Walking in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on April 16. Agence France-Presse
The Gaza genocide, unlike past genocides like that of the Congo, is being watched on smart phones around the world. The Zionist propaganda machine reveals itself as ‘white washing’ the colonial settler state and its 75 year project of Palestinian expulsion. The Zionists claim that any criticism of the Zionist state is anti-semitic and based on Jew hatred. This lie has been exposed in the streets in ten thousand demonstrations around the world where anti-Zionist Jews join arm in arm with Palestinians and their millions of supporters to oppose the genocide.
The Western world bourgeois regimes have lined up behind the genocidal strategy, while the rest of the world is screaming its support for the Palestinian bourgeois democratic right to self-determination. The means to fight genocide is limited only by the fact that workers lack a world party of socialist revolution which turns Palestinian national liberation into the cause for the global overthrow of the rotten and corrupt capitalist system which can survive only by means of genocide. The crisis of the survival of humanity as a whole comes down to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class, ending capitalism and creating a socialist world.
In Israel, the U.S. and Germany, traditionally protected democratic rights to protest and speak out are being denied to students, academics and activists. Academics with tenure have been fired, suspended and hounded out of the profession. Student protesters are arrested and suspended from schools and universities and solidarity activists are targeted by the state and denied the right to speak to public forums.
Sustained protests for the duration of the genocide is radicalizing youth, many of whom were already politicized during the Black Lives Matter uprising and the strike wave that followed the end of the lockdown. This generation has already witnessed the false hope of the Democratic Socialists of America corralling activists as a left fringe of the imperialist Democratic Party. Kim Moody of Labor Notes writes in New Politics the electoral enthusiasm around Sanders and the Squad has faded as measured in hard currency contributions of small donors! It is past time to break with the capitalist parties of war, racism, sexism and strikebreaking!
As Marxists, we reject bourgeois pragmatism which began with genocide in the 16th century on the basis of racism and sexism. We reject electoralism which cannot cover up for genocide in Ukraine and Palestine. We defend the fundamental democratic right of youth to take to the streets and we recruit them to our PMP (proletarian military policy) alongside the ranks of the unions who need to organize self-defense militias against the state forces of imperialist powers of a system that is in its death agony. We know that class consciousness cannot blossom short of the lived experience of workers in struggle. And for that they need a political party that unites them on the basis of their common interest as workers creating the wealth, against racism, sexism and nationalism which the ruling class uses to divide and destroy our class.
By organizing our class in fighting labor parties we will destroy the hold of pragmatism, electoralism and divisions in our ranks and build a revolutionary movement. One capable of smashing the imperialist states and their proxies to raise up workers’ governments around the world that will expropriate the centuries of stolen wealth to build a socialist society. An egalitarian society which restores the harmony between humans and nature and creates the conditions for the survival of our planet.
Only fatalists think it will happen by itself! Even the capitalists’ spy agencies know better; that’s why they target the organizers of the workers and oppressed. We need an army of such organizers and leaders, a party to train them, and a class struggle that demonstrates its own power, independent and based on workers’ democracy! To begin, in the Unions we need class struggle caucuses that redirect the memberships’ thought and action away from class collaboration and to actions implementing a transitional program. These caucuses will fight to replace the class collaborators with ever more militant vanguard layers.
Only Trotsky’s Transitional Program for Permanent Revolution can arm the international working class to resolve the accelerating global terminal crisis of capitalism in decay. Unable to reverse the system in its terminal decline, the capitalist rulers have blown through every global warning marker. Oceans are warming, the poles are melting, reefs are dying, fisheries are depleted, climate systems change faster than the infrastructure designed for the 19th-20th centuries can be patched up by the capitalist grafters. The contending imperialist powers have turned trade wars into proxy wars over control of resources, markets and for strategic advantage. No surprise these rivalries are catastrophic for populations who find themselves in the way.
The Ukraine, Taiwan and Israeli regimes are wholly dependent on U.S.A. funding. The NATO encirclement of Russia is backfiring as the Ukrainian proxy regime is running short of ammunition and troops. Troops are mutinying, swimming across the Dnieper to safety. ‘Slava Ukraine’ is close to collapse as more men escape abroad rather than die in the meat grinder. Israel’s fragility is exposed; it is dependent on the U.S.A./UE (European Union) and NATO for both arms and defense. It cannot get away with its genocide of Palestine without the collaboration of the U.S.A. and the UE. Taiwan, despite its recognition as part of China, has been taken over and militarily occupied by the U.S. as a new proxy for the coming war: with China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the AUKUS partners mobilizing for war, coming perhaps as soon as next year.
In the imperialist nations vital resources are channeled away from social programs and into military production. In the U.S.A. the equivalent amount of the entire national debt has been spent on the military budget since 2000. Despite the enormous outlay, Russia has fought the US/NATO proxy Ukraine to a standstill in what is an inter-imperialist conflict. The $95 billion just allotted for wars in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan by the bi-partisan neocon cabal in Washington can’t match Russian missile production, let alone sustain Israel in a regional war. Those billions will never be more than a digital blip on Ukraine or Israel’s financial radar; the profits will go to Raytheon, Boeing, Rand, GE and the military industrial complex.
In the semi-colonies a national bourgeois comprador class participates in the imperialist parasitism perilously navigating between the declining USA/EU bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc. To the imperialists they offer the resources of the nation and the working class chained to the factory floor and broken by their ideological servants in media, academia, the union leaderships and the reformist and centrist parties. The economic crisis and imperialist competition expresses itself acutely in semi colonies. The burden of the capitalist system failing to counteract the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPTF) compounded by the necessary imperialist dynamic to dump the burden of the crisis on semi-colonies makes the working class in these countries super exploited.
South Africa, is threatened with sanctions for exposing the Gaza genocide to the world at the International Court of Justice. The sanctions only drive South Africa deeper into the China camp. The ANC and its left flank are hoping to attract Chinese investments which they then sell as ‘win-win’ deals to the masses as a path to a progressive form of state socialism modeled on China. U.S. imperialism responds by preparing for a ‘color revolution’ (HR 7256) backing the Democratic Alliance Party. Across the globe the workers, small farmers and oppressed are caught in a tug of war between these great powers!
In Zimbabwe, the state is attacking workers through capturing the dominant faction of the main trade union federation by enacting a Labour Amendment Act that criminalizes calling for and organizing collective job action. The state is maintaining a multi-currency system that they, together with business, manipulate to pay slave wages, giving the Chinese license and encouragement to disregard labor and environmental rights. Now they are introducing a new currency based on the theft of the value of workers incomes and savings. This goes along with the continued crackdown on basic worker rights to organize and strike and increased authoritarianism in defense of capitalist production with looting and corruption by the comprador bourgeoisie.
The rise of China as an imperialist state has found expression in the southern African region through fake anti-imperialist stances camouflaging the ongoing exploitation of labor power and the environment. Workers in the region must organize independently of both wings of imperialism and move beyond the collaborationist union leaders and bureaucrats through building shop floor controlled action bodies prepared to utilize tried and tested working class methods.
Imperialism is a death sentence for the workers of the world and only we can stop it! To do so we need our own political party, one based on working class political independence, based on our class experience of how labor is exploited by capitalism and how only class struggle and a transitional political program can resolve the crisis by building worker organizations to smash the capitalist state and create workers’ governments. Now is the moment to build a fighting workers-labor party and the revolutionary workers international needed to lead and coordinate the class struggle.
Our transitional program rejects the ideologies of pragmatism, patriarchy and post-modernism as the decadent genocidal culture of a dying capitalism throwing up and turbocharging all the old crap of past crimes against humanity. We reject racism, sexism and national chauvinism and denounce it as counter revolutionary. We affirm the positions of the Bolsheviks; down with Eurocentric white supremacy, national chauvinism of all shades, and the historic oppression of women. We build on the rich legacy of the historic collectivist struggles of slaves, women, peasants and workers in our struggle today. Workers and oppressed everywhere have the power and the will to resist and fight back.
The horror of the Zionist Israeli state violence against the Palestinian people cannot be stopped through moralist appeals to the parasitic exploiter class or their politicians! We need coordinated international actions: mass protests and worker actions such as labor political strikes, hot-cargoing of imperialist war goods to Israel, and sit-down strikes in the war industries. Workers parties, as part of a new Workers International, would organize and coordinate these actions on a world scale. But first we need to build our own mass revolutionary workers parties in every country to marshall the resources of the working class and poor farmers as one fist rather than atomized, decentralized, and apolitical protests sucked into single-issue dead ends and diversions in election years.
Independent workers parties and a workers’ international are needed that will take the rich historical lessons of the workers movement and encapsulate these lessons into a political program of transitional demands based on the method of Trotsky’s Fourth International that recognises the necessity for socialist revolution to halt the rush to extinction. For our class and species, we demand a future! For workers to live, imperialism must die!
Free Palestine!
Victory to Palestine! Defend the Palestinians! Drop all charges and free all Palestinian solidarity protesters! Down with Israel and theocracy! For a Socialist, federated West Asia!
We need to convene a new Zimmerwald to build a revolutionary opposition to inter-imperialist wars such as Ukraine and to agitate for dual defeatism to turn these wars into class wars at home against our “own” imperialist and proxy ruling classes.
Not one person, not one penny for the imperialist militaries! Billions for public works! Jobs for all through a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For a 100% cost of living increase linked to inflation!
For free quality healthcare, childcare, housing and education! For free abortion on demand! For women’s liberation through socialism!
The capitalists will only ever offer exploitation, war, racism, poverty, climate catastrophe…and fascism as their last line of defense. We need a Workers’ Government based on workers councils and defended by a workers militia to smash capitalism and carry out the tasks of building a socialist future.
For the nationalization without indemnification of the commanding heights of industry under democratic workers control as part of a centralized, planned world socialist economy.
Build Revolutionary Workers Parties and a new Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution! Workers of the World Unite!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/25/2024
An MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter lifts off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it transits the Strait of Hormuz off the waters of Iran [File: US Navy/Reuters]
Netanyahu has been trying to drag the U.S. into its ongoing ‘shadow war’ against Iran for decades. The U.S. wants its war with Iran but on its own terms, economic isolation, limited proxy engagements, shots across the bow, tepid challenges for sea lanes. None but the most flagrant neocons want tit-for-tat sparring to escalate to full blown and potentially nuclear warfare. Yet today sectors of the Israeli establishment seriously consider the Samson Option. The west holds its breath as Netanyahu’s war cabinet considers its options.
The working class needs its own intervention to stop the escalation towards WWIII! The UN and International Court of Justice have proven themselves as feckless talk shops of the imperialist dominated by ‘world order’ which negate any independent action of the Global South. Today workers and oppressed people need a New Zimmerwald to organize an internationalist class struggle against war and the root cause of war today–capitalist exploitation at home and imperialist oppression abroad.
By bombing the Iranian embassy in Syria and killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Israel provoked Iran in hopes of a retaliation of measured proportion which would stiffen the U.S. resolve. Losing the media war, Israel needs to turn world attention away from the genocide in Gaza and to reassert its role as the primary victim of irrational international anti-semitism. Zionism’s war has exposed its character as the bulldog of western imperialism so it needs to change the world’s conversation from its attempt to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, to the Iranian response. Never mind the fact that bombing the embassy violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations article 22, which made the premises of foreign missions inviolable.
Invoking Article 51, Iran responded on April 13,th 2024 by hitting Israel with dozens of drone and missile strikes targeting military installations, emphasizing their adherence to rules of engagement by not targeting civilian populations. The U.S. and UK responded as could be expected placing the blame on Iran and employing its resources to shield Israel from the incoming. This of course stands in stark contrast to the fact that they not only stood by failing to protect the civilians of Gaza while Israel bombed them, but continued to provide arms and logistical support to the Zionist aggressors even after having been exposed in the international court of Justice.
Western media brushes aside the provocation attempting to rally international outrage at Iran–as if history started yesterday! This won’t work in the Global South! The masses are applauding Iran’s action and have been hoping someone would intervene on behalf of the Palestinians! Of course, Iran will not press on to liberate Palestine, citing violations of their sovereignty as cause. In an alignment of forces even the Arab theocracies which are today navigating the space between the Chinese and U.S. imperialisms do not speak for their own people while they close their air space to Iranian overflights, distancing themselves from the Iranian action.
