In October 2023, the Socialist Appeal organisation, a British Trotskyist organisation which is a descendant of The Militant, announced that its newspaper would become The Communist from January and that it would rebrand itself as the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ from May 2024. The question is: how can an organisation so steeped in social chauvinism imagine that it becomes communist by dint of declaring itself as such? The answer lies in the ideological weakness and fragmentation of the communist movement internationally and especially in Britain. It means that any self-defined protest group can pretend to be a communist party, with or without adding ‘revolutionary’ or ‘Marxist-Leninist’ – to the point of stretching the notion to the preposterous.
Following decades of limpet-like attachment to the Labour Party, Socialist Appeal was unceremoniously bundled out in 2021. There is as yet no evidence, however, of any ideological re-assessment of its past, or of the years Socialist Appeal spent championing the Labour Party as the political wing of the ‘labour movement’. Indeed, in its first major political test since declaring itself to be communist, Socialist Appeal has sunk back into the reactionary prejudices of its past. It has parroted the ruling class and the Labour Party in their condemnation of Hamas’s October military action. Its leading light, Alan Woods, described the attack as an ‘appalling atrocity’ (www.marxist.com, 2 January 2024), adding that ‘The ruling Israeli clique led by Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel has a right to defend itself. So it has’. Yet, as an occupying colonial power, the Israeli state has no such right. Lenin was clear:
‘National self-determination is the same as the struggle for complete national liberation, for complete independence, against annexation, and socialists cannot—without ceasing to be socialists—reject such a struggle in whatever form, right down to an uprising or war.’ (Lenin: A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism, 1916)
The right to self-determination is indivisible: socialists in the imperialist countries cannot pick and choose which bits of the road to self-determination the oppressed should be allowed. The right to determine the form of struggle ‘down to an uprising or war’ is intrinsic to their right to self-determination in each particular set of circumstances, and criticism of any tactic or individual incident in such an ‘uprising or war’ is a rejection of that right. That ‘we’, socialists in Britain who have achieved nothing, somehow have the experience and knowledge to decide what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behaviour by the liberation struggle, is an expression of social-chauvinism. Only the oppressed themselves can make these choices.
Socialist Appeal’s condemnation of armed struggle is nothing new: over 25 years ago it declared ‘Our tendency consistently opposed the insane policies of terrorism and guerrillaism (it was really the same thing) pursued by the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organisation] leadership in the past.’ (Ted Grant and Alan Woods: Marxism and the Struggle Against Imperialism: Third World in Crisis, 1998, www.marxist.com) Armed resistance to imperialism may seem ‘insane’ for fervent supporters of the Labour Party, but to openly condemn Labour as an imperialist party would have been both contrary to the opportunism of Socialist Appeal and would have ended their adventure in Labour much earlier through their expulsion.
Even today, Socialist Appeal cannot bring itself to condemn Labour as a whole, by playing on the common opportunist distinction between the left and the right of the Party. Every Labour MP is providing political cover for the Israeli state’s genocidal war. Those Labour MPs who espouse pacifist platitudes about the need for a ceasefire are still absolutely committed to their continued membership of the Labour Party and have universally condemned Hamas’s ‘terrorism’ and the 7 October outbreak of Palestinian resistance. These MPs provide a cloak for their openly bellicose colleagues. Writing about the defeat of the 15 November parliamentary amendment calling for a ceasefire, Socialist Appeal has a different assessment when it says
‘Scandalously, but unsurprisingly, the majority of Labour MPs followed the party leadership’s orders and abstained on this question. This showed – if there was ever any doubt – on whose side Starmer and the rightwing stand: with the oppressors, against the oppressed.’
But it is not just the right wing: the ‘left’ is equally part of the imperialist Labour Party, and it colludes in the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Which Labour MP has supported unconditionally the right of the Palestinian people to armed self-defence, rejected the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and demanded its total isolation? None; ‘left’ MPs are more concerned about their own hides than about the Palestinian people.
Undoubtedly Hamas in its early years was fostered and supported by the Israeli state as an opposition both to the secular working class forces involved in the First Intifada from 1987 and as a battering ram against the PLO (see Eddie Abrahams: Communism, Fundamentalism and the question of Palestine, FRFI 111, February/March 1993). But after the PLO had capitulated at Oslo in 1993, Hamas became the standard bearer against the occupation and suffered brutal repression at the hands of the nascent Palestinian Authority’s security forces. To maintain now that ‘Netanyahu and Israel have long treated Hamas as an asset, not a threat’ (emphasis in the original) and that ‘the Israeli government uses the threat of Hamas to discredit a future Palestinian state, and by giving legitimacy to Hamas rule in Gaza, hopes to drive a wedge between Palestinians there and those in the West Bank’ (John Gordon, www.marxist.com, January 2024) ignores 17 years of brutal blockade of Gaza since Hamas won the elections in 2006. The ‘wedge’ was driven by the imperialist-backed coup attempt in June 2007 which of course had the full backing of the Zionist state. Condemnation of so-called Hamas ‘terrorism’ reinforces the liberal sentimentalism that dominates the movement in Britain as it protests against Zionist genocide, as do Socialist Appeal’s pie-in-the-sky notions of socialist federations of the Middle East – meaningless waffle in this reactionary period.
Socialist Appeal and its Militant predecessors have always rejected Lenin’s assessment of social democracy which he arrived at during the First Imperialist War. Summarising a debate over the reasons for the division within the socialist movement, Lenin wrote:
‘Certain individuals among the present social-chauvinist leaders may return to the proletariat. But the social-chauvinist or (what is the same thing) opportunist trend can neither disappear nor “return” to the revolutionary proletariat. Wherever Marxism is popular among the workers, this political trend, this “bourgeois labour party”, will swear by the name of Marx.’ (Lenin: Imperialism and the split in socialism, 1916)
Yet for Socialist Appeal, the rotten Labour Party did ‘return’ to the working class with the 1918 Constitution and Clause 4, swearing not by the name of Marx, but with the anodyne phrases of the Fabian Society. For communists, Lenin’s view must hold, that
‘…unless determined and relentless struggle is waged all along the line against these [bourgeois labour] parties—or groups, trends, etc., it is all the same—there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement.’ (ibid)
Socialist Appeal has never regarded the Labour Party as a necessary product of imperialism but as the creation of an abstract ‘labour movement’. It separates the politics of imperialism from its economics, and by remaining within the Labour Party for the decades that it did, its aim was to reconcile the working class with a pro-imperialist institution. Today left Labour MPs are trying to worm their way back into favour with those demonstrating in support for Palestine by appearing on protest platforms. They are encouraged by the leaders of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and so on. No criticism is offered of them, no condemnation for their silence over Sir Keir Starmer’s Zionism or the genocidal character of the war against Gaza, no questioning of the legitimacy of the Israeli state, no demand placed on them to stand up against British imperialism or to leave their imperialist party. The work of Socialist Appeal is a political process aimed at reconciling the radical sections of the working class with the Labour Party and maintaining the support of the working class for Labour. When Socialist Appeal editor Rob Sewell, writing on the centenary of Lenin’s death, focuses his criticism on the persona of Sir Keir Starmer rather than the Labour Party as a whole (18 January 2024) and adds ‘For lack of an alternative, the working class will hold its nose and vote Labour, but with zero enthusiasm’ we might just as well have been reading Socialist Worker. This is not a communist position, and unless Socialist Appeal is prepared to acknowledge that Labour has always been an imperialist party and that it could never return to the working class, it can never be a communist organisation whatever it calls itself.
Robert Clough
