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As Israel continues its assault on Gaza, with more than 18,000 people already killed, the whole world is discussing what a just solution to the conflict could look like. Imperialist governments keep repeating the same proposal they have made for more than 30 years (and really since the Peel Commission of 1937): the so-called two-state solution. U.S. president Biden claims that a two-state solution is the only way to guarantee the long-term security of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and French president Emmanuel Macron are similarly calling for concrete steps toward a Palestinian state.

As the three decades since the Oslo Accords have shown, the two-state solution is no solution at all. The Palestinian West Bank has been cut into tiny enclaves by Israeli settlements. Far-right settlers have uninterruptedly built heavily fortified encampments with the support of the Israeli military, in order to make any kind of contiguous Palestinian territory impossible. The 1993 accords were intended to devolve some of the IDFs administrative duties to a collaborator regime in certain areas, while Israeli settlers colonized the rest of the West Bank and Gaza.

Even if it were possible to proclaim some kind of formally independent Palestinian state in the borders of 1967, such a state would remain desperately poor and totally subservient to the state of Israel, with no control over its own borders. Biden claims that two states would ensure equal measures of freedom and dignity, but as the experience with the Palestinian Authority has shown, it would at most give a liberal cover to the existing inequality and discriminationit would be an Israeli colony akin to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa.

More than 5 million Palestinian refugees live outside Palestine. They all have a basic democratic right to return to their homeland. They cant all be crammed into the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli Jews make up a minority of the people of Palestine, yet the 1948 borders assigned them 78 percent of the territory. This two-state solution would thus just constitute a different form of apartheid from the one currently practicedit would either trap Palestinian refugees in a ghetto or reject their rights entirely.

The two-state solution has never been more than an empty phrase used by imperialist governments to stall for time while Zionist settlers colonize the remainder of Palestinian land. Socialists around the world agree that this two-state solution is a farce designed to placate liberals while the Israeli government continues its program of ethnic cleansing. But what does an alternative look like? Should socialists call for one state or two states? Can there be any kind of solution to the conflict on a capitalist basis?

In this article, we will argue that a program of permanent revolution, with the aim of a unified socialist Palestine, is the only realistic option for ending the conflict. We are going to debate specifically with Trotskyist tendencies.

The early Trotskyists in Palestine opposed partition. Speaking with Jewish workers, they called for common class war with our Arab brothers; a war which is an inseparable link of the anti-imperialist war of the oppressed masses in all the Arab East and the entire world.

The Palestinian Trotskyists were mostly anti-Zionist Jews, and they called for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East that would guarantee equal rights for all peoples. This was what communists in Palestine had fought for going back to 1920. Yet Stalin, in one of his many betrayals, supported the partition of Palestine and gave military support to Zionism. The Trotskyists were therefore the only ones to continue the communist tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s, new radical left movements like the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen), working alongside Palestinian leftists like the DFLP, continued this fight for a socialist Palestine based on equality.

The Trotskyists around the world consistently fought all forms of racism, antisemitism, and colonial oppression. During World War II, Trotskyists fought for the imperialist countries to open their borders to Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. The Zionists, in contrast, were interested only in founding a state in Palestine and thus refused to give any support to refugees headed anywhere else.

In the years after World War, the Fourth International, which had been founded by Trotsky, degenerated and collapsed. There are now many tendencies that trace their tradition back to Trotsky, yet many have given up the historical program and defend opportunist positions. This is reflected in the Palestinian question as well, and different Trotskyist tendencies fall far short of their programmatic heritage.

Some socialists today believe that a just solution to the conflict can be provided by two states for two peoples, provided that these states are socialist. This position is defended by different organizations in the tradition of the South African Trotskyist Ted Grant, including International Socialist Alternative (ISA), the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), among others. The ISA is the only Trotskyist tendency at the moment with a functioning group in Israel, the Socialist Struggle Movement, known in Hebrew as Maavak.

All these organizations, with slight variations, have called for a socialist two-state solution. In a long article from 2013, Judy Beishon of the CWI argues for two statesa socialist Palestine and a socialist Israel on the basis of an equal right of self-determination for both peoples. The socialist two-state solution has all the same problems as the imperialist version: How could a socialist solution involve giving a huge majority of the territory to a minority of the people living in historical Palestine? Yet for the CWI, the essential question is formulating a program that is acceptable to the masses current consciousness, and they claim that the idea of two states would meet with much greater acceptance than one state by a majority of workers on both sides of the national divide. The CWI places a special focus on Israeli workers, arguing that the idea of one state in which they would become a minority is an anathema to most of them.

It is an undeniable fact that a majority of Israel Jews support Zionismmany believe that Jewish supremacy in Palestine is essential. This should be no surprise for Marxists, given that being determines consciousness. Israeli Jewish workers have a very high standard of living compared to proletarians in the region, both within Israel and in neighboring countries. They thus receive some profits from colonialism. In Israel today, a clear majority of Israeli Jews not only support the war but have called for it to be intensified. This is to be expected in any colony: most white people in South Africa backed apartheid until the very end.

For socialists, it should be clear that we cannot base our program on the prejudices of an oppressor nation. As Trotsky wrote in regard to white workers in South Africa, The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites. Whoever gives his little finger to the devil of chauvinism is lost.

The desire to win over Israeli Jewish workers for a socialist program is laudable. But the ISA/CWI proposes doing this by making concessions to their chauvinism, promising that their privileges can be maintained under socialism. This is reminiscent of the early Socialist Zionist settlers in Palestine who believed they could create socialist communities, the kibbuzim, on the basis of ethnic cleansing. The collapse of all socialist pretensions of the Israeli state shows that socialism is incompatible with chauvinism.

