New Interventions

Volume 12, no 2, Winter 2005-06

Current Business Riots in France Farewell Tony Blair? Karl Marx wins poll shock Germanys grand coalition Iraqs new constitution Ten years after Srebrenica Multiculturalism under attack Hasan and Louis Proyect, Natural Disasters Social Calamities The political fall-out from the New Orleans hurricane and Pakistan earthquake Tony Greenstein, A Hypocritical Charade Why state-sponsored Holocaust Memorial Days cannot challenge racism Mosh Machover, Zionism: A Major Obstacle Why Zionisms denial of the Hebrew nation bars the way to peace Cyril Smith, Two Essays on Karl Marx A controversial look at Marx and religion and materialism Paolo Casciola, Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples The theory of Permanent Revolution and anti-imperialist struggles The Israel Academic Boycott: Toby Abse, Sue Blackwell, Tony Greenstein and Mosh Machover in debate Alan Woodward, Rudolf Rocker and the Anarchist Movement The remarkable life of the anarchist thinker and activist Glyn Beagley, Anarchists, Syndicalists and Workers Councils Political parties and workers struggles Second Glance: Doug Lowe investigates the reality of Peak Performing Organisation Theory Reviews Gerry Healys political legacy The real Karl Marx Workers Socialism Nineteen Eighty-Four in song George Orwell Japan and the atomic bomb US conservatives Letters Bendy buses and British political facts 1 15

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Current Business
The Riots in France ON 27 October, at Clichy-sous-Bois, two adolescents, Zyed and Bouna, fled the police. Seeking refuge in a transformer station, they were both electrocuted. From that date, beginning in the Parisian suburbs (the banlieue), rioting has swept similar deprived areas surrounding the countrys cities. There have been confrontations with the CRS and the Gendarmerie. Bands of youths, mostly (though not exclusively) from an Arab or black African background, have wreaked havoc. Thousands of cars have been burnt out, petrol bombs have destroyed shops, schools, cultural centres, and other public buildings. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and foreign nationals threatened with deportation. The Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has been dubbed a pyromaniac fire-fighter for calling the youths involved racaille (rabble/scum). From 9 November, the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency. This gives powers to impose curfews, ban public meetings, and order house arrests. In the National Assembly, Communist (PCF) deputies were alone in their staunch opposition, and in citing the laws origins in 1955, during the war of Algerian independence. With the notable absence of the Parti Socialiste (by far the largest left party electorally, and with 127 000 members) the French left, from the PCF, the Verts (Greens), anti-racist and human rights organisations, to the League Communiste Rvolutionnaire (LCR), has united in condemning these moves. On the ground, mayors from all sides are reported to be sceptical about their effectiveness (see Le Monde, 10 November 2005). More fundamentally, a broad debate is underway about long-term plans to end the deprivation of the affected cits (housing estates) and the French model of social integration. While obviously the French media has been dominated by these events, British and other anglophone commentators have not been silent. There was an early attempt to link the uprisings to Frances secular model, particularly the ban on wearing ostentatious religious symbols in schools. Some have asserted that this is an Islamic revolt, asserting a Moslem identity against a Republic blind to cultural differences. Frances extreme right, from the Front National to the Mouvement pour la France, has brandished a jihadist menace. The FNs web site carries a clip showing an post-apocalypse Paris, saved by the Second Coming of their Leader, and the words, Le Pen la bien dit (Le Pen said it!). Yet both the supporters of Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French racists are far from reality. Religious signs have practically disappeared from schools with little conflict, reports Le Monde (30 September 2005). The lUnion des Organisations islamiques de France (UOIF) close to the UKs MAB has tried to be a privileged interlocutor with the state. Its efforts to calm youths down, by decreeing their actions un-Islamic, have not had a real impact. Indeed, they have been criticised by other Moslems for attempting to communalise the clashes (Le Monde, 9 November 2005). Which, as the reformist Salafist Tariq Ramadam has pointed out, have far more to do with the problems of racial ghettos, mass unemployment and rundown housing, than the assertion of faith (Le Monde, 9 November 2005; Guardian, 12 November 2005). Police harassment has also played its part, though undoubtedly many rioters are no angels. The cultural mix of the banlieue, and its discontents, have much in
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common with urban districts in every country, it has no direct tie to religion. There is little doubt that French society has failed to live up to the principles of social republican equality. From the Marche des Beurs (Arabs in back-slang) in the early 1980s, there has been no shortage of warnings about unemployment and discrimination amongst minorities. It is significant that studies from that period cite a right by work as the cornerstone of social and political integration (Albano Cordeiro, Limmigration, 1983). Without jobs (up to 40 per cent are workless in the worst cits), it is hard to see the underlying difficulties resolved. There are other issues: the withdrawal of subsidies for local community groups, the decline in community policing (police de proximit), and the narrowness of the education system, itself with restricted means. Tariq Ramadam rightly refers to regressive plans for the curriculum to give a positive view of French colonialism. However, his much harder line on Islamic morality, such as the separation of the sexes, than he expresses to Western audiences, casts doubt on his authority as an unbiased pedagogue (Caroline Fourest, Frre Tariq, 2004). More generally, the French education system suffers from its allegedly meritocratic biases, which favour those able to pursue extended study to enter lite higher education. A major hurdle to get over is written French, a complex language on its own, with a grammar and vocabulary far from the banlieue. There is therefore a whole series of structural reforms to confront, though who has the energy to carry them out remains in doubt. The left as well as the right (in part because most of their leaders have benefited from litist education and backgrounds) has difficulty putting down roots in the rundown estates. Without these links who will guarantee that effective change can come about? Finally, a part of the left has undergone a second childhood in celebrating uncritically the acts of violence, regarding them as a carnival of the oppressed. The principal victims, however, are the neighbours of those who sling Molotov cocktails at their vehicles, smash up public transport, burn down shops and community facilities. There is little mass involvement, and practically no women. One morning on France-Inter a teacher from an cole Maternelle spoke of her grief at the destruction of her school. She ended by saying: Quest-ce que je vais dire aux petits? (What am I going to say to the little ones?) Quite. Andrew Coates The Ditch Blair Project THE vote in early November against Tony Blairs proposal that terror suspects could be held for 90 days marks the beginning of the end for New Labours leader. Although the number of Labour rebel votes has been bigger in the past, and the Tories opportunistically opposed their law-and-order predilections to vote against Blair, this is the first time that Blair has been defeated in the Commons. His bitter ad hominem comments after the vote was announced show that he has taken the defeat very badly, and that he sees it as a personal affront. He must feel that he can no longer trust his MPs, not least when the normally loyal Nick Raynsford and significant numbers of Gordon Browns supporters voted against the 90-day line. Blair is on his way out, but what about Blairism? Writing in the Guardian on 15 September, ultra-Blairite Alan Milburn declared that not only could there be no turning back to Old Labour, but that the only credible prospectus for the Labour Party was in moving further along the path already taken by New Labour. What we heard from the Labour Party conference platform speakers was pure unadulterated Blairism, whether from Blair himself whose only regret was that he had not taken his reforms further from his acolytes, or from the man pretty much universally tipped to be his successor, Gordon Brown, who went out of his way to inform readers of The Times on 18 November that he
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would not be an easy touch for would-be Labour rebels. The enduring image of the conference was the rough-housing of 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, a refugee from Nazi Germany and longstanding CND and Labour Party member, who was pulled from his seat by night-club heavies employed as conference stewards, for the crime of heckling Jack Straw during his speech on Iraq. To add insult to injury, Wolfgang was searched by the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act as were no fewer than 600 other people who happened to be in the vicinity of the conference building, a disgraceful violation of civil liberties, but one perfectly in line with New Labour thinking. Thanks to the wielding of union block votes, the leadership lost the vote on four important matters, a call to legalise secondary industrial action, opposing the Blairites call for more private sector involvement in the NHS, the public sector retirement age, and the rights of councils to obtain funds for public housing on the same basis as housing associations. Minister Alan Johnson, to his shame a former union official, promptly informed the press that the government would blithely ignore the vote on secondary action. The government subsequently backed down over its intention to raise the public sector retiring age from 60 to 65 after various unions threatened a strike, but this only applies to those already in post; new recruits will have to work to 65. And one can be sure that New Labour intends to force as many workers as possible to carry on working up to and indeed beyond they are 65. This is certainly the impression given to me by those involved in geriatric studies to whom I have spoken. New Labour will not be deterred by adverse conference votes, and Blair later told the press that he wishes to cut down the unions influence in the party, now that the constituency party vote is to a fair degree a reservoir of support for Blairism. It is a great illusion to consider that a Brown New Labour government would be anyway different in anything but small details from the Blair ones. Brown made this clear in his speech at the conference, just as he has done on other occasions. Brown and Blair are obviously at daggers drawn, there is a tremendous personality clash between them. But this does not represent anything more than a personal dislike. Certain previous leading right-wing Labour Party figures detested each other with equal intensity, yet agreed on all but minor details; one can think of the bitter feud between Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison. On political matters, it is hard to detect any differences between Blair and Brown. Even a Brown fan like Polly Toynbee had to concede that she doesnt know what the differences are between him and Blair: At the end of the week we are none the wiser about Gordon Browns plans. But heres the consolation: But necessarily circumscribed, speaking in code, he spelled out something more hopeful. (Guardian, 30 September) This is truly pathetic. New Labour is not yet a dictatorship in which, as with Stalins Soviet Union, one had to wait for the tyrants demise to promote even a slightly different course to avoid being consigned to oblivion. Someone with Browns abilities and level of support within the party could if he so wished provide a carefully nuanced critique of aspects of Blairism without getting dismissed. John Prescott publicly showed his disapproval of Blairs latest education reforms. But Brown has never uttered a word of dissent. So what else can we deduce than that he is a down-the-line New Labourite? New Labour faces some real problems. The party leaderships manic determination to impose PFI deals throughout the public sector, to chop public sector jobs, and to ensure that privatised public utilities remain in private hands (whilst baling them out with public money when they hit hard times) will continue to alienate working-class and many middle-class people. Notwithstanding the defeat of the 90-day holding proposal, the New Labourites are hell-bent on restricting civil rights and are quite incapable of recognising the
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degree of the disaster that their friend George W Bush has caused in Iraq. The principled Labour lefts are few in number and have next-to-no influence. Party membership is down to a half of the 1997 level of 400 000, constituency parties are often moribund, party members are often demoralised and inactive, and four million fewer people voted Labour this year than in 1997. The ignominious resignation of David Blunkett has done nothing to help raise Labours credibility. It is possible that some of Blairs more (even by New Labour standards) weirder schemes may be moderated by the threat of revolts, or approved thanks to Tory MPs votes. To expect anything else is unrealistic; indeed, we can expect more of the usual: more boss-friendly policies, more privatisation, more education and NHS reforms, more PFI deals, more public sector job cuts, more useless blather about choice and empowerment, more foreign wars (whenever the USA starts them), more attacks upon civil liberties and no doubt more resignations la Mandelson and Blunkett. It is just possible that the Conservatives, should David Cameron gain the helm, might rally sufficiently to provide a challenge to New Labour in the next general election, especially if the latters support continues to dwindle. But the lack of any real debate during the interminable leadership contest about the candidates political opinions, as opposed to the endless inquisition about their imbibing or otherwise of dubious substances, gives the impression, on the one hand, that the deep divisions amongst Tory MPs, members and voters over Europe and various social issues (to which we have referred before in New Interventions) have only been papered over, and, on the other, that on such questions as privatisation there is little difference between the Tory candidates and Blair. Perhaps the most telling remarks were those when finalists Cameron and David Davis accused each other of being an ersatz Blair. Add to this the fact that the Tory partys membership is ageing and dwindling in size, even an inspiring leader will have problems heading an election campaign, and neither Cameron nor Davis gives the impression of being one. New Labour, under Blair Mark II, seems pretty well tipped to win a fourth term with all that this implies. Paul Flewers Karl Marx: Top Philosopher TO the surprise of everybody notably of Melvin Bragg, who dreamt up the whole idea Karl Marx got the vote of 30 per cent of listeners to the BBC poll of favourite philosopher. Socrates, Aristotle, Hume, Kant & Co were nowhere to be seen. Fifteen years or so after he had been consigned to the dustbin, Marx beat them all. What those worthy listeners meant by this, however, is another question, which remained unasked. What is your favourite philosopher? What is a philosopher, anyway? The criterion for philosophy was always a problem in some ways, the problem for philosophy. Marx was never in the same category. As he wrote: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Part of the trouble with trying to understand Marx is the ignorance of his development. As a result of this, some of his ideas of the earlier writings are confused with those which belong later. Born of Jewish converts to Lutheranism in 1818, Marx started his academic career aiming to be a lawyer. He didnt make it, however, being waylaid by the radical Young Hegelians in Berlin. Always separate from the rest, he came under the influence of Feuerbach, notably his criticism of Hegels religious views. This was not atheism, as usually supposed, the young Marx declaring:

I desired there to be less trifling with the label atheism (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people. (Letter to Ruge, 24 November 1842) In 1844, Marx wrote the manuscripts which, among other things, explained his debt to and criticism of Hegel: Hegels chief error is to conceive the contradiction of appearance as unity in essence, in the idea, while in fact it has something more profound for its essence, namely, an essential contradiction, just as this contradiction of the legislative authority within itself, for example, is merely the contradiction of the political state, and therefore also of civil society itself. His Comments on James Mill were written about the same time: Our mutual thraldom to the object at the beginning of the process is now seen to be in reality the relationship between master and slave, that is merely the crude and frank expression of our essential relationship. Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual relationships. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value. The object cannot be seen as merely an object, but only as a social product. As such it is not merely something which affects the thought in my head or yours, but which is a link between us and everybody else. But this is in contradiction with our human being. Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and the other person and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. In outlining his adherence to what he later called communism, he wrote the following year his Theses on Feuerbach, in which he settled accounts with materialism: The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstaende], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does conceive objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christentums he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of revolutionary, of practical-critical activity. In 1847, he and Engels, with whom he had been in contact since reading the brilliant essay The Critique of Political Economy, joined the League of the Just, converting it into a more or less open organisation, the Communist League. After Engels had written a draft, Marx
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wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. (Party, by the way, had nothing at all to do with the modern meaning of the word, just referring to a trend within society.) The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other workingclass parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. Marx and Engels returned to Germany in 1848-49, and took part in the revolution, taking advantage of the fairly liberal laws of the Rhineland to settle in here. At first, Marx tried to revive the Communist League, but a faction of it was intent on re-starting the revolution, and a split took place. From then on, he worked on his Capital, only interrupting this activity to organise the First International, to organise work for the refugees from the Paris Commune in 1871, and in order to try to keep himself and his family. So to answer the question Who was Karl Marx?, I am afraid it will be necessary to read the vast unfinished manuscript called Capital. And that is where the widespread misapprehension that this is an economics book, or a book about capitalism, comes in. (The word capitalism does not appear in the book or in any draft of it.) Capital is a critique of political economy, and critique has its special meaning of drawing out the contradictions of its exposition, so that they are related to the contradictions of the object. Volume 1 is subtitled The Production-Process of Capital, although the reader of the English translation inspired by Engels would not know this. Anyway, the distance between this Marx and the BBC listeners favourite philosopher is unknown. At this stage of the class struggle, it is best to ignore this question and study the actual Marx. Cyril Smith Germanys General Election AFTER a series of defeats in state elections for Gerhard Schrders so-called RedGreen coalition, culminating in the defeat in the SPDs stronghold of North RhineWestphalia, due to the unpopularity of attacks across the board on working-class people, including pensioners and the unemployed (see Theodor Bergmanns article in New Interventions, Volume 12, no 1, Spring 2005, for the background), Schrder gambled on a desperate stunt in order to rally disillusioned supporters by engineering the loss of a vote of confidence in the Bundestag and going for an early general election. The government voted itself down! Although the government had long insisted that there is no alternative to the reforms it was advancing (we know the sense of reform here by New Labours use of the term), and with the CDUCSU bloc led by Angela Merkel, portrayed as Germanys Mrs Thatcher, threatening to act in the same way only more firmly, in the course of the election campaign, both the SPD and the Greens presented themselves in a more social light than a market one, and succeeded remarkably in pulling back a significant sector of their lost supporters. Merkels campaign went in the other direction due to various blunders, such as the promise of a flat tax. The result was almost a tie between the two blocs, the CDUCSU leading by a slight margin. Schrder tried to hang on as Chancellor by claiming that his party was the largest. Once the delayed Dresden result emerged as a CDU win, the negotiations got underway for a Grand Coalition between the SPD and the CDUCSU bloc. Schrder stepped aside, Merkel became the Chancellor, but the SPD got the majority of cabinet posts. Both main blocs lost votes: the CDUCSU lost 1.8 million of its 2002 result, one mil7

lion going to the Free Democrats, which represented a firmer neo-liberalism. With 9.8 per cent of the vote, the FDP came in third place. Notwithstanding the revival noted above, the SPD lost 2.3 million of its 2002 vote, one million switching to the Linkspartei (Left Party), which won 8.7 per cent of the vote, thus coming in fourth place, in front of the Greens, who lost 0.3 million votes. A majority of German voters rejected the neo-liberal reforms advanced by the right-wing establishment parties, and the SPDGreens supporters had already indicated their displeasure in such policies by abandoning the government parties in the series of state elections that led Schrder to gamble on an early general election. Schrders version of the third way is over. The Grand Coalition will be an unstable entity and will only lead to more tensions between it and the working class. The Left Party can become the beneficiary. The Left Party was cobbled together in the run-up to the general election. Essentially, the Party of Democratic Socialism and WASG (Electoral Alternative: Employment and Social Justice) assembled the Left Party in order not to waste left-wing votes and be sure to pass the five per cent hurdle. While the PDS has been unable to make an impact in the West, due to its originating in the old ruling party of East Germany, the SED, the WASG represents dissident left-wing SPD members and prominent figures from the trade unions, mostly from the middle and lower levels. The WASG sector was headed by ex-SPD leftwinger Oskar Lafontaine. The PDS opened up its lists to the WASG. As yet there is no new party; the arrangement was necessitated by electoral rules. The votes given to the Left Party resulted in 54 seats in the Bundestag, which allows fraktion status, with the consequent financing of secretaries, etc. The mere fact that a left-wing challenge to the establishment parties stood meant that those who might have, in their desperation and anger, voted for the neo-Nazis had an alternative. The old neo-Nazi NPD has been gaining a base in parts of the old East Germany, due to the unemployment caused by the deindustrialisation. (By the way, a few years ago it emerged that the NPD leader in the 1960s, Adolf von Thadden, was a British agent I wonder if the British helped it into being?) However, although the usual suspects from the far left have entered the Left Party, as yet it isnt even an open socialist party, never mind one based on Marxist concepts. The WASG people often fear the term socialist, as, in their view, the discrediting of socialism by the Stalinist set-up means that the working class and its potential allies are not yet ready for it. The PDS big-shots all originated in the old East German system and, being used to holding office and being somebody, they have no concept of class politics and struggle. Wanting to get power and influence, they keep moving rightwards, and often, in the state governments or local authorities, particularly in Berlin, where they ruthlessly carry out cuts together with the SPD, they disillusion their supporters (in Berlin PDS members left to join the WASG and intend to stand against the PDS next year). So the Left Party is only a potential at present. A genuinely open and democratic debate on programme could provide a coherent way forward and avoid careerism and yet more unprincipled wheeler-dealing. Anyway, to sum-up, the German general election ended up with a positive result for the left. Mike Jones Iraq: Constitutional Capers IRAQ now has a constitution. Cobbled together through tortuous negotiations between the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and representatives of Kurdish nationalist and Shia religious parties, and with no popular input whatsoever, it was accepted by a referendum
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held in mid-October. As the voting took place, allegations were made of widespread fraud, but these were subsequently blithely brushed aside by the Iraqi quisling authorities, and the whole episode was portrayed by George W Bush and Tony Blair and their dwindling gang of sycophants as evidence of the success of their objective of democratising the country. A constitution in and of itself can be meaningless. Stalin unveiled a marvellous one in 1936; it proclaimed democracy and freedom. Its authors were sentenced to death in show trials within two years; its honeyed clauses remained a dead letter throughout the days of Stalins reign. This constitution was clearly a fraud, an attempt by the Soviet lite to present itself to the world as a new form of democracy. Many people believed the hype, although many others didnt. This time around, although only a few fools or charlatans viewed the statements by Bush and Blair about the Iraqi constitution as anything other than a cynical effort to justify the occupation of the country, just like the elections that were held earlier this year, various critics of Bushs adventure nonetheless saw something positive in the fact that voting took place and a constitution was endorsed. What of the constitution itself? There are clauses guaranteeing a wide range of human rights. These were included largely at the insistence of the Kurdish parties, whose leaders are canny enough to know that such nods to liberal ideals help to give a good impression in the West, including with some people who are broadly critical of Bushs adventure. Whatever the fine words, the actual conduct of the Kurdish parties is not inspiring, as even though they had a guaranteed overwhelming vote in the earlier elections and constitutional vote, there was considerable thuggery and fraud against non-Kurdish voters, and Arabs and Turkomen have suffered from pogroms at the hands of Kurdish militias. The clauses of a constitution can, as in Stalins day, remain a dead letter. They can also give legal and moral justification for those who profit by them. One can be certain that the clauses guaranteeing the privatisation of the Iraqi economy and the decentralisation of Iraq will be used by elements in the Kurdish and Shia lites to privatise, in the manner of the selling-off of ex-Soviet assets in Russia that is, into their own pockets and those of their rich friends in imperialist countries the Iraqi oil industry, which happens to be situated in the north and south of the country. The clauses concerning trade unions will inevitably be used to restrict the ability of working-class organisations to resist any encroachments by the new Iraqi lites and the occupation forces. And the clauses that guarantee the overarching imposition of Islamic principles a sign that the Shia leaders who insisted upon these arent too well up in the PR business and dont realise that this sort of thing doesnt go down too well with Western liberals will be used to solidify the growing power of the mosque and the mullahs, particularly in the Shia areas, but no doubt in the Sunni ones too. This is a reactionary step, although one suspects that certain elements on the British left may not be too upset by it. The voting in respect of the constitution highlighted the divisions in the country. The Kurdish area voted very highly in favour of the constitution, as the clauses that guarantee the decentralisation of Iraq can be used to back up what is essentially already an autonomous Kurdish statelet in the north of the country. Two of the three largely Sunni provinces overwhelmingly rejected it, whilst somewhat conveniently, seeing that had three provinces rejected it, the constitutional vote would have been nullified Ninevah accepted it. The predominantly Shia provinces all accepted it. The constitutionally-guaranteed decentralisation of Iraq will exacerbate tensions, as each region will look after its own interests at the expense of the others, and the Sunnis, mainly situated in the centre of the country where there is no oil, will be in a disadvantaged position. And Iraq cannot be divided easi9

ly; as the various confessional and national groups are in many areas intermingled, any fragmentation will be very unpleasant. Beyond the issue of the constitution, the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate for the occupiers. The fracas in Basra involving British troops merely demonstrated that large parts of the Shia areas are in the grip of militias that are outwith the control of the central authorities. In the mainly Sunni centre of Iraq, the broad front of resistance fighters have continued with their campaigns against the occupying forces. The triumphalism of the pro-war media over the constitution was dampened by the news of the two-thousandth US military death. The US forces carried out with Kurdish militias a wide range of military operations in the Sunni areas, but these have been singularly unsuccessful in rooting out insurgents. It is not impossible that these operations were less to do with rooting out insurgents and jamming supply lines from Syria than disrupting the lives of the inhabitants and thereby disorganising their opposition to the constitution. As before, the insurgents left a token force in the towns under attack with the bulk moving on to fight elsewhere. Presumably the US commanders consider that the ethnic tensions caused by the use of Kurdish troops in these operations and the discontent provoked amongst the Sunnis who have had their towns and cities attacked can be ignored; a very foolish assumption. The war was brought home to London in July with the suicide bombings that were carried out by home-grown extreme Islamicists. These acts, appalling and indefensible attacks upon ordinary Londoners, were seen by practically everyone except Blair, his coterie of loyal New Labour MPs and pro-war renegade leftists such as Norman Geras as the consequence of Blairs support for Bushs war. The posthumously-released video starring one of the bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan, confirmed the connection. It is true, as government spokesmen and apologists say, that extreme Islamicism predated the attack on the World Trade Center four years back, but its rise was to a large degree a response to Western interference in the Middle East, and its recent revival is directly connected to the war in Iraq. And although one could not have ruled out the possibility of extreme Islamicist terrorism occurring in Western countries, the likelihood of such actions was made immeasurably more probable, inevitable even, by Blairs wholehearted involvement in the US occupation of Iraq. Far from those who recognise such a connection being apologists for the bombings this is what Geras implied, as if, say, a psychologist trying to understand the workings of a criminal mind is an apologist for the crime! those who deny the connection can only view the attacks as the result of irrationality or just plain evil, which explains nothing whatsoever. Before the war, Blair talked of the blood price that would have to be paid. The four bombers and their accomplices were responsible for the killing and injuring of Londoners on 7 July; nevertheless, the scene for this atrocity was set by Blair and his New Labour cronies. It is true that the USA is severely bogged down which does not prevent prominent US figures from clamouring for action, not excluding military attacks, against Syria and Iran (judging by his response to the Iranian presidents stupid comments about Israel, Blair seems to be looking forward to this latter option, another war or two before he goes) and its hope of using Iraq as the main base to establish its new imperium in the Middle East and beyond has been set back a decade or two. No socialist can be unhappy about that. However, working-class politics is not a zero-sum game. No socialist can welcome the rise of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, nor can they be happy about the rise of new lites (whether or not sponsored by the occupation authorities) which can be guaranteed to run their bailiwicks with little regard to the human rights clauses in the constitution, with sorry prospects for working-class and genuinely democratic organisations. One would hope that socialists would look with grave concern at the rise of militant religious
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movements as a political force in Iraq, although one cannot be too sure about that these days. One thing is certain, the longer the occupation continues, the worse the divisions and tensions in Iraq will become. There is one positive thing that socialists can do in this and the other countries whose forces are occupying Iraq campaign for the immediate withdrawal of those forces and the immediate termination of the occupation of Iraq. Paul Flewers Srebrenica: The Tenth Anniversary THE tenth anniversary of the capture of Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb forces, and the consequent deaths of some thousands of Bosnian Muslim able-bodied males, was marked by the international press on 11 July. All the articles I saw gave a figure of 7000 or 8000 Muslims killed, and this has been the case since shortly after the town fell. That is in spite of the general tendency for such figures to fall drastically once the fighting has ended and some sort of normality prevails, with a functioning administration, criminal and forensic investigations, and once the whereabouts of citizens are known. For example, that was the case regarding Kosovo and other issues in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In fact, the portrayal of events regarding Srebrenica has remained static ever since 1995. Of course, it is an accepted fact that some thousands of Bosniak males were executed after capture in an organised manner contrary to international law, and to minimise such a deed is unacceptable. But the events surrounding the crime have been not subject to a genuine independent investigation. The authorities in Serbia proper and the Bosnian Serb ones were for a long time uninterested, even denying the mass killings. On the other hand, the Hague Tribunal is a tool of those who set it up, and its role is to underpin the aims and deeds of its masters. What can we determine? Srebrenica, like a number of towns in Eastern Bosnia near Serbia and in a region populated largely by Serbs, and which the rump Yugoslavia was determined to keep, was mainly inhabited by Muslims. When in mid-1992 Bosnian Serb forces began seizing the territory which they considered either belonged to them or was necessary to hold in a strategic-geographic sense, non-Serbs were removed. All parties to the conflict did the same, but in the Serb case it was termed ethnic cleansing a great PR move. It was, however, purely a case of military necessity, in order to secure the rear. In response to the publicity, the UN declared these Muslim-inhabited towns to be under its protection and they were to be demilitarised. The latter never happened, and Srebrenica was constantly re-supplied. The Muslim commander was the infamous Naser Ori, a sadist who specialised in beheading Serbs and videoing them. In the three years prior to Srebrenicas fall, troops under his command killed over a thousand Serbs in scores of nearby villages. (Diana Johnstone gives a total of 192 Serb villages pillaged and burnt, and over 1300 villagers killed between May 1992 and January 1994, see Fools Crusade, p111.) In spite of detailed evidence being given by the Yugoslav government to the UN, backed up by testimony from ex-UN commander General Morillon, Ori was only charged with seven Serb deaths and wanton destruction of villages by the Hague Tribunal in March 2003 a slap on the wrist. The Independent for 20 June 1995 had a big article with photos of the aftermath of the attack on the Serb village of Visnjice by troops from Srebrenica. The attack on Srebrenica was seen at the time as a retaliation for that raid. The Times for 1 August 1995 reported that only about 200 soldiers and five tanks probed the Srebrenica perimeter, yet many thousands of the inhabitants fled. At the time only The Times asked why, and it did suggest that the flight from Srebrenica was strategic and designed to focus the UN on intervening, in aid of obtaining good PR, sympathy, etc.
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At the time Srebrenica fell, the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division of the Bosnian Muslim army was present, estimated at between 3000 and 4000 men, a force vastly superior to that of the Serb one probing the perimeter. But prior to that, its leadership, including Ori, had been called to Tuzla by the Sarajevo government, and was kept there. In other words, the troops were left to fend for themselves, and the civilians left defenceless. This led to a situation where a few thousand inhabitants approached the Dutch UN troops for protection. They were duly handed over to the Serbian forces, the males being separated out (the Dutch troops acted according to their orders). A 15 000-strong column of able-bodied males left Srebrenica during the night of 11 July, in an attempt to reach the Muslim lines in Tuzla. Some were killed in skirmishes, but others were captured, and out of those it is believed that several thousand were later executed. Although it would be quite understandable that the Serbian forces were looking for Naser Ori and others of his ilk among the prisoners, who were known to have committed atrocities against local Serbs during 1992-95, and that had they been found perhaps some were among the dead they would have suffered summary justice, those executed from among the prisoners were dispatched in an organised fashion, apparently according to a decision taken on 12 July, over the course of three days. Women and children among those who sought protection from the Dutch UN troops were not detained. The 15 000 who set out for Tuzla were able-bodied males too. And in epa, which also fell to Serb forces at this time, no massacres took place, so the charge of genocide is ridiculous. Like the ethnic cleansing term, it is an emotional reference designed to portray an image akin to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. Bosnian Muslims are fellow Slavs in origins. Serb nationalists would often call them traitors for being Serbs who had converted under Ottoman rule. What took place was a war crime whereby POWs and possibly able-bodied male civilians were murdered. The figure of 7000 to 8000 murdered was made public soon after, but it has been queried ever since, not just by apologists for the Bosnian Serb cause. Various people have added up the figures of the registered displaced survivors from Srebrenica, those who were seen in Tuzla but deliberately hidden from the ICRC (Red Cross), and those killed in the fighting, then added the 7000/8000 to that figure, and find that the total then surpasses the population of Srebrenica prior to its fall. In Fools Crusade (which I reviewed in New Interventions, Volume 11, no 4), Diana Johnstone writes that two months after Srebrenicas fall, the ICRC announced that it was trying to obtain information from Bosnian Serb authorities about 3000 persons who witnesses said had been detained, and from Sarajevo authorities about some 5000 individuals who fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached central Bosnia (p114). Johnstone claims that the total of these two figures is the original source of the estimated 8000 murdered Muslims. But most of the 5000 were presumed to have made their way to Bosnian government territory. The Sarajevo authorities, however, would not give the details of those males to the ICRC, which, therefore, still listed them as missing. The Times for 2 August 1995 reported that the ICRC had knowledge of thousands of missing BiH troops from Srebrenica hidden away north of Tuzla, the families being unaware of their whereabouts. Johnstone cites an examination of the ICRC list by a Belgrade University professor, who found 500 people who had died before the fall of Srebrenica as well as 3016 listed as missing who were on the electoral register in 1996 so these people were alive and well, or the elections were bent (pp283-4, note 76). As pointed out above, at the time only The Times, to my knowledge, asked why Srebrenica fell without resistance to a far inferior force, and it did suggest that it was part of a much bigger strategic aim. In the decade since Im not aware of any mainstream publica12

