Polemic following the article Rivers of rubbish and its polemic against denunciations of Socialist Organiser (a forerunner of AWL) in the paper Workers' Press.
An ignorant and sectarian attack on the JSG, by David Rosenberg
The Octopus School of polemic, by Sean Matgamna
Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, by Myra Woolfson
Good intentions are not enough, by Sean Matgamna
An ignorant and sectarian attack on the JSG
By David Rosenberg
As a longstanding member of the Jewish Socialists' Group (JSG), who only a few months ago was invited in that capacity to contribute a feature article for your paper, which you published, I am astonished by Sean Matgamna's ignorant and sectarian attack on the JSG (SO 406).
He describes the JSG as a "strange and loose political group organised around an ill- defined Jewishness rather than precise political ideas." This is nonsense.
1. The group, which has existed for considerably more years than Socialist Organiser, is organised around a manifesto (available on request) and precise political positions adopted by majority vote at an annual members' policy conference.
2. What Matgamna calls "loose", we call non-sectarian. We make no apologies for being "all too tolerant”. We are proud that we attract members across a wide range of Left groups who manage because we openly reject rigid, hierarchical, organisational politics in favour of internal democracy
3. There is nothing remotely "strange" about the JSG. The specifically Jewish socialists of the Bund were the first Marxists to organise in Tsarist Russia. Today, autonomous Jewish socialist groups exist in many countries organising around the needs of Jewish and other minorities in relation to the general struggle for socialism, emphasising in particular, secular and anti-fascist traditions.
4. While orthodox Leninists, religious fundamentalists and Zionists have effectively colluded in reducing Jewish identity merely to religion and/or state nationalism, the JSG has developed a sophisticated, pluralistic understanding of contemporary Jewish identity, As someone with a fondness for pseudonyms, Matgamna is ill-advised to brand our Jewishness as "ill-defined". Though Matgamna often labels his opponents as "anti-semites", his refusal to countenance Jewish self-organisation and his dismissal of Jewish socialists' own conception of Jewish identity is deeply suspicious, if not something worse.
He hangs his attack on the JSG on a sectarian dispute with the one JSG member affiliated to the "Workers' Press" (Charlie Pottins) and makes the incredible claim that through this member, the JSG were led into an association with "mercenary antisemites" and "potential pogromists".
Even the most bitter enemies of our group on the far right of the Jewish community have not made such an outrageous accusation, although given the cosy relationship that seems to exist between Socialist Organiser and the Union of Jewish Students, no doubt this charge will reappear in public and private Jewish community organs.
For the record, Charlie Pottins is a much-respected and highly valued member of the JSG who has been in the forefront of our group's work against anti-semitism, right and left, and other forms of racism in the last 10 years.
Just as our group is a thorn in the side of the Jewish establishment, so our insistence that the Left takes a deeper look at national and cultural questions relating to minorities has irritated certain vanguardist Leninist groups.
Not surprisingly individuals from both these areas have sought to enter the JSG and impose their hidden agenda on the group.
Thankfully our group has resisted these attempts, including one by a person who was a member of Socialist Organiser. In contrast, Charlie Pottins has operated within the JSG with 100% openness, accountability, commitment and integrity. Matgamna owes the JSG an apology.
David Rosenberg, Jewish Socialists Group
Socialist Organiser 507 14 November 1991
By Sean Matgamna
David Rosenberg evidently belongs to the Octopus School of polemical writing.
He comes out kicking and swinging wildly and spewing clouds of ink. Unfortunately, be does not believe in dealing with the real points in dispute: his chosen technique is to lose them in inky clouds of general abuse and hope no-one notices.
Though Rosenberg throws everything he can into this letter, almost all of it is beside the point.
Some of it is mildly paranoid. SO has no especially friendly links with the Union of Jewish Students, though we have united and do unite with them against anti-semitism in the National Union of Students. The fact that a young SO supporter took a holiday job in the Jewish Socialists' Group [JSG] office six years ago - and she was known to be SO - is now cited as a take-over plot!
