ZERO-SUM (Game or Situation)
[Game Theory:] A situation where a gain for one participant
necessarily involves an equivalent loss for one or more other participants. (I.e., where the
total gains and losses for all participants sum to zero.) Chess or poker are zero-sum games
because if one player wins, the other(s) must lose.
Bourgeois economists claim that
capitalism is “not” a zero-sum economic system, because even the workers come out of it with
something (generally enough to at least scrape by on). However, all the wealth
that any society produces ultimately comes from the labor of workers acting on the natural
products of the world. Under socialism or communism, all that wealth would belong to the
workers, either individually or collectively. Capitalism modifies this situation in a zero-sum
way; whatever the capitalists take from the workers in the form of open or concealed profits,
the workers lose completely. And this is the very definition of a zero-sum situation.
One recent study by bourgeois economists of
“zero-sum thinking (the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost
of others)”, found that having a more “zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with giving more
support for government redistribution, [and] race- and gender-based affirmative action”, all of
which sound like generally positive reforms (though the degree to which these things can actually
be implemented in capitalist society is highly questionable). On the other hand, where this
zero-sum thinking is inappropriate, it can lead to wrong ideas and bad results. The same
study found that when applied to immigrants (i.e., falsely supposing that jobs and income for
immigrants come at the expense of non-immigrants) leads to public pressure for more restrictive
immigration policies. [See: “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political
Divides”, by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira & Stefanie Stantcheva, NBER working paper
31688, Sept. 2023.] Thus, it is important that people are educated to understand just
where zero-sum thinking is appropriate, and just where it is inappropriate, and why that is in
specific cases.
ZETKIN, Clara (1857-1933)
An important and influential German revolutionary socialist and then Communist leader, who
also helped to further develop and strengthen the struggle for women’s rights and equality,
including within the socialist and Communist movement itself. She was the leading organizer
of the first International Women’s Day in March
1911.
Zetkin joined the Socialist Workers’ Party in
1878, which was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
in 1890. With Bismarck’s ban on socialist activity in 1878 Zetkin went into exile in Zurich
and then Paris. (The Anti-Socialist Law lapsed in
1890.) Zetkin, along with her friend Rosa Luxemburg, soon
became one of the most prominent representatives of the revolutionary Left-wing of the SPD,
and she strongly criticized the revisionist ideas of
Eduard Bernstein.
Zetkin played a leading role in fighting for
equality for women including the right to vote, and was the leader in developing the
socialist women’s movement in Germany. From 1891 to 1917 she edited the SPD women’s
publication Die Gleichheit [“Equality”].
During World War I the SPD took on a social
chauvinist (pro-war) stance, voting for war spending and the policy of
Burgfrieden (truce with the bourgeoisie and promising
not to lead any labor strikes during the war). Zetkin, along with Luxemburg,
Karl Liebknecht, and other prominent Left-wing members
of the SPD very strongly opposed this pro-imperialist war position. Among other anti-war
efforts, Zetkin organized an international socialist women’s anti-war conference in Berlin in
1915. She was arrested several times during the war because of such activity.
In 1917 Zetkin, and many others who opposed
the dominant national chauvinist stance of the SPD during World War I, left to join the
new Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and also
its most Left-wing faction, the Spartacus League which
she co-founded. In 1919 the Spartacus League broke with the centrist USPD to form the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and Zetkin became an important leader of that new
revolutionary party. From 1920 to 1933 when the Nazis took over, she represented the KPD in
the Reichstag (German parliament). She was also a member of the Central Committee of the KPD
from 1927 to 1929.
Zetkin also played a significant role in
international revolutionary politics. In 1920 she interviewed Lenin on “The Women’s Question”.
She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International (Comintern) from 1921 until her death. In 1933 after Hitler took power and
staged the Reichstag fire (falsely blamed on the Communists), Zetkin was forced into exile
once again, this time to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately she died later that same year at the
age of 76, and was buried near the wall of the Kremlin in Moscow.
[Much of the materal in this entry is taken
from the Wikipedia article on Clara Zetkin.]
ZHANG Guotao (Old style: CHANG Kuo-t’ao) (1897-1979)
One of the founders and early leaders of the Communist Party of China who became a renegade from
the CCP and a traitor to and enemy of the Chinese revolution. During one period in 1937 he
and the section of the revolutionary army he led refused to obey the orders of the Central
Committee and then he even set himself up as the head of a separate and competing “Central
Committee” of the CCP. His renegade leadership of the Fourth Front Army led to disastrous defeats
and the loss of thousands of Red Army soldiers. At one point he plotted to arrest, and if necessary
kill, Mao and the legitimate Central Committee members. When he abandoned the CCP completely in
1938 he even worked with the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police, Dai Li (often called “China’s
Himmler”), in an effort to destroy the Communist Party. In 1949 he fled to Hong Kong, and then in
1968 moved to Canada. He became a Christian the year before his death.
“Chang Kuo-tao was a renegade from the Chinese revolution. In early life,
speculating on the revolution, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. In the Party he made
many mistakes resulting in serious crimes. The most notorious of these was his opposition,
in 1935, to the Red Army’s northward march [the Long March] and his defeatism and
liquidationism in advocating withdrawal by the Red Army to the minority-nationality areas on
the Szechuan-Sikang borders; what is more, he openly carried out traitorous activities against
the Party and the Central Committee, established his own bogus central committee, disrupted
the unity of the Party and the Red Army, and caused heavy losses to the Fourth Front Army of
the Red Army. But thanks to patient education by Comrade Mao Tse-tung and the Central Committee,
the Fourth Front Army and its numerous cadres soon returned to the correct leadership of the
Central Committee of the Party and played a glorious role in subsequent struggles. Chang
Kuo-tao, however, proved incorrigible and in the spring of 1938 he slipped out of the
Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region and joined the Kuomintang secret police.” —Editorial
note 5 to Mao’s article “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” (Feb. 1, 1942), SW 3:51.
