by
Salvage
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Not since the exuberant early days of the first intifada has the Palestinian resistance harboured illusions about an imminent victory. Optimism is not its point of view. It operates in full consciousness of the enormity of the forces stacked against it and – under the current balance of power – the slim to non-existing chances of liberating the land. So what is the point of resisting? ‘To keep the embers of the conflict burning’, in the words of Hamas, until broader historical processes have turned the tables on the enemy, at some future point, however faraway it might be – or, to keep ‘the issue alive until such time as the requirements for victory materialize’. In an interview published in Journal of Palestine Studies, Ramadan Shallah, leader of Islamic Jihad, the second most important armed force of the resistance, spells out the same strategic doctrine: the purpose is to maintain ‘the military pressure on Israel’ until ‘new parameters’ emerge. No one knows how long that will take. (Anyone who feels unease at the Islamism of these two groups should ponder, among other things, their – particularly Hamas’s – extraordinary efficiency in stamping out every attempt by Daesh to rear its head in Gaza.)
There is a point where total pessimism reverts into its opposite. ‘I’m an optimist because we have a mammoth task in front of us that has to be completed’, says Wadi. ‘The task? It’s everything. Palestine. The future. Freedom.’ Following the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, Terry Eagleton theorises this as ‘fundamental hope’. It is a form of hope that acknowledges the immensity of the defeats and the desolation and still refuses to capitulate, wagering on the possibility of some unspecified future opening. A short remove from despair, it is all that remains when the slate has been swept clean of specific aspirations and concrete assets: it is, says Eagleton, ‘what survives the general ruin.’ Thus Palestinian writers are fond of lines such as ‘in the rubble I rummage for light and new poetry’ (Darwish); ‘to be able to say “no” is a right that I will cling to with my very fingernails, my very teeth, even if it makes me bleed’ (Jabra); ‘things won’t always be like this, I thought, there’s still some fresh air left in the world’ (Badr); ‘perhaps one day / the river will cry / “arise and breathe again”’ (Zayyad); ‘I don’t know why we continue to hope for a future for these hills; one friend even clings to the long view of geological time’ (Shehadeh). Call it fundamental hope, or thinking like a mountain, or even the geological ethos of the Palestinian resistance. Surely, even axiomatically, if there is any way we can survive inside the tank of a warming world and get out of it alive, it is by learning to fight – not to die – and to nourish some climate sumud along these lines.
To those who – saturated with hypocritical moralism, an ethical smugness only the victors can afford – demand that we condemn the resistance, one should respond: what do you want the Palestinians to do? You want them to learn to drop down and die in silence. The resistance is not something to be condoned – for, you see, it’s about more than Palestine. It is something to plug oneself into. It is the last tube of oxygen when there is no other air to breathe.
For Palestinians, nostalgia is a first premise. Some exhort them to get over it, forget the old villages, move on. ‘The ability to forget’, Bonnett quotes Herbert Marcuse, ‘is the mental faculty which sustains submissiveness’. It is the voice of the triumphant master, in this case the Zionist settler-colonialist: don’t get bogged down in the past. To this, the Palestinian response is militant nostalgia.
To deny that the Palestinian people was better off before 1948, you need to be a Zionist; to deny that when it comes to climate, this planet was in a better shape before the cumulative effects of the fossil economy began to bite in the late twentieth century, you need to be a climate-change denialist. The corollary of Klein’s projection is that nostalgia, Palestinian-style, will be universalised, and for good reason: some fairly valuable things actually, objectively were better before the rivers dried up, the land disappeared beneath the sea, the breadbasket turned into a dustbowl, the snow ceased to fall on our Arctic homes. More videos will be watched and re-watched compulsively. Critics who have sneered at Palestinian literature for its surfeit of nostalgia have judged it prematurely. ‘All Palestinians are poets by nature’, writes Jabra in The Ship, ‘because they have experienced two basic things: the beauty of nature, and tragedy.’ That is more a prophetic index than a pillar of salt.
Moreover, if we hold the view that Palestine and climate change are not some minor deviations from an otherwise healthy trajectory of progress, but that late capitalism is rather a fundamentally destructive force in society as well as in nature, then we must accept that loss is a major predicament of our time, and that many struggles will have to start from baselines strewed with rubble. We ‘plunge headlong towards the inevitable pit. This is progress, rather like the progress of a disease’, with Wadi: so pick up the hand grenade and plant the tree
The acute capitalist crisis of 2008 has in the years since developed into a chronic complaint, to be managed but not overcome. In wealthy countries, ultra-low interest rates prop up consumer spending and, for investors, inflate the value of stocks, bonds, and other paper or digital assets. Swollen private portfolios induce luxury spending, and the size of the resulting wealth effect, as Alan Greenspan liked to call it, does a lot to determine what volume of crumbs spills from the banquet table in the form of worker’s wages. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their income than others, asset-price Keynesianism, as it has been called, is an inefficient way to inject demand into an economy. But the method has its allure: what could suit the rich better than rapidly rising prices for what they have to sell – namely, financial assets – while prices of the ordinary goods and services that they buy fall short of even the 2 per cent annual increase sought by central bankers as a minimum rate of inflation? To purchase the results of toil with the weightless gyrations of fictitious capital is a good bargain.