We do not throw around the charge of anti-semitism loosely. We have argued at length that the dominant attitude to Israel on the left - that it should not exist - leads in practice to a comprehensive hostility to most Jews, who identify with Israel. We have never called anyone on the left an anti-semite without spelling out why in terms of that assessment. Does David Rosenberg think that it is a wrong assessment?
And much of Rosenberg's polemic is silly. Thus, I wrote that the Jewish Socialists' Group [JSG] is politically ill-defined. Back comes Rosenberg to remind us that I, his critic, have used a few pen-names ("pseudonyms") over the years. Now, he demands sternly, who is ill-defined?
I can think of many good things to say about the JSG: the JSG's sharing a platform with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, advocating conciliation, compensates for a lot of the political woolliness exposed in David Rosenberg's letter. But woolliness takes its toll.
The article David Rosenberg replies to said: "The JSG ['s] a-political solidarity with Pottins mant that they allowed themselves to he used as camouflage for Healy's WRP, who were the paid agents of various Arab governments… mercenary anti-semites”.
Let us review the basic facts, in simple, brass-tacks, question and answer form.
Q. Was Charlie Pottins publicly associated with both the JSG and the old WRP in the years before that shattered in late 1985?
A. Yes, he was.
Q. What did he do for the Healyites?
A. His name was prominent in Newsline, the daily paper Healy put out.
Q. Where did Healy's money come from?
A. Funds were provided by Arab governments such as Iraq Libya and others.
Q: Why did they subsidise Healy?
A . For a number of reasons: to have an English-language propaganda organ putting their point of view, and because Healy provided other services for them.
Q. What other services?
A. According to the WRPers who fell out with Healy in 1985, Healy's WRP was contracted to spy on Arab dissidents in Britain and to provide reports on Jews prominent in British life. Healy helped get a number of Iraqi CPers shot in 1980, it seems.
Q. Did outsiders have to wait until the WRP broke up to know these things?
A. Not at all! It was obvious from the WRP's press that they were paid propagandists. For example, they published in 1980 a glossy pamphlet about the rise to Power of Saddam Hussein that might have been produced by the Iraqi government, and surely was paid for by that government. They publicly justified in their press the killing of the Iraqi CPers mentioned above.
Q. What grounds are there for the charge that the Healy WRP were anti-semitic, and not just anti-Zionist?
A. They printed rabid "world Jewish/Zionist conspiracy" explanations of events. See, for example, the editorial in the illustration accompanying this article. Some of the stuff, about the world Zionist conspiracy stretching from SO to Reagan's White House for example, was on the level of open clinical lunacy. It was unmistakeably modelled on the old "world Jewish conspiracy", with "Zionist" substituted for "Jewish".
When the BBC put out a mild programme about the Healy WRP's financial links with Libya, Newsline conducted a months-long campaign accusing "Zionists" in the BBC of smearing them - and accusing SO too, because in reviewing the programme SO had said it was only part of the truth.
Q. Specifically, what did Charlie Pottins do in this connection?
A. When I wrote a short piece in SO about the anti-semitism of the WRP, in response to the crazy Newsline editorial about the "world Zionist conspiracy", Pottins wrote, or at least lent his name to, a three-page diatribe against SO and in defence of the WRP. It was later included in a WRP pamphlet.
Pottins's membership of the WRP allowed people who explained world events by “Zionist conspiracies” stretching across the globe and into both the cabinets of imperialist powers and the editorial board of SO, to more plausibly deploy a hypocritical indignation against the patently true charge that they were engaging in anti-semitic agitation.
The Healy WRP, too, belonged to the “ink in the eyes” school of polemic. The “much respected” Charlie Pottins – if it was Charlie Pottins; but certainly it was Charlie Pottins’s name on the polemic – was particularly indignant because I wrote somewhere that the Jewish community might rightly see the WRP as future pogromists, and its agitation as the preparation of future pogroms. From a “much respected” member of the Jewish Socialists’ Group, that indignation was probably very useful.
Q: Did the JSG do anything about these activities by Charlie Pottins?
A: Not in public they didn’t; nor, as far as I can judge, was anything done in private. The JSG allowed him both to front for the anti-semitic agitation of the WRP and to be in the JSG.
Q: Did the “non-sectarian” JSG, whose other members had as much right to autonomy as did Charlie Pottins, denounce the WRP or take any specific stand against it?
