Force Decides; on Israel-Palestine, bourgeois law & order, and a Marxist morality

This was written some years ago.  It remains depressingly relevant.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, the state of Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel regularly visits upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.

Generally speaking, I’m very much against killing people.  Why?  Well, aside from the fact that it simply doesn’t appeal to me, I’d be tempted to invoke a somewhat traditional ethical idea going back to Aristotle, which is that morality is about the good and enjoyable and fulfilling life… with the added Socialist wrinkle that everyone should have such a life, and no good life that is dependant upon the curtailment of the lives of others is ultimately justifiable, because the fundamentally social nature of humanity means that the more socially involved we are, the better.  Killing someone is pretty much the ultimate way of curtailing their potential for development, self-creation, enjoyment, and the leading of a good life… which is, by definition, a social life, in society, in which one’s contact with others helps them to also lead such a ‘good life’.  We end up at the basic question: why is ‘good’ good?  And we might get somewhere by re-framing the question slightly, making it: why do we want ‘happiness’?  And, while I don’t pretend that it’s a perfect answer, we can probably fall back on a tautology (sometimes tautologies are allowed, via a materialist version of the ontological argument): ‘happiness’ is what we call that state of being that humans seek.

However, occupied and tyrannised people – like people who are refugees inside the tiny bits of their own country left to them, held under constant siege inside a massive concentration camp, subject to racist laws and persecutions, economically subjugated and constantly harassed, and periodically massacred – have the right to organise their own defence.  Not that many of the rockets do much damage in Israel, certainly when compared to the wholesale slaughter and destruction rained down on Gaza.  Israel, you see, has some pretty effective warning and defence systems against the rockets (unlike people in Gaza), partly owing to that pesky $3 Billion of ‘aid’ the Americans send them every year, despite the fact that they are an Apartheid state in clear breach of international law.

Ah yes, international law.

Bourgeois morality rests upon the polar twins of consequentialism and universalism, waxing and waning, and combining.  At the crudest level, consequentialism is invoked when we need to justify something horrible; universalism when we want to condemn the evil of those we are attacking.  China Mieville, in his work of theory Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, has adapted the ideas of the Bolshevik legal theorist Pashukanis and various postmodern writers.  For Mieville, international law is a never-ending oscillation between consequentialist and universalist arguments (Mieville adapts the categories of ‘Apology’ and ‘Utopia’ developed by Koskenniemi), with imperial force always lurking in the background as a way of enforcing whichever kind of politico-legal-ethical argument is currently being employed.  This gets at something built-in to bourgeois morality, in all its legalistic nebulousness.  Such principles – consequentialist or universalist – tend to get cloaked either in mystical obscurantism, or somewhat impoverished (i.e. market-based) notions of ‘rights’, or universal ‘maxims’ (whether encoded as ‘categorical imperatives‘ or whatnot) that are not really all that universal.  The bourgeois revolutions undoubtedly had their virtues (or should that be ‘Virtue’?), but their ethics tended to be universal in letter rather than in spirit, and consequentialist to the extent of considering the consequences for national bourgeois class formations.

Even so, bourgeois civilisation has offered some laudable moral insights and principles, and certainly improved – if only at a rhetorical level – upon the morality of, say, the Roman Empire, or the automatically inherited dictatorship of certain inbred families.  As Terry Eagleton has observed (following Benjamin), the task of the historical materialist is always to ask, again and again, “with a kind of faux naïveté” why such laudable bourgeois ethical ideals must seemingly always be deferred, compromised and betrayed, why bourgeois civilisation can never make good on them in practice.  Bourgeois morality, we might puckishly suggest, is always very nice in theory but can’t work in practice because of… well, we wouldn’t want to say (following the high-handed transhistoricalism of the parrot-talking anti-communist) because of ‘human nature’.  We’d want to suggest that there is something in the very structure of bourgeois civilisation that generates universalising ethical ideals that can never be met, precisely because of that same structure.

