Lebanese Left and "ignorance" (was Re: replying to Sevag)

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: replying to Sevag,
el 13 Feb 00, a las 12:01, sevag dijo:

> Dear Gary:
>  Please allow me to salute all the comrades on the list. I never knew
>  that
> opening the subject on the middle east and Zionism will cause such a
> wave of hatred in between comrades.

Don't worry, Sevag. It has not been a wave of hatred, it has just
been an idiot who tried to sneak into our debates, and who has been
expelled.

But there are -unfortunately for our struggle- too many fools like
that one. And I resort to the word in its most "Marxist" sense, as
when Engels said that "antisemitism is the socialism of the fools".
This is a strange sounding phrase today, after both the war against
Arabs -"semites", I guess- by Israelis, and the extermination of most
of East European Jewry by "Aryan" fools like the ones Engels derided.

It has been a most usual Zionist tactics to bracket any form of anti-
Zionism with antisemitism, and one of the most incredible
achievements is the branding of anti-Zionist Jews like yours truly as
"self-hating Jews". This has been very common, after 1967, as a
weapon against Soviet criticisms of Israel and Zionists. But the fact
is, however, that this mischievous interpretation rests on some
truth.

There ARE people who, in Argentina and probably elsewhere, see a
family name like mine and immediately begin to suspect. "Ah, this is
a Jew, he must be another one of those despicable subhumans, let us
sling a little of anti-Zionist mud on them!"  My own mail proved a
litmus test for this Mr. Mistery. These types are, openly or in
disguise, knowing it or not, agents of Zionist propaganda. They are
not against Zionism nor Israeli imperialism. They are against Jews,
as in fact they are against anyone who is (or they pretend to be)
"different". And they provide Zionism with a good platform to gain
abstract humanists to their cause.

What's more serious yet, they also cripple -when they act in the Arab
world- the Arab policy towards Israelis. Because they present
Israelis as a unified block, which is far from truth (nothing is a
"unified block" in this sense, there is something known as
dialectics...) and makes it harder for Arabs to devise a policy that
can act on the cracks that Israeli society contains, a policy that
may be established in order to break (or at least weaken) the grip of
Zionism.

So that this cranky nuts of strange name has provided us with an
excellent example of how these people work. They should ask for a
compensation, for example entering in the Shin Bet payroll.

I suppose this is what you are thinking of when you say that:

 It is not the
> characteristics of our generation to call each others such things. We
> watched our ancestors and the ignorance, lets us learn from their
> mistakes.

[...]

But, respectfully, I would like to do a couple of comments to your
interesting precis of the situation of the "Left" in Lebanon. As you
will learn from my further postings (or through reading my
interventions in the Archives), I am not very fond of the "Left" in
my own country, who are the ones to be blamed for their absolutely
lack of serious popular following. Out of that experience, of my
Latin American experience, of my experience in Buenos Aires (so much
a Beirut of the River Plate...), I would suggest that if you discover
that

here in Lebanon, the left is
> still undesired.

and that

The conservative units in the society have the saying
> in everything. the parliament members are elected on the basis of
> their sect, and the government institutions are based on secterian
> divisions and nepotism.

Then it is perhaps (and I stress the _perhaps_) not the wisest of the
things to do is to blame this on the fact that

Most channels of political participation,
> socialization, interest aggregation and definitely interest
> articualtion are secterian. Everybody has a share and does not want to
> let it go. This means everybody is to an extent happy with the
> situation. the evrybody i am pointing at is the bourgiosie, the
> leaders (al-zua'ama), the landowners...

This may be (and I certainly suppose it is) a fair description of
facts, but this is not answering the question "Why is it that

the worker does not trust a
> leftist, he prefers to go to the seikh or the preacher for his
> demands, which most of the times he does not get, but still goes
> there.

I am afraid that while the answer runs along the correct but IMHO
(and believe me that respectfully, I do certainly know that it is
very difficult to say a sensible word on the inner politics of one's
own country, not to speak of a foreign one!) limited description you
make, the real movement will not advance a step.

What needs be done is not to blame the "structure" for the behavior
of the workers, what needs be done is to discover what do the workers
obtain with this. We must, first and foremost, assume that dictum by
Marx: "you ask me where is socialism? Look at the workers, socialism
is where the workers are".

That is, when we observe that the working class in our country is not
well behaved, when we see that they are not "instant Marxists", when
we see that they prefer to be duped by the bourgeois politician
instead of making a revolution, we must first and foremost understand
_what is it that the workers get in these apparently senseless (from
our "enlightened" point of view) movement. What is it that carries
them to act against our theorethical predictions (or should I better
say "feverish desires"?).

We do not need to transform the current and actual state of mass
consciousness into a religious faith (this is precisely what the
bourgeois wants everyone to do). But we must be humble, and admit
that if people do not act according to our predictions, then so much
the worse for our predictions. The only way I know to transform these
predictions into something with a potential of intervention in mass
politics (and this is what politics is about, Lenin said sometime
that we are doing politics only when we speak of millions of people)
is to plunge into the deep sea of your people's history and
traditions, trying to discover the red thread of revolution and
counter-revolution in the actual workings of mass movements (or mass
quietness!). Our revolutions will spurt out from these deep sea
currents, or will always abort.

