I’ve been a longtime reader of your publication, and a longtime aspiring socialist. I find the political program advocated by the Marxist Unity Group to be particularly compelling as a middle ground between opportunism and ultra-leftism, but I’ve been finding myself struggling to reconcile certain aspects of that program. Namely, I find there to be a real contradiction between the democratic aspiration for majority rule and the programmatic need for anti-imperialist action. In particular, your recent article on the labor aristocracy made me wonder about the class composition of the future socialist republic.
To start, I’d like to take a look at an imperialist country where the first and third world populations live within miles of one another. The Jewish population of Israel is likely to never agitate for national equality with Palestinian Arabs, and no serious Palestinian organization has counted on support from the Israeli citizenry for success in their struggle for national liberation. However, as late as the eighties the primary Marxist-Leninist groups (DFLP, PFLP, etc.) always agitated for a bi-national democratic state that protected the rights of the Jewish population while restoring lost property and rights for the displaced Arabs. No doubt they anticipated that many Israeli Jews would leave for America or Western Europe in the case of the disestablishment of Israel, but they still saw a future for popular democracy in Palestine with the remnants of the settler labor aristocracy still present in the territory.
However, I can’t help but feel as though such views have largely been supplanted by a more hardline attitude toward Israeli Jews. Now the whole of the Israeli population must be forced out of Palestine and back to the US or wherever country their ancestors came from. The implication seems to be that a democratic society in Palestine can only be achieved by the total elimination of a potentially Zionist constituency, rather than their marginalization. You can see something similar in South Africa, where the SACP and ANC’s dream of a multi-racial republic has yet to pan out and the EFF’s vision of an all-black state has captured the imagination of the Marxist left. That’s not to say that these ideas are wrong, per se (the Pied-Noirs went back to France to the benefit of all involved) but they do challenge certain notions of democracy in the US.
To start, it’s a pure delusion to imagine that the total repatriation of American whites to Europe would be possible. I think that goes without saying. It is also deeply chauvinist to imagine that a socialist state would not grant substantial political autonomy (if not total independence!) to North American indigenous nations as well as reparations to oppressed peoples as a means of achieving genuine equality between nations. That’s the rub, though, are we programmatically bound to dramatic acts of redistribution or are we democratically bound to a constituency that might reject such actions out of hand? Is it possible to form a democratic majority around these ideas? Would a constitutional convention and constituent assembly produce the results we’re looking for? Millions who live in suburbs would have to relocate to new, more efficient residential urban locales. Billions of dollars would need to be provided as debt-free aid to poorer nations to fund the kind of development necessary to achieve a leveling of living standards between first and third world workers.
I don’t think that there’s some great desire by national minorities in the US and the residents of poor nations to unleash some holy terror on the American people as retribution for the inequality, war, and exploitation that the US has inflicted on them. I think that most people want to live free and fulfilling lives and I know that that can only be achieved through communism. But the question of how that is achieved is still very much up in the air. We can talk about building solidarity with the third world. We can talk about the world socialist republic. But without a correct program of action, those noble goals cannot be achieved. It’s insufficient to chase social democratic reforms for their own sake, just as it’s insufficient to throw our hands in the air and wait for a savior to arise from the periphery to subject us to guilt-cleansing punishment. There is always a course of action, even if discerning what it is remains difficult.
-Jake from Minnesota
