Eric Lee

This article appears in Solidarity.  Feel free to add your comments below.

It was a beautiful May morning, one of the first warm and sunny days we’ve had all year. In Clerkenwell Green, hundreds of people were assembling for the annual official London May Day march. Many of you will not have been there — in fact there were very few trade unionists at all on this year’s march.

So let me tell you who was there — the twentieth century’s greatest serial killer, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was on several banners, and not only his image side by side with Lenin and Mao, but huge banners just with his picture alone — and quotations from his writings.

As I marched along with some trade union leaders and a traditional brass band, I could not help feeling ashamed at what the march would have looked like to onlookers, of whom there were many along the route. Ashamed and disgusted.

It’s disgusting because holding aloft iconic images of Stalin at a trade union march shows a complete lack of moral judgement. Seventy years ago, it may have been understandable — the second world war was raging, the Soviet leadership had not yet acknowledged Stalin’s crimes. But after 1956, anyone who still believed that Stalin was a great revolutionary leader was delusional.

Many of the marchers holding hammer-and-sickle flags or Stalin images would have been from various far-Left Turkish organizations and maybe in Turkey, there is no strong anti-Stalinist left. (Not that that’s an excuse for their igorance.)

But there were also British far-Leftists, supporters of tiny fringe groups proud of their adulation for a man who is responsible for millions of deaths of innocent people, a man who contributed so much to destroying everything the Russian revolution had achieved, killing off the entire Bolshevik party in the process.

The British anti-Stalinist Left was represented by “Trotskyist” groups like the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party, who were there in strength, manning their book stalls, selling their newspapers. But there was no evidence that they challenged the Stalinists or even politely asked them to put their repulsive banners away. It seemed as if the Trotskyists and Stalinists were happy to march side by side, letting bygones be bygones. No enemies on the left and all that.

This in intolerable. If there are some, few individuals with personal “issues” who need to express themselves through things like the “Stalin Society”, that may be their right. But that doesn’t mean that they are welcome at our May Day celebrations. They are not welcome.

We must make an effort to ensure that this disgrace never repeats itself and that in 2014, there will be no banners with Stalin’s picture at the London May Day march and rally.

How do we do this? We begin by debating and confronting the Stalinist Left, demolishing their arguments and educating their members and periphery. We fight them on their turf and we fight them seriously. This is a fight over historical memory, over truth, and it is a fight we must win in order to cleanse and revitalise the Left.

At our own events such as a May Day march, we must take a firm stand of no platform for totalitarianism — no portraits of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Jon Il to be displayed. Enough is enough.

And finally, we must compell the leadership of the TUC and the unions to take May Day seriously. They must wrest it from the hands of the lunatics and the fringe. They must bring the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists who have marched under the TUC banner in recent years to come out on May Day too. The trade union leadership must help us to reclaim the holiday.

Stalin’s portrait must never again be paraded through the streets of London.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh has horrified people all over the world. Everyone wants to see something done about us, to ensure that it never happens again.

But not everyone agrees on what needs to be done.

Last week, at the request of the IndustriALL global union federation which represents textile and garment workers around the world, LabourStart launched an online campaign. IndustriALL’s text, which came in part from their affiliate unions in Bangladesh, demanded that the Bangladeshi government “take urgent action to guarantee freedom of association and improve building and fire safety and the minimum wage for the more than 3 million garment workers in Bangladesh.”

The campaign pointed out that “Working for a minimum wage of US$38 per month, less than one percent of garment workers in Bangladesh are represented by a union. The Labour Law leaves workers unable to join a union and fight for safe workplaces, improved working conditions and better wages.”

It put the right to join a union at the centre of the campaign.

Tens of thousands of people learned about our campaign due to a promotion on Facebook and thousands of them signed up. But many of them posted comments which typically asked what we, as consumers, could do.

Many people wanted an online campaign to put pressures on those huge Western clothing chains like Primark and Walmart. Others talked about boycotting those shops. Many argued that the problem was cheap clothing – only if we paid more for clothing could people in Bangladesh have a decent life. Some proposed that we only buy fair-traded clothing.

