Tuesday, 21 May 2013
Saturday, 18 May 2013
The Death of Shmuel Zyglebojm - Polish Jewry's Representative in London
70 Years Ago the Representative of Polish Jewry Committed Suicide in Protest at the world' indifference to the Holocaust as the Zionist Leaders Made the Creation of Israel the Priority
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| Shmuel Zyglebojm |
Shmuel Zygielbojm was one of 2 elected Jewish leaders in the Polish government-in-exile. The other one, a Zionist, Ignacy Schwarzbart, who proved worse than useless and like his comrades said nothing publicly about the holocaust. Quiet whispers in the Establishment’s ears about that which they already knew.
In the last Jewish Council seats in 1938 the Bund (anti-Zionist) obtained 17/20 seats. The Zionists precisely one. A pattern repeated all over Poland. As the holocaust approached Zionism proved its uselessness in its belief that anti-Semitism couldn't be fought. It was as a final gesture that this hero to Jewish people took his life as the Zionists sought to keep silent and silence ot hers.
Tony Greenstein
Seventy years ago, as the Warsaw Ghetto was crushed, Szmul Zygielbojm suicide in London was not a futile gesture.
Posted: 17 May 2013 05:30 PM PDTCross-post from
Seventy years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm took his own life in protest. He was a Polish Jew, a socialist and the representative of the Bund (the Jewish workers’ party) in the Polish government in exile.
He left behind a letter in which he explained his action:
“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenceless millions – tortured children, women and men – they have become partners to the responsibility.
… I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, in their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but since I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility even now, at the last moment, to save the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive from certain annihilation.
… My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about…”
Shmuel Zygielbojm
{ 2 comments}
George Jochnowitz May 11, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Laurel Leff, in her book BURIED BY THE TIMES, reports that the the full text of Zygielbojm’s letter appeared in a news story in the Times–on page seven.
Bob Cartwright May 12, 2011 at 12:15 am
Jan Karski had recently brought specific news of the holocaust to Britain and later America. He had met with the leader of the Bund in Warsaw, Leon Feiner. Feiner told Karski “Tell the Jewish leaders, that … they must find the strength and courage to make sacrifices no other statesmen have ever had to make, sacrifices as painful as the fate of my dying people, and as unique.”
Newspaper accounts based on Karski’s reports were published by The New York Times on November 25 and November 26 and The Times of London on December 7.
In December, Karski described the conditions in the ghetto to Zygielbojm. Zygielbojm asked whether Karski had any messages from the Jews in the ghetto. As Karski later wrote, he passed along Feiner’s message:
This is what they want from their leaders in the free countries of the world, this is what they told me to say: “Let them go to all the important English and American offices and agencies. Tell them not to leave until they obtain guarantees that a way has been decided upon to save the Jews. Let them accept no food or drink, let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. Let them die. This may shake the conscience of the world.”
Two weeks later, Zygielbojm spoke again on BBC Radio concerning the fate of the Jews of Poland. “It will actually be a shame to go on living,” he said, “if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in human history.”
On April 19, 1943, the Allied governments of the United Kingdom and the United States met in Bermuda, ostensibly to discuss the situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. By coincidence, that same day the Nazis attempted to liquidate the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and were met with unexpected resistance.
By the beginning of May, the futility of the Bermuda Conference had become apparent. Days later, Zygielbojm received word of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Zygielbojm then killed himself as a protest against the indifference and inaction of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust.
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| Michael Kaminski MEP of Poland's Law & Justice Party - opposed any apology by Poland for Jedwabne, when anti-Semitic Poles burnt alive some 600 Polish Jews. Rudolph Vrba, the famous escapee from Auschwitz, whose Protocols were covered up by the Zionists, called Israel a 'State of Judenrats) - quisling Jewish Councils |
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility.Zygielbojm’s suicide was a deeply reasoned and socially responsible act. But according to the values prevailing in our own society, it should be dismissed or even condemned as a “futile gesture”, a “pointless sacrifice” – and therefore something pathological, neurotic, “self-indulgent”. All my political life I have heard this said about any sacrifice made for a just cause. It was said in the 80s about the miners who tried and failed to save their communities, and about the councillors who stood up for local democracy against rate capping and got surcharged and chucked out of politics for their pains. It’s being said now about Palestinian hunger strikers. It has been the stock-in-trade of Third Way, post-social democratic politics, where to sacrifice one’s political career or “viability” by standing up against power and prejudice is viewed as a self-evidently self-defeating folly. Surely it is this ideology of self-serving “pragmatism” that ought to be dubbed “self-indulgent”? What’s truly pathological and neurotic is the “common sense” of egocentric individualism, the obsession with personal success and status, the desperation to conform to an inhuman, destructive social order.
