The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 23rd November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
Lenin’s work that we are using here is a major primer on the Marxist theory of the state and goes through the various stages of the development of that theory pretty comprehensively.
In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have studied this before taking on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, as this gives a grounding in some very basic Marxist concepts that are invaluable to understanding that later work.
But this chapter makes a very clear start on what we are addressing here.
In part 1, Lenin talks of Marx and Engels’s views on the state on the eve of the continent-wide revolutionary crisis of 1848.
In particular, he homes in on Marx’s formulations in The Poverty of Philosophy, his initial polemic against Proudhon, the proto-anarchist thinker. Here he wrote about the destiny of class society to disappear:
“”The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society.”
So, the idea that the state will disappear as a consequence of proletarian revolution is to be found in the earliest works of mature Marxism.
Then he highlights the way this is dealt with by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“… In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat….
“… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
And it is that formulation, that the state after the revolution will be “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” that had been, not accidentally, omitted in the various treatises on the state and socialism in the Second International:
“This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the ‘peaceful development of democracy’.
“The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught…. “
But then he clarifies:
“But they ‘forget’ to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a ‘state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’”.
So, what is this about? The state, as we touched on in chapter 1, is a special organisation of force for the suppression of one class by another. What class must the proletariat, in power, supress? Obviously, the bourgeoisie. But in what way?
“The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists.”
And Lenin points out that the social democrats did away with this with dreams of class harmony, pictured their version of ‘socialism’ as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority.
Lenin called this a “petty bourgeois utopia” and pointed out that it led to ‘socialist’ participation in bourgeois cabinets in Britain, France, Italy at the turn of the century.
He also speaks of the role of the working class in leading intermediate layers:
“Only the proletariat — by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production — is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.”
So, he summaries that:
“Marx’s theory of ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’, is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.”
And then he asks the question:
“…is it conceivable that such an organization can be created without first abolishing, destroying the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves?”
Which leads straight to the conclusions Marx drew from 1848-51. Lenin cites Marx’s later work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Noting Napoleon III’s coup of December 1851, Marx wrote:
“’This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, … this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.’ The first French Revolution developed centralization, ‘but at the same time’ it increased ‘the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon [I] completed this state machinery’ … the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power “
And he quoted the conclusion:
“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”
Lenin noted that here:
“Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto… all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”
And:
“This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852. True to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the historical experience of the great years of revolution, 1848 to 1851. Here, as everywhere else, his theory is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history.”
And this brings us to the beginning of the three-cornered polemic against reformism (and centrism) on the one hand, and anarchism, which recurs in this work. Lenin writes:
“The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society–a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores. The Kautskyite opportunism now prevailing in official Social-Democracy considers the view that the state is a parasitic organism to be the peculiar and exclusive attribute of anarchism. It goes without saying that this distortion of Marxism is of vast advantage to those philistines who have reduced socialism to the unheard-of disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland…”
And he notes what happened after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 in that regard:
“Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made to put them off “until the Constituent Assembly meets”, and to steadily put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governors-general, etc., etc.!”
Leading to the conclusion, similar but on a much higher historical place, to what Marx and Engels had discovered in 1948:
“But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia), the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. … This course of events compels the revolution “to concentrate all its forces of destruction” against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”
And on the question of what the working class will put in its place, Lenin touches on that, but it will be explored more in later chapters:
“What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.”
One final point regarding this is Lenin’s emphasis and expansion of a point Marx himself made, about his own distinctive contribution to politics. He quotes Marx:
“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
And Lenin expands on that in a devastating criticism of opportunism, both reformist and centrist:
“It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie…. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
And finally, to emphasise matters:
“Further. The essence of Marx’s theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from “classless society”, from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The following programme for a platform was, in its original form, put forward by the Spartacist League, under the title: A call to socialists: Lets build a revolutionary caucus in Your Party. They invited others to join them with the following call:
“First and foremost, we are interested in opening a debate on the policies needed to get Your Party off the ground and win mass support in the working class.
“Below we propose a set of principles which we think could serve as a basis to regroup revolutionary elements in Your Party. Get in touch with us to debate these and to work with us in building a revolutionary caucus.”
One key difference with the Spartacists is with their contention that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, liberalism became the dominant ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and that this has ensnared the working-class movement and the left and effectively caused them to capitulate wholesale to liberalism, if not become liberals outright. We differ somewhat – we consider it was neoliberalism and neoconservatism – both closely linked to Zionism – that filled much of the vacuum in imperialist post-Soviet bourgeois ideology and thought, and this has indeed infected the working-class movement with free market ideology, support for imperialist militarism, and some forms of identity politics – with Zionism in pole position. So you find in their material denunciation of liberal trends on the left, but not so much those trends that have adapted to right-wing populism, with its anti-migrant agitation and its flipflops between isolationist opposition to neocon militarism, and glorying in it, as personified by Trump.
As a result, you find material opposing ‘mass immigration’ in the Spart draft, but nothing about fighting fascism. They – in part correctly – denounce the Greens as a petit-bourgeois party, but at the same time say nothing about capitalist destruction of the environment. And their point about opposing NATO and militarism says nothing about defence of any workers’ states or other targets of imperialism. We consider our version of this programme makes it substantially better, and like them, we invite discussion and amendments. Such a programme would be the basis for a real revolutionary left wing of Your Party.
For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!
Financial capital, the final product of decay of imperialist finance capital, centred in The City of London is destroying the lives of the working class in this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.
A working-class position on immigration.
Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City compete with their scapegoating but also use migrant workers to prop up a rotting economy. Neither of these benefit working-class people whatever their origin or status. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, and all attacks on the rights of migrants and refugees, but we also oppose the capitalists’ cynical use of desperate migrants to drive down wages. We demand an end to anti-union laws and the revival of the compulsory closed shop for all industries where wages are under such pressure, with union membership and decent wages for all.
For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!
There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of winning the working class we must win the argument, not simply moralise at those with different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads – merely that we are all part of the working class and must act as a class, who agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.
Fight fascism – a working-class militia to defend organised workers and oppressed groups
We are amid the most threatening rise of fascism since the 1930s. Neoliberalism has meant decades-long declines in employment and living standards and Starmer’s neoliberal viciousness in power in the name of ‘Labour’ has led to a vacuum that Robinson, Farage and worse are attempting to fill, with the help of Trump, Musk, etc. This involves a terrorist threat against workers, particularly Muslims and other minorities, from organised fascists. Police arrest pensioners and the disabled for imaginary ‘terrorism’, while turning a blind eye to fascist mobs outside asylum seekers’ quarters demanding ‘kill them all’. We need organised groups of stewards and defenders able to fight off fascist violence. And beyond that, we need a militia to defend the population against a far right that is now fixated on Israel and aspires to inflict Gaza-style bloodshed on populations it hates here. Your Party should popularise and seek to create the conditions where such a mass-based anti-fascist militia can be created.
No to Zionism!
Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.
Down with US & British imperialism!
British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a vassal of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working-class people. We say: No arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drives against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – and all non-imperialist or oppressed countries and workers states targeted by imperialism!
No popular front with the Greens – we need to split them!
The Green Party is a middle-class radical party. We cannot merge with it; we cannot treat it as a partner. There are some seriously socialist-minded people in it, mixed with Malthusians and other reactionaries. This party supports NATO and is not anti-imperialist. Greens are correct that climate change threatens the future of working-class people around the world. But this is caused by capitalism and can only be solved by economic planning on both the national and international scale. The Greens though accept capitalism, promote ‘Green’ capitalism, and thus New Labour schemes like ULEZ that punish workers for owning old, polluting vehicles. We support cleaner air, which helps protects working class people and particularly children from dangerous illnesses, but we demand the bosses pay for it, and particularly for new, low-emission vehicles for all who need them.
