Below we’ve translated in English two texts that we’ve written back in 2018 during the then Gaza border protests. The first text was written as a preface to a Greek translation of “Lettera sull’antisionismo” [“Letter on anti-zionism”] from Il lato cattivo‘s blog. During that period, some “Autonomists”, mainly represented by the Greek journal Sarajevo, were publishing articles and posters against the Israeli state in support of the Palestian protests in a clearly antisemitic way, as they usually do. As for their general political position, they believe they’re influenced by Italian operaismo and autonomia organizzata – but, in reality, they more closely resemble autonomia diffusa. This preface was a critique of their discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The second text, called “All or Nothing?”, is a concrete response to some abstract criticisms to our first text. Unfortunately, a couple of links in the second text are dead after all these years and weren’t salvaged even by the Internet Archive.

Pictured in the photograph are Palestinian Authority civil servants waiting in line outside a bank in Gaza City to receive their salaries, May 3, 2018.

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Preface to Lettera sull’antisionismo

[Μ]y analytic method […] does not proceed from man but from a given economic period of society.
– Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischer Oekonomie“, MECW 24, p. 547.

The passion of the last few remaining Maoists, third-worldists of every hue, “anti-imperialists”, Scottish nationalists, alter-globalists, Trotskyists and even anarchists and “antagonists” for Rojava can only be compared to that for the “Palestinian cause”. After the Stalinist USSR, Mao’s China and all the exotic destinations which followed, it’s now fallen to Rojava to bear “revolutionary” hopes. Rojava feeds the hopes of those who’ve turned their backs on class struggle or who never waved its flag. The popularity of these marginal phenomena of the permanent restructuration of capitalist domination is inversely proportional to the intensity of class struggle which goes on there. Today, it scarcely appears at all so inter-classism and nationalisms of various colours prosper. Pilgrimages by “antagonists” to the new holy places of anti-imperialism and nationalism multiply as they did in the past to Cuba, Maoist China, Palestine or Chiapas.
– Mouvement Communiste/Kolektivně proti Kapitălu, “Rojava: The Fraud of a Non-existent Social Revolution Masks a Kurdish Nationalism Perfectly Compatible with Assad’s Murderous Regime“, p. 9.

As of lately, we’ve seen some posters “decorating” the walls of Athens. We put the quotation marks not because of any opposition to posters as posters, but because of the content of this particular poster. It reads “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Let us start with a lesson in geography: the river is the Jordan River, the sea is the Mediterranean Sea. We will proceed with a lesson in history. The slogan was first used by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In PLO’s history there’s a rocket attack on a school bus in the northern Israeli town of Avivim (12 Israelis killed, including 9 children, and 25 wounded) on 22 May 1970 – and for those who are quick to say that the attack was carried out by the PFLP-GC, let us remind them that until 1974 the PFLP-GC was a member of the PLO. Another small example of PLO’s activity is the hijacking of a bus on Tel Aviv’s coastal boulevard (38 Israelis killed, including 13 children, and 71 wounded) in 1978. This action was carried out by Fatah, which is the leading faction of the PLO. We think we need not elaborate further on PLO’s actions. Today, this slogan is adopted by the Palestinian Islamist organisation Hamas, a well-known Islamist fundamentalist organisation which, among other things, is responsible for many suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

Therefore, we ask: do the “Autonomists” who sign this poster not know the history of the slogan they are embracing? But, even if they didn’t know it, on the basis of geography alone, can the slogan imply anything other than the total elimination of the State of Israel? If the “Autonomists” denied the creation of a Palestinian state, then their propaganda would be balanced. But the problem is that they do support the establishment of a Palestinian state. Finally, for the “Autonomists” (and all those who adopt this slogan) do or do not all peoples have the right to the so-called “self-determination”? Or are some, the Jews, excluded from this right? And if the Israeli state is dissolved and the slogan is realised, what will happen to the current Israeli citizens? Will the Palestinian state be a multicultural and secular state that will provide Jews full citizenship and equality with Arab Muslim Palestinians? Will it massacre them? Will it deport them? The Israel-Palestine history shows that the Jews will probably have no place within a Palestinian state (recall the Nazi swastikas raised by some Palestinians calling for jihad and a new holocaust), just as the reverse is true today. So, what exactly will a role reversal solve? Why don’t “Autonomists” support a variation of the two-states solution in the region, one Israeli and one Palestinian?

