Introduction
Article 22 of the Hamas
charter, written in 1988, has this to say about the Jews[1]: “With their money [the Jews] stirred
revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their
interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French
Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and
hear about, here and there.”
Hamas are not the only
anti-Semitic organisation to have claimed a link between Jews and Communism.
Nazi publication Der Stürmer
frequently and hysterically attacked ‘Jewish Communism’[2]. The anti-Semitic pamphlet The Jewish Bolshevism, produced by the
White Russians shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,
purported to show how Jews had been the driving force behind the Revolution[3].
Whilst it is true that a
quick Google for ‘Jews Communism’ brings back a list of strange websites such
as wake-up-america.net and www.white-history.com all claiming to show
Jewish/Communist conspiracies to take over America, it must be said that the
perception of Jews has changed radically over the last 30-60 years. Today, much
of the ‘left’ views Jews (or Israelis – more on that later) as a single
reactionary bloc dedicated to oppression of the Palestinians and defence of
neo-liberalism[4].
So, Jews as revolutionary
Communists or Jews as right-wing defenders of a neoliberal world order? Is
there any truth in either of these positions? Has there been a shift to the
right amongst the majority of Jews?
What
is ‘the left’?
Many discussions of the
question the attitudes of Jews to the ‘left’, and vice-versa, are hampered by
confusion as to what actually constitutes the ‘left’. For example, the British
organisation Engage, a group of
academics and members of the University
and Colleges Union ostensibly set up to combat ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’
(but which in reality devotes much of its website space to articles beautifying
Israeli foreign policy from a ‘liberal’ standpoint), includes in the category
of ‘the left’ figures such as right-wing Independent
journalist Robert Fisk, and liberal newspaper The Guardian. This confusion does not serve for a good discussion[5].
For my part, I will be
discussing two sections usually considered to be part of ‘the left’:
revolutionary socialists (i.e. those Marxists who directly intervene in the
class struggle to overthrow capitalism in a practical manner), and the ‘left
intelligentsia’ (those academics and public figures who spend their time
debating the merits of socialism in their ivory towers, but have little
practical connection to the living struggle).
A
brief history of Jews in the left
This article is not the
place for a detailed discussion of a topic that could span an encyclopaedia,
but a brief introduction is necessary. Suffice is to say, at the end of the
nineteenth-century, vast numbers of Jews, particularly in Eastern
Europe (where sections of the vast peasant populations were
transformed into a modern proletariat by the growth of capitalism) entered the
revolutionary movement for the first time. A large percentage entered an
organisation called the Bund, or General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland
and Russia.
The Bund was a founder member of the Russian
Social Democratic Labour Party, the forerunner of the Bolsheviks. As the
size and importance of the Bolsheviks grew, many Jews joined them too. (The
Bolsheviks even had their own Jewish section.) Comparatively speaking, support
for Zionism was small.
As the Bolsheviks grew,
many Jews assumed leading positions, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev,
Adolph Joffe and of course Leon Trotsky. Across Europe,
Jews played a prominent part in revolutionary politics, including Rosa
Luxemburg, and later of course the Militant’s own Ted Grant. Jewish membership
of Communist and revolutionary organisations was relatively high: in Britain,
approximately 7-10% of Communist Party activists in the early 1950s were Jews
even though they formed less than 1% of the national population[6].
Amongst the ‘left
intelligentsia’ I defined earlier, there were also many Jewish members, from
Arthur Koestler (though to be fair to him he did engage in the practical
struggle by serving in Spain as a republican spy) to David Aaronovitch (whose
initial moment of fame was appearing in the 1975 University Challenge team for
Manchester University that famously answered every question with either ‘Marx’,
‘Lenin’, ‘Trotsky’ or ‘Che Guevara’). Contemporary examples include Noam
Chomsky and Steven Rose (though neither is as young as he used to be).
Today
The picture today at
first glance seems somewhat different. The case of David Aaronovitch is
instructive: he first came to prominence for his antics on University
Challenge, and as a student was active in the Young Communist League and the
NUS Broad Left. However, he has since moved to the right, and as a journalist
(writing in The Times, Murdoch’s scurrilously anti-Union paper) was a
strong supporter of the US-lead invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Aaronovitch isn’t the
only prominent Jewish intellectual to swing sharply to the right over the past
decades. The Euston Manifesto Group includes a number of Jewish intellectuals
formerly on the left (including Norman Geras and Eve Garrard). Supposedly
promoting a “renewal of progressive politics”[7],
in reality the Manifesto serves as justification of British, American and
Israeli foreign policy under the guise of ‘promoting liberal Western values’.
(One hopes the slaughtered Iraqis, Afghans, Lebanese and Palestinians are
grateful for their schooling in such ‘enlightened’ Western values.) Many of
this group were strong supporters of Tony Blair and his project to destroy the
Labour Party.
