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Title: Two Local Wars Author: Situationist International Date: October 1967 Language: en Topics: Israel/Palestine, Vietnam, war Source: Retrieved on June 30, 2007 from https://web.archive.org/web/20070630125804/http://stiobhard.tripod.com/east/local.html Notes: (IS#11, October 1967)
The Arab-Israel war was a dirty trick pulled by modern history on the
good conscience of the Left, which was communing in the great spectacle
of its protest against the Vietnam war. The false consciousness that saw
in the NLF the champion of “socialist revolution” against American
imperialism could only get entangled and collapse amidst its
insurmountable contradictions when it had to decide between Israel and
Nasser. Yet throughout all its ludicrous polemics it never stopped
proclaiming that one or the other was completely in the right, or even
that one or another of their perspectives was revolutionary.
Through its immigration into underdeveloped areas, the revolutionary
struggle was subjected to a double alienation: that of an impotent Left
facing an overdeveloped capitalism it was in no way capable of
combating, and that of the laboring masses in the colonized countries
who inherited the remains of a mutilated revolution and have had to
suffer its defects. The absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe
has reduced the Left to its simplest expression: a mass of spectators
who swoon with rapture each time the exploited in the colonies take up
arms against their masters, and who cannot help seeing these uprisings
as the epitome of Revolution. At the same time, the absence from
political life of the proletariat as a class-for-itself (and for us the
proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing) has allowed this Left to
become the “Knight of Virtue” in a world without virtue. But when it
bewails its situation and complains about the “world order” being at
variance with its good intentions, and when it maintains its poor
yearnings in the face of this order, it is in fact attached to this
order as to its own essence, and if this order was taken away from it,
it would lose everything. The European Left shows itself so poor that,
like a traveler in the desert longing for a single drop of water, all it
seems to need to console itself is the meager feeling of an abstract
objection. From the little with which it is satisfied one can measure
the extent of its poverty. It is as alien to history as the proletariat
is alien to this world; false consciousness is its natural condition,
the spectacle is its element, and the apparent opposition of systems is
its universal frame of reference: wherever there is a conflict it always
sees Good fighting Evil, “total revolution” versus “total reaction.”
The attachment of this spectator consciousness to alien causes remains
irrational, and its virtuous protests flounder in the tortuous paths of
its guilt. Most of the “Vietnam Committees” in France split up during
the “Six Day War” and some of the war resistance groups in the United
States also revealed their reality. “One cannot be at the same time for
the Vietnamese and against the Jews menaced with extermination,” is the
cry of some. “Can you fight against the Americans in Vietnam while
supporting their allied Zionist aggressors?” is the reply of others. And
then they plunge into Byzantine discussions ... Sartre hasn’t recovered
from it yet. In fact this whole fine lot does not actually fight what it
condemns, nor does it know that of which it approves. Its opposition to
the American war is almost always combined with unconditional support of
the Vietcong; but in any case this opposition remains spectacular for
everyone. Those who were really opposed to Spanish fascism went to fight
it. No one has yet gone off to fight “Yankee imperialism.” The consumers
of illusory participation are offered a whole range of spectacular
choices: Stalino-Gaullist nationalism against the Americans (Humphrey’s
visit was the sole occasion the PCF has demonstrated with its remaining
faithful); the sale of the Vietnam Newsletter or of publicity handouts
from Ho Chi Minh’s state; or pacifist demonstrations. Neither the Proves
(before their dissolution) nor the Berlin students have been able to go
beyond the narrow framework of anti-imperialist “action.”
The war opposition in America has naturally been more serious since it
finds itself face to face with the real enemy. For some young people,
however, it means a mechanistic identification with the apparent enemies
of their real enemies; which reinforces the confusion of a working class
already subjected to the worst brutalization and mystification, and
contributes to maintaining it in that “reactionary,’ state of mind from
which one draws arguments against it.