But, which side are we on? Obviously, we aren’t defending the Israeli state, that would be plain stupid. Palestine or Israel? What kind of question is that? Panathinaikos FC or Olympiacos FC? Who do we support in the championship? This last question is meaningless and any answer is interchangeable with any other: whether one supports Panathinaikos or Olympiacos, one’s position on this dilemma has no substance, it means absolutely nothing. But the choice between an Israeli or a Palestinian state is a political choice: it describes, if not the whole of one’s politics, at least part of it. We, paraphrasing Bebel, say that anti-imperialism is the socialism of fools, and anti-semitism is the anti-imperialism of even foolers. We give no answer to this question. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Marx, it’s that we must always first and foremost question the question itself.

It was by no means sufficient to investigate: Who is to emancipate? Who is to be emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third point. It had to inquire: What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded? (Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, MECW 3, p. 149.)

The Palestinian emancipation promoted by the majority of those in solidarity with the “Palestinian resistance” is a political emancipation. It’s about the creation of a Palestinian state by which they will be recognised as citizens. But “[t]he limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man” (ibid., p. 152). Here Marx was referring to religion as a restriction of freedom. But exactly the same, and with much greater weight, can be said of economic conditions. Obviously the creation of a Palestinian state would undoubtedly mean an improvement in the Palestinians standard of living: they wouldn’t have bombs and bullets dropping on their heads. But the majority of Palestinians would probably continue to live in poverty, with the Palestinian proletariat not gaining any particularly better position within the global division of labour. Or, if the Jews remained in the region and weren’t slaughtered or expelled, for the Palestinians to gain a better economic positions then the Jews would have to be pushed down to the bottom of the hierarchical stratification of the proletariat in the region. So, a Palestinian one-state solution would either mean a mass extermination/deportartion of Jews with the majority of Palestinians remaining in the same economic condition, or there would be a reversal of the roles between Jews and Palestinians.

There may be a conflict between Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms, but this conflict doesn’t contain within itself a dynamic that has the potential to abolish the terms of the conflict. A conflict between two nationalisms can only lead to the predominance of one over the other. A conflict between two nationalisms doesn’t have the potential to destroy the nationalisms themselves – unless when speaking of “destruction of nationalisms” we refer to the complete annihilation of the two opposing populations. The only opposition from whose internal dynamics a centrifugal force can develop, a possibility for the abolition of the conditions that determine the opposition itself, is the class struggle: the proletariat has the possibility of abolishing the capital relation, thus abolishing both the capitalist class and itself as proletariat. And the withering away of the state, a basic feature already from the zero point of the revolution, abolishes the material basis of the nation: the state.

[The] Commune proves that the “non-state” (the destruction of the state) is not just the final result of the revolutionary process. On the contrary, it is its initial aspect, directly present in it, without which there’s no revolutionary process at all. […] [T]he withering away begins immediately, and its immediate initiation, not in terms of intentions but in terms of practical measures that directly oppose the inevitable “survival” of the state, is the material precondition both for the effective transformation of the relations of production and for the definitive disappearance of the state itself. (Étienne Balibar, Κράτος, Μάζες, Πολιτική, Εκτός Γραμμής Press, 2014, p. 40-41.)

So, where does that leave us? One solution – revolution? In a way, yes. If we don’t want “half-measures” for the “Palestinian question”, there is no other answer. We may be accused that the answer “revolution” is just the easy solution, the attempt to avoid giving an answer. But the reality is that “revolution” is the difficult answer: for the moment, there’s no sign of the outbreak of the world communist revolution anywhere on the horizon. But the determination of the question precedes the determination of the answer. The answer “revolution” is the answer to the “Palestinian question” as a whole, which, in its turn, is only a small part of the global and overall “social question”. For the “Palestinian question” as an autonomous “political question”, i.e., as a question of political sovereignty over a specific geographical territory, the answer cannot escape the bourgeois framework and is “Palestinian state” – and the one-state solution “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is one of the most reactionary variations of the broad spectrum of a “Palestinian state”, as it implies the extermination or violent oppression of the Jews: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

