We would like to thank the editors of the blog leftdis.wordpress.com for translating our article in english.
More than a week after the events of Oct. 7, which raised the unresolved and unbalanced Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the level of an asymmetrical war, with the real possibility of its regional extension, further and more specific reflections are called for regarding the “interpretations” of that conflict and this war given and are being given by most of the multiple souls of the so-called “class left” in our country.
Within hours of the attack by Hamas militias and other groupings – assimilated to it or otherwise directed by it – we witnessed several attempts to describe Hamas’ carefully planned operation for a spontaneous mass uprising. In May 2021, the eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by the Israeli army had provoked a wave of protests in the West Bank and even a solidarity strike by Arab-Israeli workers. These protests and that strike were soon hegemonized by the demonstrative military actions of Hamas in an attempt to gain further political ground in the West Bank to the detriment of the Palestinian National Authority. An erosion of PNA consensus that had already accelerated following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and which, by dividing and weakening its Palestinian counterpart, was undoubtedly welcomed – if not favored – by the Israeli bourgeoisie. In October 2023, the context is somewhat different. Despite the steady stream of violence and killings perpetrated by the IDF, and despite the growing untenability of living conditions in an increasingly isolated and economically constrained Gaza Strip, the Hamas attack was not an attempt to instrumentalize and hegemonize a movement of struggle by the people of Gaza or the West Bank but rather a sinister calculation aimed at capitalizing on the violence of the Israeli reaction to awaken in Middle Eastern and world public opinion a wave of protest that would condition, slow down or even prevent the ongoing appeasement process between the regional powers traditionally “friendly” to the Palestinian cause – particularly Saudi Arabia – and Israel. The desire of one of the fractions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie to accredit itself as the sole representative of the national cause, and thus as the sole beneficiary of political support and funding from regional powers, such as Iran, and from world powers whose interests conflict with those of Israel and its allies, appears increasingly clear. Less visible are the dynamics that drove Hamas to play it all out in an operation that could in fact lead the Israeli state – assuming that the images of its disproportionate reaction projected on world television do not convince its closest allies to suggest restraint to it – to eradicate by means of a new Nakba the territorial base of the consensus of the “Islamic Resistance Movement” in the Gaza Strip.
In the meantime, in our latitudes, we have had to witness the sad spectacle of the unrestrained and discomposed gloating of those who have raved in enthusiastic admiration for the unprecedented and effective warfare techniques of the commandos that departed from Gaza or those who have devoted themselves to the smug counting of the casualties that Hamas and associates have achieved by throwing “their hearts – and hang gliders – over the obstacle.” when, unfortunately, the target over the obstacle of the concentration wall erected around the Gaza Strip were essentially unarmed civilians. Men, women, children[1], the elderly, to be killed and seized as hostages, all lumped into the indistinct and bourgeois category of “national enemy.”
At a first glance, it is clear that to speak of a “military success” of Hamas militias is serious only insofar as one recognizes that they have undoubtedly circumvented the defensive capabilities of the Israeli army and fooled those of Tel Aviv’s intelligence, less serious is to assume that these formations have somehow prevailed in confrontation in arms against specifically military targets. There is no doubt that the image of the Israeli state and that of its armed forces received a slap in the face, but wars are not won by slaps in effigy, even less by the slaughter of civilians on a home-made scale. And of this, most likely, Hamas leaders are much more aware than the enthusiastic homegrown Palestinian flag-waving. The slap in the face – as was predictable and most likely foreseen and calculated – was followed by the fierce hammer blows of the Israeli bourgeoisie, which, by bombing Gaza on an industrial scale, can certainly win its war against Palestinian civilians, who are in fact all lumped into the indistinct and bourgeois category of “national enemy,” when not into the equally indistinct and dehumanizing category of “murderous beasts.” Eighty years ago, the Jews of the Rome ghetto were rounded up and categorized under the label: untermenschen. The Israeli bourgeoisie certainly does not ignore this, but when it comes to catalyzing mass hatred and justifying inhumane violence, all bourgeoisies look alike.