The focus of many of these comments seemed to be entirely on how through our shopping we could make the world a better place.

This strikes me as well-intentioned but also patronizing – and ultimately ineffective.

A decade ago I worked for an NGO in London that had been asked to do a campaign to promote mine safety around the world. They did a beautiful poster with a slogan that I’ve never forgotten:

“The stronger the union, the safer the mine.”

It’s a simple idea, but an enormously powerful one.

The workers in Bangladesh need better laws to protect their health and safety at work, they need labour inspectors to enforce those laws, and we in the West can of course help pressure their government and employers.

But above all, they need the only tool that workers have ever discovered that really does protect them at work: trade unions.

Strong trade unions will ensure that health and safety laws are passed and are enforced. Strong unions can compel an employer to reduce risks in the workplace.

I’m very skeptical about the idea that we can shop our way to a better world by “buying ethically”. It certainly feels better to buy a fair-traded product, but in the end, is that all we can do? Just make ourselves into nicer, more caring consumers?

The terrible tragedy at the Rana Plaza should remind us that we are far more than consumers – we are workers, members of a huge and powerful global movement that when united and focussed on a goal can change the world.

Solidarity – not ethical shopping – is what the garment workers of Bangladesh are demanding.

This article appeared in Solidarity.

This article appeared in Solidarity.  Please feel free to add your comments there.

Socialist Worker last week reported on the escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula – but in topsy-turvy world of the fast-decaying SWP, it denounced “imperialist war-mongering against North Korea” which “threatened to bring the region to the brink of nuclear war.”

Allow me to make one or two small corrections.

First, it is not “the region” alone which faces the risk of nuclear war. North Korea’s Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles have a reported range of 6,000 km. That puts Alaska, the northern bits of Australia, the entire Pacific ocean, all of China, most of Russia and the Indian sub-continent all within range.

Second (and how shall I put this delicately?), comrades, the North Korean regime, peace-loving though I am certain you believe it to be, is not entirely innocent here. Perhaps in some tiny way, it might be responsible for at least some of the tensions.

Of course I don’t expect the SWP to take my word for this. So let’s call upon Fidel Castro to back me up.

According to the Morning Star, the former Cuban dictator urged “North Korea to restrain itself for the good of mankind.” Castro also reportedly said that a war could affect “more than 70 per cent” of the world’s population and said the current flare-up was the “one of the gravest risks of nuclear war,” since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis – a subject on which he is considered something of an authority. (He did allow the Soviet Union to place ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons on Cuban soil.)

The Stalinists at the Morning Star may be slightly more clued in than the ex-Trotskyists at Socialist Worker (there is something ironic in that) but they’re not entirely living on the same planet as the rest of us either.

In their one editorial so far on the subject, the only criticism they make of North Korea is that “the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang recently rewrote the Marxist maxim that the working class plays the leading role in the construction of socialism to ascribe this role to the armed forces”.

That’s an odd sentence in so many ways, not least of which is the assumption that the totalitarian rulers of North Korea know or care about who plays “the leading role” in the construction of socialism, a project which they are not remotely interested in. Whatever it is that they are building with the help of hundreds of thousands of slave labourers, it is most certainly not socialism.

It’s not surprising that the Morning Star has mixed feelings about North Korea – after all, it inherits the Stalinist legacy of full support for any country, no matter how dictatorial and ruthless, so long as it confronts “imperialism”.

Why Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, continues to bankroll this awful newspaper is beyond belief. But it may perhaps have something to do with the fact that the union’s chief of staff has been a leading figure in the British CP for some time and a decade ago publicly expressed his full support for the North Korean regime, saying “Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear.”

Socialist Worker and the Morning Star are struggling with the Korean crisis, but for socialists it is actually not very complicated.

It could be summed up in just six words – “no to war, no to dictatorship”.

No to war – meaning that North Korea must cease its threats and return to negotiations based on UN resolutions.

And no to dictatorship – meaning, down with the Kim regime, and for a united, democratic and socialist Korea.

