This popularisation of my book ‘Capital-in-Crisis, Trade Unionism and the Question of Revolutionary Agency’
is available to download at the link below and distribute freely.
A more detailed content is also freely available in the original text.
https://archive.org/details/capitalinstructuralcrisis
On The So-Called “Two-State Solution” : Towards A Unitary, Democratic, Secular State of Palestine
The so-called “two-state” “solution” as an agreed final settlement to the ‘Palestinian Question’ is the final refuge of the Zionist colonial settler statelet. There is only one word to describe any Palestinian politician who signs up to such a disreputable settlement (as an agreed final settlement to this question). That word is ‘Traitor’. It merely entrenches the current Zionist system of apartheid. The historic equivalent would have been Mandela signing up to the Bantustans or Ho Chi Minh signing up to a separate southern state in Vietnam. The “two-state solution” is the final refuge of the Zionist scoundrel.
Such a “solution” would continue to be based on dispossession, theft, mass murder, expulsion and injustice. It would still be based on the existence of an apartheid, US-backed, militarised Zionist enclave in the Middle East. An “independent” Palestinian state based in the West Bank and Gaza would be highly dependent on the Zionist state. It would be unsustainable and unviable – and the governing Zionists know this – when the Zionist state would control all the resources, access, etc, especially water, that would make such a state viable.
Whether it is “viable” (which it most certainly is not) is not really the question which needs to be addressed but whether it enables a just and lasting settlement for the expelled Palestinian people. It would continue to ghettoise the Palestinians into a landlocked, militarised enclave. The Jews themselves were subjected to the same inhuman ghettoisation and injustice in Europe for centuries. However, it took Zionism to create an anti-semitic ghetto for them in the Middle East.
Zionism was always a predatory, land-grabbing outlook and nothing whatsoever to do with socialism, never mind Marx, no matter how often some may wish to push supposed “democratic” credentials or the phoney “socialist experiments” of the Kibbutzim. The Jewish socialist experiments and settlements in Eastern Europe (Bund Socialism) in the first decades of the 20th century were not “Zionist”. In fact, they explicitly opposed Zionism.
The basic conception of the “Kibbutz movement” – and its practical outcome – was “a land without a people for a people without a land” which is a fascistic conception similar to the conception of Lebensraum. Land stolen and the local people expelled from their lands and homes. It was only a “land without a people” after Palestinians were forced out at gunpoint. Palestine was not an empty land but was a rich, living ancient culture amongst which were living communities of Jewish people. The Palestinian culture was not just “another Arab culture” but was a distinct, rich, culture which was thousands of years old. The Zionist conception that “Israel is the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people” is a reactionary conception which parallels the Nazi conception of an “Aryan homeland”. Completely anti-socialist to its very core. The Nazi ideologists had a similar outlook. They spoke of returning to “their” “Ayran” (Indo-European) homeland.
Historically, Palestine was always a crossroad for different human cultures and those cultures contributed to its rich unitary culture. The Jewish communities living there throughout its history were Palestinian. In ancient times, many were actually Hellenised and later Latinised when they moved around the empire. Abram Leon writes (in his book The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation) that at least three-quarters of all Jews were actually living outside the greater Palestine area even before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Flavian emperors in the second half of the 1st century. It is a Zionist myth based on Biblical ideology that it was simply a “Jewish homeland”. The Jews were, for many centuries, a nomadic tribal people. For thousands of years, the region has been a rich and diverse area of different cultures and religions. It has only been the Zionist state since 1948 when its creation was backed by the imperialist powers in order to serve their own geostrategic interests.
Successive predatory wars have forced millions of Palestinians into exile in refugee camps in the Arab world. But in the process of doing this, the Zionist state has – with a certain degree of historic irony – created a ghetto for Jews in the Middle East.
The very existence of the Zionist state has actually served to foster bigotry towards Jews. Over the decades of its warring existence, the hostility towards the Zionist state has often come with an absolutely false equating of “Zionist” with “Jew” which has actually served to feed prejudice and anti-semitism. In this respect, Zionism is itself anti-semitic. When I was teaching in the Arab world, I met Arab people who actually admired Hitler. I always took the trouble to explain that some but not all Jews are Zionists and that all Zionists are not necessarily Jews. One can be a anti-Zionist Jew. Or a Zionist non-Jew. I once knew somebody who was a devout English Roman Catholic and, at the same time, an ardent Zionist who supported the existence of the Zionist state. And yet I have known people who call themselves Jews who are militantly anti-Zionist and who refuse to accept any concessions to it.
