… there are Jews of many and varied ethnicities. Black, Arab, Chinese, you name it…this is not what this chat is about”

We all know what is meant when some people talk about Jewish people. Anti Semites like to make sweeping comments about Jewish supremacy and then when you push back they rush to appeared “nuanced”

Carlos quotes Simon H

We all know what is meant when some people talk about Jewish people. Anti Semites like to make sweeping comments about Jewish supremacy and then when you push back they rush to appeared “nuanced”

Why are you clearly trying to stir something up in this chat that was never there in the first place?

Ian D quotes Jessisca

“Im sorry lan, I know I’ve worked with you productively, but you think pre-WW2 Jews were a “pre-capitalist commodity trading class”. ??? Unto themselves? Pretty sure my ancestors were peasants and farm labourers lol”

Not pre-WW2. Pre-capitalist. That doesn’t come from me but from Abram Leon. The martyred Jewish Trotskyist leader (in Auschwitz) who was an associate of Ernest Mandel.

I’m surprised ACR comrades don’t know about his work: “The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation” written around 1942. He was murdered in 1944. My work has always been based on his understanding.

And I’ve been witchhunted for it. That’s the lot of those who defend Marxist ideas which are often not popular.

James Kulmer

Comrades, lets not start levelling personal accusations at one another. Vehemently disagreeing with a viewpoint is fine, but levelling accusations is not.

On the subject matter at hand, the majority of the bad blood in this argument is through poor terminology. We all clearly agree that the system of oppression and genocide in Israel, and the ideology that legitimises it – Zionism -is pernicious and to be totally opposed. The problems here are derived from ambiguity around the term “Jewish’. In my view, given how ambiguous it is, it should be done away with. Be specific. Referring to “Jewish supremacy” is going to be interpreted negatively, regardless of whether the intended meaning was ‘the supremacy of the Jewish ethnicity by proponents of Zionism as practiced within the apartheid state of Israel”. Just be specific.

Ian D

https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/leon/Abram_Leon_The_Jewish_Question.pdf

Simon H quotes Ian D

“https://www.marists.org/ebooks/leon/Abram_Leon_The_Jewish_Question pdf”

Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as bankers

Philip quotes Maher

“No, I’m someone who supports the Iranian people like Anahita does. We want democracy and secular rule.”

@Carlos Maher also shut someone up when challenged about what he actually knew about the problems of capitalism in Britain when he replied, “Look mate I’m living in it”

I think @Maher was supposed to say, Ooh, no. Not really. Please tell me what | should be thinking and I’l take notes.

Carlos quotes James Kulmer

“Comrades, lets not start levelling personal accusations at one another. Vehemently disagreeing with a viewpoint is fine, but levelling accusations is not.”

“the supremacy of the Jewish ethnicity by proponents of Zionism as practiced within the apartheid state of Israel glad someone gets it unequivocally, though I can’t see it as a very catchy, easy to remember term

Ian D quotes Simon H

“Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as bankers”

Yes indeed. But he never lived to see the creation of Israel as a transplanted imperialist oppressor state. Some of the things that he analysed made that possible.

Israel is not Liberia or Sierra Leone.

James Kulmer quotes  Carlos

“the supremacy of the Jewish ethnicity by proponents of Zionism as practiced within the apartheid state of Israel” glad someone gets it unequivocally, though | can’t see it as a very catchy, easy to remember term”

Indeed – if only inventing new words and phrases were so easy.

Ian D quotes Simon H

“Leon’s entire argument is that Jews were OPPRESSED in pre capitalist societies and forced into certain economic positions. If you extrapolate from that Jewish people now form a PRIVILEGED position then you’re just repeating anti semitic tropes about Jews as bankers”

Actually Leon’s position was that Jews became oppressed when the people-class was rendered obsolete by the beginnings of capitalism, as feudalism declined. He did NOT say that the people-class came into existence because of some prior oppression of Jews. In the early period of feudalism – he talked about Charlemagne – the Jews were a privileged, intermediary layer. The view that you are echoing here, that Jews were always oppressed, is a liberal or even liberal-Zionist view, not a Marxist one.

There is a passage in that work where Leon explicitly attacks the notion that the people-class was created by a prior oppression of the Jews.

Simon H

So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?

Ian D

No, Jews today are not a class. They are a multi-class population with a top-heavy social structure that is partly a product of their earlier role before capitalism, and accentuated by the genocide in Hitler’s day when the more working class, radical Jews were disproportionately wiped out. With the collaboration of the Zionists in some notorious instances – like Hungary

Ian D quoting Simon H

“So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?”

And the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layer I am talking about is not a class either. It’s a distinct caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie with a material interest in Israel through the racist Law of Return.

A caste is PART of a class with a special interest or purpose. The caste I am talking about has some similarities with labour bureaucracies within the working class movement. A layer within our class movement with it’s own special interests that are not those of the rest of the class.

That bourgeois caste/layer is trying to suppress the Palestine movement in the West. There is nothing racist about pointing this out. The caste being criticised though is genocidal in its racism.

Ian D quoting Simon H

“So Jews do form a separate class of people who are integrated into the global trans national bourgeoisie? I see. So yeah the protocols of the elders of Zion then?”

And there is no global trans-national bourgeoisie in any case. The bourgeoisie can not abolish the nation state. The only layer within the bourgeoisie that PARTLY transcends that, is the Jewish-Zionist caste I am talking about. But only partly – they may exist in an organised way across some borders but their real loyalty is to Israel. So they are not fully transnational either.

Only the international proletariat, objectively, has no country. That is orthodox Marxism.

Simon (not Simon H)

@Simon H I think there are some wrong things in lan’s argumentation. But I think it’s better to have good faith debates. Your last response there was quite bad. May I suggest that you try to proof your argument better? You can’ just keep repeating the charge and then try twist his words.

@Ian D I don’t understand what point you are trying to stress with the Abraham Leon quotes. Is this character what Leon describes to be attributed to Jewish people or a certain sub group of Jewish people today in 2026?

Ian D

He was mainly talking about European Jews. I am talking about the reason why Jews have a very top heavy class structure, which is elaborated in the link I posted earlier. Obviously in a capitalist society, disproportionate capitalist wealth brings disproportionate social power. Leon’s work in large measure explains that. But he never lived to see Israel created – he died in Auschwitz.

But his theories do explain this if you study them and understand the history properly. I have written about this in some detail:

hitps://www.consistent-democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/socialistfightpamphletno1.pdf

Matt GoldB. (Walthamstow) quotes Ian D

“He was mainly talking about European Jews. I am talking about the reason why Jews have a very top heavy class structure, which is elaborated in the link I posted earlier. Obviously in a capitalist society, disproportionate capitalist wealth brings disproportionate social power. Leon’s work in lar…”

So please let me get this argument, I am a European Jew, UK citizen by birth, and retired worker, and by virtue of the racist law of a foreign country I have a material interest in upholding that same foreign country? Whether I like it or not. Before the creation of this foreign country in 1948, classic Jew hatred could only claim this as ‘World wide conspiracy’ but now itis an actual fact that all Jews have these interests. in maintaining and supporting this foreign power! To me completely classically Jew hatred in 2026 writ large. I have absolutely no interest in this foreign country and wil always stand with the oppressed and NEVER with the oppressor.

Ian D

Er no. Unless you are a capitalist.

You do understand that the capitalist state is effectively the property of the capitalist class, don’t you? That is the Marxist understanding of the state.

And which capitalist state such bourgeois ‘own’ is determined by their bourgeois citizenship.

Why are you identifying yourself with part of the capitalist class? I made no such equation of you as a socialist with any part of the capitalist class. In fact, I said the opposite. I defined my argument in class terms, about the bourgeoisie.

You made that identification with your question. I’m making such basic class distinctions. Your question completely buries those distinctions. And it’s spontaneous and automatic.

That’s the unconscious influence of Zionism on the left. It’s similar to what Kaiser Bill said in 1914: “I see no parties or classes – I see only Germans”.

Everything I said was qualified in class terms. If you “always stand with the oppressed and not with the oppressor” that is fine.

But if that is the case you should also point out, name and condemn the imperialist bourgeois caste whose existence is easy to demonstrate, which is the prime mover of Zionism’s crimes, and which is now actively seeking to destroy the Palestinian movement in the West.

The Israeli Law of Return is DESIGNED to create this identification. It appears to create an identification of all Jews with that ‘foreign’ bourgeois state. But in fact, it creates such a material interest for overseas-born Jewish CAPITALISTS. It’s the usual bourgeois con trick, but given an extra-territorial twist. The same one that works on the idiots putting flags on lampposts here

No, you don’t have such an interest. That’s the whole point! But the Jewish bourgeoisie (by birth, overseas), DOES!

And if you look at the statistics, that layer is proportionately massively greater than the proportion of Jews in the general population. In the US, six of the 10 wealthiest billionaires last year were/are Jewish bourgeois. I can name them.

You don’t have their power. If you criticise them, even implicitly, for this they’ll treat you like they treat Zack Polanski.

So why the high dudgeon about them being criticised and pointed out as the bearers of Greater Israel? Surely for socialists of Jewish origin they are your enemies, because you stand with the oppressed, as you say.

The contradiction is in your head, not mine.

Ian D

Oh, and what do I mean by “treat you like Zack Polanski’? I mean like the Zionist stooge media does here… scroll down this link.

https://www.consistent-democrats org/uncategorized/analysis-of-the-results-of-the-may-7th-local-elections/

[reproduces and denounces anti-Semitic caricatures in the pro-Zionist media of Green Party leader Zack Polanski with hooked nose]

Matt GoldB. (Walthamstow) quotes Ian D

“Er no. Unless you are a capitalist….”

