Trade unions and class consciousness

'Workers must learn to act politically and think socially'

Below is an excerpt from Teamster Bureaucracy by Farrell Dobbs (1907-83), a central leader of the Teamster strikes of the 1930s and of the Socialist Workers Party. The title is one of Pathfinder's Books of the Month for October. This last in a four-part series recounts the strikes and campaigns by truck drivers that, in the 1930s, built the industrial union movement in Minneapolis and the Upper Midwest and helped pave the way for the CIO. Teamster Bureaucracy describes how this leadership organized to oppose World War II, racism, and government efforts to gag class-struggle-minded workers. The last chapter draws crucial lessons of the Teamster struggle for today's working-class fighters. Copyright 1977 © by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FARRELL DOBBS
If, during the course of their experiences in struggle, the labor militants are helped to analyze the causes of the social and economic ills facing them; if they are aided in perceiving the essence of an outlived capitalism—they will learn that the existing problems are not incidental and episodic at all, but the consequence of a deep structural crisis of the system. They will then see why governmental control must be taken away from the capitalists by labor and its allies.

Basic to such a rise in the workers' class consciousness is understanding that a fundamental change must take place in the role of the trade unions, which constitute the existing form of mass organization among the workers in this country. These broad instruments of struggle must be turned away from reliance upon so-called friends among the capitalist politicians. They must break off the self-defeating collaboration with the bosses' government, that has been imposed by bureaucratic misleaders. The unions must be transformed into mechanisms for independent and militant action by the workers all along the line. Restrictions on the right to strike must be vigorously opposed and freedom to exercise that right firmly asserted. Internal union democracy must be established so that all questions can be decided on the basis of majority rule. Then, and only then, will organized labor manage to bring its full weight to bear in confrontations with the employers at the industrial level.

Whenever conflicts of significant magnitude erupt within industry today, the government intervenes on the employers' side; and this interference is bound to intensify as capitalist decay gets worse. From this it follows that trade union action alone will prove less and less capable of resolving the workers' problems, even on a limited basis. Objectively, industrial conflicts will assume more and more a political character, and even the most powerfully organized workers will be faced with an increasingly urgent need to act on the new and higher plane of politics… .

In the process of creating their own mass party, based upon and controlled by the trade unions, the organized workers can draw unorganized, unemployed, and undocumented sections of their class into a broad political alliance. Labor will then be in a position to act both in a more unified manner and through advanced forms of struggle.

The workers will learn to generalize their needs, as a class, and to address their demands on a political basis to the capitalists, as a class. Political confrontation of that kind—for example, the nationalization of a given industry under workers' control—will raise labor action as a whole to a higher plane and at the same time impart new vigor to the continuing trade union struggles. Increased militancy within industry will serve, in turn, to reinforce activity in the political sphere. In that way interacting processes will develop through which the workers will attain greater class consciousness, more complete solidarity, and, hence, mounting ability to outfight the bosses.

Before unity of the exploited masses can be attained, however, still another of organized labor's existing policies must be thoroughly reversed. The labor movement must champion and give unqualified support to the demands of the Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and other oppressed national minorities, and of women and youth.

As Leon Trotsky¹ insisted in discussions during the 1930s, the American workers must learn to act politically and to think socially if they are to attain the class consciousness and solidarity needed to defeat the exploiters. This is the opposite of the narrow class-collaborationist course pursued by the labor bureaucracy and the privileged layers they reflect. Thus, as a matter of principle, the trade union movement must use its power to actively fight for such progressive demands as affirmative action programs against racial and sexual discrimination on the job, in the union, in hiring, housing, health care, and education; the right to abortion and childcare; busing and bilingual, bicultural education: the right to a free college education for all youth.

If unconditional backing of that kind is given, the labor movement will be helping itself in a double sense. The strengthening of anticapitalist struggles on other fronts will make it harder for the employing class to concentrate its fire on the trade unions. The greater the scope of mass confrontations with the bosses' government, the more effectively will labor be able to involve its natural allies in the development of independent political action on a massive scale….

If trade unionists aid the victims of U.S. imperialism in other countries—and at the same time back all progressive causes within the United States—they will earn extensive support for their own struggles. An anticapitalist united front can thus be built, both nationally and internationally, and, as it grows in strength, the relationship of class forces will be changed to the decisive advantage of the workers and their allies.

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1. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a central leader of the 1917 revolution in Russia and, from the mid-1920s, the principal leader in the Soviet Union and then internationally of the fight to continue the revolution's communist course against its reversal by the privileged caste headed by Joseph Stalin.

On the "character and role of the police"

The current editorial in the new issue of The Militant deserves every reader's attention:

 

Cops defend class interests of bosses

(editorial)

  

The September 21 police assault on members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Ladies' Auxiliary in Longview, Wash., highlights what the cops "protect and serve"—the property, profits and prerogatives of the capitalist class. Working people should condemn this attack on longshore workers, their supporters and their union, and demand charges against those defending the union be dropped.

