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Is German guilt to blame for the oppression of Palestinians?

Or: why are so many Germans silent in the face of genocide?


04/11/2024

There’s been a lot of talk about German guilt in the pro-Palestine movement. Stickers have been produced saying “free Palestine from German guilt”, and an Al Jazeera article has attacked the “nationwide guiltwashing – or the cover-up of authoritarian state policies through the pretense of addressing Germany’s historical guilt for the Holocaust.”

I want to argue that “German guilt” is an imprecise and not particularly helpful way of describing a very real phenomenon. As early as March, 69% of Germans felt that Israel’s actions in Gaza were unjustified, and only 18% found it justified. As it becomes more obvious that Israel is directly targeting schools, hospitals, and even UN peacekeepers, support for Israel among the German public is not rising.

At the same time, demonstrations in Germany are significantly smaller than those in other countries. Most of them have been dominated by non-Germans. It seems clear that something is different in Germany—but can this all be attributed to guilt?

This article is not about why the German state supports Israel, which has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with support for, and competition with, US imperial interests in the oil-rich MENA region. What’s most interesting here is how so many German people manage to stay silent in the face of an obvious genocide.

It didn’t start on October 7th

I first moved to Germany in 1995. As soon as I could understand the language properly, I was regularly attending meetings on Palestine. It wasn’t that Germans weren’t discussing Israel and Palestine, but they were doing it within very strange parameters.

The meetings almost always ran according to a certain pattern. The speaker would describe the horrific conditions which experienced by the Palestinians. Everyone would look sad. When the discussion was opened up to the public, people would say how terrible this was, and how sorry they were that this was happening.

Then the second or third speaker would end their contribution saying “but of course, we Germans can’t discuss Israel.” Everybody murmured their approval, and the debate was closed down after that. My friend Samieh and I developed a strategy to deal with this. Samieh is a Palestinian from Yafa. I am British. At the moment of the inevitable “Germans can’t talk about this” contribution, we thrust our hands up. “We’re not German, can we say something about it?”

Surprisingly, this strategy always worked. It was not that this lefty-liberal German public didn’t want to hear about the Palestinians. They just had some sort of conditioning telling them that if they talked about it, it would be the first step in a process which ended with them building gas chambers.

Who is guilty?

We were talking about this in a recent Left Berlin book club. Someone mentioned a story that a friend had told him. One day, the friend’s daughter came home from school and asked “Daddy, are we responsible for the Holocaust?” On one level, it is plainly ridiculous that a young girl would be responsible for something which ended nearly 80 years ago. And yet this seems to be what is being taught in German schools.

It’s not just schools. In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen brought out the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which argued that all Germans were to blame for the Holocaust and that as penance their grandchildren should unconditionally support the State of Israel. Goldhagen won the Democracy prize, and his book was a best-seller. A 1997 article said that it had already sold 160,000 copies in Germany alone.

Incidentally, Germans were not the only people buying the book. It was prominently displayed in the English shop in Stuttgart, where I lived at the time. The idea of collective German guilt went hand in hand with ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ English nationalism.

The purpose of this article is not to examine the deficiencies in Goldhagen’s argument, but if you want to know more, I highly recommend Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn’s forensic book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.

 But what does this have to do with Gaza?

Let us assume for one second that the thesis behind German guilt is true, that is that all Germans—and not just those who were alive in the 1930s and 1940s—are to blame for the Holocaust. Just what has this to do with support for the genocide on Gaza? Coming to this conclusion requires 2 or 3 sleights of hand which are based on, shall we say, flimsy logic.

The first sleight of hand is to reduce Nazi Germany’s crimes to antisemitism. I want to make myself clear: the industrial genocide of 6 million Jews was the worst crime committed by Nazi Germany. But it was not the only crime. The Nazis also managed to murder millions of Sinti and Roma people, LGBT+ people, trade unionists, Communists, and even Social Democrats.

And yet, so-called “antiziganismus” is not taboo in modern Germany. There are few howls of protest against plans to tear down Berlin’s only memorial to the Roma and Sinti who were killed in the Holocaust for a railway. Similarly, anti-Communism is so acceptable, that it was enshrined in post-war West German law. In 1956, the Communist Party was banned

Homophobia is slightly more complicated, as some liberals use their supposed support for LGBT+ rights to pinkwash Israel’s crimes, but it would be an illusion to suggest that homophobia is not a strong feature of modern German society.

Germany seems to have come to terms with most of the crimes committed by the Nazis, but antisemitism is the one thing which is beyond the pale. Again, I want to be clear about what I am saying. Antisemitism is of course beyond the pale, as are other forms of bigotry.

Israel does not equal Jewish people

The second sleight of hand involves conflating all Jews with the State of Israel, After the Holocaust, most Jews fleeing Germany did not want to go to Israel, but it was racist immigration laws in the West (including the 1905 Aliens Act, set up by Alfred Balfour – yes, the man who made the Balfour Declaration) which prevented many from finding asylum in Western countries.

