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.
There’s a lot more in this text, including some points we disagree with, such as his claims that the invasion of Lebanon was “a working class demand” and that “revolutionary defeatism only has meaning in Israel” . We will come back to those and others in another article but want to stress already that nobody in IP agrees with Singh’s view that inter-imperialist conflicts “play a subordinate explanatory role” in this war and that “For America, Israel is a strategic luxury which neither helps nor hurts their goals”. The events in Syria prove that isn’t true, as we argued in the previous article. It’s maybe worth to mention that Singh finalized his essay before these events. He writes that “the situation might escalate into full-scale war” but ads, “if so, it would a product of Israeli domestic politics”. We disagree. There is more going on than “ Israeli domestic politics”. But, as said, more on that later.
IP
The Nakba of a Surplus Humanity
by Gabbar Singh
Gaza is yet another barbaric act of what has been a barbaric century. As I write, Gazans have suffered over a year of its second nakba. Conservatively, deathtoll will be an estimated eight percent of the population. Over the same period, the Israelis have made a bloody land grab on West Bank as well as ground operations and shelling Lebanon. Yet again, democrats have shown themselves to be just as bloodthirsty as the ‘terrorists’ and the ‘dictators’.
As revolutionaries try to come to term with events, a debate has unfolded as to what primarily drove and drives current events. On one side, the IP Leaflet from December 2023 argued that Israel is eliminating Gazans because they are a superfluous mass that acts as a deadweight to profitability. Since the 1990s, Israel has politically engineered the ‘de-development of Gaza’ that has effectively decoupled its economy from Palestinian labor. After 2005, Israel began an economic siege against Gaza that ballooned unemployment up to 45%. Gaza’s economy was all but synonymous with smuggling tunnels and petty commodity production.
While I agree that Israel is being driven by a systemic compulsion to eliminate a surplus population, current theories fail to prove the argument. They fail because they make no distinction between relative and consolidated surplus populations. As a result, it cannot isolate the differentia of why and when a capitalist state opts to annihilate a part of its population. In capitalism, violence is omnipresent but genocide is rare. Capitalism has a structural tendency to create surplus populations. But, structural tendencies express themselves differently based on time and location. Various kinds of surplus populations do not suffer a singular fate.
In the next section, I will expand explanation of the distinction and how it creates differing forms of violence. Then, I will provide the historical evidence. Then, I will answer the primary disagreement which is that imperialism plays a primary role in events. Finally, I will end with some comments on how revolutionary defeatism works under conditions of genocide.
Surplus Populations and Differing Forms of Violence
Capital accumulation tends to constantly eject labor-power from some industries and absorb them into others. Inter-firm profit movements dictate relative labor demand across firms and industries, which expel labor from some industries and absorb them into others. During ascendancy, capitalists can realize absolute gains because they can all achieve gains as long as the pie grows bigger overall. As such, ascendancy sees labor absorbed into industry at a greater rate than it is shed. Of course, not all labor can be absorbed. Already in the 1950s, labor economists discovered a surplus population within America. However, capital can absorb enough workers so as to maintain profitability and political stability.
Rentierism defines decadent capitalism. What Marx identified as ‘countervailing tendencies’ to profitability loss tends to be the dominant way in which capital accumulates. Those countervailing tendencies are rentier practices whereby capitalists grow at the expense of one another. During a decadent phase, private interests of capitalists and the general interest of capital come into contradiction which creates more volatile and more socially destabilizing accumulation strategies. Marginal profits for individual capitalists can and do increase. But, these profits come at the expense of greater instability and resiliency loss for a regime of accumulation.
Amongst the most important of rentier practices are attacks upon workers that cheapen the overall cost of reproducing labor-power. These attacks create a mass of workers who are either under- or unemployed. These workers are surplus populations who exist at the margins of accumulation. Mostly, they exist as a ‘relative surplus population’ that are either underemployed within formal sectors of the economy or informal workers. Even if they are unemployed, they still should have the legal rights necessary to access the labor market so they can be potentially employable as an individual. Underemployed or informal workers are within the capital-wage labor relation. They are precarious but still produce surplus-value. As a result, they are not a deadweight upon profitability but can, in fact, increase individual profits because of super-exploitation. Finally, they tend to be politically relevant populations whose interests cannot be ignored by politicians.
