Editor of the Counter Attack Journal – Tibor Szamuely – offers this response to Rick Amherst’s article “First Things First: Stop the Genocide” in an ongoing exchange over the orientation and priorities of marxists on the Palestinian question
Rick Amherst begins his response to Sal Rojo’s Neither Zionism nor Hamas editorial with an insistence on a clearer differentiation between what he considers to be the “long term goal” defined as the “total liberation of the Palestinian people” and the “immediate goal” of “stopping the current round of genocide against the Palestinian people”. The first problem here is that the “long term goal” set by Amherst, the “total liberation of the Palestinian people” is not in fact the long term goal of communists.
Communists, unlike petty bourgeois democrats, do not have the cross class liberation of peoples (“total” or not) as a long term goal. Their long term goal is the seizure of power by the proletariat in order to transform the relations of production from capitalist to communist. A goal which entails not the “liberation” of the “people” but the repression of one part of the contradictory unity which constitutes the people (the bourgeoisie) to the advantage of another (the proletariat).
In any future socialist Palestine the Palestinian Arab millionaires (of which there were close to a thousand in Gaza alone in 2012) will certainly not be “liberated” from anything but their property. On the other hand, the Israeli Jewish working class will be liberated from capitalist command and exploitation. The long term goal of communists in Palestine is the liberation of proletarians in Palestine from wage labor regardless of ethnicity or nationality, not the liberation of the Palestinians or any other people. Unless our highest aspiration is a bourgeois democratic Palestine where Palestinian proletarians are slaughtered Marikena style by democratic Palestinian police we must always keep this in mind. As communists we support bourgeois democratic equality only as a means, however important that means may be, and never as an end.
When Amherst frames the long term goal as the bourgeois democratic liberation of a people he takes the restricted horizon of petty bourgeois democracy as his own and allows the emancipation of the proletariat to fade from view. And anyone who has ever had to sell their labor, pay rent, apply for unemployment or worry whether they can afford food understands all too well that this emancipation is anything but an “intellectual abstraction”.
As for the “immediate goal” asserted by Amherst of “stopping the genocide” we can only observe that firstly despite what bourgeois sentimentalists believe, in a capitalist society ethnic oppression and genocide however extreme never leads to the disappearance of the class contradiction among either the victims or the perpetrators. In fact the opposite, as communists observed during the elimination of the Jewish people in Poland:
One of the arguments of ghetto chauvinism and class solidarism is the lie about universal poverty, which supposedly leveled down everyone. In spite of the colossal increase in extreme poverty, despite a situation that confronts the majority with the real specter of hunger and starvation, and not in some indefinite future, and that has already caused a catastrophic increase in mortality, the ghetto society has not ceased to be differentiated. The abundance and wealth of those who still do good business today and carelessly fill numerous entertainment venues and confectioneries of the ghetto are clearly cut off from the abyss of ghetto despair. Cruel and monstrous vultures of profiteering and coarse smuggling circulate over the battlefield of general misery.
Polish Trotskyists on the Zionist face of ghetto collaboration, 1941
The idea that in Gaza today such “cruel and monstrous vultures” don’t bear the name Hamas would be a naive one. “Vultures” moreover who despite their demagogic rhetoric will be perfectly happy to cut a deal with their Zionist class siblings as soon as the opportunity presents itself. The mass death of proletarians in Gaza is first of all a joint project of the bourgeois nationalists on both sides and their imperialist sponsors.
These words will be greeted with performances of shock and outrage precisely because they are true. And in this as in so many other cases the truth hurts. Proletarians in Gaza face an external enemy in the Zionist state and its international network of alliances and an internal enemy in the Islamist bourgeoisie. Genocide and ethnic cleansing don’t make the enemy classes into friends, not in the Jewish ghettos and the Yugoslav villages then or in Gaza now.
Secondly, we must observe that as communists our first task is not simply to “stop the genocide” but to build towards the reconstitution of the class party through the struggle against the genocide just as our first task is not simply to win higher wages with our coworkers, or obstruct the imperialist war or police terror but always to build towards the reconstruction of the class party through activity on all these fronts.
As communists our first duty is always to build towards the construction of the class party whether twenty thousand, twenty million or even two billion lives are at stake. Because we understand that the root cause of unnecessary human suffering today is the capitalist mode of production and this cause can only be combated through the political class organization of the proletariat. Here it is worth keeping in mind Lenin’s words on famine:
But famine in present-day Russia, after so many boastful speeches by the tsarist government on the benefits of the new agrarian policy, on the progress of the farms that have left the village commune, etc., is sure to teach the peasants a great deal. The famine will destroy millions of lives, but it will also destroy the last remnants of the savage, barbarian, slavish faith in the tsar, which has prevented the peasants from seeing that there must inevitably be a revolutionary fight against the tsarist monarchy and the landowners. The peasants can find a way out of their condition only by abolishing the landed estates. Only the overthrow of the tsarist monarchy, that bulwark of the landlords, can lead to a life more or less worthy of human beings, to deliverance from starvation and hopeless poverty.
