Two articles from Latin America: GENOCIDE IN GAZA and DE LA NAKBA

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Undermining revolutionary internationalism and the struggle against imperialist capitalism, in war and peace

“We will destroy the old world by force!” (1932)

Spanish

Some tendencies question capitalism, and they are explained in different ways, tending to embrace discourses that mix communizing ideology, fragments of workerism and autonomism, anarchism and anarcho-communism, and other petty-bourgeois ideologies such as Wertkritik and similar. Some add twists of approaches and positions of the communist lefts (mainly Italian and German-Dutch). In abstracto, they question nationalism and war. But in practice or concrete real-world cases, they dedicate themselves to leaving the door open to the opposite: to activities they affirm as possible or as hypothetical that contradict part of what they declare in the abstract. All this is served in a ritual and doctrinaire manner, with inflamed and maximalist prose on what they wish to obtain. Frequently, the tinge of communizing ideology makes them emphasize the “programmatic” revolutionaries and the communist lefts are outdated, dedicated to continually repeating old, outmoded refrains, denying the necessary great negation that the proletariat has to carry out.

An idealized denial of a proletariat, meaning no less idealized a process that cannot be carried out, of immediate installation of communist measures that deny the working condition and the necessity of its affirmation, measures that would lead immediately to a human community without classes, and all without a transition period of revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, thus denying work and value. We see an idealistic denial of the need to control and instrumentalize the working time by the workers.

In the same way, when thousands of bourgeois leftists defend one side in inter-imperialist wars following the ideological trail of Leninist and Bolshevik analyses on the “national self-determination of the oppressed peoples” and the “necessary and pertinent” defense of the attacked and invaded party, they dedicate themselves to affirm that revolutionary defeatism must be of a ‘new type.’ Or even revolutionary defeatism is not necessary because there would be no inter-imperialist dynamics, but only the “centrality of the proletarian-capital conflict and its formalizations following the restructuring of the cycle of valorization and division of labor” before the evident “ruin of capital and the secular crisis of valorization” and all those kinds of logorrhea.

In this way, they can aspire to occupy a space in the extreme left of petty-bourgeois movements in various parts of the planet. Particularly in Latin America, we focus on two publications:

In both, there are a series of common elements that we will highlight, elements that intertwine in a type of “proletarian” and “internationalist” positions on possible causes and movements that, in fact, show open opposition to the proletariat and internationalism.

1) Some bases of strategies of followerism with respect to movements that support an imperialist bourgeois side

La Oveja Negra places the beginning of the conflict in the way that the Palestinian nationalist forces do: biased and unilateral. They say that the Palestinians were expelled by the Jews, period. Suppose we try to know the intricate history in that region of the world. In that case, we see that there were more than this and complex links to the capitalist-imperialist redistribution of spheres of influence at certain times and places in the twentieth century. [1]

Vamos hacia la vida starts from the premise of a conflict over the Israeli colonization of Palestine:

“The slaughter is in continuity with its decades-long genocidal policy against the Palestinian population. So far, several thousand people have been killed during the bombardments launched since October 7. More than a third of this figure is made up of children, to which must be added the thousands of wounded and more than a thousand children still missing under the rubble left by the Israeli bombs. A holocaust unleashed in the name of civilization and democracy.”

Not a single mention of the attack carried out by Hamas, seconded by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on October 7, practicing nationalist terrorism against the Israeli and foreign proletariat, against as many civilians as possible. Vamos hacia la vida, as well as La Oveja Negra and several tendencies of the left and extreme left of capital that align themselves with Palestinian nationalism, ignore this aspect, as they do in similar cases throughout history. The bourgeois side that supports the Palestinian nationalist movement is safeguarded, and this by an approach that views itself as critical, radical, and revolutionary, when what it does is simply a biased story full of alibis that finally confirms its followers to support these pro-Palestinian nationalist movements.

