Simeon Scott
From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th of October 2023, events have moved quickly in the Middle East. In Bradford, as elsewhere, we have seen rallies and election campaigns by supporters of the Gaza/Independent movement (GI). What is noticeable regarding most GI supporters is a seemingly exclusive commitment to Gaza, with an emphasis on calls for a “Free Palestine”, other war zones being largely, if not completely, ignored. For the most part, these GI rallies consist of young people of second or third generation Pakistani origin who, judging by the repetition of religious slogans expressed in Arabic, would appear to have little interest in class politics. These young people know that their grandfathers, who were often trade union members working night shifts in wool textile mills, lost their jobs in the1980s, as referred to in Zamir (2024). Let down by the unions, these men tended to turn away from class politics and adopted religious and national affiliations. Long gone are the days when Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others would march together in Bradford to protest against fascist attempts to gain a foothold in the city. This lack of interest in class politics is extended to other countries, with the result that rather than thinking about the exploitation of working class people in Israel, Gaza, Pakistan, Iran, America, or whatever country, the world is seen as compartmentalised into such categories as Muslim and non-Muslim, Western and non-Western.
Paper selling ‘socialism’
With regard to others on the GI rallies, there are people, mainly white, with alleged ‘socialist’ affiliations, hence the national Tory press’ references to alliances between Islamists and “the left” on such rallies up and down the country. However, quite what is meant by the spatial metaphor “the left” is unclear. Notable on GI rallies are people selling papers, who are members of various small political groups modelling themselves on the Bolshevik Party which took power in Russia in 1917. Such groups include the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), The Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain and one or two other tiny groups. As far as most working class people in Britain are concerned these groups, and their support of Russian Bolshevism, are irrelevant. The real aim of the leaders of these ‘leftist’ groups is to set up a one party dictatorship, as in the old USSR, China and North Korea, in which working class people are viciously exploited. With only a few thousand nationwide members between the lot of them, the paper sellers turn up on most ‘lefty’ demonstrations in the hope of selling a few papers and recruiting one or two well intentioned young people, most of whom leave disillusioned after a year or two. “When they leave we just recruit some more”, was how one SWP activist in Halifax explained their attitude to recruitment.
The media focus widens to Lebanon and Iran
That the focus of the war in the Middle East has extended from Gaza to Lebanon and Iran has muddied the waters with regard to the GI movement’s agenda, with the result that their rallies appear to have become less frequent. One reason for this is the fact that, like all religions, Islam is not a universally accepted set of beliefs but is split into a number of, often competing, sects. The relevance of this is that GI supporters with Muslim affiliations are overwhelmingly Sunnis, rather than Shias, and most Gazans are also Sunnis. With regard to Israel’s war on the people of Lebanon, firstly the latter are not referred to as Palestinian Arabs. Secondly, the Lebanese population is made up of a number of religious/ethnic groups. Until recently Christians were the overwhelming majority, but today, with many Christians having left the country, they represent roughly 50% of the population, with around 25% Shia Muslims and 25% Sunni Muslims. The Shia population tends to be concentrated in the south of Lebanon, some of whom are supporters of the military force Hezbollah, which has been relatively successful in several wars with Israel in recent decades. The western media by and large refers to Hezbollah as both a “terrorist” organisation and an armed “proxy” for the Shia government of Iran. As a result of which, given its goal of destroying the state of Israel, this media supports the latter’s attacks on Hezbollah. In contrast to these claims, it could more plausibly be argued that, like Hamas, Hezbollah is engaged in a legitimate war against a heavily armed occupying settler Zionist population, which is a proxy for the United States.
With regard to Israel’s attacks on Iran, we may note that the US and Britain organised the overthrow of the popular nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. He was replaced by the corrupt and unpopular, but pro-western, Shah who, in 1979, was in turn overthrown and replaced by a Shia Islamic government led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Despite Khomeini’s death, the Shia government remains in power to this day despite much popular discontent, especially amongst younger Iranian women. It is also the case that the Iranian government supplies arms to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, not to mention Putin’s Russia. It would seem that the US, in league with its proxy state Israel, is in the process of deciding how to deal with Iran’s threat to its military political and economic global dominance. One Israeli minister, Benny Gantz, in a piece in the New York Times on the first anniversary of the 7th October 2023 Hamas attack, made it clear that he wanted “Israel’s allies” to join in on an attack on Iran. Gantz claimed that “Hamas planned to join together with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shiite militias in Syria, Iraq, and Iran in a regional war with the ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state”…”governments”, Gantz added, “must also prepare for the right moment to remove the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, should that clear red line be crossed”. He concluded that “nations should empower the Iranian opposition and isolate the Iranian regime in major international forums”.
