In an article in the Weekly Worker, Moshe Machover, displays what is wrong with the petty-bourgeois, moralist position of much of the “Left” over the last century, and particularly since WWII. Moshe seeks to not only oppose the genocide being inflicted on the Palestinian people, by the Zionist state, but also to present a case for critically defending the actions of Hamas, whilst opposing its politics. The former is wholly correct, but the latter is not, and does not at all follow from the former. It is simply an application of moralism, not Marxism, of the politics of “lesser-evilism”, and “My enemy's enemy is my friend”, no different, but in reverse, to the position of petty-bourgeois moralists like the AWL that leads them into pro-imperialism, and defence of Zionism. The Marxist position starts and ends with the interests, for today and tomorrow, of the working-class, and that interest demands a militant advocacy of “a plague on both your houses”, towards Hamas and Zionism.
Moshe says that the response from Hamas, was not only predictable, but predicted, by him, and others. Quite right, and the basis of that is the continued oppression of Palestinians, in Gaza, and in the occupied West Bank, by the Zionist state. Indeed, not just continued, but intensified oppression, as Netanyahu's fascist government has sought increased support from the rabid, Zionist settlers they have encouraged to come to Israel, in larger numbers, to accelerate the theft of Palestinian lands and property, and to violently establish illegal settlements, with the full backing of the Zionist state, and its military. Al Jazeera had an insightful documentary on such settlers, moving from the US and elsewhere to Palestine, for that purpose as disciples of Rabbi Kahane, who openly proclaimed their intention to kill Palestinians in order to take their land from them.
But, the fact that such a response is predictable does not mean that it is, then, one that Marxists should support or defend, even critically or conditionally, as against understanding and explaining. When workers, in the late 18th, and early 19th centuries, responded to the introduction of machines by breaking them, as the Luddites and saboteurs did, that was also predictable, but not a course of action, or a solution that Marxists supported. As Marx put it, in The Communist Manifesto,
“They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.”
We can understand why the workers response took this form. At first, the workers bear all the characteristics of their former existence as independent peasants, and handicraft producers. They respond in an individualistic manner, in just the same way that peasant revolts occurred in the past, in acts of burning down the houses of the local landlords, and so on. The same thing can be seen in the forms of protest of petty-bourgeois students. If you have no relation to the means of production, as the industrial worker does, you are limited in being able to respond via collective action, such as a strike, the occupation of the workplace and so on.
A cessation of production by a peasant, or by a petty commodity producer, only inflicts economic pain on themselves; a strike by students simply means they lose out the education their parents have bought for them. So, these petty-bourgeois elements, inevitably respond in individualistic, destructive ways that ultimately are a dead-end and reactionary. Destroying property, as against placing it under workers control, mostly affects workers, and the deprived. That is why, in their most revolutionary actions, workers, via workers control, even during a General Strike, ensure that production and distribution continues, so as to meet the needs of other workers, the elderly and so on.
The Luddites action was understandable, in the sense we can understand, given an analysis of conditions, why it happened, but that does not make it an action that Marxists defend, support and certainly not advocate. It was reactionary, for the reasons Marx sets out. The development of machinery, by capitalism, was part of the progressive role of capitalism, in developing the forces of production, required for Socialism, but, more than that. The actions of the Luddites sought to resolve their problems, in the same manner as proposed by Sismondi, and other petty-bourgeois socialists and economic romantics, like William Morris, by slowing down or even reversing the development of capitalist production, and returning to some mythical previous golden age. The Narodniks in Russia, followed a similar course, attacked by Lenin. But, to do so, was reactionary. As Marx put it,
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”
The agenda of petty-bourgeois Socialism, of Sismondism, is simply a codification of that initial, reactionary, outburst against the injustices and iniquities of capitalist development. As Marx points out, it carried out a useful and detailed critique of those injustices and iniquities, at a time when the bourgeois ideologists like Ricardo could only see the progressive aspects of that development. But, as Marx says, in The Poverty of Philosophy, in respect of Proudhon, they could only see in poverty poverty, and not the revolutionary potential that arose from the causes of that poverty. As Marx put it in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9,
“Sismondi is only right as against the economists who conceal or deny this contradiction.) Apart from the barrenness of such edifying reflections, they reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
This is Marx's scientific approach to the evolution of social organisms, on the basis of their superiority, driven forward by The Law of Value, that requires ever greater levels of social productivity.