In January 2000 hundreds of police attacked members of the International Longshoremen's Association in Charleston, S.C., when they picketed a shipping company using nonunion labor. Leaders of the union were then framed up on "riot" charges. But through a determined struggle—which included joining with thousands of others to demand removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol—the shipping company was compelled to hire union workers and charges against the union leaders were dropped.

As Farrell Dobbs, a central leader of the Teamster strikes of the 1930s and of the Socialist Workers Party, explains in this week's Books of the Month selection: "Whenever conflicts of significant magnitude erupt within industry today, the government intervenes on the employers' side; and this interference is bound to intensify as capitalist decay gets worse." It's the bosses' government. The job of their cops and "justice" system is to keep working people "in line."

That's what's behind their death penalty, a weapon of terror aimed at working people, under which Troy Davis, framed up by cops, was executed in Georgia September 21. The same penalty is meted out to workers in the streets, as recently happened to John Collado in New York when he tried to help his neighbor who appeared to be under assault by what turned out to be an undercover cop.

A fuller picture of the brutal reality of capitalist rule for working people comes through when you consider the thousands killed and maimed each year in the coal mines, oil fields, factories, construction sites and other workplaces under the bosses' relentless drive for profit—a different form of violence reproduced by the same exploitive system.

As workers are increasingly forced to organize resistance to employer attacks, the bosses' government will seek to push them back with scabs, stool pigeons, legal red tape and an array of court tactics from injunctions against picketing to "conspiracy" charges to secret "evidence," and violence by armed bodies under the direction of the capitalists' state power.

As working people resist the employers' drive to foist the burden of the capitalist crisis on their backs, they increasingly gain firsthand experience that shines light on the character and role of the police. It also becomes easier to see that capitalism cannot be reformed. That the working class must wrest political power from the capitalist class, dismantling their state, their army and their cops. Replacing the dictatorship of capital with workers power will then lay the basis for the construction of a socialist world free of exploitation and class violence.

  

  

Related articles:

Solidarity gives boost to sugar workers' fight

1,300 fight 2-month lockout in Midwest

Steelworkers in Pa. rally against Armstrong's union-busting drive

Workers at Verizon pay for concessions on safety

UK agency workers strike banana plant, win support

Union women's auxiliary protests cop attack at port

Two workers die in North Dakota oil fields amid bosses' profit drive  

 

 

Obama Kills Civil Liberties Movement?

Tariq Ali on OWS

Against the Extreme Centre

Selling Education - Doni Faber and Greg Lucero

Looking at OWS [Occupy Wall Street]

The Nuts and Bolts of Occupy Wall Street

Published on Dissident Voice | shared via feedly

On day 12 of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I helped moderate a meeting of the "open source" OWS working group by keeping a list of speakers and co-chairing. I am not sure what the open source group is supposed to do exactly, but I decided to attend this meeting after watching a middle-aged man call in the General Assembly for developing demands and goals on the OWS live feed and people in the crowd telling him the open source working group was tasked with this.

After the daily 1 p.m. General Assembly meeting ended, OWS divided into its working groups, including media, labor, outreach, and a number of others. I walked over and sat down next to the point person (or " leader") of the working group, a young white guy in his twenties who looked like a 60s throwback with his long, straight hippy-style hair, rainbow tights, fatigue shirt, and Ziploc bag of rolling papers. Of course, you can never judge a book by its cover — he is also a student of behavioral economics and mentioned that academic studies have shown that the OWS's decentralized, highly participatory, and lengthy process of dialogue is the best way to organize.

The open source meeting swelled very quickly to 20 or 30 people, an indication that a lot of people want to figure out what OWS's demands should be. The group moderator remarked that the group was so big it was practically a "second General Assembly." His brief introduction to the process whereby OWS would define its vision (he repeatedly used the phrase "visioning") was interrupted as many hands went up, asking to be called on; at least 10 people wanted to speak and each was allowed a minute and a half.

What emerged from the discussion was that there is no consensus that demands are even necessary. Quite a few protesters argued along the lines that this is movement or process of dialogue is the demand/goal and that therefore demands are not necessary; one said our demand to the world should that they "join us." Two older people, one in his sixties, the other in his thirties, spoke out for having clear, specific demands as being a very necessary step to creating a sustainable protest, much less a movement.

I argued that a few concrete, achievable demands were important, citing the "Day of Wrath" protest on January 25, 2011 that began the revolution in Egypt that demanded raising the minimum wage, an end to the dictatorship's "emergency laws," the firing of the interior minister, and a two term presidency. I explained that Mubarak's ouster was not one of their original demands, but it became a demand once millions of people became involved in the movement, and therefore demands can and should change depending on circumstances. My suggested demand was to raise taxes on the 1%, something the New York state legislature and the city council could vote to do immediately.

