Below is the opening chapter by Socialist Workers Party leader Dave Prince of the new book, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
Other chapters feature writings by revolutionary Marxist leaders V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Farrell Dobbs, James P. Cannon and Jack Barnes. The book tells the truth about Hamas’ fascist roots, and presents excerpts from its top leaders in their own words and from its founding Covenant. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class is published as hundreds of millions are being drawn into world politics by the unfolding crisis of the imperialist system and its ramifications in every corner of the globe. The rise in Jew-hatred and violence that has marked the opening decades of the twenty-first century — from the Middle East to North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific — is deeply rooted in this global crisis.
Jew-hatred is a world question. The fight against it is decisive to every working-class battle today against the brutal consequences for humanity of imperialism and its convulsions.
This book presents the political foundations and continuity of the Marxist program and course — in history and in action — on these questions. Jew-hatred is not eternal; it is rooted in class-divided society and the class struggle. And the authors answer the all-important question: What is to be done to end it — for all time.
The pages that follow include excerpts from articles and speeches by V.I. Lenin, the central builder of the Bolshevik Party and leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. Lenin addresses the decisive place of the battle against Jew-hatred and pogroms in the fight for the socialist revolution necessary to overturn the tsarist empire. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolshevik Party placed itself on the front lines of that battle, from its formation in 1902–03 to Lenin’s death in 1924.
The battle against persecution of Jews was intertwined with the fight for the right of all oppressed nations to self-determination. It was intertwined with the fight against reactionary bourgeois nationalism and chauvinism — in the young Soviet republic and in other lands where revolutionary struggles inspired by the victorious October 1917 revolution exploded.
The book includes Leon Trotsky’s international fight in the 1920s and 1930s to defend Lenin’s communist continuity against the political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Communist Party led by Joseph Stalin. The articles and interviews by Trotsky excerpted here were written during the years when mounting Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic violence were harbingers of what was to be the second inter-imperialist world war and the Holocaust.
There are writings by central leaders of the Socialist Workers Party from its founding onward — James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, and Jack Barnes — presenting the course of action that guides the SWP to this day.
Imperialism and Jew-hatred
The persecution of Jews goes back two millennia.
But with the dawn of the imperialist epoch in the final years of the nineteenth century, the weight and place of Jew-hatred in social relations changed. It became an international question, an expression of the intense virulence of the capitalist economic and social convulsions that erupted in the imperialist First and Second World Wars.
The “international Jewish conspiracy” became the common banner of fascist movements. Under that banner, they sought to justify attacks on the working class and its political vanguard, as well as other toilers, and to smash their unions and parties. The triumph of fascism across much of Europe, intertwined with the advancing Stalinist political counterrevolution in the USSR, guaranteed the conflagration to come. Over these decades there was a sharp rise of pogroms — the brutal slaughter of Jews — and then the intensified assault with Adolph Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the mass extermination of six million Jews, in the final years of the war.
So long as the dictatorship of capital remains — based on class exploitation and capitalist control of production and exchange — there is no solution to imperialism’s recurring march toward fascism and war. Modern capitalism’s international domination, and the fight among the main imperialist powers and their ruling families to partition the world, makes recurring social crises and wars inevitable. And it also makes inevitable resistance and revolutionary upsurges by the working class and all the exploited.
The Jewish question itself is a class question.
As we are seeing again today, Jew-hatred has a permanent place and function for the propertied ruling families in the imperialist epoch.
The way forward for the international working class is through building revolutionary proletarian parties, communist parties, in the countries where we live. Revolutionary leaderships that have unshakeable confidence in the working class and oppressed to take their destiny in their own hands. To organize along the working-class line of march toward engaging the propertied ruling classes worldwide, taking state power, and transforming society.
The October 7 pogrom
The October 7, 2023 slaughter of Jews in Israel carried out by Hamas’s squads of murderers and rapists was a pogrom, reactionary to the core.
