The involvement of the British Section of the LCFI, the Consistent Democrats, in the Socialist Labour Network (SLN) has been a bumpy ride at times over the past couple of years, but our comrades have played a constructive role in trying to push it forwards. A number of our comrades were elected to the Steering Committee last year – three stood together on a joint platform as supporters of the Consistent Democrats, and played an important role in sorting out a proper website presence for the SLN, and drafting a resolution that outlined a role for the SLN as a kind of think-tank promoting unification of the various left-wing electoral challenges to Starmer’s neoliberal, hard-Zionist, anti-left Labour Party.
That there is a crying need for such a party is shown by the obvious flaws of those pretending to offer such an alternative. First you have the Workers Party, led by George Galloway, which on the positive side has solid anti-imperialist positions on Gaza and defending the people of the Donbass against NATO’s proxy war. But on the negative side you have their mimicking of the reactionary chauvinism of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and others on the populist and far right, in demonising immigrants, and their hostility to oppressed groups such as trans and gays. This has not done them any favours – in the recent Runcorn by-election they touted candidate Peter Ford, as a real challenger to Labour and Reform for working-class votes. But their candidate revealed himself as in no sense to the left of Labour, and by chauvinist anti-migrant slogans they even implicitly attacked Starmer for not being ‘tough’ enough on immigration. Ford got a pathetic 164 votes.
Then there is Transform, which was founded in 2023 from a unification of the very youthful left-wing Breakthrough party, the Liverpool Community Independents, and Left Unity. Transform is much better in defending migrants, and oppressed groups such as trans and gays, and different trends of left-wing thought within it, but echoes imperialist Russophobia. Those signed up for Transform emails in November 2024 received one headlined: “Victory for Putin, Netanyahu and Musk, more misery for the American people” which then went on to rave that “Trump’s victory was a big moment of triumph for Vladimir Putin”. Thus, buying into the Democrats’ ‘Russiagate’ hoax from the Trump first term. You would not get the slightest indication from this that Russia has been the target of an imperialist proxy war since 2014, when NATO, led by the US Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama, spend $6 billion on a far right coup in Ukraine overthrowing the elected president, Yanukovych, put in positions of power nationalist politicians like Poroshenko and Zelensky, who have treated such Nazi collaborators as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych as national heroes, while persecuting the nearly half of Ukrainian people who speak Russian. During Trump’s first term, he tore up the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty banning intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe, a major nuclear escalation against Russia, and he also groomed Zelensky as a Jewish front man to deflect criticism of the obvious pro-Nazi politics of the Maidan regime. But he wasn’t anti-Russian enough for some of the left Russophobes in Transform, who implicitly prefer Biden, who in the two months after he lost the November 2024 US election, went for broke and risked WWIII in encouraging ‘Ukraine’ to be a base for firing obviously NATO controlled cruise missiles such as Storm Shadow into Russia (which has now resumed under Trump).
We are pleased that in June 2023, our comrades moved to an SLN All Members Meeting, and got carried, a motion that clearly stated the need for “an anti-war movement that is principled, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, and stands against the drive of the far-right Maidan regime in Kiev to destroy and ethnically cleanse the Russian speaking population of what was the South-East part of Ukraine (Donbass). We must stand with the Donbass people”. The motion also criticised the politics of the Stop the War Coalition: “Although Stop the War condemns the US and NATO, it also condemns Russia. This is to condemn the Russian assistance to the people of Donbass to resist ethnic cleansing and to avoid being forced into NATO”. Thus, the SLN changed its position to a principled anti-imperialist defence of the targets of NATO’s anti-Russian proxy war. We followed this up in September 2023 with a successful motion for the SLN to support International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which campaigns to defend the Donbass people. These were important policy changes that our comrades initiated, which were a real step forward for the SLN.
Origins of the SLN
The SLN was founded as a merger of two former bodies from within the Labour Left during the period of Corbyn’s leadership, Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and Labour In Exile Network (LIEN). Labour Against the Witchhunt was effectively a front for supporters (in both the narrow and broad sense) of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker, the third-campist splinter from the old official Communist Party of the same name when it renamed itself the Democratic Left after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This group previously published the Leninist, but in 1991 they took the CPGB name and began publishing the Weekly Worker, claiming to be the (albeit ‘provisional’) leadership of the Communist Party. Those in the old party who wanted to carry on as before continued publishing the daily Morning Star, and in time reestablished themselves as the Communist Party of Britain, leaving a confusion of names for the uninitiated.
