PART II
YOU CAN READ THE FIRST PART OF THIS REVIEW HERE.Upon reaching Edmonton in Canada Ramelson went to live with his uncle; a jewish immigrant who had become rich by "'trading'" furs, who promptly made his brother (Ramelson's father) a" 'non-executive director' "of his company and paid him sizeable dividends on top of a salary. (12) This egoistic generosity (charitable philanthropy towards Russian jewish immigrants was at this time all the rage among jewish communities in the Western world) made possible Ramelson's university education in law that he was later to put to use running rings around British courts and international firms in his kosher crusade to make Marxism fit some form of reality.
That said however Ramelson's uncle and father were both caught up in the 1929 stock exchange collapse (13) and quite possibly; it is implied by Seifert and Sibley, they lost a lot of money from their financial speculation. This fits into what Muller has argued as being the strong dynamic between capitalism and anti-capitalism in jewish thought (14) as far as Ramelson's uncle and father were all for their personal advantage; and Ramelson himself was not slow to take advantage of the wealth while it was available (as Seifert and Sibley's discussion clearly implies), but yet like Ramelson supported the revolutionaries in Russia in so far as they were perceived by Ramelson's uncle and father to be better for them and also protectors of their daughters who had stayed behind and sided with the Bolsheviks as I have discussed above.
Essentially jews have two reactions to money-making: they either radically oppose it or they radically endorse it. I would concur with Muller's view that the jews are nature's capitalists (15) in that they have historically been the most individualistic of all the peoples of the earth as they have had to operate in a fundamentally very hostile environment with two strong evolutionary dynamics in play.
These two dynamics have been the fact they have been competing against gentiles who have historically competed from a position of majority group power and other jews who have competed from the perspective of an individual trying to garner as much of a finite amount of opportunity in the shortest possible time-frame in the knowledge that if he or she does not do so then another jew will just seize that opportunity.
However jews have historically also voluntarily cooperated with each other; when appropriate, to compete against gentiles in order to increase the finite amount of opportunity they have available to them. This gives rise to the theories about the clannish nature of jews in many respects as well as their often over wrought tendency to declaim loudly that they aren't clannish at all: in so far as jews do not cooperate with each other on the whole because they see it as their duty to do so; which is common among Europeans and Mongoloids, but rather because they see it in their individual interest to voluntarily cooperate with other jews for the moment and if that situation changes then a jew's loyalties can shift very quickly to keep up with their perception of the situation.
As such one could reasonably style jews as being very similar to anarchists (and many important anarchist thinkers; such as Goldman and Berkman, were jewish) because they assert the supremacy of the individual will and perception of a cause in all things, but at the same time believe that voluntary cooperation in a kind mass democracy of voting by action is how one should operate. So rather than jews talking about working with each other and deciding what is best for jews: what they are; in fact, doing is voting with their feet as to which group combination it is that they perceive to be the most advantageous one of the moment for them and their individual interests: much as how anarchist visions of mass democracy are alleged to work.
Therefore jews; like anarchists and other proponents of mass democracy, are rather open to manipulation by more gifted figures among their own kind and tend to go along with schemes and plans of other jews on much the same principle that allows anarchists to actually work together: they believe that they can advance their personal position by following an "'elected'" leader and temporarily co-operating with the group around said figurehead. In time; of course, jews break off from the group and form their own sects on the same principle as they feel they are now in a position to do so and can draw followers to them in the split.
We can see this principle; of jews switching between capitalism and communism, in Ramelson's life in that in spite of his professed admiration he preferred to stay in the West rather than return to the Soviet Union. Ramelson is rather like the leftist intellectuals that Slavoj Zizek; the popular Marxist thinker, has typified as proclaiming world revolution, while taking a nice capitalist salary from a non-socialist controlled university and then claiming their heart is really in say the Soviet Union, China and/or Cuba. Paul Johnson makes a similar point if far less gracefully. (16)
This presents something of a problem for Seifert and Sibley's interpretation of Ramelson's life and career as they style him as a hard-working, passionate Communist who had the courage of his convictions yet while maintaining membership and high-ranking position in the CPGB throughout some of the most ideologically troublesome years of its existence.
