Below this introduction is an abridged version of the article that we wrote advocating critical support for Howard Beckett’s campaign for the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union, before he stood down on 18^th June. His candidacy was withdrawn as part of a promise he made that if Gerard Coyne, the hard right-wing candidate for the GS position, managed to get enough nominations to get on the ballot, he would do everything to ensure that only a single left-wing candidate stood.

Beckett stood by this promise, which no doubt gives him a degree of kudos for honesty. However, since his campaign was politically superior to those of his two ostensibly left-wing rivals, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham, this honesty has not done the Unite membership and the labour movement any favours in terms of the political choices open to it. It should be noted that all of the ostensibly left candidates (as well as Coyne) are part of the Unite bureaucracy, which is in an integral part of the British trade union bureaucracy in general, and none of them represent a working-class challenge to that bureaucracy in principle. It is not normal practice for revolutionaries to routinely support trade union bureaucrats in internal union elections, but the political character of what Beckett stood when his candidacy was operative was not that of a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. The political break he made with Starmer, having effectively declared war on the leader of the Labour Party and his anti-left project, made Beckett qualitatively superior to Turner and Graham.

Turner made his desire for collaboration with Starmer pretty clear in an interview with the Huffington Post (27 April) that set the tone for his campaign:

“I’ve always felt we could get a solution to this [Corbyn getting the whip back]. But the longer it goes on, the more entrenched it becomes on both sides. It’s like a war of attrition going on, and it’s going on in public. That’s not helpful to the party, it’s not helpful to Keir, it’s not helpful to Jeremy and it’s not helpful to me as a trade union leader or our members.

“People don’t vote for a divided party. Or a party that’s contemplating his own navel. Sometimes it’s right to shout. But on some occasions diplomacy is best done privately. Look, Keir wasn’t my preferred candidate …. But I’m a socialist, I’m a democrat, and the reality of it is he was elected by the vast majority of our members that voted.

“We didn’t even convince our own members to come on a journey with us, in terms of the political program that was being laid out by Jeremy, Becky and that entire team. We didn’t win the argument inside our own union. We won it amongst the politicos and that group that loves to talk to themselves.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/unite-steve-turner-len-mccluskey-interview_uk_6088331fe4b0b9042d8ae549

And he went further:

“Trying to get this purist Left, I find incredibly dangerous. We’re fighting the rise of the far right and that narrative of hate and division in society more generally. We are trying to pull the Left together to create a vision of a better Britain and we’ve got this purist debate that’s taken place, pitting good Left comrades against good Left comrades, because they don’t sign up to a particular way of thinking on a particular issue.

“That purist argument, you’re a class traitor if you don’t sign up to something is just beyond belief, that’s not my Left. I’m an inclusive, tolerant, Left.”

ibid

But what is bizarre about this plea for ‘tolerance’ is that it is done in defence of ‘tolerance’ of the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer, which has engaged in the one of the biggest purges in history of the Labour Party membership, targeting leftist supporters and former supporters of Corbyn, anyone who opposes the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians, and has created a situation where anyone in the party who speaks out in defence of those purged risks being purged themselves. For Turner to speak out against the ‘purist’ and supposedly intolerant left in this context is simply grotesque. It marks him out as an apologist for Starmer’s witchhunt and as someone who could possibly even be a threat to the left within UNITE if elected, alongside the openly pro-Starmer, right-wing candidate Gerard Coyne. Such positions and attitudes have their own logic.

Since Beckett withdrew, Turner has made some very tepid criticisms of Starmer’s purges and called for the reinstatement of those thrown out. But though he mused that eventually Starmer might not prove to be a leader that unions could work with, he still refrained from attacking Starmer directly and calling for his ousting, or for unions to refuse to support Labour under his leadership. He has made a slight verbal adjustment in his campaign rhetoric, perhaps to accommodate Beckett’s supporters given the claims made when Beckett withdrew that Beckett and Turner would be running a joint campaign. But Turner, not Beckett, is the candidate, which is the reality, and it would be naïve to take such diplomatic formulations at face value and trust Turner.

Then there is Sharon Graham, who is standing on a very leftist programme of rebuilding the strength of the union, rebuilding industrial militancy, and fighting for workers gains in this way. This positive element of her campaign is spelled out:

“We must rebuild our industrial base and bring workers from outside our traditional industries into our union. We can’t afford years of drift facing a Tory government and sustained only by short-term tactical manoeuvres. We can’t fiddle while Rome burns. We have to start doing it ourselves: this is not ‘workerism’ – this is the reality of our moment.

“We need an industrial programme that moves decisively beyond the empty rhetoric of ‘partnership’ and which is also supported by our industrial activists; the vast majority of whom agree on the need for power in the workplace and strong organisation, with the ability to take strike action if and when required.

[…]

“Of course, we still need to seek influence in parliament – laws matter. They can dictate our lives. But we must now reform the way we influence legislation. If anything, I will push hard for policy, but I will base this on a workers’ manifesto that is decided by our reps and activists.

“I will pursue its priorities by actively campaigning, as well taking our priorities into the structures of Labour. I will also refuse to support future candidates for parliament that have not represented working people. We need more working-class voices in Westminster and I will turn this soundbite into reality.”

https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/32606/02-06-2021/unite-general-secretary-campaign-statement-from-sharon-graham

That is positive, the trade unions should not be giving any support to election candidates who support or refuse to oppose attacks on working class people, who refuse to oppose austerity, or who refuse to oppose the government. However, there is also this:

“Already, only a small minority of members are engaged in this debate. Make no mistake, we are moving in ever decreasing circles and we need fundamental change.

“For many years, conversations within the left have often been reduced to considering the merits – or otherwise – of the existing leadership of the Labour Party. But decades on from Thatcher, this discussion is increasingly detached from the concerns of working people. Instead of putting forward concrete plans to build working-class power, general secretary elections are being fought as proxy wars, far removed from workers.”

ibid

This is not so good. Because the supposed ‘small minority’ of members who are ‘engaged’ in the debate about the merits of the existing leadership of the Labour Party … are the highly political layer who provided the mass base for Corbynism, and their right-wing opponents of course, who are as noted earlier, engaged in the most massive purge in the history of the Labour Party and the labour movement in Britain, precisely in order to try to render impossible any future challenge to neo-liberal domination of the political wing of the labour movement. To dismiss this whole conflict as ‘ever decreasing circles’ and ‘detached from the concerns of working people’ is a false, narrowly trade unionist view that abstains from the struggles that are most crucial for the interests of working people, and actually a retreat from the best aspects of the Corbyn movement.

In essence, despite different methods of reasoning, both Turner and Graham arrive at the same conclusion: to abstain from challenging the neoliberal attacks on the Labour left and the left generally that Starmer personified, either on the grounds that to do so would mean the left becoming intolerant (Turner) or getting involved in matters that are supposedly of no interest to workers (Graham). Neither represent any challenge to the labour movement being dominated by forces loyal to neoliberalism. And both campaigns, as indeed was Beckett’s, are waged by long-time full-time officials who partake of the privileged status of the top reaches of the union bureaucracy with salaries many times above those of the members they are supposed to lead and represent.

None of the three left candidates’ platforms even pay lip service to the basic socialist view that union officials should be paid no more than a good skilled worker’s salary. The right-wing media regularly runs muck-raking articles on the sizeable salaries of union officials, who generally earn several times the salary of the members they represent. Such criticisms are hypocritical as the bourgeoisie rely on this bureaucratic layer and its conservatising influence to control the labour movement, as a firebreak against revolution. But as we explain below, sometimes despite that, trends can emerge from the bureaucracy that reflect a class-struggle impetus from below, as with Beckett’s declaration of war against Starmer which became quite sensational in the weeks before he withdrew.

It is the limitations of the ‘left’ bureaucracy, not least in forcing Beckett into line and into withdrawing his candidacy, that have now put militants on the left in Unite and in the broader labour movement influenced by Unite, into an invidious situation where the left is divided and maybe paralysed in a way that can benefit the hard, neoliberal right-wing agent, Coyne. Both Turner and Graham should have stood down in favour of Beckett’s campaign not because Beckett is a fancy lawyer, or any such rubbish of the kind some reactionary populist/workerist types have been peddling, but because his campaign, in declaring war on Starmer from a leftist standpoint, was politically superior to both. Beckett is also culpable for capitulating to them over this, out of misguided ‘anti-sectarianism’ which quailed in the face of denunciation by treacherous fakers like Owen Jones.

Now we have two nondescript ‘left’ campaigns, both of which have something fundamentally lacking about them, in that both, for different reasons refuse to take on the neoliberal parasites that are wrecking and crippling the labour movement. The two campaigns are sterile and are in danger of cancelling each other out and allowing the right-wing to sail through the middle. There is nothing we can currently do to rectify that. No doubt our own supporters in Unite, along with all other militants, will not simply abstain in the election but give their vote to whoever out of Turner and Graham are in their judgement are likely to do the least possible damage to the union, in the hope of staving off Coyne. But neither of the two ‘left’ candidates merit a political endorsement, even a critical one, unless one of them unexpectedly does something that steps beyond the fundamental flaws we point to here. The left bureaucracy in Unite have between them engineered a disappointing and risky situation in this election and will have only themselves to blame if a disaster happens.

Unite General Secretary Election

A Critical Vote for Howard Beckett! (Abridged)

Re-arm the left and the Unions to take on this Criminal Government!

The candidacy of Howard Beckett, who has strongly criticised the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer with its witchhunts against the left, its antipathy to trade unionists and organised workers, and its re-Blairisation of the Labour Party under the guidance of Peter Mandelson, who also advises Boris Johnson, has been like a breath of fresh air after the previous capitulations of the Labour left.