In its relative form, policing and welfarism can contain surplus populations. Workers suffer a ‘slow death’ based on social abandonment, homelessness, health, and/or poor living conditions. Military-style mass violence is possible but highly improbable. Police violence fabricates and maintains the order of wage labor through risk management and risk elimination. Monopoly-seeking capitalists and welfare-seeking proles always threaten to circumvent market rationality. Extra-economic tactics like theft or plunder are always options that capitalists have in relation to each other; riots and strikes are extra-economic weapons labor can use against capital. The police use force so to discipline all actors so that they all obey market rationality. Since the 1970s, governments have replaced military action with policing actions based on law and order: the War on Terror; WMD interdiction; or humanitarian intervention. These are conflicts in which internal societal contradictions interconnect with the imperialist order so as to unleash civil wars and subnational conflicts. Police violence is an iron law of capitalism. Genocide arises from different circumstances.
Rarely, capitalism creates a sizable consolidated surplus population. Consolidated surplus populations are those proletarians who have been totally ejected from the production process. They are a deadweight on capital because they do not produce value. At best, they engage in petty commodity production that does not expand national or global capital. Consolidated populations tend to be so marginalized that they have little political leverage on the state. As a result, politicians can ignore them because the social base for the regime remains intact. Usually, inherited or fabricated ethnic, national, or religious divides decide who will and who will not be excluded from a polity.
Class Struggle and the Creation of Superfluity
Class struggle is both generic to capitalism as a whole and specific to the various national territorial zones of accumulation. Given both its generic and its specific character, it would be one-sidedly false either to ignore contingent decisions in the name of global explanation or else focus so obsessively upon politics so as to make it seem as if no overarching historical logic is at play. In Palestine, the workers’ defeat during the First Intifada set in motion the road to genocide. It was driven by the restructuring and reconfiguring logic of capital. It is that, not classical colonialism, which explains present facts on the ground.
In December 1987, the First Intifada announced itself by a wildcat general strike. Workplaces across the occupied territories were deserted. Young men and women acted through strikes, boycotts, and stone throwing. At the beginning of the Intifada, coordinating and local popular committees organized the struggle autonomously from the PLO. The latter was informed after decisions were made if at all. The Palestinian workers who acted came from a population whose “faith in a solution driven by external actors, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), based in Tunis, and the Arab countries, had declined.” Unlike anytime before or since, part of the Israeli public demonstrated sympathy toward the intifada.
Over the next six years, Israel and the PLO pacified the rebellion. Israel brutalized Palestinian demonstrators either directly or through its paid Islamist groups. The PLO was more subtle and all the more efficient because of it. They created paramilitary gangs that engaged in sectarian violence; by 1990, Palestinians were killing each other at greater numbers than Israelis. Nationalist ideology was used to retake control over workers institutions. Behind the scenes, they prepared the rapprochement that culminated in the Oslo Accords. At Oslo, the PLO did not betray either their own principles or those of the nation. They pursued both logics to their natural conclusion. All nationalists must discipline their workers. It takes precedence over and above any feuds they have with another ruling class.
During the post-Oslo period, Israel created a new regime of accumulation in the occupied territories. In the West Bank, they accepted a Palestinian nouvelle bourgeoisie whose accumulation either goes into the settler economy or is embezzled. If West Bank was to be co-opted, Gaza was to be dismantled. It was more militant than the West Bank. Israelis perceived it as much more difficult to pacify through capitalist development. As a result, Israel pursued de-development in Gaza. It effectively decoupled the economy from Palestinian labor. Economic restructuring took place in and through counterinsurgency.