Dress this argument up as much as you like with “Marxist” verbiage, I asked a simple question about me as a working class Jew, and you patronised me, with your version of Jew hatred, essentially repeating that Jews are disproportionately rich and have a vested interest in maintaining capitalism in general and foreign country in particular.

Ian D quotes Matt GoldB. (Walthamstow)

“Dress this argument up as much as you like with “Marxist” verbiage, I asked a simple question about me as a working class Jew, and you patronised me, with your version of Jew hatred, essentially repeating that Jews are disproportionately rich and have a vested interest in…”

You are simply choosing to ignore everything I said. I did answer the question. My answer was clearly “no”.

In fact “no” was the second word in my reply. That no means …. ‘no’. The rest is explanation of that “no”.

Maher

Right, I think we need to take a breather and let the heat die down.

Benwwk quotes Ian D

“And the Jewish Zionist bourgeois layer I am talking about is not a class either. tis a distinct caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie with a material interest in Israel through the racist Law of Return”

Your conception of Zionism as the (historical and contemporary) project of an ethnic (Jewish) caste within the bourgeoisie is deeply flawed and leads you into serious difficulties, not least making wild statements that the jewish bourgeois caste’ is somehow acting to suppress Palestinian solidarity across the world (rather than western imperialists who nurtured and remain the primary power behind the Zionist project). Zionism is demonstrably and significantly not just a Jewish movement. Neither are the repressive measures being implemented to buttress it the result of some Jewish conspiracy. In failing to recognise this you -like Miller end up setting the tail to wag the dog: projecting Zionism onto some abstract and schematic notion of the Jews somehow subverting Western Imperialist states to repress their citizens (presumably) against their own national interests. At best this seems a bad and conspiratorial reading.”

Simon (not Simon H)

Yes, exactly. The statement that repression of pro-palestinian groups does not serve the interest of the capitalist class here is wild.

Ian D

Israel IS imperialist, its intenational dimension is a faction within the IMPERIALIST bourgeoisie with its own specific imperialist objectives – greater Israel. So, it does serve the interests of imperialism, in particular of Israel as an imperialist formation.

That state has its own special relationship with the wider imperialist bourgeoisie which is actually cultist. They are regarded as the bourgeoisie’s most class-conscious section. In particular, the role of Jewish- Zionist ideologues in the 1970s – Friedman, Sherman, Joseph, Kissinger etc, in popularising neoliberalism gives them a celebrated status

They are regarded as the saviours of capitalism from a major crisis. A huge turn around from Hitler’s day when they were suspected of being in league with ‘Bolshevism’. Zionist strategy effected that change and created that cult.

And as with so many political cults, those who dissent are excommunicated. So even bourgeois figures who dissent get their political careers destroyed. The latest being Thomas Massie in Kentucky, unseated by AIPAC. Far from the first – even presidents have been targeted. Carter and Bush the Elder for a start.

t’s happened here, too. Sir Alan Duncan is a prime example. AS is … Corbyn, arguably. There was a time when Jewish bourgeois in the US (and here) were subject to “country-club discrimination.” Not any more. Providing they are Zionists and part of the cult, they are treated like royalty. Look at Kushner and Witkoff, who are in regular touch with Netanyahu even though they formally work for the US in negotiations. Israel is part of imperialism, and so is its caste.

That was always Zionist strategy – to lead ‘their people out of oppression into the ranks of the oppressor peoples/nations. That was only possible because of the unique nature of the oppression of the Jews which had a pre-capitalist origin, and was not intrinsic to capitalism, even if it’s worst manifestation was in the earlier period of imperialism.

That is why I mentioned Liberia and Sierra Leone. They have some formal similarity with Israel, as states for returning exiles; but Israel is fundamentally different from them. They are oppressed semi-colonies. Israel is imperialist.

Simon (not Simon H)

Another thing that does not help you is the inclusion of irrelevant details in your points

Ian D

None of this is irrelevant. Evidence and facts are the basis of this understanding

Susan quoting benwwk

“Your conception of Zionism leads you into serious difficulties, not least making wild statements that the ‘jewish bourgeois caste’is somehow acting to suppress Palestinian…”

exactly, its like no one has ever heard of Christian zionism which has an old history is essentially antisemitic (we’ll send the Jews there, they are out of Europe where they create problems) and is one of the reasons that Balfour support the Zionist movement. We must remember that the dog wags the tail and, of course, there are differences between the needs of Imperialism and the needs of the the zionist state.

Ian D posts link to article (see link below) Automated extract

“US Hegemony Drains Away Through Israeli Achilles Heel – Consistent Democrats – LCFI

Trump and Netanyahu’s war-escapade is burying US world hegemony. ft has backfired and they haven’t got a clue how to defeat Iran. www consistent democrats org”

The tail and the dog are flawed concepts when discussing this. A better analogy is two creatures who have a shared leg. The supposition within the argument is anti-Marxist and anti-materialist

In 2025, out of the ten wealthiest billionaires in the US, 6 of them are/were Jewish. That is the most extreme manifestation of Jewish bourgeois overreprentation – overall its not 60% but still massively more than the 2% of Jews in the general US population (see article).

The Israeli Law of Return gives them hereditary citizenship rights in Israel. Their bourgeois class status gives them de facto ownership tights over that bourgeois state. The ideology of Zionism, which is the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews, drives almost all of them ideologically to accept that calling (with the odd exception like Soros).

Christian Zionist bourgeois do not have citizenship rights by birth in Israel, so that de facto property relationship does not exist. And the many Christian Zionists (and indeed the smaller number of Jewish Zionists) who are not bourgeois count for effectively nothing in this. Even the bourgeois are fellow travellers but without the specific rights over the Israeli state that make the Jewish Zionists the core of the movement.

Unless it can be demonstrated that these facts are materially untrue, this critique is at odds with the facts.

https: //www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/

Laurence quotes Ian D

“The tail and the dog are flawed concepts when discussing this. A better analogy is two creatures who have a shared leg. The supposition within the argument is ant-Marxist and anti-materialist”

Ian, for a period of time, something like 80% of the CEOS of the largest banks were Irish.

This is a silly link to draw.

Also I’m fairly sure the wealthiest billionaire thing just..isn’t true?|

Ian D quotes Laurence

“Ian, for a period of time, something like 80% of the CEOs of the largest banks were Irish.”

Even if that’s true, they don’t have an ideology anything like Zionism

Ian D quotes Laurence

“Also I’m fairly sure the wealthiest billionaire thing just…isn’t true?”

You can check it on Forbes Israel. The links are in the article.

Laurence

On the numbers, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are not Jewish.

So that’s at least 5 who aren’t

Ian D

Zuckerberg certainly is

Laurence

Larry Page and Zuckerberg are both atheist

I think this entire narrative is silly. Its drawing lines where they don’t exist.

Ian D

So were Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky.

Simon H posts like to Wikipedia

Antisemitism is the socialism of fools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_is._the_socialism_of fools?wprov=sfti1

Ian D

I wish those lines didn’t exist. We would be in a very different situation.

Simon H quotes Ian D

“Zuckerberg certainly is”

Are we playing “spot the Jew” now? I don’t think this is good or right

Maher

Ok alright, what the actual fuck is going on in this chat?

Lawrence

lan, I say this as someone who finds your company rather enjoyable, | think this is a very slippery slope and it leads to all kinds of nuts conclusions regardless

Ian D

You have not demonstrated that these facts are irrelevant or untrue. And saying that refusing to deny facts is ‘anti-Semitic’ is simply libellous.

Maher

This kind of stuff is why we get questioned

Ian D

It’s completely factual.

Susan quoting Ian D

“The tail and the dog are flawed concepts when discussing this. A better analogy is two creatures who have a shared leg. The supposition within the argument is ant-Marxist and anti-materialist…”

wow! There are disagreements between the US and its colonial settler state; no one disputes that, but the Israeli military and government does not dictate to the US. And the US has stopped the Israeli state from doing things; do not confuse Trump with others. What took so long to attack Iran which the zionists have wanted for a very long time; it has been an obssession of Netayahu since he was the Israeli ambassador to the UN. If they controlled the US would it have taken this long? no … but the US uses Israel to do its business in the area along with Saudi Arabia (and Iran under the Shah, etc).

One of the strangest things in all the antisemitism that I am reading here is, lan, you seem to believe that Jews are not working class people, that somehow because of a lack of religious opposition to taking interest that all Jews are somehow rich, that is a ridiculous position. It almost reeks of the Merchant of Venice. This is straightout old-fashioned antisemitism; its been a while for me to have seen this so openly except on the right (no, I am not calling you on the right-wing) … as a working class Jewish woman from NYC, I find my non-existence impressive … even if the richest person on the planet was a Jew, that would not make your cabal of Jewish people trying to control the world anything but antisemitic “

Ian D

Where is the factual error?

Maher

As a Semitic person, I plead with you all to find a new topic to argue on, this is going nowhere

Ruth Appleton

Twisted factual. What is your point?

Simon H quotes Ian D

“You have not demonstrated that these facts are irrelevant or untrue. And saying that refusing to deny facts is ‘anti-Semitic is simply libellous.”

It really doesnt matter how many of the top billionaires are Jews. It really isn’t the point and focussing on that simply sounds like a fixation on “Jews” and how they are richer than anyone else or whatever. Classic anti semitism

Ian D quotes Ruth Appleton

“Twisted factual. What is your point?”

Where is the factual error?

Simon H

The fact isn’t disputed – it’s what you politically imply about it which no one agrees on

Laurence

Consider

Clearly, the Irish run the world.