Particularly in the US, prominent Jewish organisations such as the
Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center
supported the Invasion of Iraq in 2003[8],
and have repeatedly slandered the revolutionary movements in Venezuela and across Latin
America[9]. It is easy to get
the impression that Jews today tend to side with the oppressor against the
oppressed, the reactionary against the progressive. But is this the whole
story?
Disorientation
of the intelligentsia when presented with a crisis
Firstly, it hardly needs
pointing out that the Jewish people are subject to the same forces that affect
everyone else. Whilst conditions peculiar to the Jewish people mean these
forces are expressed in a somewhat unique way, the roots of the changes in
Jewish political views are in the great political convulsions that have shaken
the world.
Following on from this,
it is also important that the left intelligentsia, with its lack of grounding
in Marxism and the class struggle, has always become disorientated and confused
when presented with any sort of crisis. One common manifestation of this
confusion is a need to ‘take sides’ when two reactionary forces are fighting
each other. This is not a recent phenomenon – after the Second World War, after
the reactionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy had become obvious, a
number of ‘left’ intellectuals chose to side with the imperialist West,
believing the Soviet Union to be the bigger impediment to socialism!
For (Jewish) Arthur
Koestler and (distinctly non-Jewish) George Orwell, this included working for
the British state to undermine the Soviet Union
and the Communist Party of Britain. Their motivation was their first-hand
observation of the crimes the Stalinists committed during the Spanish
Revolution (brilliantly described by Orwell in his book, Homage to Catalonia), and possibly some belief that the
newly-elected Labour government represented some path towards ‘democratic
socialism’ (whereas in reality this government only ever offered welfare
reforms within the confines of capitalism, and faithfully supported US foreign
policy). Koestler produced anti-Communist propaganda for the West[10], and Orwell of course produced
his infamous list of Communist ‘infiltrators’ for the British secret service[11].
There are obvious
parallels between this and groups like the Euston Manifesto Group supporting
the invasion of Iraq
against ‘reactionary’ Saddam Hussein. Of course, one should not side with the
Stalinist bureaucracy, or the Baathists (or Islamic fundamentalists). But nor
does one need to side with imperialism, whose aims are to conquer and plunder,
not to spread ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Marxists understand the need for the
working class to take a position independent of reactionary forces, and,
leading the other layers of oppressed and poor, fight for the conquest of
power. Furthermore, the Stalinist bureaucracy did not succeed in destroying all
the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution (such as the planned economy), meaning
the destruction of Stalinism and its replacement by capitalism would always be (and
indeed, was) a massive reactionary step.
The fact that all
‘intellectuals’ become disorientated in a crisis took a special form amongst
Jewish intellectuals: the long-running hostility between Jews and Arabs meant
that the tendency of intellectuals to ‘pick a side’ was more likely to cause
Jewish intellectuals to pick the side ‘fighting the Arabs’. But it represents
the same false method as other sections of the ‘left’ supporting the Iranian
regime in its oppression of Iranian workers, trade unionists and radical
students, its Holocaust-denial and anti-Semitic demagoguery.
The
disintegration of the revolutionary left
One may ask, ‘why are
there no longer many Jewish Bolsheviks?’ But then one may equally well ask,
‘why are there no longer many Bolsheviks?’ The collapse of the left, inside and
outside the mass organisations, certainly over the past two decades, has been
staggering. The Communist Party of Britain (the Stalinists), once numbering
tens of thousands of members, now numbers less than 1000. This pattern has been
repeated across Europe, where the old
Stalinist parties have a fraction of the membership or influence they once did.
The Trotskyist Militant Tendency, a
section of which renamed itself the Socialist
Party, once numbered several thousand members, but has dwindled to less
than 1000 active members. In the US, the Socialist Workers’ Party is a pale shadow of the party it once was.
And so on.
This decline was due partly to the objective factors
discussed above, and partly to subjective factors. In both the SWP and the
Militant, the respective leaderships were inadequate when faced with difficult
objective conditions. Regarding the SWP, the post-war boom in the US (where for
the first time, ordinary workers could afford commodities like cars and fridges,
fostering in many the illusion that capitalism could generate wealth for all),
coupled with the degeneration of the Soviet Union and the treachery of the
Stalinist bureaucracy, caused them to view the Soviet Union as ‘imperialist’,
and fail to defend the gains of the October revolution. It was seen as at best
a matter of indifference (and at worst a good thing!) whether the Soviet Union was destroyed. For that section of the old
Militant tendency that later went on to form the Socialist Party, the crushing
defeat of the British working class (cumulating in the 1984 Miner’s strike) at
the hands of the Thatcher government, coupled with the degeneration and swing
to the right of the British Labour Party, was enough to cause them to
eventually abandon any understanding of the relationship between the workers
and their mass organisations. They have since degenerated into ultra-left
adventurism.
