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I think that Fred is quite right in his criticism. Similitudes should not hide particular hues (and sometimes not just hues) if we are to establish a practical road to socialism. Take the gross assimilation of Israel to South Africa in face value: the Israeli citizen Daniel Barenboim -a man of Argentine birth and an Argentinean citizen by his own right- has just finished a series of presentations of his East-West Diwan Orchestra in Buenos Aires. In South Africa he would have been subject to legal process for the initiative of the Orchestra itself. And during the public, free, out of theater, presentation (which was held at a most central location in Buenos Aires with great attendance) he publicly and openly advocated for an immediate and unilateral declaration of independence for the Palestinians. This would have been subject to another legal process in South Africa, too. I can´t imagine even the most liberal-minded South African White, Britain-born, orchestra director leading a rehearsal in London, for example, of a joint South African Black-White orchestra, and immediately afterwards issuing a declaration on behalf of the right of the South African Black to be considered fully equal, in bourgeois terms, to the South African Whites. He would have been persecuted under the apartheid regime, and rightly so. This legal order made it impossible to belong to the privileged minority AND advocate the rights of the oppressed majorities without risking prison. The Israeli legal order doesn´t. The difference between Israel and South Africa makes it possible that a honest Zionist as Barenboim can step ahead in his ideas towards practical positions that in the end negate his Zionism. In South Africa nothing of this kind would have ever been not just possible but even thinkable. That we can see a TREND in Israel towards apartheid (which of course is a practical fact) does not mean that the trend has become a fact of life. The struggle against this evolution is still open to Jews in Israel in a way it was unthinkable in South Africa. But of course THERE EXISTS a common ground between Israel and South Africa. However, it does not of necessity lie in /racism/ as such. Yes, of course, in South Africa there was and there still is -witness the rugby (white) versus soccer (all colors, mostly Black) debate today- a strong racist vein beneath the general issue, but this is harder to hammer into the Israeli mindset not just because of German "racial" laws, etc., but also because there are not few Israeli Jews with an of Arabic or even Black racial origin (whatever "race" means in the human species). The common ground is of a different stuff. Please note that not even the apartheid regime simply divided the population into a White and a non-White (and a third, "Colored") caste. Much to the contrary, differences among non-Whites and Colored were functional -and essential- to the system. That is why there were MANY "national" Bantustans, not just a single "Black" state. This has to do with the idea of a "democratic and multinational state" with privileged nationalities in its constituency. Such as it was represented by the late Austro Hungarian Empire, where a privileged nationality (Germans and Germans/Hungarians in the AHE) enjoyed concrete advantages over the remaining nationalities. Concrete national discrimination on behalf of the Anglo-Boer minority was cynically depicted as "separate development" of the different "nationalities" in South Africa in the same way that the exploitation of the Slav and similar nationalities by the German and Hungarian (and to a minor degree "German Slav", that is Czech, Slovenian, Croatian) nationalities was termed "national-cultural equality" under a "liberal monarchy". The latter, in Israel and South Africa was or is referred to as a "democracy". The general line of defence of "separate development" in South Africa holds incredibly astounding similitude with the "national-cultural equality" of the AHE. And the same can be said of the general line of defence of the Zionist "exclusively Jewish" state. In the AHE, the German and Hungarian aristocrats lived off the hyperexplotation of the -usually Slav- peasants in the Eastern fringes of the Empire. The produce of this exploitation was large enough to co-opt the German and Hungarian subordinate classes to the interests of their highly reactionary aristocracies, and this is exactly why Bismark decided to shrug off his back the South Eastern Germans in his Kleine Deutschland crusade in 1866 and 1870 (he even considered leaving Bavaria out of the new nation in the making, if the price of holding it within the new Empire proved to be too high). He saw them as a great danger for the German national unity. They were a dead weight, the Eastern landed aristocracies were centrifugal to the general project, and he was decided to impose the latter even at the price of splitting the "German" unity. In South Africa, the White minority grabbed the best land tracts and enjoyed the exclusive benefit of the connections with the British Empire: this was the "Glorious Settlement" that put an end to the Anglo-Boer wars. In this sense Samir Amin wrote that apartheid is not exactly a Boer creation but an Imperial creation, because the old Boer agrarian economy rather coexisted with the remaining peoples without of necessity subduing them in the way they became subdued after the gold mines in the Witwatersrand area were discovered. Afterwards, apartheid created the Bantustans in order to keep the non-White South Africans deprived of full South African citizenship. In Israel, what took place in 1948 was an imperfect ethnic cleansing, and the idea was NOT to create a settler state where the privileged minority would live off the rent put up by the subdued Palestinian peasants (this had been the lot of the old Ottoman aristocracy up to 1918), but a "clean" Jewish state without allogenous populations. As it turned up to happen, there remained some fractions of the Palestinian nationality within the new "Jewish" state, but the size of the remaining population seemed to make it possible to asphixiate them by way of a perverted legal system focused on the ownership of the land. But the war of 1967 reintroduced in the country the "South African" tendencies that the leaders of the 1948 Zionist uprising had thought to have elliminated by way of sending "Arabs" in Israel to their brothers outside the border (a "reversed Bantustan", if you prefer). These are important differences, and Fred is right on the spot when he suggests that they should not be thrown away. What I would stress, however, is that all of them share the general idea that there is not, /nor can there exist/, a common "Austro Hungarian", "South African" or "Israeli" nation (not "nationality"), the basic status of each citizen being predicated on the /nationality/ they belong to, and not on their being part of a /nation/ in the sense created by the bourgeois revolutions after the example of the French nation as built by the French Revolution. In this, they simply enhance the basic trend of imperialism to divide the human species into separate and mutually antagonistic, or at least non-mutually-collaborative, "national" ghettoes -for the benefit of a minority of the human species. In _this_ kind of "multinational" states, which put to the service of capitalism differentiations created by pre-capitalist modes of production, the whole thing sums up to the privilege of a SINGLE (or at most a COUPLE OF) "national minorities". In the end, they express the "national" theory of the imperialist bourgeoisie as against that of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of the earlier stages of the history of the capitalist mode of production. It is by no means a matter of chance that the first branch of the Nazi party was created not in Germany itself, not in "Bismark´s Germany", but in a German village in Südetenland, that is among a spliner of the "South Eastern" German populations that had been reduced to minority status within a -now- Slav dominated country. Nor is the Liga Nord movement in Northern Italy completely different from this. Mussolini himself thought (and wrote) that SOME Italians (e. g. the "South) were born to be slaves of others (that is, the bourgeois kernel North of Rome and, if you want, North of Florence). Whatever one can say on the pro-capitalist and even pro-imperialist line followed by the ANC after apartheid was defeated, the general idea that all and every South African, regardless of her or his "nationality" or color, is an equal citizen with any other South African, by the very fact of being South African, is a step in the right direction. THIS merit is not a minor achievement, and we Marxists should take it into account. There is a deep truth with Permanent Revolution: outside the core, it does not start with 1917 but with 1789. The popular-democratic contents of the bourgeois revolution is still part of our legacy, not only in the sense that in the core countries the great ideals of the French Revolution can be achieved by socialism, AND ONLY BY SOCIALISM, but also in the sense that the whole bunch of national-democratic goals must be achieved under the leadership of the working class and with socialist means and objectives. And this does not just relate to abstract democratic legislation and the right to equal vote but also (and in many cases essentially) with the basic idea that there exists a "right to the nation" as against the "right to a nationality". Austro Marxists held the opposite view. The results are everywhere to be seen. Their theses became the basic Credo of the imperialist bourgeoisies. Their best heir was Kurt Waldheim, not to say -Verwoerd!!!! Fred Feldman escribió: > > > Louis Proyect wrote: > The answer is yes. > http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/greenstein220810.html > > Fred Feldman: > Although I am completely in support of Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions against > Israel, I have to ask: > > If Israel is an apartheid state, does that mean that South Africa was a > Zionist state? > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