Therefore

Ian D

So the fact is not disputed. But I am being denounced for being factually correct. That is not Marxism.

Lawrence

The Irish Republicans have so much support because of this.

how else would the Irish get a US President?

If not through the power of the Irish controlled banks

you see how this ine of reasoning is silly?

Ian D

So what? Ireland doesn’t oppress anyone.

Ruth Appleton

If your facts are really facts what does it lead you to conclude? The bourgeoisie are really bourgeois!

Ian D

Tell the Palestinians it doesn’t matter

Laurence quotes Ian D

“So what? Ireland doesn’t oppress anyone.”

So your issue here isn’t with a conspiracy that runs the world from one group unless that group happens to be Jews, which is one with Israelis, because they’re the ones oppressing people

maybe, just maybe, the problem is al of capital and not just ‘well Jews are capitalist too’

Ian D

That Israel is a powerful imperialist state whose ruling class overlaps with those of much bigger imperialist countries.

Maher

0k, as the only person from the Middle East, and the only active person who is Semitic. I’m going to need you all to actually take a moment to calm down and reflect

Laurence quotes Ian D

“That Israel is a powerful imperialist state whose ruling class overlaps with those of much bigger imperialist countries.”

0h maybe the ruling class’s interests everywhere overlap

Have you considered this possibility

Simon H

Ian please -1 have really respected the work you have done in YP and | agree with you on a lot of politics. But this fixation on the “Jewish trans national bourgeoise” is really really bad and wrong and I really beg you to reconsider these positions.

Ian D

Not in that specific way.

Maher

The people that you care about, are not in this conversation. Please find another topic

Ian D

This is the only Marxist analysis that fits the situation we are in. I wish it wasn’t. My life would be much easier!

I didn’t kick this discussion off.

Laurence quotes Ian D

“This is the only Marxist analysis that fits the situation we are in. | wish it wasn’t. My life would be much easier!”

Well if your Marxist analysis is ‘one group has more control of global capital than others’ but this is only an issue when Jews’ and not just maybe global capital is bad and ‘capital supports Israel because its in their interest.

Ian D

But if my views are criticised I will defend them.

It’s about Palestine.

Laurence

There’s plenty of Muslim billionaires, but I don’t go around claiming that the reason we have oppression in Saudi Arabia or Iran is that there’s Muslim billionaires

Ian D

In a sense, but in specific ways, which don’t fit the dominant dogma.

Laurence

The root of all oppression is capitalism. It is not one specific faction of capital.

Ian D

Those countries are not imperialist. Qualitatively less power.

Laurence quotes Ian D

“Those countries are not imperialist. Qualitatively less power.”

The Yemenis would beg to differ on Saudi Arabia and the Sudanese would on the UAE

Maher quotes Ian D

“Those countries are not imperialist. Qualitatively less power.”

Saudi Arabia is quite literally imperialist .

Lawrence

The Saudis are literally invading Yemen with the Americans

Ian D

But we have to analyse the specificities of what is around today.

Lawrence

This is going on right now

The UAE is funding militias in Sudan and Yemen too

Maher

Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon

Laurence

Right now.

Ian D

The Saudis are clients of Israel and the US. But all those countries are semi-colonial

Laurence quotes Ian D

“The Saudis are clients of Israel and the US. But all those countries are semi-colonial”

What???

the Saudis and the UAE are clients of Israel is a hell of a claim.

Ian D

Some are lackies, some are targets.

They both joined in the attack on Iran

1 wouldn’t think my view on that are controversial. Only my views on Zionism are controversial.

James Kulmer

I think this piecemeal, dripfeed approach that we are forced into on WhatsApp is precluding the full exposition of the various positions taken in this conversation, and given the importance and controversy of this topic, it deserves an in depth exchange of ideas. I have some severe disagreements myself with some things as stated above, but I don’t think this is the appropriate forum to hash them out.

1 would recommend we instead share some long form content that exposes our views, rebuking them in that format if needed, and if necessary we ought to schedule a debate on the topic in person, if anyone wants to. | don’t want to stifle a conversation as its  happening, but I’m not certain this one is going anywhere productive, comrades.

Ian D

I’m fine with that. I’ve always been in favour of this being discussed in a principled manner. I haven’t had that good fortune so far

(And the latter point is not about here)

Susan quoting Ian D

‘The tail and the dog are flawed concepts when discussing this. A better analogy is two creatures who have a shared leg. The supposition within the argument is ant-Marxist and anti-materialist”

lan, where would Israel be if the US was not dumping tens of billions of financial support and weaponry. If Britain had not supported it, it would not exist; if the US did not continue to support it and opposed its genocide, it would not have been able to do so, its weapon and defence systems would not be the quality that they are. You are very confused about this … there have been conflicts between them and itis brought into line by the US. The zionist state is a regional imperialist serving the interests of the US.

1 have avoided this ridiculous antisemitic discussion honestly, but at this point it has gotten to be too much to ignore. Also, just to say my last point. Zionism is a political movement, not a religious one and is independent of the Jewish religion itself (as we do know Christian Zionism is born in antisemitism as is the Jewish zionist response). Conflating Judaism and Zionism falls into exactly what the Zionists want. Zionism requires antisemitism to justify itself, you are giving them what they want. Congratulations.

benwwk

Agree with Susan, the problem here has nothing to do with WhatsApp and entirely due to the fact that lan has a patently antisemitic worldview. This shouldn’t be brushed aside but confronted. Simon touches on the core of it above (the view of the “Jewish transnational bourgoisie”). The fact its claimed as the “only possible Marist analysis” suggests how far gone we are from the realm of reasonable discussion.

Al Green quotes Philip

“Who ARE you? I mean ‘My views on this are well known. Get you. What a sense of your own importance. & I ‘suggest you read the Red Partisan article’ too. JHC. What is a Red Partisan? Is it some sort of lettuce you saw in Waitrose? And then Do you deny your support for Nazi terrorists”

I am following this debate to figure out what @lan D is actually saying

The accusation that he is some kind of “state security operative” is completely unfounded. What evidence do you have for this?

This kind of cop-baiting should have absolutely no place in any political discussion among socialists.

If we really thought we had a known, proven police agent in our midst we’d get them off this chat and shun them completely.

This is a method that the Stalin-era Stalinists used all the time. They accused Trotsky of being an agent of Hitler, and various other bourgeois state rulers, including the emperor of Japan. The goal was to seal off their members from consideration of his ideas.

The concept that Zionists are Jewish supremacist seems to me to be obvious.

But lan is not just saying that.

That the big imperialists are being manipulated to act against their own objective interests by an international extension of the Israeli ruling class, which exercises great power in other countries based on a common Jewish identity ~ that sounds like an updated version of the idea of a Jewish cabal scheming away at the heart of global finance capital.

Imperialism has always wanted a solid military outpost (and safe oil outlet) in the Middle East: it does not need to be tricked by wily Israeli operatives into prosecuting war against Iran (or Iraq), or into seeking to minimize Russian influence in Syria. A Greater Israel looks attractive to many wings or shadings of the G7 imperialists.

Divisions over ruling class policy are rife in many countries: this is because of a shifting kaleidoscope of imperialist configurations or putative alliances in the run up to generalized world war — and not because of Israeli string-pulling.

Susan quotes benwwk

‘Agree with Susan, the problem here has nothing to do with WhatsApp and entirely due to the fact that lan has a patently antisemitic worldview. “This shouldnt be brushed aside but confronted. Simon touches on the core of it above (the view of the “Jewish transnational bourgoisie”). The…”

i do not think that this can be debated as to have a ‘debate’ on a patently antisemitic position; means that it has veracity when at some level.

James Kulmer

This conversation has to cease now. I am going to put a pause to this channel to allow the organising committee to review the conversation and collectively decide how to proceed.

Ian D

Oxford Dictionary:

“Hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.

Cambridge Dictionary:

“Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”

Merriam Webster

“Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”

Collins Dictionary:

“Anti-Semitism is hostility to and prejudice against Jewish people.

The allegation made here is simply defamatory. And it’s very clear why itis being made. It has been conceded in this debate that I have got my facts correct. You cannot say that I am falsifying anything.

1 have said nothing derogatory or discriminatory against Jews as an ethnic, religious or racial group. NOTHING I have said conform to those definitions above. NONE OF THEM!

1 have a record of challenging GENUINE anti-Semitism when I come across it.

Criticising the SPECIFIC forms of racism characteristic of super-rich bourgeois Jews is not the same thing as racist abuse against Jews in general

Those who say it is actually share an element of an anti-Semitic world view. Equating the formation that I am criticising, and it is conceded that my facts are correct, with criticism of Jews in general. That is common in the world views of both Zionist and anti-Semitism, and it is very common in Western left-liberal and social-democratic discourse. Your Party, and even its diffuse left wing, is an obvious place for it to take root.

Some people are scared of the issue, not least because their arguments against it are not coherent. They are using a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is not to be found in any Dictionary but a halfway house to the IHRA where factual criticism of Zionist oppression, or key elements of it, are dragged it to suppress debate.

James Kulmer

I have not had a chance to review all of the messages in this chat, but as there are now accusations of both antisemitism and defamatory statements I think it’s in everyone’s interest that we take a pause here to assess the way forwards. Thank you all for understanding.

Red Partisan, the new journal produced by Consistent Democrats supporters and others in and around the Your Party project, has issue 2 out now.

