Ep 229 - The Gang Goes Intifada
Added 2023-11-01 10:07:01 +0000 UTCAndy and Sean discuss the invasion in Gaza, Israel's move towards ethnic cleansing, the history of proletarian resistance in Palestine, and theorize class conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian national projects and its working classes. We also talk about what all this means for those communists in the US removed from the conflict.
Some of our reading for the episode:
https://decompositions.noblogs.org/files/2023/10/Explosion- Point.pdf
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/israel-the-shattering-of-a-dream/
https://brooklynrail.org/2015/03/field-notes/negation-of-the-diaspora
https://libcom.org/article/worldwide-intifada-1
https://parallaxviews.podbean.com/e/tamara/
Shir Hever’s Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation
Azzam Tamimi's Hamas: A History from Within
Song: Hawkwind - Who's Gonna Win the War?
Comments
Chiming in hella late: Change the name! Sounds like y’all want to. Sure it may not be actively dragging the show down, but it doesn’t sound like either of you are all the way comfortable with it. Your patrons or follower count might stumble a little, but I have faith that the quality of what y’all put out will set you up to exceed those loses pretty shortly. Challenges like that are sometimes needed to get the creativity flowing.
Cowabungular Manslaughter
2023-11-15 16:33:48 +0000 UTCYeah you blatantly ignore everything I said about the necessary alliance between a revolutionary vanguard in the imperial core and the liberation struggle in the colonized countries. Easier to flatten the material differences that way. 👍🏽
teenynoid
2023-11-11 02:55:00 +0000 UTC“What the fuck do I know” Apparently nothing about the bloody dead end that is national liberation. Google the Marikana Strike in South Africa and note Cyril Ramaphosa’s transformation from marxist ANC labour militant to capitalist mass-murderer. THE CHARACTER MASK IS A HELLUVA DRUG
daytorn
2023-11-11 00:25:55 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Thank you for this much-needed perspective. On a technical note, could you perhaps reverse your respective proximities to the mic or somehow modulate so the volume of your voices is more proportionate?
Timothy Williams
2023-11-10 16:07:00 +0000 UTCDisclaimer: I love these guys, especially Sean. A worker-theoretician in the grand tradition of Bill Haywood. I'll continue listening to them. That out of the way – whole stretches of this analysis are aggressively ignorant. Just completely flattens the racialized apartheid state in an attempt to salvage the settler-colonial Zionist proletarians. I'll stick mostly with the tortured comparisons between Isr*el and the USA. Andy asserts that there's not much difference between the settlers gathering for the EDM rave outside of Sderot (the one where IDF fired through them to attack Hamas) and Brooklyn “there's raves outside of Rikers, which is one big human rights violation.” Christ, man. What are you TALKING about? For that to be accurate you'd need: 50% of the Rikers population to be children F-16s to buzz Rikers constantly as psychological warfare against those children Organized bombings announced in advance to as an excuse for the settlers to break out lawn chairs and pop molly, the way you and me would watch the thunder roll in I could yammer on; you get it. Likewise with the “Isr*eli proletarians are worried about their rent.” Yeah, no shit. We all share concerns about rentier capitalism. But the Zionists and USA proletarians are like... apples and oranges doesn't even cut it. More like apples and dragonfruit. For that to be true, from age 18 US workers would have to serve a mandatory 4-year term in the warrior-cop brigades that infest our country against a Jim Crow racialized underclass comprising 55% of the population. Our politicians would have to be: 1 crunchy granola mom; 15 George Wallaces; and 4 David Dukes, one of whom was allowed to distribute M-16s to the guy in your neighborhood who drives a lifted F-150 and wears Oakleys. Likewise with their poo-pooing the national liberation struggle. Like...WHAT? It's IN Lenin! He insists on assisting the national liberation struggle of oppressed nations while cultivating party organization and discipline, so that those structures are in place to prevent the precise kind of comprador indigenous bourgeois co-optation Andy and Sean caution against. That was the position of the PLO and PFLP in the 60s and 70s; it's the position of the PFLP literally today. I don't know. A lot of this rang to me as an idealization of the kibbutznik kumbaya model of the Mapai/Histadrut coalition from the 40s-70s, which SOUNDS socialist until you reckon with the fact that THE SOCIALIST ZIONISTS DID THE NAKBA. It's strained, tone-deaf, more than a little condescending. I'm surprised these two had seemingly little understanding – or maybe it's just contempt – for the actual decolonial struggle that necessarily precedes any internationalist proletarian movement. But what the fuck do I know.
teenynoid
2023-11-08 19:00:17 +0000 UTCIt's still a great name
Evan
2023-11-02 23:36:49 +0000 UTCSo punk to outgrow your name. Never apologize. Not one step back.
