18th March – Paris Commune 1871

Posted on 30/03/2018 by Michael

18th March – Avenue Jean-Jaures

18th March – Paris Commune 1871

‘World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.’ Karl Marx, April 17th, 1871

The 18th March 2018 marks the 147th anniversary of the start of the Paris Commune. For the workers and oppressed of the world this was probably the most significant event of the 19th century. During the short 72 days of its existence it demonstrated that once workers are united in a common goal they can quickly change their lives for the better. At the same time the murderous manner in which it was suppressed showed that the ruling class will stop at nothing to prevent the workers from taking control of their own lives.

What was the spark that caused this prairie fire?

Before it got light on the morning of 18th March 1871 washer-women, on their way to work, came across a group of soldiers trying to steal some of the artillery pieces which the local National Guard had secured in working class districts once the Prussians had entered Paris. After a long siege the national government had acquiesced to Prussian demands that the National Guard be disarmed and this group of, reluctant, soldiers were given the task to do so before the general population was awake.

Feelings were running high as those in the working class districts of the capital were prepared to hold out against the invaders and this attempt to take away the guns they had paid for was seen as the last straw. The alarm went up. Angry crowds started to gather. A couple of the state’s generals were shot and things moved quickly.

What in other circumstances might have just have been a riot became one of the most significant political events of the 19th century, where working people not only opposed the existing regime but decided to replace it with a structure that benefited the working class and not just the rich. This structure became known as the Paris Commune.

The Communards hadn’t planned in advance what to do and didn’t really understand how they were entering into brand new territory and the majority of those involved in the Commune wouldn’t have known the exact nature of the progressive organisation they were building – or of it’s possible long-term effects.

Mao stated in August 1927, 56 years after the Commune, that ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ (Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, pp. 224-225) and the spark for the Commune was the attempt by the bourgeois Thiers government to disarm the workers. Due to the siege of Paris by the Prussians many workers in the National Guard actually knew how to use what they had and this combination of armed workers with dangerous ideas made them a threat to the very existence of the bourgeois, capitalist state.

And how did they respond?

There had been political tension in Paris since the end of January when the bourgeois government capitulated to the Prussians and had allowed them to enter the city. The petty-bourgeois elements of the National Guard dissolved away and the Central Committee of the National Guard was staunchly proletarian. This meant there was a structure that was able to step into the vacuum created on that tumultuous day in March – what they did next took the Parisian workers into the unknown.

18th March – Rue Basfroi

By the evening of the 18th the National Guard was in control of key points in the city and had occupied the Town Hall (the Hôtel de Ville), where the Red Flag was hoisted. The next day, the 19th, elections for the Commune were announced for March 26th. On March 28th the Paris Commune was officially proclaimed.

However, instead of following the tried (and failed) road of parliamentary cretinism the Commune started to create a new organisation which had as its central tenet the interests of the working class. For such temerity, for such audacity they were to be severely punished within less than 70 days.

I can do no better than quote the words of the great theoreticians of Marxism for their analysis of the experience of the Commune, some thoughts written within days of the destruction of the first example of workers taking power into their own hands.

The Communards ditched the old reverence to the established electoral order;

‘From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.’ Frederick Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, p15

And that;

‘ … the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw out the entire lumber of the state.’ Frederick Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, p17

That;

‘… the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’ Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p66

However, the Paris Commune saw the significance of their new organisation as something that would have to extend beyond the Paris city limits.

‘In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short-term of service.’ Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p71

It also bore the seeds of longer term ambitions and had international implications.

‘It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.’ Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p74

What did the Commune achieve – if only for a short time?

On March 30th the first decree of the Commune concerned the suppression of a standing army and an armed people, the National Guard, would be the only army – all citizens capable of bearing arms to be enrolled, both men and women.

Your Commune has been established!

Citizens:

Your Commune has been established.

The vote of March 26 has sanctioned the victorious revolution.

A craven aggressive power had seized you by the throat; in your self-defence you have driven beyond your walls the government that sought to dishonour you by imposing a king.

Today, the criminals whom you had not even thought to prosecute, abuse your magnanimity in organizing a centre of monarchical conspiracy at the very gates of the city. They invoke civil war, they seek to corrupt; they accept every complicity; they have even dared to beg for foreign support.

We summon these abominable intrigues to the judgement of France and the world.

Citizens:

We have just given you instructions which defy all comparisons.

Your are masters of your destiny. Strengthened by your support, the representatives that you have designated will undertake to repair the disasters brought about by the defiant power. The industry that has been compromised, the labour that has been suspended, and the commercial transactions that have been paralysed will all receive the most vigorous impetus.

Today, the awaited decision on rents;

Tomorrow, that on loans;

All public services re-established and simplified;

The National Guard, henceforth the only armed force in the city, reorganized without delay;

Such will be our first acts.

The elected representatives of the people only ask, to ensure the triumph of the Republic, that you give them your support and confidence.

They will do their duty.

Hotel-de-Ville of Paris March 29th 1871
The Paris Commune

Among the other decrees (which were enacted with greater or less success with the time constraints) were;

rents for dwellings abolished
articles that had been pawned declared not for sale
the wage differentials between men and women were abolished
officials would not get any more than ‘workingmen’s wages’
the church was separated from the state
church property was to be national property
religious iconography was to be removed from schools
the guillotine to be publicly burnt, as a symbol of the old regime

Burning the Guillotine in front of Voltaire’s statue

night work for bakers was abolished
planned the reopening of factories closed by owners and these to be run on a collective basis
razed the Chapel of Atonement – built to expiate the execution of Louis XVI

Paradoxically, in a city on a war footing, besieged by hostile forces, both national and international, this all resulted in a situation where the streets of Paris were safer than they had been for decades – without a police force.

Did the Commune make any mistakes?

Of course. Many. Some forced due to the circumstances, some because someone, for some reason, made the wrong decision. Perhaps some mistakes could have been foreseen and lack of experience, lack of knowledge or even stupidity got in the way. And even in a revolutionary situation there will always be those traitors who hide themselves behind revolutionary rhetoric and seek to undermine the movement to benefit of their traditional ‘masters’.

The Commune wasn’t planned, it evolved. It wasn’t the result of a group of revolutionaries working out how best to change society. At the time of the Commune most revolutionaries in Europe were following the Blanqui model of a small group of insurrectionists creating a situation where the rest of the population would follow. (This failed approach was resurrected by Che Guevara in the 1960s under the name of the ‘foco’ theory.) The Commune was different. It was a period when thinking men and women had taken state power and they were trying to work out how to go forward – against all the odds.

And during all this they were under military attack, both from the reactionary bourgeois forces of Thiers and the presence of the Prussian occupying force.

The majority of them were workers who had never been in a position of making decisions about the rest of their community in their lives. They weren’t the trained sycophants and lackeys the ruling class accumulates around themselves. If they had not made mistakes that would have been a surprise.

Some of their mistakes were strategic, some tactical. They had no over-arching theory to guide them. The theory that would lead to a successful revolution of the oppressed and the exploited, Marxism, was in the process of being formed by its originators.

In 1927 Chairman Mao wrote;

‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’ Mao Tse-tung, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28.

He had learnt from past experience, in China’s failed insurrections and revolutions, the success of the October Revolution in Russia and the failure of the Commune in Paris in 1871. Chairman Mao learnt from the past but the Paris Commune was the present for the Communards, for the Parisians. They had no experience to guide them. The were true trail-blazers and so mistakes were inevitable.

With hindsight it’s always easy to criticise what people did in the past.

But some of their mistakes need reiteration, not least to remind future revolutionaries of some of the matters they have to consider.

The Central Committee of the National Guard (the precursor of the Commune) gave the reactionary forces almost ten days grace after the thwarted seizure of the guns on Montmartre. This allowed reaction to organise and allowed them to create chaos within the centre of Paris. When you have power you must use it – reaction never rests.
The Central Committee of the National Guard was too magnanimous during this period and allowed a violent demonstration by reactionary forces to take place. Marx criticised ‘this magnanimity of the armed working men’ (The Civil War in France, p60). Reaction is the viper in the nest – it has to be crushed.

This lesson was well learnt by future revolutionaries after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. If you can criticise Comrades Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Stalin and ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky for some of their actions (but not many) it will not be due to their ‘magnanimity’.

