This document was originally published on the Socialist Fight website (socialistfight.com) on 4 February. It was taken down by the bureaucratic action of Gerry Downing on 10 Feb, in defiance of the constitution of SF which guarantees the right of factions to publish their views in the organisations publications, including of course the website. But many had read it by the time it was taken down,so the act of censorship is also conspicuous, damaging and an admission of their inability to reply to it.

The problem is that Gerry Downing and his undeclared faction cannot refute this critque. Their only response to it has been a bilious dismissal of it as a ‘lying document’. And Gerry has been whining that comrade Ian Donovan supposedly duped him for five years into endorsing political views he now wishes he had not, now that he has capitulated to the Zionist witchhunt in British society in general. An unedifying spectacle.

It is unfortunately the case that there is a major division in Socialist Fight, British Section of the Liaison Committee for The Fourth International. This division is not primarily about Gilad Atzmon, though the sound and fury in the hysterical ‘Statement’ published by Gerry Downing’s undeclared and fraudulent faction (whose claims to be a majority only on the basis of falsely claiming as a member someone who lapsed a long time ago) might make it appear so. It is actually about Zionism, and comrade Gerry Downing’s capitulation to the enormous pressure of from political forces that express pro-Zionist social power, which has now risen to unheard of levels in the UK.

This is obvious if you think of two related social facts. One is the defeat of the Labour Party in the December 2019 General Election. Everyone in Britain knows that supporters of Israel and the leaders of the mainstream organisations of British Jewry played a major role in Labour’s defeat.  Amplified by the right-wing media and the Tory-dominated BBC, mendacious accusations of anti-Jewish racism among Labour Party members were trumpeted far and wide. The effect of the lie machine was not so much to make the smears widely believed: the accusations were usually so illogical that only those who wanted to believe them did so. But the effect was to make Labour and Jeremy Corbyn appear weak. Corbyn repeatedly confessed and apologised for non-existent anti-Jewish racism in Labour.

Well known figures on the left, such as Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, Gerry Downing himself, and Cyril Chilsom, were expelled, suspended or hounded into resigning from the Labour Party, along with many more lesser known people, amid ferocious media smears about alleged anti-Semitism. It became conventional media wisdom that Labour Party members hated Jews. There were even crappy ‘comedy’ routines on some TV shows about the Labour Party hating Jews. The power of a lying, pro-Zionist media in this country is currently enormous, and the Labour leadership crumbled before it, throwing many of the figures mentioned above under the bus. This certainly played an important role in making Labour appear weak, even pusillanimous, and thus was one of many key factors that contributed to the election defeat.

Then there is the victory of Johnson’s Tories themselves. Johnson is Britain’s Trump, a fierce pro-Zionist and a supporter of Trump’s openly pro-Zionist policies. Johnson now has an ‘anti-Semitism Czar’, former Labour Zionist MP John Mann, best known for his hounding of Ken Livingstone in 2016. His job among other things is to ‘investigate’ far left websites and publications looking for ‘anti-Semitism’ defined according to the IHRA definition, which seeks to criminalise meaningful criticism of Israel and Zionism. Johnson has immediately moved to reinstate previously defeated plans to ban councils from supporting boycotts of Israel and the BDS movement.  He has also openly supported Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ which involves the annexation of large parts of the West Bank by Israel and is so blatant a denial of any pretence of Palestinians having national rights that even the stooge Palestinian authority of Mahmood Abbas completely boycotted it.

So that is two interrelated deeply reactionary developments intimately connected with Zionism in the past few months, that have shifted British politics very sharply to the right and created a much more ideologically, and potentially legally, threatening environment for anti-Zionists. That creates enormous social pressure on what previously had been the most uncompromising and consistently anti-Zionist group on the British left, Socialist Fight.

The decline of Corbynism and the ascent of Johnson to power have exposed latent political weakness, and in one crucial sense one issue that in hindsight was a political fudge, in Socialist Fight’s politics regarding Zionism. Revolutionaries are always vulnerable to social pressure, but hidden political weaknesses can provide an entry point for something alien to Marxism to find its way in and damage key components of the group. This was the starting point of the political problems that have led us to this problem. It is not a problem merely of personal weaknesses, or the aging of our cadre, as might be concluded empirically. Those are just symptoms of where we came from.

Leftward moving – before the division

Socialist Fight before this division took place was, or aspired to be, a synthesis of the best elements of the orthodox Trotksyist tradition. We had components with experience in both the Healy and Robertson groups, different strands of orthodoxy. This was quite a slowly emerging synthesis as due to the deformations of both traditions, both of our central leading cadre had had past experiences that led to some demoralisation and some drift away from orthodoxy, whether being in the United Secretariat in the case of comrade Downing, or the third-campist CPGB/Weekly Worker, and then a relationship with the very left-wing but third-campist US League for the Revolutionary Party in the case of comrade Donovan.

What led to our joining together in the middle of this decade was militant anti-Zionism; we converged on a set of theses that comrade Donovan had written while in a bloc with the CPGB within Left Unity in 2014, which led to his expulsion from the bloc on the kind of charges of “political” anti-Semitism that were levelled at Socialist Fight and are now being raised by comrade Downing himself. However as comrade Downing himself acknowledged, the recruitment of another experienced Trotskyist cadre enormously strengthened the group. The context of this was the rise of Corbynism as a genuine left-wing development within the British Labour movement, something which pushed British politics to the left and gave a further leftward impulse to our cadre.

The group has been through some serious political fights over Zionism with other forces externally, most notably through Gerry’s expulsion from the Labour Party in March 2016, the fighting off of the attempt to purge him from the LRC later that year, and then the fight over our exclusion from Labour Against the Witchhunt at the end of 2017 and early 2018. Socialist Fight actually picked up a modest number of serious recruits as a result of this work, which then laid the basis for the fusion with the small group of ex-Moreno supporters in Liverpool. But there was one key difference that was fudged between comrades Donovan and Downing that it was a key mistake to fail to fight out. It is the fatal weakness that, in the context of the decline of Corbynism and defeats inflicted by Zionist forces on the British labour movement, of the current division and comrade Downing’s political retreat.

