21.03.2002

'Proletarian' pedantry and self-contradiction

The unity of nations can only come about voluntarily, argues Ian Donovan John Pearson once again takes up his pen in defence of a political perspective that is merely an echo of the 'new left' politics of Tony Cliff and his followers on the Arab-Israeli question (Weekly Worker March 7). Comrade Pearson denies with indignation any political softness on the Socialist Workers Party; he complains that his original arguments (published in the Weekly Worker in January, as the war in Afghanistan appeared to be coming to a close) were "misunderstood" - allegedly in part because of the editing of his original letter. Yet his clarifications, and attempts to develop his views further, demonstrate not some kind of 'revolutionary' critique of the politics of the CPGB mainstream, but again simply a genuflection before key elements of SWP politics. John quotes his own original unedited letter, criticising the SWP for its inability to forge an alliance with "the Worker Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq, the Labour Party Pakistan, and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan", in order to demonstrate that he is in no way soft on the SWP. But this only underlines again his own contradictions and confusion. Strong points He is at pains to emphasise that all he is trying to do is to identify the SWP's "strong points" in order to combat their politics more effectively. Unfortunately, what he identifies are the very elements of their politics that so outrage the most revolutionary and progressive elements in the muslim world and make any such alliance difficult. They are not "strong points" at all: they are key elements of the SWP's world view. The fact that he sees them as such is a key index of his political softness on this new left concoction. A classic example is John's refusal to use the word 'condemn' about the murder of thousands of American workers (and, no doubt, a few bosses) on September 11. Unfortunately for his somewhat discordant critique of the SWP for their inability to ally with the LPP, Rawa et al, this was a key point of difference between these very organisations and the SWP and others with a similar bent. All these groups were scathing about leftists who were so soft on political islam as to fail to condemn this bloody crime. And rightly so! John, meanwhile, goes so far as to engage in self-congratulation for his rejection of our elementary slogan, 'Solidarity with all victims of terror in the US and around the world', which is only a continuation of his earlier verbal statement at a CPGB aggregate that he "felt nothing" at the carnage in New York on September 11. He deludes himself that this is a result of his greater 'proletarian' consciousness. I myself suspect he, and the SWP, would have had a rather different attitude if September 11 had happened in Manchester, and thousands of ordinary British people had been killed in such a way. Of course, this kind of attitude is not 'proletarian' consciousness at all, but thinly veiled hostility to all Americans; the belief that, at bottom, they are all reactionaries whom we should shed few tears for. I prefer the genuine proletarian internationalism of the LPP, WCPI and others, who had no hesitation in expressing their solidarity with the many ordinary people who died on September 11, even as they sought to mobilise against the resulting imperialist war. Not for the first time, John ties himself up in a programmatic and logical tangle. One argument blatantly contradicts another. He then blunders on, equating those who condemn this act, which he admits was carried out by "reactionaries", with those who bow before the bourgeoisie in condemning the actions of forces that have very different programmes and aims - those which do have some progressive content. Such as the armed actions of the IRA during the period of the 'troubles' in Ireland, etc. Apparently, then, for John, there should be no difference in our attitude to the actions of forces that have some overlap with our democratic and socialist aims, and forces that have thoroughly anti-democratic and anti-socialist aims. To ever use the same language as the bourgeoisie regarding the actions of forces of the latter type is to adopt the language of 'bourgeois consensus'. This is self-evidently nonsense - it is not a "proletarian discourse" at all, as John laughably claims, but just a product of liberal guilt. Class independence dictates that we take positions on the basis of the class interests of the proletariat, irrespective of what the opinion of the bourgeoisie may be. We do not have a rule of thumb of putting a minus wherever the bourgeoisie puts a plus, or vice versa. To do so, in fact, makes you a negative echo of the bourgeoisie, not an independent proletarian force at all. National rights John also thinks that the SWP's new left, semi-Stalinist position on the Arab/Israeli question is one of its strengths. Sorry, but no, it is a crippling weakness. For the SWP, Israel is not a class-divided society that can be exploded from within by the struggle of its proletariat against