Guevara’s critique seems to us more important since it has its roots in
real struggles, but it falls short by default. Che is certainly one of
the last consequent Leninists of our time. But like Epimenides, he seems
to have slept for the last fifty years to be able to believe that there
is still a “progressive bloc” which is unaccountably “failing.” This
bureaucratic and romantic revolutionary only sees in imperialism the
highest stage of capitalism, struggling against a society that is
socialist in spite of its imperfections.
The USSR’s embarrassingly evident deficiencies are coming to seem more
and more “natural.” As for China, according to an official declaration
it remains “ready to accept all national sacrifices to support North
Vietnam against the USA (SI note: in lieu of supporting the workers of
Hong Kong) and constitutes the most solid and secure rear guard for the
Vietnamese people in their struggle against imperialism.” In fact, no
one doubts that if the last Vietnamese were killed, Mao’s bureaucratic
China would still be intact. (According to Izvestia, China and the
United States have already concluded a mutual nonintervention pact.)
Neither the manichean consciousness of the virtuous Left nor the
bureaucracy are capable of seeing the profound unity of today’s world.
Dialectics is their common enemy. As for revolutionary criticism, it
begins beyond good and evil; it takes its roots in history and operates
on the totality of the existing world. In no case can it applaud a
belligerent state or support the bureaucracy of an exploiting state In
formation. It must first of all lay bare the truth of present struggles
by putting them back into their historical context, and unmask the
hidden ends of the forces officially in conflict. The arm of critique is
the prelude to the critique by arms.
The peaceful coexistence of bourgeois and bureaucratic lies ended up
prevailing over the lie of their confrontation; the balance of terror
was broken in Cuba in 1962 with the rout of the Russians. Since that
time American imperialism has been the unchallenged master of the world.
And it can remain so only by aggression since it has no chance of
seducing the disinherited, who are more easily attracted by the
Sino-Soviet model. State-capitalism is the natural tendency of colonized
societies where the state is generally formed before the historical
classes. The total elimination of its capital and its commodities from
the world market is the deadly threat that haunts the American
propertied class and its free-enterprise economy; this is the key to its
aggressive rage.
Since the great crisis of 1929, state intervention has been more and
more conspicuous in market mechanisms; the economy can no longer
function steadily without massive expenditures by the state, the main
“consumer,, of all noncommercial production (especially that of the
armament industries). This does not save it from remaining in a state of
permanent crisis and in constant need of expanding its public sector at
the expense of its private sector. A relentless logic pushes the system
toward increasingly state-controlled capitalism, generating severe
social conflicts.
The profound crisis of the American system lies in its inability to
produce sufficient profits on the social scale. It must therefore
achieve abroad what it cannot do at home, namely increase the amount of
profit in proportion to the amount of existing capital. The propertied
class, which also more or less possesses the state, relies on its
imperialist enterprises to realize this insane dream. For this class,
state-capitalism means death just as much as does communism; that is why
it is essentially incapable of seeing any difference between them.
The artificial functioning of the monopolistic economy as a “war
economy” ensures, for the moment, that the ruling-class policy is
willingly supported by the workers, who enjoy full employment and a
spectacular abundance: “At the moment, the proportion of labor employed
in jobs connected with national defense amounts to 5.2% of the total
American labor force, compared with 3.9% two years ago.... The number of
civil jobs in the national defense sector has increased from 3,000,000
to 4,100,000 over the last two years.” (Le Monde, 17 September 1967.)
Meanwhile, market capitalism vaguely feels that by extending its
territorial control it will achieve an accelerated expansion capable of
balancing the ever-increasing demands of non-profit-making production.