It is well known that Leninists defend the right of self-determination. But a call for self-determination for everyone represents a double misunderstanding of the communist program against national oppression. Lenin and the Communist International never called for self-determination for all peoplesthey called for self-determination for oppressed peoples.

This was not an abstract principle but an attempt to unite the energies of oppressed people struggling against foreign rule with the proletariats struggle for self-emancipation. Calling for self-determination for all, including for an oppressor nation like Israel, makes a mockery of this principle. For the CWI, it has meant calling for a socialist Ulster: in the case of Ireland, recognizing the self-determination of right-wing Protestant settlers in the North necessarily means denying the Irish peoples right to self-determination.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks never called for self-determination for Russian-speaking people in Ukraine or other Soviet Republics, as this would necessarily come at the expense of the self-determination of nations that had historically been oppressed by Great Russian chauvinism. Today, Vladimir Putin is incensed that Lenin deliberately rejected the self-determination of an oppressor nation in Ukraine.

It would have been absurd to call for self-determination for the pieds-noirs in Algeria or the Boers in South Africathis would simply be a socialist mantle for national oppression created by settler colonialism.

The second mistake is taking the right to self-determination as an absolute. As Lenin explained,

The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement.

And one must ask: How is the enforcement of Jewish supremacy in most of historical Palestine, even in a system that calls itself socialist, in any way compatible with a basic democratic program?

You might also be interested in: Palestinian Liberation and the Israeli Working Class

Winning Jewish Israeli workers for a socialist program means, above all, convincing them of the need to break with their own ruling class. They must abandon the Zionist bloc and throw their lot in with the workers and poor masses of the Arab world. That is the precondition for their own liberation. When the ISA/CWI claim that the demand for a socialist Israel makes it easier to win Israeli Jewish workers for socialism, then this is a very poor socialism indeed, on the basis of ethnic cleansing. At most, this is the socialism of the kibbuziman apartheid socialism that has nothing to do with the Trotskyist tradition.

Several other tendencies defend a socialist two-state solution without using that term. The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) has defended the same position as the ISA and CWI, with slightly different formulations. Writing in 2005, as the Second Intifada was winding down, IMT leader Fred Weston wrote that in Palestine, two separate territories would have to be worked out. What would such territories look like? A viable state for the Palestinians could be built out of the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan (where 60 percent of the population is Palestinian!), together with any parts of present-day Israel that could be feasibly integrated into such a state. This is just a slight variation on the imperialists two-state solution. Especially the idea that Palestinians can just move to Jordan is one advocated by the Right for decades.

While we were working on this article, we discovered that the IMT has silently edited Westons text in the last few months. The quotes above can still be found on archived versions of the IMT website from this summer. The new version, however, calls for autonomous territories instead of separate territories, and a viable territory instead of a viable state. Clearly, the IMT seems to be shifting away from its earlier advocacy of the two-state solution, without explicitly changing its position. In a new article from October 2023, they appear to step away from a two-state solution but its not quite clear if theyve repudiated their previous position.

Of course, it is welcome if they step away from their earlier chauvinism. But a serious Marxist organization can be judged by how it learns from its mistakes and corrects them in discussions with the vanguardthis kind of silent editing and new articles without acknowledging their past positions is the opposite.

Yet another organization that calls for a separate Jewish state in Palestine is the Spartacist League, which is often perceived as ultra-left yet aligns itself closely with Ted Grant on the right wing of the Trotskyist movement on important programmatic questions. It defends the call for two states with the neologism interpenetrated peoples, which means nothing but making the same concessions to chauvinism by deliberately confusing oppressor and oppressed people. The founder of Spartacism, Jim Robertson, got his start in Max Shachtmans organization, and in contrast to Trotskyists at the time, he supported the creation of Israel.

In the face of the ongoing horror in Gaza, several brave Israeli intellectuals like Ilan Papp and Gideon Levy have been calling for a single democratic state in historical Palestine. This would grant equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea, as the slogan goes. Israels former prime minister Ehud Olmert once declared that the principle one man, one vote would mean that the state of Israel is finished. Olmert, a far-right ethnonationalist (who by todays standards is considered a moderate!) thus made clear that Zionism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. The state of Israel explicitly defines itself not as a state of its citizens but as a state of the Jewish people.

This means that Israel is not, by any standards, democratic. Its laws deny the rights of indigenous peoplesand as we explained above, of the majority of the population. Israels right-wing government claims to speak for all Jewish people around the world. This is, according to the deeply flawed IHRA definition, a form of antisemitism. Basic democratic principles would mean equal rights for everyone living in Palestine.

You might also be interested in: Palestine, Marxists and the One-State Solution

The one-state solution as proposed by Papp and others is a liberal democratic vision for Palestine. At a time when most self-described liberal democracies are aggressively supporting apartheid and a genocidal war, such a basic statement of democratic principles is a brave stance. As Papp points out, there is already one state ruling over all of historical Palestine. It is simultaneously simple and radical to say that all these people should have equal rights.

Some socialists also defend the idea that a single, democratic, secular, but nonsocialist state is the way forward. Socialists in the tradition of Tony Cliff, grouped in the International Socialist Tendency (IST), call for this solution. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Great Britain recently explained what a single state solution would look like (on page 11 of the PDF). As a model, they mention that the threat of a revolution forced white South African leaders to dismantle apartheid laws that separated and disenfranchised black South Africans from white ones. Yet the example of postapartheid South Africa shows that despite the abolition of explicitly racist laws, the inequality between white and Black people has actually increased. This shows the limits of such democratic victories under capitalism.