its bourgeoisie. Rather, it is a monolithically reactionary enclave that can only be subjugated from without. That is the meaning of its slogan, 'For a democratic and secular Palestine', which happens to deny the existence of a nation called Israel, and denies that this entity has any national rights whatsoever. Comrade Pearson apologies for the SWP in denying that this slogan has anything to do with Arab nationalism, that it is in any way synonymous with an Arab national state. The only evidence I have, says John, that such a state would be an Arab national state, is the use of the name 'Palestine' to describe it. This is absurd. As a symbol of nationalism, the 'name' of a piece of territory is usually as fundamental as the flag, or the language spoken and written, in indicating which national grouping is dominant in a given state. John himself gives the example of 'Zimbabwe' versus 'Rhodesia', and somewhat eccentrically 'Azania' versus 'South Africa' (in that case falsely, since 'Azania' was an attempt by some schematists to create a national identity that did not exist in the form they imagined). John states, truly enough in the case of the overwhelmingly black territory of Zimbabwe, that this name corresponded to the consciousness of the oppressed. For us, of course, this is a matter of simple democracy - the overwhelming majority of the population of this historically constituted entity were for 'Zimbabwe', hence Zimbabwe it had to be. But John is not a consistent democrat. Far from it. For John, what matters is not the 'rule of the majority', but rather the wishes of the 'oppressed', as he discerns them. In Zimbabwe, of course, the oppressed were the overwhelming majority. In the territory of what constitutes modern-day Israel/Palestine, unfortunately (taking into account the Palestinian diaspora who should have the right to resettlement, full citizenship rights and massive compensation as part of a democratic solution to this national conflict), the populations are of comparable weight. But for John, this does not matter - the wishes of Israelis as a nation count for no more than those of the small minority of white overlords in 'Rhodesia'. Since the Israelis are currently the oppressor nation, they have no rights, and certainly no right to live in a national state called 'Israel'. It is the views of the 'oppressed' that must prevail, irrespective of the views of the oppressor people, and irrespective of how many of them there are. Thus John does not deign to enter into any debate on whether Israel is a nation or not, because that is to him an irrelevant issue. Indeed, he engages in the most ridiculous finger-wagging at my original article for allegedly failing to reply to his shallowly rhetorical question as to why "jews [he means Israeli jews] and Arabs" cannot "live in the same country as equals". Perhaps he should address the same question to Serbs and Croats, who, though divided by religious denomination, are historically, ethnically and linguistically much closer to each other than Israelis and Palestinians, yet have proved thus far, even under at times far more favourable conditions, incapable of merging into one single nation-state. The reason for this, in both situations, is because the two peoples concerned are separate, historically evolved nations, and the unity of nations can only come about voluntarily. To deny this is simply an absurd attempt to do violence to reality, and has reactionary implications in practice. Uneasy about the consequences of this, he back-peddles somewhat, stating that the name 'Palestine' for his imagined "democratic, secular" entity is provisional, open to negotiation. Nevertheless, for him, any recognition that oppressor nations have any national rights whatsoever is a "particularist project" and therefore not "proletarian". Therefore, his denials that his projected "democratic, secular Palestine" would be anything other than the Palestinian Arab state its name indicates simply do not make sense - if by some metaphysical contortion this entity were to find some novel way of respecting Israeli national rights, it would be guilty of violating John's "proletarian" principle that denies them. John's claims that his views are "universalist" and "proletarian" - as opposed to the "particularist" views of those who defend the rights of all nations and peoples to exist as a matter of principle - are either naive, or, for someone with his length of experience on the left, historically short-sighted. John disapprovingly claims that the CPGB mainstream, and myself, have changed some long-standing position in abandoning the Arab nationalist mantra of a 'democratic, secular Palestine'. The founding nucleus of the Leninist grouping may well have upheld this position in the past: for myself, I have never held it, being from a political background that, despite its own considerable flaws and problems, always upheld the national rights of all peoples in the Middle East. Arab chauvinism The view upheld by Cliff that simply writes off the Israeli proletariat as inherently reactionary and irremediably chauvinist is merely a variant of the