tion returning to examine the matter. However, The Economist for 9 July 2005 has a Special Report on the Srebrenica massacre on the occasion of the tenth anniversary, which does ask awkward questions and gives tentative answers. For example, it states that Radovan Karadi had issued a presidential directive calling for an attack on Srebrenica, designed to reduce its size and make life intolerable for the inhabitants. The Dutch UN force was urged by General Rupert Smith, commander of UN forces, either to stand firmer or to withdraw. The Dutch government rejected both options. The UN couldnt defend the socalled safe areas without more troops, which member states wouldnt send. The Bosnian government made known that it was open to territorial swaps, as part of a final settlement. Srebrenica would be traded for Sarajevo suburbs inhabited by Serbs. The withdrawal of Naser Ori it sees as the most mysterious event, and it talks of the best-informed observers being amazed at the ease with which the town fell, no resistance being given. Both the UN and the Dutch have accepted some blame, but, it is stressed, the UN dissolves into national components in times of acute crisis. Governments dont want their troops to be harmed. How much did Western governments know of what was taking place and when? It asks whether it is too conspiratorial to suggest a link between the usefulness of Srebrenicas fate, and the fact that it was allowed, over five days, to unfold? Then one must ask about the role of the Bosnian government. Talking to the present mayor, Abdurahman Malki, who had been one of the towns defenders at the time and who managed to get through the Serb lines to safety, the author suggests that the responsibility lies as heavily on people like himself his position at the time is left unsaid as it does on the Sarajevo authorities. Whilst placing responsibility at the door of the main culprits the Serbs, the mayor does admit his role. There have been reports elsewhere over the years that the Clinton government told President Izetbegovi that a sizeable massacre would be required before he could get directly involved, and the Economist report describes a speech by Clinton at the cemetery in September 2003, which was remarkably blunt, and politically astute in talking about the political effects of the massacre: It enabled me to secure NATO support for the bombing that led to peace. It was the key to imposing peace. It is doubtful that well get a full picture until it suits the different protagonists, although some Bosnian Muslim politicians and military men have in the years since exposed some of the mythology, and prior to his death Izetbegovi admitted to Bernard Kouchner that the claims regarding Bosnian Serb concentration camps had been inflated, with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. The Bosnian Serb authorities have begun to be more cooperative, both in admitting the killings and locating the grave-sites, though some observers put it down to Paddy Ashdown and his masters firing Serb politicians until he finds some wholl do his bidding. It took the Soviet Union half a century to admit to the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, and to apologise. And it suited Britain to support the lie that the Nazis had been responsible. So although it is not hard to conclude that squalid realpolitik was involved in the Srebrenica events, the governments concerned will keep up with their own portrayal for as long as it is necessary for justifying their current actions. Whether the number of victims was 7000, 8000 or somewhat lower, thousands were massacred as bit-players in a larger political game involving a wide variety of interests. Mike Jones The Attack on Multiculturalism ONE result of the suicide bombings in London on 7 July and the violent clashes in October between Afro-Caribbean and Asian youth in Lozells in Birmingham has been an intensifi13

cation in the debate around the question of multiculturalism. A wide range of voices, many on the political right but also such figures as Trevor Phillips, have been stating that the official policies of multiculturalism have led to the rise of ethnical and religious divisions in Britain, resulting in, amongst other things, ghettoisation and segregation, the riots in Lozells, and the rise in Britain of an overt Muslim identity and Islamicist politics, at the furthermost end of which stood the suicide bombers. One of Phillips critics is the Socialist Workers Partys Hassan Mahamdallie. Writing in the Socialist Review for November, he points out that critics of multiculturalism have a reactionary agenda, stating that Phillips is helping New Labour in its quest of undermining support for multiculturalism in favour of community cohesion, which is nothing more than a New Labour version of the old Alf Garnett mantra, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Were, as Mahamdallie implies, multiculturalism merely a term for people of varying cultural backgrounds and manifestations living alongside each other, socialists would have no problem with it. But this is not what it means, and our SWPer carefully avoids discussing the actual theories and consequences of official multiculturalism. Writing in the Observer on 16 October, the veteran commentator Ambalavaner Sivanandan noted the difference between the two definitions: The first envisages a culturally diverse society. The second not really multiculturalism, but what I term culturalism engenders a culturally divisive society. He states that the latter was a response of the Thatcher government when faced with urban riots against racism in 1981. Money was poured into ethnic projects and strengthening ethnic cultures. This approach has informed government policy ever since. The mainstream critics of multiculturalism are concerned that its disintegrative consequences undermine the existence of a national consensus. Hence their desperate quest to elaborate a new national identity that will hopefully be all-inclusive. The results of their efforts are not impressive. There is little chance that a positive British identity can be built up around the imagery of Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. At most, taking into consideration that these were all military victories, all that one will get from pushing memories of old battles is a nasty, chauvinist attitude which the ruling class does not wish to whip up too much at the present, particularly as they were victories over what are now fellow members of the European Union. Otherwise, history arouses little more than a casual, uninvolved interest or curiosity with most people. Celebrations of things that are openly cultural music, literature, art, theatre, food cannot create a national identity, as ones appreciation or otherwise of them is necessarily subjective, nor can the celebration of science, on the grounds that interest in it is seen as nerdy, and that science is today often seen as the cause of many of the worlds problems. The socialist critique of multiculturalism is based upon different criteria. Multiculturalism promotes the idea that human cultures are discrete, immutable phenomena, and therefore emphasises differences rather than shared experiences. (Ironically, multiculturalism shares the same theoretical basis as the mainstream critique of it, as the latter is based upon the criterion of nationality as a discrete and eternal factor.) It helps to erect barriers between one culturally-defined group and another, as people are continually encouraged to identify themselves along narrow cultural or, to put it more accurately, ethnical/religious lines, obscuring class divisions in society, and encouraging people of each community to look inwards, thus reinforcing conservative social norms. It encourages political corruption as the usually unelected community leaders vie amongst themselves for government and local authority grants and favours, and politicians engage in porkbarrelling to pick up community-based votes. Far from overcoming racial divisions in Britain, official multiculturalism has helped to perpetuate bad feeling both between whites
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and non-whites, and amongst culturally- and ethnically-defined groups as a whole. Multiculturalism did not cause racism, nor is it the cause of the rise of political Islam or of the riots in Lozells. Neither did it cause the social disaggregation that we see all around us. But it has helped to exacerbate racial and religious differences, and thereby helped to weaken working-class consciousness. If socialists consider that a national identity or identities based upon culture are undesirable, then what do we need to put in its place? The answer is obvious: an identity based upon class. This is, in its way, a divisive concept, as it necessarily involves a struggle for ascendancy between the two main classes of society, the working class and the capitalist class. But it is necessary both in the short run to defend the working conditions and living standards of the working class against the attacks of the capitalists, and in the long run as it ultimately leads to the overcoming of all social divisions as a socialist society is constructed. Official multiculturalism, by dividing the working class, militates against the struggle for a socialist society; it should not be defended. Arthur Trusscott

Natural Disasters Social Calamities

The past year has seen several natural disasters, including the tsunami that hit Indonesia last Boxing Day, Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in September, and the earthquake in northern Pakistan and Kashmir in October. Such natural disasters cant be avoided, they are beyond the capability of mankind to prevent and, in the case of earthquakes, even to predict. However, the subsequent social calamities we have seen give all the indications of being greatly accentuated by socially-determined factors that could have been averted. Below are two pieces, an eye-witness account of the disaster in Pakistan by Hasan, a Pakistani socialist who has been translating Capital into Urdu for the Marxist Internet Archive, and an analysis of the political fall-out from Hurricane Katrina by Louis Proyect, a socialist in New York who runs the Marxmail discussion list. I: Eye-Witness in Pakistan I WENT to Baagh, a city 60 miles from Muzaffar Abad, to visit a colleague who lost 130 members of his family. The city is reduced to rubble. A pungent smell of human corpses is felt all around. The people say that at least 50 000 people have died in one city alone. The total number must be well above 200 000. Thousands of trucks with relief goods are arriving here from all over Pakistan. In fact in every street and road common people are collecting these items and then bringing them to the quake-hit areas by themselves. No one believes the government. No common man is contributing to the Presidents Relief Fund. In spite of this huge effort on the part of the public, relief has not reached far-flung areas. Everywhere there are looters who stop the trucks and take away everything. I observed that all those who have survived are haunted by death. Many have died; many are dying every moment. They cannot weep at any death that occurs for tears have dried in
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Hasan and Louis Proyect

their eyes. Many have lost their senses. I met an educated man who has lost many relatives. He would go to the place where dead bodies are kept and lie down among decaying corpses. His friends had to drag him back every time. He recites this poem again and again: Let me move to a place where I have no friend, no, nor any companion No one who is kind; no one who says sympathetic words to me. Let me make a house which has not walls, No neighbour, no one who speaks my language. And if I fall ill, there is no one to comfort me in distress, And if I die, there is no one to shed tears over my corpse! At first, I could not understand this cynical attitude and extreme depression. Soon I realised that all feel humiliated. A bureaucratic system of distributing relief goods has been evolved to reduce the people to a kind of beggary. One has to be either a looter or a beggar in order to get food or clothing. Nobody from the government or army reached them on the first two days. They were busy in Margala Towers, one of the most expensive residential areas in the capital. It is the only building that collapsed in Islamabad because substandard material had been used in its construction. I thank the common people who are trying to reach everyone. Many will squeeze money and prosperity out of the disaster. The bus owners charge as much fares as they will. The truck fares have risen many times. When shopkeepers observe that you are purchasing clothes or blankets for the quake victims, they rob you. And our generals and bureaucrats and ministers, etc, they will be earning millions. Only a tiny part of the aid that is being received from the international community will go the people. Our Lions will receive the Lions share. Only yesterday a brigadier was caught red-handed selling four relief trucks. The government is quick to deny it. What a pity! What shame! These traders of religion; the sellers of human shrouds! Deaths of thousands of human beings will bring them billions of money. This is the tragedy of Pakistan, or perhaps all under-developed countries. This is, as Marx has commented somewhere, like the France of Balzacs novels, or perhaps worse than that. We are carrying the stinking corpse of feudal ages with all its decadence, moral decay, self-indulgence, corruption, depravity on our shoulders. Added to it is all the greed, an intense, inordinate longing for wealth; a covetous desire for money that always comes with bourgeois society. This is the Pakistan with its culture and civilisation which is the most suitable place for dictators to rule. II: Hurricane Katrina: The Political Fallout IF September 2001 signalled an opening bid by US imperialism to impose its hegemonic will on the rest of the world, then September 2005 represents closure for a project that had already been faltering under the impact of Iraqi resistance. Richard Haass, director of policy planning in Bushs State Department and an open defender of imperialism, put it this way recently: Katrina will also have an impact on how citizens of the United States view foreign policy. The enormous problems and costs associated with the hurricane will raise additional questions about the ability of the United States to stay the course in Iraq. The aftermath of the catastrophe will inevitably increase political pressure on President Bush to begin to reduce the US involvement in Iraq and refocus US resources at home, be it on the expensive reconstruction of
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flood-ravaged areas or on improving the countrys capacity to deal with future disasters of this magnitude. Hurricane Katrina exposed a number of fault-lines that are rooted in the very foundations of American capitalist society. The frequent characterisations in the media about New Orleans looking Third World, while somewhat overstated, do get to the heart of whether or not the strategic path of the American bourgeoisie over the past 30 years, which amounts to a dismantling of the New Deal legacy by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, is tenable. In the pages of the Nation magazine, William Greider calls for a new New Deal: Senator Edward Kennedy calls for a Gulf Coast Regional Redevelopment Authority, modeled after FDRs Tennessee Valley Authority, to lead the rebuilding. Former Senator John Edwards proposes a vast new jobs program, patterned after the New Deals Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which the displaced and the poor are hired at living wages to clean up and rebuild their devastated communities. In the week after Katrina, Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie Tubbs Jones swiftly rounded up 88 House co-sponsors, including some from Mississippi and Louisiana, for a similar initiative. The conclusion to this article will propose some alternatives to both Haass overweening, neo-conservative ambitions and to Greiders nostalgia for a welfare state that can never be recreated. Although the mass media has depicted the New Orleans disaster as unprecedented, Mike Davis had already called attention to how devastating such a storm could be on the lives of poor black people in the aftermath of the Hurricane Ivan of 2004: The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmonds version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less mainly Black were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and ageing tenements to face the watery wrath. New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had 10 000 body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the citys poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orleans daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the large group mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods who wanted to evacuate but couldnt. One might expect Davis, an authority on environmental crisis, to turn his attention next to Katrinas origins and impact. This storm is a case study in how capitalism is not a sustainable system. To start with, Katrina like the previous years Ivan was a Category 5 hurricane. Scientists have grown increasingly alarmed about the possibility that such storms might be caused by global warming, since hurricanes are spawned by warm ocean currents. The warmer the water, the more intense is the storm. Although it is difficult to prove that global warming is directly related to the intensity of recent storms, respected scientists believe that the trends are unmistakable. One such scientist, MITs Kerry A Emanuel, formerly sceptical about such ties, is now convinced otherwise:
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While looking at historical records, the atmospheric physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the total power released by storms had drastically increased more than doubling in the Atlantic Ocean in the past 30 years. The evidence was so overwhelming that he could not stand by his earlier statements. I wasnt even looking for it, says Mr Emanuel. The trend was just so big that it stood out like a sore thumb. He withdrew his name from the forthcoming paper that plays down global warmings influence on hurricanes. Then he published a new study in Nature last month, proclaiming the opposite conclusion. I didnt feel comfortable saying what we said a year ago, he says. I think I see a strong global-warming signal. If the devastation wrought on New Orleans does not serve as a wake-up call to the American ruling class, then probably nothing ever will. The combination of a powerful hurricane and inadequately-maintained levees in close proximity to oil refineries has turned a major city into a toxic dump that will take months, if not years, to reclaim. In an exclusive interview with the Independent on 11 September, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste at the Environmental Protection Agency, warned that the city will be unsafe for human habitation for a decade or more. He added that the Bush administration was covering up the danger: Whatever future the city has, the nations lite has few plans for the poor blacks who were the main victims of government ineptitude. While some conspiracy theorists argue that the 17th Street canal levee was deliberately dynamited in order to flood Black neighborhoods and drive the inhabitants out in order to facilitate gentrification, it is far more likely and easier to prove that evacuation and rescue efforts were given short shrift in order to accomplish more or less the same thing. Just as the Bush administration took advantage of 9/11 in order to penetrate and control the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, it and its local allies in New Orleans (including many Black Democrats) seek to recast New Orleans as more economically viable and whiter metropolis. Such plans were already underfoot under African-American Mayor Ray Nagins administration. According to the Los Angeles Times for 6 September, Nagin, who donated thousands of dollars to Bushs campaign in 2000, was behind a controversial plan to replace many public housing projects with single-family homes and businesses. The notorious St Thomas housing projects, for example, were replaced a few years ago by a Wal-Mart. In a gesture that symbolised ruling-class insensitivity to its most vulnerable subjects, President Bushs mother stated: What Im hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. Considering the fact that this is the largest internal migration in the US since the Great Depression, one might hope and expect a militant reaction to this sort of Hooverville mentality. Although hostility and contempt for poor black people crosses party lines, there is a growing perception that the Bush administration with its commitment to small government (except when it comes to military adventures overseas) is simply inadequate to solving the mess in New Orleans or responding to future disasters, like an earthquake in Cali18

fornia or another major terrorist attack. When you get agencies like FEMA and the EPA and hire toadies like Michael Brown to run them, you eliminate the possibility of providing adequate protection against disaster and ensuring a rapid recovery. Ultimately, this involves corporate profits. Hurricane Katrina, with all due respect to conspiracy theorists, was a major blow to big business as well as the housing project denizen. As a seaport, New Orleans was second to none. A vast array of exports made their way overseas, especially farm goods that were sent south on barges on the Mississippi River just as they have for over a century. In addition, oil drilling and refining infrastructure was heavily damaged. It is entirely conceivable that this damage can be repaired and that a New Orleans might be constructed on a new basis consisting of petrochemicals, farm exports and tourism, but it is a challenge to a weakened labour and black movement, as well as the organised left, to take the needs of a vast refugee population into account. Unlike the period following September 2001, society is now far more favourably disposed to challenges to the Bush administration and its liberal accomplices. Despite former President Clintons efforts to soften criticism of Bush through his partnership with the elder Bush in charitable fund-raising around Katrina, there are signs that other mainstream politicians and the press are finally reacting to widespread alienation from the neoconservative agenda and are ready to speak out. In contrast to March 2003, when embedded reporters in Iraq served as virtual public relations operatives for the Pentagon, the media has openly challenged the Bush administration and its hard-core supporters in Murdoch-controlled outlets. The sight of bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans and babies crying for milk has had even the most flag-waving reporter crying out in anguish against government inaction and insensitivity. Anderson Cooper, a CNN host not particularly noted for challenging officialdom, conducted an interview with Louisiana Senator Mary L Landrieu on 1 September. When she began by complimenting both Republican and Democratic politicians for their response to the crisis, Cooper interjected: Excuse me, Senator, Im sorry for interrupting, I havent heard that, because, for the last four days, Ive been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. Cooper clearly reflects a shifting mood in the country. Continuing casualties in Iraq, mounting energy prices, insecurity over a jobless recovery have made the ordinary citizen less receptive to Karl Roves orchestrated media events featuring the president. The New York Times Maureen Dowd, never a great fan of the president to begin with, had this to say on 17 September 2005: In a ruined city still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 per cent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers isnt it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in
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White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background? The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage Ws High Noon snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for Monday Night Football and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr Bush. Dowd dismissed these efforts as a kind of Disney on Parade in the title of her op-ed piece. All in all, there is the ineluctable sense that the media is beginning to conclude that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Ultimately, the Maureen Dowds and William Greiders of the USA pin their hopes on an ouster of the Republican Party in 2008 and a restoration of honest government and a willingness to treat social ills with something more than private charity. They have fond memories of New Deal traditions extending through to Lyndon Johnsons Great Society. Realistically, there is about as much chance of restoring the welfare state as there is in time travel. The period they look back nostalgically upon owed more to the fortuitous circumstances enjoyed by the American capitalist economy than the beneficence of its rulers. The Second World War broke the back of the Great Depression through military spending and postwar prosperity. Programmes like the GI Bill, subsidised housing and Medicare feasibly rested on the USAs hegemonic role in the global economy. With a recovered Europe and Japan following the 1960s and with newer challenges from China and India, it is no longer possible to sustain imperialism abroad and the welfare state at home. The meanness of the Bush administration is a necessary outcome of fierce global competition. If you are forced by the logic of capital accumulation to drive down wages and cut expenses, the inevitable outcome is politicians like Bush. When the Democrats are forced by the very same iron laws to support neo-liberal trade bills and assaults on Social Security, voters will most often back the Republicans rather than a cheap imitation. As these contradictions deepen, more and more people will be open once again to the socialist alternative. Even the New York Times resorted almost inexplicably to featuring a story that had originally appeared in Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization, about the difficulties involved with evacuating New Orleans. On 10 September, Gardiner Harris reported: Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said. Harris relied heavily on an account that was filed by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky in the Socialist Worker, and that was widely distributed on the Internet. Among other things, Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote: We walked to the police command center at Harrahs on Canal Street and were told the same thing that we were on our own, and no, they didnt have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldnt stay. Regardless,
20

we began to settle in and set up camp. Their report and many others out of New Orleans describe in sorry detail how necessary it was for ordinary citizens to act on their own behalf in the face of government indifference or worse armed hostility from the cops. How much better it would be if the government was made up of ordinary working people who knew what it meant for a baby not to have milk to drink or for an old person in a nursing home to be abandoned to flood waters. Such a government not only exists, it offered to send physicians to the USA in a generous offer to help victims of Katrina that Bush turned down. We speak of revolutionary Cuba, of course, a nation that despite rationing and hardships of one sort or another at least knows how to protect its citizens against the ravages of a Category 5 hurricane. When Mike Davis was calling attention to the indifference of the authorities in New Orleans following Hurricane Ivans onslaught in 2004, Cuban officials behaved much differently in the face of that same storm. In a report by Marjorie Cohn that was widely circulated on the Internet, we learn how Cuba rose to the occasion: Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20 000 houses, no one died. What is Cuban President Fidel Castros secret? According to Dr Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go. Cubas leaders go on TV and take charge, said Valdes. Contrast this with George W Bushs reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, nothing about the presidents demeanor yesterday which seemed casual to the point of carelessness suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis. Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable in Cuba, Valdes said. Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin. They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, so that people arent reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff, Valdes observed. Perhaps the jibes about the USA looking like a Third World country might have to be qualified in light of the Cuban example. Although it is conventionally understood as a developing country, Cuba demonstrates that a commitment to social need rather than private profit can go a long way, even if the country is not a major global economic power like the USA. Furthermore, if penurious Cuba can do so well in such a crisis situation, what would a wealthy nation like the USA be able to accomplish? These will not simply be rhetorical questions as the economic and environmental contradictions of late capitalism deepen as senseless warfare is pursued in far-off lands.

21

A Hypocritical Charade
Why I Oppose Holocaust Memorial Day and StateSanctioned Anti-Racism
HOW, many readers may ask, can you oppose something like a day to commemorate the Holocaust? Surely its a no-brainer. No one, except the fascist fringe, supports the Holocaust. How then can you oppose a day remembering the victims of the most terrible crimes in history? How indeed. As someone who has been active in the anti-fascist and anti-racist movement for 35 years, I dont need convincing that the Holocaust, the extermination of two-thirds of Europes Jewry, was a terrible evil. What I cannot and will not accept is the idea that we should support a state-sponsored commemoration of the Holocaust. What were the origins of Holocaust Memorial Day? The idea had been around for some time, but the Tories, whose approach to racism has always lacked a certain sophistication, werent interested. New Labour, however, one of whose defining political characteristics was support for Zionism and the Israeli state, had a different approach to racism, just as they had a different approach to the welfare state. In essence they sought to integrate Black and Asian communities in Britain. The old need to divide and rule between different sections of the working class no longer held. They sought to create a model of Britishness which included all colours and religions. Hence they set up the Steven Lawrence Inquiry and introduced specific offences of racially-aggravated assault. Yet at the same time, New Labour outbid and outdid the Tories in anything they had done in respect to the new outsiders, refugees and asylum seekers. This is the context of Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a state-sponsored anti-racist event, whose aim is to cover that state in the glories of anti-racism, even whilst it perpetrates yet further racist outrages of its own. It is an anti-racism which seeks to divorce racism and imperialism by depoliticising the Holocaust. On 10 June 1999, in reply to a question from Andrew Dismore MP, Tony Blair said: I am determined to ensure that the horrendous crimes against humanity committed during the Holocaust are never forgotten. This, of course, is the same Blair who took Britain into a genocidal war against Iraq, and who has maintained an attitude of complete hostility and contempt to asylum seekers, all of whom in his eyes are bogus. The same New Labour administration which has introduced one Asylum and Immigration Act after another, which has jailed refugee children in prisons, locked up asylum seekers indefinitely and all but eliminated legal aid for asylum seekers, which has virtually abolished the appeal system and introduced vouchers for asylum seekers before deciding to abolish state benefits altogether, is nonetheless the midwife of Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a government which has no compunction about seizing as hostages children and putting them into care in order to persuade them to go back to a life of terror, torture and death, and which has deprived these children of all education in order to prevent asylum seekers and local communities from interacting. This is the government of the Holocaust Memorial Day. Five years is an awfully long time in politics, but on 30 January 2000 I had a letter printed in the Observer criticising the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day. I wrote:

Tony Greenstein

22

The hypocrisy of Tony Blair et al, fresh from introducing an Asylum Act which would have condemned even more Jewish refugees to death in the camps, beggars belief. Those who sat with folded arms as the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda proceeded apace, who recognised the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and who even now are arming Zimbabwean mercenaries in the Congo, should refrain from capitalising upon the memories of the Holocaust. The dead of Auschwitz have no need of New Labours spin doctors. What is even more remarkable is that this letter was written in support of Nick Cohen, who had just written an article criticising Holocaust Memorial Day. One can assume that, as with many things, Cohen has now changed his views on Holocaust Memorial Day. No example better typifies the utter hypocrisy and cant of those who parade their consciences on Holocaust Memorial Day than that of the newly-anointed saint, Robin Cook. Back in 1997, Cook was in the throes of his ethical foreign policy, and nothing demonstrated this policy better than his trip around Europe. On Thursday, 27 November 1997, Cook visited the Czech Republic and told its then President, Vclav Havel, that Britain is not a soft touch for those [Czech Gypsies] who claim asylum on the basis of false persecution. Gypsies, it might be recalled, have a long history of false persecution, as the half a million who died in the Nazi extermination camps could no doubt testify to (Cook Warns Off Gypsies, Guardian, 28 November 1997). Having warmed to his task, our saint made his way to Warsaw. Head bowed against a bitter wind, Saint Robin paid tribute to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, at the Umschlagplatz, from where 300 000 inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to these same extermination camps. The best way of making sure it never happens again in Europe, he intoned, is to make sure we remember what did happen. (Pledge To Put Record Straight, Guardian, 29 November 1997) On 27 January 2001, New Labour declared the Holocaust Memorial Day. The previous year, no less than 44 governments sent delegations to Stockholm, Sweden, to attend the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. At the conclusion of the conference, the heads of delegations unanimously agreed to sign a Declaration. In response to this, the government adopted a Holocaust Memorial Day and proposed seven principles, none of which are exceptional, the third of which states: We must make sure that future generations understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences. And it is this which Blair and the other 43 governments are determined should not happen. If one thing can be predicted with certainty in this uncertain world, it is that the 44 governments are not going to torture themselves over comparisons with the immigration policies of Western governments between 1933 and 1939. Who remembers the 1938 Evian Conference, when the leaders of 31 countries gathered together in this French spa town to try to do something for the Jewish refugees. This was a conference long on platitudes, but, apart from the offer by the Dominican Republic of 100 000 immigration certificates, virtually nothing tangible was achieved. As Christopher Sykes, the rabidly pro-Zionist British historian, noted in his Crossroads to Israel (1973): Official observers from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy looked on with pleased contempt. But the representatives of the fascist governments were not the only ones feeling pleased. There are no greater supporters of Holocaust Memorial Day than the supporters of Zionism. The Holocaust has become one of the main ideological weapons of supporters of the Zionist state. Israel is apparently the only guarantee against such an occurrence. The Holocaust is proof that the Jews needed a state. The reparations which the Zionist move23

ment and its various corrupt subsidiaries have extorted and extracted from different governments and industries but not American ones! on the back of the Holocaust make it an industry they would be loath to lose. So much so that they have repeatedly inflated the number of Holocaust survivors. In May 1999, the State Department estimated there were some 70 000 to 90 000 former slave labourers still alive, of whom between 14 000 and 18 000 were Jewish. Yet when claims were made for reparations, the Holocaust Industry demanded compensation for 135 000 Jewish slave labourers. As Professor Norman Finkelstein observes, to believe the Holocaust industry, more former Jewish slave labourers are alive today than a half-century ago (Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, pp12627). Yet, as Sykes observed in his book: The Zionists were not worried by its [Evians] failure From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference The fact is that what was attempted at Evian was in no sense congenial to the spirit of Zionism If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need, then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Zionism within Palestine would both have been relaxed As things stood after Evian the outlook for the Jews was black throughout the world except for the bright spot of Palestine and the speck of Dominica. The Zionist leaders preferred that it should remain that way If their [the Zionist leaderships] policy entailed suffering, then that was the price that had to be paid for the rescue of the Jewish soul. There is enormous amounts of evidence to support the argument that the Zionists were not only indifferent but actively hostile to any attempt to rescue the Jews of Europe which didnt involve emigration to Palestine. In the UK and the USA, they actively opposed lowering the immigration barriers, and accused those who did try to do so of undermining the war effort. There is one lesson that Blair, New Labour and the Zionist movement will never take to heart from the Holocaust. That immigration controls are the handmaiden of genocide and torture. That those who erected the immigration barriers that barred Europes Jews from fleeing are as culpable as someone who stands outside a burning house and uses a shotgun to fire at those trying to escape. Maybe he is not the arsonist, maybe he would like to put the fire out, but in preventing the victims of the fire from escaping, he too is guilty of being an accessory after the fact. There are some people who will say, yes, we agree with everything you have written, but surely a Holocaust Memorial Day will not do any harm. Indeed it might do some good by raising awareness. I disagree. The purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day is not to prevent the reoccurrence of racism and fascism. The whole project of New Labour and their Washington masters is to create repressive authoritarian states which safeguard the interests of the West. The effect of Holocaust Memorial Day is to make New Labour and the British state smell of roses. It actually undermines the anti-racist struggle by painting our enemies in pastel colours of light and sweet reason. The mock tears that Blair & Co weep on Holocaust Day, the messages from the Queen and other establishment flunkeys, act to reinforce the very state that targets and pillories as terrorists those who support freedom elsewhere. If there is one lesson that the Holocaust serves, it is of the dangers of racism and fascism. It is a lesson of Western culpability, of the lengths to which capitalism will go in or24

der to preserve itself. We have seen throughout the postwar era how the United States, in its mission to rid the continent of communism, had no hesitation in destabilising democratic regimes and installing genocidal military juntas in South America. Pinochet, Viola, Stroessner are just some of the names of these home-grown, US-supported dictators. And to whom did the Simon Wiesenthal Centre make its Humanitarian of the Year Award? No less than Ronald Reagans Secretary of State and author of their anti-Sandinista strategy in Central America, Jeanne Kirkpatrick! And when the professional Holocaust Industry politician Elie Wiesel, who lectures for $20 000 a time, was asked privately to pressurise Israel into not selling arms to the Rios Mont junta in Guatemala, which butchered over 100 000 Mayan Indians, he refused. These are the real lessons of the Holocaust for our rulers: to cover themselves in glory whilst perpetrating the same old trade in death (see Holocaust Industry, p146). The Zionist movement argues that the Holocaust is unique. That comparisons cannot be drawn. In one sense, of course, this is understandable. After all, if we draw comparisons some might conclude that there isnt a great deal of difference between those who dealt in the politics of blood and soil in the 1930s and those settler Rabbis who believe today that Jewish blood is precious but non-Jewish blood can be spilt with impunity, that Jewish life is worth somewhat more than their non-Jewish equivalents. That those who accord rights depending on the religion you are born into are little different from those who argued for similar ideas a half-century ago. But there is a stronger reason than this. The Holocaust is one of the principal ideological weapons of the Zionist movement and their imperialist backers. To draw too many comparisons will weaken the effect. Which is why, although there are token references to gays and Gypsies, the main focus of Holocaust Memorial Day is on the Jewish extermination. If those who initiated and supported the establishment of a Holocaust Memorial Day were at all honest, then even the name of the day would have been different Genocide Day might be one alternative. How else to explain that up to 10 million Africans died in the 20 years to 1911 in the Belgian Congo? Or the 14-plus millions who died in the slave trade? To say nothing of more recent acts of genocide such as the US-sponsored one in East Timor, or the death of some two million Cambodians by the US-supported Pol Pot regime, or the million-plus Rwandans who died as a consequence of French and Belgian imperialism. But a Genocide Day would also have to examine the role of imperialism, and Holocaust or no Holocaust, that is a step too far.

