A Call on May 1st to Revolutionary Socialists of Our Region

For many readers in the UK, this May 1st may arrive through a cloud of despair, a painful reminder of the apparent failures of the Corbyn process. The feeling of social isolation imposed by COVID-19 (worsened by the Tory government’s expected mismanagement of public health) only increases the feeling for revolutionary socialists that we are scattered and weak against a strong and united Westminster regime.

In spite of this, we remain hopeful now more than ever. The sheer scale of the Corbyn process and the utter lack of compromise from the ruling classes (from the government to the Labour Party leadership) has the potential not only to demoralise, but to harden the resolve and sharpen the perspective of many of the youth who first cut their teeth organising for Corbyn. Outside of the Labour Party, we see a growing consciousness of the real role of the Labour Party in consequence to the suppression and decline of relatively principled reformism. This is an important step for a generation of young people towards real revolutionary consciousness.

May 1st is a day which extolls the virtues of unity of the working classes, whose conscious political identity is the revolutionary proletariat. While it is true that this unity is not, in an immediate objective sense, in our hands, we offer a perspective, a call to our friends around the region and around the world, that might serve as a foundation for a real political unity.

The United Kingdom is at a historical crossroads. Leaving the European Union was a result of the ongoing crisis of capitalism-imperialism: the ruling classes of diverse countries are feeling the competition between them ever more sharply. The Westminster regime is willing to sacrifice some of its international good will in order to tighten control of its “home” territory. Obviously, this can mean greater danger for the workers and oppressed in this territory, particularly the political organised and the socially marginalised, the radicals and the scapegoats. However, it also opens up new problems for the regime:

Firstly, it is a well-known fact, much publicised on both sides of the Irish Sea, that the Good Friday Agreement has been jeopardised by the arrogance of Westminster and Stormont towards the occupied north of Ireland. The six counties, long thought a resolved question not only by the ruling classes in Britain, but by Irish liberals, are again a site of political concern, with Unionist and Republican political actors in the news with a frequency and seriousness not seen for years. Additionally, the partition line (“border”) with the Free State regime in the south brings the UK into continued economic confrontation not only with the Free State ruling classes (themselves facing significant dissent “from the left”, which has provoked an unprecedented unity of the right wing of the Oireachtas), but with EU imperialism which will seek to use them as a pawn against British imperialism.

The class-conscious proletariat does not take the side of British or EU imperialism against one another, knowing as we do that imperialism (as the highest stage of capitalism) is in fact the most powerful, longest-lasting means of capitalist exploitation and dominance. We know that any pleas from the EU against Westminster’s regional bullying are flimsy pretexts to carry on peaceful conflict between Brussels and London. Nothing could lay this fact more bare than nearby France, one of the most powerful economies and states in the EU, which has been most brutal in its violence against migrants and refugees, and has been among the most oppressive in its “democratic” treatment of “indigenous” minority nations, such as the Bretons. However, on both sides of the Irish Sea, the most powerful and immediate enemy of all workers and oppressed is British capital and British imperialism, based out of Westminster and looming over Ireland from Stormont. The ruling classes in all countries in this region can be most effectively fought once this fact is soberly grasped: the ruling classes in the Free State need to hold back the completion of the Irish Revolution because it was on this basis that they haggled their power. The ruling classes in Britain fear the finishing of the revolution that began in 1916 because it will be the most humiliating blow to their “local” and international imperialist position.

Secondly, British imperialism faces a threat even on the island of Great Britain itself: the impetus the crisis has imposed on the ruling classes of every country to tighten control of whatever territory they control has strengthened the hand of Scottish nationalists across the political spectrum. Just as Westminster now tries to take back its partial peace agreement with the occupied population in the north of Ireland, they attempt to deny the Scottish people the democratic right to self-determination. The Scottish ruling classes, being weaker both within the union and on the international scale than the English ruling classes, overwhelmingly opposed Brexit from the beginning, where the English ruling classes were known to have been strongly divided. While anti-imperialism is not about side-choosing, but about combatting imperialism as a stage of capitalism, it is objectively an act of defence of English capital to stand on the sidelines as the ruling classes in England seek to trample over the Scottish people’s rights. Only a firm defence of the equal national rights of the Scottish and Welsh peoples up to and including the right to self-determination can truly reflect the international perspective of our class.

Thirdly and most importantly, even if Ireland were reunited and all of the island of Great Britain shared a single national identity, it would only be an island country in a literal, geographic sense. Even if the EU continues to crumble, Britain is right next door to a powerful imperialist rival and crucial trading partner in France.

On May 1st, it would be good for revolutionary socialists in Great Britain in particular to remember our southern neighbours. The French penchant for strike actions is the most obvious point of reference on this day. Despite syndicalist and reformist limitations, particularly situated as they are in a left political culture which has trended towards nationalist reformism ever more dangerously since the end of the student protest movement of the 1960s, the French working classes are far advanced of most Anglo countries in their willingness and ability to organise in defence of their interests. In a time when NHS workers and service industry workers are risking their lives under appalling conditions which show no signs of improving under such a right-wing government, in the face of a sharp right turn by the only electoral alternative, we in Britain must not shrink back from the crucial work of organising labour in its immediate form to use the most powerful weapon in their hands: the ability to cut into profits.