And of course, the most important question: is there any relation between a national liberation and a communist revolution? Are the Palestinians a people-proletariat and the Israelis a people-bourgeoisie? Aren’t there classes within both peoples? Are there no Palestinian capitalists? Therefore, doesn’t “liberation in Palestine” in practice mean “acquiring a state machine for the class domination of Palestinian capital”? As we’ve seen above, Marx asked: “What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded?” National liberation struggles within the communist tradition have often been treated as analogous to class struggles because they organise the “oppressed” (a very general category whose content varies) and, if successful, might bring about changes in the global social structuring of capital accumulation. But what does national liberation liberate from? Only from unequal relations between different zones of the global capitalist economy – but even this is only a possibility, not a certainty. Those who preach to “liberate Palestine” forget that:

England’s industrial tyranny over the world is the domination of industry over the world. England dominates us because industry dominates us. We can free ourselves from England abroad only if we free ourselves from industry at home. We shall be able to put an end to England’s domination in the sphere of competition only if we overcome competition within our borders. England has power over us because we have made industry into a power over us. That the industrial social order is the best world for the bourgeois, the order most suitable for developing his “abilities” as a bourgeois and the ability to exploit both people and nature – who will dispute this tautology? Who will dispute that all that is nowadays called “virtue”, individual or social virtue, is a source of profit for the bourgeois? Who will dispute that political power is a means for his enrichment, that even science and intellectual pleasures are his slaves? Who will dispute it? (Karl Marx, “Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie“, MECW 4, p. 283-284.)

Of course, in the above passage, Marx was referring to the world economic domination of England, hence England’s domination over Germany. Israel’s domination over the Palestinians is also a military domination. But doesn’t this military supremacy over the Palestinians also follow from its economy? And if the Palestinians acquire a state, i.e., political power, won’t that mean that through it the Palestinian bourgeoisie will accumulate greater wealth, i.e., exploit the Palestinian proletariat more effectively? Where does national liberation lead the proletariat? Is it anything more than a “shift change” in who will hold the whip that lands on the backs of the Palestinian proletariat? Can liberation for the proletariat mean anything other than communist revolution?

The truth is that we don’t expect any particular response from the “Autonomists”. To the objections that have been raised so far by others regarding their discourse on the issue, Mr Sarajevo has avoided responding by talking about “employees of the Israeli secret services” or “useful idiots”. We, on the contrary, are presenting arguments, not unsubstantial ad hominem insults. Where would such a tactic lead to? Talking unsubstantial bullshit like that the “Autonomists” are agents of Hezbollah or Iran and that’s the reason they oppose the State of Israel? We are communists, not conspiracy theorists. Nor do we try to avoid dialogue, even if it inevitably means confrontation, not agreement.

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All or Nothing?

Several decades have passed since the black civil rights movement in the USA. In 2018, the USA has had an African-American president for eight years. In 2018, one in ten black men between the ages of 18-35 is in prison. Among black men born in the late 1970s, by the time they reach age 35, one in four have spent some time in prison. The incarceration rate for blacks who haven’t completed high school is 70% (see Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). In 1970, the American sociologist Sidney M. Willhelm predicted in his book, Who Needs the Negro?, that while the civil rights movement promised to end discrimination in employment, automation was destroying the jobs from which blacks were excluded. Despite his dystopian prophecy, even he believed that such rates of incarceration for managing the black surplus population were impossible to impose. But reality proved him wrong.

So, what happened to the civil rights movement and Black Power? Did it succeed? Did it fail? What is the criterion of success and, therefore, failure? Indeed, many of the reforms that the movement demanded were carried out. Indeed, the discrimination they experience in their daily lives both at the institutional level and at the level of their daily interpersonal relations is less. Paths of social advancement have opened up to which they previously had no access. But imprisonments and executions by cops haven’t stopped. Even on this issue, however, in the period 1970-2000 the rate of increase in the incarceration rate of blacks was the same as that of whites, and while after 2000 the rate of increase began to decrease for blacks, for whites it continued to increase. The incarceration rate for blacks remains much higher, but the gap has narrowed. That is, racism is not the (sole) reason that blacks in the US are being jailed en masse. Incarceration is the way to manage both the black surplus population and (at least part of) the white surplus population. In 2018, the basic legacy of racism in the US has more to do with who gets relegated to the surplus population. The rate of increase in the white incarceration rate shows that the way the surplus population is managed is a secondary function of racism. A political solution to racism would only mean equality between whites, blacks, Mexicans, etc., in reducing them to surplus populations.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperised sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 798.)

