Re: Zionism, the "Judeo-Christian tradition," and what a class analysis actually looks like
Kristin says she would love to hear the problem approached through class analysis. I'll take that at face value and try to supply one, because I think the exercise shows why her framing forecloses the thing she says she wants. Start with the premise: "Zionism is an internecine debate between Jews. Any non-Jew with a strong position on Zionism is immediately suspect." Consider what this rules out. It rules out Palestinians. On this premise, the people whose villages were depopulated in 1948, whose land was transferred to state and quasi-state ownership under the Absentees' Property Law, and who live under military administration in the West Bank or under blockade in Gaza hold no legitimate standing on the question of the state that does these things to them. Their position is at best suspect. That is not a class analysis. It is the substitution of ancestry for social position—the precise inversion of what historical materialism asks us to do. It also, incidentally, disqualifies Kristin. If only Jews may hold a strong position on Zionism, then the strong positions she has advanced across this thread are self-indicting by her own rule. Rules of this kind always turn out to have an exemption clause for their author. A materialist asks different questions. Who owns the land, and by what legal and coercive process did ownership change hands? Who is permitted to sell it, lease it, and work it? Which state apparatus enforces that arrangement, and which imperial power underwrites the apparatus? What is the class structure of the population inside the Green Line and of the population outside it? None of these questions is answered by consulting anyone's grandmother. And when you do ask them, you find that the labor question sits at the center of the story. The "conquest of labor" and "conquest of land" campaigns of the Second Aliyah, the Histadrut's function as a labor federation that organized Jewish workers partly by excluding Arab ones from the Jewish sector, and the Jewish National Fund's inalienability covenants—this is a class history. It is the history of a labor movement constituted as an instrument of colonization, which is exactly why it produced a workers' movement that could not become the basis of a common struggle with the Arab working class. Ber Borochov tried to square that circle theoretically. Hal Draper spent decades explaining why it could not be squared. Whatever else you say about Zionism, Israel, and the Arabs , it is not a book about who is or isn't Jewish. It is a book about land, labor, and state power. On the "Western, Judeo-Christian tradition": this is presented as two thousand years of continuous development. It is nothing of the kind, and the history is not obscure. The compound term "Judeo-Christian," in its current sense, is an American coinage of the late 1930s and 1940s—assembled as an anti-fascist ecumenical formula and then repurposed in the Cold War as a civilizational marker against communism. The two millennia it retroactively claims contain the expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492, the ghetto, the pale, the blood libel, Dreyfus, and the pogrom. Presenting that record as a shared tradition of free inquiry is not a historical claim at all. It is an ideological artifact of the mid-twentieth-century United States, being offered here as though it were a fact about the longue durée. A Marxist ought to be interested in when and why such formulas are manufactured and in whose service. On Islam. Kristin cites Erdoğan's line that there is no moderate or immoderate Islam and treats it as authoritative: when someone tells you who they are, listen. But Erdoğan is not "someone." He is a bourgeois head of state with a material interest in monopolizing the definition of the faith he governs in the name of—an interest in denying that any Islam exists other than the one he authorizes. Accepting his account at face value is not listening; it is granting a politician the essentialist claim he needs. We would not accept Netanyahu as the authoritative interpreter of Judaism or the Christian right as the authoritative interpreter of Christianity. The method has to be consistent, or it isn't a method. There is no "Mohammedan side." There is Egyptian capital and the Egyptian working class; there are the Gulf monarchies and the South Asian migrant workers they hold in debt bondage; there is the Iranian state and the Iranian bus drivers and teachers it imprisons; there are the Islamist formations that have made their careers crushing the left, in Iran in 1979 most spectacularly. To speak of a single side is to accept the self-description of reactionaries who very much want their subjects to believe there is one. Which brings me to what Kristin's opening actually does. It offers a binary: on Zionism you are either a Nazi or a Jew-hater. This is a false alternative, and the third-camp tradition exists precisely as its refutation. That position is opposition to the Zionist state project as a project of dispossession and simultaneous opposition to the Arab bourgeois regimes and to the Islamist formations that claim to oppose it—because those regimes have never been the vehicle of Palestinian liberation and have repeatedly been its jailers. Neither Tel Aviv nor Tehran, Cairo, Riyadh, or Doha. The agency lies with Palestinian workers and with Israeli-Jewish workers, whose emancipation is not available separately, and with no state or clerical apparatus above them. That position is neither of Kristin's two options. Its existence is sufficient to dispose of the premise the thread began with. Last point, on the exchange with William. He objects to class essentialism; Kristin answers that class essentialism is what Marxism is and that he wants the liberal list. Jonna already supplied the refutation, and it comes from Marx. The Kugelmann letter argues that the English working class cannot emancipate itself while it stands with its own ruling class against Ireland — not out of sympathy, but as a condition of its own struggle. The demand to fight national and racial oppression is not an import into Marxism from liberalism. It is the position Marx arrived at in working out why the English proletariat was politically paralyzed. Racism is not a departure from class analysis. It is a class question, and treating it as an ornament is the economism Marx himself spent the 1860s arguing against. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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