One woman argued against having demands on the grounds that the media wanted us to do exactly that, that it would be a way for them to put us in a nice neat little confining box the better to ignore us; instead, she proposed we copy the model used to write grant proposals and draw up a mission statement, goals, and objectives. The moderator took to this and we dispersed into six groups of five or so to discuss what motivated us to protest and what our "visions" (or goals, long and short term) were; after the break out, we would reconvene to sum up and share what each of our groups had come up with in the hopes of finding some type of consensus that would inform some sort of statement to the world.

The OWS political process is very participatory, cumbersome, and time-consuming. One strength of their process is that it avoids the top-down control that Wisconsin's union leaders exercised to scuttle the protests and developing strike wave that shook the state in favor of harmless (and ultimately fruitless) recall efforts.

To participate and help shape OWS politically requires dedicating many, many waking hours every day to ongoing, continuous debates and discussions. This is not necessarily a bad thing but in practice ends up favoring the participation of those who can afford to skip work and/or school for a week or more. With unemployment over 9% (a figure even higher for the 18-25 age group), it should be no surprise that these are the people taking the fight to the enemy's lair.

It may be that OWS never develops a clear set of demands. OWS seems to be headed toward issuing a general statement akin to the Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, although it will probably be less wordy and much darker. Port Huron spoke moralistically of the highly privileged lives led by America's post-World War Two college students that stood in start contrast to the conditions facing black and brown people in the Jim Crow south, America's urban ghettos, and the Third World. Today, students face the prospect of lifelong debt, serial dead-end jobs, and holding two or even three part-time jobs just to keep up with the bills and rent, just like the non-college educated working class.

Whatever OWS decides with regards to demands, they deserve credit for putting their finger on the real enemy and being brave enough to defy the police and break the law to make the voices of their generation heard.

Everyone who can should go and help occupy Wall Street.

"A long-term deflationary crisis"

What drives capitalism’s long-term economic crisis?

Below we reprint an excerpt from Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes. The item is from the chapter, “So Far From God, So Close to Orange County: The Deflationary Drag of Finance Capital.”

On Dec. 6, 1994, Orange County, California, filed for bankruptcy. The managers of the county’s investment fund had borrowed heavily and purchased highly leveraged securities called derivatives that simply bet on a continuing drop in interest rates. The county lost almost $2 billion when the gamble failed, as short-term interest rates began rising in early 1994.

The report printed below is based on a talk at a regional socialist educational conference held in Los Angeles over the 1994-95 New Year’s weekend. The report was subsequently adopted by the Socialist Workers Party 38th constitutional convention, held in July 1995. Copyright © 1999 Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

*****
BY JACK BARNES
The world capitalist economy has entered a long-term deflationary crisis, a contraction that cannot be fundamentally reversed by the ups and downs of the business cycle. With their profit rates under long-term pressure, the capitalists are in their “lean and mean” period, their “just-on-time” period, their “downsizing,” “computerizing,” and “de-layering” period. They are laying off workers and other employees, speeding up production, and raking in short-term cash in the bargain.

But the one thing the capitalists are not doing, and are incapable of doing, is expanding productive capacity to anywhere near the degree they need to fuel another gigantic boom, set industrial profit rates on a long-term upward course, and accelerate capital accumulation. Even as capitalists temporarily boost their returns by cutting costs and taking a bigger slice of market share away from their rivals, the long-run profit expectations of capital are such that they are still not investing in new plant and equipment that draws more and more workers into expanded production.

The money that is going into new equipment goes largely into ways to make us work faster to produce more with fewer coworkers. That does not expand productive capacity, however. It intensifies speedup and extends the workweek. But that alone does not create the basis for the rising profit rates and capital accumulation that marked the post-World War II capitalist boom until it began running out of steam by the early 1970s.

In fact, instead of issuing stock to finance expansion—the classic source of “capital formation” extolled in standard economics textbooks—U.S. corporations for most of the 1980s and 1990s have actually bought more previously offered stock from each other than they have issued in new shares. Capitalists have also issued large quantities of high-interest corporate bonds—gone deep into debt, in other words—to finance takeovers and buyouts.

So, the world’s propertied families have been fighting among themselves more and more to use credit to corner a bigger cut of the surplus value they collectively squeeze from working people. They have been blowing up great balloons of debt. But ever since the 1987 stock market panic, and at an accelerated pace since the onset of world depression conditions at the opening of the 1990s, the capitalists have been plagued by the problem that first one balloon, then another, and then yet another begins to deflate. And they have no way of knowing which balloon will go next until they start hearing the “whoosh,” and by then it is often too late.

All of us were children once and have blown up balloons. They can expand very slowly, very gradually. But then try to let the air out. That is harder to control. Remember? The balloons can get away and ricochet all over the room.

With returns on investments in capacity-expanding plant and equipment under pressure since the mid-1970s, owners of capital have not only been cost cutting; the holders of paper have been borrowing larger and larger amounts to buy and sell various forms of paper securities at a profit. They blew up a giant balloon of debt in Orange County over a period of years; the bondholders thought they had died and gone to heaven. Then the balloon began to deflate, as they learned the hard way that interest rates go up as well as down. When the balloon international bankers had inflated in Mexico in the 1980s began to collapse, the bondholders stepped in and blew it back up for a while. But in Orange County, the more local officials borrowed to make a killing using public funds to gamble with bond merchants, the greater their vulnerability became. Earlier this year, when rates started rising and low-interest bond issues were suddenly no longer available, the moment of truth arrived.