Further, although not nearly so successful as the Irish Republican movement in threatening the imperialist state which oppresses it, we have in nearby Brittany the example of the Breton nationalist movement, whose relative radicalism can serve as a powerful example to the rebel youth in Wales and Scotland in particular. Revolutionary socialists of all national backgrounds ought to share a perspective of the unity of oppressed peoples in struggle against their oppressors, against the imperialist world-system which has held back their liberation. To those who would downplay the significance of this or that national question in the fight for socialist, we remind them of the wise words of Comrade Engels:

““Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims.””

For revolutionary socialists of oppressed and minority national background, the struggle against their “own” bourgeoisie cannot be carried out as in a vacuum from the threat of British imperialism and its immediate political dominance in our region. To quote the IRSP's Naomi Brennan:

““[We] realized that to have national freedom, we must have socialism, and that, also to have any chance of socialism, we must have national freedom.””

Indeed, the cause of socialism is the cause of all liberation: it is not only the case that for the individual victim of oppression on the basis of nationality, gender, disability, etc. their capacity to grasp a universal proletarian consciousness they must, in an immediate sense, perceive the world through the lens of their particular oppression. It is also conversely the case that to achieve a universal and revolutionary proletarian consciousness means to articulate the universal liberation of all proletarians. Thus do we affirm, that in order to really achieve each liberation, we must have a movement that really stands for the liberation of all, and that, also to have any chance of really liberating all, we must really stand for the liberation of each.

May 1st is a day to proclaim our commitment to the workers of the world, in all of their multifaceted particularities. May 1st is a day that transcends borders and offers hope to the exploited that together they are strong. Let the disheartened youth know that it was not Corbyn which gave them power, but they who gave Corbyn power. Let the toilers risking their health during this pandemic know that their tormentors are few and they are many.

Our movement’s internationalism and universality must be made manifest here in our own region: the proletariat are not “British labour” or union “leadership”. The proletariat are a material class which we can discover in the reality of social relations, and can emerge as a political subject to confront them. The proletariat are the migrant workers who lived at the mercy of the EU yesterday and at the mercy of the Brexit regime today. The proletariat are the refugees, the racialised minorities, the trans youth, and the disabled. The proletariat are retail workers, fast food workers, transport workers, office workers, NHS workers, sex workers, and so many others. The proletariat are all of these, brought together, those who have nothing to lose but their chains, throwing themselves together against their bondage and in rage at their tormentors.

On this day as all other days, we affirm that those who say otherwise seek nothing less than the division of the real proletariat, the strengthening of the hand of bourgeois oppression, and the prolongation of class society. If we find within ourselves an identification with the forces of reaction against the oppressed and exploited, we find within ourselves the very enemy that it is our creed to defeat.

The Lever does not exist to gain hangers on who will stroke our egos and show up in London on May 1st with a great red banner. The Lever exists as a call to our class, to all of our real friends, to raise up all forms of struggle which are bubbling beneath the surface in our region: from Belfast to Birmingham, from Brittany to Bangor.

Our humble task is to serve as one of the voices crying for the unity of all workers and oppressed. We hope that all revolutionary, socialist, democratic, and progressive forces in our region will be in touch with us in a comradely and critical fashion with the aim of building common popular institutions of our class. We again emphasise our particular perspective of the need for a smaller, accountable, organised, and theoretically rigorous vanguard organisation for the struggles to come.

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!

The Lever Editorial Group

Post-Corbyn: Reaction and the Limits of Electoralism

The 12th of December marked a devastating defeat in the General Election for the Labour Party. This election campaign can be seen as the culmination of the process of resurrection of the British left as a real political force which began with the 2010 student movement and subsequent anti-austerity movements. The scale of this defeat will require a great deal of examination - not just with regards to the strategies and tactics employed by the Labour Party during this election, but also to take into account the historical processes which lead us to this juncture. 

One remarkable element of this election campaign was the unity of the competing factions of the ruling class against the Corbyn project. The argument between the two wings of capital over strategies for accumulation - represented by their position over the EU - was over. Corbyn's industrial strategy based on infrastructure investment was decisively rejected. Both the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ wings of the British ruling class opted for an accumulation strategy based on the cannibalisation of the state and proletarianisation. Capital was unified, labour was divided.

On the morning of the 13th, the markets opened to great celebration, the pound was up against the dollar, the Corbyn threat had passed. Boris Johnson’s newly unified Conservative Party, backed by a newly unified capital, plan to implement not only their Brexit deal, but the most reactionary political programme in a generation.

We also saw the SNP win nearly all Scottish constituencies, and for the first time nationalists winning a majority of seats in the North of Ireland, hastening the breakup of the United Kingdom.

The left, defeated, now faces a discussion about strategy and tactics both within and without the Labour Party. The key question is: where do we go from here? The reactionaries see their opportunity, and we need to see a clear path ahead.

Against a 'Blue' Labour

In the wake of Labour’s election defeat, despite bringing in a greater percentage of votes than the considerably more centrist Miliband incarnation of the party, the narratives throughout the media are abound that there’s just no place for left-wing politics in Britain. Immediately ceding ground to the convenient narratives of the bourgeoisie are many so called revolutionary communists! Indeed many within our movement have been more than eager to fall behind the rhetoric of creating a ‘Blue’ Labour, an approach to socialism that maintains “socialist” economics while leaving every reactionary social tendency intact. That associates ‘liberalism’ with the oppressed struggle against their oppressors, and that it was marginalised people from London who lost this election for Labour.