It was made possible by the advance planning and full financial and logistical support from the counterrevolutionary capitalist regime in Iran. Tehran and its top government and clerical leaders publicly celebrated the massacre, which also involved several smaller Jew-hating groups, primarily Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The new stage of the war against Jews and the State of Israel launched by Hamas that day still rages as this book is published. In addition to the battles being fought in Gaza, attacks on civilian populations in Israel have been launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah, Hamas’s Tehran-spawned ally. There are ongoing terrorist operations by groups tied to the Iranian regime operating in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
These events mark a watershed in the worldwide imperialist crisis, with unknowable consequences. They are part of the profound shift already registered by the first large-scale land war between two state powers in Europe since World War II, opened by the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Great Russian chauvinist regime. Moscow’s aim is to drown in blood the Ukrainian people’s independence and sovereignty, their existence as a nation.
Contrary to the claim by the Hamas organizers, and by supporters and cheerleaders of the October 7 pogrom, that mass slaughter of Jews was not an anti-imperialist action in any sense. It had nothing to do with advancing the interests of the Palestinian people, or of the exploited and oppressed anywhere in the world.
October 7 was not a military operation in a national liberation war. To the contrary. The pogrom was organized and carried out by trained death squads — thugs, murderers, rapists — indiscriminately slaughtering, maiming, torturing, and sexually abusing individual Jews, regardless of nationality, age, or sex.
The victims were Jewish men, women, children, and infants from kibbutzim near the border between Israel and Gaza, as well as those attending a large international music festival. The death squads murdered some 1,200 people, wounded more than 5,000, and took hostage more than 240.
Jewish women were raped and then murdered, often gang raped, sometimes in front of family members to further degrade and humiliate them. Women’s bodies were mutilated and desecrated. Hostages have been, and are being, subjected to further torture and abuse.
Hamas also killed, brutalized, or took hostage several dozen migrant workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, as well as a number of Israeli Arabs. That was not a mistake by Hamas. These workers were considered a legitimate target of the pogrom simply because they had associated with Jews.
This was a pogrom like those instigated against Jews by the tsarist regime in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Russian monarchy’s only answer “to demonstrations of the people demanding freedom,” wrote Lenin in 1911, “is to let loose gangs of men who seize hold of Jewish children by their legs and smash their heads against stones, who rape Jewish and Georgian women and rip open the bellies of old men.”
Nothing had changed on October 7 from the Bolshevik leader’s description more than a century earlier.
The October 7 slaughter was the worst single act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis. It has irrevocably shaken hopes and illusions of Jews and others that escalating acts of Jew-hatred are a historical aberration, a thing of the past. That they are exceptions to the rule. That they will die down. Or that Washington and other “democratic” imperialist governments can be counted on to defend Jews at home or anywhere in the world.
What does the future have in store? Is Jew-hatred eternal?
The global order imposed by the victors of the imperialist slaughter of World War II has been breaking down. For decades US imperialism, the earth’s final empire, has been weakening. But the US rulers’ existence is based on two interlinked goals. One is their ceaseless rivalry to dominate all their imperialist competitors. The other, vital to capitalism’s survival, is to crush the development of revolutionary struggles by the toilers anywhere in the world. That includes Washington’s multifaceted, “never forgive and never forget” efforts over decades to punish Cuban working people for their audacity in making Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Washington’s 1991 war against Iraq — ending with the US Command’s infamous “turkey shoot” of tens of thousands of retreating Iraqi troops and civilians — sounded the opening guns of World War III. That prospect is not an anticipation; it’s an unfolding reality. Only the pace and how it will unfold are still to be resolved. Only the working class, through victorious revolutionary action, can take the power and wrench the ability to make war out of the hands of the propertied rulers.
There have been two such great proletarian revolutions in the past century. The first was the October Revolution in Russia led by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party he forged. The other was Cuba’s socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro and the cadres of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement he commanded.
Each of these revolutions set an example of the political character of proletarian leadership that can and must be forged — communist leadership, tested in struggle, and acting with confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the working class and the oppressed.
Fascist roots of Hamas
Hamas, founded in 1987, has its roots both in the landed classes and monarchies in the Arab world of the 1920s and 1930s, and in anti-working-class bourgeois nationalist currents and parties across the region ever since.
These ruling classes stood in opposition to revolutionary developments among working people in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, developments that were inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution and were welcomed by its Bolshevik leadership. Communist parties, which initially drew together revolutionary-minded workers of Jewish, Arab, and other national origins, were formed in Palestine, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood and related reactionary currents forged direct relationships with fascists in Italy and especially Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany.