So, although, a Marxist, materialist analysis can quite easily explain why the crushing oppression of the Palestinians, by Zionism, the fact that they lack the kind of large-scale industrial development of an advanced capitalist economy, and so the petty-bourgeoisie represents a large social force proportionately, leads to the pre-eminence of reactionary petty-bourgeois, nationalist movements like Hamas, and why given all the other cross-cutting cleavages in such societies, this also takes the form of a prominent role for religious ideology, that is no reason why a Marxist should provide any kind of defence for such a response, rather than explaining why such a response is reactionary, and against the interests of workers, and, in the first instance, Palestinian workers themselves.
It amounts to Palestinian workers fighting not their enemies – the Palestinian bourgeoisie, whose interests Hamas represent, much as the Kuomintang was the party of the Chinese bourgeoisie – but the enemies of their enemy, i.e. the Zionist state. It is just another manifestation of social-patriotism, no different to the demands of the social-patriots for workers to line up behind their own ruling class in WWI and II, and, today, in Ukraine and Russia.
And, who is it that pays for this reactionary agenda of Hamas? It is the Palestinian workers. Set aside the current genocidal attacks on Gaza, even in more “normal” times, the reactionary, fascistic regime of Hamas, oppresses Palestinian workers and socialists. Just as with the Nazis, or Mussolini's fascists, it cannot tolerate, independent workers' organisations. Its clerical-fascist, medievalist ideology oppresses women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. It is anathema to everything that Marxists support. The idea that we have to just suck that up, and wait our turn for revolution, after these forces have carried through a national revolution, is not Marxism, but Menshevism and Stalinism, simply the application of the stages theory. Better to have no “revolution” than a revolution that puts workers in a worse place than they were in before!
But, again, just as it could be predicted that the Zionist oppression of Palestinians would produce such a response, so too the response could be predicted, in turn, to produce the response from the Zionist state of its onslaught on Gaza, and almost inevitable expansion of the conflict to neighbouring countries. Who suffers from the inevitable response to Hamas' attacks? The Palestinian workers, not to mention the damage done to workers unity as a whole, and on their consciousness. The argument of Hamas that “Zionists made me do it”, is lame, and unsupportable, when it comes to brutal attacks on Jewish civilians, just as the Zionist argument, now, that “Hamas made me do it”, is even more lame and inexcusable. More so, because the response of Hamas is driven not just by what it is, ideologically, but by what it is physically, and what the Palestinians, as a whole are, physically, i.e. a weak and oppressed population. The Zionist state is not a weak and oppressed state, but a powerful and oppressing state, backed by the might of US imperialism, and EU imperialism.
Hamas is forced, in any military strategy, to utilise asymmetric warfare, whereas the huge Zionist state, could, if it chose, use its huge power and technology to surgically strike at Hamas. It chooses not to do so, but, instead to carry out a genocide against the Palestinian people as a whole, as it has done on every previous occasion, going back to 1948, which is conditioned, not by its physical constraints, but by its racist, colonialist ideology that seeks to ethnically cleanse non-Jews from the area, and to establish a racist, confessional state, on the borders of the mythical Greater Israel. But, the idea that “anti-imperialism” is synonymous with such military struggles, i.e. essentially guerrilla warfare, is something that has only developed on the basis of Stalinism, and its variants of Maoism and Guevarism, mostly since WWII.
Trotsky criticised it in relation to the strategy adopted by the Stalinists in China, following the defeat of 1927, when the Popular Front of Stalin with the KMT, led to Chinag Kai Shek's coup, and slaughter of thousands of Chinese worker communists. As the workers abandoned the Communist Party, it was left with the peasants, and, subsequently, based its strategy on those peasants, turning itself into a version of the Left KMT. In every subsequent, “anti-imperialist” struggle, this Stalinist, Popular Frontist strategy, of subordinating the workers to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists has been adopted, and the strategy, of such forces, necessarily becomes one, not of proletarian struggle, and revolution, as described by Permanent Revolution, but one of peasant/petty-bourgeois guerrilla warfare.