A: Not that I know of. In response to the BBC programme on their finances, the WRP for months ran a half-page or page a day of testimonials to themselves, denouncing SO as “Zionists” and “agents” etc. They had the public support of prominent leftists like Ken Livingstone; they even got trade union branches and Trades Councils to pass resolutions denouncing us.
While all this was going on, the JSG’s contribution to the fight against anti-semitism in the labour movement was to provide the WRP with a captive “Jewish socialist”, David Rosenberg’s “much respected” Charlie Pottins.
Q: Has the JSG ever reconsidered any of this?
A: No. Its leaders do not even seem to have taken it in.
Q: What is the evidence for that opinion?
A: David Rosenberg’s letter!
Rosenberg is bitterly angry at what I wrote concerning the strange story of how the JSG’s “much-respected” and “highly valued” member Charlie Pottins was used by the anti-semitic WRP.
Yet Rosenberg does not even try to deal with what I wrote except by a few flat assertions. He neither refutes the facts I alluded to and here spell out, nor seriously disputes the construction I put on them. Essentially, he confines himself to telling us that Pottins was “much respected” and was the only JSG member also to be in the Healy WRP. (“Just one. We only had one stooge of the anti-semites in the JSG. Just one little muddlehead, Guv’nor!”)
Rosenberg does not notice that here he reinforces the mystery I described: for how could the Jewish Socialists’ Group, of all people, “respect” Charlie Pottins – even if they felt sympathy with him, a man torn by terrible contradictions and conflicts, as I do, having known him since we were both troubled adolescents – when he was up to his neck in Healy’s dirty anti-Jewish propaganda?
I queried their “tolerance” of Pottins; Rosenberg “explains” it by saying that Pottins was “much respected”. It is not an answer; it raises an additional question.
What is oddest about Rosenberg’s letter is that he seems to believe it is a sufficient answer. It is as if he does not realise that there is anything out of the ordinary in this extraordinary story.
In face of the facts I cite, he contents himself with a few little self-satisfied sneers and clichés about “sectarians” as distinct from broad “democratic” organisations like his own; but the point here, David Rosenberg, is that by way of Charlie Pottins your “non-sectarian”, “democratic”, all-inclusive organisation was annexed as convenient camouflage by the most vicious sectarians in the history of the British Labour movement. Your virtuously anti-Leninist Jewish socialist organisation was used as a cover by anti-semites!
This seems to me to have a bearing on the dispute between the Leninists and the others about how best socialists should organise, and I said so. Ah, says Rosenberg, you question the right of a group of Jews to define themselves? Is this because of hostility to Jews?
According to the anything-goes rules of Octopus polemic, there is nothing weird in Rosenberg, defending Pottins, and himself for tolerating Pottins’s links with crazy anti-semites, thus turning things on their head and accusing those of us who fought the real and open “left” anti-semites of… anti-Semitism. It’s all in the game. But it is not serious.
The reference to anti-semitism is a two-edged weapon for Rosenberg because I think one of the reasons why people like himself tolerated having a member in common with Gerry Healy’s WRP was that they have not faced the fact that the “anti-Zionism” of the left is currently the most important form of anti-semitism in Britain.
A number of questions are entangled in Rosenberg’s defence of the “Bundist” JSG: the sort of organisation that socialists of any sort should build; whether ethnic or national minority groups should organise separately from the rest of the socialist and labour movement; if there is a case for a distinct organisation to work with a certain constituency, whether it should be completely autonomous or a sub-section of the general socialist movement.
The latter question was disputed at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, where the majority – including the founder of the Jewish socialist Bund, the future Menshevik Julius Martov – wanted the Bund to be a sub-section of the general movement rather than fully autonomous. I cannot for space discuss the dispute here. If there is a case for a separate Jewish socialist organisation, there is no possible case for one so loose that it includes a stooge of anti-semites!
A Jewish socialist organisation which includes a member of Healy’s organisation – a political organisation defined by its Jewish identity which includes a befuddled stooge of mercenary anti-semites – is surely too loose and ill-defined. Saying it is just “democratic” is no answer, and neither is a reference to the group’s political manifesto. A political programme is not just words on paper; it is the totality of what the organisation does in life.