The ferocious defense of regions of the “free” world where its interests
are often trifling (in 1959 American investments in South Vietnam did
not exceed 50 million dollars) is part of a long-term strategy that
hopes eventually to be able to write off military expenditures as mere
business expenses in ensuring the United States not only a market but
also the monopolistic control of the means of production of the greater
part of the world. But everything works against this project. On one
hand, the internal contradictions of private capitalism: particular
interests conflict with the general interest of the propertied class as
a whole, as with groups that make short-term profits from state
contracts (notably arms manufacturers), ormonopolistic enterprises that
are reluctant to invest in underdeveloped countries, where productivity
is very low in spite of cheap labor, preferring instead the “advanced”
part of the world (especially Europe,which is still more profitable than
saturated America). On the otherand, it clashes with the immediate
interests of the disinheritedmasses, whose first move can only be to
eliminate the indigenousstrata that exploit them—which are the only
strata able to ensure the noted States any infiltration whatsoever.
According to Rostow, the “growth” specialist of the State Depart-t,
Vietnam is for the moment only the first teethed of this vasta rategy,
which to ensure its exploitative peace must start with a wardestruction
that can hardly succeed. The aggressiveness of American imperialism is
thus in no way the aberration of a bad administration, but a necessity
for the class relations of private capitalism, which, if not overthrown
by a revolutionary movement, unrelentingly evolves toward a technocratic
state-capitalism. It is in this general framework of a still undominated
global economy that the history of the alienated struggles of our time
must be situated.
The destruction of the old “Asiatic” structures by colonial penetration
gave rise to a new urban stratum while increasing the pauperization of a
large portion of the super-exploited peasantry. The conjuncture of these
two forces constituted the driving force of the Vietnamese movement.
Among the urban strata (petty bourgeois and even bourgeois) were formed
the first nationalist nuclei and the skeleton of what was to be, from
1930 on, the Indochinese Communist Party. Its adherence to Bolshevik
ideology (in its Stalinist version), which led it to graft an
essentially agrarian program on to the purely nationalist one, enabled
the ICP to become the principal director of the anti-colonial struggle
and to marshal the great mass of peasants who had spontaneously risen.
The “peasant soviets” of 1931 were the first manifestation of this
movement. But by linking its fate to that of the Third International,
the ICP subjected itself to all the vicissitudes of Stalinist diplomacy
and to the fluctuations of the national and state interests of the
Russian bureaucracy. After the Seventh Comintern Congress (August 1935)
“the struggle against French imperialism” vanished from the program and
was soon replaced by a struggle against the powerful Trotskyist party.
“As for the Trotskyists, no alliances, no concessions; they must be
unmasked for what they are: the agents of fascism” (Report of Ho Chi
Minh to the Comintern, July 1939). The Hitler-Stalin Pact and the
banning of the CP in France and its colonies allowed the ICP to change
its line: “Our party finds it a question of life or death ... to
struggle against the imperialist war and the French policy of piracy and
massacre (i.e. against Nazi Germany--SI) ... but we will at the same
time combat the aggressive aims of Japanese fascism.”
Toward the end of World War II, with the effective help of the
Americans, the Vietminh was in control of the greater part of the
country and was recognized by France as the sole representative of
Indochina. It was at this point that Ho preferred “to sniff a little
French shit ratter than eat Chinese shit for a lifetime” and signed, to
make the task of his colleague-masters easier, the monstrous compromise
of 1946, which recognized Vietnam as both a “free state” and as
“belonging to the Indochinese Federation of the French Union.” This
compromise enabled France to re-conquer part of the country and, at the
same time the Stalinists lost their share of bourgeois power in France,
to wage a war that lasted eight years, at the end of which the Vietminh
gave up the South to the most retrograde strata and their American
protectors and definitively won the North for itself. After
systematically eliminating the remaining revolutionary elements (the
last Trotskyist leader, Ta Tu Thau, was assassinated by 1946) the
Vietminh bureaucracy imposed its totalitarian power on the peasantry and
started the industrialization of the country within a state-capitalist
framework. The bettering of the lot of the peasants, following their
conquests during the long liberation struggle, was, in line with
bureaucratic logic, subordinated to the interests of the rising state:
the goal was to be greater productivity, with the state remaining the
uncontested master of that production. The authoritarian implementation
of agrarian reform gave rise in 1956 to violent insurrections and bloody
repression (above all in Ho Chi Minh’s own native province). The
peasants who had carried the bureaucracy to power were to be its first
victims. For several years afterwards the bureaucracy tried to smother
the memory of this “serious mistake” in an “orgy of self-criticism.”