Beckett has taken on the Labour right wing in a manner that no prominent figure in the Labour Party or labour movement did in the entire Corbyn era from 2015-2020, including of course Corbyn himself. He has taken on Labour’s Blairite/Zionist stooge leader head on and that is the centrepiece of his campaign. In some ways the things that he has said are exceptional for a candidate in an internal union election. On 14^th June he Tweeted simply: “Starmer must go” following earlier Tweets where he said: “If Labour HQ continues down its path and no longer speaks for working people, it will not be getting Unite money if I am general secretary.” These are not exceptional; he has said many similar things over the past several weeks. But his onslaught against the treacherous Starmer leadership of Labour is escalating and is becoming utterly counterposed to the other two ostensibly ‘left-wing’ candidates, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham.

Beckett went into more depth in his forthright attack on Labour’s right-wing leadership in an interview on 8th May with Revolutionary Socialism in the 21 Century, where he elaborated:

“He’s not a success as a leader. What’s going on now is a dereliction of duty with his failure to offer a narrative on zero Covid, or a narrative on nationalisation when it’s most needed, or resistance to fire and rehire. If he continues on the course he’s on he’ll become irrelevant, and Labour is quickly becoming a party of the establishment.

“It is for the Labour Party to prove its relationship with unions, and if it doesn’t speak on a daily, weekly, monthly basis on behalf of working people then it will become irrelevant to working people. But if that does happen, the union movement will not be found wanting. If I am general secretary, the union movement will step into that vacuum and talk with and for our communities, educate our communities and talk about socialism.

“Unite has already reduced our affiliation and we’re on record as saying we will have to take great care that any further money is given to those who share our values. If they continue on this path there will be debates not just about regular funding and funding around elections but also about affiliation, and I will happily facilitate those debates. The only language the leadership understand at the moment is the language you would be giving to a bad employer.”

https://www.rs21.org.uk/2021/05/08/unite-elections-an-interview-with-howard-beckett/

However, he is not confining himself to politicking within the Labour Party milieu. He is, as least verbally, putting forward an agenda of class struggle which is somewhat unusual to hear from an aspiring leader of a trade union in this period, and appears to be pitching to lead a left-wing political movement, not just a campaign for a leading trade union position:

“Steve Turner is running on the idea of partnership with employers. I reject that. When you talk in that language it diminishes the fact that we are in a class struggle.”

“I am banging the drum for Unite to have its own TV channel, with regular interviews with high-profile politicians and activists, constant news and evaluation of industrial and political landscape. It could be used for advice, distilling information for our reps, and even cookery shows. If we start talking to wider society the next generation will see exactly what a union does, understand the importance of collectivism and want to be part of this.”

“If the laws are trying to restrict liberties then they should be defied. As soon as we start accepting them as valid then our liberties are lost, and it becomes only a matter of time before our entire movement is lost. Unite’s rule book has been changed to make a statement about Unite stepping outside of the law. It is becoming a reality for us now.”

“Strikes. Strikes! Targeted strike action. Simple as that. The idea that protecting the NHS is done by making speeches? Nonsense. People should be in Unite because they need to be in a union that will take the fight to the government. If we can’t make the argument for reversing privatisation now after Covid then frankly we all deserve what we get. If we can’t make an argument about care homes coming into public ownership under the NHS then we deserve what we get, and if we can’t defend the argument for a 15% pay rise then we deserve what we get. Here and now the reality for all of us there needs to be strategic, targeted industrial action.”

ibid

One negative point about Beckett, where he displayed weakness, albeit in November 2020 before the Unite leadership issue became central, was when under pressure from the right and the Zionists, he pulled out of an event calling for Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement because expelled Labour member and Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was also a speaker. Greenstein is a hate figure of the Zionists and those who share platform with expelled anti-Zionists are immediately added to the list of targets. However, a few weeks later in December, at a NEC meeting discussing the Tory-stooge Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report smearing sections of the Labour left as anti-Semitic, he challenged aspects of the process, tweeting “My NEC report for Unite will record being denied access to submissions to the EHRC, denied a debate on suspensions; denied debate on the importance of protecting lawful speech.” (https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/unite-union-official-beckett-criticised-over-his-response-to-labour-antisemitism-meeting-1.509469). Beckett is a union official, not a Palestine solidarity activist, but his statements on the recent Zionist atrocities make clear that he is an outspoken opponent of these crimes which have had such a major impact on the labour movement in Britain these last few years.

Smears and Witchhunting of Beckett

He has more recently himself had a taste of the cynicism of the fake ‘racism’ allegations of the right and the fake-left, when he was himself suspended from Labour for a tweet in solidarity with a large, militant crowd of anti-racists in Glasgow who physically prevented immigration officials from seizing two Indian Muslims who were under threat of deportation. Beckett, clearly enraged by the racism of the Home Office led by Priti Patel, the far-right Tory capo, Modi-supporting anti-Muslim fascistic Hindutva bigot and Israeli stooge, who clearly ordered the action, tweeted on 13 May: “Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism.”.

He quickly apologised and said his tweet was not meant to be taken literally. Various liberals who claim to be on the left, and the Labour leadership, howled with outrage at Beckett’s supposed ‘racism’ for forgetting that the Home Secretary who ordered a racist atrocity, one of many, is also not white. But this is drivel, as usual his accusers for the most part have no problems with deporting ethnic minority people, or even if they have in theory, would not dream of refusing to support Labour’s own racist and sociopathic levy of deporters seeking government office. Anyone with half-a-brain and an ounce of honesty can see that Beckett was expressing outrage at state racism, not supporting it. He really has nothing to apologise for, and his suspension is just another piece of scandalous Starmerite dishonesty.

Apparently as part of the bilious campaign against him the Starmerites are now moving toward his expulsion from the Labour Party, supposedly for ‘racism’ against Johnson’s deporter-in-chief. Which just underlines the nature of the Zionist-led Labour Party where people are expelled with smears of ‘racism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ for opposing the organised racist and Zionist trends that dominate Labour. Including several former Blairite Home Secretaries who could give Theresa May or Priti Patel a run for their money in the migrant-bashing stakes – Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Jacqui Smith, Alan Johnson, all anti-migrant xenophobic lowlife in the same mould as Patel. Labour has never expelled such vile people, but they now propose to expel a leading union left-winger for supporting direct action against racist deportations. That is a sign of ‘racism’ in their racist fantasy world.

All this has the effect of exposing more and more the mendacity, racist and chauvinist politics behind the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaigns and the like that simply lie about the left in the service of the foulest bigotry.

Unite Election: Political Struggle not Stitch-Ups

Since then, he has been the target of similar hysteria from the soft left. In the hustings/vote for the support of the political machine known as the United Left (UL) within Unite, which is dominated by trade unionist cadre of the Communist Party of Britain, Beckett only narrowly failed to get nominated as the UL candidate, by three votes.  However there seems to be evidence that dozens of paid-up UL supporters who wanted to vote for Beckett were not allowed to vote, due to ‘technical’ problems involving an email address/server, and the legitimacy of this vote is hotly disputed by not only Beckett, but many on the wider left. This brought the machinery of the CP/B into play to get numerous nominations from branches for Turner; by the time the deadline was up he had 525, with Graham beating Beckett by 349 to 328. The openly right-wing candidate, Gerard Coyne, came last with 196 candidates.

However, nominations through formal union bodies do not necessarily equate to votes in a union election, as these bodies tend to be dominated by the bureaucracy, activists, and those closest to the formal structures of the union. The strategy of Coyne will be to rely on the influence of the right-wing gutter press to appeal over the heads of the union structure to the atomised members. However, the strategy of Beckett also seems to be based on an attempt at an aggressive political appeal to class sentiment, also over the heads of the officialdom, based on a left-wing hostility to Starmer and his supporters, something that Turner and his CPB supporters are actively hostile to from a Labour-loyal perspective, and which Graham flinches from in the name of ‘non-political’ trade unionism.

Given the recent history of Unite, this is not a forlorn strategy. Beckett could succeed, and in the process push the politics of the union much further to the left. Capitulators to Blairism and softer elements on the left, personified by Owen Jones, contend that three putative left-wing candidates standing are likely to divide the ‘left’ vote and hand the union over to the right winger Coyne. But that is not necessarily true, looking at the history of recent General Secretary elections in Unite. Apart from the fact that given his conciliation of Starmer, Turner’s designation as a left candidate is something of an exaggeration. Much depends on the quality of the campaigns waged by the candidates.

In 2010, there were four candidates: Len McCluskey (ex-Militant left-wing bureaucrat and the current retiring GS), Jerry Hicks (widely renowned victimised rank-and-file militant from Bristol Rolls Royce), Gail Cartmail (soft left ‘socialist-feminist’ and current assistant GS of Unite) and Les Bayliss, a right-winger similar to Coyne today. Bayliss came third; this was a highly political contest between McCluskey with bureaucratic ‘left’ politics and the revolutionary-minded militant Hicks, who put up a hell of a fight. Both of the top two left candidates beat Bayliss. In a repeat election in 2013 where the only two candidates were Hicks, the polarisation was stronger, and a similar result obtained where McCluskey beat Hicks by 2 to 1. Hicks improved vote of 79,819 showed there was a substantial base for political militancy in Unite. Only in 2017 was the result close, where McCluskey, in what was widely seen as an unnecessary and cynical election aimed at prolonging his own term in office, only narrowly beat Coyne. Another rank-and-file trade union militant, Ian Allinson, who appeared much less well-known than Jerry Hicks, failed to make major inroads and only gained 13% of the vote.

But that election appears very different to this one. McCluskey by then was a busted flush, and barely clung on by his fingernails, and the election itself a demoralising exercise. This is shaping up to be a highly political election fight, a real battle for the ‘soul’ of Unite, the biggest union in Britain, by forces around Beckett who hope to drive a campaign to re-arm the kind of leftist sentiment that drove support for Corbyn, and to drive the labour movement itself back to the left. That is the danger that the right-wing see from Beckett’s campaign, and why there has been a hysterical response from Starmer’s supporters.

Bureaucratic splintering and militant trade unionism

As his detractors have been keen to point out, he is not a rank-and-file worker. He is of Irish Catholic working-class background, born in Belfast, and someone who went to university and became a solicitor. He worked for the Union for a long period and is undoubtedly simply by virtue of his occupation wealthier than many union members.