There can be no political solution to the problem of the production of surplus populations. It’s as impossible as demanding the abolition of extraction of surplus value by a state’s decree. The state has a central role in the distribution of surplus value. So, now with regard to surplus population, politics can only provide solutions that will alleviate the suffering of surplus populations (welfare) and, at best, reduce surplus population (state recruitments), but cannot eliminate it. And, for the state to impliment these, there needs to be a large enough mass of surplus value so that the state can redirect a part of it towards the proletariat in general, and towards the surplus population in particular. But in times of crisis, all these state measures are thrown out of the window.

Why in the June 2012 elections did Golden Dawn go from its previous near-zero electoral strength to 6.92%? Of course, not only proletarians voted for Golden Dawn, but they are the ones who are of interest here. Were they misled? The main pillar of Golden Dawn’s policy proposals was immigration. The demand “jobs only for Greeks” is crucial at a time of rising unemployment rates and falling wages (crucial in the sense that it was put forward at the right moment to resonate with). “The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work” (Marx, op. cit., p. 792). A mass deportation of immigrants would mean a reduction in the supply of labour, which would mean an increase in the bargaining power of labour. The supporters of Golden Dawn are definitely shitheads as the criminal actions of Golden Dawn are well known. But, in general, support for an immigration policy that reduces the number of immigrants in Greece doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a hatred of immigrants. It has to do with the laws of political economy, and classical political economy’s understanding of how the interests of each class are defined: for Adam Smith, interests are defined in the market.

First, the tripartite social order of which [Smith] spoke was a predicate of a particular kind of society; that defined by the territorial reach of a definite sovereign or state. These were the states of Europe as they had been and were being formed within mutually exclusive domains operating within an interstate system.

Second, his social orders (or classes) were defined on the basis of property relations. The ownership of land, of capital, and of labor-power define his three great orders of society. […]

Third, the interests of each of the social orders/classes were identified with its market situation; that is, both their competitive opportunities in relation to each other as classes (and of individuals within each class to each other), and the costs and benefits to each of them of monopoly power within markets, understood as restriction of entry. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith limited the subjective ground of collective action by a class to these market interests. […]

Fourth, market relations were defined within or between national economic spaces. Class conflicts and alignments were thus limited to struggles within each state for influence/control over its policies. The unit of analysis, in other words, was the nation-state, which determined both the context and the object of class contradictions.

Fifth, a “relative autonomy” of state actions in relation to class interests and powers was presupposed. The enactment of laws and regulations by the state was continuously traced to the powers and influence of particular classes or “fractions” thereof. But the sovereign was assumed to be in a position to distance himself from any particular interest to promote some form of general interest, reflecting and/or generating a consensus for this general interest. (Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements, Verso, 1989, p. 5-6)

Conflicts within the proletariat don’t arise from “false consciousness” but from conflicting material interests of different fractions of the proletariat. There is no single and objective interest of the proletariat – the communist revolution. The proletariat is revolutionary only in the sense that its struggle involves the possibility of the abolition of the social relation of capital. Not every struggle of the proletariat is revolutionary -on the contrary, it may be extremely reactionary- but only the proletariat can wage struggles that may succeed in abolishing the present order.

We have been accused (for our preface to the translation of the text “Lettera sull’antisionismo”) of a manichaeism of “all or nothing”, “either a classless society or nothing”. We would like to remind our critics a few things. In the first volume of Capital, in the section on the struggle for a normal working day, Marx wrote of the relevant laws enacted that “these highly detailed specifications, which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament. They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle” (Marx, op. cit., p. 394-395). We’d like to draw attention to the phrase military uniformity and the increase in control and discipline it implies. Since the length of the working day has been reduced, the first response has been to intensify labour as an alternative method to increase surplus value (and the second response has been to increase labour productivity). Finally, concluding the chapter on the working day, Marx says that workers, in order to be “protected” from the capitalists, had to resort to the mediation of the state to pass laws that limit the working day. And he exclaims: “In the place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’. Quantum mutatus ab illo!” (Marx, op. cit., p. 416) We should not be surprised by this ironic closing of the chapter on the working day. At the very beginning of the chapter he says: “The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and, where possible, to make two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides” (Marx, op. cit., p. 344). The struggle for the normal working day doesn’t escape the law of exchange of equivalents: “I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity” (Marx, op. cit., p. 343).

