Marxism and Multiculturalism
The crisis in
multiculturalism[i] exposes not
only the unresolved conflict at its core, but the limits of its vision. Liberal
multiculturalism extends the Rights of Man as an individual, to cover the
rights of different cultural groups – and then must debate within itself what
to do when these different rights inevitably clash.[ii]
And although the older liberal debate has been broadened beyond ideas of
individual freedoms, this is not necessarily in a way that can help develop a
fairer society more generally. In concentrating on the practical details and
difficulties of interpreting liberal values so as to accommodate cultural,
ethnic and religious distinctions, we risk missing the bigger picture. We risk
ignoring all the other things that affect life and life chances. Marxists, both
theoretical and practical, have long been concerned how cultural
distinctiveness interacts with the development of society more widely. A re-examination
of Marxist debates can help us move beyond the individual/culture box
Although multiculturalism today is generally
associated with post-colonial immigration, the juxtaposition of different
national and ethnic groups within European countries, and within the Russian
and Austro-Hungarian empires, presented the early Marxist theorists with many
similar issues. Of particular interest is the discussion of ‘the Jewish
Question’, because this could have no territorial resolution (at least within
the countries concerned), and because this question and the theories
surrounding it were brought to Britain by the Russian Jewish immigrants of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Marx’s own, much discussed, relationship
to Judaism might best be described as dismissive. To him, both religion and racial distinctions were regressive
forces that he did not wish to promote. If these forces were removed, then, he
argued, Jews would be distinguished only by their place in the economic
structures of society, which he hoped to see demolished. Jewishness would then
cease to be, as Jews would be simply part of wider humanity.[iii]
The stark language of his writing on the ‘Jewish Question’ has discouraged more
sympathetic Marxists from referring to it;[iv]
and Marx himself demonstrated no particular interest in the plight of the
Jewish worker. However, Engels engaged with the Jewish socialists in London and
encouraged others to work with the East End Jews,[v]
and Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who was active in East End Labour politics, taught
herself Yiddish, and was glad to refer to her own Jewish roots.[vi]
Kautsky and the ‘Jewish
Question’
The concept of Jewishness as a secular cultural identity only
really evolved with the growth of the Jewish Socialist movement in late nineteenth-century
Russia. Before that time, the specific concerns that Jewish socialists brought
to the international debate were generally limited to combating anti-Semitism.
While active opposition to anti-Semitism and racism would today be considered fundamental
to Marxist practice, many nineteenth-century socialists were not convinced of
its importance.[vii] The
central figure in developing and promoting a Marxist understanding of the
predicament of the Jewish worker was Karl Kautsky, frequently regarded before
the First World War as the doyen of orthodox Marxism. For Kautsky the problem
was anti-Semitism, and the ultimate solution assimilation, though this could
not and should not be forced. Kautsky recognised that anti-Semitism was not
just a problem for the Jews. He understood its reactionary force in deflecting
anger from the real causes of exploitation (especially in Austria-Hungary), and
in an article published in 1885, he described anti-Semitism as socialism’s
‘most dangerous opponent’.[viii]
The article also argued that Jewish ‘racial characteristics’ were products of
history rather than nature, themes he was later to develop much more fully.[ix]
Kautsky was consistently supportive of Jewish socialist movements, but he also
insisted on the importance of avoiding isolation, and saw the Jewish movements
as a transitional step towards a time when separate Jewish socialist
institutions would be redundant. Zionism, by contrast, he found only
regressive. It divided Jewish workers from non-Jews, strengthened anti-Semitism,
and undermined Jewish participation in socialist movements.
Both Kautsky’s interest in the Jewish
position, and the way he related that interest to the wider socialist movement,
are demonstrated by the brief article he wrote in 1904 for the East London
Jewish Branch of the Social Democratic Federation. In this he describes how the
‘speculative and critical’ Jewish socialists could ‘become a sort of yeast’ to
the English movement, and also help their comrades in Russia, ‘as a part of the
great war of the proletarians of all countries and races’.[x]
Jewish Internationalism in
London
The
nineteenth-century Russian Jewish life that the London immigrants had left
behind was inward looking and conservative, relying on old traditions to
strengthen it against a hostile external society. The first Jews who had been
able to receive some more modern education were generally glad to turn their
back on their former ways – a feeling only increased by the anti-Jewish
prejudices of the radical Russian movements of which many became a part.
Russian radicals of the 1860s and 70s, whatever their own ethnic roots,
believed that the future of Russia lay with its peasants, and when Aaron
Lieberman, argued that the Jewish revolutionaries in Vilna should concentrate
their propaganda on Jewish workers and publish socialist literature in Yiddish,
this was unusual. In 1875, Lieberman fled the Russian police and came to
London, where he worked on a revolutionary paper that was smuggled into Russia.
In London, he was shocked to see the miserable living and working conditions of
the East European Jews, who were already crowding into Whitechapel. In 1876,
together with nine other Russian Jewish immigrants, he set up the Hebrew
Socialist Union in Spitalfields, but their bold attempt to spread socialism and
organise the Jewish workers was soon sabotaged by the combined conservative
forces of the workshop masters and the clergy, backed up by the Anglo Jewish
establishment.[xi]
Lieberman was not without contradictions. He was a
professed internationalist, but his socialism was tinged with a romantic love
of his Jewish heritage. As an organisation, however, the Hebrew Socialist Union
under Lieberman’s guidance combined solid internationalist principles with an
attempt at pragmatic Jewish organisation, and this was to become the accepted
approach (theoretically at least) for Jewish socialism and trade unionism in
Britain. Lieberman and his comrades wanted Jewish trade unionism to become part
of the much-admired English Trade Union movement. This was important for
workers’ solidarity, and also to dispel working class anti-Semitism – a point
that Jewish trade unionists were to make repeatedly. A handbill from the Hebrew
Socialist Union explains (in Yiddish):
…among
the [Jewish workers] there is no unity and the masters can do what they please.