Israel and Nazi Germany

The issue was quite straightforward; given that Israel is recognised by Socialist Fight as a racist state, in fact the world’s most openly racist state, should SF advocate that support for Israel be proscribed tout court in the Labour Party? Comrade Donovan said yes, comrade Downing insisted no; he cited as examples some Jewish neighbours who supported Israel, albeit in a ‘soft’ way, who were, so he said, good socialists despite their support for Israel.

This is quite an interesting question given the fulminations in the statement of the Downing faction ‘statement’ about people that oppose such right-wing causes as Zionism’s oppression of the Palestinians, or Johnson’s Brexit regime, who have gone to the effort to dig out dirt about the Rothschilds and their past involvement in Zionism and British politics, including from Nazi sources. Given that Israel as an openly racist state is only comparable to similar openly racist states such as Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, or the post-Civil War Jim Crow apartheid Southern United States, then why is it permissible for a ‘good socialist’ to be a defender of Israel, but not for some diffuse, non-Marxist but broadly left-wing individual to go to Nazi sources for information about historical questions like the Rothschilds?

This is particularly apposite given that Israel is the only one of these states that still exists. That is, an openly racist state that is considered part of the ‘Free World’ and thereby one of the ‘family of democracies’ in the lingo of Western imperialism. Jim Crow became a deep embarrassment to the democratic pretentions of the West in the 1950s, which is why the US Civil Rights movement had some real victories (now being rolled back). Apartheid South Africa was even more of an embarrassment and had to be thrown out of the British Commonwealth in 1961. Nazi Germany is obviously an anathema since WWII.

So Gerry agreed that SF should advocate that the Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, as organisations, should be proscribed as these are openly racist organisations. But he refused to agree SF should argue that support for Israel as a racist state should be banned within Labour. That was a step that he was unprepared to take. The reason being quite simple; that he had a fairly good relationship with some local Israel-loyal Jewish Labour people and to advocate that their views be proscribed would upset them, to say the least. That was taking anti-Zionism too far, in his view.

But that is the nub of the problem. Israel does have a considerable degree of support in the right-wing of the Laboour Party, and even among some ostensibly left-wing groups from the AWL to elements in Momentum. To advocate that Israel be treated in the same way as other racist states would be to anathemise a whole swathe of ostensibly left-wing opinion.

In fact, when the Third Reich existed it was never necessary to proscribe support for it in Labour as it was simply unthinkable that any Labour Party members would support such an abomination. Likewise with apartheid and Jim Crow.  But support for Israel is socially completely acceptable in Labour, almost obligatory for the right-wing, to the point that the passage of the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism means that to say that Israel is a racist endeavour is not permitted. Let alone to advocate proscribing support to Israel because of it being a racist endeavour. Gerry would never agree to raising this demand and in hindsight, comrade Donovan is self-critical that he did not openly criticise comrade Downing for this. Because it is the real root cause of the current division, as it appears that it is social pressure from this very milieu, which has driven comrade Gerry to the right.

It is worth noting that this anomaly, the social acceptability in the labour movement of support for a genocidal racist Israeli state some of whose policies towards an oppressed people resemble Nazism, can have unexpected consequences internationally that have bearing on this dispute, and can only damage the credibility of working-class politics itself if not fought.

Labour Zionism and Bolshevism: A Confusion

For instance, Gerry has fulminated recently against Gilad Atzmon and Devon Nola as echoing ‘Nazi propaganda’ for arguing that ‘atrocities’ allegedly committed by the Bolsheviks were a function of the supposedly high representation of Jews in its cadre. But no one bothers to ask how it possible that a Israeli-Jewish-led diffuse trend of strongly pro-Palestinian opinion might draw such conclusions so much at odds with history.

One pointer as to how such a thing can come to be believed is the very respectability of Zionist racism in the Labour Party, and the labour movement itself. Familiarity with this regrettable reality helps breed complacency here. But in the Middle East, and among people who have experienced the politics of that region, it brings discredit upon the labour movement itself.  When you combine that with the fact that in Israel, Zionism first came to power under a Labour banner, and parties to the left of Zionist Labour, such as the pro-Moscow, apparently pro-Russian Revolution MAPAM, played a major role in the birth of Israel, then you begin to see the problem.

The pro-Russian, semi-‘Communist’ MAPAM, closely associated with the left-talking Kibbutz Artzi movement, had a network of 85 Kibbutzim associated with it, built of course on stolen Arab land even as the MAPAM party itself mulled ideas like binational states, and such like. In other words, these pro-USSR, pro-Russian Revolution (at least in words), leftists played an important role in the founding of Israel at the Palestinians’ expense. In the first Israeli Knesset, after 1948, MAPAM was apparently the second biggest Zionist Party, after MAPAI (ie. Labour) itself, bigger than the revisionist Herut, which is the main forerunner of today’s Likud.

In this context it is not difficult to explain how alienated Jewish-led non-Marxist trends like the Atzmonites could be suspicious of the Russian Revolution, with its obvious Jewish input, and falsely extrapolate from that the view that the many bloody crimes that flowed from the degeneration of the revolution were similar to the abuses that took place in Israel against the native people of Palestine. We live in a world where, outside relatively small old-style left-wing movements, the Russian Revolution has very little authority and is heavily demonised by the media and most education systems. Why should new leftist trends in whatever form they come into existence necessarily see the Russian Revolution as benevolent?