The methods of Marxism, of proletarian revolution, as Trotsky describes in relation to the Chinese Revolution, start with the role of the industrial workers in the main industrial centres, and that is true whether we are talking about a proletarian revolution in a developed capitalist economy or one in a newly industrialising economy, also engaging in a national-bourgeois revolution.
Indeed, although we support, in the abstract, the right to national self-determination, and consequently the bourgeois-national revolution, we do so, as Permanent Revolution, and the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions set out, only on the grounds that they, now, form an integral aspect of the proletarian revolution, and are subsumed within it. But, that is only the case, in so far as a truly revolutionary movement exists that is capable of winning the leadership of such a struggle, and carrying it forward to the proletarian revolution.
What is more, it is only such a truly revolutionary movement, i.e. a movement of the revolutionary proletariat, that we as communists, internationally, give our support to. It is only such a force that we seek to arm and finance for that task, as against the petty-bourgeois nationalist, Menshevik and Stalinist position of supporting the bourgeois nationalists within the country, and subordinating the revolutionary workers to it, via the Popular Front.
That Zionist oppression of Palestinians led to a violent outburst was, indeed, predictable, and what is more, given the material conditions, any such analysis explains why Palestinians have thrown up organisations such as Hamas, i.e. the generally petty-bourgeois nature of Palestinian society, the role of religion, as a cross-cutting cleavage. The lack of development of large-scale capitalism, and consequently of class struggle, of a large and developed, industrial working-class, and more importantly, the lack of any global revolutionary labour movement, to provide leadership, enhance the weight of petty-bourgeois nationalist movements. As Trotsky pointed out, in the 1930's, even where large industrial working classes, and labour movements do exist, the path of class consciousness is not linear, or homogeneous, especially where lack of leadership or mis-leadership leads to increasing despair.
“Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice of a part of the proletariat as well. Despair, as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy, and the Comintern was the prerequisite for the successes of fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism.”
If that was true of a working-class such as in Germany, how much more is it true of one like that in Palestine? But, Trotsky did not simply acquiesce in that reality. He fought against it, arguing the need not to just understand why such reactionary sentiments and trends emerge, but to oppose them, and argue the need to provide revolutionary leadership, to undermine them. That was the point of establishing the Fourth International.
Understanding why the Palestinians threw up Hamas, as an expression of the resistance to Zionism, in Gaza, and, Zionism's actions, and failure of Fatah leadership in the West Bank, now, looks like driving even more of them into the arms of Hamas, does not, in any way, mean that we have to simply acquiesce in it, and throw our hands up saying it was all predictable, all inevitable! It was only inevitable, after the event, only on condition that no alternative, revolutionary leadership provided a different pole of attraction, around which to organise the working-class - Palestinian and Jewish.
Moshe says,
“How should we relate politically to this war? You will hear a lot of people saying that Hamas is a reactionary force - look at the way they slaughter civilians. I think we should look at it in the way that history looks at such arguments: those who fight in anti-colonial resistance movements do not behave like ethical, gentle people.”
But, this is precisely the ground of the moralist, not the Marxist. The methods of Hamas, of murdering civilians, raping and so on, are indeed, barbaric, but not the point, as far as a Marxist is concerned, when it comes to determining whether a particular social force is progressive or reactionary. The imperialists and social-imperialists, after all, were not too concerned when a captured Gaddafi was publicly butt-fucked with an iron bar on the back of a jihadists' truck, in 2011. Torture, rape and other atrocities are the stock in trade of war, and pretending they all occur only on the side of reactionaries is the stuff of fairy tales. The Bolsheviks made no secret of the need to use Red Terror, to counter the White Terror, during the Civil War.
