Chartist on the Labour Party.
As a Chartist supporter I agree with this. There are obviously things to add after the most recent Tory defection. I did not expect my old Pabloite comrade to be left wing but his recent moves are not attractive.
Israel’s assault on Gaza. How should the left react?
The AWL have a thought out stand on this which should be read not shouted down.
Galloway fails to get his Front going.
Steve https://x.com/Searchlight_mag/status/1787398556489
What a pile of cack.
Suffolk’s leading conservative intellectual, and Reform stalwart on Dan Poulter joining Labour.
This is too funny to ignore. The chaps at Kev’s Golf Club are spluttering into their pink gins. Tomorrow’s pheasant shoot will be lively!
Jim on Gideon Falter.
Jim and his comrades in Solidarity are amongst those on the left who’ve kept their nerve during the recent Gaza crisis. While condemning Israel’s atrocities and attending protests against them they have not witheld their criticisms of the Islamists of Hamas. The Tendance approaches these issues through the lens of First International Marxism and the universalist humanism of Jean Jaurès rather than Trotskyism.i
In the Falter affair most people would have found it stretching credulity that the man just happened to be in Aldwych, an area dead at weekends, just to begin with.
Jim cited I note with interest CPB leading figure, a fellow North Londoner (she even knew my Primary School) who has opposed the Morning Star line on such issues. Meeting her once she expressed views on Galloway not far off the Tendance’s.
Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain to stand against John McDonnell.
Brown Workers Party of Britain to stand against leading left winger in next election.
https://x.com/David__Osland/status/1782729370475335720
https://x.com/Pabloite/status/1782763717509181612
It seems all Labour MPs are targets for this brown brown front.
it will interesting to see how Galloway’s admirers in the Morning Star and TUSC react to this.
Galloway plumbs new depths.
Did you ever in your puff see such a frightful perisher as Galloway and his green and brown shorts ?
gshttps://x.com/paulwaugh/status/1782147992553697562 use
Galloway and the Lib Dems, a merry tale
Galloway recruits Tory
https://x.com/lmharpin/status/1782152915811021218
and more
Farage, Braverman and …Eric Zemmour.
There are lots of reports on the, ‘cancelled’, National Conservative meeting in Brussels. Coverage in the UK has focused on the one time Brexit Party leader and the one time British Home Secretary. French language articles in Belgium have focused on the way the Brussels had decided to call a halt to this ‘anti globalist’ spectacle, backed Hungary’s Viktor Obran and wealthy US hard rightists.
In France the presence of the far right leader, former French Presidential candidate and chief of Reconquête, Éric Zemmour, has drawn attention. It is hard to overemphasise how extreme Zemmour is – and I have read a number of his books starting with Le suicide Français.
Reliable sources indicate an important Spiked Living Marxism role in organising the event.
A Century of Labour. John Cruddas.
An important review by a comrade who really knows his labour movement history. The critical comments on what is known as ‘communiarian’ philosophy, no more in fashion than Blue Labour, are also well targeted.
This does not detract from the author’s strengths.
John Cruddas has had a long and fruitful dialogue with the democratic socialist left.
Gaza, Ukraine and the left.
Oakland Socialist is US blog which has gained an audience outside of America.Its views are often similar to the European internationalist left. It is always worth reading.
On Ukraine, from Shiraz.
An important article that should be widely read and shared.
Rochdale. Galloway’s gang standing far right candidate.
https://x.com/Searchlight_mag/status/1776565909886255458
Big shot Galloway is standing 13 candidates, (20 are up for the vote) in the Rochdale local elections this May. His old muckers from TUSC have helpfully not put any up there.This is their top man.
.
The Red Brown Front.
https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/wp-admin/link-manager.php
Labour and the Greens.
In East Anglia the Green Party is a force in many District councils . They control Mid Suffolk. They are not noticably left wing and will tell anybody who asks, eg me, they are not socialist. Polls published in East Anglian Bylines indicate they will not have a breakthrough in the General Election, even their Waveney target seat.
One can agree with them on some issues, here on the new Sizewell C nuclear plant which apart from energy issues will destroy an area of great beauty, without supporting them.
This is part of a wider debate.
Tom Hunt Ipswich Tory MP.
Hunt stickers all around here
Tom Hunt far right apologist.
An Easter message from East Anglia’s leading Conservative intellectual, ex-Tory and new Reform stalwart.
Kev opines.
Owen Jones. From Jim.
Good analysis. Owen has suffered so much abuse I have not posted. But he politically is going nowhere.
Woodbridge toff Kev leaves Tories and joins far right Reform UK.
The East Anglian political scene is still under the shock. Top Suffolk Tory joins far party.
Armed Road, Only Road – IMG (1970s).
Watching Trevor Phillips on the telly this morning brought back some happy memories of his student union days. He was the leader in London, later nationally, of the NUS, of an alliance between Labour students and the Communist Party. The Broad Left, who believe it or not tried to recruit me at one point at Warwick, were not fond of the faction I was I was a member of, the International Marxist Group but obviously made exceptions for outstanding cadres.
Around that time one of our favourite IMG chants at demos was Armed road, only road. One solution armed Revolution!
We would be top of the Prevent list.
These days a few former IMG members in the former left wing New Left Review are British to the core
Not most of us I hasten to add.
IMG IMG fear and the dread of the whole bourgeoise.
..’
Socialism and anti-fascist ideas a warning sign of potential terrorism – Prevent.
This alas is not a conspi joke.
The story comes from the Guardian.
I’m mortally offended.
People like Jim and myself are it seems potential terrorists.
The Tories are barking.
Galloway goes to Westminster.
Amongst the heaps of commentary on Galloway’s election the challenge he may pose at a General Election comes up.
His election machine for by-elections resembles the old Liberal Party and their Lib Dem succesor. Intense focused and short lived.
The Brown Red Workers Party of Britain is however miniscule. It lost key cadres with the CPGB M-L split. They will not be replaced by vegan croissant Chris or the good wishes of Nick Griffin, the CPB Morning Star and whatever remains of TUSC. Nor Islamic community leaders.
At a few hundred odd balls they are simply not serious.
100 candidates and an alliance with Jeremy Corbyn.
Sure…
Galloway wins Rochdale.
There are already reams written on the British nationalist Islamist fellow traveller, Chancer and huckster. Galloway has had plenty of posts on this blog.
For the moment we just say, yuk!
Others may care to add to this.
Labour MPs Defy Starmer to Back Ceasefire in Gaza
Ten Labour frontbenchers opposed the party leadership and voted for an explicit immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war on Wednesday evening.
Dozens of Labour MPs defy Keir Starmer to vote for ceasefire in Gaza.
Eight Labour frontbenchers including Jess Phillips have resigned as Keir Starmer was hit by a major rebellion over a vote for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Overall, 56 Labour MPs voted for an amendment to the king’s speech brought by the Scottish National party, a major blow to the Labour leader’s attempts to keep unity over the Israel-Hamas war.
Labour officials had said in advance that any frontbencher doing so would be sacked for backing the amendment, which called explicitly for a ceasefire.
Phillips, Afzal Khan, Yasmin Qureshi and Paula Barker quit their frontbench roles on Wednesday night after voting for the amendment and defying the whip.
Rachel Hopkins, Sarah Owen, Naz Shah, and Andy Slaughter were sacked by the Labour leader after the vote. Mary Foy, Angela Rayner’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS), and Dan Carden, another PPS, have also left the frontbench.
…..
The Labour leader had hoped to avert a rebellion with a separate amendment criticising Israel’s military actions but stopping short of calling for a ceasefire, and instructed his members to abstain on the SNP motion. Many chose to vote for both, however, amid anger among Labour members over how Starmer has handled the issue.