The hysterical response of comrade Downing to the confusion between left and right among the Atzmonites is reflective of capitulation to left-Zionist ideology. In the Middle East generally, where the main oppressors and ethnic cleaners of the Palestinian Arabs are Jewish, inhabiting a Jewish ethnocratic tyranny that engages in slow genocide with the backing of the ‘democratic’ imperialists who embrace Israel as a ‘democracy’ like them, there is a very different popular view of the Second World War to that in the West.

“My enemy’s enemy…”

Thus the Assad regime has for decades published copious quantities of Nazi material as a response to Zionist crimes. It goes back much further. In 1964, Gamal Abdul Nasser said that he opposed “the lie of the six million”. Mahmood Abbas, the current President of the stooge Palestinian authority, once produced an academic thesis that denied the Nazi genocide. The former Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, held conferences to debate the truth or otherwise of the same Nazi genocide. Hamas, who won when a free election was last held in the West Bank and Gaza, praised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their founding charter.

The fact is that the anti-Jewish element of the Western far right get a hearing in the Middle East. This is hardly surprising. To therefore equate the masses who embody such sentiments in their rage against oppression, with the far right and the Nazis, is a pro-Zionist position. This includes the small minority of very alienated Jews who have gone over lock, stock and barrel to the Arab side in this. The fact that Atzmon, in  response to being flattered by David Duke, the former Klansman, in America, for his writings on Jewish identity and the like, made a flattering comment back, is no different.

There is an element of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” deeply embedded in spontaneous anti-Zionist dissent originating in the Middle East. To equate such people with the far right, or to try to rule them beyond the pale of debate or of the workers movement, is to go over to a left-Zionist position.

Thus it is no accident that in Gerry’s original draft of his statement on this, he included a statement from America’s most famous Naqba-denier, Alan Dershowitz, denouncing Atzmon for being praised by David Duke, among a tirade of hate and smears against a variety of people. It is fitting that this came from Dershowitz as the whole thrust of his propaganda is that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism equals Hitlerism. Gerry has become like a little Dershowitz not only in his attack on Atzmon, but also in some of the other people he has vilified.

Expiation Through Indiscriminate Vilification

Evidence of Gerry’s rightward movement is to be found in his irrational and bizarre attacks on other figures on the left, and indeed particularly on the mainstream Jewish left, implying that they too are in some way anti-Semitic. For instance his attack on Tony Greenstein at Communist University, when he put out his own leaflet. This was not an SF leaflet, as it would not have been endorsed by SF comrades.

But the attack on Greenstein was clearly motivated by an attempt to ‘get back’ at him for having accused Gerry of anti-Semitism in the past. This is evidence of demoralisation: instead of continuing the fight to win the argument politically against this accusation he sought to turn the tables and imply that Greenstein was the ‘real’ anti-Semite because of his refusal to condemn Hannah Arendt for her relationship with Martin Heidegger, and having publicly stated considerable respect for her writings and philosophy.

In the course of the dispute around Atzmon and Veterans Today, Gerry denounced Phil Weiss, the leftist who runs, and is the main writer for, the highly respected US Jewish left blog Mondoweiss. This was for an article that put forward the historical view, which though its significance is disputed the facts are not, that the Israel lobby mobilised heavily against two incumbent presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George H.W Bush in 1992, and seems to have played a major role in denying them both a second term. This being because of policies on Israel/Palestine that the Israel lobby disapproved of, in Carter’s case for insisting on the Palestinians right to a state, and with Bush the Elder for withholding loan guarantees to Israel to try to force it to stop settlement activity that the President and James Baker, his Secretary of State, disapproved of.

It is not seriously disputed in US politics that the Israel lobby did indeed mobilise against these Presidents. What is subject to different views is how effective it was, whether they lost because of that, or whether it was other events in the economy and the class struggle that brought them down. The  Mondoweiss article on this is hardly definitive in saying that this was the only factor involved but it does paint a detailed picture of what happened to Carter in particular. See https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/settlements-alienated-eizenstat/

 However Gerry remarked on 6 Jan that:

“As for the Mondoweiss that too is conspiracy nonsense.  

“It wasn’t Jewish finance or lack of it that causes Republicans or Democrats to win presidential elections.”

Thus extending his attack on Atzmon to wider spheres of the Jewish left, after his attack on Tony Greenstein.

Then there was the more minor, but symptomatic episode of Gerry’s public attack on Sebastian Budgen, the editor of Historical Materialism, as promoting ‘fascist values’ because of a comment he put in an academic discussion encouraging a dispassionate discussion of the views of the reactionary 19^th Century Philosopher Nietzsche.

Moreover criticism of the attack on Budgen within SF has since led to a continual tirade of attacks implying that those who disapprove support Nietzsche, and thus by extension, fascism.  Bizarre and over the top, Gerry seems to be looking for every possible opportunity to smear anyone he can with the canard of anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies, to expiate his own transgressions, his very prominent past advocacy of views that he now suspects (wrongly) may have been anti-Semitic, as he has unfortunately capitulated ideologically to the witchhunt against Socialist Fight.

A strange symptom of this is his attack on Atzmon, which had he been so minded, he could have written at any time in the past five years, or more, since he actually endorsed Tony Greenstein’s campaign against Atzmon in 2009 and then said he had been mistaken about that when he initiated the ‘new’ Socialist Fight with a new ‘Where we stand’ statement co-written with Ian Donovan after the May 2015 General Election, around the mid-point of the Corbyn leadership election campaign.

Atzmon: A Stalking Horse for our Draft Theses

The real purpose of the attack on Atzmon and others is as a stalking horse to distance himself from our 2014 Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism. In the course of a long and tortuous discussion about whether it is permissible to cite and post material from the ‘conspiratorial’ US pro-Iran, pro-Russia anti-war website Veterans Today, and then about our Socialist Fight statement about the murder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Suleimani by Trump and US imperialism, the issues came out.