We need to split away pro-socialist elements attracted to the Greens, to our genuine socialist party, not endorse left talking but untrustworthy figures like Polanski. We reject the Greens’ self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. An alliance with them will only repel workers.
For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!
The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.
Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!
The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.
Down with the monarchy! For a workers’ republic!
Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats.
Anti-imperialist declaration distributed at COP 30 in Belém by the following organizations: Brazil: Emancipation of Labor Group; General Abreu e Lima Anti-imperialist Committee; East Timor: Maubere Resurrection Front – FRM; Hope Committee; National Agro-Ecological Rehabilitation Movement; Rosas Mean Movement;Maubere Socialist Youth.
COP30 is taking place amidst a boycott and denialist opposition from the world’s biggest polluter, the USA. Furthermore, Trump is threatening a new military intervention in Latin America.
This war operation has already begun. Nearly a hundred fishermen were murdered, summarily executed and accused without evidence of being drug traffickers and terrorists. Killed against all rules of international law.
Lula, president of Brazil, the largest, richest, and most populous Latin American country, should have adopted a sovereign stance at CELAC and COP30. Lula should have called for continental unity against these crimes and these new threats. Speeches that don’t match actions are not enough.
But, since there is no resistance of sufficient magnitude, Trump continues to escalate, now positioning the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford, in military formation in the Caribbean in a clear campaign of war against our continent.
Those who defend nature, life, and the Amazon cannot look the other way in the face of this threat. The planet’s main enemy must be defeated in order to save it. The capitalist mode of production is the fundamental cause of socio-environmental injustices. Destroying it and building a socialist society is the only way to overcome the risk that all forms of life and the planet face.
The Emancipation of Labor Group believes that defending the Amazon means urgently and immediately calling for the unity of peoples oppressed for centuries against Trump, capitalism, and the imperialist system. It is necessary to explicitly defend Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba, which are threatened and sanctioned. Likewise, it is necessary to combat Zionism, which is carrying out ecocide in Gaza.
The oil, rare earth minerals, fauna, flora, soil, and subsoil belong to the people of the region, against the pirates and invaders of all time.
We must unite in defense of national, popular, and state sovereignty over our natural resources, which should be exploited in a community-based and cooperative manner with the Brazilian government, serving development and preservation under the control of the working and indigenous population and the proletariat. International partnerships with China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela are necessary. We must guarantee the sharing of technology for the national development of refineries and processing without harming nature or indigenous communities.
No to false, hypocritical, imperialist, and capitalist sustainability. For planned social and state control of all natural resources. First and foremost must be development with social control of living conditions, guaranteeing the right to land for those who work or live on it, and fighting against capital and its predatory mode of production. Without this, the preservation of the Amazon, for example, is merely preservation for imperialism to exploit the Amazon.
Finally, and geostrategically related to the climate issue, there is the international struggle of oppressed countries allied with the Chinese workers’ state for energy transition, reinforcing the commitment to restricting the burning of fossil fuels. This dispute is part of the struggle to bury the decadent imperialist system and fight for socialism across the planet.
The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 9th November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
Studying this work is of crucial important for a Marxist tendency. We are now entering a period of political activity in a party that offers great promise for the creation, once again, of a mass working class political movement, a party of the working class. That is what Your Party signifies. We have to understand what the Corbyn-Sultana party could mean. It is a result of the failure of Labourism in the face of the ruling class’s neoliberal offensive against the working class in the advanced capitalist – that is, imperialist countries, since the mid-1970s. This had many different manifestations and timings around the world. But the whole point of the neoliberal project was always that the working class in the advanced countries was too powerful for the well-being of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Well-being in two senses. One in that the bourgeoisie feared the social power of the working class in the advanced countries. The second being that that classic phenomenon of capitalist decay, the gradually falling rate of profit, had reached a point that the bourgeoisie was desperately looking for some way to increase its profit rates at the expense of the masses. In Britain, in the early 1970s, the ruling class tried frontal industrial confrontation with the labour movement to try to fundamentally weaken the mass organisations of the working class. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act was partly prefigured by the White Paper In Place of Strife that was floated by the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1969, supported by some who were then supposed to be on the Labour left, such as Barbara Castle and Tony Benn. What this shows is that even some thought on the left were attuned more to ruling class opinion than the interests of the working class, even then.
In reality, this was a product of reformism’s attitude to the state, which Lenin, quoting extensively from Engels, touches upon in this chapter. But the expiring Wilson government of 1969 was hardly suited for a major confrontation with the working class. Though such proposals were the logic of a class collaborationist programme. It was the Heath government who tried to confront the trade unions head on, with their Industrial Relations Act, with its compulsory ballots in strikes, its attempt to ban solidarity action and various forms of picketing, its compulsory ‘cooling off’ periods, etc. And the government took on a powerful trade union movement and lost – to cut a long story short. Heath called a General Election in February 1974 on the slogan “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” And lost. The Labour Party ended up with more seats than the Tories in the 1974 Election, though the result was very close, and in terms of the popular vote, Heath was very slightly ahead. But its seats that count.
Labour called another election in October 1974, and this time improved its performance, though it only gained an overall majority of 3 seats. It was during the 1974-1979 Labour government that the neoliberal project first, very tentatively, began to be tried out in Britain. Labour’s majority did not last long, and before that issue came centre stage, Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by James Callaghan. So, from 1976 you had the Liberal-Labour pact, and a series of more insidious attacks on the working class, through cuts in public spending, including in healthcare, and incomes policy where the union bureaucracies held back working-class discontent in the face of high inflation. You had such devices as the incentive scheme in the mining industry, which laid the basis for the divisions among miners that played a major role in dividing the miners later when Thatcher attacked them. So, the Labour government, by then in a semi-coalition with the Liberal Party, came into conflict with the working class, which exploded towards the end of its term in the winter of 1978-9 with the Winter of Discontent’, when all kinds of mainly public sector workers went on strike.
Thatcher won in May 1979, and set about full-throated neoliberalism, attacks on strategic sections of the proletariat through mass redundancies. Steel, docks, miners were the strategic sectors of the working class that had to be defeated. Mass privatisation and the export of jobs to low wage countries is the core of the project. The aim being to seriously weaken the organised working class, not on a temporary basis, as was done in 1926 with pay cuts for the miners provoking a General Strike which the union bureaucracy betrayed, laying the basis for a reign of terror in industry. This was a more serious project of weakening the power of the working class through removing whole strategic sectors from the advanced countries. And since the days of Thatcher, and her ten-year implementation of this reactionary ‘revolution’ in Britain, and a similar strategy implemented in the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in the US, neoliberalism gradually became hegemonic in the imperialist world.
It went hand in hand with the imperialist offensive Thatcher and Reagan symbolised internationally, above all confrontation with the stagnating degenerated workers state of the USSR in the 1980s, which brought it to its knees, It brought about the pro-capitalist liberalisation of the Stalinist regime under Gorbachev, and then the seizure of power by the outright counterrevolutionary leader, Boris Yeltin, who also sprang from the bureaucracy, being originally the chief of the Moscow Communist Party. So that was almost like a different world.
So, what about today? Since those days, social democracy and the old bourgeois liberalism exposed their bankruptcy by becoming thoroughly neoliberal. The British Labour Party is thoroughly neoliberal. In a period where the bosses, driven by the imperative to increase their rate of profit, declares war on every gain of the working class, and seeks to abolish it by privatisation, outsourcing, and the rest, reformism does not work. So, we have had social neoliberalism instead of reformist social democracy for many decades. Going back to the Wilson-Callaghan government. Arguably it even had its prehistory with In Place of Strife.