I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland….
I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.
Mike Marqusee (with amendments to letter)
May 2013
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Monday, 13 May 2013
Time to say Goodbye
As Anti-semitism in the Palestine Solidarity Movement has all but vanished the purpose of this blog has become redundant
When the Blog started in January 2008 Gilad Atzmon, supported by the Zionists, was running wild over the solidarity movement entrapping not a few people who believed that what Israel was doing was a consequence of something inherently
Today, except at the fringes, Atzmon is a discredited figure. In 2012, a holocaust denier Frances Clarke-Lowes was expelled from PSC to the fury of the Zionists and Harry’s Place. As I argued then, Atzmon was a deliberately divisive character whose main objective was to cause disharmony inside Palestine Solidarity. He failed.
Jewish rather than the Zionist settler-colonial movement. It is like saying that White Supremacy in South Africa had something to do with the genetic make-up of the coloniser
As BDS goes from strength to strength – with Stephen Hawking, the latest prominent figure to join the campaign, Atzmon rails in his seclusion, making occasional outbursts attacking BDS as being 'Jewish'.
In May 2013 the situation has changed. Indymedia woke up, the original cause of allegations of anti-Semitism and eventually learnt the lesson. The movement has taken off. My greatest privilege was speaking at UNISON’s 2007 and 2008 AGMs where a total boycott was passed by over 80%. of conference.
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| speaking at PSC Conference |
Sadly I don’t have the time or energy to continue, though people can send me inidividual articles (& graphics) to put up which I will. From time to time I hope to post the odd article on my specialism Nazi relations with Zionism during the war rather than covering all stories which others do much better.
I hope you understand.
Lotta Continua
Tony Greenstein
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Is there any attack on the working class that the TUC leaders wouldn't oppose??
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| Frances O'Grady - the first woman head of the TUC - learnt her traditions of backstabbing from Brendan Barber well |
Or would it take an attack on Dave Prentis’s expense account to bring howls and threats of direct action?
What the banner should say is 'Prentis hands off our pensions'
On Thursday this week the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was given Royal Assent. Let us take a step back.
In 1971, at the height of the ‘wild-cat’ unofficial strike movement, the Ted Heath government conceded the right not to be unfairly dismissed. Through the influence of Europe a raft of anti-discrimination law, TUPE and the Working Time Regulations. The Human Rights Act 1998 also has had an effect on interpretation.
One wonders how many of the dunderheads who voted UKIP realise that they are further to the right than the Tories.
They are not going to abolish most rights, they are going to make it impossible to afford to go to a tribunal by paying £1,200 to have a case set down. This is equally applicable to Whistleblowing. So in the wake of Stafford NHS scandal, Savile et. al the government is going to make it harder to blow the whistle. If you are a victim of racism you will have to pay £1,200 if you want to seek redress against the racist. If you are a woman, then an ‘ordinary’ case of sexual harassment won’t get off the starting blocks. Only rich women, gay people and Black people will be able to afford to to to Employment Tribunal.
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| Prentis of UNISON in a fighting mode - as he always is till conference has ended |
Employment law will increasingly become the prerogative of bankers and the highest-paid workers. Laws against racial harassment will be meaningless if they cannot be enforced. And the TUC's 'think thank' will continue churning out pamphlets that no-one reads.
And what has the now ‘feminised’ TUC under Frances O’Grady done to campaign against this? Absolutely bugger all. At a stroke a historic gain, won by workers who stood for no nonsense from bullying employers, has been wiped out, with the support of Ed ‘millionaire’ Miliband and his ‘blue dog’ Labourites.
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| John Hendy QC - legal mouthpiece for the IER |
On 12th November I wrote to the IER and Director, Carolyn Jones. After initially receiving no reply I wrote again. The IER is effectively a front organisation for the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star).
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| Carolyn Jones - Director of the stalinist IER |
Jones’s response was that ‘As a charity IER is not as such a campaigning organisation.’ This is a lie. The IER has campaigned for a Trade Union Freedom Bill which is hardly likely to be passed by the present government when it is busy stripping away workers’ rights, led by that good ‘liberal’ Vince Cable. Defence of existing rights are likely to be more successful in such a situation.