Thus we not only suffer from disunity but also as a result draw upon us the
dislike and hostility of the English workers who accuse us of harming their
interests.[xii]
It was almost eight years after this prologue to
London Jewish socialism that Morris Winchevsky, who had been inspired by
Lieberman’s writing back in Russia, launched Britain’s first socialist paper
aimed at an immigrant readership. The Poylisher
Yidl claimed to ‘treat the Jew… as a man, as a Jew, and as a worker’.[xiii]
And in 1885, Winchevsky launched a new title, the Arbayter Fraynd (Worker’s Friend) ‘to spread true socialism among
Jewish workers’.[xiv] Earlier
that year a group of Jewish socialists had reconstituted themselves as the
International Workingmen’s Educational Association, and set up a club in Berner
Street off Commercial Road. In 1886 the club took over the running of the Arbayter Fraynd, and Berner Street
became the centre of Jewish socialist activity. Clubs and journals were to form
the two main axes of organisation for the East End Jewish radicals. The Berner
Street Club’s rule card grandly stated, ‘The object of this club is, by social
and political enlightenment of its Members, the promotion of the intellectual,
moral and material welfare of mankind’.[xv]
True to its name, the Berner Street Club, though
predominantly Jewish, attracted émigré revolutionaries from many countries.
Links with British socialists were mainly through the Socialist League, who
used the Berner Street meeting room. The Berner Street Club’s fifth anniversary
celebration in 1890 illustrates the dual concerns of its members. The fight
against the sweating system was addressed by William Morris, of the Socialist
League, while Russian Anarchist leaders spoke of their duty towards Russia,
which was on the brink of change; but there is no mention of specifically
Jewish concerns.[xvi]
Winchevsky followed Lieberman’s lead in
combining internationalist politics with pragmatic Jewish organisation, and
although he was clearly at home in a Jewish cultural milieu, the fate of that
culture was not what was important to him, or to others at that time. The
Jewish socialist, he argued, considers the Jewish problem to be part of the
general social problem, not one apart. And anti-Semitism was the result not of
cultural difference but of economic conditions, with Jewish capitalists being
used as scapegoats.[xvii]
Yiddish writing demonstrates a great
fondness for satire, and Winchevsky’s pamphlet, Yehi Or (Let there be Light), published in 1885, began a much-used
tradition of religious parody. It incorporates a socialist version of
Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith,
which begins ‘I believe, with perfect faith, that whoever profits by the labour
of his fellow man without doing anything for him in return is a willing
plunderer’; and it even includes the liberation of women through enjoyment of
the fruits of their own labour.[xviii] For Bill Fishman, Winchevsky’s writings
exemplify ‘the paradox of the outcast Jew in the diaspora’, because ‘he
intellectualised revolution as the weapon to end all anachronisms, yet remained
a hemische Yidl (‘a homely Jew’)
emotionally committed, in language and life, to his own Jewish poor.’[xix]
But Winchevsky demonstrated a strong understanding of the internationalist
solution to that paradox, by preserving the essential ideological core of his
socialism while adapting his method to suit those among whom he lived and
worked. No doubt, many of the more orthodox would have been offended by writing
such as Yehi Or, but Winchevsky was
speaking a language his readers understood.
Looking back at his earlier activities
from the perspective of the 1920s, Winchevsky did, though, question the
emphasis that the Jewish radicals gave to passing on their own liberation from
religion. ‘My greatest delight’ he recalled, ‘was to prove that Moses did not
write the Pentateuch, that Joshua did not cause the heavens to stand still’.[xx]
In misjudging their community’s readiness for radical atheism, they only
damaged their greater cause. This was even more true when anti-religious
agitation took the deliberately provocative form of Yom Kippur balls, which
were particularly favoured by the Anarchists.
The Workers United
Most important of the Berner Street Club’s activities, was the role it
played in the Great Strike of London Tailors and Sweaters’ Victims in 1889.
Despite all the difficulties associated with a workshop trade and a constantly
replenished pool of labour, East End Jews proved they could play a full part in
the New Unionism – the movement that, starting with the Bryant and May
match-girls, had shown the potential power of organised unskilled workers
across Britain. The strike was well reported in the press, and the support of
English workers took concrete form at the public meetings and in the donation
from the dockers of £100 left over from their own strike fund. It was a very
significant step, but there was still a long way to go and many pitfalls ahead.
The Arbayter Fraynd was sadly
premature in announcing to workers after the strike, ‘You will now cease to
feel strangers in a foreign land, and the great English working-class mass will
accept you as brothers in their midst.’[xxi]
The dilemma of the British workers is summed up in Henry Lewis’s essay on
‘The Jew in London’, published in 1900:
Years
ago I heard Ben Tillet [the dockers’ leader] say of the foreign Jews, ‘Yes, you
are our brothers and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come
to this country.’ I think these words represent not unfairly the views of a
large section of London workmen.[xxii]
Even the immigrant Jews themselves, though generally welcoming, were not
exempt from similar feelings towards newer arrivals.[xxiii]
The possible role of Jewish workers in
bringing down wages was the source of much debate – of reasoned argument over
whether the Jewish workshops took trade from existing English tailors or
brought more work into the country, and of prejudiced comments that the Jews
could undercut others because their squalid lifestyles gave them minimal needs.[xxiv]
The resulting crisis in relations was exacerbated by the Trade Union Congress,
which passed anti-alien resolutions calling for immigration restrictions.