Regarding the Suleimani murder, Gerry wrote agreeing with another comrade on the day we distributed our statement on the murder, that

“Netanyahu is Trump’s puppet, not the other way around.” (4 Jan)

The problem with this hypothesis is an assertion that, because of the economic and military power of the United States, Israel is subordinate, a puppet, of US administrations generally. But that is contradicted by reality. If Netanyahu is Trump’s ‘puppet’ simply because Trump is the US President, he must also have previously been Obama’s ‘puppet’ at the time of Obama’s Iran deal. But everyone knows that Netanyahu waged a massive campaign in the United States itself against Obama’s deal, and this peaked with a 40 minute speech to an almost unprecedented joint session of Congress, demanded by Netanyahu, on Capitol Hill on 3 March 2015 where he received 26 standing ovations from the assembled legislators for his denunciation of Obama’s deal.

As we now know, Trump’s campaign was massively funded by the Israel lobby, in particularly the Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a supporter of Netanyahu’s Likud, and Obama’s Iran deal was duly thrown aside by Trump. It is thus ridiculous to say that Netanyahu was Obama’s puppet and then Trump’s, and obviously the relation between Netanyahu and Trump is … unusual, to say the least. This has huge relevance for the real relations behind the junking of the Iran deal, and Suleimani’s murder.

So this boiled down to a form of words about whether the interests of Israel were ‘secondary’ to those of the United States bourgeoisie, i.e. US imperialism conceived of as a body completely separate from Israel, or not. Gerry wrote:

“… It is completely wrong to say that Zionism or the U.S. Zionist lobby is not secondary to U.S. imperialism itself and its global class interests.  Saying that, going over from acknowledging the power of the U.S. Zionist lobby to asserting or strongly suggesting that it is controlling U.S. politically..” (6 Jan)

In later emails he expanded:

“Here Zionism dictates to US imperialism what to do in the Middle East and their own material interests are secondary. This is wrong, wrong, wrong, one sided and false. It is wrong to say, ‘It’s totally wrong to say that Zionism is secondary in what happened yesterday’ (the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on 3 January). This asserts the primacy of the ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’ and the second place for US imperialist interests in this and implicitly in every other region…” (16 Jan)

And then he accuses comrade Donovan of advocating a new position:

“… Imperialism will only ‘defer’ to Israel when it suits them, and this is not, never has been and never will be, a permanent deference; the tail does not wag the dog. However, this is starkly contradicted by the piece in which he denies that Zionism is secondary to US imperialism in reply to Alonso.”

Later this was expanded to a bald rejection of the entire thrust of the 2014 Theses:

“In whose interests do US imperialism act? The ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste’ or their own? How did we come to ask such a ridiculous question?” (20 Jan)

When the explicit thrust of the 2014 Theses are that these ruling classes are not entirely separate, that they actually overlap;  a situation that the bourgeoisie of the older powers is prepared to accept because of their belief that the overlapping Jewish-Zionist layer is a crucial political asset of their class, a particularly class-conscious layer.

 This was in response to previous comments by comrade Donovan, who wrote:

“Obama’s deal was an act of defiance against Israel and the lobby which is why Netanyahu came to the US Congress to try to stop it with his speech receiving numerous standing ovations from a bunch of demented Jack-in-the-boxes, as Finkelstein put it.

It’s totally wrong to say that Zionism is secondary in what happened yesterday. Is Zionism ‘secondary’ in the move of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? In the de-funding of UNRWA by the US to starve Palestinian refugees? In US recognition of Israel’s annexation  of Golan? In the Green Light Trump has given to Israel to annex the Jordan Valley etc. by the State Department saying that it does not regard West Bank settlements as contrary to international law? (5 Jan)

He elaborated on this later:

 “This is theoretically wrong as the global class interests of US imperialism – and indeed others at different intensities – and their regional, Middle Eastern class interests are relatively different things. 

“You could say that the US bourgeoisie as a whole regards it as in its global class interests to allow the J-Z bourgeois caste to play the leading role on a regional level because of its usefulness to the bourgeoisie as a whole as a class asset. 

“Obviously the non-JZ bourgeoisie is more numerous and if it wanted to it could very firmly put the J-Z layer in its place and certainly not allow it to ‘discipline’ dissidents in its own ranks. 

“But it does so allow it, and the list of people so disciplined is quite illustrious, including Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush, and possibly Hillary Clinton who may have been punished for Obama’s insubordination as they had no means to punish Obama himself.

 “In this country a similar mechanism has been used to punish Corbyn and the Labour Party, which is even more intense because of the class hostility of the bourgeoisie as a whole to the LP in any case. It allows this because it considers the JZ caste and the state of Israel that underpins it as important class assets of the bourgeoisie as a whole.” (6 Jan)

Bourgeois Deference and Political Cultism

Comrade Donovan expanded on the mechanics of this in an exchange with Sam Trachtenberg, an American Jewish leftist who is hostile to Socialist Fight, on Facebook. Trachtenberg characterised our position thus:

“That the majority of the capitalist class is being manipulated behind the scenes by a well-organised Jewish minority who will inevitably get unquestioning lockstep loyalty and important support from the rest of the Jewish population to boot. I’ve read such formulation even in SF material couched in the thinly veiled distinctions you make here.”

To which comrade Donovan responded (edited for readability):

“The majority of the capitalist class allows this to happen because they regard the minority ethnic/communal faction as particularly class conscious representatives of their own class. They are not being manipulated. This Philo-Semitic cult has its roots in bourgeois class consciousness now that capitalism is in decline.

“Bourgeois class consciousness is not strictly rational and political cults can occur. The cult of neoliberalism and its Jewish-Zionist ideologues like Milton Friedman is the flip side of the earlier anti-Semitic irrationality that allowed them to support Hitler.

“What is excluded is that they could treat Jews as equals, with equanimity. There is an excluded middle, neither anti-Semitism nor philo-Semitism.