Now the capitalists and their public representatives—and not just in Mexico or Orange County—have been given another warning of the long-run possibilities of an uncontrollable deflation.

Over the past couple of decades, upturns in the business cycle have relied on floating large amounts of fictitious capital—ballooning debt and other paper values. The capitalists are now paying the piper for the lack of sufficient economic growth during that period to keep rolling over the loans.

The financial press has a term for this explosive process; they call it “de-leveraging.” Among other things, this means we will be seeing more breakdowns like the bankruptcy in public “trust funds” in Orange County. Now I will admit, if you had asked me which of the thousands of local and state administrations was most likely to go belly up, I would have been hard put to guess Orange County. The spiritual home of Ronald Reagan and site of John Wayne Airport, Orange County has a median income in the top 2 percent of households in the United States.

Remember those pieces of paper with the cute names we mentioned in “What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold”1—the Fannie Maes, Ginnie Maes, Farmer Macs? They are interest-bearing securities supposedly guaranteed by quasi-government agencies that buy up mortgages and second mortgages on homes and farmland. It was these bits of paper—cut apart, repackaged, and jazzed up as roulette chips labeled “derivatives”—whose declining prices imploded on Orange County and got it in such a jam.

Wall Street has already offered up Orange County’s treasurer as a scapegoat. But their bottom line is going to be that it is working people like us who are really to blame. If we would accept fewer schools and hospitals, if we would agree to pay higher tuition, if we would demand less public transportation, if “illegals” could be kept off the public rolls, then there would not be so much pressure on poor fund managers to pour billions into high-risk investments. And public workers are already the first to suffer layoffs in Orange County.

Municipal bonds, together with U.S. Treasury bills, are the prerogative of the very rich. Ross Perot, for instance, is one of the biggest individual holders of municipal bonds in the United States. And written on each and every one of these pieces of paper are the words “Full faith and credit.” That means the only collateral they are ultimately backed up by is the “full faith and credit” of the government or agency that issued them. The “faith” derives from the guarantee to the wealthy bondholders that they are always at the head of the line to be paid out of taxes and other revenues. First comes the interest—then, if there is anything left, the schools, roads, hospitals, and payroll. It is never the other way around.

No cuts! That is the bondholders’ slogan too!

And since governments produce no wealth, we are the ones the debtors come to in order to demonstrate their “full faith and credit.” The blood money is squeezed from us.

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1. This resolution, adopted by the 1988 convention of the Socialist Workers Party, is available in issue no. 10 (1994) of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory.

"....Netanyahu, Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and Ashton are a thousand times worse."

Mahmoud Abbas: Indian reservations

Zionist 'negotiating strategy' sham

What does Mahmoud Abbas expect to achieve at the UN? Moshe Machover analyses the Palestinian bid for statehood

On September 23, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen) Abbas, ‘president’ of the Palestinian ‘Authority’, appeared before the United Nations general assembly and, to the great acclaim of the majority of delegates, made a bid for the admission of the ‘state’ of Palestine as a member of that organisation.

I have put three words above in quote marks, for good reason. First, although Abu Mazen is often addressed politely as ‘president Abbas’, his official title is ‘chairman of the Palestinian National Authority’ (in Arabic there is some ambiguity, as the word ra’is can mean both ‘chairman’ and ‘president’). In any case, even his entitlement to this title is dubious: he was elected as chairman in January 2005 for a term of four years, which expired in January 2009; but he has remained super-glued to his seat.

Second, the so-called Palestinian Authority (PA), of which he is (or was) chairman, is devoid of any real authority. Its main role is to keep the Palestinian people under control on behalf of Israel, and to engage with the latter in desultory negotiations in an endless ‘peace process’ (of which more anon).

Third, the so-called state for which he was demanding UN membership is non-existent: much less than a state, it is not even a Bantustan, but more like a series of disconnected Indian reservations, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

In response to Abbas, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, made a speech in his prime poisonous style, vehemently opposing Palestinian UN membership and inviting the PA instead to negotiate. This was seconded by US president Barack Obama, who, in an utterly one-sided speech, denounced the Palestinian bid as ‘one-sided’ and, as expected, promised to veto it in the security council. The invitation to negotiate was echoed by Catherine Ashton on behalf of the European Union.

In this article I propose to explain the background to this international charade and the motives of the various actors in it.

‘Peace process’

First, Israel. For the Israeli leadership, the ‘peace process’ - or, as many Israelis (who have trouble distinguishing between long and short vowels) pronounce it, piss process - is a perpetual ratchet mechanism for buying time, while colonisation of Palestinian lands is extended and expanded.