This is both a strategy and a statement of intent. It is a strategy in that they imagine ceding ground to reaction, tailing behind the masses and indulging their worst impulses, will lead to an electoral victory for the Labour party.

But who is dramatically overrepresented in the poorest segments of the working class? Who has the most immediate material interest in vast systemic change? Who has made up large swathes of the grassroots organising that allowed Labour to get anywhere near as far as it did in such a relentlessly hostile political and media environment? Was it homophobes and racist or was it marginalised people, many of whom have been invested in radical politics since many of these ghouls were telling everyone we just have to compromise and support Blair to keep the Tories out? 

We have never won a single thing from ceding ground to the forces of reaction. Not one. 

This whole approach fails to address the profound changes in the makeup of the working class of this country. The movement of many ‘working class’ voters from the Labour Party was a product of decades of profound class struggle waged against the working class and their institutions. Centralised means of production have been replaced by disparate, low paid warehouse, call centre, care, and gig economy work. New forms of work create new forms of worker. And new workers can be made into new electorates. Shorn from centralised industrial production and the suppression of its attendant forms of working class organisation, the inherent conservatism of the 20th century labour movement is able to survive where a politics of solidarity dies. As a result, our class is more fragmented and diverse than ever before, and elements within it more prone to reaction. It is our task unify these fragments, not by tailing the reactionary elements, but by uniting the advanced, developing the intermediate, and winning over the backward.

It is unsurprising that a Brexit which wrapped itself in all the mainstays of political reaction directed at the working class by the media for decades won when all those same tropes were used to attack a newly left-wing Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. We cannot begin again by incorporating these tropes into our politics. As we have stated before, 'Fascism isn’t about the hearts of individuals, it is a strategy for taking state power...We must ask “what forces, institutions, and projects, whether political, social or economic, are attacked or promoted when certain words are uttered’ and most importantly, what class is leading this, and who stands to benefit.' The ideological system of reaction which produced this moment was sewn together over many years, by many different means, to manufacture support for the institutions of the imperialist British state and British capital. We can not turn this to our advantage without also pledging our support and ultimately furthering the aims of the British state and British capital. This may be an acceptable electoral strategy for the Labour Party (and indeed has been one for most of its existence), but it will never be one for those of us who seek the true liberation of working and oppressed people, and who seek to build a new society in the ruins of the old. This ideological system of reaction was brought in to service more feverishly in this election than at any other moment since the miners’ strike. The crucial lesson we must re-learn from this election is that any increase in the class struggle will be met with an increase in political repression.

We must ask ourselves who has more interest in building power to survive and fight back against the increasingly far right austerity and bigotry of the Conservatives, the crushing oppression of capitalism itself, than queer people who are brutally economically marginalised and overrepresented in the homeless population? Than disabled people who have been dying by the thousands under the boot of dehumanising cuts? Than Jews whose oppression has been made into a convenient political bludgeon? Than Muslims who have been dehumanised and scapegoated at every stage of the Brexit crisis? Than Roma who are facing new laws that will grant the state even greater powers to attack and rob them? Anyone who tells you that these people need to sit down and shut up is pitching you on the politics of uselessness. Class society intertwines with every axis of oppression, to be a revolutionary is to fight it on every front, not just the one that doesn’t challenge you to investigate your own bigotry.

The dire situation of austerity and increased proletarianisation will only grow over the next Conservative parliament, as will attendant attacks on the oppressed engineered to further divide our cause and out class. Indeed, this is largely what the architects of Brexit desire - an tax haven off the coast of Europe where workers, social, and environmental rights are crushed, and where resistance is scattered by the winds of reaction.

The ruling class, capital, and all their mouthpieces in the media have made their intervention. Where and how shall we make ours?

The Limits Of Electoralism

Many were disappointed by Labour’s loss, ourselves included. It would be disingenuous to take an oversimplified “All parties are equally bad because they’re all bourgeois” position, the reforms that Labour was aiming to implement would have given many vulnerable people in our society a substantial relief from the unyielding pressures of austerity. Many of us are stunted in our ability to educate and organise by spending most of our waking hours on survival, by not being able to afford to get around as public transport fares rise and rise and our wages stay the same. By enduring the damage to our physical and mental health as long hours and soaring rents take so much from us. It’s a wonder so many of us have anything left to give to the class struggle.

For these reasons we condemn no one for strategically participating in the electoral process. However it is more stark than ever that the class solidarity of the bourgeoisie is too significant a force to defeat on a battlefield in which they set all the rules, and hold all the cards. We must look beyond reform and ask what we can do to counteract the struggles described above. Can we run programs that help meet people’s basic needs so they can spend less time surviving and more time building? Can we educate each other effectively so that the unaffordability of university does not hinder our class’ drive to grow, learn, and flourish? 

