The same is true in relation to apartheid in South Africa, to Orangeism in Northern Ireland, and Zionism in Israel. These states have to develop on the basis of capitalism, which requires an expansion of the working-class, and, ultimately, the privileged community cannot provide the numbers for that expansion. In South Africa that was quite apparent from the start, as it depended on native black workers, and it was the growing power of those workers organised in COSATU that broke apartheid.
In what Marx described as the classic settler colonies such as the Americas, and Australia, the native population is too small and dispersed, and the working-class is only increased by large-scale immigration of Europeans. As I write this, (in December 2023), already, after just a month, Israel's economy is being hit, as a result not just of Palestinian workers being sent back, but also as a result of Jewish workers being tied up in military service to sustain the rule and oppression of the Zionist state. It had a 16% shortage of labour, at that time.
In August 2024, Israel had a 90,000 shortfall of building workers, despite turning to India for additional workers. Its GDP declined by 20.7% in the final quarter of 2023, driven by a 27% drop in consumption. It has driven out 160,000 Palestinian workers, affecting all sectors of its economy. Costs of its genocidal war are estimated by the Bank of Israel to be $55.6 billion, for 2023-2025, and that will drive a huge hole in its budget. Of course, although Biden/Harris in the US, and Starmer/Reeves in Britain can find no money for pensioners, the poor and to maintain services in the US and UK, they can be counted on to find money to finance arms for the Zionist regime, as well as for the corrupt regime of Zelensky, which performs a similar function for it. Each year, the US provides $3 billion in aid to the Zionist state act to buy its services in the region, and this year has provided another $14.5 billion. The UK, who Reeves has gleefully told us "has to make difficult decisions" due to the dire state of its finances, was already providing £3 billion in military aid to the Zionist regime this, year, and Starmer/Reeves have added a further £600 million to that.
A large part of the undermining of both the Protestant Ascendancy in Northern Ireland, and of Catholic clericalism in the Republic, was the need for capital accumulation, which increasingly came from multinational companies from the US and EU, which required homogeneous labour, and had no historic ties to those old sectarian privilege systems, and, indeed, which represented a racist/sectarian impediment to its free movement. The same kinds of bigotry that were behind Brexit, also stand in the way of capital accumulation in Britain, already manifest in its own labour shortages, which again have illustrated the inevitable contradictions, as despite the promises of the Brexiters, net migration has hit record high levels.
In the age of imperialism, states are forced to develop on the basis of a development of either bourgeois or proletarian property relations. What is more, in the age of imperialism, when capital has grown to immense size, and requires correspondingly immense single markets, the state itself must assume the form of a multinational state. The nation state has become a fetter on the development of capital, and so has become absolutely reactionary. The natural form of the state, in the age of imperialism is the multinational state. Even with the United States, it is really, a multinational state, expressed in its federalism, and it too has been led to join with Mexico and Canada in NAFTA. California alone is the size of the fifth largest national economy. The same applies to China, and, obviously, the EU is the clear manifestation of this inevitable drive towards, ever larger, multinational states, as the rational form of capital, as is the development of regional economic blocs on every continent.
The demand for national self-determination, in the age of imperialism is utopian, and, consequently, reactionary. Marx and Engels noted the existence of “non-historic peoples” that had not risen to the level of being able to create their own nation states. Lenin noted that the small states were similarly reactionary, as they tried to cling to those outmoded concepts of national sovereignty, whilst, in practice, aligning themselves with larger states, acting as their vassals and agents. The Palestinians face this problem – indeed so does Israel, which is why it exists as a vassal state of US imperialism – which can only be overcome within the context of the formation of a multinational state, much as European states were led to do. As Trotsky put it in relation to the Balkan Wars,
“The peoples of the Near East must organise a democratic federation on their territory, on principles of independence from both Russia and Austria-Hungary.”
More than 30 years ago, I argued that rather than the demands for a single secular state of Palestine, or a Two State Solution, we should similarly argue for a federal democratic state of Israel and Palestine, as part of a wider Middle-Eastern federation. Such a solution depends not upon it being foisted upon the region by imperialism, or negotiated above the heads of the people by the existing states, but upon a combined struggle by the workers and poor peasants, both Jew and Arab, from below, and whose first steps comprise a struggle for equal political rights, conducted on the basis of proletarian methods.
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