The Israeli negotiating strategy, successfully applied for the last 20 years, is very simple. At each stage of the process, Israel puts forward new conditions. If the Palestinian side rejects them, the negotiations are broken off, and world public opinion is invited to blame Palestinian intransigence for the deadlock. However, if the Palestinian side capitulates to the new demands, then Israel finds a pretext for stalling. A favourite ploy is to create provocations such as ‘targeted assassination’ of Palestinian militants. These are rarely reported by the international media, and never given any prominence, as they are considered routine moves in the ‘war against terror’. Eventually, some armed Palestinian group retaliates with a bloody bombing inside Israel or an ill-aimed rocket barrage. This is invariably given lurid coverage in the international media.[1] Thereupon Israel breaks off the talks, because obviously one cannot negotiate with such terrorists. Again, the Palestinians are blamed for the failure of the talks. Meantime, Israeli colonization continues to metastasise.

After a while, there is another international initiative for resuming the negotiations. In the new round of talks, the previous Palestinian concessions are taken as a starting point, and Israel’s conditions are ratcheted up. Right now the new Israeli ultimatum includes the following two demands. First, that the Palestinians subscribe to the Zionist doctrine that all Jews around the world are a nation, and Israel is the nation-state of this alleged nation (rather than a state of its own citizens, or even of the Israeli Hebrew nation). Second, that the PA drop its insistence that the eventual settlement be based on the pre-1967 de facto border of Israel (the so-called green line). These two demands taken together amount to open-ended legitimation of Zionist colonisation, past, present and future.

Israeli opposition

The dual aim of this strategy is to buy time for further Israeli colonisation, and prevent the creation of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state of any size, however mutilated. This policy is by no means new, and is common to all the major Zionist parties. Let me quote from a Matzpen discussion paper co-authored some time ago by comrade Emmanuel Farjoun and myself.

“The decisive majority of the Zionist leadership, both in the government and in the … opposition, is resolutely opposed, as a matter of fundamental principle, to the establishment of any kind of independent Palestinian state.

“First, the Zionist legitimation for the existence of the state of Israel as an exclusive Jewish state has always been entirely based not on the right to self-determination of the Jews who live in this country, but on the alleged ‘historical right’ of all Jews around the world over the whole of the ‘Land of Israel.’ From this viewpoint, recognition of the existence in Palestine of another people, the Palestinian Arab people, which has a legitimate claim in it would undermine Zionism’s legitimation and self-justification.

“Second, the Zionist leadership indeed takes into account the eventuality that within the framework of a settlement Israel may be obliged to withdraw also from parts of its conquests west of the Jordan river. But from a Zionist viewpoint any withdrawal from any part whatsoever of ‘the historical Land of Israel’, especially west of the Jordan, is - in principle - temporary and contingent on transient conditions. From this viewpoint, Israel must reserve the ability and right to reconquer these territories, if that becomes politically possible or militarily necessary. But in international politics there is a huge difference between conquering part of another state and conquering the whole of a ‘third state’ [ie, a Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan]. The world would be much more likely to accept, under certain conditions, an Israeli reconquest of part of Jordan (or of Greater Syria), than the total erasure of a sovereign Palestinian state. The establishment of such a state would therefore impose a severe constraint on Israel’s political and military strategy.

“Third, the Zionist leadership is worried that the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, however small, may be the starting point of a historical process whereby that state would expand step by step at Israel’s expense. The Zionists in fact know from their own experience all about a process of this kind: at first they agreed to the establishment of a small Jewish state within the borders recommended [in 1937] by the Peel Commission, and later within the borders of the [UN] partition plan of 1947, but they expanded the borders further and further, step by step.”

In this context, we quoted the words of a famous Israeli leader:

“Fundamentally, a Palestinian state is an antithesis of the state of Israel … The basic and naked truth is that there is no fundamental difference between the relation of the Arabs of Nablus to Nablus and that of the Arabs of Jaffa to Jaffa … And if today we set out on this road and say that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state because they are natives of the same country and have the same rights, then it will not end with the West Bank. The West Bank together with the Gaza Strip do not amount to a state … The establishment of such a Palestinian state would lay a cornerstone to something else … Either the state of Israel - or a Palestinian state.”

Our discussion paper was written in August 1976 (and published in Matzpen in February 1977), when the first Rabin government was in office. The leader we quoted was Moshe Dayan (as reported in Ha’aretz December 12 1975). Plus ça change …

Indeed, no Israeli government has signed any legally binding commitment to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state. In particular, the Oslo accords of August 1993, signed by the second Rabin government, contain no mention of a Palestinian state (they also contain no commitment on Israel’s part to halt its colonisation of Palestinian lands).

Abbas’s UN bid is not remotely likely to give the Palestinians in the foreseeable future a state in any substantive sense. At most, it will result in a symbolic act of international recognition of notional Palestinian statehood, of the Palestinians’ right to have a state. But even this symbolic international legal act is more than Israel is prepared to countenance. Hence Netanyahu’s vehement opposition.

