In the present, the Left has been completely marginalized in both Israel and Palestine, so the historical leftist perspective regarding the conflict is moot. The contemporary western Left appears to have given up on the prospect of class struggle in the region, seemingly content to tail the Palestinian resistance regardless of its ideological character. However, we believe it is important to keep the memory of that prospect alive. This is because we think it is still the case that true emancipation in the region can only be the result of class struggle by the workers of all the nationalities who live there.
Category: English
The contradictory nature of Capital
The contradiction leads to major social problems that render capitalism harmful and necessitate its overcoming. We have seen that despite the fact that technological development can increase our free time and hence our well-being (position on Freedom), this cannot happen under capitalism as the capitalists have to keep people working as much as possible. Technology thus becomes instead a means for the improved exploitation of workers, subjecting them to cruel working conditions that are designed to extract as much surplus value as possible from their labour (this is especially the case in the ‘developing’ world where most of the world’s manufacturing takes place). On the other hand, the availability of technology also facilitates unemployment enabling the capitalists to keep down wages by having more workers competing for fewer jobs (this is especially the case in the Western world). In other words, while technology creates the opportunity to redivide work so that everyone works less, under capitalism it only leads to the twin problems of overwork and unemployment.
Exploitation
On one side we have the capitalist employer, who pays for labour-power at its value, practically rents it from the worker for a set amount of time, and demands to use this time as he pleases and reap the results of his investment. On the other side we have the worker who, as the producer and seller of the commodity labour power, he tries to sell it as expensively as possible and to have a say in its sale price and its use (just as the landlord of a house determines the rent and use of the house). Both parties can argue that under the market law dictating the equal exchange of products, they are in the right. The capitalist rightly maintains that he pays the worker the full value of his labor power, and the laborer in turn rightly maintains that he is not paid the entire value of his labor.
Human Nature and Alienation
The alienation of people from their labor process, its products and those around them entails their alienation from their ability to control and direct society collectively. The result of our collective productive activity is the totality of the material and spiritual life of people, that is, society. The fact that we are alienated from this collective productive activity means that we are also alienated from its result, the society in which we live. Our cooperation in production is not something we have consciously chosen to do, but the unconscious result of our competition for the satisfaction of our immediate individual interests such as our personal survival. This blind competition leads to the spontaneous division of labor, spontaneous in the sense that it happens without any plan and direction from people. The sum total of the productive activity of the workers constitutes an unconsciously collective and interdependent whole that is regulated by the spontaneous division of labor in capitalism. The consequence: we do not realize that society is our own power and collective creation, but instead we consider it a foreign power with its own laws (e.g., the naturalized ‘laws’ of the market), independent of our productive activity. As we naturalize these laws, we believe that we can do nothing about them and we become their slaves, that is, the slaves of our own social relations and production. We accept the social domination of capital as a natural and inevitable fact. This needs to change.
Freedom
Marx’s conception of freedom leads to a radical critique of bourgeois society, the society we live in today. That form of society is underpinned by the liberal conception of freedom, and Marx has shown this conception to be confused. In the first instance, Marx’s account of freedom as self-governance is incompatible with basic tenets of the bourgeois order, most notably the capitalist mode of production and its social laws. For example, as Max Horkheimer puts it, in bourgeois society, the unemployed worker is asked to accept as objectively necessary the fact that economic laws make it impossible for him to be hired, because conditions are such that firms cannot afford to take on new staff (‘The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom’). But of course the laws governing social systems, such as economic systems, are social, and so up to us, and so not at all impossible to change – so long as we take charge of our conditions of existence. In treating these laws as immutable, bourgeois society abnegates responsibility for this task, failing to give expression to our freedom to self-govern.
Our Position on Capitalism: What It Is, and Why We Should Be Against It
We consider capitalism to be the fundamental social problem that the Left needs to tackle, and it can only be tackled adequately if we have a clear understanding of what kind of problem it is. With that in mind, we consider it necessary to re-state and re-answer the question: what is capitalism and why should we be against it? This document is our response to this question. We hope that our document will rekindle debates about the nature of capitalism and what is to be done about it, putting the problem of capitalism again at the forefront of Leftist discourse.
Culture and the Left
The result of the decline of bourgeois culture is that its best aspects have been forgotten even by most bourgeois intellectuals, erased by postmodernism, with the possible exception of advances in the natural sciences. There appear to be very few intellectuals, either from the bourgeois or the proletarian class, that have received an education in the best traditions of the past and who can thus transmit their education to the proletarian masses. A big reason for this has been the Stalinist total rejection of bourgeois culture as irredeemable decadence, a rejection that the Left has since naturalized. By throwing away the baby together with the bathwater with regards to culture, where does that leave us?
Conclusion
The real test of Marxism is thus whether it succeeds in becoming the social and political consciousness that changes reality. This is because dialectical materialism aims to be a theory with practical import – it does not aim to describe history and reality but to change it. We saw that for Marx anything that remains unrealized in a sense remains unreal, and this includes revolutionary theory. As he puts it in the 2nd Thesis on Feuerbach: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.” Only if the proletariat realizes communism through revolution will Marxism be vindicated.
Communism as Freedom
In communism, human beings will rationally legislate over and direct both their individual lives and the collective life of society, acquiring the position of free subjects.
Η Κριτική της Προλεταριοποιημένης Εργασίας
Από την ανάλυσή του για τη μισθωτή εργασία ως αναπόφευκτα να οδηγεί στην προοδευτική εξαθλίωση και καταπίεση των εργαζομένων, ο Μαρξ δείχνει ότι το προλεταριάτο πρέπει να υπερβεί τη μισθωτή εργασία αν είναι να κατακτήσει ποτέ ευημερία και ελευθερία. Η ισότητα των μισθών και η αναδιανομή του πλούτου που κηρύττουν σοσιαλιστές όπως ο Προυντόν είναι ανεπαρκείς.[26] Δεδομένου ότι αυτή η αλλοτριωμένη μισθωτή εργασία έχει αποδειχθεί ότι είναι η προϋπόθεση της ατομικής ιδιοκτησίας και συνεπώς της αστικής κοινωνίας, συνεπάγεται ότι κάθε προσπάθεια υπέρβασής της είναι μια προσπάθεια υπέρβασης της ίδιας της αστικής κοινωνίας.
1917 