Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2

[fromorbit]

The YP starting conference is in the ACC in Liverpool between 29-30 November so only three weeks off. With competing factions involving Islamic conservatives, every variety of Marxist/Communist, former Labour members, trade union activists, entryists from SWP and SPEW, splitters from the Scottish Greens, trans activists and actual left wing feminists [not the nice kind] it is difficult to underplay how much controversy there is likely to be. So we will need a second thread in advance.

Thus far following the internal drama of the UKs newest left party has taken a whole thread. It has been a wild ride and the party still does not have a name.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

I agree. in some cases Pakistanis were oppressed by Indians. The Bangladeshis certainly were. And in India itself Muslim Indians have faced increasing hostility from Hindu nationalists (to put it mildly).
But in other situations it's Pakistanis carrying out oppression of minority group.
I think blanket statements "what is it about Muslims that make them violent/mysogynist" "what is it about Israelis/Jews that make them inherently oppressive" are the really dangerous ones. And I think some on the left are a bit blind to the fact they make these blanket statements too. Probably people on the right are as well but that's not what this threads about. In the interest of not making blanket statements myself I will say it's not everyone "on the left" who does this.

Of course! And I wasn't excusing it anyway. The fact is if you look for British criticism of Irgun from that time it was in papers like the Telegraph. Those more mainstream papers tended to portray the Irgun as right wing. I think for some figures on the left it was more muddled because the Nazis were very right wing and Irgun had fought the Nazis. In fact it was suggested that the British were similar to the Nazis by opposing them. My point it is it was quite a simplistic viewpoint that the left were more receptive to than the right/middle.
The English have been prejudiced towards the Irish for centuries. IRA "jokes" or comments about the Arndale centre bombings continued for at least a decade after the good Friday Agreement and after IRA attacks on British soil stopped. It isn't right that people connected Jewish citizens in Britain with terrorist attacks in Palestine. But it happened. And it took a while for people to shift their perceptions because that's how people work.

Edited to add:By anti-Semitism I don't mean I think there were violent pogroms against Jewish people in the UK in the 40s in response to Irgun or anything. More that there was an association with terrorism..sort of how some people today wouldn't dream of being violent towards a British Muslim but might be swayed by the idea their religion is more prone to terrorism than others. Whereas 30 years ago it was Irish Catholics. And 70 years ago Jewish Zionists.

Armenians in the Middle East, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in Fiji. Same dynamics, except for the importance of the conspiracy theory to antisemitism. Turks may have resented Armenians being prosperous and educated, but they didn't believe Armenians were trying to take over the world.

I'm just about old enough to remember the Fijian coup in 1987.(*) Australia and New Zealand were full of liberal-minded people who were (rightly) angry about apartheid in South Africa, but who just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of Pacific Islanders setting up a racially based government.

(*) I mostly remember it because, while most military coups are boring, the Fijian one had a real comic opera element deriving from its leader, who had a splendid moustache, an eccentric interview style and was known as Colonel Steve Rambo. He never went away and is currently Fijian PM, though I think he's mellowed in his old age.

Even in Marx himself two interweaving intellectual strands can be detected:

1. The revisionist strain - Marx himself acknowledges that that capitalism is the most productive system developed by human kind and that it was indispensable for the development of compounding-technology, capital formation, development of large scale industrial capacity, and the reorganisation of human civilisation along productive lines. But that that very success contained the seeds of its moral abhorrence and its own destruction. I.e. capitalism is apparently successful but once established, there are better alternatives.
2. The vituperative polemicist - it was imperative to disaccustome one's self to amicable, emotionally neutral interpretations and of carefully weighing the balance of pros and cons. To transition from capitalism to socialism could only be accomplish with violent physical and epistemological upheaval. So, for example, capitalism must be condemned as a pathogen from which the worker-body-polity develops an immune response and kills, even though that that metaphor might contradict the carefully built case for socialism from the historical record.