His background is hardly the stuff of trade union militancy at a rank-and-file level as in the heyday of union militancy that existing in Britain prior to the victories of Thatcher over the trade unions, most crucially in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. It is the stuff of a trade union movement that has been beaten and betrayed for decades. Betrayed particularly by the political class that has developed centrally in the political bureaucracy of the Labour Party, which has over several decades become something more than what it was at the time of the party’s emergence: an extension of the pro-capitalist bureaucracy of the trade unions. This bureaucratic layer in Britain historically had their own organic relationship to British industrial capital from the massive industrialisation that began in the late 18^th Century, that continued at breakneck speed in the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th Century, that marked time in much of the 20^th before undergoing major decline as a result of a conscious ruling class strategy of exporting jobs and deindustrialisation, aimed at crippling the labour movement, in the last quarter of the 20^th Century.

However, this has itself led to new polarisations, part of which were responsible for the rise of Corbynism as a reaction to Blairism. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a pioneer of dialectical logic, once remarked that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. This is a key insight, regarding the inevitability of continuous change and flux in all phenomena, which found its way into Hegel’s much more elaborated, but idealistic dialectic, which was inverted and given a consistently materialist foundation by Marx. In analysing the course of the class struggle such understanding is crucial.

 This finds concrete expression when you look at Blairism, and the changes in the right-wing of political labour bureaucracies, which have not occurred only in Britain, but Britain has become an archetype. The deindustrialisation of Britain, and the rise of financial capital which has replaced its former industrial power to a considerable degree as the index of Britain’s remaining power in the world as an imperialist nation, has modified the relationship between the labour bureaucracy and British capitalism and produced new polarisations.

As was noted in an article 23 published just over a year ago:

“… there has been a further development of imperialist capital …. catalysed by the further decay of capitalism as classically expressed in Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The fall in the rate of profit meant that the classical unity of industrial and banking capital exploiting a large scale industrial proletariat in the advanced countries became less and less profitable, and so industrial capital increasingly sought to do away with the proletariat, or as much of it as possible, in the classical imperialist countries, and migrated to underdeveloped countries in search of cheap labour to manufacture goods, the bulk of which at least initially were still for realisation in the advanced countries, thus raising the rate of profit. At the same time, the further decline in profit rates gave rise to drives in the imperialist centres to privatise everything that moved. Everything from prisons to public housing, from air traffic control to schools to hospital cleaning to probation officers, everything that could possibly if privatised be squeezed to obtain a morsel of profit and hence raise the overall rate of profit, was so privatised.

“This also modified the phenomenon of finance capital as a fusion of banking and industrial capital. The migration of important sections of industrial capital from the main imperialist countries, even though the funding, as before, came from the imperialist banking arm, produced a geographical separation between industrial and banking capital even though they remained a unity under the system of finance capital. This produced an emanation of finance capital which some Marxists, entirely reasonably, call financial capital, to distinguish it from finance capital in its classical form. Its function is not the methodical exploitation of the proletariat to generate surplus value, but tricks and novel methods of seemingly extracting value from nothing, by such means as the creation of asset price inflation (closely linked to the concept of ‘fictitious capital’), ‘futures’, or other innovative ‘financial products’ which also have the effect of seemingly conjuring up new value from nothing. Such as credit-default-swaps, which played a major role in the late-2000s financial crisis. Of course, speculation is not new under imperialism, but there are also questions of degree.”

[…]

“In any case, this is what has undermined the Labour Party, and produced a new breed of ‘labour’ politician who is not a mere servant of finance capital in a political sense, like the old labour bureaucrats who fought for national welfare states and supported their ‘own’ imperialist countries’ struggles to maintain imperial influence, while trying to ‘humanise’ this imperialism. The old Labour bureaucracy was personified by Attlee, who while conceding independence to India (he really had no choice) nevertheless fought brutal colonial wars in Malaysia (including Singapore) and Indonesia, also helping the French back into Indo-China, and crushed the nascent Kenyan independence movement and workers movement.  This kind of social chauvinism linked ‘welfare’ to support for colonial oppression.

“But it is somewhat different to the ‘labourism’ of Blair and Peter Mandelson, with his infamous statement as to how Labour is ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’. The former was subordination to finance capital, the latter is subordination to financial capital. This is not, by the way, a moral difference. Both of these things are deeply reactionary and the social-imperialism of old-Labour was itself mortally antagonistic to socialism. It is however a sociological difference – the old social imperialist bureaucracy still had a material connection to organised labour, if only as a parasite upon it. Whereas New Labour has no such necessary connection at all.”

https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/no-vote-to-zionist-new-labour/

But this can, indeed must, lead to heightened contradictions between the Labour Party and the labour movement which was its seedbed. Today a key part of what was once the Labour Party bureaucracy is not connected by a class collaborationist relationship with industrial capital, and thereby finance capital, interested in preserving class peace by managing large, often militant, organised workforces with a great deal of social rhetoric and some reforms.

The traditional well organised industrial workforces have been considerably weakened, and the workforce that unions represent is much more fragmented and multi-sectored. Unions themselves have been weakened, by the strategic defeats inflicted on them in battle decades ago, by the passage of anti-union laws that the bosses have made stick for decades, by the export of heavy industrial jobs and hence the loss of industrial muscle, and by the fragmentation mentioned. But that never meant that class anger had died down. Just that the bosses had found ways to frustrate it and stop it being expressed. Or so they thought…. 

The ascent of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in 2015 was a big shock to the ruling class. It became possible because under first Kinnock, and then with a vengeance under Blair and Brown, key parts of Labour’s traditional right-wing bureaucracy had become agents of financial capital instead of the older relationship described above.

The difference is crucial as these new leaders resembled the Tories they were supposed to be opposed to much more closely. They became privatisers; during the Blair-Brown period in office they introduced private sector neoliberal practice into public services with a fervour; they fomented a capitalist boom in tandem with other neoliberal forces abroad that ended in 2007 with a major financial crisis.

Corbynism in Relation to the Class Struggle

Corbyn rose to the Labour leadership paradoxically because under Blairism many of Labour’s most class-conscious followers had ceased to recognise it as Labour and ceased to vote for it. This loss of support so worried the Labour bureaucracy that they designed a novel scheme to try to entice support back: they allowed Labour supporters (not members) to vote for the leader for a nominal one-off sub payment of £3. In 2015 they lost the second General Election in a row, in large measure because of working class abstention. Even the soft-left Ed Miliband, who talked about a ‘crisis of working-class representation’ to get elected leader but did nothing to actually represent workers – could not entice support back that the Blairites had lost.

So, in the first leadership election under the new system, they also felt compelled to allow Corbyn on the ballot, for fear that the election for leader would appear fake if they did not. The rest is history. The presence of a genuine left social democrat on the ballot, with the newly opened-up election system, and a threatening, very right-wing purely Tory government under Cameron in the saddle, led to a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of new members and supporters, and an historic victory for Corbyn.

The right-wing counterattacks began at once, with the ‘Chicken Coup’ in 2016, the brazen sabotage of Labour’s highly successful election campaign in 2017, where Corbyn stripped Theresa May, the new Tory leader who had succeeded Cameron when he lost the Brexit referendum, of her majority, and then the developing ‘anti-Semitism’ Zionist propaganda lie and the cynical posturing of the right around supposedly being diehard opponents of Brexit, only to become rampant flag-shaggers and nationalists as soon as Corbyn had been forced out of the leadership. Everyone knows that the right-wing used every method they could think of to lose both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections and were utterly mortified when Corbyn came close to victory in 2017.

But the hundreds of thousands of Labour supporters who voted for Corbyn in 2017 have not gone away, nor the millions of additional Labour voters who voted for Labour in 2017 when Labour’s share of the national vote rose from 30.4%, just over 9 and a quarter million votes in 2015, to 40.0%, over 12 and three-quarter million votes in 2017. In 2019 Labour lost only around half a million of those increased votes, but a surge of UKIP voters to the Tories put the Tories in pole position and Labour, weakened by witchhunts and right-wing sabotage, was unable to counter that.

But that still leaves several hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists pulled towards Labour in the Corbyn period, and over three million voters who would not vote for Blairites, or even soft lefts like Ed Miliband who never fully renounced Blairism, who were radicalised and mobilised by the Corbynite surge. Those people have not gone away. And a considerable number of them are in Unite.

The Beckett campaign seems to have inspired something of a reprise of the enthusiasm among left-wing Labour supporters, viscerally hostile to Blairism, that was originally given to Corbyn. Beckett was closely associated with Corbyn right through his leadership, though in the background. He led the legal team that successfully defended Jeremy Corbyn’s right to be on the ballot in 2016, during the ‘chicken coup’ leadership contest that was forced on the party by a PLP vote of no-confidence, where the plan was to exclude Corbyn from the ballot by a legal/constitutional manoeuvre, carried out by the Blairite/Zionist Lord Foster. However, since Corbyn allowed his leadership to be sabotaged and ousted, Beckett has gone well beyond that.

As well as the possibility of rank-and-file militants becoming prominent in class struggle responses, there can also be splits and fragmentation of the bureaucracy, itself resulting from rank-and-file pressure. So, while Beckett may not conform to the ideal of a left-wing trade union campaign, demanding that the officialdom be paid no more than the workforce they represent, his campaign still reflects a class struggle impulse from below. Beckett thus should be put to the test of office.

We republish below the statement of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International on Julian Assange’s case from April 2019, immediately after he was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy and sent to Belmarsh in preparation for planned extradition to the US Gulag. This is a pretty good summary of the issues and smears that were used for years to undermine Assange’s defence.

