On 4 October the Green Party conference in Brighton passed a motion titled “Zionism is Racism“ by 1,022 votes to 813. The party now declares itself anti-Zionist. The reaction from outside was predictable. The Board of Deputies called the Greens an extremist party, MPs reported the party to the equalities watchdog, and Labour, as we argued last Friday, would now rather govern with Tories than with Greens.
The reaction on the left has been a second, quieter argument. Was the motion ultra-left? The word is being used in local parties, in Green Left and in the groups around it. People who agree about nearly everything else are using it to mean quite different things. Some mean that the motion was wrong. Some mean it was badly timed. Some mean it will cost votes. Some mean only that Labour and the press dislike it.
Jewish Voice for Liberation has run two useful round-ups of the argument: one mostly from supporters of the motion, and a second from Jewish and Green critics of it. The second notes how much both sides share: Israel is an apartheid state, and the party should back boycott, divestment and sanctions and an arms embargo. In JVL’s words, “The argument is about strategy”.
This post does not argue that conference was right or wrong. It argues about the word. Used carelessly, “ultra-left” ends an argument that the left in the Green Party needs to have properly.
What did “ultra-left” mean?
The term has a precise history, and it is not “a view most people reject”.
When Lenin wrote “Left-Wing” Communism in 1920, he did not attack the German and British lefts for their goals. He attacked their tactics. They refused to work in “reactionary” trade unions and refused to stand for parliament. He answered that revolutionaries “must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found“. Parliament might be obsolete to the communists, but “we must not regard what is obsolete to us as something obsolete to a class“.
Trotsky made the same distinction fifteen years later in “Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International“:
It is not enough to create a correct program. It is necessary that the working class accept it. But the sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a stop upon the first half of the task.
The Transitional Programme lists the symptoms. Sectarians refuse to fight for partial demands. They “remain indifferent to the inner struggle within reformist organizations”. They are “capable of differentiating between but two colors: red and black.”
Socialist Outlook put the point plainly in 1989. Sectarianism, it said, “is a term to describe the relationship“ of a would-be Marxist organisation to the mass of the working class. It describes a relationship, not the content of a position. Ultra-leftism takes four recognisable forms:
ultimatism, where agreement with your programme is the price of joint action;
treating a propaganda point as an agitational slogan, as if the masses already held it;
abstaining from real movements because they are impure;
a minority substituting itself for a movement that does not yet exist.
By that test, unpopularity is irrelevant. Trotsky said so himself: “Coming from opportunists, the accusation of sectarianism is most often a compliment.“
Would opposing apartheid in 1948 have been ultra-left?
Suppose the Attlee government had called apartheid racist in 1948, when the National Party took power, and pressed for an embargo. It would have been out of step with most British voters and with most of its own cabinet. It would have been right.
What Labour actually did was the opposite. In 1950 it exiled Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland to placate Pretoria and Salisbury, because he had married a white Englishwoman. The Boycott Movement was founded in London in June 1959 as a minority cause. Even after Labour won in 1964, the Anti-Apartheid Movement found that the change of government made little difference to the refusal to impose sanctions. The Fourth International’s press was calling to boycott the apartheid regime long before that became respectable. Nobody now calls the early boycotters ultra-left. They were a minority who built a movement, not a minority who demanded the movement agree with them first.
The family is another example. The Communist Manifesto calls for the “Abolition of the family!“, and notes that even radicals flare up at the proposal. In 1991, Socialist Outlook argued for it against its own readers’ letters. Holding it is not ultra-left. Raising it as an immediate demand would be, and so would refusing to back a childcare campaign that did not adopt it. Trotsky’s correction in The Revolution Betrayed is the transitional method in one line: “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it.“ The demands are socialised childcare and collective provision. The goal is argued for through them.
Is popularity a defence, then?
No, and this cuts the other way. If unpopularity cannot make a position ultra-left, popularity cannot clear it either.
That matters because “most Greens support it” is the commonest defence of the motion, and the evidence is thinner than it sounds. No poll of Green Party members on the question has been published. The 1,022 votes in favour came from 1,900 or so members attending the party conference in Brighton on the Sunday. The party has about 200,000 members, so that is roughly half of one per cent. Green voters do back it: Opinium found 56% of current Green voters thought the party right to pass it and 13% wrong. The same poll found 35% of the public thought it wrong and 16% right. YouGov recorded a sharp rise in the share who think the Greens have an antisemitism problem.
Michel Warschawski, a leader of the Fourth International’s Israeli section, began his 1992 article “Is Zionism racism?“ by saying the UN’s 1975 vote reminded him of medieval church councils. Majority votes could not decide whether the sun went round the earth. That applies here too. A conference vote does not settle whether Zionism is racism, and neither does an Opinium poll or the Board of Deputies. Nor does any of them settle whether the motion was ultra-left.
Did the Fourth Internationalist tradition ever settle the formula?
It is worth knowing how long revolutionary socialists have argued about these exact words without calling each other names.
When the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 in November 1975, the Fourth International’s own press split three ways.
Intercontinental Press, edited in New York, endorsed it outright.
In Inprecor, Nathan Weinstock said that to ask whether Zionism is racist “is not correct“. Zionism was a colonial movement, and racist in the sense that all colonialism supposes a racist practice.
The Israeli section signed a joint statement with Matzpen saying the resolution “does not concern us“, because governments on both sides of the vote practised discrimination.
In 1992, after the UN revoked the resolution, Warschawski drew the line differently again. In International Viewpoint, he argued that Zionism as an ideology was colonialist rather than racist, but that the Zionist state was “very, very racist”. In 2015 the International’s leadership called the Zionist state “a racist and colonialist project“. In the same declaration, it insisted on combating antisemitism inside the solidarity movement.
