/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The supposedly left-wing desire to obsess over the "racist, settler-colonialist Zionism" of the Israeli state is a way to obscure how the conflict is connected to capitalism, specifically, how it emerges from the failures of capitalist politics. What the so-called left has managed to achieve through their exhortation to focus on the plight of the Palestinian people is to transform empathy for suffering into a thought-terminating cliche, wielding it as a a blunt instrument of censorship, and at the expense of the very people who they claim to have empathy for. In true Orwellian fashion, they have managed to reconcile their empathy for Palestinian suffering with unwavering support for Hamas, free from any cognitive dissonance.

The extreme rhetoric and spectacular protests of the contemporary left is little more than a means of pressuring mainstream capitalist politicians, and even the desire to "defund Israel” (a policy that far-right Zionists also support) is likely just a way to scrub away the issue of Israel/Palestine in U.S. politics. Ultimately, their goal is not to support the liberation of the Palestinian people, but to be “on the right side of history", to wield moral authority over others by appearing to side with the most vulnerable belligerents. They perversely enjoy the fact that Palestinians will continue to be slaughtered, proudly parading the numbers of dead so that their "progressive" mode of politics can remain relevant.

But the greatest crime that the contemporary left commits is to tell people that they can be petty-bourgeois radicals, nationalists and fundamentalists, yet also be progressive - that socialism is unnecessary for the cause of progress and justice. The post-colonial world is the history of peoples living together but being shoehorned into nation-states. This is the outcome of the vision of the League of Nations and of the United Nations; it is a world of nation-states, and therefore a world of widespread national repression. There is no way that the nation-states which emerged from decolonization can be accepted as progressive or liberatory in the socialist sense, and the reason why the Soviet Union refused to join the League of Nations in the first place was to reject this very vision of a world of nation-states.

How we should interpret the Israel-Hamas war is not as a noble struggle for liberation against the forces of oppression, but as a capitalist political negotiation through violence. The goal of Hamas is to embarrass the Netenyahu government and bring it down in order to replace it with an even more right-wing government that will further destabilize Israel. They wish to provoke the Israeli state to kill as many Palestinians as possible in order to alienate the world from Israel.

Hamas finds opportunity in the failure of the peace process, and they employ terrorism both as a pressure tactic and as a “very loud form of protest”. The point of recognizing that the police and the military exist to exert violence is not to argue that they are evil, but to acknowledge that their function is to keep order in a mass society of millions in capitalism. The nihilist position - the position of Hamas - is to provoke such violence in order to show how rotten the system is.

How Lenin defined terrorism could be summed up as "liberalism with guns and bombs”, understanding terrorism as just another form of capitalist politics. Yet, during Lenin's time, terrorism was understood to be the assassination of politically culpable targets. The spectacular violence we are dealing with now is what he would have called "petty-bourgeois outrages” - the tactics of the "PMC", gangsterism in its most pure form. As with all other examples of gangsterism, Hamas is little more than the capitalist misleadership of the Palestinian struggle.

From a socialist perspective, there is nothing radical about the petty-bourgeois atrocities created by terrorists, no matter how "democratic" or "liberatory" they may appear to be. Typically, socialists will misquote Marx and Lenin in order to show how Hamas and other terrorists "objectively strike against capital", implying that such is inherently worth supporting. Yet, the irony is that the socialist movement is most free to cultivate labor struggles during periods of capitalist development, the "boom" that follows the "bust" wherein hiring increases and new industry is built. Moreover, solidarity does not grow when everyone is struggling for mere survival.

The Palestinian territories are in large part built upon a remittance economy, much like many other third-world countries, and neither party to the Israel-Hamas war is interested in developing the region. In a war-torn region with no economy of note, almost entirely dependent on family remittances and foreign aid just to survive, it goes without saying that the people who would run such a place would be gangsters and thugs. The Bolsheviks were a party-disciplined organization that had no interest in such criminals joining their ranks. They had a working class base who, despite living in awful conditions, were not the most desperate lumpen people around. This is not to say that they didn't fight for and alongside the most desperate, but that they explicitly rejected the tactics that such people tend to use.

The only appropriate response that socialists ought to make is one that comprehensively rejects the moral blackmail at the heart of all such wars that result from capitalist politics, accepting the fact that there is no path to justice through capitalist politics, They ought to reject the claim that Hamas represents the Palestinian people, and recognize that there is absolutely no place for the nihilist and nationalist cause of Hamas within socialism.. They ought to recognize that the politics of delegitimization of the ruling class will not by itself lead to socialism, but rather to the rise of right-wing nationalism.

Socialists ought to reject terrorism, whether it be in the form of political assassinations or in the form of spectacular violence. They must recognize that acts of terrorism are fundamentally nihilistic, and thus fundamentally at odds with socialism. Furthermore, what terrorism does is invite state repression, which should never be invited - to the contrary, socialists should prominently reveal how it is the capitalist state that employs criminal tactics, and to show how the struggle for socialism is legitimate both in a moral/ethical sense and in a political sense. If the socialist struggle is not legitimate in a legal sense, it should be because the law is problematic, not the struggle.

Socialists ought to reject the "radical liberal" perspective wherein national-racial communities are in perpetual conflict. The point of the fight against imperialism was never to create new nation-states (though it may sometimes be necessary), but to serve the unity of the working class internationally in the struggle for socialism. To merely accept the myriad divisions in the working class (the specific forms of racism, sexism and so on that exist today) is to concede to capitalist politics. Far from being trans-historical concepts, such divisions are a concrete reality generated by capitalism, often in ways that are far worse than similar divisions in the past.

Socialists ought to respond to the violence of capitalism by rejecting the system entirely. They must have no responsibility or culpability for such a system of violence at all, and must do everything possible to protect the people from violence. Sacrifices will always be necessary in political struggle, but such a necessity must not become a virtue or a principle. Socialism will not be achieved by martyrdom, through participating in the struggle by dying; rather, it will be achieved by living people.

Socialists ought to revive the old slogan of "no war but class war" as a guide for their attitude towards all such conflicts. An independent socialist movement will not care to pressure capitalist politicians into being more “progressive". They must recognize that every moment of progress within capitalism coincides with regress as well.

The original promise of the bourgeoisie was to overcome the divisions generated by capitalism, yet what the capitalist politics that the bourgeoisie inherited does is not overcome these divisions but simply manage them. What socialists are tasked with is to take up this forgotten promise, rather than to assume that it was made in a cynical way. They must recognize that the only way to fulfill the cosmopolitan, universalist vision of the bourgeoisie is to overcome capitalism once and for all by realizing socialism.