Marx stresses over and over again in Capital that the wage is a fetish. The wage, even if we assume that it coincides with the value of labour power, has nothing to do with the amount of work performed by the worker. Because the value of labour power has to do with the socially necessary basket of goods for the (re)production of labour power. “But these things no more abolish the exploitation of the wage-labourer, and his situation of dependence, than do better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-labourer has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened somewhat. […] The conditions of [labour-power’s] sale, whether more or less favourable to the worker, include therefore the necessity of its constant re-sale, and the constantly extended reproduction of wealth as capital. […] Even if we leave aside the case where a rise of wages is accompanied by a fall in the price of labour, it is clear that at the best of times an increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to supply. This reduction can never go so far as to threaten the system itself” (Marx, op. cit., p. 769-770). Below (p. 770) Marx observes that Adam Smith has already shown that in conflicts over the wage “the master, by and large, remained the master”.

Although the struggles over the length of the working day and the level of wages don’t in themselves escape the general framework of the capital relation, they have the potential to bring the contradictions of capital on the point of exploding (it’s not only the struggle over these two issues that has this potential, we simply bring them up as an example found in Capital). If the struggle over wages or the working day is potentially revolutionary it’s not because it improves our living conditions. It’s potentially revolutionary because if it’s taken to its extreme, that is, if it reaches the point that it annihilate surplus labour (or more precisely, the amount of surplus labour necessary for the smooth continuation of the process of capital accumulation), it means that it would “threaten the system itself”. And it’s in this crisis, in this destabilisation, that the overcoming of capitalism becomes possible: the transformation of the “everyday” class struggle into a communist revolution. This means not just a quantitative difference, but a qualitative one: it’s no longer a question of reducing unpaid labour, but of the complete abolition of wage labour.

Parenthesis: Communism, “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”, is a negative process par excellence. It’s the annihilation of all contemporary existing forms of domination and exploitation. The explosion of the class contradiction means disaster: unemployment, poverty, conflicts, etc. This is the paradox of communism: the passage from capitalism to classless society necessarily implies the complete destabilisation, the destruction of everything that is today considered “normal” and “given”. The deepening of the crisis means that all the security offered by capitalism and the nation-state disappears: how can they offer security and normality when they are disjointed, when they are put out of action, when they unleash all their repressive forces as a last attempt of their immune system to keep themselves alive? In a sense, in the revolutionary process the condition of the proletarians will be worse than before: before, at least some of them had wages, had welfare benefits. Unless there is an immediate transition to a new way of life, unless new social relations begin to be established immediately at the zero point of the revolution, then all that lies ahead is either a retreat back to capitalism or death. The left-wing of capital wants to rescue the economy, it wants a “pro-worker” exit from the crisis. The communists want the class struggle to exacerbate the crisis, to destroy the economy. We close the parenthesis.

A struggle of Greek unemployed proletarians against immigrants that includes pogroms against immigrants, demands towards the state for the deportation of immigrants and demands towards the bosses to not to hire immigrants, will be a struggle of Greek proletarians defending their particular market interests in order to improve their living conditions (access to wage labour, and consequently to money to buy means of subsistence). It is therefore understood that a struggle for better living conditions does not necessarily imply that it’s potentially revolutionary. And a struggle that indeed involves this potentiality does not necessarily mean that it will result in revolution.

This is the task of communist theory: “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be” (Marx to Ruge, September 1843). Here Marx laid a first basis for the task of communist theory. But he was still among the Young Hegelians; his criticism hadn’t escaped the Feuerbachian critique. The aim of criticism remained the change of consciousness, which “consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be -as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion- to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself” (ibid.). Therefore, how do we complete the definition of the task of theory?

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. […] In all these movements, [Communists] bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. (Marx & Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, MECW 6, p. 498 & 519)

Communist theory is not a philosophy that interprets the world, it’s a critique that intervenes in struggles in order to change the world. Communist theory means reflection upon praxis, on real movements, and intervening in them to raise practical questions. This is the task of communist theory. Communist theory is not a science that derives communism from the economic analysis of capital. Instead, communist theory begins from the class struggles of the proletariat and tries to understand how the contradiction revealed by these struggles offers a possibility for overcoming the capitalist mode of production and establishing communism. These practical issues aren’t about achieving a better standard of living within capitalism, but about taking the contradiction of the class relation to the extreme in order to for it to explode. The aim of communists is not to promote struggles for a better standard of living: movements on this issue bursts spontaneously anyway, without the promotion of communists, either in progressive or reactionary forms – of course, in those in reactionary forms, such as the example of the anti-immigration movement used above, there’s usually no room for intervention, but only for direct conflict. Communist theory stares reality in the face, and looks for those movements which are a practical critique of the existing order of things.