“But the bourgeoisie is not capable of that level of equanimity about their Jewish brethren. Probably because of the history of the Jews regarding commodity exchange. They must either be subversive devils, or God-like angels.”

 “… This comes from observation over a long period. Numerous people have written about facets of it. It’s a peculiar social phenomenon that otherwise defies explanation. This has been the core of my theory since 2014. That the bourgeoisie defer to their Jewish brethren from a class instinct as they regard them as particularly class conscious.

“And classes work by a kind of spontaneous instinct. They don’t always meet collectively to work out a coherent ideology. That is true of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. My writings have never even referenced the standard conspiracy theories about the bourgeoisie, such as the one about the Bilderberg group etc. Because that is not how things work.

“Not conspiracies but the collective action of classes — or sometimes factions within classes. Brexit is also an example of such collective action of parts of a class against another part of the same class. The Jewish-Zionist faction works in similar ways.

“Properly understood, my theory is not anti-Jewish at all. Why should it be? Most of the resources I draw upon are Jewish.”

Consistent Revolutionary Anti-Zionism

This is the analysis that Gerry has now abandoned, having endorsed it fulsomely from 2015 and even defending it on national television in March 2016. Everyone who knows anything about Gerry and Socialist Fight knows this.

The Trotskyist faction has not abandoned this analysis and we have a principled platform that maintains the basic politics of Socialist Fight before Gerry’s tragic political degeneration, which threatens to destroy everything he ever fought for.

Through whatever organisational form, we will continue to struggle to build a revolutionary party on the basis of our consistent opposition to Zionism.  In this period, political Zionism has become the cutting edge of reaction and the far right in the major imperialist countries.

The Israel lobby is a key part of the genocide machine of political Zionism. In some ways it is the most important part. Without it, Israel would not find it politically possible to pulverise the Palestinian people in the way it has been doing for decades, now decisively intensifying with the full backing of Trump and Johnson.

Those on the left who politically protect the material base of the Lobby by smearing those who criticise it as ‘anti-Semitic’ are a part of the genocide machine, its gatekeepers on the left flank. As Trotskyists, as tribunes of the oppressed, as the most consistent opponents of Zionism and defenders of the Palestinians, we will continue to fight to politically expose and oppose this phenomenon as a key part of our internationalist responsibilities as Trotskyists and supporters of the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International.

UPDATE: Since this was written, Dawn Butler has capitulated to the Zionists, signing up for a Jewish Labour Movement statement that is just as bad as that of the Board of Deputies. So this is out of date: we are no longer calling for any preference vote to her, only to Richard Burgon.

Reinstate Jo Bird and Mo Azam!

Vote Burgon 1, Butler 2 for Deputy. No Vote To Any of the Blairite/Zionist Stooge Leader Candidates!

(This leaflet was published and distributed by the Trotskyist Faction on 9 February)

The Trotskyist Faction, the revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist wing of Socialist Fight, calls for critical support for Richard Burgon as the first choice for Deputy Leader. He at least has defied the demands of the racist Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) to sign their ’10 commandments’, as has the softer left Dawn Butler who deserves a second preference vote.  Though he himself has not always stood firm , as when he apologised for saying the simple truth, that Zionism is the “enemy of the Palestinian people”, he at least is defiant now and should be put to the test.

The actions of all the candidates standing for leader in capitulating to the pro-Tory BOD enemies of organised labour, have put the Zionist attack on democratic rights at the top of the political agenda. We say:  No vote to Long-Bailey, Starmer, Thornberry and Nandy.  All of these candidates, from the overt neoliberalism of Starmer to the Corbyn continuity of Long-Bailey, have sold themselves and Labour to the class enemy by signing up to the BOD’s agenda, that of organised anti-Arab racists who applauded the massacre of Palestinian civil rights marchers in Gaza and seek the wholesale expulsion of Palestine supporters from Labour.

The capitulation of Corbyn and the Labour left in the period before the election laid the basis for these attacks. For all the feverish desperation of the official ‘lefts’, it is not clear than Long-Bailey is even in a position to win, so much has the left  been undermined. One very good reason why she most likely will not is that her leftism, her talk of Open Selection and democratic reform of Labour is completely contradicted by her signing the Zionists’ pledges, to destroy the democratic rights of Labour members on behalf of the Israeli state. Thus her candidacy and her left-wing promises are just not believable; she like the others standing against her, have already sold Labour to a very important part of the ruling class. The likely result of her treachery is to let in Starmer.

The labour movement should regard the BOD and other Zionist cheerleaders for racist massacres and ethnic cleansing of Arab civilians as roughly equivalent to Neo-Nazis trying to dictate to the working class. We would not have tolerated Nazis when Jews were persecuted telling the left we had ‘no right’ to stand up for Jews. Well we should no more tolerate viciously racist bourgeois Jewish-Zionist organisations dictating to us about Palestine and banning criticism of their totalitarian racism today. They need to be very publicly declared persona non-grata to the whole labour movement. Support for Israel should be anathema in every labour movement body, just as much as support for Nazi racism.

The suspension of Jo Bird and Mohammad Azam in the NEC election is racist-ballot rigging, pure and simple. Of course we demand their immediate reinstatement, but it has to be said that capitulation of the vast bulk of the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy, including much of the ‘left’,  to the Zionist takeover of the Labour Party has made that very unlikely today. The blatant racism of the suspensions is breathtaking: Jo Bird is Jewish but in this reactionary climate she has already been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ once, a smear akin to accusations of ‘anti-white racism’ from neo-Nazis and the like. And the motive for purging Azam is equally transparent, as they don’t want people of Asian/Muslim background, particularly leftist ones, on leading committees as they cannot be relied on to vote for Israeli racism.

Pam Bromley, a left-wing councillor who has just been expelled herself, reported that 11.400 members have been recently expelled. That is an incredible number purged and there must be a risk to the right-wing and the Zionists that if they became organised, they could become a substantial political force.