The Weekly Worker group was quite an energetic, younger group around Jack Conrad, but with erratic, centrist politics that rejected aspirations to orthodox Marxism and Trotskyism, instead influenced by social-democratic (and in fact liberal Zionist) critics of the Trotskyist movement like Shachtman and Hal Draper. They have been an interventionist force among the left-of-labour political initiatives since the 1990s, and they involved themselves heavily in the Corbyn movement. Politically, they appeared as a less-virulently pro-imperialist version of the Alliance for Workers Liberty. They prided themselves as being neutral, or ‘dual defeatist’ in conflicts between oppressed Arab or Muslim countries and imperialism, including Israel. They were for a long time two-statists regarding Israel-Palestine, though prepared to be ambiguous when they allied with leftists like Tony Greenstein who rejected two-states. They are also neutral in the conflicts between imperialism and Russia/China, though their main leader Conrad, appears to consider Russia not to be imperialist, but China to be so. (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1446/notes-on-the-war/).
Irrespective of all this, the role of the CPGB in Labour was, albeit with some degree of subtlety, promoting its own eccentric version of third-campism, Islamophobia and soft-Zionist apologetics. They were probably the main initiators of LAW, which we in Socialist Fight, (our predecessor group as the British section of the LCFI), an orthodox Trotskyist group who also worked within Labour and the Corbyn movement for straightforward Marxist reasons, regarded as a correct and positive initiative. We attended its founding meeting, seeking active involvement. The CPGB then showed their real political nature by seeking to have us expelled from LAW for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ – that is, for our orthodox Marxist/Trotskyist understanding of Zionism and the Jewish Question. Derived from the political tradition of Karl Marx and Abram Leon, this position is explained in both factual and historical terms here (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)
The CPGB, and some of the allies around it, had previously, in 2014 excluded one of our leading comrades from its ‘Communist Platform’ bloc within Left Unity for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ for writing this set of Theses in the first place. But when similar accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were laid against him in Left Unity itself, he was exonerated by their disciplinary body. It was a politically motivated smear by these semi-Zionist third campists. On the Labour Left, including some who gravitated around the CPGB in this period, there were several Jewish comrades, some driven by leftist forms of identity politics, who considered criticism of a Jewish layer of the imperialist bourgeoisie with Zionist politics – a prime mover of the Israel lobby – as an ‘anti-Semitic’ concept. No matter how many facts could be cited in support, to them this was ‘anti-Semitism’. The CPGB got support from this layer. When SF challenged this in an LAW meeting in December 2017, the CPGB and co. lost the vote. So they called a ‘national mobilisation’ for a meeting in January 2018, and mobilised all kinds of people with reactionary positions, including supporters of Maidan Ukraine and the so-called ‘Syrian revolution’. Socialist Resistance, now called Anti-Capitalist Resistance, who were notorious then for all these things and even cheering for the imperialist intervention in Libya that overthrew Gaddafi, turned up to vote us out. Predictably, this rotten bloc had more voting power than our own smallish group. The whole affair made national headlines at the time as an eccentricity: an obvious, public witchhunt within Labour Against the Witchhunt.
The other component of what became the SLN was the Labour in Exile Network, simply a network of former Labour Party members, victims of the extensive purges that took place in Labour during the late Corbyn period. After the 2019 election, when Corbyn was forced out, Starmer took over, LAW and LIEN were proscribed and there was an obvious objective case for them to merge, to act as an organising centre to keep together the many leftists who had been purged. When that happened, the CPGB walked away, as they feared they would be unable to control it, though some of their allies, such as Tony Greenstein, stayed in. Our longer-standing comrades were able to join the merged group in part through joining LIEN and no objections were raised by those such as Tony Greenstein who had previously accused us of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Policies and Mission of the SLN
As recounted above, we were instrumental in bringing to the SLN a much better policy on Ukraine. But the problem with the SLN was what its purpose was. The lack of a clear purpose somewhat stalled its growth and led to a certain decline in late 2023 and early 2024. So later, in September 2024, the organisation held a ‘re-founding conference’ – and our group drafted the main resolution, which defined the SLN as a kind of think-tank, to draw together the various initiatives that aimed to provide a left alternative to Labour, though principled debate:
“… the watchword of any new party should be ‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’. This goes right beyond the limits of the present democratic-socialist and social-democratic parties and the bureaucratised ‘communist’ parties and ‘Trotskyist’ groups, where dissent is seen as a challenge to their leaderships. Working class democracy is not an optional extra, it will be the most effective weapon for building such a party.