But of course, the working class had not always taken kindly to being shafted. We have had left movements within the Labour Party. The paler one being Bennism in the 1980s. We have had attempts by fragments of Labour to resist this politically, sometimes with the aid of parts of the far left. The SLP of Arthur Scargill in 1996-8. Respect in 2004 – 2009. And other smaller projects like the Socialist Alliance, and Left Unity. But the big one was Corbyn in 2015. That was when popular anger at neoliberalism briefly took control of the Labour Party through a mass influx of new and many former members. And the neoliberal right, imbued with Zionist politics, weaponising pro-Zionist ‘anti-semitism’ scares and right-wing nationalism over Brexit, manoeuvred furiously to defeat Corbyn’s leadership and drive this massive left constituency out of the Labour Party.
But they won a pyrrhic victory. They got rid of the left, drove them into exile, and even managed to create the most openly reactionary, bordering on far right, ‘Labour’ government in history, a recruiting sergeant for the real far right. The mass base of the Corbyn-led revolt against neoliberalism merely went into exile and bided its time until the opportunity emerged to create a new party. Your Party. Created in a sense by the bold initiative of Zarah Sultana in resigning from Labour and pushing Corbyn to get a move on in creating the new party. The problem is that the revolt against the neoliberalism of Labour is being waged under the banner of left social democracy. But the cause of the crisis that gave birth to this is the bankruptcy of social democracy. That is a fertile contradiction for communists to engage with.
This is good reason why communists should join the new party and encourage both our comrades, and Your Party’s militants, to study Lenin, and other Marxist material. So, moving on to this introductory chapter, what are its central points? State and Revolution was written for a socialist movement in flux, after the betrayal of all the anti-war and socialist promises of the Socialist Parties, including the British, the French and the most developed politically, the German, into chauvinism. The whole point of the work is to delve into how Social Democracy, particularly in Germany, had mangled the approach of Marxism to questions involving the State, and to correct those problems. This was written in 1917, in the face of the developing workers’ revolution. Though we are in not in a developing revolution, many of the issues dealt with are not that different from the problems that militants in Your Party face. We need programmatic answers on the question of the state, which is central.
“What is the state?”, asks Lenin, and draws upon Engels in such works as Anti-Duhring, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The state is an expression of the fact that society has split into irreconcilably warring classes. It is a weapon of the economically dominant class to keep in check the struggles of the subordinate, oppressed classes, and prevent the society from being overwhelmed by the struggles between classes. The state, then, is a weapon of the economically dominant, that is, the ruling, class in any given society. In succeeding societies, as Engels says:
“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both…. Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.” (Origin…)
Under primitive communism, before human society split into contending classes, there was no special armed repressive organisation separate from the population, only the population itself as a “self-acting armed organisation” able to defend itself collectively as and when the need arose. The state is a special armed organisation, separate from society, and closed off from the mass of the population. Lenin quotes Engels:
““The … distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing….” (ibid)
And he continues to concretise this, as the state arose from the split of society into irreconcilable classes, so as such class rule becomes obsolete:
“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (ibid)
And then Lenin goes on to talk about this question, of the “withering away of the state”, and the necessity for a violent revolution to overthrow the rule of the possessing classes, i.e., the bourgeoisie:
“Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labour).…
“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away.” (Anti-Duhring)
The crucial point in this, is the question of the “withering away” of the state. Lenin is quoting this for a highly specific purpose, to combat the distortion of this concept by reformists and centrists such as Karl Kautsky, in the camp of Germany Social Democracy. The crucial point is that the reformists had long mystified and elided this question with their activities in the existing state. They propagated the myth that, superintended by reformists like themselves, the repressive forms of the bourgeois state, would “wither away”.
But that is not what Engels, or Marx for that matter, had projected at all. It is the opposite. For these revolutionary leaders, the precondition for the state, that is, a workers’ state, to “wither away”, was the prior, violent overthrow and destruction, disbanding and dispersal of the bourgeois existing state, its special bodies of armed men, its prisons, etc. Only after such a revolutionary overturn could a new state be created, a state where instead of the mass of the exploited and oppressed population being forcibly kept in their place by the state of their class enemies, you would have the exploiting minority losing their power and being kept in their place, that is suppressed, by the population armed and organised against them. The workers state, would only then be in a position to “wither away”.
That polemic was therefore directed not only against the anarchists, who believed it was simply possible to abolish the state straight away, but more so against the reformists, who believed that under their superintendence, the existing, bourgeois state could somehow “wither away”, without a violent social overturn of the existing order. We will continue to study this as we go through the book.
In exchanges around our 2020 split, Socialist Fight’s Gerry Downing said that Zionism represented the “racism of the oppressed” and denied its genocidal character (see text below). Whereas we said that “Zionism can quite conceivably exterminate the Palestinians”. This is a clear objective test of who was right and who was wrong about Zionism,
Turan B’s ‘apology’ to Socialist Fight regarding the late 2019/early 2020 faction fight that resulted in the foundation of the Consistent Democrats is rather strange, once you know a couple of basic facts. One is that Socialist Fight barely exists today. It is a website that is very infrequently updated, and a journal that is the sole product of Gerry Downing, that appears occasionally. The site hasn’t been updated since March 2025. Not only that, but Turan had been a member of the Consistent Democrats group from early 2020 up to late 2025 – for more than 5 years. He was a member of Socialist Fight for no more than three years before that, from 2017 at the earliest. It is rather strange, and a product of desperation, to apologise to an (effectively defunct) organisation one was in for a (relatively) short time for one’s much longer membership in a successor organisation that is still regularly politically active. Most people, in leaving any organisation with political differences, would simply move on and do what they want to do, not look back and weep in such a maudlin manner.
The real reason Turan is doing this, and suddenly feels an affinity to Gerry Downing, is because of what they both have in common. They have both capitulated to social pressure from elements on the Jewish left who are implacably hostile to the consistently anti-capitalist, anti-ethnocentric criticism of Zionism represented by Socialist Fight in the earlier period, which endorsed the ‘Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism’ (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/) that I authored in September 2014, which has been since 2020 one of the basic documents of the Consistent Democrats, British Section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and continues to be so going forward.
This document is not popular with the Jewish left, where softness on liberal Zionism is still quite endemic even among a great many (not all) professed anti-Zionists because of social pressure of the many Jews who support Zionism. The Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie, described in those Theses (though that term was formulated later), is defined by a material interest in the state of Israel, which is the purpose of its racist Law of Return citizenship law, giving citizenship rights in Israel to any Jewish person born anywhere in the world, while denying them to Palestinians native to that territory, which was seized in 1948.