We need a political lifeboat for the many Labour members who are in the process of being purged, or leaving in disgust. There needs to be created a principled bloc of socialists on the basis of the principle of freedom of criticism and debate, and unity in action, to build a broadly left-wing movement that can organise both pro-socialist militants within the Labour Party, and outside it. Given the totalitarian climate that currently exists within the Labour Party, there may even have to  be a degree of clandestinity about  the way it organises. Such a body must have a revolutionary component to act as the yeast to bring into being a genuinely anti-capitalist party, a party that can fight for socialism and which realises that capitalism in decline is making a serious struggle for social reforms impossible within the existing social and political system.

We Trotskyists stand on a transitional programme whose purpose is to act as a bridge between the felt needs of working class people today and the destruction of capitalism. But a felt need of today is for a political movement, a party, of the working class that can enforce class independence against the Zionists and the mendacious neoliberal media machine, which has effectively hollowed out and abolished in practice even much of the limited democracy that exists under capitalism. That party cannot be just declared, it must be fought for and built by a regroupment of forces currently within and without the Labour Party, not on the basis of trying to repeat the errors of the Labour left, but going beyond Labourism itself, so that a truly mass force, not just a sect or an agglomeration of existing sects, can be crystallised.

Of course that sounds like a tall order today. But with the rapid decline of both capitalism and democracy, and the advancing shadow of environmental and economic catastrophe, nothing can be more urgent.

New Introduction

This item was originally published on Socialist Fight website (socialistfight.com) on 30 Jan. It was taken down bureaucratically on 10 Feb, in defiance of the constitution of SF which guarantees the right of factions to publish their views in the organisations publications, including of course the website.

It was up for 11 days and hundreds have read it. So its disappearance is almost as embarrassing as its appearance and obviously an act of incompetent, bureaucratic censorship after the horse has bolted. Gerry Downing cannot refute the corruption spelt out in detail in this document and the signatories of the Trotskyist Platform of Socialist Fight – almost 50% of the committed full members of the organisation excluding a few who have not endorsed either faction – are still members of SF and more importantly its international tendency, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International. The bureaucratic faction do not have the votes to expel us, but they are trying to deprive us of the means to argue by whatever means available to them, which is not much. Its a tragi-comic impasse, but not of our doing, as this document spells out.

Introduction:

This statement was already written when we discovered that on 30 Jan 2020 Gerry Downing fraudulently put out his statement denouncing Gilad Atzmon and some of his associated and co-thinkers, in the name of Socialist Fight, 13 days after a 17^th January vote was taken in which he failed to get a majority. He now claims that one member who had clearly lapsed, JC, whose case is addressed below, was a full member all along, and that gave him a majority after all. This question was raised at the 17^th January meeting and various arguments were made to the effect that JC should be treated as a member. This was never agreed and ratified in an endorsed set of minutes in any case.

Objections had been raised by comrade Donovan in the meeting on the grounds that JC had made not paid subs, only made sporadic donations and had not been to any meetings for well over a year. The draft minutes mistakenly recorded that it was agreed that he was a member, after a hue and cry from Gerry and his ‘candidate members’ whose presence was itself contentious, and unwanted as the meeting in which it took place had originally been booked and planned by the decision of full members as a private meeting for those full members only.

These draft minutes had not been agreed, and the objection that JC was lapsed was made again by email during the following week. Comrade Downing claims that the statement in the draft minutes is gospel even though those minutes had not been ratified by a subsequent meeting. In any case, since JC was not at the meeting on 17 Jan, and did not vote before the deadline despite being notified, it is clear that he was not acting as a member. It is now clear that comrade Downing chased him down in the 10 days or so after the vote, persuaded him to pretend to be a member, and then retrospectively changed the vote. But the fact is that at the deadline, the vote was tied and so the statement fell. The original statement this faction put out on 18^th January after the vote was tied did not include JC’s name.

There is no agreement that JC is a member and the ‘Socialist Fight statement’ comrade Downing has put out is doubly fraudulent. JC had lapsed long ago, having not attended any meetings for over a year nor paid regular subscriptions. No meeting had the power to rewrite that history in any case. Anyone with such a record would be deemed to have lapsed from membership in a variety of organisations.

Socialist Fight has always aspired to the Bolshevik tradition, including by endorsing Lenin’s position in 1903 that a party member is someone engaged in “participation in one of the Party organizations”. The split of Lenin’s ‘hards’ from Martov’s ‘softs’ (the Mensheviks) was in counterposition to their definition that a member is someone who “renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations”. However even the latter involves paying regular subs; JC’s membership would have lapsed from the Mensheviks, or even from today’s Labour Party.

Thus comrade Downing has not only betrayed the consistent anti-Zionist positions he used to uphold, he has flagrantly betrayed the democracy of his own organisation by fraudulently and retrospectively rewriting the history of a vote he didn’t win; he has fraudulently declared an ex-member to be a full member in order to claim to have ‘won’ a vote he failed to win, and he has in the process totally betrayed the Bolshevik tradition on the party question.

All this indicates, as the statement below shows, a complete decay of communist consciousness and the embrace of opportunism.

——————————————————

We have looked at the letter and cheque that comrade Gerry Downing sent to Ian, the Treasurer, supposedly constituting membership fees for GM and CW.

We are of the opinion that all dealings regarding membership and membership subs within a communist organisation must be strictly above board, and must at the very least meet the standards expected by the labour and socialist movement generally. In fact we must be better.

For instance Clause 4 of Chapter III of the Labour Party rulebook includes the following:

“A. It is an abuse of Party rules for one individual or faction to ‘buy’ Party membership for other  individuals or groups of individuals who would otherwise be unwilling to pay their own subscriptions.

[…]

“F. Party officers and members should be aware that involvement in such abuses shall be considered as behaviour likely to bring the Party into disrepute and prima facie evidence of such behaviour may lead to disciplinary action leading to expulsion under the constitutional rules of the Party.”