Trotsky’s description of the culture of fascism in a May 1940 manifesto, “The Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution,” is accurate, more than eight decades later, as to how Hamas and its backers function today. “The sole feature of fascism that is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder,” Trotsky wrote. “Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism.”
Tehran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and their supporters proclaim to the world their commitment to more pogroms. Their banner is Jew-hatred: another Holocaust, completing the unfinished “Final Solution.” They reject any “solution” other than the physical elimination of Jews, not just in the Middle East but the world over. Seven million of the earth’s 15.7 million Jews today live in Israel, and a similar number in the United States, with smaller but significant numbers in other countries.
Jew-hatred is the banner under which the bourgeois-clerical regime in Iran justifies its expansionist drive — often carried out by terrorist groups that Tehran arms and funds in neighboring countries — to extend the regime’s counterrevolutionary military and economic domination across the Middle East. Tehran’s declared aim of getting rid of the Jews and eliminating Israel is made even more dangerous for toilers everywhere by its accelerated course toward developing and deploying a strategic nuclear arsenal.
The Palestinian people have paid an enormous price for this genocidal Jew-hating course of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Their lives and futures are sacrificed by Hamas leaders, who organize their operations centers and artillery installations inside, nearby, or underneath hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings in Gaza. They use civilians as human shields. They educate children to aspire to “martyrdom,” not to life. They organize and act with the collusion of United Nations agencies and personnel. In order to meet Hamas’s own needs, its armed thugs seize relief supplies, including food and medicine, intended for the Palestinian people.
The greatest danger to Jews and all the oppressed in the region and worldwide is the call for a ceasefire before Hamas has been defeated and its leadership and command structures demolished. Far from being a “pacifist” response to war, the international propaganda clamor for a ceasefire had been planned by Hamas and its cohorts years before October 7, 2023. It’s a Hamas campaign.
And the Democratic Party administration of Joseph Biden — confirming once again the anti-working-class foundations of the US imperialist government — is bringing to bear its weight against Israel’s right to defend itself as a refuge for Jews, demanding that it declare a ceasefire before the command structures of Hamas have been destroyed.
Only the unequivocal defeat of Hamas, however, can open up space for Jewish, Arab, and other working people to find a way forward, together, in revolutionary struggles against the capitalist rulers of Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere in the region.
A revolutionary proletarian party
Lenin’s course in combating the persecution of Jews was part of forging the proletarian program, organizational norms, and habits of conduct of the Bolshevik Party.
That course guided the party’s actions before, during, and after the October 1917 revolution in Russia, both in the young workers state itself and through the Communist International founded at the Bolsheviks’ initiative in 1919 to build proletarian parties dedicated to extending the world socialist revolution.
The tsarist empire’s ousted capitalist factory owners and landowners organized a murderous three-year-long civil war to reclaim their property and power, with decisive assistance from the invading armies of London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, and other imperialist governments.
As part of the battles that crushed the counterrevolution, the Red Army — initiated and led by Lenin, and under the command of Leon Trotsky — fought and defeated the pogromists. Those victorious battles inspired Jews and other toilers not only in the former tsarist empire but around the world.
“The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews,” explained Lenin in a 1919 speech reproduced on a phonograph recording that was widely distributed across the Soviet republic.
“The landlords and capitalists tried to divert against the Jews the hatred of workers and peasants who were tortured by want. In other countries too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to turn away their attention from the enemy of working people, capital,” the Bolshevik leader said.
“Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred toward other nations. Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.”
The Socialist Workers Party “is part of the continuity in the fight against Jew-hatred that goes back to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,” declared the SWP in its very first statement on Hamas’s October 7 pogrom. That statement — issued by Rachele Fruit at a protest of the slaughter held at Miami’s Holocaust memorial — is reprinted in this book. Fruit is currently the SWP’s 2024 candidate for president of the United States.
This Bolshevik continuity was carried forward by Trotsky in the fight in the late 1920s and 1930s to maintain Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course against the bloody political counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin. In materials in this book, Trotsky describes how the Stalinist bureaucracy fostered anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, targeting those defending Lenin’s program and actions. Many of them, including Trotsky, were Jewish. Anti-Semitism was used against those targeted by Stalin’s notorious Moscow frame-up trials and executions between 1936 and 1938, during which virtually the entire remaining central leadership of the October Revolution was killed.
