While fights in the U.S. and around the world can expose and deal crucial blows against Jew-hatred, it will continue as long as the underlying causes remain unresolved. This requires mobilizing the working class in our millions to overthrow capitalist rule and replace it with workers power. This will open the door to ending the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority by the propertied owners.
It’s here — in the heart of the world’s last empire — that the decisive question of which class shall rule will be fought out, and the Jewish question can be settled for all time.
Fighting Jew-hatred has a permanent and decisive place in the class struggle. The Newton Teachers Association set a powerful example when it spoke out to condemn accusations Israel is guilty of carrying out “genocide.” It explained that false charge will just “provoke further antisemitism.”
All political questions are class questions, and the unions need to address them. The Newton teachers set an example for the entire labor movement.
Israel’s war to defeat Hamas is aimed at preventing the Tehran-backed thug outfit from carrying out more massacres of Jews. Its victory is in the interests of workers everywhere, including in Gaza, and is central to the fight to push back Jew-hatred today.
Long before Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, antisemitic demagogy was spreading among bourgeois liberals and the middle-class left in the U.S. and other imperialist countries. As the crisis of capitalism continues to ruin ever deeper layers of the middle class, some will turn to scapegoating the Jews for their misery, including many who call themselves socialist. Adolf Hitler recruited from these socialists in building the Nazi Party in Germany.
“Capitalism today is the same global order that is accountable for the economic and social ruin, bloody wars, and genocidal movements of the first half of the twentieth century,” writes Socialist Workers Party leader Dave Prince in his introduction to The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon.
Sections of the ruling class in the U.S. will turn to fascist forces when they feel their rule is threatened as working-class struggles grow stronger and more class-conscious. They will finance fascist thugs to try to smash the unions and target working-class leaders for elimination. They will use the banner of Jew-hatred to try and divide and conquer.
But the immense power of the working class can be mobilized to take on and defeat the forces of reaction. We will have our chance to take power. Securing decisive victories requires uniting and organizing workers today to fight for our own class interests and those of all who are exploited and oppressed by capital. Above all, it requires building a party that is working class in program, composition and conduct to lead workers to conquer political power. Cuba’s living socialist revolution shows this is not only necessary, but possible.
Forging a working-class leadership in the U.S. requires workers to break from the Democratic and Republican parties of the imperialist rulers and build a party of our own, a party with the audacity to lead millions to topple the rule of the exploiting class, to reorganize society from top to bottom and join the worldwide fight for socialism.
This will open the door to stamp out Jew-hatred and all the other abominations spawned by dog-eat-dog capitalism.