[Marxism] Palestine and revolution

[Jscotlive@xxxxxxx]

Sobuad still doesn't get it. It is clear to me that his interpretation of  
Marxism has resulted in him erecting an ideological war  around himself, 
designed to keep out any and all forces that he considers may  threaten his 
Marxist 
purity. In my experience such people are insecure about  their politics, scared 
to deviate from a syllable of Marxist text for fear of  losing an identity 
constructed not from the living material of struggle and  contradiction which 
exists, but from the struggles of the past.
 
It is a grievous mistake for any Marxist to attempt to transmute Marx's  
conclusions onto to the current situation in any given period. On the  contrary 
we 
use Marx's method - dialectical thinking - to arrive at our own  analysis 
based on prevailing material conditions.
 
In his latest attempt to counterpose one section of Palestinian opposition  
to Israeli ethnic cleansing to another, Sobaud writes: 
 
'You will not get everyone to line up and anoint Hamas,and its Islamacist  
program, as the only authentic expression of Palestinian nationalism.'
 
So there we have it. For Sobaud and his co-thinkers the essential struggle  
AT THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT, with Israeli tanks poised to roll over Gaza,  is not 
one between Palestinian resistance, currently led by an organisation  called 
Hamas, with an arsenal of homemade rockets, rudimentary assault  weapons, 
stones, and slingshots at its disposal, and a state with the fourth  largest 
military in the world that is committed to the destruction of the  Palestinian 
people,culture, and national identity. No, for Sobaud and his  co-thinkers the 
essential struggle is between the Palestinians themselves,  between the secular 
forces and those he denounces as Islamo-fascists.
 
Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Bernard-Henri Levy, this is the eminent  
company of leftists who would have no problem whatsoever with the latest 
musings 
 from Sobaud.
 
As Trotsky wrote:
 
'Moral evaluations, together with political ones, flow from the inner needs  
of struggle.'
 
The fatal flaw which runs through and informs Sobaud's entire analysis is  
that he is focused on the wrong struggle entirely. For him the intrinsic  
struggle in the Middle East, and the world I presume, is one between  
secularism and 
religious fundamentalism. For me it is between the interests of  the 
international working class and global imperialism, with religious  
fundamentalism 
merely a symptom of that struggle. Lenin understood this. It  is why he amended 
Marx's 'workers of the world unite' to 'workers and oppressed  peoples of the 
world unite', doing so in order to bring the colonial peoples  into the orbit 
of struggle, into one united and international resistance against  capitalism.
 
As Marxists engaged in struggle we do not have friends. We do, however,  have 
common interests, which must needs take us into alliances in order to  
further those interests at any given time. We understand that the rise of  
religious 
fundamentalism in the Middle East as an expression of resistance to  the 
West, to imperialism, is a relatively recent phenomenon, in the wake of the  
destruction and defeat of the forces of secular resistance which formerly  
obtained 
under a unified and coherent leadership. We understand that  this turn 
towards anti-modernity reflects this defeat of secular forces,  ideology and 
politics in the region, in line with the distorting impact of  Western 
imperialism, 
which retards the natural development of the peoples  it enslaves. 
 
The issue therefore at a time when the world is confronted with the  beast of 
neoliberalism in its most extreme stage, is not the content of the  
resistance but resistance itself. James Connolly understood this when he  
brought his 
volunteers into alliance with Irish Nationalists, Catholic  fundamentalists to 
the core, in his struggle against British imperialism in  1916. His oft 
repeated quote about his men holding onto their weapons should  they succeed 
for 
they would then have a new enemy to fight is germaine to the  current conflict 
in 
Palestine, and Iraq, and for that matter Afghanistan. But  crucially Connolly 
understood that the time for that particular struggle  was in the future, 
that the fundamental role of Marxists and revolutionarieslay  in fighting the 
correct struggle as demanded by the law of historical  development.
 
So today as I march in Edinburgh against Israel's assault on the  
Palestinians of Gaza, I intend leaving my checklist of approval with regard to  
the 
Palestinian people and their resistance at home. I suggest that Sobaud  and 
others 
do likewise. This would not only be in service to the Palestinian  people, it 
would also and perhaps more importantly be in service to Marxism as a  living 
science.
 
John Wight 
Edinburgh,
Scotland
 
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