An exchange of views on Palestinian solidarity and Hamas

Posted on by
Reply

Sráid Marx has received a comment on the series of posts that were written on solidarity with Palestine from Socialist Democracy, having linked to one of its articles in my second post. I include their comment below and a brief reply.

* * *

A critique of our position on Gaza solidarity.
Are the politics of Hamas a defining issue?

Over the course of the ongoing genocide in Gaza Socialist Democracy has distributed thousands of leaflets and newsletters commenting on the struggle and the movement in solidarity in Ireland. The aim of that work has been to provoke a response and to support a debate in the movement about it’s future direction.


While we have had a number of interesting conversations, there has been no organised response, so it is with some pleasure that we read a commentary by Sraid Marx on their blogspot, especially as we are given a C‐ for our most recent publication.


However we have some difficulties in responding. The comrade does not mention our name or give a full account of our position, so we are being invited to reverse engineer to understand the comrades own position.


Essentially we feel that the Sraid Marx position is too formalistic, whereas our approach is more contextual.


A chief point in the ongoing offensive is the constant demand that we condemn Hamas. We are familiar with this approach from the troubles and constant demands to condemn the Republicans. The demand now is that we blame Hamas for the violence, ignore the Israeli and US previous drives towards genocide and agree that history started with the Hamas breakout.


We can’t agree, because that concedes to the imperialists. We can’t endorse the action because that would tie us to the strategy of Hamas. The answer is: What do you expect when you imprison millions in an open air concentration camp and constantly humiliate and murder them?


Much of the critique is given over to the nature of Hamas. We think that beside the point. The source of the violence rests with the US and Israel. The UK is a willing participant in genocide and Ireland a consistent facilitator and opposition must start from there.


A useful criticism of Hamas lies in the context of the Gaza outbreak. That was the Abraham accords, drafted by the first Trump regime and aimed at erasing discussion of Palestinian rights and winning endorsement of Israel by the Arab regimes. When Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa flood it was appealing to the Arab regimes on the basis of nationalism and to the Muslim world on the basis of religion. An immediate tactical aim was to do what they had done in the past – seize prisoners to use as bargaining chips and win concessions from Israel.


They were profoundly mistaken. Arab nationalism no longer has a progressive content. Imperialism is poised to establish complete control of West Asia, founded on establishing the absolute military primacy of the US and Israeli axis and the capitulation of the Arab regimes. Genocide is an acceptable cost of victory and dissent is to be crushed. The imperialists have scored remarkable but still incomplete victories. The final task is to crush Iran, but there are doubts about the military capacity of the US alliance and its failures in Yemen which are holding it back from regional war.


The Irish movement does not discuss politics. It remains fixed on Free Palestine and individual acts of BDS. Demands for government action do not lead to a consistent campaign against the government.


This political weakness has a material base. Much of the leadership is the decayed remnant of the anti-imperialist left. It is in alliance with Sinn Féin, who wanted to suggest anti-imperialist positions without breaking with imperialism. Sections of the trade union movement pose as defenders of Palestine without breaking their partnership with Irish capitalism. The core of the Palestinian diaspora are linked to the collaborationist Palestinian Authority and their ambassador to Ireland and are hostile to Hamas.


A new inflection came with a current associated with the group Rebel Breeze. They criticised the solidarity campaign for inaction and failure to target the US, Israel and the Irish government. We supported the criticism but did not support their position of uncritical support for the Palestinian resistance. We attempted to engage with them but they did not reply. So the current situation is that the solidarity movement is weak and has no mechanisms for national debate.


In relation to Sraid Marx we would be critical of the formalism which led to the analysis of the CounterPunch position. We see no reason to give credence to their analysis of Hamas and their Irish solution of a Palestinian Good Friday Agreement is risible.

These positions arise less from political theory than from a long tradition of opportunism. They are not a serious attempt to plot out a revolutionary position, more an attempt to align with a relatively non-political base.

Changes are taking place. The genocide in Gaza is related to the drive to war in Europe and the trade war with China. The UK is to the fore in urging warfare not welfare. The Irish government is every day taking measures to integrate with NATO and with European militarism. This feeds a growing outlawing of protest and use of state force.

The liberal virtue signalling of Irish leftism and of the NGO world will fade away like snow from a ditch. A genuine socialist and anti-imperialist movement will arise from recognising the role of local ruling classes as representatives of the imperialist world order.

* * *

You ask the question “Are the politics of Hamas a defining issue?’” to which the answer you give is presumably ‘no’ although that depends on what the issue is to be defined.  I was careful to define the issue of solidarity with Palestine in terms of the responsibility of the Irish state in collaborating with imperialism and the Zionist state in the first part of my series of posts; the general approach of socialists to solidarity in the second part and in relation to Hamas in particular in the third part.

This means that in order to rebut the legitimacy of criticism of Hamas you need to engage with the arguments of the second post and you have not.

Progress has been made, however, in that you are no longer claiming that ‘denunciation of HAMAS is simply a mechanism for supporting genocide’, which I pointed out in my second post.  Instead, you indicate that although you cannot endorse the actions of Hamas the correct response is to say “What do you expect when you imprison millions in an open air concentration camp and constantly humiliate and murder them?”  This may be a point to make in response to imperialist calls to condemn Hamas but it is woeful as a position in relation to how imperialism is to be defeated.

It would appear however that you do believe that criticism of Hamas is valid – “A useful criticism of Hamas lies in the context of the Gaza outbreak.”  This criticism includes Hamas’s reliance on reactionary Arab regimes “on the basis of nationalism and to the Muslim world on the basis of religion.”  You also concede that its tactical plan was a strategic disaster, so that “the imperialists have scored remarkable but still incomplete victories.”  As you say, Hamas “were profoundly mistaken” and “Arab nationalism no longer has a progressive content.”

You have therefore moved considerably but remain still a bit confused.  You argue that the critique of Hamas, specifically its nature that would account for and explain ,for example, all the criticism you make yourself, is “beside the point.” You are keen to argue that the political weakness of the Irish solidarity movement “has a material base” but do you not also believe that this is true of Hamas?

If you take your critique seriously you are obliged to advance the arguments that a working class alternative armed with socialist politics is required to help advance not only the solidarity movement but also the struggle of the Palestinian people against genocide.  This is what I attempted in the second post.

A penultimate point about trying to further debate in the solidarity movement.  You state of my posts, and their reference to the analysis of two authors in Counterpunch, that you see “no reason to give credence to their analysis of Hamas and their Irish solution of a Palestinian Good Friday Agreement is risible.”  