Socialists are the most consistent advocates of democracy, and hence we defend a one-state solution. But the biggest question is, who could be the social subject of such a radical transformation? Who will carry out such a program? It clearly cannot be the Israeli ruling class, who make fabulous profits from the occupation. Yet such an impulse will also not be expected from Jewish Israeli workers, who get crumbs from the tables of their rulers and thus have no immediate interest in sacrificing their privileges. The imperialists will do everything they can to prevent democratization, as this would mean losing their Zionist vassal in a geostrategically important region. The different bourgeois leaderships of the Palestinian liberation movement have similarly found a way to profit off the suffering of their people and do not defend strategies that would mean a radical break with the existing world order. The Arab bourgeoisies, while pretending to support the Palestinians, have all found arrangements with imperialism.

No, the only force that can conceivably fight for democracy are the workers and oppressed of the region. These forces are not represented by any government. Yet we are talking about hundreds of millions of people who are exploited by imperialism and the corrupt dictatorships it keeps in place, and who long for dignity and freedom. A revolutionary mass movement would tear down the borders erected 100 years ago by colonial powers. Such a revolutionary movement would form an alliance with other oppressed peoples, such as the Kurds.

Israeli Jewish workers would also be attracted by a perspective of such radical transformation of society. Despite their relative privileges, Israeli Jewish workers live in one of the most unequal capitalist societies in history, where poverty exists right next to fabulous wealth. A revolutionary movement in the Arab world, calling for a complete reorganization of social life, could break at least a minority of Jewish workers from Zionism.

A struggle for socialism would mobilize hundreds of millions of working and poor people, uniting them across national divides that have been imposed by imperialism. The experience of struggle, uniting around common interests in opposition to the different ruling classes, would create a real sense of international unity. This is what would make possible true coexistence and cooperation.

As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky described with his theory-program of permanent revolution, if a mass movement of workers and oppressed people fights for democracy, they cannot limit themselves to democratic goals. If the working class wins power across the Middle East, toppling the pro-imperialist dictatorships, they will be confronted with the fiercest opposition by imperialism and the local bourgeoisies. Workers governments will be compelled to take drastic measures against private propertyand in this way, a democratic revolution will begin a socialist transformation. This is why the revolution is permanent.

As socialists, we must emphasize that the conflict can be solved by neither one state nor two states. Palestine is a tiny regionit can exist only as part of a global economic totality. This means being a dependent client of imperialism, as the Zionists have ensured for 75 years. Or, alternatively, Palestine can be part of an alliance of workers republics across the region. That is why we call for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. Such a federation would centralize the economic activities of all the workerswhile guaranteeing all peoples democratic rights to their own culture and self-governance. This would include rights for Jewish Israeli workers to organize their own affairs on a democratic basis.

A socialist Palestine, as part of a larger federation, would not exactly be one state either. As Lenin pointed out in State and Revolution, a state run by the working class is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. Every state in history has been an instrument of a parasitic minority exploiting and oppressing the majority. But a workers state is run by the majority itself, with working people administering themselves, and therefore it is no longer an apparatus separate from the popular masses. In Lenins words, this is at most a semistate in the format of the Paris Commune, and this will wither away as socialist society develops. It is therefore not quite accurate to say that we are for one state in Palestine. We want a workers government, which is no longer a state in the traditional sense. Our goal is to have zero states: we want a global classless society in which people work together on the basis of solidarity.

To close, we would like to look back at the proud tradition of anti-Zionist Israelis from the group Matzpen of the 1960s and 1970s. These socialists displayed unconditional support for the Palestinian struggle against colonialism, with the perspective of a socialist revolution to overthrow Zionism and all forms of imperialist domination. Part of this struggle involved coordinating and debating with Palestinian leftists. Matzpen argued that Palestinians should state clearly that in a future liberated Palestine, Jews would have full democratic rights.

As part of this program, Nicola Jabra and Moshe Machover of Matzpen (the former Palestinian, the latter a Jewish Israeli) also called for the right of self-determination for all national groups living in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. Controversially, they advocated the right of self-determination for Jews as well. Now, they added many qualifiers, and made clear that the ISO [Matzpen] does not advocate a separate Jewish state. But in a post-Zionist region freed of imperialism, they wanted to make sure each group had full democratic rights.

We would agree that a socialist Palestine needs to grant the fullest cultural rights and the greatest possible autonomy to all Jewish people who want to live there, as with any other people. Jabra and Machover explained that after the revolution, which will grant millions of Palestinian refugees a right to return, there will still be a continuous territory inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews. In that territory they will exercise the right to self-determination. The right of self-determination has nothing to do with the borders of Israel, or with any other borders that can be drawn on the map at this moment.

This obviously has nothing to do with the socialist Israel advocated by the ISA, the CWI, or the IMT. Matzpen was talking about limited territories where Israeli Jewish communities would remain in the majority, if they chose to do so, after the revolutionary destruction of the Zionist state. This would not infringe on the democratic rights of Palestiniansand hence it is a basic democratic right of Israeli Jews that every socialist would support.

As Lenin explained, however, the right to self-determination means nothing if not the right to secedeanything else is just an empty phrase. If a people cannot choose to form their own independent state, then they have no right to self-determination at all. In the case of Palestine, a separate state in which Israeli Jews make up the majority can only survive if it remains dependent on imperialism and in constant hostility with its neighbors.

With the greatest possible respect for the comrades of Matzpen, we think the formulation of self-determination for Israeli Jews can only lead to confusion (even if we agree with the logic of what Jabra and Machover were arguing). We advocate a socialist Palestine with full democratic rights for everyone who lives therebut a separate Israeli Jewish state would undermine the rights of the masses of the region to live free of imperialism.

Socialism in Palestine will grant the greatest possible autonomy to Jewish people. It will finally erase all the racial hierarchies that exist among Israeli Jews, allowing oppressed Jewish cultures to flourish. There is no way to maintain a state with a Jewish majority that does not involve violating the most basic principles of democracy.