We cannot help but wonder whether, now that the “magnificent success” of Hamas’s “military strike” is counted in a number of Israeli deaths that has been rapidly surpassed by that of Palestinians – victims of “surgical” bombings, the Jewish state-operated disruption of water and electricity supplies to hospitals – whether, now that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian proletarians have lost what little they still possessed, a family, a home, a job (for those who had one), forced to flee and huddle in the southern end of a mousetrap, on the probable eve of a land attack by the Israeli army, will those gloating realize what consequences this “massive and spectacular” “uprising” will have for the immediate and future prospects of our class in the region, and whether, realizing this, they will feel any discomfort. The question is rhetorical because the answer has already been given dozens of times throughout the bloody history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: absolutely not. The action of Hamas, which becomes the “heart” of Palestinian resistance, is not subject to political evaluation by these “anti-capitalist revolutionaries,” it is right in itself, whatever the fallout may be.
To find such a way of reasoning again, on the part of those who claim to hark back to Marx, one has to go further back than a Kant and even a Machiavelli … one has to go back to theology. The next times – and there will be some, unfortunately – these “revolutionary politicians” will scream even louder, immersed in an eternal present in which at each turn of the merry-go-round… we start again; as if nothing had happened, without having learned anything and with the claim of teaching everything. Fighters and resisters “without ifs and buts” … with the skin of others, from their desks, from their tablets, or at most from some rowdy walk advertised shamelessly as an “internationalist event.”
But let us not forget the more nuanced positions, even worse in their sly ambiguity. A little more than a week later, one can already catch the first hints of distinction from the “no ifs and buts” political adherence to the October 7 operations and its perpetrators. Time to time and a good part of these “internationalists” who for a few days set up the Istituto Luce of Hamas attacks will rediscover themselves (in words of course) the rigorous interpreters (and sole, equally of course) of a class internationalism that never wavered…
When the human and political accounts of the Hamas move become self-evident, many of these gentlemen will rediscover themselves pure and untainted by any sympathy for the clerical-reactionary formations that have hijacked the Palestinian cause, and the most dishonest will refer to “escape clauses,” to tiny patches of support inserted precautiously and strategically in the margins of texts exalting the admirable “Cyclone al-Aqsa” offensive.
What then to say about those who, while flaunting an alleged lack of habit in using the term “peoples,” because – they teach us – everywhere in the world now conceals the opposition between classes, nevertheless believes that in Gaza the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are in the “same boat” as the common Israeli oppression, and that the struggle of the Palestinian proletariat against the Palestinian bourgeoisie which exploits it – and which is therefore exactly the other term of that “double oppression” of which so much is waffled on about without understanding its meaning – “objectively” passes in the background.
A “boat,” that of Israeli oppression, however, which possesses convenient lifeboats, at the disposal of the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its leading political and military representatives. Lifeboats that are always ready to set sail and whose course is set for the shores of Qatar or Iran, where hospitality is guaranteed and is accompanied by all kinds of comforts. More than two million proletarian Gazawis, however, are not allowed this escape route. At best they can reach the “beach” of the dilapidated Shati refugee camp,[2] immolate themselves for the “national cause” and settle for that “solidarity” of the Arab or Islamic states that so movingly has proven itself over the past 75 years.
A class struggle to such an extent in the “background” that in March 2019 one part of the Palestinian “people,” the part represented by Hamas, was forced to beat, arrest, lock up and torture hundreds of Palestinians belonging to the other part of the “people,” the part that is materially forced to struggle against the rising cost of living and the deterioration of their conditions of existence[3].