There is also a British precedent in a broad party. In 2002 the Scottish Socialist Party conference condemned Zionism as a racist ideology while also condemning anti-Semitism. It passed without a count, over the objections of comrades from the Militant tradition who still held to two states. The SSP went on to its best election result the following year. Socialist Outlook‘s 1987 article “Anti-zionism and anti-semitism“ made the argument the Greens’ motion now makes: opposing Zionism is not hostility to Jews.
None of these people called the others ultra-left or Zionist. They treated the formula as a matter of analysis, to be argued over, not as a password.
Where does the test actually bite?
If ultra-leftism is a question of method, the useful thing is to separate three questions the current argument runs together.
The judgement. Is Zionism, as the motion defines it (”an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population”), racist? That is a programmatic question. Socialists can disagree about the formula, as the record above shows. Neither answer is ultra-left. Caroline Lucas, speaking against the motion, called Zionism a racist settler-colonial project for Palestinians and also a response to European persecution: “Two things can both be true.” That is close to where Weinstock and Warschawski ended up. It is an argument about analysis, not about method.
The motion also contains a second judgement, which gets less attention than its title. It commits the party to “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine”. Peter Tatchell objected that most Palestinians, Marwan Barghouti among them, support two states, and that the clause “smacks of ‘westerners know best.’” The Palestine Solidarity Campaign backed the Greens against the smears, but its own policy leaves the form of self-determination to Palestinians. So did the alternative motion, E03, which fell without debate. Whether a British party should lay down the outcome is a fair question. It is a different question from whether Zionism is racist, and running the two together confuses both.
The timing. Was it wise to pass it now, with a by-election running and a leader who said afterwards that he agreed with “the substance” but would have voted only for an amended text? Opinium found 46% of adults thought it the wrong priority and 11% the right one. The “bear trap” argument deserves a serious answer. The campaign to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not new, but this motion gave it a fresh target and a deadline. Still, a tactical misjudgement is just a tactical misjudgement. Calling it ultra-left is a category error, and it makes the argument about timing harder to have.
The function. Here the classical test has real purchase. The motion’s second action point says Zionism “will be treated as any other form of racism”. Conference voted down an amendment presented to protect members who belong to Zionist synagogues and institutions from being pressured, but written broadly enough to also protect members who volunteered with the IDF. The motion’s supporters say it has no disciplinary effect because it is a policy motion. Annie Cohen, a Jewish Greens officer writing personally, went further. She argued that it was the defeated amendment that blurred Jews and Zionism, by treating everyone involved with a synagogue as a possible Zionist. Its critics fear the motion becomes a membership test. The party’s own Jewish Greens survey found its members split, and the group took no position.
The text does not say that supporters of two states are racists. It defines Zionism as an ideology of exclusion, says “not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews”, and rejects ascribing any ideology to an entire people. But whether “treated as any other form of racism” stays a policy statement, or becomes a way of sorting members, will not be decided by the vote. It will be decided by how the Anti-Racism Policy Working Group implements it, and by what the left in the party argues for while that happens.
That is the only viable path for an ultra-left danger, and it lies in what happens next more than in the vote. No-one who knows the Green Party or its cultural can honestly think there is a risk of that. If the definition became the boundary of the left inside the Greens, it would become ultimatism. That happens if comrades are sorted by whether they accept it, if the four of the party’s five MPs who rejected the motion are treated as enemies, or if it becomes the condition of working with Labour councillors who back an arms embargo. It is Trotsky’s red and black. There is nothing to suggest the Green Party would work in that way.
And the opposite error?
The opposite error is the one Labour is demanding: drop the policy, disown the conference, or lose the council deals. Agreeing to that because the press, the polls and Labour dislike the motion is not a united-front tactic. It is opportunism, and it leaves the Green Party’s decisions to be made by its opponents.
There is a democratic point too. Some motions will never be implemented in the form members wanted. Some leaders will want to reinterpret what conference decided. Neither is new in a broad party. Defending conference’s right to decide is not ultra-left. Nor is a leader’s reservation the same as Labour’s ultimatum. The left can defend Zack Polanski against the press and the Israeli government, which barred him from entering Israel, while disagreeing with him about two states.
What should socialists say?
Socialists, whatever their view of the motion, should say three things.
Defend the party and its conference against the Labour ultimatum, the EHRC referral and the media campaign. The right of a party’s members to decide its policy does not depend on whether you would have voted the same way.
Do not make the formula the basis of left unity. As we argued after Brighton, the left wins when it unites around one simple proposition that people are already moving towards. There are such propositions: a full arms embargo, lifting the ban on Palestine Action, and the anti-austerity fight over rents and the cost of living that brought most of the new members in. Those are the grounds for joint work, inside the party and with Labour members who will not follow their leadership’s ultimatum.
Hold the motion to its own distinctions. Argue with Jewish members, with two-state supporters and with the MPs who voted against. Do not sort them. If “treated as any other form of racism” starts to mean investigations of members for what they believe about a state, the left should be the first to oppose it.
Holding a minority view for decades is not ultra-left. The early boycotters of apartheid did it, and they were right. A correct position turns ultra-left when it is used as a fence to keep people out.
The iranian regime mouthpiece literally supported and co-signed this campaign, so while the motion had its truths, the campaign was destructive and involved telling members to vote DOWN human rights in other countries and regions as served the interests of the lead BRICS regimes. Campism is just swapping one dictatorial expansionist power for another, trading one profiteering mafia for another in different garb.