Sunday, 23rd June, 2024, 12:30pm

Communism as a general relation is a more realistic goal than a free Palestine, which is not to say communism is also not impossible. Instances of nationalist liberation, as some sort of speculative autonomous particularity, are feasible only where the reserves of the country’s national capital exceed its tendency towards the condition of cliency. Where a nation’s capital reserves exceed its debts, it may then dictate terms to the global market. By definition, nations seeking liberation, do not have these reserves. Nowadays, a  country only becomes independent where it is financed by the United Nations with the money channeled through ‘a raft’ of NGO (intelligence agencies) administered all-strings attached money laundering programmes designed to promote their strategically cultivated client bourgeois faction, or array of rival factions at the same time. In other words, the event of national liberation is realisable only as a horizon for a differently ordered (discreet and indirect) long term condition of dependency and cliency. National liberationism is realised as the most dependent and colonised mode of political consciousness - everyone knows this, but for reasons of cynical exploitation the resultant and perpetual experience of disenchantment at the limits of nationalism never corrects the structure of its fantasy. And it is for reason of this cynical exploitation that the only appropriate response to all current wars, the wish for it to end immediately, is deflected and downplayed - it is in the interest of too many wealth creators for it to continue indefinitely. The dominant response of western activism to the Palestine war is a call for victory (i.e. for continuation and expansion of the destruction). American led leftist activism is now inseparable from its desensitising conditioning by selective (that is, capricious and expedient) apologetics for continued violence (apeing what it imagines is the necessary level of callousness to be taken seriously) - as a consequence it has abandoned all conception of emancipation. The key diagnostic symptom of the sickness of fascism is celebration of the mobilisation for war, but to propagandise for a war in which one is not participating indicates the pathology of a sort of naive depravity, a fascism by proxy. 

Understanding proceeds either from the assumption that social events are products of a global order imposed by generalised productive relations within which nations are bound by external rules imposed by this order, or alternatively it begins from the assumption that economic forces are subject to state power. Communists assume the former, whilst leftists assume the latter. Leftism assumes not only that capitalism is responsive to state power and that states are responsive to leftism but that the state as captured by the left is identical to ‘the people’ where ‘the people’ is understood as a separate entity to people (the former is the cause for whom the latter must die). Instead of proposing the abolition of all nation states as apparatuses of the general system of exploitation, leftism distinguishes between more or less goody and more or less baddy states based on their relative alignment with ‘America’ and ‘the west.’ The advantage of this analysis for left rackets is that it anthropomorphises states and facilitates a conspiratorial understanding of economic events as motive-based rather than necessity driven. It is for this reason that the left’s entire project is the obsolete, and now objectless, desire to capture state power (where national capital is already superseded as a decisive economic apparatus) that it preserves the distinction between Zionism (a state it cannot capture) and national liberation as a general ideal. 

In reality, Zionism is just another national liberationism, a post-garibaldism/bonapartist ideological reaction. It appeared as all nationalisms in response to the development of the productive apparatus as it began to exceed national boundaries.  The corollary of the expansion of production was the late 19th Century deterritorialisation of social order as capital started to evade the ownership of the bourgeoisie and assert its environmentalising autonomy. Nationalist liberationist fantasies first took flight at the point nation states were beginning to decompose proportionately before the growing autonomy of capital - the fantasy compensated both for the state’s loss of function as an adequate organising force of variable capital and for the declining role of the bourgeoisie. The event of the apparat was waiting just around the corner. This was precisely the point at which states began restricting the growth of productive forces which they once had facilitated, without either achieving dominance over those forces falling within their specified territory or negotiating adequate recompense as fixed capital took flight for cheaper labour markets. At the point where state power becomes the fetish of revolutionaries the state itself is transformed functionally by productive relations into a representation, a false locus of power, and also deployed in its new administrative role by automatic and increasingly unstable but also increasingly powerful forces of irrationality and contradiction. 

Zionism is not distinct from any other national project appearing at that time - and the degree to which its goal has been realised is the degree to which it has served the purpose of supranational productive expansion, just as all other liberation projects also function as ciphers for interests greater than the puny earthlings’ ever dwindling capacity of nation states. 

It is always a disaster that so many people must die wherever they are mobilised into the illusory ideal of national independence, a goal that is set literally against their own interests, but it is an absolute tragedy that so many Palestinians have now died in a conflict that has functioned in effect as a distracting second front in Russia’s response to last year’s failed Ukrainian counter attack in the more economically significant war over Europe’s ‘bread basket’ - they have died not just for their own illusions but for a cynical misdirection that has used them to pursue a quite different strategic objective. The war in Palestine is not about Palestine. 

It is important, imperative even, for the left to use the term Zionism instead of Israeli  nationalism because it seeks to preserve against all evidence the viability of the possibility of a left nationalism - the realpolitik of which always depends on expedient alliances with unsavoury hamas-equivalent reactionaries (as in the generic manoeuvres of bonapartism). The ideology of anti-Zionism is an alibi of exceptionality by which leftism sustains itself in denial, and by which it struggles against making its logical next step to generalisation, namely taking up the critique of the general function of all nationalisms. Anti-Zionism is the pretext by which leftism keeps its hold on the ideal of oppressed states. But after nearly two hundred years of bonapartism, the  contradiction fixed irreversibly within the idea of emancipation is again expressed clearly as an either or: either the left reproduces its business model via ‘solidarity’ with nationalist liberationism and all this implies of its understanding of the apparat, or else its adherents commence their stepped disavowal of leftism by redirecting their critique from instances of bad states doing terrible things to the revelation that all states, goodie and baddie, are driven by the imperative to reproduce into equally desperate measures; then understanding that states if they are competitors are also interchangeable; and finally arriving at the understanding that the true object of their critique ought to be the general form of nation states. But this object has not even been maintained by the communists who have consistently slipped into an ideology of appeasing leftism. As with the covidian event and recent identitarian manifestations, the communists have failed to defend their position against the manufactured states of emergency on one side and the left’s addiction to events on the other. Instead, they have sought to accommodate themselves with the ceaseless waves of reticulated enthusiasm, and as a consequence have lost themselves - professors now rationalise their cowering beneath the students’ keisaku. 

Even so, it is still possible to extract general rules, for example: whoever opposes Zionism has not yet begun their opposition to nationalism; whoever talks of empire and colonialism is not yet able to conceive the totality.