To conclude: as socialists, we support all struggles for democracy. This means that we give our unconditional support to Palestinian resistance against colonialism and apartheid, even while we are deeply critical of the main leaderships of the Palestinians.

We reject any attempt to legitimize inequality with the farce of the two-state solution, and doubly so when such a two-state solution is presented in socialist garb.

From the river to the sea, we demand equality! We support every proposal that calls for real democracy for everyone in the framework of a single democratic Palestine. But we make clear that such a vision can only be made a reality if the workers and oppressed organize independently of imperialism and all bourgeois forces. A democratic Palestine can be created only as part of a radical transformation of the entire regionand this, in our opinion, requires a socialist perspective.

Three-quarters of a century after the creation of Israel, we think that the Jewish Palestinian Trotskyists in the late 1940s had the only realistic vision for resolving the conflict: Palestinian, Jewish, and all other workers in the region must struggle together to break with imperialism and create a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.

Link:
The Farce of the Two-State Solution and the Socialist Perspective for Palestine - Left Voice

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all Gods children.

Martin Luther King Jr., 1961.

A lot of people are saying they want to take some permanent space from capitalism. Polls show that large numbers of young people have a negative view of itno surprise given many Millennials and Zoomers arent likely to buy a home, are deeply concerned about the impact of capitalism on the environment, and believe that economic elites wield too much political power across the board.

Worse still, these feelings have a strong basis in reality. It really is the case that home ownership is becoming unattainable for everyone without a trust fund, our planet is facing a serious environmental crisis, and economic elites do in fact wield tremendously outsized influence relative to ordinary citizens. Uber-rich bros like real estate CEO and multi-millionaire Tim Gurner may try to blame this discontent on too much avocado toast or arrogant workers, but many of us right now have adopted an its not me, its you attitude towards what we call neoliberal capitalisma state of arrangements in which profit is prioritized above human needs, personal grit and developing a brand called you are deemed more important than social welfare policies, and the state and the private sector work hand in hand to enrich corporations and billionaires at the expense of the rest of us.

This frustration, and a lot else besides, is the topic of Malaika Jabalis and illustrator Kayla E.s whip-smart and very funny new book Its Not You, Its Capitalism: Why Its Time to Break Up and How to Move On. Written as an accessible guide to anti-capitalist and pro-socialist politics, it doubles as something of a therapeutic cleanse to help readers get over the worst long term relationship most people will ever have.

One of the sad truths about American socialist writers post-1980 is theyve struggled to reach a wide audience (despite the fact that there are plenty of societal conditions to be unhappy about, which could be used to spark a readers interest in alternatives to capitalism). This is in part due to the sheer ideological clout and vast resources poured into defending neoliberal capitalism at the climax of the Cold War and after it. This effort was so pervasive that even many leftists became closet Fukuyamaists, convinced we had reached the end of history. (As the idea went, after the fall of Communism, there was simply no better kind of society that could be envisioned other than Western liberal democracy.)

But as Ben Burgis reminds us, this failure was also partially a result of the socialist left retreating into intellectual, artistic, and academic spaces in the aftermath of failed 60s radicalism. One consequence of this is that socialists tended to adopt the tone, style, and expectations aligned with those communities: writing for a select audience that valued dense intellectualism, self-conscious novelty, and insular referentiality over more democratic and popular styles. By itself there is obviously a need for leftists to write big, dense, creative books that make a rigorous case for socialism for those readers who already have an understanding of leftist political theory at a scholarly level. But any political movement also needs to convert the skeptical general reader with popularizations, explainers, guides, manifestos, and, of course, many, many cartoons. Fortunately this genre has ballooned since the Bernie Sanders campaign, with energetic socialist writers like Jacobins founder Bhaskar Sunkara and Current Affairs own Nathan J. Robinson filling this giant gap.

Jabalis Its Not You, Its Capitalism has now entered the fray and brings a fresh and exciting attitude and perspective thats to be very much welcomed. Jabali completed a law degree at Columbia University and worked as a lawyer for a time before transitioning to journalism as the Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence magazine. (Her 2018 piece in this publication, The Color of Economic Anxiety, won the 2019 New York Association of Black Journalists Media Award for Newspaper/Magazine feature.) A self-described survivor of NYCs dating scene, she uses the fun and tragically relatable motif of leaving a toxic relationship behind to make the case for saying a not-so-sweet goodbye to capitalism.

For centuries, Americas capitalists have worked to structure society so that it most benefits them. For instance, they lobby for policies to make sure there are few limits on the wealth they can accumulate, from laws minimizing union power so workers cant bargain for better benefits and wages, to trade deals that allow capitalists to seek cheaper labor in developing countries, to fighting against a $15 federal minimum wage. This results in a completely skewed distribution of the countrys wealth and income.

Over 10 chapters she lays out many of the most damaging facts about capitalism while arguing for a transition to socialism. This includes the staggering levels of inequality that have become common since the 1990s, with Jabali pointing out that the top 1 percent of earners are now paid 160.3 percent more than they were in 1979 while wages for the bottom 90 per cent only grew by 26 percent. Given this, it should be no surprise that the bottom 50 percent of Americans own very little of the countrys wealth, while the top 10 percent of earners possess about 70 percent of the wealth. These are staggering levels unseen since the Gilded Era that preceded the Depression and the New Deal, and there is a high price to be paid for this inequality in terms of living standards for ordinary people and even the basic economic efficiency that pro-capitalists claim to care about.