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity.  Please post any comments there.

Four years ago, the stars of the successful BBC comedy series “Gavin and Stacey” made the mistake of starring in an abysmal comedy known as “Lesbian Vampire Killers”.

The movie was quickly forgotten, but I was reminded of it recently when I saw the latest – and last – film by acclaimed American director Steven Soderbergh, “Side Effects”.

Soderbergh’s film could easily have been given a similar title, even though it was not in any sense a comedy.

But the theme of homicidal lesbians is central to the plot, and the film absolutely reeks of homophobia.

Not everyone will have seen it that way, of course.

When I first heard about the film, a reviewer talked about it revolving around a conspiracy in which the pharmaceutical industry played a key role.

The film’s tagline was “one pill can change your life”.

The story seems at first to be about the side effects of a new anti-depressant which may – or may not – have contributed to a young woman (played by Rooney Mara) murdering her husband (Channing Tatum), who has just returned home after a few years in jail.

Jude Law plays the psychiatrist who prescribes the medication, and later becomes a kind of amateur detective, determined to figure out what really happened.

So far, so good. What follows contains spoilers, so if you really want to see the film and don’t want to know how it turns out, stop reading.

It turns out that the pharmaceutical company isn’t a protagonist in the story, it’s done nothing particularly wrong, and it doesn’t even seem that the young woman took the pills.

It’s not the “one pill” that changed her life, or ended the life of her unfortunate husband.

It was the fact that she had a lesbian relationship with her psychiatrist, who treated her for depression when her husband was taken away by the FBI.

The psychiatrist, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, would not have been out of place in “Lesbian Vampire Killers”.

It is only at the end of the film that Mara’s character confesses to Jude Law her motivation for killing the unfortunate Tatum.

She first became depressed when her bourgeois lifestyle ended suddenly as the FBI descended on a garden party to arrest Tatum on charges of insider trading.

Zeta-Jones seduced her vulnerable, and much younger, patient, and the two conspired – as lesbians do, apparently – to murder Tatum when he got home from prison.

Their relationship was kept a secret from everyone.

And their motivation wasn’t just love (or lust). There was some scheme to make a fortune by linking a pharmaceutical company to the crime, thereby driving its share price down and reaping millions on the stock market.

Near the very end of the film, Mara and Zeta-Jones meet up and embrace, discussing where the money has been stashed – though at this point Mara has betrayed her lover, and is wearing a wire.

Some viewers and critics didn’t see any of this as homophobic, but others certainly did.

If there were loads of films made by Hollywood A-listers in which the lead characters were lesbians, “Side Effects” would just be one forgettable movie in which the women were not very nice.

But how many Hollywood films with budgets of over $30 million feature a lesbian couple at the centre of the story? Very few, I imagine.

And the linking of forbidden love to murder is quite explicit in “Side Effects”.

It may not be obvious to British audiences, or even to the British leads in the film, but America is a deeply homophobic country which lags behind much of the world on issues like gay marriage or gays serving in the military.

Homophobia is explicitly used by the right in America, including even mainstream politicians like Mitt Romney. Where right-wing policies such as austerity or tax breaks for the very rich became unpopular, homophobia – like racism – becomes quite useful for the right.

It differs from most forms of bigotry in that it’s still quite acceptable, it seems, to incorporate homophobic elements in a mainstream film. It would be hard (though not impossible) to do the same with more traditional prejudices, such as hatred of Blacks or Jews.

There was an uproar in America when Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” implied that torture was an important part of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Right-wing politicians like John McCain led the charge on that one, and it’s one of the reasons Bigelow’s film couldn’t be named “Best Picture” at the Oscars.

No one expects McCain, Romney and politicians like them to speak out against the homophobia in “Side Effects” – but one wonders why the left, in America and elsewhere, hasn’t been more outspoken in taking on this vile, bigoted film.

This article appeared today in Solidarity.

When George W. Bush proclaimed his “War on Terror” more than a decade ago, there was some concern in the USA and its allies that the war might not be confined to fighting actual terrorists overseas and could also be directed against ordinary dissenters at home. For that reason, civil liberties groups were particularly concerned about any “anti-terror” legislation that could be seen as curtailing human rights.

