Your Party Members’ Charter leaders make their choice
The Members’ Charter leaders have blown it. The initiative itself was positive enough, and we in the Consistent Democrats supported it from the beginning. In the aftermath of the scandals over the smears against Zarah Sultana from Corbyn and co. over the membership system, to establish a system Corbyn and his acolytes could control, which led to the crippling of party democracy, branches without any membership data, rigged CEC elections (where only the pro-Corbyn slate had access to the data) and many other horrors, the time was overdue for an initiative regarding party democracy. The Members Charter seemed to be it, it gathered over 600 signatures before the local elections, demanding a set of basic rights for members/activists, with an ultimatum of May 16 for the Corbyn-led leadership to concede or conferences would be called. The YP CEC’s Corbynite majority responded to that with proscriptions against organised Marxists being members of YP. So, the conferences were called, beginning with the pre-conference on 31st May with the aim of a fully operative conference in September.
The vision supposedly was parallel to that of Zarah Sultana – a party of the whole left. No bans or proscriptions of socialist groups. Though comrade Sultana does not appear to have been involved in this initiative, for whatever reason. Maybe that is even fortuitous. Because when it came to the conference itself, the initiators messed it up. A motion was submitted to the conference by ourselves about party democracy, that based itself on the ethos of ‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’ – full freedom of debate among socialists of whatever description, subject only to refraining from public criticism of actual agreed actions while such actions are in progress. This was the guiding principle of Russian social democracy. The other element of the motion, that was just as crucial, was that there was one exception proposed to this ethos of debate – Zionist views were to be proscribed:
“…we must not allow political Zionists to operate within our party, given the strategy of that current to infiltrate all kinds of different parties for their own genocidal ends, which has led to the shameful support by Labour to the genocide in Gaza.”
It does appear that this proposal detonated a storm, and was felt to be acutely objectionable by the core of those involved, including some leading elements not only in the Members Charter initiative, but also of the All-London Delegate Assembly (ALDA). We in the Consistent Democrats were always aware that many of the opportunist elements on the British far left do not like our analysis and position on Zionism, which is in part built on an understanding that the ‘outsize’ (in the words of Norman Finkelstein) preponderance of Zionist Jews in the wealthiest parts of the imperialist ruling classes of the West, explains much of the power of Zionists to dictate what happens in the West politically. Right now, that is centre stage, as Zionist forces are the instigators of major attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinians across the imperialist West in the middle of what is becoming a many-sided genocide of Palestinians and other Arabs, intimately connected with the US/Israel war on Iran, where Israel has pulled the US into an unwinnable conflict.
Given their record of infiltration and witch hunting in all political parties, including those of the workers movement, any left-wing party today that stands for class independence must exclude Zionists. Some signatories of the Members’ Charter responded to this by picking a fight with one of our comrades initially about our defence of David Miller (a particular bugbear of the capitulatory centrist left). The subsequent discussion, in which our agreed position on Zionism was argued, then produced from supporters of the Anti-Capitalist Resistance typical hysteria about our alleged ‘anti-semitism’ for presenting a coherent Marxist explanation of the power of the Israel lobby. There is no need to go into details here, a full account of what transpired, and indeed screen rendering of the discussion itself, can be found here:
The original mover of the motion, comrade Ian D, was excluded from the conference for the usual nonsensical allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ from the capitulatory third-camp sects and their camp-followers. The seconder of the motion, Paul C, was allowed to propose it in his place and made excellent, brave contributions arguing for our motion, along with some other sympathetic comrades. He also made a point of order against the smears of ‘anti-Semitism’ against our comrades. Our motion was defeated with 17 votes for, 29 votes against, and 36 declared abstentions. There were at least 20 more undeclared abstentions, as the attendance at the meeting was significantly over 100. This is hardly an overwhelming mandate for those who excluded our comrade for arguing our agreed position on Zionism – the logic of that is to proscribe the Consistent Democrats as a group. If they do that, particularly as they have just fought to not proscribe Zionism, it is obvious what their real position is both on Zionism, and on bans and proscriptions on leftists.
The way is thus open for the new Socialist Federation, assuming it makes any progress, to develop a ‘Friends of Israel’ trend within it, as have all major political parties, including most recently the Greens, and now Reform. For this Federation, possibly the forerunner of a party, such a ‘Friends of Israel’ forerunner is already present with the Alliance for Workers Liberty, or perhaps also Anti-Capitalist Resistance – they work together a lot. The latter are certainly vociferous in seeking to ban Marxist analysis of the Israel lobby, and have a record of supporting Israel’s favoured wars in Libya and Syria. More verbally radical elements will pretend to oppose Zionism and NATO, while proscribing the most consistent opponents of these things, which is a classic example of what Trotsky once said about centrism: “Revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds”.
Our comrades will continue to work constructively in YP and with all those in the new Federation who are open to creating a genuinely democratic, working-class party that must be anti-NATO and anti-Zionist in words and deeds, to be a real alternative. What we have now is really not good enough.