Zionism: A Major Obstacle

IN this article, I would like to explain why Zionism, as a political ideology, is a major obstacle to the resolution of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict. Let me stress that I am concerned here with Zionist ideology rather than with the practice of the Zionist project. That the latter is an absolute obstacle to the resolution of the conflict is self-evident: it is a colonisatory project, an implantation of settlers, which has necessarily been implemented at the expense of the mass of indigenous people and the by denial of their national rights. Indeed, the Zionist project is the root cause of the con25

Mosh Machover

flict.

Zionist ideology is clearly unacceptable from the perspective of the Palestinian Arab people. But here I propose to consider the case against Zionism from a somewhat less obvious perspective that of the settler nation. How May the Conflict Be Resolved? Let us first ask ourselves what we mean by resolution of the conflict. I have argued elsewhere1 that the Zionist colonisation of Palestine unlike the colonisation of southern Africa, for example was not based on exploiting the labour power of the indigenous people, but has aimed, quite consciously and deliberately, at their elimination.2 In several other settler states belonging to the same species of colonisation, the settlers have succeeded in eliminating the entire indigenous population or in reducing it to small and relatively insignificant remnants. The conflict between colonisers and colonised ended with the overwhelming and virtually total victory of the former, and was in this sense resolved. Such an outcome is very unlikely in the case of the Israeli settler state. To be sure, the historical record suggests that Israels Zionist leaders will exploit any opportunity (sheat kosher in Zionist parlance) for further territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing. Moreover, the more daring among them will attempt actively to create such opportunities. But however far this process may realistically be pushed, Israel will always find itself surrounded by Arabs, by the Arab nation, of which the Palestinian Arab people is a constituent part.3 In the end, the conflict in this case can only be resolved by accommodating the two national groups directly involved: the Palestinian Arabs and the Hebrews.4 And no accommodation can be a true resolution unless it is based on equality of group (collective) rights between these two national groups (as well as equality of individual rights to all). This is a minimal necessary condition because its absence means, by definition, that one of these groups will be underprivileged and oppressed. National oppression inexorably leads to national struggle the very opposite of resolution. Note that I am not specifying any state-institutional framework for an equality-based resolution. In principle, many alternative frameworks are possible. I do not wish to enter here into the controversy between those who support the so-called two-state solution and those who advocate a single secular state.5 In my opinion, this controversy, in the way it is actually conducted, is a diversion. Given the present balance of power, no true resolution is possible in the short or medium term. In these circumstances, a two-state settlement is bound to be a travesty: a nominally independent Palestinian state that is in reality a disconnected set of Indian Reservations policed by corrupt lites acting as proxies for a
1. 2. 3. 4. See my article Is it Apartheid?, November 2004; posted in various web-sites, for example, http://www.pamolson.org/Art Apartheid.htm. In Zionist parlance, this ethnic cleansing is referred to as transfer. On its planning and early stages, see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 18821948, Washington, 1992. This is quite different from the case of, say, the USA, which was able to fulfil its manifest destiny by occupying and ethnically cleansing the whole space from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The latter are commonly called Israeli Jews. I have long preferred the term Hebrews, because Jew is an ambiguous term, which can denote religious rather than (or as well as) ethnic affiliation. On the other hand, the Hebrew nation is most clearly characterised by its use of the Hebrew language as a common means of everyday and cultural discourse. For a discussion of the ideology coded by the term secular in the slogan Secular Democratic Palestine, see below. 26

5.

dominant Israel a regional hegemonic nuclear super-power, in its turn a local hatchetman for the global hyper-power. A one-state set-up will be no better: an extension of direct military occupation and subjugation. The Regional Context But no balance of power lasts forever. A proper resolution will become possible in the longer term, given a radical socio-political transformation of the Arab world and some form of unification of the Arab nation (of which the Palestinian Arab people is a component). In such circumstances, a resolution of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict will necessarily be embedded in a regional constellation, a confederation including the entire Arab East. For this reason it is, in my opinion, an error to think of a resolution of the conflict within a framework confined to the borders of Palestine/Israel (whether as a single state or divided into two states) in isolation from its regional context. The Impossible as Enemy of the Difficult Let me return to the main theme: an accommodation of the two national entities, based on equality of collective national rights. We must not underestimate the enormous difficulty of such an accommodation. The Hebrew nation will have to give up its longstanding dominance and the privileges that go with it. That this is just doesnt make it easy. Indeed, it can only become realistic given a balance of power very different from the present one. But precisely in such circumstances it will be very difficult for the Palestinian Arabs to accept that the Hebrew nation, created in the Palestinian homeland as a consequence of Zionist colonisation, ought to be accommodated and granted equal national rights. The great difficulty that this represents for mainstream Palestinian nationalism is made clear by arguments put forward by Fateh (the dominant component of the PLO led by the late Yasir Arafat) as far back as 1970, advocating its call for a Secular Democratic Palestine. By that time, mainstream Palestinian nationalism was coming to terms with the painful realisation that the Israelis were there to stay, and had to be accommodated in a future free Palestine. But it denied the highly inconvenient fact that Zionist colonisation had given birth to a new Hebrew nation a fact that is indeed an enormously complicating factor in the conflict. The adjective secular in the formula Secular Democratic Palestine encoded this denial. In a programmatic article unsigned, but to my certain knowledge written by Nabil Shaath (then one of the main Fateh ideologues and now a senior minister in the Palestinian Authority) Fateh explicitly rejected the idea of a binational Palestine as a misconception, the call for a non-sectarian Palestine should not be confused with a bi-national state. It argued that in the reality of Palestine the term binational and the ArabJewish dichotomy [are] meaningless, or at best quite dubious. Moreover, the article stresses that the liberated Palestine will be part of the Arab Homeland, and will not be another alien state within it; and looks forward to the eventual unity of Palestine with other Arab states.6 In the programmatic formula Secular Democratic Palestine proposed at that time by Fateh, the adjective secular was inserted not in opposition to theocratic (a theocratic democratic state is in any case a nonsensical concept), but in opposition to bi-national. The intention was to present the PalestinianIsraeli conflict in religious terms, and to propose a future Palestine in which Jews would have individual equality and freedom of religious worship in a country whose nationality would be Arab.
6. Towards the Democratic Palestine, Fateh (English-language newspaper published by the Information Office of the Palestine Liberation Movement), Volume 2, no 2, 19 January 1970. My emphasis. 27

Yet without accepting the fact that a Hebrew nation exists, and without according it national rights equal to those of the Palestinian Arab people, the conflict cannot be resolved. Let me repeat: inequality is oppression, the opposite of resolution. It will be the delicate task of the most progressive political forces among the Palestinians (and in the region as a whole) to persuade the Palestinian masses of this.7 It is at this point that Zionist ideology constitutes a major obstacle. For Zionism like a father denying the existence of his unwanted child denies the existence of a Hebrew nation, newly created in Palestine/Israel. It shares this denial with mainstream Palestinian nationalism (as illustrated by the programmatic article quoted above), but for a very different reason. According to Zionist ideology, all the Jews around the world constitute a single nation. The true homeland of every Jew is not the country in which he or she may have been born and in which his or her family may have resided for generations. The homeland of this alleged nation is the Biblical Land of Israel, over which it has an ancient inalienable indeed God-given national right. Non-Jews living in the Jewish homeland are mere foreign interlopers. Zionist colonisation is justified as the return to the homeland a right possessed by Jews, but denied to those foreign interlopers, the Palestinian refugees, who have been legitimately evicted from the Jewish homeland. There is no Hebrew nation, but merely members of the world-wide Jewish nation who have already returned to their homeland, an advance guard of their brethren in the Diaspora, who have a right indeed a sacred duty to follow the vanguard and be ingathered in the Land of Israel. Now, my argument is quite simple. In an eventual accommodation, in the framework of a resolution of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, the Hebrew nation can legitimately claim acceptance as an actually existing nation. The only justification of this difficult claim is the pragmatic one, that otherwise the conflict cannot be resolved. But it cannot possibly make and justify this claim while it is in thrall to an ideology that denies its own national existence and instead claims a right over the whole Land of Israel on behalf of an alleged world-wide nation. No accommodation, no resolution, will be possible so long as Israelis subscribe to a claim that demands from the Palestinians (and from the Arab nation as a whole) not only retroactive legitimisation of past Zionist colonisation, but, in effect, an acceptance of an alleged continuing right to future further ingathering which implies further colonisation and expansion. Such an impossible claim precludes a true resolution of the conflict.

Two Essays on Karl Marx

I: Karl Marx and Religion IT is vital to understand the meaning of Marx to grasp his ideas in relation to his development. In this connection, his conception of religion is one of the most important aspects of his notions. As early as 1842, he wrote: I desired there to be less trifling with the label atheism (which reminds one of
7. The Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), the most left-wing faction of the PLO, has indeed gone a long way towards accepting this idea. 28

Cyril Smith

children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content philosophy should be brought to the people. (Letter to Ruge, 24 November 1842) It was quite easy to deal with religion by just being against it, but that was not good enough. Everybody knows that Marx wrote about religion being the opium of the people, so we shall look at the entire passage from which this comes. The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopdic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Introduction, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right) Everybody thinks that Marx was saying that religion was dope manufactured by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. The real Marx, however, was concerned with much more weighty problems. Among other things, he was thinking about how an abstract human being could exist. He concludes that one could not. Man is the world of man, state, society, and the conception of God was a necessary conception in an inverted world. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. Meanwhile we should pay attention to it. The Introduction to Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right contains Marxs first mention of the proletariat. His views now took on more critical political-economic ideas, following Engels brilliant essay, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which Marx was pleased to publish in the Deutsch-Franzsiche Jahrbcher. (The trouble with Engels views on political economy was that this was the limit of his work. See Friedrich Engels and Marxs Critique of Political Economy, Capital and Class, no 62.) Reading a French translation of James Mills Elements of Political Economy, Marx takes up Mills banal definition of money as the medium of exchange: Man becomes the poorer as man, that is, separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes. Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to men. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. Marx is certain that his view of money as the mediator is necessary to comprehend the situation of the proletariat. Any easy rejection of this view would be as useless as atheism.
29

The Paris Manuscripts, penned in 1844, returns to this theme: Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man a question which implies admission of the unreality of nature and of man has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as a negation of God, has no longer any meaning, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3, p306) At this time, in 1843-44, Marx thought of himself as a follower of Feuerbach. But even this thinker, beloved of atheists, was not one of them. His target was not so much religion but theology, the formal study of God, the worst enemy of the awakened spirit. But, as Marx was to realise, Feuerbach was concerned to awaken man, but as an isolated individual. Sometime in 1845, Marx scribbled 11 theses on Feuerbach, and Theses 3, 4 and 6 particularly turn on the questions of religion. Thesis 4: Feuerbach starts off from the fact of religious estrangement [Selbstentfremdung], of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [wetliche] one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated [vernichtet] theoretically and practically. Thesis 6: Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = human nature]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged: 1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract isolated human individual. 2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as species, as an inner dumb generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way. Thesis 7: Feuerbach consequently does not see that the religious sentiment is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form. Marx, in these brief summaries, has thus cleared out of the way Feuerbachs treatment of the human individual. His awakening of man is seen to be as a social atom, and not what Marx is striving for. Let us jump now to Marxs chief work, which took much more than his lifetime to complete. (Its completion, by the proletarian revolution, is not yet achieved!) We begin with a quote from the Grundrisse, the first attempt at a critique of political economy as a
30

whole: An example in the religious sphere is Christ the mediator between God and man mere instrument of circulation between them becomes their unity, God-man, and as such becomes more important than God; the saints more important than Christ; the priests more important than the saints. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 29, p257) This return to our familiar theme is part of Marxs exposition of his explanation of the central importance of money. But his treatment of this notion in Capital is not the same as that we have seen in the other extracts: The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, that is, the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possesses a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development. (Capital, p173) Here, Marx brings together his views on religion and his historical view of the communist revolution and the growth of production generally. He relates religion to the effort of attempting to unite human beings without really understanding the sweeping historical forces which have separated them. One more quotation, from a piece of Capital, the so-called Sixth Chapter, omitted from Volume 1, maintains this historical outlook: This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. (Capital, p990) Here, Marx has set out his conception of religion in the light of his notion of the stages of history as a whole. First, humans see themselves as a local community, with their local gods. Then, in the era of money and exploitation, God Almighty rules over all. Finally, there is no use for Him, as humans freely govern their own lives. II: Marx and Materialism Today, increasing numbers of people are struck by the suspicion that Marx was not the man we all thought, but very few are aware how far the Marxist picture was from the reality. Many think that Marx may be judged by the comprehensiveness of his complete works. Not many are conscious that his difficulty of finishing any one of his projects was a sign of his essential incompleteness of his overall task: the construction of communism. Unlike his devoted followers, he was not prepared to let revolutionary impatience stand in the way of clarity. Let us begin with Lenin, with the early work, What the Friends of the People Are. Lenin writes:
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We do not say to the world, Marx wrote as far back as 1843, and he fulfilled this programme to the letter, we do not say to the world: Cease struggling, your whole struggle is senseless. All we do is to provide it with a true slogan of struggle. That is what Lenin wrote in 1893, and he meant it all his life. But this is what Marx wrote in 1843: We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. Lenin did not intend to distort the words of Marx, but was incapable of imagining such a humanist thought possible for the founder of Marxism. So here we have two programmes, the programmes of Marx and Lenin: on the one side, Marxism, on the other, the figure of Karl Marx. The former holds that Marxism is a certainty, an unlimited collection of truth, or as Lenin, echoing Plekhanov, put it, a complete, integral world outlook, cast from a single sheet of steel. To the latter, on the contrary, it is an organic growth. In 1843, Marx was just beginning. As he told Karl Kautsky a lifetime later, he couldnt publish his collected works, because they had not been written. (That was in 1882.) In 1843, he had not yet developed his notions of class struggle, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of value. But already the notion was present of a truly human world. At this stage he thought of himself as a Feuerbachian. But Feuerbach was some kind of materialist. For such thinkers, the world existed, and we had to make our thoughts conform to it, and by thought, the materialists mean no more than activity of a single, isolated human head. But Marx, while partially agreeing with Feuerbach in his criticism of Hegel, has nothing to do with him in his conception of society. His discoveries of the proletariat and of communism are unaffected by Feuerbach. When he writes his Comments on James Mill of 1844, he is quite clearly not a materialist: If then our mutual thraldom to the object at the beginning of the process is now seen to be in reality the relationship between master and slave, that is merely the crude and frank expression of our essential relationship. Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual relationships. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value. The object cannot be seen as merely an object, but only as a social product. As such it is not merely something which affects the thought in my head or yours, but which is a link between us and everybody else. But this is in contradiction with our human being: Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and the other person and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love.

32

When he came in 1845 to write his Theses on Feuerbach, he could launch an attack on materialism. The very first Thesis begins: The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstaende], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does conceive objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christentums he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of revolutionary, of practical-critical activity. And Thesis 3 returns to the subject: The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveraenderung] can be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice. The point is that Marx is not a philosopher. He is a critic of philosophy. That does not mean that he disagrees with this or that philosophy, but that he takes the questions that philosophy asks and shows that the answers are to be found by relating the questions to the contradictions of society. Marx had learned from Hegel one lesson which he never forgot: putting in front of society a slogan, a formula, a set of sectarian principles with which to make the world correspond is not the point. The social formation Marx strove for all his life was a human society, which he fought to release. While he respected the work of Fourier and Owen, he saw it as foreshadowing the communism that arose from the sufferings of the proletariat itself. In 1859, Marx published Part One of Critique of Political Economy. (There was no Part Two; Capital, Volume 1 was published eight years later.) The Preface to the Critique, which Marx used to summarise his views, is noteworthy, among other reasons, for its complete failure to mention the topics we have been talking about. Instead, he refers to the the social production of the being, and contains the celebrated and much misunderstood account of relations of production relations and productive forces. I would only like to point out that the whole of this passage ends with the statement that the pre-history of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. The distinction between human productive forces and social relations of production, the key point in Marxs whole outlook, is ignored by the Marxists. They simply cannot see what all the fuss is about. Communism, which turns on the reunification of these two, is beyond them. Let us jump a few decades, to 1873. In the Afterword [Nachwort] which he wrote to the second edition of Capital, Marx felt it necessary to reply to a reviewer of the first edition on the question of the method of the book and its relationship to that of Hegel:
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My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but the direct opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of the Idea, is the creator of the actual, and the actual is only the external appearance of the idea. With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material reflected and translated in the mind of man. And he goes on to contrast the dialectical method and its role in history in Hegels case and in his own. Marxist translators have gone to great lengths to make this look like materialism. The best to date is Penguin translation, due to Ben Fowkes: With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. The Untermann translation is much more direct: With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. Eden and Cedar Paul give the following: In my view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material since it has been transposed and translated inside the human head. Marxs original is as follows: Bei mir ist umgekehrt das Idealle nichts anders als das in Menschenkopf ungesetzte und bersetzte Materialle. What these people miss is the meaning of Hegel, and without that there was no possibility of recognising the message of Marx. In everybody up to and including Kant, the pair form and matter confront each other, and there is no way of proceeding from one to the other. Hegel was the first person to break away from this, and Marx does not go back on it. For the translators of Capital, being materialists, the Kantian standpoint is the most advanced they can reach. (Kant himself was able to see, dimly, the contradictions in this. From then on, the attitude of most thinkers was pre-Kantian.) Marx is inverting Hegel without returning to the earlier point of view. Hegels Mind (or Spirit [Geist]) is far from that of the Marxists. His meaning comprises at least as much as his understanding of world, and Marxs use of this word never ignores that of Hegel. What eludes Hegels grasp is that with the victory of the proletariat the revelation of the meaning of the history places the true significance of Mind in the heads of the individuals of the whole of society. This appears to be a strange time to rediscover the true heritage of Marx. Bush and Blair, along with their counterparts Bin Laden and Putin, seem to have things their own way. How can anyone imagine that human life could be so different? Well, the works of Karl Marx, if we decide to read them as they were written, can indicate a direction we might take.

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Trotsky and the Struggles of Colonial Peoples

The Relevance of the Theory of Permanent Revolution
THIS is a thoroughly revised and considerably expanded version of a paper bearing the same title I had prepared for the international symposium entitled Leon Trotzki 18791940/1990. Kritiker und Verteidiger der Sowjetgesellschaft, held on 26-29 March 1990 in Wuppertal in Germany. It was conceived not only as an academic contribution but also, and above all, as a discussion document and a political critique of those ostensible Trotskyists such as the Workers Power group in Britain or Guillermo Loras Partido Obrero Revolucionario in Bolivia which still claimed adherence to the stagist, class-collaborationist policy of the anti-imperialist united front. The original English version and its Italian translation were published in pamphlet form by the Centro Studi Pietro Tresso in April 1990, with an additional note on Trotskys positions with regard to the relations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang in 1922-27. *** Leon Trotskys theory of permanent revolution has a lengthy historical-political background. A conception of the permanent nature of the revolutionary process can be traced back to some of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, especially the well-known Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League of April 1850. In their works, however, one can also find stagist conceptions of revolutions, that is, that the revolutionary process is confined to unavoidable historical stages. This contradictory legacy from the founding fathers of scientific communism had significant repercussions on the subsequent evolution of the working-class movement. The pro-colonialist orthodoxy of the Second International turned the stagist conception of revolution into an absolute dogma which was substantially accepted by all wings of social democracy, including the far left. The break with this falsely orthodox tradition stands as one of Trotskys major contributions to the development of Marxist thought in the twentieth century. By the summer of 1905, Trotsky had begun openly to challenge the established dogma in a fashion which went even beyond the radical ideas expressed by Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus). In Trotskys opinion, the democratic stage of the revolution in Russia could grow into a socialist revolution, thereby initiating a proletarian dictatorship supported by the peasantry. Such a possibility actually became a reality some 12 years later. The October Revolution positively confirmed the validity of the theory that Trotsky had elaborated, thus denying in practice the various permutations of the stagist notion of revolution advanced by other theoreticians. For a long time, however, the theory of permanent revolution remained a Russian theory, that is, one which was seen, one way or another, as pertaining solely to Russian history. Nobody in the Marxist camp including Trotsky himself understood the uni35

Paolo Casciola

versal scope of that theory, which, after the crucial test of 1917, was put aside as an outdated conception. Lenins Eurocentric Views on China With regard to the question of revolutions in colonial and semi-colonial countries, communist policy was based on a stagist perspective that assumed that the national bourgeoisie was capable of carrying out the democratic tasks of the anti-feudal revolution. Any attempt to generalise the basic postulate of Trotskys theory that is, the Russian national bourgeoisies inability to solve the democratic tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution owing to its links with the feudal ruling class on the one hand, and with foreign imperialism on the other was repeatedly challenged by Lenin himself in the articles that he devoted to analysing the situation in China on the morrow of the revolution in 1911. In Lenins words, the Chinese and Asiatic bourgeoisie was as yet siding with the people against reaction,1 and was therefore able to play the same progressive historical role that had been played by the French bourgeoisie in 1789: in Asia there is still a bourgeoisie capable of championing sincere, militant, consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of Frances great men of the Enlightenment and great leaders of the close of the eighteenth century.2 Lenins stance towards the anti-feudal potential of the Chinese bourgeoisie was clearly based upon inadequate information about what was happening in China at the time. In fact, the revolution in 1911 marked the victory of an anti-Manchu bloc formed by the native bourgeoisie and considerable sections of the old possessing feudal classes, and the pre-existing social order therefore did not undergo any noticeable change. The tasks of the democratic revolution were sacrificed on the altar of the alliance between the urban merchants and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and the big landowners on the other. The conservative tendencies of the national bourgeoisie became even more manifest when a little while after the coup in Wuchang in October 1911 the powerful comprador bourgeoisie in Shanghai, faced with an attempt to increase tax collection by the Nanching government (which was financially boycotted by the gentry), turned to authoritarian moderniser Yuan Shi-kai. Far from entering the same path followed by the European bourgeoisie during its revolutionary epoch, the Chinese national bourgeoisie therefore failed to assert itself as a ruling class and to create a state apparatus of its own. It was possibly in the wake of these developments that Lenin episodically raised some doubts about the actual revolutionary capabilities of the native bourgeoisie. Thus, in an article written in late 1912, he stated: Chinas freedom was won by an alliance of peasant democrats and the liberal bourgeoisie. Whether the peasants, who are not led by a proletarian party, will be able to retain their democratic positions against the liberals, who are only waiting for an opportunity to shift to the right, will be seen in the near future.3 But this embryo of a what one can call a permanentist revision remained a dead letter. The communist movement went on acting as before within an European framework according to which colonial peoples of Asia had to pass through the same stages of socioeconomic development that had been experienced in Europe. Thus the task of communist
1. 2. 3.

VI Lenin, Backward Europe and Advanced Asia, The National Liberation Movement in the East, Moscow, 1969, pp83-4. VI Lenin, Democracy and Narodnism in China, ibid, p59. VI Lenin, Regenerated China, ibid, p67. 36

nuclei in backward countries was to wage a struggle against medieval survivals and not against capitalism, since it was necessary for those nuclei to base themselves on the bourgeois nationalism which is awakening, and must awake, among those peoples [of the East], and which has its historical justification.4 The Early Comintern and the Colonial Question This aspect of Lenins views with regard to colonial and semi-colonial countries was to mark an entire epoch of the history of the communist movement. Following in Lenins footsteps, the early Third, or Communist, International (Comintern) always had an inadequate grasp of the colonial question. The very fact that the Comintern only discovered this question and resolved to pay attention to it as revolutionary perspectives in advanced Europe began to vanish, is highly symptomatic. In addition, there were more than a few ambiguities in the way the Second World Congress of the Comintern dealt with the problem of setting out the guidelines of a revolutionary policy for colonial and semicolonial countries. The approach of the Second Congress to the question led in fact to the completely erroneous policies pursued in Gilan, Persia and Turkey in 1920-21. In these instances, freedom of action for local communist movements was literally forsaken for the sake of striking compromises with such nationalist bourgeois rulers as Kemal Pasha or Reza Khan, that is to say, for the sake of Soviet Russias raison dtat. Thus the early Comintern had some of its colonial sections engaged in long-term alliances with ruling anti-British national bourgeoisies, even though the latter prevented local communists from educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited.5 Of course this went beyond Lenins theses of 1920 on the national and colonial question, but nevertheless a completely erroneous, indeed suicidal, policy was derived from the theses themselves, and, moreover, sported a seal of approval from the Comintern. Thus, as far as revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries is concerned, the official Comintern policy in the early 1920s continued to be based on an essentially stagist perspective premised on the ability of the national bourgeoisie to carry out the democratic tasks of the anti-feudal revolution. A clear permanentist view of the revolutionary process in those countries was not advanced. As a matter of fact, Lenin did envisage a skipping of the capitalist, bourgeois stage of development not in his theses, but in one of his interventions at the Second Comintern Congress but that position was flawed insofar as he failed to point to the subject, that is, the class, that was entitled to play the leading role in the process of bypassing capitalism. Thus Hendrikus Sneevliet (Maring) was allowed to bend the stick so far as to declare that the skipping of the capitalist phase was to be achieved in cooperation with bourgeois and/or petit-bourgeois nationalist forces, and by transforming them from within. Such stick-bending emphasised that the colonial policy of the Comintern suffered from a right-wing interpretation from the very beginning. Within this general framework, the official stagist line was opposed by such colonial revolutionists as Manabendra Nath Roy and Sultan Zadeh. Trotsky himself took a critical attitude toward the established policy in a report he delivered to the Third World Congress of the Comintern in June 1921: The basis for the liberationist struggle of the colonies is constituted by the peasant masses. But the peasants in their struggle need leadership. Such a leader4. 5.