‘It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat is that it did not do this with sufficient determination. But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery.’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p50

They didn’t take over the banks. How this would have worked in practice is difficult to say, especially as they had such a short time in control, but if the Commune had lasted longer then this would have become a very serious matter. Better to take them over and not have an impact than not and then suffer the consequences down the line. Something else the Soviets learnt.
Reactionary parties were allowed to stand in the elections for the Commune on 26th March. This can be a difficult one. There will be the argument that not everyone supports the new order and that opposition forces should be given an opportunity to have their say. The problem is that they have been having their say for thousands of years and still the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – that’s the case in the 21st century world and was definitely the case in 1871 Paris.

The slaughter during the last week of May 1871 was a direct consequence of the innocence, naiveté and magnanimity of the Parisian working class. They suffered for their mistakes – how many more others are to suffer because future generations haven’t learnt the lessons of the past – and of the Paris Commune in particular?

But whatever the failings of the Commune it was not given the time to sort out its shortcomings or mistakes.

What can we still learn from The Commune?

The biggest ‘crime’ of the Communards was that they wanted to plan things for and by themselves and did not choose to be limited by the established bourgeois state. Play the game by their rules and you’ll get a pat on the head. Play another game which doesn’t include them and they will (attempt to) destroy you. That’s what happened in May 1871.

In ‘theory’ revolutions of the oppressed and exploited should be an easy matter. After all we outnumber the ruling class (in whatever country, in whatever social situation – beit slavery, feudalism or capitalism) by factors of hundreds of thousands in some instances. But it doesn’t work that way.

How many slave revolts can people cite during the whole of the Roman Republic and Empire – a period of something like 2,000 years? Spartacus, yes. And?

How many slave revolts can people cite in the 300/400 period of slavery in the United States of America? Nat Turner (possibly but not guaranteed – and that only lasted less than two days). And?

However dire their existence and conditions most people cling to life and misery rather than freedom and dignity. Many individuals in the past have chosen the latter but history doesn’t always record those brave men and women as the ‘prize’ for their independence was death. There are a few episodes in history where the oppressed and exploited have come together to change their situation. In a British context I will cite the Peasants Revolt of 1381 and the English Revolution of 1640.

Fourteenth century peasants would have normally lived and died within sight of their home, only leaving it if they were conscripted into some war for a tribal warlord (as that was basically what the monarchy was at that time) to establish his (and sometime her) right to rule them. The Rebellion, led by Wat Tyler, therefore, was something that came out of the blue, something which would have left most peasants thinking they were in some sort of dream.

When some of them went to London and their leader had a meeting with the King they were probably even more bemused. Then terrified as they were once again ‘put in their place’. They followed their charismatic leader to the capital who, riding a horse (what peasant rode a horse in 1381?), was set to meet the child monarch. Once out of his environment Tyler was treacherously stabbed in the back by the Sheriff of London. The rebellion melted quicker than summer snow.

(Traditionally, ‘commoners’ – i.e., anyone not of Royal birth – in Britain walk away backwards from a meeting with the monarch. This is interpreted as a sign of respect but it comes from the fact that, in the past, no one would trust a King/Queen as they were as likely to stab you in the back as look at you. That’s a lesson Wat Tyler learnt too late and which everyone should remember. Never literally, or figuratively, turn your back on the oppressor.)

Just about 260 years later there was another revolt against a British monarch. Although there were enough grievances amongst the population this particular revolt was led, and instigated, by the nascent bourgeoisie who had their own agenda but needed the anger of the people to achieve their aims – they also needed young, working class men to fight in their war. After nine years of war, where something like 11% of the male population lost their lives, the war criminal Charles Stuart had his divine head separated from his less than divine body.

The reason I mention these two events is to try to suggest how rare are those episodes in history where the oppressed and exploited actually get to a stage of challenging the fundamentals of power. They will always riot (especially in summer, riots rarely happen in the winter, although revolutions often do), they will always go on strike, they will always gripe and make things awkward for the ruling class, but they rarely challenge the class rule.

In 1381 the peasants trusted the monarchy and their trust was thrown back at them and they returned to their misery. In 1640 the few revolutionaries that did exist in Britain thought they could advance their ideas and practices (Gerrard Winstanley, for example, with the Digger Movement) but once the monarchy had been tamed the bourgeoisie had no need of certain sections of the army and used the forelock-tuggers to destroy progress – another lesson that we should learn, not all the oppressed and exploited will side with us against the oppressors and exploiters and are quite happy to destroy their own people.

But Marx saw something different with the working class revolt in Paris. There had been revolutions in France in 1789, 1830 and 1848 but they had been subverted for the benefit of the ruling class, if not initially, eventually. The Paris Commune was something qualitatively different.

‘In September 1870, Marx called the insurrection an act of desperate folly. But, when the masses rose, Marx wanted to march with them, to learn with them in the process of the struggle, and not to give them bureaucratic admonitions. He realised that to attempt in advance to calculate the chances with complete accuracy would be quackery or hopeless pedantry. What he valued above every thing else was that the working class heroically and self-sacrificingly took the initiative in making world history. Marx regarded world history from the standpoint of those who make it without being in a position to calculate the chances infallibly beforehand, and not from the standpoint of an intellectual philistine who moralises: “It was easy to foresee … they should not have taken up … “. VI Lenin, Selected Works, Vol 12, p111

For the first time the working class were fighting, consciously, for themselves. Not that they were necessarily conscious of all that they were doing. They moved the working class movement forwards by defending and promoting the interests of their class. Starting by defending their right to their armaments they decided they could promote those interests that had been denied them by the ruling class.

Serendipity (the washer women arriving at the time the government troops attempted to steal the artillery of the National Guard and those troops preferring to be mutinous rather than go against their class brothers and sisters) also had a role to play. Being in the right place at the right time even has a role in social advancement.

…. and what has already been learnt.

Karl Marx had always closely followed events in Europe and especially what was happening in France with the country at war with Prussia. With the ignominious defeat of the French – and the subsequent declaration of the unification of Germany, on 18th January 1871, which took place in the ‘occupied’ Palace of Versailles in the humiliated France – Marx knew that the situation in Europe was about to change as the new, militaristic and powerful economic power of the new country would have to come into conflict with the most dominant economic power, Britain. It wasn’t a matter of if a war between these two powers would occur, only when. The world was too small for two such ambitious, imperialist powers to exist side by side.

Both Marx and Engels had also very closely followed and studied the revolutionary workers movements in France and Germany (especially) but other movements in Eastern Europe as well. Engels actually fought on the barricades in the Baden, Prussia, during the 1848 Revolution – even writing articles on military tactics which were published in the Manchester Guardian.

They knew that Paris was a seething cauldron of proletarian discontent but that were in a perilous position to take on the combined might of the French state – which had the tacit support of the Prussian occupiers. Although he recommended caution Marx was fully behind the Parisian workers when they were forced to either fight or capitulate after the incident of the attempted theft of the artillery of the National Guard by the reactionary government of Thiers.

He followed matters as closely as possible and, in fact, the first draft of The Civil War in France was written before the Commune was crushed in the blood soaked week at the end of May, 1871.

Apart from that seminal work Marx made an extremely important, and often ‘forgotten’ or ignored, annotation to The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. In the 1872 Preface to the German edition of the book one sentence is of special significance:

‘One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p2.

The reason this short sentence is frequently overlooked is because this had the effect of challenging those who believed that a workers’ revolution could succeed peacefully and through bourgeois, parliamentary means – the ideas that have been shown countless times in the almost 150 years of the Commune to be a fallacy but which are still promulgated by modern-day Social Democrats.

Lenin also learnt from the organisation structure of the Commune and later, after the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviets were introduced with many of the attributes of proletarian democracy that had existed in Paris for a couple of months in the spring of 19871.

‘The way out of parliamentarianism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops to “working” bodies. “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.” VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p55

Lenin believed in elections and representation but of a new kind that didn’t trap the workers who were attempting to build Socialism into the stultifying trap of parliamentary cretinism.

‘We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism,’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p56

For the first time ever the proletariat had a model which worked – in all sorts of ways – if only for a short time.

‘The Commune is the form “at last discovered” by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labour can take place…. [It] is the first attempt of a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form ….. by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p66

Although Marx had based his theories of scientific socialism on the experiences of the workers’ and peasants’ struggles in the past he was more than willing to change his approach if new experience told a new story or gave a better example of how to do things in the future.