“We in the SLN cannot declare ourselves to be such a party. But we can advocate unification of the various forces that have been driven out of the Labour Party by its authoritarian and neoliberal decline, together with other socialists, to come together as a network, on the same basis as ourselves, to deepen collaboration and lay the basis for such a Party. We need a convention of the Left to be convened on a broad basis to begin this task.” (https://socialist-labour-network.org.uk/the-need-for-a-democratically-run-party-of-the-socialist-left/)
This was to be the role of the SLN, through providing a forum for such debates, to lay the foundation for such a unifying process to draw these strands together.
Unfortunately, it did not work out that way in the last few months, in part because Tony Greenstein insisted, in the context of the genocide in Gaza, in treating the SLN as virtually his property. The SLN organised a couple of well-attended public meetings, one (co-sponsored with Jewish Network for Palestine) on 27th January for Holocaust Memorial Day, denouncing the Gaza genocide, with a good platform and mainly Jewish, but also Palestinian and other Arab speakers. And one on 10th February defending the Right to Protest, notably in the context of a series of repressive arrests using “Anti-Terrorism” laws of journalists and pro-Palestine activists. Those victimised included Tony Greenstein himself, David Miller, Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson, Natalie Strecker and many more. Organising these events was completely correct and 100% supported by us.
But Tony objected to organising broader political discussions with those with a broader range of views on Palestine and Zionism. Proposals to organise public debates involving such speakers as David Miller, Lowkey, Chris Williamson, Ian Donovan of the Consistent Democrats, as well as speakers from Jewish Network for Palestine, were ruled out by Tony Greenstein on the supposed ground that a number of these speakers held ‘incorrect’ views on the influence of the Zionist lobby, or more bluntly were ‘anti-Semitic’. Since Tony had been the main person organising these public meetings, he was in the short term able to make it very difficult to do anything else. This issue came to a head after our comrades were mandated by the Steering Committee to co-write a motion critical of the International Holocaust Memorial Alliance (IHRA) ‘working definition’ of ‘anti-Semitism’, a crucial tool in the witchhunt against the Corbyn movement, which has now been de facto incorporated into US law as part of criminalising and persecuting opponents of today’s Zionist genocide.
The IHRA and ‘anti-Semitism’
The IHRA is quite a complex tract, incorporating a short, banal ‘definition’ whose real purpose is as an introduction to 11 ‘illustrations’ or ‘examples’ of supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. These are of three types – those that resemble Neo-Nazi positions (Nazi holocaust denial and similar), those that are associated with pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism (saying that Israel is a ‘racist endeavour’), and some that are formulated to be ambiguous. The whole thing is an amalgam, that equates anti-racist hostility to the persecution of Palestinians, with Nazi racism against Jews, in quite a subtle, interwoven manner. Previous critiques of the IHRA had been defensive and criticised it merely for ‘conflating’ anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, with the aim of showing that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. The motion we produced included a full analysis of the various amalgams with the text of the fake-definition, and concluded that its overall purpose and effect was that of a tract which treated Palestinians as inferior human beings – prohibiting meaningful criticism of their racist victimisation as “racist” itself, and thus like Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws. Also, in the context of today’s Gaza holocaust it has played the role of a ‘warrant for genocide’, as originally said about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Nazi holocaust, seeking to prohibit criticism of, and indeed justify as part of a struggle against supposed ‘anti-Semitism’, what clearly has been an accelerating progression of atrocities whose logic was always a genocide.
The motion was unwieldy, as it had the complex analysis of the amalgams embedded in the body of the motion. At the 7th February AMM it was referred back to the Steering Committee for reworking, where it was to be redrafted for the next AMM. This was done by changing the format, so that it contained a few simple points at the beginning, and the bulk of the analysis in an appendix. The opening points included the analogies with the Nuremburg laws and the Protocols. Tony Greenstein vehemently objected to these and sought their removal. We formulated his objections into an amendment, removing these points, and replacing them with the traditional points about ‘conflation’ of anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism, ready to be proposed by Tony and voted on at the 11th April AMM. But Tony objected to this proposal, instead creating his own version of the motion, with many other small amendments, as well as the two changes he was really driving at. The net result was that two similar looking texts were voted counterposed, with Tony’s voted as a ‘delete all and insert’ amendment, but with the two contentious points removed. Not only that, but Tony moved, a day or two before the meeting, another motion denouncing David Miller among others as theorists of the idea that the “tail wags the dog” – i.e. that US imperialism’s Middle East policy is influenced or dictated by the Zionist lobby. Roughly coinciding with this, Tony denounced David Miller on his blog, and the site of Jewish Voice for Labour, for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. We, who have considerably different views on David Miller and Zionism, countered that by initiating an Open Letter in his defence (see opposite).