The SWP in those years — working closely with Trotsky, then living in exile in Mexico — took on the struggle against the devastating social consequences for working people of the deep worldwide capitalist depression and social crisis and the march toward a second imperialist war. Trotsky warned of rising fascist movements among the panicked petty bourgeoisie and middle classes, driven by their fear of the abyss, accompanied by “a monstrous growth of violent anti-Semitism in all the world.”
At the close of the 1930s, as the US rulers prepared to enter the spreading world war in defense of their own capitalist interests, communist workers in the SWP fought and won a political battle against a minority faction in the party who were caving to the pressures of escalating war propaganda and the social milieu of the rulers’ middle-class mouthpieces. The opposition broke from Marxism over the inseparable questions of opposing US imperialist war aims and deepening the party’s proletarian composition and orientation to the working class and unions.
The SWP’s successful struggle for a proletarian party was decisive to its response to efforts among the propertied ruling families to unleash fascist thugs and scapegoat Jews for capitalism’s mounting ills. They sought to divert the anger of the insecure or ruined middle classes and layers of working people away from the capitalist rulers responsible for the unemployment, farm foreclosures, and other consequences of the social and economic crisis of the 1930s.
Included here are accounts by two former national secretaries of the SWP, Farrell Dobbs and James P. Cannon. They describe the broad-based union defense guard organized in Minnesota in 1938 that defeated employer-instigated efforts by a US fascist organization, the Silver Shirts, to break the Teamster union and stop developments toward independent working-class political action. Promoting Jew-hatred was an integral part of the fascists’ demagogy, of course. After catching wind of the Silver Shirts’ union-busting plans, Minneapolis rabbi Albert Gordon turned to the Teamsters to respond to this rightist danger. A public display of the workers defense guard with broad support in the working class led the fascists to scuttle their plans and get out of town.
Workers and trade unionists in New York subsequently sought collaboration with the Minneapolis Teamsters leaders to resist union busting and Jew-hatred by fascist forces there and in neighboring New Jersey. They mobilized for a demonstration of 50,000 in New York City, initiated by the Socialist Workers Party, that countered a rally of 20,000 by the fascist German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden.
No refuge in imperialist epoch
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is nothing new. In the words of Hamas’s 1988 founding covenant itself, the Jew-hating premise of that slogan “has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious 1905 forgery by the tsarist secret police allegedly proving “plans for universal domination by international Jewry.”
From Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Nuremburg rallies, to the Hamas Covenant, and today’s rationalizations for October 7 — it all has the same anti-working-class foundations.
The message is clear: Drive out the Jews! Kill the Jews! From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — and anywhere else on earth Jews can be tracked down and targeted, from a synagogue to a kosher grocery, from a dance festival to a nursery or schoolyard. Destroy Israel as a refuge for the Jews.
In the imperialist epoch, there can be no permanent refuge for the Jews. That can only be changed with the victory of proletarian revolution in decisive parts of the world.
The “river-to-the-sea” campaign has nothing to do with the national aspirations of any oppressed people — in Palestine, Iran, the Middle East, North Africa, or elsewhere. Nothing to do with the fight against imperialism by oppressed and exploited toilers. Nothing to do with the working-class struggle for emancipation from the dictatorship of capital and the exploiting ruling classes.
To the contrary, the international campaign for an immediate ceasefire serves only the class interests of the reactionary bourgeois-nationalist leaderships of the regime in Iran, as well as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and a handful of others. And it is used by the world’s most powerful, ruthless ruling classes, led by those in the United States, to advance their global economic, military, and political interests and class domination.
What is to be done?
The establishment of Israel became inevitable with the Second World War.
In the years leading up to and during World War II, the dominant imperialist powers slammed the doors on all but marginal Jewish immigration. That was the course of Washington and London, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and followed by the ruling classes of Canada, Australia, and others.
In the aftermath of the war — after Hitler’s genocidal extermination of 40 percent of the world Jewish population, six million human beings — the imperialist victors in Washington and London kept their own borders shut tight for three more years. They pushed more than 250,000 Jewish survivors into barely livable “displacement camps” in the defeated European countries of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Where were the Jews to go?
