Divided on the Slogan of Ceasefire
Despite the promising escalation of progressive rhetoric to include the demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, there are no new prospects for stopping military aid to the state of Israel. The same opponents who, until recently, demonized all demands for a ceasefire as merely terrorist propaganda are now the ones who have adopted the slogan.
To anyone surprised and dismayed at the betrayals by progressives, the contradiction is not at all a question of “good faith,” which is strictly not a Marxist category. How quickly and subtly the movement’s slogans are absorbed and co-opted by the Democratic Party, desperately clinging to issues of war and peace, without any clue for solving them. In his third volume of The Bolshevik Revolution (1953), the British historian E.H. Carr sums up “The Marxist Attitude to War:”
“People who did not help to alter the relations between labour and capital were ignorant of the real pre-conditions of universal peace.” (page 544)
Rather than peace, capitalism and its political parties have a daily war for their condition of possibility. Without the difference of a social revolution, how can we ever have peace? The ceasefire movement seems guilty of arriving both too late and too soon because the Democratic Party has since adopted the ceasefire slogan, now drained of any promise for peace it previously contained. There was never any chance for peace from a party which authorizes the everyday war between employers and workers. As long as there is capitalism, there will be its wars at home and abroad.
The Divide
Within the ceasefire movement, there remains a sharp division between those who seem satisfied with a peace which accepts oppression, and those who are calling for true peace through justice and liberation. A peace which accepts oppression is no true peace, but only a nostalgic return to the already unacceptable, the prior conditions for the genocide in Gaza.
The division in the ceasefire movement represents two separate meanings for the ceasefire slogan: either as an end in itself (a ceasefire for moral-political grandstanding), or as means to an end, down a longer road toward justice and liberation in Palestine. The main takeaway should be the courage to oppose the apparently well-intentioned bourgeoisie who preach peace where there is none.
Never debate intentions, or whether any action is intended “in good faith,” or not, because these are immaterial factors. Besides confusing intentions for realities, even good-faith intentions dissolve into their opposites. Capitalism has a cynical way of absorbing slogans and demands, without surrendering to “phrases and fancies.” From Karl Marx, in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):
“And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.”
Dividing concepts from reality, Marx realizes the difference by discounting all conceited self-descriptions for peaceful intentions from parties perpetuating wars. In his book, The Sermon on the Mount (1954), the Christian theologian Roger L. Shinn reinscribes the divide between proud intentions and background interests: “Real peacemaking takes courage. It is not a matter of crying peace where there is no peace.” (page 19) The politics of fancy phrases cannot bridge a fundamental gap, that the hollow kind of peace which comes from merely accepting oppression is a poor substitute for lasting peace.
Works Cited
E.H. Carr. The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 3: 1917–1923. Penguin Publishers, 1953.
Karl Marx. 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Available online, originally published in 1852.
Roger L. Shinn. The Sermon on the Mount. United Church Press. 1954.
See also: “Liberation Theology of the Palestine Movement”