Its not the methods of Hamas, which only mirror those of US imperialism, and European colonialism, that makes it reactionary, but its class nature, as a petty-bourgeois nationalist party, based upon clerical-fascism. It is reactionary, because its programme does not start with the interests of the working-class, or even with the interests of large-scale socialised, industrial capital, and bourgeois-democracy, but from a desire to turn back the clock, so as to promote the interests of small-scale, national capital. It is a Palestinian equivalent of the BNP.
And, on that basis, the historical examples that Moshe gives, just as much as the examples that, on the other side, the social imperialists, of the AWL, give, or the social-pacifists like John McDonnell have given, in relation to Ukraine, are irrelevant, and simply wrong. John McDonnell, in arguing for support for Ukraine, gave the example of the Viet Cong, but, whilst there was every reason for Marxists to oppose the US war, in Vietnam, and to oppose the corrupt South Vietnamese government, there was no reason for them to support the viciously anti-working forces of the Viet Cong. Similarly, just as there was every reason for Marxists to oppose the French colonial rule in Algeria, and the French war against Algeria, that was no reason to support the viciously anti-working class forces of the FLN. Our goal is not bourgeois national revolutions, but proletarian revolution, and to that end, we only have a duty to support truly revolutionary proletarian forces.
Moshe continues, referring to the North American Indians,
“And they were certainly guilty of killing a large number of American settlers, yet whom do you now side with? The colonial settlers or native Americans? I think that is a question worth asking.”
Why does Moshe think it is necessary for a Marxist to choose between either of these sides? In fact, if a Marxist were to choose either side, which would have nothing to do with the question of which of them was more brutal, it would be with the European settlers, for the simple reason that they represented the force of historical progress, of the development of the productive forces in North America, which, without them, would possibly have continued for several more thousands of years of barbarism, and society stagnated at the level of primitive hunter-gatherers!
He continues,
“Let me also mention the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (better known as the Mau Mau), the resistance movement to British colonialism. It is estimated that they were responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. Whom do you side with? The British colonial regime, which, of course, was guilty of many more murders and various unspeakable atrocities? We do not side with them. We side with the KLFA. Similarly in Algeria the National Liberation Front was also responsible for thousands of civilian murders, so whom do you side with? the French colonial regime or the NLF?”
But, again, why does he think that Marxists have to choose either side? Its not the methods and atrocities committed by the Mau Mau that makes them reactionary, but the fact that they sought to turn the clock of social development back, to reverse the advances that British colonialism had brought to Kenya, and other parts of its Empire. How could any Marxist side with the Mau Mau, when its class objectives were wholly antagonistic to those of the working-class? But, not supporting the Mau Mau, does not at all, mean, instead supporting British colonialism, and its own vicious methods. And, as set out above that applies to Algeria, and the NLF too.
As Engels noted, in relation to Algeria,
“Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief [Abd-el-Kader] has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization. The piracies of the Barbaresque states, never interfered with by the English government as long as they did not disturb their ships, could not be put down but by the conquest of one of these states. And the conquest of Algeria has already forced the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli, and even the Emperor of Morocco, to enter upon the road of civilization. They were obliged to find other employment for their people than piracy, and other means of filling their exchequer than tributes paid to them by the smaller states of Europe. And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers, whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions either upon each other or upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud, noble, and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilized nations, are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means.”
(In Defence of Progressive Imperialism In Algeria, Northern Star, January 22, 1848)
For Engels, as for Marx, the issue is about what best carries forward the path of human social development, and, here, and now, that means what facilitates the growth of the working-class, and its class consciousness. As set out in The Communist Manifesto, opposition to capitalism/imperialism, is usually reactionary, and associated with those that wish to turn the clock back to some previous, less developed state of society. The revolutionary perspective is not “anti-imperialist”, or "anti-capitalist", but pro-Socialist, to take the developments produced by imperialism, as the foundation required upon which the international socialist society can be constructed.
“the modern bourgeois, with civilization, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”
(ibid)
And, the same applies to the Mau Mau, the North American Indian tribes and the like. Marxists cannot “side with” such primitivism, as against imperialism, but that does not require us to support, or “side with” imperialism either, today, in the era, in which, everywhere, an industrial working-class exists, in some form, and which, is the social force alone that we look to to “side with”, and to support as the progressive solution to humanity's problems.
