From Stalin to Zionism

Middle-class

Hallas's method is in direct continuity with that of Burnham and Shachtman, just as is his political position on the nature of the USSR.

His attack is another stage in the perennial middle-class attack on Marxism, concentrated ever more directly against the revolutionary party and dialectical materialism.

Hallas and Cliff know very well that the theoretical and political groundwork which they lay creates a situation where many of the members of their tendency openly disavow dialectical materialism; the state capitalist group actually provides a breeding-ground for relatively sophisticated methods of destroying the theoretical roots of Marxism while appearing to be 'Marxists' of some special "modern', actually very 'British' (and certainly not 'international socialist'), type.

Cliff is open about this. He will explain, like Shachtman, that he himself 'accepts' dialectical materialism, but that among his members, both leaders and rank and file, there are some who do not; they all consider that the question of adherence to the dialectic is not an important one in relation to membership or even leadership of their organizaIn the universities, where their members are concentrated, the International Socialism group are represented by young and not-so-young men who are busy reconciling Marxism with the varieties of empiricism and theoretical improvisation fashionable in sociology and the philosophy of science, not to mention tired refurbishings of bourgeois economics.

Among them are some who openly proclaim themselves 'Mensheviks'.

Verdict

The 'hypothesis-testing' and 'model-building' of these empiricist and pragmatist bourgeois schools of thought is related directly to Higgins' defence of 'reformist practice' on the grounds that 'it can at least be changed in the future'; i.e. it is a hypothesis or model to be modified according to every change in the 'facts'.

Exactly the same method is involved in Hallas' verdict that the SLL bases itself on a programme which is irrelevant or false'. In his own way Hallas realizes that to take on a criticism of the SLL is to challenge the whole basis of the Fourth International. He writes :

'A serious criticism of the politics of the SLL involves not merely a criticism of the views of the theorists of that organization, but a re-examination of the original Fourth Internationalist tradition of which, in essentials, they are the most consistent defenders in this country."

The actual meaning of this issage and all that follows it that Hallas consciously Hallas, op. cit., p. 25. ditions under which capitalism developed on a 'virgin' subcontinent encouraged and shaped the conscious fashioning of the 'pragmatist' philoshe instrumentalism or end.

It was from these thinkers that Burnham took his method in attacking dialectical materialism in 1939-1940. Marxism hor its do gmatind he attacked The American petty-bourgeois intellectuals were perfectly free to develop such a philosophy of compromise and endless adaptation because conditions persisted for a long time which permitted the softening of social conflicts.

Trotsky wrote the following illuminating lines on the subject:

"The US Secretary for Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, has reproached the author of these Lean Trotsking traditional American ideology.

'Empirical thinking, limited to the solution of immediate tasks, seems adequate, working-class as well as bourgeois circles, for as long as the law of value discovered by Marx fashions everyone's thought. But today, this very law produces opposite effects.

Instead of impelling the economy forward, it undermines its foundations. Eclectic and conciliatory thought, with its hostile and contemptuous attitude which supreme philosophica, and its expres sion, pragmatism, becomes absolutely inadequate, inconsioust, reactionary, and ridic.

Pragmatism and empiricism are more and more challenged even within bourgeois ideology today, from an openly idealist mystical standpoint, cause of the ineluctable drawing of US capitalism into the centre of the world capitalist crisis.

6 Introduction to "The Thoughts of Karl Marx' immediate reality.

For us, theory develops only through a party which, in fighting for a political programme ot the conquest of working-class power, is able to study every development in the working class as the core of the analysis of the overall economic, political and ideological crisis of society.

The Marxist party carries out such a study as itself part of the class in struggle. The as the reflection of the struggles within the working class and, at a deeper level, between the classes.

As we have seen, Hallas in his case against the SLL makes no analysis of the role of his own group or of the outcome politically of the stand which it took.

A leadership is built only in the conscious pursuit of a struggle within the movement which uncovers and fights to 11.00 11.25 11.00 7.30 8.00 8.50 TUESDAY 1913.

