anti-nationalist action: CRITIQUING CAMPISM | GA Matiasz (aka “Lefty” Hooligan)
CRITIQUING CAMPISM
I’m on the left of the Left. A libertarian socialist. I have been for fifty-five years now, ever since 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War movement. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2–24–2022 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza on 10–27–2023 I’ve been leery of mass anti-war protests organized by crude Leninists, terror apologists and left anti-semites like the Tweedledum-Tweedledee vanguardists of the PSL/WWP joined-at-the-hip by their faux ANSWER “Coalition.”
This hard Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left divides the world into imperialist nations versus anti-imperialist nations. It’s assumed that those countries in the imperialist “camp” are reactionary whereas those countries in the anti-imperialist “camp” are progressive. This basic campism insists that the US is the center of global imperialism and therefore the primary enemy, with Israel an imperialist appendage. The anti-imperialist forces arrayed against the US are considered “on the right side of history” and are, if not socialist, at least leaning Left. So campism implies that those who oppose imperialism, even reactionary Islamist Hamas, are progressive.
I’m pro-Jewish, anti-Israeli state, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Hamas armed party. But I’m convinced there can never be a simple, easy solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The Israeli government has committed war crimes; the indiscriminate use of white phosphorous, collective punishment of Palestinians, massacres of unarmed Arab civilian protesters, the relentless assault on Arab hospitals and communities. Hamas has also committed war crimes; suicide bombings, indiscriminate rocket fire, using Palestinian civilians and hospitals as human shields, the massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7. And there’s been populist pogroms on both sides, grassroots war crimes like the murders of West Bank Palestinians by the Israeli Settler Movement and the looting of Israeli communities and bases by Gazans after October 7.
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According to the anti-imperialist camp however Hamas can do no wrong and Israel can do no right. Hamas is engaged in a “decades long fight for national liberation,” a legitimate “struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” Israel is “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and “fascist-type oppression,” the “genocide being carried out by the Zionist terror state.” Resistance against “the Zionist entity-by any means necessary” is “a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation” by “Palestinian freedom fighters” who “are not terrorists!” Indeed. “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance” (by massacring civilians) “must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”
The campist anti-imperialist “unwavering solidarity” and “unequivocally expressed support” for the Palestinian people and “their attack against Israel” becomes pure Manichaean “good vs evil.”[*] I prefer the straightforward approach of Gilles Dauvé who argued: “I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an ‘anti-imperialist,’ since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.” I too am against imperialism, but I’m not an anti-imperialist.
Much has been made of former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacres when he said: “Back in South Africa in the era of apartheid, what was the problem? Was it that some members of the Black resistance, including the ANC but not only the ANC, took up arms against the South African regime and sometimes killed innocent people? Was that the problem of apartheid? No. The problem was apartheid.” What this skirts is the history of the original apartheid system. That the ANC actually signed onto the Geneva Protocols in 1980, that the ANC was party to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that clearly found the ANC in violation of the Geneva Protocols, and that ultimately the ANC accepted those judgments. What we need is to hold Israel and Hamas, Britain, the US and Europe accountable for the 75+ years of heinous war crimes in Israel/Palestine, not make excuses for them.
Campist anti-imperialism discredits the Left as a whole. The machinations of the PSL, WWP and ANSWER “Coalition” are particularly destructive, with their retro-Marcyism, support for dictators like Putin and Assad, disdain for workers struggles, sabotage of other socialists, sectarianism against alternative movements, and strong-arm tactics to silence radicals of different views. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars they’ve sought to control the anti-war movement specifically and the Left generally as vanguardist fiefdoms. John Reimann (“Oakland Socialist”) insists the present anti-war movement should be democratically organized and all points of view be represented. Jason Schulman and Dan La Botz contend (“Socialist Forum”) there is only one camp, “our camp,” “our commitment to democracy, to the workers’ movement in all countries, and to the struggle for international socialism.” I heartily concur.
[*] Preceding pastiche of quotes from Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, Black Lives Matter, Party of Socialism and Liberation, Workers World Party.
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Originally published at http://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com on December 1, 2023.