The hawkish Democratic Party, dominated by the neocons in Washington, are committed to the defense of Israel regardless of the 34,000 dead in Gaza. Arms keep flowing despite the feigned outrage at the deaths of a few aid workers! Biden feels the pressure on the campaign trail as Democratic party events are being disrupted by Palestine Solidarity activists and his government stands accused of participation in the genocide by arming the Zionist settler state. Netanyahu, observing the backpedaling of the U.S., has been stoking the fires of regional war, cashing in on the U.S. promise of unconditional defense and catching Biden in the crosshairs. Trump, sniping from the sidelines, claims this would never have happened on his watch.
Biden, losing in the polls, has made gestures to counter the Arab American community’s campaigns of withholding votes in the Democratic primary. Netanyahu also wants to stay in office to stay out of jail and could not let Biden play big daddy and broker an unwanted peace. Provoking war with Iran is a gambit to pull Biden off the fence. But the U.S. does not want nuclear war and knows the unhinged Netanyahu with fantasies of Biblical proportions could cross that trip wire. No doubt after Iran took its shot, Biden was on the horn with Netanyahu trying to calm the whole affair down. Biden lost Afghanistan, or so the story goes….he does not want to lose Israel, at least before the election. The next few hours will be a walk back from the brink. But the masses in the streets want a resolution that ends the genocide in Gaza and the accelerating pogroms and occupations in the West Bank. So neither Biden nor Netanyahu can resolve the contradictions that are foremost in front of the world today. The Zionist colonial settler state must be smashed. For workers revolution and a socialist Palestine! For a Socialist Federation of West Asia!
The terminal decline of capitalism offers up a cesspool of the most reactionary ideas. Ideas which the ‘forward thinking’ intelligentsia presumed were shadows of a long buried past are today normalized in the rantings of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Trump and and even many old fashioned liberal Democrats. They dehumanize oppressed people from Haiti to Gaza as pests, gangsters and terrorists. This is awkwardly reminiscent of how every oppressor throughout history has demonized the oppressed!
Zionism is losing the propaganda war because the mainstream media is rigged by its corporate owners in favor of imperialism, and everyone knows it, so they can no longer maintain the hypocrisy that white supremist colonialist regimes are forces of democracy!
Israel is a puppet state which cannot survive without the U.S. backing. The U.S. won’t swat them down because it is the U.S. aircraft carrier on land in the region. It stands as a bulwark against the regional powers and serves to divide the Arab nations and their Iranian neighbors. Israel serves to keep the national bourgeoisie of the neighboring nations tied to imperialism and committed to stopping the masses from advancing the permanent revolution and winning socialism by defeating imperialism.
Israel is an occupier founded upon the mutual interest of Western Imperialist intention to control Arab oil and Jewish capitalists’ class interests.
Palestine is the last of the 20thC. settler colonial states in struggle for its liberation. 75 years of determined struggle hardened ideological lines on both sides.
So we need an international proletarian military policy to turn war in Palestine into war against the actual puppet master, the U.S. ruling class, and all the other imperialist governments who support the Zionist Israeli state. In the unfolding war between the U.S. proxy Israel and Iran we stand for the unconditional military defense of Iran without giving any political support to its theocratic capitalist regime.
Build the mass actions in solidarity with Palestine and Iran up into labor struggles internationally against the imperialist backers of Israel (USA, UK, France, Germany and their proxies Ukraine etc). Create teach-ins at every labor council, to debate Palestine in front of the working class. Fight for the political independence of the working class! Give no votes to capitalist and popular front parties!
Win the workers movement to political strikes in defense of the Palestinians, against the arming of Israel and against all Israeli and imperialist military actions. Block military shipments. Dockers must initiate strikes to refuse loading Israeli commercial ships and hot cargo and divert military and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. This is how anti-imperialist workers must turn the imperialist proxy war into a class war at home!
Propagandize the soldiers, sailors and airmen; show them the facts that they are to be used for genocide in order to hold back the working masses and keep oil profits flowing between the comprador bourgeois oil barrons and big western oil interests.
Victory to the Palestine Resistance! Defeat the IDF! Defend Iran! Build revolutionary workers’ parties in the imperialist nations and throughout West Asia! For a new Zimmerwald to organize against imperialist wars! For a new Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/14/2024
Haiti is experiencing yet another moment of great instability as state power is disintegrating. Hunger and misery plague the country and armed gangs are spread across the capital, blocking roads and taking over public buildings. A consequence of centuries of control and exploitation by French and later US imperialism of the country.
Haiti had the only successful slave revolution. Its military defeat of France in 1804 sparked the wave of national independence across Latin America led by Simon Bolivar who began his struggle to ‘liberate’ Latin America from the European powers from an already liberated Haiti.
Yet Bolivar refused to come to the aid of Haiti fearing that it might inspire workers and peasants to overthrow the Latin American bourgeoisies. Isolated without support from the Bolivariains, Haiti was re-colonised by France and Napoleon forced the free slaves to pay the price of their freedom as part of the national debt well into the 20th century.
Imperialism and the Latin American bourgeoisies never accepted Haiti’s freedom because it stood out as the only example of a national liberation struggle led by slaves. Since that time it has suffered countless occupations and interventions by American imperialism which regarded it as the poor child on its back door step, either occupying or creating puppet governments for more than a century until the election of Aristide in 1991. The populist priest Aristide was elected President in 1991 but ousted by a US backed military coup that same year. Another US military occupation followed and Aristide returned in 1994 to complete his term of office. Aristide was re-elected in 2000 but fell out with the US and its neoliberal policies and was forced out of the country in 2004 by a US/French coup.
In 2004, MINUSTAH, a US intervention fronted by the UN, militarily occupied Haiti, which lasted until 2017. Under the pretext of taking care of security, it imposed terror on the population and ensured that American companies could control oil and other resources etc without risk of democratic intervention.
MINUSTAH was led by Brazil, which at the time was governed by Lula, a Popular Front government that served the interests of imperialism, whether at home or abroad. The general that Lula sent to command MINUSTAH in Haiti was the general who later became Bolsonaro's right-hand man in his government.
Haiti is the historic expression of naked capitalist barbarism from colonisation in the 15th C to its terminal crisis today. It turns the imperialist narrative of the civilizing mission on its head when slaves were the only exploited class to win freedom from bourgeois rule. In a time of decadence in American imperialism, which is in dispute with rising Chinese imperialism, the USA intends to hold on to Haiti at all costs. Through the UN, it is trying to create a security force in Haiti that appears to be independent of the hated US and UN occupations. Its attempt to use Kenyan police officers is opposed both in Kenya and in the Global South. In Haiti, the rebels have rejected all external intervention outright.
In the face of all imperialist exploitation and attacks, workers and poor people in Haiti have always resisted. Today, many of the gangs that the media demonizes are organizations that were formed in neighborhoods for self-defense against state abuse and crime. One of those who is recognized as the main leader of the popular revolution, Jimmy Cherizier, who has united a number of territorial ‘gangs’ into the G6 which fights corruption and crime and seeks to organise all the working masses in an armed struggle.
Cherizier makes it clear that he is fighting against the foreign intervention that has led the country to misery and chaos for decades. Tired of government leaders who are just puppets of imperialism, he demanded the departure of the US favoured Prime Minister Ariel Henry and prevented his return to Haiti. He is now fighting the installation by the US of a Presidential Transition Council that is not elected by the people and does not represent them.
We support the rebels who take up arms and resist imperialist domination and the national bourgeoisie who only follow orders from their international leaders. It is a basic democratic right to rebel against hunger, famine, poverty, lack of infrastructure and corruption that plague the country.
We strongly oppose the demonisation of working class rebels like Cherizier as ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ on the part of the bourgeoisie and the fake Left. It is patronizing and racist to label the descendants of revolutionary slaves as doomed to fight among themselves and incapable of resisting their oppressors. The duty of the revolutionary left is to come to the aid of such incipient armed anti-imperialist rebellions and fight for their national self-determination.
It is also the duty of the revolutionary left to win the resistance to the permanent revolution for a socialist republic and prevent the revolution being overwhelmed by the bourgeois counter-revolution. Haiti was betrayed by the first Bolivarian revolution and now by the second of Castro/Chavez. The G6 led by Cherizier needs to advance towards the organization of workers and poor peasants into armed committees who make this fight in an organized and classist way. Haiti has no way out of the barbarism it finds itself in without the seizure of power, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the expulsion of imperialism.
It is necessary to build a party of world revolution that guides workers in this moment of instability that affects countries around the world, especially in the global south. The so-called global south means the semi-colonial countries exploited and controlled by imperialism and which today are suffering the instability of a world order in which the decadence of the USA puts it directly in dispute with the ascending imperialisms of China and Russia, transmitted to the semi-colonies and moving towards a new world war.
We are for a new Zimmerwald to bring together a revolutionary left and build a program of transition to socialism for the working and poor masses in the struggle for the world revolution. A revolutionary leadership that fights Castro-Chavism as a counter-revolutionary force that prevents class independence and leads workers to an International Popular Front with the Chinese imperialist bloc and to die in inter-imperialist wars.
For class independence, for the World Party of Socialist Revolution based on Trotsky's Transitional Program! For Permanent Revolution!
Hōne Heke chopped down the flagpole with the British flag at Kororāreka four times (July 1844-March 1845)
All the old shit flying around the Treaty, everything that is not about Māori land rights and the necessity to nationalise the land to restore them, is immaterial. Ann Salmond documents what Māori chiefs said about the Treaty. They knew from experience that missionaries and settlers coveted the land as their private property. Yet they were promised chiefly sovereignty over their land; and their land rights protected by the Queen. They had the right to sell to the Crown which would stop land being wrongly taken. That promise was never kept. That was the fraud then and now and will remain so until the Treaty is honoured.
The war in the north in the 40’s was the first land war as chiefs protested the fraudulent failure of the Governor to protect their land rights. Hōne Hekes symbolic felling of the flagpole at Kororāreka (see graphic) speaks volumes. Then, in 1852 the Queen signed off the Constitution Act granting the settlers a colonial state with the power to dictate land policy. Self-rule meant white rule only as those with private property had the right to vote.
The state began to create legal ways to privatise land, often creating rifts within hapu and iwi, leading inevitably to the Kingitanga and the organised resistance to fraudulent land sales. The settler state then declared such resistance to the colonial state land grab to be rebellion, and the pretext for war to take the land.
Marx in Capital Vol 1 chapter 33 published in 1867 writes that the white settler colonies reveal the truth hidden in the home countries, that capitalism must create the conditions for capitalist production – the privatisation of land, creation of a landless labour force, and capital to invest in the exploitation of labour power.
In Chapter 31 Marx also shows his long-standing interest in the whole process of ‘primitive accumulation’ necessary for the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” at the expense of indigenous peoples.
E.G. Wakefield’s ‘Systematic colonisation’ planned to transplant capitalism fully assembled in the settler colonies by buying land, and artificially creating a labour force with NZ Company land priced ‘sufficiently’ to force workers to work for capitalists until they could afford to buy land. In reality the plan collapsed and gave way to the wild Southern frontier of decades of land wars against the indigenous people for land.
The Crown’s right of pre-emption might have slowed down the theft of the land if the state had honoured chiefly sovereignty. Instead, the colonial state became the wholesale land agent. In the 1850s Grey defrauded the chiefs, sold land cheap creating a free for all to set the price of land to meet the growing demand of the hordes of settlers escaping unemployment and destitution at home.
Marx depicts this wild frontier in the fate of John Peel of the Swan River in Australia. Having imported capital, machines and labourers to assemble a capitalist venture, he found his labourers owed him no loyalty and ‘shot through’ to the bush to claim land to work for their own subsistence.
Far from ‘transplanting’ capitalism to the colonies, the settler colonies became a state managed “free market” where white settlers and their colonial state collaborated to dispossess Māori and set up as self-employed peasant farmers. The second land war from the 1860s to 1880s followed inevitably as the numbers of settlers increased the demand for land which Māori chiefs would not sell.
Now the reality that British imperialist policy was driven by the laws of capitalist development is revealed. For the colonial state to create the necessary conditions for colonial capitalism, it was necessary to privatise property, remove Māori from the best land, create a landless labour force, and build a state which legalised this process and the military enforce it.
By the turn of the 20th century all the best Māori land was converted into private property, the people of the land, now labourers, subsisting on what was left of their land.
Marx had a lot to say over the importance of land rights in the struggle to end capitalism and build socialism. The privatisation of land under capitalism becomes a barrier to the further development of the forces of production and raises the demand for land nationalisation.
Historically it was no accident that the predatory white settler wars against indigenous peoples was to privatise their common land. That is exactly what the tribal chiefs did after the fall of Rome when they setup tributary societies based on extracting rent from the peasantry.
Most of the feudal landed gentry had no incentive to increase labour productivity on the land. Those that did made the transition to modern capitalist agriculture throwing the surplus peasantry off the land into industry as wage labour or the reserve army of the unemployed.
As Marx explained, white settler colonisation was the result of this ‘destruction of the commons’ which created a surplus population of the unemployed who then migrated and grabbed the land off the indigenous peoples as their means of subsistence.
As we have seen, the failure to transplant the social relations of capitalism in the colonies ready-made, led to an expanding warlike frontier as waves of new settlers arrived hungry for land. The settler colonial states, freed from the direct control of the mother country, created a peasant family mode of production, from which rent would be extracted by the global capitalist mode of production.
What is named the Peasant Family Mode of Production (PFM) in Development of Capitalism in New Zealand, arises at the expense of the Māori Lineage Mode (MLM), but both are subordinated to the Capitalist Mode (CMP) in its extraction of rent (the labour value produced on the land).
Both submodes struggled to evolve, but the MLM faced a disadvantage as it has lost its best land. It becomes a source of cheap labour for the growth of the PFM creating a basic class division between the white petty bourgeoisie and Māori subsistence surplus labour that persists to this day founded on land theft justified by a racist ‘civilising mission’ culture.
Meanwhile the PFM divided into poor, petty bourgeois and capitalist farmers as the majority faced debt or bankruptcy while a minority increased their share of the rent by employing farm labour.
We can now explain why the ongoing debate around the Treaty is immaterial so long as Māori land rights are not the objective. If the fraud is the expropriation of communal land as a result of the land wars, then that stolen land must be returned to the Māori owners.
So it is time to dispense with the political theatre of Waitangi Day set aside for rehearsing old arguments about the Treaty unaware of the subterranean rumbles of the ongoing clash of modes of production.
The Māori leader who came closest to Marx in understanding that the colonisation of New Zealand was part of an international assault on indigenous peoples to subordinate their societies to imperialism, was Te Whiti o Rongomai. He saw the theft of the land and its money price as a necessary condition of the capitalist mode of production, and his solution was equally clear – occupation of the common land of hapu and iwi to defend the Māori lineage mode of production.
Today the minimum demand to honour the Treaty must be the abolition of private property in the land through its nationalisation by the state. This would confront the petty bourgeois racist culture head on and allow the majority to determine land policy by means of leases with conditions that respect Māori collective use of the land, and the respect for nature in the face of climate catastrophe due to global warming.
Of course, this is expressed as honouring the right of Te Tiriti for self-determination which in the Māori context means tino rangatiratanga. We have written about de-colonisation at length from the 1970s on. We argued for Māori self-determination in Towards a Socialist Polynesia (1982) in response to the impact of the Springbok tour and Donna Awatere’s book Māori Sovereignty which shuns Marxist analysis of land rights for a petty bourgeois cultural critique of white racism.
What makes ‘honouring the Treaty’ even more explosive today is the wave of radical Māori youth coming up against a reactionary white supremacist political barrier fuelled by the terminal crisis threatening global capitalism.
As that crisis is unloaded by the ruling class onto marginalised workers, poor farmers and youth, the contradiction breaks through the surface of society as the class struggle over land rights. That struggle will unite all workers and empower them to end capitalism and build a socialist world.
The crisis in Argentina is the necessary result of the terminal crisis of global capitalism in its death agony. We say the crisis is terminal because capitalism can no longer reproduce itself when it is destroying its conditions of existence in desperation to escape Marx’s basic law, the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Yet there is no escape. The only way out for the imperialist powers is to download their crisis onto the semi-colonies which means the backs of the most exploited workers and poor farmers and force them to pay for the crisis.
The mounting escalation of global debt and stagnation of value creation gives no way out for capital other than attacking workers with extreme shock treatment - a forced depression in which jobs and living standards are destroyed along with the destruction of nonprofitable industry and business. History has thrown up Milei as the executioner of the workers, and there is no way out but the fight to destroy capitalism before it destroys us. The alternative is either socialism or fascism. For workers to live, capitalism must die!
Milei can’t solve the bosses’ crisis
The terminal crisis has thrown up Milei in a desperate attempt to make the working masses pay for the bosses’ crisis. Climate change is unforgiving especially to capital intensive, mono-cropping agricultural models which leave entire regions vulnerable as production for the world market replaces production for local consumption. Over-extended in debt to the IMF, the finance fraction of Argentina's ruling class has made a jump from the popular front to outright reactionary proto fascist solutions. This bloc of Argentina’s ruling class with its US masters can no longer depend on the Peronists to contain the masses and have opted for Melei to impose massive cutbacks in jobs and social spending to make the workers pay for the national debt. These conditions have been met by an upsurge in working class anger.
The US is pushing for a Bonaparte who can lead from above to impose austerity but maintain a balance of class forces. So far Trump and Bolsonaro have proven to be lumpen Bonapartes who cannot fulfill that task. Milei is already the most lumpen of all. Such is the terminal crisis he cannot even maintain a balance between the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. So far his edicts have blown up in his face. His anti-communism, dollarisation and rejection of deals with China are facing resistance from the Peronist fraction which can offer de-dollarisation deals from China and the BRICS+ and to bring agribusiness and the union bureaucracy into a new popular front with China.
What about the Workers
On January 24th the masses showed they are willing and able to fight! The leadership of the workers movement however, while quick to unfurl their red flags, initiated the Day of Action as a “pressure relief valve” more than a workers uprising. The FITU and its 5 constituent self- identified Trotskyist parties, act to divert the mass upsurge in defense of workers’ rights rights into their electoral project, a throwback to Bernstein and Kautsky opposed to the revolutionary method of Luxemburg and Trotsky. They have squandered 10 years of Argentina’s workers’ fight to build mass organs of extra-parliamentary power. Today workers’ councils, modeled on soviets as the basis for dual power, are at the top of the agenda!
The vanguard workers supporting FITU and other left organizations must break the stranglehold of decomposing currents of Morenoism and Altamarism. The main strains of left reformism (PO, PST and the LIT-CI etc.) who still lay claim to the legacy of Trotskyism, have long sold out to capitalist rule. Altamira in 2017 cast the PST as “Podemos in diapers' which in turn called the PO propagandists. This rare moment of theoretical clarity did not alter the fact that both currents are drowning the masses in the Kautskyan marsh.
The nature of the FITU ‘united front’ is an unprincipled agreement, burying its differences and betraying internationalism on every burning acid test! The FITU has no agreed position on the Russo-Ukrainian proxy war between the Western and Eastern imperialist blocs! Since the outbreak of war we have called for a NEW ZIMMERWALD drawing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht to fight against the inter-imperialist proxy war and for workers’ revolutions to end and prevent war.
Despite the infighting in FITU none of its adherents nor its electoral strategy remotely qualify as the United Front strategy of the 1923 congress of the Third International, or the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International! Commanding tens of thousands of votes and a few parliamentarians, their Leninist pretentions are exposed as propping up electoral gains in a bourgeois parliament. Again electoral, national pacifist Kautskyism!
A new party and a new revolutionary workers’ international to end the crisis of revolutionary leadership is the order of the day! That party has to be rooted historically in the Argentine experience with a fully developed revolutionary program integrated into an international transitional program. Only such a program can turn bankrupt reformist electoralism into the revolutionary rostrum of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. Those who know this on the factory floor should begin organizing to take back your unions today! From that vantage you can see your revolutionary road to socialism and take it!
Enter China
The international crisis of capitalism, its terminal crisis, requires the balancing of the IMF debt and trade imbalances on the backs of the workers across the Global South. Loans and currency swaps from China were used to pay back IMF debt in Yuan and IMF loans have been used to repay China! Workers carry the gold of one imperialist master to the banks of the other and back again while they rape our soil and enslave us with debt! For the working class to eat we must defeat not just the Austerity but its root cause imperialism. China is making its play to use finance capital and trade deals to counter the IMF and the Dollar debt draining wealth to Wall Street banks.
China may win the ‘left’ wing of the Peronists and layers of the Trade union leadership and left organizations to its “progressive” pose as the fair players on the international economic stage. We say China is not an oppressed semi-colony. Rather it has emerged as a great imperialist power in a bipolar world challenging for supremacy in surplus value extraction from the Global South - Argentina included. Don't fall for it!
Enough pressure relief “Days of Action” intended to pressure the left faction of the bourgeoisie against the right and ultra right! The bosses’ governments come and go, but all agree on one thing - make the workers and poor farmers pay for the crisis. We say vanguard workers must build our class’s revolutionary party armed with a transitional program. With these tools workers can create their own future based on a centrally planned economy, under workers self management which exposes the bosses as obsolete and makes them pay!
The Transitional Program
To win, Argentine workers, landless farmers and ranch hands, must build mass assemblies of the rank and file (base), form workers councils in every agricultural town, industrial center and working class neighborhood. Build workers' self-defense guards to fight the fascists and defend the mass movement to expropriate foreign and national capitals; cancel the foreign debt and reorganize the economy under workers control! Build socialism by igniting regional revolution that unites the industrial, mineral and agricultural might of all of Latin America! Prepare the indefinite general strike which poses the question of which class rules creating the conditions for for a workers’ government to expropriate the expropriators. To win, it is necessary to build a revolutionary party and program able to guide workers in the struggle to seize state power!
Jobs for all and a living wage now!
For the Sliding Scale of Wages and Hours enforced by price and neighborhood committees committed to survival of our class, something the Federations present leaders never have done!
For class struggle caucuses to carry out the renovation of our unions with ever more militant class struggle leaderships and immediate recall of class betrayers.
Down with Milei and all the bourgeois politicians. They must all go, and not one remain!
For the Indefinite General Strike! Form strike committees in every factory town and workers neighborhood!
Build workers self defense squads, from armed pickets to increasingly coordinated workers militias against the fascists and the capitalist and state thugs.
Convene a national congress of the workers base to set up workers councils across the country!
For a workers’ government based on workers’ councils and workers’ power!
Abolish the Debt!
Expropriate Big Capital, Capitalist Firms national and international and run them under workers control!
Smash the Capitalist State, servant of the stock markets and imperialist powers!
For a socialist federation of South America!
For a new revolutionary workers party in Argentina integrated in a workers’ international - the united world party of revolution based on the method and program of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program.
Palestinian residents of the town of Ramle raise their hands in surrender to Israeli soldiers on July 11, 1948. Photo: Reuters
Introduction: Zionism must go!
Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank opens the prospect of a rapid acceleration of imperialist rivalry to redivide the world between the Western Bloc led by the U.S. and the Eastern Bloc led by China. The opening of this new front between the Blocs will likely spread across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) joining the existing fronts and creating new ones threatening World War III. These Blocs originated at the end of the Cold War when in 1989-91 Russia and China were finally brought to their knees forcing the ruling bureaucracies to embark on capitalist restoration.
Yet this historic defeat for workers was far from the ‘end of history’ as the victory of Western capitalism over Eastern ‘communism’. Russia and China withstood imperialist recolonisation and emerged as new imperialist powers. This set in motion a new bipolar phase in the long running dynamic of inter-imperialist rivalry for control of Eurasia. Both Western and Eastern Blocs had no option but to advance their interests at the expense of their rival but now under conditions of the economic decline of the Western Bloc relative to the rising Eastern Bloc. This saw the Western Bloc forced to go beyond diplomacy and economic sanctions to increasingly embark on a succession of proxy hot wars and invasions, from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, Syria and Libya in the 2010s, Ukraine in the 2020s and Palestine today.
It is within this context that we can understand the character of the war in Palestine today and consider its consequences for the wider geopolitical realignment of imperialist forces. Israel at the level of economic relations is not different from any of the other settler colonies that came into existence to build bourgeois nation states to protect their own national capital. However, since it came into formal existence in the post WWII war period of world-wide so-called decolonisation, it has special characteristics that must be explained.
We will show that Israel’s ‘exceptionalism’ is due to the historic collaboration of the Zionist organizations with the imperialist ruling classes, including not only the British but also the fascists Mussolini and Hitler. The Zionists’ agreements with European leaders were based on the ideology they shared with the imperialist ruling classes, that Jews as a people were incompatible with the national characters of European nations. They then made pacts with these ruling classes, notably the Nazi regime, to deport Jews to Palestine, their proclaimed ‘homeland of Israel,’ and proceeded to build military organizations to displace the Palestinians. Immigrants to Israel were selected to favor capitalists and petty bourgeoisie committed to the Zionist cause. As a result, Jewish workers who joined working class united fronts to resist fascism in Europe were betrayed, as were the millions of Jews who suffered a genocide under fascist rule.
The formation of a settler state in 1948 was thus based on the economics and ideology of the Zionist bourgeoisie at the expense of Jewish workers worldwide. This had suited the economic interests of the British who helped create favorable conditions for the Zionists to build the administrative and military elements of their state in the post-WWI period. And with the post-war settlement following WWII which divided Europe between the Atlantic powers and the Soviet Union, the U.S. readily adopted Israel as a ‘land-based aircraft carrier’ to act as a forward military base of the U.S. in the Middle East. Overnight the Anti-Defamation League converted to Zionism. And once the extent of Middle East oil was understood generally by U.S. imperialism, the Zionist state project was approved and its existence guaranteed.
In the 75 years since, Israel backed by the U.S. imperialist Bloc has helped stabilize the Arab states allowing the Western Bloc to intervene at will. The Zionist’s reward has been the constant encroachment on Palestinian land by any means necessary right up to October 7, 2023. What is ‘exceptional’ about Israel then is its special role in sharing U.S. ‘exceptionalism’, that is, its impunity in projecting economic and physical expansion in Palestine by means of a brutal military occupation. This expansion was justified by the Zionist ideology of the ‘chosen people’ and led to the systematic dehumanization and genocide of the Palestinian people.
Then October 7, 2023 happened. In the 21st century, Capital’s terminal crisis in destroying its conditions of existence has intensified inter-imperialist rivalry, forcing the downloading of the costs of the crisis onto their allies, their client states, and finally onto the oppressed working masses. The class contradiction between Zionist settler colonialism and its oppressed Palestinian subjects intensified to breaking point with Hamas’ breakout from the Gaza concentration camp, revealing the hollowed-out fragility of both the declining U.S. imperialism and its military proxy, Israel.
Lenin said that a revolutionary crisis arises out of the failure of the bourgeoisie to rule in the old way, colliding with the working masses’ refusal to be ruled in the old way. The Hamas uprising signaled the disruption of the longstanding special relation between the U.S. and Israel, and tested the strength of this special relation, and in turn, relations with the Arab regimes of MENA. The cumulative build-up of military attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank about to be ‘normalized’ by an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia sparked off Hamas military action. The Zionist’s reaction was to reach deep into its reactionary proto-fascist ideology of ‘blood and soil’ and to bring on the final solution – the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
That a genocide by the Zionist state was not stopped by the U.S. and its close allies, demonstrates to the world’s workers and oppressed that the imperialist ruling classes cannot rule in the old way with impunity. Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ has been rejected by the masses for its incredible brutality. The Zionist ideology which projects its own anti-Semitism onto its opponents is exposed as cynical and hypocritical. The ‘chosen people’ cannot hide behind their holocaust. They must decide, do they condone genocide, or reject Zionist ideology?
The Palestinians represent the vanguard of the world revolution in resisting their ‘dehumanization’ as ‘human animals’. There is no moral equivalence between the occupying Zionist state oppressors and the occupied stateless Palestinian people. Palestinians are fighting a war of national liberation which can succeed only if they win the right to return to the land from the ‘river to the sea’. The world’s workers must join forces with them in the fight for self-determination, leading the struggle to build an international United Front against imperialism and its political allies. To prevent the imperialists, West and East, turning this liberation war into one more proxy war like Ukraine, this united front must build a new party of socialist revolution with a transitional program to create soviets and workers’ governments everywhere.
Can the U.S. or China Blocs Free Palestine? NO!
The war on Gaza is realigning the two Blocs at a rapid rate as it reflects rising pressure on the fault line between Europe and Asia in West Asia. The ‘geopolitical’ experts note that the military invasion of Gaza and the armed settlers actions in the West Bank by Israel marks a ‘historical shift’. The narrative from the West sees this as the ultimate test of ‘Western Values’, i.e. human rights, democracy and freedom from ‘terror’, against the axis of evil – Islamics, communism, terror. So, the Western imperialist powers stand or fall on Israel’s right as a nation state to ‘defend itself’ against Islamic terrorism.
The counter-narrative from the East is that this is the ‘end of civilization’ understood as the reign of the European/Anglo-American powers which has lasted for centuries. Israel is a settler colony and does not have the right as an occupying power to wage war against a stateless people, let alone one it is occupying, or to deny Palestine the same national rights under existing international law, UN resolutions etc,. Moreover, if the West is really defending its values of democracy and freedom, perhaps it should be taking Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC), as it does with Russia over alleged war crimes in Ukraine. And it should object to the IDF invasion of Gaza causing rising mass deaths of women and children, going beyond ethnic cleansing, to actual genocide.
What both the U.S. and China Blocs have in common, is the conception of world geopolitics where states compete through diplomacy, economic or military action, and arrive at a new balance of power, or ‘settlements’, of the stronger over the weaker. The assumption on both sides is that this process is based on ‘reason’. Political analyst Pepe Escobar is a good example of such thinking. He conceives of a world where the disturbances of a rational balance of power results from ‘irrationality’. That ‘irrationality’ means nations acting in their own interests against others which blowback to damage their interests. The current classic case is the West fighting a proxy war to expand NATO in Ukraine at the expense of Russia and the multi-polar Bloc aligned with China. This war is ‘írrational’ as it backfires and strengthens that bloc at the expense of the Western Bloc. For Escobar the Eastern bloc is rational in seeking negotiation and settlement of differences short of initiating wars.
Therefore, Israel as a military proxy of the Western Bloc conducting a genocidal war against Palestinians is ‘irrational’. It cannot advance its interests when it causes a massive blowback from the multi-polar Bloc, including most of the MENA states. The solution must be a re-balancing of both poles as part of a rational global order. So we see China, Russia, and the BRICS lining up behind Palestine to demand a UN controlled ceasefire to allow a negotiated settlement – a Palestinian state (apartheid statelet!) alongside an inevitably Zionist Israel! On the other side, the U.S., UK and its EU allies are so arrogant they don’t see the ‘irrationality’ of going further into debt financing Israel’s expansionist war and failing to put a stop to it.
Clearly the trans-Atlantic capitalist elites still have nostalgic delusions in a glorious historic Eurocentric hegemony over Asia and the Global South. This zombie-like Euro elite fears the loss of its declining hegemony as its zero to the sum of the China Bloc. This fear is real because while geopolitics may be the Great Game for Eurasia, the real player is the global working class that has never been reduced to a spectator in some conspiratorial game between ruling classes. This class exists as the historic protagonist for a new world which ends imperialism and its wars, when the only war is class war. It is the class struggle that forces the imperialists to go to war over their spheres of interest. In the last analysis it is the terminal crisis of capital awakening the working masses that will put an end to ruling classes and their world wars. It is the profit motive which drives great power rivalry beyond the abstract rationality of equilibrium, to the material reality of the class struggle for the survival of the fittest.
In the end it is the need for energy that drives the profit system. And it is this ever increasing energy consumption of capitalist production exhausting the world’s energy resources that is destroying the ecological equilibrium on Earth. So there is nothing ‘rational’ or ‘balanced’ about either pole in this bi-polar world continuing this destructive rampage against nature and humanity.
The great powers fight over access to cheap energy, raw materials and labor power, necessary for the production of surplus-value and profits. The failure of the U.S. Bloc to accumulate profits in the 21st century to match the rate of growth of the China Bloc explains the current power struggle. The terminal crisis of capital in the 21st century. expresses the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society against nature which makes capitalism destroy itself, opening the road for socialism.
This means today that there is no solution to the century-long war of Zionism against the Palestinians that can be negotiated by the imperialist Blocs that will bring freedom and democracy for the masses. The only ‘rational’ solution capable of stopping such genocidal wars is the victory of the masses in the class war against global capital to stop its destruction of the planet. The masses must support Palestinian self-determination against both imperialist Blocs and all their client state proxies’ endorsement of reactionary capitalism, transforming this struggle as the Permanent Revolution to overthrow the Zionist regime and install a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
What is Zionism?
The Zionist origins from the liberal imperialist Theodor Herzl to Vladimir Jabotinsky of the ‘revisionist’ current is an unbroken thread down to Netanyahu. We will show how Zionist ideology develops by both reflecting and rationalizing its material base as a developing settler state. Most working class Jews understood Zionism as pro-imperialist, pro-Nazi and anti-Bolshevik for economic reasons. So they had little interest in bourgeois nation building. Zionism arose as a bourgeois project late in capitalist development when most Jews were already assimilated into capitalist social relations. Fascism was the reactionary throwback of failing finance capital bent on destroying the political unity between working class Jews with the broader working class. The creation of Israel by the imperialists in their economic interests meant that the Zionist ideology had to adapt in order to keep pace with their desired role forIsrael in the decline and degeneration of capitalism during the epoch of imperialism, and now sinking into its terminal crisis. Though its basic claims of its ideology are unchanging, their expression has to become more violent, fascist-like, and its religious rationalizations more bizarre and extreme.
Understanding Zionism’s campaign to equate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, requires an examination of its historical record. Documents reveal not only that anti-Semitism gave rise to nationalist Zionism but that it was not the Jewish people’s only option nor their first choice. It was, from the start, the Jewish capitalist class’s solution to capitalism’s effects on the Jewish populations in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ across Eastern Europe in the age of nation building and to the irrationalism of imperialism in crisis. It emerged, as an ideology, among Jewish intelligentsia and was championed by bourgeois Jews seeking a home to build their wealth and soil upon which they could plant and defend their industries and capital. As a capitalist class project it was not readily adopted by the Jewish masses. But they, or more precisely the Jewish worker’s labor power would be needed by the Jewish capitalist and their youth as cannon fodder to fight for the nation wherever he set up shop. Would that Jewish capitalist’s profits be assimilated by the national capital of the Great Powers? Or, could a national homeland be found for Jewish national capital?
In the late 19th and early 20th century pogroms across Eastern Europe and Ukraine killed 150,000 Jews foreshadowing the coming Holocaust. Zionism, the ideological response to pogroms, was unsuccessful in winning broad support among Jewish people until after Hitler’s ‘final solution.’ Having rejected Jewish refugees for years the allied victors stood shamefaced. The allies had no plan for restitution of Jewish property. Jews and other survivors were shuttled from concentration camps to Displaced Persons (DPs) camps. Restrictions on Jewish immigration would only be slightly loosened in the UK and USA. The British realized a flood of immigration to Palestine would stoke the fears of the indigenous Palestinians so they stymied The Exodus at the port of Cyprus threatening to send the DPs back to Germany. A standoff ensued, lives were lost and the British backed down. In the U.S. a token lifting of immigration quotas, to save face, was too little too late. By the time the Displaced Persons Act was revised in 1950 the majority of the displaced Jews had emigrated to occupied Palestine.
“Never Again!” The anti-fascist slogan attributed to Jews liberated from Buchenwald, was politicized to bind world Jewry and Zionism as one. Stalin’s recognition of Israel was the fulfillment of Churchill’s fight against Bolshevism for the Jewish soul. In turn and with UN sanction Zionism gained international moral authority: any opposition to the Zionist colonial settler state and its nation building project became by agreed bourgeois definition–anti-Semitic.
Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris an avowed ‘two-state solution’ Zionist, instructs those attempting to understand the ‘Rise of Zionism,’ to consider “age old millenarian impulses,” the “return to Zion,” “bound up with the cosmic, messianic theme of collective redemption,” as an ideology in search of its moment; that moment arrives at the Diaspora when it is confronted by the national consolidations of Europe and its effects on populations in the Eastern European “Pale of Settlement” tortured with endless anti-Semitic abuses, insults, and pogroms. [Benny Morris Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict. 1881-2001 pg. 14-15]
The claim that Zionism represents all Jews, a claim made since the 19th century to justify the need for a homeland, encountered spiritual, religious and working class opposition. For the Hassidim Erez Yisrael was spiritually the land of God within, the inner voice heard as wisdom which emerges through Talmudic study, prayer, ecstatic dance and song. Such practice would usher in the messianic age and the Third Temple could then be rebuilt. Such holdovers from a dying age would have to be overcome for an emergent Jewish bourgeois class to become a ruling class. Waiting for self actualizing spiritualists and the return of the messiah was not sufficiently expeditious to keep pace in the age of nation building. And Jewish ideology has a habit of being written and rewritten as per current conditions. The fate of the eternal souls of Jews exiled in Babylon is debated by Talmudic scholars [in Ketubot 111a], not all of whom agreed but some do that, “[H]e who resides in Babylonia, it is as if he resided in the Land of Israel.” Spiritual arguments for remaining in the Diaspora had to be defeated among the Jews and the secular liberal intelligentsia of the Great Powers. And so they were.
No less an authority on the intentions of the almighty than Golda Meir, summed up the Jewish God’s role in geo-political affairs as follows, “This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.” [Libquotes Le Monde October 15, 1971]
The Jewish bourgeoisie found in these “millenarian impulses” its lever, with which it could assert its class interests. A theological story existed; its zeitgeist needed to be attached to a movement responding, seemingly, to the material needs of all Jews; a national movement for the ‘New Jew’ to uplift himself into the modern world, away from the unending pogroms. This period in history, the rise of capitalist imperialism, saw finance capital march across the world’s periphery. Outmoded economic classes, social relations and institutions in Jewish communities would be destroyed as the conditions for their existence were replaced by new social relations and class realignments. The big banks, industrialists, large factory towns, corporations and large merchants undercut the economic basis of shtetl life.
The masses of Jews who emigrated were not attracted by Zionist millenarian and messianic themes married to nation building. The middle layer professionals and large numbers of workers emigrated to the West embraced assimilation, spoke the local language, engaged in secular lives and served adopted nation states as citizens. Large numbers of workers and shtetl Jews across the ‘Pale of Settlement’ advocated autonomy and for ethno/religious/national rights inside the multi-ethnic/multinational states where they lived; this they debated and put in the political programs of their organizations. Among the Jewish workers, and portrayed demonically by history, internationalist socialists and communists fought to defeat the parasitism of imperialism, the chauvinism of nationalism and the chaos of imperialist wars by socialist revolution for workers’ control of the means of production in a free association of workers united as an international class without masters!
How did Jewry vote? Of course there was no direct plebiscite to choose between Zionism, assimilation, autonomy, and socialism. Rather, as is common among people suffering economic distress and in fear for their lives they voted with their organizations, their publications and their feet! What did that vote look like?
The so-called first “Aliyah” (the ‘ascension’ to Zion of the first wave of settlers,) was made between 1880’s and 1901 by “twenty to thirty thousand people, most of whom eventually returned to Russia or headed to the West.” [Morris pg. 19]
While thousands of first generation ‘practical zionists’ (called “Olim”, those who ascend) cycled through Palestine a newly de-classed and proletarianized mass headed to New York and points West!
“Between 1880 and 1924 twenty four million people immigrated to America. Included in that great mass of immigration were, primarily, 2.2 million Russian Jews.” [Jerry Klinger Jewish Mag: The Russians Are Coming The Russians are Coming]
We are not idealists. We recognize that every social theory and twist of ideology and theology reflects the interests or perceived interests of given social economic layers navigating their peculiar conditions as they unfold. ‘Great Men’ do not make history themselves and while having a hand and voice in the making of history they are rarely more than the best representatives of the currents and tendencies within the social class they act on behalf of. Because the historiography, though never ending, is sufficiently available and well informed by primary sources for objective readers to come to their own conclusions, our reliance on a mere smattering of the thoughts, utterances and acts of ‘Great Men’ is not meant to write a new history but rather to illustrate for (if not to bludgeon) our readers with the necessary background source documentation proving that anti-Zionism is not in and of itself anti-Semitism. Zionism was from the start reconciled to an ‘inevitability of anti-Semitism wherever Jews would intermix with non-Jews’ and tied itself, as a millenarian colonial settler and project to the imperialist’s various geostrategic and military campaigns in the colonies and semi-colonies, in particular exploiting people and resources in the areas now called the Global South. Think for a moment on Israel’s relationship with apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa.
We will look at early Zionism and its orientation to European powers using both the Zionists and the leading imperialists’ own arguments, to show that the Iron Wall, leading to today’s Iron Dome was proposed and initiated in full expectation of a perpetual state of war! But before we review the intertwined intentions of Herzl and Churchill, Jabotinsky and Hitler, we briefly look at the Jewish ‘problem’ which arose in Eastern Europe during the 18th to early 20th century.
Abram Leon, in The Jewish Question, summarized the social condition of the Jewish people:
“The entire situation of Judaism in Eastern Europe is explained by the combination of the decline of the old feudal forms and of the degeneration of capitalism. The social differentiation which took place in the village as a result of capitalist penetration brought about an influx into the cities of enriched as well as proletarianized peasants; the former wanted to invest their capital; the latter to offer their labor. But the openings for the placement of capital were as slight as those for work. Hardly born, the capitalist system already showed all the symptoms of senility. The general decay of capitalism manifested itself in crises and unemployment within the countries of Eastern Europe; by the closing of all the outlets for emigration outside their frontiers. Seven to eight million peasants were landless and almost without work in “independent” Poland. Placed between two fires, the Jews were exposed to the hostility of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; who sought to find a place for themselves at the expense of the Jews. “Jewish positions are particularly threatened by the urban Polish bourgeoisie and by the rich peasants who seek a solution for their difficulties through a fierce economic nationalism, whereas the Polish working class suffering from permanent unemployment, seeks a remedy for its poverty through social liberation and puts its reliance upon economic and political solidarity rather than upon a sterile and murderous competition ….” [Chapter 7]
The Jews like all other ethnic groupings were tossed hither and thither as peoples were displaced and declassed. Every nation’s social classes were torn to their essential elements as the world economy was restructuring in capitalism’s image.
The struggle over the soul of the Jewish people, as if a mass of people could have ‘a soul’ was of concern to Winston Churchill. He summarized what was in actuality a class division among the Jews as a struggle between the competing etheric forces. The forces of good were the elevated Jewish ethics, the foundation of civilization, the demonic forces were a “sinister confederacy…reared up among the unhappy populations where Jews are persecuted….” These demons included Karl Marx, Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman. He argued that “…a Jewish State under the protection of the British crown…would…be in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” He saw the international class struggle behind “…the fury with which Trotsky attacked the Zionists….” Churchill was writing the imperialist’s propaganda against the ‘threat’ of Bolshevism concluding: “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” [Churchill, Winston February 8, 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People pg. 23-7 of 51 Documents ed. Lennie Brenner]
Zionism political instrument of the Jewish Bourgeoisie?
Anti-Semitism in Europe had its material basis in the economic occupations Jewish people were relegated to across the Diaspora. In Christian dominated economies usury was both a legal necessity and a clerical sin; Jews, ‘hopelessly heathen’ with unsalvageable souls, were ceded the role of banker. Feudal wars, rising city states, early nation building and their requirements for money lending were fertile ground for the emergence of a Jewish class of merchants, traders, bankers and eventually industrialists. As a social layer with a common religion, multiple Yiddish dialects and limited legal options, Jews formed a merchant bourgeoisie serving an economic role as lenders, merchants and traders. No doubt Jews often fell out of favor! Scapegoated as Christ killers, this strange and clannish lot, occupying the very money lender’s tables Jesus famously overturned, provided an easy target upon whom despots could displace the frustrations of the economically distressed. This is a classical but primitive materialist history of anti-Semitism that takes no account of the Jewish peasantry, nor of the urban artisan who also suffered the pains of anti-Semitic laws and pogroms.
Burning Jews, witches and other heathens did little to rectify conditions but the criminality of the act bound landowners, peasants, participant artisans and debtors together in their self righteousness and anti-Semitic rage, normalizing and reinforcing a false consciousness, an irrational ideology where dehumanizing the ‘other’ became accepted as the inevitable consequence of the Jewish (others) presence among the ‘civilized nations,’ cities, and villages. Agreement on a solution to the Jewish problem was made between imperialism’s ‘civilizing agents’ including Churchill and Balfour, not too busy shouldering the “White Man’s Burden” in Africa and Asia to make common cause with Zionism’s founders and warriors, including Herzl, Weizmann and Jabotinsky. They agreed that assimilation was more cause than solution for the Jewish Problem and resolved that the removal of Jews from Europe for the colonization of Palestine was mutually beneficial. It was understood that Palestine would exist, as a special colony within the empire, with no special effort made at first to reconcile Jewish and Arab claims to the same real estate. Later the British would make this worse.
Decades before Herzl, Moses Hess, once a collaborator with Marx, became an early Zionist. In his work Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question(1862), he foresaw the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe preventing assimilation as a course toward Jewish liberation. The rise of national liberation movements in the Middle East, he expected, would challenge the Ottoman Empire. He argued that if the Jews built a state in the “heart of the Middle East [it would] serve Western Imperial interests and at the same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East.”
It was obvious to Herzl, Weizmann, Balfour and Churchill that such a project would serve imperial interests. Again consider Churchill in 1920:
“Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” [Winston Churchill Feb 8 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People]
But to be successful Zionism would have to defeat assimilationism and autonomism as the dominant condition, and platform of most Jews. The pogroms played no insignificant role in convincing many, especially those with means, to give up hope for assimilation. One such thinker, Dr. Leo Pinsker, rejected assimilation and argued in his Auto-Emancipation: A Warning to His kinfolk by a Russian Jew (1882) that pogroms confirmed that despite proving themselves patriots in their chosen lands they would always be “plundered and dishonored” and that “we [will]dare not defend ourselves” that mobs would remind Jews over and again that they are all “nothing but vagrants and parasites, outside the protection of the law.” Like others, Pinsker found nothing ‘illogical’ in persistent anti-Semitism, rather the Jews ‘unnatural and abnormal condition,’ “lacking territory they lacked substance” threatening and irritating as they competed with Christians for professional and economic gain. Only a Jewish homeland could lead to ‘auto-emancipation.’ His eye was not on Palestine but possibly somewhere in North America. [Morris pgs. 15-17]
Zionism, since Theodor Herzl, has been the national project of the Jewish bourgeoisie, projecting its ‘civilizing role’ as moral and essential for the survival and elevation of the Jewish people; ‘a people so degraded to its culturally unpleasing state by separation from a homeland and miscegenation.’ To succeed in becoming the undisputed national ideology of the Jewish people it had to defeat not only assimilation and autonomy but also the working class alternative.
Based on lived experience, socialist Jewish workers and intellectuals adopted the method of historical materialism to discern a program for liberation. They discovered that it would require class solidarity of all the oppressed peoples of the world and was dependent on the unity of the working class leading internationalist class war to overthrow capitalism. From Zionism’s earliest days it was opposed by the Jewish majority, the working class, many of whom became socialist revolutionaries who organized Jewish unions, published voluminous socialist journals in Yiddish and built socialist parties including sections of the Bund, the Russian RSDLP and parties of the 2nd International.
Zionism vs the Bund? The class divide among the Jews
The Bund and the mass Jewish socialist workers movement’s history is one the Zionist and compliant Western historians, media and politicians want to erase. The existence of this movement was the bane of imperialism and fascism. Jewish Labor Bund: 1897-1957 (NY, 1958) records that in the interwar years in Poland, the Bund had active branches in every town and city which published regular Yiddish journals and organized strikes and self defense against the implementation of Nuremberg laws. Many Zionists seeing the futility of their program are reported to have turned to the Bund for self defense. Tens of thousands of Bundists were victims of the Holocaust.
It was Zionism’s political task to win both world Jewry and imperialist benefactors to their project. Bankers had to be convinced of the value of a loyal Jewish outpost in Palestine. World Jewry had to adopt a supra-class national consciousness embracing a mystical obligation of spiritual renewal by a return – to the ‘Promised Land.’ Soul-renewal mandated by God and only available in the Promised Land, in the eyes of a modern secular observer, has marked parallels to the “blood and soil” spirit of Nazi Volkism.
The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed the new German state in its credo of June 21, 1933, finding in Nazi Volkism a kindred spirit…,
Point #4 “Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life.” [A Holocaust Reader Lucy Dawidowicz pg 150-5 also in Brenner 51 Documents]
The story of the uplifting of Jewry was thereby coupled to the colonial settler project as a moral imperative. The uplift of Jewry would serve all the benighted nations who would benefit from their messianic return to the promised land.
The fallacy of national purity and the impermanence of borders was apparent to the Jewish workers, who in their main, were attracted to the workers movement, its trade unions and workers circles and workers press. Organizationally and politically the Jewish workers movement existed in opposition to the bourgeois Zionists, who in their writings likened themselves to the ‘benign’ imperialists civilizing the ‘darker continents.’ The mythology of “Blood and Soil” exploded, for the Jewish masses in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ during the age of nation building. There was no eternal soul in the soil of the nation as was made clear to all who experienced their homes, villages and cities, shifted accordingly with troop movements and back room negotiations determined their futures on redrawn maps:— now Poland, now Ukraine, now Austro-Hungary, now Russia.
Neither the Jewish shtetl nor the Jewish quarters in towns and cities escaped the class stratifications created by the rise of capitalism and industry. As the Jewish clerical, technical, professional, and proletarian layers stratified, assimilation into capitalist class reality was not a choice. Only a small proportion of the 8.5 million European Jews in 1900 were well off professionals and capitalists; the majority were poor city dwellers. [Kovel, Overcoming Zionism pg. 30]
Could Zionism hold together a community increasingly divided by class, emigration and assimilation into competing nation states and Great Powers? Could the mythology of “Chosen Ones” beckoned to the “Promised Land” by an almighty Yaweh, gain sway among peoples being modernized by capitalism’s consolidation? The rise of capitalism, the bourgeois democratic and scientific age, required the defeat of theocratic authority. Jews joined the ranks of the enlightened secular. The god myth could continue as a cover story but it no longer held weight to move the Jewish population from their European homes, so another catalyst was provided by anti-Semitism and Zionism adapted that to its project. Or would a cold, calculated school of Zionism cut to the chase and define the course of Zionism to the present genocidal assault on Gaza and the continuing brutalities in the West Bank?
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.”
Vladimir Jabotinsky, revisionist Zionist praised by Mussolini as a fascist, derided as ‘vegetarians’ Zionists who believed their Arab cousins could be won peacefully to welcome the colonists. Claiming no animus towards the Arabs, he coldly declared in his essay The Iron Wall that: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” He had no doubts about bribing the Arabs with money or railroads! He knew there was no such thing as benevolent imperialism; he was a brutal realist.
To win the debate against the Zionists whose elevated ethics and morality were challenged by the task of nation building he argued…,“We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached.” Like Churchill, Jabotinsky identified the moral good as being served by the Jewish establishment of the Jewish nation where the good Jew could flourish. Vegetarianism would not suffice! The project called for meat eating, butchery and the Iron Wall!
“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population–behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” – Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall
1930 United Israel Appeal Poster
The philosophical continuity of the Likud governments runs back to Jabotinsky and is every bit as blunt. To counter the accusation of tarring all of Zionism with the brush of the fascist Jabotinsky, the record shows the gap between the words, intentions and actions of the so-called center and left Zionists and Jabotinsky was never significant.
David Ben Gurion, first prime minister and a left/center labor Zionist never shied from bluntly stating the ruthless task at hand.
“We must expel Arabs and take their places.” [Teveth, Shabtai, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.]
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” [David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.]
We could produce a catalog of similar offending quotes from across the spectrum of Zionism but that work has been done over and again here, here, here, and here.
The Jewish population was making its choices, either making common cause with imperialism or joining the workers revolution to fight anti-Semitism and all backwardness. Unable to wait for the socialist revolution or a Jewish homeland millions fled persecution, most to the U.S. Many assimilated, adopting Western cultural norms and few held on to Eastern European culture outside of synagogue. Many of those who remained sided either with the Zionists or the Bundists along class lines over the fate of Jews under fascism.
The Zionists sought economic independence of their capital from national constraints imposed by the capitalist governments across the Diaspora. The ironic lesson of the movement of the borders across the continent illustrates for the oppressed the fallacy of nationalism. The Bundists were not nationalists (though some said they were); they identified as working class fighters for socialist universalism. They rejected Zionist supra-class national unity (Klal Yisrael) and emigration to the ‘Holy Land’. The Zionists accepted anti-Semitism as the natural reaction of the ‘civilized’ West to the unkempt, recently declassed and proletarianized hordes on the run from pogroms and poverty. The Bundists fought anti-Semitism with a struggle for legal minority status in the nations they lived in. The Bundists adopted the people’s language of Yiddish as their common language. To unite a Jewish nation, the Zionists resurrected Hebrew, a long dead language relegated to use only in the synagogues for centuries.
While the Zionists navigated between the competing imperialists in search of a benefactor; the Bundists participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution, sent representatives to the Kienthal anti-war conference (2nd Zimmerwald,) were the only Jewish party to participate in the 1917 Soviets and fought in the Red Army. Indeed Bundist unions and Jewish intellectuals played a proportionally oversized role in the socialist revolution and its leadership and the founding of the Third International. “The membership of the Bund in Russia grew constantly. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917 it numbered some 40,000 members resident in 400 localities.” [Bund Archive]
It is their ghosts who haunt Zionism! In their hundreds of thousands, arms in hands, they fought the fascists, anti-Semites and pogromists while the Zionists sat on their hands advocating emigration to Palestine and armed integration into various imperialist forces instead of building mass actions in the streets and putting arms in the hands of Jewish workers to defend themselves.
“Zionism was from its inception primarily a product of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was its parent, its driving force, its obsession. According to the fundamental theory of Zionism, anti-Semitism is a peculiar disease which has infected-or can infect-all or almost all non-Jews in any country. The mere presence of Jews among Christians is an irritant which generates anti-Semitism, for which there can be no remedy. Therefore the only way to solve this problem-the most important problem of the Jewish people throughout their history–is for Jews to leave the countries of their residence and establish their own state in their historic homeland of Palestine.
The Bund is based on the opposite concept namely that anti-Semitism is not a mysterious and perennial evil. Anti-Semities has its cause in the economic, political and psychological conditions of society and, like any other human evil, it can be cured by changing the conditions which brought it about. Accordingly, the Bund maintains that the Jewish problem is part of the general problem of mankind and can be solved only by the improvement of the lot of humanity as a whole, not by any special panaceas for Jews.
Instead of an exodus, the Bund, therefore advocates greater cooperation with the non-Jewish world, especially with other underprivileged and suffering peoples. Instead of Fear and suspicion of non-Jews inculcated by Zionism, the Bund offers faith in mankind and in the brotherhood of all men. Instead of nationalistic justice, which is often oblivious to the suffering of those outside a particular group, the Bund teaches international justice which combines justified Jewish claims with respect for the rights of other peoples.” [The Jewish Labor Bund pgs 17-18]
The Bundists identified with the philosophical conquests of secularism, historical and dialectical materialism, while the Zionists adopted the irrationalist ideology of racial purity of the fascists and European imperialists. For example, the Nazi ideal of Aryan purity and the role of European imperialist settler colonialism in Rhodesia and South Africa were foundational in the revisionist Zionist project. Jabotinsky, founder of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, militantly opposed assimilation and ‘race mixing,’ counterposing pure Jewish blood lines and Jewish soil as the solution to anti-Semitism. Even today, under Zionist laws, Jewish purity of couples is a legal requirement for a Jewish couple to get married. Interfaith couples must seek other options such as civil weddings abroad. The son or daughter of a Jewish father and shiksa (gentile) mother may be allowed (by birthright law) to emigrate to Israel and be drafted to serve in the IDF but is not pure enough to marry!
Indeed the fight against anti-Semitism requires the defeat of national chauvinism and xenophobia which can only be defeated by the internationalist class unity of all workers, oppressed people and poor farmers. Such a fight, by its very nature, is the class struggle of the working class against capitalism and all its national state formations! Realizing this truth, Zionists launched an ideological class war against revolutionary Marxism, which they saw was attracting and organizing the newly proletarianized layers of the Jewish poor and many of the most brilliant Jewish intellectuals.
Despite the work of the anti-war internationalists of Jewish socialist Bund, against the German SPD’s betrayal of voting for war funding in 1914, one hundred thousand Jews ended up in the Kaiser’s army. Tragically just like workers fighting workers across the front lines for their national capitalist state, Jews fought Jews across the front lines for warring imperialisms. Indeed, likewise, Chuchill praised the Jews who fought for King and country.
Ben-Gurion proposed to the Ottoman empire that Jewish divisions be organized to fight for them but was rebuffed. Vladimir Jabotinsky in turn organized the Zionist ‘Mule Corp’ in 1915 to fight on behalf of the British, seeing action at Gallipoli and Nabalus in a bid for favor in acquiring Palestine. “The unit was composed of Egyptian Jews, alongside East-European Jews, predominantly Russian subjects expelled by the Turks from Palestine at the outbreak of the war.”
The fallacy and racist trope, updated by the Okhrana as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that the Jews controlled both the decaying capitalist West and the Bolshevik East worked its magic uniting German, Italian and Jewish fascists in an ideological, economic, political and military war on the side of imperialism and against both assimilation and the Russian Revolution and the threat of its spread.
The Holocaust became the singularly Jewish tragedy that could be used to legitimate the cause for a national homeland. It was the answer to the problem the Zionists had of explaining why Israel could not accommodate the Palestinians. The Holocaust gave the Jews special rights as a landless, oppressed people, long subject to pogroms and genocide to claim victimhood that could trump the rights of the Palestinians.
The Zionists shopped around the contending imperialist powers for a benefactor to concede land in Palestine. They used the scapegoating, anti-Semitism and ultimately the Holocaust to consolidate the national ideology over all social layers.
Zionists collaborate with fascism?
Post-Versailles, Jabotinsky oriented toward the fascists. They never mobilized a Jewish army against Hitler! On June 23, 2023 Haaertz released documents of the Stern gang’s attempt to win German support with arms for the defeat of the British and the “establishment of the historical Jewish state on a totalitarian national basis, in an alliance relationship with the German Reich, [is] compatible with the preservation of German power,…”
Efraim Zetler, a member of Stern’s Lehi Militia, “…was interrogated by Haganah fighters roughly two weeks following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, where Nazi officials deliberated on the execution of the Final Solution. Securing Nazi support is believed to have been suggested two years prior by Avraham Stern, the Lehi leader who championed aggressive opposition to British governance.” Stern maintained that Britain was “enemy no.1” and that Nazi Germany was no enemy of Israel. See the Middle East Eye account of the Haaretz revelations.
Does this throw you? In fact it follows from the 1933 policy of the Nazi Ministry of Economic Affairs if you were well off, the Zionist organization for Germany could get you to Palestine for 15,000 Marks immediately; for 50,000 you could depart later at a time you chose. Likewise, you could transfer your property to Palestine. Needless to say, for Jewish workers, this was no small sum.
In August of 1933 the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs published the text of a decree to transfer Jewish property to Palestine…
“The decree, which is numbered 54, and is dated August 28th, states that an agreement was concluded “with the Jewish bodies concerned,” for “promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine…”pg 47
“The Reichsbank is for this purpose opening two special accounts for the Bank of Temple Society, it states, in favor of the Anglo-Palestine Bank.”
“It is explicitly emphasized that these accounts cannot be used for other purposes than for investments in Palestine. A special Trustee Corporation has been founded for advising prospective emigrants.” [“Agreement for Transferring Property from Germany to Palestine: Details of the Three Million Mark Agreement”The Zionist Record South Africa September 20, 1933pg. 47 (Brenner, Lennie, 51 Documents)]
But half a million Jewish soldiers served in the Red Army to fight fascism, 200,000 of whom were killed in battle or prison camps. Their deaths alongside the millions killed in concentration camps would be used by the Zionists to drag the tattered beleaguered remnants of European Jewry to fight in Palestine, somewhere they never had intention of going in the first place!
After the Holocaust the founding of the Jewish colonial settler state was conditioned with a fortress mentality. The permanent militarized occupation to crush Palestinian resistance and the class stratification elevating Jewish workers a few rungs above those Palestinians allowed to work has co-opted and bought off the large majority of the settlers.
Blood and Soil: It’s all about oil. Anglo/American Zionism turns the Mandate into an armed Settler State. Or winning the imperialist franchise….
Jabotinsky’s contenders for Zionist leadership failed during World War two to realize their twin tasks, to get the fascists to open up a mass migration of Jews to Palestine and to create a flourishing trade between Germany and Palestine. However the war changed that. The British still controlled the Mandate, but the U.S. now had at least two reasons to push for a UN handover to the Zionists. One was to get an ally in the post-war settlement between the allies against the USSR able to act as a military outpost in the Middle East. The second was the discovery of new oil fields in the region. In the interregnum between the discovery of oil in the U.S. (Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, California) and, Baku, and its eventual discovery in the Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia), the U.S. imperialists, American Jews and European Jewry had little interest in the Zionist project before a dispossessed mass suddenly needed a place to exist.
The post-war settlement did little to alter this. But this changed by the time the Cold War began in earnest in 1948. The U.S. intervention in the Greek civil war caused the Yugoslavs to break with Stalin and when the Marshall plan pushed into Eastern Europe the buffer states had to be transformed into deformed workers’ states. The war had meanwhile accelerated the search for oil and the Allied bloc’s need for a beachhead in Palestine led to the handover of the Zionist project to the U.S. by the British, whose Empire was now left bankrupt. The armed militias of the Zionists had already driven Arabs out of much of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba. Britain gave up its Mandate and the post-1948 map of Palestine reveals Israel had annexed around two thirds of Palestine.
The Zionist state was now a reality but the question of its legitimacy remained. Of course under bourgeois ‘right’ no state can be sovereign or free if it occupies another state. But the war had provided a trump card for the Zionists. Though they collaborated with the Nazis to undermine the workers resistance to fascism and did nothing to resist the Nazis, this was quickly forgotten against the overwhelming fact of the Nazi Holocaust – the genocide of the Jews. This by itself seemed to guarantee the legitimacy of the new state – however there was the inconvenient fact that in 1948 elsewhere there was a rush of colonies to win their national independence. So the Zionists needed more than the Holocaust to justify their settler colonization of Palestine.
Of course one such argument was that Israel was also ‘decolonising’ by taking over from Britain a part of the former Ottoman Empire. So with this monstrous fabrication Israel becomes an independent sovereign nation state, with bourgeois rights such as democracy, land rights, and the right to ‘defend itself,’ while simultaneously denying all Palestinian rights! Naturally the Anglo-American Zionists in business and the media spread this propaganda.
But this image was built on a faulty foundation, Israel never had a ‘decolonization policy’ as demonstrated by their military intervention on behalf of the French and British during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 to stop Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal. Zionism never had a ‘good neighbor’ policy, it was destined, like Moses Hess predicted, to serve imperialism’s interests. The Suez episode marked the demise of the UK’s power in the region and henceforth, the U.S. would become the new benefactor, lord and master.
The newly anointed state was sustained by the massive arming by the U.S. so that each time the Arab states got involved in war with Israel or the Intifadas blew up, these wars were legitimated by Israel’s right to defend itself! On that basis Israel was free to act as the U.S. enforcer in its military adventures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states, ignoring UN resolutions and ‘international law.’ Ultimately therefore, Israel’s ‘exceptional’ status as a ‘decolonising colony’ was its dependence on the U.S. ‘exceptionalism’, that is, its global hegemony. For that reason, U.S. weakness in decline is necessarily reflected in Israel’s weakness as a client proxy militarized state.
To drive home the case for national victimhood, the Zionists had to convince the world that they were not a colonizing power, but the chosen people decolonising Israel by occupying the British Mandate. Britain had occupied Palestine as part of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and administered the state on behalf of the League of Nations – that well known ‘den of thieves’ – and was reluctant to hand over ‘decolonisation’ to the Zionists. Look at how Jabotinsky recognizes the significance of the Balfour Declaration:
“What is the Balfour Declaration for? What is the [British] Mandate for? Their meaning for us is that an external force has taken upon itself the obligation to create in the country such conditions of government and protection, under which the local population, irrespective of its wishes, would be deprived of the opportunity to interfere with our colonisation administratively or physically. And all of us, all without exception, urge every day this external force to fulfill this role firmly and uncompromisingly.” [Jabotinsky The Iron Wall]
But what angered the Zionists most was the plan to share Palestine with the Palestinians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (a Likudite and disciple of Jabotinsky) before his rise to legitimacy as a revered world leader proclaimed: “We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a Greater Jewish State”.
So the Zionists mobilized their militias to harass the receding British and force a handover of the state. This was achieved in 1948 when the militias launched the Nakba, attacking villages, killing thousands, driving perhaps a million Palestians out of the greater part of Palestine. Far from the act of a decolonising people, the Zionists acted as colonizing oppressors to build a new nation on the national territory of Palestine. Harry Truman recognised the new state of Israel almost immediately, followed by the UN in 1949. Clearly the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. was instrumental in legitimizing in the eyes of the world the founding of a settler colonial state while the rest of the developing world was fighting for national liberation.
It is no accident that the Zionists treated the Palestinians as inferior or subhuman.There has always been a Euro-centric racist strain in Zionism.
The early Zionists campaigned for national and ethnic purity. This was confronted daily by the fact that there is no uniquely Jewish genotype, a DNA that links the Ashkenazi to Sephardim and the Mizrahi! Jews are Black, Brown White and Asian! Jabotinsky, of course got his knickers in a twist about miscegenation when considering the demography of the ‘Promised Land’ to be conquered. He queried the assimilationists, “But how this will happen and what will be the nature of this new mixed race; will it consist only of the white races or will it admit also the Negroes?” [51 Documents Brenner pg. 17]
The Dreyfus case confirmed for Herzl that assimilation was futile, as he saw anti-Semitic’ discrimination followed Jews in their newly assimilated positions. This alienated existence could, in the Zionist plan, only be negated by protecting racial purity in the “Promised land” as the national homeland. For all the talk of freeing world Jewry to raise up the ‘New Jew’ freed from cultural assimilation we find today that of Israeli Jews over 20 years old, according to Israeli statistics, 45% are secular, 33% observant and 10% orthodox. Most Ashkenazi are relatively indistinguishable from Europeans and Americans in their tastes and lifestyles. Even the racism of the West is reproduced as Ethiopian and Mizrahi have struggled for years against structural racism and prejudice.
It’s clear that the Zionist ideology tracked the creation and development of Israel in relation to the Palestinians, the Arab states and its imperialist sponsor the U.S.. From the time of the British Mandate, it counted on, depended upon and today still rests upon the imperialist West (in particular the UK/US and France) to sustain it. The expressed support by Churchill, already in 1920, with his praise of Jews who rejected Bolshevism and the person and leadership of Trotsky, is indicative of a conscious alignment of class interests. [Winston Churchill Feb 8 1920 Zionism vs. Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People]
Evolution of the relation of Zionism with US imperialism
The final aspect of the adaptation of Zionism to the special relationship of Israel with the U.S. in the post WWII period is that of making Zionism a constituent feature of U.S. imperialism. Here we are speaking of the working class defense of U.S. imperialism as the world’s peacekeeper and bearer of democracy and freedom in the Cold War against ‘communism.’ Support for Zionism is the equivalent of an article of faith for Democrats and hence, for the labor bureaucracy. Erstwhile Israeli Communists and some socialists made a bloc with center and right wing Zionism, and in the U.S. they found their mirror image in the labor Zionist phenomenon. Defending its colonial settler state as an armed outpost becomes one with defending U.S. imperialism. The championing of the new state by the UN, the U.S. and some especially well-placed and talented propagandists all combined in the developing Cold War to cement a “Zionism” of Jews and gentiles in the portraits of conventional (bourgeois) success and U.S. patriotism. Television and the enormous library of World War II film made possible what has been termed a “Holocaust Industry” of heretofore unthinkable scope of indoctrination.
Raised on Zionism’s slogan, “a people without a land for a land without a people,” a generation of U.S. Jews, only a few years away from mere subsistence, were extorted to dig deep to support emigration that would afford Jews safety and make a desert bloom. The greening of the desert and the indoctrination of Jewish youth across the Diaspora went hand in hand. Buying Jewish National Fund memorial trees, a cursory tale of the Diaspora from Babylon to the concentration camps was retailed, and singing the Hatikva became the norm in Hebrew schools and Hebrew summer camps.
Stalin’s support for Israel, which seems to be a complete secret from the ranks of today’s neo-Stalinists, was derived in part from his own anti-Semitism and in part from a desire to make difficulties for the UK at a time when it was preoccupied with its troubles in India. Thus we saw Pete Seeger sing songs popularizing the life of the kibbutzim. Most Americans do not know about the rotten immigration position of the USA, the 1924 Immigration Law quotas and how they did not let Jews escape to the USA. Even the British did better than the U.S. did. Bourgeois support for Zionism in the later 1940’s hid the truth of the Ku Klux inspiration of the immigration quotas, corresponding to then-trendy concepts of race and eugenics among the U.S. ruling class of the pre-Civil Rights movement era. Hardly any one talks about the St. Louis, the ship which no one let dock to let off the fleeing German Jews.
The St. Louis Jewish Refugees turned away at the port of Miami 1939
“Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” – Kissinger
The U.S. hid behind its 1924 Johnson Reed immigration Act quotas and only later after oil was discovered all across the Middle East did Roosevelt decide upon his support for Zionism. Why did he suddenly discover Zionism? Because U.S. geologists found oil in 1938 in Saudi Arabia. Gulf Oil found it in Kuwait and Mobil found it in Iraq. A pipeline existed for a dozen years between Habbaniya and Haifa (i.e.1935-48) which was ultimately closed by the Iraqis. There was a battle over the pipeline due to the Nazi-supported uprising against the British puppet in Iraq in 1941. History records this as the battle for the Habbaniya oil field of 1941. In September 1939 when Kriegsmarine Grandadmiral Raeder heard the war started he realized Germany would lose because they hadn’t got enough oil. Oil had become the commodity incomparable, or as Daniel Yergin wrote “The Prize.”
An account of the then-secret wartime meeting of FDR and King Abdul Aziz in history.com shows an early interconnection in U.S. foreign Policy circles between increasing Jewish settlement in Palestine and security of strategic oil supplies.
“Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, saw Saudi oil and the national security/welfare of the U.S. as umbilically linked and even proposed that the federal government establish direct control over all oil resources owned by American companies in Saudi Arabia,” Montgomery says.
There were also signs that the British were trying to take control over Chevron-Texaco, so part of Roosevelt’s goal in meeting the Saudi king was strategic. As Montgomery says, FDR knew it “would serve U.S. national interests in oil security long-term.” [our bold ed.]
King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia with Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy Egypt February 14, 1945
FDR met king Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in 1945 and told him there should be a national homeland for the Jews and expressed the notion that it should be in Palestine.
The King responded“that the Jews should be ‘given living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them’ rather than Palestine. In response, ‘The President remarked that Poland might be considered a case in point. The Germans appear to have killed three million Polish Jews, by which count there should be space in Poland for the resettlement of many homeless Jews.’”
...“Ibn Saud responded that he opposed ‘continued Jewish immigration and the purchase of land [in Palestine] by the Jews.’ The king insisted that ‘the Arabs and the Jews could never cooperate, neither in Palestine, nor in any other country.’ President Roosevelt ‘replied that he wished to assure his Majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.’
...“Roosevelt’s remark ignited a firestorm of criticism in the American Jewish community. “One wonders why Arab [leaders] were consulted about the fate of the Jewish National Home,” the American Zionist leader Dr. Abba Hillel Silver complained. “Were the Jewish people consulted about the fate of Iraq, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia.”
Three years later Truman elaborated a policy to control and discipline the oil producing regimes with the colonial settler fortress state. The U.S. bourgeoisie got on board as ‘Christian Zionists’ and this reinforced the exclusionary immigration policy, i.e. the government was still refusing to let ruined European Jews immigrate to the U.S. These were the rabid Cold War days and you never heard what Lenni Brenner later revealed about the Zionists’ dealings with the Nazis; that was a subject they didn’t want to talk about when everything was anti-communism. That the U.S. went back on its word to the Saudi monarch, that they would not make hostile moves against the Arabs, wasn’t a subject of note either.