The journal is not just focussed on Your Party, it aims to address major issues in the class struggle more generally. The front-page lead article is on the West European, including Britain’s. ruling class’s ludicrous but dangerous war drive against Russia which they intend to push even without US support. Massive rises in military spending are to be funded with cuts in social spending on the mass of the population based on the preposterous projection that Russia is going to attack Western Europe by 2030.  These militarists are firing missiles into Russia and risking a major conflict, not the other way round. The article analyses the racism and irrationality of the ruling class warmongers and the reasons for that irrationality.

The current far-right upsurge and the reasons for it are featured on the back page. The reason for it is analysed as fundamentally that the working class in this country is completely politically unrepresented. The so-called Labour government is not a Labour government as previously known, but a disguised far-right regime funded by the Zionist movement that seems to have as its mission to bring a more overtly far right regime to power. It is not Labour in power, but rather Labour Together, a Zionist-funded secretive right-wing party whose purpose was to destroy the left social-democratic Labour leadership of Corbyn and squash any and all expressions of working-class politics in the party.

Other material in the journal deals with our involvement in the Anti-Fascist International and its British Chapter.  The AFI is a bloc of anti-imperialist left-wing forces that was initiated by the Venezuelan government of Nicholas Maduro in 2024, long before Maduro’s kidnapping in January by Trump and the covert takeover of the Venezuelan government by the US. It campaigns against US imperialist aggression and its promotion of far-right politics in South America and around the globe. The future of the AFI is uncertain given what has happened to Venezuela, but it is currently a vehicle for anti-imperialist campaigns, discussion and united actions that may be able to go further.

We also have an analysis of the May elections, that obviously deals with the disaster for the Starmer regime in those elections, the expected victories of Reform and less-expected rise of the Green Party, partly as a result of the sabotage of Your Party. It is written partly from the standpoint of our comrades who were active participants in the Your Party election campaign in Thornton Heath, where Grassroots Left CEC member Mel Mullings got 7.7% of the vote, a campaign in which supporters of Red Partisan played a very active role working with other left-wing people, and the activist Croydon branch acted almost as a model of what could be achieved elsewhere with a policy of harnessing the energies of all genuine left-wing trends and non-exclusion.

The converse side of this is how the Members’ Charter in YP was tainted by the exclusion of a prominent supporter of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and its British co-thinkers, the Consistent Democrats. The exclusion was simply for defending the agreed politics of the LCFI, in a WhatsApp group that belongs to the All-London Delegate Assembly of Your Party, an unofficial body that convenes regular assemblies of London delegates to discuss political and policy matters. The comrade was excluded for supposed ‘anti-semitism’ for defending our agreed position on Zionism. Our comrade committed no abusive behaviour in that discussion and was excluded without any kind of formal hearing or democratic procedure in a witchhunt initiated by the pro-imperialist ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’ whose awful, pro-imperialist record includes supporting the NATO invasion of Libya in 2011, backing the Maidan coup and NATO/Nazi proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and more recently backed Trump’s failed Maidan-style colour revolution in Iran in January, just prior to the US-Israel attack. Our comrade was agent-baited by these pro-imperialist Ziophiles in a degenerate manner. Some of the political abuse thrown at him resembles that thrown at the Green Party leader Zack Polanski when by the Zionist press, when, since these events happened, ZP called for a database of British citizens and potential war criminals who have fought in the IDF during the post-2023 genocide.

There will be more on this shortly, but this issue contains material about this witchhunt, a statement of solidarity from our leading Brazilian co-thinker, and pointers to more extensive coverage, as well as a report of the Members Charter/Socialist Federation conference from our Posadist ally, comrade Marie.

All in all, this issue is relevant to many of the main issues the left has to deal with today, and offers a genuine communist vision and programmatic solutions.

Statement: Liaison Committee for the Fourth International

Fight Imperialism from the Donbass to West Asia!

Defend Russia – defeat NATO!

We are now in a pre-war period, according to NATO politicians in Britain, France and Germany. Russia is an enemy that our rulers say they expect to attack them by 2030. This nonsensical projection is why the Starmer regime claims to have already raised the percentage of GDP devoted to ‘defence’ to 2.5%, aiming at 3% by 2030, and 3.5% by 2035, in tandem with others in Europe. This means more neoliberal austerity attacks on workers, benefit claimants, pensioners, and more. The working class is being impoverished for a programme of militarism against Russia, with a lot of similarities to the Cold War period. The latest manifestation of this is Defence Secretary Healey resigning from the government in apparent protest at it not rearming fast enough for his liking.

Trump’s US and Netanyahu’s Israel are fighting a different war against Iran, on which they launched an unprovoked attack on Feb 28^th. The US/Israel conglomerate have lost badly, and are desperate to hide it and brazen it out. Trump is trying to hide this with bluffing statements, insulting to the intelligence, that he has really defeated Iran, Iran is on the verge of surrender, a deal is due any day, and so on. Netanyahu, on whose behalf Trump launched the war, refuses to allow Trump to make a real agreement with Iran, which would seem wise for the US given the economic damage being done by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Zionist lobby in the US is strong enough to make this very difficult.

Israel has extended its genocide from Gaza to Lebanon, and in response Iran resumed firing its hypersonic missile arsenal at Israel. Israel and the US resumed their aggression against Iran, but they have no answer to Iran’s own missile superiority. Even the nuclear weapons option, which they have always had as a possible criminal means to raise the stakes, looks impossible. Due to credible but discreet threats of nuclear retaliation from others if Iran were nuked, and a real possibility that they may have provoked Iran into procuring some nukes by whatever means. Trump and Netanyahu may have provoked Iran into adopting a posture of nuclear ambiguity, similar to Israel, to counter Israel’s own arsenal. But that is not really the subject of this article – this had to be addressed to give a complete picture.

Flashpoints for NATO war

The European imperialists are not powerful enough to fight Russia, but that doesn’t mean that they wont somehow talk themselves into attacking at some point. There are some key flashpoints. Ukraine, where Russia has been fighting a war of attrition in four oblasts (provinces): Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhe and Kherson, where the majority of the population has long spoken Russian. There are other such places, in a rough line from Odessa to Kharkov. Russia has been gradually winning since its Special Military Operation began in 2022, and has been fighting very painstakingly for two reasons. First NATO and the Ukrainian regime prepared several years in advance by fortifying many towns and villages in the Russian-speaking zone, making the local population virtual prisoners in many cases. Russia is not just fighting to take towns and villages, but heavily fortified prison-like outposts. The other is that this is a war to liberate the Russian-speaking population, not conquer them. These are often being abused and terrorised by the Maidan regime’s own occupiers/jailers. So, avoiding civilian casualties is the highest priority for Russia. That is why the Special Military Operation has dragged out so long.

Russia does not seek to conquer the whole of Ukraine. It does not want to rule a hostile population. This conflict would not be happening if the current Ukrainian regime had not abolished the constitutional equality of languages that existed prior to Maidan. Rather it is fighting to liberate the Russian speaking part of the country and defeat the Nazi forces, leading to something better. It aims to denazify Ukraine and stop the NATO threat to Russia, but not to conquer Ukraine for Russia.  A US-funded coup in 2014, the so-called Maidan uprising, brought to power anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists who look to Nazi collaborators from the WWII period, such as the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) led by Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, as their political inspiration. This has been hidden by censorship in the West since the Special Military Operation began in February 2022, but prior to that much of the Western media covered the endemic far right politics of Maidan Ukraine.

The kind of event that Maidan epitomised is known around the world, particularly in the Global South, as a ‘colour revolution’. A fake revolution funded by the US with its enormous financial power, that bribes large numbers of ‘extras’ to give a ‘mass’ façade to a foreign-funded coup. There have been so many of these around the world that ‘colour revolution’ has become almost a cliché.

Another potential flashpoint for war between NATO Europe and Russia is the Kaliningrad oblast, which is a small part of the territory of Russia that is situated between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast, blocked off from Russia’s main territory and only accessible from the sea. In July 2025, one of Trump’s Generals, Chris Donahue, told the US Defense News that NATO forces could capture Kaliningrad and its surrounding oblast “in a timeframe that is unheard of” (quoted in the Kyiv Independent, July 17, 2025, https://kyivindependent.com/us-general-says-nato-could-seize-russias-kaliningrad-unheard-of-fast/)

Cold War Hysteria-Plus

European ruling class hysteria against Russia seems more acute than in the Cold War, when frequently Germany, sometimes France and even occasionally Britain demurred from some of the Cold War demands of Ronald Reagan, for example. Some of the massive left-wing pacifist movements that mobilised against the threat of nuclear war in the 1980s gained bourgeois support to varying degrees in Europe. But with the Trump administration, things appear different. Trump appears less engaged with the European imperialists’ obsession with fighting Russia in Ukraine, but that is misleading. He has the same class instincts as the rest of them, and like Biden, he has permitted, and at times encouraged, the firing of Western missiles into Russia from Ukraine using NATO guidance systems, personnel and the like. Early this year when negotiations about Ukraine were underway, he even assisted Zelensky to fire drones and missiles at the location they thought Putin was speaking from. The Russians were wise to this trick, which was used by the US/Israel to murder Iranian negotiators at the beginning of the 12-day war in June 2025. Putin was not where Trump and Zelensky, and their military cohorts, thought he was! So much for the absurd liberal myth about Trump being a Russian asset!

But Trump also has other priorities as a hireling of Israel. He provoked this war with Iran, which previous US administrations considered unwise, for his Zionist political benefactors. Ukraine is lower down Trump’s list of priorities than helping Israel destroy every state remotely within range willing to challenge its genocidal regional project: Greater Israel. That is the real tactical difference between Trump and the US bourgeois mainstream. The Democrats’ Russiagate accusation was a hoax as Trump, whatever manoeuvres he may undertake, has no loyalty to Russia or Putin. His loyalty is to Israel; if Ukraine gets in the way, taking away US resources from war projects on Israel’s behalf in the Middle East, Ukraine has to lump it. That contradiction has the potential to bury NATO, and certainly some West European NATO ideologues have been preparing for more aggressive confrontation with Russia, without US backing, as a result.