ZHOU Enlai — Role in the Cultural Revolution
Zhou’s role during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR)
has been the subject of considerable discussion and contention. Mao seems to have mostly viewed
him as a loyal supporter of both Mao himself and the GPCR, and when one college Red Guard group
in Beijing (the “May 16 Red Guards Regiment”) attacked
Zhou as a “shameful traitor of Mao Zedong Thought” in the summer of 1967, Mao and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group condemned this particular Red Guard faction as “ultra-left” and
suppressed them. Moreover, this led to the suppression of many other individuals as ultra-leftists,
including eventually Chen Boda who was himself originally put in
charge of dealing with the May 16 Red Guards Regiment but was later accused of being supportive
of their views.
During the GPCR Zhou did intervene from time to
time to rescue one or another person who was being persecuted by Red Guard groups. There
actually were a great number of excesses by the Red Guards during the GPCR and it was not wrong
to stop or correct these excesses when possible. (Mao also did so at times, and the major
campaign he authorized against ultra-leftism of the “May 16 Red Guards Regiment” type is an
example of this on a large scale.) Stopping excesses is actually a way of supporting a
revolution and of trying to prevent it from being discredited.
However, Zhou’s “moderating” role sometimes
seems to have gone well beyond merely stopping violence and unjust treatment of basically good
comrades who had made some mistakes. While he apparently agreed with Mao at the beginning of
the GPCR that Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping should be criticized for their views and policies, he strenuously opposed putting
it as strongly as that they were leaders of a “bourgeois reactionary line”. If Zhou had had his
way, it seems that the whole heart would have been cut out of the GPCR, and the whole point of
it vitiated. A revolution requires more than mere slaps on the hands of those who really have
become the enemies of the people!
As the GPCR quickly developed, Zhou, as head
of the Chinese government, put a lot of emphasis on Mao’s slogan, “grasp revolution and
promote production”, and in this he was quite correct. There was in fact a danger that the
necessarily disruptive political revolution might lead to a collapse of the economy—which
would have discredited the GPCR far more than any mere excesses against particular individuals.
(As it was, the Chinese economy did suffer small declines in GDP for three years but then,
because of the political enthusiasm and positive changes in the factories, quickly zoomed
ahead again at an even faster pace. The trend line for the entire 1966-1976 period shows the
initial dip but also an end result that is just the same as if there had been a uniformly fast
advance of around 10% a year over that entire period.)
In early 1967 a number of military marshals
and government leaders raged against the GPCR in what became known as the
February Adverse Current. Zhou did not openly
support this trend, though he let slip his identification with these other veteran leaders
when he referred to them and him together as “us”.
But by far the worst aspect of Zhou’s role in
“moderating” the GPCR was his evident attempt to wait it out, and to then reverse at least
aspects of it by eventually returning the individuals who were overthrown as
“capitalist roaders” to their positions of authority
in the party and government. And the very worst example of this turned out to be his
rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping and the recall of Deng to again be a vice-premier and Zhou’s
designated successor. However, this is something that Mao himself also agreed to, and if Zhou
should be blamed for this so should Mao. It seems that the CCP was too easily fooled by
confessions and phony self-criticisms. Perhaps this is a perpetual problem for people like Mao
who are themselves open and honest about their opinions, when it comes to trying to
politically “treat the disease in order to cure the patient”.
After Zhou’s death a huge memorial gathering
in his honor held in Tiananmen Square on April 5, 1976 turned into a reactionary demonstration
against the whole GPCR. Was this just a case of reactionaries making use of the occasion to
attack the GPCR, or was it actually the view of Zhou Enlai himself and his friends, which they
merely kept mostly silent about while he was alive? Perhaps some of each. Right after Zhou
died Maoist groups around the world, including the RCP in the U.S., wrote articles lauding him.
(See for example: “Chou Enlai (1898-1976): A Fighter for Our Class All His
Life”, Worker for Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Area, February 1976, p. 9, online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Worker-Milw/Worker-RCP-Milw-V1N05-Feb1976.pdf)
But after the April 5th Tiananmen Incident the
view of Zhou by many Maoists turned diametrically around, and Zhou has since then been
routinely condemned as a hidden rightist.
It seems clear that while Zhou publicly
supported Mao’s GPCR he was personally opposed to at least many aspects of it; possibly in his
heart he did not truly support it at all, though he did nevertheless play a fairly important
role in making it possible. Pretty obviously someone like Zhou could not possibly have
initiated or led the GPCR. In any revolution there will be people on the revolutionary side
who do not fully understand and support all the aims of that revolution. But it is wrong to
force such people away and into the enemy camp. That is what was wrong with the ultra-leftists
of the type of the May 16 Red Guards Regiment. They did not understand the necessity in any
revolution of uniting the vast majority against a much smaller enemy. But was it correct to
later on start criticizing Zhou as he more and more seemed to be undermining the GPCR by
bringing back capitalist roaders like Deng? The so-called “Gang
of Four” appeared to be doing this as a somewhat camouflaged part of the
Anti-Lin Biao, Anti-Confucius
Campaign. It seems they may have been quite right to do so. —S.H.
[Comments from a book deeply hostile to the Cultural Revolution:]
“Zhou Enlai’s position in the CCP leadership was on the rise during the Cultural
Revolution. At the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August 1966),
he became the third highest ranking leader of the CCP. After the downfall of Lin Biao in
September 1971, he became second, next to Mao. As his status and power increased, however,
Zhou was facing greater challenges and provocations from the ultraleftist faction of the
CCP leadership who, along with Mao, envisioned Zhou as a formidable anti-Cultural
Revolution force after Mao’s death. And, as indispensable as Zhou was, Mao never
considered him as his successor; rather, Mao often equated Zhou’s meticulous attention
to details and superb skills as an administrator with the neglect of more important
matters and the lack of firm ideological and political conviction.