Of the same ambiguous tenor are the positions of those who deny the possibility of reading the Israeli-Palestinian one as a wound that imperialism has opened and that continues to fester, and that imperialism can only close again by opening new ones, a wound that only the destruction of imperialism will be able to heal for good. For them, Palestinians and Israelis fall into the categories of “colonized and colonizer.” Opposite poles that certainly cannot “fraternize” in the darkness of that night of Marxism in which all social classes are gray and in which the fundamental opposition seems to become that between “proletarian nations” and “bourgeois nations.” Pascoli and Bottai have definitely left a more lasting mark than Marx and Lenin with a certain “class” left.
The definition of the Israeli as “settler” conceals the class division of an Israeli society in which, in addition to a ruthless and arrogant bourgeoisie, there is also a proletariat. A proletariat that, however momentarily enslaved to a racist ideology (as repulsive as any other racism) and addicted for generations to believing both apartheid against its Palestinian class brethren and their segregation in the bantustans of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be a necessity, nevertheless remains proletariat, with all that this class characterization entails. As Marxists, let us remember what others who also call themselves Marxists regularly find it convenient to forget – assuming they have ever learned it – namely, that the dominant ideology is that of the ruling class, and we know that however much the proletariat may be conditioned by bourgeois ideology its opposition as a class to capital and its states is a material fact that will not fail to manifest itself, in times and ways that communist revolutionaries will not determine.
On the other hand, within the definition of the Palestinian as “colonized,” as vague and undefined as that of “people,” should fall an even more parasitic bourgeoisie than the concept of the bourgeoisie as a class already implies: a social stratum that, despite the restrictions on economic growth imposed by the oppression of the Israeli bourgeoisie, finds ways to benefit from a condition of privilege vis-à-vis its compatriots as well as to pocket profits, often by virtue of the very same restrictions that impoverish the weaker strata of the population[4]. A greedy bourgeoisie, bribed by handouts from regional powers, fierce racketeers of an uneven, dispersed Palestinian proletariat, concentrated exclusively in the sense of high-density housing in a strip of land, employed mostly in the reduced agricultural, construction and tertiary sectors; a bourgeoisie that in Gaza, in the face of appalling unemployment produced by increasing exclusion from the Israeli economic tissue, maintains a social stability that is as dear to them as their eye pupil through subsidies bestowed with what remains of international aid.
Returning to the homegrown interpreters of the current flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is sad to have to hint past the usual, predictable, waffling accusations of “indifferentism,” “ultra-leftism,” and even “workerism” hurled in the manner of an excommunication urbi et orbi by self-proclaimed “red popes,” devoid of temporal and even less (et vraiment pour cause) spiritual power, against the few political subjectivities that try to keep themselves coherently in the camp of proletarian internationalism…
In the year 2023, about 800 years after the germination of capitalist relations in Europe, about two and a half centuries after the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, more than a century after the October Revolution, 80 years after the last generalized inter-imperialist conflict, and about 50 years after the last significant national revolutions in the colonial world, internationalists still have to put up with grotesque sophistry about an incomplete world affirmation of the real subsumption of labor to capital that should justify substantial support for any “national liberation struggle”, from here to eternity.
If one were to take seriously the prissy balderdash of these cassock-clad sophists who proclaim themselves Marxists, the international labor movement would then have only to wait for the proletarianization of the last peasant in sub-Saharan Africa producing for self-consumption; to wait for the abandonment of the tapir hunt with the curare blowpipe by the last of the Yanomans in the Amazon rainforest; to wait for the passage through the “gallows” of capitalism of all those exploited people in the vast world who still live and work in Asian, feudal or communist-primitive modes of production – and whose weight in the world economy is “notoriously” so great that capitalist relations of production cannot yet be said to predominate – so that the proletariat can put its immediate and historic class claims on the world-wide agenda. While we are at it, even a scrupulous investigation into the ways in which even certain hermits in our Alps, consequent supporters of “happy degrowth” who live off the cheese of their little goat, “produce and reproduce their real lives” might prove appropriate before going so far as to call the Italian economic and social structure capitalist.
