It is blatantly clear that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The imperialist powers, our own government included, are fully complicit, through arms supplies, intelligence sharing and failure to apply any meaningful sanctions. 

Western liberal thought ignores the fact that genocide did not start with the Nazis. It went hand in glove with colonial conquest – in Hispaniola, Tasmania, North America and Belgian-occupied Congo, to name just a few examples. A number of scholars internationally have established a relation between settler colonialism and genocide. The perpetrators have generally been of European origin.

What is happening in Gaza (and less blatantly in the West Bank) is essentially a European settler-colonialist genocide. The Israeli government is in thrall to far-right settler colonialists – of European or US origin – who have made clear their ambition to clear out the Palestinian people. 

But it’s not ethnicity, the Israeli lobby, or its secret service Mossad, which is responsible for the imperialist powers’ failure to apply the brake to the genocide. They won’t do it because Israel is an essential part of the their strategy of dividing up the Middle East, in order for transnational corporations to control its main resource – oil. Keir Starmer has said more than once that Israel is our “ally”.

Western imperialism represents a terrible danger to humanity. But that danger goes much further than Gaza, to include the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the military encirclement of People’s China and the continued possession of nuclear weapons, as well as much more.

Here in Britain, the working class and progressive movement has a responsibility to deal with our own country’s imperialism. The trade union movement is however weak on this, wedded as the TUC is to supporting increased expenditure on so-called ‘defence’. It is therefore very timely that, in response to the government’s Strategic Defence Review 2025, CND has produced an Alternative Defence Review. Here, on page 29, we reproduce an introduction to it.

Hand in hand with this weakness, the labour movement’s priorities and concerns are Eurocentric, as Nigel Flanagan points out here in his review of Roger McKenzie’s new book, The Rebirth of the African Phoenix. Fundamental changes are taking place in Africa, Roger says; and if the movement here is to progress, it needs to make more room than ever for the leadership and experiences of Africans themselves.

That is a major theme of our lead article by Dennis de Oliveira on Martinican Marxist Aimé Césaire. Well known in France, and in the African diaspora, Césaire deserves to be much better known in Britain. In his work he “vehemently addressed the wounds of European racism and colonial oppression of Black people”, while at the same time “advocating a radical transformation through Blackness as the only way to save the world from barbarism.” For Césaire, Blackness was a revolutionary consciousness, and “his criticism of the Eurocentric perspective of the communist movement [at that time –Ed] claimed that the Black population should play a leading role in the construction of revolutionary experiences in their territories.” 

Eurocentricity is also a feature of so-called Western Marxism, as Domenico Losurdo pointed out in his book of that title, reviewed by Nick Wright in CR116. A discussion on the book took place at the Marx Memorial Library on 5 July, and we print here Alex Gordon’s contribution, where he argues that the past role of the labour aristocracy has perhaps been substituted today by “Western academia responsible for the social and ideological reproduction of the ruling ideas in our own times.”

The battle of ideas is the main theme of William Dry’s article on the necessity of Communist electoral work. He goes back to Marx, Engels and Lenin for the theoretical basis for contesting elections, and then shows how a successful electoral strategy was developed in Stepney. He concludes with seven points for successful electoral work in practice.

The battle of ideas takes many forms. There is a widespread perception on the left that Venezuela is socialist-oriented and is at the forefront of the struggle with US imperialism. But leading Venezuelan Communist Pedro Eusse argues here that President Maduro’s government has been moving to the right, shifting to neoliberal (and anti-communist) policies, and that the coercive measures by the US and the EU are not about Venezuela “having a ‘socialist’ government but about seeking to prevent Chinese and Russian capital from taking exclusive control of the country’s strategic resources.”

This edition of CR includes five discussion articles. Three of them relate to building socialism: a short contribution by Martin Graham on the theme of markets and socialism, raised by Jerry Jones in CR116 and Oliver Coxhead in CR118; Ruth Pitman’s political education column, which tackles the topic of workers’ co-operatives, also discussed by Jerry and Oliver; and a considered piece by David Grove showing how societies embarking on the construction of socialism, such as the Soviet Union and China, are heavily influenced by the birthmarks of the past revolutionary struggle and the geopolitical situation they face. The other two articles, on the sex and gender issue, are part of the Communist Party’s discussion leading up to the 57^th Congress in November; they represent two sides to the debate, and we shall not be able to publish more on this topic in future as our next edition will mostly cover the post-Congress period. 

Finally, Nick Moss’s ‘Soul Food’ column looks at two recent poetry anthologies from Culture Matters, Michael Rosen’s Words United and Alan Maguire’s The Last Days of Alicante. Nick points to engaged poetry having the role of exposing the truth – and uniting people.

Notes and References

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism_and_genocide.