This is really where the irrational element of bourgeois consciousness reveals itself. Obviously, without the United States as lynchpin, European NATO powers would be massively weaker, and yet those who fear such abandonment are more inclined than ever to hysterical Russophobia and making plans for all out war with Russia, with the crystal ball forecast (or whatever) that Russia intends to attack Western Europe in the next few years. Why is not made clear.

“Russian Expansionism” – A Persistent Myth

This is a repeat, ratcheted up to the Nth degree, of NATO’s paranoia during the Cold War about the USSR invading Western Europe, which never had the slightest chance of happening. This paranoia grew from the existence of the “Iron Curtain”, as Churchill dubbed it in his Fulton, Missouri speech of 1946. He referred to the Soviet Red Army advancing as far as the Elbe in Central Germany, and consolidating a belt of carbon-copy workers states from East Germany to Bulgaria.

But that was never the product of any Soviet project of expansion. It was simply the consequence of the USSR fighting off the attack from Nazi Germany, which had already occupied that whole massive area and had to be driven out of there to defeat it. The USSR was not keen on a future repeat invasion, and made that impossible for two generations with the export to the ‘glacis’ (East European buffer zone) of its model of bureaucratic castes sitting on collectivised property relations as inherited from the October revolution. Soviet Russia’s backwardness and isolation after 1917 created the possibility for that degenerated form of proletarian dictatorship to come into existence. Trotsky, the Russian Revolution’s main surviving prominent revolutionary Marxist after the degeneration, regarded Stalinism as a short-term, unstable regime that would either have to give way to the working class retaking direct political power in a new, political, revolution, or else be overthrown by capitalist restoration. His evaluation was ultimately true, but took much longer to happen.

But in WWII the USSR proved more durable than Trotsky thought. It not only survived the war intact, defeating the Nazi invasion in an epic, heroic struggle, but also managed to create replicas of itself in several countries that its armies liberated from fascism. Even more unexpectedly, it managed to inspire petit-bourgeois peasant-guerrilla movements in a number of countries where wars against imperialist forces put capitalism itself under extreme stress. Such movements expropriated capital and created regimes that obviously imitated the Stalinist regime in Russia, with collectivised economies ruled by bureaucratic regimes that took shape from the command structures of the guerrilla armies that won these battles. This happened first in Yugoslavia, then China, then Vietnam/Indochina and finally Cuba in 1959-60.  These took shape in the broader context of the USSR’s victory in WWII, and were a secondary product of that.

The Partial Retreat of Counterrevolution

By the end of the 1980s Stalinist rule was in a state of collapse, centrally in the USSR but also throughout Eastern Europe. These regimes collapsed in 1989 in Eastern Europe; in the USSR in August 1991 the regime finally collapsed when the liberal, increasingly pro-capitalist Stalinist leader Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted by a coup of “hardline” Stalinist bureaucrats opposed to both his pro-capitalist market “reforms” and his glasnost (openness). This met determined resistance from forces led by the former head of the Moscow Communist Party, Boris Yeltsin, and collapsed after three days. Yeltsin became the leader of the counterrevolution, seized power in Russia and instigated the end of the central USSR state by Christmas 1991, and the separation of the non-Russian union republics. His economic programme was a rapid neoliberal ‘shock treatment’, among the most ferocious ever attempted: privatisation, mass sackings of workers, and impoverishment of the masses on a massive scale, such that in the decade of the 1990s life expectancy fell by five years. This was the greatest fall in Russian life expectancy in peacetime since Stalin’s forcible collectivisation of agriculture at the beginning of the 1930s. It could only be explained by millions of workers suffering premature death from malnutrition, deprivation of healthcare, and in many cases suicidal despair. It was more severe than the economic shock that hit Weimar Germany after the Wall St crash of 1929, which brought Hitler to power.

But the response of the masses was not to support fascism, but to put enormous pressure on the apparatus left over from the USSR, which was a massive social layer that had been, and still was to a degree, a kind of labour bureaucracy. Even though its ‘communist’ ideology had been junked, links with the masses existed, and were able to give expression to that popular backlash. Yeltsin was ousted by the apparatus and Putin replaced him. And a process of partial rollback of the shock treatment began. Russia under this new political configuration rolled back much of the neoliberal shock, reversed much of the privatisation, and now has a kind of mixed economy. It has recovered a real measure of world power under Putin, whose popular authority is considerable because of this reversal.

In historical context, these events resemble the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo in the early 19^th Century. The defeat of Napoleon appeared to signal the final defeat of even the most degenerated expression of the French bourgeois revolution against feudalism. Yet the victorious reactionary powers found it impossible to restore the feudal regime. Because bourgeois society represents a higher mode of production. Likewise in Russia, the counterrevolution encountered major problems because the socialist elements in the USSR workers state, however stunted, represent elements historically superior to capitalism, and proved much more difficult to expunge than many thought. In Russia you thus have a new form of combined and uneven development.

Russia today is not a workers’ state. It is a non-imperialist bourgeois state with major post-capitalist deformations from its decades as the centre of the USSR workers’ state. But it is clear what the basis of imperialist hatred for Russia is – it is hatred of the survivals of the workers state, the elements of its social gains now embodied in Russia’s ersatz mixed economy. Western anti-communist hatred of the USSR has morphed into a demented racism against the Russian people themselves, Putin’s mass base. Just as Hitler believed that Jews were irremediably tainted with ‘Bolshevism’, and sought their elimination, the imperialist bourgeoisie of the West consider Russians, as a people, to be incorrigibly disobedient to the dictates of neoliberalism, and basically enemies. Hence the demented war threats against Russia, including killing civilians. Hence the firing of missiles into Russia from Ukraine under British, French and US Command and Control, and the threat to do the same from the Baltic states.

Hence the wanton risking of nuclear war in such escapades. And the need for the working class in Europe to mobilise against this demented war drive, and defend Russia against NATO imperialism.

In late May this year, the Socialist Federation was created at a Conference of the ‘Members Charter”. The Charter was formed Your Party (YP) when the Corbyn clique reversed the original YP conference decisions and confiscated the members’ data. In this article, I will want to make an assessment of that Conference, and contribute ideas which I mean to be useful to the evolution of our Socialist Federation. I note that it had been the stated aim of the Members’ Charter “to provide a home to any group which aligns with a set of socialist points of unity to be established collectively”.

This June Conference decided not to form as a ready-made political party with a programme, but to provide a democratic structure “for vigorous and principled debate”.  This is a good basis for the Socialist Federation, considering how badly the dispersed forces of the original YP need to be drawn back together again.

The resolution by Consistent Democrats “regarding the Socialist Federation” offered concrete ideas on “how to repair the damage done by the anti-party saboteurs”. To illustrate the point, it said that “we should create a national team of volunteers to work out a plan of how to do this, and to implement it”. During the Conference, the proper consideration of this matter was hampered by the unexplained administrative decision of the organisers to stop the resolution’s mover Ian Donovan (ID) participating in the Conference. The result was tension in the room, along with curt instructions and curtailing of Paul Collins who moved the resolution instead. And no interactive debate about the ideas in the resolution.

For the same reason, the afternoon “Motion on Party Democracy” was also moved by Paul Collins. This resolution stated the importance, apparently recognised by most comrades, “to safeguard freedom of discussion and debate”. I do not think that this right should need to be claimed amongst us anymore!  To the organisers of the Conference, I say that they must present to all the members, and during a meeting open to all, the reasons for their decision to stop Ian Donovan attending meetings.

War and the long arm of Zionism

High finance imperialism is taking control of capitalism. This brings a qualitative change in the way capitalism has become ready to do away with all restrictions on its crimes, on its genocides and on its wars. In its Strategic Defence Review, the Starmer government has formally included China and North Korea alongside Russia and Iran in its assessment of “severe, persistent state threats”. The British army is being geared “to rapidly integrate artificial intelligence, automated software, long-range missiles and land drone swarms to massively increase battlefield lethality”.

Our Socialist Federation does not have to search high and low for what to do next. Had it created a national team of volunteers “to create a national centre” as suggested in Ian’s morning resolution, the team would have gone to localities and branches where they would have found all the anti-war and anti-austerity organisations up in arms, so to say, and ready with a proper anti-war program. It is sectarian on our part to seek refuge in small groups.

I note with alarm how, on 4 June, the Starmer government officially accepted the recommendations of the Lord Mann Review. As was meted out against us in the Labour Party under Iain McNichol, false allegations of antisemitism are already flying like arrows throughout the UK Health Service; presumably to extirpate from there the opponents of Palantir. When Ian Donovan says that “political debate and disagreement should be seen as a strength, not a weakness”, he is not just defending himself, but our ability to face this level of adversity.

Many fine ideas were raised during the Conference

In the Conference, there was an exaggerated concern about the Greens and the LibDems. There is an objective need for Green and Ecology ideas, and it is no wonder that they attract votes. This will be so until we adopt policies that attract people to us around these issues.  There have been great fluctuations in the voting patterns in the last few years. Where a particular group attracts votes, the best thing to do is to look for electoral pacts, tactical united fronts, whilst discussing the ideas and seeking unity.  It is not objective to be so much concerned with the Greens and so little concerned with the war we are in!