The situation now is just as much as an outrage. Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused to extradite Assange to the US because his being flung into the US ‘Guantanamo-like ‘Maximum Security’ Gulag would likely cause his death, as the abuse involved would cause him to take his own life. She thus admitted the inhumanity of the US rulers’ system for incarcerating those like Assange who expose their criminality, their massacres of prisoners, their systematic use of torture and mass murder in their rampages around the world. Yet she upheld the grotesque charges even as the US lawyers themselves implicitly admitted that their original indictment did not stand up even in their own terms and attempted to supplement it with another pack of nonsense from a new informant, an unstable young Icelandic man who is in fact a proven liar and convicted child sex offender. And this individual, one Siggi Thordarson, has now confessed that his testimony against Assange in the new indictment (objections to which Baraitser refused to hear), was fabricated.

So, there are three sets of lies that have been hurled at Julian Assange. Firstly, the phoney rape charges that were concocted in Sweden (see below). The second being the attempt to indict Assange over Wikileaks’ work with Chelsea Manning (the real motive for the first fabrication in Sweden). And the third based on Thordarson’s lies. And yet Assange is still in Belmarsh, while the US liars and torturers look for a way to appeal/justify this potentially deadly persecution of a courageous journalist who exposed the crimes of US imperialism. This is just obscene!

Free Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning! Defeat Imperialist War Criminals! (2019)

 The arrest of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on 11 April is another imperialist crime and exposes once again that a key international role of the British imperialist ruling class, in the words of Assange’s friend Pamela Anderson, is to act as “America’s bitch”.

This after 7 years of political asylum in the face of a phoney rape prosecution in Sweden, which was always political cover for an imperialist attempt to cage Assange for political ‘crimes’ against imperialism, in that he evidently worked together with former US soldier and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning to expose imperialist crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the notorious ‘Collateral Murder’ video that shows helicopter-borne US troops blatantly murdering journalists in Baghdad under cover of fighting ‘terrorism’, killing with abandon civilians who happened to be near to a resistance fighter.

Assange’s arrest was facilitated by the imperialist bribery of the Ecuadorian regime of President Lénin Moreno with around $4.2 billion worth of IMF loans/aid. Moreno was denounced by his predecessor, the radical nationalist Rafael Correa, who gave Assange asylum in 2012, as “the worst traitor in Ecuadorian history” for this selling of Assange, and Ecuador itself, to US imperialism.

The delivery of Assange to imperialism by the traitor Lenin Moreno, is part of the hunt for anti-imperialist fighters promoted by the right-wing governments that now control most Latin American countries. The neo-Nazi government of Jair Bolsonaro revoked the right to asylum of activist Cesare Batiisti, allowing his arrest and deportation to Italy. Moreno and Bolsonaro act under the direct orders of imperialism.

At a stage of capitalism in which the capitalist mass media are all bought by the great financial and imperialist capital, Wikileaks has carried out a fundamental historical mission for investigative journalism world-wide. Assange and his collaborators anticipated the entire conspiracy of the judicial-parliamentary coup d’état and the rise of the pro-US extreme right to power in Brazil. In 2015, Assange revealed that the US spied on 29 phones from the Dilma government, the Workers’ Party, and even the presidential plane.

The articulations for the Coup have developed from 2009. As revealed by Wikileaks, the Conference “Bridges Project: Building Bridges for Law Enforcement in Brazil” was held, between October 4 and 9, 2009, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, by US authorities for members of the Judiciary, Public Ministry and Federal Police of Brazil. The then Federal Judge Sergio Moro, (today awarded the position of Justice Minister in the Bolsonaro government) participated in that Conference.

The “training” was continued by several visits of Moro to the USA. This frantic articulation served to initiate the great judicial-police operation known as “Lava Jato” (car wash). The central objective of the mega-operation was, in the name of combating corruption, to expropriate the Brazilian oil company Petrobras and incriminate and arrest the most popular left-wing political leadership in Brazil, former President Lula, although nothing had been proven against him. All this was previously revealed by Wikileaks.

The judicial operation mounted by imperialism was initially supported by the PT. With the help of the PT itself, imperialism paved the way for the overthrow of the PT and the rise of the extreme right to the presidency. Assange was responsible for filtering thousands of documents that pointed to an intense espionage operation conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States against the then Brazilian government.

Anomalous figures like Correa tend to be pushed aside by those more in tune with the class aims of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ in oppressed semi-colonial countries like Ecuador. Once again the ‘national bourgeoisie’ is shown to be an agency of imperialism within these countries. To really fight imperialism, capitalism itself has to be uprooted by the proletariat as part of an international revolutionary movement with the strategy of permanent revolution.

The Assange rape allegations are political cover for the liberal bourgeoisie and treacherous not-so-left reformists and neoliberal fifth columnists within the workers movement to give their support for the persecution of Assange. The driving force of the case was a key neoconservative Blair-like figure in Swedish social democracy, Claes Borgstrom, and main alleged accuser, Anna Ardin, is a Swedish Social Democrat who remarkably is one of a microscopic minority of Swedish citizens who have been deported from Cuba for political activities. As Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan and now a principled anti-war activist laid out in detail, Ardin was the driving force of the case and coerced the other woman involved into going along with allegations she considered were fabricated by the police. [1]

Now the US had revealed its hand, it has exposed what has always been true all along – that the ‘rape’ setup was political cover for extradition to an American gulag. This is where Chelsea Manning has already been thrown, indefinitely, once again, for refusing to testify to a grand jury that is preparing further charges against Assange.

We are seeing the resurrection of the liberal refrain that Ardin, as a putative victim of sexual assault, should not be named however outrageous her behaviour in setting up Assange. However, according to Swedish law, both the putative victim and the suspect are supposed to remain anonymous, yet Assange was named in the media simultaneously with the beginning of the case. Ardin took advantage of this to attack him in the media right from the start. Given her history involving Cuba, and her documented behaviour towards Assange when he was in Sweden in 2010, the chances of her not being an imperialist spook appear negligible.

The US doesn’t treat prisoners as brutally as China or Russia – because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). In this sense, the US is even more dangerous than China insofar as its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed.

It is therefore not enough to play one state against the other (like Snowden, who used Russia against the US): we need a new international network to organise the protection of whistleblowers and the dissemination of their message. Whistleblowers are our heroes because they prove that if those in power can do it, we can also do it.

For defenders of democratic rights and opponents of imperialism, the right of accusers to anonymity do not trump the duty to expose an attempted frameup by sinister imperialist spy agencies. The CIA is far more dangerous to the rights of ordinary people than any individual suspect in a criminal case.

The indictment against Assange that is part of the extradition demand includes Assange allegedly ‘conspiring’ with Manning to access material on government computers,  along with such ‘normal’ journalistic activities like seeking information not in the public domain from internal sources, seeking to protect the confidentiality of sources, etc. So such paragons of the liberal bourgeoisie as the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post worry that they could be next. But they were exactly the kind of people who threw Assange under a bus the moment the CIA tried to fit him up on rape charges.

The treachery of this kind of people is epitomised by the so-called Independent Group of MPs, the Umunna-Soubry group, who have, along with dozens of Labour MPs and some Tories, 70 parliamentarians in all, signed a letter to the UK government demanding that Assange should be extradited to Sweden as priority, while the US should take second place. Fat chance – the Swedish case was a means to an end with a limited life, which has now run out, and the imperatives of US imperialism will take precedence. They are no longer deniable, and there is no way the CIA’s tools in Sweden will stand in the way of Uncle Sam. These Tory-Blairites are merely seeking a political alibi for their own actions in support of such blatant attacks on journalism and elementary democratic rights by their imperialist allies.

It is good that Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot have spoken out against Assange being extradited to the USA, even if their statement was somewhat weak on the ‘rape’ calumny. This mirrors their chronic weakness in the face of the phoney ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign in the Labour Party, their failure to stand up for blatant victims of racist abuse by the racist apparatus of their own party, such as Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth.

But at least they have spoken out against Assange’s extradition and that ought to place some political obstacles in the way of Assange simply being rendered. There needs to be a broad-based labour movement campaign to stop Assange being buried alive by US imperialism.

 Free Assange! Free Manning! Defeat British/US imperialism.

Notes

[1] Craig Murray, Why I am Convinced that Anna Ardin is a Liar  11 Sep, 2012 https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/09/why-i-am-convinced-that-anna-ardin-is-a-liar

Defend the Russian Federation!

On 22 June, In a blatantly obvious publicity stunt and military provocation, evidently ordered by Boris Johnson himself, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender, with a BBC Camera crew and a Daily Mail reporter on board, ostentatiously sailed through the territorial waters of Crimea, which has been part of Russia for most of its history and certainly since a popular referendum in 2014 secured a massive majority for Crimea becoming part of the Russian Federation, claiming the waters, and Crimea itself, belongs to its client regime in Ukraine. The outcome of the referendum is hardly surprising, since the majority of the population of Crimea is Russian, not Ukrainian.

The Western imperialists refuse to recognise Crimea’s status as part of Russia, and Johnson’s provocation is a further part of the anti-Russian campaign resulting from that. Indeed the whole point of the Western offensive against Russia, even decades after the Soviet workers state collapsed, is to complete what Hitler sought to do to Russia in 1941. Nations and peoples that have the temerity to have ever overthrown capitalism cannot be allowed to go their own way even after a counterrevolution.

Imperialism demands that they be humiliated, crushed, made into totally dependent lackeys of the world imperialist hegemon, the US.  That is why, despite promises made by then-US President George H.W. Bush, to the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not be expanded East, NATO has been extended through Eastern Europe all the way to the three Baltic republics of the former USSR – right to the Russia border. Ukraine is to be next. The imperialist-sponsored Ukrainian Maidan coup in 2013 was driven by outright neo-Nazis, admirers of the OUN forces led by Bandera who fought for Hitler against the USSR in the Second World War.

The Defender sailed from Odessa in Ukraine, straight through Crimean (i.e., Russian) territorial waters, just off Sebastopol, which is the headquarters of Russia’s strategic Black Sea naval fleet, on a course towards Georgia. The British government claimed that “The Royal Navy ship is conducting innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law”. The Russians, quite rightly, did not see the British ship’s activity as ‘innocent’ at all, and fired a series of warning shots at the ship. Then a Russian Sukhoi SU-24 supersonic fighter-bomber dropped several bombs in the path of the Defender to underline the warning.