With these efforts, we must go further than we have before. Food Banks alone do not create class consciousness. Providing basic needs, when not coupled with political intervention, leadership, and most importantly, appropriate organisational structure, creates passive political subjects. Central to these efforts must be the production - through confrontation with capital and the state - new, active political subjects who are able to take action on their own behalf.

If you can imagine a world beyond capitalism. If you can imagine a world where we control our own destiny, the answer to those questions has to be yes. Imagine if even half the resources, time, and energy invested in the electoral process throughout the frequent elections these past few years was put towards those ends instead. Towards things that a Tory victory can’t undo.

This is not an argument for a mass exodus from the Labour Party. Ever since our projects inception, we have maintained the necessity of work both within and without the Labour Party, with a focus on extra-parliamentary organisation.

The mass movement which has grown within the Labour Party cannot be allowed to fragment, either through internal division or through repression and expulsion of the left by the right of the party seen in the 80s. The election drew the collective energies of thousands, and produced a platform which encompassed the dreams of many. We must also note that (bar from a few notable exceptions) the energy of the new movement around Corbyn has been directed solely at maintaining Corbyn’s leadership against attacks from the media and the right wing of the party through the parties institutions, whilst also dealing with the moderating effects of the large unions on policy and internal democratic structures. Whilst the gains made within the party cannot be lost, there must be a strategy to consolidate and remove the institutional blocks and ‘moderating’ influences which only seek to keep the movement divided. Now is not the time for capitulation to ‘moderation’ on any front. The Conservative Party has thrown away moderation, capital calls for an end to any ‘moderation’ shown in the years of austerity. The newly unified forces of reaction intend to wage a class war sharper and more open than before. We must meet them in kind.

Our task now, is not to let the dreams of emancipation which fuelled the Corbyn movement wither in defeat. We must steel ourselves, and divert these energies into building real counter-power, into long term revolutionary institutions, to re-build a base for an emancipatory politics, and one that can be lead into a revolutionary confrontation with the current system.

We are not alone. Across the world, in countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, India, Kurdistan, Turkey, and many others, the masses are confronting the capitalist-imperialist system and sweeping reaction in their own social contexts. Bringing unity through common struggle here is but one part of building unity with the working and oppressed people of the world. The cause of liberation has suffered many setbacks. On the eve of the Great War, one of the greatest defeats our movement has ever known, no one knew that already historical forces had been unleashed which would lead to our historic victory in 1917. We may have lost, but we have never been vanquished and we have but a world to win.

- The Lever Editorial Group

On Criticising Past Socialist Projects

 - by Kay

Before we can engage with the challenge of analysing past socialist projects in the internet era we must first look at the way the internet, and social media specifically influences the way we discuss politics and history. In an environment dominated by character limits and people often just reading headlines before deciding what they think about something, many political stances are not explorations of the topic, but statements of intent.

Let’s use the USSR as an example. If a person believes the USSR was generally a positive thing in the 20th century, even if they are willing to accept that it failed in some places, it can still be much easier for them to concisely display their support of the USSR via pithy statements such as “Stalin did nothing wrong” to align yourself with other people who support the USSR. Likewise, if another person views USSR as a revisionist distortion of the goals set out by the revolution, but is still prepared to acknowledge some areas where it succeeded, it can still be much easier to align themselves with people who do not support the USSR and/or hold anti-authoritarian stances with their own one liners about “Tankies” and “Red Fascists”.

Now that we’ve each picked our teams we can begin the work of selectively trawling for information on the USSR to find ammunition with which to attack the enemy team, proving once and for all that the Soviet Union was either a perfect utopia or a giant death camp. Things are either Good or Bad and once you decide which thing is which the discussion kind of has itself.

A problem of the internet era is that for nearly any stance, there exists evidence in support of it, if you simplify the stance enough. If your stance is “USSR Good” you can quote any number of quality of life improvements (reduction of homelessness, progress in women’s rights) and be technically correct. If your stance is “USSR Bad” you can quote the wholesale deportation of specific nationalities. Also technically correct.

This is reinforced by the argument style we apply to currently living people. If you can provide evidence of a person doing or saying something bigoted or otherwise harmful you now have a source in your back pocket and can freely respond to any mention of that person with “X is problematic because Y” and be technically correct. The thing with random celebrities who say racist shit is they are: a) individuals, b) given an opportunity to respond to these criticisms with the possibility of positive change and aiming to make amends as well as the possibility of doubling down or outright denial.

Applying this same way of thinking to, say, the leader of a party with membership numbering in the millions at the head of a country made up of a complex bureaucratic network and declaring, with the benefit of hindsight, that something they did was harmful or generally a failure, therefore “USSR bad” is not a helpful way to view history, and with these men long dead and unable to actually respond to these criticisms (and they are often valid criticisms, though some may be ahistorical) it doesn’t have the same possibility of positive improvement that it does when applied to a living person.

We need to let go of the concept of past socialist states and leaders being Good or Bad and accept them for what they are: a massive resource of lessons (both positive and negative) to take forward in the struggle to build socialism and oppose the stranglehold of global capitalism. As well as an attempt (with varying degrees of success) to actualize the will of that country's proletariat, for better or worse. No socialist project exists in isolation (philosophical, economic, geographic, or historical). The ideas of their time and their people will have an impact on them and some of those ideas WILL be wrong, and even dangerous. We need to deprioritize scoring Gotcha Points on dead men (it’s worth noting just how many of them ARE men) and constructively analyse the environment that breeds such policies.