Yet our Leninist truths about loose organisations like the JSG do not answer all the questions raised here.
Sympathy for Charlie Pottins; “tolerance” philistine dismissal of the dispute between the WRP and SO as “sectarian”; old Bundist obsessions with old anti-Zionist polemics and thus, I guess, the half blindness to the fact that “anti-Zionism” is now the cutting edge of anti-semitism, especially on the left; a rare, only-once-in-a-lifetime, political obtuseness – these are the elements which led them to tolerate Healy’s advocate Charlie Pottins as a “much respected” member of the JSG. But what was the mix? And why does Rosenberg mark “tolerance” of “anti-Zionism” a virtue? I wish he would tell us.
If apology is due, it is due SO from Rosenberg for helping cover for the WRP at a time when they were dragging us through the courts and conducting a lying campaign against us in the labour movement. For myself, I would settle for a plain no-bluster explanation!
Yet the JSG is, I think, owed an apology – from David Rosenberg and any others of its members who knew what Charlie Pottins was doing for Healy and let him get away with it, being “all too tolerant” of Healy’s crazed anti-semitism and its “anti-Zionist” Jewish stooge Pottins. Or, maybe, they like me would settle for a candid explanation.
Socialist Organiser 507, 14 November 1991
Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism
By Myra Woolfson
It does not seem helpful to pursue the recent disagreement between Socialist Organiser and the Jewish Socialists' Group.
There is however, one major point in Sean Matgamna's reply to David Rosenberg's letter (SO 507) which cannot go unchallenged.
That is that "the anti-Zionism of the left is currently the most important form of anti-semitism in Britain".
Attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and the distribution of anti-semitic literature are carried out not by the left, but by the far-right.
The far-right are also involved in physical attacks on Jews, black people and other minority groups.
At a time when support for fascist parties is growing throughout Europe, we should not underestimate the threat posed by the far-right in Britain.
This is not to ignore the fact that there is also anti-semitism in the mainstream of our society, including of the press and, indeed, parts of the political left as well.
However, it can only help the cause of the fascists if groups like Socialist Organiser and the Jewish Socialists' Group get caught up in disputes.
Of course we value debate on all these issues, but when a short letter from one of our members is answered by a full-page condemnation of our organisation by you, we feel that the energy spent in this way, is not progressive.
Myra Woolfson, Jewish Socialists’ Group National Committee
Good intentions are not enough
By Sean Matgamna
New waves of old-style Jew-baiting are now washing across Europe.
The cemetery dauber, the synagogue burner, the thug who attacks Jews - these pose the immediate threat, and if I seemed to imply otherwise, that was clumsiness and I regret it.
But would Myra Woolfson contend that the coverage in Socialist Organiser and in Workers' Liberty, our magazine, has underplayed the danger from the new wave of anti-semitism? She couldn't, seriously.
The new wave of open anti-semitism is a relatively recent development. The demonisation of Israel and the comprehensive 'left wing' hostility to Jews that goes with it, have been with us for a couple of decades.
Even the anti-semitic thugs - those of them who can do other than grunt - now often disguise themselves as "anti-Zionists".
Whatever is "most" important, that is very important still.
The left's anti-Zionism could easily merge with the old-style anti-semitic agitation.
Below a certain level of political awareness - that is, to the degree that the propaganda of a group like the SWP succeeds in reaching raw, politically uneducated people - it is not at all easy to distinguish one from the other.
The good intentions of the left - which is not racist, but "anti-imperialist", albeit with the "anti-imperialism of idiots" - will count for very little here.
The sustained anti-Zionist polemics of the left and the demonisation of Israel - including, it should be said in the interest of truth, by Socialist Organiser for a long time - have created a widespread political culture that may well ease the way for the new fascist anti-semitic right - just as Stalinist "National Bolshevism” in 1930s Germany helped ease the way for the Nazis to win over left wing workers.
If Myra Woolfson's letter is the JSG's reply to my article about the JSG and the WRP, then it is a throwing in of the towel. Progress!
S. Matgamna
Socialist Organiser 510, 5 December 1991