As Marx pointed out, it is the nature of the bourgeois mode of production that it must always be based upon exploitation (directly or indirectly coerced wage labour, extraction of surplus value… and he’s clear that this is wrong, even if – as Norman Geras observed – he doesn’t always know that he is), and thus the curtailment of freedom for the many.

But, as an initially revolutionary movement overthrowing older forms of class society, the bourgeois revolutions depend upon offering freedom as an achievable goal, and even – so to speak – believing this promise itself.  This is a perennial feature, but we see it begun and demonstrated perhaps most dramatically at those moments of bourgeois revolution, when the rising middle class enlists the much-needed numbers, sinew, passion, energy, grievance and courage of the poor and the peasantry, and does this by espousing the great universalising bourgeois promises of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.  (As I say, we might puckishly want to add Naïveté to that list.)  Or when they declare “all men are created equal”, very much meaning the ‘men’ and very much not meaning the ‘all’.

This is an interesting issue in itself.  The contradictions – and the attempts to resolve the contradictions – give rise, dialectically, to new material and ideological forces.  Modern biological racism, for example, is partly a response to the fact that the bourgeois revolution in America rested upon both universalising promises (i.e. the Declaration of Independence, etc) and upon slavery.  The inescapable, in-born, auto-segregating factor of skin colour can be used – when integrated into a new theory: modern racism – as a ‘get out clause’, a codicil of the promises of the new society.  Pre-bourgeois societies in which slavery obtains – pre-C20th Tsarist Russia, for instance – don’t need to explain why some are serfs and some are not.  That’s just the way it is.  There’s no document, signed by people who extol ‘Liberty’, which says “all men are created equal”.  So there is no need to wriggle off that hook.  The hook simply isn’t there.

And here we see the fundamental nature of bourgeois morality.  It is self-righteous and self-exclupatory.  And it is based on the assertion of power and, ultimately, force.  This is the wider meaning of Marx’s comment (adapted for the title of Mieville’s book) that “between equal rights, force decides“.  Marx isn’t offering that as a ‘maxim’, but as a critique.

Marx saw – even if he never developed this in a book of his own called Ethics, the way proper philosophers are supposed to do – that the constant oscillation in bourgeois morality between universal mysticism and pragmatic consequentialism is directly bound up with the nature of the system.  It relies upon relative freedom for the majority, because the freedom of the boss to hire and fire is the flip side of the worker’s relative freedom to buy, move, pursue a career, seek higher wages elsewhere, etc…  so a universal declaration of rights is always useful.  At the start, it helps to define emergent bourgeois culture in opposition to feudalism, to rally the support of the masses to the libertarian cause of the new middle classes, to open society for job markets and commodity markets, etc.  At the same time, real human freedom is limited by the bourgeois conception of liberty as being the liberty to enjoy ones ‘rights’ in the market of life, by the conjuring trick that allows bourgeois culture to pretend that it has few enforced relations between people by relying upon the enforced relations between people and property (which is actually a social relation between people).  This is why the whole idea of ‘universal human rights’, while undoubtedly a great improvement on previous ways of looking at life and worth defending on its own terms, nevertheless seems designed to limit the idea of freedom.  Similarly, the corrective consequentialism comes in to limit the scope of such universal principles within the bounds of brutal pragmatism and ‘realpolitik’.  It must happen that way, because the actual consequences of the bourgeois ideas of inborn freedom (and natural rights and universal liberty, etc…) would, if actually and sincerely pursued to their logical conclusions, make the oppression built into capitalism untenable.  If you really believe the declarations of universal liberty, it becomes hard not only to justify owning people with different coloured skin and using them as farm machinery, but also to justify forcing huge numbers of people to work for the profit of others, or to justify the unpaid domestic labour of women, the nature of education as preparation for the job market, the exploitation of less-developed economies for the benefit of imperialist powers, homelessness, unemployment, and sundry other moral obscenities that bourgeois civilisation rests upon as normal, everyday practice.