VI Lenin, Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East, ibid, pp252-3. VI Lenin, Regenerated China, ibid, p67. 37

ship used to be provided by the native bourgeoisie. The latters struggle against foreign domination cannot, however, be either consistent or energetic inasmuch as the native bourgeoisie itself is intimately bound up with foreign capital and represents to a large measure an agency of foreign capital. Only the rise of a native proletariat strong enough numerically and capable of struggle can provide a real axis for the revolution.6 Such permanentist statements, however, were only exceptions to the prevailing stagist views, which found a sound expression in January 1922 in the belief of Grigory Zinoviev and Georgy Safarov that Eastern Asia was not ripe for a socialist revolution, but only for an anti-feudal, anti-imperialist national revolution that would hand the power over to the national bourgeoisie. The Anti-Imperialist United Front from Comintern Theory to Chinese Practice This policy was subsequently fully endorsed by the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in November-December 1922 through the adoption of the slogan of the antiimperialist united front, which called for the creation of a common front of the colonial proletariat and the native bourgeoisie a political bloc aimed at achieving such bourgeoisdemocratic tasks as national unity and independence from imperialism. The underlying stagist notion was, again, that a sovietisation of Eastern countries was not on the agenda and could not be realised. The anti-imperialist united front was presented as an extension of the tactic of the proletarian united front to colonial and semi-colonial countries. However, it was radically, qualitatively different politically insofar as the proletarian united front, that is, the confrontation of one class (the proletariat) against another (the bourgeoisie), was turned in those countries into a cross-class, popular-frontist bloc. Trotsky was not involved in the discussion on the Eastern question that took place at the Fourth Comintern Congress, and there is no evidence that he ever supported the policy of the anti-imperialist united front. But in a report on this congress he advanced a left variant of the European standpoint: the colonies, if taken independently and in isolation, are completely unready for the proletarian revolution. If they are taken in isolation, then capitalism still has a long possibility of economic development in them. But the colonies belong to the European metropolitan centres and their fate is intimately bound up with the fate of them. In the colonies, we can see the growing national revolutionary movement. Communists represent there only small nuclei implanted among the peasantry. So in the colonies we have primarily petit-bourgeois and bourgeois national movements The growth of influence of socialist and communist ideas, the emancipation of the toiling masses of the colonies, the weakening of the influence of the nationalist parties, can be assured not so much by the activities of the native communist nuclei as by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the metropolitan centres for the emancipation of the colonies.7 Following the theses on the Eastern question adopted by the Fourth Comintern Congress, the official documents on China in 1923 focused on the necessity to carry out a national
6. 7.

LD Trotsky, Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, New York, 1972, p223. LD Trotsky, Report on the Fourth World Congress, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, p317. 38

revolution. The central bourgeois-democratic task of agrarian reform was completely downplayed precisely because of its revolutionary potential, that is, its ability to mobilise the poor peasant masses and to ignite class struggle in the countryside. Such a rejection of any possible intervention of the oppressed onto the political scene, which was necessitated by a desire not to frighten the native bourgeoisie, went hand in hand with an interpretation of the national democratic revolution as merely the unification of the country and the liberation from the foreign yoke. The Chinese national bourgeoisie would have subsequently shown both its determination to achieve national unification and independence and its desire to maintain pre-capitalist social relations in the rural areas. Trotsky and the Chinese Communist Partys Entry Into the Guomindang On the whole, the course of the second Chinese revolution demonstrated that all sections of the native bourgeoisie, however left-wing they appeared, were quite ready to take action against the workers and the poor peasants. The Menshevik policy of stagism and class-collaboration forced upon the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by the Stalin Bukharin leadership of the Comintern paved the way to Chiang Kai-sheks coup in Shanghai in April 1927. That was the last link of a long chain of national-bourgeois counter-revolutionary activities that had set in on the morrow of the strike wave of May-June 1925, when the class antagonisms between the Chinese proletariat and the native bourgeoisie had become crystal-clear. But Trotskys views on the Chinese revolution were not permanentist right from the start, and until September 1927 he upheld the slogan for a democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasantry, that is to say, the same formula that Lenin had advanced for the Russian revolution of 1905. This was linked to Trotskys analysis of the Guomindang. Until early 1927, Trotsky regarded the Guomindang as a two-class embryo of a future fully-fledged party, and he expected that the treacherous policy of its bourgeois wing would have caused the more radical petit-bourgeois wing to split away. The CCP could then have been able to set up a bloc with the latter, which was seen as the political representative of the peasant component of the democratic dictatorship. And as long as the Guomindang acted as the leading force of the national liberation movement, Trotsky did not oppose CCP-Guomindang cooperation, provided that Chinese communists maintained their full political and organisational independence. In August 1922, Hendrikus Sneevliet (Maring), in his capacity as a Comintern representative in China, called a special plenum of the Central Committee of the CCP, where he moved a motion that the CCP should join the Guomindang since the latter was not a party of the bourgeoisie but the joint party of various classes. 8 This was opposed by the whole CCP leadership, and Sneevliet had to invoke the authority of the Comintern to have the CCP leaders submitting to international discipline, that is, to the ZinovievStalin diktat. In the end, despite a resolution drafted by Zinoviev and adopted by the Comintern Executive Committee in January 1923, the policy of CCP-Guomindang alliance was not fully implemented until the Third Congress of the CCP in June 1923. Later on, Trotsky claimed to have opposed entry into the Guomindang and to have called for full independence of Chinese communists, although no document to that effect has so far been discovered. He wrote in late 1930: I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist Party joining the Guomindang, as well as against the acceptance of the Guomindang into the Kuomintern.9 It is a fact, however, that one year
8. 9.

See Chen Tu-hsiu, Appeal to All the Comrades of the Chinese Communist Party, Leon Trotsky on China, New York, 1976, p599. LD Trotsky, A Letter to Max Shachtman, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p490, my emphasis. 39

previously he had partially endorsed the Comintern policy of entry into the Guomindang: In 1922, the perspective of an entry [into the Guomindang] was not a crime in itself, and perhaps not even a mistake, especially in the south [of China], if we admit that the Guomindang included at that time a large number of workers and that the young Communist Party was weak and almost completely composed of intellectuals In that event, entry would have been an episodic step in the direction of independence The question is: what was the aim of the entry, and what policy was followed subsequently?10 Trotskys Mistakes on China for the Sake of Unity with the Zinovievists These contradictory statements are but one facet of Trotskys overall inconsistent stance with regard to the CCPs entry into the Guomindang, that is, of a twofold approach which attained its peak at the time of the United Opposition, which resulted in April 1926 from the merging of the Moscow-based Trotskyist Russian Left Opposition with the Zinovievite Leningrad Opposition. As the President of the Comintern Executive Committee until October 1926, Zinoviev had shared responsibility with Stalin and Bukharin for the classcollaborationist policy forced upon the CCP. And even after his political break with Stalin in December 1925, Zinoviev went on arguing that the CCP had been right to drop independent activity in 1923 to join the Guomindang. Despite the fact that in the spring of 1927 he came to agree with Trotsky on the need to call for the formation of workers and peasants soviets in China to give a revolutionary content to the slogan for a democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasantry, the United Opposition did not endorse Trotskys fresh demand that the CCP should organisationally break with the Guomindang. Thus until the beginning of March 1927, Trotsky wavered between formal opposition to entry with the aim of safeguarding the class independence of the Chinese proletarian vanguard, and thereby rejecting any idea of building a Chinese anti-imperialist united front as conceived by the Comintern and a failure to call for a prompt withdrawal from the Guomindang, since this would surely have opened up a crisis with the Zinovievite wing of the United Opposition. True, in his autobiography, Trotsky had claimed that: Since 1925 I had demanded the withdrawal of the communists from the Guomindang.11 And the following year, he introduced a little change in the timing of his call for a CCPGuomindang break: In 1925 I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist Party leave the Guomindang instantly In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision [of the United Oppositions Trotskyist wing] that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally on this question.12 As a matter of fact, however, despite these ex post facto assertions, no documents preceding March 1927 are available in which Trotsky openly and unambiguously called for the CCP
10. 11. 12.

LD Trotsky, Objections au livre dIsaacs, uvres, Volume 15, Paris, 1983, p243, my emphasis. LD Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, Harmondsworth, 1975, p552, my emphasis. LD Trotsky, A Letter to Max Shachtman, op cit, pp490-1, my emphasis. 40

to abandon the Guomindang. A different interpretation of Trotskys attitude to CCP-Guomindang relations has been advanced, in a polemic against the present writer, by one of the editors of the German-language collection of Trotskys writings on China.13 Horst Lauscher tried to prove that Trotsky clearly demanded its [CCPs] withdrawal well before 1927 by referring to a paragraph of a document Trotsky had drafted in September 1926 for the Fifteenth Conference of the Bolshevik party, in which he stated that: now the Chinese CP can no longer remain a propaganda group within the Guomindang, but must set itself the task of building an independent proletarian class party, which should fight for the hegemony of the working class in the struggle for national liberation.14 Leaving aside the mere philological argument that Trotskys exhortation here the CCP must set itself the task, etc has not the same immediate practical/political meaning as demanding a prompt withdrawal of Chinese communists from the Guomindang, it should also be remembered that only a few days later Trotsky actually raised the question of revising relations between the Communist Party and the Guomindang.15 But he did so, again, in a contradictory way. The participation of the CCP in the Guomindang, he argued, was perfectly correct [my emphasis PC] in the period when the CCP was a propaganda society which was only preparing itself for future [my emphasis PC] independent [Trotskys emphasis] political activity but which, at the same time, sought to take part in the ongoing national liberation struggle.16 However, after Chiang Kai-sheks anti-communist coup of 10 March 1926 and after the start of the Northern Expedition against the warlords in July 1926, the immediate political task of Chinese communists was, according to Trotsky, to fight for direct independent leadership of the awakened working class;17 but such a struggle was conceived within the framework of a political bloc with the Guomindang as a whole or with particular elements of it, throughout the republic or in particular provinces, depending on the circumstances.18 In the end, it was only at the beginning of March 1927 that Trotsky definitely declared that: If we want to try to save the Chinese Communist Party from ultimately degenerating into Menshevism, we do not have the right to put aside one day longer the demand for withdrawal from the Guomindang.19 And one month later, he wrote that it was necessary to recognise the correctness of a resolution by Chen Tu-hsiu and Peng Shutse that had been adopted some nine months before by the Central Committee of the CCP, which demanded that the party withdraw from the Guomindang and conclude a bloc

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

See Horst Lauscher, Trotsky and the Guomindang, Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no 3, Autumn 1994, pp269-70, with a rejoinder by Al Richardson on pp270-1. It is clear that Lauscher did not read my 1990 work on Trotsky and the struggles of colonial peoples and based himself on a second-hand knowledge of it through a deformed quotation from it made by Al Richardson in a footnote to his introduction to CLR James, World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, Atlantic Highlands, 1993. LD Trotsky, Zur 15 Parteikonferenz (Auszug), Schriften 2 ber China, Volume 1, Hamburg, 1990, p102. LD Trotsky, The Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p113. Ibid, p114. Ibid. Ibid, p116, my emphasis. LD Trotsky, Second Letter to Radek, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p123. 41

with that organisation through its left wing,20 that is, a united front with the left wing of the Guomindang. Nature and Dynamics of the Chinese Revolution In 1926-27, Trotsky hoped to defeat Stalin politically through the bloc with the Zinovievists. In order to preserve that bloc, he submitted to the majority of the United Opposition, including on the burning issues of the Chinese revolution which had started in May 1925. As we have seen above, during most of the revolutionary period Trotsky did not envisage a Chinese revolution that could follow the same course of the October Revolution in Russia, and he raised the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasantry, not of a proletarian dictatorship. Being still basically tied to the European views of the early Comintern, for a long time he refrained from challenging Stalins stagist conceptions. On the other hand, before March 1927 the Chinese events did not occupy a prominent position in Trotskys political fight. But in March 1927, as Guomindang armies were capturing the main industrial towns of China and the Guomindang right wing was rapidly developing increasingly anticommunist inclinations, Trotsky rejected for the first time the possibility that any wings of the Guomindang could play a progressive role. In Trotskys words, the Guomindang as a whole, with no distinctions between its right and left wings, was an organisation of the past: While driving the Communist Party away from a strictly defined organisational position and subjecting it to the ideological discipline of Sun Yat-senism, the Guomindang will necessarily and inevitably transfer power to the most influential, weighty, and organised elements of the united national camp, that is, bluntly speaking, to the liberal bourgeoisie. Thus, the Guomindang under the present conditions is a transmission belt for delivering the revolutionary popular masses into the hands of the bourgeoisie, for politically subjugating them to it.21 With the agreement of Zinoviev, he called for the formation of workers and peasants soviets to be organised under the guidance of the communists, who were urged to quit the Guomindang, as a concrete expression of the worker-peasant alliance. This was intended to give a revolutionary content to the slogan of democratic dictatorship: the task was to create a workers and peasants government in struggle against imperialism and its national-bourgeois agents. But in Trotskys opinion, such a government still had nothing to do with the socialist revolution: The problem of a struggle for a workers and peasants government should in no case be identified with the problem of non-capitalist roads of development for China. The latter can only be posed provisionally and only within the perspective of the development of world revolution. Only an ignoramus of the socialist-reactionary variety could think that present-day China, with its current technological and economic foundations, can through its own efforts jump over the capitalist stage.22

20. 21. 22.

LD Trotsky, Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p146. LD Trotsky, Letter to Alsky, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, pp130-1. Ibid, p129. 42

Six months later, in September 1927, Trotsky made a decisive qualitative step and unequivocally declared for the first time that the only way to the victory of the revolution in China passed through a proletarian dictatorship. In other words, the tasks of the democratic revolution in China could be solved only under the leadership of the urban proletariat: The Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution will go forward and be victorious either in the soviet form or not at all.23 This turn in Trotskys analysis took place only after Chiang Kaisheks bloody coup of 12 April 1927, and some months before the break of his political bloc with the Zinovievists. It was therefore only on the morrow of the Chinese tragedy, and drawing the due lessons from it, that Trotsky resolved to apply the theory of permanent revolution to China and to all colonial and semi-colonial countries. The Generalisation of the Theory of Permanent Revolution Thus the defeat of the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27 involved a generalisation of the theory of permanent revolution to all backward countries throughout the world. But there is at least one particular case in which Trotsky seems to have made an attempt, however embryonic and undeveloped, to apply a basic tenet of permanent revolution outside the Russian tsarist empire even before 1917. In an article dealing with the national problems of the Balkan region that appeared in the Viennese Pravda in August 1910, Trotsky argued: The Balkan bourgeoisie, as in all countries that have come late to the road of capitalist development, is politically sterile, cowardly, talentless, and rotten through and through with chauvinism. It is utterly beyond its power to take on the unification of the Balkans. The peasant masses are too scattered, ignorant and indifferent to politics for any political initiative to be looked for from them. Accordingly, the task of creating normal conditions of national and state existence in the Balkans falls with all its historical weight upon the shoulders of the Balkan proletariat.24 Apart from this exception to Trotskys pre-1917 Russia-only permanentism, the permanent revolution was eventually codified as a world-wide theory in his book of 1929, The Permanent Revolution, which was a thoroughgoing polemics against Karl Radeks views on that matter. The book ended with a whole set of theses bearing the title What Is the Permanent Revolution? Basic Postulates, where the first, basic feature of the theory was resumed in the following terms: With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses. Not only the agrarian, but also the national question assigns to the peasantry the overwhelming majority of the population in backward countries an exceptional place in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be
23. 24.

LD Trotsky, Second Speech on the Chinese Question, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p235. LD Trotsky, The Balkan Question and Social Democracy, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912-1913, New York, 1980, p40. This article has been brought to my attention by Ian Harrison. 43

solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realised in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie. No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realisation of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organised in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.25 Finally, in the so-called transitional programme adopted by the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938, he unequivocally commented that, the general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917).26 A Revolutionary Policy for India Trotskys generalisation of the strategy of permanent revolution to all colonial and semicolonial countries is graphically exemplified in the position he adopted with regard to India. As early as May 1930, in an article devoted to analysing the tasks and dangers of the Indian revolution, Trotsky pointed to the treacherous role of the native bourgeoisie, which had been forced into action to master the movement in order to blunt its revolutionary edge.27 Taking into account the poor peasants longing for a just distribution of land, he argued that the struggle of the peasantry could be turned into a genuine social revolution only under the leadership of an urban class, which then becomes the leader of the revolutionary nation,28 that is, the colonial proletariat. Thus one of the main features of the Indian revolution was the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasant masses.29 Trotsky sharply rejected the programme of the Stalinist Comintern, which attributes a revolutionary role to the colonial bourgeoisie,30 whereas the latter is capable only of a counter-revolutionary role and not a revolutionary role,31 and condemned Gandhis passive resistance movement which was aimed at averting a social revolution through preaching non-violence as the tactical knot that ties the navet and self-denying blindness of the dispersed petit-bourgeois masses to the treacherous manoeuvres of the liberal bourgeoisie.32 And he arrived at the following conclusion: if the Indian revolution will develop on a basis of a bloc of the workers, peasants, and the petit-bourgeoisie; if this bloc will be directed not only against imperialism and feudalism but also against the national bourgeoisie which is
25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

LD Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York, 1986, pp276-7. LD Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, New York, 1974, p98. LD Trotsky, The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930), New York, 1975, p243. Ibid, p245. Ibid, p246. Ibid, p247. Ibid, p248. Ibid, p244. 44

bound up with them in all basic questions; if at the head of this bloc will stand the proletariat; if this bloc comes to victory only by sweeping away its enemies through an armed uprising and in this way raises the proletariat to the role of the real leader of the whole nation then the question arises: in whose hands will the power be after the victory if not in the hands of the proletariat? 33 Nine years later, in 1939, Trotsky again emphasised in unequivocal permanentist terms the Indian bourgeoisies inability to lead a genuinely anti-imperialist struggle due to its close ties with, and dependence upon, British imperialism. The final victory of the revolution in India could only be assured by the alliance of workers and poor peasants, since coalition with the bourgeoisie leads to the proletariats abnegating the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.34 Trotsky, however, did not exclude the possibility that the native bourgeoisie, while seeking compromises with British imperialism no matter what the price,35 could be compelled to take some steps on the road of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain. In such a circumstance, the proletariat will naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations, and more decisive combat actions,36 and not under the discipline of a class-collaborationist political bloc with the Indian bourgeoisie. The policy of subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie which the Stalinists were putting across under the guise of Peoples Front was tantamount to a rejection of the revolutionary agrarian programme, a rejection of arming the workers, a rejection of the struggle for power, a rejection of revolution.37 Thus Trotsky recognised the need to support every oppositional and revolutionary action directed against imperialism.38 But he made clear that this support must be inspired by a firm distrust of the national bourgeoisie and their petit-bourgeois agencies. We must not confound our organisation, our programme, our banner with theirs for a moment. 39 The Permanent Revolution in Indochina Trotskys position regarding Indochina in the early 1930s showed a similar distrust of the national bourgeoisie. In a criticism of a document drafted by a group of Indochinese Left Oppositionists in Paris, he called for an uncompromising struggle against the national bourgeoisie.40 The only acceptable form of collaboration between classes was the collaboration between the proletariat and the poor peasantry, as well as with the most oppressed and exploited lower layers of the urban petit-bourgeoisie. This kind of revolutionary collaboration is such that it transforms the proletariat into the true leader of the nation. 41 Trotsky also made a clear distinction between the nationalism of the native bourgeoisie, which is a means for subordinating and deceiving the masses, and the nationalism of the Indochinese popular masses, which is an expression of their just and progressive hatred for
33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Ibid, p249, my emphasis. LD Trotsky, India Faced with Imperialist War, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), New York, 1973, p32. Ibid, p29. Ibid, pp31-2. Ibid, p32. LD Trotsky, Letter on India, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), op cit, p109. Ibid. LD Trotsky, On the Declaration by the Indochinese Oppositionists, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930-31), New York, 1973, p30. Ibid. 45

foreign imperialists.42 While fighting against the former, the proletariat does not have the right to turn its back on this kind of nationalism [of the mass of the people]. On the contrary, it must demonstrate in practice that it is the most consistent and devoted fighter for the national liberation of Indochina.43 These permanentist positions of Trotsky were endorsed by the Indochinese signatories of the document to which Trotsky was referring, who were going to found the Ta Doi Lap, the first Left Opposition organisation in Indochina. And in 1936 one of them, Ho Huu Thuong, drafted an article44 for the French-language theoretical journal of the Indochinese Fourth Internationalists in which he presented a comprehensive summary of the Trotskyist policy with regard to the national bourgeoisie. He criticised those conservative theoreticians who regarded the national bourgeoisie as a class which was still revolutionary. Contrary to this, Ho Huu Thuong explained, the native bourgeoisie is not independent from the international bourgeoisie. More than that, it is an agency of imperialism, and one which goes so far as betraying at every moment its own specific class interests, because its life and death depend on the goodwill of imperialism. French imperialism was using the Indochinese bourgeoisie to exploit better the working masses with semi-feudal methods. Therefore, the native bourgeoisie is the worst enemy of the people, and the proletarian struggle should be waged first of all against it. Ho Huu Thuong, however, did not exclude the possibility of reaching practical agreements with some sections of the national bourgeoisie provided that they serve the purpose of better fighting against imperialism as a whole. And at any rate, he emphasised the need to remember that those people with whom we are setting up a bloc are our enemies: These agreements with native bourgeois forces should remain strictly practical. No placards with common signatures. No common programmes. No common organisations. Each class should retain its full freedom of criticism even in the heat of the struggle A practical agreement is not a peaceful coexistence of the wolf and the lamb A practical agreement is not an attempt at a marriage of convenience between two basically antagonistic classes A practical agreement is nothing but a new form of struggle, and one very rich in content, by which the proletariat enters into competition with the bourgeoisie. And anyway it is a class struggle. It can have no other meaning.45 The Indochinese Left Oppositionists were thoroughly in agreement with Trotskys recognition of the necessity to relate politically to national bourgeois movements in backward countries. Trotsky, too, did not reject rigidly delimited and rigidly practical agreements as serve each time a quite definite aim46 with those sections of the native bourgeoisie that, at a given juncture, might actually fight against imperialism. In Trotskys opinion, such agreements had no strategic, long-term nature since he did not believe for an instant in the capacity or readiness of the bourgeoisie either to lead a genuine struggle against impe-

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Ibid, p31. Ibid. HHT [Ho Huu Thuong], tous, Le Militant (Saigon), Volume 1, no 2, 8 September 1936, p7. All quotations in this and the following paragraphs are taken from that article. Ibid. LD Trotsky, Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution. Its Lessons for the Countries of the Orient and for the Whole of the Comintern, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p292. 46

rialism or not to obstruct the workers and peasants.47 In other words, like his Indochinese followers, Trotsky did not rule out the possibility that, owing to the concrete development of the anti-imperialist struggle, qualitatively different class forces in colonial and semicolonial countries could temporarily come together to fight against a common enemy. But a crucial precondition for such a separate, practical and expedient agreement consisted in not allowing either the organisations or the banners to become mixed directly or indirectly for a single day or a single hour.48 Latin America from Lenins Comintern to Trotskys Fourth International The same views were held by Trotsky with regard to Latin America. Here, however, it should be said that differently from Eastern Asia permanentist perspectives had not been absent from the early Cominterns official documents on Latin America. In an appeal addressed to the working class of the American continent published at the beginning of 1921, the Comintern Executive Committee called for the building of South American communist parties that would gain influence among the peasant masses since a revolutionary unity of the poor peasant class and the working class is indispensable; only a proletarian revolution can liberate the peasantry by breaking the power of capitalism; only an agrarian revolution can save the proletarian revolution from the danger of being crushed by counter-revolution.49 And two years later, the Fourth Comintern Congress issued another appeal to Latin American workers and peasants that was completely at odds with the stagist, class-collaborationist policy adopted by the same congress on the Eastern question. Instead of calling for the creation of an anti-imperialist united front with the ostensibly revolutionary native bourgeoisie, the appeal argued that proletarian unity must be opposed to the bourgeois offensive. The Latin American toiling masses were urged to struggle against their own bourgeoisie in order to fight also against Yankee imperialism which embodies capitalist reaction.50 Thus the policy of the early Comintern for Latin America revolved around the perspective of building an alliance of the urban and the rural proletariat as against both US imperialism and national capitalism, that is, the national bourgeoisie. The various national capitalist ruling classes were neither interested in a fight for independence which they had formally won in the nineteenth century, but which had only led to a growing economic dependence on foreign finance capital nor in carrying out a radical agrarian reform, because they were closely bound to, and intertwined with, the big landowners. The realisation of these bourgeois-democratic tasks fell upon the shoulders of the working people. Trotskys position on the problems of the Latin American revolution were quite similar to those of the early Comintern. For example, in the final draft of his theses of 1934, War and the Fourth International, he displayed a total mistrust towards the belated South American bourgeoisie, a thoroughly venal agency of foreign imperialism.51 In the same vein, during a discussion that took place in 1938, Trotsky argued that the Latin American bourgeoisie, in the same way as the bourgeoisie in Russia and China, was incapable of resolving dem-

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Ibid. Ibid. Executive Committee of the Communist International, Sur la rvolution en Amrique. Appel la classe ouvrire des deux Amriques, LInternationale Communiste, no 15, January 1921, p3323. Fourth World Congress of the Communist International, Aux ouvriers et paysans de lAmrique du Sud, La Correspondance Internationale, no 2, 20 January 1923, p27. LD Trotsky, War and the Fourth International, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), New York, 1975, p306. 47

ocratic tasks52 that were posed by the anti-imperialist struggle. He also raised the question of maintaining the class independence of the proletariat against the native bourgeoisie, especially with regard to the agrarian question, which would play a decisive role within the framework of a genuine fight against imperialism: during the struggle for democratic tasks, we oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. The independence of the proletariat even in the beginning of this movement is absolutely necessary, and we especially oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie in the agrarian question If the peasants remain in support of the bourgeois class, as is now the fact, then it will be such a semi-democratic, semi-Bonapartistic state as now exists in every country of Latin America, with inclinations toward the masses. This is the period in which the national bourgeoisie searches for a bit more independence from the foreign imperialists. The national bourgeoisie is obliged to flirt with the workers, with the peasants, and then we have the strong man of the country oriented to the left as now in Mexico. If the national bourgeoisie is obliged to give up the struggle against the foreign capitalists and to work under the direct tutelage of the foreign capitalists, then we have a semi-fascist regime, as in Brazil for example. But the bourgeoisie there is absolutely incapable of creating democratic rule, because on one side stands imperialist capital, on the other side they are afraid of the proletariat because history there skipped a stage and the proletariat became an important factor before the democratic organisation of the whole society.53 Military Blocs with Nationalist Forces and the Struggle Against Imperialist Sanctions In the course of the discussion on Latin America, Trotsky called for the need to support the national bourgeoisie in every case where it is a direct fight against the foreign imperialists or their reactionary fascist agents.54 Such support for anti-imperialist mass movements led by the native bourgeoisie should not, however, be mistaken for political support for the bourgeoisie itself. Proletarian support for, and participation in, the anti-imperialist struggles in colonial and semi-colonial countries should be aimed at counterposing the genuinely revolutionary-democratic nationalism and expectations of the people to the reactionary nationalism of the treacherous native bourgeoisie, that is, to sharpen the contradiction between the progressive, anti-imperialist character of the movement and the counter-revolutionary nature of the forces that were leading it. As we have seen, Trotsky did not rule out the possibility of supporting the national bourgeoisie insofar as the latter took some steps along the road of a direct fight against imperialism. In his opinion, this could be done either in the form of those rigidly delimited, practical agreements required by the concrete dynamics of the anti-imperialist struggle or in the form of a military bloc with nationalist bourgeois and/or petit-bourgeois forces in the event of an open military confrontation with the imperialist troops. Both form of cooperation were aimed at winning the leadership of the mass movement from the nationalbourgeois politicians or, whenever the latter were in power and faced with an imperialist aggression, at politically preparing their overthrow by exposing their weakness and treacherous wavering in the eyes of the colonial masses.
52. 53. 54.

