Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
Introduction
Two different ideologies dominated the last two centuries – Nationalism and Socialism. The first was a reflection of the fact that an old world, based upon the persistence of feudal parochialism, and local economic relations, was being destroyed and giving way to the formation of capitalist nation states, as the natural political structure within which the economic relations of capitalism, based upon the requirement of single markets and economies of a minimum size, were organised. In Europe, and North and South America, capitalism had largely brought that about by the end of the 19th century, but, in other parts of the world, the persistence of colonialism, feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production, meant that it was still a live issue. In Russia, the question remained live, at the start of the twentieth century, because the Tsarist Empire contained, within its borders, hundreds of oppressed nations and nationalities. The second was a reflection of the fact that industrial capitalism, in becoming the dominant mode of production, had created a new revolutionary class – the proletariat – whose labour was immediately socialised, but which, also, by its own natural process of concentration and centralisation, had socialised not just the means of production, but capital itself. It had created all of the economic basis, the productive and social relations of Socialism, and now required only the legal and political superstructure to be brought into alignment with it.
In opposing national oppression, socialists have continued to emphasise the right of self-determination for oppressed peoples, even though the logic of development of capital and the productive forces leads in the opposite direction, to the association of nations into ever larger economic units. The demand for self-determination, in fact, becomes increasingly a reactionary demand, used as cover for a range of nationalistic agendas. It is used by the ruling class of developed nations as cover for “Defence of the Fatherland”, and by the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie in oppressed nations to distract the proletariat, whilst the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie in those countries stitch up deals with the ruling class of the oppressor nations. Lenin changed the demand from “the right to self-determination” to “the right of nations to secede” to overcome these limitations, and emphasise the need for voluntary association rather than separation.
Zionism uses the concept of self-determination, particularly for oppressed nations, and the idea that each nation has an unbridled entitlement to its own nation state, as the basis for promoting its own reactionary, nationalist ideology. It is to turn what was once, in a previous set of historical conditions, a revolutionary and progressive demand, into a reactionary and chauvinistic demand, in the changed conditions in which it was applied, and even more so the conditions of today. A Marxist, materialist analysis leads to the conclusion that the nation state is now a fetter on the development of the productive forces, and of capital. It is no longer the ideal form of state for capital, as it was in the 19th century, at the time when capitalism was creating such states, as it liberated itself from the shackles of feudalism. Defence of the nation state, and the associated demand for self-determination is now reactionary.
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