“From 25 November to 5 December 1973,
enlarged Politburo sessions were convened at Mao’s suggestion to criticize Zhou for his
‘right revisionist line’ and ‘capitulationism’ in foreign policy because of his
negotiations with the United States on the sensitive issue of miliary exchange. Jiang
Qing [Mao’s wife] called the conflict between Zhou and Mao [the] ‘eleventh line struggle
within the party.’ A month later, in January 1974, another general offensive against Zhou
was launched in the name of an anti-Lin Biao campaign known as Criticize Lin and Criticize
Confucius, which was followed by yet another implicitly anti-Zhou movement: that of the
Water Margin Appraisal (1975-1976). The attack on Zhou in both of these campaigns
took the form of allusory historiography in which Confucius and Song Jiang—a capitulator
in the historical romance Water Margin, in Mao’s view—were depicted with
considerable resemblance to China’s current premier.
“Zhou was instrumental in Deng
Xiaoping’s reinstatement as vice-premier in 1973. In December 1974, Zhou, gravely ill
with cancer and escorted by hospital nurses, flew to Changsha to discuss personnel matters
with Mao in preparation for the forthcoming Fourth National People’s Congress. Zhou
recommended Deng for the position of the first vice-premier against Zhang Chunqiao, the
candidate of the Jiang Qing group.”
—From the entry on Zhou Enlai in
the Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by Guo Jian, Yongyi
Song and Yuan Zhou, (2006).
ZHU Rongji (Old style: CHU Jung-chi) (1928- )
Premier of the capitalist regime in China from 1998 to 2003.
Zhu joined the CCP in October 1949, and graduated
from Tsinghua University in 1951 with a degree in electrical engineering. However, he spent most
of his career as a political cadre in the economics and production planning sphere. He was
criticized and labelled a Rightist in 1958 for opposing the “irrational high growth” policies
during the Great Leap Forward. He was pardoned in 1962, but then criticized again during the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and sent to a “May Seventh Cadre School” from 1970-1975 for
re-education. Apparently this attempted re-education didn’t have any positive effect on him.
From 1975 to 1979 Zhu was the deputy chief engineer
for a company run by the Petroleum Ministry and director of the Industrial Economics Institute of
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. When the notorious capitalist-roader
Deng Xiaoping returned to power in 1978 he sought out like-minded
people as economic advisors, and Zhu Rongji in particular. Zhu was formally rehabilitated by the
now revisionist CCP because of his supposedly forward-thinking and bold economic ideas (i.e.,
because he too was a capitalist-roader intent on developing China as a capitalist country). Deng
said that Zhu “has his own views, dares to make decisions and knows economics.”
[Quoted in the article on Zhu Rongji in the Wikipedia, from which some other information here is
also taken.]
Zhu then went to work for the State Economic
Commission as the division chief of the Bureau of Fuel and Power Industry and then as deputy
director of the Comprehensive Bureau in 1979-1982. He was appointed a member of the State Economic
Commission in 1982 and was the vice-minister in charge of the Commission from 1983 to 1987. In
that year he was appointed major of Shanghai. As mayor he won the acclaim of the other enthusiasts
for the return to capitalism by overseeing the development of Pudong, a large Special Economic
Zone situated between the city itself and the ocean. These SEZ’s pioneered in the so-called
“reform” and “opening up” of the Chinese economy to full-scale capitalism and foreign
investment.
Zhu became the vice-premier of the PRC State
Council in 1991, and moved to Beijing. He was also the director of the State Council Production
Office, which focused on industry, agriculture and finance. In late 1992 Zhu became a member of
the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, the highest political
body in China, and retained that position for a decade. He was also the governor of the People’s
Bank of China, illustrating how the top leaders of the bureaucratic national bourgeois ruling
class in China are now financial capitalists. Through this political and financial control, and
with the support of President Jiang Zemin and Premier
Li Peng, Zhu helped force the closure of many state enterprises and
started a large privatization program which led to massive growth of China’s private sector of the
economy.
Zhu was himself Premier of the State Council from
March 1998 to March 2003, and continued and extended those same policies. The Chinese economy
expanded at a rapid pace during these years, though it must be said that this was not really all
that difficult to accomplish. As a new capitalist-imperialist country China did not have the
huge load of accumulated government debt, nor massive consumer and corporate debt, that most major
capitalist countries did. So they could easily stimulate demand to overcome adverse local and
international economic problems, such as the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. However,
the pro-capitalist economic policies of Zhu and the other PRC bosses led to enormous job losses
for workers as a great many state factories were closed down. It is true that new jobs were
opening up because of foreign investment in China, but these jobs were generally much worse,
with far less security and far fewer benefits. Zhu led capitalist China into the World Trade
Organization in 2001, and because of the very low wages of most Chinese workers, China soon
became the “workplace” of the world, with enormous and fast-rising exports. But as usual, the
capitalist “success story” was founded on a major attack on the working class.
ZINN, Howard (1922-2010)
A radical American historian best known for his excellent book, A People’s History
of the United States (1980). This volume appropriately focused on the ordinary people
of the country and their lives and struggles, and not the politicians, generals and
millionaires. Zinn taught for many years at Boston University and inspired many students
and readers of his works. He was also an ardent political activist, especially in the civil
rights and anti-war movements. On his last day of teaching at Boston University he ended
his class 30 minutes early so that he could join a picket line, and urged his students to
go along with him. One hundred of them did so.
“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I
would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’;
I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to
relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice
wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.” —Howard Zinn,
in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994).
ZIONISM
[Note: This entry is an overall, high-level political summation of the general idea of Zionism,
written from the revolutionary proletarian point of view. If you are looking for the historical details
of the origin and development of Zionism in its many forms, as written from the usual bourgeois academic
perspectives strongly sympathetic to the basic idea of Zionism, then refer to the many exhaustive
articles in the Wikipedia, starting with the central article at:
Zionism]
In its central essence, Zionism as a political movement is
the idea (and actions toward implementing this idea) that Jews should have their own country, and that this
country should be a Jewish homeland run by and for Jews alone. (Or at the very least, a state completely
controlled by Jews alone, even if there are some non-Jews tolerated within its boundaries.) There
are also a variety of Jewish religious conceptions of Zionism, which often relate in various ways
to the political conception, but we are only concerned here with the Zionist political movement.