Jewish trade unionists responded to the 1895 resolution with a pamphlet
entitled A Voice from the Aliens.
They used a variety of examples to argue that Jewish immigrants created work
for themselves and for English workers by developing new areas of trade, and
they ended by appealing to their ‘fellow-workers’,
whether…
it is not rather the capitalist class (which is constantly engaged in taking
trade abroad, in opening factories in China, Japan, and other countries) who is
the enemy, and whether it is not rather their duty to combine against the
common enemy than fight against us whose interests are identical with theirs.[xxv]
These battles are only too familiar. We have all heard comments like
those expressed by Tillet; and newer immigrant groups also stress the
contributions they have made to the economy. For example, it is claimed that in
Britain the Bengali restaurant industry employs ‘more people than steel, coal
and shipbuilding combined’,[xxvi]
as well as generating millions of pounds worth of associated business.
In the years before the First World War, the battle
for trade unionism among the East End Jews was led not by the Marxists, but by
the Anarchists, who had gained control of the Jewish radical movement in the
lean period of the 1890s. Their internationalism was demonstrated in the
surprising figure of the charismatic leader who soon came to dominate and
resuscitate the group. Rudolf Rocker was a German gentile who taught himself
Yiddish to work with the Jews. Just as Jews in 1889 had proved that they could
play a full role in British New Unionism, so, aided by Rocker’s revived Arbayter Fraynd and Anarcho-syndicalist
political organisation, Jewish tailors again took their place in the industrial
struggles of 1912. As Rocker later explained, the 1912 Jewish Tailors’ strike
‘was even more important morally than economically’.[xxvii]
It was a strike not just for better conditions in the workshops (though it was
that too), but in demonstration of worker solidarity; and its prime motivation
was to take action in support of the striking English West End tailors. As in
1889, the tailors’ strike coincided with that of the dockers and now they held
big joint meetings and demonstrations. This time the tailors settled first and
the East End Jews were able to give practical help to the dockers by taking
dockers’ children (generally Irish Catholic) into their own homes.
The Jewish Workers’ Movement in
Russia
While Yiddish-speaking Jewish unions attempted to take their place in the
British trade union movement, many of their comrades back in the northwest part
of the Jewish Pale of Settlement[xxviii]
were consolidating a separate position within the Russian Social Democratic and
Labour Party through the creation of the Jewish Bund. By the 1890s, the labour
movement among the Jewish workers had grown to such a size and strength as to
provide practical inspiration to workers across the whole of Russia. In the
Pale itself, an immediate effect of this growth was the activists’ tactical
shift to Yiddish in order to speak to the Jewish workers. This was a pragmatic
choice, but it was to have two major and connected consequences. It encouraged
the development of separate Jewish workers’ movements, and it stimulated the
flowering of a secular Yiddish culture, – a secular Yiddishkeit – which itself added a new dimension to the debates
about Jewish ‘nationality’ and identity.
In 1895 Julius Martov made a speech to the Vilna socialist leaders that
would come back to haunt him. In it he put forward the aim of building ‘a
special Jewish labour organisation’. He wanted to build on the strength the
Jewish movements had already achieved, and he was also concerned with the
oppression of the Jews in Russia – though he did stress the crucial importance
of keeping ties with the Russian and Polish movements.[xxix]
The first steps towards separate organisation seem to have been taken
without fully realising how far they would lead. As the forces of Russian
democracy moved towards a more formal union, the Jewish activists organised
themselves into a caucus representing Jewish interests. In 1897 different
Jewish workers’ committees came together to form the General Jewish Workers’ Union
[Bund] in Russia and Poland. (Lithuania was added later.) The group’s leader,
Arkady Kremer, explained that the Bund would not only be part of the general
political struggle but would also fight for Jewish civic rights ‘because Jewish
workers suffer not only as workers but also as Jews’.[xxx]
Jews in the Russian Empire formed a distinct and
concentrated group, isolated by an endogamous religion, their own language and
culture, ingrained prejudice, and a raft of legal restrictions, and they
occupied a distinct socio-economic position. But, although separate
organisation might seem almost inevitable, in the south of the Pale, and among
those allowed to live outside it, there were disproportionate numbers of Jews
who joined the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the mainstream Russian movement,
demonstrating that separatism was not the only option.[xxxi]
The Bund’s numerical and organisational strength enabled it to play a key
role in the organisation of the First Congress of the new Russian Social
Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP), in 1898, and to demand the Jewish Group’s
continued autonomy. But the Bund was not destined to remain comfortably within
the wider Russian organisation. By the time of the RSDLP’s second Congress,
held in London in 1903, their pragmatic turn towards the Jewish workers had
become a point of principle.
The move towards Jewish separatism was spurred on by the growth of
Zionism, which was beginning to offer Russia’s Jews an alternative way out of
their oppression and to heighten awareness of specifically Jewish problems. At
the same time, a practical and theoretical precedent for separate organisation
was provided by the Austrian Marxists. In 1897, the Austrian Socialist Party
responded to the national tensions within the Hapsburg Empire by adopting a
federal structure with six autonomous national groups, and two years later, at
their 1899 Brünn Congress, they put forward a federal solution to the Empire’s
problems based on self-governing regions. The agreed Brünn resolution[xxxii]
was territorially based, but with the proviso that different regions of the
same nation would be united in a single autonomous union – a compromise that
reflected the arguments for recognising non-territorially based autonomous
national groups. These events, and the theories of ‘cultural-national autonomy’
on which the concept of non-territorial nationalism was based, were closely
observed by the Jewish socialist groups, even though Otto Bauer, the principal
theoretician of cultural-national autonomy, had argued that this was not
relevant to the Jews who were, at least, ‘ceasing to be a nation’.[xxxiii]
The issue of Jewish national rights was raised at the Bund’s Third
Congress in 1899, and its Fourth Congress in 1901 passed a resolution
supporting non-territorial national autonomy for Russia, including for the
Jewish people.[xxxiv] Although
it was thought too soon to put forward the demand, and although, even at the
next congress in 1903, the debate on the national question was heated and
divided, the Bund’s course had been set.