The good news is that the democratic rights we had pre-2001 are largely intact in countries like the USA and the UK. The intelligence services no doubt have larger budgets and electronic spying on all of us has probably increased, but the fears of an all-powerful “national security state” emerging have thankfully not been realized.

It’s not as if armed riot police would storm Unison’s headquarters on the Euston Road, arresting hundreds of activists, accusing Dave Prentiss of “terrorism” because he’d spoken out against some government policy.

But that’s precisely what’s happening today in Turkey, one of the junior partners in the US-led “war on terror”.

Two weeks ago, police stormed the Ankara headquarters of KESK, the public sector union, arresting over 100 activists. Over 160 arrest warrants were issued. Fifty were arrested in Istanbul. The teachers union Egitim Sen was also subjected to a wave of arrests.

The leaders of KESK and Egitim Sen were accused of involvement with terrorism.

The arrests were, it was claimed, part of an investigation into a suicide bomber’s attack on the US embassy in Ankara at the end of January in which one guard (and the bomber) were killed.

We have to admit that Turkey does in fact suffer from a lot of political violence – on all sides. Kurdish fighters of the PKK, far-leftists angry at the USA and Israel, and others have from time to time engaged in horrific violence. So has the Turkish state.

It’s not like the Turkish government is making up the idea of “terrorism”.

The problem is that it appears to be using a genuine security situation to justify attacks on organisations that it doesn’t like for other reasons, such as unions of teachers and other public sector workers.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the McCarthy era in the USA when the genuine threat of Stalinist domination of Europe was used to justify a crackdown on any form of dissent.

In Turkey, the organization the government is blaming for the US embassy bombing is known as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP/C. The DHKP/C is listed by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

But KESK is not. And Egitim Sen is not. And it’s an important distinction.

Amnesty International says it “has long campaigned against the abuse of Turkey’s overly broad and vague anti-terrorism laws to prosecute legitimate peaceful activities.”

Note that Amnesty isn’t saying Turkey shouldn’t combat terrorism. It’s saying that the laws are overly broad and vague. And they’re being abused by the state to persecute legitimate dissenters, like the unions.

Unions around the world have rallied to the defence of KESK and Egitim Sen.

The Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation, representing 175 million organised workers, was the first to issue a strong statement. They were followed by the global union federations for public sector and education workers, Public Services International and the Education International. All three groups have teamed up to launch an appeal on LabourStart which has been signed – so far – by over 8,000 trade unionists.

The LabourStart campaign is here:

http://bit.ly/13QoD18

Please sign up and spread the word.

This article appears today in Solidarity.

Recently, I co-authored a book on online campaigning for trade unions and self-published it using a print-on-demand service called CreateSpace.

CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon, the giant online retailer, and any book you publish there is automatically available for sale on the Amazon websites. It was a great option as it cost nothing and allowed us to reach a very large global audience.

When I announced this to LabourStart’s mailing lists, we got hundreds of people to buy copies of the book. But a small number, mainly from the UK, wrote in to say that they wouldn’t buy from Amazon.

Most of them had heard that Amazon doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes in the UK. Some will have heard of the online petition at Change.org that got over 90,000 supporters.

That petition — which has proven to be far more popular than any of the campaigns we’ve done in defence of workers’ rights — was posted by Frances and Keith Smith, independent booksellers from Coventry. The first line reads like an advertisement for their shops.

Their shops, they say, “have been a proud part of our local high streets for many years. We are proud of the personal service we provide to all those who visit our store.”

That sounds like self-promotion to me, but for tens of thousands of people, it sounds like a just cause — supporting small, family-run businesses against the encroaching faceless and all-powerful American-owned corporation.

This is, as Marxists will be aware, a thoroughly reactionary attitude toward capitalism, a longing for an earlier era of friendly Mom-and-Pop shops where smiling shop owners greeted every customer by name, and freely extended credit to those who were a bit skint.