LD Trotsky, Latin American Problems: A Transcript, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1934-40), New York, 1979, p784. Ibid, pp784-5, my emphasis. Ibid, p785. 48

In the event of imperialist aggression against a colonial or semi-colonial country, therefore, Trotsky stressed the need for supporting the latters progressive fight for independence from a foreign yoke. This was the case, for example, with the Italo-Ethiopian conflict which broke out in October 1935. Trotsky had started sketching the position of the Fourth International movement towards that conflict in a period in which the aggression was still being prepared: the struggle of revolutionaries should have been directed not against fascism, but against imperialism55 as a whole. Thus he pointed to the antiimperialist character of Ethiopias fight and declared himself for a victory of Ethiopia over fascist, imperialist Italy. This point of view found a practical application in the attitude adopted by Trotskys Italian followers with regard to the sanctions against fascist Italy decreed by democratic imperialist powers through the League of Nations: to the policy of the Stalinist, socialdemocratic and centrist forces who, being in favour of a defeat of Mussolinis war machinery, supported in fact the work of the League of Nations within the framework of a sort of international union sacre with a section of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the Trotskyists opposed an independent revolutionary orientation which was resumed by Alfonso Leonetti at a meeting of the International Secretariat in late October 1935: Sanctions are a question between imperialists. We cannot be either in favour or against imperialist sanctions; we must denounce them, and call for the autonomous action of the proletariat. 56 Such an action, which included a revolutionary boycott of all imperialist states and propaganda for the fraternisation of the Italian soldiers with Abyssinian fighters, was nurtured by the consciousness that a defeat of fascist Italy by Ethiopia could have been not only an opportunity to revitalise the Italian proletariat in view of a possible revolutionary overthrow of the fascist dictatorship, but also, and above all, that it would have given impetus to the rebellion of all oppressed colonial peoples against imperialism (Italian, British, French or whatever), thereby helping to open up new perspectives also for the struggle of the working class in the imperialist heartlands, be they fascist or democratic. Or, to cite Trotsky: If Mussolini triumphs, it means the reinforcement of fascism, the strengthening of imperialism, and the discouragement of the colonial peoples in Africa and elsewhere. The victory of the Negus, however, would mean a mighty blow not only at Italian imperialism but at imperialism as a whole, and would lend a powerful impulsion to the rebellious forces of the oppressed peoples.57 The same reasoning was applied by Trotsky to the hypothetical assumption of a British military aggression against semi-fascist Brazil:

55. 56.

57.

LD Trotsky, The Italo-Ethiopian Conflict, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36), New York, 1977, p41. Minutes of the meeting of the International Secretariat held on 30 October 1935, in Trotsky exile papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, 16495. The Italo-Ethiopian conflict raised important political debates among Italian migrs. La Vrit on 25 October 1935 carried an appeal of the Bolscevichi-Leninisti Italiani to the Italian proletariat which ended with the slogan: Down with the imperialist war in Africa; long live the civil war in Italy. In November 1935, the official Gruppo Bolscevico-Leninista issued a lengthy pamphlet by Pietro Tresso (Blasco) on the Ethiopian war under the title The New African Undertaking of Italian Imperialism and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat. An article along the same line was also published by the dissident Gruppo Nostra Parola led by Nicola Di Bartolomeo (Fosco) in January 1936. LD Trotsky, On Dictators and the Heights of Oslo: A Letter to an English Comrade, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36), op cit, pp317-8. 49

I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will ask for myself personally in this case I will be on the side of fascist Brazil against democratic Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat.58 The Policy of Military Blocs in Practice: the Sino-Japanese War The policy of military blocs against imperialist aggression was advanced by Trotsky in a very systematic way during the Sino-Japanese War. That policy, which he also applied to the StalinNegrn government during the Spanish Civil War, was derived directly from the Bolsheviks experience in the fight against General Kornilovs attempted coup against the Kerensky-led Provisional Government in September 1917. As Trotsky himself recalled 20 years later: The Bolsheviks did not remain neutral between the camp of Kerensky and that of Kornilov. They fought in the first camp against the second It was precisely in the month of August, with the Kornilov uprising, that a prodigious upswing of the Bolsheviks began. This upswing was made possible only thanks to the double-edged Bolshevik policy. While participating in the front lines of the struggle against Kornilov, the Bolsheviks did not take the slightest responsibility for the policy of Kerensky. On the contrary, they denounced him as responsible for the reactionary attack and as incapable of overcoming it. In this way they prepared the political premises of the October Revolution, in which the alternative of Bolshevism or counter-revolution (communism or fascism) evolved from a historic tendency into a living and immediate reality.59 Thus when Japanese troops invaded China in July 1937, Trotsky stated that, while actively participating in the war, Chinese revolutionaries cannot and should not take upon themselves the slightest political responsibility for the bourgeois government60 of Chiang Kai-shek. Instead, even in time of war they had to remain in irreconcilable opposition to the bourgeoisie, and to weld the workers around the revolutionary vanguard, to rally the peasants around the workers, and by that prepare for the dictatorship of the proletariat.61 He fostered no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China,62 but he also recognised that it was necessary for revolutionaries to take part in the emancipatory and progressive struggle of China through the creation of a military bloc with the native bourgeoisie, as it happened at the time of Chiangs Northern Expedition in 1926.
58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

LD Trotsky, Anti-Imperialist Struggle is Key to Liberation: An Interview with Mateo Fossa, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39), New York, 1974, p34. LD Trotsky, Ultra-Lefts in General and Incurable Ultra-Lefts in Particular (A Few Theoretical Considerations), LD Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), New York, 1973, pp296-7. LD Trotsky, Afterword, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p565. Ibid. LD Trotsky, On the Sino-Japanese War, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p568. 50

Within the framework of such a bloc, however, the revolutionary party must maintain its entire political and organisational independence, and the working class, while remaining in the front lines of the military struggle, must prepare the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie,63 because the latter fears its own armed masses more than it does the Japanese ravishers. If Chiang Kai-shek, the sinister hangman of the Chinese revolution, is compelled by circumstances to wage a war, his programme is still based, as before, on the oppression of his own workers and compromise with the imperialists. 64 That was Trotskys attitude towards a crucial question of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries, that is, towards the national bourgeoisie, a class that: tolerates all forms of national degradation so long as it can hope to maintain its own privileged existence. But at the moment when foreign capital sets out to assume undivided domination of the entire wealth of the country, the colonial bourgeoisie is forced to remind itself of its national obligations. Under pressure of the masses it may even find itself plunged into a war. But this will be a war waged against one of the imperialist powers, the one least amenable to negotiations, with the hope of passing into the service of some other, more magnanimous power Only that class which has nothing to lose but its chains can conduct to the very end the war against imperialism for national emancipation.65

The Israel Academic Boycott A Debate

THE policy of boycotting Israeli academic institutions that was initiated by the annual conference of the Association of University Teachers last April, and then abandoned at a special recall conference shortly afterwards, caused considerable controversy in left-wing circles, and not least in this magazine. Toby Abse contributed a short piece that was critical of the ban, and we publish below three sharp criticisms of Tobys article, by Sue Blackwell, who was the prime mover behind the boycott campaign within the AUT, and Tony Greenstein and Mosh Machover, who are both distinguished by their long-standing principled opposition to Zionism. Following this is Tobys response to these criticisms. Not for the first time, the question of the AUTs boycott confronts us with the question of how to provide effective and principled opposition to the policies and actions of the state of Israel and support for the Palestinians whilst remaining carefully distinguishable from the murk of anti-Semitic agitation. Before considering that, I must state that Tobys original article contains an assertion with which I strongly disagree. He states that the AUTs boycott was part of a tsunami of
63. 64. 65.

Ibid, p570. LD Trotsky, Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), New York, 1973, p203. LD Trotsky, Revolution and War in China, Leon Trotsky on China, op cit, p584. 51

Jew-baiting that has swept the British left from Blairs entourage via the London Mayor to Galloways followers, referring specifically to the New Labour posters sporting flying pigs bearing the faces of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin and equating the former with Fagin, Livingstones drunken tirade against a Jewish Evening Standard reporter and the eggs thrown by Respect supporters at elderly Jews attending a memorial service for the victims of Hitlers V2s. There was, to my mind, something sinister about the New Labour posters. I cannot believe that there was nobody in either the design studio or the New Labour propaganda branch who did not notice the use of pigs and a fictional figure infamous for its antiSemitic overtones with two well-known Jewish politicians, and think that it could be interpreted as anti-Semitic? We are not talking of simpletons here, but clever advertising and propaganda merchants. I do not believe the imagery was accidental. It was a clever device. Any critical response could be brushed aside by the perpetrators as an over-reaction, whilst at the same time a nudge-nudge, wink-wink reminder of the Jewish parentage of the posters subjects could be aimed at the less enlightened members of the electorate. I do not, however, consider that Ken Livingstones inebriated shouting-match demonstrated any anti-Jewish feelings; he could have perhaps chosen his words a little more carefully, but the Mail Group of newspapers hardly enjoys a clean reputation when it comes to prejudice, and anyone from a minority, be he black, Asian, Jewish or whatever, working for its rags is in danger of doing the reactionaries dirty work. As for the pelting of the Jewish memorial service in Stepney, there is no evidence that the Bengali youths who hurled eggs and cabbage stalks at the mourners were Respect supporters. There were no anti-Jewish slogans shouted; indeed, it was more likely that these hooligans had picked up a bad old East End habit hostility to foreigners, that is, anyone from outwith ones little patch. To talk of a tsunami of Jew-baiting that has swept the British left is an overstatement that borders on the ridiculous. Nevertheless, the left must tread carefully when dealing with the question of Palestine and Israel and Zionism, and it has over the years left itself open to criticism. Unlike solidarity action with those fighting apartheid in South Africa, where the reactionaries in Britain and elsewhere sided with the white supremacists and there was little danger of any misinterpretations, in this case one will find all manner of reactionaries from the relatively marginal forces of fascism to the more widespread forces of fundamentalist Islam posing as friends of the Palestinians not so much out of sympathy for the oppressed of the Middle East, but because it offers them a chance to attack the Jews. Although Zionists constantly use the experience of anti-Semitism as a means of deflecting criticisms of Israeli policies, crudely-put criticisms of Zionist theory and practice can veer dangerously close in appearance to anti-Jewish sentiments masquerading in an anti-Zionist guise. This is all the more important these days with the emergence of a gaggle of vociferous anti-Zionist Jews who, in their disgust at Israeli government actions, have adopted not a little of the baggage of classic anti-Semitism and see nothing at all wrong with associating with Holocaust-denying cranks. Furthermore, there are indications of anti-Jewish feelings arising amongst people who are neither far-rightists nor extreme Islamicists, but who consider themselves liberal and anti-racist, but nonetheless place the blame for the Israeli states foul treatment of the Palestinians upon Jews as a whole, and consider that a Jewish lobby is the main driving force behind US foreign policy. Whilst such a view is encouraged by the effective carte blanche currently given by Washington to Ariel Sharon and the direct association made by Zionists between all Jews and the state of Israel, it is quite mistaken, and it has very dangerous consequences. Our opposition to Zionism must therefore be carefully distinguished in both words and deeds from any possible association from
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anti-Jewish sentiments. Proposals for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions had been circulating for some time prior to the vote in the AUT. Over three years ago, various left-wingers (including this writer) became concerned about the actual modus operandi of a boycott when the manager of two academic journals, the Translator and Translation Studies Abstract, removed from the list of contributors two Israeli academics purely upon the grounds of their nationality. Neither of them was a political reactionary; indeed, one of them had a record of activity with Israeli peace groups. Not only did this dismissal strike me as politically and personally wrong, it was counter-productive as it was easily and inevitably presented by the Israel lobby as an act of anti-Semitism. Following from this inauspicious start, it was never clear whether the boycott campaign was aimed at Israels academic sector as a whole or at specific academic institutions. It was in this atmosphere that the AUTs resolution was discussed and voted on. It was not clear whether the demand of the motion for the boycott of Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities was the specific aim of the campaign, or the prelude to a much more extensive or even full blacking of Israeli academic institutions. This is important, as a sharply-aimed boycott, by focussing on specific notorious factors the victimisation of Ilan Pappe by Haifa University, and the validation by Bar-Ilan of the settlers Judea and Samaria College would have brought to light in an immediate and vivid manner in British the Israeli states shabby treatment of the Palestinian students and the underhand manner in which Jewish academics and students who unearth uncomfortable findings about the Zionist state are dealt with. However, a more extensive or total boycott of Israeli academic institutions would blunt the effectiveness of the limited campaign, as it would both downplay the above examples by lumping them in with the conduct of Israeli academia as a whole, and brand all Israeli academic institutions and academics as overt instruments of Zionist oppression, thus putting them all beyond the pale. This would serve to isolate those in Israeli academic institutions who are opposed to the Israeli states treatment of the Palestinians, and, as there is no call for an academic boycott of any other country, whatever the crimes of its government, would enable the Israeli authorities to accuse those involved of picking solely on them, with the obvious implication that they are acting because of anti-Semitic motives. It will be argued that the Israeli state and its fellow-travellers abroad will anyway accuse their critics of anti-Semitism. This they do as a matter of course. But this would be made that much more difficult, and the task of building solidarity with the Palestinians made more easy, if the left were to organise its campaigns on this issue with sufficient care so that the Zionists complaints could be easily and widely seen as fraudulent and selfseeking. By not stating clearly its objectives, by making rash and incorrect decisions, the campaign for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, whatever the honourable intentions of its organisers, could well be seen as a lesson of how not to go about Palestinian solidarity work. Arthur Trusscott

The Boycott: A Response to Toby Abse

TOBY Abses article Boycotting Israeli Universities was, by any stretch of the imagination, an abysmal as well as a reactionary tirade. Indeed it is almost a textbook example of how to construct an illogical argument. If it had been written by one of his students, the only mark would have been an F for Failure. Indeed it is hard to know what Tobys complaint is. That a traditionally weak and
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apolitical/right-wing union took, albeit for a brief moment in time, a radical position on the Israeli-Palestine situation in support of the oppressed? No doubt he is glad that the old right in the union, coupled with Zionist co-thinkers, reasserted themselves in good time. With the help of those other good friends of the Jews through the ages, the Daily Mail/Express et al. The lack of logic to which I referred is his jump from bewilderment at the sudden radicalism of the AUT to the explanation Jew Baiting no less. Now Im sure that Abse can enlighten us as to what he means by Jew Baiting, but let me have a guess. Call me old-fashioned or an anti-modernist if you wish, but to me anti-Semitism has been about bricks and bottles, calls of dirty Yid, discrimination and Jewish benches, and the belief that Jews do not belong in the societies they live in and that they should live in Palestine/Israel (or worse). Yes I know the latter sounds remarkably like Zionism, but Abse, who is not stupid, despite impressions to the contrary, is well aware of the historical relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Now I look forward to an explanation from Abse about how the AUT resolution was in anyway compatible with any of the above, as opposed to isolating a settler colonial state whose treatment of the Palestinians mirrors that of the anti-Semitic states in Europe. For Abse to trivialise anti-Semitism by comparing it with solidarity with the victims of the USAs client state, speaks volumes about his chauvinist politics, and also raises questions about the judgement of New Interventions Editors. The reason that Abse, for whom Zionism has always been a blind spot, has now joined the ranks of ex-socialists, is that he has no hesitation in joining with the right, to the extent of bemoaning the adoption of a radical political stance by the AUT, despite the opposition of their Executive. Much else about his assertion that Israeli academics are critics of the occupation isnt borne out, when one considers that the religious university of Bar Ilan was one of those boycotted. Bar Ilan has validated the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, established by Military Decree, a hotbed of far-right settlers. In fact Abses assertion is a lie. With a few honourable exceptions, Israeli academia and their academics have been complicit in the occupation from the very start, and today more so than ever. Haifa, the other university boycotted, hosts Professor Arnon Sofer, high priest of the science of racial demographics, whose conference on the Demographic Problem in May had as its guest of honour none other than Professor Yossi Artzi, Rector of Haifa University, who has openly called on the anti-Zionist Jewish academic Professor Ilan Pappe to resign. This is the company Abse keeps. But a simple question to Toby Abse if what Israel does, not just to the Palestinians but even to its own Arab citizens via agencies such as the JNF (refusing to sell, lease, etc, land to non-Jews), were done to the Jews of Britain by an English National Fund, would Abse condemn this as anti-Semitic? What would Abse say if say Goldsmith College, where he teaches, were to hold a conference on the Demographic Problem Britain Policies and the problem referred to was that there were just too many Jews in Britain, and especially in Golders Green. If he cannot answer the latter questions in the affirmative, then he has also taken leave of his senses, as well as his integrity. Tony Greenstein

Academic Freedom and Academic Boycott

THE vote at AUT Council to boycott Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities was indeed, as Abse says, unexpected: our Executive had recommended the motions be referred, and Council
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usually takes the Execs advice. There are a number of reasons why on this occasion it did not, and I can assure Mr Abse that Jew-baiting was not among them. Firstly, there was the appeal to delegates from Ilan Pappe, an Israeli Jew, to be part of a historical movement and moment that may bring an end to more than a century of colonisation, occupation and dispossession of the people in Palestine. Pappe has been victimised by his employer, the University of Haifa, ever since he came to the defence of a student called Teddy Katz, whose thesis documented a massacre of over 200 men, women and children at a village called Tantura by the Haganah in 1948, a week after the state of Israel came into being. Secondly, there was the fact that two of the motions were proposed by Shereen Benjamin, a Jewish colleague of mine, who began her speech by explaining that she supported the right of Israel to exist, but nonetheless believed that there was no alternative to supporting the boycott resolutions. Thirdly, delegates may have been moved by the photographs we displayed showing the bulldozers sent in by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to evict Arab families from their land in order to expand their student dormitory accommodation. (Yes, I know that Israeli courts have ruled in the Universitys favour, but the point is that the Israeli authorities confiscated this land in 1968 soon after the military occupation of East Jerusalem. I believe that international law takes precedence over anything the Jerusalem District Court has to say about the matter.) And fourthly, Council was persuaded by our arguments that Bar-Ilan University is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention. As Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc, put it in their open letter to Bar-Ilans President Moshe Kaveh: The Judea and Samaria College which you and your colleagues established and nurtured has a central role in the settlement of Ariel, increasing its population and its economic clout. The colleges faculty and students are prime users of the Trans-Samaria Road, the four-lane highway which was created on confiscated Palestinian land in order to provide quick transportation to Ariel. The Palestinian villagers on whose land this highway was built are excluded from using it. Mr Abse is right: the decision is not explicable in terms of the AUTs internal politics. It is explicable in terms of decent trade unionists choosing to stand up for human rights. When the left in the AUT loses the vote as is common we are expected to put up and shut up. On this occasion it was the right who lost the vote, and their response unprecedented in all the years I have been an AUT member was to call a Special Council to get the decision overturned. This meeting took place against a background of legal threats to the AUT, death threats to Ilan Pappe and myself, media hysteria in the UK, Israel and the USA and a general campaign to smear proponents of the boycott as antiSemites. In these circumstances the outcome was predictable, but the boycott campaign will now spread to other unions and resurface in the AUT, until the occupation is ended and Palestinian students and teachers can enjoy the same academic freedoms as their Israeli and British counterparts. Sue Blackwell Sue Blackwell is a member of BRICUP: British Committee for Universities of Palestine.

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Tobias Abses Outrageous Libel

FOLLOWING the by-now hackneyed reflex of Zionist black propaganda, Tobias Abse (New Interventions, Volume 12, no 1) claims that the decision of the AUT to boycott two Israeli universities is part of a tsunami of Jew-baiting that has swept the British left (in which left he quaintly includes Blairs entourage!). This detestable calumny cannot be allowed to defile the pages of New Interventions unanswered. Lets get a few things straight. First, Israel is a colonial settler state the last remaining one that is still active as such, still aggressively expanding. The Israeli military regime in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (POTs), now in its thirty-fifth year, is not less oppressive, and in many respects more cruel, than the apartheid regime was in South Africa. In one major respect it is much, much worse. Apartheid was based on the exploitation of non-while labour power; the non-whites were therefore needed as part of the economy, although denied civil rights. Zionist colonisation has always been deliberately based on the exclusion of indigenous labour power. For Zionism and the Israeli settler-state, the Palestinians are surplus to requirement, to be ethnically cleansed when the opportunity arises. The Israeli plans for the POTs resemble Indian Reservations more than Bantustans. Needless to say, the exploitative colonial structure of apartheid is much easier to reverse than the expulsivist Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing. It must therefore be stopped in its tracks. Boycotting Israeli exports and public institutions is one way for progressive public opinion to exert pressure in this direction. Second, the boycott against Israel follows the example of the boycott against South Africa under apartheid. The first step was taken by an ad-hoc group most of them Israel Jews, including the present writer who called in April 2001 for a boycott of Israeli exports and leisure tourism in Israel. See www.matzpun.co. Hundreds of people in many countries including many Jews added their signature to this call. Readers of New Interventions are invited to join us. Our call was soon followed by the Ban Israeli Goods (BIG) Campaign in this country. The AUT resolution simply joins this honourable line. Socialists should welcome rather than vituperate it as Abse does. Third, Abse claims that while Israeli universities obviously contain some rightwingers, Israeli academics as a group are far more critical of their government and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and far more open to dialogue with Palestinians, than Israeli society as a whole. This claim is the exact reverse of the truth: while some Israeli academics are critical of the colonial policies of their government, Israeli academics as a group are no more so than Israeli society as a whole. In any case, this is irrelevant, because the AUT boycott is directed against academic institutions, not the individual academics employed by them. No sanctions are called for against individual academics so long as they act as individuals rather than as representatives of their institutions. Fourth, the two academic institutions targeted have a particularly notorious record. Bar-Ilan, the religious university, a hotbed of fanatic chauvinism, supports the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel (also known as Ariel College), which in fact was nurtured as a branch of Bar-Ilan. Ariel is an exclusively Jewish settlement constructed on illegally-seized land in the occupied West Bank. (An occupying power is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva convention from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory and from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area, except for reasons of military necessity or for the benefit of the local population.) Bar-Ilan supervises degree programmes for students at Ariel College. The AUT resolution states that a boycott
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by AUT members of Bar-Ilan as an institution should persist until it severs all academic links with Ariel College. As an Israeli commentator, Tom Segev, pointed out in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (19 May 2005), the boycott of Bar-Ilan hurts only those Israelis who support the perpetuation of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories. As for Haifa University, it has a long record of hounding its few faculty members who are anti-Zionist dissidents. The official policy of Haifa University is well illustrated by a conference that it officially hosted in mid-May 2005 on The Demographic Problem and Israels Demographic Policies. Haaretz (17 May 2005) reports: Several dozen Jewish and Arab students protested Tuesday morning at Haifa University against an academic conference titled The Demographic Problem and Israels Demographic Policies that they described as racist. The students, prevented by campus security personnel from entering the auditorium where the conference was being held, sat down outside and refused to be evacuated. Conference participants are slated to discuss the forecasts that Arabs will constitute the majority of Israels population with several decades. The student protestors maintain the conference is racist and anti-Arab. They attempted to distributed to conference participants certificates reading licensed racist and the bearer of this certificate completed with honours an advanced course in racism at Haifa University. Conference participants include demographic experts Professor Sergio della Pergola of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Professor Arnon Sofer of Haifa University. In this light, Abses allegation that the boycott against Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities is an instance of Jew-baiting is a sickening outrageous libel. Mosh Machover

Selective Boycott or Academic Jihad?

SINCE, unlike George Galloway who no doubt would support any academic, cultural, sporting, diplomatic, political or economic boycott of Israel I do not resort to the courts to deal with slurs on my personal integrity (out of principle in relation to fellow socialists, due to poverty in relation to Blairites and post-modernists), I had better begin by dealing with some of the more absurd allegations against me before engaging with the substance of the broader debate in a rather more detached manner. Some of this introductory paragraph will be somewhat tedious for many readers, but certain claims might be repeated if left unchallenged, even if they emanate from somebody as universally distrusted on the left as Comrade Greenstein. Firstly, I am not an ex-socialist. I have not seen the Blairite light, discovered the wonders of the free market and learnt to hate all benefit claimants. I continue to believe in the ultimate need completely to expropriate the capitalist class and bring all major economic enterprises into some form of social ownership. More immediately, I oppose all privatisation, whether overt or disguised as PFI or PPP, as well as all attacks on the welfare state, and support all partial re-nationalisations and increases in taxes on the rich. This is probably not enough for Greenstein, who seems to have set himself up as the Chief Rabbi and expelled me from his congregation for the offence of disagreeing with him. Secondly, I am not a Zionist in any sense that the Zionists themselves would understand. I have never visited Israel, let alone lived there, and have no intention of emigrating
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there or urging others to do so. Moreover, I have not shown any great enthusiasm for Israeli government policy, even when Likud was not in control, nor have I ever contributed financially to Zionist causes. I believe that Israel should withdraw from all the territories seized in 1967, and I support the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. I believe that Israel has a right to exist within its pre-1967 boundaries, just as I believe, for example, that France has a right to exist within its present boundaries. I fail to see how this makes me a Zionist in any ideological sense, although doubtless Comrade Greenstein disagrees (and perhaps Comrade Machover too I am not clear whether he thinks I am a dupe or perpetrator of Zionist black propaganda I have never knowingly met an agent of Mossad). Thirdly, I am astounded at the reference to my chauvinist politics. Since I have a British passport, not an Israeli one, I would interpret this phrase in a conventional sense as suggesting that I am some sort of enthusiast for British imperialism, or regularly wave the Cross of St George at Millwalls home games. Whilst I would have whole-heartedly supported the British states war against Nazi Germany between September 1939 and May 1945, I have actively and publicly opposed all the wars fought by the British state in my own lifetime (Falklands, Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq). Fourthly, I have never met, spoken to (even on the phone) or corresponded with (even via e-mail) Professor Sofer or Professor Artzi allegedly the company Abse keeps. Having dealt with most of the scurrilous jibes to refute every one of Comrade Greensteins numerous innuendoes would exhaust any readers patience I want to turn to matters of more general interest. The first question I want to address is the question of Jew-baiting since I have been accused of a sickening outrageous libel. I have never suggested that Comrade Blackwell was anti-Semitic, and the other two comrades have a stronger claim to being Jewish than myself (according to the kind of rabbinical definition used by Comrade Greensteins father, rather than the Reform rabbi who converted my mother). Therefore, I assume my critics were objecting to my general inferences about the popularity of the boycott campaign, rather than claiming that I have libelled them as individuals. Are all supporters of the boycott campaign sincere supporters of a bi-national, secular, democratic (and presumably socialist) state in Israel/Palestine like my three individual critics? Frankly, no. The increase in Jew-baiting in both Britain and France in recent times is not a Zionist myth, even if Zionists have been cynically exploiting it to call upon Diaspora Jews to leave Europe for Israel forthwith. This does not seem an appropriate place to discuss the French instances further, beyond observing that France has the largest Jewish community, the largest Muslim community and the largest Fascist organisation in Western Europe, and this coincidence has unfortunately not led to Jewish/Muslim unity against Fascism on any large scale. In the British case, this year has seen the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents since records began to be kept about 20 years ago. The most notable and well-publicised outrages were the attacks on Jewish cemeteries in Manchester and East London. I am not attributing these actions to the left, merely providing some broader streetlevel social context, outside the rarefied world of the campuses or small left-wing meetings, in which the AUTs actions and the response to them need to be placed. Jew-baiting on the British left has a far more direct link with the disgusting opportunist alliance between various left groups from the Marxist tradition (most notably the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Action, although arguably some cadres from other groups too) and political Islam (basically the soft Jihadis of the Muslim Association of Britain and the Islamic Party of Britain, since the harder Jihadi groups that Blair is trying to proscribe did not en58

dorse any such tactical alliance with kaffirs). Arguably, the roots of this ghastly lash-up (which, questions of anti-Semitism aside, is a total betrayal of the lefts traditional stance on womens rights, gay rights, secular education and Enlightenment values generally) go back to the support given by sections of the left to the ultra-reactionary fundamentalist counter-revolutionaries in Afghanistan and to what some of us called Bosnomania (uncritical support for the fundamentalist Izetbegovis spurious claims to represent a multiethnic ideal at a time when Sarajevo was crawling with Jihadis of all nationalities, including Osamas Finest). By far the largest single donor to Respects General Election campaign, a figure linked to the Birmingham Central Mosque, claims that the Jews were responsible for both 11 September 2001 and the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Have the socialists in Respect no shame? Do these comrades need to be reminded that Trotsky condemned the Nazi Soviet pact? Do comrades need to be reminded that the Trotskyists of the 1940s, including Tony Cliff, denounced as clerico-fascists the Muslim Brotherhood, whose chief ideologist, the bigot Qutb, is the political inspiration of both the soft and hard Jihadis of our own day? Bookmarks, the SWP bookshop, was recently the venue for a book-launch for a totally deranged anti-Zionist Israeli Jewish musician who believes in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (just like Hamas and its sister organisation, the MAB), and associates with notorious Holocaust deniers linked to David Irving. In such a climate, the boundaries between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, Israelis and British Jews, get a little blurred, to put it politely. The fact that some British leftists still seem to have no problem with the MAB line (seemingly endorsed by the Catholic Cherie Blair and the Lib-Dem Jenny Tong) that the bus bombers of Haifa and Tel Aviv are heroes, whilst the bus bombers of Hackney and Tavistock Square are not, seems to suggest that ordinary Israeli Jewish civilians (all of whom, including women and children, are to be considered either former soldiers or potential soldiers, as Ken Livingstones great friend, the murderous, homophobic and misogynist Sheikh Yussef el-Qaradawi, has pointed out) are somehow less human than ordinary Londoners. Am I a Zionist in suggesting this is anti-Semitism? Perhaps after 7 July, when Jihadi terrorism ceased to be a spectator sport for sections of the British intelligentsia (including many liberals, whose petit-bourgeois, often postmodernist world view rejects class analysis, and whose original Christian upbringing makes them often unconsciously prone to scapegoat Jews in their new guise as Israelis/Zionists as the source of all the worlds problems), some comrades can retrospectively appreciate why Jewish academics turned up in large numbers to local AUT branch meetings to demand a recall conference and a reversal of the boycott, without assuming it was entirely the result of a well-organised Zionist conspiracy. The second point I want to make is that supporters of the boycott were usually disingenuous about their aims, and this criticism might perhaps be made of two of the current contributions to the New Interventions debate, although certainly not of the tirade by Comrade Machover, who overtly models his call for a boycott of Israel on that of South Africa, a line whose meaning would be clear to even the most apolitical and inattentive AUT member. The supporters of the boycott aimed to win over the uncommitted middle ground in the AUT, what Comrade Blackwell called decent trade unionists, by pretending to advocate a boycott of specific institutions on empirical grounds, claiming they had irrefutable documentary proof of exceptionally appalling repressive or racist practices in particular universities, when what they really wanted was an ideologically-motivated total boycott of all Israeli universities. Speakers at the pro-Palestinian lunchtime fringe meeting at the recall conference (which as an observer at the conference I felt duty-bound to attend,
59