To this “purely economistic and mechanistically deterministic logic,” which has nothing to do with Marxism, internationalists have nothing to counter but Marxism itself, pointing out how the claim that every single oppressed nationality in the world-not to mention those that imperialism will not fail to generate like the heads of the hydra[5] – must be guaranteed its own state before communist revolution can be put on the agenda, is but a way of “postponing” the latter to the “Greek calends.” And this, let it be said with unequivocal clarity, is undoubtedly the best way to train the proletariat of the advanced countries in supporting one or the other of the powers of imperialism, which arouse, restrain, move or extinguish, according to their interest, the timeless and eternal national questions; and therefore also the best way to convince the working class to remain inert in the face of the only possible non-imperialist solution of these questions.
Incidentally, it is decidedly peculiar that some of those who would appear to have taken an internationalist position in the context of the imperialist war in Ukraine, despite the fact that there is still no autonomous proletarian movement in either Ukraine or Russia, instead consider calls for internationalist solidarity in the case of the current war in the Middle East to be meaningless rituals, since there is still no autonomous proletarian movement in Palestine and Israel. In this case, the shames of an unmistakable acquiescence to imperialism are hidden quite clumsily, just as clumsy is the presumption to attribute a progressive content to clerical-reactionary ideological forms[6] which, as such, can only represent materialistically the expression of an equally reactionary content, unless one wants to equate, neglecting a few centuries of bourgeois historical evolution, the Ayatollahs with the Albigensians of Occitania or the Taliban with the English Puritan Roundheads.
We have many elements to draw an initial sketch of false internationalism.
False internationalism confuses – whether intentionally or not is of little relevance – internationalism with chauvinism in favor of other people’s homelands. Shrewd enough to recognize that his own nation does not fall under a condition of oppression – which distinguishes him from the popular red-brown sovereignist – he also believes that it is internationalism to be infatuated with an oppressed homeland other than his own. Not “any” oppressed homeland, mind you, but essentially those where even in the very distant past the nationalist movement has given itself some “socialist” tinge: the Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Palestine, Iraq, etc. Then, of course, there is also the “broader” false internationalism, that of the discoverers of the progressive content of religious nationalism (which has often been and is more of a supranational confessional universalism than a true nationalism, which is why it has been and is a tool of the powers of imperialism), and then the fanatical sects of the Taliban in Afghanistan or ISIS in the Middle East, typical by-products of imperialism, are also included in the count. Of other national oppressions, less “leftist” or simply less at the center of inter-imperialist dynamics – and thus bourgeois media coverage – false internationalism cares less than zero.
At the bottom of false internationalism is the need to take sides for something that manifests itself concretely, with limpid clarity, without too much complexity; which is why it fails to get excited about the class struggle, which is constant but at certain historical stages is less visible, less spectacular in its manifestations, less satisfying in its forms and immediate outcomes. False internationalism then throws itself headlong into the most classic of “just causes,” the most seemingly “simple,” the most tangible and conspicuous in its political and military dynamics: the cause of oppressed nations, ignoring or pretending to ignore the current world imperialist context, and for reasons completely unrelated to those for which even Marxism has given it support.
The class struggle, for false internationalism, is after all but “a game at which little is played,” a fallback for lack of better, and the best are those struggles likely to awaken the enthusiasms of the petty bourgeois.
Evidence of true “indifferentism,” that toward the class question and toward the prospect of communism, emerges unmistakably from the total disregard about the consequences of these purported national struggles for the viability of an internationalist discourse aimed at the proletariat of the areas involved. It is implausible that the current proponents of a “Palestinian resistance” – which, at present, cannot be disentangled from the control of reactionary bourgeois fractions, serves multiple masters, except by getting drunk on self-deception – believe in its chances of victory in arms against Israel. Then how can one sincerely believe that such a victory – which after each military flare-up of the conflict recedes with increasing clarity and rapidity from the horizon – is an obligatory step to take before the class question can finally be put on the agenda? How can one sincerely insist on supporting an approach that, lingering without visible solution, only exacerbates national hatreds by mutually propping up the ideological hold of the opposing bourgeoisies and making any internationalist presence in the area increasingly complicated?
