In a recent post, Israel Another War Setback, the US Third Campist, Barry Finger, gave a classic example of the way the petty-bourgeois moralists and romanticists argue, not on the basis of materialism – let alone Marxism – but, on the basis of subjectivism and idealism. They argue not from the perspective of a materialist analysis of how the world actually is, and must be, given any set of material conditions, and balance of class forces, but from the perspective of how the world might be, in the best of all possible worlds, if only the real human beings inhabiting it, conformed to the set of moral imperatives the moralists have decided are rational.
So, Finger says, of conditions in Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians,
"Any sensible Israeli government could have extinguished the flame by simply buying the land, converting it to state property, while reassuring Arab tenants that past arrangements would be honored. That is, any Israeli government that sought reconciliation with its Arab citizens and residents and sought to parlay such acts as olive-branches to the surrounding Arab world; any government, that is, that sought to defang Jewish rabble rousing and embrace Arab rights; any Israeli government that sought to promote a multinational Israeli democracy; any Israeli government that sought to redeem and rebuild its international standing.
But a non-chauvinist government is a government Israel is sadly lacking. What it has is a Netanyahu leadership and bankrupt political elites that feed on chauvinism, winks at supremacy and thrives on national division.”
Anyone who has been reading my series of posts on Lenin On Economic Romanticism, will recognise this approach as coming directly from that same idealistic and subjectivist school of Moral Socialism as that of the Narodniks, against whom Lenin was polemicising. Like Finger, they could only look on aghast at the actions of the Russian state, in the closing decades of the 19th century, and bemoan the fact that it seemed to not be acting sensibly, as it promoted the development of capitalism in Russia, a development the Narodniks could only see as being wholly irrational and self-defeating, as against their desire that Russia should chart a different path for itself, based upon a continuation and development of the Russian Mir, and the small scale, independent production that went with it.
The Narodniks, basing their view on what they saw as being “progressive”, on the basis of preserving and promoting a way of life which they considered promoted happiness for the “the people”, sought to construct a schema of development based upon that view. As Lenin describes, it was a view itself which stemmed from the petty-bourgeois nature of the Narodniks, and their glorification of the small producer. Whether such a development would have been desirable or not – and as Lenin demonstrates it would not – the reality was that it was an impossible Utopia, and for that reason, also reactionary. The material reality, in Russia, was that capitalism had already been established, and was developing at a pace.
The “people's production” that the Narodniks saw as the model of a separate mode of production, in Russia, was a fantasy, because that production was itself already ensnared in the grip of capitalism, as the small producers themselves were forced, by material conditions, to become commodity producers, engaged in production for the market, and in competition with each other, that led inexorably to them becoming differentiated into a bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Russian intelligentsia and the Russian state, who the Narodniks saw as acting irrationally, in promoting capitalist development, were, of course, acting completely rationally, or “sensibly”, in Finger's words, because, they recognised that Russia was already capitalist, that its future depended upon the most rapid capitalist development, and indeed, as Lenin describes, that intelligentsia was now drawn from and inextricably tied to the bourgeoisie, as was the state itself.
Similarly, from his petty-bourgeois, moralist standpoint, Finger cannot possibly explain the irrational behaviour of the Zionist state, cannot help but see it as not being sensible, as it fails to comply with his categorical moral imperative. It does not seem to have occurred to him to question why it is that the Zionist state acts in this way. For Finger, as with the Narodniks, these irrational ideas have no basis in the real world, are not the reflections of any set of material conditions and material interests of classes or social groups, but simply pop into the head of Netanyahu and his supporters willy-nilly, presumably to be explained, subjectively, on the basis of them being themselves irrational, immoral, or some other bad actor.
It is the same subjectivist sociological method of Proudhon. In The Poverty of Philosophy, much quoted by Lenin in his critique of the Narodniks, on this same basis, Marx notes,
“When, consequently, in order to save principles as much as to save history, we ask ourselves why a particular principle was manifested in the 11th century or in the 18th century rather than in any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw materials of their production – in short, what were the relations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to the bottom of all these questions – what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive – by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset.”
