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Old March 19th, 2012 #45
Karl Radl
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Default Revolutionary Jew at Work (Part I)

Revolutionary Jew at Work

A Review of Roger Seifert, Tom Sibley, 2012, ‘Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson’, 1st Edition, Lawrence & Wishart: London

Part I


Baruch Rachmilevitch; aka ‘Bert Ramelson’, isn’t a name well known outside the very specific area of the study of post-war British Communism and even then one has to know something of the unionist side of the British left to have some knowledge of Ramelson. This new biography; by one jewish academic (Roger Seifert) and a Trade Union researcher (Tom Sibley), is thus to be welcomed precisely because it sheds a lot of useful light on the kind of man of Ramelson was.

The work is obviously well researched with plenty of citations of source literature and discussions of academic views and controversies. However the book comes across; somewhat unintentionally I think, as being hagiographic as throughout the whole book not a bad word is said about Ramelson and; in fact, I am pushed to recall a single instance where Seifert and Sibley show any sort of criticality towards their subject.

Obviously this doesn’t bode well for the intellectual balance of the work and nor does the fact that Sibley; by his own admission, lacks emotional distance from his subject and writes from his heart not his head. This is best demonstrated in that the criticisms that Seifert and Sibley offer of those; on the ‘right’ and ‘ultra-left’, (1) are always to Ramelson’s favour and generally defend him from any reproach or blame. They treat Ramelson in the tradition of Marxist mythologizing that Lenin so pioneered in his sketches of Marx, his wife Jenny and Engels among others.

Indeed both Seifert and Sibley appear to subscribe to a Marxist-Leninist world-view and as fellow travellers to Ramelson seem to disagree with the demand made by the modern ultra-Leftist; Slavoj Zizek, that all Marxists be ‘ruthlessly critical’.

This lack of criticality is perhaps most bemusingly shown in the appalling lack of general knowledge and numerous misstatements the authors make such as wild statements claiming that Franco would been defeated if he hadn’t been backed by Hitler and Mussolini, which is a ‘what if’ scenario that is only a figment of an author’s imagination rather than the ‘hard reality’ endorsed by Seifert and Sibley's own alleged historical materialism.

They also proceed to claim that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 was ‘defensive in nature’ for the USSR (actually it was meant to give Stalin a free hand in expanding ‘the revolution’ to smaller states giving him time to prepare before launching an invasion of Western Europe) (2) and then have the literal chutzpah to claim that while the pact was defensive: it was brought about because Britain and France wouldn’t endorse an ‘anti-fascist’ alliance. (2) Meaning; in effect, that in their view the USSR was the only consistent ‘anti-fascist’ power when in reality the USSR was interested only in promoting a conflict in Western Europe to weaken it for invasion.

The authors fail to provide any necessary context to their claims and blandly cite one academic; of strong leftist sympathies, as being ‘proof’ of their contention. This is poor and the authors; both with PhDs, are surely aware of it, but does not stop them doing it.

Getting away from the laughable lunacy that these two wannabe Bolsheviks propound in their attempts to place Ramelson in his early historical context: I think a summary and short analysis of Ramelson’s involvement with communism; as a jew, is in order.

Ramelson was born in the Ukrainian town of Cherkassy; near Kiev, to a Torah Scholar (Seifert and Sibley are ignorant of the correct terminology but there we go) and his wife. His mother; as was not uncommon among the orthodox and ultra-orthodox, was the main earner of the household with his father being dedicated to the study and elucidation of the Oral Torah. Seifert and Sibley assert; without necessary qualification, that the family was given charitable gifts by the local jewish community: the necessary qualification being that this was part of the tradition of the Talmid Chacham (Torah Scholars) whereby it was; and is, considered a Mitzvah to support the study of Torah by materially supporting ‘scholars of the law’ so they can devote themselves wholly to their studies.