A multipolar world?
Speaking to supporters of the GI movement on their rallies, it is clear that there is a well-founded dislike of American foreign policy. Unfortunately, rather than calling for a peaceful world, in which all nuclear weapons are banned, for instance, some supporters instead call for a so-called multipolar world. The meaning of this term is a world in which US military and economic power is matched by that of a combination of Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China and, believe it or not, North Korea. Of course the world would be a much better place if the power of America’s ruling elites was taken away. But to want the tyrants and psychopaths who run Russia, China and North Korea, with their fake elections, or indeed no elections at all, to take America’ place is surely madness. With regard to those Sunni Muslim GI supporters calling for a multipolar world, they surely need to ask themselves if their religious beliefs and practices would be welcomed by the ruling elites of Russia, China and North Korea. Having said all of this, it may surprise some readers that, given his well-documented dislike of Muslims, not to mention his support for Israeli expansionism, none other than ex-president Donald Trump is well regarded by some GI supporters.
Thinking about the wage labour system
So, let us consider one alternative to this multipolar council of despair: abolishing the wage labour system. Faced with our need to interact with nature, in order for us to obtain our food, clothing and shelter, it is clearly not possible for us to do this as isolated individuals. As a result, as far as we know, during prehistory we were all part of a tribal community, with each member contributing to the collective wellbeing. Being nomadic hunter-gatherers, each tribe would move around within a certain geographical location, so as not to hunt out or gather out a particular area. Quite how a given tribe would interact with another would vary from friendly cooperation to open hostility, depending on a range of factors. From various sources, including religious texts, we know that the victorious warriors in a tribal war would sometimes capture or kill the defeated men and enslave the women in order to breed more warriors. Thus began the earliest exploitative mode of production, with a sharp distinction between free men and women of a tribe, on the one hand, and the enslaved, on the other. Press reports confirm that even today this mode of exploitation still exists, and not only on the criminal margins of international capitalism, but also by British merchant shipping companies and landowners, to cite but two examples.
Tribal affiliations remain strong in some parts of the world to this day, however, with the rise of city states in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and elsewhere the egalitarian ethic within tribes gradually gave way to hierarchies based on social class relationships. In ancient Egypt, for instance, political power and ownership of resources, such as the fertile land either side of the Nile, was dominated by the ruling Pharaoh and his, or occasionally her, royal family. Below them was a hierarchy of priests and army commanders, below which was the majority of the population, including artisans, soldiers, landless peasants and slaves. In fact, versions of this hierarchical structure still exist today in a number of countries; with regard to Britain, it lasted from the Norman conquest in the 11th century AD until the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production in the 19th century. Prior to capitalism, during the medieval period in Britain, the exploitative basis of the class system was plain to see: the monarch, along with the baronial and manorial landowners would take a portion of the harvest produced by their serfs, or landless peasants. As well as this, the serfs were obliged to provide young men to fight for their lords as and when commanded to do so.
Gradually this form of exploitation was replaced by one which was much less transparent. In short, serfs found themselves outside of the manorial system, ‘free’ to rent out their capacity to work in return for a weekly wage. Wage labour has existed for thousands of years on the margins of society; however, during the 19th and 20th centuries it came to dominate economic relationships in the world’s most prosperous nations, i.e. in Western Europe and North America. Today, the wage labour system dominates economic relations in most countries in the world, with capitalist employers arguing that they pay their workers a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. The reason that they can more or less successfully argue this way is because the exploitative relationship between capitalist and wage worker is hidden behind the veil of money. In order to look behind this veil, let us consider a self employed person who produces ten tables per week, let us say. The income he or she earns is equivalent to the selling price of the ten tables, putting the cost of making them to one side. If, however, the person making the ten tables is a wage worker, her or his wages will typically only be equivalent to say five tables; the income earned by selling the other five tables is pocketed by the employer. In essence, the exploitation at the core of the wage labour system is as straight forward as that. Obviously, in the real world of capitalism the employer may well have borrowed money from a bank in which case the bank will take a share of the employer’s profit in the form of interest on the loan.
