[Marxism] Zionism: A Marxist Understanding

["Carl Webb" <carlwebb@xxxxxxxxx>]

Zionism: A Marxist Understanding

Amid the Nazi genocidal rampages against European
Jewry, the young Trotskyist Abram Leon, who died in
Auschwitz in 1944, warned against Zionism as a
solution to the oppression of the Jewish people.
Indeed, the Israeli capitalist state, founded in 1948
and today possessing nuclear arms, is premised on the
expulsion and brutal oppression of the Palestinian
people and is also a death trap for the
Hebrew-speaking people themselves. There can and will
be no just resolution to the conflicting national
rights of the Palestinian and Hebrew-speaking peoples
short of the establishment of a socialist federation
of the Near East, requiring the overthrow of all the
bourgeois regimes of the region through proletarian
revolution.

Zionist theoreticians like to compare Zionism with all
other national movements. But in reality, the
foundations of the national movements and that of
Zionism are altogether different. The national
movement of the European bourgeoisie is the
consequence of capitalist development; it reflects the
will of the bourgeoisie to create the national bases
for production, to abolish feudal remnants. The
national movement of the European bourgeoisie is
closely linked with the ascending phase of capitalism.
But in the Nineteenth Century, in the period of the
flowering of nationalisms, far from being "Zionist,"
the Jewish bourgeoisie was profoundly assimilationist.
The economic process from which the modern nations
issued laid the foundations for integration of the
Jewish bourgeoisie into the bourgeois nation.

It is only when the process of the formation of
nations approaches its end, when the productive forces
have for a long time found themselves constricted
within national boundaries, that the process of
expulsion of Jews from capitalist society begins to
manifest itself, that modern anti-Semitism begins to
develop. The elimination of Judaism accompanies the
decline of capitalism. Far from being a product of the
development of the productive forces, Zionism is
precisely the consequence of the complete halt of this
development, the result of the petrifaction of
capitalism. Whereas the national movement is the
product of the ascending period of capitalism, Zionism
is the product of the imperialist era. The Jewish
tragedy of the Twentieth Century is a direct
consequence of the decline of capitalism....

It was capitalism, by virtue of the fact that it
provided an economic basis for the national problem,
which also created insoluble national contradictions….
With the disappearance of capitalism, the national
problem will lose all its acuteness. If it is
premature to speak of a worldwide assimilation of
peoples, it is nonetheless clear that a planned
economy on a global scale will bring all the peoples
of the world much closer to each other.

—Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist
Interpretation (published posthumously in 1946)

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