Even the Employment Law Association has done more to campaign against the fees and their implications than the TUC and the trade union leadership. It seems that the TUC and its offshoots have become so addicted to defeat that they are unable to imagine a situation where they might, in part, be successful.
Public Concern at Work, is also non-political, but unlike the IER is an effective campaigning charity. It has nonetheless secured major amendments to the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, including a statutory reversal of Fecitt v NHS Manchester [2012] ICR 372 which determined that vicarious liability did not attach to an employer for their employees’ actions. Likewise they secured the abolition of the good faith test as a condition of a disclosure being protected.It seems that the TUC and its offshoots have become so addicted to defeat that they are unable to imagine a situation where they might, in part, be successful
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| The Tories said the unions were holding the country 'to ransom'. The bankers are however a major 'industry'. It's this that Ted Heath and the TUC sought to put an end to |
It would have been relatively easy if, in the wake of the Savile, Stafford NHS and other scandals, IER and the TUC had campaigned against fees on the grounds that someone exposing wrongdoing, in addition to all the other risks, would now have to pay for the privilege. Instead they said nothing and sat on their hands.
Employment rights legislation was not handed on a plate to workers. It was a culmination of the inability of union leaders to control their own members. Hundreds of thousands of workers each year use the tribunal system, including trade unionists. The effect of these proposals will undoubtedly mean that unions become even more selective in funding cases involving their own members, turning down otherwise meritorious cases.
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| A traditional 'wild-cat' strike that obtained workers' rights |
Oh and just in case you thought you might get a fee waiver if you've been sacked. Sorry. That's also been tightened up. If you have a house worth more than £100,000 then that will count towards your fees.
Tony Greenstein
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013
The final text of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 has been published, coming in at a mere 292 pages. Sections 7-24, and Schedule 2, are the ones which are relevant to employment practitioners.Notes for editors
1. The Bill was introduced to the House of Commons on 23 May 2012, and completed its passage on 24 April 2013.
2. The provisions which come into force on Royal Assent include:
- A power to include review and sunset provisions in secondary legislation, which streamlines implementation of the government policy on such provisions first published in March 2011.
- A prohibition on Acas disclosing specified information except in certain defined circumstances such as criminal investigation.
- All the order-making powers (that is power to make provisions by means of secondary legislation) come into force, which means that they are available to be exercised.
- 3. Further provisions will come into force on 25 June namely:
- Certain provisions on employment (Part 2) as follows:
- Ensuring that the 2 year qualification period for employment will not apply where the main reason for dismissal is the employee’s political opinions or affiliation.
- Simplifying the procedures and costs of deciding tribunal cases
- New provisions on whistleblowing
- Certain other repeals:
- Abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales, (although the current Agricultural Wage Order will remain in place until 1st October 2013, and similarly applications to Agricultural Dwelling House Advisory Committees will be permitted until that date)
Tony Greenstein
Monday, 6 May 2013
UK Far-Right Surges to 23%
As the British National Party Lose their Final Seats - UKIP - a party of 'fruit-cakes' and 'closet racists' [Cameron] rises
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| Nigel Farage, the 'hail fellow well met' bloke at home with South Coast prejudices about how they should scrap benefits |
No more. Thursday’s local election results produced a situation where, if it had been a General Election, Labour would have gained 29% under Millionaire Milliband, the Tories 25%, UKIP 23% and the Lib-Dems, who have acted as the government’s faithful nodding poodle, a mere 14%. The figures, compiled for the BBC by Professor John Curtice, suggest that on the basis of Thursday's voting, Labour might have won 29 per cent in a general election, the Conservatives 25 per cent, Ukip 23 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 14 per cent, and "others" 9 per cent
Contrary to some of the cheaper jibes coming from Cameron and Clarke, UKIP isn’t a fundamentally racist as opposed to a chauvinist party. It hates’ ‘Johny Foreigner’ no matter who s/e might be. Although there will no doubt be found plenty of ckoset fascists and ex-fascists in the party, it isn’t like the BNP or National Front, derived from the bowels of British fascism but the country villages of the home countries.
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| Ed Milliband - not an ounce of socialist politics or personality. Political programme identical to that of the Tories. His main claim to fame is that 'blue Labour' is just another establishment party |
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| Laughing all the way to the voting bank - does anyone remember the rise of Robert Kilroy Silk, ex-Labour MP, BBC broadcaster and ex-UKIP MEP? |
The primary blame for the ascendancy is the socialist left, who have continued to insist that they are the main enemy rather than those who run capitalism. They fea ture on the bankers as if Chief Executives and Directors, with their massive 20%+ annual salary increases aren’t also a symptom of capitalism.