US position

In our discussion paper, comrade Farjoun and I explained also the American position, which has not changed since then:

“The minimal demand, which even the most moderate current in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) cannot give up (so long as it exists as an independent actor), is the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied territories, which would exist for an entire historical period alongside the Zionist state of Israel.

“The Americans for their own part could accept this demand in order to tranquilise the [Arab] national ferment. From a purely American viewpoint, as from that of the moderate current in the PLO, a compromise that includes the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state under US protection would be acceptable. But in practice such a compromise is precluded by the resolute Zionist position and the special position of Israel in the American set-up in the region.”

The total, apparently slavish, US support for the Israeli position (illustrated for the hundredth time by Obama’s veto threat) is often explained by the great influence in Congress and the US media of the pro-Israel lobby (consisting of some important Jewish organisations and a much larger fundamentalist Christian network). But this ‘Israeli tail wags US dog’ explanation is at best only part of the truth, and it begs the question as to why that lobby is allowed to wield such influence. There is no sign that any major US capitalist interest group, including the dominant military-industrial and oil complex, which commands huge political and financial resources, makes a really serious effort to counteract or limit the effects of pro-Israel lobbying (billionaire George Soros is a rather isolated exception[2]).

In fact, Israel is the most reliable American ally - in effect, a junior partner - in the Middle East, and is even more indispensable now, given the downfall of some Arab protégés of the US, and the general instability in the region. So the Obama administration is torn between its reluctance to arouse anti-American rage among the masses of the Arab world and beyond, and its commitment to Israel, obliging it to block the PA’s UN membership bid by a veto in the security council. To save the US this embarrassment, its EU camp followers (led by Nicolas Sarkozy and Catherine Ashton) have devised alternative plans: to persuade the PA to withdraw its bid for full UN membership, and apply instead for non-member-state status (like that of the Vatican). This can be granted by a two-third majority in the general assembly, where the US has no veto. Failing that, if the PA insists on its full membership bid, the issue can be kicked into the long grass of endlessly prolonged deliberation among members of the security council.

Why Abbas went to UN

It is impossible to believe that the Ramallah-based PA has not cottoned on long ago to the Israeli negotiating strategy and realised that the ‘peace process’ is leading nowhere except to the expansion of Israeli colonisation and theft of Palestinian land and resources. No-one can be that stupid. The reason why Arafat, and later on Abbas, and their clique have persevered in collusion with this pretence is - apart from their pathetic pro-US commitment - the considerable privileges in status granted by Israel to its favourite collaborationists, and the material benefits derived from their control of various funds, including grants from the EU (in this, Tony Blair has played a significant role as pander).

But even collaborationism has its limits. The Abbas leadership has been so discredited among its own people that it was rapidly losing control. Here the Arab awakening has played a crucial role in raising the expectations of the Palestinian masses. No Arab leader whose mandate on power has long expired can feel secure. In desperation, Abbas played the UN gambit. In the short term, it has won him fairly wide, open support in the West Bank, and covert support in the Gaza Strip, where the rival Hamas leadership has suppressed any open pro-Abbas manifestations.

Hamas is by no means alone in its sceptical attitude to Abbas’s UN gambit. Palestinian opinion generally is deeply divided. While many Palestinians point out the advantages - symbolic, diplomatic and legal - of internationally recognised statehood, many others are worried about the disadvantages. They point out that the likely outcome would be freezing the Palestinians for the foreseeable future in possession of a symbol devoid of any reality, without actual control of any territory, borders and resources such as water; and unable to halt further Israeli colonisation. The Palestinian refugees outside the occupied territories would remain in limbo.[3]

Our response

Let me end with a few words about the position that, in my opinion, socialists should take towards the whole issue.

We should certainly be critical of the motives behind Mahmoud Abbas’s initiative, as well as of his utterly compromised and politically bankrupt Palestinian Authority. More generally, the so-called two-state ‘solution’, to which the PA is committed and on which the present UN membership bid is based, is a dead end as far as Palestinian liberation is concerned, and will not provide a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[4]

However, right now socialists, especially in Israel and in the west, should direct their main attack against the moves by Israel, the US and its camp followers to block Palestinian UN membership. Whatever we think of the PA and its UN bid, the hypocritical positions of Netanyahu, Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and Ashton are a thousand times worse.

Notes

1. On the systematic pro-Israel bias in British TV reporting, see G Philo, M Berry More bad news from Israel London 2011. Israeli attacks are invariably described as ‘retaliation’. Palestinian revenge is invariably described as ‘starting a new cycle of violence’.

2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros and his article, ‘On Israel, America and Aipac’ New York Review of Books April 12 2007.

3. For a position of profound scepticism by Palestinian nationalists (including Karma Nabulsi) towards the Abbas initiative, see http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/09/20119881338104223.html. For a more robust Palestinian nationalist criticism, see G Karmi, ‘A token state of Palestine’ The Guardian September 24.

4. See my article, ‘Breaking the chains of Zionist oppression’, Weekly Worker February 19 2009.

"....rooted in the social conditions of existence."