There was a long history of hostility towards, and physical
attacks on, Jews in Europe, originally the work of Christians fanatically opposed to the existence of
other religions. These attacks even reached the extreme of murderous pogroms,
especially in eastern Europe. As capitalist society entered the modern era of imperialism and
ever-more-serious economic crisis and social chaos, minority peoples and religions—and especially the
Jews—became an easy target to blame for such growing socioeconomic problems. This then led to further
strongly increased antisemitism, and eventually even to the horrendous
extreme of organized Nazi genocide during World War II resulting in the systematic murders of six million
Jews. All of this ghastly history is one of the somewhat understandable reasons why many Jews in this
nation-based capitalist world have longed to have their own homeland.
But “understandable” or not, the actual creation of a
Jewish homeland, the state of Israel, has turned out to be horrible nightmare for the world, especially
for the Palestinians and other peoples of the Mid-East, and actually even for the Jewish people themselves
(though this may still not be widely recognized by Jews or others).
In a bourgeois world organized on the foundation of
separate nation-states, which are possible because of the considerable nationalist, ethnic, linguistic and
religious uniformity in separate regions (or at least their majority domination there), this notion of
establishing an exclusively Jewish state sounds to many people, both Jews and many others, as a very
reasonable thing. But there are inherent critical flaws in this Zionist goal. First, such a state,
if run exclusively by, and for the benefit of, Jews would thereby be unjust and oppressive toward anyone
else living in the country. In other words such a state could not be a true democracy, not even a
real bourgeois democracy, as long as anybody other than Jews
lived there. It must of necessity be an oppressive apartheid state as bad
or worse than the old South African racist regime was. (Some liberal Jews deny this inevitability, but
just look at how things have actually developed during the entire first 75 years of the state of
Israel!)
And second, and vastly worse, all the world is
already occupied by other people, and the only real way to set up a new nation just for Jews
is to steal the land area from others and force the existing population out. And the only way to
accomplish this massive ethnic cleansing is through unrestrained
violence and even genocidal attacks on the existing population (who naturally will put up great
resistence to their being expelled from their existing country and their own homes). And this is
exactly what has happened in the century-long efforts of Jewish Zionists (with the indispensable aid
and connivance of British and U.S. imperialism) to create and then continue to expand the Jewish state
of Israel in the land of Palestine. This was not an accident, or unfortunate “unforeseeable” result;
instead this this was the inevitable consequence of the whole Zionist idea of creating a new Jewish
state in Palestine.
There were once a large number of other proposals for
the location for a Jewish homeland. Most of these various ideas were suggested by Jewish Zionists, though
some were also promoted by viciously antisemitic individuals. Hitler and his Nazi regime promoted one
such rather wild plan and in 1940 seriously proposed shipping all the European Jews to Madagascar,
almost entirely against their will, of course, and with no consideration for the Malagasy people already
living there. But he couldn’t get the cooperation of Britain (which controlled the sea lanes) and the
other imperialist powers to actually do so. [See the Wikipedia article:
Madagascar Plan] (It is also true, however,
that Hitler and the Nazis did not promote a full Zionist program, since they envisioned that Germany
would run Madagascar as a colony, and not that the Jews sent there would be in full control of their
own state.)
Most of the schemes for establishing a Jewish state
somewhere were put forward by individual Jews, but sometimes sympathetic non-Jews promoted their own
plan. Stalin, who approached the national question for the Jews in a quite mechanical (undialectical)
way, felt that every nationality must have a homeland, so he actually set aside a remote area of
Siberia next to China to be a Jewish homeland within the Soviet Union, and tried to build up a Jewish
population there. (Which still exists, in a miniscule way!) [See the Wikipedia article:
Jewish Autonomous Oblast]
However, almost all Zionist Jews wanted a new Jewish
state to be in Palestine, because the ancient origin of Jews as a religious/nationalist/ethnic/cultural
entity was in that area. And there were in fact already some Jews (about 10% of the population) living
more or less peacefully in Palestine all through the centuries before World War I, along with a few
people of various other religions, and within a population that was mostly Muslim. However, the Zionist
doctrine that individuals today have a right to the land in which their distant ancestors once lived is
completely ridiculous. By that standard, the Russians would indeed have the right to control Ukraine
because the ancient tribal Rus peoples first developed there, as Vladimir Putin has pointed out. And
the Celts, now mostly in Ireland, the British Isles, northwest France and in America, would have a
“right” to kick both the Ukrainians and the Russians out of the lands to the north of the Black
Sea, which is where the Celtic peoples (though not their modern languages) are said to have
originated some four or five thousand years ago. The world is full of peoples whose ancestors lived far
from where they now live. (Virtually everybody, really, since humanity originated in a small region in
Africa.) And the idea that “everyone should go back to where their ancestors came from” (or have the
“right” to do so) is utterly crazy and totally impossible. It is bourgeois nationalist logic carried to
a truly absurd extreme. [See: Immigrants—Deportation Of]
For this reason, it is now also outrageously wrong to
say that all the Jews living in Israel/Palestine should go back to “where they came from”, or be forcibly
expelled. Instead, the only reasonable, humanitarian solution to the deplorable situation today is for
all the people of Palestine, including Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and
elsewhere, and Jews (and anybody else living there) to form a democratic country with absolutely
equal rights for everybody. Most Palestinians today are in fact quite willing to agree with this. But this
democracy-for-all plan is exactly what the Jewish Zionists controlling Israel continue to absolutely
refuse to accept! And it is therefore why the people of the region, Jews and non-Jews, and the people of
the world, must unite to completely defeat the whole idea of Zionism.
Zionist Jews usually argue that, given the history of
antisemitism, pogroms, the Holocaust (or Shoah
as it is called in Hebrew), and other past genocidal attacks on them, they simply have no choice but to
set up their own nation for their own safety. However, the original and primary source of that anti-Jewish
hatred, namely Christian ultra-fanaticism, has now nearly disappeared in the world today. And the terribly
ironic thing is that it is now this Zionist effort itself to create (and continually expand)
Israel, and to attack, expel or kill Palestinians in order to do so, which is by far the biggest factor in
the world leading to renewed hostility and hatred towards Jews. Far from saving Jews from the hatred
previously directed against them, Zionism is now by far the gravest source of renewed danger for Jews!