The oscillating employment of universal and consequentialist justifications is not rigid, even or schematic.  The forms of argumentation (or should I say, of ideology) are not mutually exclusive.  Ideology simply doesn’t need to make sense, as long as it seems to be sense.  You get the two styles blended, or employed simultaneously by the same – or different – people, ignoring the fact that they clash.  Or you will get one bourgeois employing a universalist argument against another bourgeois who wields a consequentialist one, or vice versa.  Or one issue gets argued about, or agreed upon, using different versions of one type of argument, or two types, or whatever.  An Abolitionist might condemn slavery on the universal grounds that the slave “is a man and a brother” (negating the existence of the female slaves, by the way) against an upholder of slavery who offers a consequentialist argument, i.e. “if we free them, the slaves will slaughter us in our beds”.  Or an Abolitionist might employ a consequentialist argument – “if we don’t free them, they will slaughter us in our beds” – against a proponent who offers the universal word of the Bible, in which God explicitly tolerates the keeping of slaves.  The rise of biological racism offers a fusion of the two styles.  The idea that black people are inherently ‘inferior’ can be seen as universalist, because it is ostensibly based on eternal and fixed patterns of human nature.  But it can be developed in a consequentialist way, via the claim that because the black people are incapable of anything much besides labouring for their white superiors, to free them would thus be to condemn them to useless starvation… which would, of course, be terribly wrong.  This is an argument that has unexpectedly - to some - come back into vogue in the last few years.

The same argument was the ideological basis for colonialism because it supplied a rationale that was brutally pragmatic and realistic, while also seeming to be attenuatedly altruistic.  We all know the contours of the argument.  It goes back to locke, who argued that the coloniser had the right to appropriate land that was not being used productively by the native, and that this was to everyone’s benefit, as God intended.  It’s basically a rearguard re-tooling of the argument from the start of the colonial project, that the ‘natives’ are not entitled to their own lands and resources because they’re not able to make proper use of them.  You can give this a universalist spin in various ways – i.e. “they’re inherently inferior” and the related claim that “the superior have the right to dominate the inferior” – alongside the basically consequentialist argument – i.e. “if we don’t step in, loads of land and resources will go to waste”.  (You can “make the desert bloom” for instance.)  Or you can modify the basis of the argument using a consequentialist logic of stages, development and progress.  “We happen to be more advanced than them…” (whatever that means coming from colonialists and conquerors) “…so it’s our duty to teach them and help them, and bring them civilisation”.  The boons you supposedly bring can be consequentialist – i.e. “trade, technology, a better life” etc – or universalist – i.e. Christianity, or whatever.  Pretty much all these arguments have been used against the Palestinians at one time or another, by the way.

You see the point?  The merry-go-round goes on and on, with infinitely possible permutations.  Every developing need of bourgeois civilisation can be met by some ingenious fusion or opposition of these two obliging moral styles.  That’s the whole point: that the merry-go-round need never end.  There will always be a moral point to debate, a moral claim to evaluate, a justification to ponder.  Debate can be eternally contained and assimilated.  Meanwhile, nobody ever has to admit that they’re doing anything wrong.  There is always a point-of-view.  It works like international law – or like bourgeois law in general – in Mieville’s conception.  The debate never ends.  It isn’t supposed to.  The process of constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the law is an industry in itself.  And the basis of legality is the idea of the market actors debating their competing ‘rights’… until, of course, between equal rights, force decides.

