As Owen Jones and others have extensively shown, western media, let alone the totalitarian, Zionist media inside Israel itself, has systematically covered up the atrocities committed by Zionist settlers, and by the IDF, day after day, both before and after October 7th, the most obvious atrocity that began the process being that of the violent creation of the Zionist state, itself, in 1948, which led to more than 700,000 Palestinians being forced from their land and homes, many of whom were driven to become refugees in Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan, and who are refused the right to return. As Marxists, we do not act as moralists seeking to right historical wrongs such as that, but seek to act in such a way as to best further the interests of the working-class in the conditions of today, and, invariably that means seeking to build the greatest possible unity of workers across national borders. Indeed, those national borders, in the age of imperialism, are an anachronism, a fetter on the rational development of capital itself, let alone the goal of creating international socialism.
As Lenin had put it,
“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
Consequently, although Marxists could never have justified the creation of the Zionist state in 1948, we deal with the reality of its existence. To seek the destruction of that state by the same kinds of violence that saw its creation, would be as reactionary as that act of creation itself, simply winding the film of history in reverse. The question, for Marxists is always focused on the agent of change, and the only progressive agent of change is the working-class, a class which itself has no nationality, because it is a global class, fighting a global capitalist/imperialist ruling class. We seek the destruction of the Zionist state, only in the same way that we seek the destruction of all other capitalist/imperialist states, not at the hands of some other class state, or exploiting class, but at the hands of the revolutionary proletariat.
The project of Zionism, as a reactionary, racist and colonialist ideology could never be supported by Marxists, precisely because it places race and nationality above class, and focuses on the former rather than the latter as the basis upon which the fundamental divisions of society are based, and which must form the axis around which history is driven forward. So long as that is the case, then all such struggles will lead to class being subordinated to race and national identity, and consequently, the objective reality of the unity of the working-class as a global class, and of the actual fundamental antagonism – the contradiction between capital and labour – will become secondary. It means that the working-class will be repeatedly divided on the basis of race and national identity. The struggle for its own interests will repeatedly be postponed until some future date, after it has already weakened itself via a popular front with its real enemy, the bourgeois ruling-class.
As again, Lenin put it,
“That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.”
No comments:
Post a Comment