In one way or another, like everyone else, GI supporters are involved in this exploitative system. For example, rather than working in textile mills or driving taxis like their grandparents, many are doing courses in higher education in order to avoid low paying jobs or starting their own businesses. Former US president Woodrow Wilson told it like it was, and still is: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal eduction and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks”; quoted in McGarvey (2023).
Divide and rule
So, faced with a life of “difficult manual tasks”, such as those performed by Pakistani men in Britain in the 1960s and ‘70s, most GI supporters, like the rest of us, steer away from becoming a member of the working class and thereby avoid ending up in an insecure minimum wage job. These decisions are constantly reinforced as, when walking around Bradford city centre, they see homeless people sitting on piles of rags and beggars asking for “small change”. Added to this, we are all bombarded by adverts promising us the good life, with a big house in Ilkley, an electric car and so on. The result is that socialism, i.e. democracy and equality in the workplace, has been consigned to near oblivion. Apart from the paper selling ‘socialists’ on the GI rallies, who want Britain to be controlled by the demagogues of their central committees, few people talk about the exploitative core of the wage labour system. Rather we are all profoundly influenced by the media and internet platforms which promote not only the consumerist lifestyle but also nationalism, including allegiance to the royal family, with emphasis given to our various religious, ethnic and gender identities. So in keeping with the colonial divide and rule strategy, we all tend to think in abstract terms of “the people” of a given nation, be it Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, Ukraine et al. We further tend to focus on “the people” of each nation as a homogeneous whole, rather than its exploitative class based system in which the largest class performs “specific difficult manual tasks”. As when the Roman empire adopted Christianity as an ideological means of keeping its masses in check, today’s ruling elites use religion to offer us comfort in troubled times: “a heart in a heartless world” as Karl Marx put it. It therefore comes as no great surprise that GI rallies are marked by repeated use of Islamic slogans, despite the fact that a minority of Palestinians are not actually Muslim. In any event, there is little or no attempt to make common cause between the working class people of Israel, many of whom detest Netanyahu’s war mongering and want immediate peace talks, and those of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Conclusion: one step forward
What is clear is that, via its proxy Israel, the United states wants to radically ‘rearrange’ the world’s military and economic order. Obviously, cutting Iran and its proxies down to size and overthrowing the unpopular Shia regime in Tehran, would seem to be a first step in this rearrangement. With regard to the ruling elites of the Sunni Muslim states in the Gulf, most of them tacitly, or even explicitly, support this US aim; offering support to Israel and caring little for the Palestinian cause. With regard to Russia, the stalemate in its war with Ukraine would suggest that Putin’s military is not a serious threat to American expansion; the more serious threat coming from China. Faced with this scenario, rather than advocating multipolarity, meaning support for Putin and Xi, and emphasising our religious and racial differences, we surely need to start thinking about the international wage labour system and how people of all nations are a part of it. As working class people, both on these GI rallies, in election campaigns and more generally, we can make common cause with foreign workers and begin to discuss the reasons why the ruling elites of America, Russia, China and their proxies are locked into constant economic jockeying and war. History would suggest that, in the main, wars consist of working class people on all sides killing and maiming each other; whilst the ruling elites watch the action from a safe distance. So, on GI rallies, as elsewhere, we could perhaps at least make a start by thinking about alternative ways of providing everyone on the planet with sufficient food, clothing and shelter, which would be a historic step forward. We could, for example, consider how we could introduce democratic decision making in the workplace and thereby collectively decide what to produce and how it is distributed; which is surely better than the global catastrophe that exists today.
Bibliography
McGarvey, D. (2023) The Social Distance Between Us; Penguin: London.
Zamir, K. (2024) From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: shaping Our Own Destiny; available at https://wakeupbradford.com/2024/08/08/title-from-textile-mills-to-taxi-ranks-shaping-our-own-destiny/
Wake Up Bradford! 
Leave a comment