Has the existence of the Zionist state increased or lessened anti-semitism in the region? Zionists tend to play the same old reprehensible trick card of inferring that Zionism is the inevitable outgrowth of the experiences of Jewish culture in various parts of the world and that anyone who opposes the Zionist state (including “self-hating Jews”) is “anti-semitic”. This is one of the favourite tactics of the supporters of the Zionist state : to accuse their opponents of ‘anti-Semitism’. This argument is advanced in an attempt to prevent criticism of it from being presented, or to attack the individual or group, that is defending Palestinian human rights. The conception is purveyed that Jews generally support the Zionist state and that those who do not are “self-haters” or “deranged”, etc. It also implies that the crimes of the Zionist state are “Jewish” crimes which they are not. Once again, the assertion of Zionist anti-semitism carries legitimacy here. The Zionist state is itself antisemitic. When we actually look very closely at the doctrinal aspects of Zionism – and their significance for real social relations between Jews and Non-Jews – we almost inevitably arrive at the conclusion that Zionism is fascistic. There are so many parallels between Zionism and Nazism. Those tiny number of Arabs who admire Hitler should be aware of this.
Jews and Muslims had, generally, lived peacefully together for centuries in different parts of the Arab world, specifically in Palestine, until the Zionist state was established. It is reactionary, and resembles an apartheid conception, to imply that Jews and Arabs cannot live together in a unitary state. There are many laws on the statute books that discriminate specifically against the Palestinian citizens of the Zionist state. This is done either directly or indirectly, based solely on their ethnicity, rendering them second or third class citizens in their own homeland. This state discrimination against Palestinians is direct and institutionalised in the laws of the Zionist state.
https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771
The so-called “two-state solution” really amounts to the maintenance of the oppression of a whole people in a disingenuous arrangement which is really only a one-state solution for the Zionist state enclave.
One cannot be a Zionist and a Socialist at the same time. That is like being a whitewasher and a chimney sweep at the same time. The Zionist state not only embodies the ethnic cleansing of a whole people. It is also a state-form of the rule of capital. If you advocate Zionism then, implicitly or explicitly, you advocate the oppression of a whole people. And the oppression of the working class itself within the Zionist state enclave. The perspectives of the Zionist state are not merely nationalistic, fascistic but also class-antagonistic. They represent the interests of capital and its class of owners.
What is the significance of the outlook of any Palestinian or Arab politician who signs up to a two-state solution as the final settlement to the historic question of the rights of the Palestinians? Whether they are conscious of it or not, it articulates and represents the interests of the murderous Zionist colonial settler state. It serves to entrench the Zionist state and maintain the oppression of a whole dispossessed and expelled people. A unitary democratic secular state is the only feasible, provisional solution. Only such a solution will enable Jews, Palestinians, Druze, etc, to live together as full and equal citizens with full and equal democratic, civil and political rights. Everything else serves to entrench Zionist state oppression even more deeply.
Those individuals who advocate a two-state solution as a final settlement are, ideologically – consciously or not – articulating the interests of the Zionist colonial settler regime. And yes, even those Palestinian politicians who advocate such a final solution are doing this.
A provisional solution would be the establishment of a secular democratic state in the region which includes, geographically, the current Zionist entity, the West Bank and Gaza within that unitary state. All occupied lands external to these areas would be returned to their original jurisdiction. For example, the Golan Heights would return to the Syrian state. Palestinian exiles must have the right to return and re-settle in their homeland and all present inhabitants – Jew and Arab – must have the right to remain, living according to full democratic rights, freedom of movement, compensation, re-housing, freedom of religion but keeping religion out of state policy and administration, etc. All Jews must have the right to settle within the boundaries and political conditions of this unitary state which would be a unitary secular state with full democratic rights for all regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc.
The so-called “two state solution” as a final permanent settlement is the bottom line for the Zionist state because it will guarantee its existence. It will maintain this state with the Palestinians isolated on the West Bank or enclaved in a virtually destroyed and depopulated ghetto in Gaza as a result of the current genocide and ethnic cleansing. This is what the Zionist state would want if it had to settle for this two-state scenario. A Palestinian enclave at the mercy of the Zionist state – dependent upon this state in every sense of the word – in their so-called permanent “two-state solution”. Even so-called ‘Liberal’ Zionists would settle for this. Once again, here we see that Liberalism is the “civilised” acceptance of class division and oppression. And specifically, in regard to the question of Zionism, the “civilised” acceptance of that as well.
