Below are excerpts from the opening chapter of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class by Socialist Workers Party leader Dave Prince. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
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. …
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 [Tehran-championed Hamas] 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. …
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.