to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the other sides case as objectively as I could), made no attempt to disguise the nature of this strategy, so I would be grateful if my critics would refrain from suggesting that in labelling it a thin end of the wedge strategy I am engaged in some Zionist libel. The duplicitous nature of these tactics meant that they backfired in practical terms. Insufficient care was given to collecting compelling evidence of wrongdoing of the kind that would convince decent trade unionists rather than long-standing anti-Zionists. Empirically, the original case against Haifa was very weak it rested on uncorroborated assertions by Pappe, disputed by colleagues within his own institution. At the end of the day, the allegedly persecuted Pappe has not been sacked, indeed he seems to have been promoted (inevitably, his supporters make the riposte that he should have been promoted far earlier, but such claims and counter-claims are endemic to university life with all its petty personal rivalries, and not unique to Haifa or indeed to Israel, as Comrades Blackwell and Machover must be aware, even if Comrade Greenstein may genuinely nurse numerous illusions about what is going on in British academia under Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly). I cannot help comparing the hullabaloo over the Pappe case with the deafening silence about the enforced early retirement of the distinguished Trotskyist historian Professor Antonio Moscato and the abolition of his popular course The History of the Workers Movement at a southern Italian university increasingly under direct business control. This occurred this year, and had none of the ambiguity of the Pappe case, but it happened in Berlusconis Italy, not Sharons Israel. The switch from the Pappe issue to the Demographic Conference issue as the grounds for a boycott of Haifa appeared to the uncommitted as a belated and cynical ruse. I myself would be very much opposed to boycotting a university on the basis of one conference with which the vast majority of its staff had no connection; and Rectors or their equivalents (Vice-Chancellors, Masters, Principals, Wardens, etc) often endorse obnoxious visiting speakers with warm words of welcome, sincere or otherwise (I vaguely remember some such incident involving some particularly bellicose American statesman at the University of Leeds about 15 years ago). Nonetheless, I would acknowledge that the pro-boycott campaigners would have been in a stronger tactical position if they had used the Demographic Conference as the initial reason, not a fallback. The effect of what was perceived by many uncommitted members as Pappes dodgy dossier was to discredit the rather stronger case against BarIlan. It was obvious to me in private conversations with supporters of Engage in my own college that they felt far happier defending what they saw as tolerant multi-cultural Haifa with its 20 per cent Palestinian student body than protecting Bar-Ilan with its more reactionary reputation, and that they felt Ariel College itself was indefensible. To continue in this tactical vein, I suspect that a call for a boycott of Engineering Departments with any documented links to the Separation Wall might have been a far better tactic if the proboycott lobby had actually wanted to undermine the occupation of the West Bank rather than the State of Israel itself. The third substantive point I want to make here concerns the nature of the Israeli state, and the question of equating it with South Africa. I would argue that one has to draw a rigorous distinction between the Occupied Territories seized in 1967 and Israel proper. I would remind the pro-boycott camp that the Israeli Arabs or Israeli Palestinians of pre-1967 Israel do have the right to vote in Israeli elections for the Knesset and, in principle, have the right to form their own political parties (whatever limitations may exist in practice because of security concerns). Moreover, they can attend the same educational institutions as Israeli Jews (as the case of Haifa clearly demonstrates). I acknowledge that they are subject to various forms of discrimination, but so are ethnic minorities in many
60

countries (including the United Kingdom) I really do not see any parallel with apartheid South Africa, with its separate voting rolls, separate educational institutions, legal ban on inter-racial sex and so forth. Similarly, Comrade Greensteins claim that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians mirrors that of the anti-Semitic states in Europe falls down if we are discussing pre-1967 Israel. Leaving to one side the notorious example of the Third Reich, which the more demagogic anti-boycott campaigners such as Professor Steven Rose are keen to invoke as often as possible, let us look more calmly at Fascist Italy after the introduction of the Racial Laws in 1938 as our point of comparison. Italian Jews were banned from teaching in Italian schools and universities, and all Jewish students had to cease attending their school or university classes. Moreover, Jews were legally excluded from numerous professions and occupations, and severe restrictions were placed on their ownership of property. As I pointed out when discussing the alleged South African parallel, the Palestinian minority within Israel proper is not treated in this way. I do not in any way endorse Israels occupation of the West Bank (Sharon seems to have left Gaza for good), but Israel is not the only state in todays world engaged in an illegal occupation (the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus and the Chinese occupation of Tibet are two obvious examples, even if the AUT is not prepared to acknowledge the illegality of British actions in Iraq). In short, Israel is not a particularly benevolent state, but there are far worse examples (although the lefts flirtation with the Jihadis seems to lead to silence, or even deliberate obfuscation about the Sudanese states role in supporting Arab militias engaged in mass killing of black Sudanese in Darfur), and it should not be treated as a South African-style pariah, but judged case by case like any other state, including the British state, whose agents have recently gunned down an innocent Brazilian at Stockwell Tube Station. To judge Israel by different criteria does raise the question of Jew-baiting, about which I have said enough for the moment, earlier in my reply. Doubtless, as my critics have pointed out, the debate will go on. Tobias Abse

Rudolf Rocker and the Anarchist Movement

THE London Years is Rudolf Rockers autobiographical account of the period that he spent in the UK.1 Rocker was probably the foremost anarchist activist in the world for several decades. Born in Germany, resident in Paris and then London from the age of 22, he tells of the development of the anarchist movement in Britain and elsewhere from 1885 to the end of the First World War. His personal stay, associated with the Jewish labour movement in Londons East End, though he was not a Jew, was from 1895 to the end of his wartime internment in 1918. His second son Fermin recently wrote a complementary but lighter biography covering the same period, The East End Years.2
1. 2. Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, 1958 and 2005. Fermin Rocker, The East End Years, 1998. 61

Alan Woodward

I must first of all record that it is an unusual but pleasant experience to read a history book and not have to dismiss much of it as Leninist, Stalinist or reformist propaganda. There is no division between Rockers beliefs and his actions, everything is consistent. Were the book to be written and published today, it would need little amendment a rare justification for the anarchist tradition of reprinting classic texts without explanatory notes. Even so, notes and an index would assist understanding for the modern reader. The history of the UK anarchist movement has been more comprehensively covered,3 but not more persuasively written. Apart from the main theme, there are interesting pen portraits of his partner Milly Wincop and others, including Gustav Landauer, Ted Leggatt, John Turner, Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, Peter Kropotkin and Francisco Ferrer, along with a host of lesser-known figures. Rocker has interesting chapters on the Second International and the Sydney Street siege, plus an idiosyncratic account by a lifelong Marxist who blames Friedrich Engels for the split in the First International, in spite of the obvious clash of the differing politics of Marxism and anarchism. The final chapters, 26 to 33, give some details about the plight of the German wartime internees, who were chiefly held in Alexandra Palace. This is a useful addition to the political literature of imprisonment, a real piece of hidden history, and should be assessed as such. Themes: For our purposes, there are two main aspects of the significance of the UK anarchist movement in these years: firstly, the extent of the movement in the decade after 1895, before the massive expansion of anarcho-syndicalism of the following decade; and secondly, the international links kept by the Jewish immigrants, primarily with their homeland in western Russia, now Poland, and particularly the role of the Jewish anarchist movement there in the first revolution of 1905. Anarchism in Britain: On the first point, Rocker traces back the origins of UK anarchism to the split in the Communist League in 1850, and examines the part played by exiles like Johann Most. He takes up the story with his own role in editing journals like the Yiddish Arbeter Fraint, Workers Friend, and later Germinal, which is described modestly but realistically, learning the Yiddish language and becoming a busy, popular speaker as well. The London Years is largely concerned with the Jewish settlers in East London and anarchism. There were other anarchist groups and newspapers in these years, including one run by Guy Aldred and his paper The Spur, as well as that of Freedom, founded by Peter Kropotkin in 1885. Workers Friend was an agitational centre to the group, a point no doubt picked up by Vladimir Lenin for his theories for developing the more authoritarian Bolshevik party. Its function was to care for the families of the Jewish workers against the opposition of the official and religious structures, which were increasingly traditional and conservative, and sharply opposed to the anarchism of the Workers Friend. The ideas of anarchism always inspired the activists and the journal, and from 1900 Rockers personal initiative in setting up the more theoretical Germinal was a logical step as the movement grew. Workers Organisation: A special concern in the day-to-day work was the backbreaking efforts to organise the Jewish workers against the sweated labour system in the East End tailoring industry. The economic exploitation of the clothing workers by the selfemployed tailors was organised by the City of London financial institutions not a lot changes here then.
3. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, 1993, and for Britain, John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British Anarchists, 1970. 62

Years of hard graft climaxed with the mini-general strike in 1912, surely one of the supreme examples of hidden history. Workers Friend become a daily paper for the duration, and the group was engaged in a permanent round of meetings and other strike work. The strike affected both the less poverty-stricken tailors of the West End and the myriad Jewish workers of the East End and their families. Rocker records the immediate solidarity with the dock strikers, whose action overlapped with theirs. Three hundred children were taken into the homes of the Jewish workers, and strong lasting relations were built as a result. The roots of class solidarity run deep. Local Structures: Within the Jewish community the sense of community was always strong. Meetings were first held in a selected pub, but then a dedicated club house was set up in Jubilee Street, off the Commercial Road, E1. This was a meeting place, hired out to other organisations, as well as a social centre, although the sale of alcohol was not allowed. Rocker was familiar with the activities in the provinces, making regular visits, and living for a while in Liverpool and Leeds. His book records the activities of city groups in such places as Manchester, Hull and Glasgow. He notes also how the UK movement acted as a staging post for further immigration to the Americas. His own trips to the USA and Canada are a testament to this, a point examined below. A French Comparison: Overall, Rockers account of the Jewish group, within the anarchist movement, strengthens the ideas about the UK movement in comparison to what has conventionally been seen as the larger French syndicalist counterpart. Its similar significance is a theme that has been previously examined in another important text.4 Pre-1914: While the relations between anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were not always as cordial as might be imagined, it is clear is that the subsequent expansion of anarcho-syndicalism in the prewar period was the culmination of much hard work at this earlier stage. The great unrest in Britain was preceded by educational bodies following the tradition of the Communist Workers Educational Union of a half-century previously. Concluding this factual summary, it can be seen that anarchist organisation within the Jewish community was strong, structured and productive. So much so that the question is posed as to why many anarchists make a point about opposing political parties when what we have here is an obvious case of a political party, group, organisation or whatever, that was a highly successful model for others to follow. Political Organisation: For the purposes of clarification, we can analyse in more detail the components that make up a political organisation. These are ideology and structure. Ideology consists of unity around a common set of political ideas, and a drive to propagate them. Conventionally the basis is laid by intellectuals, who may have defected from other ideologies, and who draw out the implications of their analysis into the general lines of strategy. Promotion of the ideology is through theoretical journals where the tolerance of dissent is dependent on several factors, but which is liable to decline if a dominant leadership becomes more domineering.5 This concept suggests the rejection of alternative ideologies, organisations and all the associated implications. The downside of this commitment to a specific ideology is the rise of party chauvinism, where it so dominates members minds that all other ideas are fiercely rejected, or not even considered, but this is another story. Structure consists of an elected/appointed leadership charged with the constitutional
4. 5. Bob Holton, British Syndicalism 1900-1914, 1976. See Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1911 and 1968, for a lengthy discussion of the subject. 63

role of executing policy. As outlined above, this usually involves the production of a central journal for the implementation of various functions. The leadership can function within a structure that is centralised, federated or rotationally appointed on a locality basis. A major function is to recruit new members plus the optional one of levying membership subscriptions or persuading people to make a donation or to buy the journal. Some form of education by meetings general or specific is also necessary. Local organisation consists of branches, locals or cells which meet regularly with members allocated by geography or occupation, operating within the national, central or coordinated guidelines laid down, having a role of relating to the overall structure, and representing the public face of the organisation. Activity consists of specifically engaging in what is seen as the application of the ideology to the problems of their members in order to legitimise the ideas and build the overall structure. In most socialist organisations these follow traditional patterns, although some organisations, crippled by party chauvinism, are less flexible in their tactics. There can optionally be participation in electoral systems as such, and this involves additional organisations for the purpose of controlling representatives. For example, the programme of Workers Socialism, As We See It, calls for the following: Socialists to build rank and file committees in all structures especially the workplace, and to promote their aims by being active and unionised members of a workplace, and standing as delegates in that capacity. This is a primary agitational function, even for those who choose to become politically active, and one that cannot be neglected in favour of politics. Outside this, Workers Socialists may be active in organisations fighting racism and including discrimination against asylum seekers, the defence of the welfare state against closure, cuts and privatisation, anti-war campaigns, and other fields including possible electoral work at some stage. The promotion of socialist ideas, organisation, perspectives and literature, is an integral part of the this activity. Workers Friend and the Political Party: It can seen that the Workers Friend group meets many of the above criteria and can in effect be designated a political party. It is the common practice of many anarchists to pretend that their organisations are not political parties on the basis that they do not include one or more of these features. This is quite invalid. Anarchist Theory and its Limitations: Usually this means in practice a refusal to participate in electoral activity. In fact, the debate about this is another subject entirely, but we can note in passing that the issue of voting for political parties was of course a major cause of the split between the Marxists and libertarians in the First International of workers organisations of 1864-72. Historically, the ideas of Michael Bakunin have been proved correct, both in respect of the corruption of parliament parties and the linked issue of the dominant political party and revolutionary politics, as shown in Russia after 1917.6 Electoralism? Small wonder then that the argument that electoralism results in trapping the successful candidates and that it provides a cover for the exercise of real power by capitalists, has generally won the day, even with the German council communists in 1919.7 However, to regard electoral abstention as a totally sacrosanct negative principle, ra6. 7. Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and Workers Councils, 1978. Jan Appel, The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, 1990, see the explanato64

ther than a tactic, is increasingly open to debate. In fact, the traditional anarchist concept of abstention from voting was based at least as much on opposition to conventional parliamentary activity as opposition to engaging in action within the state. It is of course necessary to distinguish between the tactic of standing candidates and voting in elections. In respect of the former, in practice some compromise in respect of participation has been the rule. The Experience: Some anarchist organisations have promoted parliamentary action. Rudolf Rockers own brother-in-law Guy Aldred, the leading British anarchist of the twentieth century, favoured the Sinn Fin tactic standing, getting elected but not taking the seat.8 A version of this tactic was used with astonishing success by the nationalist Bobby Sands in the Irish Hunger Strikes of 1981, standing for election from his deathbed in prison and helping ultimately to defeat Thatcher. Even the leading anarchist PJ Proudhon stood for and was elected to the French National Assembly in 1848, though his inconsistent performance there puzzled friend and foe alike. He later disowned it. It should also be noted that measures can be taken against the defection of parliamentary representatives by groups which sponsor them. The Bolsheviks supervised the election of tribunes of the people in the Russian Duma prior to the First World War, but with certain safeguards in respect of any possible default on their part.9 Regarding the other point about voting in elections, Daniel Gurin relates how the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, during the Alliance of the Left in 1924, whilst conceding that elections can have good or bad results, and that anarchist votes can be crucial, nonetheless continued to advocate abstention. The Spanish Revolution: By contrast, the Spanish anarchist workers in 1930 voted pragmatically for the new republic but abstained three years later, allowing a very reactionary government into office. The alternative policy of insurrections was a disaster for the anarchist participants. In the crucial Popular Front election in 1936, although the CNT/FAI policy was officially for continued abstention, this was largely tokenism, and many supporters voted against the political right. This was followed by revolutionary events.10 Benefits: Some political activists, including the present writer, feel that the general tactic of electoral activity can be beneficial today in some circumstances; for instance, to exercise a negative veto and prevent the extreme right wing taking office through nonviolent methods, such as alliances of left candidates in Germany in 1932 which could have marshalled the divided working class. The involvement of the BNP in current elections comes into this category. Participation can also be part of consolidating mass movements for such social-reform objectives as anti-war activities, though to make it the sole mechanism as happened in 2004 against the Iraq invasion is clearly mere reformism. It can also be a means of helping to develop a popular movement against capitalism, subordinate to direct action, but necessary to widen the struggle, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in Germany in the postwar crisis of 1918-19. Anarchist Parties: In conclusion, the issue of libertarian opposition to political parties seems misplaced. Anarchist organisations are themselves effectively political parties, they have ideas and perspectives, constitutions, rules and procedures; they organise activities as well as publishing journals and leaflets. So it appears to an outsider that anarchist denials on this issue fall into the Alice in Wonderland practice of defining words to mean what anybody wants them to mean. Such
8. 9. 10. ry notes. John Taylor Caldwell, Come Dungeons Deep: The Life and Times of Guy Aldred, Glasgow Anarchist, 1988. AY Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, 1987, see especially the introduction by Tony Cliff. Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War 1936-39, 1981. 65

delusions suggest a continuing confusion over strategy, tactics and the role of organisations. It should also be noted that at the highest level of anarcho-syndicalist organisation in the Spanish revolutionary period, the perceived degeneration of the CNT represented by the formation by Angel Pestaa of the Syndicalist Party, was countered by the establishment of another political party, the FAI Anarchist Internationalism: On the second major point, the international links of the Russian Jews were to assume great importance in the revolution in 1905. There was a regular exchange of literature, promoting ideas and organisation. The Jewish anarchists in Ukraine were a major part of workers resistance in the general strikes at the end of that year. The same pattern of steady production and distribution of literature over a long preparatory period was repeated in the Spanish revolution around 1930.11 Revolution in Russia: Historically, the agitation in the Ukraine was also important both in the revolution of 1917 itself and the war against the counter-revolutionary Tsarist White troops. This has been told in a recent biography of Nestor Makhno and his peasant armies.12 At the same time, labour discontent, led largely by anarchists, was central in the opposition to the increasingly authoritarian regime of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In the agitation for a third revolution in 1920-22, the movement created by Jewish anarchists was pivotal.13 Its repression, and that of Bolshevik dissenters like Gabriel Miasnikov,14 leads straight to the horrors of Stalinism. We should not forget the Leninist roots of this.15 Prison and Politics: Rockers account of his years in British internment during the First World War opens up some intriguing possibilities. The fate of many who oppose governments, politicians, capitalism generally and capitalists individually, the militia, the legal system and the police, colonialists, imperialists, etc, is often a spell in prison. This can be short-term, like many of the ill-treated early victims of the Nazis,16 or a life sentence as in the case of Antonio Gramsci. The purpose is to induce silence, or exile, if not compliance. Death is not generally an option, as the victims may be needed at a later date, and execution is another issue entirely. Prisoners, such as Rosa Luxemburg, write letters,17 whole volumes such as Gramscis Prison Notebooks,18 or subsequent memoirs, such as Alexander Berkmans.19 Prisoners have debated political issues such as Ante Ciligas analysis of the nature of Stalinist Russia, 20 or formulated theories like George Jacksons efforts to integrate Marxism, Maoism and black urban resistance.21 Countless anarchists, dissenters, Marxists, national liberationists, war protesters, workers on strike, etc, have served their time this is a subject waiting for an author. Meanwhile some general comments can be offered. Rockers internment resulted in a more modest essay which concerned itself with the nuts and bolts of the situation. After being housed in temporary accommodation, the prisoners were put in a series of camps, Rocker was fortunate to be held in Alexandra Palace.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. Stuart Christie, We, the Anarchists: A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937, 2000. Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno, Anarchys Cossack: the struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 19171921, 2004. Jonathan Aves, Workers Against Lenin: Labour Protests and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1996. Ibid. Gregory Petrovich Maximoff, The Guillotine At Work, two volumes, 1940 and 1975. Oscar Hippe, And Red is the Colour of Our Flag, 1991, the author has the distinction of being imprisoned by both the Nazis and the Stalinists. Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, 1921 and 1946. Paulo Spriano, Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years, 1979. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 1970. Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, 1940 and 1979. George Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 1972, and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 1971, 66

This huge building was divided into occupational workshops, for tailors and suchlike. Amid the complaints and grievances, the demand for access for visitors was important, for material and psychological reasons. Rocker held lectures, permission having been granted after a while, and as the internees were a politically mixed collection of miscellaneous German nationals or their partners, this was seen as a central, though non-partisan, activity (English officers monitored them).22 Some General Criticisms: Rockers book can be criticised for his omissions. Guy Aldred, perhaps the most consistently active anarchist in this country, is not mentioned, despite being in the authors own family.23 Similarly, the expansion of the wider anarchosyndicalist movement in these years is somewhat neglected. Rockers interwar role in the anarcho-syndicalist International has a crucial significance in this later decade, but at this early stage there was much opposition to the movement from such eminent leaders as Errico Malatesta. Rocker does not tackle this subject, though he may in the 1950s have considered it to be a dead issue. He also skates over the question of violence, which affected the anarchist movement especially in this period and which also was divisive. One final omission concerns the Jewish immigrants, not all of whom went into tailoring. Much of the workforce of the rapidly-growing furniture factories, for example, was provided by people who were recruited on the dockside as they disembarked from the boats. Later these workers were to become unionised and form the basis for the furniture workers union, a prominent left union of its time. The Communist Party of Great Britain was to dominate the union, which had a powerful tradition of workplace organisation before it disappeared through amalgamations in the Thatcher years.24 There were also other struggles involving immigrant workers at this time. One such is the little known catering workers actions in Londons West End during 1910-14.25 From the viewpoint of Workers Socialism, it would have been interesting to read Rockers thoughts on the development of workers councils and the council communists during the First World War and its aftermath. The movement drew extensively on the anarcho-syndicalist traditions in the main countries. The current movement for Workers Socialism similarly shares some of these roots.26 The Authors Later Career: Rudolf Rocker went on to play a pivotal role in the anarchist International Workers Association. This opposed the Bolsheviks Third International, which was rejected by many national anarchist parties and unions. It enjoyed an excellent record, but was forced out of Germany by Hitler. It still survives if in a reduced structure.27 Its experience was similar to that of the council communists International, the FAI. Rocker was forced into exile again with the Nazi takeover, and he spent his remaining years in America until his death in 1958. He continued to be active, publishing the
22. Local history books have little information on the events of the period, but the Hornsey Historical Society does keep a copy of a recent booklet published by the Anglo-German Family History Society on civilian internment. This has two essays by Richard Noschke and Rocker. The former became a revived nationalist from his experience, while Rocker retained his beliefs and went on to many years of constructive contributions in Germany after the Russian revolution of 1917. Their joint booklet is more explicit about such concerns as diet, prisoners problems, etc, than Rockers later book. See Rudolf Rocker and Richard Noschke, An Insight into Civilian Internment in Britain During World War One, 1998. Caldwell, op cit. Huw Reid, The Furniture Makers: A History of Trade Unionism in the Furniture Trade 1868-1972, 1986. Wilf McCartney, Dare to be a Daniel! A History of One of Britains Earliest Syndicalist Unions, 38 Strikes Fought, 38 Won, 1944, 1992. Alan Woodward, Political Economy of Workers Socialism: A First Approximation, 2005. See Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective, 1990, for a somewhat academic account of anarcho-syndicalism. 67

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

monumental Nationalism and Culture in 1936. This surveys European history on a grand scale, and has recently been republished. His booklet on Spain, published in the midst of the Spanish revolution, was an early exposure of the counter-revolutionary betrayal of the Communist Party. The frequently reprinted Anarcho-Syndicalism is one of the best accounts of the international labour movement from any source, and is highly recommended.28 Conclusion: Rocker was a leading figure in the labour movement, and his belated recognition is long overdue. If you read The London Years, be prepared for a likely desire to follow up the experience with other interesting and revealing ventures into his perceptive later books.

Anarchists, Syndicalists and Workers Councils

ALAN Woodwards reply to my article opens with both a justified and critical welcome for my article, because it opens a debate on the contentious subject of political leadership and revolutionary industrial action. But when reading it, I quickly detected that someone was missing from the story and that was the anarchist worker who made up a big part of Europes workforce after the First World War.29 The omission on my part is one of pure oversight, born out of an attempt to concentrate, perhaps overmuch, on the institutional political process of dual power within the overall revolutionary process, especially in relation to the organs that the working class uses during periods of open crises. It was not an attempt to write the anarchist worker, or any other section of the working class, out of the historical process. Indeed, Alans point could be extended to include a number of other trends present within the European working class at this point in time. I have in mind the whole period from the early twentieth century up to the end of the Second World War. During this period, the anarchist/libertarian tradition was a genuine mass movement, in Spain especially, but also in Russia, and to a lesser extent Italy, France and momentarily Germany as well, if we include the syndicalist tradition, which often overlapped or ran alongside the anarchist viewpoint. This context has to be expanded to include Northern America. This is because the early trade union movement often sought new sources of politics and inspiration in order to carry through its objectives of organising the working class into a mass movement. We should also include the various Jewish workers organisations, especially the Bundists, who were responsible for founding the trade union movement within the Tsarist Empire, and who often played a wider role within the pan-European left. Along with them there were other left parties, such as the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) in Germany and the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who at times moved from reformism into a centrist direction.
28. 29. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1989; Nationalism and Culture, 1933 and 1998; The Tragedy of Spain, 1937 and 1986. Alan Woodward, Another Dimension on Workers Councils: A Reply to Glyn Beagley, New Interventions, Volume 12, no 1. 68

Glyn Beagley

Yet what became of these organisations? For the post-Second World War period was totally different gone was this heterodox political landscape, and in its place were the overriding, stifling bureaucracies and mass movements of Stalinism and reformism of one type or another. One explanation might be that both Stalinism and reformism had, in different ways, developed a close relationship to and involvement with the exercise of state power, the latter in association with the bourgeoisie, and the former by supplanting it when necessary or convenient. Other left-wing movements within the working class, including the Trotskyists, lost momentum and were dispersed, as the prospect of a democratic, all-inclusive working revolution receded and failed. Counter-revolution in various guises fascist, Stalinist and bourgeois wiped out much of this vanguard. For the Bundists, it was especially difficult, because the result was Zionism, not socialism, as the reaction to the anti-Semitic holocaust created the building blocks for the new right-wing state of Israel. Those sections of the left who for one reason or another failed to contribute to the successful foundation of a democratic working-class state formation were doomed to become the victims of others. Alan writes: The commitment, or rather non-commitment, of the new Bolshevik state to workers management and democracy has been analysed extensively already. Workers councils the workplace kind were all very well in winning the revolution in October, but after that were soon to be amalgamated into partydominated trades unions. The Soviets, the first step up from the direct bodies, were quickly by-passed as the State Council of Peoples Commissars took over. From February to October 1917, the actual existence of a heterodox working-class movement, which included anarchists, as well as syndicalists, Bundists, Mensheviks and the more peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party, was a fact of political life in Russia. This was a part of the political reality of Russia in the throes of revolution, that no one, not even Lenin, Trotsky and the entire Bolshevik party could wish away. No matter how often they referred to themselves as the majority! On occasions, I reach the conclusion that Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted both a highly pragmatic, as well as an ideological view, of this form of reality. On the one hand, they formed a view of the rest of the left based upon a particular interpretation of Marxist theory, and then implemented it in a way that circumstances allowed them to do so. For example, they adopted the traditional Marxist viewpoint that anarchism was a petitbourgeois and ultra-left trend within the working-class movement. But, having done this, they then went on to analyse the local Russian variety as having two quite separate parts. One part was described as (to use todays term) lifestyle anarchism, and the other part as political anarchism. The former were lost to the world, but the latter could potentially become useful allies. After all, every insurrectionary movement needs its insurrectionaries, and in due course it is bound to attract to its side, at the moment of overturn, all of those who support its shared, common class objectives. For Lenin, the anarchists with their revolutionary zeal and enthusiasm had their uses after all. But not all was well with the revolution. The early post-October government inherited a difficult legacy, and one that was soon to be further compromised by the failure of a successful international revolution coming to the aid of beleaguered Russia. The problem of lifting Russia out of its peasant backwardness was compounded by a heterodox revival in 1918 within the soviets. By then, the Bolsheviks had come to look upon the soviets as