The bizarre pretence from the government that this was some kind of ‘innocent passage’, and not a pre-planned provocation designed by Johnson’s government, was equally bizarrely exposed when a bunch of confidential Ministry of Defence documents were somehow lost and found at a bus stop in Kent on the morning of Tuesday, 21^st June. Incredibly, these documents discussed the likely impact of a provocation that had not happened yet. Defender’s provocation happened the following day. In the words of the Guardian, the documents “discussed the potential Russian reaction to HMS Defender’s travel through Ukrainian waters off the Crimea coast on Wednesday”. The Guardian comments that the documents reveal that the operation “was conducted in the expectation that the Kremlin might respond aggressively.”:

“Three potential Russian responses were outlined, from ‘safe and professional’ to ‘neither safe nor professional’. On Wednesday, Russia said warning shots had been fired, and that a jet had dropped four bombs in the path of the British destroyer to force it to change course. It emerged that cannon had been fired at a safe distance behind the British warship, while there was no evidence to support the latter claim.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/27/classified-ministry-defence-papers-found-bus-stop-kent

The Russians released somewhat fragmentary video footage of the incident that shows aspects of threatening confrontation of their craft with the Defender, as well as some activity by Russian aircraft in its vicinity. Its hardly very clear but that is immaterial. The point is that this was a deliberate provocation by the British, and it was designed to ‘test’ the Russian forces’ resolve to defend Crimea’s territorial waters. It was obviously for propaganda purposes which negates the convention of ‘innocent passage’ that the British are trying to use to justify the ship’s presence. Insistence that Crimean waters are ‘Ukrainian’ waters is self-evidently just such a propaganda purpose.

According to what appears to be a freelance military blog called The War Zone/The Drive:

 “While all this was going on, it appears that at least one NATO intelligence-gathering aircraft was monitoring the activities in the area. Publicly available flight-tracking data indicated that a U.S. Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joint was airborne off the coast of Crimea, having flown in from Souda Bay on the Greek island of Crete.”

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41239/russia-claims-bombs-dropped-to-warn-off-british-warship-royal-navy-says-it-never-happened

If this is accurate, it does cast some light on what the British were up to. Johnson wants to play the jingoistic ‘Global Britain’ card with his pretentions that not only Russia, but also China’s presence in the South China Sea can be dealt with by the British Empire practice of “sending a gunboat”. But that is a joke. Brexit has made Britain even more of a lackey imperialism to the USA than it had been previously.

The British warship was playing a similar role to the South Korean Airliner KAL-007 in September 1983, when it deliberately flew off course above then-Soviet territory in the Far East (Kamchatka and Sakhalin) to trigger off radar and air defences so that an American spy plane could gather data about the defence capabilities of the USSR, then the main degenerated workers state in the world. Now capitalist, but non-imperialist Russia, is still the target of US imperialism, albeit not as a workers’ state but rather a dependent form of capitalism resisting outright subordination to imperialism, similar tactics are still being used by the US against it.

Far from being ‘Global Britain’, Johnson’s absurd and decrepit British Lion is just a Judas Goat for the US. As indeed was and is South Korea. Johnson even overruled the reservations of Raab, his own foreign minister on this. HMS Defender’s task was setting off Russian defences so that the US could hoover up the data. Hardly “ruling the waves”. More like a pilot fish swimming ahead of a shark.

HMS Defender is lucky that it did not share a similar fate to KAL-007 (whose flight number, in the British context, was indicative of its mission). Russia would have had every right to so respond. In imperialism’s current war drive against the bloc of non-imperialist nations in some way resisting imperialist world domination, not just Russia, but also China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and of course the two remaining deformed workers states of Cuba and North Korea, it is in the interests of the world proletariat for the states currently in conflict with imperialism to prevail.

No Support for Starmer’s Labour

This 26 June Peoples Assembly demonstration is important because it is called, in a still simmering pandemic, against the government’s attempts to ram through its Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, under cover of the same pandemic. They calculated that the labour movement and working-class people generally would be so preoccupied with protecting themselves from Covid that they would not have the stomach to fight back against such an attack on basic protest rights. Or that the population are so bloated with nationalist fantasies about Brexit and defeating ‘foreigners’ that they would all snap to attention at the attacks on supposedly ‘woke’ anti-racists and climate protesters, and do as they are told.

They have miscalculated, just as they did about the pandemic. Johnson’s original plan was simply to allow enormous numbers to die, like Trump and Bolsonaro, to maintain profit in the name of ‘herd immunity’: letting the disease ravage the whole population in the hope that survivors would eventually become immune. The population refused to be led to the slaughter for profit, and the government had to take quarantine measures that Johnson had previously mocked as unnecessary in Britain, the ‘Clark Kent’ of capitalism. Still as a result of the government’s repeated sabotage of its own public health measures, and its huge corruption, at least 100,000 perished.

The government has been aided, both in slaughtering the British population by negligence, and in its attacks on democratic rights, by the Labour Party. When the pandemic began Jeremy Corbyn was able to sharply attack Johnson’s malign neglect. But when Starmer tool the reins all that changed, and Labour baldly said it would support the government, “whatever it decided to do”(!). So Starmer supported the sending of kids back into schools in June, before any vaccines existed, which gave the virus room to mutate into the Kent variant and laid the basis for the Second wave. Starmer also refused to oppose the legalisation of rape, torture and murder by the secret police (!) and would have refused to oppose Patel’s anti-protest law if the scandal of the murder of Sara Everard (by a cop!) and the brutalisation of those holding a vigil in her memory, on Patel’s orders, had not exploded the issue.

Starmer’s Labour party deserves no support in parliamentary elections, as the British working class has figured out for themselves, despite those fossils on the British pseudo-left who insist that Labour is still the embodiment of the British working class’s aspirations for social reform and class consciousness. It self-evidently is no longer anything of the sort, as shown by its pathetic poll ratings in the face of a brazenly corrupt and self-seeking gang in government, the loss of Hartlepool to the Tories, the lost deposit in Chesham and Amersham (from second place in 2019!) and the upcoming loss of Batley and Spen. Those sections of the working class who were enthused by Corbyn certainly have no illusions that Starmer represents anything ‘working class’ and quite rightly let him go hang! The most class conscious workers are fully aware that the Blairite/Zionist wing of Labour are Tories in all but name, and vote with their feet accordingly. They are right to do so: the road to the rebirth of working class politics lies through the destruction and humiliation of these bastards, whose aim is to stymie any possibility of an alternative to neoliberal capitalist reaction.

There will be social-political struggles and explosions under this government. Hence the attacks on democratic rights – Johnson and co. are battening down the hatches already. We need a party of the working class to give them political leadership, and the Labour Party is worse than useless right now. Those desperately trying to ‘stay in and fight’ should not be simply dismissed, but the urgent need is for a public political pole of defiance of Zionist New Labour. We support Chris Wiliamson’s initiative, the Resistance Movement, as the beginning of such an initiative, though we do not necessarily have to agree with everything it does (supporting George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’ candidacy in Batley and Spen, given his own support for Farage and the Scottish Tories, is in our view a mistake). But we still see this is as the most likely vehicle for a new political party of the left in Britain to emerge.

We will support, critically when necessary, any initiative in the labour movement that points in the right direction politically. Thus, we supported Howard Beckett’s highly political candidacy for the leadership of Unite, which he has unfortunately now withdrawn under immense pressure from the left bureaucracy of which he is still part. This shows the limitations of bureaucratic politics even in its most left manifestations and underlines that the labour movement needs something more than this (though it is an open question whether the blended Turner-Beckett campaign is the complete negation of Beckett’s original).  It needs a revolutionary leadership and programme, and a revolutionary party, which is the only way a political force can be created that will not back down in the face of our class enemies and their agents in the workers movement.

After Israel’s May Defeat

The following article was distributed on the People’s Assembly Demonstration in London on June 26th as part of a Communist Fight supplement. The demonstration itself, though worthy enough, did not manage to connect with some of the sizeable and youthful movements that have errupted against racism (Black Lives Matter), environmental degradation and disaster (Extinction Rebellion) as well as some of the mobilisations against the Police Bill. The turnout, no more than around 10,000 as a rough estimate, was quite disappointing in that regard.

The one seriously dynamic part of the demonstration was those who came to demonstrate against Zionist crimes and in support of the Palestinians. A late decision had been taken by the organisers to appeal for Palestine activists to turn out and build a anti-war, pro-Palestinian contingent. They saved the march and gave it a dynamism it otherwise lacked. Our supplement which addressed this head on with the article below as well as another one about the situation with the government and the Labour Party, was well received: we distributed over 200 of them.

May’s Saif Al-Quds (Sword of Jerusalem) war was an important political defeat for the Israeli ethnocracy. It showed Zionism is not all powerful, despite its hi-tech weaponry and the massive military and economic largesse it receives from its imperialist allies with their overlapping Zionist lobbies – Israel’s partners in crime. But Israel will not easily be overcome. Unlike South Africa, its settler colonialism is far more entrenched and aims to eliminate the native Arab population of Palestine, not exploit it. Unlike that previous racist transplant, Israel is far more strategically placed within the Western imperialist powers and its lobby is a powerful imperialist force, albeit of varying strength, within the ruling capitalist classes of Europe and North America.

