Reply to Socialismo o Barbarie

• Our first letter to Socialismo o Barbarie
• Reply from Socialismo o Barbarie
• This response to their reply
• machine translation into English of the introduction and chapters 5 and 9 of SoB's book Marxism and the socialist transition, volume 1, by Roberto Saenz, and the Spanish original

1: Israel-Palestine

You call Israel a “colonial enclave” of the United States. Israel is a key regional ally of the USA. It relies heavily on the USA for military aid (although not entirely: Israel is a net exporter of arms). But Israel is not a “colony” of the USA. Israeli policy is set by its own government, not by Washington. Israel has occasionally pursued policies to which America has been opposed, sometimes openly so. Israel acts to further its own regional interests. Typically, these align with the interests of US imperialism, but are not wholly determined by them.

Israel was founded by the Hebrew-speaking Jewish population that had developed there, through many decades of immigration and settlement, pursuing a war to secure its own self-determination. That settlement often involved the displacement of existing Arab populations. In the course of the war, the Zionist movement acted brutally, as many nation states in the process of formation have done throughout history. It violently displaced many Palestinians from their homes. Many others fled. As you indicate, the Zionists relied on Stalinist military aid to win that war. Israel later pivoted to alignment with the USA. To see nothing in that history other than the establishment of a “colonial enclave” of America is to mechanically impose pre-determined categories of analysis onto a situation that does not support them.

You ask us to “distinguish between imperialist and oppressive states [and] semi-colonial and independent states”. You say Iran is in the latter category. But all states are “oppressive”. To suggest a category of “non-oppressive” capitalist state abandons class analysis. You rightly describe Iran as a “repulsive bourgeois theocracy”. We agree. We believe the political character of the regime substantially determines the role it plays in the region and beyond.

You say Iran is both “semi-colonial” and “independent”. Of whose empire is Iran a “semi-colony”? It is “independent”, in the sense that its policy is determined by its own ruling class, not imposed on it by an external colonial power. But no state is “independent” of global capitalism. Capital is substantially integrated on a global scale. Some national economies are better integrated than others. Some states, like the USA, are especially dominant. But a picture of the world as divided between a small number of colonial metropoles on the one hand, and their colonised (or “semi-colonised”) territories on the other, is radically outdated.

Iran is clearly an imperialist power on a regional scale. It has projected its military power throughout the region via sponsorship of forces such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and previously the Assad state in Syria. Parties aligned with the Iranian regime are influential in the political life of Iraq. Iran makes $67 billion from oil exports. To describe such a state as non- or anti-imperialist is to empty the word “imperialism” of meaning.

In the recent war between Israel and Iran, Iranian self-determination was not threatened. There was no prospect that Israel, either on its own or in alliance with the USA, would invade and conquer Iran, and subjugate the Iranian people to a foreign government directed from Washington or Jerusalem. In what sense, therefore, did the war have any kind of “anti-imperialist” character on the Iranian side?

Iran pursued its war by bombing civilian targets within Israel, whilst increasing repression domestically, including using the cover of war to intensify the oppression of national minorities. Since the war, 600,000 Afghan refugees have been deported from Iran. Millions more are threatened with deportation.

The war was reactionary on both sides. This is not to say it was a conflict between equally-matched parties; there are many asymmetries, political and military, between Israel and Iran. But on both sides, the war was fought to pursue regional-imperialist interests.

Elsewhere in your text, you say you “defend the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist [...] occupation.” So do we. But defending the right to resist is not enough to establish a political orientation. Defending the right to resist no more obliges us to defend specific forms of resistance than defending the right to free speech obliges us to defend all speech. There is no form of resistance that is wholly negative, defined solely by the thing it resists. All resistance also has a subjective political character. It is carried out for certain ends, in accordance with a worldview which shapes it.

You describe Hamas’s worldview as “reactionary”. We agree. Do you see no connection between this reactionary worldview and the actions Hamas undertakes? In our view, the 7 October attacks represented the pursuit of a reactionary worldview via reactionary means. The alternative for which Hamas resists Israeli occupation, a theocratic Islamic state with Jews driven out or subjugated, is not progressive. It would not represent freedom for the Palestinians.

That Hamas has never possessed, and in all likely scenarios will never possess, the capacity to achieve this end does not make it any less reactionary. Indeed, its impossibility makes international leftist support for Hamas even more of a tragic dead-end, even when that support is “critical”. It binds solidarity with the Palestinians to support for a reactionary political current which offers no possible path to freedom and equality.

You write that, “The colonial and genocidal state of Israel must disappear to make way for a state without religious prerogatives of any kind, in which all can live together.”

Many states, in history and today, have carried out colonial and genocidal policies. That does not mean any state based on a particular national group necessarily has a “colonial and genocidal” character, in an essential sense.

How is the “disappearance” of the existing Israeli state to be achieved? To what agency do you look to carry this out? For the Israeli state to be destroyed via external military force would require a bloody war which would almost inevitably take on a global character. Such a war would overwhelm any prospect of Palestinian liberation.

The only democratic way to dismantle and replace the existing Israeli state is via social revolution involving the people living in the territory. There is no way to achieve this without the involvement of a substantial section of the Israeli Jewish working class. This does not mean pandering to the existing chauvinist consciousness of Israeli Jewish workers; on the contrary, it means building movements of struggle which persuade those workers that stabilising their own democratic rights requires a political framework guaranteeing those same rights to Palestinians.

Later, you describe Israel as a “theocratic” state. This is false. The religious right has become increasingly powerful in Israeli politics over the last several decades, but Israel is still some way from becoming a theocracy. Despite the prominence of religious reactionaries in the politics of both Israel and Palestine, the conflict is not fundamentally “religious”, but national: a state based on one national group oppressing another national people. The question of “religious prerogatives” is therefore not central.

The aim must be for equality of national rights. This is both a universal democratic entitlement, and the best available mechanism for draining the poison of national oppression and creating conditions for the unity of Jewish and Arab workers, on a class basis.

You say “every Israeli citizen is an occupier [and] a settler”. You say this is “central” to your analysis. But the claim breaks down under the least interrogation. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab-Palestinians. Another 300,000 are Bedouin Arabs. Another 150,000 are Druze. Are these people, too, “occupiers and settlers”?

Presumably you mean that every Israeli Jew “is an occupier and a settler”. But within the Jewish population of Israel, there are Jews with family roots in historic Palestine stretching back many generations. Others descend from Jewish refugees from Tsarist or Nazi oppression. Still others descend from Mizrahi Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab countries in the years following Israel’s foundation. People with Mizrahi heritage now comprise a majority of Israeli Jewish society.

All of these groups have varying relations to power and privilege within Israel. Many have experienced historic and ongoing discrimination. The Arab-Palestinian minority faces intense racism.

Do you see no difference between a West Bank settler who recently moved from the USA, and a resident of Tel Aviv whose grandparents and great-grandparents may all have been born in Israel? To collapse all Israeli Jews into an undifferentiated category of “settler/occupier” is to move from historical materialism to a form of ethnic essentialism.

The seven million Israeli Jews are not a colonial bureaucracy like the British in India. Nor are they a transplanted settler caste with an ongoing relationship to an imperial metropole like the French in Algeria. Nor are they a racial-supremacist minority, defined by their exploitation of the labour of an indigenous majority, like the whites in apartheid South Africa. They were a 13% minority when apartheid fell. The Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations in the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea are of roughly equal size.

Israeli Jews are a fully class-differentiated group, rooted in the territory, with no metropole or cultural “homeland” to return to. They are a nation, by any operable definition of that concept. If we support the right to national self-determination, we must support that right consistently and universally. It is not a reward for good behaviour, or something to be upheld only when states based on particular national groups pursue policies we approve of.

No national group has the right to deny self-determination to another people. That is why the immediate issue for democratic politics in Israel-Palestine is ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and establishing a genuinely independent Palestinian state.

You refer to the possibility of “sectors of the Israeli population emerging that oppose the occupation”. Such “sectors” already exist. They are currently a small and embattled minority. That is all the more reason for us to provide solidarity. These binational currents, such as Standing Together, do not seek the “destruction of Israel”, but rather a democratic upheaval that achieves a political settlement in which both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have equal rights. That is a far better basis on which to build socialist politics than dismissing the entire Israeli Jewish nation as an illegitimate colonial implantation, and offering support, however critical, to reactionary currents such as Hamas.

The effect small groups of revolutionary socialist activists around the world can have on the political reality of Israel-Palestine is scant enough. If we can have any effect at all, it is only by providing solidarity to currents on the ground pursuing democratic and class struggles. To reduce ourselves to passive cheerleaders for the “destruction of Israel”, rendering us apologists for the reactionary currents which proclaim this as their aim, is to waste what little resources we possess. It does nothing whatsoever to advance the cause of Palestinian freedom.

In fact, it has no impact on the situation on the ground at all. The only effect it has, the only effect it can possibly have, is to educate those we are able to reach in the nonsensical idea that the values we claim to fight for — liberty, equality, democracy, socialism — can somehow be advanced by political forces mortally hostile to all of them.

2: Stalinist states

We agree entirely that the Stalinist states were "social formations that developed new forms of exploitation of labour and appropriation of social surplus value", and no form of "dictatorship of the proletariat", however "degenerated" or "deformed".

But we disagree with your view that those class-exploitative formations constituted, nonetheless, "partial conquests that must be defended". We think "Trotsky's classic position" of "defencism" in a war between the old USSR and capitalist powers, even when those are historically oppressed small nations with no realistic imperial ambitions, like Finland, does not stand up in the light of events since 1940.

Kautsky wrote about the Marxist appraisal of state ownership in 1892, in his commentary on the Erfurt Programme which became a primer for such people as Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky. He warned against any idea that "every nationalisation of an economic function or of an industry is a step towards the Co-operative Commonwealth, and that the latter could be the result of a general nationalisation of all industries without any change in the character of the state.

"The... modern state is preeminently an instrument intended to guard the interests of the ruling class. This feature is in no wise changed by its assumption of features of general utility which affect the interests not of the ruling class alone, but of the whole body politic. The modern state assumes these functions often simply because otherwise the interests of the ruling class would be endangered with those of society as a whole...

"If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labor, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class.

"As an exploiter of labour, the state is stronger than any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields..."

Reasonably enough at the time, Kautsky saw no chance of state ownership becoming other than very partial, short of the working class taking power.

Trotsky, in his day, concurred. He thought that the statisation of the USSR economy had been made possible only by the workers' revolution of 1917, and that it had given economic development a boost which, even despite the horrors of the bureaucracy, allowed the USSR to develop productive forces in a world where capitalism could not.

Whatever the arguments for that judgement then, experience since 1940 shows it was wrong.

We have seen many cases of states taking ownership of all large-scale industry and commerce. The non-USSR Stalinist states did that with no workers' revolution. There have been other cases which we all call "state-capitalist", such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Burma, etc. etc. at various times.

A large role for state enterprise, and for protectionism, was often rational for poorer states developing industry in the winds and storms of a rapacious world market. But a very large role was advantageous only in early (very far from "post-capitalist") phases. And there is no evidence of developmental advantage from a super-large role, in the sense of the near-elimination even of small private workshops, shops, and farms, as done in the Stalinist states (excepting, perhaps, China, East Germany, and Poland).

North Korea has not been economically superior to South Korea, or East Germany to West Germany.

Even if they could show better figures for industrial growth - and they couldn't - that would not mark them as overall better from our point of view, since the industrial growth came with a suppression of working-class organisational and intellectual life even greater than in the most authoritarian private-profit capitalist states.

State property can bring social improvement. But it depends on whose state. Ownership of industry by a Stalinist state is not a social conquest of the working class, or to be cherished by the working class.

Imperialism? Even in 1939 Trotsky wrote: "The driving force behind the Moscow bureaucracy is indubitably the tendency to expand its power, its prestige, its revenues. This is the element of 'imperialism' in the widest sense of the word which was a property in the past of all monarchies, oligarchies, ruling castes, medieval estates and classes".

Essentially the rationale for Trotsky refusing to apply the term "imperialist" to the USSR's role in the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-40 was that he saw that war as only a subsidiary part of the World War, with the big powers of Britain and France likely to send troops; that in that World War he could not envisage the USSR's part as being fundamentally other than defensive; and that any conquests by it would thus be only marginal and secondary, of a different order to the main capitalist-imperialist powers.

That made some sense at the time. Experience since then shows it was wrong. From 1944 the USSR conquered and looted a large empire in central and eastern Europe; it exercised imperialist hegemony over many Stalinist states beyond that, even if some like China would eventually throw it off.

Also, we do not agree that Ukraine's battle against Putin's drive to conquest "is a very different case from the independence struggles in Asia and Africa in the 20th century", because those had "anti-imperialist" leaderships and Zelenskyy is "pro-imperialist in relation to the US and the EU".

The nationalist leaderships in Vietnam, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Yemen, etc. were anti-imperialist in the sense of fighting domination by France, the USA, Portugal, Britain, etc. Zelenskyy is anti-imperialist in a similar sense, fighting domination by Russia. Of course he seeks aid from the USA and EU states. That does not make him more pro-imperialist than leaderships in Vietnam, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Yemen, etc. seeking to move into the USSR's sphere, or acquire a position of "balancing" between US and USSR influence.

Most (not all) NATO powers back Ukraine because they want to curb Russian imperialism, as say the USSR and China backed Vietnam because they wanted to curb US imperialism. That does not make the Ukraine war a proxy war between NATO and Russia, any more than the Vietnam war was essentially a proxy war between the USA and Russia and/or China.