History

There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s ferocious genocidal war on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimate its formation and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1947-1949, which the revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has deemed ‘ethnic cleansing’, an ongoing lethal project that has accelerated since 7 October 2023.[1] Characterising Israel as a European colonial settler state, a characterisation first elaborated by the French Jewish scholar Maxime Rodinson in June 1967,[2] this article traces Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust as ‘myth’, i.e. as state legitimation, and considers how this has impeded criticism of Israel’s relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine. The issue here, of course, is not the fact of the Holocaust, but of its representation and manipulation.

In October 1994, I opened one of those light blue Royal Mail International Aerogrammes that periodically crossed my desk in times past from friends in the United Kingdom. This one was from John Saville, of whose support and generosity I had been the beneficiary since our first meeting at a gathering of “Commonwealth Labour Historians” in 1981.

[This article is based on an unpublished manuscript by Farrell Dobbs, his Schematic on Party History.[1] Quotations from the Schematic begin each section of the article.]

I’ve divided this presentation into four distinct parts.[1] A shorthand description of these might be

The three texts published here were written in the mid-1970s.

For Marx, the major determinants of historical change lay within the dominant mode of production of a specific social formation. The mode of production involves a labour process (elements: labour power, instruments, materials) carried on at a specific level of technological development by men who work within the context of a specific set of property relationships. In any social formation above physical subsistence level, there is an economic surplus. The strategic social relationship is that between social classes defined primarily (though not exclusively) by whether they control, or do not control, the means of production. Those who control the means of production form the dominant class, and appropriate the surplus. The kind of property relation that exists is itself a significant limiting factor on the kinds of technology that can be developed within a particular productive mode. It is mediated through ideological beliefs and cemented by institutions of domination, notably the state. Thus “the essential difference between the various economic formations of society ... lies only in the form in which … surplus labour is in each case extracted from the direct producer, the labourer”.[i] It is this, according to Marx, that “determines the relationship of ruler and ruled … It is always the direct relation of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers - a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thus its social productivity - which reveals … the hidden basis of the whole social structure and with it … the corresponding specific form of the states”.[ii] Marx left a number of points unclear, notably the exact causal relations deemed to exist between the elements of his model. For instance, the base/superstructure formulation of the 1859 Preface gave the impression of a one-way determination of base on the ideological and political superstructure belied by his more detailed analyses elsewhere. He also left a number of problems unresolved, a major one being, as Marx himself said, “the relations of different state forms to different economic structures of society”.[iii]

“…. There is no true understanding without a certain range of comparison; provided, of course, that that comparison is based upon differing and at the same time related realities”.[1]

This book raises a vast range of problems. To make the paper manageable, I can only concentrate on the major argument: Anderson’s explanation of absolutism. I do not consider Book I, chapters 5 &. 6, Book II, chapter 7, and the two appendices. These deal with cases where neither absolutism nor the basic economic changes which Anderson relates to absolutism occur. If one argues that Anderson^’s positive explanations of absolutism do not work, then the counter-factual function of these chapters disappears.