Philosophy and Critical Theory
(Excerpt: Philosophy and Class Society)

by Herbert Marcuse

The transformation of a given status is not, of course, the business of philosophy. The philosopher can only participate in social struggles insofar as he is not a professional philosopher. This "division of labor," too, results from the modern separation of the mental from the material means of production, and philosophy cannot overcome it. The abstract character of philosophical work in the past and present is rooted in the social conditions of existence. Adhering to the abstractness of philosophy is more appropriate to circumstances and closer to truth than is the pseudophilosophical concreteness that condescends to social struggles. What is true in philosophical concepts was arrived at by abstracting from the concrete status of man and is true only in such abstraction. Reason, mind, morality, knowledge, and happiness are not only categories of bourgeois philosophy, but concerns of mankind. As such they must be preserved, if not derived anew. When critical theory examines the philosophical doctrines in which it was still possible to speak of man, it deals first with the camouflage and misinterpretation that characterized the discussion of man in the bourgeois period.

With this intention, several fundamental concepts of philosophy have been discussed in this journal [Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung]: truth and verification, rationalism and irrationalism, the role of logic, metaphysics and positivism, and the concept of essence. These were not merely analyzed sociologically, in order to correlate philosophical dogmas with social loci. Nor were specific philosophical contents "resolved" into social facts. To the extent that philosophy is more than ideology, every such attempt must come to nought. When critical theory comes to terms with philosophy, it is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. It presupposes that they really contain truth. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths of previous philosophy. To be sure, even the highest philosophical categories are connected with social facts, even if only with the most general fact that the struggle of man with nature has not been undertaken by mankind as a free subject but instead has taken place only in class society. This fact comes to expression in many "ontological differences" established by philosophy. Its traces can perhaps be found even in the very forms of conceptual thought: for example, in the determination of logic as essentially the logic of predication, or judgments about given objects of which predicates are variously asserted or denied. It was dialectical logic that first pointed out the shortcomings of this interpretation of judgment: the "contingency" of predication and the "externality" of the process of judgment, which let the subject of judgment appear "outside" as self‑subsistent and the predicate "inside" as though in our heads. Moreover, it is certainly true that many philosophical concepts are mere "foggy ideas" arising out of the domination of existence by an uncontrolled economy and, accordingly, are to be explained precisely by the material conditions of life.

But in its historical forms philosophy also contains insights into human and objective conditions whose truth points beyond previous society and thus cannot be completely reduced to it. Here belong not only the contents dealt with under such concepts as reason, mind, freedom, morality, universality, and essence, but also important achievements of epistemology, psychology, and logic. Their truth content, which surmounts their social conditioning, presupposes not an eternal consciousness that transcendentally constitutes the individual conscious ness of historical subjects but only those particular historical subjects whose consciousness expresses itself in critical theory. It is only with and for this consciousness that the "surpassing" content becomes visible in its real truth. The truth that it recognizes in philosophy is not reducible to existing social conditions. This would be the case only in a form of existence where consciousness is no longer separated from being, enabling the rationality of thought to proceed from the rationality of social existence. Until then truth that is more than the truth of what is can be attained and intended only in opposition to established social relations. To this negative condition, at least, it is subject.

In the past, social relations concealed the meaning of truth. They formed a horizon of untruth that deprived the truth of its meaning. An example is the concept of universal consciousness, which preoccupied German Idealism. It contains the problem of the relation of the subject to the totality of society: How can universality as community (Allgemeinheit), become the subject without abolishing individuality? The understanding that more than an epistemological or metaphysical problem is at issue here can be gained and evaluated only outside the limits of bourgeois thought. The philosophical solutions met with by the problem are to be found in the history of philosophy. No sociological analysis is necessary in order to understand Kant's theory of transcendental synthesis. It embodies an epistemological truth. The interpretation given to the Kantian position by critical theory does not affect the internal philosophical difficulty. By connecting the problem of the universality of knowledge with that of society as a universal subject, it does not purport to provide a better philosophical solution. Critical theory means to show only the specific social conditions at the root of philosophy's inability to pose the problem in a more comprehensive way, and to indicate that any other solution lay beyond that philosophy's boundaries. The untruth inherent in all transcendental treatment of the problem thus comes into philosophy "from outside"; hence it can be overcome only outside philosophy. "Outside" does not mean that social factors affect consciousness from without as though the latter existed independently. It refers rather to a division within the social whole. Consciousness is "externally" conditioned by social existence to the very extent that in bourgeois society the social conditions of the individual are external to him and, as it were, overwhelm him from without. This externality made possible the abstract freedom of the thinking subject. Consequently, only its abolition would enable abstract freedom to disappear as part of the general transformation of the relationship between social being and consciousness.