MPs voted 293 to 125, a majority of 168, to reject the SNP’s amendment, with Qureshi, Khan and Barker quitting before the vote.
Phillips, the most high-profile frontbencher, said it was with a “heavy heart” that she was quitting.
“This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered parliament,” the Birmingham Yardley MP said in her resignation letter.
Good. This seems the most reasonable take, John McDonnell on this: a balanced and principled stand.
Reform UK Poll Boost?
GB News ‘reports’.
Richard Tice’s populist party could potentially win as many votes as UKIP did under Nigel Farage in 2015
Support for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is continuing to collapse as Brexit-backing voters flock to Reform UK, a damning new opinion poll has revealed.
A PeoplePolling survey conducted exclusively for GB News revealed 11 per cent of voters currently support the rebranded Brexit Party.
Esther McVey.
Tory nation : how one party took over by Samuel Earle, (2023) one of the best recent books about the Tories, “This is a parable about the Tories’ periodic bursts of reinvention never really being what they seem. Thatcher, Earle argues, essentially wanted to avenge the collectivism embraced by her immediate predecessors, and return to the small-state attitudes that had prevailed before the second world war. In the same way, the Conservative belief in Brexit is all about returning control of the UK to Britain’s old elites. “Conservatism is often pitched as the opposite of radicalism,” he says, “but radicalism is permitted – even encouraged – so long as it is in pursuit of restorative ends.”
As John Harris states, ” Tory Nation capably explains two innate Conservative traits that are beyond doubt: an unquenchable lust for power, and a deep belief in stooping to conquer.” Having an even more favourable opinion than Harris recommend the book heartly.
Yet who would have predicted the present turn of events…
Update.
France: Demonstrations against anti-Semitism.
New Start?
The protest, called by the leaders of France‘s two houses of parliament, was prompted by a three-fold increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents compared with the whole of 2022, according to French authorities, since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel reports France24.
“Our order of the day today is… the total fight against anti-Semitism which is the opposite of the values of the republic,” Senate speaker Gerard Larcher, who organised the demonstration with lower house speaker Yael Braun-Pivet, told broadcaster LCP before the marchers set off.
Political figures, including Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and former presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, headed the march, holding a banner with the slogan “For the Republic, against anti-Semitism“. They led several renditions of the French national anthem.
…..
The hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party boycotted the event which the far-right National Rally (RN) attended.
LFI leader Jean-Luc Melenchon rejected the march as a meeting of “friends of unconditional support for the massacre” of Palestinians in Gaza.
A separate rally against anti-Semitism that LFI organised in western Paris was disrupted on Sunday morning by counter-demonstrators.
Le Monde states,
For the National Rally (RN), and this is the main lesson of this day, there will be a before and an after. The elected representatives of Marine Le Pen’s party, even isolated and under tension, came in large numbers, and were able to march to the end.
More than thirty years after the great demonstration against anti-Semitism, organized the day after the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras (Vaucluse) in May 1990, blamed on four neo-Nazis, it is a Copernican revolution: “A glass ceiling has exploded,” the historian Grégoire Kauffmann warned in Le Monde on Sunday morning, according to which the demonstration of November 12 will remain an essential moment in the history of the far-right party, consecrating a profound recomposition of the political game.
There were protests at the RN presence:
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party La France Insoumise will not be taking part in Sunday’s demonstration in Paris, unlike its Socialist, Green, and Communist allies
March against anti-Semitism: Mélenchon isolated on the left.
A few hours earlier, the leading left-wing party – which has increasingly been the subject of controversy since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip – had announced its intention to attend this gathering in order to “reaffirm the rejection of anti-Semitism, racism and fascism.” The move is meant to make up for their conspicuous absence from the march against anti-Semitism planned on Sunday, November 12, by President of the Assemblée Nationale Yaël Braun-Pivet and President of the Sénat Gérard Larcher. The march will be attended by the other left-wing parties: The Socialist Party, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts and the Communist Party.
Far Right, London, more.
Tommeh ended up here: Chinatown, Gerrard Street, not far from where Coatesy did his A levels at FE College.
Then there’s this: Guardian.
“One of the problems is that many on the left insufficiently differentiate between Jews. They seem to categorise them as Zionists or anti-Zionists,” he said.
“In fact, British Jews have a wide range of views and very many who the left might see as ‘Zionists’ are critical of illegal settlements, the occupation, of the Israeli government and even of the conduct of the present war.”
Like others, he said he now found himself conflicted against the backdrop of the current conflict. While recoiling from the particular horror of the Hamas attacks, he added: “There are similarities between Hamas and ministers from the [far-right] Religious Zionist party in the Israeli government that are horrible.”
Douglas Murray returns to the culture wars.
Douglas Murray’s books have been critically reviewed on this Blog a number of times.
This is the most recent one.
2022: “The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason. Douglas Murray. Review.“
“From existentialism to deconstruction, all modern thought has exhausted itself in the automatic denunciation of the West, underlining its hypocrisy, its violence and atrocities.” wrote Pascal Bruckner in 2006 (La tyrannie de la pénitence. Essai sur le masochisme occidental). In The War on the West Douglas Murray has a more dramatic target than the long-standing critic of Third Worldism and “l’auto-flagellation” of Western intellectuals. There is, he sets of his first sentences, a “cultural war” “against all the roots of of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced”. The alarm sirens sound out, “There is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world – its past present or future.”
A “grand project of deconstruction and destruction fuelled by resentment and revenge” is underway. Murray’s battlefields range from the National Trust, statues, Western Holy Places, Museums, Schools, the American centred Black Lives Matter movement, and academic and educational institutions, also centred on the USA though with some nods to domestic haunts, su
This is worth recalling:
Now he is back in the fray.
As I said after watching at the Israeli embassy the other day the unedited footage of the massacre, this is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole.
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up.
Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff “morale”. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.
Compare this with the behaviour of Hamas on October 7.
Labour Calls for Home Secretary to be sacked.
Labour says Braverman should be sacked as backlash grows over her attack on Met police
Last Saturday Chartist magazine had a well attended AGM at the Marx Memorial library. Clerkenwell Green. A key speaker, John McDonnell, former Shadow Chancellor, talked on Ukraine and finished by citing his Guardian article on Gaza calling for a Ceasefire. McDonnell has been at many of the protests on the issue.
Nobody could have anticipated that politics on this subject would take this turn.
Last night Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, posted these on X.
Suella Braverman is out of control. Her article tonight is a highly irresponsible, dangerous attempt to undermine respect for police at a sensitive time, to rip up operational independence & to inflame community tensions. No other Home Secretary of any party would ever do this
She’s deliberately seeking to stir up political division around Remembrance Day, a moment when the whole country can come together to pay our respects for sacrifices of the past. And at same time she’s deliberately undermining police ability to deal with problems she whips up
Either Rishi Sunak has licensed this or he is too weak to sack her. Job of Home Secretary is to keep our country safe, not to run an endless Tory leadership campaign If PM can’t get a grip of Suella Braverman’s conduct, means he’s given up any pretence of serious government
And this morning Lammy posted this.
Suella Braverman seeking to exploit the sensitivities of this moment, and an ignorance of Northern Ireland’s history, to inflame community tensions for her own leadership campaign is an appalling new low. Rishi Sunak must sack her. But he’s too weak.
Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in Crisis as Manchester Officers suspended.
Racists Suspended from PSC.
This story came out a couple of days ago.
Now the Squawking one had waded in.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has suspended four officers of its Manchester branch for statements supporting the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation, according to new revelations by Electronic Intifada‘s Asa Winstanley.!