The comrade Ian Spencer of the Democratic Socialist Party said that we need Marxism and “a Communist Party”. I believe he was right to speak like this. It shows a belief in the future and confidence in the ability of humanity to look into the future. The Trotskyist and revolutionary leader J Posadas wrote texts based on the notion that the progress of Britain would have to pass “from Labourism over to Communism”.

The tandem US-Israel forms part of the Nazification of the world

In the Conference, many comrades spoke against Zionism and the need for our Socialist Federation to adopt an anti-Zionist stance. I do not think many comrades are opposed to that. Only, it is not enough to advocate the boycott of Israel for instance. One must deal with the war of the US and Israel on the populations; their war on medical knowledge; their war on children, their war on reporting on them. Meanwhile, a few billionaires takes everything over, turning every human need, and every human, into a value to be siphoned off.

Global finance imperialism is taking control of bourgeois society, with fewer and fewer people in overall charge. In the world, Trump – and him alone – possesses the sole authority to order a nuclear launch; and no one can legally stop him. The tandem US-Israel forms part of this subordination and Nazification of the world. It forms part of the Nazification of all the bourgeois parties, all the centres of social, cultural and political organisation; the religious organizations, the municipalities, the organs of the States.

It is not antisemitic to say this.

Those who find fault with the notion that the US and Israel operate in tandem against life, could propose a better description. This matter requires heads together, concertation and debate. I call on the organisers of our Socialist Federation to allow Ian back in the meetings. It is a fact that there are fewer and fewer of his previous detractors who continue to call him anti-Semite.

It would be alarming to me if our leading comrades did not return openly to this question. In our Conference, they let the participants believe that Ian had been excluded. But excluded by whom? At what meeting? Were are the minutes of that meeting? Was there a vote, or was it just a few individuals who decided?  Who had organised that meeting?

As I said, this is not a defence of Ian Donovan that I am making. It is a defence of our ability to continue breaking away from social democracy, getting closer to socialism. This is the only way forward. Should we fail to be thorough on the question of Zionism, there will always be individuals in leading positions amongst us to bring the seeds of doubt, incomprehension and social democratic vacillation. Particularly in the times when unity in action will be required.

I look forward to the pre-conference in June. Some comrades said that “we are not ready for a Conference later in the year”, and I agree. There is plenty that needs doing right away however, like uniting against the war that we are in – a war that did not attract the attention of our Conference as much as the Greens and the Lib Dems did.

Whatever organisation we create, it will have to support the RMT, the teachers, the scientists, the doctors, the nurses. Whether we are a Party or a Federation, it is our task to demand that the funds for the war on Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are not taken from the young, the unemployed, the sick or the old; but from the tiny handful of billionaires whose power must be overthrown, for they hold individual fortunes bigger than the budget of entire countries.

Marie Lynam, posadiststoday.org – 6.6.2026

Britain is being beset by a new wave of far-right aggression against migrants. This is fuelled by despair in sections of the native-born working class and other sections that have long been abandoned by the Labour Party, that was originally created as a half-step towards independent working-class politics. But the days have long gone when any real gains from working-class people came from electing Labour politicians. 40 years ago, Margaret Thatcher waged war against effective trade unionism, in order to gut the core of the British working class and export productive manufacturing sectors: mines, steel, the motor industry largely to lower wage economies to offset the low rate of profit that the employing class were able to make from these industries when located in the former ‘workshop of the world’. Similar problems have beset most of the older imperialist countries.

The core of the British working class benefited considerably from Britain’s early monopoly position as a capitalist-imperialist power, and gained the subliminal consciousness of itself as the ‘popular’ layer of Britain, the supposed bringer of democracy and progress to the world. The working class of imperial Britain was “cut down to size” decades after Britain lost its imperial monopoly, first in conflict with Germany in two world wars, following on from which it was by degrees pushed to one side by its ally, US imperialism. The sheer strength of organisation of the British working class delayed the massacre by decades – only by the 1980s was the sledgehammer ready. But when the British ruling class decided it could no longer afford that imperial illusion among its subjects, the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, in thrall to that imperial conceit far more than the masses, betrayed every struggle against the jobs massacre.

Ever since then Labour has been a Thatcherite party, barring a brief period in the late 2010s when a tepid left-Labourism was reinstated under Corbyn through a revolt from below as the neoliberal political class in Labour was caught napping. But that did not offset the decades-long purging of the parliamentary and political bureaucracy under Labour by neoliberals, and relatedly, fervent Zionists who are key to the neoliberal cult that arose out of Thatcherism in the whole political class. Even though Corbyn’s Labour was able to show its mass appeal in the 2017 election and nearly won, it was still sabotaged, ruthlessly by the neoliberals. They put together effectively a new, secretive Zionist-funded bourgeois party, Labour Together, within Labour to reassert neoliberal control with Starmer as its frontman.

The party in power today is Labour Together, not Labour as previously known to the masses. Its main policy seems to be to inflame far right discontent with attacks on the working-class and thereby feeding the growth of posh-boy billionaire- and Israeli-funded far right parties – Reform, led by Nigel Farage, the more openly racist Restore Britain of Rupert Lowe and not least their street thug auxiliary, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”). Starmer’s victory in the 2024 General Election therefore was that of a secretive party of outright bourgeois reaction thinly disguised in a Labour Party wrapper. The British working class was completely unrepresented. Its foreign policy is completely reactionary, backing Nazism in Ukraine and Zionist genocide to the hilt in Gaza.

The attempt by Zarah Sultana in 2025 to create a new working-class party was shipwrecked by the duplicity of Corbyn, who appears to have gone along with it in order to wreck it. It gained the active attention of 800,000 potential members when it was announced, but afraid that the party whose creation would be too radical and too large for his liking, Corbyn manoeuvred to sabotage it. Since then, it has been a shambles – much of its potential mass base has defected to the Green Party, led by the left-talking Zack Polanski, which however is not a working-class party and therefore does not have the class-based drawing power that a real workers party would have.

So, the British working class is still leaderless, and its more backward, demoralised and lumpen sections prey to delusions in right-wing parties that they can “Restore Britain”, the analogue of Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. This is in reality a nightmare for working class people of untrammelled rule by the decayed predatory billionaire financial-speculator bourgeoise, with its fondness for Zionist genocide and sexual abuse of children. As epitomised by the social connections of both the right-populists like Farage and Trump, and also the godfathers of Labour Together (Peter Mandelson) with the Israeli-Mossad child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

So that is the context for the far-right riots, flags on lampposts and painting of roundabouts, the racist polarisations that repeatedly happen in Britain, and which the left is struggling to combat. Fundamentally the problem is that the working class in Britain has been robbed of class-wide political representation and political leadership for its struggles.  What is needed above all is a party of the working class able to give a class expression to social discontent and to put forward systems of demands to be implemented in struggle that point to the abolition of capitalism itself. We need to mobilise the sections of the class that do retain class-consciousness against the lumpen demoralisation – and where necessary against the hardened lumpen elements themselves – in organised defence corps and ultimately working-class militias. These must defend the migrant sections of our class, and indeed all sections, against reactionary and anti-social violence. This has to be tied to a firm defence of migrants against all legal and physical attacks, and the demand for trade union organisation of migrant workers and the restoration of the closed shop. But that principled approach does not absolve us of the need to address actual issues that arise concretely.

Racist eruptions and despair – the antidote

The murder of 18-year-old university student Henry Nowak in Southampton on 3 December 2025 was a flashpoint. When the culprit, Vickrum Digwa, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on May 28^th, it ignited a storm of far-right agitation. This agitation had been prepared on Elon Musk’s X for several months, but could not be mentioned in the British media until the case concluded. Henry Nowak was an English-born youth of Polish parentage; his killer is a 23-year-old Sikh. It does appear that after an apparently trivial late-night exchange between them, Digwa took offence and stabbed Henry Nowak five times with a 21-inch ceremonial knife. Digwa and his brother then phoned the police and claimed that Henry was a racist assailant, which was untrue. The cops arrived and treated Henry as a criminal, putting him in handcuffs even as he was bleeding to death. When he told the male officer he had been stabbed, the cop replied “I don’t think so, mate” and put cuffs on him. Only then did a female officer realise what had happened and try to save him. In vain – he died at the scene.

The cops were clearly negligent, as they did not separate the parties and examine both – it is not clear whether Henry Nowak would have survived if they had. They simply believed Digwa and his family, who knowingly called police and made false allegations of racism to get Digwa off the hook. There was a huge outcry from the far right, despite the Nowak family – his parents are Polish immigrants – stating publicly that his death must not be exploited to cause hatred. But this case has been a cause celebre of fascists who initiated riots in Southampton over this case and extensively fought battles with cops. Farage’s incendiary claim that this was ‘two-tier policing’ in favour of non-whites against white people, and call for ‘cold rage’ in response to that was obvious incitement for this violence. The ‘cold rage’ phrase was formulated for ‘plausible deniability’ so those who responded with violence could then be disowned, as they duly have been as a variety of rioters have been sent down for various violent offences related to the riots.

Then there was a stabbing in Belfast by a Sudanese refugee, which was the spark for a pogrom in the Protestant Shankhill Road area. Black families were the target of virulent racial hostility with people burned out of their homes, while British far-right politicians basically called for the violence and sought to spread it. Hundreds of lamentable murders take place in Britain every year, most of them are committed by perpetrators from the native population. Sensationalising the inevitable ones where immigrants are involved is a dangerous, cynical form of grifting that the ruling class uses as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. The cops are incompetent and class-prejudiced even when they are put upon to check the race prejudices that are rampant among them. The idea that there is some kind of ‘two-tier’ justice system discriminating against whites is a cynical piece of nonsense put about by fascist grifter politicians, looking to ride to power in the manner of Trump on the backs of despair and a vacuum of class politics.

