Hello comrades. To preface my question, first let me give some brief context as to what led me here. I have been doing lots of reading of newer and older texts ranging from classic theory, history, civil rights, etc etc, in preparation for a book I intend to write in the future. However, as I have grown a bit tired of blowing through dense economic texts and academic material, I decided to try and find some communist newspapers to subscribe to and receive and read in the mail as a more of a literary appetizer and to see what said organizations have to say about modern happenings. I have become aware of Peace Land and Bread by Iskra(https://www.peacelandbread.org/journal), but the only other ones I see that aren’t digital only are two sources. That being Socialist Revolution (https://socialistrevolution.org/) and The Militant (https://themilitant.com/) However I have noticed something worrying about The Militant. I did some light googling, found they have been around a long time, and are a Trotskyist paper. While I myself am not a Trotskyist, I still value other opinions from comrades and wanted to receive as wide of range of leftist reporting as possible. However I noticed their newest publications seem VERY pro Isreal and anti Palestinian liberation. This is confusing to me for what I think are obvious reasons. However I did some googling to see what their views were when you turn back the clock. This is a source from their page published in Oct 30th, 2000. (https://www.themilitant.com/2000/6441/index.shtml) Here, they are talking about the Palestinian struggle in a way that is a stark difference from their new stuff that seems aggressively pro Isreal. My question has two parts. 1. What happened to the militant between 2000 and 2023? 2. What in the hell makes a COMMUNIST NEWSPAPER PRO ISREAL? Is there some sect of socialist thought I am unaware of that is somehow pro isreal? If so, why? What is going through their heads? What’s the thought process? I know many westerners struggle separating anti-Zionism with antisemitism in their heads, (which is a whole other mind numbing conversation) but I was under the OBVIOUSLY mistaken impression that Marxist are generally able to comprehend these kinds of socioeconomic nuances. I’m not sure how well known these papers are in the modern era, but that’s why I am reaching out and posting this as many places of relevance I can. Somewhere, is some nerd that knows much, much more about socialist print history, the people behind them, and that whole specific ‘scene’ that just hasn’t come up yet in my current state of research/education. So, if that fellow nerd is out there, I would love some in-depth explanations on this phenomenon. As for everyone else, I ask everyone to see what we can find about the MODERN people currently running the Militant, as that information is surprisingly hard to come by. I may be bad at ‘googling,’ but this seems very evasive which tends to raise my brow. I feel this could be an important problem for us to pay attention to as communist, for if this is a recent trend, or imperial propaganda is out right taking over socialist and communist outlets, which given the history of The Militant, makes me worry. They have been historically targeted by COINTELPRO and harassed, infiltrated, and so on and so on, the things we all know happened in that era. It could just be a stray string of renegade marxism, or, if it IS an intelligence operation, we need to know. With the rise of anti-isreal sentiment in America, the rise of leftism as well, it seems like something certain 3 letter agencies would be motivated to squash. I should also mention, I am not a ‘conspiratorial’ person, I find the trend of conspiracy in America to be dangerous and actively undermining our ‘democracy.’ This change in rhetoric is proof of nothing more than something, sometime, changed. It is up to us marxist to find out what, and how this happened. Thank you for your time comrades.
There are quite a lot of people on the left (including myself, when younger, to my great shame) who become so accustomed to being on the other side of political debates that they develop a tendency towards just being contrarian.
Of all the contrarian factions that there are, one of the ones that punched way above their weight was the Revolutionary Communist Party. They used to have a magazine called Living Marxism and sometimes their takes were good. That magazine got sued out of existence about the time that the Berlin Wall fell and that grouping kinda pivoted to being libertarians. Their organ is now renamed Spiked! and you might have seen it online.
One of their positions is a staunch opposition to Islam. I have no great love of Islam or any other monotheistic religion but you’d have to be blind not to see that working class opposition to Islam in Britain is mostly just a proxy for hating Pakistani and Bangladeshi people. If you look at census data about people identifying as Muslim in the UK people from those two countries make up the vast majority of them.
Nevertheless the Spiked! crew went after Islam and also loved that anti-Semitism claims took down Corbyn’s Labour Party. Having banged on about Corbyn’s anti-Semitism at length of course they’d have to double down when things kicked off in Israel-Palestine.
I don’t quite know if Militant followed the RCP down this rabbit hole or their route to supporting Israel uncritically was different but I’d expect it was made up of the same kinds of reasoning.
There’s also something in here about middle class intellectual worship of what they consider to be authentic working class culture. Some of them might see anti-Islamic feeling as a way to recruit their own kind of EDL-but-left-wing kind of support.
Trotskyists love selling papers, they have also been subverted (from what I have seen) into “legal marxism” that is, the fringe left wing that is allowed to exist by the bourgeois for the purpose of venting class anger (but not actually threatening the ruling class). They are a distraction, nothing more. The idea of anti-zionism is not in the legal marxist purview, and thus the trotskyist papers will tow that line.