If the theory's fundamental conception of the relation of social existence to consciousness is to be followed, this "outside" must be taken into consideration. In previous history there has been no pre‑established harmony between correct thought and social being. In the bourgeois period, economic conditions determine philosophical thought insofar as it is the emancipated, self‑reliant individual who thinks. In reality, he counts not in the concretion of his potentialities and needs but only in abstraction from his individuality, as the bearer of labor power, i.e. of useful functions in the process of the realization of capital. Correspondingly, he appears in philosophy only as an abstract subject, abstracted from his full humanity. If he pursues the idea of man, he must think in opposition to facticity. Wishing to conceive this idea in its philosophical purity and universality, he must abstract from the present state of affairs. This abstractness, this radical withdrawal from the given, at least clears a path along which the individual in bourgeois society can seek the truth and adhere to what is known. Beside concreteness and facticity, the thinking subject also leaves its misery "outside." But it cannot escape from itself, for it has incorporated the monadic isolation of the bourgeois individual into its premises. The subject thinks within a horizon of untruth that bars the door to real emancipation.

This horizon explains some of the characteristic features of bourgeois philosophy. One of them affects the idea of truth itself and would seem to relativize "sociologically" all its truths from the start: the coupling of truth and certainty. As such, this connection goes all the way back to ancient philosophy. But only in the modern period has it taken on the typical form that truth must prove itself as the guaranteed property of the individual, and that this proof is considered established only if the individual can continually reproduce the truth as his own achievement. The process of knowledge is never terminated, because in every act of cognition the individual must once again re‑enact the "production of the world" and the categorical organization of experience. However, the process never gets any further because the restriction of "productive" cognition to the transcendental sphere makes any new form of the world impossible. The constitution of the world occurs behind the backs of the individuals; yet it is their work.

The corresponding social factors are clear. The progressive aspects of this construction of the world, namely the foundation of knowledge on the autonomy of the individual and the idea of cognition as an act and task to be continually re‑enacted, are made ineffective by the life process of bourgeois society. But does this sociological limitation affect the true content of the construction, the essential connection of knowledge, freedom, and practice? Bourgeois society's domination reveals itself not only in the dependence of thought but also in the (abstract) independence of its contents. For this society determines consciousness such that the latter's activity and contents survive in the dimension of abstract reason; abstractness saves its truth. What is true is so only to the extent that it is not the truth about social reality. And just because it is not the latter, because it transcends this reality, it can become a matter for critical theory. Sociology that is interested only in the dependent and limited nature of consciousness has nothing to do with truth. Its research, useful in many ways, falsifies the interest and the goal of critical theory. In any case, what was linked, in past knowledge, to specific social structures disappears with them. In contrast, critical theory concerns itself with preventing the loss of the truths which past knowledge labored to attain.

This is not to assert the existence of eternal truths unfolding in changing historical forms of which they need only to be divested in order for their kernel of truth to be revealed. If reason, freedom, knowledge, and happiness really are transformed from abstract concepts into reality, then they will have as much and as little in common with their previous forms as the association of free men with competitive, commodity‑producing society. Of course, to the identity of the basic social structure in previous history certainly corresponds an identity of certain universal truths, whose universal character is an essential component of their truth content. The struggle of authoritarian ideology against abstract universals has clearly exhibited this. That man is a rational being, that this being requires freedom, and that happiness is his highest good are all universal propositions whose progressive impetus derives precisely from their universality. Universality gives them an almost revolutionary character, for they claim that all, and not merely this or that particular person, should be rational, free, and happy. In a society whose reality gives the lie to all these universals, philosophy cannot make them concrete. Under such conditions, adherence to universality is more important than its philosophical destruction.

Critical theory's interest in the liberation of mankind binds it to certain ancient truths. It is at one with philosophy in maintaining that man can be more than a manipulable subject in the production process of class society. To the extent that philosophy has nevertheless made its peace with man's determination by economic conditions, it has allied itself with repression. That is the bad materialism that underlies the edifice of idealism: the consolation that in the material world everything is in order as it is. (Even when it has not been the personal conviction of the philosopher, this consolation has arisen almost automatically as part of the mode of thought of bourgeois idealism and constitutes its ultimate affinity with its time.) The other premise of this materialism is that the mind is not to make its demands in this world, but is to orient itself toward another realm that does not conflict with the material world. The materialism of bourgeois practice can quite easily come to terms with this attitude. The bad materialism of philosophy is overcome in the materialist theory of society. The latter opposes not only the production relations that gave rise to bad materialism, but every form of production that dominates man instead of being dominated by him: this idealism underlies its materialism. Its constructive concepts, too, have a residue of abstractness as long as the reality toward which they are directed is not yet given. Here, however, abstractness results not from avoiding the status quo, but from orientation toward the future status of man. It cannot be supplanted by another, correct theory of the established order (as idealist abstractness was replaced by the critique of political economy). It cannot be succeeded by a new theory, but only by rational reality itself. The abyss between rational and present reality cannot be bridged by conceptual thought. In order to retain what is not yet present as a goal in the present, phantasy is required.

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SOURCE: Marcuse, Herbert. "Philosophy and Critical Theory," in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, with translations from the German by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 134-158. Excerpt, pp. 147-154, footnotes omitted. Originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI, 1937.