We’re often told that terrorism is a weapon of the powerless.  Actually, as Chomsky (who used to not always be wrong) has said, most terrorism is perpetrated by the powerful, as long as we don’t two-facedly redefine terrorism to mean something other than ‘violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political objective’.  By that definition, Israel’s actions in Gaza are clearly terrorism, which makes the United States into the aiders and abetters of a ‘rogue state’… if not a ‘rogue state’ itself… though I dislike the term ‘rogue state’ because it implies an otherwise hunkydory international order from which a state deviates.  But that old oscillation of universalist and consequentialist moralising can be brought into play.  Israel (an explicitly racist state) is “the only democracy in the Middle East” (never mind the Apartheid).  Israel must defend itself.  In Gaza, civilians supposedly have rockets in their bomb shelters.  And so on.

The problem isn’t that there are no universally applicable moral principles.  I think there probably are, as long as we limit ‘universal’ to mean something like ‘transhistorical to human cultures’.  I’m not personally one to discount that, though we have to be very careful about what we identify as transhistorical or universal.  Neither is the problem that there are no good arguments to be made about morality based on consequences.  Of course there are.  Trotsky said “the ends can justify the means as long as something justifies the ends”.  Nor is the problem even that you can’t mix the two.  You can.  The universal right to resist occupation (formally recognised by the UN) presumably entails consequentialist justifications for violent acts in the cause of liberation.  And the idea that liberation is an inherently good thing may trace back to one of those permissible transhistorical principles.  Freedom from exterior domination is a pre-requisite for any society to allow all its citizens to achieve the ‘good life’… even if that doesn’t always follow from such freedom.  The problem is that bourgeois civilisation rests upon either mystical ideas of the universal or employs the most cynical form of brutally pragmatic consequentialism.  Universal arguments become so decoupled from society that they can be mustered for either side by appeal to mystical entities.  Consequentialist arguments can be mustered by either side too, with ‘good’ defined by the needs of whichever powerful person is currently speaking, and with the violent force of nation states always lurking in the background, ready to decide the issue.  The UN recognises the universal right to resistance, and the impermissability of acquiring territory by war, and then permits Israel to go about its nasty business for decades, while states such as Iraq or Iran get held to more urgent account because of the priorities of the United States.  The problem crystallises in that phrase: ‘humanitarian intervention’.  A perfect illustration of the cynical, opportunistic marrying of spurious universal and consequentialist arguments, ultimately nullified by the priorities of Empire, and the brute reality of imperial force

The moral question of intervention in Iraq was ‘settled’ by force.  The universalists on both sides squabbled back and forth – “we have a moral duty to help the Iraqis!” vs. “it’s wrong and illegal to invade without provocation!” – and the consequentialists on both sides squabbled back and forth – “it’ll be good for the Middle East!” vs. “it’ll be bad for the Middle East… and for us!”.  Pretty much the only people saying anything like “Iraqis should be given the chance to free themselves and create their own new society!” were the far Left.  Of course, the turn of history made mincemeat of such hopes, though the Arab Spring showed the essential correctness of the argument…  But, of course, as we know, that all went wrong too.  But why?  Because imperial force was allowed to decide.  In Egypt, a popular rebellion ended the decade-long tyranny of a US-backed dictator… until a US-backed coup overthrew the resulting new government, instituted a junta, and started executing people wholesale.  A familiar story to anyone who knows the history of American foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the only thing that will ever break this endless, genocidal situation will be the resistance that the Palestinians are condemned and demonised for ever daring to show… joined by the organised, militant resistance of millions of workers all across the Middle East.  We saw it start in Egypt, and get suppressed.  We saw it start in Syria and get bogged down in inter-imperialist competition. We saw it start in Libya, and the ‘humanitarian interventionists’ of NATO jumped in to co-opt and control it (odd how we never hear the humanitarians advocating NATO airstrikes on Tel Aviv on the grounds that “we’ve got to do something!!!”).  

It will, ultimately, come down to force.  The force of resistance.  Force will decide, one way or another.  But not, in the end, between equal rights.  Because the desire of the many to lead good lives, uncurtailed, self-creating, happy, with the free development of each being a prerequisite for the free development of all (and vice versa) should trump the desire of the few to rule, plunder and kill.