From: Platypus Review 35 | May 2011
Last November Platypus hosted a roundtable discussion between Alan Goodman from The Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and Richard Rubin from Platypus entitled “Marxism and Israel: Left Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” at Hunter College in New York City. Panelists were asked to speak on the role the Left has played in the development of Israel, the Left’s analysis of the role of American intervention in the Middle East, and what a critical Marxian approach to the conflict currently looks like, compared to what it might look like. What follows is an edited transcript of the event. Full audio of the event can be found at: <http://www.archive.org/details/MarxismAndIsraelLeftPerspectivesOnTheIsraeli-palestinianConflict>.
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“Richard Rubin: My esteemed teacher and friend, the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was himself a close friend of Edward Said, once remarked many years ago when speaking on the difficulty of addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that the first thing one must bear in mind is that one is dealing with two communities of suffering. Furthermore, each is a symbolic representative victim of two great crimes. The Jews, although by no means the only victims of Fascism, are the archetypal victims of Fascism. The Palestinians, although by no means the only victims of colonialism, or even the worst victims, have also, like the Jews, with their particular fate, become the archetypal representative of a colonized people for many around the world. The intersection of these two communities of suffering leads to many pitfalls of discourse. I will not be addressing such issues here, however, and you must take my sympathy for all victims of oppression for granted. Rather I will address, as much as is honestly possible, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Marxism. This is by no means a self-evident perspective, and it is one that is generally avoided even by professed Marxists who, when they speak on the issue, usually say things that are identical to what many non- and anti-Marxists say. So is there, then, a Marxist perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict?
To begin to address this question, I will draw your attention to two articles that both purport to offer such a perspective, although they come to radically different conclusions. One is an article entitled “Bastion of Enlightenment or Enforcer for Imperialism?” that appeared recently in Revolution, the newspaper of the RCP USA, which we were just hearing about. The other is an article entitled “Israel and Communism” that appeared in the Platypus Review in issue 28, written by Initiative Sozialistisches Forum.3 The latter, which is a translation from a German article that appeared in 2003, will strike most American readers as by far the more exotic and strange of the two. Indeed, to many it will seem not a document pertaining to the Left at all, but rather a manifestation of neo-conservatism. The deep origins of the Antideutsch current, from which the “Israel and Communism” article is written, are in German Maoism. The article is premised on an acceptance of Marxist categories and written in a Marxist language close to jargon. While superficially the “Antideutsch” article and the Revolution article appear to be polar opposites, I would like to claim that they actually stem from a similar methodology and misconception of the Left”
Read the article here: Marxism and Israel: Left perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
What’s so progressive about anti-imperialism?
Friday, April 22 · 16:00 – 18:00
6 East 16th Street @ New School for Social Research, Room 1107
As a movement, anti-imperialism has always been a traditional rallying point for the radical left and rightfully so. Yet historically speaking, the left has been responsible for backing a number of autocratic regimes which use the language of socialism in order to garner international support.
Loren Goldner is a veteran activist and writer who takes a critical stance on left-wing support of anti-imperialist struggles and explains what it means for the fight against capitalism and imperialism.
Join us for a 40 minute talk sponsored by Workshop No. 2 followed by an open Q&A session.
For more information on Loren Goldner and his works, you can check out his website, “Break Their Haughty Power”:
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/
Loren is also part of a left Marxist collective journal called Insurgent Notes:
http://insurgentnotes.com/
***NOTE: It is advised that you come 10-15 minutes early.***
By Loren Goldner. Insurgent Notes. March 19, 2011.
The following recounts the evolution of the core pre-MNR intelligentsia and future leadership of the movement and its post-1952 government from anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, pro-Axis ideologues in the mid-1930′s to bourgeois nationalists receiving considerable US aid after 1952. The MNR leadership, basically after Stalingrad, began to “reinvent itself” in response to the impending Allied victory, not to mention huge pressure from the U.S. in various forms starting ca. 1942.
However much the MNR purged itself of its “out-of-date” philofascism by the time it came to power, I wish to show it in the larger context of the top-down, state-driven corporatism that developed in key Latin American countries in this period, specifically Argentina, Brazil and (in a different way) Mexico through the Cardenas period.
The following is a demonstration that, contrary to what contemporary complacent leftist opinion in the West thinks, there is a largely forgotten history of reactionary populist and “anti-imperialist” movements in the underdeveloped world that do not shrink from mobilizing the working class to achieve their goals.
This little-remembered background is all the more important for understanding the dynamics of the left-populist governments which have emerged in Latin America since the 1990’s.
Continue reading here: http://insurgentnotes.com/2011/03/anti-capitalism-or-anti-imperialism/
October 16th, 2010 | admin
Here is part of a report from inside the meeting:
While I didn’t know if I would have the opportunity to ask any questions or raise any issues at the meeting, I was hoping that I would be one among many that would challenge Ahmadinejad over Iran’s human rights violations.
Unfortunately, after over one hour of speeches from other activists in the room, I found myself feeling disappointed and dismayed. One after another, the guests at the dinner delivered prepared statements, posing no questions or challenges to the Iranian delegation. Mostly, people expressed outrage over U.S. foreign policy. They lauded Ahmadinejad as a hero for standing up to the bullying of the United States government and likened the meeting to Malcolm X’s encounters in Africa with revolutionaries fighting against colonialism. Many apologized for decades of dire U.S. policy towards Iran, while calling for self-determination for Iran and confidence in Ahmadinejad.
Speech after speech failed to address any calls for solidarity with the brave young men and women in Iran who took to the streets and demanded their rights in the face of government suppression. Iran has upwards of 500 political prisoners and the highest rate of capital punishment in the world. In the last year government critical newspapers have been shut down and countless journalists imprisoned. An estimated 44 people were killed in street protests in the last year.
I recognize that many in the room were not there to excuse the Iranian government’s brutality, but their silence was striking. A fundamental role we have as American peace and social justice activists is to oppose our government’s threats towards Iran, while building solidarity with the Iranian people. Activists calling for solidarity at the dinner acted as though we stood in a town hall with our Iranian counter parts; however the fact is we stood in a room with the Iranian state, not its people.
Read more…
Two things to read:
Kellie Strom on “anti-imperialism”, taking as a point of departure Judith Butler on the Berlin Christopher Street Day Parade, but moving on to “anti-imperialism” in general. Continue Reading »
Excerpt from Democracy and Nature:
One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.
Continue Reading »
From the conference “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left” organized by the The Platypus Affiliated Society in November of last year.
Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.
In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.
As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.
Continue Reading »
Two texts on the problems of anti-imperialism:
Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925
By Loren Goldner
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html
‘The Anti-Imperialism of Fools’: A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement.!
By Camila Bassi
In ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
http://www.acme-journal.org/vol9/Bassi10.pdf
Eyes Closed and Attack*
From Volker Weiss | Jungle World | Nr. 47, 19. November 2009
*Translated from the German
After the violent blockade of a film showing of Claude Lanzmann’s “Why Israel” in Hamburg, Germany, the coalition around the Internationalist Center B5 has tried to find an explanation.
This Autumn in Germany the showing of two films were forcefully prevented: In Hoyerswerda, a bomb threat caused the cancellation of Quentin Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds,” and in Hamburg the showing of the documentary “Pourquoi Israel” (1972) of the French filmmaker and former antifascist partisan Claude Lanzmann was also not allowed to take place.
Continue Reading »
This is a rough translation about a forceful blockade of a showing of Claude Lanzmann´s film “Why Israel?” in Hamburg, Germany a few weeks ago.
Seht nicht beim Juden
29.10.2009 | Redok
Hamburg, Germany — A group of left anti-Semites on Sunday has violently prevented the showing of a film about Israel. During the blockade of the cinema insults such as “Jewish swine” were to be heard. A Hamburg association of the Left Party published a justification of the action, saying a “Zionist propaganda film” was prevented from being shown.
Continue Reading »