La Oveja Negra says that the Gaza Strip “became increasingly a giant prison of surplus population for Capital. The ethnic cleansing historically carried out by the State of Israel is aberrant. Regarding class contradiction, it means a slaughter of surplus and oppositional labor force, with an unbreakable tradition of struggle”. This is repeated in communist, anarcho-communist, and maximalist sources in the wake of the now-defunct GCI. Currently, a text elaborated by Emilio Minassian is reproduced and praised in these media.[2]

If the assertions by Minassian were true, capitalist exploitation is exercised only by the State of Israel. The Palestinian and Arab bourgeoisie is thus taken out of the scene, made unaccountable, its exploitation of the Palestinian proletariat erased. And “the unbreakable tradition of struggle” of these masses of unemployed “surplus” is artificially and opportunistically framed to a Palestinian nationalist movement. The complexity of class struggles that they affirm in their narratives remains limited to the workers’ actions following the political and military factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement. The struggles and protests against the shortages, the abuses of the Palestinian political-military leaderships, the delays in the payment of civil servants of the Palestinian government of Hamas in Gaza, the lack of resources, and the authoritarianism of these Palestinian capitalist factions all disappear as no interesting to these tendencies when in other occasions they exalt them and name them as an example. Something is quite strange here; there is a “cat in the bag.” Palestinian proletarians exploited and oppressed by the Palestinian bourgeoisie, by Palestinian capital, have disappeared in the narratives of La Oveja Negra, of Minassian, of Vamos hacia la vida. These magicians also abstain from naming and denouncing how the Palestinian bourgeois factions use the Palestinian unemployed as a labor force in the creation of their infrastructures, their commercial networks, their armaments manufacturing workshops, their surveillance and transport networks, etc. Likewise, a part of the working class in Gaza works for the Hamas administration and its allies, as well as for the PNA of Fatah and PLO allies in the West Bank, who are supposed to act as “rent-seeking intermediaries” of many activities of and for the Israeli and Arab capital. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, the Palestinian capital, exploiting Palestinian proletarians, have mysteriously disappeared!

La Oveja Negra does not use this term to deal with some aspects of very inter-imperialist strife and friction. Vamos hacia la vida does it to a lesser extent. But that is not an obstacle for both to coincide in errors and drifts.

For La Oveja Negra, what is brewing is the world Nakba, the “global revolt” that they associate with a kind of communist social revolution by a radicalized working class. For Vamos hacia la vida: “In other words, what we ask ourselves is whether there is the possibility of the confluence of processes of liberation from colonialism with the production of communism, and of the role of proletarian activity in these processes.”

This ‘question,’ only rhetorical, is very ‘old.’ When Lenin formulated this position of wars of national liberation being favorable for proletarian revolution, it was ‘new’. ‘New’ as in contradiction with Marxism and notably with the proletarian internationalism of Luxemburg, Gorter, Pannekoek, and Bordiga in World War One. As a material base for his position, Lenin stated that a fundamental characteristic of imperialism was that of the “rentier state” or “usurer state” (….) The world has become divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states”. [3] Therefore, what nowadays is presented as a ‘renewal’ of revolutionary theory is, in fact, a return to ‘national liberation’ so dear to the Latin American petty bourgeoisie, from Peronism to Guevaraism, and from the PRI in Mexico to Allende in Chile. Its bourgeois left parts, naturally sympathize with tendencies of national liberation movements in the Middle East that claimed to be socialist and anti-imperialist, from the pan-Arabist nationalist socialisms of the Nasser type in Egypt, the Syrian regime of Assad father and son, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein to the PLO of Arafat with its leftist members of the  FPLP, FLP, FDPLP-General command.

La Oveja Negra affirms that the proletariat does not yet have any revolutionary capacity anywhere. Still, even so, it says: “We salute the fleeting and incipient ruptures of the workers who in various corners of the planet refuse to produce and distribute arms, as well as to extract the minerals necessary for the arms industry and the shipment of fuel for this massacre, of the students who strike in the West Bank, of the thousands and thousands of demonstrators who come out all over the world to make visible and protest against these massacres.”