Even now, most Jewish people do not live in Israel, and an increasing number of Jews actively oppose what the state is doing. A survey of US Jews taken at the end of the last Trump administration provides interesting results: over half had never visited Israel, and 41% felt not too or not at all connected to Israel, a figure which rose to over 50% among people younger than 30. 

These figures date from before a wave of Campus protests for Gaza began, much of which was led by young Jewish people. After the protests in Spring 2024, the Middle East Eye found that “at several of the encampments, anti-Zionist Jewish students vastly outnumbered Palestinian or Arab student protesters.”

And yet, the self-appointed protectors of Jewish life insist, it is only Israelis and supporters of Israel who are proper Jews. This brings us to the absurdity of a multi-cultural centre in Berlin shut down because of alleged antisemitism, specifically for hosting an event organised by the Jewish Voice for Peace—the ‘wrong sort’ of Jews.

“Imported antisemitism”

One more step is required to justify the repression of Palestinians, and this is the dubious concept of “imported antisemitism.” In 2018, Angela Merkel made a speech saying “We have refugees now, for example, or people of Arab origin, who bring a different type of antisemitism into the country”. Around the same time, her antisemitism Tsar Felix Klein raised the issue of “imported antisemitism”

According to the theory of imported antisemitism, Germany has had no problem with antisemitism, apart from a short blip in the 1930s and 1940s. Now that this problem has been dealt with (we’ll ignore the fact that the Fascist AfD is polling around 20%, and around 30% in most East German States), a new scapegoat is in order. If the Holocaust can be reduced to antisemitism, and Judaism to Israel, then it is Arabs, and particularly Palestinians, who are trying to start a new Holocaust.

This is what lies behind a recent claim, made during the Berlin Linke conference, that Hamas and Hisbollah are guilty of eliminatory antisemitism—a term used by the aforementioned Goldhagen to refer to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Seeing how ridiculous this comparison is doesn’t require you to be a big fan of Hamas and Hisbollah (to let you in on a secret, I’m not). 

Besides, the statistics show that most antisemitic violence is carried out by the Right. A report in Al Jazeera in 2021 found that “the German police recorded a total of 2,351 anti-Semitic incidents in 2020. Of these, 95 percent, or 2,224, were committed by right-wing extremists.” Even with the increased tendency to label any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, it is clear that the main danger to German jews is home-grown.

The irony of the situation is that the idea of German guilt is now used to imply that no German is guilty of any antisemitism. It’s all the Arabs’ fault, apparently. The untenable theory intended to prove that Germans are guilty has been flipped around and is now being used to argue the opposite.

So what is the cause of German silence on Palestine?

We should start by rejecting wild generalisations about “the Germans”, “Arabs”, and “Jews”. In each of these groups there are different class interests. Not all Germans were high-ranking Nazis or people who directly profited from the Holocaust.

It is true that some working class Germans supported the Nazis. Others resisted and ended up in Concentration Camps. But just as the grandchildren of Nazis are not responsible for their ancestors’ sins, some descendents of resistance fighters have unfortunately ended up trying to justify the unjustifiable.

It goes without saying that different people have different motivations, but here is my attempt at an explanation for the relative weakness of the pro-Palestine movement in Germany.

Many Germans are appalled by what their grandparents might have done. Quite understandably, they find it uncomfortable to talk about the past. Added to this is the false assumption that Germans have a genetic tendency towards antisemitism. This has led many to believe that talking about Jewish people in any form would make things worse.

These vague inferences were compounded by reunification in 1990, when a fear of a greater Germany emerged (remember what happened last time?) accompanied by a series of high-profile Nazi attacks on refugee homes in both East and West Germany.

This in turn led to the growth of the Antideutsche—a strange but self-confident group of leftist Israel supporters. It is not that the Antideutsche were ever particularly strong outside certain areas of academia, but when everyone else is saying nothing, your shouts sound much louder than they actually are.

This was the situation when 7th October posed questions about anti-colonialism and our relationship to national liberation movements. Most of the German left couldn’t come up with answers. And when the left cannot provide an answer, other,  less progressive ideas start to sound more plausible.

Looking forward

One year on, the conditions have shifted slightly in favour of our message. General opposition to Germany’s complicity with Israel’s attack on Gaza has led health workers, students, artists, and other groups to act. Top German NGOs, traditionally having  distanced themselves from pro-Palestine statements by international partners, recently launched a petition against German arms sales to Israel.

Above all, German people have eyes and ears. Even though German media tend to show everything from the point of view of the German and Israeli governments, the existence of social media means that people have access to other sources of information, if they choose to use them.

This does not mean that hundreds of thousands of Germans are immediately taking to the streets for Gaza. Many have had to cope with decades of uncertainty and doubt, of thinking that it’s “too complicated”, that there are “problems on both sides” or that this is a discussion which Germans must sit out.

But people are starting to break with the old way of thinking. Israel’s war crimes are so explicit and unapologetic that it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify them or to look away. White Germans are more open to us challenging their old assumptions than they have been in decades.