The Zionist lobbies are a unique formation based centrally on ethnocentric Jewish chauvinist politics within the Western imperialist ruling classes. They are an alliance of similarly minded but sometimes dissenting factions – they are not monolithic. A Jewish-born capitalist in the West is entitled by right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s racist ‘Law of Return’, and thus to become part of Israel’s ruling class. Many though not all do. Israel is not a Western colonial servant as much of the softer left says. Much of Israel’s power comes from these pro-Israel ruling-class factions overseas. Israel’s ruling class overlaps with the ruling classes of the West, which is why its power is proportionately much greater than its size and population. Without this, Israel’s power would be no greater than that of, say Denmark. But Denmark’s Prime Minister cannot do things like marching into the US Congress to ovations from all sides while denouncing Obama’s Iran deal, as Netanyahu did in 2015. Denmark does not have overseas interests who can do things like sabotaging the Labour Party here, as happened to Corbyn through a torrent of smears and lies.

Elbit Systems, whose facilities in Oldham courageous Palestine Action supporters have been occupying, symbolises what Israel is about. This is not some Western arms exporter supplying arms to a client, like Saudi Arabia in Yemen. This is an Israeli arms company that supplies high-tech weaponry to the West and its clients: to the British armed forces, those of the US, France, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines; from military drones to night-vision equipment and other military surveillance equipment. Its military hardware is marketed as tested in action, i.e., against the Palestinian people. Israel is a far tougher nut to crack than any mere colonial outpost, it is an imperialist enemy in its own right. Therefore, you get the contradictory phenomenon where, while Israel sometimes acts like a Western client state, at other times the US and other Western powers act like Israeli client states. The overlapping of the ruling classes means there is an element of truth in both.

We must know what we are up against. Otherwise, we will be suckers for the smears about ‘anti-Semitism’ that have driven back the left repeatedly. Israel is a key element of world imperialism and will not be defeated or humanised by liberal pressure tactics or boycotts based on moral disgust. While boycott campaigns like BDS have some value, this is only as a step towards mobilising working-class actions. Mass solidarity demonstrations like the ones in Britain are crucial. But even more the labour actions boycotting Israeli ships and/or arms shipments in San Francisco, Italy and elsewhere. These point the way toward internationally based working-class revolutionary action to inflict major defeats on Zionism, and indeed given Israel’s key role as a quartermaster and a centre of neo-liberalism, on world capitalism itself.

It is crucial, but not enough, to protest and mobilise against Zionism and imperialism’s wars, their crimes against the Palestinians, their threats to Iran, to Syria, and the region. What this points to is the need for a strategy of permanent revolution, of the working class acting as the leader of all the oppressed, with the centrally Arab working class in the Middle East struggling for its own power, overthrowing class and national oppression, liberating both itself and the Jewish population from Zionism which is a key mainstay of capitalist oppression.

The following is a translation of a leaflet issued by the Emancipation of Labour movement in Brazil (a working-class revolutionary trend which the Brazilian LCFI section, the Frente Comunista dos Trabalhadores, supports and works closely with), before the massive nationwide Day of Demonstrations on 19th June where marchers demanded the impeachment and expulsion from power of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s depraved Neo-Nazi president, whose misrule has led to a mountain of deaths from Covid. The fury against Bolsonaro among the Brazilian working class is finally turning into mass political action. And this is expressed in the exponential increase in the number of protesters and cities that participate in national protests. The May 29 demonstration 2021 took place in 213 Brazilian cities and 14 cities outside Brazil and was attended by approximately 200 thousand people. At the demonstration on June 19, that is, 20 days later, more than 750,000 people in 427 acts in Brazil and in 17 countries abroad took to the streets against Bolsonaro.

F. A. S., a 26-year-old seamstress, worked in an average company with a signed portfolio, with her husband. A mother of three, and pregnant, she contracted Covid. The husband had to leave work to take care of the children and the house, and both were fired. They were unable to pay the rent of almost 400 reais, in addition to the bills for food, water, electricity, gas, internet, … He received emergency aid which was later reduced. The family became unemployed and homeless during the pandemic. They have joined dozens of other workers in a similar situation to occupy land abandoned for decades. In a police raid on the occupation, F.A.S. lost the baby. After all that, she remained firmly in the occupation Carlos Marighela, who resisted for several months against several other threats of eviction, obtained the solidarity of various parties, unions and left-wing organizations and emerged victorious.

Poverty and extreme poverty punish 61.1 million Brazilians. Unemployment has already hit a record high and reached 14.4 million people, the highest number in a decade. Blacks, women, and people with less education are hit hardest. Official inflation (IPCA) recorded the highest peak in 25 years. Fuel prices and cooking gas are still rising. Correios, Eletrobrás and Caixa Econômica are threatened with privatization later this year. This will raise (even more) their service prices, such as the electricity bill, and further increase the number of unemployed.

We are impoverished to make them rich. The Bolsonaro government is a fascist and perverse government that conducts a new cycle of enrichment of the bosses. Blackmailing with blows and exploiting the pandemic the government increases poverty, unemployment, despair and hunger. The government’s greatest aspiration is to consolidate a military dictatorship, police and militias, creating a coup so not to leave power anymore. The last presidential elections in 2018 have already been intervened by the Armed Forces high command so that Lula, the candidate for which much of the population intended to vote, remained unjustly imprisoned. That election was the continuity and deepening of the 2016 coup. And the 2022 elections will be rigged if we allow them to.

Although there are differences between O Globo (Brazil’s main bourgeois media organisation), the Supreme Court, the PSDB with Bolsonaro, all were together in the coup and work together in a bosses front, attacking the living conditions of the population. We workers need to create our own front, to unite for our common interests. To fight hunger, poverty, unemployment, evictions, police violence and the pandemic, in the streets and in elections, to fight for a workers government. This time, ours alone, no bosses. The 2016 coup was the result of the popular front of workers with bosses. It is clear that we can only trust ourselves and not those who six years ago joined with Bolsonaro to carry out a coup against us.

We need a united front of the left-wing labour parties to stay alive, not just for the 2022 elections. To get rid of Bolsonaro and the many military personnel who have come to power we need to organize committees of unemployed, sharing basic supplies, supporting occupations, plenary sessions, strikes, mutual assistance funds. If most workers are already forced to expose themselves to the virus to work, staying at home without a fight does not solve the problem of the pandemic. You must go out on the street carefully but go out and fight so as not to die of hunger, or shooting, or Covid.

May 29th was important. June 19th, too. But we need more than that to achieve the demands of our parade. “Bolsonaro Out!” just to wear down the government, it’s not enough for us. It is necessary to create a united national plan of mobilization and struggle, with united demonstrations, without divisionism, organized by Popular Workers’ Assemblies to defend the lives of workers. We need a journey of continuous struggle to ensure the implementation of measures that take us out of the current suffocation. We at Emancipation of Labour think that some of these measures to combat the Pandemic and get out of the Crisis should be:

1. Immediate and mass vaccination for the entire population, prioritizing the poorest and most vulnerable sectors!

2. Emergency aid of a minimum wage for all underemployed and unemployed!

3. Against inflation, freezing the products of the basic basket, gas, fuels and rents.

4. Exemption from all tariffs with continuity of provision of water, energy, internet services!

5. No layoffs or evictions in the city and in the countryside!

6. Nationalization without indemnification of the big companies that close!

7. Nationalization and control by the workers’ organizations of pharmaceutical companies, medical supplies and the private health system!

8. General amnesty of workers’ debts to the loan sharks of banks and credit cards! Credit to associations and production cooperatives without interest!

9. Do not return to face-to-face classes until vaccination of the entire population!

10. Repeal of labor, social security and all coup measures.

11. Full rights of Brazilian citizenship for all immigrants.

12. Down with the government – Bolsonaro, Mourão and all scammers!

13. Let millionaires, bankers and foreign companies pay for the crisis!

14. Against the oppression of women, blacks and lgbtqa+ of the working class, the indigenous and quilombolas*!

15. End the of repression of the working class!

*population descendent from rebel ex-slaves

Recently the Trotskyist Faction decided to change our name. This became necessary after the formal split of the Gerry Downing grouping/website that still calls itself Socialist Fight from the international tendency that we previously commonly adhered to, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI). We came into existence as a faction to defend the previous programmatic positions of SF, and particularly the consistent hard anti-Zionist positions that SF had become known for over the past 5 years or so, from attack by the other side of the dispute. For the full background of this it would be useful for new readers to examine three documents.

The first being our January 2020 Platform within Socialist Fight. This codified our basic programmatic positions. In the text there are references to five basic documents of our tendency, which expand on the politics of the Platform in considerably more detail. They are available on the ‘Basic Documents’ section of our website, at https://www.socialistfight.org/basic-documents/, for convenience of readers.

The second document necessary to understand this is entitled Trotskyist Faction Takes on the Mantle of Socialist Fight, https://www.socialistfight.org/uncategorized/trotskyist-faction-takes-on-the-mantle-of-socialist-fight/, dated March 2020. It contains a full account both of the political reasons for, and the course of, the faction fight that took place in Socialist Fight in January-March 2020, which culminated in Downing splitting away from us, and the LCFI Secretariat in the Americas recognising two sections, Socialist Fight and our Trotskyist Faction/Socialist Fight, as dual British sections of the LCFI until the situation could be resolved.

The third document that needs to be read to explain this, is the document produced collectively by the LCFI itself, in the aftermath of the rump Socialist Fight grouping led by Gerry Downing formally splitting away from the LCFI, titled LCFI Statement on the departure of the Downing faction of Socialist Fight (Britain), https://www.socialistfight.org/uncategorized/lcfi-statement-on-the-departure-of-the-downing-faction-of-socialist-fight-britain/, in February 2021, it explains the overall context of the differences that led to this grouping splitting away from us. We will not repeat this here obviously but given that this grouping has left the LCFI and is using the name Socialist Fight, we are no longer a faction of anything, but just the British Section of the LCFI. So, we need a new name, which reflects our independent existence.

We have chosen the name Consistent Democrats, which we have been using as a provisional, alternative designation for our faction since last summer, knowing that the name Trotskyist Faction had a limited life. Why use this name? Well it is a name the Bolshevik Party used when the Russian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks) were formally illegalised under Tsarism. Obviously, we are not suffering from that problem. But we have been suffering from the hostility of the soft-left and pseudo-left and there has been a fairly systematic attempt by much of the left that is politically soft on Zionism and the Zionist lobby, not to engage with our politics, but to suppress them.