It goes without saying that Amazon should pay its taxes. We also demand that government ramp up corporate taxes and enforce payment. And that’s our minimum demand — in the longer run, we support expropriating the expropriators.

Unions have also started to take on Amazon here in the UK.

In mid-February, the GMB held protests at nine Amazon facilities. They presented the company with “corporate ASBOs” in an attempt to focus public attention on the company’s record of tax avoidance — but also on their record of low pay and union-busting. These are issues which concern socialists and deserve our support.

As the union put it, “Amazon pay its staff as little as £6.20 per hour — just above the national minimum wage of £6.19 per hour. Staff complain to GMB about a culture of bullying and harassment endemic in the dataveillance that comes from staff being required to wear digital arm mounted terminals (AMTs) with no agreed protocols re breaks, speeds etc. Union activity has to be kept underground for fear of reprisals.”

But GMB have so far refrained from calling for a boycott of the company.

And they’re absolutely right — because this is not how you will compel Amazon to pay a living wage and recognize trade unions.

The boycott, like the strike, is one of the most powerful weapons in a trade union’s arsenal. It needs to be used with care — which is why unions very rarely use it.

For a boycott to be called, one should expect it to produce some kind of result. Calling a boycott that has no effect on a company’s profit may make boycotters feel worthy, but it distracts from the real issues.

Coca-Cola is a company that is often targetted by campaigners for boycotts — but the unions representing Coke workers have never called for such a boycott, and in some cases have outspokenly opposed one.

For a boycott of Amazon to be effective, it would need to make a dent in the company’s sales — something that seems rather unlikely considering just how vast the company has become in recent years.

A decade ago, when the Communication Workers of America were attempting to organize Amazon workers in the Pacific Northwest, a boycott might have had a chance. Not today.

Amazon made the news yet again this week, as reports came out of its maltreatment of temporary workers in Germany, where neo-Nazi thugs were hired by the company to “keep order” among the workers.

This, just like union-busting, low wages, contract labour and tax avoidance, are all good reasons to shop elsewhere if you can — but they are not grounds for a general boycott of the company.

So if we’re not boycotting Amazon, what can we do?

We can support the GMB and any other union that tries to organise workers there. We can publicise their appalling record on the living wage and union busting through the media. We can demand that Parliament fix a system which allows companies to legally avoid paying taxes despite earning billions of pounds in this country.

We can even help build alternatives by supporting left-wing bookshops, of which there are still several in the UK.

But signing up on Change.org to show your solidarity with some small bookshop owners in Coventry, or taking the personal decision to not shop at Amazon and then telling all your mates about how worthy that makes you, is little more than posturing.

This article appears today in Solidarity.

“The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves” – that’s a phrase which will be familiar to most Marxists and originates in the Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association which Marx drafted.

A century later, Max Shachtman wrote that “When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek ‘no condescending saviours’ as our great battle hymn, the International, so ably says. We do not believe that well-wishing reforms – and there are well-wishing reformers – will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. … We believe that task belongs to the proletariat, only the proletariat itself. That is a world-shattering idea. It overshadows all social thought. The most profound, important and lasting thought in Marxism, the most pregnant thought in Marxism is contained in Marx’s phrase that the emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself. It is clearly the most revolutionary idea ever conceived, if you understand it in all of its great implications.”

I thought of this “most revolutionary idea” the other day as I watched two recent acclaimed films on the same subject – Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”.

Tarantino and Spielberg have now made their films about American slavery, just as previously they both made films about the Nazi Holocaust – “Shindler’s List” and “Inglourious Basterds”.

And those four films reflect two very different approaches to the issue of emancipation.

Spielberg’s films – which are largely historically accurate, extremely well crafted, and well-intentioned – are accounts of how a gentile (Shindler) risked everything to save the Jews and how a white man (Lincoln) did the same for Black slaves.

Spielberg chose when taking on the giant subjects of slavery and the Holocaust to focus on those two men. He could have made different films, could have focussed his Holocaust film on, say, the Jewish fighters who battled the Wehrmacht in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. He could have chosen one of the many Black slave rebellions that preceded the American Civil War – for example, the story of Nat Turner who led an uprising 1831 that resulted in some 160 deaths.