Across the world, the
working class has suffered a series of terrible defeats, particularly in the
1980s. In Britain,
Margaret Thatcher’s Tories succeeded in inflicting a defeat so heavy on the
Labour Movement that the wounds have taken many years to heal. As a result,
many revolutionaries dropped out of the movement in despair, and without the
anchor of a revolutionary party and active participation in the movement,
quickly became disorientated and disillusioned. This happened to Jews just as
much as to anyone else. Again, the special conditions of the Jewish people
(such as the existence of a conservative and predominantly middle-class Jewish
‘community’ ready to welcome disaffected Jewish socialists into the fold) meant
that this affected Jews in a particular way.
Israel
The question of Israel and
Zionism is also of great importance. In 1948, the State of Israel was
proclaimed in Palestine,
leading over 700,000 Palestinians to either flee or be driven out of their
homes (their descendents to this day live in squalid refugee camps). The
imperialist powers and the Stalinist bloc were complicit in this horrific
ethnic cleansing, which lead to retaliatory pogroms in many Arab countries
against Jews living there.
The terrible
anti-Semitism Jews had faced, culminating in the Nazi genocide, meant that many
Jews overlooked the crimes committed against the Palestinians in creating Israel, feeling
that they at last would be safe from persecution. Of course, it turned out
exactly as Trotsky predicted: Zionism was a “cruel trap” for the Jews, who have
been locked in bitter conflict with their Arab neighbours for 60 years.
The Holocaust had a
profound effect on the consciousness of European Jews, partly because it was
carried out in ‘civilised’ Germany
(where, up until Hitler came to power in 1933, Jews were integrated more than
in other European countries), and partly because of the scientific,
industrialised nature of the genocide. (In camps like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the Nazis had created ‘killing factories’
to murder as many people in the most efficient way possible). The mundane
nature of the operation (there were Nazi bureaucrats in charge of booking
tickets on the trains to transport Jews to the camps) is perhaps the most
shocking part of all.
Fear of a repeat of this
tragedy meant it was easier for the Israeli ruling class to produce cynical
propaganda along the lines of ‘if we don’t hammer the Arabs into the ground,
they’ll rise up and kill us, just as the Nazis did’. Many Jews, inside and
outside Israel,
began (reluctantly) to accept this logic. This put them at odds with the
majority of the left, who recognised the Palestinians as the innocent victims
of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. For this, the Soviet
Union must take much of the blame. It utterly failed to provide a
revolutionary alternative to the Jews of Palestine, many of whom still had a
great deal of respect for the Soviet Union and
the achievements of October. Instead, the Stalinists supported partition, and
the Communist Party of Palestine split into Jewish and Arab sections!
It is also worth noting
that the nature of the Israeli state has changed dramatically. Whilst we have
no illusions in a mythical history of ‘Israeli socialism’ (the Kibbutzim were
isolated communes on ethnically-cleansed land), nonetheless early Israel has a
strong social model (at least for Jews). Jewish Israelis enjoyed full
employment and a reasonable standard of living. Many of the key industries were
nationalised (albeit in a very bureaucratic way), meaning Jews around the world
who defended Israel
felt they were defending a ‘progressive’ state which looked after its people
(ignoring that elephant in the corner, the Palestinians).
However, as the world
entered capitalist crisis in the late 1970s and 1980s, this collaboration
between capitalists and trade-union bureaucrats began to break down, and a
‘traditional’ right wing emerged in the form of Likud. Israel’s state
sector was privatised, unions were undermined by the use of (primarily
Palestinian) casual labour, and the social wage of Israeli Jews was
relentlessly attacked. Nowadays, Jews who (for the same reasons as they always
have) defend Israel
are defending a state which, far from looking after its citizens, exploits them
viciously, constantly attacking their standard of living. In modern day Israel, Jewish
pensioners pick up food from supermarket floors because their pensions don’t
allow them to live. Binyamin Netanyahu, the ‘Israeli Thatcher’ responsible for
many of the attacks on Jewish workers, is widely respected amongst Jews the
world over, not for his hawkish foreign policy (which many Jewish liberals
rightly reject), but for his economic policies, which (apparently) ‘saved Israel’. These
changes in Israeli society have without doubt tended to encourage a layer of
formally liberal Jews, out of support for Israel, to adapt themselves to a
neoliberal and free-market worldview.