This created a material bond between overseas Jewish bourgeois, particularly in the older imperialist countries, and the Israeli bourgeois state, and gave them a common national/class interest with the bourgeoise of Israel. Taken by pure size alone, Israel would be a minor imperialist power comparable to Denmark, but in fact with the imperialist caste described above, the Israeli imperialist bourgeoisie overlaps with the imperialist bourgeoisies of North America and West Europe (the only imperialist power unaffected by this phenomenon is Japan). So, with this specific international extension to its bourgeoisie, Israel acts like a superpower in the Middle East, because it has the unflinching support of the bulk of the older imperialist powers, particularly the US but only slightly lesser in Western Europe. The social weight of Jews in the imperialist ruling classes of the West is one of two more crucial factors that give this caste its remarkable power in Western politics. I cited in my 2014 Theses an article in Jewish World Review, from 2007, that in the United States, put the representation of Jews among billionaires, the most powerful elements of the capitalist elite, at between 40 and 48% – nearly half. Norman Finkelstein, in his 2018 essay Corbyn Mania, noted the following:
“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits. Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful. These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish. Jews are incomparably organized as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing communal and defence organizations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas. In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. “Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,” British-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notes, “in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions, and just about every walk of public life. The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power.” (https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/)
David Miller
David Miller has cited Forbes statistics that say that on a world scale, 10% of billionaires are of Jewish origin, while only 0.2% of the world’s population is of Jewish origin (these Jewish elements of the super-rich are unsurprisingly concentrated in North America and West Europe). That is 50 times overrepresentation. But though this might seem a bit counter-intuitive, it is a product of the fact that in much of the semi-colonial world, even the bourgeoisie is so relatively poor that billionaires are much rarer. In the imperialist world, where billionaires, and the Jewish population are more concentrated, the proportion of both among the general population is relatively higher. So, in Britain, where around 0.5% of the population is of Jewish origin, and the US, where approximately 2% of the population is of Jewish origin – 20 times overrepresentation appears to be the approximate ballpark figure. Billionaires are not the be-all and end-all – other bourgeois layers fall short of the magic billion. However, there is no particular reason why their composition should be massively different. Be that as it may, overrepresentation among the very wealthy in a capitalist society does not guarantee overwhelming power, – it can help, or hinder, depending on conditions. At some times in history, aspects of this have led to persecution, with this Jewish layer of the bourgeoisie being regarded with suspicion or hatred by the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, as frequently before WW2.
The opposite is true today. They are regarded with reverence. The reason why is explained quite simply in my 2014 Theses:
“It [i.e., the Jewish-Zionist caste] is therefore both a powerful imperialist formation, and deeply unstable. In this epoch of declining capitalism, it plays the role of a kind of ‘vanguard of the bourgeoisie’ – not quite the mirror-image of Marxism but with aspirations along those lines. It has been instrumental in pushing the nationally limited imperialist bourgeoisies to partially transcend their own national particularisms. Hence the ‘traditional’ imperialist bourgeoisie, based on the nation-state, having overcome their previous fear of the supposedly proletarian-internationalist role of the Jews as a result of the outcome of WWII, now regards Jewish ‘cosmopolitanism’ and bourgeois semi-internationalism as a good thing, and to a considerable degree defers and follows the leadership of the Jewish/Zionist bourgeoisie.”
“Whereas previously they had often looked at the Jewish bourgeoisie with suspicion, as a potential danger to them, now with the defeat of the Jewish left, they began to develop the opposite conception, which is the case today. As part of the outcome of these events, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie has come to regard its Jewish compatriots as a priceless resource of the capitalist system itself, a kind of vanguard, class conscious layer, the bearer of a culture whose connection with commodity exchange is older than capitalism itself, as a system based on the generalisation of commodity production and exchange. This became clear in the post WWII period, particularly after the rise of Israel and the 1967 war. It was manifested in the rise of neo-liberalism, with ideologues like Milton Friedman, and then neo-conservatism in Cold War II and later the neo-colonial wars against the Muslim world, with the very prominent role of Zionist ideologues, often Jewish, in these bourgeois political movements and trends which have become pretty well hegemonic in bourgeois politics.”
“And that is the take-off point for the situation we have today. Zionism has become the vanguard of racism in the main, traditional imperialist countries. Zionists are the vanguard of anti-Muslim agitation, they have been the core of the neo-conservative movement that has been, and still is, the vanguard of imperialist militarism in the Middle East. To a real extent, they are seen as a vanguard by the imperialist ruling classes in the most advanced countries. This has a material basis; for the historical reasons mentioned earlier, Jews have always been over-represented in the bourgeoisie of the advanced Western capitalist countries. In the earlier period of Jewish involvement in genuine revolutionary anti-capitalism, this was seen as threatening by many non-Jewish bourgeois in the imperialist countries.
“But with the revolutionary change of consciousness referred to earlier among both Jews and the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, this has been transformed into its opposite. Jews are now seen as almost the Holy of Holies by the Western imperialist bourgeoisie. This process was inseparable from the rise of the state of Israel with its peculiar citizenship law, the Law of Return, which gives everyone regarded as Jewish in the conventional sense the right to Israeli citizenship. Thus the overrepresentation of Jews in the ruling classes of the imperialist countries added an additional element; that overrepresented layer acquired a material stake in another state, one they had already been considerably involved in funding and bringing into existence in the earlier period on the basis of a Zionist-nationalist vision. What in effect happened is that part of the ruling classes of the Western countries came to overlap with the ruling class of Israel, the most recently and artificially created of the advanced-capitalist, imperialist states. That is the material basis of Zionist power in the advanced capitalist countries; the ‘moral’ authority of Zionism and Israel has had its own autonomous elements, but materially it is based on that.”
Gerry Downing on the Daily Politics show, March 2016
These views were accepted by Gerry Downing in 2016. He even went on the Daily Politics TV show in March 2016 to defend them. These were the politics of Socialist Fight. Turan was recruited to them around 2017 and agreed with them until very recently. But over the past two years he has become socially distanced from the group for what seemed like personal reasons and no longer participated, except occasionally, in its frequent political events. It appears he has gained new social and political connections that have put him under social pressure to renounce his previous political history. But his efforts to minimise his own role are disingenuous, to say the least.
He writes:
“At the time, I gave my full support to an individual opposing Socialist Fight’s decision to expel him. My objection was not entirely rooted in political alignment, but in my discomfort with how quickly and in an opaque manner the process was handled. With hindsight, and knowing what I know now, I realise I would have voted differently if the process had been more balanced and transparent. That episode culminated in a rupture, leading those who left to form a new group, the Consistent Democrats.”
What he does not say is that there was no ‘decision’ by ‘Socialist Fight’ to expel anyone. Turan was a member of the Trotskyist Faction, the precursor of the CD group, there were three of us: Turan, comrade D (who is no longer involved), and me. We were half of the membership of SF. The others were Gerry Downing, and two other comrades who were effectively neutral, and both of whom subsequently joined the Consistent Democrats (one remained nominally in both groups).
In fact, Downing did not just claim to have expelled me as an individual, he actually said, under the headline “Socialist Fight has expelled Ian Donovan” the following:
“Socialist Fight has expelled Ian Donovan and his ‘Trotskyist Faction’ from the group at its meeting of 19 February by a unanimous vote. They were expelled for antisemitism and support for the racist, antisemitic and left Mussolini-Strasserite fascist Gilad Atzmon.” (https://socialistfight.com/2020/02/20/socialist-fight-has-expelled-ian-donovan/)
Since Turan and D were members of the Trotskyist Faction at the time – there were three of us – this passage claims that all three of us were expelled. Turan is clearly, knowingly trying to falsify his own political history here, and degrading himself. For what reasons? Who knows? During that period, he was even racially abused by some hysterical ’unaligned’ backers of Gerry Downing. In any case, the claim that there was some kind of meeting of ‘Socialist Fight’ at that time that ‘unanimously’ expelled the Trotskyist Faction is preposterous. The TF was half of the membership. And two others were neutral. So how is that numerically even possible? What actually happened is that Gerry Downing expropriated the website from the group and decided in the manner of a pint-sized version of his original mentor Healy, to publish any old abusive rubbish about those he disapproved of, even stuff that was obviously not true and not possible.