Making the case for Medicare For All, Jabali points out that the idea of free, government-funded healthcare is growing in popularity. But like with many of our social services, we can only have good things in limited ways or in temporary spurts, with the ever-looming threat that they will end. Jabali draws attention to how the United States spends more on healthcare per capita than any other wealthy country yet has very little to show for it with the for-profit system. Life expectancy in the United States is considerably lower than in most other developed states, infant mortality rates are high, and satisfaction with the healthcare system is low. Despite this, and the fact that countries with publicly funded health systems blow the United States out of the water in terms of both health outcomes and public satisfaction, very little progress has been made to get us closer to a Medicare for All kind of system. A big part of the reason for this isnt that it would be politically unpopularindeed, polling shows that the public increasingly favors government-provided, universal healthcare but that vast sums are spent by the insurance industry to prevent public healthcare from taking off. As Jabali points out, the big problem isnt our inability to envision another systemthere are plenty of more successful public alternatives around the world that we could use as models. The problem is political will since many elected officials just cant get out of the insurance companies beds This showcases the deeper structural problems with contemporary capitalism and puts the lie to the there is no alternative rhetoric that was once so popular. Even when there is a clear, popular and better set of alternatives, the political economy of power in our society makes it so that we cant make progress towards it. Capital is more than a bit controlling like that.

Perhaps the most vital contributions of Jabalis book are her lightning fast introductions to a huge array of socialist icons. These include familiar, but rarely read, voices like Martin Luther King Jr. and Karl Marx to less well known icons like Charles Barron and Bayard Rustin. This is an extremely important project, since one of the consequences of the post-Cold War era is that the canon of socialist thought became largely unfamiliar even to academics and intellectuals. As political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson put it in her excellent new book Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, its telling that in the history of political thought, no social democrat has been canonized, despite the huge influence of social democracy in many wealthy capitalist democracies.

One would add that this is in spite of the enormous intellectual and moral contributions made by writers in the socialist canon, from Marx through Eduard Bernstein to Rosa Luxemburg and Cornel West. It is only now that the canon of socialist thought is becoming resuscitated and reintroduced as interest in socialism increases alongside anger towards neoliberal capitalism.

Jabali deserves an additional note of gratitude for introducing the huge number of socialist and anti-capitalist writers and activists who were and are women and people of color, disproving the caricature of socialism as exclusively the purview of Bernie Bros and class reductionist white dudes. These writers played an essential role in directing the socialist movements attention to issues of sexual and racial oppression. Discussing W.E.B Du Boiss contribution, Jabali observes out how he thought Marx and Engels had the right diagnosis for capitalism in Europe, but he showed that their analysis couldnt be perfectly applied to the United States. He argued that it wasnt only white capitalists who harmed Black workers by treating them as property and forcing them to toil on their land. The white proletariat harmed Black people, too.

This was (and occasionally still can be) an uncomfortable lesson for many on the left who adopt the reductionist view that class solidarity will trump everything. But its a vital one in helping us understand why many in the white working class support the Republican Party. When Trump slashed taxes for the rich and appointed union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, he also kept his promise to build a border wall and ban Muslims from entering the country.

Of course, introducing long-dead authors to readers is helpful, but is far from enough. This is where Jabalis decision to refer to all kinds of present-day activists is a savvy one. If a skeptical reader is expected to act on what theyve read in a book, they need to see examples of those ideas put into action. I was inspired by the example of how socialist Astra Taylor, cofounder of the Debt Collective, successfully put pressure on Joe Biden to abolish student loans for borrowers while organizing strikes in support of abolishing $10 billion in debt for students who had attended for-profit colleges that had engaged in unethical practices.

This kind of story undermines the most powerful weapon in the reactionary arsenalnamely the rhetorical imploration that the inequities and injustices in the world, whatever one thinks about them, are either God-given or natural and so cannot be changed. The there is no alternative refrain is played whenever someone tries to say public healthcare is too expensive, or environmental reform is impossible given our dependence on fossil fuelsthough, strangely, cost never seems to be an issue when it comes to exporting weapons, bailing out banks, or offering hundreds of billions in tax cuts to the already very wealthy.

Its Not You, Its Capitalism is a very funny and lucid introduction to anti-capitalist politics that doubles as the book debut of a fresh voice in American socialist circles. In many ways, its a model for how to write and present these ideas to a mass audience that may not be familiar with them but feels deeply that our present society has a lot wrong with it. Above all else, Jabalis portraits of the ordinary men and women who did make things better, many very poor and disadvantaged, shows how the only unrealistic sentiment is the idea that things can carry on as they are. People deserve justice and have been denied it for too long. As Jabali points out, socialism may not complete us and sweep us away in some whirlwind romance. But it may give us the comfort we havent felt since capitalism forcefully weaseled its way into our lives. Its long past time we showed capitalismalong with its plutocratic friends, bad taste, and extraordinary lack of stylethe door.

Read the rest here:
It's Time to Break Up With Our Exploitative Political and Economic System Current Affairs - Current Affairs

SEP (US) National Secretary Joseph Kishore addressing the meeting on the Centenary of Trotskyism in Colombo on 10 December 2023

On Sunday afternoon, Joseph Kishore, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the US, addressed a well-attended public meeting titled Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the 21st Century at the New Town Hall in Colombo to commemorate the centenary of Trotskyism.

The meeting was organised by the SEP and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka, and was preceded by another meeting on the same theme addressed by Kishore at the University of Peradeniya on December 7.

Over a hundred workers, students and housewives, including SEP members and supporters from Colombo and outstations, attended the meeting, with a strong delegation from Sri Lankas war-torn north.

The meeting was chaired by SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekara. His initial remarks, made in Sinhala, were translated into Tamil by SEP Political Committee member M. Thevarajah. Kishores speech, delivered in English, was translated into Sinhala by Jayasekara and its Tamil translation was made by SEP Political Committee member Shreeharan through an online link for relevant listeners in the audience.