A
brief word on Jewish ‘communal organisations’
The right-wing attitudes
of the ADL and the Simon
Wiesenthal Center
come as no surprise to anyone who understands the Jewish people not as a single
bloc, but as a group riven by class divisions. As in any community or ethnic
group, the ‘communal organisations’ have always represented the wealthy elite
of the Jewish community, who adapted themselves to the ruling classes of the
countries they settled in (particularly Britain
and the US),
and often had scant regard for poor and working-class Jews. Hence the British
Board of Guardians (forerunner to the Board of Deputies) supported the
notoriously anti-Semitic 1905 Aliens Act, aimed at curbing Jewish immigration
to Britain, partly for fear that many of the Jewish immigrants were
‘Communists’ and would undermine the position of this communal elite[12], partly because they (as MPs and
even peers) were thoroughly wedded to the British ruling class.
Similarly, the communal
organisations in the US
were set up, and funded, by wealthy Jews, and unsurprisingly reflect the
interests of the wealthy. It is not that Jews are threatened by the Latin
American revolution, rather the US
ruling class feels threatened, and a
section of the US
ruling class claims to speak on behalf of all Jews.
Who
are ‘the Jews’?
In many ways, religion in
the West has become the preserve of the middle-class, now that the working
class can no longer be coerced or frightened into observance to the same extent
that it could previously[13].
This also applies to Judaism[14].
Throughout the Western world, there are high levels of Jews leaving the
community, ‘assimilating’[15].
Due to these processes,
the demographic of the Jewish people has altered dramatically. Statistics on
religion are based on self-identification of the people being asked – who knows
how many working-class ‘Jews’ no longer identify themselves as such? The mass
Jewish proletariat of Tsarist and Soviet Russia is gone – today’s Jews (or
those who consider themselves such) have a very different class composition.
Therefore it is hardly surprising that the basis for a mass Jewish
revolutionary movement is gone.
Conclusions
This essay may seem
somewhat disjointed, but that is an inevitable consequence of the complexity of
the subject matter. Simplistic denunciations of ‘Jews abandoning their
morality’ and ‘turning from oppressed to oppressor’ (accusations hurled by Jew
and non-Jew alike) are worse than useless. I’ve tried to chart the many
dialectical forces that have affected the world population over the past 60
years, and show how, due to the special historical and material conditions of
the Jewish people, these forces have affected Jews in a special way.
Some Jews became split
from the left over the question of Israel, and this split will not be
healed until a revolutionary movement develops which can unite the Israeli and
Palestinian workers and poor against their imperialist oppressors, and provide
a class-based solution to the problems of the Jews and the Palestinians.
As revolutionary
Marxists, we concern ourselves little with the fate of the ‘left
intelligentsia’ (whether Jewish or gentile), which has always splintered and
fragmented when faced with any sort of political test. To borrow Trotsky’s
phrase, they are ‘political eunuchs’, so of little interest to us.
As for the decline of
‘Jewish Bolshevism’, we feel sure that the emergence of a serious revolutionary
movement, capable of challenging the capitalist system and its bourgeois
ideologues, will attract many Jews to its banner, just as has happened in the
past.
References
[1] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
[2] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/dersturmer.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewish_Bolshevism
[4] For example, the International Socialist
Organisation, an American sect, justifies the boycott of Israel partly
in moral terms, seemingly arguing that Israeli Jews ‘deserve’ to be boycotted
because they supposedly overwhelmingly have reactionary views:
“And, incidentally, Israel’s
Gaza assault
had the support of 84 percent of Israeli Jews, according to opinion polls.
“Of course, there are Israeli Jews who will become
disgusted with Zionism and turn against it (Orr and Machover are clearly
testament to this). But we can’t ignore the fact that an overwhelming majority
of Israelis support their government’s violent and racist policies against
Palestinians–because those policies allow Israel to continue existing on
stolen land.”
(Source: http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/2737/)
[5] See their website, http://engageonline.wordpress.com/
[6] www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN_10.doc
[7] http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/
[8] See statements by
the two organisations in support of the invasion of Iraq:
http://www.adl.org/iraq_war/statement.asp
http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bhKRI6PDInE&b=296323&ct=350392
[9] See statements by the two organisations accusing the
Venezuelan government of anti-Semitism:
http://regions.adl.org/florida/news/adl-jj-3-3.html
http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4441467&ct=6708287
[10] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm
[11] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16550
[12] See Steve Cohen’s book, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic¸ for a discussion of the
relationship between the ‘Jewish bourgeoisie’ and the British ruling class:
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/ressources/funny/chap2.html
[13] www.sociology.org.uk/relspos.doc
[14] For example, the Scottish Government report shows
that Scottish Jews are overwhelmingly middle-class:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/36496/0029047.pdf
[15] ‘Marrying out’ is a good indicator of Jews drifting
away from the community:
http://lubavitch.com/news/article/2016874/Jews-Who-Marry-Out-Slip-Away-Studies-Say-Now-What.html
