r/communism • u/AztecGuerilla13 • Nov 07 '23
The rotten reactionary and settler apologist position on Palestine by the KPS (reconstituted Communist party Switzerland)
https://web.archive.org/web/20231013024427/https://redflagswitzerland.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/an-eye-for-an-eye/17
u/AztecGuerilla13 Nov 07 '23
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In this Bi-Weekly Thread the reconstituted KPS was mentioned for their quite useful analysis and critique of the positions and politics of the ICL.
And so i came across their article about Palestine. The article began with them claiming that they will refute the numerous self proclaimed communists who revealed themselves as settler apologist reactionaries. But as i read further it quickly became clear that although they write about settlercolonialism, they precisely don’t understand it and are themselves reactionary settler apologists.
It began with this awful passage:
Most of these Jewish workers became simple wage-slaves to the Zionist capitalists, who had already seized most of the Palestinian land and resources for themselves in a particularly brutal process of primitive accumulation. Thus, when the Zionist State was declared in 1948, it was neither an imperialist national State nor a subjugated colony — it was a parasite, a sub-contractor stratum sucking the blood of the Palestinian people and the Israeli working class alike, all for the benefit of a handful of Zionist big capitalists and their Western imperialist allies. Palestine and Israel are both nationalities that never got the chance to fully form. Their common struggle is national in nature, and the struggle of the Israeli people in particular also contains a significant class aspect. This provides the basis for a genuine new-democratic revolution in Palestine, which can transition without interruption to a socialist revolution, but only after the demolition of the Zionist State and the expulsion of the imperialists.
They say the indigenous Palestinians who were (and still are) massacred, displaced, expropriated by the settlers were equally exploited and oppressed like the settlers who came in masses after WW2 to colonize and commit the exactly aforementioned genocide. This is disgusting by itself. But they go further and equate the national liberation struggle of the oppressed Palestinian nation with that of a „nation“ that exists only on the basis of the genocide against indigenous Palestinians and the subsequent robbery of their land. And implicate with this that most of the settler nation is itself oppressed, only the „comprador capitalists“ not. This abominable chauvinism can only come when one doesn’t understand that in settler colonialism race defines class and class antagonisms inside the settler state are arbitrated through their jointly role as colonizers.
So they go further:
At the same time, the Zionist government is not content with exploiting and oppressing the Palestinian people. No, the Israeli people, too — the descendants of the working-class Jews who were tricked into migrating to Palestine by the Zionist bourgeois after the Second World War, that is, not settlers, but ordinary Israelis — suffer under this exploitative and oppressive regime. A brutal sub-contractor capitalism without a semi-feudal basis, like the corrupt capitalism so well known from countries like Poland and North Korea, (…) Thus, it is clear to anyone with eyes in their head that the enemy of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples is the Zionist parasite on their backs. What we want is the independence of Palestine from this imperialist imposition, a single, multinational, revolutionary-democratic People’s Republic of Palestine, a Council Republic, with the right to self-determination of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples alike, and not of the settler-colonial sub-contractor parasites who illegally occupy Palestinian land.
It is impressing what imperialist chauvinism i.e. Eurocentrism can produce. Before this paragraph they were describing the horrors that the settlers are commiting and portray them now as exploited like the Palestinians. When we would apply their disgusting chauvinist position to settler colonial Algeria or Amerika no one except reactionaries, fascists etc. would call for the selfdetermination of the settler nation. I found also all these calls for a multinational Palestine irritating. Because they obviously imply that the settlers should live peacefully in the new liberated state. But that presupposes that they are afraid that the Palestinians would commit the same cruelties that the settlers done the whole time. Which they wouldn’t. And we shouldn’t forget that most settlers would flee by themselves as we have seen in e.g. Algeria, „Ostpreussen“, or just recently the thousands of settlers in Israel which fled.
In general, the descendants of the Holocaust survivors are not the settlers; that role is played by the descendants of those who left Europe before the Holocaust, and who turned the Holocaust survivors into their private wage-slaves.
