Center the System, Build for Revolution

(Transcribed and Slightly Edited)

Friends, current and former: a current friend transcribed my Saturday 11/18 talk. I added a few things here and there but it’s pretty much the same thing as went up as audio.

A picture certain to trigger US Wokesters: a white male “patriarch” explaining revolution to children.

The counsel on why I must not criticize Hamas after the deadly October 7^th terror attack that organization’s military wing carried out in southern Israel came from a friend in three words: “center the oppressed,” she said.  An additional and related instruction told me to shed my First World white “fragility.”

In my religious and anti-communist friend’s view, which can be heard in certain parts of the US “left,” legitimate support for the mass Palestinian victims of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and terror requires stifling criticism of Hamas.

The message was clear: no matter how strident and thorough a radical like myself might be in my condemnation of the Zionist state, I betrayed the “the oppressed” and show my privilege by daring to criticize Hamas.

It was a curious command from a white First-World feminist woman who opposes the death penalty on Catholic grounds and who insists that Marxists like me are wrong to focus on the system of capitalism-imperialism since “the real oppression structure is patriarchy.”

The October 7^th action involved the cold-blooded mass murder of more than 1200 noncombatant civilians by Hamas and by others who came in from Gaza into kill and take hostages after Hamas breached Israel’s security fences (a curious thing for a Christian opponent of the death penalty to exempt from censure). Hamas is a deeply  reactionary Islamo-fascist organization with revanchist, arch-patriarchal notions of women’s role and status in society. As Alan Goodman explained on the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA three weeks ago:

“Hamas’s outlook and vision is an ‘extreme version of traditional relations and traditional values and culture.’ That includes misogyny, and endless, vengeful, religious war. Hamas’s founding and defining document, ‘The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,’ defines the role of women as an Islamic fundamentalist version of The Handmaids Tale…In opposition to educating the masses in the nature of capitalism-imperialism, and how Israel and Zionism serve as enforcers of a world of exploitation and oppression, and the need and basis for all of oppressed humanity to unite and struggle for real revolution, Hamas’s Covenant demands that schools and teachers ‘instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.’..The Covenant is virulently anti-Semitic with genocidal aspirations….Nowhere in its Covenant does Hamas pose a challenge to the imperialist system of economic and political domination of the oppressed nations of the world, including Palestine. They are, at most, fighting for a better deal within the confines of that system. And in the social relations they promote and enforce, they maintain backward and reactionary relations of even older, more archaic forms of oppression” (emphasis added).

Is Goodman expressing white First World fragility here? Hardly – more like revolutionary strength and solidity.

The fact that Hamas and others (see below) “picked up the gun” (as a friend of mine admiringly puts it)  to exact revenge on racist, Judeo-fascist Israel hardly makes it a noble and liberating people’s organization that deserves mention in the same breath with Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Revolution, which is what the Palestinians and all humanity need right now, isn’t about wanton  revenge. It certainly isn’t about virulent anti-Semitism and it certainly isn’t subordinating women on the model of the Iranian theocracy and the Taliban.   

It hardly seems doubtful that many Gazans harbor understandable ill-will and revenge impulses for the people of Israel, who enjoy First World lives on land stolen from impoverished and brutally tyrannized Palestinians.  How could they not? More than two million Palestinians have been penned-up by Israel and its vast repression apparatus in an open-air concentration camp called the Gaza Strip. What did Israel and its imperial sponsor the United States expect? What’s surprising about October 7?

Still, Hamas and October 7 were/are NOT in fact the legitimate expression of the will of most Gazans.  Nearly two-thirds of Gazans polled last summer wanted civil authority in Gaza handed from Hamas to the unpopular Palestinian Authority (PA). A solid Gazan majority wanted Hamas to maintain its declared ceasefire with Israel and to disband its military units.  Surely most Gazans knew that a vengeful action targeting Israeli civilians like October 7 would bring a massive and pitiless military response from US-backed Israel, something that would generate a Palestinian civilian body count far beyond the number of Israelis killed on October 7^th.

Most Gazans wanted nothing to do with anything like October 7.  And surely most Palestinian females and anti-sexists want nothing to do with Hamas’ vision of abject female subordination.

Yes, Hamas won an election in Gaza….seventeen years ago. There hasn’t been an election since.  Hamas won just 44% of the 2006 vote and did not win a majority in a single Gazan electoral district.  The vote was largely a reflection of Gazan disgust with the Israel-captive PA, considered the lesser evil by most Gazans. Since half of Gaza’s residents are  under 18 and Gazan life expectancy is abysmally low, only a small number of Gazans today ever cast a ballot for Islam-fascist Hamas. 

Hamas itself is split between military leaders who appear to have carried out the October 7 atrocity without the approval of a political leadership that, according to the remarkable investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, may now be ready to sell out the group’s military wing to Israel to save its own skin.

But let’s step back a bit from the Israel-Palestine situation for a moment and consider the whole “center the oppressed” and “stop being fragile and privileged” head trip for a moment. Beyond the “Israel-Hamas War,” which really ought to be called “The US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza,” consider the lethal nothingness of “center the oppressed” as an axiom and the “fragility” charge directed at a revolutionary communist who has so far participated in seven major Palestinian solidary marches, including today’s occupation of Lake Shore Drive.  Here’s the translation for that “woke” language: the real wisdom we need is found in the experience, consciousness and  actions of those at the bottom of society and we should not criticize their views and world view as we engage in advocacy and activism.

This is childish nonsense that induces “leftists” to tail rather than to help lead the masses out of oppression. By one reputable recent poll, for example, more than a fifth (22%) of Black Americans are currently backing the fascist leader and abject white supremacist Donald Trump in the next presidential election. (Speaking of patriarchy, I will hazard the guess that that Black support for the white male fascist and rapist Trump is at least three-fourths male.) Trump support is considerably higher among US Latinos, which is also richly  ironic given Trump’s viciously racist anti-immigrant  nativism, which includes an open call for giant immigrant round ups and concentration camps and a promise to “end birthright citizenship.” Am I “crossing lanes” and failing to “center the oppressed” out of white male colonizer “fragility” when I (naturally in my case with no illusions about Joe Biden’s presidency of course) point out the self-harming revanchist absurdity of Black and Latino support for the nativist and racist Trump?

Across Black America and in urban downtowns today one runs into gaggles of mostly young Black men caught up in the reactionary madness that is the women-hating Black Israelite Twelve Tribes movement.  Recently in a march for Gaza in the Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore, two angry Black men explained to me that Native Americans stole North America from its original inhabitants, the Black people of Africa, and that Arabs stole Palestine from its original Black inhabitants. Now, both narratives are of course total unmitigated historical lunacy without a hint of a wisp of a remote iota of historical or scientific evidence.  Before calling one of my female comrades a “bitch” and threatening to shoor her, a Black Israelite informed me that I was occupying originally Black African Israelite land in Chicago and needed to get on a boat and “go back to Finland.” 

My fellow revolutionary communists (who my Christian friend says are caught up in a “patriarchal fundamentalist religion”) and I didn’t need to center this deranged moron because of his oppression. We contained his crazy mother*#king ass and protected ourselves from his threats while talking to sane South Shore residents about the real basis for their oppression in the vast police-terrorized Black ghetto that is much of Chicago’s South Side: the system of capitalism-imperialism, inextricably bound up with racism and sexism – the system that distorts people’s hearts and minds to the point where they fall into ridiculous and lethal nonsense like the Twelve Tribes trip and backing Hamas even as they identify as pacifists and feminists.

It’s the same system behind the United States and Israel’s oppression and crucifixion of the Palestinian people, something that seems lost on US Palestinian activists who are fantasizing that they are going to decouple the American Empire from its pit-bull Israel.

Now this whole attitude that the oppressed know best and that’s where the real wisdom is – in the experience and consciousness of the oppressed — extends even to class in many cases. I’ve run across this many times with people who could be called identitarian proletarianists.

How childish. I’ve worked a slew of blue and gray-collar and precariat jobs alongside oppressed working-class people who have said and done a ton of revanchist and reactionary shit:

+ a bus driver who enjoyed pulling away from Black women with children trying to catch a ride, calling them “stupid niggers” as he roared off.