Marxist Internationalism
versus Cultural-National Autonomy
Lenin and the
group round Iskra (The Spark), the
journal he had founded in 1900, were implacably opposed to the Bund’s
arguments, which they saw as destructive of class unity. And they believed
intra-class division was already being encouraged by the expansion of the
Jewish workers’ movement southwards, where the Bund was demanding the monopoly
representation of workers already incorporated into the mainstream of the
RSDLP. Fierce polemical argument was accompanied by tactical manoeuvring (from
both sides) over the organisation of the Second RSDLP Congress, eventually held
in London in 1903. It was a famously tense meeting on many counts, but for the
Bundists the final crunch came when they insisted on the exclusive right to
speak in the name of the RSDLP on all Jewish affairs. Martov countered,
We cannot allow
that any section of the party can represent the group, trade, or national
interests of any sections of the proletariat. National differences play a
subordinate role in relation to common class interests. What sort of
organisation would we have if, for instance, in one and the same workshop,
workers of different nationalities thought first and foremost of the
representation of their national interest?[xxxv]
The Bundists were unanimously defeated and their delegates walked out of
the Congress. Lenin had argued against the Bund’s call for federation on the
grounds that this institutionalised ‘obligatory
partitions’.[xxxvi] In Iskra he pointed out the ‘bitter mockery’
of the Bund’s call for a joint struggle to avoid a repeat of the pogrom at
Kishinev, which was made at the same time as they put forward rules to keep the
Jewish workers separate;[xxxvii]
and he complained of the Bund misinterpreting the RSDLP’s actions towards
itself as specifically anti-Jewish, and so stirring distrust among Jewish
workers.[xxxviii]
Lenin’s many attacks on the Bund pull no punches. Although his argument,
in essence, was similar to that put by Kautsky, he drew the line at what
constituted dangerous separatism in a different place, and he saw the Bundist
position as a threat to the unity and strength of the movement in Russia.
‘There is a borderline here,’ he wrote, ‘which is often very slight, and which
the Bundists… completely loose sight of. Combat all national oppression? Yes,
of course! Fight for any kind of
national development, for "national
culture" in general? – Of course not.’ And he pointed out that at the Brünn
conference it had been argued that cultural-national autonomy would tend to strengthen
clericalism and perpetuate chauvinism.[xxxix]
Lenin’s objection to the Bund’s emphasis on national culture was not an
objection to culture as such, but to their prioritising of culture and emphasis
on cultural divisions. The Bund identified culture with the nation and so,
Lenin argued, inevitably with the dominant culture of the ruling classes, which
pretends to be the culture of all, and obscures class divisions.[xl]
Lenin was not concerned with whether workers take pleasure from traditional
folksongs or high opera, but with the use of culture as a political tool to
destroy working-class unity.
Lenin’s response to cultural difference was pragmatic. A Marxist, he
explained, should oppose the slogan of national culture ‘by advocating, in all
languages, the slogan of workers’ internationalism
while "adapting" himself to all local and national features’.[xli]
The orientation remains Marxist, and this Marxism is articulated through
different cultures for practical and not dogmatic reasons. This could describe
the approach adopted by Winchevsky in Yehi
Or, almost thirty years earlier.
Central to cultural-national autonomy was the
segregation of schools (still, of course, a hotly debated issue today). Lenin
argued, in line with working-class internationalism, that this would be
reactionary, but that under ‘real democracy’, which ‘can be achieved only when
the workers of all nationalities are united’, ‘it is quite possible to ensure
instruction in the native language, in native history, and so forth, without
splitting up the schools according to nationality’.[xlii]
Children of all nationalities should be mixed, and equal rights and peace would
be achieved through solidarity.
For a brief period, before the rise of Stalin, the
Russian minorities experienced a new freedom; and the new regime discussed the
nature of proletarian culture. Under socialism it was understood that every
worker would have increasing time for cultural pursuits, but that people should
want to continue to pursue cultural difference was not really expected. Looking
back at this period, Trotsky wrote:
One of the aims of the Austrian program of "cultural autonomy" was "the
preservation and development of the national idiosyncrasies of peoples." Why
and for what purpose? Asked Bolshevism in amazement… the thought of
artificially preserving national idiosyncrasies was profoundly alien to
Bolshevism.[xliii]
By contrast, the Bund, following the failure of the 1905 revolution, had
turned their attention to semi-legal cultural work, strengthening their
symbiotic bond with secular Yiddishkeit. For the Bundists,
preservation of Jewish culture had become an essential creed. Others claimed
not only that this was destructive of class unity and unnecessary, but that it
introduced an arbitrary freezing of a historical phase of community development
and would only bring new restrictions on individual and cultural evolution.
In practice, the Bolsheviks in power bowed
a certain extent to separatist pressures. They set up a Jewish branch of the
party, and established many institutions that reflected the cultural demands of
the Bundist programme: Yiddish schools, journals, libraries and
socialist-realist drama; Jewish agricultural settlements; Yiddish speaking
Jewish National Regions; and even, in the 1930s, an Autonomous Territory
designated for Jewish colonisation in Birobidzhan in the (inhospitable) Soviet
Far East. All these developments were followed with more than interest in the
Jewish East End, and Branch 11 of the Jewish Workers’ Circle gave especial
support to Birobidzhan.