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With Bradford Dillman. The life of the 13th century crusader and saint. 10.50 News Summary and Weather. 10.55 By FURTHER EVIDENCE of the deepening crisis in the British Communist Party has come with the formation recently of what can only be described as a pro-Zionist faction in the Party's Manchester area.

To the worsening sickness of Stalinism, complications are setting in.

The pro-Zionist tendency expressed itself at the CP Congress last month with a resolution from the Prestwich branch which condemned the executive committee for failing to appreciate the dangers of 'pan-Arab chauvinism' as the threat to peace in the Middle East.

Now this tendency has emerged more openly with the formation of a society calling itself 'Progressives for Peace in the Middle East' which attacks Arab opposition to Israel and declares its aim to 'combat the intensive propaganda by the Arabs directed at the extreme left'.

The secretary of this society is Mr Aubrey Lewis, who has been a Communist Party member for 36 years. Mr Dave Nesbitt and Mr Joe Garman, who are on the committee, are also CP members.

Garman had a letter in the CND publication 'Sanity' recently supporting Israel and denouncing the Arab guerrillas.

According to a report in the Manchester 'Jewish Gazette', these CP members say they are opposed to Party policy because it describes Israel as an aggressor.

Welcomed

This reactionary development from the Stalinist ranks must have been welcomed by the so-called pabour zionist organizations such as Poale Zion and Mapam. Both these movements are affiliated . to parties in the Israeli coalition.

Poale Zion in this country is also affiliated to the British Labour Party, where it serves as a mouthpiece for Zionism.

It mainly works through the 'Labour Friends of Israel', which has the support of a number of MPs ranging from Ray Gunter to Eric Heffer.

Mapam does not compete with Poale Zion on this pitch, but has participated in such bodies as the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

At the time of the June the Zionists carried out a SUCCharles Parkins cessful take-over operation in the Workers' Circle', a Jewish society which had previously been under Stalinist influence.

Mapam then specifically set out to win over former CP members to Zionism. Now, with the formation of the •Progressives for Peace in the Middle East' group, it looks as though they can chalk up their first gain.

As a counterpart to the 'Labour Friends of Israel', we now have the 'Stalinist Friends of Israel'!

This little gain for the Zionists is in complete contrast with the general trend on the left which has been away from illusions in Zionism and towards a recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Some of the intellectuals who sided with Israel in the atmosphere created by the Zionists at the time of the June war have been brought towards a clearer understanding of the issues by the Israeli occupation policies in the Arab lands they took.

Failure

Professional Zionist propagandists have acknowledged their failure to win 'left-wing opinion'.

If they have succeeded in winning some Stalinists, then this indicates that the seat of the sickness is in Stalinism itself, laying it open to fresh infections, such as nationalism, or Zionism.

Jewish members of the Communist Party were thrown into a crisis by the June war. Wars put to the test any Party which claims to be communist; and the Communist Party of Great Britain can hardly be regarded as a school for internationalism or Marxist principles !

How could the Party give a lead to its members, when it had never taken a principled, revolutionary, consistent stand on the Middle-East issue?

In 1947, Stalin supported the partition of Palestine, and in 1950 Palme Dutt, in his sive. referred to the 'progres- book 'Britain's Crisis of Emnature of the State of Israel.

Subsequently, the Communist Party supported a 'diplomatic solution' of Middle-East problems by the great powers, as it still does.

On the eve of the June war, Colin Sweet, of the British Peace Council, appeared on a joint platform in Trafalgar Square with Arnold Wesker and other Zionists.

day, understand the failure of the early Trotskyist movement PRESS PAGE unemployment and casualization 'we have failed to counter the massive unemployment which now exists among our film production workers'.

Why? Well it seems 'the problem is rooted in the structural shifts now taking place ..?

The 'patterns of control' are altering and, amazing revelation, 'the l new conglomerates with immense and diversified interests over the