politics of the 1960s new left, dominated by variants of Stalinist/Maoist and third-worldist ideology that often extended this view to the working class of all the advanced capitalist countries. Of course, in the 1960s, the forerunner of the SWP, under Cliff's leadership, opposed this nonsense vis-à -vis the British or American working class. But it appears, thanks perhaps to Cliff's own, somewhat partial and distorted, experience as a revolutionary in the Middle East prior to the foundation of Israel, to have adopted a similar view of the jewish 'settler' proletariat in Israel itself. There is a logic to this writing off of the Israeli proletariat. It is vicarious Arab chauvinism, including in wars. These issues were posed point blank in the 1967 and 1973 wars, when the armies of the surrounding Arab states - Syria, Egypt and Jordan - engaged in major wars against Israel. It is one thing, and obligatory, to defend the oppressed Palestinians against Israeli terror, but I hope John would agree that it is quite another to call on the workers of Egypt, Jordan or Syria to go off and fight 'Zionism' for the benefit of their corrupt, dictatorial and, in the case of Jordan, monarchical rulers. But this is the logic of the kind of softness on Arab nationalism that animates those who deny any national rights to the Israelis. Here we saw much of the 'Trotskyist' left - Healy, Cliff and Mandel - along with the block-headed student vanguardists/third worldists who tended to regard the western working class as being the likely agency of fascism, constitute part of a broad 'left' movement in support of the Arab despotisms and monarchies at war. A class-collaborationist 'anti-imperialist' front whose most prominent spokespeople were, unsurprisingly, Brezhnev and Gromyko - this logic, which regards the working class in key strategic locations as irremediably reactionary, and looks to the classless notion of (as John puts it) "all oppressed human beings" instead, dovetails perfectly with Stalinist notions of the 'progressive' bourgeoisie of the 'oppressed' countries. Unsurprisingly it led to disaster for the oppressed - a few years after the new left were supporting the Arab reactionary regimes against Israel, these very same regimes were massacring the Palestinians. From King Hussein's 'Black September' butchery of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan in 1970, to the 1976 massacre of thousands of civilians at the Tel Zataar Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon by Maronite militias acting under the protection of the Syrian army, when the prospect of any real independent struggle of the Palestinians against their oppression has come about, these regimes' hands have scarcely been cleaner than those of Ariel Sharon. But the strategy of building an Arab state on the ruins of Israel, denying any national rights to the Israeli nation, can only conceivably be implemented by a strategy of war and conquest against Israel by the neighbouring reactionary Arab states. That is the real meaning of the Cliffite/Healyite/Stalinist (in reality bourgeois Arab nationalist) strategy of a 'democratic secular Palestine'. It is the road to suicide for the oppressed. Ultimately the only road to liberation and real justice for the Palestinians lies in a revolutionary alliance with a radicalised, revolutionised Israeli proletariat, which necessitates a democratic resolution of the complex national question that has concretely arisen in the Middle East over the past century. Unfortunately, in the few perfunctory attempts he makes to justify his positions with any actual concrete analysis, John merely shows he is confused about the actual empirical circumstances in the Middle East. For instance, he writes that "to separate out the jews and Arabs (and where does that leave the poor christians?) and to somehow assign to them territories in which they are to be respectively hegemonic is a shabby and pathetic backward-looking exercise". John is obviously confused as to what is a religion, and what is a nation or ethnic group. Israel, as a nation, is defined largely by the cultural-religious origins of its dominant groups. This is not entirely unknown in the history of nations - such European nations as Britain, Holland, Serbia and Croatia, for instance, were defined largely by the religions of their founding populations, as against adjacent populations of similar language and ethnicity that embraced a different religion. However, Hamas notwithstanding, being Palestinian is not defined by muslim religion, as shown by the fact that the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, is a christian Palestinian Arab himself. What is clear is that the relationship between the religious beliefs of antagonistic populations and formation of nations is a complex one and cannot be reduced to some simple, lazy formula based on either the inherently religious or inherently secular nature of a given nation. Particularly in addressing complex national questions like that of the Middle East, concrete detailed study, not knee-jerk leftist prejudice and ignorance, is a matter of life and death.