Instead he chose to focus on brave white men (the abolitionists) and a brave gentile (Shindler).

Tarantino made a radically different choice when he decided to make films about Nazi Germany and the American South.

Tarantino’s films are fantasies – and unlike Spielberg’s are often hilariously funny, even if brutally violent.

Tarantino’s “basterds” are American Jewish soldiers sent into Nazi-occupied Europe to kill – and scalp – as many German soldiers as they can. In the end, their efforts combine with those of a French Jewish woman also seeking revenge on the Nazis.

Django too is a story not about good white men who come to free the slaves, but about a slave who frees himself. Even though Django is assisted by a white German (the magnificent Christoph Waltz, who played a terrifying Nazi in “Basterds”), it is he – and not Waltz – who deals the death blow to the slave-owners in the film.

One could make the argument that while Tarantino’s take on slavery and the Third Reich may prove more satisfying, the reality is that it wasn’t Black slaves who brought down slavery and it wasn’t armed Jews who defeated Hitler. It was a mostly (though not entirely) white army led by a white man that brought an end to the Confederacy. And it was the allied armies – particularly the Red Army – that destroyed the German Reich.

So yes, Spielberg’s view may be the more accurate one, but Tarantino’s reflects an aspiration – the hope that the oppressed, slaves and others, can liberate themselves and indeed that only they can do so.

This is, as Shachtman wrote, “the most pregnant idea” in Marxism, and while one can be fairly certain that Quentin Tarantino has never heard of the great third camp socialist, it is his films – not Spielberg’s – that most closely realize that idea.

This article appears in Solidarity.

In the course of just a few days, three news stories came across my desk that highlighted one of the problems we face in the British trade union movement.

As I write these words, the Israeli nurses’ union is engaged in a major fight with the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu is the health minister (as well as prime minister) and his government stands accused of starving public hospitals, while coming up with millions to construct new illegal settlement housing. The nurses strike deserves the support of unions everywhere, in particular unions which organise nurses.

Israel’s public sector unions solidified a major victory early this month. An agreement that ended February’s general strike has now been translated into results on the ground. The general strike had been fought over the question of precarious employment and the Histadrut won a substantial victory. This week, contract workers in the public sector will get huge wage gains and back pay thanks to the solidarity of unionised workers who shut the country down and compelled the government to make concessions.

Both examples show an independent, and sometimes militant, Israeli trade union movement that deserves the solidarity of trade unionists in Britain. Indeed, the Israel public sector unions may even have a thing or two to teach their British counterparts about how to win on issues like contract labour.

But unfortunately Unison and the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), unions which should, in theory, be promoting solidarity with the Israeli nurses and indeed with all the Israeli public sector unions, have played a rather different role recently.

Unison and PCS were among the leading unions which actively pushed the recent congress of Public Services International (PSI) to adopt a new policy supporting boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targetting Israel. PSI is also now on record supporting the slander that Israel is an “apartheid state”.

It is unusual for a global union federation like PSI to take such a strong position in opposition to Israel, even if its BDS call was limited to “firms complicit with the occupation”.

The pro-Hamas Palestine Solidarity Campaign hailed the decision as a breakthrough. I want to step back here and try to understand what is going on.

Israel is the only country in the region with a strong, independent trade union movement. It is not a perfect movement and there is much to criticise about it. But when Unison sent a delegation over to meet with Israelis and Palestinians, everyone they spoke to — including the Palestinians — encouraged the British union to keep up its relationship with the Histadrut.

No one, not even the far-left critics of the Histadrut, suggested to Unison that it disengage.

But when the report of the Unison delegation was put to the national executive, it was rejected and Unison carried on with a policy supporting boycotts of the Jewish state and its trade union movement as well.

This makes absolutely no sense.

If you oppose the right-wing, neoliberal policies of the Netanyahu government, shouldn’ t you support the struggle of the Israeli nurses? Shouldn’t you support the Histadrut’s general strike which resulted in such an important victory?

