Chapter 11

Our Present Task: To Build a Revolutionary Alternative

OUR ANALYSIS of the international, Arab, and Palestinian realities points to one clear conclusion. People today are suffering instability, war, and unemployment, along with crime, cultural decay, and pervasive moral corrosion. The tragedy facing humanity, however, goes far beyond fear and hunger. Only an alternative to the present new world order can give ordinary men and women the hope of improvement in their lives -- but no such alternative presently exists.

The problem centers on the absence of qualified leadership. The pursuit of an alternative world order will require leaders with knowledge, analytical skill, and determination. They must be capable of using the crises of the capitalist system to eliminate that system and lead humanity towards socialism. No lesser program or leadership can catalyze the radical transformations the human race now requires.

The most promising seedbeds for this leadership, however, have rotted as the three main currents of the communist movement lost their way. Some adapted to the present system; the rest cling to the old dogmas that are now detached from reality. The old Moscow-oriented Communist Parties transformed themselves into traditional social democratic parties. The old social democratic parties of Britain, France, and Germany defected to the new capitalist order and adopted a platform of privatization. 

The second current - Maoism - reached a dead end when the Chinese Communist Party caved in to capitalist pressures. Privatizing part of the Chinese economy, it laid its market open to capitalist penetration. The leaders of the third communist current - Trotskyism - made the grave mistake of calling for a "political revolution" against the Soviet Union and supported movements opposing it. These positions ultimately furthered the capitalists' drive to overthrow socialism and take control of the world. 

Because the world's political and economic structures are still in transition, the old currents somehow survive, deformed remnants of the system that globalization replaced. They will vanish completely only as the crises of the world capitalist system become sharper.

So far, the wars that signal the world capitalist crisis have been confined to limited areas: the Gulf, the Balkans, Central Asia. However, the explosive internal situation in Russia, the tensions between the U.S. and China, and, most recently, hair-trigger relations between the new nuclear powers of Pakistan and India sustain the possibility of a conflagration on a world scale.

As for the system's economic crises, though they began in the emerging markets, they have for several years involved the greatest economic powers. As early as 1999, the chairman of the American Federal Reserve Bank warned of the likelihood of a crash on the scale of the Wall Street meltdown that began in 1929. Since then, the situation has grown only worse.

Given the quandaries of capitalists, a new ideological and political current will surely form, although the process will be gradual and sporadic. Objective developments like those noted above will continue to penetrate people's consciousness. Political and social reflections are already leading to a search for new kinds of solution to the obvious problems. Economic experts worried about the maladies of the present system severely criticize the capitalist centers. Around the world, people are discussing the idea of changing, or at least modifying, the present global system.

Arafat's authority without opposition

In this context, ten years after the end of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab working class is facing questions that confront its counterparts all over the world. The traditional parties of the Left no longer represent the interests of the working class. In the majority of Arab countries -- Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Yemen -- these parties are content to live with their state regimes. The regimes, in turn, long ago adopted the IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that provides for the privatization of the economy and the abolition of welfare programs.

Even as they protest against the social results of these policies, the left opposition parties refuse to challenge the regimes' legitimacy. Their impotence has discredited them in the eyes of those they claim to represent.

Although the Arab opposition parties coexist comfortably with their regimes, ordinary citizens do not. The Arab countries' acute economic and social problems are exhausting the patience of the population. The regimes have lost further credibility through widespread corruption and through choosing to misuse national resources rather than develop national economies. Several face domestic instability as a result of this complex of shortcomings.

In this regard, Palestine is no different from the other Arab countries, as the Palestinian Authority imitates its counterparts. Ignoring the decisions of its Legislative Council, the executive makes a mockery of the law. As for the Palestinian opposition, far from proposing a practical alternative, it restricts itself to complaining about the performance of individual ministers. When ministerial incompetence arouses public anger, the Palestinian Authority resorts hastily to cosmetic changes of portfolio to cover up its corruption and appease the public anger.

The main proposition of the Palestinian Leftist opposition parties is to reactivate the PLO institutions. This, they argue, will establish a framework for national unity among the different political factions. The PLO institutions, however, long ago entered the ranks of the living dead. 

The Palestinian National Council (PNC), for instance, convenes only when the Palestinian Authority needs cover for its deal-making with Israel. The PLO lost its militancy after its institutions abolished the National Charter and, under Israeli pressure, gave up the national principles. The PNC convened in April 1996 and December 1998. Both these meetings were a farce, as they were tailored to the needs of Israel and the US. In addition, most Palestinians consider the PLO a hotbed of corruption. This explains why so many of them have gone over to the Islamic movement, that was never part of the PLO.

In proposing to revitalize PLO institutions, then, the Left reveals its real motive: to maintain good relations with Arafat's faction, Fatah, and with the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, as we have noted, the PA, which represents the Palestinian bourgeoisie, has turned from confrontation to cooperation with Israel. In this situation, any call for "national unity" among all classes of the Palestinian people would be a dangerous mistake.

The disappearance of the PLO from the arena does not, however, diminish the importance of its revolutionary experience. Palestinian workers, in particular, showed an exemplary energy and capacity to fight back against occupation and exploitation. Their combination of armed struggle and everyday grassroots work, which reached its peak during the 1987 Intifada, is a valuable model for revolutionaries all over the world.

Preserving the Palestinian revolutionary traditions is especially important for anyone concerned to secure Palestinian national rights. It is a vital task to transfer these traditions to young people who reject the humiliations of the Oslo agreements. No one can build a revolutionary alternative to the path represented by Oslo and the PA without drawing the lessons from the period of PLO activity in the life of the Palestinian people. Anyone hoping to succeed in this task must, furthermore, clearly distinguish between the Palestinian revolution and the PA.

To confront the occupation means confronting the PA

We cannot in logic call for defiance of occupation and colonization without calling the PA to account for its collaboration with Israel. To confront the occupation will require replacing the PA, which has become one of the main obstacles to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. As long as the initiative to confront the occupation stays in the hands of the PA and its supporters, it will remain limited and ineffective: no threat to the occupiers. The basic purpose of the Oslo Accords, for example, was to free the occupier, Israel, from the need to confront the occupied Palestinians. This it did by assigning the most heavily populated Palestinian areas to the PA. Israel has used its new freedom to continue reinforcing its settlements.

Because the PA refuses to confront the occupation, it cannot for long appease the people's anger. Those who are most afflicted by the Oslo agreement and the PA's practices will form the bases of a political alternative. One of these groups is the Palestinian working class -- suffering from high unemployment, living in poverty, deprived of basic civil and democratic rights, humiliated at numerous checkpoints if they do find work in Israel. The other base will be the Palestinian refugees in other countries, who have seen the PA desert them even more blatantly.

The task of building a Palestinian political alternative, difficult and complicated at best, will succeed only as a revolutionary alternative develops elsewhere in the Arab world. The Palestinian working class, once a leader in this development, exhausted its energies in the long, bitter fight against occupation. As a result, the PA now can exploit the tragic situation of the Arab masses to convince Palestinian workers that change is impossible. The growth of a new movement directed against the Arab regimes will have a powerful impact, both in the territories ruled by the PA and in the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.  n

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