Famine, V.I. Lenin
It is the duty of every class-conscious worker and every class-conscious peasant to make this clear. This is our main task in connection with the famine. The organisation, wherever possible, of collections among the workers for the starving peasants and the forwarding of such funds through the Social-Democratic members of the Duma—that, of course, is also one of the necessary jobs.
For Lenin as a communist the “main task” was not the unfortunately impossible one of immediately stopping the famine but of using the famine as a means to further build the class consciousness and organization of the revolutionary classes as the only possible way to make future famines impossible. Struggling against the immediate effects of the famine was indeed a “necessary job” but not the “main task”.
Before there is any chance to overthrow world capitalism orders of magnitude more people will die horrific and senseless deaths as a result of its operations than are currently dying in Gaza. The main question for us is not whether we can prevent them (we can’t) but how effectively we use them to build the only political force which can stop this barbaric irrationality for good.
Therefore as communists our long term goal is the liberation of the proletariat from wage labor through the dictatorship of the proletariat, our immediate goal is the use of the horrors of capitalism to build the class party as a means to accomplish this. The rest, as important as it is to understand, is always secondary.
After his formulation of long term and immediate goals Amherst chides Rojo for not paying enough attention to the “immediate specificities” of Gaza. He notes the mass unemployment and general immiseration even before the current genocidal assault and observes that although proletarian revolution “has often emerged in the midst of the worst conditions” this was in cases where an “effective vanguard party had been built prior to these situations”. This is a very strange argument.
The crisis and immiseration which Amherst cites as an obstacle to the victory of the proletarian revolution is in fact its objectively necessary precondition. Revolution as a “horrible end” will never be seen as preferable to the “horror without end” of capitalism by most practical people in situations in which the “suffering and want of the oppressed classes” have not “grown more acute than usual”.
The obstacle to revolutionary developments in Gaza is not the objective-economic severity of the situation but the subjective-political aspect of domination by bourgeois national-clerical conservatives and their opportunist Stalinist camp followers. And this same obstacle is the one which with countless concrete permutations we face throughout the world in the current period. And here we come to the nub of Amherst’s argument: the classic Menshevik theory of stagism whether in its proud Stalinist or shamefaced Trotskyist incarnation. He informs us that:
“Gaza’s working class must recover and reorganize to make such a revolutionary push feasible.”
In fact the reverse is the case. Only a struggle to reconstitute the proletarian class party which asserts the absolute independence of this party from reformist, nationalist and clerical policies of class collaboration and materializes this independence within the mass movement will make a future “revolutionary push” feasible.
A peoples front with bourgeois nationalists today will ensure the non-existence of the subjective conditions for proletarian revolution tomorrow. Such fronts indeed led to the victory of popular-democratic revolutions based in the peasantry in the past. Revolutions which were able to consolidate historic conquests for the working class within world capitalism. However the purely socialist-proletarian revolution demanded by the current level of productive forces and class structure requires the complete political independence of the working class as its prerequisite. There is no room for a Chinese or Yugoslav petty bourgeois national popular path today.
What we must “recover” and “reorganize” first of all is the ideological and political independence of the proletariat. And the necessary precondition of such independence is open hostility to all bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties. Although we cannot be neutral on the question of obstructing the policies of discrimination, expulsion and elimination demanded by the ethnonationalist logic of Zionism and therefore are compelled to seek the defeat of Israel we at the same time cannot hope for the victory of Hamas without liquidating our own political existence. We can only advocate both the obstruction of Zionist policy by all possible means and simultaneously the accumulation of forces for the overthrow of Hamas by the proletariat in Gaza.
This is the only strategic line compatible with the political independence of the proletariat and it is a line that is completely compatible with pressure for intermediate objectives such as ceasefire and the release of all prisoners and hostages. So long as this pressure is carried with the recognition that “…reforms are the by-product of the revolutionary struggle”. And not of the liquidation of the revolutionary struggle in favor of subordination to a bourgeois nationalism which current economic reality prevents from ever having a revolutionary content.
A victory by Hamas although it would obstruct the genocidal dream of a greater Israel would at the same time give force and courage to the Islamist dominated “Resistance Axis” which is an equally criminal project on the spectrum of world anti-proletarian reaction. The construction of independent proletarian power against all odds in the struggle against Zionism, Islamism, Arab nationalism and Stalinist opportunism, the entire clown show of bourgeois barbarism is the only bridge to a new era of socialist revolution.
The Virginia Worker 
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