The authors claim that it was Ramelson’s mother who struggled against poverty and the ilk, but in reality Torah Scholars would never go hungry while there were observant jews around as they could turn up at any house and be welcomed to a meal: particularly if on Shabbos or a festival day. (4)

Of course: Ramelson's father would be expected to provide free tuition and guide religious discussion and rulings per the normal exchange between sponsoring family/community and the Talmid Chacham and his family similar to the deeply personal but incredibly detailed description given by Glückel of Hameln of this same phenomenon several centuries earlier. (5)

This portrayal of the 'starving Ramelson's' is typical of both Marxist claims about Russia before 1917 and also jewish claims about the condition of jews in the Russian Empire before the February Revolution of that same year. Such a portrait is just so much nonsense as there was plenty of food: however it was unscrupulously hoarded and sold at high prices by the heavily jewish 'middle class' whom I would rather expect Seifert and Sibley would rail against for being a 'product of capitalism'. (6)

That however would not be accurate as it is taking the effect as the cause and then building an intellectual Disneyland on top of it. The idea that 'capitalism' causes most; if not all of the world's problems, is a fundamental denial of evolutionary theory, which tells us that any organism will always compete; as an individual and often as a part of a group, for the best reproductive situation for itself.

Therefore if one is competing for the best reproductive situation then it does not fundamentally matter which economic system you institute: the evolutionary nature of human beings as organisms like any other will assert itself and they will only modify their behaviour to best compete for reproductive position within the confines of that system. So rather than having a jewish 'capitalist' on the top: you end up having a jewish 'socialist leader' at the top. Both have competed against others for that position; which leaves them in an excellent reproductive situation, and they continue to be competed against by those with the urge to get to the top themselves.

It is true that 'capitalism' will always exploit the less able, but socialism will always do exactly the same thing: for the simple reason that one does not get to a position of any influence or power without having competed for it and it isn't about the 'best man winning' as both capitalists and socialists frequently aver in their jargon-laden polemics and apologetics. Rather it is about the 'most ruthless man winning': the more ruthless you are in putting yourself forward and getting the best perceived 'results' to back up your personal propaganda the more likely you are going to be promoted to the power and influence you desire.

Life is war: nothing more, nothing less.

When Hayek famously quipped that socialism was and is the 'revolt of the losers' in a capitalist society : he only got it half right as capitalism is by direct contrast the 'revolt of the losers' in a socialist society. In both cases what is constant is not the economic, philosophical or social ideology, but rather the simple animality of man: the change is merely in the contours of the 'survival of the fittest' not in removing that competition and struggle.

As such the jewish capitalist who held the grain back for profit was no better or less 'just' than the jewish socialist who held the grain back for 'the industrial workers' as was later done as part of Lenin's 'war communism' policy during the Russian civil war. Ramelson however; like many jews of the period, perceived this rather differently and he saw 'anti-Semitism' being behind his family's perceived poor economic position.

To give some idea of how absurd and self-serving Ramelson's fundamental reasoning was we can point out that Ramelson's mother actually owned and ran a corner-shop: probably specialising in kosher food for the jewish community. Now in spite of the fact she had a lot of children to look after (and remember this was a time when having 5-8 children was normal); which Seifert and Sibley make much of (without that vital context), the fact she owned property and wasn't having to search for work (common among the Russian agricultural population if they weren't attached to a specific piece of land) or having to perform additional back-breaking piece work to make ends meet (like Joseph Goebbels family had to do at about the same time) (7) tells us that at the very least she was better off than a lot of people around her and across Europe at the time.

That is; of course, with a husband whose position allowed her and her family to have access to free meals and to be first in line for any hand-outs from the local jewish community. Hardly the poor starving jews of Seifert and Sibley are they?

This is further alluded to; however unintentionally, by Seifert and Sibley when they quote Ramelson as saying that after his elder brother died in a swimming accident: he was 'spoiled rotten' by his mother and numerous sisters. That is hardly the behaviour of a starving mother with a large family to feed now is it?

Now if we bear this stable economic position in mind within the other context of the popular; not state-sponsored as frequently claimed, (8) anti-jewish incidents such as the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (9) and the famous Beilis ritual murder trial between 1911-1913. (10) Then it is hardly surprising that the Ramelsons felt threatened as jews in one of the most anti-jewish areas of the Russian Empire: the Ukraine.

This feeling of insecurity left the Ramelsons with four paths open to them: they could choose between segregation, emigration, nationalism and/or assimilation.

