Some words on the Gaza/Israel Conflict, 2023

 

In recent history a two state ‘solution’ has often been put forward for the Palestine/Israel problem.

The most salient problem it seems to me is that in 1948 a number of people declared Israel a state (in the special circumstances of post WWII), a state effectively within a land that was not clearly defined as distinct from Palestine, so that Palestinian people became at this point automatically dispossessed from any possible statehood, and this dispossession process has continued to this day as actual dispossession, the expropriation of land and so wealth, or capital.

But a two state solution in Palestine/Israel cannot work. Why? Because these two states cannot rule the same geographically contested region, and it is all contested. That it might possibly be able to is an idea which fundamentally misunderstands and overestimates the real power of a state apparatus and the source of that power, which chiefly does not exist in human will, democracy and elections but in economics, and the class struggle.

This mistaken idea of the state and its power often leads to incredulous frustration at the ineffectiveness of the state, or indeed any state, or the supra state institutions, to solve these problems, no matter how urgent they are and in spite of the fact that we think of the democratic state as a personification of the peoples’ will and presume that this should prevail, with all its good intentions.

Two states can only have a small hope of being successful, in this case, by dividing up the contested region geographically into separate contiguous areas that are governed by the different states, so essentially two distinct nations are formed side by side.

This is of course very simple, easy to imagine, but it has no current chance of happening at all.

In the current Palestine/Israel theatre the long term problem is, as stated, precisely the contested land, and that two distinct geographical areas do not exist. And they are in any case resisted by the dominant economic power in the region, Israel. Does a dominant capitalist power ever voluntarily give up its profitable gains, if it can help it?

A lot is often said about the 1967 borders, as if those would magically solve things, but they are already inadequate for Palestine, dividing it up into separate components with borders governed by Israel, which de facto have already formed the basis for the occupation and are useless for independent trade, imports or exports.

The Israeli state is based on its economic forces, as is the Palestinian, both are capitalist. Israel’s strong economy is however backed chiefly by the might of the US capitalist economy. Palestine has some rich Arab nations as apparent friends and ethnic partners, but many feel unstable as ruling classes and themselves rely on the US for much of their protection from their own working classes.

For the US and the west, Israel is a western entity within a region strategically important to it, mainly because of the fossil fuel resources and their effect on the global market.

States arise upon an economic base, the strongest economic forces create their state in a territory, based in the need and desire for the dominant class to maintain their rule, in the end by force. If two distinct ethnic ruling class powers within a single land are unequal in these terms, then the poorer economic force will not be able to sustain a state, for it will automatically be subsumed by the stronger state and its class struggle, because the stronger state derives from the stronger economic base.

As implied already, the only way a single land could be shared by two states, is if the two sides were relatively equal as economic powers. But even if this became possible, it would likely still fall into conflict, because any state, as a capitalist force, understands these resources are finite and to be fought for, if they are not owned universally.

To get to a stage where there is a respect for sharing such resources is obviously pie in the sky, an ideal, but such a single state also cannot happen here because of the deep religious differences.

It is clear that a single state that is secular and modern that could embrace both Israel and Palestine in religious terms in the same region must be preferable to what exists, but many various imperialist actors involved, on both sides of the conflict, do not want this because it would need a certain amount of socialism and class struggle that is unacceptable to their strategic economic interests.

In general, the western world is experiencing a slow but exponentially rising political tide of Nazification that we can see particularly well at the moment arising in this conflict.

The term Nazification was used by Putin, but it is not wrong because of that. The too enthusiastic western support for Ukraine Nazi battalions, the tacit support for Israel’s series of war crimes against a caged and occupied civilian people in the Gaza Strip, the gross hypocrisy of challenging one occupation as a war crime (Russia) but supporting another (Israel), the prevention of a ceasefire and the continuation of bombing trapped civilians, including a high proportion of children, US President Biden calling the deaths of over 400 people in the Gaza hospital blast the work of the “other team” - is this not an entirely inappropriate and belittling phrase for such a terrible event, and strangely disconnected from reality?

This all normalises things that hitherto would have been, at least in this open way, unthinkable. Certainly Russia and Israel are not equivalent, but both ethnic groups lost very many people during WWII against the German Nazis, and so multiple questions cascade as to why we must think of one occupation so differently to the other. Is it that a democracy may commit war crimes but others not? Partly I fear it has something to do with how the dominant news media can continue to report on both conflicts (the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and the ‘expanded ground operation’ in Gaza) with any credibility, moral or rational.

Look at the language: Israel has the right to defend itself, this is of course correct, but does this not also mean the Palestinian people have this right to defend themselves? Over the recent years their situation as an oppressed and occupied people has simply been ignored by the media. Let us be clear, this occupation is not benign, it represents continuing decades long violence at a low simmering level by the Israeli state.

