As an occasional Cosmonaut contributor (examples here and here), I feel obliged to respond to Cosmonaut‘s recent statement on Hamas’s horrendous Oct. 7 assault. The editorial is a mess – un-Marxist, un-Leninist, and more than a bit juvenile with its silly macho denunciations of “traitors” and “cowards.”
No one denies that violence is sometimes necessary. Marxists don’t like it, but it’s unfortunately the case. But violence is only useful to the degree it advances socialist goals. Yet what did the Oct. 7 terror operation accomplish by slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians other than arousing the opprobrium of the world? What did Hamas hope to achieve other than bringing down the wrath of the Israeli military on the Palestinian people? “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told a mass rally in Gaza in 2014. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad added in October. Vive el muerte, as the Francoists used to say. But is this the sort of death cult that Cosmonaut supports? Hamas’s goal is obvious: to inspire jihad throughout the Muslim world. But even if successful (which it won’t be), the result will be a medieval religious crusade that can only add to the hatred and violence. It’s very easy to call for endless warfare from the comfort of the United States. But it will do nothing to benefit the Palestinians. To the contrary, it will make their plight a hundred times worse.
No less foolish is the editorial’s casual identification of Hamas with the Palestinian masses. Hamas is not the people. Rather, it’s a political party, and a far-right one at that. It denounces the French and Russian revolutions, it holds the Jews responsible for both, and it “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” to quote its 1988 charter, which has been amended but never repealed. Treating Hamas as the legitimate leader of Gaza means acceding to a dictatorship by a group that has not held an election since 2006. The editorial says that Gazans on Oct. 7 made “the painful, but legitimate decision to liberate themselves through armed resistance.” What nonsense! The Gazan masses did not make any such decision – Hamas made it for them. If the people of Gaza are to be subjected to mass destruction, don’t you think they have a right to be consulted about it beforehand?
Yes, Marxists support Third World goals such as independence and self-determination. But rather than nationalism, Islamism, or any other such nonsense, we believe that a policy of proletarian internationalism is the only way to achieve them. Lenin’s 1920 “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” are highly relevant in this context. Paragraph 11.5 stresses “the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist coloring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries” (emphasis added). It goes on:
…the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form…
What comes through loud and clear in this statement is not only the need for socialists to distance themselves from such forces, but to compete against them. We must continually stress that our methods are different and that our goals are as well. The class question must be emphasized, not glossed over. Marxists believe that the only solution to the bloody conflict in Gaza is a workers’ democracy in the context of a socialist Middle East, and we stress that anything that impedes that aim – as bloody communal slaughters obviously do – must be opposed.
There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine. Cosmonaut is urging on a policy whose consequences can only disastrous.
-Daniel Lazare