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their own domain.30 This threat was reinforced by the dbcle over the Constituent Assembly and the onset of the Civil War. In fact, the Bolsheviks were only saved by the continuing instability in the main centre of European capitalist countries in the postwar period, initially combined with the upsurge of peasant rebellion in the Russian countryside. The peasants reacted with undisguised horror at the prospect of Tsarist victory, since that would mean the reinstatement of landlordism. Quite naturally, they gravitated towards those who urged land to the peasants, especially when the track record of the Bolsheviks spoke for itself. After all, the peasants, reasoned, the Bolsheviks had actually done what they had promised to do, whilst others had only spoken about land redistribution and then walked around the edges of the problem. Eventually the Bolsheviks and their allies won the Civil War, but at a terrible cost; in effect the country was wrecked. The bourgeoisie and much of the technocratic lite, who ran and managed much of the most advanced sections of the economy, left Russia along with the defeated Tsarists after the conclusion of the Civil War and the Wars of Intervention. This downhill process continued with the mass epidemics, hunger and starvation. Even if this structural dismemberment of the revolution had not occurred, it is difficult to see just what Lenin and the Bolsheviks might have attempted to do in order to achieve the effective modernisation of Russian. Even under a best-case scenario the only thing that they had going for them short of a pan-European revolution was to use working-class state power plus a revolutionary government to guide the implementation of managed industrialisation of the economy and society. Someone had to drag this vast underdeveloped country into the twentieth century. The bourgeoisie had failed in its historical mission of confronting and defeating the Tsarist autocracy. Consequentially, they failed to overthrow and modernise the Tsarist Empire, and therefore matters of historical fate fell to the working class and its revolution. But that task required a stable, widespread democratic soviet formation present within society and the economy, as it does in every modern revolution. And that was now missing, in its place a monster grew up and buried the revolution. Soviets, as the highest expression of working-class unity and power, operated at many different levels; as full-blown workers councils, which were individually workplace-based or industry-wide networks, or as soldiers or sailors councils, or as armed groups of workers defence units or Red Guards. They also seemed on occasion to take on more community or locality-based social dimensions, dealing with housing issues, or alcohol abuse.31 However, the real strength of this movement was its class basis and direct democracy. It can only be described as a quantitative and qualitative historical development. That is why we see so many different versions of workers councils manifest in every open crisis throughout the globe wherever workers struggle on their own behalf. Soviets replace the democratic moment of a bourgeois representative political system, in which periodically we are allowed to vote and replace one government with another, for example Labours victory over the Tories in 1997. But soviet-style democracy introduces a permanent participatory democracy, which includes the regular election of delegates, recall, replacement and continuing report-back or feedback. The whole political and state system is democratic, dynamic and universal. But this new revolutionary democratic political system is closely tied into the deeper fate of the social development of the revolution. Any setback for workers control over the
30. 31. Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, Polity Press, 1990, pp22-23. Ibid, pp31-32. 70

economy and its future wellbeing spells disaster for the whole revolutionary project. Once the democratic and social aspects are compromised, then we have some real problems. One of the problems in Russia, and this may well be a general feature of both dual power and post-revolutionary society, is the sheer lack of effective coordination throughout both the national and international territories. Councils, by their very definition, often have their own limited constituency. A factory council or a shop-based movement of councils may have a very single-industry view of the overall process, for example, as so often with the engineering industry, and likewise with military-based formations, soldiers of a particular regiment, or with a particular military function, such as COPCON during the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-76.32 This can lead all too quickly to parochialism and fragmentation of revolutionary effort, leaving someone else to get on with the important business of running the government, something that is a thoroughly dangerous precept, especially when it takes place behind the backs of the workers. The purpose of a genuinely revolutionary party is to assist in the process of centralising workers power by constantly expanding its democratic content over all aspects of economic and social life. This did not happen in Russia to the degree that was desirable and necessary, whether it was due to pre-conceived Bolshevik perspectives about state involvement in the economic development of peasant Russia, the limited scope of workers councils, workers control and the minority social weight of the Russian working class, or the actual course of events, which as a material process dragged the revolution downwards. The actual conjunctural crisis remains an important matter for research and debate, because Russia is the only example of a successful and then a failing revolution. As the soviets and the Bolsheviks parted company because of a fragmented postrevolutionary situation, were the Bolsheviks sucked into a power vacuum created between the defeated ruling classes on the one hand and a dispersed working class on the other? In the case of Germany and Spain, pure bourgeois counter-revolution won out, aided by the failure of the official leaderships of the workers parties and trades unions to prepare for and take state power. It resulted in strategic compromises that included outright collaboration, for example the right wing of the SPD in Germany during 1918-19 and the Popular Front government in Spain between 1936-39, with the bourgeois republican component. Earlier on in his article, Alan has rightly pointed to my propensity for blind spots, and he does so again: So much for the thumbnail sketches of the councils and revolutionary situations in three countries. Before concluding, it is worth noting that a full account of workers councils would include: The magnificent role of councils in opposing imperialism as in China in 1925-27, Ireland in 1920-21, Algeria in 1962-64, and Chile in 1974. The resistance to the right wing and fascists in Spain in 1936, France in 1936 and 1968, and Portugal in 1974-76. Workers organisations against state-capitalist Russia, as in Hungary and Poland in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and even in the perverse case of state-sponsored councils in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Interesting incidents like the councils in the American general strikes in 1947 and in Japan in the same year.
32. This radical wing gained control of the MFAs security apparatus, COPCON, which in the Lisbon region in particular frequently intervened in strikes and occupations on the side of the workers. (Workers Action, no 27, October-November 2004, p19) 71

 More recent insurrections like those in Iran in 1979, Poland in 1980, and Argentina in 2002. In my defence, I must state that any blindness or one-sided treatment of the subject matter was not intentional, nor did I intend to convey chauvinism of any type. It was more a matter of process. Rather, my focus has been over-concentrated and in danger of a Golden Age of Revolution type of approach, set as it is in a particular time-frame, the first three decades of the twentieth century and in a particular place, Europe. For some time now I have attempted to expand my own areas of research and interpretation with a broader historical scope. In this respect, Alans contribution is doubly welcome in that it provides a framework for just such a study, by moving the focus forward from the time-limited Eurocentricity of my earlier article, Workers Councils in the Revolutionary Process (New Interventions, Volume 11, no 4) to include the anti-imperialist and anti-Stalinist struggles, especially of the post-Second World War phase. We should be able to grasp a fuller, richer and more complex theory and history of workers organisations during the process of dual power. My own research in relation to the framework that Alan sets out, although limited by lack of time and resources, demonstrates to me that the working class and its allies have for most of the twentieth century, in fact ever since the 1905 Russian Revolution, attempted in practice to try and inform the left of something rather important about the process of revolution, during both its open and closed phases of activity. Above all, it has tried to demonstrate a willingness to use both existing and new forms of organisation as an expression of its class-based power. Yet much of the left has either failed to listen and observe, or has often distorted the historical record to suit its own purposes. We all have much to learn from the actual political and social struggles of the international working class and its allies. We are in need of a renewed collective effort in pursuit of this task, and it will be interesting to see just what Alans suggested framework for further study helps us to uncover.

Second Glance
A Series of Retrospective Reviews
The article below is the first in a series that will examine works of some vintage that have caught the interest of the contributors. These can be classics of socialist thought, works which the reviewer thinks should be better known or re-evaluated, as well as texts which just provide an occasion for critical discussion and polemic. If you would like to contribute, get in touch. Our first offering is a review by Doug Lowe of Clive Gilson, Mike Pratt, Kevin Roberts and Ed Weymes, Peak Performance (Harper Collins, 2000). This book is a Management Studies text that was chosen as the Harper Collins Business Book of 2000. It promised to reveal the secrets of Peak Performance in the running of organisations, using examples from the world of sport like the one spotlighted here, Bayern Munich Football Club. Does Peak Performing Organisation Theory tell us something we didnt know about contemporary professional soccer? Are these heirs to Adam Smith on the ball? ***
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AT first glance, the book might appear to be an excessively long parody of modern marketing jargon. The truth soon dawns, however, that such phrases as sharing the dream, inspirational dreams and making magic are being repeated ad nauseum without a shred of irony. The authors are clearly capable of alternative and lucrative careers as TV evangelists or snake-oil hucksters. After all, theyve managed to put together about 400 pages of jargon and flowery prose, a mind-blowing mixture of corporatespeak and adolescent hero worship. Affiliated with the Waikato Management School at the University of Waikato (New Zealand), the authors espouse the theory of Peak Performing Organisations (PPOs). The book underpins this, based as it is on studies of a variety of successful sporting organisations, five from the United States, five from Australasia and two from Europe. From football, Bayern Munich were chosen. One of the books authors, Kevin Roberts, is CEO for the global advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. He has been implicated in the murkier waters of New Zealand politics, including giving motivational talks on PPO theory to the right-wing National Party in 1999.1 On a 2001 business video, Roberts declared his belief that developing brand loyalty should be replaced by a focus on trust and lust, that is, it is up to firms and their advertisers to develop images that will have customers lusting after their products.2 Another of the authors, Clive Gilson, was once a revolutionary comrade of mine back in our Leamington days. A pity he ended up using his talents in the service of corporate capitalism. Peak Performance identifies several common approaches among these organisations that appear to sustain long-term success. These include formal structures that do not stifle initiative or new ideas, the important role of what the authors dub inspirational players in motivating staff, the fostering and encouragement of a family/community spirit, the continuity of knowledge/experience/expertise in the main activities of these organisations and the concentration of all efforts towards sporting goals/success. For the authors, the critical element is that the organisation not individuals within it provides vital continuity to all these strands. The authors have subsequently defended their theory when some organisations more recent lack of success have been raised. They argue that the key factor is long-term, sustained success, which can and will override short-term failures. They also cite the successful application of PPO theory to non-sporting businesses such as Procter & Gamble and Saatchi & Saatchi. I am in no position to comment on that. Nor do I have sufficient knowledge of those sports to comment about most of the individual organisations studied in the book. Ive been on this planet long enough, however, to spot flannel when I read it apparently the Australian Cricket Board is at its best when it has earned the right to tell yet another story which adds a new ring to the contours of the cricketing soul [!] (p342). Ill confine myself to remarks concerning the study of Bayern Munich, also referred to in the book as FCB. The impression given is of a club existing in some cocoon of self-perpetuating excellence. When Bayern actually became (or started becoming) a PPO is never stated. According to the authors, loyalty is retained or gained through the dissemination and repetition of a variety of facts, half-truths and myths. These are centred upon key events and particular individuals in the clubs history. In Bayerns case, people like Franz Beckenbauer (in fact, the Bayern study was more of a love letter to him than an analysis of the club). But
1. 2. See New Zealand Prime Minister Storms Out of Parliament Over Tourism Scandal (www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar 1999/nz-m02.shtml). Professor William McCarty (Western Michigan University) Video Review, International Branding for the Twenty-First Century (www.kelley.iu.edu/ciber/fall02). 73

these means of cementing loyalty are hardly unique to Bayern. Even the lowliest football clubs have these shared traditions. The authors emphasis on the positive atmosphere inside the club is sharply at odds with the reality. In Germany, the club is nicknamed FC Hollywood because of its reputation for internal bickering and personality clashes. Just a year before Peak Performance was first published, Beckenbauer admitted: If you follow Bayern Munich, we always have had troubles.3 Curiously, this not the impression given by his quotes in Peak Performance. Apparently, however, there is an FCB community, an extended family that definitely includes the thousands of fans (p185), and the organisation makes magic and builds community [eh?] (p192). There is also an emphasis placed on Bayerns supposed aversion to 1-0 wins and its concern to be much more than a football team by embracing wider social responsibilities. This culminates in the assertion that FC Bayern Munich wants to win championships, but the dream that gives this meaning is More than 1-0: soccer working for the greater good of society (p372). Im not sure whether this PR balderdash is merely Bayerns, swallowed by the authors, or Bayerns and the authors, for the benefit of the more gullible reader. This rosy view of the club tends to be somewhat tarnished by their extremely dubious antics between 2000 and 2003 concerning the issue of TV contracts. In late 1999, the German Football Association (the DFB) began what became extremely protracted negotiations with the Kirch Media Group for a new TV contract for the Bundesliga. Eventually a deal was struck in April 2000. In February 2003, however, it emerged that Bayern had secretly signed a huge marketing contract with Kirch back in December 1999! This constituted a grave breach of Bundesliga regulations and an official investigation was initiated. As a result, a fit of pique by Beckenbauer led him to announce in April 2003 Bayerns intention to apply for the Italian League! A messy compromise was eventually reached involving Bayern paying a fine plus a donation to Iraqi children, but the German League still considered Bayerns behaviour morally reprehensible.4 Fortunately, considerably more balanced, accurate and down-to-earth information about Bayern can be found elsewhere.5 The authors cite the clubs record to back up its choice as a prime example of a PPO in football. Bayern has certainly dominated German club football for a considerable part of the last four decades, but the authors justification in choosing Bayern from the world of football leads to suspicious sleights of hand. Firstly, there is the seamless association of the club with the German national team, intended no doubt to enable it to bask in its past glories (as World Cup winners and finalists). But German national teams have always contained a mixture of players from various clubs, and there has been no conveyer belt of managers/coaches moving from Bayern to international level. Its also arguable how useful this clever but unjustifiable association is. Germany has won one World Cup since 1974 (in 1990) and one European Championship since 1980 (in 1996). The German national teams over the last decade or so have arguably been the worst since the Second World War. Secondly, there are the references to Germany being Europes most consistently competitive soccer nation (pp187, 400). Really? Italian, Spanish and English fans may strongly beg to differ.
3. 4. 5. Taming the Shrews: Hitzfeld Turns FC Hollywood into German Juggernaut, 24 May 1999 (www.cnnsi.com/soccer/ world/1999/champions_league/news/1999/05/24/hitzfeld-profile/). See Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger, Bayern Bye, When Saturday Comes, no 196, June 2003. See, in particular, the fascinating history of German football, Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenbergers book Tor!, WSC Books, 2003. 74

If PPO can only be fairly judged on the basis of long-term success, then let us use that yardstick to measure Bayerns record. For any European club team the ultimate measure of success has to be Champions League (formerly the European Cup) triumphs. Since these competitions began in 1955, Germany has produced six champions, Holland six, England 10, Italy 10 and Spain 10. The most successful club sides have been Real Madrid (nine wins), AC Milan (six), Liverpool (five), Ajax and Bayern (four each). Bayerns triumphs have been in 1974, 1975, 1976 and 2000. So their greatest period of success was during the 1970s. It is hard to take seriously a claim for long-term sustained success based on a record of one win in 29 years. This begs the question, why was Bayern chosen for the book? Were other, more successful, club sides approached but declined to participate? Why not study Brazil, the nation with the most World Cup successes? Or Real Madrid or AC Milan, the most successful club sides in Europe over the past 50 years? Would scrutiny of the reasons for some of these other teams successes have disproved or undermined the PPO theory? For example, Real Madrid, with their past dubious political associations with the far right. Are there any sporting organisations that fit most, if not all, PPO criteria, but have had little or no success? Perhaps it isnt too difficult for any organisation to claim adherence to PPO theory to a greater or lesser extent. For example, most clubs (successful or not) retain the intense loyalty of fans and staff, and many find key roles for ex-players. Continuity in personnel and organisational arrangements is also hardly unusual. What the authors appear to disregard is the whole context in which Bayern Munich exists historical, geographical, economic. Munich is a major European city and the focal point for a relatively prosperous region. It has been so since Germanys postwar economic growth kicked in in the 1960s. Is it really any great surprise that Bayern Munich attract large crowds and the involvement of major businesses (such as Adidas and Opel) and hence the permanent large-scale revenue sources that sustain all top-level football teams? Peak Performance, then, contains serious flaws. Those more knowledgeable about the other sports covered in the book may be able to identify specific problems with those studies. Clear problems in the Bayern Munich section alone fatally undermines the projects credibility. Despite its claims to be all-embracing, PPO theory seems to disregard other key factors in the success of sporting organisations. For most football clubs, periods of success (that is, winning important competitions) are rarely sustained for more than a few seasons because they are dependent on a unique combination of factors that is difficult to replicate; not least being the existence of an exceptionally astute manager/coach and a group of particularly skilful/talented players that gel together. Club football throughout Europe is becoming increasingly dominated by a handful of clubs, but the richest dont always win the biggest prizes. Chelsea may have won the Premiership last season, but all their money couldnt get them past Liverpools stubborn defence and into the Champions League final. What Bayern Munich have achieved hasnt depended on how closely theyve adhered to the criteria associated with PPO theory. It has owed much to being based in a big city, with a consequently large fan base and therefore the ability to attract substantial amounts of money/sponsorship. Everything follows on from that, that is, the ability to attract good managers, coaches, players, backroom staff, etc. Not necessarily the best in Europe (hence their relative lack of Champions League success), but certainly head and shoulders above their rivals within Germany. Nowadays, no misty-eyed rhetoric about dreams, magic, family and community will convince most English football fans that a club like Manchester United is little more than a soulless money-making machine. The defining moment in that clubs journey from suc75

cessful but generally admired and respected football team to a PLC motivated by the endless search for new markets for its merchandise (human or otherwise) was its withdrawal from the 1999-2000 FA Cup. That most romantic of English football traditions was casually snubbed in favour of a fast buck in a meaningless South American mini-tournament. The recent events at that club are unlikely to win it much sympathy. What goes around In some countries, particular historical, social and cultural factors have led to the clear ascendancy of certain sports, with all that this implies in terms of numbers of fans, economic clout and attractiveness as a career choice. Its hardly surprising that this generates success, for example, the New Zealand All Blacks, and that it is often underpinned by government support as a matter of national pride/political expediency. For socialists, the increasing concentration of wealth amongst fewer and fewer football clubs across Europe will hardly come as a surprise. It merely reflects the centralising/monopolising tendencies Marx identified as a key aspect of capitalist development. Although this doesnt automatically guarantee success (sometimes smaller clubs such as Porto win the Champions League), it does mean that key domestic and international club competitions are now dominated by the same handful of teams in the major footballing countries. To suggest that by merely adopting certain organisational approaches, combined with particular corporate ideas and attitudes, as a means of achieving success (that is, at the expense of rival clubs/firms) reflects the ideological delusions of the authors and/or their target audiences. The harsh realities and complexities of capitalist competition (both in and outside sport) seem to have passed them by completely. Back to the drawing board, boys. Thanks to my son, Jim, for his helpful comments and suggestions.

Reviews
Norman Harding, Staying Red: Why I Remain a Socialist, Index, 2005
WHEN this reviewer first became involved in left-wing politics in the late 1970s, I and others in my situation had the opportunity of choosing from amongst the array of groups that were touting for business at demonstrations, on picket lines and Saturday street corners and in meeting halls. Going by our own observations and listening carefully to more experienced comrades, we noted the characteristics of each and every left group, tried to tease out the truth from the fanciful tales told about each one by adherents of rival outfits, and endeavoured to find a group with which we could agree the most, or perhaps disagree with the least. One group which had absolutely no attraction for me was the Workers Revolutionary Party. Was it the rumours of Libyan gold (we neophytes quickly heard about that), the thuggery dealt out not only to rivals but to dissident members (we heard about that too), the utterly impenetrable philosophical ramblings, the hysterical tone of its constant pronouncements demanding a general strike, the branding of rival Trotskyist leaders as GPU and FBI agents, and the forecasting of an imminent slump and police state, or was it the fact that I (amongst others) could not really take seriously any organisation that had Vanessa Redgrave in its leadership? Whatever the reason, I soon asked the WRPs local organiser not to stuff any more
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copies of Newsline into my letter-box, and I had no more contact with the party, save sharing with other cheeky leftists the occasional fun of impudently asking its members about the class nature of Libya, and, with a well-timed heckle of one of its less shining members at the big London Assembly beanfeast it organised, upset the solemn proceedings by provoking guffaws of ill-mannered laughter from non-WRP participants. As we all know, the WRP came to grief in 1985, when its leader Gerry Healy was exposed as having sexually exploited female members of his party over the years (this was one aspect of the Healy regime that no one whom I knew suspected). Repeating the troubles besetting the official communist movement after Khrushchevs Secret Speech in 1956, many of Healys closest supporters suddenly realised what a monster they had been harbouring for decades, whilst others, especially Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, continued to support the old gangster, and since his death have dedicated themselves to upholding his memory. Since the WRPs implosion, its remnants have fragmented time and again until today it is not certain to even the most inveterate Trot-watcher just how many bits remain in some kind of working order. Norman Harding himself sided with the WRP that ran Workers Press for some years, but that fragment now appears to be divided into three microfactions whose differences seem to revolve around the quest of finding a suitable suitor with which to ally themselves. This book can be divided into two parts: the first being a lively description of Hardings earlier political life as a working-class militant; the second being an account of his time as a full-timer at the partys Clapham headquarters. The contrast is clear and very disturbing. In the former part, Harding describes his activities working in the rag trade, dealing with the bosses sneakiness in the factory and the Stalinists dodgy dealings in the union, fighting against the right-wing Labourites on the local council and trades council, and campaigning against rent increases, slum landlords and nuclear weapons. The group certainly had influence within the local working class, and was taken seriously by many workers. A particularly nice episode was when the group was heavily involved in a rent dispute. A leading Labour right-winger on the council harangued the miners wives lobbying the council, saying how their campaign had been infiltrated by Trotskyists. One of the women replied: Dont be daft, we hijacked him. In sharp contrast to the genuine feeling of satisfaction when describing the above activities, Hardings account in the groups centre in Clapham has a depressive feeling about it. Full-time party life was one long hard grind, an unremitting routine of party activity which precluded any kind of a family life, of cultural pursuits such as listening to music, or of simple, normal relations with other comrades. Consumed by the obsession to produce a daily paper a pointless operation for a small organisation and manic campaigns, the members in the centre slaved away at their machines or desks day and night, month after month. This part of the book is strangely apolitical; it is as if Hardings neverending party work also precluded any political discussion or even thinking on his part. Then there was the question of the groups leader, Gerry Healy. Hardings book is useful as it gives non-WRPers a close look at this loathsome creature. Most if not all leftwing leaders, whatever their class background, run their organisations in the same way as a particularly narrow-minded, pedantic and obsessive confectioner treats his shop. Healy was different; he went a lot further, and treated his organisation in the same way as a particularly vicious and vindictive feudal baron would handle his estate, only in this case neglecting his responsibilities in exchange for his subjects obligations. As time went on, Healy showed all the signs of going insane, and his members had to indulge him, writing self-criticisms, running absurd errands, as Harding describes at length. Reading this book,
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one gets the feeling of being immersed in a political lunatic asylum. The atmosphere that Harding describes was poisonous. Members thought nothing of writing tell-tale minutes to the leadership stating that so-and-so had expressed mild deviations from and criticisms of the party line this happened to Harding, leading to an almighty row. Did this happen in other groups? Somehow, I cant imagine it. Vanessa Redgrave emerges very badly in Hardings account. Full of her own selfimportance, she swanned around the centre as if she owned the place, demanding attention like some precious royal dignitary. Hardings withering contempt for her runs throughout his account. Eventually, by the mid-1980s, things reached such a pass that various party members started conspiring against Healy. Harding acknowledges Dave Bruces key role in this operation, which went so far as the bugging of Healys office. Readers will be aware of how the WRP bandwagon hit the buffers, with all the dirty business being exposed for all to see. Healys sexual abuse of women members came as a particularly heavy blow to Harding, as it was none other than he who would take young women across to Healys flat for what he and they thought was to be a political discussion. One can imagine his feeling of disgust and horror when the sorry details came into the open, and one can feel this in his heartfelt apology. One problem with this book is that even in the earlier part, there is very little discussion of the partys politics. What of the catastrophism that oozed out of almost every page of Healyite propaganda throughout the time Harding was a member? Its clear that in their local work in Leeds, Harding and his comrades maintained a very heavy schedule, so its possible that the shrill pronouncements of imminent slump and revolutionary upsurge and the sectarian denunciations remained on the pages and werent a factor in their dayto-day work. A hint is given when John Archer, a leading figure in the group, rose to speak at a Leeds Trades Council meeting. Oh dear, said one of Hardings comrades, and Archer promptly launched into a denunciation of Pabloism. Readers who knew Archer can easily picture the scene. A major gap is the absence of any discussion about the split in 1974, when Alan Thornett and his comrades, by then about the only working-class cadres left in the partys ranks, were booted out, leaving its influence in Actors Equity as its sole presence within the unions. (Harding shows Healys distrust of his members when he writes how he, Healy, rejected any ideas about using that influence to develop a modern equivalent of the 1930s political theatre.) An interesting fact, one on which Harding does not comment, is that this very damaging split occurred shortly after the Socialist Labour League (as the group was called from 1960), in grand proclamatory style, in 1973 transformed itself into the WRP and only when its influence within the labour movement was waning. Although he describes the madness of running a daily paper, Harding does not question the need to publish one, the production, distribution and selling of which took up a vast amount of the memberships time and energy, when a substantial weekly would have been less of a burden and would surely have produced better political (and financial) returns. How was it that Harding, who one can see from this account stood up bravely against the police, the fascists, the Labour right, the Stalinists and all other adversaries, and other class-conscious militants along with him were in fear of the unprepossessing small-time thug Healy, ready and willing to do his business? He says that he rationalised away all the problematic factors. I guess we all have done this in our times as group members and supporters, but surely things with the Healyite group had gone beyond what could rationally be rationalised long before the group collapsed in on itself in 1985.
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Harding remains a socialist, and he admits that he doesnt really know what sort of organisation is needed to rejuvenate the cause. Such honesty is refreshing, and his bemusement should not be belittled, although one can imagine sundry (to use the old Stalinist term) steel-hard cadres doing just that. The history of the Healyite tradition is something that all socialists must take into consideration. Now whilst no other left-wing group in Britain (and possibly elsewhere) has degenerated into such a vile swamp of personality cult, personal abuse and general gangsterism, so many have developed some form or another of guru-worship, considered dissent as disloyalty, and been unable to deal with tactical or theoretical differences without expelling people. There have always been more splits than fusions. The WRP was a spectacular disaster, yet its rivals havent done too well. The International Socialists, in similar grandiose manner, declared itself the Socialist Workers Party a few years after the SLL became the WRP, but, unlike the latter, after it had lost its industrial base in a faction fight. And the party seems to have lost its way after the death of its leader Tony Cliff. The self-denying Militant tendency, possibly the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain at its peak, came out proudly as the Socialist Party only after its office boys had booted out its main man Ted Grant and lost most of its membership. The small fry havent fared too well either. The group that I supported for many years, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the last organisation on the British left to experience any real growth, collapsed nearly a decade ago into a tiny, weird right-wing libertarian clique. Norman Harding has provided us with a fascinating account of one working-class militants experience within the Trotskyist movement. There are places where I wish he had written more, and I wish that he had provided more political analysis of the Healyite tradition. Nonetheless, its well worth reading. Lets hope that more comrades will put their reminiscences in print. Paul Flewers

Cyril Smith, Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, Lexington Books, 2005
Over the past 80 years or so, the notion of a revolution which would transform social and economic relations was largely absorbed into the idea that a bureaucratic state would take the place of privately-owned industry. The Russian Revolution was supposed to provide the model of how such a change would come about. Marxs understanding of revolution was totally obscured by the ironclad dogmas of Marxism. (p143) CYRIL Smith is actually one of those rare individuals in search of whom Diogenes was observed going round carrying a lighted lantern in broad daylight an honest man. He is an honest man insofar as he was, like many of us, an adherent of Marxism, before realising that this version of the masters thought was defective and corrupt: having realised this, Cyril has since been busy trying to establish the real content of Marxs message. We are greatly indebted to him in consequence. This volume is a companion piece to the earlier Marx at the Millennium (Pluto Press, 1996). Cyril Smith begins with a short discussion of historical materialism and how it differs from the thought of Karl Marx; this is followed by an analysis of the Communist Manifesto. As Cyril underlines, Marx was calling for the alteration of humans on a mass scale (p25), which necessarily requires a conception of what it means to be human. In order to realise this conception it is necessary to take certain measures and set in train a number of processes: these latter include the withering-away of the state. As Cyril writes:
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In fact, Marx came to envisage the rule of the proletariat as operating through local communes, not through a centralised state power. This conception, reinforced by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, was essential to his notion of communism as the self-movement of the proletariat. (p35) This was to lead to a truly human world in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This approach entails a critique of all hitherto-existing political philosophy. Cyril takes us on a guided tour of political philosophys European core. (It must be emphasised that the bulk of non-European political thought presents, as far as one can tell, a similar picture: the only significant point that needs making here concerns the exceptional passage in Lao Tzu, where the best leaders are praised for bringing their ends to fruition in such a way that the people say: We did it ourselves. Tony Benn deserves credit for spotting this remark.) Accordingly we begin with Athenian democracy, Plato and Aristotle, and then move on through the Stoics, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant and Adam Smith. The purpose of this rapid resume is to introduce Hegels summary of his predecessors and the distillation of his own theory in The Philosophy of Right, which Marx criticised in his youth. Cyril quite correctly underlines the position that Marx takes up in his Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right in favour of democracy. This was a text unknown to the inventors of Marxism: it was unearthed by David Ryazanov in 1927. It is nonetheless an absolutely crucial work for Marxs political philosophy as a whole. Hence Cyril is right to concentrate on the attitude of past political philosophers to this form of government. By and large, his assessment of the thinkers that he lists is accurate, although one minor qualification is perhaps in order. This concerns the European Middle Ages, during which there was an undercurrent of democratic agitation centred on the mediaeval cities, which found a certain echo in the political thought of the period. This can be seen to some extent in Thomas Aquinas and, much more openly, in Marsilio of Padua, both of whom can be construed as supporters of representative democracy under certain circumstances. However, Cyril very rightly points to Spinoza as the first Western thinker of comparatively modern times to come out in support of democracy. It is interesting that two of the greatest non-Jewish Jews in history have a similar attitude here. Cyril mentions the extensive copying that Marx made from Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (p135). Marxs conception of democracy as the political form of the truly human is central to his criticism of Hegels Philosophy of Right. However, Cyril also points out correctly that Marxs idea of true democracy is much closer to Athenian participatory democracy than to modern bourgeois representative democracy (see page 140). Cyril writes: In this book, we have been trying to uncover the ideas of Marx For him, the social revolution had to be the work of the immense majority. The idea that the masses were to be used as muscle to overthrow the old order, then handing over power to their leaders, was quite alien to him. The new world had to be founded on a transformation of humanity itself, by itself, its universal emancipation. That is why we have concentrated on Marxs critique of the tradition of systematic notions which explained why the world was like it is. Without dealing fundamentally with all such ideas a free association of humans is not possible. (p143) This means, of course, the tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but also a counter-tradition that runs deep in European thought, that of mysticism. Cyril takes us
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through the chief representatives of this outlook in Part III of the book. Adherents of Marxism will no doubt be especially scandalised by Cyril Smiths treatment of this topic, and will regard his enthusiasm for the likes of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme as evidence that he has finally flipped, but it is Cyril who comes out on top here. He cites Marxs description of the labour process in general (Chapter 7, Section 1 of Capital) as a combination of the elements of Aristotles poesis with the Hermetic understanding of imagination as an active power (p206). This relates in turn to the First Thesis on Feuerbach, where, you will recall, Marx asserts that: The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism that of Feuerbach includedis that the object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism (cited, p200) Indeed Cyrils comments on the Feuerbach Theses as a whole are some of the best parts of what is, overall, a marvellous book. The work ends with the little essay on Karl Marx and William Blake which we published separately (see New Interventions, Volume 11, no 3). Here Cyril rightly underlines the importance of the imagination as a common human faculty, one not to be thought of as the exclusive possession of artists (or of lites, for that matter): it is a faculty we all need to cultivate. Chris Gray

