ALB
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Though it is understandable why, in terms of dirty politics, both the pro-Israel lobby and the anti-Corbynites in the Labour Party should, independently, have thought it was a good idea to play the anti-Semite card against Corbyn, it is not clear that it is proving effective outside the media itself.
They may well have overplayed their hand, as it doesn’t seem to be having any effect on votes for the Labour Party. This will be due to a combination of people dismissing the claim that Corbyn is an anti-Semite as untrue (as it manifestly is) or because people don’t care or don’t think it important. Melanie Phillips, one of the traducers, drew attention to this last point in an article about the result of the Peterborough by-election in June where the Labour candidate, despite being targeted by the campaign, won with an increased majority:
“the by-election result shows that the stench of antisemitism is failing to repel the voters. Either they don’t care or, worse, they may actually be sympathetic – perhaps because they don’t like what they perceive as people ganging up on someone.”
The Socialist Standard also commented on the German elections of 1912 and 1919. The first, while conceding that there would have been some socialists among the members and voters of the SPD was scathing about the party as such. This was repeated in the second:
“For years we have pointed out that the Social Democratic Party of Germany – now called the “Majority Socialists” – was not a Socialist party. Its persistent support of the capitalist parties at elections, coupled with its advocacy of capitalist reforms, marked it off as merely a reform party similar to the Labour Party in this country, though it carried a Socialist name.”
It went on to say that any socialists would be found among the members and voters of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had broken away from the SPD over its support for the war (and included Kautsky and of all people, Bernstein and, before they split to form the Spartakist League, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg). It also clearly identified Karl Liebknecht as a socialist, though critical of his attempt to seize political power for socialism without majority working-class support (though unaware that the week before the issue appeared he had been murdered).
The USPD later split, with some (including Kautsky and Bernstein) going back to the SPD and others joining the KPD, or Communist Party of Germany as the Spartacist League had become (a few, including Liebknecht’s brother Theodor, refused to join either and kept the party going for a while) That was the problem: many of those who could be considered socialists were led astray by the Bolsheviks (including for a while Pannekoek before he realised that Bolshevik Russia was heading for state capitalism not socialism) and the trend towards the growth of socialist ideas halted and reversed. The Bolshevik seizure of power put the clock back as far as the growth of socialist ideas was concerned, as those who supported them absorbed ideas that meant that they were no longer recognisably socialists.
Actually individual articles there do have a unique URL but it’s not easy to find. There is a way but it’s very roundabout. Copy the title of the article into a search engine and its URL should appear. Copy that and paste it. On my browser the URL also appears briefly at the bottom lefthand corner but not long enough to capture it, but you can copy it by hand. It works for me, if anyone else wants to confirm it.
All this is not very practical, I agree, but not impossible.
Which article did you want to link to? Let me know and I will see if the above works for it.
Robert Michels’s 1911 book, Political Parties, in which he propounded his “iron law of oligarchy”, according to which democratic control of large organisations such as mass political parties and trade unions was not possible, was largely based on a study of the SPD of which he had been a member even of its radical wing and a parliamentary candidate (resigning in 1907) . He later, logically enough in a sense, became a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party (arguing that charismatic leaders represented the masses better). Even so, there are some interesting insights in his book as to how the SPD was organised and operated. Essential reading for anyone who wants to go into this in detail.
The “radicals” in the SPD attributed its drift towards reformism as being due not so much to the bureaucratisation of the Party (after all Luxemburg and Pannekoek were at one time paid Party officials themselves) as to the fact that the SPD was the only party firmly committed to introducing political democracy in Germany and that this attracted the support, in both members and votes, from radical bourgeois democrats who wanted this rather than socialism. I don’t know how much there is in this nor how the SPD could have avoid advocating political democracy. Even Luxemburg regarded the proletariat as having to take up the torch of political democracy that the bourgeoisie had abandoned.
Speaking of her, there were only two SPD members whose articles were translated and published in the early Socialist Standard: her and Kautsky (the Party’s first three pamphlets were a translation authorised by him of most of his introduction to the Erfurt Programme).
I think the early Party members regarded the SPD pre-WW1 in the same way that Tony Benn, I think it was, regarded (mistakenly) the Labour Party as: while not a socialist party at least a “party with socialists in it.” After all, they had themselves just come out of such an organisation.
The problem of the pre-WW1 SPD is not so much why a once revolutionary socialist party went reformist (which has tended to be our approach, ie because it had a minimum programme of democratic and social reforms which attracted support for these rather than for socialism) but why what was always essentially a pro-democracy reformist party claimed for a period to be a revolutionary socialist one (a thesis subject for Alan’s Ph.D. candidate).
In the meantime I think you can do it manually. The Party’s PayPal address is the same as our email.
We are forgetting that in Germany there is another party calling itself “socialist” which situates itself to the left of the SPD — Die Linke (The Left), which is in a line of descent from the old KPD and the SED party which ruled East Germany though it doesn’t claim this heritage. It has non-negligeable electoral support and is represented in the Bundestag and regional parliaments. Though it wouldn’t claim Kautsky it would both Liebknechts (father and son). Its foundation (all German parties have them for tax and subsidy purposes) is called the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. In contrast that of the SPD is called the Friederich Ebert Stiftung, after the first President of the Weimar Republic who was in that post at the time of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Their English-language website is here. There is an interesting video on Rosa Luxemburg on the home page of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. One of those interviewed is the “Marxist-Humanist” Peter Hudis.
There are also much smaller, more interesting groups in Germany such Gegen Kapital und Nation (Against Capital and Nation).
A return to Wilhelm Liebknecht that would be something:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/1899/nocomp/index.htm
But I couldn’t find any reference to either him or Kautsky in the link, so is anybody there really talking about this?
“as long as Israel and Israelis are not punished and don’t pay for the occupation, for the crimes,” There is something incoherent, and rather disturbing, about this statement by that South African MP. Since 20% of so of “Israelis” are not classified by the state there as “Jews”, he is either saying that they too should be punished or (more likely) that only those Israelis classified as Jews should be. I think that might qualify as being anti-Semitic.
That’s a possible alternative explanation but I don’t think it can be in this case since at least one of the organising groups does accept the Democratic/Republican “binary” as they are busy boring from within the Democratic Party, ie the so-called the “Democratic Socialists of America.”
Incidentally, the word “alternative” originally meant a choice between one of two courses of action. It is only because it has come to be used to also mean a choice between more than two that the new word “binary” has been coined. It still seems odd though to use it in the plural unless for instance in this case it means No to both gender and political either/or choices.
The editorial in next month’s Socialist Standard is going to be on this entitled “Syriza : A Textbook Failure” ie a leftwing government is elected to reverse austerity, is forced to recognise capitalist reality, and is booted out at the next election. As we know will happen to a Corbyn government (if one is ever elected). When will they ever learn?
i thought it would have to mean something like that. So they want people to be able to choose how they are to be classified from a gender/sex point of view. No problem in principle with that though I wouldn’t have thought it was on apartment with no Borders or no bosses.
Looks as if the trots think they have found another discontented group whose grievances they can exploit to win recruits or followers for their vanguard party.
However, this can’t be a proper “transitional demand” as it is something that capitalist states can grant and have in some places, the UK for instance where the “non-binaryists” are fighting not do much against the law as against some sections of public opinion (and some feminists)