Prospects for an extension of the socialist revolution in Europe were betrayed by the Stalinist regime and its national Communist Parties. In the early 1930s they sabotaged revolutionary opportunities that could have united the workers movement in Germany and defeated the Nazis in Germany before their consolidation of power. In 1936–37 they undermined a prerevolutionary situation in France by joining a so-called Popular Front government in alliance with a wing of the capitalist class. They turned their guns against revolutionary-minded workers fighting the fascist forces in Spain that triumphed over the toilers in 1939. Proletarian victories in one or more of those countries could have stopped the human catastrophe of the Second World War.
After the war, revolutionary struggles in Greece, France and Italy by armed workers, looking to find a road toward socialist revolution, were blocked by Stalinist-led parties, in order not to disrupt the postwar carve-up of “spheres of influence” across Europe by Moscow, Washington, and London. On the ashes of the war, the imperialist Democratic and Republican Parties established a new Washington-dominated world order — one that has now begun to fracture.
Under the mantle of the fight against fascism, the imperialists rationalized their rapacious war aims by portraying the populations of both Germany and Japan as uniformly reactionary. But the fire bombings by the US and British imperialist armed forces of working-class neighborhoods in major German and Japanese cities were aimed at blocking workers’ struggles after the war. As was Washington’s dropping of atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was this history, these class-struggle realities, that made the establishment of Israel inevitable. Not a “realization of Zionism.” Despite efforts by London and Washington to use divide-and-rule policies against Jews and Arabs alike (as the colonizing powers did in India and Pakistan, across Africa, and elsewhere), Israel’s existence was not the imposition of a “colonial settler state.”
Israel became inevitable as a refuge for the Jews. But not a solution to Jew-hatred or pogroms. There is no safe haven for Jews in the imperialist epoch, anywhere in the world.
Defense of Israel’s right to exist is based on that history. It is a country that offers sanctuary to Jews, anywhere, anytime, in face of persecution and violence.
Only under such conditions will working people in Israel and the region — of Jewish, Palestinian, and other national origins — have the political space to build mutual trust and unity in common struggle. And such class solidarity, in turn, opens the road to forging a communist party, a proletarian party, capable of leading the working class and its oppressed and exploited allies toward a socialist revolution.
Various Zionist currents today wrongly persist in the claim that Jew-hatred is eternal. Some also argue that the persecution of Jews has its roots in inherent prejudices in the working class, permanently necessitating an insular bourgeois Jewish state. But the opposite is true.
In fact, the deepest abhorrence of the October 7 pogrom is found in the working class in the United States and elsewhere. It is there — not among privileged professionals and the middle classes, or on university campuses, where Jew-hatred is flourishing today — that communist workers find the greatest openness to the fight against the persecution of Jews. It is among working people that communists get a hearing on why the stakes for the labor movement in fighting Jew-hatred and pogroms are so great.
Lenin was right in 1903 when he insisted on “the link that undoubtedly exists between anti-Semitism and the interests of the bourgeoisie, and not the interests of the working-class sections of the population.”
In 1937 Trotsky posed the question of whether or not a world socialist federation would make it possible “for those Jews who wish to have their own autonomous republic as the arena of their own culture” to do so. A proletarian government would never “resort to compulsory assimilation,” he said, and it might “very well be that within two or three generations the boundaries of an independent Jewish republic, as of many other national regions, will be erased….”
“I have in mind a transitional historical period when the Jewish question, as such, is still acute and demands adequate measures from a world federation of workers’ states,” Trotsky added. An autonomous Jewish republic “under the regime of a socialist federation [would] take on a real and salutary meaning…. How could any Marxist, or even any consistent democrat, object to this?”
In Trotsky’s 1938 “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism,” he explained that the most virulent anti-Semitism can be expected in the strongest imperialist powers, “above all in the United States.” Amid world capitalism’s deepening economic and social catastrophe and fascist advances, Trotsky said, “It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without the war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.”
“Now more than ever,” the Bolshevik leader concluded, “the fate of the Jewish people — not only their political but also their physical fate — is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat.”
Those words remain true. A victorious socialist revolution in the United States is both necessary and possible. What’s needed, what must be built, is a revolutionary working-class party politically armed with a communist program and a battle-tested proletarian leadership.
That is what the Socialist Workers Party is fighting to build. The party of the American socialist revolution. A revolutionary transformation — part of an expanding world socialist revolution — that opens the road to rebuilding society on foundations of human solidarity.
March 30, 2024