National hatred and hostilities are always going to be a
serious problem in capitalist society, under which nationality-based ruling bourgeoisies control states to
promote their own exploitative interests. That is why the international proletariat needs to make world
revolution and to reorganize the world without bourgeois nation-states. One step toward doing that
would be for Jews (and all others who support the equal welfare of Jews) to give up the reactionary attempt
to set up and expand this dangerous, inhuman Zionist state which itself foments still more national hatreds,
and even leads to ethnic-cleansing and genocide against Palestinians. Surely most Jews do not really believe
that there is something about their ethnicity, religion or culture that makes it impossible for them to live
peacefully in a democratic world alongside other people! Certainly revolutionary working class Jews mostly
do not believe such a deplorable thing. And we Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, from whatever national or cultural
heritage and background, are determined to unite together in revolutionary struggle against
capitalist-imperialism and all its associated national enmities, including Zionism. —S.H. [Dec. 16,
2023]
See also the entries below, and:
“ARABOUSHIM”,
BALFOUR DECLARATION,
CHRISTIAN ZIONISM,
“GREATER ISRAEL”,
ISRAEL,
NAKBA,
PALESTINE,
“TWO-STATE SOLUTION”
ZIONISM — and the Creation of Israel
As history actually developed, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain took
control of Palestine (which then included what is now Jordan), along with a lot more of the Middle East.
[See: Sykes-Picot Carve-Up] So it was British imperialism that allowed,
and initially encouraged, the Zionists to start to implement their colonization plan by sending more and
more Jewish settlers to Palestine after World War I. For a brief discussion of Britain’s imperialist
and antisemitic motives for encouraging Jewish migration to Palestine, see the entry
Balfour Declaration. And it should be well noted that Zionism
has only been successful in creating the state of Israel because of the bizarre alliance of both Jewish
Zionists and European antisemitic governments who wanted at that time to get rid of the Jews in
their own countries. There were, and continue to be, many non-Jewish Zionists! There are many
fundamentalist Christians in the U.S., for example, who strongly
support Zionism, some for the inane reason that, based on their reading of the Bible, they think this
will be a sign of (or even help advance) the supposed “Second Coming” of Jesus! And as mentioned in the
main entry above, even Adolf Hitler and the Nazis supported aspects of the general idea of Zionism at one
point.
As virtually everyone knows, the German Nazi regime was
responsible for terrible crimes against Jews including horrifying mass murders and ultimately systematic
genocide, as well as similarly evil crimes against many others (and especially the Slavic peoples). Though
their crimes against Jews began in the 1930s, they became totally horrendous during World War II itself, with
even the establishment of many extermination camps. All of this terrible and worsening situation led, in
reaction, to further vastly increased support for the Zionist idea among Jews, and increased Jewish
immigration into Palestine during the 1930s, and later.
Before long this immigration, and the growing appropriation
of more and more Palestinian land by the immigrant Jews, led to increasing violence between Jews and Arabs.
This in turn led to Jews setting up their own paramilitary force, the Haganah, to fight against the
Palestinian resistance. The Haganah became the nucleus for the Israeli military (the so-called “Israeli
Defense Forces” or IDF) when Israel was formally established in 1948. And worse yet, openly pro-fascist
Jewish terrorist groups arose, including the Irgun [see Wikipedia
entry] which operated from 1931-1948, and then later the even more extreme Lehi (or Stern Gang) terrorist
group, which admired and emulated the techniques of the Nazis, and which operated from 1940-1948. [See
Wikipedia entry] While the main Zionist military
force, the Haganah, was more “moderate” in comparison with Irgun and the Stern Gang, over time it also
became more and more engaged in what was basically an anti-democratic (i.e., also fascist) program of
terroristic violence designed to oppress, expel, or kill Palestinians. The Zionist program has always been
inherently anti-democratic (fascistic), in essence, toward the Palestinians, from its very conception and
still in the present day. The very idea of establishing a “Jewish state” requires at least the severe
limitation of democracy for non-Jews, if not its total absence.
It should have been obvious to everyone that Zionism
and increasing Jewish immigration into Palestine was destined to lead to more and more violence, and eventually
to an outright national war between two peoples, and possibly even eventually war to the death for one or both
of these peoples. It should have been obvious from the start. But it is amazing how in bourgeois politics (and
Zionism, as an openly anti-democratic nationalist movement, is bourgeois politics if anything is), what should
be obvious with regard to its eventual course over the long run is rarely actually so for many people in the
early stages. Thus it is only in bitter retrospect that Zionism is now appropriately becoming seen by growing
numbers of people in the world as the inherent oppression, ethnic cleansing, and outright genocide of Palestinians
that it inevitably became.
Further information about the formation of Israel in 1948, and
the role of U.S. imperialism (and also of the then-socialist Soviet Union!) in promoting this, will be added here
later. We will try to especially focus on the Nakba, the great number of murders and
the violent forced expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their own land by the Zionist terrorists.
One of the greatest and most depressing ironies of history is
that the Jews, who have historically been so horribly treated by Christian Europeans, have so often supported
Zionism to one degree or another, and have themselves turned around and done something very similar to the
Palestinians. In both cases the actions have at times reached the level of open and systematic genocide, as is
once again obvious to any reasonable person watching the horrifying bombings and massacres by the Israeli
military in Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led uprising gave Israel a new “excuse” to attack all
Palestinians.
Zionists are always outraged when the all-too-glaring analogies
between what they are doing to the Palestinians, and what the Nazis did to them, are pointed out. But this is
a plain fact to see for anyone not blinded by their own self-serving ideology. And perhaps even more ironically,
these two sets of vicious bourgeois nationalist crimes developed more or less together. Even in the 1930s the
Zionists in Palestine were already seeking to “cleanse” the country of Palestinians, to work to push them out;
even as the Nazis were doing the same to them in Germany. And while the Israeli Zionists have not used gas
chambers to exterminate Palestinians, they do in fact use campaigns of massive military bombings to effect the
same result. To those of us on the outside of all this, we just don’t see a whole lot of difference between the
murderous actions of the Nazis against the Jews and those of the Israeli Zionists against the Palestinians. Both
things horrify and totally disgust us and make us want to get rid of this damned nationalist-based capitalist
system completely. —S.H. [Feb. 3, 2024]
[A Zionist Defense: “Why Israel Must Be a Jewish State”, by Alan G. Futerman & Walter
E. Block, a column in The Wall Street Journal, as summarized in The Week magazine, Dec. 29, 2023
- Jan. 5, 2024), page 14. Followed by our response.]
‘Before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948,
said Alan G. Futerman and Walter E. Block, Jews everywhere were largely defenseless against the persecution
and mass murder that marred “Jewish history for 2,000 years.” Wherever Jews fled, they established communities
and thrived for a time, and then were “robbed, attacked, murdered, or expelled.” European Crusaders massacred
thousands of Jews in 1096. The Spanish Inquisition expelled or killed tens of thousands more. Russian pogroms,
riots in the Arab world, and Nazi extermination camps all taught Jews the same grim lesson: “The possibility,
the probability, of violent death was always there.” After the Holocaust’s systematic murder of 6 million Jews,
it became clear to Jews—and the world—that the only way to “assure Jewish survival” was “a Jewish state.” In
creating a “national homeland,” Zionism finally gave Jews “the power to defend themselves,” to collectively
fight back against those who seek their destruction. Hamas’ barbaric slaughter on Oct. 7 [2023]—the result of
Israel dropping its guard—was a deeply alarming reminder of “what it means to be Jewish without Israel, and
especially without the Israel Defense Forces.” We will never go back.’
[An MLM response:] What an argument! In effect it
is claiming that the only way to prevent genocidal attacks on Jews, is to set up and expand a Jewish state, even
though the only way of actually doing that is by means of genocidal attacks on Palestinians! Somehow the
past history of attacks and genocide against Jews supposedly makes the continuing genocide against Palestinians
necessary! Such a view is outrageously wrong and outrageously immoral. And the really ironic thing is that the
existence and expansion of the Zionist state of Israel is itself now actually the primary source of the greatest
dangers to Jews in the Middle East and around the world.
Yes, the religious wars in Europe over past centuries were
horrible. And the original leading force behind that carnage was fanatical Christianity, and its intolerance
for other religions, Judaism, Islam, and all others; and even occurred between Catholicism and Protestantism
within Christianity itself! In addition, fanatical Christianity was similarly deathly opposed to atheism
and much of science too. But in the world today Christian fanaticism is vastly reduced, and its ability to
instigate new religious wars and widespread murderous campaigns against non-Christians (and Jews in particular)
has almost disappeared. Instead, today the new source of extreme anger towards Jews comes from the Arab world,
and is virtually entirely the result of the vicious Zionist attacks on Palestinians and other Arabs by the
Jewish state of Israel. Thus the summary article above which appeared in full in the Wall Street Journal
has it exactly wrong. The existence of the Zionist state of Israel, and its continuing oppression of Palestinians
and murderous attacks on them is now by far the most important source of antisemitism and dangers for
Jewish people. Anyone who is at all sensible about trying to stop attacks on Jews should begin by working to
stop the Zionist attacks on Palestinians and others, which in turn provoke those generally justified attacks on
Israel. —S.H.
ZIONISM — and Imperialism
As mentioned in the above entries, Zionists could not have been successful in forcibly establishing the Jewish state
of Israel in Palestine without the limited support of first British imperialism and later, from the 1940s on, without the
vastly greater and still continuing military and financial support of U.S. imperialism.
It is true that both of these imperialist powers have wavered at times,
and opposed some specific violent or reckless actions by Jewish settlers in the pre-1948 era, or by Israel once it was
established, sometimes even forcing Israel “back into line” and to remember that it is subservient to the great powers
who really run this capitalist-imperialist world. Thus the Big Boss, the United States, forced both Israel and
Britain and France to back down and retreat in the 1956 Suez Crisis.
But it also does happen at times that the fanatically determined Zionists
force events on their imperialist backers that those dominating imperialists would rather have avoided. On occasion, the
“tail really does wag the dog”, as the saying goes; and the dogs are pushed to do things they would like to avoid in order
to hang on to their very useful tails! So, for example, U.S. imperialism at present (early 2024) would really like Israel
to more or less accept the status quo, the continued existence of several million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank
areas, and even allow some compliant Palestinian government to be set up as a weak and subservient Palestinian state in
those areas. But all reactionaries, including Israeli Zionists, seize upon opportunities as they arise to expand and
extend their power and areas of control. So, just as U.S. imperialism used the excuse of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda in
the U.S. to invade Iraq and seize more complete control of its oil resources (even though Iraq had nothing at all to do
with those 9/11 attacks), so did the Israeli Zionists seize upon the Hamas-led uprising against them on October 7, 2023,
to start a major genocidal attack against the Palestinians in general, by attempting to destroy Gaza as an area where
Palestinians could continue to exist, and at the same time to step up their efforts to force the Palestinians out of the
West Bank as well.
Thus what is called by Zionists, imperialists and other reactionaries, as
the “War between Hamas and Israel”, is really in essence yet another in the long series of genocidal massacres of
Palestinians designed to push the rest of them completely out of Palestine, and at the same time to further expand the
Zionist state in the direction of the long-time goal of a “Greater Israel”. As of
early 2024 it looks like the Israeli Zionists are refusing to acquiesce in U.S. imperialist desires to maintain the
possibility of some fanciful “two-state solution” in Palestine, and are in the
process of gradually making that proclaimed American goal obviously impossible even to the eyes of the U.S. imperialists.
And if they don’t succeed this time, there will still be other opportunities later.