So, in a sense, our use of this name expresses the fact that we have been fairly systematically the target of attacks on workers democracy by the capitulatory left. Because of this, we are the only tendency on the left that has consistently opposed the Zionist-fuelled right-wing witchhunt in the Labour Party. Other trends on the left have refused to defend the whole left against the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, always finding some left-wing tendency or individual (often, but not exclusively, ourselves) as unworthy of defence, suitable to be thrown under the bus and denounced as real left-wing ‘anti-Semites’ who can be sacrificed to appease the witch-hunters. Which it never does, of course, their attitude is that as soon as their adversaries give an inch, they immediately try to take a mile.

As well as that, the name has the advantage that it is distinctive; there are so many Trotskyist fragments around with very similar names as a result of the fragmentation of the Trotskyoid left, (a serious problem whose causes we have made a serious attempt to address) that this name is somewhat distinctive.

The name does have its dangers and drawbacks though. As Trotsky once noted regarding its use by the Bolsheviks in illegality:

“”the Bolsheviks were compelled to call themselves, at trade union meetings and in the legal press, not Social Democrats, but ‘Consistent Democrats’. True, this did not pass scot free; a considerable number of elements adhered to Bolshevism who more or less were consistent democrats, but not at all international socialists; however, by supplementing legal with illegal activity, Bolshevism overcame the difficulties.” 

Writings, 1935-36, p156

There would potentially be an opportunist danger if we were simply operating under the banner of ourselves as Consistent Democrats; it would seem to dilute the socialist content of our political activity in a similar way as Trotsky noted above.

However, our journal, which we have been publishing since the inception of our faction just over a year ago, is called Communist Fight. This in our view counteracts the danger Trotsky referred to splendidly. Far from diluting the communist element of our politics, it highlights it very sharply.

So, we are now the Consistent Democrats. This is splendid in our view. Marxists are the consistent democrats, we seek to take up all struggles around genuinely democratic questions, all questions involving oppression, in the spirit of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. As Lenin famously said in What is to be Done (1903):

“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

In the Batley and Spen by-election, called because the previous Labour MP, Tracy Brabin, vacated the seat after being elected as Mayor of West Yorkshire, there is currently no genuinely supportable left-wing candidate running, though there is still time should someone with the resources to run one, such as the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), decide to stand. In the absence of that, there is no one standing that is supportable by socialists up till now.

The Labour Party candidate, Kim Leadbetter, is the sister of the former MP Jo Cox, who was murdered by a fascist during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. Notwithstanding that, she is an imposed candidate by the Labour Party leadership of Keir Starmer, who are beholden to the Zionist Board of Deputies and still on full pelt to purge the Labour Party of leftists and particularly those who oppose the Zionist genocidal project against the Palestinian people. The witchhunting of the Labour left, and the destruction of Corbyn’s leadership in the last period is a major attack on the working class, in which Zionists played the role of vanguard/spearhead, and no Labour candidate is supportable in an election to the Westminster parliament who is not prepared to stand up and denounce these attacks.

George Galloway is also unfortunately not supportable in Batley and Spen, where he is standing on the ticket of his ‘Workers Party’ organised jointly with the Maoist Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB (ML)). He has betrayed much of what he used to stand for. There was a time when he was able to boast that he was the most pro-immigrant MP in Britain, after his defeat of the pro-war Blairite MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow as the candidate for RESPECT in 2005, right in the middle of the Iraq war, after playing a crucial role in mobilising the mass anti-war movement that brought 2 million people onto the streets of London in February 2003. His defiance of the US/UK war in Iraq was legendary – his attack on the US Neocon Senate shortly after his election as a RESPECT MP in 2005 was likewise exemplary.

He was hostile to any whiff of anti-immigrant politics in those days, even though he could not oppose immigration controls in principle … having too much national-reformist baggage for that. But nevertheless in 2009 he refused to support Bob Crow’s No2EU left wing Eurosceptic election campaign because he did not like its implicit nationalism.

In the spring of 2014 he ran a principled, working class campaign (Just Say Naw) against Scottish separation, and correctly attacked the Labour Party for its ‘Better Together’ anti-independence campaign that was jointly organised with Tories.

But in 2016 he supported Brexit and even tried to work with Nigel Farage. In 2019 he called for a vote to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, and even attempted to become a Brexit Party candidate. His bloc partners in the CPGB (ML) also called for Brexit Party votes. This crossing of class lines was not a one-off aberration – it has continued. In 2021 his ‘Alliance for Unity’ Campaign in the Scottish Holyrood Parliamentary Election called for votes for Tories against the Scottish National Party. There is nothing wrong with challenging the SNP but allying with Tories to do so is crossing class lines, as Galloway said sharply in 2014. Obviously there has been a major political shift in Galloway since 2014, and he is doing pretty much the opposite of what he did before then.

He appears to have suffered a major loss of political coherence, and left-wing commitment, since then. It is obvious that the change occurred after George was outrageously beaten up by the Zionist fascist, Neil Masterson, in August 2014, after the Scottish referendum and during Israel’s Protective Edge massacre, and was betrayed by the entire parliamentary left, who ALL (including Jeremy Corbyn) failed to publicly condemn the terrible, violent attack on a 60-year-old man and elected MP by an assailant 20 years younger.

That was a terrible betrayal by a left that capitulated to Zionism, which also included most of the cowardly far left. Apart from individual leftist bloggers, such as that run by one of our political predecessors Communist Explorations, (see https://commexplor.com/2014/11/11/state-collusion-jewish-extremist-escapes-trial-for-religious-assault-on-galloway/) hardly anyone on the far left even made a fuss about it. Unfortunately, those events politically destroyed the old George. The new George, the husk of what once was, is still acting politically and inadvertently trampling over his own honourable past by doing things like this. A tragedy. But in the wider interests of the working class, we cannot indulge him.

It would have been excellent to give electoral support, still critical of course, to the old George in current circumstances. But the old George Galloway no longer exists. Instead, we have someone who supports Tories, and Farage, and gives a platform to the proto-fascist celebrity Laurence Fox, who really needs to become better acquainted with the pavement, on his media show.

George Galloway is not supportable in Batley and Spen because of these things. Nor is Zionist New Labour, beholden to the racist BOD, who really would have considerable common ground with Laurence Fox since they praised Donald Trump for his Jerusalem policy.

George Galloway’s still-fervent anti-Zionism is commendable. But it is not enough on its own to merit electoral support. Supporting Farage and Scottish Tories is incompatible with basic class independence, which is a sine qua non for supporting a candidate in an election. Sayeeda Warsi and Sir Alan Duncan have both been fiercely critical of Zionism, but they are still Tories and not supportable by socialists. George is now politically promiscuous across class lines in a way that the old, pre-Masterson George would not have been happy with at all.

The following letter was a creditable and supportable initiative of Class Conscious, a leftist trend based in Australia, which we are pleased to endorse and publicise.

To Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President

We defend the right of the Vermont AFL-CIO to have passed a motion authorising a General Strike if the 2020 election results had been overturned in a coup. This motion voted on by the rank-and-file delegates at the Vermont AFL-CIO 2020 Convention was in the proud tradition of labor fighting together against the threat of fascism and dictatorship. We defend the right of workers and the organised labor movement to strike together to defend their democratic rights.

We therefore stand in solidarity with the Vermont AFL-CIO and demand that you immediately drop the vindictive and retaliatory “misconduct” investigation into the Vermont AFL-CIO

Signed

Organisations

Jews Against Fascism (Australia)

Liaison Committee for the Fourth International and its national groups: Consistent Democrats (Great Britain) Frente Comunista dos Trabalhdores (Brazil) Tendencia Militant Bolchevique (Argentine) Socialist Workers League (United States)

Socialist Fight (UK)

Trotskyist Platform (Australia)

United Front Committee for a Labor Party (US)

Workers Power (USA)

Individuals

Charles Dineen, AFSCME (retired). (Direct action gets the goods!)

Jonathan Cooper

Lori Drohan

Steve Early, NewsGuild/CWA member and former International Representative, Communications Workers of America.

Cassandra Edson

Michael Eisenscher, Alameda Labor Council Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus

Mike Gimbel, Retired Executive Board Member, Local 375, AFSCME

Andres Gonzales, (formerly) United Steel Workers of America

Daniel Guza, Admin FB group Labor and Politics

Davey Heller, classconscious.org and Australian Services Union member

Heather Harman, IWW, & Socialist Party USA

Mahanama Heller

Owen Hseish

Leslie Hight, VSEA rank and file

Klaus Helms, Member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Germany (Hoch die internationale Solidarität!)

James Marc Leas

Traven Leyshon, President of Green Mountain Labor Council

Dave Levi, Jews Against Fascism (Australia)

Brandon Marsden, Member of Reform and Revolution Caucus of the DSA

Gareth Martin

Bob Montgomery, AFSCME DC 93 (retired)

George Montgomery IBEW 2222 (As a proud lifelong (35 years now retired) member of an AFL-CIO union, I urget you to drop the misconduct investigation.

Barbara McGrew
Mary Morton

John O’Conner, AFM Local 442 and 1000

Robert Oeser

Jamie Partridge, NALC 82

Charles Rachlis, Communist Workers Group

Gabriel Rivera

Carla Ringler

Arlene Treacy (Hands off Vermont AFL-CIO!)

Marcus Vickers, Workers Power USA

Brian Walsh

Daniel Waterman

The recent retreat of Israel from 11 days of bombing Gaza, the unconditional ceasefire effectively imposed on it, is a major defeat whose implications are very damaging for the entire Zionist project. An article in the Middle East Monitor (24 May) by Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh characterised the outcome very sharply:

“Nuclear-armed Israel, and its army equipped with the latest weaponry, has been defeated. It’s much-vaunted and hugely expensive “Iron Dome” missile defence system failed in the face of rockets fired by the Palestinian resistance groups in the besieged Gaza Strip. The result was that the rockets could reach all parts of 1948-occupied Palestine, as well as Israel’s gas platforms in the Mediterranean Sea, and the country was at times almost under curfew.