In fact, Gerry was so desperate to somehow get a majority in the group, which he didn’t have, that he tried to pay subscriptions for several semi-sympathisers so he could eventually get them a vote (for him). This is a practice so immoral that if anyone tried it in the Labour Party (before Starmer), they would likely be expelled for corruption. Gerry bitterly complained in another article that:
“We have been now forced to set up a new bank account because Ian and Turan have control of the Socialist Fight bank account and this, they believe, should give them control of the group. Ian has refused to accept the votes of the majority of the group. He has decided that John Carty is not a member and his membership subscriptions are ‘donations’ and not subscriptions. My daughter, Ella, Gareth Martin, and Charlie Walsh cannot join as candidate members for six months because he disagrees with them over what Gilad Atzmon’s politics are. He has refused to bank their subscriptions that I sent to him, said I was buying their membership and he was keeping the cheques as evidence of my ‘corruption’.” (https://socialistfight.com/2020/02/24/socialist-fight-ian-donovan-and-the-trotskyist-faction/)
When Gerry published this, he simply made himself a joke. It is obvious he was trying to rustle up a majority which he didn’t have by dubious means. Why should a faction that is marked for a purge cooperate with such a corrupt procedure directed against itself? Turan, with myself, was central in spiking this corruption, which ensured there was no ‘expulsion’ of anyone. Gerry did not expel us, he just took his ball home, and destroyed SF. The CD group took its place over time as the British Section of the LCFI. We do not engage in this kind of irrationality and are not going to disappear anytime soon.
Turan claims that: “Let me be clear: my politics are not “soft” on Zionism. I advocate for one secular state with equal rights for all. I have no interest in reinventing myself for any political gain”. Likewise, he states that “I also want to make it clear that my aim here is not to distract from, or in any way compromise, solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are enduring a genocide carried out by Israel with the full participation and support of Western imperialism.” But he protests too much, he obviously is trying to ‘reinvent’ his own political history by not mentioning the Trotskyist Faction, the precursor of CD, which he was one of the central figures in.
And while it is true that he acknowledges that the genocide is being carried out “by Israel” he is allying with people like Downing and others who effectively deny that the primary role is played by Israel and pretend that Israel is just a puppet carrying out the wishes of other imperialist powers. When in fact, in this genocide, it has been the other way around. It is true that this genocide has taken place with the “full participation and support of Western imperialism” who have armed imperialist Israel, but it is obvious that the prime driving force of this genocide is the drive for Greater Israel, which comes from within the Zionist entity itself and its international extensions in the JZ caste. It is Western politicians who are cult followers of the JZ caste that have driven attacks on democratic rights in the major Western powers, from Trump’s attacks on dissent over Palestine around the US to the attempt to proscribe Palestine Action here.
Map of Greater Israel, as envisaged by Zionism’s most virulent imperialist factions.
This is now facing a major crisis here as much even of the ruling class is uneasy at such irrationalities as the Palestine Action ban, and other idiocies such as the attempt to force violent Tel Aviv Macabees football thugs on the Birmingham police, with leaders of all four major parties accusing the Birmingham police and local Independent Muslim MP, Ayoub Khan, of ‘anti-Semitism’ for banning the Macabees thugs, and looking utterly ridiculous when the same thugs rioted in Tel Aviv itself. It is also in crisis in the US, as important figures in Trump’s MAGA base are splintering away because of his obvious role as a lackey of Israel, around such important figures as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the late Charlie Kirk, who it appears likely was assassinated by Mossad for what they consider very dangerous dissent from subservience to the Israel lobby.
Turan says that Gerry Downing has been ‘vindicated’ and yet denies that there is any softness on Zionism in his political volte-face. One wonders what he thinks of a grossly pro-Zionist passage penned by Gerry Downing when he broke from the LCFI later in 2020, in the light of the current genocide. Gerry Dowing denounced me for writing the following:
“But Zionism can quite conceivably exterminate the Palestinians because the Zionist colonisation is that of the exclusion type, not the exploitation type, as Machover put it. Ronnie Kasrils, of the SACP and ANC in South Africa, was making the same point when he said that Zionism is worse than South African apartheid. It is also worse than Jim Crow. It is closer to Hitlerism for the genocidal threat it poses to the Palestinian people.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/gerry-downing-political-decline-and-centrist-capitulation/)
And Gerry responded thus:
“What Zionism might potentially do in the future is certainly not worse than what the KKK might do if afforded the opportunity. Zionism is not fascism. There are Zionists who are fascists, and we will no-platform them like we will attempt to do to all fascists. But we will never equate racists in general with fascist racists. We distinguish between the racism of the oppressor and the racism of the oppressed, we distinguish between the fascist Zionism of the oppressor and the racist, apartheid or liberal Zionism of the oppressed, many of whom genuinely fear the return of the Holocaust and so support the state of Israel.” (https://socialistfight.com/2021/02/15/socialist-fight-breaks-with-the-lcfi/)
Gerry thus said that Zionists generally, except for those who openly declare themselves to be fascists (such as the Kahanist Ben Gvir and the clerical-fascist Smotrich), represent “the racist, apartheid or liberal Zionism of the oppressed, many of whom genuinely fear the return of the Holocaust and so support the state of Israel.” He thus said that the mainstream of Zionism, from Netanyahu leftward, represents the “racism of the oppressed”. In the light of the current genocide in Gaza, this ought to be extremely offensive to any opponent of the genocide. It is very clear that the CD group were correct in their prognosis in 2020, and that Zionism was destined to become genocidal in ways that South African apartheid, and Jim Crow, were never able. Turan both claims that Gerry Downing was “vindicated” in his political attack over me on Zionism and yet that his own politics are “not ‘soft’ on Zionism”. It is clear when he wrote this recantation of a principled political position he was not thinking of the Palestinian victims of Zionism, but his own growing comfort with semi-chauvinist elements on the Jewish left, who he seems to have got closer to in his activities as a roving photographer. There is nothing wrong with what he was doing regarding this, so long as you keep your political wits about you. But he seems to have failed to do so.
Which is where David Miller comes in. It should be noted that defence of David Miller in his current legal battles with Zionists is a question of class principle. Much of the left is flinching on this – from the SWP to the CPGB/Weekly Worker to Jewish Voice for Liberation (formerly Jewish Voice for Labour) to Gerry Downing. And now Turan has split from the CD group because we refuse to capitulate to the reactionary outcry against Miller. Of course, David’s original victimisation by Bristol University, fuelled by an open letter demanding his sacking from MPs of all major parties, and some minor ones, even the Green Party, was a Zionist campaign against him for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’.
We have some differences with David Miller, but mainly where we consider that sometimes his approach is a bit too rigid. Like where he recently said Jeremy Corbyn is a Zionist because he supports a two-state solution in the Middle East. We certainly concur with Zarah Sultana’s criticism that Corbyn’s leadership capitulated to Zionism and the Zionist witchhunt against him, but that begs the question of, if Corbyn were simply a Zionist, why there should be a witchhunt against him in the first place! This in our view is an example of over-rigid thinking by David Miller. But despite such rigidity, unlike for instance Gerry Downing, his heart is clearly in the right place, and he is clearly driven by righteous anger at those who are in any way politically soft on Zionism in the context of this genocide.
Likewise for the supposed ‘rabbit holes’ Turan complains about. He apparently says that “Jewish anti-Zionists are compromised by ‘residual Zionism.’”. Which is apparently terrible, because:
“This logic is nothing less than condemning Jews for being Jews; damned if they support Zionism and damned if they don’t. Jewish anti-Zionists have long been among the Palestinian movement’s strongest allies, precisely because their existence disproves the false claim that Israel represents all Jews.”