I was listening to one woman in the South-Shields by-election, where the Tories were knowced intto 3rd place by UKIP. ‘I’m voting UKIP’ she said. ‘I’m fed up with cuts and closures’.
The problem is that Farage, both himself and his party, are to the right of the Conservative Party. If that woman seriously believes a coutnry toff, whose trade-mark is a pin-striped suit, is going to come and reverse the iniquities of capitalism when she and others need to seriously think again.
But who can blame such people, the atomised working class of the North, when the manifestos of all 3 main parties, the Green Party being pretty irrelevant, is almost identical. All 3 agree the welfare state should be shrunk. All believe in the privatisation of public services (mainly the Post Office is left) and NHS – indeed New Labour under its previous war-criminal Prime Ministers Blair and Brown, pioneered such ‘reform’. All believe in cutting benefits to the unemployed and disabled. All believe in the holy grail of housing left to the market without any meaningful addition to the public housing stock. New Labour had 13 years to take Rail back into public ownership. Instead it squandered the money on Bush’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There’s No Success Like Failure
The Never Ending Retreat of the Far Left
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| Alex Callinicos SWP Chief defended party hacks against accusations of rape |
Nearly a decade ago the SWP successfully destroyed the Socialist Alliance when their attention span, never great at the best of times, became distracted by the allure of Respect and George Galloway. Today the electoral embodiment of the far-Left is the misnamed Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, which manages to achieves fewer votes each time it stands for election. But despite their abject failure to sink roots, Marxist groups and self-declared parties run a mile rather than confront their own failures. There is no debate about the reasons for the Left’s failure in Britain or how such a failure can be reversed. The only option left to members is to leave, disenchanted or burnt-out or both. Both the principal groups on the left – the SWP and Socialist Party – take it as a personal affront when it is suggested that perhaps their strategy needs revising. Suggest to them that perhaps a balance sheet could be drawn on the successes and failures of the far left and they will look at you blankly as if you were an economist from outer space.
Whereas the secret state and MI5 have long ago transferred their attentions to anarchist and environmental groups, the sects and groups of Britain’s far-left see failure as success and survival as an achievement of its own. Recruiting in ones or twos is more important than effecting an overall change in the balance of class forces. The most important battles of all are with each other. The SWP in particular is an unstable, stalinoid group whose modus operandi is that of a revolving door. The secret is to ensure that recruits-in are more than recruits-out and any statistical sleight of land is employed to ensure that the first is greater than the second. What none of the larger groups on the Left will do however, and this includes the Communist Party of Britain, is to draw up any kind of honest assessment of where they have gone wrong as well as what they’ve got right.
Perhaps I can declare my own interest. I joined the International Socialists (later SWP) when I was still at school aged 16, having just led a school strike. Within 3 years I was expelled for breaking the rules of ‘democratic (i.e. bureaucratic) centralism’ when I voted publicly against IS’s attempt to wind up the Anti-Internment League. I considered the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle and the fight of the nationalist minority in the North of Ireland as more important than the sectarian interests of the IS leadership. After the branch had twice hesitated to do the deed, Roger Rosewall – IS’s Industrial Organiser at the time – was brought up to Liverpool to effect my expulsion, which he did. Amongst those abstaining was John Bloxham, pillar of Socialist Organiser/Alliance for Workers Liberty. Rosewell himself later became Shirley Porter’s bag carrier, an employee of Aims of Industry, leader writer for the Daily Mail and a member of the Industrial Committee of the Social Democratic Party! Clearly he had been a state asset but to this day I never received an apology from the SWP for the role that Rosewell played and the membership received no explanation either. After all he too has long disappeared down an Orwelllian memory hole.
Although he later recanted and changed his views in Days of the Locust, at the time it was National Secretary Jim Higgins who effected my expulsion. I mention this not because my case was in any way exceptional but because it is precisely such behaviour that has alienated thousands of potential revolutionaries over the years. Although IS(SWP) has a formal system of appeal against expulsions, I doubt if any of the hundreds of expelled SWP members has ever successfully appealed. By way of comparison, the bourgeois courts are a model of democracy! Indeed most employers have disciplinary appeal structures in which people are successful. Yet socialist, Marxist even, groups treat democratic rights and debate as a luxury .
