US vs China for Global Hegemony

China differs from Japan in '80s: politics combines with potential for growth

The United States' trade deficit with China hit $162 billion last year, making it the largest imbalance ever recorded with a single country. This year's deficit is already running 32 per cent above last year's pace, and political pressure is heating up to put tighter restrictions on imports from China.That is why Chinese currency reforms take on much greater importance, that the Chinese might have learned from the Japanese to resist U.S.-led political pressure for currency revaluation. Japan ran into trouble in the late 1980s, in part by abdicating control over the yen and letting the dollar-yen conversion soar from 259 in 1985 to 121 by the end of 1987. Many blame that for setting the stage for an asset bubble that eventually collapsed in Japan.There are also significant political differences between the two. While the Chinese have been more open to foreign investment than Japan, there are some concerns that the communist political structure means that the Chinese won't embrace all kinds of foreign involvement such as an American company buying a big Chinese company. In addition, Standard & Poor's chief economist David Wyss points out that China's huge population - which he estimates is 10 times as large as Japan's - means that China has the capability of taking over world production of just about everything.

CHINA REPLACING THE UNITED STATES AS WORLD'S LEADING CONSUMER

China developed it's Three Worlds Geo Political Policy to combat American and Russian Hegemony back in the 1970's about the same time after Mao's death that the slow privatization of the State began.

Under the post Mao regime, the Three Worlds Policy acted as the basis of China's international relations. The Reforms of Deng Zhao Ping, and others kicked off the transition from a State Capitalist economy, to a mixed market economy. Anyone outside a few misquided Stalinists and Trotskyists who still believes that China is in anyway socialist and not an emerging capitalist economy is sadly deluded.

Chinese stocks surge as government's shareholder reforms advance

You can't have trusts, and stockholders in a socialist economy, these are the symptoms of industrial capitalism as outlined by Marx, Lenin, and Hilferding. China has moved beyond being a state capitalist economy, into being an industrialized monoploy capitalist economy. Which even the old left at Monthly Review has come to recognize.

China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle
Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett
Monthly Review July-August 2004, Volume 56 — Number 3

Unlike Social Democratic mixed economies in Europe, the Chinese model is not that much different from the MITTA in Japan. Today China is applying the Three Worlds Policy to its economic clout in the world economy in order to bolster its polticial and economic hegemony in the Asian Pacific and into the Middle East, The regions of the Stans, Afghanistan,Kazahstan, Krygistan, etc., and into Africa.

PetroKazakhstan sold for $4.18 billion
CALGARY -- Canadian-based oil company PetroKazakhstan Inc., which placed itself on the auction block, announced Monday it has entered into an agreement to be purchased by a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation in a deal worth $4.18 billion US.

Japan could be defeated because it operates within the global economy. China's isolationism allowed it to do what Japan and Russia couldn't, develop its internal market operations to rely on external investment and distribution while having the backing of the surplus value produced under State Capitalism. China's privatization has the backing of the state, and it is rapidly creating not a free market but monopoly capitalism as a result of large scale fordist industrial production.

Center for International Private Enterprise
Economic Reform Today
Globalization, Trade and Democracy
Number 3, 1997
Reforming China's Trading System
by Will Martin

In other words the surplus value is now becoming exchange value in the global marketplace, while internal reforms have less of an impact on the state and politics, as they do on the new Chinese 'market' of monopoly capitalism. Capitalism does not need democracy to function. And China is proving that. WTO China Updates

China and the world economy
From T-shirts to T-bonds
Jul 28th 2005
From The Economist
Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere

Hence the urgency of the Americans to secure their place in the Alberta Tar Sands and in the global battle with Chinese capital over oil companies.

US To Raid Oil Sands

Americas Oil Security: Alberta's Tar Sands

Chinese President set to visit Canada
Coincidentally while US VP and Halliburton Consultant Dick Cheney will be visitng Alberta's Tar Sands.

China appears to notch a win in oil race
PetroKaz deal could reinforce country's presence in region
Rudyard Kipling and other 19th century writers called it the Great Game: British-held India and Czarist Russia playing out their imperialist ambitions on the vast and largely uncharted black hole of Central Asia that lay between them. More than a century later, there's a new "Great Game" under way in Central Asia, and the prize is one of the planet's last oil frontiers. Russia to the North, India to the South, China to the East and the United States all want a piece of the oil-rich countries of the Caspian Sea basin, including the mainly Muslim former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Yesterday, a unit of China National Petroleum Corp. struck a $4.18-billion (U.S.) deal to buy Calgary-based PetroKazakhstan Inc. and its roughly 150,000 barrels a day of oil production in Kazakhstan. The apparent loser in the bidding was India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp.

Venezuela's oil company sets sights on China
Venezuela's oil company opened an office in China, a client that is becoming increasingly important to the oil-rich South American country, the state news agency reported yesterday. Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, who is visiting China, told the Bolivarian News Agency the new office in Beijing will serve as a "bastion for forging relations with new strategic partners." Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has promoted a closer relationship with China, India and other Asian countries in an effort to secure new markets for oil aside from the United States. Venezuela currently ships 68,000 barrels of oil per day to China, compared 12,300 barrels daily last year. AP

Unlike Japan, China views this as much as an economic war as one by any other name. Or in Clauswitzian terms; War is international economics by any other name, and the USA is no longer the lone hegemon in this field. China unlike the USA plans in terms of long wave strategies, as does Japan, which leaves the US vulnerable to eventual economic, military and political defeat in the Asian Pacific Region as well as in the currently contested region of the 'Stans. US imperialism is subject to the limitation of a national isolationist sensibility, while China has no such compunction.

''Setting the Stage for a New Cold War: China's Quest for Energy Security''
However, just as China has for centuries engaged in competition for leadership of Asia, the developing world and status on the world stage, so the need for energy security has now raised the possibility of further competition and confrontation in the energy sphere. This competition has so far been limited to the economic sphere through state-owned oil and gas companies such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), China National Petroleum Corporation (C.N.P.C.), its subsidiary PetroChina and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (C.N.O.O.C.). However, as oil prices rise and China imports an increasing amount of its energy needs, the competition is likely to spill over into the political and military spheres. There are already indications of this.

China: middle kingdom, world centre
Le Monde Diplomatique August 2005
China has announced that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar; greater currency flexibility will permit Beijing to use monetary policy to control its economy. And the entry of its enormous labour force into the global economy will change the world balance of trade. China wants to bypass the Japanese-United States alliance in Asia and at the United Nations, and, through asymmetrical diplomacy, become a different kind of world power.

China: Containment Won't Work By Henry A. Kissinger
Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly reemerged. Various officials, members of Congress and the media are attacking China's policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying China is on some sort of probation. To many, China's rise has become the most significant challenge to U.S. security.Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. Clausewitz, the leading Western strategic theoretician, addresses the preparation and conduct of a central battle. Sun Tzu, his Chinese counterpart, focuses on the psychological weakening of the adversary. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances -- only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown.It is unwise to substitute China for the Soviet Union in our thinking and to apply to it the policy of military containment of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was heir to an imperialist tradition, which, between Peter the Great and the end of World War II, projected Russia from the region around Moscow to the center of Europe. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years. The Russian empire was governed by force; the Chinese empire by cultural conformity with substantial force in the background. At the end of World War II, Russia found itself face to face with weak countries along all its borders and unwisely relied on a policy of occupation and intimidation beyond the long-term capacity of the Russian state

''China's Geostrategy: Playing a Waiting Game''
t is common knowledge that China is the most important ascending world power, and one that has only begun to realize its economic and military potential. Before the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001, neoconservative strategists in Washington identified China as the most significant future threat to U.S. interests and defined the Sino-American relation as one of "strategic competition" rather than "strategic partnership." Although the "war on terrorism" has taken precedence over the longer term conflict with China in Washington's geostrategy, the neoconservatives' pre-9/11 judgment was well founded and remains so.

The "ruling party" -- as the Communists in Beijing now call themselves -- sees China's ultimate interest as becoming the undisputed regional power center in East and Southeast Asia, and a major influence -- along with India -- in South Asia, and -- along with Russia -- in Central Asia. In order to achieve its goals, Beijing will have to edge Washington out of Asia by incorporating Taiwan and rendering Washington's security guarantees for Japan and South Korea less credible. Beijing's strategy puts Washington on the defensive with the expectation that, as time goes on, the balance of power will shift inexorably in Beijing's favor. That is why Washington's current National Security Strategy posits a window of opportunity of about a decade for the U.S. to achieve permanent strategic supremacy in the world.

At present, China is what historian John Gittings calls a "status-quo power that often punches below its weight in international politics." That is a realistic position for a power to take that expects its situation to improve over time, as it builds up its economy and military to full potential. For the moment, Beijing's interests are best served by adopting a "defensive" posture and a foreign policy geared to promoting stability. That is likely to change to a more assertive stance the more that China's power resources increase.

Support Locked Out CBC Workers

Adrienne Arsenault in Neve Dekalim on the Gaza Strip on August 15, day 1 of the lockout.

