Get the Tories out!

Mrs May’s government has survived the week by the skin of its teeth following the resignations of two prominent Eurosceptic ministers and a number of their underlings over her botched-up Brexit plan that was presented to the Cabinet earlier in the month. Labour’s standing continues to rise in the opinion polls. The Tory government, which is dependent on the votes of sectarian bigots from northern Ireland, is on its last legs and there’s every chance of a fresh general election this year.

The dominant wing within the ruling class is pulling out all the stops to sink Corbyn and make it impossible for him to become Prime Minister. Their smears are aimed at splitting the Labour Party and keeping the Conservatives in office. Their collaborators are the Blairite fifth column within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Zionist apologists within the labour movement.

But amongst the Europhiles within the corridors of power there is a growing realisation that the only way that Brexit can be stopped is with the return of a Labour government, dependent on the support of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and the Liberal Democrats, whose price will inevitably be a second referendum.

We have to make sure this doesn’t happen. And it won’t if Labour gets a big enough mandate at the next general election to govern without the dubious assistance of the SNP or the Liberal Democrats. But there’s no guarantee that this will happen, or indeed that the Conservatives will be forced out ahead of time, without massive pressure from the labour and peace movement across the country.

But the wounds inflicted by the Blairite rump in the Labour Party can only be healed with an end to the witch-hunt and the return to Labour’s ranks of all those unjustly suspended or expelled over the last few years. The Blairites, who are still a major force within the Parliamentary Labour Party, say that Corbyn’s left policies make Labour unelectable. But what they really fear is that Labour will be returned to office on a programme of trade union rights, public ownership and social justice that they so bitterly oppose.

Communists must campaign to ensure that a future Labour government sticks to its guns and honours the European Union (EU) referendum result. Brexit would mark a significant shift in the balance of power between capital and labour in Britain. It would leave a Labour government free to trade with any country around the world and free to invest in British manufacturing industry. It would be a government ready to restore trade union rights and in so doing reverse the yawning wealth gap between rich and poor in Britain. It would be a government that could cap rents and burst the housing bubble which has led to the forest of towering luxury homes in our great cities that only the rich can afford whilst workers are forced to live in hovels or sleep on the streets.

Corbyn’s overwhelming support within the trade union movement and the rank-and-file of the Labour party shows that Labour is still a potentially strong weapon for our class. Although the New Communist Party has never confused the Labour Party with a revolutionary party, nor imagined that we can gain a workers’ state through parliamentary elections, a Labour government, with its organisational links with the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Our strategy is for working class unity. We struggle to defeat the right-wing within the movement, and campaign to strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions. We support Labour’s demands for the restoration of trade union rights, progressive taxation, state welfare and a public sector dedicated to meet the people’s needs.

But social democracy, left or right, remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it. It has never led to socialism. So, at the same time, we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change.

Professor Stone’s Turkish delight

by New Worker literature correspondent

Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone (first published 2010). Thames and Hudson: London, pp192. ISBN 10: 0500251754 ISBN 13: 9780500251751

The Ottoman Empire effectively lasted from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 until the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The same period in English history would have begun during the Wars of the Roses and ended almost with the first Labour Government; in other words, from Henry VI to Arthur Henderson. The book gives a number of reasons why the empire lasted this long.

But the history of the Turks long pre-dates the final days of the Byzantine empire. They were part of a number of tribal, nomadic groups that originated in Central Asia and at times held sway over the vast area between western Europe and China. This area, across which lay the trade routes that linked the Eurasian land mass, was highly lucrative. Many of these nomadic groups, which included the Mongols, Tartars and of course the Turks, captured these areas, adapted themselves to the customs of the region as well as establishing their own empires. These included the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, the empire of Tamerlane the Great, the Indian Moghul Empire, as well as the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, and may even go back as far as the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

According to Professor Stone, a conservative Oxbridge don who now heads the Department of International Relations at a private university in Turkey, the Ottoman system of rule was less repressive than European feudalism. This may on the one hand provide a clue as to why the Ottoman Empire lasted so long whilst on the other it may provide a reason for its ultimate weakness.

It did not see social upheavals on a par with Western Europe, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Peasants War in Germany, the English Revolution in the 1640s and the French Revolution of 1789. Events like these are engines of social change and take societies forward.

The Ottoman Empire was to a large extent a military empire. It had a standing army based on elite units called janissaries whilst other European states were using conscripts and mercenaries.

It was able to make full use of artillery, long before many contemporary societies. For instance, military historians often talk about the role of the long-bow in the English victory at Agincourt in 1415; around the same time the Ottoman army besieged Constantinople using cannon.

As a result, it was able to control at its height an area from the Atlantic Ocean to India and at various times threatening the borders of Hungary and Austria. The Ottoman advance in the 16^th and 17th centuries could also be attributed to both the schism in the Christian world at the time as well as rivalries between European nations. Elizabeth I was keen to strengthen ties between England and the Turks as a counter balance to her rival Spain.

