Re: AUT: Re: Palestione, Israel and other ghettoes

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all,

What is our task in thinking about this problem?  Our eye has to be not on
the immediate relief of Palestinian suffering, but on what furthers the
prospect of the abolition of capital and workers' self-organization,
self-determination, and strength.  We would like them to be the same, but in
struggling to end our suffering, we know that the working class often incurs
suffering.  Everybody should be able to agree that even national
independence would produce some immediate benefits that we would be obliged
to defend.  On this, Tahir is right and it is a point of no small
importance.  But it is not yet a communist position.

Scott's position seems to me the least tenable.  Scott is caught in
contradictions.  This is a revolution to overthrow capitalism, but with the
winning of democratic, national demands at the same time.  This requires
recognizing the need for military alliance with sections of the capitalist
and 'middle' classes, which oddly do not include the peasants, a position
neither Lenin nor Trotsky ever accepted, as the former considered the
peasants a non-class or an agglomeration of classes and the latter
considered the peasants as quite solidly petty bourgeois.

The idea that the anti-imperialist capitalist class will side with the
working class militarily is a rehash of Spain in 1936-9, but there it was
the 'anti-fascist capitalists.'  We know what that meant in practice, so why
revive a tired and failed and deadly approach?  Also, there is something
oddly 'block of four classes'-ish here in the need to find the
anti-imperialist anti-working class forces.  This also has nothing to do
with permanent revolution, since Trotsky argued that that involved the
smashing of both imperialist and national bourgeois power, based on arming
the working class as the state.  There is no talk of military alliances (of
course Trotsky was involved in recruiting former generals and bourgeois, but
even then only on the basis of their complete submission to 'the proletarian
state' and never as a cross-class alliance.)

Also, neither Trotsky nor Lenin made a fetish of national independence,
arguing that in some cases amalgamation did more to strengthen workers'
power objectively if that overrode the risk increasing of national divisions
between the workers.  They did feel that in most cases, national separation
was the only means to eroding imperial chauvinism in the imperialist working
classes and creating trust and mutual respect between workers from both
sides, but they also conceived of that in radically different terms.
Lenin's 1905 position was pretty much a call to state capitalism, a position
he would more or less maintain his whole life aka the democratic
distatorship of the workers and peasants, which was NOT about the abolition
of capital, but about the workers' and peasants' management of the state
while the capitalists retained control of the means of production.  If ever
there was a position which gave evidence to a total lack of understanding of
the relation between the political and economic, between the capital-labor
relation and the state, I would be hard pressed to find it.  Trotsky at
least understood that it really was sort of 'all or nothing', that it was
soviets and workers' power or it was capitalism.  But the end result is
still a fixation on the nation state and a lack of understanding of what the
state represents.  We have had that argument enough on this list to not need
it again except to say that if one considers the armed working class in the
process of abolishing capital's social relations as a 'state' (and I think
it is a limited understanding indeed, but a conceptual framework lots of
people would recognize), then we are at most at Marx's idea of a semi-state
and the Paris Commune.  But as I think Marx understood it, in so far as it
already means the abolition of the separation of political and economic, of
social production and social power, it is already the withering away of the
state, not in the future, but in the very revolution itself.

As such, I don't see how Scott's position, revised though it may be, holds
together in any coherent fashion.  It is Scott who is now arguing for
workers' revolution as the immediate task, but in a way which augurs state
capitalism.  It is not a reform position aimed at strengthening the working
class' unity and self-organization, but one which will result in the
subordination of the working class' of Israel and the PA to capital through
the re-inscription of the separation of social production and social power,
but with much more equivocation towards the capitalists and other
ant-working class elements than even Trotsky nominally made room for.  And
it will involves a revolutionary effort, which will mean decades of
exhaustion and defeat in all likelihood.

Harald's point, in so far as it argues for a viable reform demand short of
the overthrow of capital, focusses on a useful point that achieves three
issues politically: 1) it undermines the nationalists on both sides, 2) it
lays a basis for a possible common ground on which class politics could
fruitfully develop solidarity between Israeli and Palestinian workers, and
3) it pushes to the foreground the class differentiation within these
groups.