If Hamas, representatives of Gaza, (a part of the Palestinian ruling class) currently have chosen an extreme way to express the defence of blockaded Gaza, one that includes killing civilians, the war crime of hostage taking, and the use of human shields, this is a war crime, yes, but we must recognise this is happening within an existing war crime against Palestinians. This is not to be used as an excuse, but it is not as simple, as Biden suggested in his recent speech to the US nation, that it is mere ‘neighbour on neighbour’ violence and antisemitism by Hamas, because the Gaza Palestinians could be regarded also as hostages, so hostages who have taken hostages. The violence of the Hamas attack is a violent extreme event in a long line of extreme violence in this conflict, which has a history.

But the media begins where it wishes to so as to frame the events for the ruling classes and to more easily and readily describe who is the evil to the masses: the Gaza population as such becomes the universal perpetrators of evil, even being associated with the Nazis of WWII.

But let us carry this logic onward: If the Palestinians are entirely responsible for Hamas, and evil because they elected them, then logic would dictate that the German people would also have been responsible for the Holocaust, and are therefore also evil, forever, for such evil derives from mystical essences that do not live or die in flesh and blood like us, they are timeless.

This is of course not taken as being the case for Germany in current accepted political discourse, reflecting how usually we do not consider democracy to function so perfectly that it really represents people or their interests very well, if at all (which is especially true in an occupied territory you would think), yet the far right Israeli leaders justify their bombing of Gaza by this exact claim: the Gazan people elected terrorists. Actually, it was surprisingly quickly that the west was able to forget the gross war crimes and crimes against humanity of the German Nazis and carry on with business as usual.

Anyway, this twisted logic is a tactic that is beginning to expect, and prepare for, the genocide of Palestinians, who represent, among other things to the current Israeli leaders, a thorn in the flesh of their capital expansion. - That capital seeks to expand in such a region in such a way is not surprising also I think due to some unique and broader factors operating today that you can notice.

A major one is the backlash in bourgeois ideology and aesthetics to the two recent global economic crises, plus the global pandemic which necessitated certain socialist style measures for the protection of people. This ‘rebound’ is happening in tandem with the rise of the new crisis of capital. I suggest it is this effect that has helped push the Nazification process to this extreme, in other words it is a kind of inflation of the powers of the superstructure and state and its enforcement to a crazed degree, perhaps even more so because it always feels its own lack of power over civil society and that it must compensate for this lack by going to ever greater lengths (re: the two standing ovations given by the Canadian parliament to a Nazi recently, this is a sign of this tendency).

In an article in The Guardian by Jonothan Freedland “Warning: Benjamin Netanyahu is walking right into Hamas’s trap” (21/10/23), it notes Netanyahu’s personal role contributing to generating this conflict, and how the poorly condition of the Israeli state and its current political culture has led to Israelis seeing him as culpable for the conflagration, due partly to his past hands-off policy towards Hamas. What it also points to, but which is not openly mentioned, is how the interplay between the two ruling class factions of Hamas and Likud engenders a kind of hellish mutually assured need to stay in power, as institutions, by always ramping up the stakes and the violence. This is not a sign of evil essences at work, but of class struggle and institutional strategic opportunism and profit seeking, and this is tacitly understood by the ruling class participants in this mundane struggle.

Obviously, Israeli citizens understand this situation much better than most foreign politicians (surveys point to this), who seem blind to it and line up to show visible support for Netanyahu, helping cement his position. But because his power seems likely to end after the conflict ends and he faces the music, his interest is of course to prolong the conflict indefinitely or to take it to such an extreme level that there is a chaos in which everything becomes blurred and upended.

This therefore reveals what the big capitalist world powers must want, not any real resolution of the problem in any real ‘two state solution’, but a continual diminishing of any prospect of progressive class struggle in the region: a stasis, forever. No better example perhaps than the peculiar timing of the Hamas attack on Israel which comes when Israeli social protests have been strong against the far right ruling factions. This is a sign that Israel society is becoming mature and more normalised in terms of its internal class system and struggle; this is also under attack. But this in its turn tells us that it is this class struggle that offers some hope even in the midst of this terrible nightmare.

Notes on Stalinist Humanism, Italian politics and the 'Grillini'

I realized recently that it was hard to accurately name a certain type of 'communist' (an unusual situation in itself) that I regarded as having a retrograde effect in today's political arena, specifically in Europe. But now I think I've nailed it: Stalinist-humanists. These communists (or 'communists', it depends) come from the history of the notion of 'actually existing communism' and its post war social imperialist past, particularly the Soviet Union.

