godless red

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to go about defining socialism. One is more rationalist, exegetical — it begins with Marx’s description of capitalism and negates whatever it takes to be its core components. The other way is more empirical, historical — it takes Really Existing Socialist states at their word and seeks to identify what is distinctly progressive about them. Many partisans of the former approach smugly dismiss the latter, and vice versa. The problem for the former camp is that they can never beat the charge of perfectionism, of lacking realism and so being locked into world-weary pessimism and misanthropy, since fallen humanity keeps failing to push the communism button. The problem for the latter camp is that we can never beat the charge of apologetics — we specialize in support to such an extent that it’s hard for us to stay critical or advance the state of the art. Both errors can be avoided only if we can somehow bring both methods to bear simultaneously. To that end, I’d like to show how a more thoroughgoing rationalism, one that takes more seriously the necessity of beating capitalism, converges on the same results as Really Existing Socialist practice.

The October 7 Hamas-led military operations against Israel were events of world-historical importance. Palestine contains the world’s most active armed anti-colonial national movement. Israel is the world’s least consolidated settler state, forced into brutal, constant counter-insurgency to defend settler property rights and imperialist domination of the Arab working classes. Furthermore, the operation brought into explosive combination yet larger forces, outside the territory of historic Palestine: The United States and the US-allied neo-colonial states alongside Israel, against regional republicanism, mass-mobilizing popular militia, and Iran.

The Palestinian insurgency has brought the national question back to the table (Moyo & Yeros, 2011). As with other anti-systemic experiments, like Zimbabwe amidst agrarian reform, and Venezuela under Chavismo, it has polarized not merely its surrounding state system, where Palestine has been the compass orienting any resolution to the Arab national question, but the world system. Indeed, Palestine crystallizes nearly every contradiction within the current order. Although Zimbabwe and Venezuela confronted the racial distribution of world power, the Palestinian question spills far beyond questions of class and nation internal to historical Palestine’s boundaries. Amongst its myriad complexities: “one section” of the Palestinian people “exists under a racist, fascist entity,” namely Israel, supported by imperialist powers, while the latter also turns “feudalist, tribalist, reactionary and puppet regimes in the Arab world into mediators in the ongoing plunder of the Arab revolution and the Arab toiling classes.” Thus, “the issue of struggle against these regimes indirectly becomes a Palestinian front as well” and raises, beyond the puppets, the nature of struggles to deepen popular democracy and resistance capacity within those regimes’ enemies (Kanafani, n.d.; PFLP, 1969).

Moreover, the question of Palestine is not merely a question of national oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colonial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of global counter-insurgency, all melded in a manticore of death and destruction. Indeed, the harder and stronger Palestinians fight for liberation, the more, like lightning bolts of ever-increasing luminosity, they bring the relief of the world system into clearer view: the impotence of the United Nations; the imperialist contempt for international law; the complicity of the Arab neo-colonial states with Western capitalism; the fascist racism at the heart of modern European and US capitalism, as murderers and maimers operate in Western capitals; the neo-colonial structures of the Arab and Third World; and the hollowness of Western liberal democracy and its constellation of civil society institutions.

This set of regional forces has allied with Palestinian asymmetric militia in their guerrilla war against Israeli settler-colonialism, and particularly the siege on the Gaza Strip. We consider their post-October 7 activities, as well as the Palestinian militia, in more detail in Part II of this article. These forces have distinct orientations and internal disagreements regarding models for economic development but converge on the active defense—or achievement—of political sovereignty as necessary for the well-being of the region’s peoples. We have argued that the current strategies of US imperialism make it necessary to re-visit the theory and practice of national sovereignty and the role of self-defense in socialist construction. Given that the US is carrying out a policy of state collapse and de-development in major Arab population centers, which is a testing ground for broader US methods of income deflation, destabilization, de-development, and de-statization, forces defending state sovereignty cannot simply be dismissed as “bourgeois nationalist,” “state-capitalist” or using kindred typologies. Such descriptions may have elements which are formally correct. But they block from view the strategic landscape which is contoured by the current stage of US accumulation, wherein “waste” is an input into accumulation. The systematic attacks on Iranian-Arab state capacity, the policy of de-development, and the military, political, and legal encirclement ought to be understood as part of accumulation-through-waste and the attack on working peoples on a world scale.

Reconsidering contemporary accumulation strategies allows us to understand the conjunctural role of defense of state sovereignty in the current context, as a positive good in and of itself, and as providing a platform for planning policies which can lead in the direction of expanded accumulation (as with Yemen’s 2019 national document). While the limits of such visions can and should be explored, any such critique must depart not from fancy but facts: US-Israeli operations only allow national capitalist development on certain terms within countries fully integrated into their security and financial umbrella. In that context, the contemporary axis plays a limited but real liberatory role in staving off state collapse in the countries near and around Palestine and shielding populations’ social reproduction and popular well-being against the reaper of accumulation-through-development.