Vamos hacia la vida and La Oveja Negra do not position themselves as staunch defenders of nations and nationalist movements. Still, they carry out a conveniently opportunistic following of pro-Palestinian movements. They do not say whether those few examples of boycotts by workers and trade unionists of the arms transport are only against the side of Israeli capital, as is mostly the case. They do not say that the striking students in the West Bank want a Palestinian state and greater harshness against Israel, nourishing in the polls the notorious rise in the acceptance of Hamas and similar Axis of Resistance. They do not say that Hamas et al. are aligned with imperialist capitalist forces like Iran, Turkey, and Qatar and with their respective regional bourgeois mentors (Qatar-Muslim Brothers) and international imperialist block (Iran, China-Russia). They do not say that in these protests against the war in Gaza predominate the support to Palestinian nationalism, and in many cases to Hamas and its various allies, in addition to pacifism, which is a virus contrary to the international proletarian struggle against capital and all its states.

Vamos hacia la vida performs logorrheic pirouettes, leaving open the possibility of radicalization of proletarian masses still framed in bourgeois nationalist causes. A radicalization that would imply nothing less than a struggle toward communism. In between, they “rethink internationalism,” saying, “We cannot subsume all the activity of this ‘population in transition’ (or of late proletarianization) to the activity represented by the political apparatuses operating in the region, and despite being ideologically permeated by all that talk of national liberation, their destiny is not inscribed in stones” (Vamos hacia la vida)

Now that we noted what is in these affirmations and these silences, it must also be said that there is no proof that the history of the movement of class struggles in the world has ever confirmed their claims. On the contrary, this discourse reactivates the previous slogan of the “Arab working and popular masses and the oppressed peoples of the world for national liberation and socialism,” the alibis and banners of the bourgeois forces in the competitive imperialist struggle against others, from “nationalized” Algeria to “free” Cuba, from Angola to Nicaragua, from Maoist China that defeated Japanese imperialism to Vietnam that made the US army retreat, only to arrive at the present situation, where capitalism reigns everywhere, where those national liberation movements engendered bourgeois governments and states, exploiting and dominating the proletariat. Castro’s Cuba killed people in Angola when Russian imperialism wanted to remain in the background, “socialist” Vietnam invaded Cambodia and now works extensively for US capital and EU allies trying to avoid being dominated by the capitalist imperialism of China. The extensive list would take a long time to recount in detail what characterizes these movements. It cannot be otherwise except for those considering them revolutionary and potentially subversive to world capitalism. For those who deceive themselves and those who deceive others, for those who remain stuck to the threads of the spider’s web of mystification.

In another phase of the social movements, such as the Arab Spring and the like, they will support interclassism as probable germs of proletarian emancipation, when interclassist and national-democratizing movements have never been, nor can be proletarian.

The facts are there. They repeat themselves, as stubborn facts do. But these tendencies have to either accept them or openly ignore them. With a cascade of rhetoric, they come to give hope that they are what they cannot be, that, yes, transmuted into something “proletarianized” by the art of opportunist wishful thinking and its fabrications of abstractions and alibis. These discourses are well seen and not simply rejected by activist sectors that are unclear or aligned with Palestinian nationalism (as in other cases with Kurdish nationalism in Rojava or elsewhere before similar interclassist movements). At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we had to endure their illusions about workers’ resistance at the tail of bourgeois forces. In Iran they followed the women-life-freedom movement that framed petty bourgeois pretensions and illusions.

With an immediatist and activist emphasis on a possible transmutation of this “cycle of struggles,” they thus leave the door open for their followers to be the extreme left of these movements. In this way, they cut off and annul the necessary clarification and internationalist communist organizational activity. For this, they denigrate those of us who continue defending the traditional slogans and orientations based on the radical and implacable criticism of nationalism, interclassism, and national populism, against the militarism that spreads imperialist capitalism and for the internationalist revolutionary defeatism in the face of wars, everywhere and clearly affirmed whether in Ukraine, in Gaza, West Bank or Israel, in Sudan and South Sudan, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, Turkey, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, Burkina Faso, etc.

In these speeches, as they pretend to go deeper into the critique of the existing order, they divert us from the necessary and pertinent critique. The more they pretend to base their reflections and orientations, the more they move away from the existing truth in the material movement of society and capitalism.