“The suspension came around two weeks after Manchester PSC displayed a banner supporting Palestinian resistance at a pro-Palestine march and posted an article to its website supporting Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ in their action against Israel. Manchester is reportedly one of the group’s most active branches.”
Chubby Skwawkbox continues,
“Right-wing groups and publications (sic) attacked PSC Manchester’s support for Palestinian resistance and the criticism appears to have spooked PSC national’s leadership, as national secretary Ben Soffa emailed the Manchester officers, each individually, notifying them of their suspension and telling them that they “must therefore cease from taking actions in the name of your PSC branch whilst your membership remains suspended”, because the earlier posts may “exhibit hateful or discriminatory behaviour, or significantly undermine PSC’s ability to function as a welcoming and inclusive organisation“.”
Small businessman Steve Walker churns out this conspiracy anti-Semetic stuff.,
“As Winstanley notes, the reality of events in Israel on 7 October may be at severe variance with the ‘atrocity propaganda’ that continues to be pushed about them, particularly when Israeli survivors of the day have told their own media that they were well treated by the Hamas fighters and that many and perhaps most deaths were caused by IDF bullets – and that doctors and bereaved families have expressed alarm at the Israeli government’s haste to bury the bodies of those killed even when they have not yet been identified:
..what really happened on 7 October is hotly contested. Hamas itself has denied targeting civilians, and some Israeli survivors of that day have insisted that many of the civilians died at the hands of Israeli forces.
Until Israel allows an independent international investigation, we are unlikely to learn the full truth. But it may already be too late for that – Israel appears to be literally burying the evidence.”
Apart from truth-seeker Walker’s wild claims the suspended PSC officers will remind some people of the unconditional solidarity some on the ‘left’ expressed with the Black September Munich Massacre in 1972.
The Legacy of Lenin. Dave Lister.
The Legacy of Lenin.
Dave Lister was a valued member of Chartist Magazine’s Editorial Board who passed away recently.
Arguably no other person has had more influence on the events of the last hundred or so years than Lenin. Arguably without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, no Stalinism, no Cold War, no monolithic state apparatus in China and elsewhere. It is also the case that fear of communism was one factor, although admittedly not the main one, leading to the triumph of fascism and Nazism in the inter-war period.
Yet Marxists would argue that the modern world has been shaped by the emergence of capitalism from feudalism, the class struggle, base determining superstructure etc., not by the role of an individual. Yet, another yet, Marx himself wrote that men make their own history but under already existing circumstances.
Lenin came from a wealthy land-owning background and always had the resources to fund his own activities. The fact that his older brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for his involvement in the Narodnaya Volya attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III must surely have reinforced his revolutionary beliefs. He was clearly influenced by the writings not only of Marx and Engels but also the founder of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov, as can be seen in his early work on the development of capitalism in Russia. His seminal work ‘What Is To Be Done’ outlined his conception of a tightly-knit party of professional revolutionaries that would lead the proletariat to socialism. The working-class was incapable of developing socialist consciousness spontaneously and therefore needed a vanguard party to show them the way. This was a momentous development, the substitution of party for class as it subsequently unfolded. It led to the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, with Lenin’s Menshevik opponents advocating a more open mass party. Trotsky rightly foresaw at the time the danger that this conception presaged dictatorship over the people as its logical conclusion, but unfortunately perhaps Trotsky changed his mind in 1917.
Maybe if events had worked out differently the Bolsheviks would have remained a marginal force in Russian politics. However, the outbreak of the First World War proved fatal for the Tsarist regime as defeats led to disillusion and scarcity and the spontaneous February Revolution was the result. The Provisional Government that then emerged, based largely on the more moderate socialist parties, did not ultimately have an answer to the Bolshevik demands for “bread, peace and land”. However, until the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd in a sealed German train, the Bolshevik leadership had assumed that Russia would undergo a period of bourgeois liberalism. Then Lenin turns up at the Finland Station and urges them to prepare for the seizure of state power. Without Lenin therefore it is unlikely that the October Revolution would have occurred, since it was not a spontaneous uprising as in February but a planned coup with support from workers and soldiers in Petrograd. It could also be argued though that without the Bolsheviks General Kornilov’s reactionary coup attempt would have succeeded in summer 1917 and Russia might then have been plunged into a bloody counter-revolutionary scenario.
My late friend Tony Polan published a book in 1984 entitled ‘Lenin and the End of Politics’, which focused on Lenin’s work ‘The State and Revolution’, which he wrote in the period before the Bolshevik Revolution. One of Polan’s main themes in this book is that there is no place for civil society in Lenin’s vision of the future. He blames this on Marx’s writings on ‘The Civil War in France’ on the Paris Commune of 1871, in which he described how the Commune combined both executive and legislative functions. However, one of the reviewers of Polan’s book, Wayne Gabardi, suggested that it was Engels rather than Marx who saw the Commune as the blueprint for a future socialist society.
The point about civil society is crucial though. We are talking about democratically elected parliaments, some sort of party system, freedom of speech and the press and the rule of law. Polan argued that all of these were seen by Lenin merely as the outward show of bourgeois rule and not appropriate for life under the dictatorship of the proletariat. “The state, formed under the capitalist mode of production, is appropriate only for that social system”. It was necessary therefore to smash the bourgeois state machine.
Polan concluded that the abolition of civil society represented the end of politics, to be replaced by the arbitrary rule of bureaucrats and inevitably in the end came the Gulag. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, this system “was worse than the disease it was meant to cure”. The absence of the rule of law meant that there were no legal constraints on the operations of the Cheka, the secret police force established under Lenin and Trotsky, which could arrest people or shoot them arbitrarily. It meant that a march of women protesting about food prices could be fired on. It meant that 2500 Kronstadt sailors could be shot down without mercy.
Bukharin and some other Bolshevik leaders wanted to see a coalition government made up of all the socialist parties. Instead, the road to tyranny was being paved. Elections were held to a Constituent Assembly in 1918 but when the Bolsheviks found that they had received only 25% of the vote they moved to dissolve it. Not only the pro-capitalist Kadet Party but also the socialist parties – the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – found their newspapers shut down, their members arrested and, in some cases, shot, their parties totally banned. Lenin advised his Menshevik friend Martov to flee the country as he could offer him no protection. Undeniably the scale of repression increased massively under Stalin’s paranoid regime but the repression began well before his rise to power.
So this is how the party came to hold sway over society as it still does in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. Polan made the point that Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party addressed the problem for Marxists of “the apparent inability or reluctance of the proletariat to act as the self-conscious agency of revolution”. This may not have been apparent in 1902 but was more obvious in the period after the First World War. Marx however wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “the communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties”, so it appears that Lenin’s notion of the vanguard party is an epistemological break with Marxism and this makes a nonsense of the term Marxism-Leninism.
Polan also addresses Lenin’s understanding of bureaucracy, which he contrasts unfavourably with that of the German theorist Max Weber. Lenin seemed to believe that once the working-class had seized power only a minimal state would be required á la Liz Truss because the administrative tasks of the state had been immensely simplified by the forces of production. In contrast Weber understood that the modern state requires a sizeable bureaucracy which will include technical experts. It had developed a new complexity. The tasks previously carried out by the family and the community had now been assigned to the new welfare systems in Britain and Germany for example.
Polan made the point that if you abolish the market economy, you have to take on directly some immensely complex tasks and the further point that the political revolution that Trotsky advocated in order to overthrow the rule of the bureaucracy “would not remove the complex tasks which demanded the operation of those necessary functions which the bureaucracy had performed”. He later contrasts Lenin and Trotsky’s narrow view of bureaucrats as motivated solely by economic gain with Weber and Habermas’s more sophisticated view that “the bureaucrat derives a motivation from the functions he performs and a power from the necessity of that function and the skills that he possesses to fulfil it”. (Polan op.cit.)
