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Report on distribution in Yorkshire from Spintcom
Attended what was in fact public evening meetings in Sheffield , Doncaster and a afternoon meeting in Wakefield.
The Sheffield meeting attracted about 40 attendees with the advertised guest speaker a Lindsey German. Prior to the meeting starting the audience were informed that Lindsey would not be able to attend in person as she had been engaged in discussions with the Met’ Police in London regarding in the Stop the War rally scheduled for Saturday 11th.- she did however address the meeting via a link. The opportunity was taken to check out who Lindsey is and transpired she had previously been a member of the SWP for some 37 years sitting on their central committee before resigning and becoming a founder member of the Stop the War Coalition (STOC) eventually becoming the STOC convenor. This background gave a SWP flavour of how the meeting unfolded, primarily to get support for attending the rally in London with little mention of the real and primary cause of this conflict and others. When questioned on nationalism and capitalism the answer went along the lines of it was for the Palestinians’ to determine their homeland. 40 party leaflets or so were handed out.
Much the same thinking as had been outlined in Sheffield arose in Doncaster where about 25 people attended and the same in number of party leaflets handed out. The speaker in Doncaster was a Andrew Murray who had previously been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and then a member of the Communist Party of Britain and now a member of the Labour Party. On secondment from UNITE the union he had also been Special Political Adviser to Jeremy Corbyn for a couple of years and at one point Chair of STOC.
All in all the Doncaster and Sheffield meetings could well have been held by the SWP
The Wakefield meeting was a more constructive affair where the speaker a Adrian Cruden gave quite an extended history of the evolution of the origins in the creation of Israel and conflicts that had arisen for some 2000 years. The Q&A session after the address was also fruitful with a number of those present complimentary of the party leaflet of which again about 30 were handed out before the meeting reflecting the attendance.
And in Glasgow:
Had some positive reactions and interactions to the flyer, from fellow workers on the streets of Glasgow yesterday. One or two dodgy ones too! But overall very convivial and supportive of its content.
Well, the government has got rid of her. It was too much even for them to have a cabinet minister boasting of having family members serving in the Israeli armed forces and referring to Muslim demonstrations in London as “pollution”, precisely the language Hitler employed against the Jews. Maybe the police will get their revenge by charging her with using racially aggravated language. What a despicable character.
What we said in what we called a “Peace Manifesto” sent to an international conference of social democratic parties in June 1917 (and by published in the July 1917 Socialist Standard):
What interest have the Workers, then, in either starting or carrying on war for their masters? Absolutely none.
Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.The other leafletters also gave out their 300 leaflets in record time, one reporting:
“We could have got rid of twice the leaflets easily. I don’t think more than 5 people declined a leaflet. Many more came up and asked for them and several said they agreed with it, even one handing out a certain religious book (the front side anyway). Very few marchers had any other leaflets than ours.”
In all 1200 were distributed at the demonstration. A drop in the ocean of course seeing there were 300,000 demonstrators.
For the record, a further 100 were distributed outside head office and by a visitor on his way watch Millwall play Sheffield Wednesday. He said he would leave them on the train rather than hand them out at the match. Which seemed a wise decision.
A Western leader breaks ranks:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/frances-macron-urges-israel-stop-bombing-gaza-2023-11-10/
I can’t understand how anybody anywhere can support what the Israeli Attack Forces are doing in Gaza — deliberately targetting and cutting off supplies to hospitals and brazenly defending this on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction (or whatever) are hidden underneath them.
I don’t know what Macron’s motives are in publicly calling for a stop to the deliberate killing of babies and hospital patients but at least he is reflecting what most people are thinking.
The Jewish Nationalist government of Israel can’t call him an antisemite, though they might still deploy the self-hating Jew trope.
Nobody really supports what the IAF is doing to the population of Gaza. How can they without denying their humanity?
As socialists we don’t see Palestinians being bombed there but fellow workers and fellow human beings. The immediate interest of the working class is that the fighting stop unconditionally. It won’t, but at least we will have made our position clear.
More Remembrance Day hypocrisy.
What does the day mark? The anniversary of the armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended the First World War.
And what is an armistice?
“Armistice descends from Latin sistere, meaning “to come to a stand” or “to cause to stand or stop,” combined with arma, meaning “weapons.” An armistice, therefore, is literally a cessation of arms.”
So what is wrong with calling for an armistice on Armistice Day?
Remembrance Day hypocrisy. Will they be remembering the time when the Jewish Nationalists were terrorists killing British soldiers and hostages:
“The Sergeants affair was an incident that took place in Mandate Palestine in July 1947 during Jewish insurgency in Palestine, in which the Jewish underground group Irgun kidnapped two British Army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice, and threatened to hang them if the death sentences passed on three Irgun militants—Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, and Yaakov Weiss—were carried out. The three had been captured by the British during the Acre Prison break, tried, and convicted on charges of illegal possession of arms, and with ‘intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people’. When the three men were executed by hanging, the Irgun killed the two sergeants and hung their booby-trapped bodies in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya.