Last year, I interviewed Ilan Pappe, and he said: “we should not give up on Germany”. Germans still have the time to atone, not just for the crimes of their grandparents, but for the fact that until now they have looked away from genocide. We should approach them, listen to them, but above all we need to convince them that an international movement for Palestine is both possible and necessary – in Germany as much as anywhere else.

The Valencia Floods Have One Clear Culprit: Capitalism

Capitalism and Spain’s right wing parties are responsible for Valencia flooding deaths

I am writing this article on Sunday, 3 November 2024. It’s been almost five days since the devastating floods that struck Valencia on 29 October 2024. Official reports now cite 270 confirmed deaths, with 1,900 people still missing. But on social media, residents in affected towns and cities describe grim scenes: garages filled with bodies, people trapped in cars swept into heaps in the streets — some of them might have survived the initial flood only to perish in the days that followed from lack of assistance. Many report deceased loved ones, neighbors, and strangers decomposing in homes and on streets. What they describe resembles an apocalypse, and assistance has yet to arrive.

Five days on, social media is flooded with videos of residents reporting that the promised government aid has not materialized. Most of the help that is arriving comes from volunteers: some walking kilometers with supplies and equipment to drain water, farmers coming with tractors to clear the roads of debris, and still others driving hundreds of kilometers to accessible villages loaded with potable water, food, and medicine. Most of the people who lost everything in a mere 20 minutes are still without food or water.

Yes, just 20 minutes, because despite torrential inland rains dumping an year’s worth of rain in just hours, the coastal areas downstream saw little more than a drizzle, so life carried on as usual. The Spanish Meteorological Agency had warned of the severity of this DANA (isolated high-altitude depression) days in advance, yet the government of Valencia — led by Mazón from the Popular Party (PP), which allied with the far-right VOX in the last election — did not raise the alert level or inform residents of the impending danger until it was too late. These climate change-denier parties made dismantling the Valencian Emergency Unit one of their first actions in power, scrapping a unit established by the previous left-wing government to coordinate emergency responses. Such a response could have saved hundreds of lives, as only after five days were fire brigades from other parts of Spain finally allowed to respond, despite being ready from day one, some stationed only a couple of hours away. The staggering dysfunction was made clear when a team of French firefighters, arriving voluntarily and without permission on Saturday, discovered they were the first responders in the area.

Employees who received warnings from family and friends about river overflows upstream were not allowed to leave work. Consequently, when the worst of the flood came, countless people were trapped in their cars on the way home, many of them returning from industrial parks on Valencia’s working-class outskirts, caught at the end of their full shifts. Those workers now still lie trapped in their cars, waiting for rescue — if they survived — or decomposing.

Meanwhile, the areas hardest hit by the torrent are mostly working-class neighborhoods, built on floodplains near the river’s overflow zone. Construction was permitted there for developers — many friendly with politicians — in a region known for government corruption, particularly under the right-wing Popular Party’s administrations between 1995-2015.

This dangerous mix of factors has one common denominator: capitalism.

We know that climate change is driven by major corporations, especially those in fossil fuels, and that the ultra-wealthy pollute more in an hour than most people do in a lifetime. The latest Oxfam report highlights how just 50 billionaires generate more pollution than 155 million people combined.

Capitalism has also allowed developers, enabled by corrupt politicians, to build on floodplains. These areas were once fertile fields that would have absorbed far more water than today’s concrete-laden landscape. They knew the risks: Valencia has suffered frequent floods, including a historic one in 1957 and several more in the now-affected areas. For years, experts have warned about the dangers of building in these zones and of the likelihood of a powerful DANA event in the eastern Iberian Peninsula.

Capitalist employers put profits before their workers’ lives. Testimonies abound of employees spending the night at work, unable to leave until it was too late. A video has gone viral showing a Mercadona supermarket lorry, owned by a tycoon notorious for ruthless business practices, stuck in the floodwaters — though the servile Spanish media pixelated the logo to protect its reputation. The same employer, while making a show of charitable donations for the flood-affected, has forced affected employees back to work since the very next day. The underground car park of the Bonaire shopping center, one of Spain’s largest, is feared to hold many bodies, as the center stayed open despite the red alert from the Meteorology Service. Public institutions like Valencia’s University sent staff and students home hours before, as did the Valencia government, which sent its workers home because of “a high risk for the population”.

Capitalism, too, is behind the rise of parties that further its sociopathic interests. Parties like the PP are plagued by corruption scandals involving their politicians, wealthy businesspeople and extra payments — a list of the (known) corruption schemes is available here from A to Z. The PP party itself stands accused of corruption. Capitalism also fosters monstrous parties like VOX — racist, sexist, and climate-denying — whose shadowy, apparently limitless funds fuel their strategies. One of their affiliate organizations, Manos Blancas, has already filed a lawsuit against Spain’s meteorological agency for reckless homicide to deflect from the criminal negligence of Mazón’s government.

