
A leaflet IP published in december 2023 on the slaughter in Gaza raised a discussion within our group. What was objected to was that the leaflet related the mass murder committed by the IDF to Israeli capitalism’s need to control and reduce a surplus population that yielded no profit for it, and that it saw in this an indication of the genocidal direction in which capitalism as a whole is going. Against this view it was argued that only the rise of interimperialist tension explains this conflict. Singh, who is not a member of IP but discussed with us, reacts to this debate in the following essay. He agrees with those who defended the leaflet that a surplus population was the target of the Israeli operation but argues that, to understand this, a distinction needs to be made between the relative surplus population which the capitalist mode of production creates everywhere and which it can contain with policing and welfarism, and consolidated surplus populationwhich is a marginalized deadweight it seeks to eliminate. The latter, so he claims, exists only in specific conditions and he goes on to show how these conditions arose in Israel/Palestine and led to the destruction of Gaza.
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