So the reality of life in post-revolutionary Russia precluded Lenin’s original minimalist view of the post-revolutionary state. It is also noteworthy that in this period Lenin became obsessed with the current practices of American capitalism and advocated one-man management of industry and Taylorism. Workers’ control of industry had never been in the Bolsheviks’ playbook and this is certainly not what happened. Consequently it is difficult to see what the workers of Petrograd ultimately gained from the second revolution which many of them had supported.
What then should we conclude from all this? Any plans to develop a vanguard party that believes it is the sole guardian of truth should be discarded. However, the world is suffering not only from the existence of totalitarian dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that claim to be democracies. It is also suffering from largely unregulated capitalism that, since the Thatcher-Reagan era, has produced a growing gulf between a tiny minority of the super-rich and the growing multitude of the poor. The sustained development of the forces of production is causing immense damage to our world threatening both the future of its human beings and of its other species.
My conclusion is that a rejection of Leninism and an appreciation of where the limitations of Marxism lie should not lead us to rule out the notion that some form of democratic socialism is the way forward. If we embrace Polan’s argument on the need to retain the liberal freedoms of ‘bourgeois’ civil society – freedom of speech, the press, the right to form political parties, the rule of law etc – then we could be envisaging a pluralist socialistic society. Precisely how to square this with the continued existence or abolition or containment of capitalism is problematic and beyond the scope of this article or its author’s capacity to provide a comprehensive solution. Perhaps the most we can hope for currently is something like the programme outlined in the 2017 Labour Party manifesto leading to a more progressive outcome, from which we could hope to make further advancement. Venceremos, but be wary of what this means.
Dave Lister was a member of Chartist EB and Brent Central CLP
Outrage Grows at National Front stunt at Cenotaph. Er….
Thought they were no longer around. Apparently they are.
We fought them so many times in the 1970s…
Here they are:
Well, well.
John McDonnell on Labour’s response to the Gaza Crisis.
Labour’s response to the crisis in Gaza is a test of whether it’s fit to govern
John McDonnell Guardian
Extracts,
..the question now is whether Labour is capable of effective government – not just in managing the day-to-day administration, but in responding to potentially world-changing events that require moral judgments and fundamental political choices. Gaza has been the most significant test to date of whether Labour is fit to govern.
When Hamas launched its appalling pogrom on innocent Israelis, there was unanimous condemnation across the Labour party and the trade union movement. There was also unanimity that Israel has the right to defend itself.
It is in determining how Israel exercises that right to defend itself that finer moral and political judgment comes into play. Some people would consider that it is here that Labour’s judgment is found to be significantly wanting, alongside a display of inexperience in the political frontline in a time of crisis and a failure of political delivery.
When the Israeli government took the decision to blockade Gaza, preventing the supply of food, water and medicines, it was an absolutely clear breach of Article 8 of the Rome Statute determining war crimes. The article stipulates it is a crime to intentionally use “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Convention”. More significantly, it was morally indefensible.
The recitation of ineffective calls for Israel to abide by international law when the indiscriminate effects of its bombing are self-evidents calls into question yet again the moral judgments being made at the centre of the Labour administration.
The same question is being asked about the decision to shelter behind the US’s call for a pause in the bombing and invasion, rather than a ceasefire. When the loss of life has reached more than 9,000 people, how can we morally even consider the proposal that, after a short break in combat, we support the return to the inevitable mass killing of civilians and more children that will ensue from the street-by-street attack on Gaza City?
If there is to be a pause, I would suggest it should be a very brief pause within the Labour party to assess the moral basis upon which decisions are being taken, and for reflection on whether they align with the moral compass that has directed our party since its foundation.
…….
This measured article will be welcomed by many.
More on Labour developments,
Two Labour Council leaders: Starmer must go!
Labour Hub.
Meanwhile Sheffield Labour Councillors have voted publicly at Council to demand an immediate ceasefire, a cessation of all arms sales and military aid to Israel, to condemn the government’s abstention at the United Nations against a humanitarian truce and to join Sheffield Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.
This is believed to be the first time Labour councillors have voted for a motion calling for a ceasefire in a public meeting since the Hamas attacks on 7th October. Councillors suggested to the leadership of the Labour council group that many could resign their positions if Labour did not vote to back the motion.
Private Eye on Hamas and its “terrorist dictatorship”.
“it is not freedom it wants but control; and it is equally prepared to torture Palestinians to achieve this.”
The latest Private Eye carries this article, “Hamas Watch”.
It begins in 2014 when Hamas “used the cover of an Israeli attack to carry ouf a campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings again those whom it accused of “collaborating’ including Fatah supporters.”
There were at least 23 murders.
The piece cites Human Rights Watch in 2018.
The full report also mentions the Palestinian Authority,
Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza have in recent years carried out scores of arbitrary arrests for peaceful criticism of the authorities, particularly on social media, among independent journalists, on university campuses, and at demonstrations. As the Fatah-Hamas feud deepened despite attempts at reconciliation, PA security services have targeted supporters of Hamas and vice versa. Relying primarily on overly broad laws that criminalize activity such as causing “sectarian strife” or insulting “higher authorities,” the PA and Hamas use detention to punish critics and deter them and others from further activism. In detention, security forces routinely taunt, threaten, beat, and force detainees into painful stress positions for hours at a time.
Accusations of torture in Gaza, in 2021, were not investigated.
In August of this year six men were hanged for “collaboration” after peaceful protestes were held.
The column concludes by saying that Gazans are living under a “terrorist dictatorship”. The author accuses Hamas of turning its citizens into “not just as human shields, but into weapons.
………
Full article, (hat-tip Jim D)
“
Hamas Watch (from Private Eye 3 Nov 2023):
THE sheer brutality Hamas displayed against innocent people in Israel on 7 October shocked and appalled the world.
Partly this is because people cannot comprehend how any human being can carry out such acts. But had they studied Hamas’s record, they might have been less surprised: Hamas has been honing its brutality for years on another group of innocents – the people of Gaza whom it purports to protect.
Hamas may claim to want freedom for Gaza. But its actions show it is not freedom it wants but control; and it is equally prepared to torture Palestinians to achieve this.
This was clear in 2014 when Hamas used the cover of an Israeli attack to carry out a campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against those it accused of “collaborating”, including Fatah supporters.
At least 23 people were extrajudicially murdered, some of whom had been in jail for years. They included Atta Najjar, a former police officer with a mental disability, who was jailed in 2009 for “collaboration”. His body was returned to his family looking, his brother told Amnesty International, “as if you’d put it in a bag and smashed it.”
The pattern has continued ever since. A 2018 Human Rights watch investigation, based on 147 interviews and a review of photographic and video evidence, medical reports and court documents, concluded that Hamas used arrest to deter and punish criticism, with torture in custody not only routine but actual Hamas government policy.
In 2021, Palestine’s Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) received 193 complaints of torture by Hamas in Gaza, but said no steps are taken to investigate this. Accounts of torture included beatings with truncheons, gun butts, hoses and wire, whipping of soles of feet and prolonged and painful stress positioning, forcing detainees to stand or sit on tiny chairs for hours or even days.
Torture sites included Internal Security’s Gaza City detention centre and a disused outpatient clinic besides Al-Shifa hospital. In 2022, a UN Human Rights Council Report accused Hamas of using excessive force against its people, who have occasionally tried to complain peacefully to their “government” about living conditions and shortages.
