David Miller Witchhunted Again for Touching on Obvious Truths

By Ian Donovan

This is response to Tony Greenstein’s latest post denouncing David Miller, at: https://tonygreenstein.com/david-miller-has-gone-from-asset-to-liability-for-the-palestine-solidarity-movement/

Personally, though I disagree with David Miller on speaking about his own views on Zionism and Islamophobia to a a meeting hosted by far right elements (who I would not touch with a 10-foot pole), it’s rather hypocritical for Tony Greenstein to denounce David Miller for that.

Recall that when Socialist Fight was purged from Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) in 2018, Tony did that as a joint action with the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker (CPGB/WW), who have a theoretised position in favour of debating with fascists, and who also periodically publish letters from fascists in their letters page. The CPGB/WW also have an explicit policy that they have every right to debate with fascists, and they denounce as undemocratic anyone on the left who condemns them for that.

Yet Tony not only applauded my being purged from the Communist Platform of Left Unity in 2014 by the CPGB/WW for arguing views on Zionism of which he disapproved, he repeated this in Jan 2018 by purging Gerry Downing and me, then the main leaders of Socialist Fight, from LAW for defending those correct, undiluted Marxist positions.

All this time the CPGB/WW were in favour of debates with fascists. Neither I nor Gerry Downing ever supported this anti-Marxist view. But Tony still supported us being purged because suppressing Marxist criticism of Jewish identity politics was more important to him than criticising those on the left who advocate, or practice, debating with fascists.

Which had the consequence on more than one occasion when sharp criticism was expressed of their softness on Zionism, they would refuse to print my letters, but print letters by supporters of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. For instance, they refused to print a letter by me about their refusal to condemn the violent assault on George Galloway by a Zionist-fascist, Neil Masterson, in August 2014. While in this period they were, as they periodically do still, printing material from Yaxley’s defenders. Tony knew of their position on these things, but it never stopped his blocs with them against SF and me.

Because they supported his heresy hunts against those whose application of Marxist principles to Zionism as an international phenomenon clashed with his identity politics, part of which is about protecting the external Jewish bourgeoisie from the accusation that it plays a primary and independent role in Israel’s imperialist oppression/dispossession of the Palestinians.

That’s what Tony is doing with this polemic. It is clear that citizenship of a bourgeois state gives capitalists membership of the ruling class of that state, particularly when that citizenship is extended on an ethno-centric, i.e. racist, basis as Israel does.

And when that birthright citizenship is extended on an extra-territorial basis, it creates a layer of bourgeois particularly in the imperialist countries who have a direct material interest in the Israeli bourgeois state, because it is their state both in a class and ethnocentric sense. Thus by a simple, undiluted application of the Marxist theory of the state, this layer becomes an extension of the ruling class of Israel into the core ruling classes of the US and West Europe. Therefore we have an unusual caste or faction within the ruling classes of several imperialist powers, by virtue of the also unusual top-heavy social structure of the Jewish population, which is overrepresented often by dozens of times over in the bourgeoisie of these states compared with the percentage of the overall representation of Jews in the population of these countries. That is why and how the ruling classes overlap.

Tony pretends that this is some sort of esoteric theory. It’s not. It’s simply the application of the Marxist understanding of the state to the phenomenon of Zionism, whose extra-territorial, ethnic-based hereditary citizenship law is designed to create a phenomenon like the Israel lobby. This has acquired many ‘hypenated-Zionist’ fellow travellers among both Christian and even irreligious bourgeois in the US and elsewhere who venerate this layer because of the role of some of its most famous figures in popularising and promoting neoliberalism in the crisis of the 1970s. These bourgeois credit these largely Jewish ideologues with saving capitalism from a major crisis, possibly terminal. Thus a kind of cult has grown up among the wider bourgeoisie around this Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste.

Israel by size ought to be a minor imperialist power like Denmark. But because of this wider Jewish-Zionist caste, and the cult worship of it, it punches far above its weight.

There is nothing anti-Jewish at all about this understanding. It simply, logically results from the application of the Marxist theory of the state to facts that are widely available. But in Tony’s form of identity politics it is forbidden to ascribe any independent predatory role to any Jewish bourgeois layer. They must be deemed as lackeys and ciphers of the ‘real’ imperialists, to protect them from this characterisation which in the eyes of Tony appears to imply that Jews have some kind of collective guilt for those activities.

But Marxists reject such notions of collective guilt. We need to analyse these things in materialist terms to overcome such notions. David Miller’s real crime is mentioning and repeating these facts and thus clashing with Tony’s personal prejudices and those of his co-thinkers. For Tony, to reject his schema of the way the US -Israel relationship works is ‘anti-Semitic’.

In the real world, an antisemite is someone who hates Jews in general: Jews as Jews. These allegations – that simply mentioning well-known and facts to analyse social and economic reality, is supposedly ‘anti-Semitism’, is anti-Marxist and irrational.