Felix Morrow

How Shall We Fight Anti-Semitism

Socialism Only Hope for Jews

(December 1938)


From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 56, 31 December 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


IV

That the Jews, if they are to survive, can do so only by linking their fate to that of the labor movement, is the inescapable logical conclusion to which all our analysis points. On numerous occasions, this conclusion has driven itself home to the minds and hearts of many a leader of the Jewish community, in discussions I have had with them. The debacle of assimilationism, the blind alley into which Zionism has led, the sharp fact that only where the labor movement still stands strong can Jews lift their heads – all this leads them to agree that Jewry must cast in its lot with the working class and with labor’s allies, the colonial peoples oppressed by the great powers.

But that same Jewish leader, hearing one bark out of a Coughlin, drops all this and reverts to the near-sighted cowardice in which he has been nurtured. Whipped into line by Coughlin, the Jewish leader proceeds to work with might and main against any link between Jewry and the labor movement.
 

The Mechanics of Anti-Semitism

So prevalent is this attitude among Jews that to refute it requires a concrete exposition of the mechanics of anti-Semitism at work.

In a typical American city of half a million, the Jews number 20,000. The proportion of wage-workers among them is a minority (the development of capitalism never proceeded to the point where the Jews were able to complete the transition from the middlemen occupations they had been limited to under feudalism). The small minority of Jewish workers are concentrated primarily in the needle trades. A larger group are store-keepers and peddlers. The workers and petty bourgeosie live in one part of town, in houses and at living standards generally below that of the well-unionized Gentile workers, but the latter have practically no contact with these poor Jews. The average Gentile worker in the city sees Jews only as employers, owners of department stores, saloons and gambling joints, loan sharks, etc., “Did you ever see a Jew do a real day’s work?” “There isn’t a single Jew in my union.” These are typical remarks by Gentile workers, heard not once but regularly. Here is propitious soil for anti-Semitism. But it takes systematic, deliberate fanning to create flames.

Those interested in creating the flames appear: the conscious reactionaries and Fascists, interested in anti-Semitism as a weapon against the labor movement. They tell the masses: your real oppressors are the Jews. They fan hatred of the Jews, and then proceed to turn this hatred upon the militant labor movement by lumping together labor and the Jews as “Jewish Bolshevism.” Of Bolshevism itself, the backward worker or farmer knows little, and generally has no active hostility to it; the mechanism of fascism serves to transfer his dislike of the Jews to the Bolshevism which is described to him as Jewish.
 

How Not to Fight Anti-Semitism

The only way to fight this anti-Semitic mechanism is to expose it as being aimed against the labor movement. But the smug, complacent Jewish leader, completely blind to this mechanism, concludes that the people have a lively hatred of Bolshevism and that this hatred is being directed from Bolshevism to the Jews. Therefore he calls upon the Jews to separate themselves as far as possible form the labor movement, in order that the Jews not share the stigma of Bolshevism; he denounces the young Jewish radical as responsible for anti-Semitism. Actually, only the presence of these Jewish radicals in the labor movement, where the Gentile workers can see them, serves to show the Gentile worker that the Jew is not universally the oppressor that he is pictured to be by the fascist!

If timidity and cowardice could save the Jew, he would have been free of anti-Semitism by this time. Russian-Jewish capitalists gave endless proofs to Czarism that they repudiated radicalism and submitted to the regime; but Czarism nevertheless employed hatred of Jews to smear radicalism. German Jewry, predominantly middle-class, fawned upon the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic’s Junkers and capitalists; far from saving the Jews, all this facilitated Hitler’s picture of the Jews as oppressors. Neither timidity nor silence have saved the Jew from anti-Semitism, for, as we have already demonstrated, anti-Semitism is an indispensable instrument to the decaying social system of capitalism.
 

Coughlin, Stalin and the Jews

“I can see the logic of all you say,” said a leader of a Jewish community to whom I developed this thought. “But after all, you must admit that when Coughlin attacks us for instigating the Russian Revolution, we can’t very well say, yes we did, or that we approve of the Soviet regime. Coughlin’s audience takes him to mean that we are responsible for the decimation of the Russian farmers, the dictatorial regime in the factories, the terrible blood purges, the Moscow trials, and so forth. We can’t very well identify ourselves with that.”

The answer to this argument is not an easy nor a simple one. There is no doubt whatever that Stalin’s foul regime has served to discredit the Russian Revolution in the eyes of millions of American workers and farmers who greeted it with hope and longing: Stalin’s crimes facilitate the fascist propaganda of Coughlin. But this complication cannot be solved by joining Coughlin in attacks upon the Russian Revolution. One must learn to understand the full meaning of the Russian Revolution, and then one must learn to tell the people what has happened to the Russian Revolution.
 