When, this August, the complaining turned to peaceful protest, Hamas responded with violence, restricting public access to the streets and arresting and assaulting Palestinian journalists like Ihab Fasfous, Mohammed Abdlrazeq al-Baba and Bashar Ahmed Taleb. That same week it was announced that six men were to hang for “collaboration”, the sudden escalation to death sentences looking like a clear warning to others.
While Gazans have been living under a terrorist dictatorship, with no right to complain, dissent, or, since 2006, to vote, Hamas has practiced its brutality on them, erasing its own humanity in the process. Now, in brutalising Israelis, it has turned Gazans not just into human shields, but into weapons, probably hoping that provoking their deaths by hiding among them will eventually lead to the destruction of Israel. It is as disgusting as it is cynical.
Hamas has failed its people, but we should not. All of which means the near-impossible must be achieved. Gazans must be protected, but Hamas must be held to account.
Activists Release Rodents in MacDonalds to protest against Israel.
There have been some bizarre stunts against Israel but this one, involving cruelty to animals, tops them.
Police said they were investigating after the first incident in Birmingham on Monday in which what appeared to be mice painted red, black, green and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag – were released into a McDonald’s in the north of the city.
Other videos posted on social media showed what appear to be two similar protests at different McDonald’s branches.
In one video, staff can be seen trying to contain dozens of rodents under a plastic box, with one onlooker saying they had been “dropped off”.
Another video appeared to show a group of masked men enter a McDonald’s while chanting “Free Palestine” and throwing a box of rodents on the ground near to staff.
West Midlands police said: “We’re investigating after live rodents were thrown into a restaurant off Watson Road, Nechells. We understand the distress this will have caused and it’s not acceptable in any circumstances.
“This is currently being treated as a public nuisance offence and we’ve active lines of inquiries to identify, and then arrest, who was involved.”
They urged anyone with information, photos or video footage of the incident to submit it to the force.
In the first incident, video footage shows a man with what appears to be a Palestinian flag draped around his head carrying the rodents from the boot of a car into the McDonald’s and tipping them on to the floor, in front of horrified customers.
As the animals scurry around the floor, diners can be seen running away. He can then be heard shouting: “Boycott Israel” and “Fuck Israel”.
Videos from a separate incident in Birmingham on Tuesday showed a group of people entering a McDonald’s and shouting “Free Palestine” as box of what appeared to be mice was thrown on to the floor.
McDonald’s UK said: “We are aware of a second incident in one of our Birmingham restaurants. The restaurant has been fully sanitised and our pest control partners have carried out a full inspection. We are working with West Midlands police on both incidents.”
Calls to boycott the global fast food chain have stemmed from McDonald’s Israel saying that it had given thousands of free meals to Israeli military personnel.Gang release mice in third McDonald’s branch as company hits back at online ‘misinformation’
The Birmingham Mail adds,
…
Meanwhile:
Afghans forced to flee Pakistan as Islamabad cracks down on refugees.
France 24.
Islamabad issued an ultimatum in early October to 1.7 million Afghans it says were living illegally in Pakistan: leave by November 1 or face arrest and expulsion. The government has blamed recent militant attacks on Afghans living in Pakistan. Faced with the impossible choice, many Afghans are now choosing to leave the country despite having made their homes there.
‘Party of Islam’, Electoral Commission rejects registration.
Bid to join other far-right groups in elections, rejected, for now.
“A new “Party of Islam” has been rejected by the Electoral Commission in the UK. A spokesperson for the commission said “We refused the application. The proposed constitution did not satisfactorily set out the structure and organisation of the party.” Reports EU Today.
The party had applied to register with the commission, which is the independent body that oversees elections and regulates political parties in the UK.
The application was submitted on October 13th, just days after the Hames atrocities committed in Israel left more than 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, dead.
In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”
The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”
he commission said that it had considered the party’s application “in line with the legal tests set out in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000″.
“We refused the application,” the spokesperson said. “The proposed constitution did not satisfactorily set out the structure and organisation of the party.
“Their proposed financial scheme did not meet the requirements set out in electoral law. Their application form was also non-complaint with electoral law. They have not been registered as a political party.”
The party has the right to appeal the decision.
Previously, The Islamic Party of Britain, formed in 1989, claimed to be the very first national Islamic political organisation in the UK and the only Islamic political party in the non-Muslim Western world.
The party argued that homosexuality needed treatment, was not to be tolerated and that homosexuals should be put to death for a “public display of lewdness.”
Comment.
There is no law against far right religious parties standing in UK elections. It is hard to justif ban as such.
Look at this lot: Christian People’s Alliance.
Leading UK Islamist site Five Pillars editor welcomes attempted Dagestan pogrom.
Dilly Hussain, “Deputy editor of @5PillarsUK • Blog for @HuffPostUK • Contributor at @AJEnglish Columnist for @MiddleEastEye .
The story:
Mob storms Dagestan airport in search of Jewish passengers from Israel Guardian.
Airport in Russia’s Muslim southern region closed after hundreds storm tarmac and climb on to planes
A mob in Russia’s mostly Muslim region of Dagestan has stormed the airport in Makhachkala in search of Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.
In the past day, local people have besieged a hotel in search of Jewish guests and stormed the airport after reports emerged that a flight from Tel Aviv was arriving in the city. Passengers were forced to take refuge in planes or hide in the airport for fear of being attacked.
Local health authorities said that 20 people had been injured, including two who were critical. The RIA news agency said nine police officers had received injuries in the incident, two of whom were being treated in hospital. The passengers on the plane were safe, security forces told Reuters.
Sixty people were later detained..
Au Daghestan, un aéroport fermé après avoir été pris d’assaut par une foule hostile à Israël Le Monde
Plusieurs dizaines d’hommes ont pénétré, dimanche, sur le tarmac et dans le terminal de l’aéroport de Makhatchkala, capitale de cette république russe à majorité musulmane, à l’annonce de l’arrivée d’un avion en provenance d’Israël.
……..
Dilly graduated from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, with a BA Honours in Politics in 2009. He went on to complete his NCTJ Certificate in Print Journalism in 2010 while reporting for the Bedfordshire on Sunday.
He left Bedfordshire on Sunday in 2011 and worked as a freelance documentary researcher at Press TV. (Iranian regime state channel) Dilly has also contributed to numerous Islamic publications like Al Jumuah Magazine, The Revival Magazine and Islam21c.
Dilly regularly appears on Sky News, Channel 4 News, BBC Look East, BBC South, BBC One, Islam Channel, Russia Today and BBC radio stations discussing Middle East and North African politics, and domestic topics concerning British Muslims. He is also a blogger for the Huffington Post, a columnist for the Middle East Eye and Pakistan Today, and a freelance contributor for Al Jazeera English, the Ceasefire Magazine and the Foreign Policy Journal.
He enjoys reading and writing, as well as keeping up to date with current affairs. Dilly is also keen on learning about different cultures, traditions and history. He speaks fluent Bengali, and good Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi (Kashmiri).
Dilly plays Saturday league cricket, is a member of Bedford Amateur Boxing Club, and is an avid Liverpool FC and UFC fan. He loves reading historical fiction, crime novels and watching documentaries, as well as travelling and the gym.
Dilly is a British born Bangladeshi, raised and residing in Bedford.
Tariq Ali Speaks on Gaza to SWP Meeting.
The killing of Palestinians is undoubtedly genocide’ Tariq Ali and others speak out (Socialist Worker)
“Over 600 people packed into a hall and two over-spill rooms at Socialist Workers’ London Palestine meeting this week.”
Tariq Ali.
“When I heard that Hamas decided to go in and say to the Israelis, “Here we are, get out of our territory, lift the siege”, I was actually very happy.”