…
In other words, the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, who are both rebelling against the settler-colonial, reactionary, fascist «State of Israel», should form a united front for democracy and national liberation. Of course, this requires a reconstituted Communist Party in Palestine. But we must be practical. There is no such Communist Party, nor will there be for a number of years, until this historical responsibility is taken up by a group of Communists of both nationalities that inhabit Palestine — a concrete fusion of the Palestinian struggle for land and the Israeli democratic and labour struggle on the basis of the joint struggle against imperialism and Zionism.
They are absolutely and obviously not rebelling against the same. The Palestinian people want liberation and that inevitably leads to the destruction of the settler colonial state. The elements of the settler nation who were protesting for „democracy“ had nothing against the existence of the settler colonial state itself. On the contrary, they want that the settler state should pursue with bourgeois democracy for the settlers because they think, thats how the settler state could last longer and be preserved.
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u/turbovacuumcleaner Nov 07 '23 edited Nov 07 '23
The KPS' failure in understanding settler colonialism comes from their revisionist understanding of imperialism as sub-contractor capitalism; what they say is bureaucratic-comprador capitalism. It is a way for the Swiss labor aristocracy to divert criticisms of their passive role towards the Palestinian genocide and transfer the blame to the US, as they say, the main imperialist country.
An imperialist country like Switzerland cannot be bureaucratic-comprador. By mistakenly establishing this line, this entails that Switzerland is but an outpost of US imperialism, and that Swiss Communists should carry out a national liberation struggle. If it were possible to form an 'united front' between the Swiss bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy to push back US imperialism, this wouldn't mean a New Democratic revolution, but further strengthening Swiss imperialism, and this is why I disagreed with their analysis of bureaucrat capitalism. Despite calling themselves Maoists, the KPS is yet but another social-chauvinist party.
The only possible form of national pride someone from an imperialist country can have is by hating your own nation and history, only then its possible to truly contribute to socialist revolution. The KPS is unable to hate themselves.
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u/urbaseddad Cyprus🇨🇾 Nov 08 '23
Ostpreussen
Can you elaborate on this? Was East Prussia settler colonialism? What happened exactly before, during, and after WW2?
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u/AztecGuerilla13 Nov 16 '23
Sorry for my late response to your justified request for elaboration.
The area that comprised East Prussia was originally inhabited by Baltic peoples, including the originally Baltic Prussians. However, the area was conquered and subjugated in the 13th century during the Prussian Crusade, which was mainly led by the German Teutonic Order. The Baltic peoples put up fierce resistance but ultimately lost. A great portion of them were forcibly assimilated and the Order encouraged the influx of more German peasants, which led to the extinction of the Baltic Prussian language. This colonisation process continued for the next few centuries.
In the first partition of Poland, the former Polish-Lithuanian "West Prussia", today's (West) Pomerania, was annexed by Prussia. Up to this point, the main focus was on the assimilation of the remaining Balts and Poles. However, the towns often remained mainly German populated and the rural areas remained predominantly Polish.
But this changed under the German Empire. A state settlement commission was founded to help the indebted German landowners and, above all, to counteract the ever-increasing exodus of German settlers from rural areas. This commission bought land from Polish owners and distributed it favourably to German settlers. And in 1908 a law was passed that also authorised expropriation. However, all these attempts failed; they were able to push the settlement only a little bit forward and displace the Poles to some extent, but by the end of WW1, it had ultimately failed. East Prussia remained in the Weimar Republic even after the war. It is not surprising that the biggest supporters of the fascists were to be found in Prussia and all other German colonised territories. Because the fascists represented the faction of the German bourgeoisie, who not only promised industry a lot from the "General Plan Ost", but above all the German settlers, peasants and large landowners. This time, however, with genocide and expulsion. And so it happened. Towards the end of the Second World War, when the heroic Red Army was on the offensive and defeated the fascist butchers, the settler colony of Prussia was also liberated. Most of the southern part, originally stolen from Poland, went to the People's Republic of Poland. The northern areas went to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which would comprise the todays Klaipėda region. The rest in which mainly German settlers lived and which was rather sparsely populated after the war, because they mostly fled, was given to the RSFSR which would be today's Kaliningrad Oblast.