Having established what sort of criticisms are NOT useful we now need to look at what kind of criticisms ARE useful.

As Marxists we have a question that we must ask of socialist projects first and foremost. What is their approach to the contradictions of class society? This should be the starting point of asking the second question, and the question that matters much more than applying some moralistic Bad or Good status: Are they building socialism? Building socialism will not always look the same, it will not be without setbacks, and it will be imperfect. The goal is not perfection, the goal is to build a better world by ending class contradictions by bringing the struggle between classes to its natural conclusion: the withering away of classes. Taking a single failure and reasoning that this project has therefore failed is to not accept the fact that socialism is built in the real world, by real, fallible people, and it is to assume that any mistakes suddenly render the progress made in the struggle for liberation somehow irrelevant. Some failures reverse the direction of travel of the class struggle and others do not.

What does it look like when a socialist project is taking an approach to the class struggle that does not aim to progress toward that ultimate goal of elimination of class society, therefore descending into revisionism? Continuing to use the USSR as an example we can learn a lot about the face of revisionism from the likes of Nikita Khrushchev, who proposed a policy of “Peaceful Coexistence” between the proletariat and capitalist classes, both in individual countries and globally, and asserted that revolution could be carried out without violence, through the ballot box, with the approval of the state.

History has, of course, undone that sort of wishful thinking, but its indicative of an abandonment of the most fundamental principle of building socialism: The goal is to end class society. The class in power, the bourgeoisie, will not allow this to happen peacefully and uninterfered with, as has been demonstrated by the Cold War itself and countless coups, propaganda campaigns, and outright military opposition. Khrushchev’s proposition was, in effect, to put the class struggle on the back burner and prioritise the strengthening the USSR's productive capacities from within; and while still espousing "revolution" but only on terms that the ruling classes of other countries knew were generally doomed to failure or at best reformism in order to develop better ties with the imperialist powers, headed by the USA.

To criticize a socialist project for not completing the massive undertaking of transforming their entire society and production model within your personal timeline is not a good faith engagement with the struggles we face in the fight against capitalism. However, criticizing a socialist project for stunting that development and deprioritizing the class struggle in order to play at conventional global power politics, which they would ultimately go on to lose (inevitably, as the terms of these power politics are dictated by capitalism) is completely justified.

A socialist project demonising other oppressed groups, or agricultural reforms which when improperly implemented add to the immense hardship and starvation caused by drought can be cause for criticism but is not always cause for abandonment. It is important that we be critical and understand both where socialist projects have gone wrong, and also, where in spite of this, their role in historical context is still worth defending. Most importantly, we must remain conscious of the difference between an error and a betrayal of the revolution, even where there is a relationship between the two. Failure should be an indictment reserved for cases where direction of class struggle has actually been reversed.

The failures of socialist projects, especially when it comes to replicating oppression based on sexuality and race, often mirror the same trends in capitalist nations of the time. Communism is not the inverse of capitalism. It is the progression beyond the class contradictions that prevent our society from flourishing. A revolution will take on aspects of the society that birthed it, for better or worse. The continuation of such bigotries are to be corrected, not used as a bludgeon to beat down efforts at socialism and allow capitalist powers, who have no love for those oppressed groups, to further their global hegemony.

We must always strive to learn from the mistakes of our past, but we must also learn from our successes. We have an incredible history of proletarian struggle, a history we should be proud of. We cannot allow bourgeois idealism to prevent us upholding our greatest victories just because we have also known failure.

Embracing ''The Other'' - Islam and the Left

Picture: İhsan Eliaçık leads the 'Antikapitalist Müslüman Gençler' [Anticapitalist Muslim Youth] in Friday Prayers during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013.

by Muhsin Yorulmaz

The following is a response to Matt Hrkac's piece for Green Left Weekly, ""Take a stand against the mainstreaming of racism".

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I recently read Matt Hrkac's piece for Green Left Weekly, "Take a stand against the mainstreaming of racism". I wanted to applaud the piece's connection of the bourgeois press to the rise of hate speech directed against racial and religious minorities in Australia. Like Yassir Morsi's piece for the Guardian, it highlights a worrying and fascistic trend which is being "allowed" to grow thanks to the "tolerance" of the bourgeois press towards such views (a tolerance never afforded to communists or others on the "extreme" left).

Australia is known around the English-speaking world for the nonchalance and lack of apologetic attitude with which it regards its own extremely racist settler-colonial history and a fascistic attitude towards immigrants which is born out of this white supremacist history. But if Australia is quantitatively more racist than the US or Canada, this difference is not yet qualitative. Therefore, despite not being an Australian in any sense myself, my own experience in the Turkish community in the US and my time in the "motherland" of Turkey does give me some insight into the "problems" of anti-immigrant racism and Islamophobia in Australia.

Matt Hrkac concludes his piece with a message which is both hopeful and practical, allow me to quote at length:

“We must not fall into the trap of talking only among ourselves, whether that is on social media, or in our day-to-day lives.

When millions of working people are doing it tough, and the right is providing scapegoats, the left must put forward real solutions and direct people’s rising anger towards those who are really making their lives a misery — the government and their hired minions in the media.