He adds, with a tear in his eyes, ” Obviously, I was not happy by the death of civilians anywhere.”
Ali avoids mentioning what this “hit back” from Gaza involved. The October the 7th massacres. ” Hamas murdered 1,400 people on 7 October, there are not one or two Israelis captive in Gaza, but 220 – among them children, the elderly, and dual and foreign nationals. Netanyahu must now decide what price Israel is willing to pay for their safe return, if it is even possible while waging a war against Hamas that has killed more than 7,000 Palestinians.” (Guardian)
Ali then recalls, through the fog of ages, Vietnam,,
I thought then about the Vietnam War—the press reported another [Vietnamese resistance] bombing of a café in Saigon, which was then controlled by the Americans. The Vietnamese replied, saying, “Yes, we did it. All the places we’ve bombed are used by US soldiers. We don’t like killing civilians, but if the US leave Vietnam, we will stop bombing these places.”
Then Algeria, and the 1966 film by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers,
In one part, a resistance fighter is asked why they bombed cafes where French families were killed. He replied that they [the resistance] would be more accurate if the French gave them an air force.
If Ali think this detail in the Pontecorvo has aged well, it has not. The bombing of targets like the Milk Bar, ( Algeria’s Milk Bar Bomber). It might be helpful were he familiar with such details as this: La Bataille d’Alger was this, “The Battle of Algiers was a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks carried out by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French authorities in Algiers, and by the French authorities, army, and French terrorist organisations, against the FLN] Both sides targeted civilians throughout the battle.”
Would he like to see something like that again?
From cosy Camden Ali continues,
On the first occasion the Palestinian resistance decides to hit back, there has been complete criticism. But there’s no criticism in Palestine, nor on the streets of Cairo, nor Rabat in Morocco.”
The Arab Street, which the former leftist knows well, speaks. He listens.
“The global fight, of course, will carry on. I appeal to the Palestinian Authority to stop the collaboration with Israel. Here’s your opportunity to break with them, say you will no longer sit at the table with Netanyahu and the outright fascists in his government today.”
Ali does not mention what the other fascist body, Hamas wants…..
The one time IMG member, admirer of Boris Yeltsin, one time Liberal Democrats voter, Green voter, self-identifying Corbyn’s one time best friend, Brexit ultra and associate of Communist Party of Britain’s Andrew Murray, now SWP star, still has fire in the belly.
“And say you won’t talk until they end the siege of Gaza. They should say to Israel that, “You can’t obliterate us. We refuse to die, and we are going on, and large parts of the world are with us.”
Ali wrote this on the New Left Review Blog. recalling one of his essays as pupil at Saint Custard’s, when he’d just read Franz Fanon and Malcom X,
.”.they know this must be resisted by any means necessary. Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours. They decided to take matters into their own hands.
Do the Palestinians have a right to resist the non-stop aggression to which they are subjected? Absolutely. There is no moral, political or military equivalence as far as the two sides are concerned. Israel is a nuclear state, armed to the teeth by the US. Its existence is not under threat. It’s the Palestinians, their lands, their lives, that are. Western civilization seems willing to stand by while they are exterminated. They, on the other hand, are rising up against the colonizers.”
Uprising in Palestine. October the 7th Sidecar.
Comrade John McDonnell, by contrast, speaks for internationalists,
Armita Garavand, victim of the Islamic Republic of Iran, dies.
This is tragic.
France 24, Iranian teen dies a month after losing consciousness in incident on Tehran’s metro
“Iran has stepped up measures over the past few months against women and businesses who breach the hijab rules.
In September, lawmakers voted in favour of toughening the penalties, which include jail sentences of up to 10 years for women who violate the dress code.
Morning Star on French Left and Sarah Wagenknecht.
Nick Wright: Tumultuous times for the left in Europe
The Morning Star, independent of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and published by the co-op, carried this story yesterday by a top Tendance Coatesy contributor.
(note I have added the vexing absent accent in the article original for Mélenchon)
“LAST weekend saw big upsets on the left in France and Germany. The economic crisis that goes with Europe’s submission to the US strategy of tension with Russia — with its openly proclaimed objective of limiting Chinese influence — expresses itself in a political crisis that has inevitably drawn in the left.”
Despite this bizarre beginning, though perhaps Wright knows something about French left politics and its relationship to the US “strategy of tension” that has escaped other commentateurs, he makes some reasonable points about the crisis in the French left alliance, NUPES, Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale. This brings together La France insoumise, Communists, Socialists, Greens and some small parties and has 151 MPs in the National Assembly, rather more than the MPs from Wrights own party, the CPB.
Now NUPES is falling apart.
The French Communist Party (PCF) has concluded that NUPES is at an impasse and has called for the opening of “a new page in the coming together of the left and ecologists.” The objective is to constitute a “new popular front” capable of being in the majority.
Among the factors leading up to the division (note this particular split extended right through the LFI) was the reinstatement in the parliamentary group of La France Insoumise (LFI), the biggest component of NUPES, of the deputy Adrien Quatennens, an ally of LFI leader Mélenchon, despite his conviction for domestic violence and against the opposition of of many, including feminist deputies.
In the labour movement the LFI in general and Mélenchon in particular are criticised for the disrespect they displayed towards the unions during the powerful pensions protests which earlier this year so dramatically weakened President Macron’s standing.
This is also the case, and the Tendance reported on this in details – noting for example the stand of the PCF in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre where the rioting began.
“More immediately Mélenchon’s tone-deaf take on the urban violence which followed the death of teenager Nahel Merzouk — shot by a police officer during a traffic stop — has caused an open breach.”
So far so accurate, and this Blog reproduced their statements at the time.
In the judgement of the PCF, this stance failed to connect with the growing sense that people living in working-class neighbourhoods were those most affected by the violence.
These tensions were heightened over recent days by divisions over the Hamas military assault on the Israeli border settlements.
Mélenchon’s failure to characterise the Hamas action as terrorism resulted in Green leader Marine Tondelier arguing that he had “removed all credibility from the left coalition,” while Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure called for a “break with the Mélenchon method.”
In an argument with with Fabien Roussel, Mélenchon compared the PCF leader to Jacques Doriot, a pre-war PCF renegade who led a fascist formation.
In a posting Mélenchon said: “History repeats itself, there is a Doriot in Roussel.”
For those who have not heard of Doriot, he was a leading Communist, deeply rooted in the working class Parisian suburb of Saint Denis who became this,
Jacques Doriot (French: [ʒak dɔʁjo]; 26 September 1898 – 22 February 1945) was a French politician, initially communist, later fascist, before and during World War II.
In 1936, after his exclusion from the Communist Party, he founded the French Popular Party (PPF) and took over the newspaper La Liberté, which took a stand against the Popular Front.
During the war, Doriot was a radical supporter of collaboration and contributed to the creation of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (LVF). He fought personally in German uniform on the Eastern Front, with the rank of lieutenant.
Perhaps I have missed something, but it was one of Mélenchon’s LFI deputies, MPs, (the Leader of the rally does not actually sit in the French Parliament) who said this, “La députée LFI Sophia Chikirou, proche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a publié cette semaine un message comparant le chef du PCF à Jacques Doriot, ancien communiste passé à la collaboration dans les années 1940. Invitée de LCI ce dimanche, la députée Nupes Sandrine Rousseau fustige cette déclaration.”
“The NUPES project is not quite in ruins, but the PCF summarised the situation: “All this prevents us from meeting the challenges. This prevents us from being as strong as the left could be regarding social combat. This prevents us from fighting effectively against the far right by trivialising Nazism. And it prevents us from building the rallies we need to demand peace in the Middle East. This is why we are calling for a new gathering on the left that is broader, clearer, and more useful to our common struggles.”