Segregation was the traditional mode of life for jews in Eastern Europe and simply involved using the jewish ghettos; and the Pale of Settlement generally, as a place to sit out of the stormy winds of anti-jewish sentiment until the Messiah turned up and the jews would rule the world in Yahweh's name.

Emigration was where jews decided that they did not want to be restricted in their 'upward mobility' and sought to leave to Western Europe, Latin America or North America to 'find a better life'.

Nationalism; better known as Zionism, was where jews agreed with the teachings of Theodore Herzl and his numerous Zionist ideologues of many different stripes: effectively meaning that they believed that they were a 'race apart' irrespective of Judaism and thus had a 'national right to self-determination' in the form of a new state, which would either be Palestine or somewhere else in the world if Palestine was not obtainable.

Assimilation was where jews either converted to Christianity and sought to 'russify' themselves or they became socialists/anarchists and rejected a separate identity en toto: thus seeking to submerge themselves in humanity as being no different from the rest of it.

All these positions are largely interchangeable and can be combined with each other in varying degrees as indeed was the case in Russia; and the world in general, at the time. Ramelson's family typify this in that Ramelson's father chose segregation and emigration for the family. While Ramelson's uncle chose emigration and assimilation and Ramelson's sisters chose assimilation. Ramelson himself chose assimilation, emigration and nationalism.

We can thus see that what was driving Ramelson and his family to make the decisions they did was not their economic position, but rather the fact that they were jewish and needed to make up their mind about what to do about it in an increasingly hostile environment.

Ramelson appears to have chosen the assimilationist path in part because his sister; Rosa, was a fervent Bolshevik, was very active in the Komsomol (the Bolshevik youth section), became pregnant by and married a Red Army officer (that he himself was jewish is quite possible as Seifert and Sibley mention no disapproval from Ramelson's highly religious family) and became a 'Professor of Economics' at Sverdlov University (she didn't even have a degree). Ramelson remembered her in the following terms; that beautifully describe her actual motivation, as 'a young woman with a pistol in her waistband determined to rid her country of poverty, illiteracy and anti-Semitism'.

While Rosa was bent on eliminating anti-Semitism as well as poverty (which jews frequently believed massively effected them) and illiteracy (which jews frequently believed and still often believe is the cause of anti-jewish sentiment [i.e. 'ignorance of the jews']): her father heartily approved and allowed her to bring non-jewish factory workers to their home so they could show them 'real jews' and how lovely and charming the self-chosen can be when they want something.

Indeed Seifert and Sibley tell us that Ramelson's father heartily approved of Bolshevism for its 'combating anti-Semitism and poverty' in spite of its 'secular nature': this might not sound surprising for many, but in truth it is quite a shocking indication of how jews are utterly egoistical creatures. We can elucidate this by pointing out very simply that to a Torah Scholar Judaism and religion are the be all and end all of his existence in theory: he cares for nothing else as he is strictly to confine himself to understanding and spreading his understanding of the Oral Torah.

So for a jew to be an altruistic creature then Ramelson's father should have immediately sacrificed his own personal interests to defend jews against Bolshevism (i.e. it was a threat against Judaism being militantly atheistic and thus to the jewish religious system of Kehilla/Kahals and Tzaddiks of which Ramelson's father was part) or he should have joined the Bolsheviks (in order to gain best position for the jews after the fighting was over).

The former is actually the more likely of the two eventualities given that; as I have said, Bolshevism was militantly atheistic and it would be difficult not to recognise that even within the time from of the provisional government of Count Lvov and the jew Alexander Kerensky to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

Instead Ramelson's father actually supported Bolshevism; without joining the party or actively fighting for it, while still being a highly religious jew, which is odd precisely because of Bolshevism's obvious atheistic nature and the fact that there were more Judaism-friendly alternatives with just as much chance of victory in the civil war: the Cadets (Liberals), the Social Revolutionaries (Russian peasant socialists), the Greens (non-aligned peasants and anarchists), the local nationalists (e.g. the Ukrainian Rada and its supporters) and the less radical monarchists (i.e. those not associated with the famous 'Black Hundreds'). (11)

Each party/group would have served Ramelson's father a lot better as an alternative for jewish people generally: however Ramelson's father chose to support the Bolsheviks presumably on the logic that they were the strongest opponents of anti-Semitism and poverty which were Ramelson's and his father's chief social concerns (i.e. their own perceived personal situation).