The time to stand up and fight back is now.”

Definitely this is true, and it is a message which first of all resonates with me as a part of the Turkish left, who find ourselves repeating similar messages against the campaigns of hate by the fascist Turkish regime against Christians and Alawites in particular. While Sunnite Turks are driven towards an orgy of hatred for the identitarian "other" who supposedly "betray" Turkey, they save themselves from association with the forces of "treason" and "terrorism" on the political left, but at the cost of any ability to take a stand against their "co-religionist""compatriot" bourgeoisie. As the AKP clique line their pockets, building a palace for Erdoğan in the midst of a deepening crisis and rising unemployment and debt, the only forces who speak of a meaningful alternative, are precisely the socialist left who defend the Kurdish people, Alawites, women, LGBT, Armenians, etc. from the hateful and fascist rhetoric of the Turkish government. This goes even for the most reformist elements, such as the mainstream and Turkish nationalist CHP. The entire CHP is united in word in its hatred for Erdoğan, but it is ONLY those elements within the CHP who are brave enough to defend the HDP and the Kurdish movement against the fascist rhetoric of the government (rather than buckling to it like the buffoonish party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu or the cowardly presidential candidate Muharrem İnce) who have the vision to to speak most clearly of a worker's movement to attack both the fascist ruling classes and the crisis which creates and was created by them. One cannot accept Erdoğan's rules and expect a fair game, and this is what those who think we should exercise "caution" in speaking up for the rights of minorities and their resistance fail to see.

It is precisely by embracing "the other" that we can begin to imagine a universality of struggle that embraces the totality of the working class. This is no different in the US, this is certainly no different in Australia.

When I write these words, I know those reading it will broadly agree. When it comes to anti-racist rhetoric, the Australian left is well versed in opposition to the Pauline Hansons and in empathy for the targets of the hate speech of people like her. However, there is something which has bothered me for years as someone living in a diaspora Muslim community about the way in which Islam is treated by the left in English-speaking countries.

Naturally I am not about to insult the intelligence of the reader by playing the role of the neoliberal shill Mohammad Tawhidi and suggest that we must recognise some unique threat to Islam, nor am I going to imply that there are no efforts to drive Islamophobes out of the movement in Australia. My concern is a somewhat more nuanced one, which is the sort of positive, almost fetishistic way in which Islam is regarded by non-Muslim leftists in majority non-Muslim countries.

Islam, in short, is rather boringly like Christianity or Judaism. This is something we are all well-versed in pointing out when people rail against "the Muslims" in a way they would not (usually, although this is tragically becoming less certain of late as well) rail against "the Jews", or when people are made uncomfortable by public displays of religiosity by a Muslim minority than they are by the Christian majority, who necessarily have more economic, political, and cultural power. But it is equally true within a given community, outside of the question of bigotry. Many "western" leftists attempt to uniquely court Muslims through the medium of Islam, or attempt to identify with Muslim figures or political trends they would reject or ignore if they came from a non-Muslim community, such as the Chinese.

For example, at least prior to the Rojava Revolution, I bore witness to dozens of white US leftists who would "critically" defend Erdoğan "against Israel", despite his government's ongoing agreements (including military agreements) with Israel. One can still see the same sort of support for various conservative Muslim groups with ties to Gulf oil money simply because of some vague belief that they are "democratic" and "anti-Zionist". How many of these leftists would fawn over a right-wing Latin American president offering some criticism of Israel's abhorrent war crimes, which are naked for the whole world to see? No, in Latin America, these leftists see the class contradictions which lurk behind the lying rhetoric of bourgeois politicians.

I am not denying for a second the strong role that Islam plays in Muslim societies. During Gezi we all saw it with our own eyes, as many religious yet politically progressive youth grouped themselves around İhsan Eliaçık (who presently is not allowed to travel outside of Istanbul within Turkey for his comparison of the trench resistance by the PKK to the Battle of the Trench waged by the Prophet Muhammad and his disciples). We saw that religious Muslims, who, broadly defined, are the majority in Turkish society, would bring food and otherwise aid resisters, and even the muezzin in an Istanbul mosque sheltered the resisters from the Turkish police, as well as went on record defending the protesters from the religiously motivated slander of the AKP. But none of these things are different to how things actually function in a Christian society. We have seen in many Catholic societies priests who sheltered leftists and aided the cause of human liberation, as well as fascist and abuser priests close to the bourgeois state.

This is what we mean when we speak about class. We are none of us, who are really honest, trying to reduce everything to paycheques and job titles. Capitalism does that. We are the ones who speak of the liberation of the human life and spirit, the passing over from necessity into freedom. But in class society, in our diverse social experiences, the universal that we all experience is something which we can call "class". As Matt Hrkac puts it, "we must not fall into the trap of talking only among ourselves", and when we go out to the masses, we can and must use class to expose the hatemongering fascists in every society, to expose the lie of common interests between racist politicians and workers who, out of lack of social experience and fear, are hostile to "the other". But I hope that white Australian leftists do not imagine their only task is to organise white, Christian Australian workers and ask them to leave minorities be.