CBC Workers Blog, Podcast, use student radio
Its an on air strike back by locked out CBC workers. They are blogging, podcasting, doing an online webnews page, and working with Canada's University/College radio stations which have public fm access, to create an alternative to CBC, broadcasting your favorite shows on air, as mp3's, etc. Its a whole new era of high tech labour activism.

Locked-out CBC staff in Calgary launches weekly radio broadcast Canadian Press
CALGARY - Locked-out CBC Calgary personalities launched a news and current affairs show on university radio Monday as the dispute with the public broadcaster dragged into its second week. "We hope we only have to do this once," said Tom Spear of the Canadian Media Guild, which represents 5,500 employees who have been locked out since Aug. 15. "But we're prepared to do it once a week for one hour on Mondays for as long as the lockout lasts."The program, on CJSW at the University of Calgary, began at 11 a.m. and was hosted by Newsworld anchor Kathleen Petty and other local broadcasters. Other radio shows are planned across the country in Vancouver and Fredericton through connections with campus radio stations.

Help Locked Out CBC Workers

Contact Anne McLellan and ask that she help resolve the dispute.

Alberta Federation of Labour Aug 19, 2005

4,500 CBC workers, ranging from technicians to on-air personalities, were locked out on August 15. The main issue in the dispute is CBC's attempt to bring in temporary contract workers, undermining job security and stability.

The Canadian Media Guild is asking Canadians to contact their MP to ask that the federal government step in to help resolve the dispute. In Alberta, we are being asked to contact Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan. You can contact her here:

Anne McLellan
MP Edmonton Centre
Constituency phone: (780)495-3122
Ottawa phone: (613)992-4524
email: McLellan.A@parl.gc.ca

Find the contact information for your local MP here.

For more on the CBC Lockout, go to the Canadian Media Guild's website.

Also see my blog articles on the strike:

Nasty Mother Corp.

Solidarity With Locked Out CBC Workers

And the issue is not Wages, Labour disputes not about wages

Like the Telus Lock Out, this is Management attempting to outsource and privatize work. And it is a Lock Out by Management this is NOT a strike.

Outsourcing is the 21st Century class stuggle; like the eight hour day was the 20th Century labour struggle.

CBC, union see contract work as the great divide

Contracted labour: Better for corporate bottom lines, worse for society?

Trend toward contracts over full-time jobs bad for society, say experts

Anarchism and Authority

ON AUTHORITY- by Frederick Engels

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

 
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the
imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority
presupposes subordination.  Now, since these two words sound bad, and the
relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated
party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing
with it, whether -- given the conditions of present-day society -- we
could not create another social system, in which this authority would be
given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear. 
 
On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which
form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend
more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of
individuals.  Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where
hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has
superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages
and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just
as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. 
Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and
of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small
proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate
vast stretches of land. 
 
Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon
each other, displaces independent action by individuals.  But whoever
mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to
have organisation without authority? 
 
Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise
their authority over the production and circulation of wealth.  Supposing,
to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the
land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of
the workers who use them.  Will authority have disappeared, or will it
only have changed its form? Let us see. 
 
Let us take by way if example a cotton spinning mill.  The cotton must
pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to
the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in
different rooms.  Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an
engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current
repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the
products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men,
women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the
hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for
individual autonomy.  The workers must, therefore, first come to an
understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed,
must be observed by all, without any exception.  Thereafter particular
questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of
production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by
decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if
possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will
always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled
in an authoritarian way.  The automatic machinery of the big factory is
much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have
been.  At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the
portals of these factories: _Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate!_
[Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]
 
If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the
forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him,
in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all
social organisation.  Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry
is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power
loom in order to return to the spinning wheel. 
 
Let us take another example -- the railway.  Here too the co-operation of
an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this
co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no
accidents may happen.  Here, too, the first condition of the job is a
dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is
represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution
of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested.  In either case
there is a very pronounced authority.  Moreover, what would happen to the
first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the
Hon. passengers were abolished? 
 
But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will
nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. 
There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and
absolute obedience of all to the will of one. 
 
When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid
anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the
following:  Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority
which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted!  These
gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have
changed the things themselves.  This is how these profound thinkers mock
at the whole world. 
 
We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter
how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things
which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us
together with the material conditions under which we produce and make
products circulate. 
 
We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and
circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale
agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. 
Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being
absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely
good.  Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with
the various phases of the development of society.  If the autonomists
confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future
would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions
of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but
they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they
passionately fight the world. 
 
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out
against political authority, the state?  All Socialists are agreed that
the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a
result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions
will lose their political character and will be transformed into the
simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of
society.  But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be
abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth
to it have been destroyed.  They demand that the first act of the social
revolution shall be the abolition of authority.  Have these gentlemen ever
seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing
there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its
will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon --
authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party
does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means
of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.  Would the Paris
Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority
of the armed people against the bourgeois?  Should we not, on the
contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? 
 
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't
know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing
but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the
movement of the proletariat.  In either case they serve the reaction.

written 1872, published 1874 in the Italian Almanacco Repubblicano



Engels is right in his criticism of anti-authoritarian social democrats.

Just like then,  the current  'anti-authoritarian' movement on the left, 

still does the knee jerk reaction to so called authority.

And lets be clear this is a a movement of the generic liberal left

in North America not specifically anarchist or libertarian as much

as it's supporters claim it to be.

Hence the navel gazing crusade to adopt consensus building

as key to the anti capitalist movement, while approving sectarian

self aggrandizing actions like the black block  as being acts of 'autonomy'.

As Engels says; "It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian

for it to be condemned". Yep nothing has changed in 133 years


Anarchism however is NOT Anti-Authoritarian liberalism as Emma Goldman

continously pointed out much to the chagrin of other anarchists of the time.

Which is why I do-not call myself an anti-authoritarian anything.

And neither did he:

From the Makhno Archive

• About the Platform, Nestor Makhno (a reply to Malatesta) 1928

You yourself, dear Malatesta, recognise the individual responsibility
of the anarchist revolutionary. And what is more, you have lent your
support to it throughout your life as a militant. At least that is how
I have understood your writings on anarchism. But you deny the
necessity and usefulness of collective responsibility as regards the
tendencies and actions of the anarchist movement as a whole. Collective
responsibility alarms you; so you reject it.

For myself, who has acquired the habit of fully facing up to the
realities of our movement, your denial of collective responsibility
strikes me not only as without basis but dangerous for the social
revolution, in which you would do well to take account of experience
when it comes to fighting a decisive battle against all our enemies at
once. Now my experience of the revolutionary battles of the past leads
me to believe that no matter what the order of revolutionary events may
be, one needs to give out serious directives, both ideological and
tactical. This means that only a collective spirit, sound and devoted
to anarchism, could express the requirements of the moment, through a
collectively responsible will. None of us has the right to dodge that
element of responsibility. On the contrary, if it has been until now
overlooked among the ranks of the anarchists, it needs now to become,
for us, communist anarchists, an article of our theoretical and
practical programme.

Only the collective spirit of its militants and their collective
responsibility will allow modern anarchism to eliminate from its
circles the idea, historically false, that anarchism cannot be a guide
- either ideologically or in practice - for the mass of workers in a
revolutionary period and therefore could not have overall
responsibility.

MAKHNO AND THE MAKHNOVSHCHINA.

Makhno led his army from the front but he also ran it with few concessions
to his political beliefs, discipline was harsh and often terminal.

The Makhnovist military forces
were commanded directly by Makhno and his staff with only lip service
paid to the ‘Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents’,
who theoretically controlled them. Makhno’s General staff were chosen
by him and were mainly Gulyai-Pole men that he new and trusted, this
group despite its lack of trained career officers was the backbone of
the Insurgent Army. So successful was Makhno’s tactics and organisation
that the White’s believed he had a professional staff pressganged from
captured officers, rumours spread that Makhno was advised by Colonel
Kleist a member of the German General Staff. In reality the Makhnovists
had no professional officers among their army, captured officers and
NCO,s were shot and the ordinary soldiers either joined the Makhnovists
or were disarmed and released after being distributed Makhnovist
propaganda. Though the Staff officers were appointed by Makhno, on a
Regimental level officers were elected by the men from their own ranks
and were mostly ex-soldiers. As to Makhnovist order of battle it is
confusing, certainly troops were organised into regiments, but it is
unknown if they were all of the same size or organisational structure.
Specialised units included eight Machine gun regiments of 300 men each,
and two Artillery divisions. Former Red army infantry Regiments
fighting with the Makhnovists would be of between 400 to 1,000 men.
Regiments seem to have been quite large and when fighting on the front
organised into Corps of six regiments. The confusion over the
Makhnovists order of battle probably has more to do with the
destruction of almost all of the records of the insurgent Army and the
deaths of most of its commanders than with any problems of
organisation. As well as the fighting forces the Makhnovists had their
own intelligence service the Kontrazvedka who gathered intelligence
from the villages and arrested Bolshevik and White spies, foiling
several attempts on Makhno’s life by the Bolshevik’s. The Makhnovists
while certainly not in the same league as the Red Army organisationally
did have an organised senior military staff, a civilian political
organisation and unit organisation at regimental level . Indeed for
several months they were part of the Red Army fighting on the southern
front against Denikin and later the Makhnovists activities in the
Whites rear forced Denikin to divert forces from the Moscow front to
deal with the insurgents. these were hardly the actions of counter
revolutionary kulaks.
The Makhnovists described themselves as Anarchists
but this has been denied by critics and indeed contemporary Anarchist
supporters of the Makhnovists. The 3rd Nabat (Confederation of
Anarchist Organisations of the Ukraine)Conference in Kharkiv held in
September 1920 reported that;
"As regards the ‘Revolutionary Partisan Army of the
Ukraine (Makhnovites)....it is a mistake to call it anarchist....mostly
they are Red soldiers who fell into captivity, and middle peasant
volunteers".
As regards the insurgent army this is basically true
many Red army men captured by the Makhnovists decided to stay and fight
and the majority of Makhno’s cavalry were middle peasants, due to the
agricultural development in South East Ukraine commercial grain farming
in an area of low population wages were higher and there was a far
larger number of middle peasants than in other areas of the Ukraine.
Makhno was undoubtedly an Anarchist of deep conviction he had spent
nine years in prison for his involvement with crimes committed while a
member of an Anarchist Communist group in Gulyai-Pole and had his
beliefs strengthened and sharpened by his time in prison with other
Anarchists. On leaving prison he worked in Gulyai-Pole to set up
organisations based on Anarchistic principles and attempted to apply
his beliefs to the Makhnovshchina. Makhno was no ideologue following
the teachings of any one Anarchist ideology he believed that Anarchism
was not a doctrine but a way of life;
"Anarchism does not depend on theory or on programmes
which try to grasp man’s life in its entirety.
It is a teaching which is based on real life,
which outgrows all artificial limitations".
To compare the Makhnovists and foreign peasant movements one should 
look to Mexico and the Mexican Civil War which gives two peasant 
movements to compare with Makhno’s.That of Doroteo Arango 
(Pancho Villa) and Emiliano Zapata. 
With the fall of the dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1910 Mexico fell into confusion
with peasant rebels, constitutional reformists and reactionary
supporters of the old regime vying for control over the country. Villa
operated in the Northern state of Chihuahua an area mainly of cattle
ranches and dominated by the landed upper classes. Labour was scarcer
and more expensive than in the rest of rural Mexico and the
independently minded cowboy’s and bandit’s provided Villa with
supporters susceptible to revolutionary propaganda. These hard core of
supporters provided Villa with cavalry, and like Makhno his was a war
of manoeuvre. Villa unlike Makhno could obtain weapons and equipment
from outside his own area across the border in the United States. Villa
like Makhno was a peasant who while in Prison gained what political
education he had from Gildardo Magana an intellectual involved in the
Zapatista movement. By 1914 he commanded 40,000 troops in the North of
Mexico. Although he paid lip service to the land reform program of
Zapata he never carried out any agrarian reforms, due partly to the
difficulties of dividing cattle estates up viably among peasants and
cowboys . In the South of Mexico, Emiliano Zapata led a peasant
partisan army that had perhaps more political similarities to the
Makhnovists than any other. Operating in their home region of Morelos
the Zapatistas redistributed the land of the huge estates (Haciendas)
to the local peasantry and sought to build self governing village
communities similar to those advocated by Makhno. Indeed the
Zapatista’s rural anarchism resembled that of the Makhnovists. Like the
Makhnovists the Zapatistas had to rely on what materials and supplies
they could capture and operated in their home region with some success
eventually capturing the capital Mexico city. The Zapatistas fought
mainly a defensive guerrilla campaign which was unable to defeat
superior government forces in open battle. Both the Zapata and Villa
movements failed to become more than peasant rebellions concentrated in
their home regions, and both failed to gain support among the urban
working class. The constitutional government who gained power with the
help of these two movements then turned on them killing Zapata in an
ambush in 1919 and making peace with Villa who was later assassinated
in 1923.
The Makhnovshchina was a peasant movement based
mainly on the support gained from around its centre, Gulyai-Pole and
the surrounding province of Ekaterinoslav. The Makhnovists
redistributed the land to the peasantry and attempted to run its
affairs in an instinctive Anarchistic fashion, despite the lack of
intellectuals among their ranks. While the Bolsheviks attacked them for
being petty-bourgeois Kulaks and agents of French and Belgian
financiers, they were quite happy to accept the Makhnovists help
against the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel. The Makhnovshchina was
a regional phenomenon which failed to gain support in urban areas, it
did succeed in winning the support of the Ukrainian peasant by
addressing their needs and organising in ways they could recognise and
relate to from their own experience of village life. But its strength
in the countryside, the movements understanding of peasant life was its
weakness when trying to organise in the urban environment.

Emma Goldman
My Disillusionment In Russia
CHAPTER XI
A VISIT FROM THE UKRAINA

In 1918, when the Brest Peace opened Ukraina to German and Austrian
occupation, Makhno organized the rebel peasant bands in defence against the
foreign armies. He fought against Skoropadski, the Ukrainian Hetman, who was
supported by German bayonets. He waged successful guerilla warfare against
Petlura, Kaledin, Grigoriev, and Denikin. A conscious Anarchist, he laboured to
give the instinctive rebellion of the peasantry definite aim and purpose. It was
the Makhno idea that the social revolution was to be defended against all
enemies, against every counter-revolutionary or reactionary attempt from right
and left. At the same time educational and cultural work was carried on among
the peasants to develop them along anarchist-communist lines with the aim of
establishing free peasant communes.

In February, 1919, Makhno entered into an agreement with the Red Army. He was
to continue to hold the southern front against Denikin and to receive from the
Bolsheviki the necessary arms and ammunition. Makhno was to remain in charge of
the povstantsi, now grown into an army, the latter to have autonomy in its local
organizations, the revolutionary soviets of the district, which covered several
provinces. It was agreed that the povstantsi should have the right to hold
conferences, freely discuss their affairs, and take action upon them. Three such
conferences were held in February, March, and April. But the Bolsheviki failed
to live up to the agreement. The supplies which had been promised Makhno, and
which he needed desperately, would arrive after long delays or failed to come
altogether. It was charged that this situation was due to the orders of Trotsky
who did not look favourably upon the independent rebel army. However it be,
Makhno was hampered at every step, while Denikin was gaining ground constantly.
Presently the Bolsheviki began to object to the free peasant Soviets, and in
May, 1919, the Commander-in-Chief of the southern armies, Kamenev, accompanied
by members of the Kharkov Government, arrived at the Makhno headquarters to
settle the disputed matters. In the end the Bolshevik military representatives
demanded that the povstantsi dissolve. The latter refused, charging the
Bolsheviki with a breach of their revolutionary agreement.

Meanwhile, the Denikin advance was becoming more threatening, and Makhno
still received no support from the Bolsheviki. The peasant army then decided to
call a special session of the Soviet for June 15th. Definite plans and methods
were to be decided upon to check the growing menace of Denikin. But on June 4th
Trotsky issued an order prohibiting the holding of the Conference and declaring
Makhno an outlaw. In a public meeting in Kharkov Trotsky announced that it were
better to permit the Whites to remain in the Ukraina than to suffer Makhno. The
presence of the Whites, he said, would influence the Ukrainian peasantry in
favour of the Soviet Government, whereas Makhno and his povstantsi would never
make peace with the Bolsheviki; they would attempt to possess themselves of some
territory and to practice their ideas, which would be a constant menace to the
Communist Government. It was practically a declaration of war against Makhno and
his army. Soon the latter found itself attacked on two sides at once--by the
Bolsheviki and Denikin. The povstantsi were poorly equipped and lacked the most
necessary supplies for warfare, yet the peasant army for a considerable time
succeeded in holding its own by the sheer military genius of its leader and the
reckless courage of his devoted rebels.

At the same time the Bolsheviki began a campaign of denunciation against
Makhno and his povstantsi. The Communist press accused him of having
treacherously opened the southern front to Denikin, and branded Makhno's army a
bandit gang and its leader a counterrevolutionist who must be destroyed at all
cost. But this "counter-revolutionist" fully realized the Denikin menace to the
Revolution. He gathered new forces and support among the peasants and in the
months of September and October, 1919, his campaign against Denikin gave the
latter its death blow on the Ukraina. Makhno captured Denikin's artillery base
at Mariopol, annihilated the rear of the enemy's army, and succeeded in
separating the main body from its base of supply. This brilliant manceuvre of
Makhno and the heroic fighting of the rebel army again brought about friendly
contact with the Bolsheviki. The ban was lifted from the povstar~tsi and the
Communist press now began to eulogize Makhno as a great military genius and
brave defender of the Revolution in the Ukraina. But the differences between
Makhno and the Bolsheviki were deeprooted: he strove to establish free peasant
communes in the Ukraina, while the Communists were bent on imposing the Moscow
rule. Ultimately a clash was inevitable, and it came early in January, 1920.

At that period a new enemywas threatening the Revolution. Grigoriev, formerly
of the Tsarist army, later friend of the Bolsheviki, now turned against them.
Having gained considerable support in the south because of his slogans of
freedom and free Soviets, Grigoriev proposed to Makhno that they join forces
against the Communist regime. Makhno called a meeting of the two armies and
there publicly accused Grigoriev of counter-revolution and produced evidence of
numerous pogroms organized by him against the Jews. 

Declaring Grigoriev an enemy of the people and of the Revolution,
Makhno and his staff condemned him and his aides to death,
executing them on the spot. Part of Grigoriev's army joined Makhno.

I Rest my case.



For Nick Driedger

Lack of Planning Created Skills Shortage in Alberta

Premiers say education and training key to Canada's economic future

Having a plan for economic development is seen as being a "planned economy'" in some folks minds, like the ruling Tired old Tories in Alberta.

Well all economies are planned, including the so called market economies. The plan can be obvious, such as government intervention in the economy ala Keynes or the plan can be, the Adam Smith secret hand of the marketplace, that is the corporate control of supply and demand. Yes market economies are planned economies, they are not 'free' associations of producers, so they have to plan.

Unfortunately when right wing nuts run the government for their business friends they let them do all the planning. Dumb move that. Cause they plan in quarters and bottom lines and fail inevitalibly to take into account the business cycle of boom and bust. Which is why all this talk about a Skilled Labour shortage in Alberta and increasingly across Canada is a great example of the failure of neo-liberalism and conservative governments to plan for the economy.

They knew they had a skills shortage in Alberta in the late 1970's when the Oil Boom was in full swing here. I worked for the Department of Adanced Education and Manpower in 1980. There used to be two seperate departments Advanced Ed for Post Secondary Education and Manpower for labour needs, labour law, etc. The then ruling Tories, under Peter Lougheed, came up with the brilliant scheme to merge these two completely different departments into one in order to solve the Skilled Labour shortage at that time. But since they didn't have a plan or a philosophy as to what the focus of Post Secondary Education was in Alberta (and by the by they still don't) or should be nothing really changed. Universities produced managers, engineers and professionals, Technical Institutes like NAIT and SAIT produced workers, tradesmen, etc. And never the twain would meet.

So what clever solution did the Alberta Government come up with to solve its skilled labour force crisis in both the oil patch and the construction industry? Importing workers, first from other provinces, such as Newfoundland, (which is why Fort McMurray is the biggest Newfie city in Canada) and when that wasn't working they began looking overseas. They also began the process of allowing private for profit insititutions like hair salons, to begin granting certificates and run apprenticeship programs (Esthetics is the biggest pink collar ghetto of young workingclass women in Alberta who enter trades).

We had begun to develop a trades and apprenticeship program in High Schools under the previous Social Credit Government after the Woods Education Commission report. Several schools in Calgary and Edmonton began to offer skills instruction and pre apprenticeship training, such as W.P.Wagner High School in Edmonton.

All of this came to a grinding halt in 1982 when the economic melt down affecting Canada and the rest of the G8 countries became a reality in Alberta, the bottom fell out of the gas and oil market while inflation hit double digits. All thought of skills training went out the window, as the Tories scrambled to save their asses, cause they hadn't planned for the economic boom and bust of capitalism. Duh oh.
Construction work disappeared, and wages fell, workers and management left the province in a rush to find work elsewhere. Skills training was no longer an issue, mere economic survival was.

Well here we are 25 years and one boom gone bust later, and we have the same old Tories in power and we have another skilled labour shortage, and their solution has been the same old same old:

The shortage of skilled workers is acute in booming Alberta, says Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Ed Stelmach.

"You can pick any trade, any profession: we're having difficulty filling those spaces with people,'' Stelmach said.

"It's hitting us on every level, even in small rural communities. I've talked to small agriculture machinery dealers who say they can't sell any more harvesting equipment because they don't have people to put them together in time for harvest.''

The strength of Alberta's oil and gas sector has allowed it to steal workers from other industries and provinces, a short-sighted strategy that's now created a looming crisis. Stelmach says skill shortages are hurting Alberta's economy and he believes the impact will be felt elsewhere.

"We just won't be able to grow at the same rate if you don't have the people to build the plants, to provide the goods and services,'' he said. "We'd like to come forward with a common strategy amongst all the provinces so we can get an agreement with the federal government and get different options.''

Premiers to concentrate on workforce
By Judy Monchuk
Canadian Press

Students demand more cash from Ottawa
Aug 8 2005 CBC News

Quebec university and CEGEP students want the premiers to concentrate on one major issue when they meet this week: getting more money from Ottawa for post-secondary education. The student groups say the federal government cut billions from education and social programs in the 1990s to balance the budget.

Like Health Care, Post Secondary Education is a Provincial Responsibility. Ottawa has handed over transfer payments for years until the deficit hysteria took over in 1995 and then Finance Minister Paul Martin cut federal funds to the provinces. The problem with federal transfer payments is that the provinces put them in general revenues, and there is no strings attached to ensure they are used for what they are supposed to be used for. We are just supposed to trust our Provincial governments to do the right thing with taxpayers money. Ah hem. Right.

In Alberta awash in oil riches, a billion here or there is negligble, the Ralph Reich is opposed to spending on infrastructure or the public sector. But this is nothing new, in the late seventies and early eighties with the first big boom in Tar Sands development, there were fewer students in university and college in Alberta due to many of them working. The lure of big bucks was there and our post secondary institutions were going through a funding crunch even then.

Again there was no plan, no vision for what training was needed for working class kids, what there was of a paln by the Tory government was that while Oil made the province money, what created jobs was a state subsidized construction boom.

Vote buying is an old tradition in Alberta, it's colourful and apocraphile beginings were in booze for votes and having the local drunk vote more than once for the same candidate at different voting stations. By the time of Peter Lougheed Government awash in oil money, this became a full fledged program aimed at the construction industry in the province. The Lougheed government built universities, seniors homes and hospitals all over the province. What they didn't fund was enough staff for these institutions. That was always an after thought.

In universities and colleges if you wanted to staff the new buildings, you increased tuition fees and user fees to pay for it. In 1977-78 differential fees were introduced in Alberta universities for foriegn students. Despite wide spread protests, the fees were passed by Government appointed Boards at the Universities and Colleges.

This set the stage for the imposition of tuition increases that would follow for the next quarter of a century. That's right we have had tuition increases for 25 years now. And all they have done is expose the policy, the only policy the Alberta government has ever had towards post secondary education, of downloading provincial debt to institutions, faculty and students.

In an Interview I did with the then Deputy Minister of Advanced Education in 1980 he said that the reason the province imposed tuition fee increases was because "there were not enough students in university and college" to make up for the funding shortfalls. Funding shortfalls that were a result of the province limiting funds for staff and student support, but being generous with funds for capital projects' ie. buildings.

He said then "It's a chicken and the egg problem", not enough students means that there aren't enough operating funds for universities and colleges, so the government allowed them to increase tuition fees to make up for the lack of bodies. When I asked if the logic of this would result in a tuition decrease if the student population increased, he said no, it would just stay stable, that is at the last rate of increase.

Well that didn't last long, as the oil boom and the economy took a nose dive with the global crash of capitalism in 1984. Remember the Dark Thursday of 1984 when the stock market crashed the worst it had since 1929, of course you do. we all do because it caused massive inflation not seen since the Weimar Republic.

As Kim Moody points out in his book An Injury To All this was the begining of capitals declaration of Class War against the working class and its unions. Wages fell or were rolled back, while inflation was rampant people lost their homes unable to make boom time payments. The Real Estate market caught fire, and flipping became the big thing.

If you had the money for a downpayment you could buy a house and sell it in a week. Farms collapsed, and lenders forclosed on farming families, across North America. It was as bad as the time of the Great Depression, but the social safety nets absent then, were in place now to help ameliorate some of the worst of the bottoming out of the marketplace.

Still it was not enough and food banks were created as a short term solution to the food crisis of the working class now unemployed. They are still with us today. And it was the time when homelessness became visible to the middle class in their communities. No longer just the mentally handicapped or the addicts, the street people were joined by working class families with no homes and no jobs. And they are with us still.

The old fall back of the Lougheed era of state subsidies to the construction industry for building infrastructure was halted, as was attempts to invest in big time heavy industrial projects, like the Swan Hills Hazardous waste plant, an original Don Getty P3.

By the time of the Ralph Reign in Alberta the government still had no plan for post-secondary education, except to use it willy nilly to meet short term employment needs whether that was teachers or nurses, which had projections of shortages due to pending mass retirements in the ninties. Or the development of management and entreprenaurial courses,such as Management Studies at the University of Lethbridge, and including selling off entire departments to industry and corporations, such as the University of Calgary Petrochemical Engineering department.

While the arts, humanities and libraries were cut back in funding, practical employable skills programming in science, engineering, education, medicine, and business/mamagement studies flourished.

In K-12 education the attack was over back to basics, testing, and in the ninties charter schools, vouchers, and the rise of market competition for schools. In Edmonton Public the ultimate reform in education complete decentralization, known as School Based Management, was introduced in the dark days of the early eighties as the government reduced its comittment to funding public education.

This meant the end and destruction of embryonic apprenticeship programs at W. P. Wagner. By the mid-eighties vocational education in Edmonton Public Schools was like its German or Japanese counterparts, based on targeting or tracking students into a career path. Unfortunately in Edmonton, and across Alberta, that targeting was not of the average student the vast majority of whom would not be going to university, but to the underprivileged, the emotionally or phsyically challenged. It was reduced to remedial vocational education.

Showing a complete disregard for working class educational needs, W. P. Wagner in its final days as a vocational school was doomed to comics in the library and an armed cop on patrol.

The failure to link skills education and vocational training begining in High School with streaming into apprenticeships was not restricted to the Department of Education, but also the newly renamed Department of Advanced Education and Learning. Once again the departments were seperated, new empires were created for Cabinet Ministers, but no plan was developed to deal with post secondary education in Alberta. No plan for training the vast majority of students who graduate from High School and will not be going on to university doomed to become little business men; managers at Wal-Mart or hair stylists in someone elses salon.

This government never did have a plan for training or vocational education. In the ninties when faced with its debt and defecit hysteria it began an ambitious program of rebuilding Alberta along Republican lines, including transforming public education and post secondary education into fee for service, school based management, voucher system funding to further reduce the governments funding of education. It also encourage privatization of eduction especially vocational education with the introduction of American private colleges and fly by night computer colleges with certification.

That was its sum total plan after special hearings on the future of post secondary education. The same old government appointed boards of directors of Alberta universities and colleges remained, only with more corporate partners and corporate hacks in charge. Even the corporatization of post secondary education in Alberta was left up to the market, leaving each institution to compete with each other for students (provincial funding) and corporate sponsors (operational and infrastructure funding).

While a specialized school like Old Scona Academic, which is the top academic school in Alberta, could exist all this time and successfully graduate high school students with a BA equivalency in courses that was given credit at Alberta Universities, such did not exist for trades or vocational training.

In Edmonton and Calgary the Trades Unions put more High School graduates through apprenticeship training programs than either the Public or Catholic boards do. Skill training in the urban mileux is not seen as essential, it is however seen as essential in the rural and smaller urban communities in the province.
Still for the Alberta Government its vocational program for High School is seen as an after thought, not a neccisity.

Through out the ninties, the provinces benefited from getting direct EI funding from the Federal Government to implement trades training. In Alberta no such a program was developed, instead those funds went into the provinces general revenues. Once again ripping of both employees and employers who paid into the fund, and the society at large for failing our students and adult learners who might want skill training. Instead the goverment funded private for profit companies that taught you how to write a resume. This was the extent of skills training in Alberta.

In order to integrate a proper skills training program in Alberta for the working class majority it has to begin in High School tracking non university track students into trades. The program has to be credit based and credited as part of the students apprenticeship. In post secondary education both the Trades Colleges and the University need to cross credit courses, for instance, in welding students in Fine Arts at University should take welding at NAIT or SAIT, and welding students at these colleges should be able to take credit courses in abstract metal sculpture. All students in both institutions should be taking economics, politics, science and philosophy courses offered by universities. The motto should be that every plumber can read Shakespere. We don't need comic books in our public school libraries. And we don't need the ideology that says being a blue collar worker is for 'dummies' literally or figuretively.

But that is the attitude, we currently have in 9-12 primary education and post seconday education. Because we have no plan.

Creationism is NOT Science

Creationism versus Science

Welcome to the Creationism vs Science page! To your right, you will see a 3.5 million year old skull excavated from Kenya in 1999. Scientists have named it Kenyanthropus platyops, and it is being proposed as another possible distant ancestor of mankind. Its features are somewhat different than those of "Lucy", also known as Australopithecus afarensis (discovered in Ethiopia in 1974), with smaller teeth and a flatter face. It is also possible that it is related to the australopithecus family, and that its initial classification as a separate genus may have been premature.

Researchers are hopeful that more such remains may be found as excavations continue. This specimen is being added to the growing list of so-called "missing link" species, and the evidence is clearly pointing to the conclusion that numerous such species would have existed around the same time (2-3.5 million years ago), one of which was successful enough to eventually become homo sapiens.

However, creationists have undoubtedly discounted this in their minds as yet another fraud, just as they dismiss virtually all of the geological, paleontological, and astrophysical research that shows that the Earth is billions of years old. The creationist movement is very powerful in America because it's so well funded. That funding, plus a weak education system and a gullible public, has led to a very successful misinformation campaign for the oxymoronically named "Creation Science" lobby.

Well it's always nice to find a site that tackles the right wing nuts directly. And here is one that I encourage you to read as the debate on evolution being challenged in US schools by Creationism and Intelligent Design and the Bushites continues to percolate. Next we will be teaching Flat Earth Theories as valid science.

One Hundred Years of the Wobblies

Industrial Workers of the World

Edmonton General Membership Branch

PO Box 75175, Edmonton T6E 6K1
Email: iww-edm@iww.ca Web Page: edmonton.iww.ca

PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release: Friday, August 12, 2005

The Wobblies Celebrate their Centennial
Archival Display in Edmonton

Edmonton - The Edmonton Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) affectionately known as the ‘Wobblies’ are celebrating their Centennial 1905-2005 with a display of IWW archival materials from the Walter Reuther Labour Archives in Detroit. The material includes major historical events in the struggle for free speech, against war, and in the fight for workers rights in North America. Mush of this material has never been seen before.

This Archival display is traveling across North America in celebration of the first North American radical Syndicalist union. Edmonton is the first Canadian city to host this display. It will be shown at the at the 2005 Labour History Day celebrations tomorrow in the Stanley A. Milner Library,

Celebrations will begin shortly after 12 Noon on Saturday, August 13, 2005 in the Edmonton Room of the Stanley A. Milner Library, 100 St. & 102 Ave., Edmonton. The afternoon program will commence at 1:00 PM with official greetings followed by the 100^th Anniversary Presentations.

The IWW Archive Display will then be on public display at the Stanley A. Milner Public Library until August 23.

-30-

IWW CALLS CLAC ATTACK!

THREE PICKETS THREE CITIES ONE DAY

The next CLAC ATTACK will take place on Friday, August 26th in Edmonton, Calgary and Fort McMurray at the following times and locations:

Edmonton CLAC Office
15505 Yellowhead Trail, NW
Edmonton
5:00-7:00

Edmonton and General Contact E-mail: edmonton(at)haywood.iww.org

Calgary CLAC Office
232 - 2333 - 18 Ave. NE
Calgary
5:00-7:00

Calgary Contact E-mail Chad: kibilz(at)shaw.ca

Fort McMurray
Bob Lamb Building - 8015 Franklin Ave.
Fort McMurray
7:30-9:30pm

Fort McMurray Contact E-mail Maryann: maryannroberts(at)shaw.ca

Alberta Phone Contact: 1-780-439-8235 (Ask for Bryan).

You can download the CLAC ATTACK Poster for distribution in your community.

---

Who is CLAC and why are we picketing them? Read our CLAC Attack leaflet to find out who CLAC is. Read our Why Picket CLAC? leaflet to find out why you should be helping to shut down the Christian Labour Association of Canada.

---

The IWW’s CLAC Attack demos this spring were very successful. For more information, read our article on the events in the first issue our branch newsletter, the Wobbly Dispatch. We’ve also been noticed by the CLAC supporters at Canadian Christianity.com who wrote the article Christian Union Stands Firm in Alberta.

See my articles

The origin of CLAC? Dutch Emigres from Collaborationist Regime Create CLAC

Right to Life = Right To Work

Cry Wolf!

File this under another ecological 'duh oh'. Notice how these studies are done after the fact, like after the fact that the Alberta government has allowed commercial expansion into wilderness areas.

Banff food web shows sharp differences without wolves

CBC News

Mon, 01 Aug 2005

When wolves left an area near Banff, Alberta, elk became more common, a meadow replaced willow trees, and songbirds were replaced by sparrows, biologists say.

In the mid-1980s, wolves naturally recolonized the Bow Valley in Banff National Park, except for areas near the town itself.

Gray wolf (CP file photo)

Mark Hebblewhite of the University of Alberta in Edmonton and his colleagues have found the exclusion of the wolves caused major changes in the area's food chain, down through its trophic levels.

The study in the August issue of the journal Ecology is one of the first large-scale studies to show the key role of a top predator on land.

"Those effects trickled in a cascading fashion down the trophic levels from the highest carnivore to the herbivores, elk, down to vegetation," Hebblewhite said.

Since wolves feed on elk, the number of herbivores jumped without the predators. Elk populations were 10 times as high in the low-wolf area compared to where many wolves roamed, the team found.

"Where there's lot of elk, it's like a lawnmower's gone through and mowed everything down," Hebblewhite said. "There's no young aspen."

Beaver populations, which depend on willow to build their dams, also seemed to decline. Songbirds like the American Redstart also vanished from the area without wolves.

Anti-Zionism is NOT Anti-Semitism

I shall continue to be an impossible person as long as those who are now possible remain possible. Michael Bakunin 1814-1876

In response to Warren Kinsella who maintains the myth that criticism of the State of Israel is Anti-Semitism. And to other critics of my articles:

Warren Kinsella moves Right
&
Lies of Our Times

Bakunin’s denunciation of Nationalism and the State led him to denouncing Polish Nationalism in favour of Pan-Slavism. At the same time Bakunin denounced the Zionism of Herzl, who wanted Jews in Russia to leave for a new utopia, rather than to fight against the Tsarist Pogroms and for a social revolution. Anarchism opposes nationalism and the Nationalist State in all its forms.

Theodor (Binyamin Ze’ev) Herzl

(1860-1904)

“In Basle I founded the Jewish state . . . Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it.”

The Jewish State
Theodor Herzl
1896

"Anti-Semitic behavior is generated in situations where blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects. For those involved, their actions are murderous and therefore senseless reflexes, as behaviorists note -- without providing an interpretation. Anti-Semitism is a deeply imprinted schema, a ritual of civilization; the pogroms are the true ritual murders. They demonstrate the impotence of sense, significance, and ultimately of truth -- which might hold them within bounds . . . Action becomes an autonomous end in itself and disguises its own purposelessness." Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), pgs. 171-2.

JEWISH CRITICISM OF ZIONISM

Edward C. Corrigan

Mr. Corrigan has a law degree from the University of Windsor and a Master's in political science from the University of Western Ontario. He advises the reader: "This article is not intended to be a comprehensive study of Jewish criticism of Zionism but only an introductory survey. The author owes a debt to many people in the Jewish community for assistance and would like to thank David Finkel and especially Harriet Karchmer for her help with the material on Orthodox Jews. The writer, of course, bears all responsibility for the material and any errors or omissions."

The Palestinian uprising or intifada and the Israeli campaign to suppress it have caused considerable anguish for many Jews around the world. A large number of Jews have even begun to reassess their support for Israel and critically analyze the ideology of Zionism which legitimates the Jewish state. One example of this phenomenon is a statement that appeared in The Nation on February 3, 1988. It was endorsed by 18 prominent American Jews.

The advertisement called upon American Jews to "dissociate from Israel." It expressed the concern that "the close identification in the public mind between Israel and Jews -- an equation vigorously fostered by both the Zionist movement and the American Jewish lobby, which has come under its control -- threatens to stigmatize Jews everywhere." The ad called for a two-state solution and for negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The statement also discussed past discrimination against the Jews and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust adding:

How tragic that in our own time the very state established by Jews in the aftermath of this evil has become a place where racialism, religious discrimination, militarism and injustice prevail; and that Israel itself has become a pariah state within the world community. Events taking place today are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers fled two and three generations ago -- but this time those in authority are Jews and the victims are Moslems and Christian Palestinians.

Those endorsing The Nation statement included Professor Yigal Arens, the son of Moshe Arens; Mark Bruzonsky, former Washington Associate, World Jewish Congress, who now serves as chairperson for the organization; Professor Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor MIT; Rabbi Susan Einbinder, Colgate University; Jane Hunter, publisher of Israeli Foreign Affairs; Jeremy Levin, former CNN Beirut Bureau Chief and former hostage in Lebanon; Professor Don Peretz, Department of Political Science, SUNY; and Henry Schwarzschild, of the American Civil Liberties Union. The subsequent organization they formed, the Jewish Committee on the Middle East (JCOME), has, in the short time that it has existed, attracted well over a thousand signatures endorsing their statement. These include academics at 125 U.S. universities.

JCOME has challenged pro-Israeli American Jewish leaders to conduct a joint poll to see what American Jews really think about Israel and the Palestinians. To back up their challenge JCOME cited evidence which suggests that there is a divergence of opinion between American Jews and the pronouncements of their "official" leadership. As one example of a difference in opinion JCOME pointed to a poll which showed that 29 percent of American Jews favor negotiations with the PLO. However, while this new organization is important, Jewish criticism of Israel's policies and Zionism is not new. They both have deep roots within the Jewish community.

It is clear that the ideology of Zionism has had a profound impact on Jews. Today most Western Jews support its objective of establishing and securing a Jewish state in the territory formerly known as Palestine, even though the majority do not follow its precepts and immigrate to Israel. Historically Zionism was the subject of intense debate. Zionism has always meant different things to different people. It could be interpreted in a religious, political, national or racial light depending upon the circumstances. For some, Zionism was a solution for the age-old problem of anti-Semitism, while for others merely an excuse for getting rid of the Jews. As Hannah Arendt explained, "The Zionist Organization had developed a genius for not answering, or answering ambiguously, all questions of political consequence. Everyone was free to interpret Zionism as he pleased . . . ."

Zionist leaders have put off indefinitely the attempt to resolve the resulting conflicts and even contradictions generated by different interpretations of Zionism. This explains why the "Jewish state" has no constitution and why many fundamental questions about the nature of Israel remain undefined. The avoidance of a battle over conflicting definitions of what is a Jewish state is one of the reasons why Israel has a vested interest in maintaining the state of war in the Middle East. This interest has been openly acknowledged by a former president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann:

On the day when peace comes, the leftist movement will undoubtedly be very strong in Israel, and it will be anti-Orthodox. A great cultural battle will then break out which, like Ben Gurion, I want to avoid at this moment: as long as war prevails, that kind of internal struggle would be terribly dangerous. But after the hostilities the first thing to do will be to separate religion and state. Today we confine ourselves to telling the leftists: "Don't make a fuss on this question, you will be obstructing our defence policy, which requires national unity" -- and the leftists, being good patriots, give way. But after the peace they will resume the debate.

Prior to World War II the majority of Jews were non-Zionist, and a large number were openly hostile to Zionism. As Nahum Goldmann wrote, "When Zionism first appeared on the world scene most Jews opposed it and scoffed at it. Herzl was only supported by a small minority." It was not until the full horror of the Holocaust was realized that the great bulk of the Jewish community came to support Zionism.

Jewish history is rich in its diversity of ideas and ethical dissent. Many of the Hebrew prophets were "solitary voices" who criticized their people for betraying the great principles of their faith. The prophet Amos, for example, advanced a new interpretation of the "Chosen People" thesis. He wrote: "From all the families of the earth I have chosen you alone; for that very reason I will punish you for all your iniquities." Amos' concept of "chosen" did "not imply the assurance of victory or prosperity" but rather that of "the burden of more severe punishment for 'normal' unrighteousness."

Amos was even more revolutionary in reinterpreting the meaning of the "Promised Land." To quote Hans Kohn:

Through his mouth the Lord proclaimed that the children of Israel were unto Him no better than the children of the Ethiopians. True, God had brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt; but equally He brought the Philistines (then Israel's hereditary enemies) from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir, guiding each one into its land.

In Amos' view all peoples were entitled to the land they occupied in a spirit of equality and sharing. No one people had special God-given rights.

One of the most critical moments in ancient Jewish history was when Jochanan ben Zakkai, the leading representative of Judaism in his day and the disciple of Hillel, "abandoned the cause of the Jewish state." At the time, the city of Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans and heroically defended by the zealots. Zakkai escaped from the city by a ruse, and with the agreement of the Roman commander, established a Jewish academy at Jabne. Judaism survived while the Jewish state was destroyed.

In the more recent period, Ahad Ha-am (Hebrew for "One of the People" and the pen name for Asher Ginzberg), one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of this century, was also highly critical of Zionism.10 He drew attention to the fundamental and neglected ethical dilemma of Zionism, namely the presence of the Arabs. In his 1891 report, The Truth from Palestine, he pointed out that "there was little untilled soil in Palestine, except for stony hills and sand dunes." Ahad Ha-am also warned the Jewish settlers against arousing the wrath of the large native Arab population:

Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in freedom, and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.

Ahad Ha-am wrote this statement when Zionist settlers formed only a tiny portion of the population of Palestine. He also gave the following warning: "We think. . . that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around. This is, however, a great error."

Ahad Ha-am worked tirelessly for an intellectual and spiritual revival of the Jewish people. His belief in Zion was of a spiritual and prophetic nature. In 1913 he attacked the Zionist labor movement's racial boycott of Arab labor:

Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people; and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve "at the end of time" power in Eretz Israel? If this be the "Messiah," I do not wish to see his coming.

Israel Zangwill, one of Herzl's earliest and strongest supporters, eventually turned against the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Ironically it was Zangwill who coined the phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land." It was this phrase that became the potent rallying call for Zionist settlement in Palestine.

It was not until 1904 that Zangwill realized that there was a fundamental problem with the Zionist program. In a speech given in New York in that year he explained:

There is. . . a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan.. . . This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it. . . .

Zangwill and many other leading Zionists split from the movement in 1905 when the Zionist Organization turned down the British offer to settle Jews in Uganda. Incidently, this proposal was supported by Herzl. The dissidents set up the Jewish Territorial Organization to pursue alternative settlement proposals. Zangwill was elected leader of the new body. The organization was, however, dissolved in 1925.

Sir Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George's cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, was also adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu based his argument on the fact that both Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the premise that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist. He was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the security of Jews in other countries. Montagu's opposition to Zionism was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by Claude Montefibre, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.