Jayasekara began the proceedings with a warm welcome of Kishore. He explained the immense significance of the revolutionary life of Helen Halyard, a long-time member of the SEP (US) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), who died suddenly at the age of 73 on November 28. In response to his request, the audience observed a one-minute silence to pay tribute to Halyard, who had devoted 52 years of her life to the struggle to build the world Trotskyist movement.

Kishore said that it is a great honor to be able to address workers and youth in Sri Lanka and to meet with comrades who have played such a long and essential role in the history of the ICFI. He added that Sri Lankan SEP leaders are justly revered throughout the international socialist movement for their principled struggle for Trotskyism, often in the face of violent opposition from the ruling class. He specially recalled the late leaders of the Sri Lankan sectionKeerthi Balasuriya, who died 36 years ago and Wije Dias, who passed away on July 27, 2022.

Explaining the need for workers and youth to base their struggles on an international perspective, not a national basis, Kishore pointed to the basic Marxist principle that it is impossible to develop an orientation in any particular country based on the national peculiarities of that country.

Kishore outlined the ongoing genocidal war for the past two months against Palestinians in Gaza by Israels right-wing Netanyahu regime, which has included systematic bombing, murdering, starving, deprivation of medical care and people being driven from their homes.

Detailing how the US and its NATO allies have actively supported Israels war, Kishore commented: The open support for genocidal actions can only be understood as part of the unfolding global war of the US-NATO axis, which is or will impact the population of the entire world.

For American imperialism, support for Israels actions is bound up with its striving for world hegemony. Most directly, the Biden administration has utilized Israels actions in Gaza as an opportunity to deploy massive military hardware to the Mediterranean, explicitly targeting Iran. A conflict with Iran is itself seen in relation to the US conflict with both Russia and China. The war on Gaza and the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia are in fact two fronts in a rapidly escalating world war, he said.

Pointing out how South Asia was being pushed into the global geo-political tensions, Kishore said: There is no part of the world that is not ensnared in this expanding conflict. In particular, South Asia and the entire Indian Ocean region, including Sri Lanka, is being dragged into the US campaign to encircle China, which is seen by the American ruling class as its principal global rival.

The speaker explained how far-right and fascistic individuals were rising internationally, pointing to former President Donald Trump of the US Republican Party, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Javier Milei in Argentina, Narendra Modi in India and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.

Kishore insisted, however, on the importance of the resurgence of the most basic and powerful of all social forces, the working class, as the most significant factor in the present situation. He detailed the growing strike movements of workers throughout the world, including the US and Europe, and the struggles of workers in Sri Lanka against International Monetary Fund-backed austerity.

Everywhere workers and youth are confronted with a situation that raises the necessity for revolutionary solutions, on a global scale, Kishore said. This necessarily raises fundamental political and historical questions. What is socialism? What happened in the 20th century? Was there an alternative to Stalinism?

Kishore elaborated on the 100-year struggle waged by the Trotskyist movement for the perspective and program of international socialism, starting with the founding of the Left Opposition under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in October 1923. This was followed by the establishment of the Fourth International in 1938 and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in 1953 to fight the liquidationist Pabloite tendency that had emerged in the Fourth International.

Kishore provided a detailed account of the rich history of Trotskyism in Sri Lanka, from the formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1935, which turned to Trotskyism in the late 1930s, and then in the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI), formed in 1942 through a fusion of the LSSP with several organizations in India.

This history included the BLPIs powerful intervention in the anti-imperialist movement, on the basis of a perspective for an all-India revolutionary struggle, uniting workers and oppressed masses of all languages, religions and ethnicities and its opposition to the 1947 communal partition of British India into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India, and also to the 1948 nominal independence of Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon.

The speaker added that in a speech in August 1948, BLPI leader Colvin R. de Silva attacked moves to disenfranchise Tamil workers, which were based on the assumption that the state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race as an outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy. Kishore also quoted de Silvas remarks in the same speech that: It is precisely under fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state.

Kishore then referred to seventy years since the Open Letter, published by American Trotskyist James P. Cannon, and the formation of the ICFI in 1953, on the basis of the most fundamental principles of Trotskyism elaborated in that document, to defend and continue the Trotskyist movement against the Pabloite revisionist tendency that had emerged in the Fourth International in the early 1950s.

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Kishore explained how Pabloite revisionism openly encouraged the political degeneration of the LSSP along a nationalist line, culminating in the Great Betrayal in 1964 when the LSSP entered a bourgeois coalition of then Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike.

The speaker pointed out that the Revolutionary Communist League, the SEPs predecessor, was founded in 1968 on the basis of a struggle led by the ICFI to draw the real lessons of the Pabloite LSSPs betrayal of the program of socialist internationalism.

After explaining that workers and youth, entering into struggles throughout the world, are beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions, Kishore said: The task facing workers in every country is the building of a genuine socialist movement in the working class, that will fight to take power from the criminal oligarchs and warmongers, the purveyors of genocide and their accomplices, and reorganize social and economic life, on a world scale, based on social equality. In accomplishing this task, workers and youth cannot escape history.

Kishore concluded: The present is formed and molded by the past, and it is on the basis of the experiences of the past that we will prove up to the challenge of meeting the problems of the present and building a socialist society in the future.

In the question-and-answer session, replying to a question on the relationship between the ICFI-SEPs call for workers to form their own rank-and-file committees and its struggle to build the revolutionary party, Kishore explained that ICFI-SEP does not impose any requirements for workers to accept socialism and revolutionary politics when joining action committees. Also, we do not obscure or downplay the significance of the political questions. We explain to workers that the struggle for their rights is a fight against the betrayals of the trade union apparatus. The development of this struggle is ultimately a fight against the ruling class and capitalist system. Also, this struggle for basic rights cannot be separated from other problems. Thus, it is tied to the struggle against imperialist war.