But the same Geneva agreements enabled the Diem clique to set up, south
of the 17^(th) parallel, a bureaucratic, feudal and theocratic state in
the service of the landowners and compradore bourgeoisie. Within a few
years this state was to nullify, by a few suitable “agrarian reforms,”
everything the peasantry had won. The peasants of the South, some of
whom had never laid down their arms, were to fall back in the grip of
oppression and super-exploitation. This is the second Vietnam war. The
mass of the insurgent peasants, taking up arms once more against their
old enemies, also followed once again their old leaders. The National
Liberation Front succeeded the Vietminh, inheriting both its qualities
and its grave defects. By making itself the champion of national
struggle and peasant war, the NLF won over the countryside from the very
first and made it the main seat of the armed resistance. Its successive
victories over the official army provoked the increasingly massive
intervention of the Americans, to the point of reducing the conflict to
an open colonial war, with the Vietnamese pitted against an invading
army. Its determination in the struggle, its clearly anti-feudal program
and its unitary perspectives remain the principal qualities of the
movement. But in no way does the NLF’s struggle go beyond the classical
framework of national liberation struggles. Its program remains based on
a compromise among a vast coalition of classes, dominated by the
overriding goal of wiping out the American aggression. It is no accident
that it rejects the title “Vietcong” (i.e. Vietnamese communists) and
insists on its national character. Its structures are those of a state
in formation: in the zones under its control it already levies taxes and
institutes compulsory military service.
These minimal qualities in the struggle and the social objectives that
they express remain totally absent in the confrontation between Israel
and the Arabs. The specific contradictions of Zionism and of splintered
Arab society add to the general confusion.
Since its origins the Zionist movement has been the contrary of the
revolutionary solution to what used to be called the Jewish question. A
direct product of European capitalism, it did not aim at the overthrow
of a society that needed to persecute Jews, but at the creation Of a
Jewish national entity that would be protected from the anti-Semitic
aberrations of decadent capitalism; it aimed not at the abolition of
injustice’ but at its transfer. The original sin of Zionism is that it
has always acted as if Palestine were a desert island. The revolutionary
workers movement saw the answer to the Jewish question in proletarian
community, that is, in the destruction of capitalism and “its religion,
Judaism”; the emancipation of the Jews could not take place apart from
the emancipation of man. Zionism started from the opposite hypothesis.
As a matter of fact, the counterrevolutionary development of the last
half century proved it right, but in the same way as the development of
European capitalism proved right the reformist theses of Bernstein. The
success of Zionism and its corollary, the creation of the state of
Israel, is merely a miserable by-product of the triumph of world
counterrevolution. To “socialism in a single country” came the echo
“justice for a single people” and “equality in a single kibbutz.” It was
with Rothschild capital that the colonization of Palestine was organized
and with European surplus-value that the first kibbutzim were set up.
The Jews recreated for themselves all the fanaticism and segregation of
which they had been victims. Those who had suffered mere toleration in
their society were to struggle to become in another country owners
disposing of the right to tolerate others. The kibbutz was not a
revolutionary supersession of Palestinian “feudalism,” but a mutualist
formula for the self-defense of Jewish worker-settlers against the
capitalist exploitative tendencies of the Jewish Agency. Because it was
the main Jewish owner of Palestine, the Zionist Organization defined
itself as the sole representative of the superior interests of the
“Jewish Nation.” If it eventually allowed a certain element of
self-management, it is because it was sure that this would be based on
the systematic rejection of the Arab peasant.