Capitalists will be the ones to benefit from the state’s relief funds while the public pays the price. In the past few days, local police have been more focused on arresting people for taking food and clothing from shops in affected areas (all covered by insurance) than on draining water. Authorities’ cranes have been busier removing volunteers’ cars from flooded areas, with fines imposed, rather than clearing those displaced by the flood itself. On Saturday, hundreds of volunteers, who showed up at a supposed organization point, were misled and redirected to clean shopping centers instead of residential areas. Those defying the Generalitat’s ban to help are now being fined up to €350.

And it is capitalism that, with its lobbies and compliant governments, has deceived the public for years about climate change, suppressing critical voices. Worldwide, climate activists warning of this tipping point are silenced and prosecuted. Right now, 15 Spanish scientists face prison and fines for throwing beet juice in Parliament to highlight the climate emergency. If history is any guide, no responsible businessman or politician will see the inside of a cell for this flood’s tragic toll, however much they might deserve it.

Update,

The figure given in this article corresponds to the leaked figures from the meeting on Friday, November 1st between the Minister of the Interior Marlaska (PSOE) of Spain and the President of the Generalitat Valenciana Mazón. Today, Wednesday 6th, the official figures are 216 dead (211 in Valencia) and 89 missing. The disparity in the figures is due to the general and informative chaos in particular on the part of the Valencian authorities. On the same day of the hurricane, while there were already floods, Mazón was at an awards ceremony having a long lunch, which caused him to be delayed for an essential meeting.

The emergency telephone 112 which collected the calls that day was already in orange alert. It has been privatized and its workers are complaining of lack of staff and precariousness. There were 24 people that day for the whole Valencian country, as reported by El Salto: “Anastasio Borreguero, a member of CGT and the only representative of this union in the staff confirms the data in the usual shifts. However, he emphasizes that from the first moment the staff was reinforced and there were up to 40 people to deal with the avalanche of calls: ‘On that day we sized up everything we could, our colleagues were next to us and we voluntarily worked 10-hour shifts’, explains Borreguero, who confirms the collapse experienced on the lines: ‘We had up to 400 calls in queue’.”

Thankfully Bonaire’s subway parking lot has now been emptied of water and checked and both workers and customers managed to get out alive. This parking lot has been the focus of several fake news stories about thousands of deaths that have stirred up even more tempers.

Call for a protest action in Valencia next week

Imperialism and the working class in the Global North

A response to Joseph Choonara’s talk on the relationship of Global North workers to imperialism


03/11/2024

The British communist newspaper the Daily Worker exposing British atrocities during the Malayan Emergency, 1952. Author unknown, Wikimedia Commons. Gore censored.

This article is meant to act as a response to Joseph Choonara’s series of talks on whether or not workers in the Global North benefit from imperialism in the Global South. While different variants of this talk have been presented to a number of leftist groups in London and Berlin, I am responding to the version of the talk presented at the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism festival in London. In this article, I briefly summarise Choonara’s main positions, some of which I agree with, and then proceed by responding to those that I take issue with.

Global North workers

Choonara begins his talk by discussing the gravity of his theory, in light of the hundreds of thousands of British workers pouring out onto the streets in solidarity with Gaza. If he is wrong, he claims, then the only reason these people are protesting is because of morality; their material interests are tied to imperialism, and therefore to Israel.

He then states that he is not claiming that living standards for British workers are somehow lower than or even equivalent to living standards for workers in Global South countries like Bangladesh or Chad. He also does not debate that imperialism has ravaged the world, and helped birth capital, which (quoting Marx) “comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. Having said that, he takes objection to dependency theory, which states that there is a flow of value from the Global South to the North, and the theory of a labour aristocracy, which states that the interests of workers in the North lie with capital, due to how relatively well-compensated they are.

His issues with dependency theory lie in that it allegedly replaces the ideas of exploitation on the basis of class with ideas of exploitation on the basis of nations. This leads to a core of nations (the capitalist class) and a periphery (the working class), together with a semi-periphery (the middle class). He claims that this obscures class divisions within nation-states, and, more importantly, obscures the mechanisms through which value flows. The birth of capitalism in Britain was due to the specificity of exploitation as a form of labour under capitalism. The same mechanisms that benefited from the slave trade and colonialism, through the processes of primitive accumulation, transformed British farmers into a doubly-free worker: free to sell their labour, free of the ability to reproduce themselves. Dependency theory, by decentering exploitation, obscures its novelty and effectiveness as a mechanism of accumulation.

Moving onto slavery and colonialism, he says that slavery ended due to slave revolts; colonialism in broad swathes of Africa and Asia came to an end after the Second World War, partially because the United States wished for the more capitalist subjugation of these markets. Colonies became less critical to profits, and were left in a state of malign neglect; Northern capitalists attempted to substitute Southern resources with domestic alternatives, oil being an exception. His explanation for the perennial underdevelopment of the South is that capital is directed towards where profits can be generated. This is where one finds clusters of highly educated workforces, large amounts of fixed capital, functional infrastructure, and so on: the global North.