I make my own criticism of the authors references to Ireland clear, while it gets you nowhere to claim that their criticisms of Hamas should not be discussed because I should not “give credence to their analysis.”  If you think they are categorically wrong, you need to say why and where they go wrong.  Otherwise, dismissive comments are but another example of the refusal to engage in debate for which you criticise others.

A final point. You write that a “genuine socialist and anti-imperialist movement will arise from recognising the role of local ruling classes as representatives of the imperialist world order.” It will also require a political struggle against nationalism and fundamentalism and rejection of the petty bourgeois moralism that preaches that the leaders of oppressed groups are beyond criticism.

UK Supreme Court decides a woman is an adult human female

Posted on by
Reply

Although this is how the decision of the supreme court has been interpreted, the actual decision is the narrower one of what the GB Equality Act (EA) of 2010 means by ‘sex’, which it has decided means biological and not certified sex.  It has therefore been hailed by ‘gender critical’ activists as a victory for common sense and by certain trans activists as an attack on their human rights.

An alternative potential judgment – that the term ‘sex’ and thus sex itself – is determined by a certificate demonstrates how bizarre an alternative decision would have been.  In effect, it would mean one’s sex as far as the state is concerned was determined through its award of a certificate.  This would not have represented the continuation of the status quo, with the advances already achieved by the gender identity movement, but would have provided the grounds for a further attack on the rights of women, and then men.  If sex was certified, what obstacle would exist to certification being required?

The judgement of the court dealt with the problem of pretending that there were two types of women with all the incoherence that this would involve. Anyone from the left lamenting the judgment, and state interference in matters that do not belong to it, should consider how we got to this position through gender recognition certificates and how the scope for its massive inflation would have been prepared by the alternative decision some seem to have wanted.

The court ruled that ‘Any other interpretation would render the EA 2010 incoherent and impracticable to operate’, and rejected ‘the suggestion . . . that the words can bear a variable meaning so that in the provisions relating to pregnancy and maternity the EA 2010 is referring to biological sex only, while elsewhere it refers to certificated sex as well.’  (para 265) In doing so the court rejected the deliberate ambiguity and confusion of trans arguments presented by the lawyers for the Scottish government in which use of the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ can alternatively be employed as synonyms and as different concepts as suited their purposes.  I have looked at this sort of confusion before by what, for example, is meant by the word ‘gender’?

The court judgement stated that in getting a gender recognition certificate ‘there is nothing to suggest that undergoing such a process changes a person’s sex as a matter of law. It does not. Indeed, a full process of medical transition to the opposite gender without obtaining a GRC has no effect on the person’s sex as a matter of law.’ (para 200) It is also the case that this is true as a matter of fact, while the gender identity movement obviously thought the imprimatur of the law would allow them to claim this.

However, as the judgement stated: ‘a strong indicator that the words “sex”, “man” and “woman” in the EA 2010 have their biological meaning (and not a certificated sex meaning) is provided by sections 13(6), 17 and 18 (which relate to sex, pregnancy and maternity discrimination) and the related provisions. The protection afforded by these provisions is predicated on the fact of pregnancy or the fact of having given birth to a child and the taking of leave in consequence. Since as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant, the protection is necessarily restricted to biological women.’ (para 177)

As the court notes ‘Put another way, if the acquisition of a certificate pursuant to section 9(1) of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 applies to these words, so that biological women living as trans men (with a GRC in the male gender) are male, they would nonetheless be excluded from protection when pregnant notwithstanding a continued capacity to become pregnant . . .’   So, some women (identifying as men) would lose the rights that come with pregnancy were sex to be defined by the gender recognition certificate they might have.

The court ruled that ‘We can identify no good reason why the legislature should have intended that sex-based rights and protections under the EA 2010 should apply to these complex, heterogenous groupings, rather than to the distinct group of (biological) women and girls (or men and boys) with their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group.’ (para 172)  ‘Moreover, it makes no sense for conduct under the EA 2010 in relation to sex- based rights and protections to be regulated on a practical day-to-day basis by reference to categories that can only be ascertained by knowledge of who possesses a (confidential) certificate.’ (para 173).

Media reaction, and almost all previous media attention to the issue, has framed the judgement as one primarily impacting on trans women, much less on trans men (i.e. biological women), while some on the left that we have addressed before have repeatedly referred to the ‘small numbers’ (of trans people) involved, as if this meant that their feelings could be accommodated by any ‘solution’ regardless of any changed meaning to the word ‘women’, and thus the rights of half of humanity.

For all the faux left denunciations of a reactionary court by gender identity supporters, its recognition of the material reality of the sex class of women and of the shared ‘disadvantage, and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group’ shows it has a better grasp of reality and how to address it than some self-identified Marxists.

I am reminded of a tweet by the bête noir of the supporters of gender identity ideology, JK Rowling, who noted that she doubted Marx would have supported them:

‘Ironically, I can’t see Marx having any truck with gender ideology at all. He believed women were oppressed on the basis of their sex and I doubt he’d embrace a highly individualistic ideology that offers fertile new marketing opportunities for the capitalists of Big Pharma.’

The court seemed impressed by another argument that left supporters of gender identity ideology have failed to understand:

“Arguments concerning the definition of a protected characteristic are never simply  manifestations of individual claims. They are always group orientated. The claim that one is a woman is a claim to be included within a particular category of persons and to be excluded from another. It is also a claim to include some persons and to exclude other persons within the group that one is a part of. This matters especially for aspects of the Equality Act 2010 which require duty-bearers to be cognisant of how their conduct might affect those who share a protected characteristic or where there is an obligation to account for the distinct needs and interests of those who share a particular characteristic.” (para 142)

This blog has repeatedly criticised the moralistic politics of much of the left, which has departed from class analysis based on an understanding of objective reality to moralistic claims divorced from this reality.  So, their support for the supposed moral value of ‘inclusion’ means the inclusion of men in the category of women along with appropriation of their specific rights and prerogatives, regardless of women’s own views.  In fact, if challenged some of these men claim that as women they are the best defenders of such rights!

All this is based on purportedly unverifiable subjective claims that this left makes no attempt to verify or validate.  It thus accepts or acquiesces in all the most outlandish nonsense the radical trans movement throws out.  The claim to the impossible – to be, or to be able to change to, the other sex – defies reality and thus rational debate but becomes an assertion that is to be accepted without question or to be asserted and imposed.

This is the significance of the compelled use of the ‘right’ pronouns on others and the ‘crime’ of ‘misgendering’, which can demonstrate acceptance of, if not agreement to, the tenets of this ideology.  What is involved is not the exercise of rights but compulsion to unagreed social norms.  In capitalist society the state stands over the boundaries and content of many social norms and this defeat for gender identity ideology not only sets duties and responsibilities on state institutions and private bodies but frees up restrictions on social intercourse that the gender identity movement has been so successful in imposing.

The court noted the argument of Sex Matters that ‘many organisations feel pressured into accepting de facto self-identification for the purposes of identifying whom to treat as a woman or girl when seeking to apply the group-based rights and protections of the EA 2010 in relation to the protected characteristic of sex. The result in some cases is that certain women-only groups, organisations, and charities have come under pressure (including from funders and commissioners) to include trans women and policy decisions have been taken simply to accept members or users of the opposite biological sex . . .’ (para 203)

Judge Lord Hodge from the court said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, but it is.

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (3 of 3) – Solidarity with Hamas?

Posted on by
Reply
National demonstration in support of Palestine, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times

In the previous post I stated that the October 7 attack by Hamas precipitated the current genocide in Gaza, as in to hasten the occurrence of something; hastily, or suddenly.  This does not make Hamas responsible for the genocide.  This responsibility belongs to the Zionist state and to its US sponsor as well as those states that have also supported and defended it.  As the first post made clear, this includes the Irish State, which studiously permits and facilitates the transfer of weapons and munitions from the US to Israel.

The responsibility of the Zionist state for genocide should not be a surprise, since the state itself is a settler colonial creation founded on the dispossession of the native Palestinian population subject to repeated expulsions and attacks.  The viciousness of the Zionist state and of its response to any challenge has routinely been disproportionate and the evolution of Zionist politics from labour to far-right reflects the logic of its existence.

All this does not excuse Hamas from criticism that it provoked an attack for which it was totally unable to defend the people that it claimed to represent.  This is essentially the argument of the Counterpunch article that I referenced before and which is illustrative of the arguments presented in the previous post. 

On the Oct 7 attack the Counterpunch article states that ‘Hamas must have known that Israel would react with massive destruction in Gaza after the October 7th attacks’ and that its  ‘military strategy was suicidal and poorly planned, also entailing war crimes against civilians which the leadership must have known would lead to the total destruction of Gaza.’  It further argues that ‘those who wish to engage in deluded fantasies like endless military confrontation having been the only avenue available to Hamas are quite deficient in their analysis which is bereft of intellectual rigor, to say the least. This sentiment is often felt by those attempting to appear the most revolutionary by taking what they perceive to be the most radical position.’

The failures of Hamas flow from the nature of the organisation: ‘the bulk of Palestinian resistance fighters—the actual fighters of Hamas and other entities—are acting out of anger and a desire for revenge, as the majority of them have lost family members due to Israeli attacks’; however ‘Hamas’ leaders . . . have climbed to the apex of power amongst the exploited and now seek their own privileges, power and financial gain.’

Hamas are described as corrupt ‘kleptocrats keen on getting rich, content with the privileges they possess in real life, and if they’re assassinated or killed in combat by the Israelis, then they believe they’ll be absolved in the afterlife—as Islamic fundamentalists do.’  An example of their corruption is provided – ‘Hamas had agreed to let the PA develop Gaza’s natural gas fields in exchange for a portion of the profits during negotiations with the US, Israel and Egypt. Simply put, Hamas’ leaders had decided they would sell their own people out to the Americans and Israelis—who effectively control the PA—in exchange for a cut on the back end.’

It is ironic therefore that the authors of the article argue that this is the alternative to HAMAS’s militarist adventurism and that the example provided by the Irish peace process is one to be emulated.  The Irish example helps point to why they are wrong.

The success of the Good Friday Agreement, such as it actually exists, is largely due to the failure and unpopularity of the militarism of the IRA.  What is wrong with this peace process is not that this militarism was abandoned but that without it the IRA and Irish republicanism generally had no political alternative to British imperialism.  The circumstances in Palestine are radically different from the North of Ireland, including that there was never any threat of genocide to the nationalist population.

So, while imperialism in Ireland and the Irish state are genuine in seeking a pacified Northern state with nationalist participation in the local administration, the view that ‘for now only a two state solution along the 1967 borders seems even remotely achievable’ after ‘Palestine [is] developed and modernized under US-Israeli-PA rule’ is hopelessly optimistic and misguided.  The two state policy has been endorsed by most of western imperialism for a long time and shown to be a fraud.  The Zionist regime has rejected it and, as the authors explain , its initial support for Hamas was precisely to help prevent it.

On its own, their proposal for the economic and social development of the Palestinian areas (under what currently could only be some sort of imperialist rule) is not wrong.  It is better, infinitely better, than genocide, but it fails to appreciate that the policy of genocide and steps to ethnic cleansing are a rejection of it by imperialism and Zionism, and of itself is not a policy of the working class, rather than simply potentially the best current conditions to allow one to develop. 

The article, at best, falls into the familiar trap of providing ‘solutions’ that are not those of the working class because the working class cannot provide its own. It does this instead of accepting weakness and pursuing a policy of opposition, one that doesn’t pretend to the current possibility of socialist revolution.  The writings of Marx and Engels are replete with such a policy where the working class is too weak or undeveloped to impose its own power but should not therefore politically support that of the bourgeoisie.

One of the ways by which better conditions for a working class alternative can be created is a working class led solidarity movement that sees this as one of its tasks.  This involves opposition to genocide and western imperialist complicity but also an open policy of supporting a working class policy and movement.

This is a long way from the current humanitarian solidarity that refuses to take a position on the political solution while, in doing so, leaving reactionary forces to fill in the gap.  It involves hoping that imperialism will do what it has demonstrated it has no intention of doing; hoping the Zionist state will be forced by imperialism to accept it, and hoping the reactionary Arab regimes will play a positive role in pushing this along, as opposed to their current closer and closer accommodation with both imperialism and Zionism.

Back to part 2

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (2 of 3) – Socialist solidarity

Posted on by
Reply

Belfast City Hall 5 April 2025

A friend sent me an article on the Counterpunch website that looked at Hamas and the October 7 attack that precipitated the current genocide in Gaza, which I will look at it in the next post.  It raises issues about solidarity with oppressed groups by socialists and what, if anything, socialists have to say that is different.  Having something different to say isn’t in itself a reason to say it, but if socialists think they have a distinctive view of the world and don’t have anything very different to say it implies that their socialism isn’t very important.

Socialism is international or it is nothing.  By this we mean that the cause of the working class in other countries is our cause and that socialism cannot exist within a single country.  This means that we seek to advance the socialist struggle of the workers in every country and that a victory in another country is a victory for us.  This is the material basis of solidarity for socialists.

Of course, in doing so we oppose oppression in every country, but you do not need to be a socialist to do this and we are socialists not just because we oppose oppression but because we believe only socialism – only the actions of the working class – can defeat oppression and establish freedom.  And this goes for the struggle in Palestine as well, although often these considerations appear to disappear when socialists discuss it.

Instead, we get statements such as the following – ‘that we must not only oppose oppression but support the oppressed, the right to resist oppression and the resistance itself.  We also get formulas that we should not take sides in intra-Palestinian political disputes, which only the Palestinians should engage in and determine.

If we work backwards – what is this last idea but a form of identity politics?  That Palestinians are a group apart with ideas and movements separate from the rest of the world’s struggles with nothing to learn from them; nothing to learn from the long history of working class struggle across the planet? If they are so different as to have nothing to learn then they would have nothing to teach us either. Either they are uniquely blessed with a political leadership beyond criticism because it never gets anything wrong, or it gets it wrong but is beyond help.  If neither of these are true, is it because we have no right to speak about their struggle or only to do so to voice our support? (Do we take this view about every struggle: of the French working class or German or any other?).

If it is the last argument, this simply leaves us back at the start and fails to argue why socialists have no right to state what we think is good or bad for the struggle; one that we have said is part of our own world-wide struggle and on which we are also at least partly dependent.  In short, the international struggle for socialism is something that involves Palestine and therefore involves us.

It might be argued that the struggle in Palestine is not about socialism, but this is no answer since socialists have a position on all struggles against oppression and these very often do not immediately raise the possibility of a socialist victory.  Otherwise, in today’s condition of the class struggle, we would silence ourselves across most of the world.

Of course, what we have to say should be within the framework of solidarity with the oppressed and should have something relevant and positive to contribute, but part of our solidarity is that we believe we do have something distinctive to contribute, not least because for us, solidarity is not an act of altruistic humanitarian concern for others but is part of our own fight.  The only basis for refusing to engage in debate on the way forward for the Palestinian struggle is the belief that it is separate from us: ‘In our thousands! In our millions! We are all Palestinians!’ becomes not only untrue (we are not suffering genocide!) but is also denied and rejected by the claim that we are not permitted to offer our own views.

This, however, is the most common view of solidarity, which thus becomes a sort of activist charitable exercise fed by the politics of self-determination of nations.  The socialist view is the primacy of self-determination of the working class, as an international class that can unite politically and organisationally, which is obviously impossible without debate, argument and disagreement.

Where does this leave us with the formulation that we must not only oppose oppression but support the oppressed, the right to resist oppression and the resistance itself? 

First, even oppressed people’s and nations are composed of classes involving class exploitation and oppression.  Genocide only partly qualifies this, as those with lots of money will always find a way to use it to their benefit.  Class divisions have a bearing not only on whether and how to resist oppression but also on the objectives of resistance.  Class struggle doesn’t disappear and socialists above all should recognise this in their solidarity and within the solidarity movement.

So what about the right to resist?  Socialists are in favour of the working class and other oppressed groups resisting exploitation and oppression but do so on the basis that capitalism exploits and oppresses, and that class struggle exists as a result.  As Marxists we understand that capitalism gives rise to the potential for socialism because of the nature of its development.  From this arises the struggle for socialism, not some moral right to resist that is independent of the circumstances and conditions in society.  This is important for how we resist, which we will explore in relation to Gaza in the next post.

In general, however, socialists are always to the fore in advocating resistance to exploitation and oppression, with the view that advancing towards the alternative is what matters above all.  We therefore support the oppressed by seeking to end their oppression, which ultimately can only be through the working class becoming the ruling class of society.

This leads to the final claim, that those in solidarity with the oppressed must also solidarize with the resistance and with the resistance movement, and this is where the biggest difference arises.  Since our view of solidarity is not dictated by any moral assertion there can be no moral claim on us to support resistance movements that are themselves reactionary, and this obviously includes Islamic political movements (as opposed to democratic and socialist movements composed of religious believers).

Solidarity arises from common interests and purposes.  What common interests and purposes arise between reactionary movements in conflict with imperialism and socialists?  To ask the question is almost to answer it.  Both can be opposed to imperialism on the grounds of some common effects of its rule or intervention but reactionary movements that come into conflict with imperialism are not anti-capitalist, never mind socialist, so their opposition is limited and qualified.  Ultimately their interests and purposes are opposed to those of socialists and is the reason for separate organisation and politics in the first place.

Since our primary interests and purposes are separate any common activity is also limited and qualified and there can be no unqualified or unconditional support.  Common objectives may allow episodic common actions and organisational cooperation to achieve them but there are no grounds for avoiding criticism or separate organisation.

We therefore do not give political support to reactionary movements on the grounds that they embody the resistance of the oppressed, because that resistance is politically reactionary and cannot represent their full and complete interests.  Whether these movements are in our own country or another does not fundamentally change this but at most determines the emphasis to be placed on opposition to our own state for whatever role it plays in the oppression.

In practice many socialists acknowledge this while denying it in words and will criticise the Palestinian Authority but not Hamas, for example on the illogical grounds that ‘denunciation of HAMAS is simply a mechanism for supporting genocide.’  Such an overblown statement scarcely warrants a response.  See below a better statement by this organisation to the Belfast rally pictured above. 

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (1 of 3) – the Irish State

Posted on by
Reply

Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach “is that where we’re headed” when he recounted the arrest of fourteen women from Mothers Against Genocide during their peaceful protest outside the Dáil on Mothers’ Day.

The right answer is yes and no.  Yes, we are heading towards a more repressive state and no, because we have been heading along this road for some time.  What has changed is the decision of the Irish state that it needs to abandon its appearance of some sort of neutrality, and defender of at least the appearance of international legality, and sign up to membership of NATO.

It’s difficult to sell the legitimacy of the state on current grounds when it has steadfastly refused to do anything meaningful to oppose genocide in Gaza.  It becomes impossible when it explicitly permits the use of Irish air space to transfer the weapons by which genocide is carried out, from the US to Israel.  Up until now it had appeared that the state had simply turned a blind eye to such flights while The Irish Times has now revealed that it has explicitly approved them.

The idea that the state is a leading defender of Palestinian rights is consequently as dead as a Dodo and the foot dragging on implementing the Occupied Territories Bill has become the least of the proof.  The decision of the new government to endorse the IHRA definition of antisemitism only makes sense in order to defend the Zionist state and to develop cover to those who defend and support its mass murder. The Irish state has already gone beyond both of these and is now revealed to be up to its neck in complicity with it.

Irish neutrality is a myth, as we have argued before (here, here and here), but it has involved constraints on its collaboration with NATO.  Now the state has decided that the drive towards war by the US and rest of Europe leaves it exposed just when it already faces severe threats to its economic role as a tax haven and general platform for US multinationals.  Pissing off Trump and the rest of the supporters of Zionism in the US is not going to help any special pleading it might want to make nor engender sympathy with the rest of the EU that backs genocide to the hilt.

Within this context, the attack on Palestine solidarity protests and signing up to defend the Zionist state makes perfect sense.  What doesn’t make any sense is to base a solidarity campaign on persuading this state to defend Palestinian rights, which is what the present campaign has been doing.  Repeated calls for the state to do this or that, pass the Occupied Territories Bill or new Air Navigation and Transport (Arms Embargo) Bill, has to ignore the determination of the state not to do anything like this.  

Instead, official Ireland has sought to protect itself by recognising the Palestinian state, which most countries have done to no effect, and intervene in the International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa, which also has little effect.  Of course, this has still upset the rabid Israeli regime despite secret calls from the Irish government that nothing is meant by such actions.  Meanwhile the Irish Central Bank helps Israel finance its genocide.

A solidarity campaign based on moral appeals to the amoral or to International law that Western imperialist powers decide to accept or reject as it suits, is to already accept hypocrisy as sincerity, imperialist actions as simply mistakes, and imperialism itself as capable of taking a progressive course.  It is fine to point out the hypocrisy, the real policy, and the nature of Irish state collaboration with imperialism, but it is simply foolish and futile to expect that anything meaningful will be achieved by this alone.

The picket at the trade union conference in Belfast, picked up by this Zionist news outlet, shows the beginnings of awareness that it is not enough for trade union figures to make fine speeches at demonstrations and demand that others, especially the government, take action, but that the trade unions themselves should take action and the campaign should focus on them and speak directly to workers.

It might appear that the widespread sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people is a strong basis on which to force effective solidarity but the ability of the new government to ignore international law, stymie its own minimalist legislation, and go on the offensive to protect Zionism is all evidence of the limits of such popular opinion.

The general lack of understanding of the reasons for the genocide and the ability of the Zionist state to act with impunity is a result of the failure to appreciate the nature and current role of imperialism.  This can be seen in the acceptance of Irish sanctions against Russia and support for the US, EU and Britain in provoking and continuing the war in Ukraine.  In a world in which imperialism can ‘do the right thing’ in Ukraine, the possibility of persuading it to do the same in Gaza can appear as a reasonable possibility.

Only by rejecting the war in Ukraine as the product of inter-imperialist rivalry, as the result partly of deliberate US provocation, and acceptance of it as essentially an imperialist proxy war, with the Ukrainian state as the willing proxy, is it possible to see the perfect consistency of US, EU and British actions in both Palestine and Ukraine.  Unfortunately, much of the Irish left, just like the British, has capitulated and supported Western imperialism through its Ukrainian proxy.

The latest revelations of the major role of the US in the war, published by the New York Times, should leave no one able to claim the innocence – never mind progressiveness – of its role, or the claim that this is something other than an imperialist war.  To continue to do so is to wilfully ignore the evidence or make an unconscious claim to stupidity.  Absent both, the real condemnation is of the rotten politics of most of the Irish and British left.

For those in Ireland, the relationship between imperialism in Palestine and imperialism in Ukraine is bound up with the attempt by the state to dissolve the pretence of neutrality – as a stepping stone to open NATO membership as a junior component of the Western imperialist alliance.  It is the responsibility of socialists to explain this and to point the campaign towards the action of the working class as the mechanism to enforce effective solidarity.

Forward to part 2

The domestication of the Irish Left

Posted on by
Reply

Marxists believe that power in society resides in capital, in the capitalist system and its property relations in which ownership and control of the means of production etc. are monopolised by one class.  In the form of money, capital can be otherwise employed to gain political influence through the media, buy politicians and discipline governments through speculation on the bond markets.  Capital strikes can disable economies just as individual capitals can close down workplaces overnight destroying the livelihoods of their workers.

On top of this are states that defend these property relations through a multitude of laws bolstered by assumptions about the primacy of bourgeois private property rights that are considered holy writ.  Should this be questioned the state is also composed of forces armed with the monopoly of violence to police and impose the requirements of these property relations.  Since such relations involve the exclusion of ownership and control by the majority there is nothing democratic about them and no bourgeois claims to democracy entertain the notion that there should be democratic ownership and control of the economy.

Instead such claims to be democratic rely on parliamentary institutions that are dignified with reverential rules and procedures, the better to elevate their status above their essential subordination to the real power in society.  Incantations about their sacred embodiment of democracy cover for this subordination while most people vaguely register their awareness of the sham through a view of all politicians as essentially liars.

This, however, is a purely cynical reaction and is not the ground for either an adequate understanding of what is going on or the envisioning of a genuine democratic alternative.  Nationalism provides additional glue to bind workers to their (nation) state and the claims it makes for itself on their behalf, but more and more decisions are taken at an international level where real democracy is even more obviously absent. It is generally considered in most of Europe that its people live in a ‘democracy’.  The job of socialists is to make them aware that this is bourgeois democracy and that it is a sham that they should seek to change.  Moreover they need to be convinced that the state they are invoked to give allegiance to does not defend their interests.

One very small example of the fraudulent character of bourgeois parliamentary democracy has erupted in Ireland as the governing parties have voted to restrict the speaking time of the opposition, reduced its own exposure to questioning, and allocated opposition time to a group of ‘independents’ who have all declared full support for the government and have a number of members as ministers within it.  As all the opposition parties have put it, you are either in the government or in the opposition – you cannot be in both.

Dáil sitting has been suspended before in much disorder but was suspended again yesterday when the change in Dáil standing orders was pushed through without debate by the Ceann Comhairle (the Speaker of the House). She is supposed to be independent but was elected as a member of the same ‘independent’ group and appointed as part of the secret deal that no doubt lies behind the speaking privileges now given to it.

This is no doubt a cynical political stoke that should be opposed. The up-its-backside liberal propaganda news sheet ‘The Irish Times’ opined that “normal Dáil business” must “resume immediately” so that a list of issues can be discussed. These include climate and health care that “normal Dáil business” has failed to successfully address for decades.  Even these relatively minor attacks on democratic functioning do not find this liberal mouthpiece defending it.

Of course, the government is committing much greater crimes against democracy than these latest shenanigans, including allowing planes delivering arms to Israel to pass through Irish air space.  Like governing party claims before the general election about the number of houses that were being built or support for the Occupied Territories Bill, this is a government that cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

The opposition parties, including People before Profit, have united to ‘stridently’ oppose this ‘alarming’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘unprecedented’ plan and to defend the ‘fundamentals of parliamentary democracy’.  There has been a lot of talk about the government’s changed procedures reducing their ability to ‘hold the government to account’ and to ‘represent their constituents’.

But this follows People before Profit centring their recent electoral campaign on ending 100 years of unbroken office by the two ugly twins who nevertheless won the recent general election.  When has either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael been held to account over this 100 years?  When has it been punished for its failures, lies, hypocrisy and previous much more authoritarian measures?  In what way do impassioned speeches by People before Profit TDs excoriating government ministers to an almost empty Dáil chamber – shown regularly on social media – embody holding these ministers to account?

The man in the centre of it all,’independent’ TD Michael Lowry, has been found by a state tribunal to be “profoundly corrupt” but here he was giving two fingers to the PbP TD Paul Murphy! Why is he not in jail, never mind inducing the government to tear up Dáil standing orders on his behalf?  Tribunal after tribunal has demonstrated that there is no justice from the state and the Dáil chamber is incapable of delivering it either.  More evidence of the sham that is bourgeois democracy!  Why not say this?

Rather than use the episode to demonstrate this to the Irish working class, to further explain the limits and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, and to call out the alternative, People before Profit has decided to become bourgeois democracy’s most vocal defender.  Rather than use it as support for the argument that the working class will not find real democracy within a bourgeois parliament, it declares the vital need to support its fraudulent claims that it can allow workers to hold the government to account’, i.e. criticise and punish it.  Instead of exposing the hot-air bloviating that passes for democracy it holds out the necessity for extra hours of fine speeches.

Illusions in bourgeois democracy run deep in Irish society, as in most advanced capitalist states, with the continued election of Lowry and the ugly party twins as plenty of evidence.  Every opportunity to expose it should be grabbed.  Ironically, a previous posture of doing this – of exposing the hollowness of bourgeois democracy evidenced again by this latest stroke – would have been more powerful in embarrassing the government than the strident claims that more time to ask questions and talk to an almost empty room is vital to democracy.

To go back where we started – with Marxist principles.  These declare that the emancipation of the working class will come from the activity of the working class itself, a principle precisely counterposed to the parliamentary illusions of much of the left.  Real power comes from outside, that of both the capitalist system and of the working class.  It is on the power of the working class and its organisations outside that socialists need to focus, and which could do with much greater democratic functioning. Illusions in the Dáil are only for those for whom these illusions are comforting and who seek a career within it.

A ceasefire designed not to work

Posted on by
Reply

If Ukraine was winning the war Trump would not have humiliated Zelensky in Washington and probably claimed the victory as his own, through originally arming Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles.  But Ukraine is not winning, and its defeat would also be that of the United States.  Besides his egotistical aversion to being a loser, he has admitted that the only alternative to ending the war through negotiations with Russia is to escalate with the increased risk of a world war.

Thus, we got the ham-fisted proposals for a temporary and unconditional ceasefire forced upon Ukraine without meeting its demand for what it calls a security guarantee – the promise of direct Western intervention.  The promise of such an intervention would require a capacity to quickly attack Russia that the US has rejected but the British and French have supported without, however, having the capacity to do it.

At most, while it would incentivise Ukrainian belligerence and Zelenskyy’s propensity to provocation, it would involve a combined Ukrainian army fighting alongside the British and French.  Such a war would have a natural dynamic to rapid escalation and Russia is no doubt wary of a temporary ceasefire that might allow the Western ‘coalition of the willing’ to openly put its troops into Ukraine, leaving another ‘ball in Russia’s court’ on whether to attack or accept their presence.

The proposal for a temporary and unconditional ceasefire is an obvious trap and consistent with the months of speculation in the Western media that the best outcome is to freeze the conflict and thus freeze the Russian offensive.  Since this is Minsk 3 and, like the previous two, is a proposal to give Ukraine a breather until it is better prepared to reengage in war, there is no reason for Russia to accept it.  Even some in the Western media have admitted that there is little reason for Russia to agree.

Ukraine has anyway made it clear that while it wants a temporary ceasefire, it wants a longer one, and also wants all its pre-2014 territory back; will not reduce the size and power of its large armed forces and will still pursue membership of NATO.  With such red lines any sort of truce is doomed and pointless from a Russian point of view.

There is still scope to tighten sanctions that will hurt Russia, especially if they successfully involve reducing the demand for Russian energy exports from India, for example.  The incentive for India would be to avoid US sanctions itself while gaining US support, for what that’s worth, while the disincentive in geopolitical terms is the greater dependence of Russia on China with whom India seeks to balance against.

The EU with the support of the US could seize Russia’s frozen assets but if this was clearly legal it would have happened already.  The West, especially but not only the US, has however demonstrated that ‘the international rules based order’ means whatever it says it is.

The assets could thus be confiscated but this would require getting someone to buy them.  If Russian bonds were bought by Western central banks it would be equivalent to printing money with inflationary effects while securitisation guarantees to commercial banks to buy them would be expensive.  Germany is already seeing the cost of selling its bonds increase due to its plans to massively increase borrowing and Britain is in an even more parlous situation as Starmer’s ‘growth’ agenda is flailing.  Seizure would weaken the confidence of third countries in the security of holding Euro assets, and while it is claimed that there is no indication of concern, reluctance to do it is evidence of it, while this would have massive confirmation if they were actually taken.  Robbing a state of hundreds of billions of financial assets in no small thing.

Keeping the assets frozen is therefore a useful means of continuing to put pressure on Russia to accept a deal although there is no indication that it is sufficient to deliver what is demanded.  The short pause in supply of weapons by the US was of little consequence, while it’s not clear that the denial of intelligence was complete or even real.  Trump demanded that European states start paying more for constraining Russia and their consternation and outrage propelled them to agreeing – under the banner of independence from the US!  Europe is now just as subordinated to the US as before by taking an aggressive stance against Russia, led by Britain under Starmer, who stupidly thinks he can balance the US against the EU.  Britian is now in competition with France and Germany to lead the continent.  But lead it where?

Britain still wants to believe that it can be the favourite vassal of the US and carry the rest of Europe behind it, while the EU has selected a foreign policy diplomatic representative, Kaja Kallas, who declared the break-up of Russia as a good idea just before she got the job.  Diplomatic or what?  Further she blurted out the complaint that how could Europe defeat China if it could not do so to Russia?  So defeating China is now a goal of the EU?   European independence from the US plus hostility to Russia and China is not a recipe for strategic independence but for isolation.

The blunt demands of Trump and belligerent approach to Russia have put the question of European unity to the fore, which pulls against the historic and current role of a Britain that hopes it will suffer a different fate than the EU in Trump’s tariff war.  The unity of Europe is historically a progressive task that would erode the petty nationalisms that fed two world wars and currently feeds the rise of the far right. However, under capitalism this is being done through the promise of the militarisation of Europe upon the backs of its working class who will pay for it through austerity.

No doubt this will propel the statist left to seek refuge in petty nationalisms under the rubric of a ‘national sovereignty’ that Trump is proving illusory.  The Irish state is vivid demonstration of this as its Taoiseach grovelled before Trump, applauding his idea that the housing crisis is a good problem to have and staying stum about his plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.  Ireland is only the most obvious example of the power of US capital in Europe and the difficulty of achieving any sort of autonomy from it.

The European powers are committed to continuing the war, unless Trump decides to make them desist, which will depend on the circumstances of the war and its prospective resolution.  In this the ruling parties in Europe will find willing allies in the petty bourgeois left for whom the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause is absolute, regardless of the reality of the war, its current and potential consequences, and of the ethno-nationalist character of the Ukrainian version of bourgeois democracy.

 

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (61) Alienation and abolition of private property

Posted on by
Reply

Hudis claims that in those countries where capitalism had been overthrown the statist ‘socialism’ that existed ‘eliminated private property and the ‘free market’ by bringing the process of distribution and circulation under the control of the state. But they did little or nothing to transform production-relations. Concrete labour was still reduced to a monotonous, routinised activity through the dominance of abstract labour. Abstract labour continued to serve as the substance of value.’ (p104)

By this is meant that social labour was fragmented and produced commodities that exchanged with each other based on the abstract labour contained within them, which was determined by the labour time necessary to produce them and not by the conscious decision on the distribution of social labour according to a preconceived conception of need and human development.  Almost immediately he states that ‘instead of a surplus of products that cannot be consumed (which characterises traditional capitalism), there is a shortage of products that cannot be produced.’ (p 104).

However, this eventuality demonstrates that these societies, while not abolishing alienation – far from it – had abolished the market to the degree that meant all commodities were not produced according to the socially necessary abstract labour required to produce them and not under capitalist relations of production with a labour market producing a free working class employed by capital, either private or state. Even the creation of healthy worker’s states will not immediately end alienation, by definition the continuation of any state denotes the continuation of classes, however much their antagonism is attenuated.

Further, as Marx explained in Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. . . .’

‘But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.’

‘Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’

‘But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.’

Hudis is correct that it is the active role of labour that creates private property, but when he quotes Marx saying that ‘though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal’, he leaves out the last sentence, which makes (bourgeois) private property constitutive of this alienated labour.  (Marx quoted in Hudis p 61) Unlike ‘the gods’, this private property is real.

Marx says: ‘It is only at the culminating point of the development of private property that this its secret re-emerges, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and on the other it is the means through which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.’ C.W.3, 280;(Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Early Writings, p 392)

“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self- estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself . . . which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol..3, p 296; Early Writings p 348).

Elsewhere Hudis quotes Marx that ‘[P]rivate property, for instance, is not a simple relation or even an abstract concept, a principle, but consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production…a change in, or even the abolition of, these relations can only follow from a change in these classes and their relationships with each other, and a change in the relationship of classes is a historical change, a product of social activity as a whole’ (p83 -84)

‘Marx grasps the situation as one of labour’s self-alienation in and through private property. Only if labour is grasped as the overriding moment in the alienated labour/private property complex can the conditions of a real transcendence of estrangement be established. Grounded in the alienation of labour, the immanent movement of private property necessarily produces ‘its own grave diggers’ (in the famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto). But in the dialectical opposition of private property and alienated labour the principal aspect of the contradiction then becomes the latter; hence Marx says that the fall of wage-labour and private property – ‘identical’ expressions of estrangement – takes place ‘in the political form of the emancipation of the workers’. Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 3 p280).

Private property in its capitalist form entails the capital-wage labour relationship – the relations of production between capital and working class – from which class struggle arises, which struggle must eventuate in social revolution that makes the working class collective owners of the means of production and whose political emancipation entails overturing the capitalist state and creation of its own. 

As Hudis himself notes: ‘Communism does not deprive man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation’.

Hudis continues: ‘In the Manifesto, Marx also writes that ‘the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property’. It may seem that Marx has muted, if not moved away from, his perspective of 1844, in that the abolition of private property here seems to be posed not just as a mediatory stage, but as the ultimate goal. However, this would be too facile a reading. Marx focuses on the need to negate private property because it is the most immediate expression of the power of bourgeois society over the worker. Through the bourgeois property-relation, the workers are forced to sell themselves for a wage to the owners of capital, who appropriate the products of their productive activity. Without the abolition of this property-relation, the economic and political domination of the bourgeoisie remains unchallenged.’ (Hudis p82-3)

The abolition of bourgeois private property means the overthrow of the capital-wage relationship and exploitation, which are the grounds for the abolition of all classes.  This objective is therefore not just required because ‘it is the most immediate expression of the power of bourgeois society over the worker’ but because, to put it in its active sense, it is thereby the most immediate expression of the power of the workers to overcome the exploitation and oppression of bourgeois society.

It is why Marx also said in The Communist Manifesto that “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property . . . In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.  In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.’

Back to part 60

Forward to part 62

Part 1 is here

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (60) Alienated labour and private property

Posted on by
Reply

In his book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Peter Hudis lays emphasis on the statement by Marx that ‘ it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion.’

He argues that private property is not the key to the emancipation of the working class but rather alienated – estranged – labour.  He quotes Marx: ‘when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man’ but Hudis goes on to point out that ‘Property is, after all, the product of human activity. Classical-political economy reverses matters, by presenting the predicate – property-relations – as the determining factor while ignoring the alienated nature of the workers’ activity.’ (p62)

For Hudis, this has implications for the centrality of the abolition of private property to those seeking this emancipation: ‘since private property is an objectified product of human activity, the critique of private property does not satisfy the requirement of reducing all emancipation to ‘relationships to man himself’. [quoting Marx] The critique of private property still deals with what is ‘external to man’. Marx’s normative principle of human emancipation – which he reiterates in 1844 as ‘man’s relation to himself only becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man’ – drives him to look deeper than the property-relation. This takes him to his theory of alienated labour.’

As noted in the previous post, he quotes Marx ‘When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.’  For Hudis, the solution is put this way:

‘It follows from the analysis that, while private property must be abolished – since it separates workers from the conditions of production – that alone does not get to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is abolishing capital itself, by ending the estrangement in the very activity of labouring. We have reached the conceptual pivot of what Marx sees as the alternative to capitalism.’ (p63). He later concludes that ‘In contrast to how Marx was understood by much of twentieth-century ‘Marxism’, our exploration indicates that his real object of critique was not the market or private property, but rather the social relations that underpin them.’ (p92)

Hudis continues: “Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labour. To ignore alienated labour while altering wage- and property- relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labour on the workers. Society as a whole now becomes the ‘abstract capitalist’.”  Hudis states this in referring to those socialists who think higher wages are socialist or that the existence of wages in itself is compatible with socialism, since ‘they are paid to the worker on the basis of the capitalist’s ownership of the products of labour.’ (p 64) Specifically, his reference to society becoming ‘the abstract capitalist’ refers to Marx’s view of this as a necessary concept arising from Proudhon when the latter conceives of the equality of wages.