As for the Histadrut, it was since its inception in 1920 subjected to
the authority of world Zionism, that is, to the direct opposite of
workers’ emancipation. Arab workers were statutorily excluded from it
and its activity often consisted of forbidding Jewish businesses to
employ them.
The development of triangular struggles between the Arabs, the Zionists
and the British was to be turned to the profit of the Zionists. Thanks
to the active patronage of the Americans (since the end of World War II)
and the blessing of Stalin (who saw Israel as the first “socialist”
bastion in the Middle East, but also as a way to rid himself of some
annoying Jews), it did not take long before the Herzlian dream was
realized and the Jewish state was arbitrarily proclaimed. The
recuperation of all “progressive” forms of social organization and their
integration within the Zionist ideal allowed even the most
“revolutionary” to work in good conscience for the building of the
bourgeois, militaristic, rabbinical state that modern Israel has become.
The prolonged sleep of proletarian internationalism once more brought
forth a monster. The basic injustice against the Palestinian Arabs came
back to roost with the Jews themselves: the State of the Chosen People
was nothing but one more class society in which all the anomalies of the
old societies were recreated (hierarchical divisions, tribal opposition
between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim, racist persecution of the Arab
minority, etc.). The labor union organization assumed its normal
function of integrating workers into a capitalist economy, an economy of
which it itself has become the main owner. It employs more workers than
the state itself. It presently constitutes the bridgehead of the
imperialist expansion of the new Israeli capitalism. (“Solel Boneh,” an
important building branch of the Histadrut, invested 180 million dollars
in Africa and Asia from 1960–1966 and currently employs 12,000 African
workers.)
And just as this state could never have seen the light of day without
the direct intervention of Anglo-American imperialism and the massive
aid of Jewish finance capital, it cannot balance its artificial economy
today without the aid of the same forces that created it. (Theannual
balance of payments deficit is 600 million dollars, that is, morefor
each Israeli inhabitant than the average earnings of an Arabworker.)
Since the settling of the first immigrant colonies, the Jews have formed
a modern, European-style society alongside the economically and socially
backward Arab society; the proclamation of thestate of Israel only
completed this process by the pure and simple expulsion of the backward
elements. Israel forms by its very existencethe bastion of Europe in the
heart of an Afro-Asian world. Thus it has become doubly alien: to the
Arab population, permanently reduced tothe status of refugees or of
colonized minority; and to the Jewish pop-elation, which had for a
moment seen in it the earthly realization ofall egalitarian ideologies.
But this is due not only to the contradictions of Israeli society; from
the outset this situation has been constantly maintained and aggravated
by the surrounding Arab societies, which have so far proved incapable of
any contribution toward an effective solution.
Throughout the British Mandate period [1920–1948] the Arab resistance in
Palestine was completely dominated by the propertied class: the Arab
ruling classes and their British protectors. The Sykes-Picot Agreement
had put an end to all the hopes of nascent Arab nationalism and
subjected the skillfully carved up area to a foreign domination that is
far from being over. The same strata that ensured the servitude of the
Arab masses to the Ottoman Empire turned to the service of the British
occupation and became accomplices of Zionist colonization (by the sale,
at very inflated prices, of their land). The backwardness of Arab
society did not yet allow for the emergence of new and more advanced
readerships, and the spontaneous popular upheavals found each time the
same recuperators: the “bourgeois-feudal” notables and their commodity:
national unity.
The armed insurgence of 1936–1939 and the six-month general strike (the
longest in history) were decided and carried out in spite of opposition
from the leadership of all the “nationalist” parties. They were
widespread and spontaneously organized; this forced the ruling class to
join them so as to take over the leadership of the movement. But this
was in order to put a check on it, to lead it to the conference table
and to reactionary compromises. Only the victory of that uprising in its
ultimate consequences could have destroyed both the British Mandate and
the Zionist aim of setting up a Jewish state. Its failure heralded the
disasters to come and ultimately the defeat of 1948.