So the Israeli war on the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states was cleverly sold as part of the bourgeois “decolonization” of the European powers’ empires to those with no idea of the true events. The resemblance was a superficial camouflage of what was in fact the exact opposite of “decolonization.” The fact that Palestine had been a British colony was hyped. The bigger truth that Israel was the triumph of colonial settler invaders exactly when the oil monopolies needed them as a border army was hidden.
The San Remo Conference attended by the French and British and other victors of WWI, on April 25th, 1920 they signed an oil agreement carving up and sharing out Turkish Petroleum. Business before pleasure, the partitioning of the Ottoman empire could wait until August that year. Movietone newsreel exists on YouTube of the French and British high commissioners ceremoniously starting the pumps on the Habbaniya-Haifa oil pipeline in February,1935. The Rashid Ali coup in Iraq of 1941 attempted to deny this source to Britain, but the support extended by Hitler and Mussolini to Ali was ineffective.
The biggest pool of all, even down to today, was found under Saudi Arabia by the geologists and drillers of the CASACO consortium of five U.S. oil companies in March, 1938. CASACO became ARAMCO in 1944. By the time Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz it had already been long apparent to the “7 Sisters” oil firms that control of all sources of oil on the capitalist world market was essential to the ability to support its price! So the U.S. went back on FDR’s word after just three years, leaving little doubt who holds the power in America. Zionism was all about blood and soil. But under the soil was big oil.
BUT Fascism???? Only technically not fascism!
Churchill, the spokesman, on this subject for both the Anglo and American ruling classes, was preoccupied throughout his career with preventing and then defeating the Bolshevik revolution. This mandate was picked up by the Zionists and shared with the Italian and German fascists. Thus we make the case above for Zionism as anti-Bolshevik and pro-fascist. It remains to be seen if Zionism has plumbed the depths of its racist colonial settler national chauvinism and emerged under terminal crisis as full blown fascism to realize its historic mission defending Israeli finance capital. Will they succeed as a bulwark against Permanent Revolution into the indefinite future? Everything will depend on the workers’ subjective factor across the region.
Is the evolution of Zionism in its current form under Netanyahu qualitatively fascist? Or has it always been proto fascist in search of its own crisis-ridden finance capital? The expulsion of Palestinians was always the objective and now it is happening again. Is this because Zionism has had to adapt to the terminal crisis of capital as a settler colony, which crisis it experiences as an existential threat revealing its inherent barbarity in service of a panicking national bourgeoisie?
We argued against the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) in 2009 that Zionism is not fascist despite having long associations with fascists and sharing many characteristics with fascism. It lacks the vital ingredient in that the Israeli working class is not yet a revolutionary threat to the rule of finance capital.
“Nevertheless, despite its history, its complicity with Nazism, and its occupation of Palestine, the Zionists are not fascists. They are extreme racist nationalist colonial settlers who in many ways resemble fascists. But since the Israeli working class is also Zionist there is no need for the Israeli bourgeoisie to impose a fascist reaction to smash any communist movement among Israeli workers. When Israeli workers turn against Zionism and unconditionally support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, then we will see the Zionist regime resort to fascism.” – Living Marxism, “Is Zionism Fascism?”
The extent or level of barbarity and dehumanization offender states subject occupied or warred upon peoples and nations to are not elemental in a historical materialist definition of fascism. The genocidal brutalities carried out against Palestine are dwarfed in magnitude by U.S. imperialism’s brutalities in the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Vietnam etc. The racism and dehumanization of whole populations, concentration into viciously policed ghettos, pogroms, concentration camps, and disproportional mass incarceration are all elements of the democratic bourgeois state as evidenced by the U.S., the British and the French imperialists. Were Puerto Rico, Guam or Hawaii, Guadalupe, or Martinique to act up or get out of hand we would expect U.S. or French forces to assert their authority with all the brutality deemed necessary.
Special laws targeting Jewish economic and legal rights were elemental in the lead up to the Nazi final solution and today the Palestinians inside the Green Line are subject to dozens of special laws to limit their legal and economic power. Black and Brown folk in the democratic U.S. have suffered similar restrictions without the U.S. capitalist class requiring fascism.
The Palestinian working masses do represent a threat but they have not organized a politically independent working class organizational threat. In large part because the majority of the Jewish workers are not receptive to a united Jewish /Palestinian Workers Party. Their loyalty to Zionism pushes the Palestinian workers into the shadow of the bourgeois nationalists. The October 7th events showed the limits of an isolated military incursion without a coordinated working class united front to strike against the entire state. Tactically it may have mobilized the opinion of the Global South and driven the wedge deeper into the Zionist hold on the Jewish youth in the Diaspora, but without the program of Permanent Revolution the threat is missing– its Bolshevik leadership. (Even Churchill knew that.)
As for the elements of a corporate state that fuses finance capital with state capital to keep overall capitalism afloat against the collapse of industry and the threat of worker occupations…is that the case with Israel’s economy? The industry shows no sign of collapsing requiring state ‘intervention’; workers’ occupations are so far not even a threat.
Fascism in Israel would shut down all opposition in the press, academia and the class struggle. Today there is not much opposition from the Jewish working class and the Palestinians inside the Green Line are restrained and ironically academics, mainstream and alt-media still issue stories that are more highly censored in the U.S. than in Israel. And only this summer we saw mass demonstrations against the Likud government consolidating unconstitutional powers.
The definition of the ideology of fascism has been summed up by an anti-Marxist academic Ryan Chapman on YouTube to a pithy statement : “We think with the blood of our nation.” By that measure the Zionists can be equated with the fascist ideology. Marxism explains that fascism is always waiting in the wings, that fascist power is employed in the streets to crush the threat of the working class taking power and it is employed as a regime as punishment for the workers not having taken power.
“At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.
From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism …”
But holding an ideology is one thing, using its state power to crush the working class with authoritarian measures is not always necessary.
Trump appeared as a wannabe fascist dictator, he had executive power for four years, but fascism was not necessary to protect capitalism from popular revolt. Likewise, Israeli citizens’ persistent and mass anti-Netanyahu demonstrations earlier this year were never a threat to the Zionist project, only to the illusion that democratic institutions are capable of eliminating corruption and providing an independent judiciary. October 7th provided Netanyahu a reprieve from the pressure but he has no need to continue to assert authoritarian controls on citizens.
Fascistic, authoritarian control of information flows, brutal disregard for human rights and sanctioned extra-legal murder of occupied peoples, journalists, and political oppositionists are all recurrent elements of liberal democracies, such as have been employed by the U.S., Britain and France against oppressed people at home, in their colonies and semi-colonies. Zionism claims to have established the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and in comparison to the behavior of its benefactors it complies with tradition. Even to the point of having incipient or proto-fascists administering their ‘bourgeois liberal democracy.’
We claim the basic characteristics of Zionism in and out of power are pro-imperialist, anti-Bolshevik, colonial settler state myth-and nation-builders. As an ally of fascism which defines its international work, what is Zionism today in Israel? We say that Zionism is proto-fascist. We use James P. Cannon’s 1954 article on fascism which argues that capitalism in decline keeps its fascist layers available for counter-revolution when it can no longer rule in the old ways. So while the Zionist state is not yet fascist, the compounded terminal crisis guarantees that the conditions will arise to make fascism the last resort of the Israeli finance capital.
The qualifier ‘proto’ fascism is used here to mean the same thing as incipient fascism. Moreover, Zionism has been in ‘proto mode’ for a long time as the degeneration of the capitalist mode of production makes it certain to be unleashed. We know that the ruling class will fail to rule in the old way, the regime’s weakness and desperate resort to genocide shows that it knows it has to smash all resistance. We also know that the Palestinians will keep fighting, and that now they have the support of the Arab masses, the masses in the Global South, broad layers of alienated Jewish youth, and important layers of radicalizing workers in the imperialist countries.
But critically, these layers need to form an alliance with all radicalizing Jewish workers’ and anti-Zionists inside occupied Palestine. The revolutionary traditions of the Bundists who joined the Bolsheviks must be revived in historic Palestine to unite Jewish, Arab, Christian and secular workers. This will break the congealed Zionist popular front where Zionist workers have been pulled right into support for any number of bourgeois parties, none of whom can mount a movement that can strip power from the far right Likud and even further right parties, and behind them their international co-thinkers in an international popular front, as the U.S. and Chinese imperialists attempt to resolve the war with a regime change and new bantustans.
The ostensible opposition parties all support or acquiesce in Zionist agendas, even as some hopelessly ‘represent’ two-state plans in the Knesset. So as revolutionaries we have to confront this objective situation with the building of the new world party of socialism that exposes the neo-Stalinists, neo-Maoists, and fake Trotskyists, all of whom fail to raise the Transitional Program for workers’ democracy, workers’ power and workers’ states to overthrow the bourgeois states and the global capitalist system.
How to defeat Zionism
By necessity our party and program is international. For socialism the national program is insufficient.
Our program must call for building the multi-ethnic revolutionary workers party uniting Hebrew and Arabic speaking workers inside the Green Line and in the occupied territories.
Our party exposes the fallacies of Zionist nationalist program and the limits of Arab nationalism’s programs in liberating the region from the dominant and competing imperialist powers.
Our party unites the Jewish and Arab workers against becoming proxies in Great Power politics by bringing the politics of Permanent Revolution to the front of all workers struggles and struggles of the oppressed. We fight species extinction and against Capitalism and its offspring wars, climate catastrophe and economic depressions. Today to secure democratic reforms of society only the self-organized productive class in society can deliver!
IDF Out Now from Gaza and All Occupied Territories! Stop the bombing now!
Release all Palestinian resistance fighters! This means all those in “Administrative Detention” too! Free All the Kids snatched from the streets!
For International Worker actions to strike Israeli shipping at the ports! For Labor Political Strikes against Israel’s genocidal war! Transport and Port Workers: Refuse to Handle All Military Aid to Israel!
Victory to the Palestinian resistance! Break the economic blockade of Gaza! For Labor-Organized International Aid With Distribution Under Palestinian Workers’ Control!
Smash the Apartheid walls and closure system checkpoints! Build a secular multi-ethnic worker’s militia to defeat the IDF! For an international working class military bloc with the resistance fighters of today.
Down with U.S. imperialism! Abolish U.S aid to Israel! Close U.S. foreign military bases! Bring the fleets home! To do so, troops must form enlisted persons unions and a “Let’s go home” movement.
For a multi-ethnic revolutionary Workers Party uniting Arab and Hebrew workers inside the Green Line and in the occupied territories.
Our party must fight against Jewish-only trade unions both inside the Histadrut and outside to demand its expulsion from the ILO. Build class struggle caucuses fighting to break from Zionist racist practices and ideology. Build multi-ethnic trade unions! Same Work, Same Contracts on both sides of the Green Line!
For socialist revolution to establish a workers government based on workers councils and an armed, multi-ethnic workers militia!
For workers control of production and its management for use, by means of a democratically formulated central plan. Open the Books! Stop capital flight. For a state monopoly of foreign trade.
A workers government must fight for:
For Palestinian National Independence by Socialist Revolution to break the chains of Imperialism.
The expropriation of the Imperialist and national Capitals by the Working Class for its use under its plan! Full employment. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay.
For massive public workers to raise Arab communities housing, utilities, transportation, educational, medical facilities, water and food distribution to parity with Jewish communities.
Ensure the right to return for all expelled people and their descendants. For the return of all confiscated properties. For rebuilding and return to prior inhabitants all destroyed housing and agricultural plots.
For Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution! For freedom of sexual orientation! For full democratic rights for Lesbians and Gays!
Freedom of the press, internet, the right to assembly and religious privacy. For secular marriage rights. For passports and state identification in two languages without ethnic or religious identification.
For a secular, multi-ethnic Socialist Palestine! For a Socialist Federation across MENA!
Build the Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution!
– International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) December 4th 2023
red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil). In December 2019 the LCC became the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) on the basis of agreement on program and perspectives, and the need for a higher level of democratic centrism in the fight for a new world party of socialism.
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