The establishment of a unitary democratic secular state in Palestine would establish more favourable historical presuppositions and conditions for the struggle for a more just society in the region. The creation of a democratic secular state is socially and politically more progressive than the Zionist state. Such a state would be a provisional solution to fight for something better. And this is where Socialism comes in. But it would, provisionally, be a just secular settlement to the current conflict.
The position of the one-state solution is, therefore, to resolve the conflict between between Zionism and the rights of the Palestinian people onto a higher secular democratic level. This would provide the basis for a higher form of struggle. The struggle for a socialist Palestine.
Shaun May
mnwps@hotmail.com
May 2014 (Revised February 2024)
Second Edition is now available.
A popularisation of the book will also appear in due course and be linked on this site.
….the mode of thought of the philistine and the vulgar economist derives…..from the fact that only the immediate form of appearance of relations is reflected in their brains, but not in their inner connectedness. Incidentally, if the latter were to be true, what need for a science at all?
‘scientific essays revolutionising a science can never be really popular. But once the scientific basis is set out, the popularisation is easy. If times become more stormy then one can again select the colours and inks which would make up a popular presentation of these subjects. However, I never expected the German academic experts to ignore my work so completely, even if only for decency’s sake. Apart from this, I have also had the not very friendly experience of having party sympathisers in Germany, who had long busied themselves with this science and who had written overdone paeons of praise to me privately concerning Part 1, (Marx is referring to his work ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ – SM) not making the slightest effort to write a critique or even a summary of contents in magazines which they can use. If this is party criticism, then I confess that the secret of it is quite mysterious to me……………’
On Darwin and Malthus
‘Darwin, at whom I have had another look, amuses me by saying that he applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals : the whole point about Malthus was that it was to be applied not to plants and animals but only to men – in geometric progression – in contradistinction to plants and animals. It is notable that Darwin recognises among the beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labour, competition, opening of new markets, ‘inventions’, and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. This is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all] and it reminds one of Hegel in his Phenomenology, where bourgeois society appears as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom’, while the animal kingdom appears to Darwin as a bourgeois society…….’
Marx to Engels, 8 October, 1858
” There is no denying that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant over a far greater area? ”
Letter from Marx to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852
I have not earned the honour of having discovered either the essence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Bourgeois historians had presented the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists had presented its economic anatomy long before me.
What I did that was new was to prove :
1. that the existence of classes is merely linked to definite historical phases of development of production;
2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;
3. that this dictatorship itself forms only a transitional stage in the removal of all classes leading to a classless society.
[Marx’s emphasis given by italicisation]
1. A truly free human being can hold no concept of freedom.
2. God is a human creation. Humanity bows down and worships its own creation in the inverted world of all religion.
3. A society containing cruelty – regardless of its form – remains a society of the enslaved.
4. Any society mediated by fear can never be a society of free men and women. How can human beings move from the enslavement and fear of the global capital system onto the path of the globally evolving ‘true realm of freedom’ within which such a mediation has passed or is in process of its disappearance? The deepening and intensification of human freedom is identical with the unfolding disappearance of this mediation.
5. What has fundamentally changed in the human personality since the time of Christ over 2000 years ago? And why? Christ would recognise the human personality of first century Palestine in the people of the twenty-first century today. This merely reveals the profound social and psychological depth of revolutionary change which will be required in the coming ‘Second Human Revolution’. It will not be simply a break with the epoch of capital but rather with the full history and complete legacy of the history of private property as a whole in its many forms. This is what now confronts humanity. This utter transformation of society and humanity on every level in the process or barbarism followed by annihilation.
6. The pursuit of pleasure and the mind’s relationship with this pursuit is a behavioural and psychological manifestation of pain (Weltschmerz) mediating the human personality. Where this psychic pain ends, so does this pursuit. In the ages to come beyond the global capital order, this negation in the human psyche will be intrinsic to the psychological revolution in humanity.
7. The capital system of commodity production and exchange cannot endure. It is unsustainable. Either humanity will abolish this system and save itself and Nature as whole or this system will abolish humanity, itself as a system in the process and leave behind a wasteland on Earth.
………..(plus venire)
spmay 