Internally, Israel began its own liberalization process. However, Jewish labor was ferociously hostile toward it. Unfortunately, it pursued its interest through reactionary trade unions and through far right populist parties. By the early 2000s, Israel saw a stalemate between the majority Ashkenazim bourgeoisie who favored liberalization and peace and the majority Mizrahi working class that favored welfare and warfare. In this context, Ariel Sharon waged his ‘dual war’ whereby he conceded the working class’s political demands and the bourgeoisie’s economic demands. On the Palestinian side of the Green Line, he destroyed the Oslo framework and enacted ‘politicide’ against the Palestinians. On the Israeli side, Sharon passed through a comprehensive set of privatization policies. In 2005, Sharon pulled settlers out of Gaza in favor of a low-cost occupation based on economic siege and imprisonment. Since 2005, Gazans have existed as a consolidated surplus population whose immiseration excludes them totally from economic life. Already back in 2018, the UN warned that Gaza would become eventually uninhabitable due to inadequate physical infrastructure.
After decouplement, Israel broke strikes and boycotts as a source of leverage that workers had over the economy. Fatah and its policemen have a bureaucratic nerve center almost everywhere they have nominal control over. Hamas act as prison guards that snuff out all serious opposite to its rule. Israel has favored a combination of high-tech surveillance and aerial bombing to contain the insurgency. Nothing significant has yet to develop outside the parties.
Military Futility
In lieu of class action, Palestinian parties have either favored outright collaboration (Fatah) or adventurist terror actions (Hamas, PFLP). Each side is forced into a cycle of war where neither can conventionally defeat the other. Israel pursues what it calls a ‘Dahiya doctrine’, which is an updated version of Giulio Douhet’s airpower doctrine which advocated the use of aerial bombing to terrorize civilians. In theory, it is supposed to break civilian morale and by extension unravel the social basis of resistance. Over the past decade, they used a softer version of their doctrine through ‘mowing the lawn.’ They inflicted civilian casualties in order to neutralize without thereby containing Hamas. Already by 2016, they had grown tired of wars of attrition with Hamas. October 7th gave them the excuse to unleash a total war. They seek to win surrender through the elimination of society.
Organizationally, Israel cannot eliminate the Palestinian guerrillas. The Palestinians have access to foreign funding and to foreign equipment. Israel cannot disrupt those networks which are based on social relations of which physical infrastructure is only a part. Hamas’s leadership lives abroad in Qatar and in Turkey. In Gaza, the militias have turned the strip into a series of barricades and mouseholes, which are connected by bombproof tunnels. Finally, the Palestinian guerillas cannot be coerced based on civilian casualties. They have willingly placed thousands in harm’s way, without any safety or relief plans, because they believe it will help them win international public opinion.
Equally, the Palestinian insurgency cannot win. A bourgeois-nationalist insurgency grabs a piece of territory, then replaces one police order with another. It can expand only to the extent that its nationality has the majority. The Vietnamese faced no limits to expansion because it was a fight between North and South Vietnam. Both claimed to speak for the same nation. The Algerian FLN faced no problem because the indigenous vastly outnumbered the French colonists. The Palestinians do face a problem. Both Israelis and Palestinians understand themselves as separate nations who have sovereign rights over a single peace of land. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have roughly 50-50 demographic parity. Palestinian militias cannot fight or win a war of national liberation.
All they can do is cause lots of damage through targeted killings of Israeli civilians or indiscriminate rocketfire. Palestinian organizations use terrorism because they believe it will degrade Israeli public morale. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was accompanied by a maximalist fantasy about the quasi-automatic collapse of the Zionist project. Now, terrorism is justified by the more humble belief that it will force Israel to accept a two-state settlement. But, terrorism is a spectacle. It participates and reinforces all ideologies including the ones it seemingly opposes. Terrorism reinforces the paranoia at the heart of Zionist ideology which says that all Jews have lived for all times under a metaphysical terror that seeks to eliminate them. It reinforces submission to the repressive state apparatus because it provides an illusion of order and of safety through its exercise of mass violence against the Other. The nation state provides psychological outlet for aggressive rage which is then steered into a desire for conquest. The Palestinian so-called Left, the PFLP and the DFLP, have long claimed to want alliance with Mizrahi working classes. They are either lying or stupid because targeted killing of Israeli civilians could never hope to create the alliance that they state they want.