And, similarly, a materialist, let alone a Marxist, in analysing the actions of the Zionist state, and of Netanyahu's government is led not to consider it from the perspective of some abstract principle of rationality, but from the perspective of whose interests such actions do represent a rational response. Otherwise, there can be no scientific basis for explaining any political actions, and they all become pure flukes and randomness. It becomes an explanation based upon whether the actors are “good” or “evil”. And Finger's approach is the same as that of Proudhon in other ways. Proudhon's method, his version of dialectics, on this same basis becomes one in which any phenomenon is considered to have a “good” and a “bad” side, and his method, therefore resolves into dispensing with the “bad” side whilst retaining the “good” side. This is entirely Finger's method when it comes to his view of, and his proposals for the Zionist state. As Marx puts it in relation to Proudhon,
“What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”
And this is precisely Finger's method when it comes to discussing Zionism, and the oppression and discrimination faced by Palestinians. I have left out of account the fact that Finger turns the recent events in Israel and Palestine into one about Hamas aggression against Israel, rather than the reality that what started things off was proposed evictions of Palestinians from their homes by the state, followed by attacks by that state on Palestinian men, women and children in their mosque, using stun grenades etc. Yet, the reality of that condition of the Palestinians, whether they live in Israel itself or in the occupied territories, is one of the inescapable material conditions which has to be considered, when viewing all of the claims of equal citizenship that Finger wants to have us believe are possessed by Palestinians.
He sets out a series of rights of Arabs living in Israel – but fails to deal with the fact that the majority of Palestinians actually live in the occupied territories, even denied these rights – but then admits they are heavily constrained in their practice. He does not question why it is that these rights are heavily constrained in practice, it being presumably just another unfathomable example of the Zionist state not acting “sensibly”. The only task, therefore, for Finger is to follow the method of Proudhon, and retain the “good” side of those rights, whilst discarding the “bad” side as represented by the constraints upon them.
“That is, it is possible to conceive of an Israel—largely within the existing legal framework—that accords comprehensive equal individual rights to Israeli Arabs, of translating paper equality into active equality. This does not prevail today, but neither is it precluded in advance from coming into existence through existing channels of legal reform.”
Is it? If we use the same Utopian and moralistic method of Proudhon, then, yes, indeed, we can “conceive” of all kinds of future scenarios of nirvana. All that is required is to separate off the need to connect such conceptions from the real world. Indeed, its on a similar basis that liberals have promoted for decades the Utopian conception of a Two State Solution that has no grounding whatsoever in reality, and current material conditions, the proof of which is that we are, today, much further away from any such possibility than was the case half a century ago! “It is possible to conceive” of a bourgeois society in which all privileges for the ruling class no longer exist either de jure or de facto, and in which the working-class is able to march forward to bring about a peaceful transition to Socialism. Possible if you suspend disbelief, and all experience of what we know about the real world.
Is it possible for workers to make the transition to Socialism? Yes, of course it is, provided that the material conditions in society, the development of the productive forces, exists to support it, and provided the working-class itself, in its vast majority, has become a class for itself, able to mobilise and to face down any opposition from the ruling class. Is it possible that Jews and Arabs could live in a society in which, both in practice and not just in theory, they have equal rights? Yes, it is, but only on the basis of a joint class struggle by both Jewish and Arab workers in Israel, and across the occupied territories. In practice, no such state is going to arise without a political revolution in Israel that overthrows the existing Zionist state.
On paper, Finger, himself argues for such a course. He writes, calling forward the shade of Hal Draper,
“When Hal Draper posed the problem of “How to Defend Israel?” in 1948, he meant defending Israel with socialist, not Zionist, arguments and means. He meant class-struggle politics that unified Jews and Arabs against their common oppressors.”
In practice, he immediately shies away from it. When I put forward such a proposal to him, in a previous thread, he responded,
“As for your suggestion that a more realistic approach to collective equality might be addressed through joint Arab-Jewish parties operating across Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, I’ll leave that to the reader. If you believe that a Jewish-Arab movement can even exist in the West Bank, not to say, Gaza…well more power to you. What you are actually proposing, if you were entirely honest, is not a mass party of Jews and Arabs, but an underground party in the occupied territories with a legal center, perhaps, in Israel.
There is a way to implement your proposal and bypass the knotty problem of the underground, conspiratorial apparatus implied by your proposal. It actually has a following in Israel—among the right wing. The out-going President of Israel, Reuvin Rivlin, is even a proponent of it. They call for the annexation of the West Bank with full citizenship rights for Palestinian Arabs. You can also check out the writings and youtube postings for Rudy Rochman. Many, like Rivlin and Rochman, may even be sincere.
