Our comrade, Ian Donovan was invited to the Socialist Federation (SF) pre-conference on 30th June meeting in June by Facebook invitation, evidently by someone with the power to issue such invitations. Then, 15 minutes before the conference was due to start, he was excluded apparently by the personal decision of Richard Gerard, one of the initiators of the earlier Members’ Charter. It appears that the organisers do not agree with each other on this.
This was after Ian being excluded from the May 31st meeting of Members’ Charter, of which he was one of the earliest signatories, on the insistence of leading members of the social-imperialist, Ziophile Anti-Capitalist Resistance grouping, the British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and it appears also their fellow traveller Richard Gerard. Gerard was the main leader of Workers Power until a few years ago, when he apparently developed ‘gender-critical’ views that led to him parting company with Workers Power, which has a correct position of defending the rights and equality of transexuals, similar to the position of the Consistent Democrats in fact, and indeed Anti-Capitalist Resistance themselves are broadly correct on defending trans rights.
The reason for this block of defenders and opponents of trans rights to exclude our comrades was a common determination to defend the main social force that is perpetrating the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, along with Lebanese Shia, as well as waging an international campaign to enlist other governments in crushing all opposition to these genocides, from Marxist criticism. That is the ruling class of the Israeli imperialist state, with its project of Greater Israel created through regional genocide, and its international extensions in the Israel lobby in North America and West Europe, that is, the international political Zionist movement, the core of which is factions within the ruling classes of the older imperialist countries that composed of those who have a material interest in the Israeli state through its racist birthright citizenship law (the ‘Law of Return’) – that is, those bourgeois who are born Jewish overseas.
For reasons that can only be explained in historical materialist terms, it is an easily verifiable material fact that the Jewish population has a very top-heavy social structure that means that the number of Jewish bourgeois particularly in the main imperialist countries is massively larger, in the highest wealth category 30 times larger (e.g., in the United States) proportionately than the numerical proportion of Jewish people in the general population. It is also true, that for class reasons, that while the political views of the general Jewish population are heterogenous, mixed and fluid, particularly in the turmoil produced by today’s genocide, the views of such Jewish super-rich bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries are overwhelmingly Zionist. A clear class-related difference. The whole foundation of the international Zionist movement and its lobbying effort, thus is bourgeois ethnocentric politics and bigotry in the service of a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.
The USFI, Gerard, and other phoney anti-Zionists on the British left evidently consider themselves to have more in common with the ethnocentric politics of this bourgeois layer than with Marxists who criticise it from an anti-imperialist, class standpoint. That is a reasonable conclusion to draw from their behaviour: the phoney and outrageous charges of ‘anti-semitism’ against comrade Donovan and the Consistent Democrats for criticising this ruling class, imperialist layer as having agency and being the driving force of the genocide. Objections were raised on the floor of the conference to this exclusion, but the organisers’ weapon of choice in an attempt to quell this dissent was to hide behind the mute button to silence anyone attempting to make points of order; as happened with comrades Paul and Marie. This also happened to other participants whom do not necessarily agree with our position on this outsized Jewish-Zionist layer within the imperialist bourgeoisie, which we call the Jewish-Zionist caste (J-Z caste), but defended our right to argue for our positions.
The Socialist Federation was formed as a coming together of networking and political strategies for dealing with the internal sabotage of Your Party. The SF currently has no procedures for excluding people. It excludes people through bad faith actors and political cowardice and on the say-so of a small clique. Our comrade is not excluded from YP, but is excluded from the SF purely for his anti-Zionist views. The SF has no hearing process at all. This ironically makes the SF worse than the Labour Party.
This all started out of a softness on Zionism; in spite of the SF outwardly having an anti-zionist policy. Apparently, it is not acceptable to have a class analysis of the role of the Zionist movement, which is centrally based on Jewish-Zionist bourgeois social weight in proportion to the rest of the ruling class, or to argue that the J-Z caste has distinct interests which diverge from the interests of the ruling class as a whole. But this is obvious in the current Iran war, where it is not even hidden that the US has been dragged into an ill-advised and unwinnable conflict because of the social power of the Zionist movement that has proved quite capable of trumping (no pun intended) rational US imperialist strategy.
People often mention the large contingent of Christian Zionists in the US as if this can disprove the above analysis. But however numerous they may be, and however useful they are to the Zionist movement itself; they are fellow travellers; they do not have the hereditary claim to Israeli citizenship that bourgeois Jews have, and thus Israel is not, in material terms, “their” state. Therefore, this argument about Christian Zionism is a diversion from the core of the issue.
Nothing in our analysis is hostile to or discriminatory against Jewish people generally – subjecting the bourgeois part of the Jewish population to class analysis does not represent any attack on Jews generally. It is normal procedure for Marxists for all peoples. These smears are just aimed at destroying consciousness and discussion of this question, which is of world-historic proportions for socialists and anti-imperialists. Such chauvinism from within the socialist left, internally policing what we are allowed to analyse and hence say, is reactionary, anti-communist and at odds with workers democracy. Just because Jews were once oppressed does not make this Jewish chauvinism today one iota less reactionary and, given’s Israel’s imperialist nature, a form of imperialist chauvinism.
We, the Consistent Democrats and our international co-thinkers in the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI), are unrepentant in using Marxist tools of analysis of the ruling class, in all its wings and national/ethnic contingents, and we will continue the struggle against capitalism and agents of capitalism in the workers movement!
More material on this subject can be found here:
