Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr, and the class structure of Israel posted by Meaders
For those who've not seen it, Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr's classic essay, "The Class Character of Israel" is now available online. Machover and Orr were founding members of Matzpen: Machover now lectures in logic at King's College London, Orr continues to live and campaign in Israel. Despite its age, the analysis remains as sharp as ever: a dissection of Israel's social and economic structure, and a firm rebuttal to those socialists seeking to find a uniquely progressive role for the Israeli working class.ISRAELI SOCIETY, like all other class societies, contains conflicting social interests—class interests which give rise to an internal class straggle. Yet Israeli society as a whole has been engaged, for the last 50 years, in a continuous external conflict: the conflict between Zionism and the Arab world, particularly the Palestinians. Which of these two conflicts is dominant and which is subordinate? What is the nature of this subordination and what is its dynamic? These are questions that everyone involved with Israeli society and politics must answer.
For revolutionaries inside Israel these questions are not academic. The answers given determine the strategy of the revolutionary struggle. Those who consider the internal class conflict to be the dominant one concentrate their efforts on the Israeli working class and attach secondary importance to the struggle against the colonizing, nationalistic, and discriminatory character of the Zionist state. This position sees the external conflict as a derivative of the internal one. Moreover, in this perspective, the internal dynamics of Israeli society will lead to a revolution in Israel, without this necessarily depending on a social revolution in the Arab world.
The experience of classical capitalist countries has often demonstrated that internal class conflicts and interests dominate external conflicts and interests. However, this theory fails to hold in certain specific cases. For example, in a colonized country under the direct rule of a foreign power, the dynamics of the colonized society cannot be deduced simply from the internal conflicts of that society, since the conflict with the colonizing power is dominant. Israel is neither a classic capitalist country nor is it a classic colony. Its economic, social, and political features are so unique that any attempt to analyze it through the application of theories or analogies evolved for different societies will be a caricature. An analysis must be based rather on the specific characteristics and specific history of Israeli society.
Read the rest, and Machover's interview in Socialist Worker. (There's also this hysterical - in both senses - article on Matzpen that might provide a little light relief.)