This latter defeat tolled the knell for the “bourgeois-feudality” as the
leading class of the Arab movement. It was the opportunity for the petty
bourgeoisie to come to power and constitute, with the officers of the
defeated army, the driving force of the present movement. Its program
was simple: unity, a kind of socialist ideology, and the liberation of
Palestine (the Return). The Tripartite aggression of 1956 provided it
with the best opportunity to consolidate itself as a dominant class and
to find a leader-program in the person of Nasser, put forward for the
collective admiration of the completely dispossessed Arab masses He was
their religion and their opium. But the new exploiting class had its own
interests and autonomous goals. The rallying cries that produced the
popularity of the bureaucratic military regime of Egypt were already bad
in themselves; in addition, the regime was incapable of carrying them
out. Arab unity and the destruction of Israel (invoked successively as
the liquidation of the usurper state or as the pure and simple driving
of the Israeli population into the sea) were the core of this
propaganda-ideology.
What ushered in the decline of the Arab petty bourgeoisie and its
bureaucratic power was first of all its own internal contradictions and
the superficiality of its options (Nasser, the Baath Party, Kassem and
the so-called “Communist” parties have never ceased fighting each other
and compromising and allying with the most dubious forces).
Twenty years after the first Palestinian war, this new stratum has just
demonstrated its complete incapacity to resolve the Palestinian problem.
It has lived by delirious bluff, for it was only able to survive by
permanently raising the specter of Israel, being utterly incapable of
effecting any radical solution whatsoever to the innumerable internal
problems. The Palestinian problem remains the key to the Arab power
struggles. It is everyone’s central reference point and all conflicts
hinge on ft.-It is the basis of the objective solidarity of all the Arab
regimes. It produces the “Holy Alliance” between Nasser and Hussein,
Faisal and Boumedienne, Aref and the Baath.
The latest war has dissipated all these illusions. The absolute rigidity
of “Arab ideology” was pulverized on contact with an effective reality
that was just as hard but also permanent. Those who spoke of waging a
war neither wanted it nor prepared for it, and those who spoke only of
defending themselves actually prepared the offensive. Each of the two
camps followed their respective propensities: the Arab bureaucracy that
for lying and demagogy, the masters of Israel that for imperialist
expansion. It is as a negative element that the Six Day War has had a
prime importance: it has revealed all the secret weaknesses and defects
of what was presented as the “Arab Revolution.” The “powerful” military
bureaucracy of Egypt crumbled to dust in two days, disclosing all at
once the secret reality of its achievements: the fact that the axis
around which all the socioeconomic transformations took place—the
Army—has remained fundamentally the same. On one hand, it claimed to be
changing everything in Egypt (and even in the Arab world as a whole),
and on the other, it did everything to avoid any transformation in
itself, in its values or its habits. Nasser’s Egypt is still dominated
by pre-Nasser forces; its bureaucracy is a conglomeration without
coherence or class consciousness, united only by exploitation and the
division of the social surplus-value.
As for the politico-military apparatus that governs Baathist Syria, it
is entrenching itself more and more in the extremism of its ideology But
its phraseology takes in no one anymore (except Pablo!): everyone knows
that it did not fight and that it gave up the front without resistance
because it preferred to keep its best troops in Damascus for its own
defense. Those who consumed 65% of the Syrian budget to defend the
territory have definitively unmasked their own cynical lies.
Finally, the war has shown, to those who still needed showing, that Holy
Alliance with someone like Hussein can only lead to disaster. The Arab
Legion [Jordanian Army] withdrew on the first day and the Palestinian
population, which has suffered for twenty years under its police terror,
found itself without arms or organization in the face of the Israeli
occupation forces. Since 1948 the Hashemite throne had shared the
colonization of the Palestinians with the Zionist state. By deserting
the West Bank it gave the Israelis the police files on all the
Palestinian revolutionary elements. But the Palestinians have always
known that there was no great difference between the two colonizations,
and the blatancy of the new occupation at least makes the terrain of
resistance clearer.