NON-RELIGIOUS OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM

Not only Orthodox and Reform Jews were opposed to Zionism. In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was leaving for the Paris Peace Conference. The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. These included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy's Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco.

The petition read in part:

. . . we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World's Peace Conference to establish.

Whether the Jews be regarded as a "race" or as a "religion," it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.

Albert Einstein was also anti-Zionist. He made a presentation to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was examining the Palestine issue in January 1946 and argued against the creation of a Jewish state. Einstein also later turned down the presidency of the state of Israel. In 1950 Einstein published the following statement on the question of Zionism.

I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from the practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight without a Jewish state.

Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt and twenty-five other prominent Jews, in a letter to The New York Times (December 4, 1948), condemned Menachem Begin's and Yitzhak Shamir's Likud party as "fascist" and espousing "an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority." The same theme is echoed in William Zukerman's 1934 article in The Nation, "The Menace of Jewish Fascism. "58 This is also the premise of Michael Selzer's book, The Aryanization of the Jewish State.

For most Western Jews and many other people, the connection of Zionism to fascism and racism is odious and inappropriate. However, this theme is a recurrent motif in the debate on Zionism within the Jewish community. Even David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father and first prime minister, wrote an article in 1933 entitled, "Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler."60 Vladimir Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the mentor of Menachem Begin.

Professor Richard Arens, the late brother of Moshe Arens, the Israeli defense minister and leading figure in the Likud party, has also equated Israeli policies towards the Palestinians with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.61 Hannah Arendt, when writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, pointed out the irony of attacking the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws of 1935 when certain laws in Israel regarding the personal status of Jews were identical to the infamous Nazi code. Morris Raphael Cohen, the distinguished philosopher, went so far as to argue that "Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of anti-Semites, but draw different conclusions. Instead of the Teuton, it is the Jew that is the pure or superior race."

Other leading Jewish intellectuals who opposed Zionism include Louis D. Brandeis (see Menuhin, Jewish Critics of Zionism), Martin Buber (coauthor, with J.L. Magnes and E. Simon, of Towards Union in Palestine: Essay on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, 1947), Isaac Deutscher ("The Non-Jewish Jew," in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, 1968), Simon Dubnow (Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, edited by Koppel S. Pinson, 1961), Morris Jastrow (Zionism and the Future of Palestine, the Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism, 1919), Emile Marmorstein ("A Bout of Agony," The Guardian, April 1974), Moshe Menuhin (father of Sir Yehudi Menuhin and author of The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time), Claude Montefiore ("Nation or Religious Community?" reprinted in Selzer, Zionism Reconsidered), Jakob I. Petuchowski (Zion Reconsidered, 1966), and Franz Rosenzweig. Hans Kohn, who was one of the world's leading authorities on nationalism, posed the following questions on the issue.

Might not perhaps the "abnormal" existence of the Jews represent a higher form of historical development than territorial nationalism? Has not the diaspora been an essential part of Jewish existence? Did it not secure Jewish survival better than the state could do?

Erich Fromm, the eminent scholar, also was critical of Zionism. He stated that the Arabs in Israel had a much more legitimate claim to citizenship than the Jews. Fromm also wrote:

The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.

"One Man, One Vote, One State"

Israel Shamir, a leading Russian Israeli writer, is a champion of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution seeking to unite Palestine & Israel in one democratic state. Shamir's work and that of his contributors speaks to the aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians seeking an end to the bloodshed, true democracy and lasting peace.
In the midst of the endless talk of a "Two State solution", Shamir, along with Edward Said, has become a leading champion of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution in all of Palestine/Israel. His most recent essays have been circulating widely on the Internet and are now posted on many prominent media sites. With every new article, Shamir is establishing himself as a journalist whose work speaks to the aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Zionism as Jewish National Socialism
Lasse Wilhelmson - 31.08.2004 11:55

The Jewish colonization of Palestine under the Zionist slogan "the land without people to the people without a land" started almost a hundred years ago and reached its first climax with the proclamation of The Jewish State of Israel in 1948. A second climax is now in the offing through the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and Gaza.

Moses Hess converted Karl Marx to Communism, yet advocated National Socialism for Jews; Shlomo Avineri on the Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State- Selections by Peter Myers. Date November 14, 2000; update August 17, 2004.

Kibbutz Reshafim

After growing up in the antisemitic 1930's in Eastern Europe and escaping the Holocaust by hair's breadth, it is no wonder that many Jews, the founders of Kibbutz Reshafim among them, became fervent Zionists. The fact that of the famous saying "A country without people for a people without country" only the second part was correct, didn't escape members of the Hashomer Hatzair Movement, who favoured the creation of a bi-national state in Palestine. It didn't work out that way, and during the War of Independence in 1948 many Palestinian communities were displaced. (A list of abandoned Arab villages in the Beit Shean Valley). A number of kibbutzim and moshavim (another form of cooperative agricultural settlement) were founded and populated by refugees and olim² from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Socialism in all its forms was immensely popular in the 30's (as were the variants of Fascism). Its aim in those days was not just the economic betterment of the working class, but the creation of a new, more humane society and a new man to go with it. The kibbutzim were to serve as a model for this revolution. They were the proletarian vanguard, and much admired for it.
Even if quite a few of the founding members considered Stalin to be the epitome of human endeavour and mourned his (long overdue) passing on, they never adopted his policies of proletarian dictatureship. Decisions were made by a democratic show of hands, and there was quite a bit of pressure on those black sheep who wouldn't accept majority rule.

Eyal's Radical Corner

Class War in Palestine

The Zionist Scourge

We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."

—David Ben-Gurion, prime-minister of the provisional government of Israel, speaking before the IMF general staff during the 1948 war

The Birth of Zionism

With the onset of industrial Capitalism in Europe in the 19th century, the ruling classes took advantage of ethnic divisions in the European population to vent the masses' anger at them, incurred by deteriorating living standards and intensified exploitation. One of the immediate and easiest targets were the Jews, who, due to various factors (not the least of which being religion-inspired separatism, often even xenophobia) had failed, in many areas in Europe, to harmonize themselves with the rest of the population, and many of then had found refuge, for the previous several centuries, under the protection of the nobility and the monarchy, as petit-bourgeois tradesmen, artisans, scribes, lawyers, etc. Now their former benefactors were inciting the more violent non-Jews even to harm Jewish people physically in the infamous 'pogroms' (which were, by the way, not only inspired but often actually organized by the national governments).

So, basically, the Jews had two options: the first, to seek unity with the peasants and the workers, forsaking the landed nobility and the the bourgeoisie; the second, to look to the masters for solutions.

Many Jews opted for something which was a mix of these two - immigration to the more advanced Capitalistic countries: the western European countries and the USA.

Of those who did not immigrate, the more progressive Jews (probably the poorer ones, the workers, the peasents, and some of the landless petit-bourgeois) came to adopt a Socialist perspective, understanding that racism and nationalism to be by-products of the Capitalistic class society, and must therefore be resisted by joining forces with the radical forces in combating the exploiters. Many of the influential agitators and organizers struggling for social change in Europe were Jews. And, of course, the 'Algemeiner Yidisher Arbayterbund' cannot go unmentioned here...

The Jews more closely tied to the ruling classes, those who were service-renderers to the rich and powerful and dependent upon their wealth for a living, saw things differently, of course. Theodore Herzl, the 'founding father' of political Zionism, an Austrian playwright, journalist and outspoken admirer of the policies of the Imperialist European governments, decided that what the Jews needed was a nationalistic movement of their own. The idea was not to remove the causes of ethnic strife, but rather find a place where Jews could be the ones holding the economic, military and political power, and therefore the on the attacking side of ethnic confrontations (which, claimed the Zionists, were completely unavoidable, since Jews and non-Jews are 'incompatible').

Zionism was a part of a wider current in European political thought, and it seems to have been inspired by Sorelianism (e.g. purification by violence and nationalist revision of Socialism), de-Man's Planism and other pre-Fascist thinkers. With it, world Imperialism acquired its foremost champion in its unfolding war against the toiling masses of this region.

A Deal

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

—British Lord Arthur Balfur, two years after issuing the 'Balfur Declaration' (supportive a 'National Home' for Jews in Palestine)

So imagine you're a prominent Jewish businessman or intellectual in the 1880's. Given the facts that:

1. You're all buddy-buddies with the political leadership and the economic elite of Europe, which is at the height of its colonialist period
2. You want 'save the Jewish people' (the same ones you'd do everything to distance yourself from, and didley-squat for their protection from the almost-officially-mandated violence)

What's more natural than to offer up the Jews as harbingers of European rule to the countries of the 'uncivilized barbarians'?

So the Zionists came to the German Kaiser, and the Russian Tsar, the British and other governments (all of them anti-Semitic to some degree or another, obviously) and proposed the following deal: "we'll get all the Jews out of your sight and render you further economic and military services abroad, providing you find us a country in which to settle them all and to rule."

It took a few years of convincing, but the Imperialists couldn't resist an offer of erecting "a bastion of Europe against Asia" (to quote Herzl), not to mention a chance to drive out Millions of members of an ethnic group highly prone to Socialism and other 'destructive' and 'harmful' notions.