Thomas Rogers
2023-11-02 19:01:05 +0000 UTCDanya Qato was a guest on Death Panel last year, and she quoted an essay by Sobhi Samour called “Covid-19 and the Necroeconomy of Palestinian Labor in Israel” Journal of Palestinian Studies. Vol. 49 No. 4. Summer 2020: “The specificity of Palestinian labor centers around it having to survive under two overdetermining logics that often converge in practice, but do so conjecturally rather than structurally: the logic of settler colonial elimination and that of capital. That is to say, while Palestinian workers are exploited by settler colonial capital, this is historically not been Zionism’s original or ideal arrangement. Rather, in its ideal scenario, there would be no Palestinian left to be exploited. “After 1967, its policies of de-development resulted in hollowing out local productive capacity of the economy by preventing it from accessing and utilizing critical inputs needed to promote internal growth, thus surrounding local job creation structurally insufficient to meet demand of a growing population. Since the beginning of the century, it has bifurcated Palestinian labor by continuing to subject West Bank labor to conventional forms of colonial exploitation. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza, once Israel’s main reservoir for cheap labor, have been rendered profitable not through their labor force but instead through it becoming a testing ground for Israel’s high tech weapons and surveillance industry. “While any analyses of the Palestinian labor question need to be attentive to its specificity, they need not foreclose situating it with a universal perspective - one that locates global forces operating in Palestine and one that understands Palestine as an index of historical processes unfolding on the global scale, such as practices of surveillance and population control, counterinsurgency, and international aid.”
Mike
2023-11-02 18:00:32 +0000 UTCGreat ep. Great use of Hawkwind
Nathan Gilbert
2023-11-02 15:03:45 +0000 UTCWhen it comes to the question of 'revolutionary selfishness', I think the easy solution is to dissolve the distinction of Self and Other itself. Parochial proletarianism can easily lead to socdem chauvinism (socialism for me but not for thee), just as self sacrificing dedication to faraway causes only saps your movement of its own vitality. The answer is obviously to care for everyone, including yourself, and realizing that self care is the first step to helping others. That all may sound obvious, but the Self-Other dichotomy is still sufficiently popular that I feel like pointing it out.
The Inner Moon
2023-11-02 10:30:37 +0000 UTCI don't think the show name is a problem. I could understand changing it if it was something really embarrassing and off-putting, something like, idk, "Chapo Trap House".
Pug_luvr
2023-11-02 05:41:55 +0000 UTCThis was a very thoughtful and nuanced reflection on the present moment. Andy your willingness to acknowledge and move past theoretical deficiencies while remaining committed to the global communist project is commendable.
daytorn
2023-11-02 04:10:32 +0000 UTCWithout wanting to reproduce the contrarianism of Andy’s youth, it has to be said that every state is the enemy of working class movements and until they are all destroyed there will be no revolutionary overcoming of this world and its horrors. As for class analysis in Israel: every labour market is stratified. I, personally, have an Australian passport, access to unemployment benefits, healthcare, etc. The presence of vast swathes of workers here on temporary visas without those privileges (not to mention the largely immiserated indigenous population) does not make me any less a proletarian.
daytorn
2023-11-02 00:56:24 +0000 UTCOnly thing I would point out about socialism in Israel: they are censoring and censuring left voices and on that old well known path of making the parties illegal.
Adam
2023-11-01 19:07:16 +0000 UTCHi guys with respect, I don't think talking about Israeli working class as a coherent class is a valid analysis. Palestinian and Arab workers in Israel are not class cohorts with Israeli laborers. They do not operate in the same fields, share the same rights, and most importantly, we see that Israeli workers do not see Arabs as human beings. That is what we must reckon with, all else is sugar coating. There is no communist path for a zionist state. It's inversion and rejection of class society is baked into itself. This is why the Israeli left is irrelevant in its modern politics. Zionism is the enemy of working class movements and until it is destroyed, and israel is not a Jewish ethnostate, then there is no revolutionary class in the society
Taz
2023-11-01 15:53:07 +0000 UTCI really appreciate podcasts doing episodes where they talk through things in a quasi-therapeutic way like you have here, and like the Trillbillies have been doing.
Alex Hennessey
2023-11-01 15:41:14 +0000 UTCI like the name, but I do understand your trepidation. You guys do whatever you think is best. I'm not going anywhere.
Mx. Maxwell
2023-11-01 13:35:36 +0000 UTCKeep 👏 the 👏 name 👏
E
2023-11-01 11:09:02 +0000 UTC