The images of the mangled bodies of Israeli civilians – probably largely of our own class; those of Israeli girls and boys bound, hooded and kidnapped; the screams of a Palestinian proletarian mother rolling on the ground in despair in front of her bombed house with her children inside; the wails of suffering of a newborn baby in a hospital deprived of electricity in Gaza[7], should arouse unspeakable rage, uncontainable fury at the retreat of at least a century of our class prospects in Palestine and Israel. Certainly they should not arouse the irresponsible and unconscious jubilation over the outbreak of a bourgeois war for which the Palestinian masses will pay the highest price, without probably even coming close to that independence which not even the rotten national bourgeoisie believes in.
For false internationalism, for indifferentism toward the class question, the appeal to the prospect of communism is now only a tired habit, the tribute paid to a self-representation of one’s own image, the simulation of a feeling that one no longer feels.
Instead, internationalism, the coherent kind, is once again ridiculed and mocked, mystified to the extent of criticism as arrogant as it is devoid of backbone and intellectual honesty. Imputed to it is the fear of national “taboo,” a “lack of concreteness,” the repetition of obtuse “litanies,” and even a complicity with imperialism.
No taboo, but above all no fetishizing of the national question, which by its very essence was, is, and will be bourgeois, whatever its usefulness may have been or may possibly become again in the interests of the international workers’ movement.
Our concreteness, is the concreteness of all those who identify with an unpolluted Marxism, and it certainly does not consist in reducing to rhetorical declamations, or slogans, watchwords that in Palestine are unfortunately still out of real possibilities, far from visible horizons. Unlike, however, those who would like to take advantage of the curvature that conceals these horizons as a “den free all,” we can, must and will hold high and well in view the torch of proletarian internationalism, to signal the need for class independence. For the doubly oppressed Palestinian proletarians, so that one day not too far off they may defend their physical existence from the prevarications of the Israeli bourgeoisie and its state in an autonomous manner, separate and opposed to the politico-military operations of the human flesh merchants of the Palestinian bourgeois fractions, whether secular or bigoted (and we would not dream of blaming the Palestinian proletarians should they liquidate their bourgeoisie, even of Islamic matrix, that day with methods as blunt as exemplary). For the Israeli proletarians, exploited by their own bourgeoisie, hostages to a deeply reactionary and aggressive nationalist ideology, nurtured for generations by a knowingly cultivated climate of uncertainty and fear, so that, first and foremost for their own interests, one day not too distant they may fight against the apartheid regime inflicted on their Arab class counterparts, fight for the recognition of their legal and political equality in Israel, and even programmatically recognize for the Palestinians the bourgeois right to separation in a proper territory, thus setting themselves incontrovertibly against their own state, against the enemy at home.
If, given the present imperialist context, the realization of such separation is highly unlikely, except as a possible result of a war between the powers of imperialism involving the Middle East or of a revolutionary victory of the proletariat in the imperialist metropolises, the approach in these terms of the problem by a conscious and organized workers’ movement in Israel would reveal such a development that it could hardly be limited to the achievement of this insufficient result.
Recognition of the national rights of oppressed proletarians by proletarians in states that oppress others is a step toward internationalist class self-determination. It is a necessary step, whatever the actual possibilities of realization of separate state entities, a step that the proletarians of oppressor states must take 1) to give oxygen to the struggle of the proletarians of oppressed nationalities against their own bourgeoisies; 2) to show that they really stand in opposition to their own bourgeoisie and against its state; 3) to prove themselves credible interlocutors of an international class solidarity and to make possible that mass fraternization which today is implausible and which the “realists” unable to see beyond their short-sighted opportunist noses deride as utopia.