This story has been carried on TC, drawing on L’Humanité.
Le Monde reports, The PCF takes note of the “impasse” that the Nupes has become and calls for “a new type of union” of the left
“It is time to build a gathering that is useful, respectful of our differences and all the living forces of our society,” states a resolution from the Communist Party, adopted very widely.
A different dynamic is at work in Germany where the growth of the right-wing Alliance for Germany (AfD) threatens to breach the cordon sanitaire around the far right.
Now this is where Wright gets seriously dodgy.
“Sahra Wagenknecht, former Bundestag leader of Die Linke (the Left), and nine deputies have broken away from the party.”
……
Capitalising on Wagenknecht’s great personal popularity in Germany — 20 per cent say they would consider voting for a party led by her — the new formation is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — for Reason and Fairness (In German: Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht/BSW — fur Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit).
…….
The war in Ukraine has brought some of the divisions to a head. BSW’s members say they no longer see any place for their political positions in Die Linke.
Referring to the massive February 2023 “Uprising for Peace” rally organised on Wagenknecht’s initiative, they say: “Tens of thousands gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Although and precisely because around half of the population rejects the government’s military course, the country’s entire political establishment resisted and defamed the rally.
“Instead of supporting us in this dispute, the Left party leadership stood shoulder to shoulder with the other parties: they accused the initiators of the rally of being ‘open to the right’ and were thus the keyword for accusations against us.”
They accused them and they were 100% correct.
Alongside a clear anti-imperialist and anti-war stance, (note some would say an implicitly pro-Putin line) the strategic orientation of the new project is to shape a clear class challenge the growth of the right-wing AfD, which has grown particularly in the former GDR lander.
Its opponents, both in the government parties and in Die Linke itself, characterise the new formation as left-wing on economic questions and “conservative” on social questions.2
……
A bit like the Morning Star’s old mucker, now consigned to utter darkness, George Galloway and his little band, the Workers Party of Britain in fact.
It is true that it takes a detailed class position on the main economic and social questions and is highly critical of what it described as Die Linke’s focus on identity over class, but its position on immigration is more nuanced than its opponents claim.
Set in the context of “an innovative economy with fair competition,” it argues that action should be taken against growing inequality and a reliable welfare state should be created.
Sounds like a pretty similar stand to Keir Starmer…
The group’s chair Amira Mohamed Ali said: “Immigration is an enrichment if the infrastructure is not overwhelmed.”
There follows some puff on her Spiked like views on urban elites, Greens, and what one might call Woke.
In essence neither of these developments are due to either of the personalities involved. In the case of Mélenchon, a former member of the ferociously anti-communist Lambertiste Trotskyists, his political approach is notoriously confrontational.
The PCF describes him as “hegemonic,” the Socialist Party says that where once he was a factor for unity he is now the source of division.
Mélenchon, was not only a Lambertist in his youth (a cadre in fact) but on joining the Parti Socialiste in 1976, an admirer of President Mitterrand (Le Choix de l’insoumission Co-auteur :Jean-Luc Mélenchon Co-auteur :Marc Endeweld. 2016) who sees himself as a leading figure in the French Republic, one capable of creating a new Sixth Republic…
Here Wright flutters his eye-lashes at his heroine.
“Wagenknecht is a brilliant leader with a real connection to millions of voters, but the source of division in Die Linke was not her personality (although the resentment and envy was palpable) but in Die Linke’s drift away from its working-class orientation and the alienation of its base, particularly in the lander of the former socialist Germany.”
It’s the Americans again…
At the root of Europe’s present economic and political trauma, and especially the German economic crisis, is the failure of the European elite to resist the drive by US capital to frustrate any challenge to its global position.
For social democracy — competing to manage the system — the crisis is destroying their electoral base.
What distinguishes the Wagenknecht initiative is a willingness to challenge the basis of foreign policy and war while making a direct claim for working-class support on a class basis.
….
When will Galloway Return to the pages of the Morning Star?
……..
Update: this was signalled to me today:
Alexander Hurst Guardian. Friday 27th of October.
A serious intra-left backlash is brewing in France as others distance themselves from Mélenchon’s approach. “Mélenchon, the whole of the left’s problem,” declared Le Monde in an editorial. Reasonable voices on the French left know that after months of division he is no longer fit to lead them, and seem ready for this to be the last straw. The Socialist party has, at the urging of Hidalgo and others, suspended its participation in Nupes, and the Communist party has called for “a new type of union” for the left.
Mélenchon may have made a name for himself as a gifted orator in his younger days, but what is left of whoever he once was seems to consist of delusions of grandeur, petty insults and a deep bitterness that the French have overwhelmingly refused to elect him president.
Mélenchon is interested in fire, rage, revolution and fuelling a vision of France that is disconnected from reality. This has only worked to make everything more extreme, though not necessarily in Mélenchon’s favour. If the French were to find themselves facing a 2027 ballot choice between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le Pen would win. It would not even be close. Whether some new grouping forms or not, what’s clear is that the left must dump Mélenchon, and swiftly. For its own good, and for that of France.
AWL: new statement on Israel-Gaza War.
Statement which resonates with many not in the AWL.
There are some X/Twitter accounts which offer good sense on the war.
Sense of perspective:
Against the war, for consistent democracy. AWL (Extracts).
The population of Gaza faces an increasingly desperate situation. Blockaded and besieged by Israel, with access to basic utilities and aid having been cut off, a humanitarian crisis mounts. As of 23 October about 5,000 have been killed. Over 10,000 are injured. UN statistics estimate that 25% of homes in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.
Israel has instructed 1.1 million people, over half of Gaza’s population, to evacuate the north of the enclave. The instruction is a practical impossibility. Some humanitarian aid has entered Gaza via the Egypt-controlled Rafah crossing. Aid workers say the quantities – of food, medical supplies and equipment, and other vital necessities – fall well short of what is needed. The transport of aid will be impeded by bomb damage to Gaza’s roads. Hospitals in particular are in grave danger of running out of fuel.
Israeli troops mass on the Gaza border. A ground invasion seems imminent. That invasion will see many more civilian deaths, inevitable in an area as densely populated as Gaza.
Israel’s ultimate aim in Gaza is far from clear. Its leaders talk about the total destruction of Hamas, and of being prepared to turn Gaza into a “city of rubble” in order to achieve it. But even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas as a military force, what then? An attempt to reoccupy Gaza and rule it directly would mean indefinite war (even if low-level at first) and large Israeli military casualties.
Hamas does not exist only as a response to Israel’s action, but as an expression of distinct national and regional political-religious currents. Nevertheless, like many fascistic movements throughout history, it draws on real social grievances. Unless the social conditions on which Hamas’s eschatological Islamic-nationalism feeds are changed, then it – or an even-worse, more-reactionary successor, closer to Al-Qa’eda or ISIS – will regrow.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian territory subject to a 56-year-long Israeli occupation and de facto military dictatorship, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, some by armed settlers, some by the Israeli army. Friday 20 October saw images circulate of Palestinian men stripped and bound by settlers, along with allegations of sexual abuse.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian territory subject to a 56-year-long Israeli occupation and de facto military dictatorship, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, some by armed settlers, some by the Israeli army. Friday 20 October saw images circulate of
Deep wounds have been caused to Israeli Jewish society, too, where the death toll from Hamas’s attacks of 7 October has reached 1,400. The Israeli security forces have revised their estimate of the number of hostages held in Gaza upwards to over 200. Hamas has begun releasing videos of the hostages, and a burgeoning movement in Israeli society is calling for more effective action to be taken to secure their release, with many family members of hostages indicting Netanyahu’s strategy for putting them at greater risk. A few more hostages have been released from 20 Oct.