But is it the most viable, if we are concerned with 'viability'?  I assume
viability is an issue since we are thinking of an achievable demand less
than immediate workers' power (whatever we each construe by that idea.)  It
assumes that most Palestinians in the PA see unity under the Israeli state
as either viable or desirable.  Many no doubt would prefer any situation
that would be better, much as African Americans preferred at least the ends
of de jure segregation and Jim Crow, even if they knew damn well that de
facto would still exist.  Of course, many in the North did not think that
that was enough of an improvement.  We may see the same situation here since
no one in their right mind could believe that Israel will not maintain de
facto segregation and oppression of Palestinians, even with the end of its
status as a colonial settler state.  Again, much as we have seen in South
Africa.  Neither South African nor U.S. Black people would go back (except
some university intellectuals longing for the good old pre-class
differentiation days of Jim Crow a la bell hooks and the cult crit crowd),
and in both cases it has allowed a process of class differentiation which in
the long run will benefit the drawing of clearer class lines and weakening
racial lines in some ways.  Also, in thinking about it, given the ways in
which Zionism has written (a bastardized) Judaism into the very constitution
of Israel, it is hard to imagine something less than revolution causing a
complete overhaul of the very foundations of Israel.  Even so, if South
Africa could do it, one might suspect that Israel could too.  It is however,
only a limited demand and we would never want to become fixated on it as
self-sufficient or as logically and necessarily leading to the demand for
the overthrow of capital.  It has not led to that elsewhere as yet, anymore
than the national liberation strategy has.  It is a demand which has, in
revolutionary hands, a political purpose, and which is not immediately
concerned with alleviating suffering.

Thinking in terms of suffering at all is in fact mistaken.  Those who seek
an increase in suffering, equating more suffering with more revolutionary
desire, are reactionary and stupid.  But seeking amelioration of suffering
regardless of the impact on the strength of the class and the revolutionary
interests of the class internationally is a liberal politics, IMO.  That may
seem a harsh judgement, but it is one I am ready, and I think able, to
defend.  Real amelioration of suffering will only happen through workers'
self-organization, but in other ways workers' self-organization and struggle
often results in additional suffering and violence.  Suffering is a poor
basis for political judgement.

In all this, it needs to be recognized that our task, the pro-revolutionary
task, is to increase the self-confidence, self-awareness, self-organization,
and thereby the unity and strength, of the working class.  This can result
in different needs at different moments, in different political positions in
what seem like similar situations.  So for example, did the Australian
intevention in East Timor increase workers' power as well as ameliorate
suffering?  Or did it ameliorate suffering and have no effect on workers'
power?  Or did it ameliorate suffering and weaken workers' power?  In the
first case, we should support it.  In the second we would defend any
amelioration of suffering and work to try and take advantage of that
amelioration.  In the third, we would be forced, despite its seeming
cruelty, to say that it was a regression and a reactionary act.  We know the
fourth possibility (worse overall) and we would oppose it wholly.  Frankly,
I see the second as least likely, but in East Timor I do not know.  After
all, it is never clear whether a move by capital will work in capital's
favor or whether it will backfire and work in our favor.

I don't think that a fixation on this or that immediate demand is as
important as trying to think through what demands promote the organization
of the workers as a class at a given moment, always keeping our eyes fixed
on the abolition of capital and the international interests of the class.
What is possible at any given moment can radically change and leave us far
behind.  Who in Argentina had put out "overthrow the current regime and
establish organ of workers' power" as an immediate demand in October of
2001?  Fellow workers would have laughed at such people, and yet found
themselves doing that two months later.  The best work we can do is to help
foster a distrust of solutions not emanating from the workers' themselves or
which divide the working class hierarchically, to ceaslessly critique the
anti-working class nature of the nationalists and the 'imperialists' or
'imperials', of reformers and conservatives, the absolute limitedness of
their non-solutions, and to pose the possibility of something else.  We have
a necessary and valuable critique to make of their ideas, actions, and of
every demand they put forward and to insist to our fellow workers that only
we (as workers, not the we of pro-revolutionaries) hold the solution and the
power and that anything less is a compromise.  If other workers decide to
compromise, we can criticize that, but we also defend every single gain we
made along the way.  This is elementary.  In the end, our demands will have
less impact than we would like and if we could, organized as a vanguard
party or some such, lead our class to revolution, then someone could also
lead them into counter-revolution.  Our task is not to lead, but to clarify
and strengthen every 'autonomous' tendency, to strengthen the circulation of
struggles, to encourage workers' collective self-organization through organs
of our own creation.  We are not seeking to separate ourselves from the rest
of the class as a vanguard or elite, but to foreground workers' power and
the international interests of the class, ie the universal interest in the
abolition of capital.

If that does not satisfy some people that we do not have 'the program' and
do not wish to become a distinct leadership seizing state power, that is no
insult to us.  We have never believed that we could do anything 'for' the
working class, but only our part as members of the working class and that we
will have to all do it for ourselves together.  In that sense, the criticism
that we are sometimes abstract is not a problem for me.  Sometimes we can be
no other way except in our ceaselss promotion of autonomy and generalization
of all struggles.

Cheers,
Chris




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