Like all states, Israel cares for its continuity. Nationalists are loyal to abstractions like ‘The People’ or ‘The Nation’ whose organizational expression comes in the form of the state and whose leaders express its will. Those abstractions are not synonymous with individuals of a community. Terrorist actions are convenient excuses to deploy the latest military-security technology or to cover up this or that domestic conflict. Politicians can and always will sacrifice individuals for their political projects and ambitions. Any government that implements a program like ‘The Hannibal Doctrine’ will never be phased by the murder of its own people.
On Imperialism
Against the surplus population thesis, some in the group have focused upon inter-imperialist rivalry. As argued, Israel-Hamas war is a theater of combat behind which lay the interests of regional and of global powers. Some evidence can be justifiably cited. Palestinian militias receive arms and funding from the Iranian regime. Those militias help Iran to pursue its own raison d’etat. Western governments supply billions of dollars of unconditional military aid to Israel. Almost singlehandedly, America has bankrolled the genocide. Recently, China has more openly asserted its leadership in the Middle East. It advertises itself as leader of the ‘axis of resistance’ against Western imperialism. Undeniably, world rivalries have sharpened.
But, these structural facts play a subordinate explanatory role. Palestinian parties and militias operate autonomously from regional patrons. Little evidence shows that Iran had a role in planning Al-Aqsa Flood. Briefly, Israel and Iran traded attacks. But, it was more Punch and Judy show than serious geopolitical conflict. After Iran conducted its symbolic strike, Israel responded with another attack in kind. Iran made no other response than a tweet, which stated the matter finished. In the beginning, Hezbollah stated it would not open a second front. Only recently has it taken actions because its domestic credibility would have been threatened. After a brief war, Hezbollah signed a ceasefire with Israel. They did so in the absence of a pause in Gaza. China has good relations with all warring parties. China is Israel’s second largest trading partner. For America, Israel is a strategic luxury which neither helps nor hurts their goals. They support Israel because it is a zero-cost endeavor for Empire. To be clear, I am not saying that imperialism plays *no* role in events. But, it expresses itself in subnational conflicts very differently than it does in interstate conflicts such as Hezbollah-Israel, Iran-Israel, or Russia-Ukraine. Presently, If Netanyahu cannot convince America to let Israel re-occupy Gaza, then he might satisfy his coalition with an interstate war. But, so far, it has been measured and controlled. Iran does not want to fight a war that it knows it cannot win. Israel has contained Hezbollah which can now retreat without significant public opinion loss.
On Revolutionary Defeatism
Revolutionary defeatism remains a principle but expectations have to be realistic. In Lebanon and Iran, we should be emphatic that the ‘enemy begins at home.’ Between 2017 and 2022, Lebanese workers staged an insurrection against their kleptocratic masters. All political parties, including Hezbollah, collaborated in order to put down the insurrection. Recently, Iran saw a wave of protests focused upon women’s rights. Arguably, the Ayatollahs currently face their biggest problem since the revolution. Their popularity is at an all-time low. Neither the Lebanese nor the Iranian workers should be blackmailed into defencism. Obviously, Iranian and Lebanese workers feel a sincere desire to help Palestinians. But, if they support their ruling class, then they substitute a short-term feeling of action for a long-term understanding that Palestine is best served by overthrowing all the wretched governments of the Middle East.
In Gaza itself, it is obviously impossible to seek a revolutionary situation to the war. Communists cannot do more than the proletarians themselves. Indeed, no short-term solution seems feasible at all. Israel will only be more and more the prisoner of its genocidal logic. The Palestinian insurgents will continue fighting for fighting’s sake. Nothing will change without putting an immediate end to Israeli aggression in order to allow real social struggles to develop. Many Gazans have grumbled about Hamas both before and during the war (Amira Hess). After the conflict, I suspect many Gazans to be unhappy with a leadership that lived safe while a nakba was brought upon them. Meanwhile, revolutionary defeatism only has meaning in Israel as the occupying power. The Israeli working class has been drunk on ideology for quite some time. How to break the thrall will be a necessary question to ask but a difficult one to answer. Until then, we can only insist as Otto Ruhle did in 1940: “No matter to which side the proletariat offers itself, it will always be among the defeated.”