Something that is not always recognized is that in the modern
capitalist-imperialist era, especially since World War II, all capitalists and capitalist states operate as
imperialists to the extent they can get away with it! There is a world capitalist system in which capitalists from
almost all countries can participate, to one degree or another. There is a world capitalist market in which nearly all
countries can participate (though the U.S. is constantly trying to tighten the restrictions on its most worrisome
competitors, and especially China and Russia). Even individual capitalists in tiny and extremely poor countries can engage
in one of the hallmarks of capitalist-imperialism (as Lenin pointed out), namely the export of capital. The tiny and
miserably poor country of Nepal has at present just one billionaire, but that one billionaire invests much of his money
in other countries and directly benefits from his personal participation in the present world capitalist-imperialist
system—even if Nepal as a nation, and overall, certainly does not benefit from it. Most countries of the world today are
still more the victims of imperialism than ones where even their own ruling class in general benefits from it. Still,
there are some countries, such as India and Brazil, where the ruling classes are both restrained and maintained as
compradors by world imperialism to some degree, but where they are beginning to escape those restraints and join in the
more systematic imperialist plunder of the rest of the world themselves. These are the nations we refer to as
sub-imperialist.
And the Zionist state of Israel, specifically, is behaving in a more and
more sub-imperialist or even outright openly imperialist sort of way. Even just from the territorial perspective, the Israeli
Zionists have step-by-step expanded their area of political control over the decades. And they have great hopes and plans
for massively expanding their current realm in the future into what Zionists have from the beginning referred to as a
“Greater Israel”, sometimes described as extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. They have their own nuclear weapons,
and are said to now be rapidly building a lot more. They are rather obviously preparing for eventual major wars with other
countries in the region, most notably at present, with Iran. We do not know what the precise final consequences of such
wars and imperial ambitions will be, but one very serious possibility is the death of millions of people in the region,
and even the eventual complete military destruction of whole countries such as both Iran and Israel itself. It will
probably take a series of ever-more murderous wars, some almost certainly involving nuclear weapons, to lead to such a
horrifying result. Those Jews in Israel and around the world who support Zionism should really try to think through what
all this Zionist imperialist fanaticism might well eventually result in, and just what the final terrifying consequences
might turn out to be! —S.H. [Feb. 4, 2024]
ZIONISTS — “Liberal” vs. “Right-Wing”
In the main entry above, Zionism is introduced as the idea (and actions toward implementing this idea) that Jews should
have their own country, and that such a country should be a Jewish homeland run by and for Jews alone. This is the
central and defining goal of Zionism. However, even though all Zionists uphold that central doctrine, not all of them
have the same understanding of what it would require to fully and completely establish such a Jewish nation. Some think
it has already been basically accomplished with the state of Israel. But most understand that there is still a long way to
go, at least with regard to the question of what to do with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. And while some
Zionists are content with the present borders of Israel, many want to expand Israel to formally include at least the West
Bank and Gaza, or even beyond that to include some or all of Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries. (See:
“Greater Israel”). So there are some significant differences among Zionists, with
regard to further territorial expansion, and especially with regard to how to treat or dispose of the Palestinians. There
are the “liberals” or “left” Zionists, who “regret” what has been done to Palestinians in the past (but who still defend
the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and for Jews alone). And there are the “hard-liners” or “right-wing”
Zionists, who have little if any concern for the Palestinians, and who are totally focused on getting rid of them one way
or another, and on seizing at least the West Bank and Gaza from them, and eventually, the hoped for much greater expansion
of Israel.
How different are these two trends within Zionism? They are not as
fundamentally different as might be supposed, or — indeed — as they themselves usually do suppose! Both trends are completely
opposed to allowing democracy and equal rights for Palestinians with Jews within Israel. While one end of the spectrum
thinks of themselves as being “liberals” or on “the left”, positively all Zionists are anti-democratic at least
when it comes to Palestinians and other non-Jews living in Israel. Of course bourgeois
democracy is itself very limited, and is basically fraudulent in comparison with genuine democracy in the Marxist
sense (i.e., where people really do have a combination of genuine individual and collective control over their own lives).
Nevertheless, the established names given to the opposition to formal democracy and political equality for everyone in
society are racism and fascism. Anybody in Israel who opposes full
democracy and equal rights for Palestinians (including all those millions of Palestinians forced out of their land into
nearby refugee camps) is thus properly viewed as a racist and fascist, no matter how “liberal” or “leftist” they
falsely imagine themselves to be. Zionism is opposed to democracy and equality for the Palestinians by its very
definition, and certainly by its political practice from the very beginning.
And for these reasons, most of what is commonly called the “left” in
contemporary internal Israeli politics is still actually also racist and fascist in its essence; they still uphold
and support the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and as a state in which the Palestinians are not allowed
to have an equal part. Only the very tiny percentage of the current Israeli population who actually oppose the continued
existence of Israel as a Jewish state are true believers in basic democracy and human equality.
The strange thing is that many Zionists themselves have not faced up to
the full implications of their own Zionist doctrine. There are some “left” Zionists who do not even understand that they
are Zionists! They defend the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state, but absurdly hope to come to some
sort of peaceful deal with the Palestinians, by perhaps allowing a tiny separate Palestinian state to come into existence
which is totally subordinate to Israel. This is like saying “We’re not really thieves because we’re only stealing 90% of
your land!” Or maybe it is actually more like saying “Sure we’ve moved into your house and booted you out, but perhaps we
can come to an agreement where some of you can still live in the dog house in the back yard.”
On the right, a great many Israeli Zionists do seem to understand and
openly accept that their program is inherently anti-democratic (at least as far as the Palestinians and other non-Jews is
concerned), and maybe even fascistic, if we are to be plain-spoken about it. Open support for racist and fascist
ideology has been a significant trend within Zionist ideology for nearly a century now, especially among the most
militant Zionists. Perhaps these openly racist and fascist Zionists should be commended at least for their
consistency and honesty in this regard!