The problem with that interpretation however is its hagiographic nature, which; as I have already mentioned, characterizes the whole of their work and means that to achieve this effect Seifert and Sibley have had to ignore the inconvenient truth that Ramelson was basically a Western parlour Bolshevik. A jew who enunciated that his goal was world revolution and lionized the USSR and the Soviet bloc in general, while maintaining a far more comfortable existence as a professional revolutionary bureaucrat in the West than he could possibly have had in aiding the development of revolution in say the USSR.
If Ramelson had had the courage of his convictions then; as I have similarly mentioned in my article on Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider, he would have sought to help establish an enviable form of socialism that could rival capitalism in terms of the satisfaction it gave its citizens rather than sit in a capitalist country proclaiming the necessity of revolution there.
My point here is relatively simple in so far as it is very easy to say what you are against something when you are in a country which allows you to do so, but it is another matter entirely to sacrifice yourself to help build a better future for a country that already has your preferred form of government.
This is particularly true when dealing with Marxism as it; as an ideology, declaims loudly about the future that it can offer should it be implemented, but its intellectuals and activists don't actually tell you how they could implement their ideas as practical policy (as opposed to generalised abstractions and pie-in-the-sky) and how those ideas would necessarily create the future they envision. No: it is much easier to tell everyone why the current system is so bad and to pontificate that one has a supremely brilliant alternative that one has never tried out but yet you just somehow know will work. (17)
Hardly" 'scientific socialism'" now: is it?
So if we understand this we can see that what Ramelson is essentially doing was not trying to "'build a better future for the workers of the world'", but rather Ramelson was simply trying to sell his ideas to everyone else: much like a capitalist tries to sell his products so was Ramelson trying to sell his services. This is the essential truth behind Muller's dichotomy of extremes in the capitalist and anti-capitalist jew, but what Muller does not note is that the issue is not so much about ideology but rather one of attitude.
In both instances the jew concerned is principally trying to sell an economic idea and/or intellectual system to principally non-jewish consumers, which is necessarily the same thing as a jewish salesman selling subscriptions to the Jerusalem Post or a jewish charity trying to entice the wealthy philanthropist to "'purchase a plate'" at a charitable function.
As such Ramelson no longer appears as being quite the hard-working, dedicated and altruistic Communist functionary that Seifert and Sibley portray, but rather when we highlight their mention of Ramelson's extraordinary faculty to disagree with other Communists and champion his own course. We actually begin to see the portrait of the stereotypical Rabbi emerge, but instead of competing with other Rabbis in terms of popular following and citations of his halakhic interpretations and frum ("'pious'") lifestyle: Ramelson is competing with other Communists for a popular following and citations of his Marxist interpretation and proletarian lifestyle.
This is most easily observed in Ramelson's conflicts with other members of the CPGB over his industrial tactics in the 1960s and 1970s as well as the fact that he worked hard to understand Keynesian economics; as Seifert and Sibley rightly affirm this was and is a rare thing among Marxists, (18) was in part to allow him to maintain and hone an edge over his Communist opponents who he could then criticise for not having read; let alone understood, the guiding economic theorist of Britain at the time.
Indeed Ramelson's tactics of loud mouth political brinkmanship with his opponents that Seifert and Sibley describe is in fact symptomatic of the concept of "'chutzpah'" in jewish culture as well as the the imperious "'I am chosen therefore I am right' "attitude that so frequently afflicts jews as both individuals and as a group.
When we compare this to Ramelson's tactics with organised and unorganised workers who he was seeking to convert to the Marxist cause; as remember that Marxism is less an intellectual philosophy and more of a political religion (19) although some proponents try to claim this obscures "'context'" (20) this is a meaningless sophism (it doesn't clarify how or why this obscurification occurs it merely asserts that it does), then we see a profound change in the Ramelson that Seifert and Sibley describe as he is always wanting to help, always kind and always trying to be everyone's best friend. This is also symptomatic of the kindred tactic to chutzpah; "'schmoozing'", in jewish culture: where instead of brow-beating people (chutzpah) one tries to ingratiate oneself with them via the use of proverbial "'honeyed words'" (schmoozing).