Instead of engaging with the Israeli labour movement, unions like Unison and PCS are moving away from it.

There was a time not long ago when British unions played a more constructive role. They would bring over representatives of the Histadrut and the Palestinian unions to Britain where they could meet British trade unionists — and each other. British unions saw their role as bridge-builders, taking no sides in a tragic conflict between two nations.

One doesn’t want to get all nostalgic about this — instead, I suggest we try to find ways restore some sanity and balance into the British labour movement’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Above all this means educating activists and members, whose only source of information seems to be the pro-Hamas camp, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Unfortunately, there is no effective alternative voice in the British labour movement today.

If members of Unison, PCS and other unions were to be made aware of the reality of the Israeli trade union movement, its struggles and its victories, I think it might be possible to have a more interesting and productive debate.

At the moment, the agenda in those unions is being dictated by supporters of Hamas, and that, comrades, is not a good thing.

At first glance, who could oppose the Palestine Solidarity Campaign?

The very name implies one of the most noble human aspirations – solidarity with a people. And in particular a people like the Palestinians, whose suffering is genuine. No doubt many people who join the PSC, attend its demonstrations, donate money to it or encourage their unions to back it are expressing their support for the idea of solidarity with the Palestinians.

But there’s a difference — a huge one — between showing solidarity with the Palestinians and supporting the PSC. Despite the PSC’s best efforts to convince everyone that these are one and the same thing, they aren’t.

And this becomes obvious whenever things heat up in Israel and Palestine, and when war is in the air.

Last week, I found myself at the demonstration of the PSC opposite the Israeli embassy in Kensington.

The call for the demonstration focussed on the Israeli air offensive against Gaza and was issued at a time when the only casualties seemed to be Hamas fighters, in particular Ahmed al-Jabari, the leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Still, by the time demonstrators began to arrive at the embassy, things had gotten worse and a number of civilians — on both sides – had been killed.

The demonstration would have focussed on those killings, right? It would have called for a cease-fire or something like that, wouldn’t it?

But the very first thing I heard was not a call for an end to the violence — which would have been understandable and would have gotten sympathy from anyone — but instead was the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“.

From the river to the sea?

Sorry, but there’s no way to be polite about this. That chant, and the PSC’s own logo of a map of Palestine from the river to the sea, and the subsequent chanting of “Israel out of Palestine” really could mean only one thing.

The demonstrators, or at least the people leading the chanting and making up the slogans, were supporting a one-state agenda, a solution to the century-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians by demanding that one side pack up and leave.

As it’s unlikely the Israelis are going to do this voluntarily, realistically what the demonstrators were calling for was the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine.

Not from the illegal settlements in the West Bank — no one mentioned those.

The Jews are to leave “Palestine” — from the river to the sea.

This is an exterminationist agenda. I don’t think that’s too strong a term.

These are not people who dislike Israelis or Jews, or who want to discriminate against them, or put them in their place, or treat them as second class citizens. That would be ordinary anti-Semitism.

This is a different kind of anti-Semitism, the kind that imagines a Palestine without its six million Jews, from the river to the sea.

An exterminationist anti-Semitism whose solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be another Holocaust.

Of course one expects to see radical Islamists at a demonstration like this — after all, that’s been their agenda for decades.

But it’s not the agenda of the mainstream Palestinian national movement, not anymore. It’s been nearly a quarter of century now since Arafat and the leadership of the PLO embraced the two-state solution, which paved the way to the Oslo accords.

Palestinian President Abbas isn’t calling for driving the Jews into the sea. The Palestinian trade unions aren’t calling for that.

But that’s what the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was doing in Kensington — that’s their agenda.

So what was the Socialist Party doing there — a party which historically opposes the boycott of Israel and which supports a two-state solution? On their website, they write that “The Palestinians and the Israeli Jews have a right to their own separate states.” They don’t say that one of those states will be in
Palestine, and the other — in the sea?

And what was the SWP doing there, for that matter? Do they too support the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine?