‘Marx did not indulge in utopias; he expected the experience of the mass movement to provide the reply to the question as to what specific forms this organization of the proletariat as the ruling class will assume and as to the exact manner in which this organization will be combined with the most complete, most consistent “winning of the battle of democracy.’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p48

All great revolutionary thinkers learn from great events – from both their success and failures. It can’t be otherwise and this is why both Marx and Engels constantly referred to the Commune in their writings after 1871. When Lenin was trying to make sense of the Russian situation he found inspiration in the events in Paris – which were taking place at the very time he was celebrating his first birthday 3,249 kilometres away in Simbirsk, Russia.

Lenin also liked the way the Communards organised themselves, in a new way and very different from the hierarchical structure that characterises capitalist states.

‘There can be no thought of abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely. That is utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will permit to abolish gradually all bureaucracy – this is not utopia, this is the experience of the Commune, this is the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p57

The proletarian dictatorship replaces the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This turns the world upside down and now instead of subordination to a monarchy, an aristocracy or an industrial or financial bourgeoisie society would now be under the control of the armed working class.

‘We are not utopians, we do not indulge in “dreams” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams, based upon a lack of understanding of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control and “foremen and bookkeepers.” But the subordination must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and toiling people, i.e., to the proletariat.’ VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, p58

It was the Commune, without an organised, revolutionary Party leadership, that came up with the form of the new State that Marx had been looking for. It was workers themselves, and not ideologues, who realised what was needed to liberate themselves from oppression and exploitation.

They were not a movement as Lenin wrote about 31 years later; ‘Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.’ (VI Lenin, What is to be Done? – Burning questions of our movement, p28), but without the Paris Commune Lenin might not have come up with this important conclusion.

However the lack of organisation was one of the contributory factors in the defeat of the Paris Commune. Not the only factor, as they had so many things going against them, but divisions based upon different political interests didn’t help in the struggle against the reactionaries. Future revolutionaries who have not learnt that lesson will end up suffering the same fate.

Women and the Paris Commune

Women had played a role in previous revolutions in France but the part they played was not recorded in a consistent manner and is often overlooked. Their role in the French Revolution (1789-1799) is often caricatured with harridans knitting at the public executions of the aristocracy but this is merely promoted to deny what actually was taking place – even when against the odds.

The Women’s March on Versailles, in October 1789, forced the royal court back to Paris – and was the virtual beginning of the end for this episode of the Bourbon’s. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women agitated for full citizenship for women – their position in society being vague (to say the least) when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was published in August 1789.

Meetings of the Patriotic Women’s Clubs were held in churches – something that was copied in many of its aspects during the Commune.

Women’s Club – 1793

Revolutionary women also played a major role in the funeral of Jean-Paul Marat, the radical writer who produced the periodical ‘Friend of the People’, who was assassinated by a counter-revolutionary woman (not everyone who should be is always a revolutionary) in July 1793. They carried the bath tub in which he had been murdered – which even I think is a strange way of playing tribute.

Women were also very much involved in demonstrations against the increase of the price of basic foods and were prepared to riot when their demands were not met.

However, as the revolution was hijacked and moved to the right organised women’s groups were permanently shut out of the French Revolution after October 30, 1793.

So there was a tradition of women fighting for their freedom in uprisings and revolutions in France but in the Paris Commune of 1871 it (like the workers’ movement in general) took a qualitative leap.

It should be remembered that women were the ones who really started the revolution in March 1871 when they prevented the theft of the workers’ armaments and sounded the alarm which woke Paris to the theft and to a new dawn in so many ways.

They revived the clubs using, as in the 1790s, the same churches from where the clergy had been evicted following the decree on religion.

‘The sacred revolt of the poor, the exploited and the oppressed’

Although there are examples of women taking up arms in the 1790s this was more prevalent in the Paris Commune, especially so when the reactionary state machine started its slaughter of all those who had dared to challenge state power at the end of May 1871. Not only fighting side by side with their male comrades on the barricades but also causing mayhem by setting alight and destroying many buildings in the centre of the city. These ‘petroleuses’ (women incendiaries) were especially vilified by the reaction for the contempt they held for bourgeois property.

‘A girl soldier’

One renowned woman of this group of female revolutionaries was Louise Michel. Louise was an anarchist – and this will probably be the only time where an anarchist will be lauded on this blog – but was steadfast in the face of the threat of death once the Commune had been destroyed. She showed her contempt for the court at her trial – which took place as the fires in the city were still smouldering.

The reaction wanted contrition and regret, what they got was defiance and hatred;

‘You must cut me off from society! You have been told to do so, well, the Public Prosecutor is right! Since it seems that every heart that beats for liberty has the right only to a lump of lead, I demand my share! If you let me live, I shall not cease calling for vengeance, and I shall denounce to the vengeance of my brothers the murderers of the Commission of Pardons! … If you are not cowards kill me!

They were cowards and she was sentenced to, first, imprisonment in Paris and then deportation to the French colony of New Caledonia (off the eastern coast of Australia), returning to Paris when the surviving Communards were given an amnesty.

Louise Michel

She wrote a poem in honour of her fellow Communard and friend, Théophile Ferré, the Blanquist Delegate to the Police, who refused to recognize a military court’s right to judge him after the defeat of the Commune and was sentenced to death and executed.

The Red Carnation

If one day to the cold cemetery I were to go,
brothers, cast on your sister,
like a final hope,
some red carnations in bloom.

In the final days of the empire,
as the people awoke,
red carnation, it was your smile
that told us all was reborn.

And now, go blossom in the shade
of dark and drear prisons,
go blossom near the sombre captive,
and tell him we love him.

Tell him that in these changing times
everything belongs to the future;
that the victor with his pallid brow
can die as easily as the vanquished.

She remained active in revolutionary politics (if anarchist politics can be called ‘revolutionary’) until her death in 1905 – the year of the revolutionary events in Russia which were to lead to the October Revolution of 1917.

In 2008 a film was released, ‘Louise-Michel’, directed by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, where female workers made redundant from a textile factory decide to pool their redundancy payments to hire a hit man to eliminate the boss. I’m sure Louise would have approved

Long Live the memory of The Paris Commune!

Eternal glory to the Parisian Martyrs of the Working Class!

From a Marxist-Leninist perspective:

The already referenced works by Marx and Lenin:

Karl Marx – The Civil War in France, 1871

VI Lenin – The State and Revolution, 1917

And earlier analyses of the Paris Commune by Lenin;

In Memory of the Commune

Lessons of the Commune

A History of the Paris Commune:

The best general history of the Paris Commune, as far as I’m concerned is:

The Paris Commune of 1871

written by Frank Jellinek, and originally published in Britain in 1937 as part of the series of books under the umbrella of ‘The Left Book Club’.

To put The Paris Commune into its historical context the Left Book Club Edition of Frank Jellinek’s ‘The Paris Commune of 1871’ included a very short – but useful – pamphlet by Dona Torr.

An Introduction to The Paris Commune by Dona Torr

Women in The Paris Commune

One book that investigates how women fought for their own freedom during The Paris Commune is:

The Women Incendiaries by Edith Thomas – not yet available in digital format

UK Budget 2021 – relief for business; suffering for the poor

Posted on 08/03/2021 by Michael

UK Budget 2021 – relief for business; suffering for the poor

The vaccination programme in Britain continues to go well (especially when compared to the experience across the Channel in the European Union – but, then, what can you expect from ‘Johnnie Foreigner’), infections are falling as are deaths. Capitalism in Britain breathes a sigh of relief – as does their present puppet – the Buffoon.

It seems like they have got away with it.

Totally unprepared at the beginning, lacking any semblance of a strategy – even a year after the pandemic hit the sceptred isle – ‘science’ has pulled them out of the mire by being able to produce a vaccine that seems to work. (Let’s not talk about how much the British government, i.e., the British people, paid for that vaccine programme. Pumping gold into peoples’ arms would probably have been cheaper.)

Despite the ineptitude, the incompetence, the lies, the corruption, the arrogance of the rich and powerful, the U-turns, the confusion and fear levels going through the roof the Buffoon is coming out Okish, if not smelling of roses.

Even after showing their contempt for the ‘heroes’ of the National Health Service with the derisory pay increase (not forgetting that all the ‘heroes’ in the other public services will get nothing at all) there doesn’t seem to have been any great condemnation of the present government.

And even if people had gone to the streets – the only real way to show anger in any society – then that would have been turned against the demonstrators as they would be ‘putting other people’s lives in danger and would be undermining all the sacrifices of the past year’. You have to admire them – they place the blame for the crisis on the victim and shrug off any responsibility.