In relation to ‘society’ becoming the ‘abstract capitalist’, Marx is quoted as saying that ‘‘above all we must avoid again postulating “society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being.” Hudis says that ‘Marx is not trying to wall humanity into the ‘social’; he rather seeks a mutual compatibility between individual and general interests.  Yet exactly how does the present mode of production compel civil society to assume an abstract form? The answer is the social division of labour. By forcing individuals to adhere to a social division of labour, individuals become radically separated from one other. This separation takes on a fixed form, regardless of their actual talents and abilities. Society becomes an abstraction that governs the lives of individuals, instead of the other way around.’  Quoting Marx: ‘As long as man remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as the cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, so long, therefore, as activity is not voluntary, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.’ (p 77 – 78)

How is this situation to be overcome?  ‘By abolishing the social division of labour’, says Hudis, (p78). He makes the point that Marx ‘sees the process of revolutionary transformation not as a singular act, as the negation of private property and political overthrow of the bourgeoisie, necessary as that is, but as a consistently self-critical social revolution, that is, as a process of permanent revolution. Crude communism – the abolition of private property – is only the first negation. It is a necessary but insufficient step towards liberation. To achieve ‘positive humanism, beginning from itself’ much more is needed – the negation of the negation.’ (p73)

The end of alienated labour entails the end of the social division of labour but the overthrow of capitalism will not immediately end this division or the alienation arising from it.  It will not immediately, or even rapidly, align individual interests with those of others or of ‘society’ as a whole: ‘History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process.’ (Hudis, quoting Marx emphasis added, p 75). In this statement Marx is not talking about the end of the social division of labour but of abolishing ‘actual private property.’

The overthrow of capitalism and the beginnings of a new society will not instantly realise these aims; alienated labour will not immediately end.  Private property relations of production entail alienation but alienation does not immediately disappear with them, so that alienated labour will still exist upon the overthrow of capitalist property relations.  Capitalism is not therefore defined by alienated labour but by a particular form social relations that give rise to a specific form of alienated labour; it will still, ‘after the revolution’, be necessary to develop the forces of production, as Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto and still require that much labour remains necessary, understood in Marx’s terms as required to meet the needs of the working population and those dependent on them, while surplus labour, required to develop and meet new higher needs, including more time free of labour, will grow but not yet predominate.  While this is the case the division of labour will entail alienation as will the continuing, although reducing, social inequalities.

A certain compulsion of labour remains, albeit more and more voluntary and collective as the forces of production develop to the degree that the time required for necessary labour declines and the choice over the extent of surplus labour increases.  Just as the state withers away after the capitalist state is overthrown and a workers’ state created, so does estranged, alienated labour also shrink and fade.  The continuation of a (worker’s) state and the continuation of alienated labour does not indicate the continued existence of capitalism, whether called ‘state capitalism’ or not, but the continuation of ‘a very rough and protracted process’, as Marx outlined.

Hudis quotes Marx saying that ‘man’s relation to himself only becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man’ but it is through the relations of production that are entailed by bourgeois private property, and the society upon which is developed from it, that relations to other men and women and thus to him and herself are formed and within which alienated labour exists.  The centrality of these relations of production and bourgeois private property entailed in them is repeatedly advanced by Marx and Engels in their political writings and programme as we shall note in the next post.

This, as we have noted, is also advanced by Hudis, that Marx’s ‘real object of critique was not the market or private property, but rather the social relations that underpin them.’

Back to part 59

Part 1

Forward to part 61

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (59) – Alienated labour

Posted on by
Reply

The early Marx sought to understand the new capitalist society through a study of political economy as expounded by its disciples and critics.  In doing so he faced multiple phenomena, seeking ‘to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.’ (Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844)

In doing so he considered that ‘Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.’

Marx goes on to put forward the idea that in ‘our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production . . . We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labour.’

‘If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. . . . Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.’

‘Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour creates the relationship to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.’

‘Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.’

‘True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.’

‘Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.’

The alternative to capitalism for Marx is not simply the abolition of private property but the ending of alienation: of workers from their work (as it is imposed as a necessity in order to live while not under their control as to its nature or purpose); of workers from their product (which includes products they would choose not to make with workplaces and technology that subjects them to control and determines the nature of their work); alienation from each other (they compete for resources, including employment, and are atomised by lack of collective control of the means of providing for their needs); and through all this, alienated from their essential nature as social animals working in cooperation to develop their humanity in all its richness through and with other people, who are regarded not as constraints on their freedom, as in bourgeois theory, but only through whom their freedom can be realised.

‘From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.’

‘We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.’

Marx’s critique of political economy, and the conditions of estranged labour in capitalism, included the concepts of the forces of production and relations of production and the potential to overthrow the capital-wage relationship upon which they were based.  Labour power is the main force of production and the relations of production are more and more dominated by the capital-wage relationship. It therefore becomes clear that the social revolution that is necessary is one not just for the working class but by it:

‘Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology)

The alienation that thwarts the exercise of human powers and potentialities is the product of these forces and relations, which also provide the potential to free humanity from such alienation and allow the further development of human powers and potentialities. Bourgeois private property and alienated labour condition each other and reflect aspects of the same social relation of wage labour and capital. The overthrow of this form of social labour is not therefore something external to humanity (‘man’) but deals directly with its social relationships and therefore directly to humanity itself, as its nature for Marx is the ensemble of these relationships.

The forces and relations of production in feudal society created classes within which an individual’s identity is fixed and determined in a hierarchy by birth. As Marx puts it: ‘a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner’.  (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology) Capitalism involves capitalists and workers and while there must always be capitalists and workers within it, the individuals personifying this class relationship are not always necessarily fixed.  An individual may not always be a worker if she then employs labour, and a capitalist may be reduced to a member of the working class if she becomes bankrupt.

More importantly, while the peasants of precapitalist society were socially and geographically isolated as virtually self-sufficient economic units, producing almost everything they needed, the working class is part of a cooperative division of labour spanning the world (with the organisation of society corresponding to it) and organised by capitalism in such a way that, while alienated from the very powers it has created, has the potential to appropriate these powers and dispel their alienation.

This is what the abolition of bourgeois private property begins to do, with the creation of a cooperative economy and a workers’ state that defends it, together developing the forces of production and dissolving the exploitation of labour by capital.

Back to part 58

Part 1

Forward to part 60