Bundist influence was never as strong in London as it
was in New York, for two reasons. From the 1890s, Jewish radical politics in
London had become dominated by the Anarchists, but also, just as America was
receiving an influx of Bundist political refugees following the failed
revolution of 1905, Britain introduced the Aliens Act that put the first
restrictions on immigration. However, all emigrant communities kept a close
watch on events in Russia, and also in Poland – where the Bund continued as a separate
organisation right up to the Second World War. The Bund had a special Foreign
Committee to co-ordinate political work and fund raising, and Bundists would
continue to play an important role in the debates that took place among the
Jewish emigrants.
Breaking out of the Circle –
the 1930s
In London, all forms of Jewish radicalism were represented at the
Workers’ Circle, which itself exemplified the contradictions within Jewish
internationalism. This organisation was founded in 1909 in the mould of the
political circles in Russia – but without their need for secrecy – and grew to
be an active social club cum friendly society, with a busy programme of
lectures, concerts and other events. Members could always be sure of finding
passionate political debate, as well as endless games of dominoes, and the
circle served as a school of radical politics, especially in the twenties and
early thirties. Jack Shapiro, who became an active member of the Communist
Party, found that it was
full of a vast variety of militants fresh out of the revolutionary
parties in their own countries [whose] militancy and keenness to keep the
struggle alive was an important inspiration to young people such as myself.[xliv]
Although many members of the Circle would have
described themselves as internationalists, they appear not to have discussed
opening membership to non-Jewish workers. Shapiro explains that this was
because ‘it was taken for granted that there was a separation between Jews and
non-Jews in Stepney. It was taken for granted that you shopped in a Jewish
shop…’[xlv]
Some Jews mixed more, depending on where they lived and how they spent their
spare time, but Jewish memories of East End childhoods often describe the
boundaries beyond which it was not considered safe to go alone (as well as
adventures beyond those boundaries).[xlvi]
In his autobiography of the period Joe Jacobs recalled his surprise when he
attended his first May Day march: ‘What had happened to the "Yoks" and Jews. We
were all "comrades".’[xlvii]
As late as 1938, Mick Mindel, of the United Ladies Tailors, had to confront
ingrained Jewish separateness when he led the campaign to persuade his Jewish
union to amalgamate with the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. As
he later explained,
It was really easy to arouse the opposition to [this policy] on the
grounds that I was depriving the Jewish Workers of their independence, of their
trade union: leading them into a Union which didn’t understand the Jewish
problems and Jewish people.[xlviii]
Mindel’s father was a Bundist political refugee and
founder-member of the Workers’ Circle, and Mindel, himself a Communist, was
acutely aware of Jewish sensitivities. His great nephew, Jonathan Freedland,
further records the role played by Mindel’s partner, the Communist
trade-unionist Sara Wesker, in speaking to the older union members about the
benefits of amalgamation in their native Yiddish.[xlix]
The Workers’ Circle reflected existing
Jewish separateness, but it could also help perpetuate it. In its Yiddish
school, the Circle attempted to pass on secular Jewish culture to the next
generation. In supporting the Aid for Spain Campaign it concentrated on an
International Brigade battalion made up of Jews from Poland and elsewhere. And
in promoting a united front against Nazism it affiliated to the World Jewish
Congress in 1937. Non-Jewish friends might come to Circle House to share a cup
of tea, but they were not expected to take a more active part in proceedings.
In his study of Jews and the Left, Arthur Liebman explained how the community basis
of American Jewish socialism ultimately proved to be a fundamental weakness
that hastened its decline. It provided initial strength, but as other Jewish
interest groups and organisations became more powerful and the Jewish working
class constituency itself declined, the socialism was forgotten.[l]
It is tempting to wonder whether, if the Workers’ Circle had encouraged a wider
membership, some descendant organisation might have continued a little longer.
Radical politics in the East End of the Thirties was focused through the
Communist Party, which was well represented in the Workers’ Circle. The East
End party was overwhelmingly and disproportionately Jewish, but reports do
contain quite a number of non-Jewish names and the East End branches worked
with people throughout the British party. The Jewish turn towards Communism was
encouraged to a large extent as a reaction to the rise of fascism
internationally and locally, but that does not mean that it can be dismissed as
an ‘infatuation’, as Geoffrey Alderman attempts to do.[li]
Those who became interested in Communism through the fight against fascism were
given plenty of opportunity to find out what the Party stood for, and the
glaring social inequalities that surrounded them provided a powerful argument
in themselves. Party membership introduced young Jews to a wider world, as they
campaigned outside the old boundaries and sang Irish songs with their Catholic
comrades,[lii] but even
so Jews and Jewish secular culture predominated, and this was especially true
in the Young Communist League.
The anomalous position of the East End Jewish Communists –
and the elusiveness of that tactical separatist borderline – is illuminated by
the debates that surrounded Proltet. Proltet was a Yiddish theatre group,
active in the early thirties, that was started by young Polish immigrants
through the Workers’ Circle and became part of the Workers’ Theatre Movement
(WTM). Its members were largely recent immigrants, and the group grew out of
the Yiddish school, so its initial choice of language was perhaps inevitable.
