Tag: Marx

On the profound question of historical circumstances Palestine demands a hearing

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Politics2 Comments

I was then I wasn’t going to say anything about the heart-breaking events unfolding in the continuing tragedy, that is the brutal occupation by Israel of Palestine and most immediately Gaza. Simply to venture such an understanding is at odds with the version dominating our screaming screens, mobile or fixed. My empathy with the Palestinian cause, which goes back to the 1970s and refers to my critical allegiance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation [PLO] is to be dismissed, forgotten or ridiculed. To my shame, I was in danger of remaining silent.

Then, only a few hours ago the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman tells senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs in the region may be a criminal offence. In a letter to chief constables in England and Wales, she opines:

“It is not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern. I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.”

In this Manichean simplistic obscenity, whereby it is demanded that we agree without a murmur what and who is Good or Evil, how long before even Facebook comments or even ‘likes’ not toeing the line are deemed heinous? Or even this innocuous questioning of the mainstream narrative is seen as unacceptable?

Whilst in accord with Marx himself I am no longer a Marxist I learned much from my days under the ideology’s influence. I remain indebted enormously to the insistence that all events must be grounded,, need to be understood in both their specific and historically intertwined circumstances. This profound, even obvious observation engages with the past and present, with contradiction and complexity, with the dilemma of defining the ethical and the moral, with what is right or wrong. It precludes shallow, immediate and opportunistic readings of what’s going on. It demands, following Aristotle, ‘phronesis’, the thoughtful interrogation of what is happening and what we might do for the best.

For now, if you have the time or inclination, I offer the following links to articles of a dissenting character, although themselves, perchance, too hasty and superficial, which I hope you will read in full.

The West’s hypocrisy towards Gaza’s breakout is stomach-turning – Jonathan Cook

The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.

Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.

The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.

This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage in 2007, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air.

Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza “unprecedented” – and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting “a cruel and evil war”. But the truth is that the Palestinians have “started” nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.

Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, “the price will be heavy” – especially for Hamas is Israel’s creation. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.

Hamas is Israel’s creation -Thomas Fazi

Many people don’t know this but Hamas is largely a creation of the Jewish state. For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel”), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. “The Israeli government gave me a budget”, the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques”.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I… suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”, he wrote. They didn’t listen to him. What we’re witnessing is a classic case of blowback.

Israeli Bombing of Gaza, “I have ordered a “Complete Siege”… “We are fighting human animals”, Israeli Defence Minister SaysI – Global Research

Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip.

Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, an area of about 365 square km, and home to 2.3 million Palestinians, which has been under an Israeli-led blockade since 2007.

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said.

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he added.

The Israeli air force has dropped 2,000 munitions and more than 1,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza in the last 20 hours, the army said on Monday morning, having shelled 20 high-rise residential buildings, mosques, hospitals, banks and other civilian infrastructure.

What Is the Gaza Strip?

Gaza was part of historic Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from historic Palestine in what is known as Al-Nakba, or “The Catastrophe”.

More than 60 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, following the expulsion of families from other parts of Palestine in 1948.

Bordered by Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Gaza was captured by Egypt during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and was under Egyptian control until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when the territory was seized and occupied along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 2005, Israel purportedly pulled out of Gaza and relocated around 8,000 Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers living in 21 settlements around Gaza to the occupied West Bank.

But in 2007, following the Hamas movement’s election victory in Gaza, Israel responded by imposing an air, land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip.

According to international law, the blockade amounts to an occupation of the strip.

Since 2008, Israel has launched four invasions of Gaza, in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, which resulted in the deaths of thouands of Palestinians, mostly civilians and many children.

The campaigns resulted in the destruction of homes and offices, damage to pipelines and sewage treatment infrastructure, impacting drinking water and spiking waterborne diseases.

In the last major operation in 2021, at least 260 Palestinians were killed in Gaza while 13 people were killed in Israel.

Open-air Prison
Israel’s blockade systematically denies Palestinians access to services, hospitals, banks and other vital infrastructure, leaving the population to exist in fraught living conditions.

The blockade has also resulted in a perennial shortage of clean water, electricity, and medical supplies in what is often dubbed the world’s largest open-air prison.

Roughly 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water is contaminated, and residents are forced to live with constant power outages due to a power grid that has been heavily damaged in repeated Israeli attacks.

Meanwhile, close to 60 percent of Palestinians live in poverty, and youth unemployment sits at 63 percent.

According to UNRWA, the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, years of conflict and blockade have left 80 percent of Gaza’s population dependent on international assistance.

An Introduction to Revolutionary-Humanism by Roy Ratcliffe

On By Tony TaylorIn PoliticsLeave a comment
The young Marx

Roy Ratcliffe and I first crossed paths when I joined the tiny Marxist Workers Group in around 1976. Later we worked together in the Wigan Youth Service seeking to politicise its practice. In the 1980s we were leading lights in the creation of the Community and Youth Workers Union, the authors of its radical ‘horizontal’ constitution. We were to go our separate ways and lost contact for many years. Significantly though we both became increasingly critical of the vanguard Marxist-Leninist tradition via different routes. Mine saw me influenced by anarchism and such as Castoriadis, who broke from Marxism. However Roy has devoted his life to rescuing Marx from the Marxists. Indeed in 2003 he published ‘Revolutionary Humanism and the Anti-Capitalist Struggle’, a rigorous reworking of Marx for the 21st century. He has continued to refine his argument across the decades, always striving to integrate theory and practice as praxis, always seeking to influence activism. I look forward to being challenged as ever by this latest effort to introduce revolutionary humanism to a wider audience.

Roy writes:

By clicking on the long Web link below, (or by copying and pasting it into a search engine) a copy of a new document ‘An Introduction to Revolutionary-Humanism’ can be obtained at no cost. In 35 short chapters of explanation and criticism, it covers the many forms of exploitation, oppression and patriarchal prejudice which characterise the capitalist mode of production. The document builds on the original anti-capitalist perspective of Karl Marx – as it was before his firm revolutionary-humanist principles were ignored or suppressed by subsequent generations of sectarian dogmatists. Presented in what I hope will be easy to understand language, the chapters in the document are aimed in particular at anti-capitalists, humanists and eco-activists, but has also been written with an even wider and more general audience in mind. If the web link fails to deliver then a copy of the document can be requested by email to royratcliffe@yahoo.com


 The link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTgiCGN-50rGR9uOFKxOmWztx8_4v88kKMy3dHtlTGjZcC5wBQYKu3CXRlmUZcvtQegx-lzvWl83peo/pub

PREFACE

In the 21st century, a new generation of young people were born into global society and by 2019, many began questioning the effects of its method of production, distribution and consumption as the basis for the future of humanity. School students leaving their classrooms and demonstrating against climate change and many other negative aspects have become a phenomenon of ‘ecological enlightenment’. These new activists have replaced the previous generations of people who once protested against aspects of the capitalist system or even against its whole ethos. Previous ideological expressions of this generalised opposition to capitalism took the form of Socialism in the 19th century and Communism or Anti – capitalism, in the 20th century.

Those earlier political expressions of dissatisfaction with the capitalist mode of production often gave rise to groups and political parties with the aim, in one form or another, of positively improving or transforming it.  Such groups competed with each other for leadership of what they hoped would be a movement of ordinary working people which would by political means elect them, or by ‘revolution’ project them, to political power with a mandate to change things for the better. Some of these groups succeeded in part of that elitist hope and took power in various countries during the 20th century period of crisis; the ‘right-wing’ ‘National’ Socialists in Germany and Italy, the ‘left-wing’ Socialist/Communist Parties in Russia and China, and the ‘social-democratic’ socialists in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.

However, none of these groups and parties, once in power, even tried to end the exploitation of people and the planet. Indeed, most of these so-called reformist and revolutionary (sic) governments even intensified the exploitation of working people and frequently made matters worse with regard to pollution, ecological destruction, climate change, general poverty and hardship for the majority. Clearly, the ideas and practices which these groups and parties adopted did not benefit the mass of humanity or the planetary biosphere and so in the 21st century humanity is faced with even more problems than it was in the 20th.

This introduction to Revolutionary-Humanism seeks to explain why previous attempts to counteract capitalist exploitation were such dismal failures. In brief chapters, the ideas and methods previously employed by these groups and parties which led to dead ends are outlined. There are of course, hundreds of volumes of long – winded arguments detailing a multitude of disagreements within and between these groups and political parties, which for those with lots of time and patience, can be delved into. However, this introduction is an attempt to familiarise new generations of concerned students, workers and climate activists with the past struggles in a more easily digestible form.  Longer documents and larger volumes can always be visited and considered if and when time and/or inclination permits.

I suggest there is a pressing need for a younger generation to grasp the complexity of the struggle which faces humanity and to avoid both the sectarian dogma of those previous anti-capitalist political distortions and the economic and social ‘dead ends’ they led their ‘followers’ into. Hopefully the chapters in this book will facilitate the re-discovery of the early Revolutionary-Humanist aspirations held by ordinary working people and those who supported them. For it was these aspirations which became abandoned and sidelined by the egotistical and toxic dogma of elitist ‘vanguard’ leaders wishing to become the new leaders and top-down guardians of collective humanity.  

The chapters are introductions to the topics indicated by the chapter headings and can be used for individual study and reflection or for group discussion purposes. The subjects they deal with have been condensed to make them manageable for group discussions and for those new to the Revolutionary-Humanist  perspective on the capitalist mode of production. To the best of my knowledge the facts and conclusions stated are as accurate as I can make them given the resources currently at my disposal.

Roy Ratcliffe. (2021)

CONTENTS.

Chapter –  1   On Revolutionary-Humanism.

Chapter –  2   On Modes of Production.

Chapter –  3   On Capitalism.

Chapter –  4   On Finance – capital.

Chapter –  5   On the three forms of slavery.

Chapter  –  6  On Slavery and Racism.

Chapter  –  7  On Colonialism and Imperialism.

Chapter  –  8  On Past and Present Labour.

Chapter  –  9  On Productive and Unproductive Labour.

Chapter – 10  On the Origin of  Class Struggles.

Chapter – 11  On recent and future Class Struggles.

Chapter – 12  On Alienation and Addiction.

Chapter – 13  On Beneficial Association and Symbiosis.

Chapter – 14  On the Nation – State.

Chapter – 15  On Reformism.

Chapter – 16  On Anti-Capitalism.

Chapter – 17  On Individualism and Entitlement.

Chapter – 18  On Neo-liberalism.

Chapter – 19  On Capitalist Crisis and Crises.

Chapter –  20  On Public versus Private Production.

Chapter –  21  On Extinction by Extraction.

Chapter –  22  On Co-operation.

Chapter –  23  On Revolution.

Chapter –  24  On  Karl Marx.

Chapter –  25  On Capitalism’s War against Nature.

Chapter –  26  On Sectarianism.

Chapter –  27  On Ways of Thinking – 1.

Chapter –  28  On Ways of Thinking – 2.

Chapter –  29  On Historical Materialism.

Chapter –  30  2020 A Paradigm Shift?

Chapter –  31  On Politics and Power.

Chapter –  32  On Bourgeois Democracy versus Fascism (1)

Chapter –  33  On Bourgeois Democracy versus Fascism (2)

Chapter –  34  On Bourgeois Democracy versus Fascism (3)

Chapter –  35  On The Bourgeois World View.