China, he claims, is rather exceptional. China’s meteoric economic rise to being the world’s production hub cannot be explained by dependency theorists. The people that derive their wealth from Chinese growth are exclusively capitalists (who are egalitarian, in that they only care about profit). China, too, has seen the birth of a colossal domestic bourgeoisie, and the rise of massive inequality. Yet, capital remains predominantly focused on Northern Europe, North America and Japan.

Finally, Choonara ends with two problems that dependency theory turns up. First: how do we mobilise British workers if capitalism works in their interests? Second: do we tell Global South workers to strike deals with their own domestic capitalists?

***

If I had to hazard a guess, there are three historic motivations for Choonara’s position. The first of these is that import substitute industrialisation—the idea that the South needed to shut off imports from the more developed North to fuel internal industrialisation—has tended to fail where it has been attempted. The second is that the Global South bourgeoisie does tend to view colonialism as some sort of balance sheet, cynically using the most absurd market valuations of “colonial plunder” to further their own political careers. Finally, the bourgeoisie in the Global South have indeed often succeeded at using postcolonial nationalist fervour to rally “their” workers for “their” cause. For instance, the recent outpourings of grief in India after the death of the industrial capitalist Ratan Tata exemplifies how real this absurd phenomenon is.

Motivation aside, however, Choonara’s interpretation is rather blind to how profits are made and redistributed in the contemporary economy, which is the focus of this article. I shall begin by addressing how Northern capital benefits from imperialism; I shall then follow up with how these advantages are absorbed by Northern labour.

Capital

Choonara is correct that exploitation is the source of surplus value and capitalist growth. However, as theorists since Rosa Luxemburg have been pointing out, capital is subject to frequent crises of profitability, or barriers to its own expanded reproduction. This forces it to rely on spheres of the economy located outside capitalism to offset these crises, such as gendered labour, or racialised labour in the global South. Particularly in the colonial context, these crises were partially offset through cheap resource inputs from the colonies. In Britain, for instance, this included sugarcane from the Caribbean, cotton from American plantations, and later, oil from Iran (p. 94). They have also been offset by turning colonies into (non-competitive) markets, allowing for the expansion of capital located mostly in the core, often mediated via capital in the periphery. This was India’s primary role within the British Empire. Balance-sheet analyses of “how much money was drained from colonies” can actually end up obfuscating these mechanisms, and validating vulgar economism: resources expropriated from the colonies were undervalued by design.

These periodic crises also serve as an explanation for China’s rise. Choonara is correct that China cannot be explained by dependency theory: Dengist reforms and the rapid integration of Chinese Special Economic Zones (SEZs) into the world economy was the exact opposite of what many dependency theorists recommended. Deng’s reforms instead created a Chinese bourgeoisie who drew massive profits from the exploitation of Chinese workers, but also drove colossal economic growth for decades, effectively turning China into a microcosm of capitalism itself. But China also represents a bit of a problem for Choonara’s framing. His claim that “capital clusters in the North because profits are higher there” fails to explain why industrial capital moved to China in the first place. A popular analysis of this shift has involved ascribing it to the relative collapse in the rate of profit in the global North’s industrial sector, due to rising productivity and growing wages through organised workers’ movements. Under these readings, this collapse in profitability is what first sparked American industry’s shift to Germany and Japan, followed by South Korea and Taiwan; and finally, two decades ago, to China. Choonara’s repeated insistence that China is an exception is rather iffy. As critics of the winners of this year’s economics Nobel have pointed out: if China or India are exceptions to your model, you need a new model.

Choonara is correct when he says that capital is attracted to where the most productive workers lie. Following the deindustrialisation of the Global North, Northern labour has flooded into the service sector. Britain today produces very few goods: manufacturing accounts for around 8% of both GDP and employment. The majority of British workers are employed in the tertiary sector, which includes fields as diverse as finance, IT, fundamental research, medicine, care work, etc. Some of these roles are intrinsically resilient to real subsumption, and lack clear notions of productivity: a barista or a schoolteacher are equally productive all over the globe (if not more productive in the Global South). Other roles, particularly those that employ highly skilled workers, do generate massive profits. This is where the third volume of Capital becomes relevant. The distribution of profits and rents in the economy, Marx is clear to point out, need not necessarily align to the generation of surplus value itself. As Caffentzis puts it, profits are more of a “field variable” (p. 119), a result of a transformation process applied to societal surplus value. It is precisely this phenomenon that dependency theorists have concerned themselves with: the global North’s use of political power to redirect the surplus value generated in the South towards the North. This does not in any fashion preclude domination by class being the primary mechanism of accumulation, as Choonara would claim it does.

In a contemporary economy, the profits generated by much high-end labour are not necessarily generated through expansions in productivity and output, but rather through their ability to enable this redistribution of surplus value. This is done through a broad range of mechanisms that I shall briefly touch upon.