But this provoked criticism from the Central Committee of the WTM, who claimed
that ‘only some very old Jews do not understand English, and as our object is
to reach as many workers as possible, we defeat our purpose by presenting
Yiddish sketches’.[liii]
In defending its position, Proltet argued from a point of principle. The forces
of reaction were reaching the Jewish masses through popular Jewish newspapers
and the Zionist movement, and had to be rebuffed through a Jewish revolutionary
movement: ‘wherever there is reaction it needs to be fought, and fought in its
own language’.[liv] Members of
Proltet themselves were becoming assimilated and the group did not outlive the
decline of the WTM; however, the promotion of Yiddish cultural activity
continued to be important for some Jewish Communists.[lv]
From 1928 to 1933 Communist Party growth
had been restricted by the policies of ‘class against class’, which meant that
it had refused to work even with other socialists, but the victory of the Nazis
in Germany prompted an abrupt sea change in Communist politics. The Party
turned outwards, calling for a Popular Front of workers’ parties and those of
the ‘progressive’ bourgeois, and putting itself at the centre of radical
struggle; and in the East End it was able to develop an exceptionally dominant
position, with a semi-mass base.[lvi]
Unity in
Action
The strength of the Party in the late Thirties came out of
new movements – the fight against
fascism and the fight for better housing – that complemented their work in the
trade unions and brought in new people and a new sense of purpose. Under
Stalin, the Soviet Union had reverted to new forms of nationalism and
anti-Semitism,[lvii] but,
although the British party was always subject to the Comintern and intolerant
of those who questioned authority at any level, its grass-roots work in the
pre-war East End was developed as a paradigm of Marxist internationalism. Many
of those who enjoyed the Jewish culture of the Worker’s Circle were determined
to prove the universality of the ideas they debated there.
The Communists were anxious to draw attention to the threat that fascism
and anti-Semitism posed to the whole of the working class, and to emphasise the
breadth of anti-fascist support across the class. The ‘Battle of Cable Street’,
in which they played a leading role, was seen as a symbol of working-class
unity. The fight against fascism and the fight for better housing boosted each
other. People were drawn into the Communist Party by the fight against fascism,
and, through the party, they helped to organise the concerted attack on slum
housing. The fight for better housing brought everyone together, Jew and
Gentile, to attack the social and economic causes on which fascism thrives.[lviii]
This is epitomised in the description of one of the early housing battles
as told by Phil Piratin, who was later to become Communist MP for Mile End. The
events took place in 1937, in Paragon Mansions, which had an active tenants’
committee and Communist sympathisers among the tenants; however, the immediate
concern was the threatened eviction of two families who had no connection with
the committee. Communist activists discovered that this was because they were
both members of the British Union of Fascists, which had done nothing to help
them. The Communists now had a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the strength
of working class unity and of their Party and to discredit the fascists. Under
Communist leadership, the tenants united to barricade the block against the
bailiffs and police, and armed themselves with mouldy flour and pails of water,
and during the lunch hour an impromptu meeting was held outside to explain to
passing workers what was happening. The uncomfortable mixture of flour and
water and public antipathy persuaded the bailiffs to hold off for a fortnight
to allow further negotiations with the landlord. And most importantly, as Phil
Piratin later wrote,
The kind of people who would never come to our meetings, and had strange
ideas about Communists and Jews, learnt the facts overnight and learnt the real
meaning of the class struggle in the actions which now followed.[lix]
Max Levitas, who lived in Brady Mansions, where he was
convenor of a twenty-one week rent strike in 1939, explained in a recent
interview how such strikes could also demonstrate another aspect of class
unity:
We
were fighting the Jewish landlords the same way as we’d fight any landlord that
increases rents, doesn’t care if he repairs flats, so forth and so on: these
are the enemies of the people and must be fought – if they are a Jew, black or
white. And this helped to develop a much more broader understanding and [to
unite] the struggle against Mosley and the fascists.[lx]
The Communists were always anxious to stress the
inclusive nature of the movement. Simon Blumenfeld’s Rent Strike Play, Enough of All This, which was written
and performed at the time, has the Jewish Secretary of the Stepney Tenants’
Defence League, Tubby Rosen – Tich Rose in the play – as central character, but
the other characters are Father John (based on Father John Groser, the League’s
President), the landlord, and the Irish Catholic residents of a housing block.
In his speech at the final meeting, Rose speaks of them all, and their
ancestors, as ‘Englishmen’, and tells the tenants, ‘we ordinary people are the
real England’.[lxi]
The Popular
Front
Left critics of the Communist Party tactics of this period
argue that Popular Frontism contained the seeds for the disintegration of the
workers’ unity that was being painstakingly built up through grass roots
activism. Trotsky drew a distinction between this and a ‘united front’, in
which separate groups work together over a particular issue – such as the fight
against fascism – but many people do not draw this linguistic distinction and the
two terms tend to get used somewhat indiscriminately. The broad Popular Front
politics practiced by the Communist Party risked generating support for the
other parties with whom they worked; and even within their own ranks immediate
campaigns could take precedence over the bigger fight to transform society.
Although it was conceived as a response to a particular situation, Popular
Frontism continued to be pursued after the war and gained a permanent place in
Soviet Communist theory.
Even after the defeat of the fascist threat, the 1945
Communist election manifesto, The British
Road to Socialism, eschewed radicalism in favour of broad inclusive
policies, to the frustration and disillusionment of many Party members. Piratin
had been concerned that the Communists should not lose their identity under the
immediate concerns of the tenants’ movement, but the policy under which he was
elected in 1945 was far from revolutionary. In fact, as he himself explained,
‘essentially, as understood by the electors, it was not so very different from
that of the Labour Party.'[lxii]
This blurring of the older Marxist arguments was to
have particular effect on the party’s attitude towards ethnic groups, as
groups, and ultimately enabled the growth of multiculturalist ideas. After the
Soviet entry into the war, the British Party set up a Jewish Bureau, using
arguments very similar to those given by Proltet, and its chairman explained
that the correct Jewish Communist attitude was:
"I am a good Jew, and I realise the trials and tribulations of my people.