It is fitting and proper for people who are shocked by the violence, and angry at the decision of the Israeli government, to protest and to show their solidarity with Palestine.

But to do so by chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state is to do the Palestinians no service.

For socialists to participate in such a demonstration is a disgrace.

This article appeared in Solidarity today.

The announcement that another high street retailer, Comet, had bit the dust was hardly unexpected. We’re in the midst of a recession, competition is fierce, the company had long been in trouble. There’s not much Marxists can add to the debate — or is there?

We can of course start with an analysis of the inevitability not only of Comet’s collapse that also the (barely-noticed) collapse of its American rival Best Buy, which withdrew from the UK market in the midst of a recession before you could say “bad idea”.

And you don’t have to be much of a financial wizard to predict the eventual failures of those high street electronics retailers still standing — primarily Curry’s.

Capitalism is a constantly shifting, fiercely competitive environment and at a time when anyone can order anything online, why would someone go the old-fashioned route to buy, say, an MP3 player or laptop computer on the high street?

Anyone who’s been inside a Curry’s or Comet recently can tell you that this can be an entirely unpleasant and demoralising experience, one that many of us would avoid at all costs.

Marxists would go a bit further than that and say that an outstanding feature of the collapse of Comet is the fact that the venture capitalist who bought the business eight months ago for just £2 will probably lose no money at all, and might even make a profit as he sells off unsold stock, shops and so on.

And the company’s 7,000 staff who all face the sack? No one will do much for them — and they’ll be added to the increasing number of people seeking work and living on the dole.

But what struck me in the coverage of Comet’s collapse in the Sunday Times, for example, was the way in which it was none of this really was the focus of the story. Not the 7,000 workers (this is the Sunday Times, of course), and not the nature of technology and the likely death of high-street retailers in this field.

No, the entire focus of their coverage has been on Henry Jackson, the “smooth talking American” who had picked up Comet for less than the price of a cappuccino last winter.

The Times was keen to show that it had predicted that Jackson’s period at the helm of Comet would end badly and showed its headline from last February — “Starry couple behind Comet” — with a photo of Jackson and his wife.

Mrs Jackson gets noticed in this week’s coverage with just a quick mention of how her husband devoted time to “helping his glamorous Canadian wife Stacey forge a semi-respectable career as a pop star”. Jackson, it seems, was so keen to help his wife — perhaps to help her move up to a “fully-respectable” rather than “semi-respectable” career — that he sent out regular emails to his contacts in the City “urging them to buy her music”.

The article I’m quoting from didn’t appear in the gossip columns of the Sun, or in OK or Hello — it appeared in the business pages of the Sunday Times.

It reeks of misogyny, of contempt for women, but more than that, it plays up to an image of “smooth talking Americans” that sneak up on good, old-fashioned British businesses, buy them for a song, milk them for all they’re worth, and then toss them aside, destroying the lives of hard-working British families.

It’s all part of a broader narrative that divides capitalists into two classes — the worthy ones, who run productive family businesses that create jobs, and the others.

The others are often described as “vultures” or “predators” who are value-less scoundrels who are in the business just to make a quick buck. They are often Americans, often linked to Wall Street or New York, and there’s more than a hint of xenophobia in all this.

The fact is that Henry Jackson was trying to make a quick buck made him no different from Kesa, a French-owned concern (more bloody foreigners) that had previously owned Comet.

Kesa which got out at the first opportunity and passed on what was a ticking time bomb to Jackson. Kesa, like Jackson, was only interested in making money.

The notion that there are good, productive family-owned businesses — especially at the level of Best Buy, Comet and Curry’s — is an utterly reactionary one, and a fantasy. It’s part of the world-view that says that the global economic crisis was caused by greedy bankers, rather that being something endemic to capitalism itself.

Marxists have the often-thankless job of telling the unvarnished truth, which is that lowlife like Henry Jackson and his “glamorous” and “semi-respectable” wife are not the rotten apples in the barrel.

All the apples are rotten because the barrel rots them. The system itself is rotten, the rules are rotten, and that is truth we need to tell.