Indeed we see another reason for an egoistic explanation of Ramelson and his father's behaviour in the fact that; according to Seifert and Sibley, Cherkassy was Bolshevik territory and hence it would be most personally beneficial to Ramelson's father to support the Bolsheviks at that point in time, while not formally committing and opening himself up to possible reprisals by opposing groups later on.

It is interesting to note that while their father dallied slightly on the sidelines: Ramelson and his sisters became ardent Bolsheviks with the exception of one; the 'black sheep' so-to-speak, who sided with the Social Revolutionaries. From what Seifert and Sibley annunciate it is quite clear that all of Ramelson's sisters; like him, retained their Bolshevik convictions all their lives.

Ramelson's sister Rosa was later sidelined by Stalin and her (possibly jewish) husband executed during the purges of the late 1930s (for being Trotskyites from what I can discern from what source literature I have had a chance to look at) by the NKVD. She herself was placed within the famous gulag system for a decade as a counter-revolutionary in Stalinist logic.

Indeed it was Ramelson's sister Rosa who 'converted' him by; during a short three week sojourn in Moscow, taking him to see Leon Trotsky harangue the crowds trying to whip up some kind of 'revolutionary' rent-a-mob. That contact left an indelible impression on Ramelson in addition to the mobs of jews attacking Russian policemen in ghettos; probably the reasoning that they were 'Amalek', as shown by the fact that before he left for 'capitalist Canada' in 1922 he did a bit of pro-Bolshevik agitation among his fellow ghetto-dwellers at his leaving party.

References


(1) This bit of Marxist jargon tends to confuse many people, but when Marxists refer to ‘the right’ they are referring to those who have less radical views on the ownership of the 'means of production' (often contracted to simply ‘property’) and when they refer to ‘the left’ they are referring to those who have more radical views than they do on this subject. Hence the assertion that there are ‘right Marxists’ (e.g. Bukharin) and ‘left Marxists’ (e.g. Trotsky) in relation to Lenin’s Marxism.
(2) On this point see Joachim Hoffmann, 2001, ‘Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation’, 1st Edition, Theses & Dissertations Press: Capshaw and Ernst Topitsch, 1987, 'Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War', 1st Edition, St. Martin's Press: New York.
(3) Worley gives a similar view and calls its theoretical justification ‘crude Marxism’ (Matthew Worley, 2009, ‘The Soviet Union and Bolshevism Abroad’, p. 207 in Nicholas Atkin, Michael Biddiss, 2009, ‘Themes in Modern European History’, 1st Edition, Routledge: New York) but in fact this is actually orthodox Leninism applied to real politik (i.e. wait till your opponents weaken each other and then take power with your strength).
(4) Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1990, 'The Eastern European Era in Jewish History', pp. 5-9 in Deborah Dash Moore, 1990, 'Eastern European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual', 1st Edition, Northwestern University Press: Evanston
(5) Marvin Lowenthal, 1932, 'The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln', 1st Edition, Harper: New York, p. 54
(6) Jerry Muller, 2010, 'Capitalism and the Jews', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 18-20; 74-75
(7) Karl Georg Reuth, 1993, 'Goebbels', 1st Edition, Constable: London, p. 10
(8) See John Doyle Klier, 2011, 'Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York for the most recent debunk of the 'anti-Semitic Russian state conspiracy' argument still trotted out by some Israeli and jewish writers.
(9) See John Doyle Klier, Shlomo Lambroza (Eds.), 1992, 'Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York for a detailed discussion of this general phenomenon as well as a detailed discussion of Kishinev.
(10) I am in the process of researching and writing a book about the Beilis ritual murder trial of 1911-1913, but for general reference Alexander Tager's, 1935, 'The Decay of Czarism: The Beilis Trial', 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, is by the far the most complete; if heavily skewed towards the 'Beilis was innocent' camp, account as it is one of the few accounts in a select field that actually uses the trial records and the original source literature.
(11) Still one of the most readable and educational of the many intellectual offerings concerning this period of Russian history in the English language is William Henry Chamberlain's, 1987, [1935], 'The Russian Revolution', 2 Vols, Princeton University Press: Princeton.

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...w-at-work.html
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