Letter: On Cosmonaut's Supposed "Un-Marxism"

Comrades V. and Ashlar have successfully refuted much of comrade Lazare’s response to Cosmonaut’s editorial of October 15th. The following takes issue with something Lazare asserts which has not been addressed. This is his accusation that Cosmonaut’s editorial is “un-Marxist.” A claim like this, which insinuates that Cosmonaut’s editorial board failed to make a statement based on rigorous analysis of the current moment, carries with it the implication that Lazare’s alternative is based on such rigor. A close reading reveals that this is far from the case.

Toward the end of his letter, Lazare subjects us to a long block quotation of Lenin. This is clearly meant to imbue his criticism with an aura of scholarly strength and to mark Lazare as an erudite Marxist intellectual. However, for any committed Marxist thinker, Lazare’s reliance on such isolated, decontextualized quotes reveals a deep intellectual weakness.

Marxism is a politically committed, socio-historical method of intellectual investigation engaged in the production of revolutionary strategic knowledge for the wage-laboring class. Its commitment to wage-laborers as a collective political subject produces a specific set of analytical tools. In turn, these tools are used to produce politically revolutionary strategic knowledge. This knowledge is then tested by Marxists in the field of political struggle. Sometimes these tests end in success.¹ Of key importance is that this process is organic, the strategic knowledge produced in discrete historical conjunctures is specific and can even appear contradictory if approached without context.

Marxism is not blind adherence to the words of dead heroes construed as trans-historical proclamations. This by no means implies that Lenin has nothing to teach contemporary Marxists. However, Lenin’s writings only have contemporary utility to the extent that their context is put into dialogue with our own moment in history. Lazare’s use of Lenin fails to do this. Instead, Lenin’s words are ripped out of history and, as comrade Ashlar correctly points out, theologized in the service of an argument with no strategic purpose. One could just as easily refute Lazare’s argument by quoting some other dead Marxist revolutionary.²

As both comrade V. and Ashlar reveal, Lazare’s letter is built entirely on this disgracefully irresponsible approach to history. Just as Lazare evacuates Lenin’s words of any value by wrenching them from history, his political analysis of Hamas is rendered worthless by his Islamophobia-tinged fixation on the organization’s early history.

Although Hamas remains an Islamist organization, that it has slowly secularized itself in practice in order to appeal to a broader swath of the Palestinian population is well-known to those even moderately familiar with the Palestinian political situation. This is not a new development. It has been apparent for over two decades and became unmistakably clear in the wake of Hamas’ surprise landslide win in the Palestinian Authority elections of 2006.³ Rather than taking seriously this history in an attempt to reckon with Hamas’ current actions, Lazare treats their early documents in the same way he treats Lenin: as binding theological texts, though in this case blasphemous ones, which explain the organization’s development wholesale.

The intellectual negligence on display here is disturbing and calls into question Lazare’s skills as a political analyst in general, let alone his bonafides as a Marxist intellectual. Indeed, the only other possible explanation for the total failure of Lazare’s letter as a piece of Marxist analysis is that which comrade Ashlar suggests.

Solidarity,

Christopher Carp

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This, of course, is an idealized version of what Engels described as ‘scientific socialism.’
For instance, see Karl Marx’s comments on the cultural-developmental relation between national liberation and proletarian politics with specific regard to Poland from his March 24, 1875 speech in London. These, if taken out of context, would seem to imply the opposite trans-historical Marxist strategy of that which Lazare claims Lenin asserted in 1920. See: Karl Marx, “For Poland,” in Karl Marx: The Political Writings, ed. David Fernbach (London, UK: Verso Books, 2019), 1075.
For example, see Khaled Hroub’s 2006 analysis to this effect. See: Khaled Hroub, Hamas: A Beginners Guide (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2006), 30.