One of these mechanisms is financial capital, which works to maintain expropriative tendencies in the Global South. This is done through organisations like the IMF, that tether the productive forces of the Global South to Northern credit lines, destroying state capacity through forcing endless reforms. This helps spawn a domestic bourgeoisie, and is also why leftist strategy should not involve pushing citizens of the global South to compromise with their capitalists. First, this class is tiny: it is unclear that a labour-capital compromise in the South would do much to raise living standards. Second, this class often ends up acting as a comprador class, raking in profits while shuffling even larger profits higher up the value chain, mostly to Northern firms. An examination of H&M’s value chain ought to illustrate this perfectly: no Bangladeshi mill-owner will ever approach even a fraction of the wealth of the Persson family.

Yet another mechanism includes the generation of intellectual property, maintained through diverse, shifting mechanisms, such as patents or data holdings. Global North states are able to leverage their highly educated populations to attract both highly educated workers in the South, as well as actual surplus value generated in the South. This is ensured through the creation and the enforcement of ownership over these artificially scarce assets, protected by international law and enforced via treaties like TRIPS. Similar mechanisms increasingly permeate into industrial manufacturing, in countries like Germany or the United States (or critically, Taiwan): patents that protect high-tech manufacturing ensure continual surplus drain from countries that lack the capacity to generate IP at scale.

Often, these processes are accompanied by attempts to shut down Southern productivity where it does exist, forcing payments up the value chain. An example of this is the decades-long battle to force the Indian pharmaceutical industry — which supplies most of the Global South with generic drugs — to recognise intellectual property rights (India presently retains the legal right to ignore international drug patents if there is a major public need for a drug). More recently, the utility of user data in contemporary capitalism has led to Northern corporations actively lobbying for monopoly positions in data extraction: see, for instance, Meta’s Free Basics scandal in Africa.

Labour

One might argue, at this point, that the search for profits benefits capitalists and not labour, whose interests lie in the abolition of capital. But labour has another, more immediate interest than the abolition of capital: it is the consumption of use-values. Being a worker is universally alienating, but alienation is a lot less bad when you only have to work 36 hours a week, mostly at a desk job, and when you can afford to buy a lot of commodities with your wage. Northern states have the capacity to ensure precisely this compromise, to ensure its smooth functioning and reproduction. States aid capital in creating and enforcing the legal mechanisms that allow for the smooth appropriation of surplus value; in exchange, capital transfers part of this appropriated surplus to states, allowing them to retain the capacity to create enough of a welfare state that domestic dissent is quelled. The ability that Northern states have to tax and redistribute surplus value (often generated elsewhere, often through the use of resources expropriated from elsewhere) is what quells domestic workers’ movements. Capitalists have framed the welfare state as a compromise between domestic capital and labour. They are correct.

This is precisely the argument that many dependency theorists have made; to accuse them of “replacing class with nation” is a colossal misrepresentation. Yes, exploitation and expropriation do exist in the Global North. But the former is often offset through the receipt of wages higher than the surplus value generated by the worker. The latter falls squarely onto a range of insecure populations: such as migrants, held captive to migration regimes that kill their capacity to organise, and allow capital to treat them as entirely disposable workers through the very enforceable threat of deportation. To address Choonara’s question about mobilising British workers: capitalism is not going to be overthrown by British workers. It is in the interests of workers in the Global North to retain their reformist sensibilities and struggle for a restoration of the welfare state. This will not change without mass movements in the Global South that de-link both their resources and their labour from the North, redirecting their productive capacities towards instead producing domestic use-values, rather than luxury goods for Northern citizens.

To ignore this is to ignore reality. The Northern working class fully recognises their position, which is simultaneously both privileged and precarious. The desire to maintain this and to win some compromise explains the massive popularity of anti-migration reformists like Sahra Wagenknecht, or of MAGA communism across the pond. As long as Northern states retain their ability to mediate bargains between global capital and domestic labour, this progression is inevitable.

Compromise

Today, the mechanisms of expropriation and of the transfer of surplus value from the Global South as profits and rent towards the North appear to be increasingly turning inwards. This is neoliberalism manifest: the same processes of subjugation forced upon the Global South have been granted increased freedom, in the wake of profitability crises, to inflict the same horrors upon Northern citizens. This has been particularly true in the aftermath of 2008, where quantitative easing (QE) has resulted in extraordinary freedom for capital, and these processes of commodification have accelerated all over the globe. Financial capital, for instance, has embarked upon a program for the rapid privatisation of assets previously held by the state, such as public transport, housing and even healthcare. This follows market principles: these commodities are affordable, but for high-wage workers that enter the hallowed halls of finance and tech. Ultimately, this growing wage gap has sparked growing polarisation in Western economies, and is potentially the cause of the renewal of radical politics beyond the end of history.

But times change, and political economy with it. The Western world appears to have begun an orderly exit from neoliberalism, precisely now that capital accumulation outside the core has accelerated. There have been signs of this reversal for decades: already in the 2000s, Brazilian and Indian capitalists had begun suing the United States for its anti-competitive agricultural subsidies. QE might have extended neoliberalism’s longevity somewhat, but perceived Chinese belligerence and the COVID supply chains crisis have led to de-risking becoming an increasingly consensus position in the US. Europe remains more split, partially due to German economic imbecility. German capitalists dream of selling cars to the Chinese middle class, and appear to take some perverse pleasure in impoverishing Greeks; at this point, this fetish goes against the better judgement of even orthodox establishment economists like Mario Draghi.