The idea that 'communism existed' was an error or at least a deviation from Leninist theory, given that what actually existed was socialism and continued class struggle (excepting with the previous main class relations inverted). - Post WWII Stalinism tended to assert that the class struggle was concluded for it. This state position was combined with the cult of personality and a socialist-but-imperialist foreign policy. - Both of these positions also deviated from Leninism. It is possible to trace the roots of this deviation but I shall not here, suffice to say WWII had a big effect (which is of course an understatement).

There are certain parties in Europe that owe their existence to a past allegiance to the Soviet Union, as is natural, and these often had or have a peculiarly fusty, conservative flavor which seems, today, extremely anti-radical, promoting a sort of humanist gradualism and compromise with, even fondness for, almost any fixed authority, even while being able to propagate classic Marxist critical analysis. One traditional reaction to this co-option with the state is to counteract this, 'within the fold' so to speak, through Trotskyist anarchism directed from outside the traditional corridors of bourgeois power, i.e. with an extreme 'militancy'.

The current European 'communist' movement is split by this division between Stalinism and Trotskyism, as played out in the political arena. It is, I suggest, a false dialectic that actually represents a threat to Marxist theory and practice in the day-to-day struggles we currently see in the severe global capitalist crisis. It is fairly apparent the bourgeois media enjoys this agonistic situation. 

- Not that I wish to create some kind of 'grand unity' here, and I recognize that often the arguments between factions are productive, and this isn't ever a pure thing, but what I suggest this represents, basically, is the repression of the Bolshevik position within current revolutionary communist politics and the splitting of an old Menshevik type position into two essentially humanist tendencies: Stalinist humanism and Trotskyist humanism.

Bolshevik versus Menshevik was an old struggle in revolutionary Russia that most comrades will know about. I am unable here to go into the details of the historical differences between them, but the Menshevik position tended to represent bourgeois reformist 'Marxism' in a more social democratic flavor, seeking to stick with the then existing bourgeois state structures. The Bolshevik position was that of the early revolutionary Soviet Union, one of its famous slogans was "All Power to the Soviets" (worker councils). 

In the S.U. the New Economic Policy and the war tended to reduce the impact of Bolshevism, even though Lenin was a revered Bolshevik figure. The embalming of Lenin's body after he died represents, I think, a stage in the eventual victory of this humanism, and reveals a resort to political social democracy within (a denegated) socialism in the Soviet Union's state apparatus - to cut a long story short of course.

We all recognize, even when we are sympathetic to the Soviet war-time experience, that the Soviet Union began at some stage in its later social evolution to resemble the more rightist type of authoritarian state, particularly in its superstructure and culture. It is a matter of irony that this statism derives from the return of humanism and social democracy, exactly what the external bourgeoisie decried as missing in such an 'authoritarian' or 'totalitarian country', but this is, I submit, the case. What else could it be? After all the normal bourgeois answer boils down to the idea that there is something innately wrong with all socialists.

Stalinist humanism is a bourgeois ideological variant of Marxism. As such it is a reversion to the Menshevik position, which is as I have described dualistic. It does not just contain Stalinism: the dualism derives from the way the Menshevik humanist position acts on the current political stage. Its gradualism and Statist reformism corresponds to the fondness for stability and authority that we see today among the 'communist' parties that cooperate within the European bourgeois parliamentary systems, while the sometimes sudden and forced realization that this is obviously not producing the desired social results ('actually existing communism') leads to, as it were, an extreme reaction that goes the opposite way: to a rejection of all gradualism, reform, and authority, even in socialism.

We should be quite familiar with humanist dualism as a bourgeois philosophy, it is a source of a lot of cultural angst, anguish and stress, the constant swinging from love and peace to extreme violence and hatred, because of its belief in and sometimes abandonment of (in disgust) the 'human spirit' and God; it goes back to Descartes at least and is tied into religion. Indeed it is to a large extent a religious attitude and aesthetic more than a strict ideological system and corresponds to the feelings of alienation that are not eliminated by the socialist state merely asserting that those problems have evaporated.

The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser addressed in his work the subject of Marxist humanism and critiqued the phenomenon of cult of personality and Stalinism, but not from the standard rightist position, in fact he demonstrated that the rightist critique was actually the same position (theoretically) as Stalinism. It is also possible, though, as I think the above shows, to extend this critique into the modern political arena, for example the career of Giorgio Napolitano the Italian politician who has been the 11th President of the Italian Republic since 2006 and who has just been re-elected (April 2013) due to a political deadlock. He was a long-time member of the Italian Communist Party but later the Democrats of the Left, and served as President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994 and as Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998. The current radical intervention into parliamentary politics of Beppe Grillo's party has upset the old established left and right political cartel and false dialectic, but it has also discredited, thankfully, much of the Stalinist humanist conservative communists. At least at the moment M5S is more communist than the communists.