I would argue that both have some validity: all systems need to be able to correct course: revisionism. And correcting course means summoning political will which is at least as much of an emotive as an intellectual endeavour. But Marxism seems to often make mixing these two problematic.

The twin currents make any apparently successful endeavour (even/especially socialist) subject to a potential fall from favour after being 'correctly' reinterpreted - and the rhetoric applied to the condemned concept very extreme. In the 70s Israel was arguably the most socialist western aligned country in the world, and also arguably the most successful one. But it was reinterpreted by the left through the colonialism lens rather than the 'are they socialist enough' lens. It's fairly obviously that a big factor in that was Israel become a strategic threat to the USSR's ambitions in the Middle East. And it IS highly relevant in the left's unusually keen ability to champion ethically and economically losing causes.

' the Mullahs used the Left in Iran ' - I think pp meant the native Iranian left too. So they presumably didn't see their fellow Iranians as 'noble savages' in a racial sense. Probably a similar mistake going on that's more about underestimating religious beliefs.

Exactly.

I get fed up when people online commenting on Unherd pieces about Muslims cite Bosnia, Xinjiang Uyghur Muslims and Partition as evidence for 'Muslims causing conflict' as in all those cases Muslims were primarily the victims of violence (Partition esp is complex as all sides were both victim and oppressor to some extent but Muslims did have legitimate reasons to worry about their fate as a minority and did face a lot of violence).

The left do this in the opposite way as you say when they make Muslims always oppressed. Nuance is poison to zealots of both sides...which of course paves the way for whole groups to be demonised.

Great post.

This is complex though: ' I think for some figures on the left it was more muddled because the Nazis were very right wing and Irgun had fought the Nazis. In fact it was suggested that the British were similar to the Nazis by opposing them. My point it is it was quite a simplistic viewpoint that the left were more receptive to than the right/middle.'

• this is interesting as the Irgun splinter group Lehi went the opposite way almost in that leader Abraham Stern attempted at one point to make a deal with Hitler..fortunately they didn't go further with this idea!

Exactly. Thomas Sowell has done some work on these so-called 'middleman minorities', and Tiger Mother Amy Chua's book World On Fire has a good account of various cases.

Another example might be Koreans in the US, who were unfairly caught in the crossfire of the 1990s Rodney King riots.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority&ved=2ahUKEwjehsmYsJaSAxVlW0EAHTyEJFYQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1FiSKEIFYIr5Dj3oE9KNjd

For some reason, transwomen are apparently very common in online talkie groups. Some extankies I've seen online claim it's because they want to recruit people who feel oppressed, just as Communists tried to target groups like civil rights organisations, women's rights, gay rights groups etc in part times.

It is clear that Indian Muslims often are oppressed by Hindu nationalist/Hindutva type Indians in India though. Pakistan is a different matter.

'This carried on all the way into the 1970s largely because Israel was the democratic, left wing country surrounded by non-democratic countries. Also lots of interest in Kibbutzes etc which were very socialist in their desig'

• I probably fall into this camp myself, to some extent. The kibbutz movement, the drive to include women in the army, the general socialist ethos etc of early Israel produced some bad (people like Bettelheim initially praised kibbutzes & a lot of left wingers & feminists at the time thought they were positive. Unluckily the collective childrearing system didn't end up working very much better than other commune systems back then did) results but many good ones which persist today. I wad reading Lynne Reid Banks' books on it recently, a non Jewish 60s British author (who wrote the pioneering novel of single motherhood, The L-Shaped Room) who became enamoured with the idea of Israel and moved to a kibbutz to marry an Israeli sculptor. Her novels & non fiction books about it do give a hopeful overview of how many left wingers back then had a positive view of Israel, supported a genuine peace process and condemned mistreatment of Arabs but did not have the crazily Manichaen attitude so many seem to have today though.

I wonder if the more recent shift to more aggressive government (Likud supporting illegal settlements) & a more Haredi-dominated Chief Rabbinate (Haredi elements want stuff like more sex segregation in public, female modest dress codes, restrictions on women singing in public services- which most Israelis would hate, so unlikely to pass, but they do push it) means people ignore that most people in Israel are fairly progressive? Israel is instead caricatures by people to blinkered & lazy to properly investigate.