"Ok," says Britain (who ended up being the main supported or political Zionism) "How's about you take Uganda?"

"Hmmm... let us think..." say the Zionists. "Naah, we want Palestine. We need the sound basis of crackpot religious myths to bring together diverse religious groups to form a single national entity. We'll call it 'a land without a people for a people without a land'. It'll work out great! ... The only problem is pushing the Turks around some and we're set!"

Colonization

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because the geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kfar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single site built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

—Moshe Dayan, addressing the Technion, Haifa (reported in Haaretz, April 4th, 1969)

"But what about the Palestinian Arabs?" you would ask. And so did Max Nordau, another famous Zionist leader. This question brought about (not immediately, but soon enough) the great split in political Zionism - the split between the so-called-left (supposedly-Socialist, to some extent) Zionism - and the more overtly Fascist Zionism.

The 'left' surmised that "for now, we'll just concentrate on getting as many Jews as possible to settle in Palestine and we won't talk about what's to happen eventually - we'll tell everyone we're just trying to evade persecution, or to bring progress to an under-developed region, or to carry out a social experiment, or to create a Jewish worker's society or some other fibs" ; the right-wing, who were less ashamed of their racism and felt no need to identify themselves with the masses struggling for freedom and equality, said openly: "Fuck the Arabs. Not with words but with blood and iron shall a nation be molded - their blood, our Iron. We'll take control of the entire land and they'll either accept us as absolute masters, be driven out or die at our hands."

But such distinctions were hardly relevant when it came to practical action. Once the first world war was over and the British assumed control of the country, wave after wave of Jewish immigrants began flooding Palestine. There was hardly a peasant among them and not too many manual laborers... but they did bring on a steady stream of investment capital, and the technical expertise to use it. The pseudo-feudal, agricultural, semi-theocratic Palestinian society did not stand a chance. It gradually began to fray and eventually disintegrate in an alarming rate, as more and more agricultural land was bought by Jews and an increasing number of Palestinians sought employ with the Jews. Even the local elites, the more powerful 'hamula' structures, where overwhelmed and didn't put up much of a fight.

A great backlash against this process took place between 1936 and 1939 in the form of a mass strike followed by an armed rebellion, but it was doomed to fail, both because the Palestinian working class was weak in number and the peasantry disorganized (or rather mis-organized), with its leadership fearing the rebellion and aiding its diffusion, and because the British were bringing in massive troop reinforcements (rumor equates the number of British soldiers in Palestine during the rebellion to their numbers in India, but I haven't confirmed that) and did not hesitate to resort to house demolitions, mass arrests, numerous executions and assassinations.

The Zionist leadership, tightly controlling the Jewish workers, teamed up with the colonial ruler to violently suppress the rebelling natives by force.

Anarchy in Yiddish: Famous Jewish Anarchists from Emma Goldman to Noam Chomsky

Anti-semitism, argued anarchists such as Voline, had evolved as a sort of safety valve that the wealthy and powerful could use to control working class anger – people who were conscious of being cheated and misused could be persuaded to attack the Jews rather than their rulers or their employers. As everyone from the Czars to Hitler discovered, Jews make excellent scapegoats. To really permanently destroy anti-semitism, anarchists argued, we have to attack the root of the problem: the conditions of exploitation and injustice that Jew-hating serves as a distraction from. Thus, Voline wrote that only

the complete destruction of present-day society and its reorganization on a completely different social basis which will lead to the definitive disappearance of the nationalist plague, and with it, of antisemitism. It will disappear when the vast human masses, at the end of their sufferings and misfortunes, and at the price of atrocious experiences, comprehend, finally, that humanity must, on pain of death, organize its life on the sane and natural basis of cooperation, material and moral, fraternal and just, that is to say, on a truly human basis. (“Antisemitisme,” Encyc. Anarchiste)

Jewish anarchists took this a step further by beginning the battle against anti-semitism in the present. Samuel Schwartzbard didn’t stop at his personal revenge for the pogroms; he founded an organization called the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. In exile from the U.S., Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman investigated and reported back on the condition of the Russian Jews in the early years of the Soviet Union. Leah Feldman rode with Nestor Makhno’s army against the pogromchiks. One way or another, Jewish anarchists fought back – as Jews, as anarchists, as human beings rising against their oppressors.

At the same time, they didn’t always have an easy time getting along with other Jews. Religion was a particular sticking point. Proudhon and Bakunin had defined anarchism as the revolt against all forms of human enslavement, physical and mental – and religion they counted as a form of mental slavery, noting that the Church had always bolstered the State, and that poor people were always told to wait for their reward in heaven rather than seeking justice on earth. Jewish anarchists frequently took up this wholesale attack on religion; in her famous manifesto, Emma Goldman wrote of “religion” as “the dominion of the human mind” (AOE 53):

The primitive man, unable to understand his being . . . felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the . . . biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society . . . [express] the same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself . . .

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress. (51, 53)

Now, in light of this kind of pronounced atheism emanating from the anarchist quarters, it’s no wonder rabbis in New York and London saw the Jewish anarchists as a threat to their traditions, their communities – and their own rabbinical authority. In 1888, the “clerical and lay leaders” of London’s Jewish community “set out to destroy” the Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper, the Arbeter Fraint. According to Fishman, “The back page of every issue carried the appeal in heavy type: ‘Workers, do your duty. Spread the Arbeter Fraint!’” The typesetter was bribed, and issue number 26 appeared with the wording of the ad slightly changed: “Workers, do your duty. Destroy the Arbeter Fraint!” The typesetter promptly disappeared, fleeing the wrath of the editors; then, after that, they bribed the printer (155). By 1904, they were hiring “gangs of thugs (schlogers) . . . to break up Anarchist and Social Democrat meetings” (259).

Anarchists didn’t take all this lying down, needless to say – nor did they fail to provoke it. When the Arbeter Fraint started up again, it featured a full-bore attack on orthodox Judaism, including parodies of the Passover seder and the Lamentations (155). In the late 1880s, a group of Jewish anarchists on the Lower East Side organized as a club called “The Pioneers of Freedom,” which “distributed Yiddish parodies of penitential prayers, mocking the traditions of Yom Kippur,” and organized “Yom Kippur Balls held on Kol Nidre night” (Kolel) In 1889, they leafleted to “[invite] Jewish workers to spend Kol Nidre evening at the Clarendon Hall on Thirtieth Street” – causing a “near-riot” when the proprietor, “under political pressure,” tried to call it off. In 1890, in Brooklyn, they threw a “Grand Yom Kippur Ball with theater” on the Day of Atonement (“A Life Apart: The Treyfe Medina”), advertising their celebration as “Arranged with the consent of all new rabbis of Liberty . . . Kol Nidre, music, dancing, buffet; Marseillaise and other hymns.” This spectacle, which more than once provoked actual street fracases between believers and non-believers, was duplicated in London and in Philadelphia (Kolel) – although on at least one occasion, in 1890, the Russian-Jewish anarchists of Philadelphia actually called off their Yom Kippur Ball – which was to feature “pork-eating” – out of respect for the role played by the city’s orthodox rabbi, Sabato Morais, in mediating a crucial strike of cloakmakers that year (“Morais”). In London in the 1890s, Rudolf Rocker was asked to comment on the habit of some Jewish anarchists of demonstrating “provocative behaviour” in front of the Brick Lane synagogue on Shabbat. He answered that “the place for believers was the house of worship, and the place for non-believers was the radical meeting” (Ward). Which, if you think about it, is a peculiarly rabbinical sort of exchange – it’s just the sort of question young men used to ask rabbis to answer: Rabbi, are the comrades right to demonstrate in front of the synagogue on the Sabbath? No wonder Sam Dreen said “Rocker was our rabbi!” (qtd. in Fishman 254).

The Jewish Question from the Left

Persistent Memories of the German Revolution the Jewish Activists of 1919

Stephen Eric Bronner

[New Politics, vol. 5, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 18, Winter 1995]

Netanyahu and the Palestinians

Adam Keller

[New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 22, Winter 1997]

The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism

Jason Schulman

[New Politics, vol. 9, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 35, Summer 2003]

Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization

Enzo Traverso

[New Politics, vol. 9, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 36, Winter 2004]

The Silence of the Vatican and the Plight of the Jews

H. Brand

[New Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 30, Winter 2001]

Demonizing the Germans:
A New Mythology of Collective Guilt

Horst Brand

[New Politics, vol. 6, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 23, Summer 1997]

The First Neoconservative

Herman Wouk, the Americanization of the Holocaust, and the Rise of Neoconservatism

Joel Brodkin

New Politics, Vol. X, No. 3

No Symmetry:
Notes From Israel & "Palestine"

Mark Dow

[New Politics, vol. 9, no. 1 (new series), whole no. 33, Summer 2002]

The Struggle for Palestine

Barry Finger

[New Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 30, Winter 2001]

Standing Fast Julius Jacobson (1922-2003)

Barry Finger

[New Politics, vol. 9, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 35, Summer 2003]

The Al Aqsa Intifada: Taking Off the Masks

Tikva Honig-Parnass

[New Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 30, Winter 2001]