> I would not expect a different position from Tikkun,
> but not being the pious
> sort I tend to decide who I will support based on
> whether they are oppressed
> or oppressor, exploited or exploiter.
I think this is shoddy reasoning.
A neo-Nazi youth in eastern Saxony might be structurally exploited if he is party to a wage-relationship, but exploitation is not a moral category that compels us to choose sides in a conflict. It's simply an analytical category that helps us to understand the value category (in the sequence of depictions in Capital, every category that is introduced has as its necessary precondition the category that follows it in the depiction).
Now, I'm not fond of police, but if the police bust up a neo-Nazi demonstration, or even decide to beat up on some Nazis, I'm not going to defend the Nazis because they are "exploited" or "opressed."
Please do not misinterpret me as saying that Hezbollah are the equivalent of Nazis or that Israel is a cop. I'm just trying to show what I think is wrong with your reasoning.
Also, I think "opressed" is a very fuzzy concept. Exploitation as a concept is at least firmly rooted in the categories of the critique of political economy.
I think the whole thing is an outgrowth of historical Leninism. Not that the problem begins by Lenin, really the problem is the Lasallean German Social Democracy, which was a model party for the Bolsheviks (an essay by Dauve has the wonderful title "The Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin).
I think, basically, for the past 150 years or so, Social Democracy (I include Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, etc. under this term) has gotten Marx distorted, wrong, incomplete.
They have made out of Marx a sort of cosmic space opera Star Wars movie of the war between the exploiter and exploited, the opressor and the opressed.
But Marx's great mature critique of political economy is really a critique of reified, fetishized social relationships. About how social structures which are at root human creations take on an independent life, and these social structures impose imperatives on social actors, who in term re-create and strengthen these social structures by acting according to this imperative logic.
This is the core of the Marxian critique of political economy. This is why the chapter on the commodity form is the first one in Capital.
And the critique of political economy, because it depicts a "pure" ideal average of capitalism, and not an actual capitalist economy (as opposed to the Leninist account, which argues that Capital is a historical depiction of 19th century English capitalism), is invaluable for understanding how capitalism functions.
But the Social Democrats, and especially the Leninists, have created an ideology called "Marxism," which creates an allegedly coherent worldview by attempting to construct a whole, complete Marxist worldview by tying together works as disparate as the Communist Manifesto, the Theses on Feuerbach, and Capital.
But I am skeptical about what the categories of the critique of political economy tell us about the Israeli-Arab conflict. I think Postone's attempts at deriving modern anti-semitism from the commodity form offer some light, but not much. National conflicts like those between Israel and Lebanon happen in a capitalist world, and are coterminous with a functioning world-capital, but I'm not sure if they can be derived from the commodity form.
For this reason I think taking a side, and doing so on the basis of who is "exploited" and "opressed" is sloppy thinking. Israeli workers are also exploited in the structural sense. So are Christian fundamentalist workers in America who vote for George W. Bush.
I think I might turn to Michel Foucault's _Society Must be Defended_ in the next few days, to see if his writings on war and nations can contribute something to understanding what is happening between Israel and Palestine. The Marxian categories strike me as simply the wrong tool, like trying to use sociology in order to solve a mathematical equation.
To say nothing of the "Marxists," who generally don't give a damn for the critique of political economy, or the question of ideology.
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