+ a working class union member in a cannery who started to give me a dangerous cleaning job and then said “no wait a minute, I can’t have a white man do this, let me find a Mexican.”

+  Sudanese packaging workers who denounced Black Americans as “lazy criminals” while putting Head and Shoulders bottles on a moving line in Iowa City.

+ a tattooed long-haired white worker who refused to taken any direction from “a nigger” – his description of a Congolese shop-floor team leader.

+ an Iranian-American parking garage cleaner who had helped the US occupation of Iraq and who told me that “Jews run the world” and must be “cleaned out.”

I could go on and on with stories like these. Am I not supposed to criticize workers (including fellow workers I’m working alongside) who do and say noxious shit like this because of their class oppression and status? For real? Am I supposed to believe that their status as exploited proletarians grants them some kind of special class-essentialist experience and wisdom that inoculates them from reactionary ideas and bourgeois and imperialist ideology and nativism and racism and secism? Seriously? I am not supposed to struggle with them about the real underlying system behind their oppression and that of their fellow workers of different races, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities…behind their prejudices? That’s religious “class truth” nonsense.

Please. Fuck “center the oppressed.” That little axiom sounds pretty fragile to me. Show some strength and solidity: center the system in struggling with the oppressed to join movements to liberate humanity from oppression down to its systemic roots.

She would deny it but my Hamas-defending friend is channeling the anti-revolutionary left pathology of wokester identitarianism and the related mental affliction of “standpoint epistemology.” Acting like the reverse negative image of the white Christian nationalist neofascists, they bestow exaggerated and even outrageous intellectual and political privilege on one’s skin color and/or gender and/or sexual identity and/or ethnicity and/or (in the proletarianist version of the standpoint disorder) class over and against basic scientific investigation and rigor. Left wokesters’ left-ness is all about who you are, with the who being all about your race and/or gender and/or sexual identity and/or even class instead of what serious and hard intellectual and political work you’ve done and how you propose to work with others to liberate humanity from oppression, from all oppression. Their “standpoint” is one of identity and experience rather than science, objective reality, and theory tested by evidence.

Left woketarians are invested in cancel culture, which is a real and obstructionist thing even if the right exploits and distorts that pathology for revanchist purposes.  Confusing victimization with moral and intellectual attainment and political vision, the hyper-identitarian standpoint-epistemological left also promotes an “Oppression Olympics” mindset that seeks to determine who are the most truly oppressed people of all instead of how to build a revolutionary movement against to defeat all oppression.

Without such a movement, left-identified folks are left with nothing but milquetoast reformism, the usual bourgeois electoral bullshit (reflected in Palestinian solidarity activists’ recent  chant telling Biden “we’ll remember in November”), utter passivity, and/or or bitter revenge-ism.  Reflected in her statement that “Israel you’ll get yours,” my friends’ concept of revolution is mired in violent revenge, which is every bit as ironic for her supposed pacificism as her defense of Hamas is for her declared feminism. It’s a mindset rooted in The Holy Bible: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” an axiom that amounts to nothing more than an inversion of position – to payback and retribution without systemic change.

Sorry, no.  My perspective (my “fundamentalist religion” – LOL) says that the Gazan people and all humanity need a revolution.  Revolutions aren’t about bloody revenge against ordinary if differentially privileged citizens, they are about a mass movement to overthrow the dominant oppressive sociopolitical order and replace it with a new and liberating one.  It says center the need for revolution.  It says center all of humanity on the need to confront and topple capitalism-imperialism.  It says lead and not tail the oppressed in a many-sided revolutionary struggle against any and all forms of exploitation and oppression – a struggle that urgently needs to be waged on a rapidly growing scale if humanity now is going to have any chance of surviving and thriving in coming years. And for this it is recurrently cancelled not only on the right but also on “the left,” such as it is.

Correction: ex-friend.    When you decide to be seriously out about advocating actual revolution, “left” friends start dropping like flies in the United States. Someone should write a book titled “The Left Against Revolution.”