Such considerations must be maintained in a communist organisation more even than a mere reformist party.

It does appear that comrade Downing has paid the membership fees, for these two supposed new candidate members, for six months in advance. Not only is this contrary to the rules of financial probity even of the Labour Party – see clauses above – but it also has a brazen cynicism about it in another way. Because even if it were conceded that these people are legitimately candidate members of the organisation – and we do not concede this – it is completely wrong that candidate members should have their membership fees paid in advance for the whole of their six month period of candidacy – thereby short-circuiting their candidacy and rendering it a corrupt process.

This amounts to a corrupt payment for membership in a double sense – not only are their dues paid by someone else, but the process of candidacy in a communist organisation – which is supposed to be a process where a new member proves their commitment in practice over a period of sustained political activity, including by paying the appropriate sub month-by-month as part of that commitment, is substituted by a single payment by the leader of an unprincipled faction just bribing the organisation to give them full membership in a few months, thus displaying complete contempt for all notions of commitment to a communist organisation.

This can only reflect a complete collapse of the entire concept of commitment to a communist organisation, replacing that with a squalid vote-buying process so comrade Downing can by himself some extra votes for his faction in a few months’ time. This can only signify a complete collapse of communist political consciousness by the person paying this cash for votes.

This is particularly obvious with CW, an amiable enough long-time friend of the organisation, but who had not sought membership over the last five years. He is retired, with little money and health problems. Comrade Downing repeatedly complained he never paid us anything over all that period. At least he is broadly speaking a political supporter.  But paying his membership subs six months in advance still amounts to buying his vote.

Then there is GM. He clearly is hostile to the established politics of the group, so hostile in fact, that he has made outrageous and indeed criminally libellous allegations against leading members, lies so serious that he is in our view unfit for membership. More on that later. Comrade Downing claims that he is a candidate member of the organisation, and indeed he has been inveigled into two meetings this year already on the basis of that claim.

Yet no agenda was circulated in advance for the meeting, on 9^th January, where he … and ED … were said to have joined SF. ED’s joining was also contentious, and the proposal for her joining should have been circulated and the decision taken by a vote at a properly constituted meeting. The branch members were not informed in advance of any proposal for them to join at that meeting.

This happened at a meeting that should not have taken place, because half of the London branch informed comrade Downing in advance that they either could not attend through illness, or would be most unlikely to be able to attend because of a medical problem involving a child in their family. One other full member attends meetings only occasionally because of disability, but there are five full members of the branch, four of which attend most meetings, and all of these members have the right to a say on membership, particularly of anyone contentious. This is a basic democratic right of members of a communist organisation. The meeting should have been rearranged and a proper discussion and vote taken on their membership with the existing full members informed in advance of the proposal.

The lack of proper warning of this; the known-in-advance and unavoidable non-attendance of the majority of the branch on 9^th January, plus the lack of minutes at that meeting means that that was not a valid meeting of the London branch, and it was not in its power to take on new members. The existing full members of the branch have the right to a vote on the accession to even candidate membership of anyone proposed to join, and certainly to know in advance of the proposal. Therefore their membership is null and void, and we in the Trotskyist faction do not regard them as members of SF. Bringing them in without proper democratic procedure is an abuse.

And regarding CW and GM, it is clear that buying their membership six months in advance is a corrupt practice. Even to bank the cheque would make the treasurer complicit in what amounts to a corruption of communist norms, and therefore our faction has advised the treasurer that he should not bank this tainted cheque, but keep it and the letter accompanying it as evidence of malpractice, to be presented to the international movement.

Indeed the letter itself is pretty outrageous and insulting in the assumptions it makes:

“Enclosed membership subscriptions for CW and GM. Both are unemployed (CW is retired) so pay the minimum of £3 a month. The sum of £40, therefore, covers from now to the end of July. ED has set up a standing order from the [bank] for £3 a month as she is also unemployed. So all three will become full members at the end of July, as per the constitution.”

There are examples available of how democratic norms are supposed to operate regarding membership of a communist organisation. Here are some extracts of the organisational rules of the Spartacist League in the United States, which are pretty straightforward in formal democratic terms even though that organisation is not particularly democratic in practice. Its formal rules are still pretty good:

“Individual applicants for membership shall be voted on by the Local Committee [a fully recognised branch] in their locale. In those areas where an Organising Committee (OC) [a new, as yet not fully-recognised branch] exists, applicants shall be voted through by the Political Bureau (PB) with the recommendation of the OC…”

“Action on membership applications should take place in the absence of the applicant”.

What is notable about this is not so much the formal structure, which is obviously more developed than our own,  but the basic concept that the organisation has the right to collectively control its recruitment. It is a collective, democratic decision. People should not be able to be sneaked into an organisation without the knowledge of the existing membership. Especially people who, as is the case with GM and ED, are notably hostile to part of the existing full membership and are quite prepared to smear them.

What is also remarkable about the letter from comrade Downing is the assumption that if only he pays in advance for his friends, they will automatically become full members in six months’ time. That is not true; there will have to be a vote on that also. A vote of the full members who have the right to decide whether the candidate members have proven their commitment to the organisation, or not. They have every right to decide, democratically, whether they have passed their candidacy or not. And like the admission to candidate membership, there has to be a free discussion among the existing members, and a vote, on whether they are suitable for full membership or not. Comrade Downing blithely assumes that his recruits will automatically pass their candidacies just because he has stumped up the cash now.

Of course this has never been contentious until now. People have never tried to join with the aim of overruling the existing members before. People who formally joined have either stayed, or left. But in a situation like this, where the integrity of the organisation is under attack from within and without, the formal democratic control of the membership over who is recruited becomes crucial. This is not about imposing political uniformity, it is not about formal political beliefs. But when outrageous smears are made against comrades, proven smears that even those responsible cannot deny, then the existing members have the right to protect themselves and the right to vote on who becomes a new member of the organisation.