NB : the Likud party's attitude to the King David Hotel bombing as recently as early 2000s was vile. The terrorist Begin should not have been leader, either. But most Israelis did not & do not support violence against innocent people.

She wrote one more river didn't she?
That's also why I don't want to slag off every aspect of "the left" some of it (the positivity around the kibbutz system) is/was just hopefulness of finding better ways to do things which isn't always bad. It's when it morphs into very rigid thinking/a refusal to adapt that it's problematic. Or when people get into very rigid thinking patterns along the lines of this group good this group bad. Which probably is a human failing to be honest. And all societies contain multiple different ways of thinking when you drill down.

Yes. She did a sequel, Broken Bridge & did 2 more (Children at the Gate & An End To Running), plus a history in interviews of the 1948 war & a history of Israel in letters to her sons.

Yes, definitely: these patterns recur everywhere, the real problem is when they become entrenched as they have in the hard left at the moment. I'm hopeful the left could regain healthier ways of thinking about various things (including Israel).

There's a screenshot going around online of a your party tweet claiming that they are merging with the green party, does anyone know if this is real or fake news

I suspect that is not going to happen for quite a long time. Everything is now so rigidly polarised and extreme; exacerbated by on-line culture and algorithms. And now the whole world is polarising along geo-political lines in a more extreme way than even before. I'm really not sure how this is all going to come to a head and dissipate.

Yes. She did a sequel, Broken Bridge & did 2 more (Children at the Gate & An End To Running), plus a history in interviews of the 1948 war & a history of Israel in letters to her sons.
Did she write a what would be called YA book now? I remember reading and lovibg a book about life on a Kibbutz and her name rings a bell.

The Trans Liberation group are backing the Sultanate Grassroots Left faction, but things as always are messy.

The Grassroots slate not only added Corbyn without permission but others. It seems they are being denounced for undemocratic manoeuvres.

Fractures amongst Sultana's shadow caucus have opened up before voting has
High profile DemBloc founder Mish Rahman defected to the Green Party on 12/01/26. Rahman was heavily involved in discussions amongst fringe groups that had taken place prior to the formulation of the slate. According to leaked minutes from a meeting of the Democratic Socialist of Your Party (DSYP) Rahman was in a WhatsApp group that operated as an inner-organising circle for Sultana called “Zarah Sultana Advisory Committee” that had been coordinating since conference. Rahman claims he defected to the Greens because he saw them as better placed to fight urgent political battles, but one has to wonder what he thinks about the revelation that the Greens are willing to form an electoral pact with Labour to “keep Reform out.”

Was the real reason he left because of friction between slate organisers? The minutes from the DSYP meeting detailed how Rahman and ex-Corbyn campaign coordinator Max Shanly were co-ordinating Sultana’s team and the fringe groups that would make up the slate. The DSYP had voiced concerns that they were not directly in contact with Sultana’s team, instead having to rely on Shanly as a kind of go-between. The DSYP made complaints that this did not reflect the open democracy pledge that Sultana had made central to her messaging.

South East applicant Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was named on the slate but has since announced she will stand as an independent. While this does not breach any rules, it is likely to cause confusion among party members. She remains listed on the slate, has rejected affiliation, and yet is still accepting their endorsement. How does that work, then? This contrasts with reports that Jeremy Corbyn has explicitly asked not to be featured on the slate and intends to stand fully as an independent.

A few years ago, Wimborne-Idrissi, candidate for South East, refused to sign a trans supportive statement for Momentum and was subsequently removed from their slate for the Labour NEC at short notice. It is not confirmed whether the presence of the Trans Liberation Group on the slate was part of her decision to (kind of) disaffiliate.