That there are objective reasons for the weakness of the socialist left cannot be doubted. Prime amongst them is the restructuring of the working class itself as symbolised in the defeat of the Miners’ strike in 1984-5. Long gone are the big trade union battalions – the miners, dockers, shipyard workers and car workers, to name but a few. Of course the working class hasn’t disappeared as such, people still need to sell their labour, but it has been fragmented, atomised and depoliticised. There has been a catastrophic decline in union membership, the abolition of the closed shop and a massive decrease in union militancy. One of the few blue-collar unions remaining, the RMT, despite moving to the left, is weak and fragmented as a result of rail privatisation.
What is the point of an organised Left that goes through the motions whilst accepting defeat? If we are really the creatures of forces beyond our control then the only conclusion is that we may as well go home or confine ourselves to the letters page of the Guardian or academic discussion groups.
Internationally capitalism is not only undergoing a massive economic crisis, the worst of which is probably to come, but it has also become more savage and war-like. Where once the US only tiptoed around the Middle East, preferring to rely on its surrogates, today the region bristles with warships, drones, missiles and marines. We are in a state of permanent war yet the Left, apart from the million + march in 2003, has had virtually no impact. Whereas the international left played a major part in the withdrawal from Vietnam, it has had little impact on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. That has been the prerogative of the armed resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One question that left groups have never faced up to is whether it is indeed possible to replace capitalism given the weakness of our own side. The emphasis by Marx and socialist theoreticians on the organised working class as an agent for change in society was predicated upon the fact that industrial capitalism had thrown together, in factories, large numbers of workers, whose consciousness would, as a result of the battles they were forced to undergo, generalise from the economic to political. It wasn’t that the working class was any more oppressed or exploited, in the commonly understood sense of the word, than the peasantry and villeins of the feudal era, but that unlike their predecessors they had the possibility and ability to do something about it and further, that capitalism laid the basis for a society where humanity was free of want.
In Britain, as Lenin recognised, the working class’s conservatism was a direct product of the fact that it dined off the crumbs of British imperialism. In fact they did better than that. The Attlee government in 1945 came into office with a crisis whose dimensions were not dissimilar to those of today, although the nature of the crisis was very different, since although Europe had virtually been bankrupted by war, the USA was barely affected economically and further had surplus capital aplenty. The UK was bankrupt and only a £3 billion loan from the United States kept it afloat. Yet the Labour government not only nationalised the mines and rail and utilities but it created the NHS and introduced a National Assistance Act that guaranteed everyone a minimum standard of living. How was it able to do so? Because the Labour government super-exploited its African and Asian colonies (whilst being forced to concede independence to India, Sri Lanka and Burma). The rubber plantations of Malaya and the cocoa crops of Ghana, in addition to the forced loans that constituted the sterling area, financed Labour’s reforms. Today the City of London continues that tradition in a different guise.
The Queen is alleged to have asked a group of economists why they didn’t predict the economic crisis. Perhaps the same question should be asked of the socialist gurus who preside over the different groups and their pet economists? Marxism is supposed to be scientific socialism, yet it operates in code with an understanding of dialectics being reserved for the high priests of the order. The fact is that socialist groups have no greater understanding of the crisis of world capitalism than any bourgeois economist. I make no claims to an understanding of the dismal science that is economics but it seems to me that we have witnessed the transferrance of production to the third world and Asia whilst Western societies have lived off credit as consumers, having defined the rules of the game via the Dollar and Euro. If this is true then it raises questions about whether revolutionary change is even possible in the West any longer, even as a theoretical possibility.
The Left Groups
I stood at the last local elections in Brighton for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition alongside a supporters of the Socialist Party and Socialist Resistance. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, mid-campaign, that the SP had produced an extra leaflet, which I had been unaware of, naming only their candidate. In essence two campaigns were being fought – the electoral campaign and a recruitment campaign for the SP. As long as TUSC continues as a Heath-Robinson contraption, a coalition of convenience between sections of the RMT bureaucracy and Bob Crowe and the SP, with the SWP, although formally a part, in practice having little to do with it except as a flag of convenience, it has no future. How can you have a credible electoral group unless it is a party with individual membership?
The argument that the SP puts forward is that one person one vote was responsible for the Labour Party moving to the right. In fact it was a symptom of the Left’s lack of a base, even at the height of the Benn campaign for Deputy Leadership. But to imagine you can create a viable group which refuses to have members, which won’t allow a vote at its national conference in order not to offend trade union leaders who wish to exercise control whilst their own membership remains uninvolved, is an absurdity.