When the bodies were found, the booby trap injured a British officer as they were cut down. This act was widely condemned in both Palestine and the UK. After news of the deaths became widely known, some British troops and policemen went on rampages in Tel Aviv; five were killed and others wounded by the police, while anti-Jewish rioting broke out in some British cities.”https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
More on the “Jewish Insurgency” here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_insurgency_in_Mandatory_Palestine
Even the police are less belligerent than the Home Secretary. Cruella Braverman is denouncing the anti-Gaza demonstrations, especially the one planned for Saturday, as a “hate march”. To which the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, replies:
“‘I wouldn’t use one phrase to characterise 100,000 people,’ adding that many of those attending were pacifists who had a right to protest against Israel’s mass bombing of Gaza” (Times, 8 November).
This will be a fair assessment. The organisers and many on the demonstration will be pro-Palestine but others perhaps most will simply be protesting at the massacre of ordinary people in Gaza.
Actually, it is Braverman herself who is more probably motivated by hate. Here is what she told the Jewish Chronicle earlier this year:
“Part of the reason for her anger is that her husband, Rael, is Jewish. “The Jewish community is our community,” she said. “My husband is a proud Jew and Zionist.
“He’s lived in Israel. We have close family members who serve in the IDF. My children will be raised with a strong sense of Jewish values and their Jewish heritage. We enjoy Friday night dinners at our mother-in-law’s.
“I love Jewish culture and I have very much loved learning and embracing the Jewish way of life, and our children being raised with a very strong connection to it.” (https://www.thejc.com/news/politics/police-must-understand-that-jews-do-count-says-braverman-4Q7armNPfrgXcW2P2VIv65)This is not just taking sides with Israel for geopolitical reasons (counterweight to Iran to stop it gaining control of the Gulf, etc) which is the official government and Labour position. It’s an emotional commitment to the Zionist project. She clearly hates pro-Palestinians and is trying to use her position to further the cause of the Jewish nationalists who control the Israeli government by banning pro-Palestine demonstrations.
This must be unprecedented in British political history — a Cabinet minister acting as an agent of a “foreign” power. But of course that’s their problem not ours.
I went to a local meeting of the Stop the War group yesterday and bought a copy of “Socialist Appeal” to add to my collection of Trotskiana. It’s a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s — capitalism is on the brink, we must do something urgently, build a vanguard party, etc, etc.
On Gaza and Palestine they are calling for a popular uprising to overthrow the Israeli government and state which they hope will spread to other Arab states and lead to a “Socialist Federation of the Middle East” (which Trotsky probably mentioned in 1938).
The only interesting thing in it was this about Starmer:
“The only difference between him and Sunak is that he doesn’t have the keys to the war room just yet.”
Not bad. I think we can plagiarise that.
As I was in Waterstones yesterday I had a look inside the book by Rachel Reeves, the would-be future Chancellor of the Exchequer, on “The Women who Made Modern Economics”. I see it has a chapter on Rosa Luxemburg. Which would mean that if she actually read anything by her (which is by no means certain since she has been exposed as a common plagiarist) she might have some acquaintance with Marxian economics.
She ends the chapter by saying that she is a Fabian rather than a Marxist. But even that’s not true as the Fabians stood for state capitalism (run by them) while she stands just for the predominantly private enterprise capitalism that we know today — and is under the illusion that it can be made to serve the interests of the majority class of wage and salary earners. She is in for a shock.
Despite the unacceptable way in which he put it, he may have had a point about there being an economic rresources aspect. There have been some links on this thread about the gas field in that part of the Mediterranean as well as about pipelines from the Gulf passing through Israel instead of Syria and Lenanon.
There have been some developments since. We proposed a public debate on the matter to which they replied:
“Do you believe that a government that reflects your principles is the answer?
For us, any entity with power is to be avoided.
We’re not naive – to get to total individual responsibility, co-operation and everyone getting to keep what they earn and voluntarily help the community from here (“the government will take care of us” attitude) will take a few generations.
The problem with giving anyone power over others (even if it’s for good intentions) is that people always abuse power, without exception.
A debate might be interesting, though it would be better to have 2-4 from each position on a panel.”Watch this space to see if anything results.
On the other hand, I am not quite sure what century Elon Musk hails from with his odd assertion that AI will mean there will be no more work to be done but for some strange reason, money will persist and we will all enjoy a “Universal high income”
To be fair, I don’t think he meant “income” in a monetary sense but more in the sense of standard of living (what people use or consume). This in contrast to what the measly poverty-line “basic” income advocated by sundry reformists would buy.
Clarkson expressed the concept more clearly (assuming that he wrote it himself).
From the Wikipedia entry on the Home Secretary:
“She married Rael Braverman, a manager of the Mercedes-Benz Group, whom Braverman described as a “very proud member of the Jewish community”, in February 2018 at the House of Commons. Rael Braverman lived in Israel, and Suella Braverman told The Jewish Chronicle that she has “close family members who serve in the IDF”.
So she has relatives who serve in the Israeli killing machine. That no doubt explains her wish to ban pro-Palestine demonstrations but isn’t there some rule that you have to declare an interest if you are personally involved in something you have to take a decision on? In any event, the police are not taking notice of her ravings.
That passage from Antonio Domene about “Knowing the Zionists’ greed for power and money” seems rather anti-semitic. Why single out the Jewish nationalists (Zionists) for this when it applies to all capitalist states? It sounds as if he means “knowing the Jews’ greed for power and money”. Which is definitely anti-semitic.