As for Israel, it has become everything that the Arabs had accused it of
before the war: an imperialist state behaving like the most classic
occupation forces (police terror, dynamiting of houses, permanent
martial law, etc.). Internally a collective hysteria, led by the rabbis,
is developing around the “ironclad right of Israel to its Biblical
borders.” The war put a stop to the whole movement of internal struggles
generated by the contradictions of this artificial society (in 1966
there were several dozen riots, and there were no fewer than 277 strikes
in 1965 alone) and provoked unanimous support for the objectives of the
ruling class and its most extremist ideology. It also served to shore up
all the Arab regimes not involved in the armed struggle. Boumedienne
could thus, from 3000 miles away, enter the chorus of political
braggadocio and have his name applauded by the Algerian crowd before
which he had not even dared to appear the day before; and finally obtain
the support of a totally Stalinized ORP (“for his anti-imperialist
policy”). Faisal, for a few million dollars, obtained Egypt’s withdrawal
from North Yemen and the strengthening of his throne. Etc., etc.
As always, war, when not civil, only freezes the process of social
revolution. In North Vietnam it has brought about the peasantry’s
support, never before given, for the bureaucracy that exploits it. In
Israel it has killed off for a long time any opposition to Zionism; and
in the Arab countries it is reinforcing—temporarily—the most reactionary
strata. In no way can revolutionary currents find anything there with
which to identify. Their task is at the other pole of the present
movement since it must be its absolute negation.
It is obviously impossible to seek, at the moment, a revolutionary
solution to the Vietnam war. It is first of all necessary to put an end
to the American aggression in order to allow the real social struggle in
Vietnam to develop in a natural way; that is to say, to allow the
Vietnamese workers and peasants to rediscover their enemies at home: the
bureaucracy of the North and all the propertied and ruling strata of the
South. The withdrawal of the Americans will mean that the Stalinist
bureaucracy will immediately seize control of the whole country: this is
the unavoidable conclusion. Because the invaders cannot indefinitely
sustain their aggression; ever since Talleyrand it has been a
commonplace that one can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
The point, therefore, is not to give unconditional (or even conditional)
support to the Vietcong, but to struggle consistently and without any
concessions against American imperialism. The most effective role is
presently being played by those American revolutionaries who are
advocating and practicing insubordination and draft resistance on a very
large scale (compared to which the resistance to the Algerian war in
France was child’s play). The Vietnam war is rooted in America and it is
from there that it must be rooted out.
Unlike the American war, the Palestinian question has no immediately
evident solution. No short-term solution is feasible. The Arab regimes
can only crumble under the weight of their contradictions and Israel
will be more and more the prisoner of its colonial logic. All the
compromises that the great powers try to piece together are bound to be
counterrevolutionary in one way or another. The hybrid status
quo—neither peace nor war—will probably prevail for a long period during
which the Arab regimes will meet with the same fate as their
predecessors of 1948 (and probably at first to the profit of the openly
reactionary forces). Arab society, which has produced all sorts of
dominant classes caricaturing all the classes of history, must now
produce the forces that will bring about its total subversion. The
so-called national bourgeoisie and the Arab bureaucracy have inherited
all the defects of those two classes without ever having known the
historical realizations those classes achieved in other societies. The
future Arab revolutionary forces which must arise from the ruins of the
June 1967 defeat must know that they have nothing in common with any of
the existing Arab regimes and nothing to respect among the established
powers that dominate the present world. They will find their model in
themselves and in the repressed experiences of revolutionary history.
The Palestinian question is too serious to be left to the states, that
is, to the colonels. It is too close to the two basic questions of
modern revolution—internationalism and the state—for any existing force
to be able to provide an adequate solution. Only an Arab revolutionary
movement that is resolutely internationalist and anti-state can both
dissolve the state of Israel and have on its side that state’s exploited
masses. And only through the same process will it be able to dissolve
all the existing Arab states and create Arab unity through the power of
the Councils.