You say, for example, that:

>  Facing such a situation, the left is looked at to be the atheist, the
> hater of god, and in one word, the person who is coming to take our
> land or manufactury away from us.

And then you explain, inadequately if I may be allowed to say it,
with a couple of terrible words:

Ignorance prevails.

I will be harsh here: it is the ignorance of the Left, not of people,
that prevails. If the Left blames the people and their "ignorance"
for the Left's failures, then the Left will remain isolated forever.
In countries such as ours, we should imagine the reasons why do
people believe in God (or god, if you prefer), understand them, and
give to these reasons a new road, the road to revolution. We should
positively NOT haughtily (yes, haughtily dear Sevag) call people
"ignorants".  That is not a good way to begin a working partnership,
and of course it is not a good way to generate a common passion for
revolution and socialism. There is a mistake in that way of
reasoning,for the which mistake I hope I am wrong to put the blame on
the particular spiritual life of Beirut, that Western-looking port of
Syria since at lest the 18th. Century.

Do not understand me wrongly, I am not trying to flame nor insult
you, but in your words and ideas I find too many mistakes with which
me, a Marxist in Buenos Aires, a typical "Europeanized" Latin
American harbour city, struggle almost every day. Maybe it is not
people's ignorance, but our Marxism's ignorance of people, what we
should think about.

This is a provocative idea, isn't it, Sevag? Perhaps the fact that
the capital city of Lebanon has been a commercial station, interested
in trade with the West, living off the subordination of the country
to Europe, and accustomed to think according to the last "Western"
fad, has something to do with your blaming the Lebanese workers or
peasants with "ignorance"?  And perhaps all this has something to do
with these workers disgust with such a Left?

>  The left is not in a very good status in Lebanon.
>  Someday it will?

Maybe we should put things differently: for example, "what did the
Left do to be in such a status? What should we do in order to have it
changed?".  Carrol Cox, a member of the Marxism mailing list has put
this in wonderful words: "the word 'should' must be always preceded
by the word "we'".

>  That someday it will rise is not so clear. The instituions are based on
> secterianism, the society is a conservative and absolutely refusing
> any change. It will take a 100 years if not more, for things to
> change.The power of the religious figures is getting bigger and more
> legitimate, and the worker thinks that it is not right to claim for
> things which we as leftists consider his basic rights.

What do the workers think it is right to claim for, then? Listen to
them, and hear the people. There is only one thing for sure, that
behind those weird, "anti-leftist" claims, there lies an objective
material truth, and this is the truth that the Marxists must unearth,
and propel to a higher level.

It is only once Marxists discover that at last they are in possession
of this knowledge that they may step ahead of the pessimism that your
posting expresses ("100 years or so", etc). "Bread, Peace, and Land"
were hardly a Marxist Manifesto. But these three words concealed the
Russian Revolution. It was the great merit of Lenin to have
discovered this, to have been listening to the deep currents of the
Russian ocean in the midst of the howling of the surface waves.

Then, you go on with a very incissive notion, which shows that you
are trying to think exactly in the line I commented above:

>  Some ppl would say that a revolution is needed. Under such
>  circumstances a
> revolution will only lead to more chaos. the situation in Lebanon is
> getting worse, the solution is problem that the leftists are trying to
> figure out.
>  Not to forget that the regional condition does not permit a radical
> change. The Zionist, not the Jew, is the enemy. The Jews and the Arabs
> lived prosperously for so many years. Nobody is anti-sematic. But we
> are anti what is happening here, and we see in the heart of the
> problem Zionsim as the cause of this catastrophe. We are enemies of
> Zionism. I cannot explain more clearly. Nobody has anything against
> the Jews and today most of the ppl are calling for Israel and
> Palestine to coexist (well except some extreme fundemantlists). But,
> the problem is not the Arabs, the problem is the Zionist movement.

Though I would say that the only way to stave off Zionism in the
Middle East is a strong national Arab movement clearly defined
towards a socialist revolution, I understand that under the current
situation, the struggle against Zionism is the basic struggle in
Lebanon. What I am surprised at is that while you understand this you
do not clearly see all the consequences this fact brings about, the
"ignorance" and "conservatism" of the Lebanese masses included. I
feel it is quite reasonable, for anyone who knows to be in a decades
long intermittent (and not always intermittent) war, to be more or
less conservative. When you know your house may be bombed next day,
it is no little relief to believe that there is a Paradise where you
may end in the day after. The first thing I would attempt to do, as a
Marxist (but I am giving NO advice here, just posing an example)
would be to explain that the only way to end with these bombings
forever is not faith in God, but struggle for an Arab national
movement with a strong socialist definition.

Comradely,





Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx