This is an edited version of Will McMahon’s eight-minute roundtable introduction at the recent TAS Meeting on Palestine. You can find Ed Pott’s and Nick Wrack’s verbal introductions at the start of the meeting on the TAS Youtube channel.
What is happening in Palestine is the kind of colonial exclusionary project which has happened over the last three centuries. North America was occupied by a colonial and exclusionary white settler project over a period of two hundred years. There was a belief in what was called ‘manifest destiny’ that the white settlers were the rightful inheritors of the land. The colonialists also drove west under the flag of Christianity ripping up, as they went along, treaty after treaty they had agreed with the indigenous people.
In Australasia there was a genocide carried out against the Aboriginal and Maori populations. In South America too, where the Spanish and Portuguese reduced the indigenous population from 60 million to 6 million in about a century and a half under a Christian banner.
So, the use of religion to ideologically underpin a colonial project is not new.
In the present context, the new expansionary settler state is a client state of a global superpower, the United States. Israel is a pivotal regional power for the United States, it’s hegemony in the Middle East would be part of a new US global order.
This is pretty similar to US projects in other parts of the world, the most recent version we can see is Ukraine. We are in a period where the United States is in decline as global power and in order to maintain its position it is more than prepared to supply the Israeli state with arms and political support, irrespective of what it does, including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. For Israel to lose this war would be a strategic defeat for the United States.
This is why we are being subject to a repeat of a well-honed Orwellian communications strategy by the White House, where every time the Israeli state does something terrible in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon we get a press briefing saying we ask our Israeli partners to be careful and targeted in what they are doing.
The British media version of this is the notion that the United States are not in charge of what is happening in the war. A headline to a recent analysis by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen read “West left powerless as Israel claims its biggest victory against Hezbollah.” The idea that the United States is powerless in this situation is risible because it is the power that underpins the Zionist project. This is not to say every dot and comma goes through the State Department but that the broad strategy is agreed and signed off over time.
Observations from the colonial past
Now there are observations from the colonial past that we need to take into account. The first one is that colonialism was an absolutely brutal and murderous project. The horrors of colonialism in China, India, Africa and Latin America saw tens of millions killed and enslaved with torture a modus operandi of the process. It is hard to comprehend that it happened, but it did.
The response by the occupied indigenous people was also, understandably, very, very brutal. So the Hamas invasion of October 7th is not unusual in terms of anti-colonial resistance. There is not need to prettify it or justify it. One can think of Algeria or Vietnam or even Haiti and other places, of course, where history records very brutal armed resistance by those fighting occupation. Hamas is no different to that in terms of the violence used.
They do, though, have a specific ideology that is explicitly opposed to human equality, class struggle and socialist liberation and this cannot be ignored. Now, this is not to put an equal sign between the acts of occupation and resistance, but to say that colonialism produces brutality and murderous intent on all fronts. It is a tragedy of history.
Clearly, Socialists should be with the oppressed and colonised people who are having genocide committed against them and we wish for their victory over the colonisers, recognising that this will involve a social, political and military struggle.
The question is what is the nature of that victory and how do we get there? The ideologies of anti-colonial resistance have been various. Some religious and mystical, for example the Saya San in Burma in the 1930s, others more politically conscious.
You can look at for example many struggles in Africa, Latin America and Asia where clearly some form of Marxist or communist or socialist ideology was a mobilising ideology against imperialism. It was possible to look for allies in these formations, to find non-Stalinist Marxists to work along side.
If you look at the case of Nicaragua, where the US client regime was led by the murderous dictator Samoza, in the successful resistance of the Sandinista National Liberation Front you had diverse political wings. A sort of light Maoism in the Prolonged People’s War tendency. A more traditional Marxist wing called the Proletarian Tendency and you had a third tendency led by Ortega that was Stalinist and believed in a long transition to socialism and making alliances with the so-called ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’.
The left engaged in long debates about how to support the revolution. In the end I rested on the position that we should support the genuinely Marxist currents within the revolution but not be unthinkingly uncritical of them or of the Sandinista leadership. I write about Nicaragua to focus on the fact that we are a world away from that simplicity, although it felt complex at the time. The defeat of the Soviet Union and the huge impact that it has had upon the left and socialist ideology across the world means that it is really hard to find allies in comparison to the the anti-imperialist struggles of half a century ago.
In Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, allies are very hard to find for marxists. Most Marxist currents have been obliterated by the course of history following the collapse of the Stalinist project in the Soviet Union. In the absence of such groups, we should not, by default, simply support whoever is at the head of the anti-imperialist struggle. We should, however, support the broad struggle of the Palestinians to destroy the occupying power and build connections with socialist and Marxists current in the region as they exist no matter how weak they are.
What we would want to see is the development of a socialist current that favours a single state solution, a socialist state, within a wider socialist federation of the Middle East – no matter how far off that seems at present. This outcome would mean, amongst other things, a socialist current that reaches out to and contains members of the Israeli working class who understand that there will never be a two-state solution and that any solution is also based on the ending of the Israeli state as it exists and its replacement by a secular and socialist alternative. It would also mean the overthrow of the Palestinian Authority which Rashid Khalidi, the author of The 100 Year War on Palestine, describes as ‘a subcontractor for the occupation’, and a Quisling authority.
Why join Palestine Action?
I knew very little about this organisation until I heard that it was accused of Terrorism for the very serious crime of trying to stop terror.
I was a supported of the Committee of 100 in the 1960s. We did something very similar to Palestine Action and faced legal charges and harsh police action but were not accused of being terrorists.
In the last 20 or so years we in Britain have faced increasing restrictions on the right to protest. If any radical movement wants to even dent the establishment’s armour, we have to re-establish our ancient rights. This will take a serious conflict with the government. That simple fact has to be faced. Only a tiny number of MPs believe in civil liberties and they are powerless.
The battle for our liberties is centred around a much bigger battle – mass murder in Gaza, terrorism in the West Bank and now killing in Iran. Despite our political class and its poodle-like media much of the public supports Gaza.
This could be issue on which we stand. If a few thousand people join Palestine Action, the authorities will be faced with a real crisis. Can they ban a mass movement? If they do, will they clear the jails of serious criminals to fill them with people who have widespread public support?
Let us make this a crisis for Starmer. It would also present a crisis for international support for Israel.
It is time to join and show real support for Palestine and for civil liberties. Join now!
I don’t really share this if it means taking sides in military adventures outside of the revolutionary abolition of capitalism.
“ Clearly, Socialists should be with the oppressed and colonised people who are having genocide committed against them and we wish for their victory over the colonisers, recognising that this will involve a social, political and military struggle.”
Firstly, I do think that imperialism, employing whatever level of coercion, exploitation, all the way up to genocide, elimination of population, is to be thoroughly condemned. We who happen to live in the belly of great imperialist powers should oppose such action as part of our opposition to ruling class domination of any stripe, in other words, the very existence of a class structure. Equally, we see as part of our struggle the struggle of workers the world over against those who dominate and exploit them.
But this is not to say we should support the struggles of “ peoples” for “national liberation” or “self determination” where this entails something other than the struggle for world revolution, where this entails the preservation; of existing capitalist entities or the establishment of new ones. Today there is no progressive content in such struggles, today, when capitalism is firmly established the world over, unlike in Marx’s day when certain national struggles could serve to extend the system, calling for the defence of capitalist states or the establishment of new ones is crossing the Rubicon, supporting the ruling class.
The following are brief extracts from a piece on the issues of imperialism, national struggles and the opposing views on the matter, particularly those of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, a link to which I will provide at the end. It seems to me that the author of the TAS article, like much of the “left” with its illusions in solutions outside of the revolutionary rupture, expects us to accept without question taking sides in inter-capitalist, imperialist wars.