Many European Protestants actually saw Islam as no worse than Catholicism and, in some circumstances, even preferable to the rule of Rome. Whether Shakespeare’s {Othello} really was intended to celebrate the friendship between Elizabethan England and the Ottoman empire is a matter for debate. But in mentioning these points, Stone further demolishes the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington at the end the Cold War.

In his book, Stone shows an understanding of linguistics when he explains the origins of certain Turkish words that have passed into English such as tulip, which is a derivation of the word turban.

Obviously Stone concentrates on Turkish, which he says has more in common with Chinese or even Japanese. Meanwhile he also points out that because of the complexities of the German language, Kant is taught in English to students in Berlin.

Stone plots the gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire through the 17th and 18th Centuries. Arguably it only lasted for so long as a means of preserving the power balance in the region. Russia wanted to eat away its territories from the north whilst Austria–Hungary coveted the Balkans.

Britain and France were concerned about the encroaching power of Russia, and wanted to protect the trade routes and keep Russia out of the Mediterranean. As a result, they were willing to prop up the Ottoman empire that by the 19^th century was openly being called the Sick Man of Europe.

The last three chapters of the book cover the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in the First World War and the establishment of the Turkish Republic; which was proclaimed by Kemal Ataturk on 28^th October 1923. Unfortunately, this is where Stone’s view of Turkish history becomes problematic. He can arguably be described as a Turcophile, if there is such a thing. For instance, controversially he claims that the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did not go unpunished and there were a number of massacres of Muslins around the same time.

Although there may be some truth in this I do take issue with his defence of the present Turkish regime, though this is perhaps not surprising given Stone’s past admiration of Margaret Thatcher.

Today’s government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a combination of reactionary Islam, neo-liberalism and fascism. From reading the book I was able to deduce that the present regime had its origins in the government policies of the 1980s; the military coup of 1980 saw the army increasingly look to the Muslim clergy for support, whilst at the same time the government of Turkut Ozal carried out policies of neo-liberalism supported by the USA.

 In a recent tour of UK cities, the Morning Star journalist Steve Sweeney described instances of Kurdish civilians in eastern Turkey being burned alive in underground car parks whilst attempting to call foreign news agencies. Meanwhile the vile ultra-Blairite MP John Woodcock has been denounced as an apologist for Turkish war-crimes after he defended the actions of the reactionary regime as part of a supposed “fight against extremism”.

Let Assange go!

Rumours abound, within the corridors of power, about a deal that could allow Julian Assange safe passage from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The fugitive founder of WikiLeaks fled to the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges that he vigorously denies.

Assange publicly declared he would go to Sweden if that government could guarantee he would not then be sent on to face charges in the USA. The Swedes would not guarantee that. His supporters believe that the Swedes were doing the bidding of American imperialism, enraged at the Australian whistle-blower’s publication of thousands of embarrassing secret communications between the US government and its embassies and military bases around the world.

There is little doubt that heavy pressure on both Britain and Sweden was wielded behind the scenes by the US government, with the ultimate objective of getting him sent to the USA where he could face the death penalty. He has never lived in the USA and that country has no jurisdiction over him. But that sort of thing has never bothered the country that built the concentration camp at Guantanamo or that has secret torture bases – not so secret after WikiLeaks – around the world.

WikiLeaks has done a lot of damage to imperialism by exposing its ugly, deceitful, cruel and greedy underbelly. Genuine left-wing communist and workers parties around the world have long supported demands for Assange’s release to a country of his choice. Let’s hope that the rumours are true…

Corbyn on Palestine

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said that the next Labour government will recognise Palestine as a state. Corbyn, on a tour of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, said that a future Labour government will recognise Palestine as a state as one step towards a genuine two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict. He also criticised the Trump administration for recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and called the moving of the US Embassy there a “catastrophic mistake”.

At Labour’s annual conference last year Corbyn received his longest and loudest standing ovation when he called for an end “to the oppression of the Palestinian people” and Israel’s “50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion”.

No-one, apart from the most rabid Zionists, would disagree with Corbyn’s sentiments.

Unfortunately there are plenty of them about within the Labour party apparatus.

Zionism, which Lenin said was “absolutely false and essentially reactionary”, has never supported the working class movement.

 Zionism poses as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” but it has never served the interests of Jewish workers. Zionists would have us believe that all members of the Jewish faith are in some way the literal descendants of the Jews of Biblical days. In fact it is nothing more than a reactionary bourgeois-nationalist ideology of the big Jewish capitalists in the imperialist world. It tells Jewish workers that their interests are served by Jewish exploiters and it seeks to colonise Palestine in the same way as the imperialist powers it allies itself with have done in the past.

Those who stand in their way are often branded as anti-Semites for daring to uphold the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs. But the Zionist lobby and its Blairite allies in parliament can bleat on about “anti-Semitism” for as long as they like. They represent no-one but themselves.

What the mass movement has to ensure is that Corbyn’s very modest steps to meeting the aspirations of the Palestinian people are immediately taken on board when Labour returns to power in the not-so-distant future.