One requires a general analysis of Islamism as a phenomenon of late late capitalism. At the end of the 1980s Chris Harman, then pre-eminent theorist of the International Socialist Tendency, sought to elucidate such a Marxist position on Islamism, which came to be politically relevant, especially in Egypt (the country in which he was to die suddenly, by cardiac arrest, in 2009). His starting point – that analysis should start from the political economy of capitalist imperialism, and the relations between dominant and dominated classes rather than an opposition in thought between belief and un-belief – holds true. However, the argument that follows from that starting point must necessarily change as the external world does.
More than the expression of the politics of a particular class, ISIS are the noxious by-product of the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’. The political project of disaster.
It is unfortunate that the myth of ISIS as US creation has spread so widely, since it forces serious discussion of the topic to begin with a lengthy rebuttal. More fruitful is to understand the organisation through the political theology it practices, its relationship to the state and exploiting classes in the countries in which it operates, and the lineage of Islamism from which it both derives and departs. But to begin with the necessary myth debunking.
For many of the years covered by this book, CP activity in the United States
followed a party line that originated in Moscow, especially during the existence
of the Communist International (1919–1943). For the 1930s especially, mate-
rial in RGASPI suggests an iterative process: U.S. party leaders met with the
Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat (AAS) in Moscow, reported their per-
spective on situations facing the CPUSA, and proposed a policy; their report
was discussed in the AAS and sometimes at higher levels of the Comintern;
drawing on such reports and on information from the press, the AAS drafted its
own report analyzing events and proposing policies, which report was some-
times discussed and approved at higher levels of the Comintern. [...]
my knowledge of this is so patchy lmao
The District 13 Executive Committee waited until mid-July to launch their campaign for a “United Political front.” In a letter to the state SPA, the DEC proposed “to issue jointly a call to all labor unions and workers Fraternal Organiza- tions for the purpose of placing into the field a united labor ticket.” The Socialists’ reply is not in the files, but the DEC’s five-page response, on July 21, emphasized that the CP was proposing not a joint slate of candidates but “a conference of delegates” to form a united labor front. The DEC also derided the SPA as reformist and charged them with failing to understand that “in order to abolish capitalism, and to establish Socialism, the workers must first achieve control of the governmental power as was done in Russia,” and that “all history shows that a ruling, privileged class has never given up power without resorting to force to maintain its privileged position.” After that lesson in Leninism, the DEC urged the SPA to send a committee to meet with their committee and with representatives of unions to plan a conference for a united front.
i mean lol
Several party members then began to work in the Imperial Valley, organizing Filipino and Mexican field workers. Local authorities responded by arresting the most prominent organizers and charging them under the criminal syndicalism law. Of the eleven arrested, three were deported and one was found not guilty. The remaining seven, including Frank Spector, were sentenced to prison terms and two were deported.51 Those events contributed to the departure of two more factional leaders, Frank Spector and Frank Waldron. Spector was convicted of criminal syndicalism in June 1930 and imprisoned in San Quentin until his conviction was reversed on appeal in July 1931. He and others used their time in prison to conduct study groups among the prisoners and recruit CP members. After his release Spector worked for a time as an ILD organizer in New York.52 Waldron, under indictment for criminal syndicalism, fled to New York, took the name Tim Ryan, went to Moscow, and was soon joined by Reggie Karasick and their one-year-old son, Tim. [...]
amazing
In early June 1931, Darcy wrote to Jack Stachel about his first six months in the district. Party headquarters was at 734 Harrison Street, in a neighborhood Darcy called the “skid-road” and the local press called the “skid-way”—an area of inexpensive residential hotels, cheap cafes, and numerous bars and pool rooms, home to many male waterfront and maritime workers and unemployed or underemployed single men, as well as poor families and single women. Darcy found party headquarters “in the hands of ‘skid-road’ elements.” He explained, “While there are many good, normal workers on the skid-road, there are also very many degenerate elements, drunkards, dope fiends. . . . They completely discredited the Party.” On Darcy’s first day, he “had a physical fight with two of them who were among seven or eight who were lying around the Party Headquarters dead drunk.” On his third day, “two Party members made a hold-up on some other Party members, and we had all we could do to prevent the police from learning of the situation.” Darcy’s first task was “to eliminate these elements and to get factory workers or at least unemployed workers into the Party and into Party leadership” and “drive out a considerable number of these degenerates from the Party and Unemployed Council.”