While genuinely anti-Zionist Jews are indeed important allies of the struggle against Zionism, this is overstated. To understand it properly, you must understand that what we call the JZ caste is an imperialist formation that operates in the major North American and West European imperialist countries as a social and political agency of imperialist Israel. As previously noted, the racist Israeli Law of Return gives the Jewish imperialist bourgeoisie in those countries, where they mainly live, a direct material stake in the Israeli imperialist-bourgeois state, as their state in class/communal terms. But of course, the same racist law also covers all Jews – and creates a form of ‘national’-imperialist identification among non-bourgeois Jews, those without proletarian class consciousness at least – and this in a population that (as Tony Greenstein, no less, pointed out) no longer really has a proletariat.
In this context, saying that “Jewish anti-Zionists have long been among the Palestinian movement’s strongest allies” is akin to saying that the British working-class movement is one of the “strongest” allies of the Irish people against British imperialism. It simply is untrue. The British labour movement to this day is riddled with support for anti-Irish, pro-imperialist sentiment over Ireland. It may be dormant as currently there is not a mass struggle against British rule in the six counties, but as was shown in the period of the previous Irish war, the British labour movement was anything but “one of the strongest allies” of the Irish people. Unfortunately. And Jewish anti-Zionists, while we welcome their political activism and seek to radicalise it more, are anything but the “strongest allies” of the Palestinian movement.
Pro-Zionist social-imperialists – Tony Greenstein and the CPGB/Weekly Worker In December 2017 proposed the exclusion of Socialist Fight from Labour Agaisnt the Witchhunt for analysing the class role of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Zionism in Marxist terms
If you want a barometer of that, look who among Jewish anti-Zionists is prepared to tolerate and solidarise with those who criticise the activities of the JZ bourgeois-imperialist caste in the West. Anyone who attempts to ‘cancel’ or ban criticism of the JZ caste by Marxists is a social-imperialist – a political agent of the imperialist bourgeoisie in the workers movement. But the political layer of the bourgeoisie they are acting for is not the British or US bourgeoisie in the traditional sense; they are acting as political agents of the Jewish-Zionist imperialist-bourgeois caste itself, which is the prime mover in today’s genocide. Such social- imperialists encompass all those on the Jewish left who have denounced David Miller for supposed anti-Semitism, and all those who denounced Socialist Fight between 2015 and 2020, and since then the Consistent Democrats since for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ for pointing out the existence of, and producing a Marxist analysis of, the Jewish-Zionist caste among the imperialist bourgeoisie. Those, like Tony Greestein and Jewish Voice for Liberation (formerly Jewish Voice for Labour), in seeking to ban criticisms of the JZ caste in the workers movement, no matter how much anti-Zionist rhetoric they use, and no matter even if they take part in supportable actions and are victimised for them (in which case, like Tony Greenstein, they should be defended tooth and nail), nevertheless in doing this are acting for what is objectively their ‘own’ ruling class, acting as enemies of workers democracy and political agents of the JZ caste, part of the imperialist bourgeoisie, in the working class movement.
So, when Turan complains “Miller has gone so far as to claim that the UK is now an Israeli colony run from Tel Aviv”, Turan is answering, assuming DM did say literally that, an empirical observation with a flat denial of reality. The explanation for the subservience of the bulk of British bourgeois politicians to Zionism, grotesquely demonstrated recently over Aston Villa/Tel Aviv Macabees recently, is not that Britain is literally a colony, but rather that there is bizarre political cult of Zionism among the imperialist bourgeoisie in the West, the mirror image of the old bourgeois anti-Semitism. Which leads them to behave so that it superficially appears that way. But if Turan wishes to say that there is nothing out of the ordinary about such incidents as the Macabees affair, that it is normal functioning of British capitalism, then it is he who is at odds with reality, not David Miller.
Then there is the crescendo of Turan’s attack on Miller, that he has discussed the question of supposed Jewish ‘super intelligence’ with some elements of the far right, among the few that have not simply declared their loyalty to Israel as the most successful (so far) example of a racist ethnic state that ever existed. But this question arises from time to time among those attempting to get to grips with the Jewish question – the reason for the apparent domination of Jews in some spheres of intellectual life. Those who are trying to understand Jewish history properly are well advised to read a wide variety of views on the subject, to try to understand it comprehensively. At the same time some discretion is advised, as we do not seek to platform such people.
The actual explanation for such phenomena is in the sphere of class – the role of Jews as the embodiment of commercial capital under pre-capitalist natural economy, in Europe and indeed in some other places, did tend, because of the international connections of such traders, to broaden their understanding the outside world and give them an intellectual advantage over those not involved in what Abram Leon called the “people-class”. Some who have investigated aspects of Jewish history say that some Jews actually at least dabbled in eugenics to try to enhance this phenomenon. This is possible, as there appears to be evidence that Brahmins in India, for instance, at the summit of the caste system, did similar things. These are entirely valid subjects to study, even if it is a mistake to engage in public exchanges with elements of the far right about it.
This is what Gilad Atzmon called the ‘cognitive elite’. It is a product of class, not ‘race’, and is in some way like what the European aristocracies call ‘blue blood’. Symmetrically opposite phenomena can exist among those who were enslaved; degraded cultures as noted by G.E.M. De Ste Croix in his enormous work The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981).
In any case, it is grossly hypocritical for Gerry Downing to denounce David Miller for such a mistake and demand his ostracism, along with Turan, who now says that Downing is ‘vindicated’. Gerry Downing regularly writes for the Weekly Worker, he does not ‘ostracise’ them. Even though, as is their policy, they periodically publish material from people on the far right in their letters page, and even sometimes allow debates to develop with such people on that page. I have long held this to be wrong; at times in the past, I have found my sharply critical letters refused publication while some Yaxley-Lennon supporter gets their letter published. But I would not smear the Weekly Worker as pro-fascist because of this error, even though they have sometimes tried to smear me like this. In joining this campaign against David Miller, the fake-left, the SWP, WW, Gerry D and now Turan, are capitulating to a reactionary outcry in some ways like that against Julian Assange in the past.
David Miller, in spite of being sacked for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ by Bristol University after a virulent Zionist campaign including the all-party letter by MPs demanding his sacking, won his industrial tribunal case against the University, and this set a legal precedent that anti-Zionist views are a protected characteristic, a valid philosophical belief, under the Equality Act, making it unlawful for someone to be victimised because of their anti-Zionist views. That was an important victory for all anti-Zionist militants over the Israel lobby, really over the J-Z caste, and a real gain for the working-class movement. There is a hysterical campaign by Zionists to reverse that gain, through their sponsorship of an appeal by Bristol University to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, to be heard this month (November).
David Miller was also outrageously held and questioned under the Terrorism Act when he returned from covering Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Lebanon as a journalist several months ago. The police had no valid reason for doing so; it was done for the Zionists. And the Zionist fake-charity the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAAS) have tried to instigate a private prosecution against him for some tweets that they alleged were in some way hateful; just a couple of weeks ago the CAAS suffered a major setback as the judge in that trial noted that they had unlawfully withheld crucial evidence regarding context in this case, and gave them 28 days to hand it over to the court. It looks likely their case could collapse because of this. But the whole thing is obviously part of a Zionist campaign to overturn the ET ruling in his favour, and thus also overturn the gain made for all anti-Zionists that his original victory represented. This is why the ‘left’ campaign against David Miller crosses class lines.
As I said, the Zionist campaign against David Miller resembles in some ways the campaign against Julian Assange. And like in that case, much of the left is crap on this question. Those echoing the Zionists campaign against his supposed ‘anti-semitism’ in these circumstances are doing the Zionists work for them and trying to undermine solidarity in a struggle that is in the interests of all opponents of Zionist terrorism. We in the Consistent Democrats utterly reject this betrayal of basic class principles and express our full solidarity with David Miller against the witchhunters.