We also want to organise "the other", because if our values are universal, we see our reflection in "the other" and we want them to see their reflection in us. "The people" whose "rising anger" we must "direct", to which Matt Hrkac refers, surely this includes all kinds of people. We must be equally comfortable in a mosque as in a church as in a gay bar as in a student dormitory. When white Australian leftists meet Australian Muslims, they must not "tolerate" them. They must find a way to identify with them, and make them identify with them in return. These communities are themselves divided on the basis of class, and can be united in struggle with other immigrant communities of different faiths, with the white Australian proletariat, and with the downtrodden Aboriginal people.

I write these words in a dark hour for the Turkish left. Many of our cadres sit in jail. We have given many martyrs over the past few years alone. The state has carpet bombed Kurdish cities to no outrage by the Turkish masses at large, who are fearful of being identified with the "terrorists". And yet we are still hopeful. Our people are back out in the streets for the recently passed Eid distributing propaganda against the regime's attempts to make the poor pay for the crisis while offering them nothing but empty holiday wishes and nationalist lies.

The situation in Australia is better, for now. The fascist tide is still weak, as the economy is much stronger. I know that there are many people reading this who sympathise with what I have to say, and who are worried about the ticking clock imposed by crisis and environmental catastrophe. I hope that interested comrades will reach out to us, our organisations and our communities, and I work to make sure our people do the same. Crisis and danger lurks around the corner, but at the same time, it is inspiring some of the best in our collective action and thinking. I hope this crisis brings us closer together.

"The time to stand up and fight back is now."

How many nations live in England?

by Anthony Jones

Officially, the United Kingdom presently recognises four constituent “home” countries, three of which  (Wales, Scotland, and the occupied six counties in the North of Ireland) are in fact under the open economic and sometimes covert political domination of Westminster, which serves as the political head of England, whose capital, London, is also the capital of the whole United Kingdom.

With the national identity and economic life of England being so strongly identified with the British state as such, “the English” are objectified in the “oppressor nation” role within the UK and around the world through British imperialism. “The English people” fill the same role for the UK and British imperialism that “the French people” fill with regard to the French state and its domestic and foreign policies.

It is the tendency of imperialism to create through the internationalisation of the productive process “oppressor nations” and “oppressed nations”. In contrast to the Three World Theory, we do not hold that this means that these national formations are no longer actually divided on a class basis. It was the Leninist assumption from the beginning that in spite of the power of imperialist to “nationalise” class struggle, the national struggles could never be fully extricated from the class dynamics. From the perspective of the proletariat of the oppressed nation, they experience their class oppression through the lens of the extra oppression and exploitation they receive as members of, for example, the Irish nation. From the perspective of the proletariat of the oppressor nation, however, they can conceive of the totality of the position of their class by identifying with the oppressed nation’s proletariat.

In this sense, Marxists even unfamiliar with British politics could easily say that the truly class conscious English proletariat ought to identify with the struggle against British imperialism, a principled unity in struggle against the capitalist-imperialist ruling class in Westminster. But in the UK, it has for some time been an implicit assumptionthat there is no national question on the island of Britain itself. It is very easy from Wales or Scotland to counter that, in fact, the Welsh and Scottish are separate nations from the English.

But it is not our goal here to enter into polemics on the Welsh national question, a debate which we consider very clearly resolved: there is a Welsh nation, with a territory and language, and a right to self-determination, which is being oppressed by England. The more interesting point is this: it was only by an ongoing process of nascent struggle by the Welsh people ourselves that Wales was again recognised as a country in its own right, separate from England, as it was insultingly considered a part of until the 1960s. We have won this debate in practice, and the Welsh people continue to struggle for our own future. No, magnanimously, in an internationalist spirit, it is our intention here to return to the question of England and ask how many nations live in England today?

Cornwall

Cornwall is a small national territory, south of Wales, and created by the expansion of the Kingdom of England over indigenous British territory. By the time of capitalism’s development and with it, the development of nations, the remnants of the British tribes on the island who began to develop something like a national consciousness were cut off from one another. The larger group became the Welsh of today, and the territory in question is clear. The smaller group, in Cornwall, spoke a closely related language which was dying out already by the time of the industrial revolution, and the policy of linguistic genocide applied by the English rulers in Wales to some success easily destroyed Cornish entirely.

Linguistic revival attempts are ongoing, but the Cornish still have a clear territory of their own, and a distinct economic life typical of small colonies of Westminster and its imperialist domination. The Cornish disparagingly refer to their neighbours to the east as “Emmets”, and a small national liberation movement exists, albeit even weaker than the one in Wales.

As political development continues throughout the crisis and takes increasingly national form on the island, it is possible the Cornish will experience a considerable growth in national consciousness, that the autonomist and secessionist movements will gain followers and reshape the economic and social dynamics in this territory. It is also possible that their weak cultural, economic, and political position will cause them to gradually identify with their long-lost cousins, the Welsh, or with the English people who currently dominate them.

It is up to the Cornish to decide what sort of national future they envision for themselves, but it is in our interest as revolutionaries to defend their right to resist the assimilatory politics of England, late though it may be, and it is in anti-imperialist terms clearly advantageous to us if the Cornish begin to sever ties with England.