Tony then submitted a second motion, aimed at David Miller and us, attributing the genesis of Zionism as a movement to non-Jewish Christian ideologues in the early days of capitalism, when to Marxists capitalism was still its progressive epoch. This being derived from the form of Jewish identity politics that Tony adheres to, which denies that any Jews played any real role in the creation of the Zionist movement at all. In response to that, we responded with a ‘delete all and insert’ amendment reaffirming that Zionism is a product of imperialist capitalism from the late 19th century onward and rejecting the anti-Marxist position that seeks to dissociate Zionism from imperialism. This is a complex debate, and this online version of this article includes links to the motions so that readers can make their own judgements.
Two things distinguished the AMM on 11th April. One was that those invited were not all members. It was Tony’s idea that all previous members of LAW and LIEN should be invited, as the SLN membership was supposedly in the doldrums. This, in hindsight, was clearly a ploy to mobilise his base. The other was confusion about which amendment was for which motion. The agenda was a confused mess. This was raised by us as a point of order at the beginning of the meeting, but Tony, among others, dismissed this. This may not have been deliberate but caused confusion. Parts of the discussion had to be re-run as it became clear that the motion/amendment order was indeed scrambled. In some heated exchanges, Tony blamed the chair of the meeting, although most of the confusion came from his behaviour. In the end, Tony got his motions through with what appeared to be a voting bloc of around 30, whereas most of the remaining members abstained, probably out of confusion. So, Tony won his votes, though apparently with the help of quite a few who were not actually SLN members.
A Pyrrhic Victory
It proved to be a pyrrhic victory. Regarding his attempted witchhunt of David Miller, we countered this with a collective statement/petition which, though not huge, included some prominent names. The real political upshot of his ‘victory’ at the AMM was that he had mobilised a crowd of his old supporters, many of whom were not even members of the SLN, to dilute a criticism of the IHRA fake definition that he considered to be too sharp (or ‘hyperbole’ as he put it). In mobilising for this, and afterwards, he accused supporters of the CD group of anti-Semitism, on the same basis as he did in previous encounters, such as in 2014 and 2018. This argument has continued after the AMM in Steering Committee forums, with Tony denouncing our comrades for our supposed ‘anti-Semitism’, and our people countering with criticism of his form of identity politics.
The upshot of this is that Tony Greenstein resigned from both the Steering Committee and the SLN. He also approached non-CD members of the Steering Committee offering to withdraw his resignation if they would back a motion saying that, because the Consistent Democrats derive from Socialist Fight, which was excluded from LAW in 2018, CD should be proscribed from the SLN. But this is unviable – he has been working with us in the SLN without complaint since 2023 and earlier and has earlier defended our comrades against the same allegations, knowing full well what our views are, from other critics who for their own reasons, walked away from the SLN. He only resorted to this when a concrete difference arose, over the IHRA. Given that, endorsement of such a motion would simply discredit anyone who co-signed it.
The problem for Tony Greenstein is that the world has changed since the days when he, and the Weekly Worker, were able to excommunicate so-called ‘left-wing anti-Semites’ (i.e., authentic Marxist anti-Zionists) from their version of the ‘labour movement’ and influence the Corbynite left. Today, fearless leftist critics of bourgeois Zionist Jewry, such as David Miller strike a chord among left wing opinion in the context of the genocide, and the likes of Tony Greenstein, for all his undoubtedly genuine anti-Zionism, look like backsliders and capitulators when they trot out their form of Jewish identity politics. Which to a degree they are. They should seriously examine the authentic Marxist analysis of Zionism we put forward, and thereby politically rearm themselves.
So now we are making proposals to try to drive the SLN forward on the lines of the September 2024 relaunch conference, proposing some public meetings/debates on resisting Starmer’s austerity attacks, and a proper, open debate on Palestine and the genocide, with a range of speakers with counterposed views when they exist. Hopefully, in implementing this perspective, the SLN can go forward.