With reference to struggles within the rank-and-file committees, Kishore explained that it is the workers who are trained and educated, based on the ICFIs political program and clarity on political issues, that can provide the necessary political guidance for workers in these rank-and-file committees in fighting for their rights. He continued: In these challenging tasks the party takes into account the political issues. When organisational issues are given the priority, it indicates organisational opportunism. Our main focus is on the clarity of historical issues, and it can only be done on the basis of an understanding of the history of Trotskyism.

Kishore added: The working-class political leadership must be built on these lessons, and the realisation of socialism is possible only through that. Revolutionary struggles are developing across the world, and working-class struggles are developing. Our movement is based on the understanding that the theoretical and political level of the working class must be elevated to the necessary level. Only through this method do we approach the masses.

Before closing the meeting, Jayasekara announced the publication of the Tamil translation of Trotskys monumental work, The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, by Kamkaru Mawatha/Tholilalar Pathai Publishers, the publishing house of the Sri Lankan SEP. He especially thanked comrades of the French section of the ICFI for arranging the translation, editing and computer page-setting of the publication. He handed a copy of the book to Kishore.

On the chairs appeal for contributions to the SEPs party building fund, the audience donated over 16,000 rupees (about $US50). The meeting concluded by singing the Internationale.

In depth

History of the Fourth International

The International Committee of the Fourth International is the leadership of the world party of socialist revolution, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

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SEP (US) National Secretary Joseph Kishore addresses Centenary of Trotskyism public meeting in Colombo - WSWS

We are publishing here the tribute given by Larry Porter, the assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (US), to Helen Halyard, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International for more than half a century, who died suddenly at the age of 73 on November 28. Porter delivered his remarks to a memorial meeting for Helen held on Sunday, December 3.

Dear comrades, friends and supporters,

We gather here today to honor our dear Comrade Helen Halyard.

I too wish to paraphrase Trotskys beautiful appreciation of his son Leon Sedov: Helen was our comrade, friend and fighter. She was an indefatigable fighter for the working class and socialism. She had an enormous impact on everyone she worked with in the party, and on the tens of thousands of workers and youth she spoke with over the last 50 years in the course of fighting to build an international party based on Trotskyism. Millions will come to know her name.

Helen was an extraordinary comrade who will be sorely missed. She was selfless, highly intelligent, courageous and deeply principled. We appreciated her immense personal warmth, but knew she would give no quarter on political differences.

Those of us who worked with her almost daily until the end of her life find it hard to accept that she is no longer with us. This heartfelt memorial expresses both an outpouring of love and our admiration.

Helen represented the imperishable human continuity in the historical struggle for Trotskyism against all forms of Stalinism, Pabloism and revisionism. She epitomized the words party cadre. She distinguished herself from those who abandoned revolutionary policies and rejected the revolutionary role of the working class. She often concluded her remarks by emphasizing that the task of the full material and spiritual liberation of the working class is the task of the working class itself. That was one of her favorite lines.

Helen exemplified the high intellectual and cultural level of the human material that was attracted to our party. She brought a dogged determinationshe would never give upa determination based on principles. Once she joined the party, she never turned away.

What made Helen into the person she became? As the history of the Marxist movement has shown, Revolutionaries are not born. They are forged. They are trained out of the experiences of the movement, out of the intervention of its leadership, out of the whole struggle of past generations.

Helen was so forged, and she, in turn, helped forge the party. As David North said in his tribute to Helen, A revolutionary party educates its members. But the political, social, cultural and moral character of the party is, in turn, profoundly influenced by the character of its cadre.

I first met Helen in 1972 while in college at Lehigh University. She came to the area with a team to campaign with the Bulletin newspaper, the political organ of the Workers League. At that time, the Stalinist Angela Davis was wildly popular, considered an icon of revolution by many young people. This was symptomatic of the various forms of petty-bourgeois influence on the working class, such as feminism, black nationalism and reformism. At this time, many of us knew Black Panther members personally. Many of them were courageous and left-wing, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. As a result, they were viciously repressed and many were murdered by the state. But they never broke from black nationalism, a petty-bourgeois outlook.

Upon meeting, Helen and I immediately struck up a discussion on black nationalism. We had both been in the party only a short time. She had joined the Young Socialists in December of 1971, and I followed a few months later. Both of us were won to the party in a fight against various forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism.

The Workers League, in an important and widely circulated pamphlet, Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory, had explained why this was a dead-end orientation. Our party stood in opposition to every other movement that claimed to be socialist.

We explained that capitalism was not based on race, but on the economic divisions of society. The basic conflict in our society and the source of all forms of oppression was capitalist ownership of the means of production, and the basic conflict was between the capitalist class and the working class in America and all over the world. We came to learn and agree that race was subordinate to class, and that racism was deliberately fomented by the ruling class to divide and weaken the working class.

We predicted that those who based their perspective on raceno matter the anti-capitalist rhetoricwould end up in the camp of the ruling elites. This largely took the form of supporting black Democratic Party politicians and black capitalism. This outlook, against which Helen fought courageouslyat that time against the streamhas been completely discredited and exposed by the role of a black upper-middle class layer that promotes such racialist historical falsifications as the New York Times 1619 Project.

Helen was a fighter for the whole working class internationally. She was a Trotskyist internationalist, a materialist, a fighter for permanent revolution.