In this sense, and only in this sense, it can be said that we have an all-or-nothing logic. Only in the sense that we’re interested in those movements within which can develop a dynamic that might abolish the capital relation. Whether this dynamic will actually develop and, if yes, whether it will win or lose is another question. In the aforementioned example of the anti-immigration movement, such a dynamic cannot develop, so we aren’t interested in such a movement – or rather, we are interested in confronting this movement, because it undermines the creation of a movement in which such a dynamic could develop. In the case of Rojava, such a dynamic cannot be developed. We cannot say that we’re seeking a conflict with this movement. It’s about the creation of a proto-state, but it’s a survival attempt in the context of a war, and what can you say about the people who form the basis of this movement? Should they sit quietly while bombs are dropping on their heads? No revolutionary alternative has been developed by any other movement. Since no such movement has been developed by others, why should we expect them to do so and blame them for not doing it? Should we say that they should either make a revolutionary movement or drop dead? Of course not. The only criticism we are interested in here is not a criticism of Rojava per se, but a criticism of those who raise this struggle for survival in the midst of war to a revolution.

Let’s return now to Palestine. The Palestinian proletarians are getting strikes from two sides: both by their own ruling class and by that of Israel. In fact, at the moment, there exist two factions of the Palestinian ruling class, which are in conflict with one another. One is the official Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Fatah, and the other is the government of the Gaza Strip, led by Hamas. Hamas found itself in charge of the Gaza Strip after armed clashes with Fatah in June 2007. After several failed attempts for the reconciliation of the two governments, an agreement was signed last year, 2017, according to which Hamas gave control of Gaza’s public services to the Palestinian Authority (i.e., Fatah) in exchange for the easing of economic embargo on Gaza. Fatah seems to be slowly making a comeback in Gaza, but this too has been no less violent than Hamas’ seizure of leadership. The Palestinian Authority itself, a few months before the deal was finally concluded, put pressure on Hamas by not paying for the electricity that Israel provides to Gaza, with the result Gaza only having electricity for 4 hours a day. According to Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Zahar University in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, instead of cutting its direct subsidies to Gaza, decided to attack Hamas indirectly by not paying Israel for the electricity it provides to Gaza. For Abusada, the Palestinian Authority is trying to put the blame on Israel, since if Israel cuts off the electricity supply because the Palestinian Authority isn’t paying for it, Gazans will blame Israel and not Fatah (q.v. the related New York Times article). And we add: so, if an agreement is finally reached, Fatah could present itself to the people of Gaza as a saviour. Also, Qatar, Hamas’ patron, is under embargo from Egypt and other countries. Qatar continues to support Hamas, but it’s pressured to reconcile with Fatah. The United Arab Emirates has shown an interest in investing in Gaza if it’s no longer under Hamas’ control (q.v. an Economist article).

Another measure of pressure was the drastic salary cuts made in 2017 to Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza, with cuts ranging from 30%-70% (q.v. articles by Electronic Intifada and Ma’an News Agency). Palestinian Authority, which has been formed in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords in 1993, established a Palestinian minimum wage only after 18 years, in 2012, at 1,450 shekels (then $375) and only after pressure from Palestinian trade union protests and general protests against increases in the prices of basic commodities. Shaher Sa’id, then general secretary of the Palestinian General Confederation of Trade Unions, told the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds that the minimum wage should be linked to the poverty line, which was 2,300 shekels, and that the current minimum wage condemned workers to misery and death (q.v. articles in The Times of Israel and Ma’an News Agency). At the beginning of this month (May 2018) the Palestinian Authority made new salary cuts of 20% for its employees in Gaza, while it has not yet paid the April salaries and has meanwhile forced 1/3 of its employees in Gaza into early retirement (q.v. Reuters article).