I therefore dedicate myself to help them, and the only way to help them is to
fight for Communism, which is the solution of their problems".[lxiii]
These were extraordinary times, which produced strange
political combinations; however the monthly Jewish
Clarion, launched by the party just before the end of the war, continued to
be produced as a specifically Jewish journal until 1957.
British Bengalis and the Legacy of Stalinism
Notwithstanding the post-war election of a Communist MP and Communist
councillors, the heyday of East End Left radicalism had past. Disappearing too,
increasingly rapidly, was the area’s Jewish community, to be replaced in the
following decades by new waves of immigrants, especially Bengalis from what was
then East Pakistan.
The general level of political
consciousness among the new – often illiterate – immigrants was low, but the
British Bengali community included a highly active layer. This was centred
around politicised students, whose Leftist nationalist ideas, nursed in the
cradle of East Pakistani politics, were further developed in London, where they
remained focused on their own Bengali community. The evolution of British
Bengali Left politics was constrained by the Stalinist doctrines of Popular
Frontism, ‘socialism in one country’, and revolutionary ‘stages theory’ – in
which socialist revolution was seen as separate from and following after a
previous bourgeois revolution. These allowed the underlying struggle for
socialism to become lost and diverted under the immediate demands of other
causes.
Leftists played a leading role in the
massive Bengali mobilisation in support of Bangladeshi independence in 1971,
but, in accordance with these doctrines, they temporarily put aside their
socialist demands to work alongside the nationalists. And when independence had
been won, they found (in an echo of the situation in Bangladesh itself) that
they had been so busy propagating the nationalist cause and avoiding anything
that might discourage the broadest possible involvement, that people remained
ignorant of socialist ideas. Not only did the British Bengali Left fail to gain
from the political mobilisation that accompanied Bangladeshi Independence, but
they actually lost much of their earlier potential as the community’s political
leadership.[lxiv]
The same was true of the Leftists’ role in
developing welfare organisations. Tasadduk Ahmed, who played a key part in
Bengali political organisation of all kinds, promoting student discussions as
well as community welfare, was himself a paradigm of this politics. Looking
back, he recalled,
My
main experience in the UK has been the experience of how to manage or organise
united front activities, keeping my own belief to myself and to my close
associates.[lxv]
Although he and his comrades spoke the language of Marxist
internationalism, their first focus, the focus of all their activity, was the
Bengali community. Working-class unity remained an ideal, but Stalinist theory
enabled this to be seen not as the cause that should dictate immediate action,
but a dream for an ever-postponed future.
Black
Radicalism – New Separatism
The next generation of Bengali activists had little
connection with the old Bengali socialist traditions – and many only arrived in
Britain with their mothers and siblings after the independence war. Like the
Jews in the Thirties, they found themselves fighting a double battle against
racism and appalling housing conditions.
But this time the overriding ideology influencing their organisation and
actions was that of Black Radicalism.[lxvi]
Black groups had dipped their toe into East End anti-racist politics in the
early seventies; but in the latter half of the decade, under the influence of
activists from Race Today, Black (in this case almost entirely Bengali) organisation
became increasingly not just a matter of fact, but of principle.
Black Radicalism was inspired by events in
America and liberation struggles in the former colonies. Its ideology developed
out of the interaction between Communist Popular Frontism and anti-colonial and
black rights movements, whose leaders were regarded by the Communists as a
‘progressive bourgeois’. It was a formative strand of the New Left that
developed from criticism of tendencies towards excessive structuralism within Marxism, to criticism of Marxism
itself. Black Radicalism disputed Marx’s essential argument that the primary
division in society is class, based upon ownership of the means of production,
and that revolution must come initially and finally from the proletariat united
against the exploiting capitalist classes. Socialist revolution remained the
ultimate aim, but the autonomous black revolution had to come first, and would
help to bring it about. In this version of the ‘stages theory’ the majority of
the working class was temporarily excluded from the equation altogether. The
white working class itself was seen as part of the problem, and the
socio-economic causes of working-class racism were overlooked. Separate
organisation, far from being seen as a risk, was regarded as the solution, but
Black Radical theory never confronted the crucial question of how the step was
to be made from autonomous movements to overall unity – perhaps because there
was no answer.
In the East End, Race Today activists organised
Bengali squatters and would-be squatters into a Bengali Housing Action Group
(BHAG), which demanded that its members be re-housed closer together in the
safe area of E1, away from outlying, predominantly white, estates; and they
organised Bengali anti-racist vigilantes. Together, these movements played a
key part in empowering a generation of young Bengalis. There was little
discussion of political ideology – which was, anyway, never fully theorised –
but Black Radical ideas impacted both on the geographical development of the
community and on its social and political integration with its non-Bengali
neighbours.
Even when BHAG was no longer active, the new
separateness was perpetuated through the resulting ghettoised community and
ethnically distinct electoral wards. There had been no coming together of
different groups in a common cause, as had occurred in the Thirties, and BHAG
had not attempted to link housing problems and racism to issues beyond the
Bengali community. This was grass-roots politics with the politics reduced to a
poorly defined identification of Bengalis as a deprived community that needed
to help itself. BHAG’s followers had learned to fight, only to strive for a
greater share of the establishment cake.
Diversity and Disintegration
The idea of autonomous organisation had opened a Pandora’s box, and the
Eighties saw the simple dualism of Black Radicalism shattered into a new
politics of competing identities and new ethnicities.[lxvii]
The celebration of difference soon became an end in itself. Radical separatism
became transformed by the liberal establishment into safe ‘multiculturalism’,
and this has been allowed to grow from cultural sensitivity, into the political
privileging of cultural concerns and community loyalties.