Our class orientation and perspective was tested in the case of Gary Tyler. It was a critical experience, in which Helen played a major role. In 1976, Gary, then 17, was falsely charged and convicted of first-degree murder by an all-white jury. A racist mob had organized a violent protest against the busing of black youth to the high school in Destrehan, Louisiana. Gary was framed up for the death of a 13-year-old white youth and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Helen and David North traveled to Louisiana in May 1976 to speak to the Tyler family. There, they interviewed members of the family, including Terry, Garys brother, and Mrs. Juanita Tyler, Garys mother. Helen also traveled to the prison to meet Gary personally.

The Workers League and Young Socialists pledged to defend Gary and take his case into the working class. Helen played a critical role in developing the campaign. She was the chairperson of the powerful December 1976 march held in Harlem, New York to fight for Garys freedom. Hundreds of workers and youth participated.

Over 100,000 people signed the Workers Leagues petitions demanding his freedom. Helen maintained close contact with Mrs. Tyler throughout Garys incarceration, until Juanitas untimely death in 2012. Helens moving obituary of Mrs. Tyler appeared on the World Socialist Web Site.

Various petty-bourgeois groups portrayed Garys frameup simply as the product of Southern racism, and directed appeals for his freedom to black Democratic Party politicians. Our approach was the opposite. We explained that Gary was a class war prisoner, i.e., a representative of the working class, not just a black youth. We warned that the attack on Gary was an attack on the entire working class, black, white and immigrant. We fought to mobilize the full strength of the working class in Garys defense, as part of the defense of the democratic rights of all workers.

The response to this class appeal was enormous. We won the support of workers in trade unions that represented literally millions of workers.

This past July, Helen and many members of the party had the opportunity to see Gary when he visited Detroit, which was the first time we were able to see him since he won his freedom. It was a wonderful reunion. At the event, Gary paid tribute to both the party and to Helen and those who fought for his defense, recognizing that they played an absolutely critical role in providing him the resources necessary for him to carry out his fight.

I will close by quoting from the heartfelt letter Gary sent to me upon hearing of Helens death. Gary wrote:

Larry,

I am very sorry to hear about the unfortunate passing of Helen. I most distinctly remember meeting her back in 1976 when she bravely visited me in Convent, Louisiana.

I admired her strength and tenacity to get the story out about what happened to me. She had become highly respected and loved by my family and became especially close to my mother. I am forever grateful for the endless support and dedication she unselfishly rendered to the campaign to free me. She was a true comrade, who was willing to sacrifice so much, even her life, if it was meant to be, like Tom Henehan.

Once again, we lose another soldier in the struggle. May her soul rest in peace. Thanks for informing me of this tragic news. My heart is heavy tonight.

In closing, as we say, Well done for Trotskyism, Comrade Helen.

Hers was, indeed, a life from which we draw inspiration, political lessons, and renewed determination to finish the job she so courageously devoted her life to carrying out.

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Helen was our comrade, friend and fighter. She was an indefatigable fighter for the working class and socialism - WSWS

We are publishing here the tribute to Helen Halyard given by Ula Atei, a leading member of the Sosyalist Eitlik Grubu (Socialist Equality Group) of Turkey. Comrade Helen, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party (US) and the International Committee of the Fourth International for more than half a century, died suddenly on November 28. Comrade Atei delivered his tribute to a memorial meeting for Helen held on December 3.

Dear comrades, friends and relatives of Helen Halyard,

On behalf of the Sosyalist Eitlik Grubu (Socialist Equality Group--SEG) in Turkey, we share your deep sorrow at the loss of Comrade Helen. I would like to report that we dedicated todays public meeting in Istanbul, titled Stop Israels Genocide in Gaza, to her memory and to the memory of Comrade Halil elik, leader of the SEG, who died five years ago on December 31.

Comrade Helens death is a great political and personal loss to her comrades in the US and internationally. It is sad that I did not have the opportunity to work many years with her, and only recently met her personally. But socialists like Helen leave behind not only sad comrades and friends, but also an inspiring political legacy.

The tributes written by both Comrade David North and Comrade Patrick Martin make this clear.

When we look at the political life of Comrade Helen, we see that as early as 1971, at a very young age, she took a stand that required both courage and political consciousness, which she pursued consistently to the end of her life: A decisive political break with all forms of nationalism and a commitment to the struggle for revolutionary internationalism, that is, for Trotskyism.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) conferences on the centenary of Trotskyism have explained, this has been and still is the key to the fundamental problems of the epoch of imperialist war and socialist revolution. We argue that if the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, defending the programme of socialist internationalism on which the October Revolution of 1917 was based, had triumphed over Stalinism, it would have meant the victory of the world socialist revolution. This is indeed true.

The political role played by Comrade Helen during her 52 years in the Trotskyist movement rightly places her name in a central position in the history of our movement. This is a highly honourable position, which applies in particular to the comrades who joined the movement in the 1960s and 70s, and whose struggle played a decisive role in ensuring the political continuity of the Trotskyist movement.

The struggle of the Workers League after Wohlforths desertion, not only to maintain its existence, but to defend and advance Trotskyist principles against Stalinism and Pabloite revisionism, was the necessary basis for opposing the national-opportunist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain and for the ultimate political victory of the International Committee. Comrade Helen was part of the generation of leaders who ensured the continuity of the international party at these critical turning points.

Today, the expansion of the ICFI in Turkey and in various parts of the world, including the former Soviet Union, has been made possible by the conscious and determined struggles of this generation of Trotskyist leaders, including Comrade Helen.

For this we are grateful to Comrade Helen. Her life will provide an inspiring example to a new generation of Trotskyist revolutionary workers and youth in the United States and around the world, including in Turkey, and her name will live on in the international struggle for socialism.

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The expansion of the ICFI in Turkey was made possible by the determined struggle of Comrade Helen and her ... - WSWS