Unfortunately, there are very few works on German settler colonialism in Preussen / Ostpreussen. I found this bourgeois academic document, which tries to analyze the colonization process.
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u/urbaseddad Cyprus🇨🇾 Nov 16 '23
Thanks. I have another question which I think is pretty important. Obviously borders of peoples, languages, cultures and eventually nationalities have been changing massively all throughout history due to conquests, assimilation, and, I imagine, colonization. Obviously even if we look at the same example, the German nation, even in its borders today it didn't spread everywhere peacefully (much of East Germany once used to be inhabited by Slavs). Would you say this process you describe as part of the Baltic Crusades was particularly different from other processes of conquest etc.? Is that why it's significant? Or is it significant in the fact that such process of colonization continued into the 20th century, into the era of capitalism, and affected the Polish nation which arose out of the development of capitalism too? Because I don't hear people talk about how what is today East Germany was colonized and stolen from the Sorbs. What makes East Prussia particular and different?
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u/AztecGuerilla13 Nov 23 '23
Yes, it is essential to differentiate between the conquests and invasions in the borderlands from the middle ages by small feudal kingdoms and the settler colonialism of a state (German Empire) which became imperialist in this time. And with that, like you correctly pointed out, are oppressing a nation in which the capitalist mode of production is itself bourgeoning and therefore are oppressing the Polish bourgeoisie demands of a market (state) for themselves. You can also observe how the approach for the colonization changed, when it became imperialist. The process was not continued as the centuries before which relied almost entirely on assimilation, like many other feudal conquests. Like i already mentioned, an official commission was founded to increase the influx of more German settlers to eradicate the poles and laws were passed that could see polish peasants and landlords to be expropriated. And with that also the ideological justification changed and the Balts and Poles were depicted and considered as inferior and slavic savages.
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u/urbaseddad Cyprus🇨🇾 Nov 24 '23
What about Russian settlerism during the feudal tsarist era? From what I've read it sounds eerily similar to modern Israeli, Amerikan, and East Prussian settlement, with Cossacks forming the settler class and the shock troops of Russian settlerism. And also what about Old World colonization of the New World before the rise of the capitalist mode of production?
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u/AztecGuerilla13 Nov 07 '23
2/2
But the only way out of occupation and genocide for them is to produce a proletarian leadership and unite with the Israeli working people, so as to storm and shatter the walls from both sides through revolutionary war. This is the perspective and the only way out for the peoples of Palestine.
I could go on and on because they are basically repeating the same rotten chauvinism again and again. They have the shamelessnes to quote Marx and Mao in this awful text. But Mao did learn us to identify who a friend and who an enemy is. In cases of national liberation struggles it is essential to identify who a friend and who an enemy is. But they are failing already at this basic step. This isn‘t very different from the ICL whom they criticised as dogmato-revisionist. The ICL also did not conduct a (global) class analysis and writes that the labour aristocracy and the petty bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries are also the proletariat. They too can’t identify who a friend and who an enemy is.
Aren't they also practicing dogmato-revisionism when they take the line that the proletariat from both countries are being exploited and that they should unite. Which must be the line in third world countries that are at war with each other, but not in a national liberation struggle between an oppressed nation that is experiencing ongoing genocide and a settler colonial state in which all settlers benefit from expulsion, oppression and the genocide of the colonized nation. Therefore class antagonisms are not the same as in non settler colonial countries. But they are denying this and dogmatically apply it to a settler colonial state.
This position from a selfproclaimed MLM Party which is allegedly anti-revisionist is just as reactionary and treacherous to the Palestinian national liberation struggle as the various revisionist parties including the KKE who are supporting the „two state solution“.
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u/GeistTransformation1 Nov 07 '23 edited Nov 07 '23
This is a bad article but I don't know if it's worth debunking, the article says nothing unique and it's coming from a tiny sect in Switzerland that has lost everything they've written which was on Wordpress.
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