This has the potential to lead to a grand restoration of labour movements in the global North. Now that essential production is less inclined to move to China or Vietnam, labour could win back its fading ability to compromise with capital by asserting control over their own states through labour movements, just as they did in the past. Whatever revolutionary fervour exists in the Global North can be quelled: the labour-capital compromise is, at the cost of the Global South, something that can be attained. Congolese tantalum will continue to enter Chinese suicide-proof factories for consumer electronics; the productive forces of Bangladesh will remain devoted to spinning yarn for Northern luxury brands as their own country disappears into the Indian Ocean; the deforestation of the Amazon and the Indonesian rainforest will continue so Northern consumers retain easy access to the finest hazelnut chocolate spreads. Smaller, wealthier European nation-states are a template for this paradigm. Their economies tend to consist of highly-educated service workers engaged in generating intellectual property. High taxation, and union-driven wage negotiation ensures both that the proceeds of capital are distributed to workers, and that rapidly growing wage discrepancies do not upset domestic markets. This is accompanied by rigid migration systems (such as in Denmark): ensuring, in practice, a system that works mostly exclusively for highly-skilled workers that will join the IP/patent-generating masses.

***

I would like to raise a counter-problem to the challenges that Choonara has raised. In light of the fallout from 2008, many Southern countries have fallen deeper and deeper into economic stagnation and an active de-development that rivals the colonial period. This is increasingly impossible to ignore. At this point, the extractive tendencies of Northern capital are clear to most heterodox economists, and even a subsection of the orthodoxy. The average early-20s liberal activist is fully aware of the conditions in which their chocolate and coffee are grown, or their 118 items of clothing are produced (what they choose to do with this knowledge is, of course, a different story).

Someone who has grown up in a Global South country integrated into the world economy has likely either experienced or witnessed gruelling labour conditions, and is fully aware of how they end up generating profits for Northern firms. For the lucky few that end up moving to the North, what they see is a crumbling but still intact welfare state, with leisure time and a bountiful surplus of commodities and services, many of which are subsidised by precarious labour in their home countries. In the absence of a movement that genuinely acknowledges the role imperialism plays in subsidising Northern lifestyles, many of these workers will be driven to reaction, driven more by a desire to “discipline” the “lazy” than to actually collectively liberate humanity from exploitation.

When all is said and done, Choonara and other developmentalist-Marxists are perfectly entitled to their own analysis of things. What is rather poor form, however, is to present these analyses as if they were established fact: as if Marxian analyses of the utility of colonialism were fringe tankie opinions, and critical analyses of the welfare state were revisionist heresy, tearing apart the unity of the workers of the world. This goes beyond being merely poor form, and becomes actively harmful when presented to an audience of newly radicalised Northern citizens, as an invitation to participate in some sort of collective moral redemption, but in a leftist fashion.

***

Finally, a few finishing notes. Choonara refers to Saudi Arabia (and presumably other petrostates, like the UAE and Qatar) as “Global South” nations. This is quite a strange usage of the term. The Gulf features some of the highest incomes for citizens in the world; they feature extensive welfare states, near-0% taxation, and require very little labour from citizens. The labour forces in these countries tend to be migrants with no pathway to permanent residence, let alone citizenship. Many of them work in non-free conditions akin to slavery, with routine passport confiscations through the kafala system. But more importantly, these nations are very much part of the informal American empire. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar are major non-NATO allies; Saudi is frequently referred to as an American client state, with good reason. The sole exception in the Gulf is Iran, a country that has been wrecked by sanctions since the Revolution.

Next, the planet. At this point it is abundantly clear to everyone that there are planetary limits to consumption, and that consumption patterns simply cannot be extended to the entire world. This provides an almost trivial counterargument to Choonara’s claims: the consumption power of the Northern (particularly American) worker, in an egalitarian world, must necessarily collapse. This is definitionally against their interests.

Finally, concerning Israel. It seems to me to be rather uncharitable to refuse to credit British workers with even a shred of morality and camaraderie. Yes, these workers benefit from imperialism; this does not mean that they will blindly support imperialism’s absolute worst excesses, especially not if they are workers whose ethnic or religious identity emphasises solidarity with Palestine. This wasn’t true during the colonial period, when abolitionism and Home Rule societies thrived in England, and there is no reason it should be true today. And it would do us good to remember that not all forms of imperialism serve the same purpose or are equally useful. The establishment of the State of Israel may have been in the interests of Western capital, but at this point, it is unclear what anyone in the West gains from Israel’s expanding, genocidal campaign. At this point, the Western world appears to be lumbering towards slow political suicide, under no force other than its own sheer inertia.

Good. The sooner it dies, the better.