I’m not convinced that this has any purchase among Palestinians or Jewish Israelis. But I’ll defer to a master materialist such as you. Have at it.”
In practice, therefore, Finger has no belief in the Jewish and Arab working classes, or the potential of them uniting in class action from below, thereby making his use of the quote from Draper merely an exercise in fig leaf wearing, the usual approach of such petty-bourgeois elements of bringing out the Sunday best socialist verbiage, only to discard it once the parade has ended. Like all such moralists and Utopians, he is left merely with complaining about the state of the world, and the senseless policies that governments pursue, for no apparent reason, and yet, to place his faith on some future government coming along that might instead act rationally, and see that the moral imperative he has set out is really for their own good, if only they would think about it!
The reality is that Finger is a part of that Third Camp trend that demonstrated its lack of faith in the working-class also back in the 1940's, when they decided that the working class could not act to provide Jews with the protection they required against anti-Semitism, and so collapsed into the reactionary nationalist and colonialist ideology of Zionism that argued the need to establish a confessional Jewish state in Palestine, a state that could only be erected itself over the bones of the millions of Palestinians already living there. He cannot admit that that decision was wrong, and so is led into all sorts of contortions, today, to act as apologist for that state, and its systemic racism towards Palestinians. If he were to start from that premise, he would find no problem understanding why the Zionist state acts in the way it does towards Palestinians, and why, its actions, and those of successive Zionist governments have continued to operate in that way.
To say that is not to agree with the other Third Campists, such as the SWP, who apply a similar method, when it comes to dealing with the problem of the Palestinians, and who, thereby, demand the destruction of the state of Israel, as the basis for the creation of a secular state of Palestine. That would involve a war with millions of deaths, and would itself be entirely reactionary. But, the argument that Israel has a right of self-defence, is itself a bourgeois chauvinistic argument. It is the argument that the chauvinists used in WWI, as the basis for supporting their own bourgeoisie, and lining up to kill millions of their fellow workers standing in the opposing trenches. Its why Lenin scrapped the slogan of “The Right To Self-Determination”, and put in its place the slogan of “The Right To Secede”, for oppressed nations. (See: (Lenin – The Revision of Our Programme) We are not bourgeois defencists.
Our immediate aim must be the unity of the Jewish and Arab workers. We can continue to argue the right of Arabs to secede from Israel, which, in practice, means the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and Jewish workers in Israel should certainly emphasise that right, in the same way that Lenin argued the Russian workers had to do, in their appeals for unity to the non-Russian nationalities in the Tsarist Empire. But, the reality is that no such separate Palestinian state is likely, and if it were to occur, it would be entirely a vassal state dependent on much larger powers for its survival. But, more importantly, the Palestinians have been fobbed off with such promises of a separate state for decades, whilst their own position has become progressively worse, both inside Israel and within the occupied territories.
A starting point, therefore, of Jewish socialists in Israel, has to be, as Lenin proposed in the Tsarist Empire, a struggle to demand full democratic and political rights for Palestinians and other Arabs, whether they live inside Israel or in the occupied territories, including the right for all to stand candidates in elections for the Knesset, and so on. Instead of simply issuing pleas for the paper rights of Arabs to be respected, in the best of all possible worlds, as Finger does, it is necessary to organise a struggle for it. Such a struggle will inevitably be a class struggle that brings together the Jewish and Arab workers for those rights.
But, it is necessary to understand what that means. The Third Campists defend the notion of a “Jewish state”, i.e. of a confessional state. That is different to the notion of the nation state in any other context, in which we conceive of it as being a secular state. A confessional state, by definition, is a state that is systemically racist/sectarian, having in built privileges and superiority for one national or religious group as against all others. Whether you call such a state an “apartheid state” or not is irrelevant, and, in practice, all such racist states will be different to one degree or another, just as fascist Italy was not identical to Nazi Germany. A fundamental element of any struggle by Jewish and Arab workers would have to be the ending of the notion of Israel as a confessional state, as a Jewish state, because it is impossible for non-Jewish workers to truly have equal democratic, civil and political rights without it. A joint class struggle by Jewish and Arab workers, would of necessity have to be a struggle for a secular state, much as workers in other bourgeois states, such as Britain had to undertake.
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