Some praise Minassian’s text, spread it, and avoid revolutionary defeatism. Others try to make it converge with a defense of it, praising its approach and “perspectives.” But it is neither possible nor even concrete as something truthful in the existing reality: thus, in Gaza, 70% of the housing and infrastructure is destroyed by the Tsahal-IDF-Israel and not of the human beings that Minnassian presented as surplus population and as an objective to eliminate and neutralize: the Israeli imperialist action is turning more Gazan and West Bank population, especially youth, in favor of Hamas. And Hamas, the Iranian ayatollahs and generals, and all the court of allies are never tired of repeating that the idea that Hamas represents cannot be defeated by Israel. The population eliminated in Gaza right now is in the order of 1%. So, something doesn’t fit with Minassian’s supposedly accurate and enlightened analyses, but they don’t care.

It is about encouraging each other like good doctrinaire sects, installed in the comfort zone delimited by what they report and gather from the world in their own elective, unilateral, and biased way. That most of the demonstrations protesting the war in Gaza and the massacres in the West Bank do not show proletarian anti-capitalist expressions is a matter of no interest to them. We criticize the radical tone of these tendencies to hide the misery of its contents, the logorrhea to hide their analytical deficiencies. We denounce the defense of the lumpenproletariat, the indignant student group, and everything that carries a Molotov cocktail, although its objectives are bourgeois.

This fascination is transmuted into a broad and significant silence before Hamas and co., which only in the abstract they consider as what it is, a bourgeois force, in affirmations such as that of Minassian that in Gaza we are not witnessing an inter-imperialist war but a capital conflict (Israeli) against Palestinian surplus proletarians, in the workerist and autonomist tradition that gave so much support to petty-bourgeois causes and movements.

2) Recalling again the factual experience of the class struggles and the ABC of the positions of the internationalist communist left

Let’s see what they say. Vamos hacia la vida:

“On the other hand, not only the call of small groups to revolutionary defeatism that will not find greater resonance than within a limited spectrum of comrades, but the hope in a unity of the working class under traditional conceptions of the workers’ movement and its organizations, even those that in some periods radically broke with reformism and social democracy, whether in the form of workers councils or unitary organizations [the German ‘Arbeiter-Unionen,’ close to the KAPD] are in the present context unrealizable, and are not even something desirable” (emphasis added).

Here, they say that the communist left and communism based on the revolutionary workers’ councils are NOT DESIRABLE. And that all this must be replaced by anarcho-communist, communization, and GCI-type ideologies and practices. These hyper-ideologized sectarian tendencies do not tire of repeating Marx’s quotes on the re-emergence of the past and of dead ideologies, but – as we have seen with Lenin’s idea of national liberation- they precisely re-actualize some of the past, such as the Marxian ones on the Russian Mir,[4] or the workers ideas of an ‘anti-work’ proletarian pole against the ‘old proletariat,’ barely hiding the alibi to promote the lumpen desire to live without working and the indignant protest of the petty bourgeoisie socially degraded by the capitalist development.

Vamos hacia la vida continues:

“The resistance of the Palestinian people is frustrated if it is guided by bourgeois gangs that obey the geopolitical interests of the regional capitalist powers and their reactionary ideologies …”

Contrary to their claim that the resistance of the ‘Palestinian people’ is frustrated by nationalism, it is precisely this nationalism that pretends to protect and offer an alternative to the ‘Palestinian people’: being all interclassist citizens led by the Palestinian bourgeoisie.

Vamos hacia la vida continues with the illusion that it is possible to move from a national struggle to classless communism:

“… these struggles also generate a communitarian dynamic that can be autonomized from the militarist logics of the reactionary gangs and the inheritors of Stalinism, which is what has in fact been expressed in the revolts against Hamas and, more strongly, against Fatah in various cities of the West Bank in recent years.”