One result is the
encouragement of religious groupings as active players in civil society. Thus
multiculturalism has legitimised and strengthened Islamic organisations, which
may not share its liberal values, and which already have an ideological pull
with which community politics cannot compete.[lxviii]
Well before 9/11, many young Bengalis, who could find little inspiration in the
pragmatic politics of the generation that had been mobilised in the seventies,
had been attracted by the alternative ideology and practical grass-roots work
of the mosque. Beyond and apart from the headline grabbing concerns over
Islamic revolutionaries, political Islam has brought new divisions and moral
pressures into families and communities. And those who want to see progressive
change across the whole of society will soon find that religion will accept
reforms only within its own terms.
The Respect
Experiment
George Galloway and Respect are attempting to unite Muslim groups and
socialists into an instant radicalism;[lxix]
but one thing that Islamists and Marxists both agree, is that their respective
philosophies are based on different, and mutually incompatible, understandings
of ultimate truth. A religion such as Islam may incorporate ideas that can be
interpreted as socialist, but the very name, Islam, means submission to the
rule of God, as revealed to Muhammad. In the Marxist view, ‘Man makes religion, religion does not
make man.’[lxx] The world
will be changed by human action, but in order to change the world for the
better, it is necessary first to interpret it correctly. That is why Marxists
will argue against what they believe to be a wrong interpretation of the world,
and why, for Marx, ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all
criticism’.[lxxi]
Whilst it
is possible to imagine an Islamic socialism being practised by secular Muslims,
who regard religion as a private matter, it is impossible to combine the two
different and complete worldviews of Marxism and Islamism. To attempt to do so
can only result in fatal compromise to one or other ideology.
This does not mean that Marxists and Islamists cannot
or should not work together on particular issues when, as is often the case,
they share similar immediate aims. But each should remember that their ultimate
aims are very different. There have been many times in history when alliances
have been formed, and as many bitter disappointments. This Popular Front politics is achieved at the expense of
fundamental principles. The Islamists know this. They have kept a semi-detached
position, and (apart from the pressures caused by their revolutionary
co-religionists) have generally come through the political upheavals of the
last few years stronger and uncompromised.[lxxii]
However, despite their respect for their new comrades, many on the Left have
failed to learn from them the important lesson of faith in ones own ideology.
Winchevsky had discovered the importance of not alienating people through
insensitivity to their religious beliefs, but this is not the same as actively
encouraging religious organisations to play a political role.
Galloway claims a
place in the history of East End radicalism, but in their bid for a short cut
to socialism, Respect has yet to learn the lessons of that history. As they
competed with New Labour for the Muslim vote – and both parties were blatant in
their attempts to woo Muslims as a religious group – it was not surprising to
see the reappearance in the local paper of aggrieved letters from old white
East Enders asking what about us?[lxxiii] In order to build links across ethnic
divisions in the shared fight against inequality there is no substitute for
painstaking grass-roots work that addresses basic socio-economic issues. The
battle has to be won in the estates of Tower Hamlets, not in Westminster.
Learning from History
Over one hundred years after the Brünn
Resolution, support for cultural and ethnic politics has become accepted as
almost the litmus test of progressive thought and political correctness (even
if this is now tempered by lessons in ‘citizenship’). But the debates of that
time still raise issues for all those who are concerned with bringing about
real improvements in people’s living conditions and opportunities.
Socio-economic integration does not have to mean the homogenisation of all
differences;[lxxiv] whilst,
if we continue to allow multiculturalism to distract political attention from
fundamental socio-economic divisions, we will hold back progress towards
greater equality.[lxxv] And when,
in consequence, society polarises and rifts widen, the frustrations of those at
the bottom will turn against ethnic minorities – especially if these can be
perceived as having received any sort of special treatment – and everyone will
suffer.
In a fair society,
resources should be allotted according to need – rather than to each according
to his (or her) ethnicity. If one ethnic group is generally more deprived than
others, it would still benefit – or at least those members would who actually
needed more help. Today, the Bengalis, like many other former immigrant groups,
have come of age and taken their place within local structures at all levels.
This does not mean that there is no institutionalised racism, or that ethnic
minorities can relax their vigilance in the fight against prejudice of all
kinds; or that anyone should stop enjoying – or even spending public money on –
Bengali cultural events.[lxxvi]
What it does mean, is that community organisations are not enough, and
community politics can even be counter-productive. There are deep and
fundamental inequalities that cut across all ethnicities and urgently need to
be addressed.
The best known modern
exponent of the ideas discussed in this paper is Robert Miles, who stands out
among more recent writers on issues of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ for his rigorous
Marxist argument. Miles claims that what we describe as racism is not the
result of a thing called ‘race’ but of processes of racialisation that arise
out of the material conditions of capitalist development. Dominant groups have
promoted racialisation to legitimate the social hierarchies of colonialism,
nationalism and the post-colonial world, and to fragment opposition to their
control. He argues that, by explaining the process of racialisation, Marxism
provides the key to its demise. If racism is derived ultimately from
socio-economic structures, then the struggle against racism must be
incorporated in the struggle to change those structures – it must be a
socio-economic struggle.[lxxvii]
This account has examined the implications of the Marxist approach through a
100 year history of the actions and debates of some of those who have attempted
to put it into practice, and who have all had to strike a balance between the
pragmatic demands arising from working with ethnic minority groups, and the
dangers of separatism. It has shown that, despite the difficulties, Marxism –
far from neglecting divisions that cut across the basic categories of class, as
is so often claimed – has a long history of analysing them and arresting ethnic
and racial conflict.
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