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

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> If the idea of the SACP making a military bloc with
> the ANC to achieve permanent revolution in South
> Africa ten years back is absurd, because the SACP is
> bourgeois and workers' revolutions can't be effected
> by bourgeois actors, then how much more absurd is your
> offering of the SACP-ANC post-apartheid government as
> a model for the Palestine in the immediate future?

Gee Scott, you caught me!  I was advocating exactly that!  Oh wait, or did I
just say that the end of apartheid was a gain that few Black South Africans
would take back, as bad as the ANC-SACP regime is?  That it was in many ways
an improvement in people's practical lives and opened up the political
situation.  At the same time, would I have wanted to see the overthrow of
the whole situation?  Duh.  I warned Leftists 15 years ago (when I was a
Trotskyist) that the ANC would turn out like this, but they had the same
senile belief that you did, either in the ANC or the SACP.  The only way to
have avoded this would have been the end of capital, but it didn't happen.
So does that make post-apartheid SA qualitatively the same as pre-apartheid
SA?  Do you want to go back to the good old days?  Are you longing for the
clarity of apartheid?

As for Israel, you consistently ignore the fact that the problem is to
undermine the nationalists on both sides and that any one demand is less
relevant than the promotion of workers' self-organization and any one demand
is only a means to this.  It is not that I am not for the destruction of
Israel, but I am not convinced that this is immediately on the agenda nor
that it will do much more than encourage the nationalists, and the most
reactionary ones like Hamas at that.

Now your whole argument rides on the existence of a so-called revolutionary
situation, of dual-power even.  This is the typical nonsense of the
Trotskyists who fail to look and see if real organs of workers' power exist
and who are looking for a second state apparatus instead.  The facts don't
sustain your claims and no one I know connected with the Palestinian
struggle feels that this is even at the level of the first intafada.  The
situation is much more controlled by the nationalist leadership.  So how do
we proote something different?

Maybe the demand I am talking about would not be the right one.  But as I
have said, the demand is less relevant than the orientation, towards
workers' self-organization and towards finding a way to build bridges
between the different workers.  A democratic Israel would offer a better
situation, though I gotta tell you as I said before, I'm not sure that it
would be easier than just overthrowing Israel.  In either case, the issue
will be one of strengthening links across the region Harald refers to as the
East Mediterranean (and really Egypt is linked with this as well.)  Even if
it starts in Palestine, it has to spread fast.  On that much, Trotsky and I
agree.

> If the Bolsheviks betrayed the Russian workers with
> capitalist policies, why would the Palestinians
> workers benefit in the short term from independence
> under a capitalist government?

Well, first you confuse a small step forward (gaining democratic rights for
the Palestinians, in whatever form, which I hope you think would be good,
rather than the current repression) with taking a revolutionary movement
having its burgeoning (and the process was only beginning really, not
completed) organs of workers' power strangled by the very same
revolutionaries who claimed to defend it.  Gaining breathing room for
greater organization under a capitalist state is simply not the same as
watching the revolutionaries dismantle the workers' independent organs of
social power and reintroduce piece wages, one man management, strike
breaking and secret police.

You are not looking at the question from its transitions, only as static
moments, and that is a mistake.

> The second approach, which I argue for, is that of
> permanent revolution, which wants the workers to make
> a 'military' alliance with the national bourgeosie
> only to defeat imperialism, and then to turn the
> defeat of imperialism into a socialist revolution, a
> revolution which must be spread to many other
> countries to be successful in the long term.

And this is not a stagist conception how?  This is my complaint, that you
actually think that these are separate moments.  That is why I argue as if
you hold a two-stage notion that is even at variance with Trotsky.

> The third approach, which Harald and Peter J argue
> for, says that the whole idea of a bloc of any sort
> with other classes and a national liberation struggle
> is wrong, and that a revolution has to take place
> across a whole region or even the whole world to be
> successful anywhere.

The regional/international may not be true in the immediate, but it is true
in the short run.  Come one Scott, did you miss the part of Permanent
Revolution where Trotsky talks about the need to spread the revolution?  At
best, even in a big state, you will prolly only have a few years of
isolation that you can survive.  In Palestine, you prolly only have months,
maybe weeks, so that a regional spreading of the revolution is not only
correct politically but a question of survival.

> The problem with your arguments is that you invoke the
> third approach to criticise me, then switch to the
> first approach when you make the positive parts of
> your arguments. I think you should make it clear where
> you stand on the question of blocs with other classes.
> Do you support them, and if so under what
> circumstances? If the criteria of the military bloc
> are useless, what alternative criteria do you advance?

I am against blocs with other classes period.  Its suicide, which is why
Peter and I raised Spain.  Not because the situation is analogous, but
because a bloc is always suicide.  And again, this is strictly an approach
which sees the working class as an army to be maneouvered.  It nowhere
raises the ongoing transformation of social relations as part and parcel of
the revolutionary process.  My demand and perspective is aimed at allowing a
deeper recomposition of sections of the working class in the region, at the
expense of the nationalists.

Cheers,
Chris




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