We print below three items., relating to the Spartacists’ attempt to create a ‘Revolutionary Caucus’ in Your Party, which to us appears to be a laudable thing to attempt to do. The brief platform they drafted had some very good points in it, but we considered it to be flawed in the sense that it was very hard in criticisms of those on the left who accomodate to liberalism, but somewhat less so in its attack on those who accomodate to the ‘working class’ pretensions of the populist right. Positive points were its firm opposition to NATO and Zionism, less impressive was its somewhat evasive points about migration and its seeming to endorse the populists’ attack on ‘mass immigration’, which accepts the divisions that these reactionaries are promoting in the working class. Also, its attack on the Green Party conspicuously did not address the question of the environment at all, which is simply wrong.
They motivated such discussion here:
“This is why a revolutionary caucus is needed. The Spartacist League wants to build such a caucus, but we cannot do this on our own. We want to work with other organisations and individuals to build it. If we want this new party to succeed, socialists must work together and place the interests of the movement above those of their own organisation or clique. First and foremost, we are interested in opening a debate on the policies needed to get Your Party off the ground and win mass support in the working class.
“Below we propose a set of principles which we think could serve as a basis to regroup revolutionary elements in Your Party. Get in touch with us to debate these and to work with us in building a revolutionary caucus.”
Unfortunately, when we submitted it, then they told us they were not interested in discussing these changes. Which is a pity, as there could have been some negotiations on some of the points given that we do not have full agreement. Our amended point on NATO would not explicitly commit them to defending Russia’s Special Military Operation in East Ukraine, which is our position, though logically it does point in that direction. But it does explicitly defend workers states against imperialism, and make a reference to China in that regard, which is something both of our tendencies formally agree on. Evidently they want a bloc that omits this.
The complete absence of a point on fascism from their original draft is also a notable omission, and in our view related to the programmatic concessions they made on immigration.
Anyway, for ease of presentation, item 1 below is the amended version of the platform as shown by us. Item 2 is contains trackings of the suggested amendments, which may appear arcane, but should help the reader to see what the differences in the texts are. Item 3 is their original proposal.
1. Our amended draft
For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!
Financial capital, the final product of decay of imperialist finance capital, centred in The City of London is destroying the lives of the working class in this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.
A working-class position on immigration.
Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City compete with their scapegoating but also use migrant workers to prop up a rotting economy. Neither of these benefit working-class people whatever their origin or status. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, and all attacks on the rights of migrants and refugees, but we also oppose the capitalists’ cynical use of desperate migrants to drive down wages. We demand an end to anti-union laws and the revival of the compulsory closed shop for all industries where wages are under such pressure, with union membership and decent wages for all.
For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!
There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of winning the working class we must win the argument, not simply moralise at those with different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads – merely that we are all part of the working class and must act as a class, who agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.
Fight fascism – a working-class militia to defend organised workers and oppressed groups
We are amid the most threatening rise of fascism since the 1930s. Neoliberalism has meant decades-long declines in employment and living standards and Starmer’s neoliberal viciousness in power in the name of ‘Labour’ has led to a vacuum that Robinson, Farage and worse are attempting to fill, with the help of Trump, Musk, etc. This involves a terrorist threat against workers, particularly Muslims and other minorities, from organised fascists. Police arrest pensioners and the disabled for imaginary ‘terrorism’, while turning a blind eye to fascist mobs outside asylum seekers’ quarters demanding ‘kill them all’. We need organised groups of stewards and defenders able to fight off fascist violence. And beyond that, we need a militia to defend the population against a far right that is now fixated on Israel and aspires to inflict Gaza-style bloodshed on populations it hates here. Your Party should popularise and seek to create the conditions where such a mass-based anti-fascist militia can be created.
No to Zionism!
Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.
Down with US & British imperialism!
British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a vassal of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working-class people. We say: No arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drives against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – and all non-imperialist or oppressed countries and workers states targeted by imperialism!
No popular front with the Greens – we need to split them!
The Green Party is a middle-class radical party. We cannot merge with it; we cannot treat it as a partner. There are some seriously socialist-minded people in it, mixed with Malthusians and other reactionaries. This party supports NATO and is not anti-imperialist. Greens are correct that climate change threatens the future of working-class people around the world. But this is caused by capitalism and can only be solved by economic planning on both the national and international scale. The Greens though accept capitalism, promote ‘Green’ capitalism, and thus New Labour schemes like ULEZ that punish workers for owning old, polluting vehicles. We support cleaner air, which helps protects working class people and particularly children from dangerous illnesses, but we demand the bosses pay for it, and particularly for new, low-emission vehicles for all who need them.
We need to split away pro-socialist elements attracted to the Greens, to our genuine socialist party, not endorse left talking but untrustworthy figures like Polanski. We reject the Greens’ self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. An alliance with them will only repel workers.
For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!
The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.
Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!
The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.
Down with the monarchy! For a workers’ republic!
Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats.
2. Tracking of Amendments
For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!
Financial capital, the final product of decay of imperialist finance capital, centred in The City of London is destroying the lives of the working class in has destroyed this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.
A working-class position on immigration.
Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City compete with their scapegoating but also use migrant workers encourage mass immigration to prop up a rotting economy and drive down wages. Neither of these benefit working-class people whatever their origin or status are any good for the working class. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, and all attacks on the rights of migrants and refugees, but we also oppose the capitalists’ cynical use of desperate migrants to drive down wages. We demand an end to anti-union laws and the revival of the compulsory closed shop for all industries where wages are under such pressure, with union membership and decent wages for all. but we also oppose the government’s policy of mass immigration. Instead of an immigration policy dictated by the bosses, we need one determined by the needs and interests of the working class.
For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!
There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of winning the working class uniting the left we must win the argument, not simply moralise at those with and exclude people who have different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads – merely that we are all part of the working class and must act as a class, who To unite we need to agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.
Fight fascism – a working-class militia to defend organised workers and oppressed groups
We are amid the most threatening rise of fascism since the 1930s. Neoliberalism has meant decades-long declines in employment and living standards and Starmer’s neoliberal viciousness in power in the name of ‘Labour’ has led to a vacuum that Robinson, Farage and worse are attempting to fill, with the help of Trump, Musk, etc. This involves a terrorist threat against workers, particularly Muslims and other minorities, from organised fascists. Police arrest pensioners and the disabled for imaginary ‘terrorism’, while turning a blind eye to fascist mobs outside asylum seekers’ quarters demanding ‘kill them all’. We need organised groups of stewards and defenders able to fight off fascist violence. And beyond that, we need a militia to defend the population against a far right that is now fixated on Israel and aspires to inflict Gaza-style bloodshed on populations it hates here. Your Party should popularise and seek to create the conditions where such a mass-based anti-fascist militia can be created.
No to Zionism!
Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.
Down with US & British imperialism!
British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a vassal part of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working-class people. We say: No more arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drives against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – and all non-imperialist or oppressed countries and workers states targeted by imperialism!
No alliance with the Greens! No popular front with the Greens – we need to split them!
The Green Party embodies everything the working class hates about the left today: self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. The Greens are not for the working class or socialism, nor do they want to be. An alliance with them will only repel workers.
The Green Party is a middle-class radical party. We cannot merge with it; we cannot treat it as a partner. There are some seriously socialist-minded people in it, mixed with Malthusians and other reactionaries. This party supports NATO and is not anti-imperialist. Greens are correct that climate change threatens the future of working-class people around the world. But this is caused by capitalism and can only be solved by economic planning on both the national and international scale. The Greens though accept capitalism, promote ‘Green’ capitalism, and thus New Labour schemes like ULEZ that punish workers for owning old, polluting vehicles. We support cleaner air, which helps protects working class people and particularly children from dangerous illnesses, but we demand the bosses pay for it, and particularly for new, low-emission vehicles for all who need them.