And after having denied the existence of a Palestinian bourgeoisie exploiting and repressing ‘its’ proletariat – as we have seen above -, it is only logical that Vamos hacia la vida denies the inter-imperialist character of the war in Gaza, on the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria, in the Red Sea. And with it, revolutionary defeatism magically disappears and is replaced by a national struggle that our wizards declare a potential source of … revolt:

“Revolutionary defeatism as a principle will always be the only coherent policy for those of us who recognize ourselves as proletarians, but we consider that this principle obeys a dynamic of inter-bourgeois warfare, which is not exactly what we are observing in Gaza. While there are capitalist interests in dispute, the historical occupation of Israel shapes a specific form of warfare that does not respond to a war as we know it, but rather to the acceleration of the process of militarization of the region, probably as the only way to sustain the interests of the West in the Middle East enclave, and also to contain the potential for revolt that we have seen since the Arab Spring.”

And not only is revolutionary defeatism declared obsolete, ‘internationalism’ in the sense of the classical left bourgeois ‘internationalism’ of support to this or that national liberation movement is revamped:

“We must rethink internationalism and its field of action. Internationalism must leave behind its position of only support or solidarity with some oppressed people and must understand that it is a question of global survival, from a perspective that takes into consideration the counterinsurgent drift and global militarization at the state and parastatal level. Internationalism plays a crucial role especially in the face of the crisis of capital and the resurgence of ethnic struggles and world conflicts, as the only perspective in the face of catastrophe, but it is necessary to debate and apply it with the complexity that the real struggles express. It is not the internationalism of the old workers’ movement, even if it preserves its principles, but one that is capable of projecting the communist content that can be gestated in the battles for the survival of a proletarianized humanity that finds itself in a new critical stage of the development of capital” (Vamos hacia la vida).

The bourgeois leftism of the past and the present made internationalism concrete as inter-NATIONALISM, from Stalin to Mao, from Fidel Castro to the ETA and the IRA, from the Vietcong to the FLN, from the Sandinista front to the MPLA, etc. All the rhetoric was based on this alibi that these people try to update, doing it in conditions that present evident differences and also with the passing of decades and decades that serve to liquidate illusions about Leninism, anarcho-populism, and the national liberation movements that so much attracted the indignant leftist petty bourgeoisie.

We have to state clearly: from the nationalist resistances and petty bourgeois and interclassist movements, no communist dynamics can emerge. The proletarian struggle either manifests itself as a class struggle, or it is a force at the service of bourgeois causes. Either it is internationalist, or it cannot be communist and revolutionary. There is no proletarian national liberation or anything similar; there are bourgeois nationalist movements that necessarily develop within the framework of inter-imperialist disputes. These tendencies want to attract petty-bourgeois leftism, which demonstrates for “Palestine,” in favor of the Palestinian nationalist movement. That is why, among other things, they “forget” that the “Arab and Palestinian” cause from the beginning is not that of the simplistic story of one people colonized by another, but of a dispute between bourgeois contenders, where one imposes itself on the others and massively displaces populations to implant its new Zionist state structure, and all in a context of inter-imperialist redistributions of power. The Arab states also repressed and exploited Jewish and other proletarians and expelled thousands of members of Jewish populations, launched wars (a good % of them lost over many years) against the State of Israel after 1948, massacred and caged Palestinian proletarians and populations (Egypt in Gaza, Lebanese State, State of Jordan.). This approach is silenced by leftism and this tendency to “go with the flow” with its corresponding communizing and anarcho-communist stench in the tradition of the GCI.

Aníbal, Fredo  Corvo, 3-01-2024

Notes

[1] Wikipedia: 1948 Arab–Israeli War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War. For more articles, see the end of this document.

[2] See the critique of this text: Aníbal, ‘Proletarios revolucionarios’ on war and class struggle in Gaza – West Bank – Israel, Aníbal, Desbarres, ambigüedades, doctrinarismo.  Crítica  de  un texto de   Internationalist Perspective   muy fundamentado en otro  de  Emilio Minassian

[3] See FC, The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine – From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter and Lenin to “Council-Communism”, L’Ouvrier Communiste, “Imperialism and the National Question” (1929), ‘Internationalisme’ (GCF), On the National and Colonial Question (1945/1946)

[4] Mir, a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands. To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the mir assumed communal control of the community’s arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes. (Britanica)

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 Category: Communization, English, German-Dutch Communist Left, Historic materialism, Imperialist war, terror, terrorism, Israël, Italian Communist Left    

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