This special feature is to mark the life and political contributions of Dave Prince, a central leader of the Socialist Workers Party, celebrated March 22 in New York. The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class is by V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Farrell Dobbs, James P. Cannon, Jack Barnes and Prince. The excerpt below from the first chapter was written by Prince. 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.
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.