Beyond Israel-Palestine, many Arab and Muslim states have seen large demonstrations. In Tunisia, a mob attacked and partially destroyed the historic Al Hammah synagogue – an antisemitic outrage that does nothing to help the Palestinians, but only helps to entrench chauvinist politics. In other countries, antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents have spiked. Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American child was stabbed to death in Illinois. Samantha Woll, the president of a synagogue in Detroit, was stabbed to death on 21 October.
The Israeli state has dispossessed, displaced, and colonially subjugated the Palestinian people over many decades. In that conflict, between Israeli occupation and the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination, any consistent democrat, let alone socialist, should be on the side of the Palestinian people. This does not mean, however, that we side with Hamas in the immediate military conflict with Israel. Or with Hezbollah if outright war also breaks out on the northern border, initiated either by Hezbollah or by Israel.
This is a crucial point.
The US socialist theorist Hal Draper once said that, if war is the continuation of politics by military means, socialists should determine their attitude to a war based on their attitude to the politics of which the war is a continuation – on both sides. Of what politics is the war between Israel and Hamas a continuation?
(more on Hal Draper here: The SWP’s filthy insult to the memory of Hal Draper. Jim Denham.)
On Israel’s side, it is a politics of collective punishment, stretching Israel’s legitimate right to defend its civilian population past breaking point. Its war is inextricable from its policies of blockade and occupation towards the Palestinians; some of its leading politicians now talk more-or-less explicitly about ethnic cleansing. One possible endgame of the current war, from Israel’s perspective, could be the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinian populations into Egypt (from Gaza) and Jordan (from the West Bank). Like all the other outcomes, that does not seem “likely”, but one of the “unlikely” outcomes will occur nonetheless. All the options Israel might pursue through a continued and escalating war will involve massive civilian death tolls and displacement.
And on Hamas’s side? Does Hamas’s war against Israel merely express the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to defend itself, to resist occupation? Is Hamas’s aim simply for Palestinian self-determination? No. The statements of Hamas’s own leaders make clear that their aim is for the driving out of the Jews. Hamas is for a theocratic Islamic state in all of pre-1948 Palestine. It resists Israel in the name of these, reactionary, aims. The slaughter on 7 October was an expression in miniature of what Hamas would unleash on a bigger scale if it had the means to do so.
Those on the global left who, like the UK Socialist Workers Party, “rejoiced” at Hamas’s attacks are not aiding the Palestinian cause. In fact they are saying that that cause should be confiscated by one of the most violently reactionary political forces in Palestinian society, whose maximum horizon is not the “secular, democratic state” the SWP used to say it favoured, but a vicious war between rival imperialisms (Iranian and Israeli) in which not only Jewish, but Palestinian, self-determination would surely be drowned in blood.
For now, Hamas is limited in the damage it can inflict on Israel. Israel is capable of inflicting much more widespread damage on the Palestinians. But it cannot undo their existence as a national people. The two peoples will remain. There can only be a political, not a military, solution to the disparity of rights between them. As the Palestinian-Norwegian human rights activist İyad el-Baghdadi put it: “Regardless [of] what anyone thinks, nobody will exterminate anybody. When this is all over, be it in 20, 50, or 100 years, there will be Jews and Palestinians – our children – living in the Holy Land. May it be in peace, love and equality.”
El-Baghdadi has a liberal-humanitarian (and liberal-religious) outlook rather than a class-struggle Marxist one. But people with el-Baghdadi’s politics have generally responded to the current war with far more moral clarity than the vast majority of the organised Marxist left. There, a perspective that sees world politics as a dualistic struggle between “imperialism” and “anti-imperialism”, with Israel the quintessential expression of imperialism, has led many left groups to cheer for anything that wounds Israel and Israelis, even wounds inflicted by political forces hostile to basic left-wing principles of democracy and equality.
Abandoning that perspective, a poisonous legacy of Stalinism, and re-anchoring socialist politics in universalist, humanist and democratic principles will make the organised left a far more effective advocate for Palestinian rights. It is only on the basis of those principles that we can advocate for the Arab-Jewish workers’ unity that is a prerequisite for any socialist future in the Middle East.
The political force in Israeli society that currently best represents a politics of coexistence and equal rights is Standing Together, a grassroots Arab-Jewish coalition led by Israeli and Palestinian socialists. Since the war began, they have combined anti-war agitation with community self-defence and mutual aid efforts, organising especially in “mixed cities” to establish “Solidarity Committees” to resist attempts by the racist right to stoke intercommunal violence. Out of such common organising, a cohesive political alternative to chauvinism could emerge.
Unlike much of the left, which sees all Israeli Jews as legitimate targets, Workers’ Liberty believes Israel has a right to defend its civilian population. However, between its “Iron Dome” missile interception system and its existing military supplies, it surely already has the equipment it needs to carry out legitimately self-defensive activities. (Israel is a major military exporter, and UK military exports to it, of components not systems, are minor).
Palestinian trade unions have called for workers’ action to block arms shipments to Israel. Further arms shipments will inevitably be used offensively, as part of the bombardment or ground invasion of Gaza. Supporting the Palestinian unions’ demand is not incompatible with supporting Israel’s right to self-defence.
The National Executive Committee of the RMT union has voted to support moves by workers to block the transportation of arms to Israe
The call to block arms shipments has most publicly been taken up by political currents who oppose not only Israel’s policies but its very existence, and their perspective on that must be challenged. Political narratives arguing that Israel is an artificial creation or implantation of specifically British imperialism must also be challenged.
Nevertheless, the general call itself, to block arms shipments to Israel, should be supported. The four largest exporters of arms to Israel are the USA (70.2%), Germany (23.9%), Italy (5.9%), and Canada (0.05%) Therefore, the workers with the most power to block arms shipments to Israel are in the military industries of these countries. The Italian “base union” SI Cobas has said it will seek to organise action to block shipments from Italy.
Many people will be motivated to donate and fundraise for “mainstream” humanitarian initiatives such as Medical Aid for Palestinians and the International Red Cross. In the absence of any independent labour-movement infrastructure for providing aid, those efforts are the best-available humanitarian projects to which people can donate.
But the most effective political step socialists and trade unionists who want to advance struggles for democracy and equality can take is to make direct links with activists and organisations engaged in those struggles on the ground.
Standing Together is conducting a fundraising drive to support its mutual aid and community self-defence work. It has also published an online briefing giving guidance on what its international supporters can do to give practical support. Supporters in the UK have launched a network to coordinate solidarity activity. The Democracy and Workers Rights Centre, a Palestinian labour organisation active in both the West Bank and Gaza, is also calling for support.
While the world’s attention turns to Gaza, Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine and Turkey’s colonial war against the Kurds are continuing. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal assaults on his own people go on. The Chinese state’s colonial repression of national and ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs also continues. The clerical-fascist regime of Iran continues to suppress opposition and dissent; trade unionists like Reza Shahabi languish in its jails. All of these struggles are no less deserving than the Palestinian national struggle of international attention and support.
The campist left hides its support for Hamas behind slogans like “freedom for Palestine” (would a Palestine under Iran-sponsored Hamas rule be “free”?), often whilst indulging in apologism for the colonialism, authoritarianism, and brutality of other imperialist powers. The alternative is a politics of consistent democracy, supporting rights for oppressed minorities whilst not vicariously adopting the politics of reactionary political forces within them.
For freedom and democratic rights for all peoples – against all colonialisms, against all imperialisms – for solidarity and workers’ unity! Self-determination for Palestinians and Israeli-Jews – two states and equal rights!
Tendance Coatesy 