Two examples of outrageous smears against full members by two of these “candidate members” are illustrated here. The first comes from GM. He wrote in the public SF Facebook the following accusation against comrade Ian Donovan:

“You are justifying fascist murders by attributing them to some sort of principled retaliation against Israel. You have systematically conflated and defended antisemitism with opposition to Israeli apartheid. You have brushed aside any attempt to draw the distinction.”

When comrade Donovan challenged GM to quote him “justifying fascist murders” anywhere, he failed to do so. Comrade Donovan provided evidence that he had always condemned all terrorist attacks directed against civilians, as a matter of principle, that he written for Socialist Fight articles condemning a particularly bloody terror attach in Paris in 2015, and that he had written articles in SF calling for workers defence guards to militarily crush fascist groups. When challenged to quote comrade Donovan “justifying fascist murders” which is just about as serious a political crime as it is possible for a communist to commit, GM was unable to do so. Yet he has not apologised. In our view this foul lie alone renders GM morally unfit for membership of SF and the LCFI, and his pseudo-‘candidate membership’ should be brought to an end immediately. We do not regard him as a comrade.

Secondly there is the smear, also against comrade Donovan, by ED. After the branch meeting at the Lucas Arms on 17 January, which was booked on the understanding it was supposed to be a private meeting to resolve this issue among full members only, but which Gerry declared Open with a public email on the day, and then GW and ED turned up and Gerry inveigled them in, after that ED made the following accusation against comrade Donovan a week later. She wrote:

“When I interrupted Ian to call out his insane rant about the Rothschilds’ he became outraged, shouted and threw his pen on the table..”

This was a complete pack of lies from start to finish. Another comrade who was there wrote:

“Sorry, E, I do not recall Ian raising his voice and shouting at all”

To which comrade Donovan responded and pointed out that he had challenged Gerry a week earlier about Gerry’s shouting in the meeting:

“Indeed. I note that when I challenged Gerry about shouting, he justified it on political grounds. But he did not say ‘well Ian shouted too’ when criticised for it by [another comrade]. If I had shouted at Ella he would have condemned me and been angry.

“This alone corroborates that this is untrue”.

And it did. And do E was compelled to admit:

 “Hiya folks, maybe I misspoke…“

though she still tried dishonestly to imply all those who remembered differently and never noticed this ‘shouting’ were wrong and she was really right. This kind of lying, fake politics, is no different to the squalid bourgeois politics around at the moment. Boris Johnson, for instance, when caught lying, as he has been many times now, tends to say “Folks, maybe I misspoke” in his plummy voice. It’s no better coming from E. This proven lie, laced with phoney accusations of ‘sexism’ against people who dare to challenge her politically in the manner of Jess Phillips or Hillary Clinton, again renders her unfit for membership of SL and the LCFI.

This ‘candidate member’ lied to smear the existing full members of SF with the aim of derailing SF from its principled anti-Zionist politics in cahoots with the other ‘candidate member’ GM, who is so irrational he comes out with outrageous lies that even the likes of John Mann would consider reckless. We do not recognise her as a member; her fake candidacy is null and void as was the meeting that initiated it. Her conduct since has shown that she is unfit for membership.

So CW, GM and ED are not members. You cannot buy a majority, you cannot sneak people, including blood relatives, into the organisation at illegitimately called meetings that deny the basic democratic rights to a say of the existing full membership, and not be called out on it.

Regarding the membership of JC, a lapsed member who Gerry is trying to manipulate back into SF as a full member to gain him an extra vote, it is worth quoting the formal rules of the Spartacist League/US again. At least formally, they point to correct Communist practice whatever structure of dues the organisation decides on:

“Any member more than one month in arrears in sustaining pledge [membership subs] ceases to be in good standing. Only members in good standing may vote and hold office in [the organisation]. Any member more than three months in arrears … shall be dropped from [the organisation] after notification”.

The cynicism involved in the attempted guilt tripping about the comrade’s personal problems, being blacklisted, which certainly merits sympathy and solidarity, is appalling. Indeed one of our comrades twice made suggestions to simplify our membership subs to help avoid such problems in future. But Gerry’s pleas are not based on sympathy for him, but just the desire to gain an extra captive vote from a sympathiser who for personally tragic reasons, was unable to sustain membership. According to these norms, he would not have been able to vote in any case. Allowing him to do so would be right outside the norms of Bolshevism as laid out in the famous criteria of the 1903 split about the membership rules, that membership involved “personal participation in one of the party’s organisations”, or at the very least regular payments of dues, however low. And someone else paying your dues in advance for a captive vote is an abuse that would get the culprit expelled from the Labour Party. Rightly so in such a case!

So this is about the boundaries of the organisation, maintaining basic membership norms, and not allowing fraudulent membership claims to defraud those who have worked hard to develop the organisation. The aim of these tactics is transparently to create a majority of fake members to purge the real activists who keep the group going. We cannot allow this and will not refrain from challenging such bureaucratic trickery and unprincipled behaviour.

Another, even worse way that these boundaries have been breached is through the deliberate publication of our internal platform without the permission of the signatories, containing identifiable names, designated at ‘full members’. This can only be seen as an outrageous attempt to create the conditions for the victimisation of oppositional comrades. The whole thrust of the recent paralysis of SF has been because of the emergence of an unprincipled faction that has finally begun to fray before the ferocious Zionist-led witchhunt in Labour, and has been at pains to dissociate itself from its hard anti-Zionist left wing: “we are not as bad as these people” Gerry and his new friends are eager to proclaim.

To reassert principled politics, we need to draw those boundaries properly, and to re-establish Socialist Fight on proper Communist organisational norms. These are difficult and reactionary times, and some basic discipline and good security is essential to ensure that we are effective going forward.