We need to split away pro-socialist elements attracted to the Greens, to our genuine socialist party, not endorse left talking but untrustworthy figures like Polanski. We reject the Greens’ self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. An alliance with them will only repel workers.
For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!
The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.
Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!
The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.
Down with the monarchy! For a workers’ republic!
Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats.
3. Original Spartacist League/Britain draft
For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!
The City of London has destroyed this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.
A working-class position on immigration.
Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City encourage mass immigration to prop up a rotting economy and drive down wages. Neither of these are any good for the working class. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, but we also oppose the government’s policy of mass immigration. Instead of an immigration policy dictated by the bosses, we need one determined by the needs and interests of the working class.
For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!
There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of uniting the left we must win the argument, not simply moralise and exclude people who have different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads. To unite we need to agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.
No to Zionism!
Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.
Down with US & British imperialism!
British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a part of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working people. We say: No more arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drive!
No alliance with the Greens!
The Green Party embodies everything the working class hates about the left today: self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. The Greens are not for the working class or socialism, nor do they want to be. An alliance with them will only repel workers.
For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!
The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.
Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!
The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.
Down with the monarchy! For a workers republic!
Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats.
The discussions around the use of ‘sortition’ as a method of choosing delegates for the founding conference of Your Party in late November have brought this obscure question to some public attention. Whatever people think about it, this has arisen before in left wing thought. So we held an online discussion forum today on the subject as a one-off using CLR James essay “Every Cook Can Govern’ from 1956.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has called for armed intervention in Palestine, emphasizing the need to build an international army to “liberate Palestine” and stand up to “tyranny and totalitarianism” propagated by the United States and NATO
Colombian President Gustavo Petro intensified his stance against the Israeli regime after Israeli naval forces raided the Gaza-bound Global Summud humanitarian aid flotilla carrying two Colombian women. Petro ordered the expulsion of the remaining Israeli diplomatic staff in Bogotá—leading to a complete breakdown in relations after Colombia had already severed formal ties in May 2024. He also announced the termination of the Free Trade Agreement with Israel, denouncing it as incompatible with a country that practices colonial violence.
Petro condemned the attack as “a new international crime” committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring that the Zionist colonial entity cannot be above the law. He instructed the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to file lawsuits in Israeli courts and called on international legal experts to reinforce the Colombian legal team.
The announcement comes after Petro’s powerful speech at the 80th United Nations General Assembly, where he stated that the world could not prevent the genocide in Gaza with words alone. He called for a coalition of nations to form a “powerful army” to defend the Palestinian people and “liberate Palestine ,” framing it as a continuation of Latin America’s anti-colonial struggles. “It is Bolívar’s sword, of freedom or death,” Petro declared.
At the UN, he accused the United States and NATO of complicity in the genocide through vetoes that silence international action and labelled Netanyahu a “genocidal.” He accused Washington’s partnership with Israel of making them a guarantor of colonial massacres rather than a defender of democracy. In retaliation for his statements, the US revoked Petro’s visa—an act he called a violation of diplomatic norms.
By expelling envoys, denouncing trade, and invoking international law, Petro has positioned Colombia as one of the most vocal voices on the global stage against the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. His actions deepen the historic rift and highlight the growing South American solidarity with the Gaza liberation struggle.
The detention of George and Gayatri Galloway on 27th September is an outrage against civil liberties and basic democratic rights, and a very sinister attack on one of the best-known left-wing politicians in Britain, and his family. It is an attack on the democratic rights of all working-class people and the labour and anti-imperialist movement generally by the pro-NATO, anti-Russian militarist and Zionist government of Starmer. IUAFS condemn this act utterly and declare our full solidarity with George and Gayatri against this sinister attack.
After arriving in Gatwick Airport on a flight from Abu Dhabi on 27th September after celebrating their wedding anniversary in Moscow, George and Gayatri were picked up by armed “anti-terrorist” police. They were told “you are not under arrest, but you are not free to leave. You do not have the right to remain silent. If you do not comply and cooperate, and answer any and all of my questions, you will be automatically committing an offence under the Act”. That is, schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
This permits detentions and searches at ports, borders and airports, without any consideration of ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the victim has any involvement in any form of terrorism, and denies those questioned the right to silence – indeed this draconian law says that any attempt by a victim to exercise the right to silence as under ordinary criminal law, puts them at risk of conviction for a criminal offence itself. It also gives the cops the right to demand passwords and other access keys to social media and other private electronic repositories, and the right to confiscate and examine electronic equipment such as phones, laptops etc. Accordingly, laptops and phones belonging to the Galloways were confiscated by the cops and when they were finally released, after four hours of questioning for George, and five hours for Gayatri, they were stranded with no means to contact anyone else to inform them of their whereabouts.
They were also lied to by the cops, as George was told that his wife was at liberty and in the process of contacting solicitors etc, when she was also detained and subjected to a longer interrogation than her husband. At a 29th September press conference that the Galloways held in Belfast with their specialist civil liberties lawyer, Kevin Winters, they announced that they were challenging their detention legally under articles 5, 8, 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights and demanding the return of their electronics.
George Galloway is one of the best known and most elected politicians in the UK. He is also the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, a legal political party. His weekly YouTube show has 5 million views – a bigger audience than much of the bourgeois press. Galloway and his party are hated by much of the ruling class in Britain. They are fiercely on the right side in two major conflicts between imperialism and its victims in shooting wars – siding with the Palestinians against Zionist genocide and siding with the Donbass people against a Western backed NATO proxy war in East Ukraine where outright Nazis are the weapon to eliminate the Russian/Russophone population there. It is obvious that there were no grounds whatsoever for the state to remotely suspect him or his wife of any involvement in terrorism or anything like it. Galloway and the Workers Party have questionable views on migration, climate change and other questions regarding the rights of some minorities such as gays and trans, but we have no hesitation in denouncing this act of political persecution against them.
This detention, like those of several journalists and activist such as Craig Murray, Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst, had nothing to do with ‘terrorism’ in any shape of form. These all are about intimidation and harassment of political dissidents from the West’s involvement in genocidal wars in Palestine and the Donbass. In many cases, including those of the Galloways, they were about finding a pretext to seize electronics to find others to persecute. The case of Farhad Ansari illustrates this perfectly, as it was clear that the purpose of his recent Section 7 detention was to seize legally privileged material that is covered by client confidentiality rules. He is the eminent civil liberties lawyer who is bringing a case under the appeal provision in Schedule 3 of the same Terrorism Act 2000, to overturn the proscription of the Palestinian political party Hamas by the British government. This proscription was done in pursuit of genocide, as the effect of this mischaracterisation is that obviously civilian functions in Gaza: civil administration, medical people, and anyone else involved in ordinary civil society activities in Gaza can be defined as ‘terrorist’ and murdered with impunity by Israel. The Starmer government is up to its neck in funding and arming Israel for these purposes.
The proscription of Palestine Action is the ultimate expression of this persecution of dissent against Starmer’s support for such genocidal campaigns. That is up for judicial review in November, and the government is desperately trying to stop that case being heard. Then there is the case of the 2024 raid on the home of Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley, where the cops were found by a judge to have acted unlawfully.
The detention of George and Gayatri Galloway is yet another escalation of attacks on democratic rights ordered by this government. Hands off the Galloways! Down with genocidal fake ‘anti-terrorism’ laws that are really aimed at persecution of opponents of Western terrorism and genocide!
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