Michael Lavelette
Independent Lancashire councillor and slate-constituent Counterfire member Michael Lavelette withdrew his affiliation after fellow Astroturfs the Trans Liberation Group attacked Mark Serwotka of the Morning Star newspaper - who Counterfire support - for wrongthink. Serwotka committed the cardinal sin of advocating for an accountable, democratic party that does not sabotage its own chances with factionalism.

Serwoka on Your Party: “This [discussion] must be open, fraternal and comradely — no heresy hunting, no de-platforming, none of that intolerance that has driven so many people, particularly women campaigning for their sex-based rights, away from the existing left.”

Were these two defectors pushed out because of a bias towards Trans Activists on the slate?
https://skidrowradio.substack.com/p/the-slate-that-wasnt

The set up of the YP votingalso means there are male and female posts in each region.

The non binary types are claiming this is unfair what about them:
Is this trolling? LGBTQIA+ group demand "non-binary" CEC spots
A Your Party clique is infuriated that non-men/women isn't a category for the elections.

https://skidrowradio.substack.com/p/is-this-trolling-lgbtqia-group-demand

Fake. Though it seems many individual YP people have left to join Greens

What happens when the purity spiral becomes the accelerating vortex.

One More River is a YA-type book, yes.

This is complex though.

Islamists do definitely believe their fundamentalist version of Islam. But it's often more selectively practised in the case of a lot of Islamists. I was reading Guest House For Young Widows (about women who travelled to join Isis during the Syrian war) and Christina Lamb's Farewell Kabul, about how the Afghanistan war went so wrong. In both, it was notable that a lot of aggressive fundamentalists were happy to disregard rules about sex,,alcohol and a variety of other things behind closed doors. (An egregious example would be the Taliban sexually abusing boys via bacha bazi) Many of the men & women recruited to join seemed to have been fairly moderately religious and not from very fundamentalist families.

I've read similar patterns elsewhere from investigations into radicalisation: family are not fundamentalist Salafi or Wahhabi, the radicalisation seems to come from online sources or sometimes mosque (remember Saudi Arabia were exporting their Wahhabi fundamentalism for decades).

It's definitely true Muslims here are more likely to be practising rather than just cultural ly Muslims. Some are clearly more cultural than devout (Sultana's parents, probably, for one). And some are devout without wanting a full-scale Islamic government.

Economically ? - in America especially bit also here I definitely agree left wing economic policies have been more abandoned, and that ties in with switches in social positions I suppose (eg. Previous Latino workers' rights campaigners like Cesar Chavez sympathised with exploited illegal workers but did not deny that illegal immigration was a problem).

Could you give any more examples of social positions that have switched maybe? I've noticed this too but find it harder to think of specific examples.

Sorry, the previous post about Muslim findamentalism was meant to be quoting this one.

Re British Anti Semitism being non-violent - that's complex...

Since Edward II expelled Jews from England & they only returned (at least officially) in Cromwell's time, when anti Semitic fervour had cooled at least somewhat. The earliest UK Jews experienced violence like the massacre at York : we have no way of knowing for sure if there would have been more such atrocities as there were in Germany, Spain etc if they hadn't been expelled.

Britain isn't, moreover, the only European country to have been much less inclined to violent antisemitism post-1650s. The same pattern would apply to Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Italy, France (excluding the Dreyfus Affair period). Even Germany until the Nazi period. During WW2 deportations were imposed top-down in places like Italy, Netherlands etc. Obviously countless people collaborated and enabled them, but it's arguable whether collaboration with the regime was primarily motivated by violent anti Semitism or by cowardice & desire for personal gain.

Off the top of my head, a lot of left wingers were anti EU because it is basically a Capitalist trading bloc. Also, the thing with free University fees, what you are campaigning for is for people who don't go to University (people who statistically are from poorer backgrounds and have lower paying jobs) to pay for people to get a free University education when statistically they will have better chances in life and higher paying jobs. In comparison with the University and schools sector, the FE sector is horrendously underfunded, yet FE is the engine room of vocational education, usually the place where you would go if you couldn't or didn't want to go to University, if you didn't do well enough in your GCSES to resit, to learn trades etc.