So it’s back to business as usual with the Budget of 3rd March 2021.

Money continues to be given to businesses that probably won’t exist by the end of the year – and shouldn’t all these entrepreneurs and petty minded petite-bourgeoisie refuse such state support as it goes against the grain of neo-liberalism?

Money gets thrown at first time house buyers – trapping them in the iron grip of debt – but offering no relief to those who have no other option than to rent. Companies will have to pay increased corporation tax (but not until 2023 – and perhaps not even then if the memory of the British population in the past is anything to go by) yet at the end of summer this year the poorest in society will be faced with a huge financial break with the withdrawal of the extra £20 per week that has been paid (temporarily) to raise the level of Universal Credit – an already totally inadequate system whose flaws still exist even if not now being highlighted.

And after almost a year where there seemed to be no limit to the amount of money that was available to pull capitalism out of the crisis it itself had created the tap is to be turned off and there will be more ‘belt tightening’ and a virtual return to austerity.

As with the financial crash of 2008 – yet another capitalism created crisis due to greed and arrogance – the cost of the pandemic will again fall upon those who were completely innocent and of its causes.

Perhaps not completely innocent. The crime of omission in allowing the capitalist system to continually play fast and loose with the lives of billions of people is just as pernicious as the crime of commission of the perpetrators.

Vaccination Programme

UK think tank calls for door-to-door covid jabs to tackle vaccine disparities.

Number of UK Covid vaccinations falls by a third as vaccine supply dips. (24th February)

Extra £1.6 billion for UK’s covid vaccination roll out.

How does the Johnson & Johnson vaccine compare to other coronavirus vaccines? Four questions answered.

Covid vaccines: how to make sense of reports on their effectiveness.

The UK’s speedy covid-19 vaccine roll out: surprise success or planned perfection?

Coronavirus vaccine scams – fraud experts give their top tips to help you stay safe.

How well does the AstraZeneca vaccine work? An expert reviews the current evidence.

Privatisation of the pandemic

In the USA but we have seen similar in the UK with the awarding of billions pounds worth of contracts to untested providers

Massachusetts spent 20 years refining its own mass vaccination plan. Then it looked elsewhere.

The ever changing virus

World yet to see ‘full extent of coronavirus evolutions’.

New coronavirus variant: here is what scientists know about B1525.

What problems do coronavirus variants pose?

New covid variant infects 16 people in UK.

Recognition of the ‘heroes’

One of the problems of many workers in the British National Health Service (NHS) – especially the medical staff, the nurses and the junior doctors – is that it has taken them the best part of 75 years to recognise they are actually ‘workers’.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, even though the NHS was under almost constant attack by various British governments, the idea that such medical workers would go on strike was received with shock and horror. This was to defend their own pay and conditions let alone to support those other workers who were facing the destruction of their jobs as successive governments presided over the the de-industrialisation of the United Kingdom.

At that time there was even a television soap opera called ‘Angels’ (which ran from 1975 to 1983) which perpetuated this myth that workers who took care of others were not the same as those who worked in any other industry. Too many heath workers took in that propaganda and their conditions and workload got worse each year as a result.

With the arrival of the covid pandemic at the beginning of 2020 the NHS was found to be in a sorry state – desperately short of staff, underfunded and led by managers whose main concern was the balance sheet rather than the best care of those in the time of their greatest health need.

No surprise there. Whatever social welfare function the NHS had at the end of the 1940s had been stripped away and was being converted into a money machine for private companies and investors. What capitalism does to every endeavour. No profit = no use.

To make up for the unpreparedness of the government of the Buffoon for the pandemic, the shortage of vital Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as well as an adequate provision of the equipment necessary (in the early days when the virus was still not fully understood) the Thursday ‘Clap for the NHS’ was turned into a nationwide ritual.

Instead of being considered as skilled workers medical staff were being applauded for being ‘heroes’. But that cost nothing. Neither for the government or the population of Britain. This activity ceased by the end of May 2020 as a growing number of NHS workers started (belatedly) to realise that this was just an empty gesture that took the pressure off the government – and in effect, put all the pressure on those working in the NHS (and other so called ‘essential industries’).

And following the Budget of March 2021 those same workers that were so lauded for their ‘sacrifice and dedication’ only a few short months ago have learnt what their true value is to this government of over-privileged public schoolboys and girls.

The reaction, so far, from the health workers has been one of anger. But what will come of that? Will they act as workers, organise and take action to force the government to act? Will workers in other industries support them (difficult as that is after years of attacks and the weakening of Trade Unions)? Time will tell.

However, workers in Britain should be careful. Already, in their ‘justification’ for awarding health workers a measly handful of crumbs, the Buffoon is seeking to divide the working class by stating that other public service workers won’t even get that. Unless the action is taken in a unified manner, across the whole country and all industries, this struggle will end up being splintered and divided – the only winners being the capitalist system.

‘A 1 per cent pay rise is the worst kind of insult the government could give health workers’

Nurses prepare for strikes over 1% NHS pay rise in England.

Managing the pandemic in hospital

NHS faces questions over covid infections contracted in hospital.

Critical care beds shortage prompts calls for review – but this is all down to government policies over the last three deaceds (at least) on top of which has to be added post-2008 ‘austerity’.

Susceptibility to infection

Do genetic differences make some people more susceptible to covid-19?

Covid deaths high in countries with more overweight people.

Who profits from a pandemic?

Moderna forecasts $18 billion in sales of covid vaccine this year.

AstraZeneca and Moderna’s contrasting rewards for fighting covid hardly seem fair.

From Pfizer to Moderna: who’s making billions from covid-19 vaccines?

The return to ‘normality?

English school leaders despair over new rules on covid tests and masks.

‘Immunity Passports’

Vaccine passports to prove covid immunity could be banned in some circumstances.

Government considering revamp of NHS app for vaccine certification.

Thousands sign petition against ‘vaccine passports’.

Green pass: how are Covid vaccine passports working for Israel?

Austerity will remain after the pandemic

Austerity to continue for many public services as Budget makes further £4 billion of cuts.

Strip away pandemic largesse and UK is banking on recovery with no extra public spending.

Poverty in Britain

Is covid at risk of becoming a disease of the poor?

A-levels: Poorer students ‘three grades behind’.

Universal credit: the whole system needs an overhaul.

One in five UK schools has set up a food bank in covid crisis.

Why has the UK’s covid death toll been so high? Inequality may have played a role.

But it’s not (unsurprisingly) just a problem in Britain

The Millionaire Senators who voted against the Minimum Wage in the USA

All in it together?

The very private life of Sir Chris Hohn – the man paid £1 million a day.

The problems for private renters

Eviction orders being issued despite UK government covid pledge.

Bail out renters, not just landlords, unions urge Rishi Sunak ahead of Budget.

‘Collateral damage’

England’s covid catch-up plan for pupils – summer schools and tutoring.

Covid job losses show structural racism of UK labour market.

Study shows one-in-three children have rarely been leaving the house.

Collapse of social care could force more elderly people out of their own homes.

Thousands of urgent operations building up across London as covid pressures continue.

Young ethnic minorities bear brunt of recessions, and it’s happening again.

The price of global pandemic responses has been to make many other diseases worse.

Special needs pupils in England living in dread of returning to the classroom.

Schools warned to be alert for mental health problems among pupils as they reopen.

What comes after the pandemic?

More of the same if we listen to some so-called scientific ‘experts’. It might have been a positive development that scientists have become the new ‘rock stars’ over the course of the last year but that new found fame (and fortune) should be taken in context. One of the reasons that ‘experts’ started to be distrusted was the way in which they were used in a number of high profile criminal cases where the decision of the jury depended upon who was the most convincing ‘expert’ – and the prosecution could always afford the most high profile and therefore, most ‘credible’.

Now they have the limelight some are trying to keep themselves there for as long as possible. As the UK appears to be coming out of the present lock down there is optimism that ‘normality’ will return in the not too distant future. However, those ‘experts’ who are risk averse are already raising the spectre of a return of non-covid respiratory diseases this coming winter – and in the process attempting to maintain the idea of control over the population. This control will be in the areas such as the (unproven) wearing of face coverings/masks. (It’s perhaps pertinent here to mention that this has become one of the growing cottage industries in recent months and small companies are now dependent on this fad staying around for some time.)

The manner in which many governments throughout the world, and especially in Britain, have managed the pandemic in the last year or so has been totally inadequate for a so-called modern society in the 21st century. To ‘institutionalise’ a minor tactic which doesn’t address the main issues surrounding the incompetence and corruption that has dominated the last 12 months will just be another way the thieves and incompetents get off the hook.

UK must prepare for ‘hard winter’ of flu.

Personal data in private hands

Yet another dodgy contract given under the excuse of dealing with the pandemic – but which will have consequences far beyond the period the virus is dominating British life. NHS faces lawsuit over data deal with “spy-tech” firm Palantir.

Leadership in the pandemic

We get the leadership we deserve.

On British colonialism, anti-Semitism, and Palestinian rights

Posted on 05/03/2021 by Michael

12 May 1948 Members of Haganah expel Palestinians from Haifa Nakba

On British colonialism, anti-Semitism, and Palestinian rights

Avi Shlaim

From the ‘original sin’ of 1917 to the government’s more recent adoption of the controversial IHRA anti-Semitism definition, Britain has always been firmly in Israel’s camp

In December 2016, then British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of anti-Semitism. It was the first government in the world to do so, marking yet another milestone in the 100-year history of British support for Zionism and callous disregard for Palestinian rights.

The ‘original sin’ was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised to support the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, provided that nothing was done to ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. In 1917, Arabs constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine; Jews made up less than 10 percent.

The declaration was thus a classic colonial document: it granted the right to national self-determination to a small minority, while denying it to the majority. To add insult to injury, the declaration referred to 90 percent of the country’s inhabitants as ‘non-Jewish communities in Palestine’, relegating them to an inferior status. Although grotesquely imbalanced in favour of Jews, the declaration at least included a promise to protect the civil and religious rights of Palestinians – but even this promise was never kept.

The British mandate for Palestine lasted from 1920 until midnight on 14 May 1948, the date the State of Israel was proclaimed. The first high commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel, was a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Partiality towards Jews was evident from day one; the cornerstone of the mandate was to deny representative institutions as long as Arabs were the majority in Palestine.

In the end, Britain over-fulfilled its promise to Zionists by helping the ‘national home’ evolve into a Jewish state, while betraying its pledge to Palestinians. Britain’s betrayal gave rise to the Palestinian Great Revolt of 1936-39. This was a nationalist uprising, demanding Arab independence and an end to the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases.

The revolt was suppressed with utter ruthlessness and brutality by the British army and police. Britain resorted to the entire panoply of colonial measures, including martial law, military courts, detention without trial, caning, flogging, torture, extra-judicial killings, collective punishment and aerial bombardment. Nearly 20,000 Palestinians were killed or wounded during the revolt, and villages were reduced to rubble.

In the process of crushing the uprising, Britain broke the backbone of the Palestinian national movement. British actions gravely weakened Palestinians and strengthened Zionists, as the two national movements moved inexorably towards a final showdown. Palestine was not lost in the late 1940s, as is commonly believed; it was lost in the late 1930s, as a result of Britain’s savage smashing of Palestinian resistance and support for Jewish paramilitary forces.

Anti-Arab Racism

An undercurrent of anti-Arab racism coloured Britain’s entire handling of the mandate for Palestine. In 1937, future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: ‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right.

‘I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race … has come in and taken their place.’

A Black Lives Matter protester had a point when, in June 2020, he sprayed graffiti on a Churchill statue in London’s Parliament Square to add the words ‘was a racist’. Churchill held Arabs in contempt as racially inferior. His description of Palestinian Arabs as a ‘dog in a manger’ is shocking, but not entirely surprising; racism usually goes hand in hand with colonialism.

As the British mandate for Palestine approached its inglorious end, Britain persisted in its anti-Palestinian stance. When the United Nations voted in November 1947 to partition mandatory Palestine into two states, Britain adopted an official posture of neutrality. Behind the scenes, however, it worked to abort the birth of a Palestinian state.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement, fell out with Britain over its pro-Zionist policy in Palestine and made contact with Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. In British eyes, a Palestinian state was synonymous with a mufti state; accordingly, Britain’s hostility towards Palestinians and Palestinian statehood was a constant factor in its foreign policy from 1947-49.

Wiped off the map

Britain gave a green light to its client, King Abdullah of Transjordan, to send his British-led little army into Palestine upon expiry of the British mandate, to capture the West Bank – which was intended to be the heartland of the Palestinian state. The winners in the war for Palestine were King Abdullah and the Zionist movement; the losers were Palestinians. Around 750,000 Palestinians, more than half the population, became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map.

In short, Britain played a significant but little-known part in the Nakba, the catastrophe that overwhelmed Palestinians in 1948. When Jordan formally annexed the West Bank in 1950, Britain and Pakistan were the only UN members to recognise it.

Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter, the reassessment of Britain’s colonial past and the drive to decolonise school curricula, some scholars have leapt to the defence of the British Empire. Nigel Biggar, the Regius professor of theology at the University of Oxford, for example, defends the British Empire as a moral force for good.

Referencing Cecil Rhodes and the campaign to remove his statue from Oriel College, Biggar conceded that Rhodes was an imperialist, ‘but British colonialism was not essentially racist, wasn’t essentially exploitative, and wasn’t essentially atrocious’. The British Empire’s record in Palestine, however, is rather difficult to reconcile with the benign view of the learned professor.

Shameful legacy

The Conservative Party and its leaders are the standard-bearers of this shameful legacy of unqualified British support for Israel and indifference to Palestinian rights. Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is by far the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in Britain, and its membership includes around 80 percent of Tory members of parliament. Since the May 2015 general election, CFI has sent 24 delegations with more than 180 Conservatives to visit Israel.

The last three leaders of the Conservative Party have been uncritical supporters of the State of Israel. Former Prime Minister David Cameron described himself as a ‘passionate friend’ of Israel and insisted that nothing could break that friendship.

Theresa May was probably the most pro-Israeli leader in Europe during her premiership. In an address to CFI in 2016, she described Israel as a ‘remarkable country … a thriving democracy, a beacon of tolerance, an engine of enterprise, and an example to the rest of the world’. She spoke of Israel as ‘a country where people of all religions and sexualities are free and equal in the eyes of the law’.

May reserved her sharpest criticism for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and to pressure Israel to comply with international law. BDS is a non-violent, global grassroots campaign whose principal demands – the right of return of 1948 refugees, an end to occupation, and equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens – are grounded in international law. This movement, May stated, ‘is wrong, it is unacceptable, and this party and this government will have no truck with those who subscribe to it’.

May reminded her audience that Britain was entering a ‘special time’ – the centenary of the Balfour Declaration – and went on to deliver a wholly one-sided verdict on this colonial document: ‘It is one of the most important letters in history. It demonstrates Britain’s vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish people. And it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.’ There was no mention of Britain’s failure to uphold even the minimal rights of Palestinians.

National rights

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a slightly more nuanced take on Britain’s record as a colonial power in Palestine. In his 2014 book on Churchill, he described the Balfour Declaration as ‘bizarre’, ‘tragically incoherent’ and an ‘exquisite piece of Foreign Office fudgerama’. This was one of the rare examples of sound judgement and historical insight on Johnson’s part. But in 2015, on a trip to Israel as mayor of London, Johnson hailed the Balfour Declaration as ‘a great thing’.

In October 2017, in his capacity as foreign secretary, Johnson introduced a debate in the House of Commons on the Balfour Declaration. He repeated the mantra about Britain’s pride in the part it played in creating a Jewish state in Palestine. He had the perfect opportunity to balance this with a recognition of Palestine as a state, but he repeatedly turned it down, saying the time was not right. Since the Conservative Party supports a two-state solution, recognising Palestine would be a logical step towards that end.

Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary in 1917, undertook to uphold the civil and religious rights of the native population of Palestine. A century later, the House of Commons added national rights as well, voting in October 2014 – by 274 votes to 12 – to recognise a Palestinian state. Cameron chose to ignore the non-binding vote; at least he was consistent in his passionate attachment to Israel, which is more than can be said about his successor. As with Johnson’s approach to any subject, in his attitude towards Palestinian rights, expediency prevails.

An unbroken thread of moral myopia, hypocrisy, double standards and skulduggery connects British policy on Palestine, from Balfour to Boris. The Conservative government’s adoption in 2016 of the IHRA’s non-legally-binding working definition of anti-Semitism falls squarely within this tradition of partisanship on behalf of Zionism and Israel, and disdain for Palestinians.

The definition states: ‘anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.’

Problematic examples

The definition does not mention Israel by name, but no fewer than seven out of the 11 ‘illustrative examples’ that follow concern Israel. They include ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’; ‘applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’; ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’; and ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’.

The 11 examples make a series of unwarranted assumptions about Israel and world Jewry. They assume that all Israelis adhere to the notion of Israel as a Jewish state; that Israel is a ‘democratic nation’; that Israel is not a racist endeavour; and that all Jews condemn the comparison between Israeli policy and that of the Nazis.

In fact, Israel is a highly heterogeneous and deeply divided society with a wide range of opinions on all these issues – and a political culture marked by fierce disputes and no-holds-barred debates.

Many left-wing Israelis regard Israel as a racist endeavour. B’Tselem, the highly respected Israeli human rights organisation, issued a closely argued position paper in January titled ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.’

It declared: ‘The entire area Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is governed by a single regime working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group over another. By geographically, demographically and physically engineering space, the regime enables Jews to live in a contiguous area with full rights, including self-determination, while Palestinians live in separate units and enjoy fewer rights.’

Right-wing Israelis continue to hotly deny that Israel is an apartheid state and reject any comparison with apartheid South Africa. But there is no law against calling Israel an apartheid state, and progressive Israelis do so all the time. Comparisons with Nazi Germany are also not proscribed by Israeli law. Such comparisons are less common in Israeli political discourse, but they are occasionally expressed in newspaper editorials and even by politicians.

Devil in the details

The global Jewish community is just as diverse and disputatious. Ironically, to treat Jews as a homogeneous group is in fact an antisemitic trope. It is antisemites who fail to differentiate between different kinds of Jews, and want to see them all clustered in one place. It is on this basis that Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish state, predicted that ‘the antisemites will become our most dependable friends’.

The devil is in the details or, in the case of the IHRA document, in the examples. Strictly speaking, there are two definitions: the two opening sentences, quoted above, and the list of 11 examples. This point cannot be emphasised strongly enough; it is a tale of two texts.

To achieve consensus on the document within the IHRA, it was necessary to separate the statement from the illustrative examples that followed. Pro-Israel partisans, however, have repeatedly conveyed the false impression that the examples are an integral part of the definition. They also habitually omit the qualifier that this is only a draft – a ‘working definition’.

As countless commentators, lawyers and scholars of anti-Semitism have pointed out, the IHRA working definition is poorly drafted, internally incoherent, hopelessly vague, vulnerable to political abuse, and altogether not fit for purpose. It does not fulfil the most elementary requirement of a definition, which is to define.

The definition states that ‘anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews’, but fails to spell out what this perception is. In my 50 years as a university teacher, I have not come across a more vacuous or useless definition. Yet, although it is vacuous, it is not innocuous. Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the definition, has rejected its adoption as a campus hate speech code, arguing that it ‘will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself’.

Anti-Semitism vs anti-Zionism

What the non-legally-binding IHRA document does do, with the help of the examples, is shift the focus from real anti-Semitism to the perfectly respectable and growing phenomenon of anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is sometimes described by pro-Israel stakeholders as ‘the new anti-Semitism’. It is essential, however, to distinguish clearly between the two.

Anti-Semitism may be simply defined as ‘hostility towards Jews because they are Jews’. Zionism, meanwhile, is a nationalist, political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state, and now supports the continued existence of Israel as such a state. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the exclusive character of the state of Israel and to Israeli policies, particularly its occupation of the West Bank. anti-Semitism relates to Jews anywhere in the world; anti-Zionism relates only to Israel.

The IHRA document, taken as a whole, is susceptible to political abuse in that it makes it possible to conflate legitimate anti-Zionism with nefarious anti-Semitism. Israel’s energetic apologists, who were instrumental in promoting the document, conflate the two deliberately and routinely.

To criticise the definition for its vacuity is thus to miss a central point. In this endeavour, the definition’s very vagueness confers a political advantage. It enables Israel’s defenders to weaponise the definition, especially against left-wing opponents, and to portray what in most cases is valid criticism of Israeli behaviour as the vilification and delegitimisation of the State of Israel.

Double standards

Israel is not the victim of double standards. On the contrary, it is the beneficiary of western double standards. Under the IHRA examples, it is antisemitic to require of Israel a behaviour ‘not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’. But this has nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism.

In any case, Israel is not a democracy. Even within its original borders, it is a flawed democracy at best, because of discrimination at multiple levels against its Palestinian citizens. But in the whole area under its rule, including the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel is an ethnocracy – a political system in which one ethnic group dominates another.

The superior status of Jews in Israel is enshrined in the 2018 nation-state law, the official confirmation that Israel is an apartheid state. The law states that the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel is ‘unique to the Jewish people’. It establishes Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and downgrades Arabic – which is widely spoken by Arab citizens of Israel – to a ‘special status’.

Israel is the only member of the UN that enshrines its racism in law. It is therefore not antisemitic, but only right and proper, to expect Israel to behave like a democratic nation by giving equal rights to all its citizens.

Israel’s friends in the US and Europe have claimed for the definition an international status that it does not have. They pushed hard for the adoption of the definition by as many governments as possible, because it can be used to intimidate critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian campaigners by tarnishing them with the brush of anti-Semitism.

In Britain, the top echelons of the Conservative Party have followed the Israel lobby’s lead. Indeed, in the Conservative Party as a whole, the IHRA document seems to have acquired the status of holy writ.

Divisive consequences

The Labour Party discovered to its cost the divisive and damaging consequences of adopting this document. Initially, the party’s code of conduct incorporated five of the IHRA examples verbatim, and an additional two with minor amendments.

This did not satisfy Israel’s friends either inside or outside the party. The party was bullied by the Jewish Labour Movement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust, and the Campaign Against anti-Semitism to adopt all the examples verbatim. Not to adopt all the examples exactly as they stood, it was misleadingly argued, was tantamount to a rejection of the definition.

Labour’s national executive committee caved in and abandoned its amendments to the remaining two examples. In the Orwellian world of the post-full-adoption Labour Party, many of the members who have been suspended or expelled for the crime of anti-Semitism were themselves Jewish. Several Jewish Labour Party members have been investigated since 2016, nearly all on the basis of allegations of anti-Semitism. This made a mockery of the claim of Keir Starmer, who succeeded the allegedly antisemitic Jeremy Corbyn as leader, to be making the Labour Party a safe place for Jews.

Under the new regime, the Labour Party is slavishly subservient to the benighted definition. A local Labour Party branch recently tried to submit a motion endorsing B’Tselem’s latest report on Israeli apartheid. It said: ‘This Branch supports the call from B’Tselem for an end to the apartheid regime to ‘ensure human rights, democracy, liberty and equality to all people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, living on the bit of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.’’

The motion was ruled out of order at the national level of the party on the grounds that, according to the IHRA’s working definition, this could be seen as designating Israel a ‘racist endeavour’.

Politically dangerous

In the rush to burnish its pro-Zionist credentials, the Labour Party turned against some of its most progressive Jewish members. Moshe Machover, the veteran Israeli British anti-Zionist, was expelled and then reinstated in 2017 after the Guardian published a letter of protest undersigned by 139 Labour Party members, including eminent Jewish lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, dismissing the insinuation of anti-Semitism as ‘personally offensive and politically dangerous’.

But in 2020, Machover was suspended again. He received a 20-page letter from party bureaucrats containing a melange of old and new allegations of anti-Semitism, which Machover described as “full of lies” and part of a ‘Stalinist purge of the Labour Party’. He considered resigning and slamming the door behind him, but decided to give the party inquisitors a chance to further disgrace themselves by expelling him.

The real question is: why did the British government adopt this fundamentally flawed and deeply controversial document? The government cannot claim in self-defence that it had not been warned about the potentially harmful consequences of adoption.

It actually rejected calls from the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee to insert two ‘clarifications’ to the IHRA definition and examples: firstly, to clarify that it is not antisemitic to criticise the government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent; and secondly, to clarify that “it is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent’.

Funding threatened

The clearest clue that the present Conservative government is wedded to the IHRA definition as a means of curtailing debate and restricting free speech on Israel is contained in a letter from Gavin Williamson, the secretary of state for education, to university vice chancellors.

Sent in October 2020 amid a national crisis of the education sector due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the letter noted that the number of universities that had adopted the IHRA definition remained ‘shamefully low‘. The universities who ignored it were said to be letting down their staff and students, and their Jewish students in particular.