The Spirit of the Russian Revolution

In the revolution of November, 1917, the working class, led by a revolutionary party and backed by the vast masses of the peasantry, took the power and established the first Workers’ Government in history. That meant complete liberation from Czarist and capitalist oppression. Every national minority, including the Jews, were provided with free scope to develop, both within their own national grouping and in the general society. The scourge of anti-Semitism was eradicated, for the peasant no longer could be befuddled by the oppressing landlord into believing that not the landlord but the Jew was his oppressor. Such anti-Semitism as remained as a dark heritage of the past was ruthlessly punished if it assumed overt forms. The Jew could confidently lift his head, a man among men. That was the spirit of the Russian Revolution.

But that spirit could not live if the Soviet Union remained indefinitely an isolated garrison surrounded by hostile capitalist states. The whole weight of capitalism pressed in upon Russia. Either the revolution must be extended into Western Europe, or the surrounding capitalist states would press in and strangle the revolution.

When the post-war revolutionary upsurge of 1918-1923 failed to break through the capitalist cordon around Russia and the revolution fell back, a mood of retreat and compromise with capitalism arose within Russia. This mood was enormously enhanced by the fact that Russia was pitifully backward in its technology, far below the level of the surrounding states.
 

Stalin, Enemy of Socialism

This mood of retreat and compromise found its expression in Stalin and his clique. Step by step, in their course of making peace with the surrounding capitalist world, the Stalinist clique degenerated until their political methods have become indistinguishable from those of Hitler. Nor, it is clear, will Stalin hesitate at employing anti-Semitism. Walter Duranty, Stalin’s unofficial spokeman, has indicated that in his now-famous dispatch of November 11, 1938, to the North American Newspaper Alliance, predicting a rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler: after all, Duranty pointed out, “Stalin has shot more Jews in two years of the purge than ever were killed in Germany.” Despite widespread comment in the labor press on this extraordinary cynical remark, the Communist parties nowhere have repudiated Duranty’s statement! How else explain, too, that Stalin has said no word on the Nazi pogroms, and the doors of the Soviet Union remain closed to the refugees.

The spirit of the Russian Revolution is as alien to Stalin as it is to Hitler. That must be understood, must be explained tirelessly to the people. When Coughlin accuses the Jews of instigating the Russian Revolution, the answer to him is that he and Stalin are of one mind and that mind is the deadly enemy of all that Marx, Lenin and, Trotsky stand for.
 

Reformists Opened Door to Fascism

Why did not the revolution spread from Russia into Western Europe in those surging years of 1918–1923? This key question, too, the Jew must learn to answer. He must acquaint himself with the stark tragedy of the German, Austrian and Hungarian revolutions, all but successfully achieved, but then thrown into reverse by those who stood at the head of the majority of the workers: the reformist Socialists, the Social Democrats of the Second International. The Kautskys and Hilferdings stood at the head of those revolutions only to behead them. In the name of “democracy,” they gave the power back into the hands of the Junkers and capitalists. So, too, Leon Blum and the other French Socialist leaders, in 1936-1938, smothered the revolutionary will of the struggling workers. In each case, the question was posed inexorably: either socialism or fascism. Refusing to take the road of socialism, the reformist Socialists thereby opened the road for fascism. Some of these gentlemen, who in the stark days of the fight against the Moscow trials were living cheek by jowl with the Stalinists in the People’s Fronts and would utter no word of criticism of these allies, today dare to justify their original hostility to the Russian Revolution of 1917 by pointing to Stalin’s crimes. But it was they who strangled the develpoment of the Russian Revolution, they who left it an isolated garrison and, finally, gave way to a fascist encirclement of the Soviet Union to which Stalin is now yielding. Reformist socialism and its “democracy” is no alternative to Stalin. The destroyers of the Western European revolutions are no less despicable than the destroyers of the Russian Revolution!
 

Choose Your Fate: Socialism or Fascism

Time presses upon all of us the real, inescapable alternatives: either down in the dark with fascism or up into the kingdom of freedom with the socialist revolution: Shackled slaves or valiant fighters for humanity. Choose your fate! For the Jews, moreover, the question is posed even more sharply: either physical extermination or a new social order. The number of countries which have declared totalitarian war upon the Jews increases incessantly: Germany, Italy, Czecho-Slovakia, Roumania, Poland. Next on the order of the day is France; we have already indicated why a middle road for France is no longer possible; it is now a case of either a victorious revolution or a fascist dictatorship. And if the French workers do not mobilize in time, if the revolutionists in France are not aided in every possible way by partisans in the rest of the world to make the necessary forced, march to victory, French fascism, triumphant, will immeasurably increase the fascist process in England and America. Even if one would, it is impossible to heighten the picture. The facts are too gripping in themselves. He who will not hearken to them has already condemned himself to the fascist terror.

But many Jews will, that I know, for many are already joining the struggle. For what else, in the whole wide world, is there left to fight for, except the socialist revolution? All other roads have failed. Fascism or Socialism: thus stands the order of the day.


Last updated on 11 September 2014