But the “liberal” or “left” Zionists seem not to really or fully comprehend
that their continuing support for the Jewish state puts them firmly into the very same basic camp with these racists
and open fascists. They may “regret” the past treatment of Palestinians, but the moment any serious and open struggle breaks
out between the Palestinian resistence and continued Zionist oppression, somehow these “liberal” Israelis overwhelmingly
find themselves on the side of further violent repression of the Palestinians. The very resistence itself of the
Palestinians to their past and present oppression — especially when violence is involved, as of course it often will be — is
taken as a horrible crime which necessitates even more oppression, destruction of Palestinian homes, ethnic cleansing,
expulsion, and even mass murder or outright genocide of them.
The “right-wing” or “hard line” Zionists openly proclaim that their project
to create a Jewish nation is far from finished; that, in fact, Zionism is of necessity an extended step-by-step process
which has long been underway, which has had some major “successes”, but which still has a very long way to go in order to
achieve its final end of a “pure” and further-enlarged “Greater Israel”, where virtually all the original Palestinian and
other non-Jewish inhabitants of this realm are permanently expelled (or dead).
“Left” or “Liberal” Zionists have never understood that the whole Zionist
project is actually open-ended and permanently expansive, and destined to remain so as long as it exists at all. In this,
Zionism is like capitalist-imperialism in general. [See above entry on Zionism—and
Imperialism.]
Self-imagined “Left” or “Liberal” Zionists often lament, but still insist
on accepting, the results of the Zionist crimes which have already been committed against the Palestinians in the
past (and in the present, as in Gaza in 2023-24). Yes, they are saddened by that history, embarrassed by it, and sometimes
even publicly apologetic for it, and say they want to avoid committing new actions (they usually avoid calling them
crimes) of the same extremely murderous degree again. At least this is what they themselves think they
believe during the relatively peaceful lulls which separate the openly violent major struggles between the Zionist
regime and the oppressed Palestinians. In such relatively quiet interludes these liberal Zionists just want peace, just
want the status quo to continue, or perhaps in some cases, they may even suggest easing the burden on the Palestinians
somewhat, and to stop stealing their land (which constantly continues in the West Bank area, for example.) But permanent
“peace” between the oppressed and the oppressors is simply not possible (or even desirable from a truly moral point of
view).
These “left” or “liberal” Zionists still oppose any serious efforts to
redress past Zionist crimes against the Palestinians, such as by allowing the millions of Palestinians in refugee camps
in neighboring countries to return. And more to the central point, they still refuse even to consider that all the
Palestinians should be given completely equal rights with Jews in a truly democratic (non-Zionist!) state. Instead,
various impossible schemes are put forward, such as promoting some pathetic “two-state
solution”, wherein a tiny part of the original Palestine is permanently reserved for Palestinians in a subordinate
separate Bantustan within Israel. (Such a vastly large part of Palestine has now been stolen by Israel, including
ever-increasing parts of the West Bank area, that this supposed “two-state solution” has become ridiculous even on the
face of it. It might well be characterized as proposing to set up a completely miniscule, or “postage-stamp” sized
nation, without the space or national resources to possibly provide for millions of Palestinians. The idea today amounts
to little more than setting up a large open-air prison for Palestinians, as the Gaza Strip has often already been
appropriately called.
Those who do not agree that Israel as a Zionist state, a state run by and
for Jews alone, must be destroyed and replaced with a fully democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians,
are in reality still Zionists themselves, even if they would not describe themselves that way. This category may even
include some rather radical people, such as Noam Chomsky.
The real test and exposure of what “liberal” Zionism is all about is
what happens when violent resistance struggles break out on the part of Palestinians. Of course these violent struggles,
such as the “war” between Israel and Hamas that began on Oct. 7, 2023, will mostly be about mass murders of Palestinians
by the Israeli military, but there will also be killings and attacks against Jews, including some attacks (such as the
killing of unarmed Jews and even some children) that cannot be justified on the part of the Palestinians either. All
mass struggles are like this, with some secondary errors and crimes even by the side that is overall in the right and
quite justified in general. But as the specific events on Oct. 7th showed, these inevitable secondary errors and crimes
on the part of the oppressed will shock the “liberal” Zionists into suddenly becoming just as supportive of a murderous
response against Palestinians in general as the most rabid right-wing Zionists are! The true hidden, equally fascistic
nature of the “liberals” suddenly becomes exposed.
Those “liberal” or “left” Zionists who regret the past treatment of
Palestinians, but who still favor a Jewish state — an Israel by and for the Jews alone — are really not much better than
the most rabidly racist and fascist Zionists are! Indeed, whatever they themselves might imagine, to some considerable
extent they merely provide a false cover for the continuation of this horrible, genocidal Zionist project.
—S.H. [May 16, 2024]
“[T]here is no version of Zionism (except perhaps ‘spiritual Zionism’) that does not end in genocide,
any more than a version of Nazism could lead any where but the gas chambers.” —Paul Larudee, anti-Zionist
activist, in a public email, Oct. 18, 2024.
ZOMBIE
A term which first rapidly spread in usage in the U.S. in late 2008 and early 2009, during the financial crisis marking
the beginning of the Great Recession. It refers to a company or bank which is one
of the “living dead”, i.e., a company which is either already insolvent, or else which
will soon become so, and which will therefore go bankrupt before long. (See also below.)
“They are called zombies, companies so laden with debt that they are just stumbling by on the
brink of survival, barely able to pay even the interest on their loans and often just a bad business hit away from
dying off for good.
“An Associated Press analysis has found that the number of those
publicly traded companies around the world has soared to 7,000, including 2,000 in the United States, whiplashed by
years of piling up cheap debt followed by stubborn inflation that has pushed borrowing costs to decade highs.
“And now many could be facing their day of reckoning, with due
dates on hundreds of billions of dollars of loans.” —San Francisco Chronicle, “Deeply Indebted
‘Zombies’ On the Rise”, June 8, 2024.
A top leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Vice-Chairman of the CCP (1956-1976), and Premier
of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1976). In the earliest period of
the 1920s and early 1930s Zhou followed the line of the