The education secretary insisted that these universities stop dragging their feet and formally endorse the IHRA definition. He threatened to cut off funding to universities at which antisemitic incidents occur and which had not signed up to the definition.

Williamson’s letter was not well received. He himself came across as authoritarian, while the tone of his missive was arrogant, hectoring and bullying. More worrying, however, was the content. It made no reference to any other form of bigotry, such as Islamophobia, homophobia or anti-Black racism. It did not escape notice that anti-Semitism was singled out for attention and punishment by a Conservative government that is renowned for its intensely relaxed attitude towards Islamophobia.

The letter assumed that universities that did not formally endorse the IHRA definition were not taking anti-Semitism seriously, which is far from being the case. It did not allow for the fact that most universities have rules and disciplinary procedures for combatting most forms of discrimination and racism, including anti-Semitism. Even if a specific definition of anti-Semitism is needed, which is debatable, no reason was given for privileging the IHRA one.

Above all, the letter, or rather the ultimatum, was seen as a threat to free speech, which universities and the Department for Education have a statutory duty to uphold.

Ministerial diktat

Some English universities openly, and courageously, rejected the IHRA definition; about a fifth capitulated to the ministerial diktat by signing up to the definition; and the majority chose not to commit themselves one way or the other. My own university, Oxford, has fixed its colours firmly to the fence.

The statement on its website reads: “Oxford University aims to ensure that all students, whatever their background, have a fulfilling experience of higher education. To support us in our work, we have adopted (reflecting the position of the Office for Students) the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as a guide to interpreting and understanding anti-Semitism, noting the clarifications recommended by the Home Affairs Select Committee. The IHRA definition does not affect the legal definition of racial discrimination, so does not change our approach to meeting our legal duties and responsibilities.” In other words, Oxford will draw on the definition for intellectual enlightenment in thinking about anti-Semitism, but not as a guide for action.

In a letter to the Guardian published in November 2020, a group of 122 Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals expressed their concerns about the IHRA definition. Palestinian voices are rarely heard in the national debate on anti-Semitism and Israel-Palestine. This letter is therefore worth quoting at some length for the light it sheds on Palestinian perceptions and positions:

‘In recent years, the fight against anti-Semitism has been increasingly instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights. Diverting the necessary struggle against anti-Semitism to serve such an agenda threatens to debase this struggle and hence to discredit and weaken it.

‘anti-Semitism must be debunked and combated. Regardless of pretence, no expression of hatred for Jews as Jews should be tolerated anywhere in the world. anti-Semitism manifests itself in sweeping generalisations and stereotypes about Jews, regarding power and money in particular, along with conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. We regard as legitimate and necessary the fight against such attitudes. We also believe that the lessons of the Holocaust as well as those of other genocides of modern times must be part of the education of new generations against all forms of racial prejudice and hatred.

‘The fight against anti-Semitism must, however, be approached in a principled manner, lest it defeat its purpose. Through ‘examples’ that it provides, the IHRA definition conflates Judaism with Zionism in assuming that all Jews are Zionists, and that the state of Israel in its current reality embodies the self-determination of all Jews. We profoundly disagree with this. The fight against anti-Semitism should not be turned into a stratagem to delegitimise the fight against the oppression of the Palestinians, the denial of their rights and the continued occupation of their land.’

Chilling effect

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), Britain’s leading academic organisation for the study of the Middle East and North Africa, issued a statement expressing its profound concern about the pressure applied on universities by the government to adopt the IHRA definition.

It said Williamson’s intervention would have a “chilling effect” on academic freedom and the university sector in Middle East studies and beyond. While welcoming steps to root out anti-Semitism and all forms of racism from university campuses, the association came to the conclusion that this particular definition would have a detrimental impact on researchers and students.

After tracking the use of the IHRA definition in different contexts in the UK, it concluded that it was being deployed “to use the false charge of anti-Semitism to silence and delegitimise those who support Palestinian rights”. The anti-racist working groups within universities with whom it had consulted were all vehemently against adopting the IHRA definition.

The statement ended by urging universities “to protect academic freedom, to defend their autonomy against the government’s pressure to adopt the IHRA definition, and to retract the definition” where it had been adopted.

Another call on universities to resist the government’s attempt to impose the IHRA definition came from an unexpected source: British academics who are also Israeli citizens. I am a member of this group, brought together by outrage at Williamson’s rude and crude intervention. It came as a surprise to discover that there are so many of us but, on the issue of his threat, we were all on the same page, regardless of our diverse academic disciplines, ages, statuses and political affiliations.

Attacking free speech

Our demarche took the form of a long letter sent in the last week of January to all vice chancellors of English universities and many academic senates. Since then, our letter has been signed by an impressive list of 110 supporters, all Israeli academics outside the UK, including many from Israel.

We tried to reach a wider public beyond the academy by publishing our letter in the mainstream media. Our request was either rejected or ignored by no less than 12 national newspapers and other media outlets. We were rather surprised and disappointed that not a single national paper saw fit to publish our letter or to report our initiative. But the letter was eventually published by the Jewish leftist online journal, Vashti.

The litany of rejections is in itself a comment on the reluctance of the mainstream media to give space to non-mainstream Jewish voices.

In our letter, we said: ‘Fighting anti-Semitism in all its forms is an absolute must. Yet the IHRA document is inherently flawed, and in ways that undermine this fight. In addition, it threatens free speech and academic freedom and constitutes an attack both on the Palestinian right to self-determination, and the struggle to democratise Israel.’

We also pointed out that the government’s pressure on higher education institutions to adopt a definition for only one sort of racism singles out people of Jewish descent as deserving greater protection than others who today endure equal or more grievous manifestations of racism and discrimination.

Step in the wrong direction

We took strong exception to some of the ‘illustrations’ of the IHRA document. Surely, we argued, it should be legitimate, not least in a university setting, to debate whether Israel, as a self-proclaimed Jewish state, is ‘a racist endeavour’ or a ‘democratic nation’. We found it alarming that the document was being used to frame as antisemitic the struggle against Israel’s occupation and dispossession. No state should be shielded from such legitimate scholarly discussion, we opined, and nor should Israel.

Our letter went on to say that ‘as Israeli citizens settled in the UK, many of us of Jewish descent … we demand that our voice, too, be heard: the IHRA document is a step in the wrong direction. It singles out the persecution of Jews; it inhibits free speech and academic freedom; it deprives Palestinians of a legitimate voice within the UK public space; and, finally, it inhibits us, as Israeli nationals, from exercising our democratic right to challenge our government”.

In conclusion, we joined in the demand that UK universities remain firm in their commitment to academic freedom and freedom of speech. We urged UK universities to continue their fight against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. We repeated that the flawed IHRA document does a disservice to these goals.

We therefore called on all academic senates in England to reject the governmental diktat to adopt it, or, where adopted already, to act to revoke it. A copy of our letter was sent to the secretary of state for education but, so far, we have not heard back from him. It would seem that all the protests about his letter are, for Mr. Williamson, like water off a duck’s back.

The case of Ken Loach

A recent episode at Oxford highlighted the problematic implications of adopting or even semi-adopting the IHRA definition. Ken Loach – the multi-award-winning British filmmaker, lifelong anti-racist and social campaigner – was invited by his old Oxford college to a discussion that had nothing to do with Jews or Israel. This was advertised as a joint event between Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and St Peter’s College.

Loach was billed to discuss his filmmaking career with the master of St Peter’s College, Judith Buchanan, who is also a professor of literature and film. The event was part of a broader university humanities cultural programme that fosters debate between artists and academics.

What followed was a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against a man who had spent his life championing the victims of oppression and discrimination, including Palestinians. Buchanan was bombarded with messages demanding she cancel the event.

The Oxford University Jewish Society said it was deeply disappointed by the decision to host the event because ‘on numerous occasions, Loach has made remarks that are antisemitic under the IHRA definition, which was recently adopted by the University of Oxford’.

Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, wrote to Buchanan, describing the decision to invite Loach to speak at her college as ‘entirely unacceptable‘, and called for the event to be cancelled. She added that the board had been in touch with Jewish students at Oxford and ‘wholeheartedly support their condemnation of the event’. The categorical conclusion was: ‘This event should not take place.’