It is of course welcome that the RMT is involved in supporting TUSC. However to try and exercise control, not via a block vote even but through a complete absence of democracy, where all decisions are taken by a small handpicked group, is self-defeating. Political currents will of course exist within such a party but loyalty has to be to the party not the current. Why? Because the priority is building for socialism and no political sect or current is capable of doing this.
We have the situation whereby the different sects believe that the only route to socialism lies in their retaining control of what are effectively front groups. The SP believes a party can only be created by the trade unions, i.e. by the left trade union bureaucracies. Since that is not going to happen without extreme pressure to break from the Labour Party from below, it effectively means that there will be no other party other than themselves. A mass party based primarily on individual membership would of course exert its own attractions on the membership of trade unions, but that isn’t a road that even the furthest left of union executives is prepared to contemplate. The SP’s position is a reflection of their own economism, which is based on an adaptation to the existing economic and trade union consciousness. For example one of the unions that they put forward as an example to follow is the Prison Officers Association – barely a trade union and one whose membership has never shown the slightest degree of sympathy or support for political prisoners. The SP’s economism helps explain why it is not involved in international solidarity work or indeed virtually any other campaign outside those with direct economic demands.
I must confess that the SWP’s trajectory is even more difficult to fathom. It is a long time since they had a ‘turn to industry’ and their politics are eclectic. Although they are more likely to be involved in international, environmental and anti-war campaigns, at the end of the day they are in complete agreement with the SP that the main purpose of political activity is to recruit to their own sect.
It never ceases to amaze me that groups led, as in the SWP’s case, by distinguished professors aren’t able to see that building one’s own group at the expense of the class is a recipe for never achieving socialism. Is it any wonder that the British left is by far and away the weakest in western Europe?
Long gone are the days when IS organised a 6 week strike in a Manchester engineering company because of the victimisation of a shop steward (John Deason). The decline of engineering has seen to that. But the lack of any base in the working class (the SWP in particular) has meant that their politics have lacked any firm grounding or principle. The anti-war struggle developed into a love-in with Islamic mullahs and small businessmen. Respect was founded, not on any class basis, but out of the most opportunistic electoralist reasons. And likewise, when they woke up to the fact that SWP members were unlikely to benefit from an Islamic vote (unless they were Muslims) they broke for the most opportunistic reasons from Respect.
The Socialist Party has been more immune to this and it does have a base within some unions, in particular PCS. However it is noticeable that this is at the expense of raising any political demands. The savage attacks on DWP members are a direct consequence of New Labour’s abolition of the divide between the Employment and Benefits service. Yet the two are quite different and many people receive benefits whilst at work (less common now that universal benefits are being scrapped) and many looking for work won’t receive income-based benefits at all. This was symbolised by the creation of Job Centre Plus offices yet PCS failed to oppose what was a naked ideological attack by New Labour on the very concept of benefits (which is why the successor to Family Credit was termed a Tax Credit – literally the same people swapped department from the DWP to HMRC).
The failure of the SP to even raise political demands to do with the structure of employment which affected their own members reflected a wider problem. They didn’t question the political right of management to manage and the government to dictate how the department was organised. And if they failed to oppose Job Centre Plus they also failed to oppose the use of sanctions against benefit claimants or the use of privatised companies to provide ‘training’ and now the Work Programme. Yet the logical culmination of the use of Atos, Maximus, A4E and all the other crooked companies that the Tories and New Labour have employed, has been savage cuts to jobs with the prospect that the entire DWP labour force will be contracted out.
In short a failure of politics has led to a failure in the economic battle too. Yet the major political groups on the Left have their own peculiar definition of sectarianism which goes something like: ‘if you criticise us then you are being sectarian’. In other words people are expected to work alongside them, put up with party building at the expense of joint work but if you raise your doubts as to what they are doing then you are the sectarian!
The strength of the Communist Party of Britain lies in its control of the Morning Star, despite its failure to learn any lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I understand they sent a delegation to ‘socialist’ China recently. I can only assume they weren’t put up in the same hotel as the IMF! The CPB operates at the fringes of the TUC and trade union bureaucracy and because it is vastly weakened compared with the halycon days of Harry Pollitt, it or some of its members have been forced into co-operation with their hated rivals in the ‘Trotskyist’ groups. I refer to Andrew Murray in particular, but also Robert Griffiths.