The only sustainable antidote to this fascistic project is to create a genuine class party to fill that vacuum. And the latest diversion from this is the candidacy of Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election aiming at a return to parliament to challenge Starmer’s leadership, trying to keep the neoliberal Labour project going after Starmer appears to have run it off the road. Another key obstacle is the Green Party, which is attempting to fill the vacuum to the left of Labour but is unable to do so because of its petty-bourgeois class nature and politics. All of these may require various tactical approaches to win people away from them, but this can only be done by creating a real working-class party out of those forces open to this, and with the potential to develop a real, anti-capitalist revolutionary programme.

by Peter Gregson

Based on Pete Gregson’s talk of 30^th May 2026 at www.tiny.cc/hamastalk

In the years of Pro-Palestine demonstrations I’ve attended since Oct 7^th 2023, there is rarely a mention of the group at the core of the whole issue: Hamas. For people are fearful to talk about them. But whilst calling for support for Hamas may be illegal, seeking its de-proscription is not. The UK Government’s 2000 Terrorism act permits requesting the de-proscription of any “terrorist” group. You can’t be penalised for calling for de-proscription. Citizens have the right to appeal against proscription if you give a reason as to why its proscription affects you.

Following the events of 7^th October 2023, I did exactly that and launched a petition to the Home Secretary. Initially I tried to get the petition before Parliament using the UK Government portal but was told it was beyond Parliament’s remit! So, I launched it online on Go-Petition, promoted it using 20,000 flyers – which I took to all the demonstrations around London and Scotland – and started getting signatures.

By January, the online petition had 45,000 views and 1,410 signatures which, though fearing arrest, I took to Downing St. My two supporters and I had our photo taken outside No. 10 and were welcomed into the building by police carrying a big box with Hamas Petition written on it.

The mainstream media was completely absent, despite my mailing 270 journalists – not one of whom decided to cover it. Only Russia Today, Al Jazeera, the Canary and Middle East Monitor carried it.

I experienced no issue with the police despite threats of being arrested from two of the 650 MPs I had written to on the petition. Unhappily for these two public servants, I had broken no law.

To be clear, although I have previously been in touch with Hamas on a prior campaign to twin Edinburgh with Gaza, they did not request nor have any involvement with this one. Indeed, around this time, an organisation called Riverways Law were asked by Hamas to submit a de-proscription application.

Their submission was much more thorough than my 8-page submission to the Home Secretary. You can check it out in full on their website at https://hamascase.com. It had lots of witness statements, including from members of Hamas describing what they saw on 7th October as well as the impact de-proscription was having on people’s lives. It was a phenomenal amount of work. They asked for de-proscription on three grounds:

a.       They said the Home Secretary has a duty to prevent even a suspicion of genocide; the way that the rules are set out, it’s not that she needs to see someone committing genocide in order to stop them – if there is even a suspicion of genocide, it becomes incumbent upon her to act. But because she’s banned Hamas and Hamas is fighting genocide- proscription means she’s undermining that fight.

b.      The second issue of course was Freedom of Speech. The Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) were banned in 2001 by Tony Blair, but the political part of Hamas was accepted by Britain as being legitimate – they were essentially the government of Gaza. It wasn’t until 2021 when Priti Patel went on holiday to Israel, met Netanyahu and banned Hamas on her return. No vote in Parliament was required. Yet as Hamas has never operated outside Palestine, there is no issue of protection within the UK. We in Britain should have a right to discuss Hamas and by banning it, the Home Secretary has taken away our freedom of speech, which is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. So, it is the British Government who are breaking the law here.

c.       Finally, there is the lack of proportionality over banning. The Quartet (Russia, the US, UN and the EU) – set their preconditions after Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Despite the fact that the UN has allowed the use of armed force against occupation since 1982, they said they would only engage with Hamas if they gave up arms, recognise Israel and accept all PLO/Israeli agreements that had been made in the Oslo Accords of 1993. Clearly, Hamas were never going to do that.

The Quartet later appointed Tony Blair because of his ability in Northern Ireland to get peace- which was an incredible achievement. But we got peace because we negotiated. We never asked Sinn Fein to recognise Britain’s authority over Ulster. We weren’t asking the same thing that he was then asking Hamas to do. Another example, Nelson Mandela, when he headed the armed wing of the ANC, wasn’t asked to renounce the ANC before discussing peace.

Also, Hamas is the Gaza administration- so proscription criminalises all public sector workers there. Gaza City Council has 5,000 employees, just looking after the million people who lived in Gaza City. Technically, if you send money to one of those employees- you could be supporting Hamas. So its banning is simply unjust because it criminalises a vast swathe of people. It’s also pointless because they don’t have any influence over Britain.

The 1987 charter was drafted when Hamas set itself up; there were some quite harsh things in there. It’s an Islamic resistance movement after all – but that wasn’t the full thoughts of Hamas, because it wasn’t written by all of them, it was written by one man. So, in 2017 they released a clarification – their Principles and Policies. In it, they even said they would settle for a “Hudna”, a truce, along the same lines as the UN and UK demands – a return to the 1967 borders, Israel giving up the land it had taken then, giving up that occupation. Hamas also wanted the Palestinian prisoners to be released and the Palestinians who were driven out in 1948 to be given the right of return, as the UN had called for in resolution 194. But the Hamas offer of a truce was completely ignored; this proposal wasn’t covered in the West at all.

Each year Hamas calls for elections; but Fatah each year denies them. It’s true that Hamas would prefer Sharia law, but it has said it will go with the majority in a democratic Palestine. It seeks the end of Israel but would live alongside Jews who gave up Zionism. But none of this was or is talked about.

We get a very twisted view of Hamas. A brief look at its history; it all began with the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt; which was then constituted in Palestine in 1946. The Brotherhood concentrated on philanthropic acts; setting up mosques, schools, universities and so on. Back then Russia and China supported the liberation movements all over the world and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) benefitted from this. As the Soviet Union fell, political Islam rose. In 1987 much of the Brotherhood realised it could not refuse to fight any longer and so with the first intifada in 1987, Hamas emerged. Initially, Israel discreetly supported them as a counter to the secular PLO. But in 1993 matters exploded after Israeli Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshippers at a mosque in Hebron (Goldstein is a hero nowadays to people like Ben-Gvir), he committed mass murder and injured hundreds more. As a response, Hamas declared they would retaliate, using two suicide bombs in buses against civilians in 1994. This resulted in their proscription by the EU and US.

In 1993, Israel and the PLO had signed the Oslo accords without most Palestinians knowing about it.  The PLO was led by Fatah, Arafat’s party.

Hamas rejected these accords and wouldn’t get involved in the first elections but chose to give the new Palestine Authority (PA) a chance. The PA began then doing what Israel had said they should do in the agreement which was to jail people who were resisting Israel’s rule. The PA started jailing Hamas supporters, doing Israel’s dirty work. Also, it was becoming quite corrupt.

Then Arafat died in 2004 and Abbas stood for election. Hamas boycotted this, because any president of theirs would have had to negotiate with Israel, which they did not wish to do- so Fatah’s Abbas took power. But in 2006 Hamas decided they would stand for election because they fundamentally believe in democracy. They did stand, winning handsomely. But Israel and the US immediately set about undermining the Hamas Government, which Fatah had also rejected, because they didn’t want to give up power. Abbas had his own US-trained police force versus Hamas’ police force; this was just a recipe for disaster. There were many killings of Hamas, then revenge killings; eventually it became clear that Fatah was planning a coup, leading to Hamas seizing power in Gaza. Thereafter, Israel refused to negotiate over Palestinian statehood. They employed a catch 22; they said they wouldn’t negotiate with Hamas, because they were “terrorists”; and they wouldn’t negotiate with the PA because it didn’t reflect all Palestinians. There was no way to win because Israel had every excuse in the book for refusing the things that they had agreed to.

In the West Bank, as expected, the PA became responsible for arresting Hamas supporters, making them very unpopular. Note that Hamas made repeated attempts over the years at peaceful protest, culminating in the 2018 Great March of Return. It was just so shocking; people were getting murdered by snipers just because they wanted to go home, back through the fence. Many became aware of the true nature of the Israeli regime at this time.  Also note that over the 20 years from 2021, 44 Israelis were killed by rockets fired from Gaza; over the same period, Israel killed many, many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

But Israel continued to allow Qatar to fund Hamas; suitcases full of dollar bills went into Gaza because Israel wanted to keep Hamas going, as then they would then conflict with Fatah (the PA), who were being funded by the EU and the US. The more they became polarised, the more the Israelis benefitted.

This carried on until Donald Trump set up the 2020 Abraham Accords in an attempt to “normalise” relations between the Arab states and Israel, seeking the former’s recognition and trade with Israel. Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates all signed and in 2023 it looked like Saudi Arabia was going to be next, even though up until then the Saudis had said they wouldn’t normalise unless Palestine attained  statehood. But the more the Israelis promised the Saudis- their own nuclear power stations for example- the more the Saudis were tempted, which gave the strong impression that Palestine was being negotiated away. Hamas felt it had to put Palestine back in the public eye. Also, there was a lot of anger about Israeli actions at Al Aqsa mosque in 2023, where IDF soldiers attacked people at worship during Ramadan.

Hamas launched their strike pre-emptively as they became aware that Israel was about to attack again and take the Hamas leaders. In this strike, their stated aim was to capture soldiers- as the going rate for one Israeli soldier was about one thousand Palestinians, as evidenced by the various previous prisoner exchanges that had taken place.