Combined pressure

The Union of Jewish Students, a national organisation that represents around 8,500 students, piled on the pressure. ‘Just last summer’, it tweeted, ‘the University of Oxford stated they were committed to addressing systemic racism wherever it may be found, including within their own community. We do not see how this event can be reconciled with that statement. It is an outrage that St Peter’s College has ignored the concerns of its Jewish students and we urge Judith Buchanan, Master of St Peter’s College, to remove this speaker from the event. UJS are offering support to the Jewish Society.’

Buchanan and Torch stood firm against the combined pressure from all Jewish quarters, and the event went ahead as planned. It was also streamed live on YouTube. The discussion was moderated by Professor Wes Williams, the director of Torch.

In my inexpert opinion, it was a wonderful cultural event, a model of its kind. Loach showed clips from his films The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) about Ireland in the early 20th century and I, Daniel Blake (2016) about the inhumanity of the social benefits system.

Loach talked about his films, and the worldview that informs them, eloquently and movingly in the discussion with Buchanan. There was no mention of Israel or Palestinians. After the webinar, Buchanan referred to the controversy surrounding it and stressed that neither the college nor the university believe in no-platforming. In an email, however, she apologised to Jewish students for the ‘hurt’ caused by the row over the event.

Rehashed allegations

The day after the event took place, on 9 February, the student union of Wadham College held a meeting regarding St Peter’s College and Loach. It is unusual for the students of one college to criticise the conduct of another college, but the Jewish students at Wadham evidently felt strongly about this issue.

The motion before the meeting went into great detail about comments made by Loach on different occasions that were considered to be antisemitic and complicit in Holocaust denial. The document generated more heat and venom; it was essentially a rehash of old allegations that had been comprehensively refuted in the past. The motion was to formally condemn Buchanan and St Peter’s College in poorly handling the concerns of Jewish students. The censure motion was passed with 150 votes for, 14 against and four abstentions.

Loach told the Telegraph, which reported on the controversy: ‘These recycled accusations are false and based on persistent misrepresentation and distortion.’ The embattled filmmaker’s friends rallied to his defence. Some were members of Jewish Voice for Labour, which in the past had defended Corbyn against false charges of anti-Semitism.

At their request, I sent a statement to be read at the student union’s meeting at Wadham College. It read: ‘I deeply regret the attack by Wadham College students on Ken Loach. He has a strong and consistent record of opposing racism of every kind, including anti-Semitism. He is anti-Zionist but in no way antisemitic.

‘He is charged with having made comments that are antisemitic under the IHRA definition. But that definition is utterly flawed. Its real purpose is to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to suppress legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies. anti-Semitism is hostility towards Jews because they are Jews.

“Under this proper definition Ken Loach is completely innocent. He is also an admirable person, a champion of social justice, and an outstanding artist. The attack on him undermines freedom of speech and that has no place in an academic institution. I therefore urge the students of Wadham College to stop their vilification of Ken Loach and to accord to him the respect that he so richly deserves.’

Smearing critics

The Loach affair vividly demonstrates the damage that the IHRA document can do to free speech on campus. The document was used to smear a prominent left-wing critic of Israel and a defender of Palestinian rights, and to try to deny him a platform.

The attempt at no-platforming ultimately failed, but it caused totally unwarranted pain to the artist, placed the master of his old college in an extremely awkward position, stirred up a great deal of ill-feeling on both sides of the argument, wasted a great deal of time and energy that could have been put to better use, and, worst of all, in my humble opinion, was completely unnecessary, unjustified and unproductive. All it did was sour the atmosphere around an imaginative cultural event.

Are there any lessons to be learned from this sad episode in relation to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism? First and foremost, it must be emphasised that anti-Semitism is not a fiction, as some people claim. It is a real problem at all levels of our society, including university campuses, and it needs to be confronted robustly wherever it rears its ugly head.

Secondly, it would be quite wrong to suggest that Jewish students who protest about anti-Semitism are inventing or exaggerating their feeling of hurt. Jewish students genuinely feel vulnerable and have a real need for protection by university authorities against any manifestation of bigotry, harassment or discrimination.

Fighting racism

The real question is this: does the IHRA definition provide that protection? If the Loach affair is anything to go by, it most certainly does not.

In the first place, the definition is implicitly premised on Jewish exceptionalism – on the notion that Jews are a special case and must be treated as such. This gets in the way of solidarity and cooperation with other groups who are also susceptible to racial prejudice, such as Arabs and Muslims. To be effective, the fight against racism needs to take place across the board and not in isolated corners.

Another serious flaw of the IHRA definition is that, as I and many others have argued, so many of its examples are not about Jews, but about the State of Israel. As a result, it comes across as more concerned with the protection of Israel than the protection of Jews.

It is true that for many Jewish-British students, Israel forms a vital component of their identity. It is unhelpful, however, to let Israel feature so prominently in the analysis of anti-Semitism. Israel is a controversial country whose democratic institutions are being constantly eroded, and whose oppression of Palestinians attracts ever-increasing international censure – and, most recently, a ruling that paves the way for an investigation of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Despite its claim to the contrary, Israel does not represent all Jews globally, but only its own citizens, a fifth of whom are Palestinian.

British Jews are not collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct, but the IHRA definition implicates them in Israel’s affairs, and encourages them to target anyone they consider to be an enemy of the Jewish state.

Furthermore, it bears repeating that criticisms of Israel are not necessarily antisemitic. The IHRA definition blurs the line between legitimate and illegitimate criticism. Nor does it protect Jewish students specifically; by aligning them too closely with Israel, it does the exact opposite. In the long term, therefore, it does not serve the interests of Jewish students.

No definition needed

The question arises, finally: do we need a definition of anti-Semitism at all? My own view is that we do not. The very term “antisemitic” is problematic because Arabs are Semites too. I prefer the term “anti-Jewish racism”. What we need is a code of conduct to protect all minority groups, including Jews, against discrimination and harassment while protecting freedom of speech for all members of universities.

The universal right to freedom of expression is already embodied in UK law by the Human Rights Act of 1998, which prohibits public authorities from acting in a way that is incompatible with that right. Specific protection for freedom of expression in universities is provided by the 1986 Education Act.

We do not therefore need any more legislation; all we need is common sense and honesty in applying the existing legislation. If a person attacks Israel, we should not ask whether the attack is antisemitic or not. And we should certainly not have to ask whether their statement falls foul of any of the seven Israel-focused IHRA illustrations of what might constitute anti-Semitism.

We should simply ask whether what they say about Israel is true or false. If true, the charge should be investigated further to ascertain whether the motive behind it is hostility or prejudice towards Jews and, if it is, appropriate action should be taken. And if the charge is false, it would be futile to speculate about the motives behind it. The debate about both anti-Jewish racism and Israel should be based on evidence, not on political or sectarian affiliations.

The essential point is that universities in the UK must have the autonomy to oversee and regulate all activities on their campuses, according to their own circumstances, free from external interference. Protecting freedom of speech on campuses is both a moral obligation and a legal duty.

The IHRA definition conflicts directly with this duty. I am old-fashioned enough to warm to the idea that a university is a pile of books and a community of scholars. In my kind of university, there is no room for colonial-style autocrats such as Williamson and his ilk.

18th March – Paris Commune 1871

What was the spark that caused this prairie fire?

And how did they respond?

What did the Commune achieve – if only for a short time?

Did the Commune make any mistakes?

What can we still learn from The Commune?

…. and what has already been learnt.

Women and the Paris Commune

Further Reading

From a Marxist-Leninist perspective:

A History of the Paris Commune:

Women in The Paris Commune

UK Budget 2021 – relief for business; suffering for the poor

Vaccination Programme

Privatisation of the pandemic

The ever changing virus

Recognition of the ‘heroes’

Managing the pandemic in hospital

Susceptibility to infection

Who profits from a pandemic?

The return to ‘normality?

‘Immunity Passports’

Austerity will remain after the pandemic

Poverty in Britain

But it’s not (unsurprisingly) just a problem in Britain

All in it together?

The problems for private renters

‘Collateral damage’

What comes after the pandemic?

Personal data in private hands

Leadership in the pandemic

On British colonialism, anti-Semitism, and Palestinian rights

Anti-Arab Racism

Wiped off the map

Shameful legacy

National rights

Problematic examples

Devil in the details

Anti-Semitism vs anti-Zionism

Double standards

Divisive consequences

Politically dangerous

Funding threatened

Ministerial diktat

Chilling effect

Attacking free speech

Step in the wrong direction

The case of Ken Loach

Combined pressure

Rehashed allegations

Smearing critics

Fighting racism

No definition needed