Alan Woodward, Political Economy of Workers Socialism: A First Approximation, Workers Socialism, 2005
ALAN Woodward is a remarkable man. He is virtually the sole survivor (politically speaking, that is) of the original International Socialism group as it was in the early 1960s. In those years the group was critical of Lenins legacy it published a translation of Trotskys early article on substitutionism which attacked the organisational approach of What Is To Be Done? and was close to the libertarian socialist grouping known as Solidarity. Peter Sedgwick, who translated Victor Serges Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was a member of IS in those days, and Alan stands in the same tradition. Since that time, Alan has read deeply and widely in the history of the international workers movement, producing a number of important studies, such as Party Over Class: How Leninism has Subverted Workers Council Organisation, Workers Socialism: A Short Guide and an article entitled Marx, Bakunin or What? published in What Next?, no 28, 2004. What he has to say needs to be addressed, even by those who do not agree with his viewpoint. I must confess, however, that, in comparison with some of his earlier writings, I find this particular work a bit of a disappointment, since the pamphlets title seems something of a misnomer. Whilst it does contain a distinctive approach to the problems of the political economy of workers socialism (however one wishes to define that), there is very little in the pamphlet of what one might expect by way socialist political economy as discussed elsewhere in recent years: the pamphlet, indeed, is more of a commentary on various aspects of workers struggles since 1905, and contains analyses of anarchism, Marxism and council communism. Let me clarify the grounds of my criticism. For some decades now, a supposed alternative to the Stalinist command economy has been canvassed under the title market so81

cialism. Alan nowhere discusses it: indeed, the words plan and market seem strangely absent from the pamphlet. Nor is there any mention of recent books on the subject, which is a pity, because Alan might have some trenchant criticisms of them. I am thinking, for example, of Pat Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning (Polity Press, 1988), which, in stark contrast to the project-mongers in the Labour Party, takes the stakeholder concept seriously and attempts to work out a version of democratic planning described as negotiated coordination. There is Brian Greens Planning the Future (Socialist Platform, 1999). There is the four-way discussion between Hillel Ticktin, Bertell Ollman, David Schweickart and James Lawler entitled Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists (Routledge, 1998). There is the section of Hillel Ticktins book The Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (ME Sharpe, 1992, pp175-81). There is David Schweickarts Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which, besides containing some useful remarks on the political theories of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, puts forward his own version of economic democracy, which overlaps to some extent with Alan Woodwards approach, in that it involves each enterprise being democratically managed by its own workers. This, in turn, is only part of the literature on the subject, which we need to discuss. In practice, Alan seems content to ignore the contributions mentioned above because his model appears to be the Spanish revolution of 1936. This was an extremely deep and thorough-going revolution, possibly more so even than the earlier Russian revolution, so the choice is not a bad one. The Stalinists suppressed the Spanish revolution for reasons of their own, which we cannot go into here. Alans pamphlet contains a short account of the operation of the Barcelona tramways by the CNT (pp31-33), which confirms what some of us have known for years, namely that workers, where they understand the needs of their industry, are quite capable of running it. He also has some observations on the Spanish agricultural collectives (pp37-39) and on health services (pp39-40). These derive from two extant books, viz Gaston Leval (Pierre Robert Piller), Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Freedom Press, 1975) translated by Vernon Richards from the original French edition of 1971, and Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives in the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939: Workers Self-Management (Black Rose, 1990). Of this latter work, Alan writes that its detailed description of collectivism in practice answers all the questions from doubters about how workers socialism would work (p61). As the stage Japanese are supposed to say: Ah so! Tell us more. In particular it would be useful to know how relations between different self-managed enterprises were handled. There is also a brief tantalising reference to Venezuela on page 63 which prompts the same response. But at least Alan has seen fit to reproduce Reg Wrights beautiful description of the Gang System in Coventry, dating from 1961, an excellent example of what Jrgen Habermas calls the life-world in creative practice. The pamphlet is worth reading for this piece alone. There is much else of value, not least the extensive and partly annotated bibliography. I did, however, miss one or two items there. On Spain, Burnett Bollotens The Grand Camouflage: The Spanish Civil War and Revolution 1936-39 (Pall Mall Press, 1968) documents the activities of the Stalinists mentioned above. Similarly, on Russia, Sam Farbers encyclopdic Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1990) also merits inclusion. (There is a Leninist rejoinder in John Rees, In Defence of October (Bookmarks, 1997), which also includes contributions by Farber and Robin Blackburn, but in my opinion Rees does not win the argument.) All in all, readers of this journal will profit by a perusal of Alans pamphlet. But on the central question posed by its title, my response is similar to that of Igor Stravinsky in relation to John Cages celebrated piano work which requires the pianist to remain seated
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at the instrument for a period without playing a single note, after which the pianist exits the stage: Stravinsky is reported to have said: I should like to hear more from this composer. Workers Socialism can be contacted at 87 Grove Park Road, London N15 4SL, e-mail alan@petew.org.uk. Chris Gray

Lorin Maazel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Libretto by JD McClatchy and Thomas Meehan, Director: Robert LePage
LORIN Maazels reworking of Orwells novel, staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 14 May 2005, has been almost universally condemned by the critics, but I did try to keep an open mind; there were many things I liked about it! Not least the fact that it started with the sound of Big Ben striking 13 youll probably recall that the novel starts with the clocks striking 13. The opera starts with the Two Minutes Hate, and, unfortunately well-written as the music is (including the National Anthem of Oceania, which seems to parody every clich of every national anthem that has ever been written surely deliberately!), Maazel seems to think that the Two Minutes Hate is directed at the current enemy, Eurasia (though it will become and will always have been Eastasia in the course of the narrative), whereas in the novel it is directed at the figure of Goldstein, enemy of the party, enemy of Big Brother, corrupter of youth, etc, etc. This indicates right at the outset one of the main problems with Maazels version of Nineteen Eighty-Four that the more general political thrust of the novel is weakened in favour of the love-story of Winston and Julia. Before pursuing this theme, I will draw attention to the episodes that I thought were very well done One of Smiths colleagues, Syme, sings a lyric in praise of Newspeak: The only language whose vocabulary gets smaller every year! The text of the lyric is quoted in the programme, and the first line is The beauty of Newspeak. The irony is, of course, that once Newspeak has been fully launched, there will not be a concept of beauty. This is sung by Laurence Brownlee in an audaciously high tenor verging on the falsetto, to, of all things, a jaunty dance tune! Much of the score relies on parody and pastiche, and as these were the parts that stood out and grabbed the attention, I imagine that this is deliberate on Maazels part. There are also some beautiful passages for solo violin Maazel is a violinist. Sometimes the music is a bit well, obvious I suppose when Winston and Julia are caught, you just know there are going to be crashing chords in the orchestra, and sure enough and there is no shortage of ominous drumbeats at crucial moments. The other scene that I thought was very well done was the scene after the arrest, when Winston is separated from Julia and waiting for his fate. Some ordinary that is, non-political prisoners are brought in, including a drunken prostitute (Diana Damrau). She makes crude advances to Winston, and then while two of Winstons colleagues are brought in (including Syme, who hasnt quite managed to make Newspeak stick after all) the high womans voice (uttering crude banalities) accompanies the mens voices like a sort of threnody. I had been wondering how Maazel was going to deal with the central political theme of the novel you will recall that when OBrien has Winston completely at his mercy, he reveals the reason why the Party is in power and why it will stay in power: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the
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good of others; we are interested solely in power We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end There will be no art, no literature, no science If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. Now that is the central thesis of Orwells novel. I thought perhaps it could be done as a sort of Handelian aria, or perhaps like Iagos Credo in Otello, but in the event Maazel deals with it by leaving it out!! And that was really the greatest disappointment for me. Ive mentioned Lawrence Brownlees striking performance as Syme; Simon Keenlyside is appropriately tormented (psychologically, I mean) as Winston Smith, convincingly conveying the yearning for (or possibly memory of) a better world than the one he lives in, and he is well-matched by Nancy Gustafsons Julia. And I was impressed by Richard Margisons OBrien. All in all then it was interesting, but in the final analysis it has to be said that Maazel has rather missed the point. Jane Susanna Ennis

Paul Flewers (ed), George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist, Socialist Platform, 2005
JUST what the world needs, writes Paul Flewers in his introduction. Yet another book on George Orwell. The book itself is the answer to this. That it has been attacked in a review by Andy Brooks, General Secretary of the antediluvian Stalinist New Communist Party (New Worker, 16 September 2005) should arouse the interest of readers. If the NCP attacks it, there is a fair chance it is worth reading. Many of the essays in the book have been taken from International Socialism, the theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party. Paul writes: this organisation [the SWP] has taken Orwell seriously and has dealt with his works and historical legacy with a skill and sensitivity that has often been absent amongst other sections of the left. This may be so, but an interest in Orwell, who was nothing if not an anti-totalitarian, has not cured the SWP of an opportunistic fascination with authoritarians such as George Galloway MP and the Muslim Association of Britain. Nor has it made the SWPs internal regime any more democratic. The political scene is littered with bitter people and organisations who have been expelled from the SWP. One also wonders why Ian Birchalls essay, which in part was a critical reply to an earlier contribution to a contribution from John Molyneux, was not published in International Socialism. While not a Trotskyist or even a Marxist, Orwell was without doubt a socialist. Even before his death in 1950, he suffered the unenviable fate of having his political views misrepresented by those he would have seen as his political opponents. For their own reasons, both Stalinists and anti-Soviet supporters of the West have depicted his postwar novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as Cold War propaganda and even anti-socialist tracts. On the left, anti-Stalinists such as Trotskys biographer Isaac Deutscher denounced Orwells work as a sort of ideological super-weapon in the Cold War, while Frank Ridley, a leading figure in the Independent Labour Party of which Orwell was once a member, attacked him as typifying the left propaganda of Wall Street. Writing in 1969 in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1968, Peter Sedgwick states: We should enter the study of Orwells politics both because they are our politics too, and because they are not. (International Socialism, June 1969) It is important that one understands Orwells roots in the ranks of those who administered the British Raj. He suffered the horrors of prep school and Eton. For his family, common people were almost subhuman. Having resigned from the colonial police in Burma, as if to compensate for his origins, Orwell joined the ranks of the down and outs sampling the delights of the work84

house casual ward. Eventually, Orwell joined the ILP in 1938. It would be near impossible to write a history of the ILP from the time it disaffiliated from the Labour Party to the time what remained of it went back in some 40 years later. Ever after the defeat of the pro-Comintern elements around Jack Gaster in the Revolutionary Policy Committee, the ILP faced the problem of trying to create a socialist politics which were neither Stalinist or social democratic. This was Orwells dilemma. Orwells biographer Bernard Crick described the ILPs ideas as a strange English mixture of secularised evangelism and non-communist Marxism. Orwell wrote in its weekly the New Leader that while he hoped for a Labour victory at the next general election he was all too aware of its tendency to fling every principle overboard. Little has changed, and a viable socialist alternative to Labour remains to be built. Before he had joined the ILP, although damned as a fool by the American writer Henry Miller and refused help by Communist Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt, who had taken a dislike to Orwells The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell had gone to Spain where a fascist coup had been answered by revolution. Although at first he took the communist view that revolution would have to be postponed until after the defeat of fascism, Orwell joined the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificacin Marxist. Although condemned by the Stalinists as Trotskyist, the POUM had broken with Trotsky over whether to pressurise the anarcho-syndicalists into completing the revolution, or whether to set up an independent vanguard. Out of Orwells Spanish experience, during which he was seriously wounded and saw the fratricidal fighting in Barcelona in May 1937, came for me what is his best book, Homage to Catalonia. I first read it over 40 years ago as a teenage YCLer. Overcoming his middle-class cynicism, Orwell enthuses for what is a genuine workers revolution and those who were making it. I was amused to discover that when the book was published in America in 1952 reviewers just could not understand why Orwell supported the POUM. The best essay in this collection of interesting essays is John Newsingers Orwell and the Spanish Revolution. Newsinger reveals that the New Statesman, then in the grip of the Popular Front, refused to publish Orwells articles on Spain, and the communists tried to destroy his publisher Frederick Warburg, who also published books by CLR James and FA Ridley. Thirtyfive years after Orwells death, the communists were still attacking him. In a collection of essays published in 1984, Bill Alexander, an International Brigader, and the historian Robert Stradling launched a ferocious attack on Homage to Catalonia. Stradling claims that Orwell knew too little Spanish to understand properly the political situation in Spain. The NCP continues this campaign of libel. Mr Brooks, while claiming that had it not been for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell would be a forgotten 1930s writer, suggests that those who have to study Orwell at school should see the book under review as an excellent source to pillage and plunder. He even suggests that students pass off the books observations as their own. Considering the number of readers of International Socialism involved in education, this would be unwise as well as dishonest. One final minor quibble. Because of his view of Orwell, Paul Flewers is critical of FA Ridley. An objective view of Ridleys work as a socialist and secularist can be found in RW Morrells short biography The Gentle Revolutionary (Freethought History Research Group, 2003). This book has a far more important role than as an aid to passing exams. Not only does it correct many of the myths about Orwell, it also raises the question of what socialism is, and how it should lead to freedom, not to new and worse tyrannies. Terry Liddle
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Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, Harvard University Press, 2005
WE have just passed the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A total of 110 000 civilians were killed instantly in the two blasts, and by the end of 1945 a further 140 000 people had perished. Japanese have continued to die from radiation poisoning ever since. Of the 75 000 buildings in Hiroshima, 70 000 were destroyed by the explosion and by the fires started. Black rain fell, coating both the living and the dead with radiation. The official interpretation of these events is that they were necessary (a word much used this year) because they ended the war in the Pacific. The Japanese leaders would not have surrendered without such a shock, and the USA had to use the weapon (being the only power that possessed it) to avoid more casualties pursuing victory island by island. There is also the implication that the Bomb was a punishment for Pearl Harbour and prison camp cruelties. Another dissident response, which followed the war, characterised the obliteration of Hiroshima as the start of a new more frightening era, frozen in cold war, determined by the capacity of the world to destroy itself faster than at any time in history. The Atomic Bomb has thus been seen as both a necessary act of war and a sad indictment of human inventiveness in the modern era. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, however, has a more concrete story to tell. In exhaustive detail, this book gives us the matted circumstances around why the bombs were dropped. Was it the Bomb that ended the war? Hasegawa is a Professor of History and the Director of the Centre for Cold War Studies at California University, Santa Barbara, and in Racing the Enemy he spares no one not Washington, Moscow nor Emperor. A review cannot do more than give some idea of this works detail and power. We are given an almost day-by-day account of the circumstances and decisions leading to the use of the Bomb. It examines the after-story, and in two final chapters goes through a number of counterfactuals, alternatives to the actual series of events. It concludes with a discussion of the perspectives of each of the main parties that were maintained after the war. Hasegawa begins the analysis with Yalta in 1944, the conference between Allied leaders over how the postwar spoils would be divided. It was here famously that Churchill outlined two spheres of influence in Europe (a division later denounced as an Iron Curtain by Churchill himself): the Soviet Union would keep order in territories such as the Baltic states, while Britain would superintend Greece and Yugoslavia. It was at Yalta too that Stalin offered the Allies a pledge to help out in the war with Japan. In response, President Roosevelt promised his ally rights and privileges in Manchuria and the Kuril Islands (lost by the Tsar in the war with Japan of 1904-05). The Japanese, however, showed no signs of accepting the Allies demand for unconditional surrender; the sticking point being the continued reign of the Emperor after the war. Even heavy conventional bombing of their cities, including Tokyo, had not persuaded them. When Stalin met the new American president Truman in 1945, the Russian assumed that the USSRs help would still be required. A Russian deployment into Japaneseoccupied Manchuria was set for 15 August. However, the Americans now had the Bomb, and Truman and his advisers went through a series of moves which would lead to its use to compel Tokyos surrender and exclude Moscow from the Allied victory in the Pacific. Secrecy was paramount: one lapse about the date (and Stalin certainly knew about the Bomb as such) and the Russians might engage prematurely. Stalin certainly wanted in on the Pacific, but not so as to provoke reprisals (things were already tense over the division
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of Europe). On the other hand, Churchill proposed a quick way of ending the war: an offer to the Japanese of a constitutional monarchy following surrender. Truman refused. Stalin wouldnt have allowed such an offer to be made anyway, and it might not be too popular in the USA either, after years of propaganda comparing Hirohito to Hitler. The fear now was of an un-American ideology spreading to Asia after Stalin had occupied Manchuria. Over China, the US was committed to the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek, while seriously underestimating the strength of the indigenous Chinese Communists (see Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History). On 26 July 1945, an Allied proclamation was prepared, reiterating the unconditional surrender demand. To the Russians this was simply a preamble to their action on 15 August. Tokyo had in fact already approached Moscow (carried out by the infamous General Togo) to see whether the Russians could mediate a peace deal. Unconditional surrender, however, was still unacceptable especially to Hirohito and those to whom the status of the Imperial House was sacred. On 6 August, the Bomb, nicknamed Little Man, was dropped on Hiroshima. The Tokyo high command became aware that the USA had used a new weapon of unprecedented destructiveness and that more cities might be totally destroyed. However, far from entertaining acceptance of the going surrender terms, the cabinet was in an outright combative mood against the enemy. On 9 August, Nagasaki was obliterated. Washington now considered doing the same to three or maybe five more cities, though the historic city of Kyoto was to be excluded. The previous day, however, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan and the Soviet army had entered Manchuria, 10 hours before the Nagasaki bomb. Now that the Russians were no longer a possible mediator, they became the greater threat. Fearful of further Soviet advance, the Japanese accepted the American terms and surrendered. Hasegawa makes a good case that it was the Russian entry that ended the war. In the event, the Russians did go on to get the Kuril Islands, though they hardly gained an Asian empire, and the postwar Japanese did get to live under a constitutional monarchy, though for a time subject to American rule. Stalin had recognised the Nationalist Chinese immediately Manchuria was invaded, but it was the Chinese Communist Party that came to rule China. Maos forces were stronger; the USA ignored intelligence reports to that effect because Washington was committed to Chiang Kai-shek. All this points to an urgent lesson, if a superpower or anyone else has enough intelligence (or Intelligence) to observe it. That is, know your opponent, whether that means the strength of the forces on the ground or the priorities of an adversary. These were the factors, the struggles of the times, that were decisive. Nuclear weapons themselves were the result of advanced productive forces (and the commitment of scientists to the defeat of fascism). Their development did initiate a riskier world; it was called the Balance of Terror. But in 1945, Truman must have thought that with this new power, Washington could decide events. In the event, this was an illusion. It was the struggles over the production relations, over the kind of society that would emerge postwar, that made history. Mike Belbin

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Why America is Different, Allen Lane, 2004
DESPITE being published last year, just before the US election, The Right Nation remains an excellent introduction to that coalition of campaigners and politicians called the American Right, from conservatives to neo-conservatives.
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Humorous at times (intellectuals wearing dollar sign brooches, politicians announcing that they intend to get up a posse and ride), this book fills in the gaps that may be missing in our knowledge of the US conservative movement. Before the 1960s, the authors argue, the American Right were marginalised as an eccentric minority peculiar to certain parts of the country. Complacent Rooseveltian liberalism held sway. Then came the Civil Rights Movement, and whites had to choose: the Democrats split and the Republicans went south. Initially, those supporting segregation and those chasing tax cuts found a candidate in extreme Republican Barry Goldwater, but extreme was still bad news in the early 1960s, and Lyndon Johnsons suggestion that his opponent would be too quick to use the Bomb scared voters off. After this, the low-tax-chasing rich started to fund small think tanks. These would make a good job, as the 1970s wore on, of issuing conservative broadsides against the permissive and revenue-raising Liberal Establishment. Meanwhile, intellectual New Yorkers like magazine editors Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol (once co-editor of Encounter) proposed a more conservative line on everything as they took a more aggressive stance on supporting Israel. Fundamentalist Christians also saw in a strong Israel the right spot for the Armageddon of the Second Coming which theologically would have to entail the conversion of the Jews, but that was a small detail that was not dwelt upon. Concurrently, Protestants allied with Catholics to proclaim against secularism and sexual liberation. These disparate forces thought they had found a leader in 1968 with Richard Nixon. But he let them down by continuing to put up taxes. Their candidate, of course, came in the shape of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then Bush the Elder followed, promising a kindlier, gentler politics and no new taxes. Conservatives thought that theyd got too much of one, as Bush failed to go far enough with his Iraq War, but not enough (or too much) of the other. No, the Son also rises. The Bush W may be ignorant, but hes smart and a very much a Texan (grown in the most conservative state of the Union). He might have been incompetent at running a baseball team, but appealing enough to attract rich backers. And as a Bush, he was well known across the Union and had friends in high places. If nothing else, people knew he was a conservative. When pressed to come up with a common theme amongst the different groups in the coalition, a leading light called it the leave us alone movement. One danger for the governmental wing is precisely their not leaving others alone, their interventionism. After 9/11, Bush asked his people for solutions, and it was the neo-con one he chose. Not merely defensive nationalism and international cooperation (as Colin Powell favoured) or defensive nationalist power politics (c/o Condoleezza Rice), but the neo-conservative policy of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle: pre-emptive war and nation building. If the Right are in tune with American tradition, they can also be said to be out step with it too, not only making costly war abroad, but also risking big government type behaviour over issues in education and medicine. Not that this will offend the authoritarians, but it may mean critics can call on traditional themes like non-interference and freedom of choice. The Right have come far through developing arguments (zero-tolerance, dependency culture) and fostering alliances. The conservative movement is large, well organised and philosophically confident seeing themselves as pitted against an Establishment of big-spending bureaucrats and tenured pinkos. Conservatism seems the exciting as well as the proper answer: leave us alone being a not unjustifiable response to the everupgrading pace of capitalist modernity. If there is a lack in the book, its a lack of interest in discussing the wider social reasons for the Rights popularity, beyond reiterating that the USA is pretty conservative anyway. The more recent basis for the upsurge of conservatism has been named elsewhere as due to the failure of the Democrat Left to connect with
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working-class voters. The authors of The Right Nation (both Economist staffers by the way) do state: Liberalism as a governing philosophy is dead. The success of American liberalism was based on its ability to solve problems. (p356) Just so, but big government no longer even claims to solve problems such as unemployment, economic crisis, urban blight doesnt want to, doesnt try to. Is there any chance then of an alternative? The authors put their hope in the Constitution: the USA affords room for diversity. This may mean gay marriage in California, but not in Utah. Leave our state alone is not only an advantageous cry in conservative states. The question is, however: where will the Centre end up? The Right started with local interests (albeit of southern racists) and common peeves (if only with tax). It added intellectual clout and attacked complacency. It campaigned for hegemony. The strength of the Right coalition is that theyre united by asserting a common interest in opposing their adversary (the taxing-irreligious-handout-untraditionalliberal culture). There are possible contradictions involved between corporate profit and holiness, between leave us alone and interventionism, between liberty and a state church yet for the time being, Right groups have a common interest and an alternative (reactionary) vision. Can the Left (however broadly or narrowly defined) summon such a will; make a coalition of forces, based on minority rights and common disgruntlement, and unite around an alternative model of liberty? Will they do more with local struggles than mobilise to get Hillary Clinton elected? Can they (or we for that matter) envision a time when self-flourishing and common need are not seen as at odds? Do the anti-cons represent an alternative society, an alternative democracy? Mike Belbin

Letters
Bendy Buses Dear Comrades I admit to being slightly taken aback that New Interventions should allocate to John Plant four pages of the Spring 2005 edition for a piece about bendy buses. I know that sometimes it is necessary to pad out a magazine, but this is just ridiculous. One page would have sufficed. There are some valid criticisms to be made about the bendy bus. They do have difficulty turning around some corners, they tend to be very hot even with the windows open. However, the fact is they form only a tiny proportion of the London bus fleet and bus routes. In other words, anyone using the buses in London will find that the vast majority of buses are double-deckers and conventional single-deckers. However, I doubt if John appreciates that as he rarely forgoes the use of his car. John makes no mention of the big increase of London bus passengers. Surely this increase does not come out of thin air. It arises from the GLA, TFL and of course the Mayor making a conscious decision to improve bus services throughout London and ensuring that this decision is implemented. And of course money from the government has helped. In the whole of the UK, its only in London that there has been a consistent rise in usage. But Im pleased to say that bus usage in Brighton, Cambridge and York is now rising.
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John cites the case of a friend being inconvenienced of where to stand waiting for a bus. Well John, in the real world nothing is perfect. But I trust your friend coped. John bemoans the fact that passengers can no longer pay their fares to the drivers of buses in Central London. But most people would think that its a good thing that drivers dont have the pressure of collecting the fares added to the stress of driving. And it makes them less likely to be attacked. Of course John will say bring back conductors. But the lack of cash payers in central London plus the ever-increasing usage of the Oyster card throughout London means that they will never come back. But if you said more revenue inspectors are needed, I would agree with you. On the question of the Routemaster, Im glad to see the back of them. They were useless for the disabled or for people with buggies. From my own almost daily travelling on the newer London buses, I can tell that there is a much greater use of them by such users. But John gives away his true feelings in his defence of those residents of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea who are against the congestion charge being extended to their area. John who lives in East London is being rather generous to the moneyed people of Central London. Thats not the John who once graced the pages of Socialist Press. Ah but maybe Johns dream of bendy buses being used as spontaneous barricades to block roads may indeed come true. Perhaps thats what the bourgeoisie of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea will resort to in protest at the extension of congestion charging. And John will be there cheering them on. Fraternally Barry Buitekant Postwar Party Politics Dear Comrades Alan Spence (Condition Critical, New Interventions, Volume 11, no 3) starts with the old Tory myth that Labour in 1945 did not have an absolute majority over some imaginary Tory-Liberal coalition. His figures, to start with, omit the fact that Common Wealth and the Communist Party got a quarter of million votes each, the ILP and various Labour Independents a further eighth of a million each, and there were about 70 000 more votes cast for a raft of smaller socialist groups (Aldred, De Leonists, SPGB, the International Communist who stood in Woodford Green, Trots and Bukharinists). He also omits to mention that at least a third of the votes cast for Liberals were cast for former members of the Popular Front (some of whom under the leadership of Honour Balfour had opposed the wartime Coalition from the left when Labour had supported it), most of whom had fought the election demanding a Labour-led Coalition government. He then repeats the accepted claim that the 1951 election was just a matter of Liberals voting Tory. This totally ignores the evidence of the gallop polls. No doubt as the Tories subsequently were able to manipulate a four-year boom-bust cycle to their advantage, it is very convenient to assume that Attlee had so done, and explain away the evidence; but the assumption doesnt stand up to close examination of the facts. If he looks at the polls he will see that before both the 1950 and 1951 elections, until about six months before the election there was a more or less constant swing from Labour to the Tories with Liberals staying steady. Then with the election imminent there was a compensating swing from Liberals to Labour. If he then looks at the overall history of the period, he will find that this was the beginning of the Cold War and the inception of the McCarthy period. Labour, by joining
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Nato, by spending vast sums on armaments, by continuing (outside India and its neighbours) a broadly imperialist policy, helped foster the popular belief in the necessity of an anti-communist crusade. It is well known that a majority of those who voted Labour in 1945 so did despite reading Tory papers. The Tory press latched onto the anti-communist atmosphere, and found it easy to convince Labours soft support that the Tories could wage an anti-Soviet crusade better than Labour. The Liberals remained relatively unaffected. Though Clement Davies was about to go over to support Churchill (there were numerous resignations from the party in response to his change), the majority of the Liberal Party took the slogan Which twin is the Tory? (on which they fought the election) seriously. They were committed to opposing Nato and arms expenditure (to opposing the building of Britains nuclear weaponry), to advocating further decolonisation, and the party had at that time demanded that all industries valued at over 10 000 hand over onethird of their ownership to cooperatives of their workers. Policies that put them firmly to the left of the Labour government. After such a beginning, the reader feels disinclined to continue further, so I cannot comment on the rest of the article. Fraternally Laurens Otter We apologise for the delay in publishing Laurens Otters letter; it was temporarily mislaid by our Production Manager. We hope that comrade Otter has in the meantime read the remainder of Alan Spences article on the National Health Service.

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