The other Englands

The most salient division in England is that between the north and the south, with the southerners generally being the more bourgeois and mainstream and the north being the more economically disadvantaged and “otherised” culturally. But this does not mean that the north and the south of England constitute two separate nations. The north and south of Wales are likewise culturally, linguistically, and economically different, but it is no one’s view that there are two Welsh nations as a result. As far as it is normal within any country, it is not surprising that the English or the Welsh might display some quantitative differences in national cultural and politico-economic standing that does not carry over into a qualitative difference of being two separate national populations (of north and south).

So as much as we might relish the idea of dividing England after their bourgeoisie has done everything in their power to assimilate us into the culture of capitalist English modernity, it is of course up to the groups living in England today to resist this process and lay claim to an alternative future.

It does so happen that there are some such trends already, and it should not surprise us to find them in the north of England where local culture was not as quickly or as definitively bound into the new metropolitan English culture that became dominant in the era of imperialism. Each of these, like the Cornish national movement, may end up failing, and the people may choose instead an “English” identity, or some other one. But we should be aware of these trends, in touch with their proponents, and able to provide a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the concrete reality of these potential national struggles.

There exists a “North East Party” movement, which seems to seek autonomy for what is effectively the parts of Northumbria that fell under English rule. The historical context is telling: such a movement could easily eventually choose union with Scotland as conflict between England and Scotland grows, or it could present a “wedge” role, or it may remain satisfied with a certain autonomy of a non-”national” character within England.

Also in the north is Yorkshire, who have their own “Yorkshire Party”, but even without it, Yorkshire’s strong attachment to their regional identity is well known. In short it might be said that the entire north of England is host to a dynamic of strong proletarianisation and strong local culture born out of their fringe relationship with “their” capital in the south. Revolutionary cadres who organise in this part of the country ought to be especially sensitive to this potential for resistance to the state and capital becoming objectified in a “local culture” rather than “strictly” within the political realm, as has been observed in Wales and Scotland already for decades.

Moving south, there is a movement in the Midlands for a sort of revival of “Mercia”, which has an anti-Norman historical character and a regionalist present character. Even “Wessex”, a very traditional southern English region, has produced a small movement to protect local culture and advocates some sort of autonomy.

However much these movements are signs of the potential for national struggles that right now appear within “one nation” or not, it is a sign that whatever remains at the end of these deliberations, whatever is “legitimately” England, has some unease about an imposed monolithically English identity. The English, it would seem, come in various colours even once they have stopped colonising the other. A socialist and federative England alongside socialist republics of various Celtic peoples seems a perfectly noble goal for the English revolutionary, in this light.

The centre of empire

As the centre of empire, even when it is not incorporating their territory into itself, England is incorporating the labour, materials, culture, and lives of persons of many national backgrounds into its borders. Today one cannot help but notice in London that “the English” are the minority there. The majority is in fact the multinational proletariat which built the empire whose stolen wealth lies in the same city. Like a magnet, the two are attracted to each other. Without the labour of the slaves of empire, the imperialists in Westminster cannot go on, and so they jealously guard their commonwealth, their crown, their history of lies that is shoved down our throats, of the glorious empire on which the sun never sets. Their victims, unable to develop their own countries thanks to the genocide and subjugation and robbery of England, now fill England’s un-English capital, face racism and exploitation and death in burning tower flats, driving themselves to the very edge to survive.

London’s great multinational character is in some ways a disadvantage from the perspective of radical struggle: various national groups distrust one another and become nationalist in the diaspora, and to the extent they intermix, they begin to socialise into the English nation and its social-political values, regardless of their origins. To the extent that London can prove a base to radical groups from other countries, for example, the Turkish and Kurdish revolutionary movements, or the Irish, it would behoove British revolutionaries to offer concrete internationalist solidarity to help them build. Just as the English must see in the liberation of the Irish a blow against empire, so too must every Welsh or English or Scottish view the autonomy of anti-imperialist actors swimming in the sea of their compatriots as a key front of struggle against our common enemies.

Just because a potential geography, such as Cornwall, may not choose national development, does not mean their autonomy is of no value to us. The experience of local politics and fighting for local culture is the experience of the masses in fighting alienation, in demanding radical change, real democracy. By the same token, just because no national group in London can call London their national territory, does not mean that their national origins are of no concern. On the contrary, the longer that, for example, the Kurds hold on to their national identity in diaspora, in spite of the impossibility of creating a full national life as they hope to in their liberated homeland, the more chances the Kurdish liberation movement and our own socialists have to reach one another through this dialectical point of tension that we call “diaspora”.

Conclusion

When we look at England, we do not see one nation, and we do not see one class. We see a constellation of social groups, national formations, class politics, which reflect the totality of a brutal history of oppressive and exploitative empire. In this geography too, there is the real potential for struggle. But Marx did not say that “the lever must be applied in Ireland” because he was an Irish nationalist. It is because Marx understood that the march to proletarian liberation for English people must pass through a reckoning with the victims of the empire which was built in some sense in their name and image.

Under the conquest of the indigenous Celts, the toiling multinational proletariat of London pulled from the four corners of the empire which committed genocide against them, lies a complex history of the English proletariat, which like the French proletariat, first glimpsed a view of a radically different world during a “national” revolution. Like the French today, it is by fighting against the nationalism of the triumphant empire that followed that the English will achieve their dreamt-of liberation.