Marxists, in recognising the truly revolutionary role that the bourgeoisie played, were not, thereby, required to support or defend the bourgeoisie, and its actions, other than in the negative sense of supporting it as against some more reactionary force, as with the tactical alliance of the industrial workers with the industrial bourgeoisie against the landed aristocracy, on the basis of permanent revolution.
In terms of imperialism, understood as meaning a global capitalist economy, based upon large-scale, socialised industrial capital, we do indeed, see that as progressive, and to be defended against the attempts of petty-bourgeois nationalists, such as the Brexiters, to undermine it, in favour of a utopian and reactionary defence of the nation state, just as we defend monopolies against attempts to break them up in favour of small scale, private capital. But, our goal is not imperialism, nor capitalist monopolies, and we are, in no sense, bound to support them, or defend the methods they use to sustain themselves, only to oppose those that seek to turn the clock backwards from them. Our goal is to go beyond them to Socialism.
As I have set out, elsewhere, the argument of the AWL, of why it supported the Algerian NLF, but not Hamas, is convoluted apologism. It does not explain why it supported the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, in 2011, for example, which is wholly comparable to Hamas, in the terms they describe. The fact is that Marxists should not have supported the NLF, nor the IFG, and nor should they support Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, or any other bourgeois nationalist movement. We should only support the truly revolutionary, proletarian forces, in any such struggles, and if those forces truly are revolutionary proletarian forces, they will see the national bourgeoisie as much their immediate enemy, as the imperialist bourgeoisie.
When Lenin and Trotsky talked about the revolutionary proletariat, in such conditions forming a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement they meant with those masses themselves, not the bourgeois nationalist parties, and certainly not bourgeois nationalist governments and regimes. As Trotsky put it,
“Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie.”
(Trotsky – Stalin and The Chinese Revolution)
Not supporting Hamas, does not require us to support the Zionist state, as the AWL does, and likewise, not supporting the Zionist state does not require us to support Hamas, as a large part of the “left” has done. Similarly, not supporting Putin's invasion of Ukraine dos not require us to support Zelensky's corrupt anti-working class regime, or the Ukrainian imperialist state backed by NATO, any more than opposing Zelensky and NATO requires us to support Putin! A plague on all their houses, support the revolutionary working-class, support the camp of international socialism.
And, indeed, after all of his confusion, Moshe does arrive at this conclusion. He says,
“But does Hamas have any real prospect of liberating the Palestinian people? Will it end up like the KLFA and the NLF? This can be ruled out. The balance of forces is massively weighted in favour of the Zionist colonial regime. As we in Matzpen have long argued, its overthrow would require the participation of the Israeli working class, and this in turn can only occur as part of a socialist transformation of the Arab east, leading to a regional socialist union or federation, including Israel. Hamas is leading away from this direction. Its present onslaught is an act of desperation.”
Which is precisely why it is reactionary, irrespective of any moralising over the methods it uses. It is clear that the Two State Solution, was never feasible, and was just a sop to western liberals, and means to bribe the Palestinian bourgeoisie with the jam tomorrow prospect of a capitalist state of their own. Neither the US nor the Zionists had any thought of actually bringing about such a solution, which would still have left the workers of the region divided on national lines, still subordinated to and oppressed by those bourgeois states. At least Trump-Netanyahu have cleared away that façade, and made clear that they have no intention of pursuing, it, and, at last, the penny seems to have dropped with the Palestinian masses that they have been duped, as Biden, as much as Trump, simply acts as Netanyahu's straight man.
The only solution resides in a secular state of Israel and Palestine, with universal and equal rights to Jews and non-Jews alike. But, such a state requires the smashing of the existing Zionist state, just as every other bourgeois state must be smashed, and in its place, a progressive solution, requires not some other bourgeois state, or separate Jewish and Palestinian bourgeois states, but a workers' state. Given the existing level of hostility, and given the fact that the Zionists have intensified their organised movement of extremist Jews into Israel, any such development is, indeed, only likely to occur as part of a wider socialist revolution across the Middle-East and North Africa, supported by revolutions across the EU.
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