The Alliance for Workers Liberty is barely worth mentioning. Led by its own guru, Sean Matgamna, it distinguished itself during the Iraq War by refusing to oppose the occupation and it has adopted much the same attitude to Afghanistan. Only US troops can guarantee the ability to organise of the Iraqi working class! What began as support for federalism in Ireland and then support for Zionism in the guise of 2 States for 2 Peoples has become naked support for US imperialism.
What is left of the old International Marxist Group are two groups and a couple of splinters. Socialist Action operates in a semi-submerged state, its politics combining neo-stalinism and a third worldist approach to national liberation movements. Alone among the groups it has no paper, albeit issuing a political bulletin fairly regularly by e-mail. It is active in various solidarity groups, notably Palestine and Venezuela Solidarity Campaigns. Having tied its fortunes to Ken Livingstone via his Chief of Staff, the late Redmond O’Neill, it has seen its fortunes decline alongside him.
The other group is Socialist Resistance. On an individual basis I have a high regard for many of its members but as a group it leaves a lot to be desired. Marginalised in TUSC it is led by Alan Thornett, who first earned his spurs in the WRP. Although more principled than most groups it has barely a hundred members.
The reality of the far left today is that the various groups and sects are little more than propaganda groups. Their intervention in either class or related social struggles is next to zero. One of the more remarkable features today is that it is the anarchists and direct action activists and groups who are more vibrant. UK Uncut, Occupy – these are the targets of police repression. In Brighton we have a vibrant anarchist social centre, the Cowley Club. When the EDL came to town it wasn’t the SP or the SWP (UAF) who took the lead but the anarchists together with old unattached far-left socialists. The result was a mass campaign which led to Sussex Police being unable to force a path through Brighton for the fascists. After just 1/3 of the way along their route they were diverted down the backstreets. It was as magnificent a victory as anything we saw in the 1970s and 1980’s when the SWP was committed to direct action against the fascists and physical opposition to their marches and activities. The anarchists had learnt the lessons of the Trotskyists and Red Action of 30 years ago. In the lead up to the march I was one of those who spoke to a packed meeting of students at Sussex University. During the demonstration against the EDL one young woman at the meeting came up to me and asked pointedly whether their achievements matched those I had talked about a few days previously. These are young people for whom the current grouplets of the far left hold no attraction
One group I haven’t mentioned is the Communist Party of Great Britain! The CPGB is committed to building a Marxist Party. However this is a purely theoretical position since it abandoned pretty quickly the Campaign for a Marxist Party! It was part of the Socialist Alliance and even joined, half-heartedly, Respect. Despite this it proudly proclaims that there are no half-way houses. Either a Marxist Party nor nothing at all. The problem is that a Marxist party consisting of all the sects would resemble nothing so much as rats in a bag. It wouldn’t be the capitalists I had to fear but my own comrades! The one thing the CPGB has going for it is the most open paper on the Left. The SP’s ‘The Socialist’ is as dull as ditchwater. Socialist Worker has never recovered since Paul Foot and is as predictable as ever. Neither publication boasts an open letters page because debate is frowned upon. It is ironic that one of the smallest groups on the left boasts a paper with perhaps the largest readership. It is an asset that they would be foolish to dispense with.
The one silver cloud in an otherwise bleak sky was the Scottish Socialist Party. Of course circumstances were more favourable, with PR elections to the Assembly and the recent experience of a successful fight against the Poll Tax. But nonetheless it pointed the way and that was why the RMT, which was expelled by Labour for supporting it has ended up supporting TUSC ironically. The SP which opposed the direction that Scottish Militant Labour took was nonetheless forced to follow in their footsteps.
That the SSP ultimately collapsed in the wake of Tommy Sheridan’s disastrous libel and perjury trials should not blind us to its successes. Whether you call it a Labour Party Mark 2 or a half-way house, the fact is that half way is better than not even setting out on the journey. To broaden the base of socialist ideas and support can never be a bad idea.
What of the Labour Party to which the CPGB is increasingly drawn? Having been active at the time of the Benn deputy leadership campaign I have no doubt whatever that the position of the SP is essentially correct. Whether you call it a bourgeois workers party or an openly pro-capitalist party along the lines of the Democrats, the fact is that socialists no longer have any purchase on it.