It was a strategic defeat, which saw the myth of the invincibility of the Israel Defence Forces destroyed, despite its strength, technology, resources and unrivalled foreign support. Tanks deployed to the nominal border with Gaza went no further, even though the politicians had claimed that they would get a swift victory. The ground invasion didn’t happen”

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210524-the-battle-for-jerusalem-has-humiliated-israel-and-its-arab-zionist-supporters/

Furthermore, the same article captures the element of mass Palestinian politics that has emerged through this struggle:

“Moreover, probably for the first time since the 1936 “Arab uprising” during the British Mandate era, the people of occupied Palestine united across religious and political boundaries, and the imposed “borders” separating those in Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and the besieged Gaza Strip. This will go down in history as a key moment, and will not be forgotten by Israel. Cracks have appeared in its domestic front and it really does face an intifada from the river to the sea.

“It is clear that the Israeli plot to separate Gaza from the rest of occupied Palestine has failed, and it was all down to the resistance groups linking the coastal territory to Jerusalem in the rules of engagement. In doing so they placed the occupied city, and Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular, under Gaza’s protection. Indeed, I would go further and suggest that all of occupied Palestine is now under Gaza’s protection. Not for nothing were victory celebrations and the flag of Hamas seen on the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Lod, Nablus and the other occupied Palestinian cities. This is an achievement that would not have been possible without the resistance victory in the Saif Al-Quds — “Sword of Jerusalem” — battle.

This is remarkable, and points the way to the possibility of Israel being cracked open by the Palestinian working class, organised across the various barriers that the Zionists have imposed on them in an attempt to slice them up like so many pieces of salami.  As we noted in our own LCFI statement on this recent explosion:

“But even more shocking from the point of view of the Israeli ruling class was the unified General Strike of Palestinian workers across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel ‘proper’ within the ‘Green Line’ (the 1948 ceasefire borders). The Palestinian population within Israel, those who escaped the 1948 Nakba and were not expelled (but spent decades under military rule, and then as second-class non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state), acted in solidarity with their Palestinian brethren right across occupied Palestine between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, underling that despite the Zionist fiction that designates this population as “Israeli Arabs”, they are Palestinians, part of the dispossessed Palestinian nation, and part of a integral Palestinian working class and oppressed population despite the division of this population by borders, checkpoints, separation walls and the Gaza fence. […] Palestine is one nation from the River to the Sea, and the Palestinian working class has considerable power, beyond its formal industrial muscle, which is limited as Israel limits its exposure to Arab labour with the long-term aim of dispensing with it. The political impact of such an act of the proletarian and oppressed masses is what frightened the Israeli ruling class into cutting their losses in this situation and accepting a ceasefire that only days earlier they had ridiculed”

https://www.socialistfight.org/uncategorized/lcfi-statement-victory-of-palestinian-workers-and-international-resistance-humiliates-netanyahu/

The enforced nature of these concessions and Israeli bitterness at them is shown clearly by Israeli actions after the capitulation, with mass arrests and detentions of ‘Israeli Arabs’ who demonstrated and fought the Zionists during the upheaval, to ‘punish’ them from having defeated the Zionists. This requires continuing, ongoing solidarity from the left, the working class, and oppressed minorities in the West. It is also a sign of Zionist weakness. The mask whereby Israel pretended that it had an ‘Israeli Arab’ minority who were supposedly treated well, had democratic rights, is slipping, and its is becoming obvious to all that these are Palestinians, and are being treated as such by the Zionist usurpers. They are being victimised because they are feared.

This social power of the Palestinian working class needs to be linked to that of the working class in the (predominantly) Muslim Arab and other Middle Eastern states in the countries surrounding Israel, such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, whose struggle to win state power in the struggle against imperialist domination supplements the democratic struggle against Zionist racism and for the right to return of millions of Palestinian refugees.  This can drive forward the programme of permanent revolution in the Middle East, the only process that can resolve all the manifold democratic questions that plague the region, with the dispossession of the Palestinians in the first rank. Only under proletarian rule, though a multi-ethnic Palestine as part of a regional federation of workers states, can this question be resolved.

The mass upheaval nature of Israel’s defeat in the “Sword of Jerusalem” battle had its counterparts elsewhere, including in some Arab countries that have recently signed treacherous deals with Israel, such as the UAE, where the popular sympathy is overwhelmingly with the Palestinians no matter what the various dictatorial regimes may say.

And in the West, including in Britain. In fact, the two biggest solidarity demonstrations in the world took place in London. On 15 May 150,000 marched: on 22 May, after the Israelis had agreed to the ceasefire, 180,000 marched. That is somewhat at variance with the experience of previous wars in the Middle East, where the end of overt hostilities tended to result in a reduced attendance. Here it actually increased. The demonstrations were also remarkable because Britain is just in the process of slowly and hesitantly loosing restrictions on mass assemblies aimed at mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mass movement in Britain and left weaknesses

Our comrades attended four major London demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians during that 11-day period. It is notable that on the first three of those, the British left was very much underrepresented compared to its attendance on events where other issues were the focus. The demonstrations were overwhelmingly of Muslim, South Asian and Arab, composition and our literature (in our first outing, as our distinct group was formed during the pandemic) sold well, as there were relatively few leftists selling their literature. But on the largest demonstration, on 22 May, there were many more leftists present, which while welcome, somewhat swamped those present with leftist literature and our material was much more difficult to sell among the other left publications on sale.

The reluctance of the bigger battalions of the British left to turn out on these demonstrations while the rocket-firing and mass actions were going on, reflects a certain dismissiveness towards a movement that was very much composed of Muslims, and a degree of latent Islamophobic backwardness on the British left, which needs to be overcome politically.

One other unfortunate by product of the Israeli setback is that there are signs of unease by some seemingly stalwart pro-Palestine leftists as to the sheer power of this mass movement, and its potential to undo Zionism. In one recent case – we will not name names here, as a personal polemic is not the point – a long time leftist, himself unjustly suspended from the Labour Party, removed a Facebook comment by one of our comrades containing references to remarks by some prominent Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide, comparing Israeli behaviour to the Nazis. Such comparisons were deemed to be anti-Semitic. But this fits not the definition of anti-Semitism in the dictionary, but the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) pseudo-definition with its fraudulent ‘examples’ (which it turns out were never actually endorsed by the IHRA!) one of which deems such comparisons of Israeli behaviour with that of the Nazis as ‘anti-Semitic’.

There have been other incidents of a similar type, where dedicated Palestine campaigners have pulled up others for using ‘tropes’, like the idea that Jews are a ‘privileged’ group today. But whether Jews are a privileged group relative to other ethnic groups in today’s capitalist society, or whether Israel behaves in a genocidal manner comparable to the Nazis, are matters that can be empirically investigated, and the answers are matters of factual determination. Nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism, and the facts speak in favour of both propositions.  

We hope that this weakness can be overcome. There is considerable rage among Arabs and Muslims about Zionist crimes, but nothing among them that is comparable to the anti-Semitism of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. There are good material reasons for this. Hitlerian and Tsarist anti-Semitism were imperialist ideologies, reflective of the bigotries of pre-revolutionary Russian imperialism and the reactionary attempt to preserve the Tsarist autocracy, or German imperialist hostility to Communism and the then-widespread belief, now dispelled (largely by Zionism, ironically) that Jews were in some way inherently revolutionary and hostile to capitalism and imperialism.

 Whereas there is no imperialist power in on Earth, in the modern, monopoly capitalist sense, that has an Islamic culture, and never has been. Even those elements of ideology among Muslims that in some ways conflate Zionism with being Jewish, are not ideological expressions of a predatory, imperialist project like Nazism, but simply one-sided expressions of experience of oppression at the hands of Zionist Jews, who claim (with the support of virtually the entire imperialist bourgeoisie) to represent Jews in general.

Our attitude to this movement, and in particular its large component with a Muslim culture, should be similar to that laid out by Trotsky in a small but very important letter from 1932, on the approach of the Fourth International to militants from nations oppressed by imperialism:

“When ten intellectuals, whether in Paris, Berlin, or New York, who have already been members of various organizations, address themselves to us with a request to be taken into our midst, I would offer the following advice: Put them through a series of tests on all the programmatic questions; wet them in the rain, dry them in the sun, and then after a new and careful examination accept maybe one or two.

“The case is radically altered when ten workers connected with the masses turn to us. The difference in our attitude to a petty-bourgeois group and to the proletarian group does not require any explanation. But if a proletarian group functions in an area where there are workers of different races, and in spite of this remains composed solely of workers of a privileged nationality, then I am inclined to view them with suspicion. Are we not dealing perhaps with the labour aristocracy? Isn’t the group infected with slave-holding prejudices, active or passive?

“It is an entirely different matter when we are approached by a group of Negro workers. Here I am prepared to take it for granted in advance that we shall achieve agreement with them, even if such an agreement is not actual as yet. Because the Negro workers, by virtue of their whole position, do not and cannot strive to degrade anybody, oppress anybody, or deprive anybody of his rights. They do not seek privileges and cannot rise to the top except on the road of the international revolution.

“We can and we must find a way to the consciousness of the Negro workers, the Chinese workers, the Indian workers, and all the oppressed in the human ocean of the coloured races to whom belongs the decisive word in the development of mankind.”

Leon Trotsky, Closer to the Proletarians of the Coloured Races, July 1932

Differences of time, location, situation, and even some archaic 20^th Century language in the passage, do not obscure the point. This movement is not to be feared, but to be embraced, politicised, and revolutionised. The latent softness on Zionism and fear of masses of Muslims that is widespread on the British and Western left must not be allowed to get in the way of pushing this movement forward, a movement that has huge class potential for the struggle to defeat Zionism and imperialism and push forward the struggle for socialism and revolution.