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the official statistical institute of Palestinian Authority, in 2017 the unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip was 43.6% while in the West Bank was 18.1% (note that for brevity, moving forwards whenever we refer to Gaza we mean the Gaza Strip and not Gaza City, whenever we refer to the West Bank we refer to areas A and B of the West Bank, and whenever we refer to Israel we include the Israeli settlements). Overall, among men the unemployment rate was 22.3% while for women it was 47.4%. Of those working in Palestine and not in Israel, the service sector employed 32.7% of Gaza workers and 53.3% of West Bank workers. For the public sector (the Palestinian Authority) 36.5% work in Gaza and 15.2% in the West Bank. The average daily wage in the West Bank is 101.5 shekels (about €24) while in Gaza it is 59.4 shekels (about €14). The average working week of wage earners in the West Bank is 44.2 hours, while in Gaza is 37.6 hours. Of the total of wage earners in Palestine, 25.3% have an employment contract, 51.2% do not have a contract, and 23.5% have an oral(!) contract. The 17.9% of employees in the West Bank receive less than the minimum wage, while in Gaza the figure is 80.6%. The number of Palestinians working in Israel is 130,700. Of these, 67,900 have a permit, 43,400 have no permit (hence, undeclared work) and 19,400 have an Israeli ID or a foreign passport. The average daily wage for Palestinians working in Israel is 226.7 shekels (about €54), with an average working week of 41.6 hours. 61.6% of Palestinians working in Israel are employed in the construction sector. (For all the above figures, see here). The average daily wage of Palestinians working in Israel seems to be slightly below the Israeli minimum wage, as according to data from Bituah Leumi (National Insurance Institute of Israel, the Israeli state’s social security agency), in 2017 the minimum daily wage for a 5-day job was 230.77-244.62 shekels (about 55-58€) (see here).

There are 504,600 workers in Gaza and 870,000 in West Bank. The unemployment rate in Gaza is 43.6% and 18.1% in the West Bank. Therefore, the total labour force in the Gaza Strip is 894,680 people and in the West Bank 1,062,271 people. In total, 1,956,951. And as we said, there are only 130,700 Palestinians working in Israel. That is, of the total Palestinian workforce, only 6.7% work in Israel. The rest either work in Palestine or are unemployed. Therefore, where’s the “Israeli apartheid” that the “friends” of Palestinians are talking about? Apartheid in South Africa had a specific purpose: the exploitation of labour of blacks, Asians and other minorities. In the case of Palestine, the majority of Palestinian proletarians experience labour exploitation by Palestinians, not by Israelis. And those unemployed are a surplus population for both Israeli and Palestinian capital. Israeli capital doesn’t want to exploit Palestinian workers, the majority of them are rendered useless for it and it tries to keep them out of its territory. No welfare state supports the Palestinian surplus population, neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian authorities, and they are known to survive only thanks to international humanitarian aid.

Why are the Greek “friends” of the Palestinians silent about all these? Why instead of talking about the concrete conditions of the Palestinian proletariat they only talk abstractly about the Palestinian people? When the Palestinian proletariat is dying from the threefold conflict between the Israeli bourgeoisie (trying to keep them out of its territory) and the two warring factions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie (fighting for the reins of political sovereignty in the Palestinian territories), why are they only talking about the israeli bourgeoisie? Is Israel alone responsible for the impoverishment of the Palestinian proletarians? Why don’t they talk about the contradictions and conflicts within Palestinian society? Last month (April 2018), a 25-year-old West Bank Palestinian, Ahmad al-Awartani, was arrested and beaten unconscious by the Palestinian Authority for criticizing it in a Facebook post, and then went on hunger strike in prison. Addameer, a Palestinian NGO supporting Palestinian political prisoners in both Palestinian and Israeli prisons, frequently speaks of torture of political prisoners by the Palestinian Authority (q.v. an Al Jazeera article). A few months ago, cleaners in Gaza hospitals went on strike because they hadn’t been paid for 4 months (q.v. a Haaretz article). Strikes and protests by Palestinian workers for the humiliation they experience at the checkpoints for their entry/exit from the Israeli territories everyday while going to work aren’t rare. The “friends” of the Palestinians who only talk about the relations of the Palestinians with Israel, why do they refer exclusively to the conflicts regarding the territorial borders of the political territories? Why don’t they talk about the working conditions of Palestinians in Israeli and multinational companies located inside Israeli territory? In fact, since such businesses are a meeting point for Palestinian and Israeli workers, it’s the most likely point from where a common struggle could burst, rupturin the nationalist divisions between the two working classes. “Friends” of the Palestinian people, at last, please tell us: which banner are you raising? That of class struggle or of national liberation?