There was a time when the Labour Party proclaimed its belief in the reform of capitalism. As Alan Bullock wrote in his biography of Labour’s post-war Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the ghost of the 1930’s stalked the Labour cabinet. And by that he meant mass unemployment. Does anyone seriously believe that of today’s party? When Aneurin Bevan, John Freeman and Harold Wilson resigned from the Labour Cabinet in 1951, over the introduction of prescription charges, to form the Keep Left (later Tribune) group, their support lay in the constituencies. Their opponents were in the trade unions – people like Arthur Deakin of the TGWU and Lord Carron of the AUEW. When New Labour gained office and Gordon Brown refused to reestablish the link between pensions and earnings, it was the union block vote that passed the successful motion. The CLPs voted by nearly 2-1 against. When the individual membership of a party swings in such a dramatic fashion from left to right – a swing that is as much in evidence today as it was 15 years ago – then it is time to draw conclusions, one of which is that the Labour Party can only be the graveyard of socialism.
Tony Greenstein
Sunday, 5 May 2013
BBC admits downplaying the scale of Israel’s occupation
What the BBC doesn’t admit to is a consistent and overwhelming pro-Israeli bias
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| BBC2's Gavin Esler - a tame pro-Israeli broadcaster |
It’s always a good result to get anything out of the BBC, whose hostility to the Palestinians is palpable. At the time when the last Director-General, Greg Sykes, was sacked by virtue of the trumped up report from Lord Hutton, for not having done the government’s bidding more easily, a new era began. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s still comatose Prime Minister, threatened the BBC that it would lost its privileged access to Israeli news and the army, unless it changed its stance.
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| Brighton picket of the local BBC during the Gaza attack |
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| BBC Broadcasting House |
Submitted by Amena Saleem on Wed, 05/01/2013 - 18:11
The BBC has admitted that a report it broadcast in January implying that only part of the West Bank is under occupation was inaccurate.
The claim that there is a difference between “West Bank towns and villages and areas occupied by Israel” was made on the BBC’s heavyweight current affairs program, Newsnight.Introducing an item about the Negev (Naqab) desert, presenter Gavin Esler, said: “Israeli soldiers shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian youth today near the barrier which separates West Bank towns and villages from areas occupied by Israel.”
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) wrote to the BBC to point out that the whole of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is under Israeli occupation and that a false distinction cannot be made between “West Bank towns and villages” and “areas occupied by Israel.”
The BBC initially wrote back defending Esler’s phrasing. In an email to the PSC, Stuart Webb of BBC Complaints wrote: “With this reference Gavin sought to broadly differentiate between parts of the West Bank administered directly by the Palestinian Authority and sections directly occupied by Israeli forces.”
At no point in his introduction to the Negev report had Esler mentioned the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, as the PSC pointed out in its reply, “West Bank towns and villages,” which Esler was implying are not under Israeli occupation, and “areas occupied by Israel” are one and the same — it is all Palestinian land which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Put simply, the BBC was wrong to attempt to make any kind of differentiation.
“Belligerent occupation”
The facts make this abundantly clear. That the whole of the West Bank is under occupation is recognized by the UN, the UK and other governments, and by international organizations. The Israeli high court has ruled that Israel holds the West Bank under “belligerent occupation.” In July 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel illegally occupies the whole of the West Bank, with no distinction made between Area A and Area C — the zones under Palestinian Authority and Israeli administration respectively — in violation of international law. And, of course, UN Resolution 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including the whole of the West Bank.
It is curious then, with all of this information readily available, that the BBC made such a serious mistake in a scripted item, a mistake which downplayed the true scale of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Following further correspondence with the PSC, the BBC today acknowledged its mistake and apologized.
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| Passers-by stop to give the picketters encouragement |
Newsnight added: “We regret any mistake we made,” but rejected claims of bias towards an Israeli narrative.
Catching them out
It was important to the PSC to pursue this case and secure an admission of error, because the narrative that it is only Area C that is under occupation is one that the BBC seems to be taking up across its reporting, and this needed to be challenged.Most recently, on 17 April, in a documentary entitled Israel: Facing the Future, BBC presenter John Ware, filmed driving through Ramallah, said: “Although Israel occupies most of the West Bank, Palestinians are governed day-to-day by the Palestinian Authority, based here.”
Like Esler, Ware is not a rookie reporter. He knows, and his team of researchers would know, as Newsnight’s researchers should know, that Israel does not occupy most of the West Bank, it occupies all of it.
The reasons for the BBC trying to obscure this fact and mislead its audiences can only be guessed at. However, it is to be hoped that, now it has been challenged and caught out, its misreporting on this particular subject will cease across the whole of its considerable output.
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