What lurks beneath Israel’s right to defend itself?

No, bombing schools and hospitals is not legitimate self-defence


02/11/2024

The other day I heard Bernie Sanders proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as he made the case for a Harris presidency. He spoke in his trademark gruff manner, a tone whose charm has long faded since it has been co-opted to the service of empire—of making the empire marginally more progressive.

“…but”, he went on to deliver a call for moderation and limits to Israel’s violence. And then to insist we should still vote for politicians who enable genocide and glory in the lies that justify it. I’m not here to debate whether or not someone should vote. This is a morally and strategically complex issue that is mostly inconsequential to the mad trajectory our planet is spinning along.

What interests me more is the construction of the oath: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, that Bernie and others feel the need to recite before delivering any critique of Israel’s war on Palestine. Curiously, it is the same line used by Biden and Harris to justify sending the weapons that are doing the killing that Sanders claims to find abhorrent. And it is used by the genocidaires themselves, Netanyahu and others, along with their cheerleaders. This should be enough to make us pause and consider what this supposedly self-evident truth says and does not say.

So, once again: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Let’s start with the “Israel” part. In what sense does the identity of being Israel constitute a set of rights? Is it that Israel, as a nation-state, has a right to defend itself, because, apparently, nation-states have a right to self-defence?

A lot of legal minds don’t think international law supports what Israel has done to Gaza. In any case, I doubt that many people are weighing the UN charter in their heads when someone is droning on about Israel’s righteous violence. They are more likely to reach for whatever commonplace ideas of fairness they have accumulated in their everyday lives.

For instance, the way I typically understand self-defence is that, when someone is attacking me, I have the right to use violence to repel their violence. So if someone comes into my house and strikes me with a baseball bat, I can use the counter-violence of my cast iron wok or electric fly swatter until they stop, and preferably leave. The right to self-defence does not endorse finding out where my attacker lives and blowing up their house, killing them, their families and their neighbours as well.

This is obviously not a perfect analogy for many reasons. Individuals and nation-states are different kinds of entities, and also, the Hamas attacks on October 7 took place in the context of Israel’s long genocidal campaign against Palestine. It is not some random home invasion.

I make the analogy to show that even if we were to agree that nation-states have a right to use violence to make themselves safe, in the case of Israel, this right applied only when Hamas was attacking the rave, kibbutzim and military bases along the borders of the Gaza concentration camp. Once Hamas left, that licence expired.

What about the rockets? Given that they have caused very few civilian casualties, the right to self-defence does not extend to obliterating apartment buildings, schools, universities and hospitals on the faintest whiff of conjecture that someone is hiding a rocket launcher in an MRI machine.

Perhaps Israel does understand self-defence to mean that when someone attacks you, you have an unlimited right to strike back with no consideration of proportionality. An eye for an eye doctrine, or at the latest count 250 eyes for an eye, according to the Lancet journal (and not just eyes, but arms, legs, jaws, skin–hundreds of thousands of human lives obliterated).

If this is the case, then the right to violence extends in all directions—physical, temporal—and to all actors in the bloody drama of human existence. Israel justifies its violent war on Gaza based on the October 7 attack. Fine. But in this infinite regress, Hamas can then say the October 7 attack was justified by, for instance, Israeli snipers shooting out the knees of peaceful protesters. Or the kid you pushed around when you were 13 can show up at your work and break your legs, so you can never ever bully them again. This concept of self-defence bloats and degenerates to the point where it can justify virtually any act of violence, by anyone, committed anywhere—because there will always be some act of violence preceding it.

I don’t think that’s what Israel or its defenders want to imply. In fact, I see the outlines of something much more ominous lurking beneath the surface.

Let’s circle back to the question of what “Israel” signifies. Perhaps they are saying that Israel has a right to defend itself not as any old nation-state, but because it is Israel. What then is the elusive quality of “being Israel” that grants it special rights to use violence against its perceived enemies?

The way I see it, Israel’s right to self-defence is not about the October 7 attacks or the fleeting barrages of rockets that disturb the sky over Tel Aviv. Rather, it is coiled with a desire to repress the memory that Israel was created very recently on lands upon which others lived and who were violently expelled. The Nakba haunts the lands upon which the nation-state of Israel stands.

So it is the mere existence of Palestinians at all that constitutes a psychic and existential threat to the state of Israel, against which Israel feels emboldened to unleash unending waves of slaughter until those they perceive as a threat escape into permanent exile or turn into dust. This would go a long way to explain why so many fading empires and settler-colonies are backing Israel’s genocide with moral support and military aid. Also, why Israel’s war on Palestine has no end in sight; why parents carry their children home from school as bags of meat; why Gaza sometimes looks less like a city under siege and more like the cratered surface of the moon.

However you interpret it, none of the many implications of the dirge that “Israel has a right to defend itself” withstand scrutiny—unless you are inclined to partake in a nihilistic orgy of retributive violence, or you think that certain ethnic enclaves possess special rights to commit genocide.

So we should just stop saying it.