The plan therefore was to take captives. On 7^th Oct Hamas launched an attack with the IDF falling back quickly, which Hamas didn’t expect. They then moved to settlements seeking more captives. Israel now employed the Hannibal directive.  Clearly, the damage to cars at the scene could not have been done by guys on motorbikes with Kalashnikovs and were likely done by Hellfire missiles from IDF Apache helicopters. These cars were completely and utterly burned out. The cars had been taking Israelis back to Gaza as captives, but the IDF bombed them. Damage from IDF tank fire of kibbutz homes was also apparent. Whether there was a Palestinian in there and some Israelis, the IDF didn’t care, they just bombed the whole building because they knew that they could blame Hamas. It’s believed as many as 800 Israelis were killed by the IDF. As more and more evidence has come to light following the attack, the claims of mass rape have by now been largely dismissed, despite the media frenzy. There were 19 breaches of the border fence, through which lots of people flooded out of Gaza, not just Hamas. The psychological state of these Gazans can be guessed at, after being starved and bombed for twenty years. They attacked the Nova festival that Hamas says they didn’t know was taking place.

The US and UK accepted Israel’s narrative. And now Israel uses the terrorist label to justify a genocide. And most Israelis have gone along with this because, they think “Oh no, they’re going to kill us all”. It’s got to that level of terror amongst your average Israeli – that they think “we can’t do anything but kill Palestinians, because otherwise we’re dead”. Which is exactly what Netanyahu and the Zionists want.

Even in this country, they brew up terror amongst Jewish people, because they know that just keeps the whole ridiculous ball rolling – and nothing sells newspapers like antisemitism.

As long as Hamas represents the majority view in Palestine, any negotiations would need to include Hamas, for any resulting deal to have any legitimacy within Palestine. Various UK Lords- Lord Peter Hain, Lord Rickets, have declared that wiping out Hamas is impossible. Even Tony Blair said it was a mistake to ban Hamas. Yet, these issues are shoved under the carpet and what we have is a very silent acceptance of proscription. But 80% of countries in the world do not label Hamas as terrorists. The UN does not define Hamas as terrorists. It’s actually the UK, the EU and the US that do so, which gives Israel all the cover it needs to continue killing Palestinians.

Pro-Palestine demonstrations are all very good but are not really getting at the root of what’s going on; Palestinians are fighting for their lives and land, and we should not ignore the fact that Hamas are fighting for them.

We must keep calling for de-proscription. If you agree, please sign the petition at www.tiny.cc/hamas and then we can start getting people to write to their MPs and MSPs. If enough people bug their politicians, it may succeed, not tomorrow perhaps, but if we persist for as long as it takes, it may lead to the establishment of a new democratic state for the most persecuted and oppressed people on this planet.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 7th June on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

This chapter is magnificent, in my estimation, and the core of this work by Lenin. The Chapter, and arguably the book itself (since this is its core) is a restatement of a crucial work by Marx, which was never published until after Marx’s death (the Critique of the Gotha Programme – published in 1891, whereas Marx died in 1883).

It is in four discreet sections, which stand together in explaining this subject matter in a fairly straightforward, but rich and subtle manner. It explains the stages of the emergence of socialist society out of capitalism via the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then the later emergence of Communism out of the socialism that it is possible to build today. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or go into a learned set of extended these on this. So, I don’t propose to go through this in great depth, but rather to give a sketch of the main points. What I would advise, however, is to study this chapter in particular several times. It contains the political ballast to not only understand the whole of Lenin’s small book, but there is also a linear progression from some of the material particularly in section 3 of this book, to understand Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, which we studied earlier.

The other point that is worth noting is that none of this is developed in terms of any particular national terrain. It is taken as given that that we are discussing the overcoming of capitalism as a whole, and not any nationally-isolated posing of the question. In this regard, this citation of Marx is significant:

“…the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense it is possible to speak of the ‘present-day state’, in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

It is clear that this is about developed capitalism in its entirety, and none of this implies any national isolationism or perspective of socialism in one country.

The first part of this is on the Presentation of the Question by Marx. Lenin briefly looks at two letters, Marx’s letter to Wilhelm Bracke of May 5, 1875, and Engels’ letter to August Bebel of March 28, 1875, which address basically two facets of the same question in different ways – the nature of the state in the immediate aftermath of a working-class revolution. Engels argued against Bebel, who was fond of agitation in favour of such things as a ‘people’s state’ or a ‘free state’, that the state was not a weapon of liberation, but something that our aim is to abolish. Engels argued that socialists should stop using demands about the state in agitation, and instead talk about the ‘community’.

Whereas Marx had written at some length about the ‘future state in communist society’, which would seem to imply the opposite of Engels’s argument. Lenin pointed out that they were just emphasising particular aspects of their joint views to address different questions, and were united in their basic position. Lenin thus quotes Marx:

“The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state. (ibid)

So, you have the three-pointed scientific answer Marx produced, and which Lenin elaborates and popularises in this work. Lenin quotes Marx

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

and continues:

“Previously the question was put as follows: to achieve its emancipation, the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie, win political power and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.

“Now the question is put somewhat differently: the transition from capitalist society–which is developing towards communism–to communist society is impossible without a ‘political transition period’, and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

He notes such achievements as the SPD, in organising “…a larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere else in the world.”.  One million in party itself, and 3 million in unions, out of 15 million.

 Yet notwithstanding this:

“If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for ‘paupers’!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

“Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”

He notes that capitalist democracy has this character, and does not proceed, as the opportunists say, towards greater democracy. Instead:

“.. forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

“…Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.”

He quotes Engels to Bebel: “the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist”. Thus:

“Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less.”

But there is a fundamental difference between this, and the bourgeois state:

“…the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people.”

The ‘machine’ is the armed people – we are talking about a semi-state. So, then Lenin goes (with Marx) into the first phase of communist society. Again, he quotes Marx:

“What we have to deal with here [in analysing the programme of the workers’ party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes.”

In particular, he notes that the revolution expropriates capitalist property, and each worker receives the share of the product of society proportionate to that which they contributed. This is formal equality.

“The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labour which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”

But it is not real equality, because the individuals receiving these equal shares, are themselves unequal. “But people are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on” Therefore this:

 “…is an application of an equal measure to different people who in fact are not alike, are not equal to one another. That is why the ‘equal right’ is violation of equality and an injustice. In fact, everyone, having performed as much social labour as another, receives an equal share of the social product “

What this leads to is a paradox; that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even under the lower stage of communism, such inequalities, which Lenin acknowledges are unjust, are still inescapable and cannot be simply wished away. This Marx, and then Lenin, calls “bourgeois right”. This is part of material reality. Lenin again quotes Marx as to why that is:

 “… these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth pangs, from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

Thus, the state, even the bourgeois state (or part of its social function), cannot be abolished by decree alone. It continues to exist, and must continue to exist in some form, until social development renders it superfluous in a more distant future:

“In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois law’. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”

This became the crucial issue after the Russian revolution, when the proletariat conquered power in a huge, backward, overwhelmingly peasant country. Though in formal terms the state was the owner of the entire collectivised economy, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ had its power enhanced by the difference of material productivity between Soviet Russia and its imperialist enemies. The only basis upon which the power of this necessary apparatus could diminish was by a harmonious development of the productive forces, which presupposed the joint efforts of the proletariats of all, or at least several, advanced countries. But with the first, materially backward, workers state plunged into political isolation, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ that Marx spoke of and Lenin amplified/elaborated, became relatively more powerful against the masses, and were able to politically expropriate the working class, while maintaining the property relations of the proletarian revolution, for several decades. This is all explicable, and explained, by this chapter, in essence and in embryo.

The flip side of this is that given a sufficient development of the productive forces, the state, including the administration of distribution we are talking about, obviously ceases to be economically justified:

“Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labour and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know…”

“When the majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be ‘nowhere to go’.

“The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay.

“But this “factory” discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress”.

And quoting to conclude this:

“From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism–from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.

“Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.”

Q1: Have the Socialist Federation/Members Charter and Your Party All-London Delegate Assembly Proscribed the Consistent Democrats and Liaison Committee for the Fourth International?

Q2. What Happened to Opposition to Anti-Communist Bans and Proscriptions?

We reproduce a statement in Portuguese, with English translation, from Humberto Rodrigues, leading spokesperson for Emancipação do Trabalho, Brazilian section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, about the recent exclusions of our leading spokesperson by USFI and allied leftists from events relating to the left of Your Party:

“Neste momento, apresar das expulsões, golpes, calúnias e injustas difamações, os camaradas da LCFI britânica, mais do que nunca, devem estar orgulhosos do nome que se batizaram: Democratas Consistentes. São, na prática, os mais consequentes entre os comunistas e entre os liberais na defesa da democracia e da liberdade de expressão dos trabalhadores dentro de suas organizações políticas e na luta de partidos. De nossa parte, da LCFI do Brasil, estamos orgulhosos de sermos irmãos de DC, os melhores lutadores da esquerda da Grã Bretanha na luta contra o sionismo, que é a vanguarda mundial do nazismo de nosso tempo.”

Or in English translation:

“At this moment, despite expulsions, coups, betrayals, slanders and unjust defamations, the comrades of the British LCFI, more than ever, must be proud of the name they have baptised: Consistent Democrats. They are, in practice, the most consistent among communists and liberals in the defence of democracy and freedom of expression of workers within their political organisations and in the struggle of parties. For our part, from LCFI Brazil, we are proud to be brothers of DC, the best fighters of the left of Great Britain in the fight against Zionism, which is the world vanguard of Nazism of our time.”