“ In the 19th century the formation of national states served the purpose of developing the national capital, often behind protective tariff barriers, capitalising agriculture and converting the agricultural population and artisans into wage labourers. In doing this capitalism was eradicating feudalism and creating the proletariat as a class within capitalism, thereby carrying out a progressive role. This role could be described as progressive since it was creating the class of wage labourers as a distinct class within capitalist society. This class was an exploited class on which the whole capitalist system depended and a class with a clear interest in ending their exploitation. It was, therefore, a class in “radical chains” which could be the agent for the socialisation of the means of production and the construction of a higher form of social organisation, namely communism. The general content of the nationalist struggle was the consolidation of the national state through a struggle against feudalism and consequent development of the capitalist system and the working class. While this was the content of nationalism, proletarian political organisations could give political support to the bourgeoisie in carrying out these tasks. The nationalist struggle could, therefore, be supported where it favoured the interest of the working class. Support for the national bourgeoisie was, in this period, a tactical issue. However, at the end of the 19th century the phase of formation and consolidation of capitalist states was, in Europe at least, generally completed. For the major capitalist states there was now a need for the national capital to secure sources of raw materials, theatres for export of capital, markets and trade routes on a worldwide scale. Capitalism, as a global system, had entered a new phase, that of imperialism.
Wars of national formation gave way to imperialist wars, of which the First World War was the most dramatic manifestation. Changes in the material needs of the major capitalist states produced a change in the ideological content of nationalism. In the period from the start of 20th century to the present, nationalism became synonymous with support for the imperialist struggle to project the interests of capitalist states, a struggle against other capitalist states. The change in the content of nationalism demanded that the political attitude of communists to national struggles had to be re-evaluated. Whereas in the earlier period communists could give tactical support to bourgeois national struggles, because of their generally progressive character, in the later period these struggles became part and parcel of wider imperialist struggles in which workers slaughtered each other in the interest of their national bourgeoisie. National struggles were now directly opposed to the interests of the working class and were counter-revolutionary.”
“Imperialism is a global system, a phase in the global operation of capitalism, and all states are therefore forced to participate in the system and do so, in one way or another. However, this participation is not the participation of equals. The minor powers participate as junior partners of the major powers or junior members of a bloc of powers.
What underlies imperialism is a process of transfer of surplus value to the dominant imperialist powers and it is clear that this transfer cannot benefit all states. The major beneficiaries and controllers of this process have been in the past, and today still are, the metropolitan capitals of Europe and North America and Japan. The role of the minor powers is that of lieutenants of the major powers. Often their role is principally to ensure the smooth transfer of surplus value from their workers to the metropolitan capitals which exploit them. In other words, to ensure the rule of capital is not threatened in their area of the globe. Although the dominance of the powers controlling the system, and their resulting privileges, are always under threat from rising powers such as Russia, China, India and others, this challenge of rising powers in no way changes the operation of the system as a whole. It simply means new powers rise to dominate the system. As we have seen in the 20th century, although the top dogs of imperialism have been changed by world wars, the global system has remained essentially unchanged.
Since all states participate in this system the only real anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle to overturn the whole system. Of course, the only struggle capable of doing this is a class struggle directed to the overthrow of capitalism. The so-called “anti-imperialist” struggles, so beloved of the leftists, are in reality inter imperialist struggles. Their real content is the alteration of a nation’s status within the concert of imperialism. The famous liberation struggles of Africa, South America and Vietnam have really been struggles to change the position of the various states from that of being clients of US imperialism to that of being clients of Russian imperialism. The same goes for the more recent struggles of countries in Africa, Asia or South America to reorient themselves from the US towards China…“
So yes, we can all oppose imperialism, abhor the killing and other crimes, but taking sides, forgetting that we are the party of the global proletariat, not this or that national “ people” whose ruling classes are our enemies, that we can rank the capitalist regimes and support the “ good” against the “ bad” and that there are courses of action we can advocate, wars even, outside the revolutionary abolition of capitalism on a world scale is far from, clear, obvious, but a betrayal of our opposition to capitalism of every stripe everywhere.
The link to a deeper analysis which contradicts all the talk of supporting underdog nationalism, lesser evils, concern about who fired the first bullet, self determination, national liberation etc is https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2010-09-15/the-national-question-today-and-the-poisonous-legacy-of-the-counter-revolution
I put it to you this is genuine proletarian internationalism.
But if you want the simple version; No war but the Class War.