Seifert and Sibley try to blend these two tactics together without their jewish cultural context; and we should remember that even they admit that Ramelson stayed very conscious of his jewishness all of his life, to make Ramelson into the Leninist ideal much as described of Lenin himself in official Soviet publications. (21)
In so far as Ramelson is always the advocate of the right Marxist line, is loved and adored by the industrial proletariat and whose legacy is then betrayed by false Communists. The only significant substitutions in Seifert and Sibley's account compared to the official Soviet version of Lenin's history and legacy is that the replacement of the "'neo-Gramscians'"(i.e. Eurocommunist and/or Frankfurt School proponents) in Ramelson's time for the ultra-leftists of Lenin's epoch.
As such we can see that to understand Ramelson we have to place him in his jewish context as otherwise we are examining the man without those things that made him who he was. Ironically then Seifert and Sibley are wandering around in an abstract mind-maze of their own devising in terms of their hagiographic interpretation of the facts of Ramelson's life, but as stated if one removes the interpretative framework the authors use then it is quite possible to get to the good scholarly bedrock that underlies the work as a whole.
If we thus rebuild our picture of Ramelson's life on the factual bedrock rather than rooting it in what we wish to see (i.e. Seifert and Sibley interpretation): then it is clear that we come to an appreciation that Ramelson was little different from his fellow members of the tribe who took the opposite side in the intellectual cold war. He; like them, was just trying to sell everyone around him his version of Marxism and as such gain for himself the highest position possible: much as his uncle sold furs, Ramelson sold ideas.
It just goes to show that jewish capitalists and jewish communists are first, last and always the same thing: salesmen.
REFERENCES
(12) According to Andrew Heinze, 1990, "'Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity'", 1st Edition, Columbia University Press: New York, pp. 37-48 such success was not uncommon in part because of the ruthlessness of jewish entrepreneurs in exploiting gentiles and jews a-like backing up Muller's (Op. Cit., pp. 94-97) argument as well as John Glad's suggestion (John Glad, 2007, "'Recent Books on Jewish Eugenics: A Triple Review'", The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 216) that Judaism has acted as social positive eugenic pressure to breed for raw intellectual ability, ruthlessness and racial purity.(13) On jewish involvement in this see Liaquat Ahamed, 2010, "'Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke the World'", 1st Edition, Windmill: London, pp. 386-388(14) Muller, Op. Cit., p. 1(15) Ibid, pp. 110-111; the jewish economist Milton Friedman also argues a similar proposition in Milton Friedman," 'Capitalism and the Jews'", Encounter, June 1984, p. 74(16) Paul Johnson, 1988, "'Intellectuals'", 1st Edition, Weidenfeld and Nicholson: London, pp. 179-181(17) A not dissimilar point was made by Henry de Man, 1926," 'Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus'", 2nd Edition, Eugen Diederichs: Jena, pp. 65-66(18) Another Marxist who was a member of this quite select club was John Strachey: a senior member of the CPGB till 1940 when he defected to Keynes' economic camp after attacking his ideas for a decade from a Marxist economic perspective. Strachey's 1936 "'The Theory and Practice of Socialism'" (1st Edition, Victor Gollancz: London) is still one of the most lucid and eloquent statements of Marxist theory (in its Leninist-Stalinist variant) that I have read, which takes pains to explain the author's precise meaning at every opportunity.(19) Thomas Linehan, 2007," 'Communism in Britain 1920-1939: From the Cradle to the Grave'", 1st Edition, Manchester University Press: Manchester, p. 102(20) David Roberts, 2009, "'"Political Religion" and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-War Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category'", Contemporary European History, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 397-398(21) Anon., 1970, "'Lenin: A Short Biography'", 1st Edition, Novosti: Moscow, pp. 51-59