Only with the achievement of class self-determination can the prospects be opened for a federation of the proletariat of the Middle East that can do without borders filled with the blood of generations of exploited people aroused against each other. Deep furrows into which all the sordid powerhouses of imperialism, all the ragged and scrambling bourgeoisies, periodically dip their infected claws.
Only the achievement of class self-determination can be the premise of the only revolution that can liberate all oppressed nationalities without necessarily having to go through the establishment of a bourgeois state. The only revolution that can liberate all existing ethnic and linguistic communities from any legal, political or cultural oppression by going through the formation of nations, then states, but revolutionary workers’ states, organically united in the goal of a society in which (in the words of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto) “public power will lose its political character,” in which the state as such will become extinct, where, even if nationalities should be preserved, the political delimitations of peoples will disappear and there will be no place for separate nation-states[8].
This is a distant prospect, but – at least for those whose revolutionary conviction strengthens rather than wavers – it is the only one that prevents them from becoming instruments in the hands of others. In order to get far, it is necessary to set out beforehand, without hesitation, without hiding or concealing the immense difficulties of the task – perhaps for fear of “scaring off” those who are probably not made for the struggle. We must start now, despite the obstacles that the world bourgeoisie will put in our way and heedless of the cowardly derision of the shouting doge of opportunists. Today and always, the uniform of the internationalist communists is: Trotz alledem! – despite everything – the last words left to us by Karl Liebknecht before he was slaughtered by Freikorps as fanatical and reactionary as the Zionist and Hamas gangs.
!أيّها البروليتاريون، في جميع البلدان، إتحدوا
!פרולטרי כל הארצות, התאחדו
PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
NOTES
[1] Various rumors have circulated in recent days in the press and television organs about the killing and beheading of a number of Israeli children. Partisans on both bourgeois sides have been frantically and recklessly launching themselves on the one hand into pure denial of the content of these rumors, attributed to Israeli war disinformation, and on the other hand into unhesitating prejudicial trust in the media apparatus covering the conflict. In all likelihood, these rumors will have their final confirmation or denial only when the “fog of war” has long since cleared. In any case, the horror of the slaughter of innocents and the ignominy of propaganda slander represent nothing new under the sun of imperialism and its wars, only one more reason not to be tools of it.
[2] Beach, in Arabic.
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/03/gaza-hamas-must-end-brutal-crackdown-against-protesters-and-rights-defenders
[4] For example, thanks to smuggling.
[5] Be it said for the “smartasses” who spit into the wind believing they can pit those who remain consistently internationalist against the elaboration of a Lenin they have gobbled up without having digested.
[6] Frequent is the reference in these terms to the so-called “Khomeinist revolution” of 1979. However, the Iranian left and not a few European “leftists” were by no means “indifferent” to this purported expression in religious form of “revolutionary” content; on the contrary, much of the Iranian left resolutely supported it … ending up massacred after the seizure of power by Iranian bourgeois fractions organized in religious form. A plastic demonstration, if you will, of how much today, in the age of imperialism, the religious garb has real, fiercely bourgeois and anti-proletarian contents.
[7] It is of these hours the news of the bombing of a hospital complex in Gaza. Let us leave it to the partisans of one or the other imperialist camp to debate who bears the responsibility. For internationalists, the certain fact is the death of hundreds of Palestinian proletarians and the equally certain responsibility that of an equally reactionary bourgeoisie on both sides of the Strip wall.
[8] “… separate socialist nation-states will constitute only a transitional stage on the way to the classless and stateless society of the future, since the construction of such a society is possible only on an international scale!” See R. Rosdolsky, The Proletariat and the Fatherland, https://coalizioneoperaia.com/2020/04/22/roman-rosdolsky-il-proletariato-e-la-patria
circolo internazionalista "coalizione operaia" 