Zionism and Marxism
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
Dec. 10, 2005
Notes on Zionism & Marxism -- David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson & Ber Borochov
The historic alliance between David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson, dating from their meeting in 1918 at the end of World War One, provides an excellent standpoint for an understanding of the decisive period of Zionist political development in Palestine. (The "Chronology of Ben-Gurion" handout, circa 1919-1920, provides a glimpse of the formation of this alliance as it launched the Zionist Labor institutions that eventually shaped the Israeli government.) In 1919 Ben-Gurion and Katznelson drew both Marxist and non-Marxist forces into a new political organization called Ahdut Haavoda—"Workers’ Unity." Soon afterwards they also founded a much larger labor organization called the Histadrut ("Federation"), whose service functions transcended class and political differences. Eventually, in the early 1930s, the Histadrut became the bureaucratic engine of the entire Zionist movement.
The second half of the xeroxed selections from Anita Shapira’s biography of Katznelson (pp. 84-91) provides significant details of this historic moment. Shapira argues that the "abiding rapport" between Ben-Gurion and Katznelson occurred as much because of their differences as in spite of them (84). From a historical perspective, their gifts and political attitudes appear to have perfectly complemented each other. If we have a working sense of their biographies, their differences will point us toward a more concrete understanding of the political tensions within Zionism.
Ben-Gurion and Poale Zion
Ben-Gurion’s personal development parallels the basic ideological evolution of Zionism from a hard-line Marxism, as the activists of the 2nd and 3rd Aliya learned it in the Russian revolution, to a "softer," more pragmatic version of socialism that proved to be better suited to the organizational needs of the Yishuv. Both Avineri and Sternhell suggest that what Ben-Gurion chiefly derived from the Bolshevik movement was not its ideology but a Leninist understanding of the need for a disciplined, all-unifying party run by a vanguard elite. This is an important aspect of Ben-Gurion’s famous "organizational genius." Ben-Gurion himself coined the phrase "From Class to Nation" to emphasize the parallel between his personal career and that of Israel. In doing so he was underscoring the significance of his early years as a leader of the Marxist "Poale Zion" (Zionist Workers) party in Palestine, which for years kept up a fierce political rivalry with the anti-Marxist workers’ party known as "Hapoel Hatzair" (the Young Worker). The Palestine branch of Poale Zion was founded in October 1906, just seven months after Ber Borochov established the main Poale Zion party of Poltava (Ukraine) to promote his own Zionist revision of classical Marxist theory. Borochov’s aim was to recruit young Jewish activists for Zionism who were also caught up in the Russian Revolution, in the wake of its initial defeat in 1905. Many of the revolutionaries, however, were committed to the Jewish socialist organization known as the Bund, which assumed that a successful revolution would solve the problems of Russian Jews. In his opposition to the Bund, Borochov predicted the re-emergence of antisemitism in Russia’s post-revolutionary state, and his warnings proved correct. The revolutionary leaders had already rejected the Bund (and all nationalist separatist movements) at their 1903 Congress, and Stalin's Soviet regime banned Zionism in 1928.
Berl Katznelson's Anti-Marxist "Conquest of Labor"
Berl Katznelson was fiercely anti-Marxist from the start. He arrived in Palestine five years later than Ben-Gurion, passionately committed to personal transformation in the experimental Zionist worker communities. Early on, he became close to A. D. Gordon, the Tolstoyan philosopher of the "conquest of labor" through agricultural work. Gordon was considered the embodiment of the values of the Second Aliya. He and Katznelson even roomed together at Kinneret during the war. In her biography of Katznelson, Anita Shapira summarizes his recollections of his involvement in the founding of the first kibbutz (see pp. 42-47). Regardless of the details (did Katznelson actually organize the strike at Kinneret, and did he actually lead the negotiations with Arthur Ruppin that won the kibbutz its autonomy?), the association of Katznelson’s personal "conquest of labor" with the kibbutz experiment correctly places his political role for us. His career reflects the importance of the utopian socialist tradition in Palestine. He had no use for the class issues of the Russian proletariat. After World War One, when Katznelson headed a "non-political" organization of Jewish agricultural workers in Galilee, Ben-Gurion recognized that the future of Zionism as a national movement lay with Katznelson's model rather than with a Marxist program. Ben-Gurion and Katznelson set about unifying the Jewish labor groups in Palestine, regardless of their political stances, while drawing upon the resources of the World Zionist Organization.
Marxism and the Problem of Arab Labor
Two major Marxist challenges to Jewish nationalism emerge from the context of the Russian revolution. Both stem from the anti-nationalist bias of classical Marxism, which was reaffirmed by the Russian revolutionary leaders at the same 1903 Socialist Democratic Congress that saw Lenin’s Bolshevism separate itself from Menshevik gradualism. At this historic conference, the Jewish Bund (the largest socialist group of Jewish activists) sought a guarantee of limited autonomy for Russian Jews after the revolution, but they were decisively rejected by both Marxist factions. The Marxist challenge to the Palestine Jewish workers also derived from its basic commitment to international workers' solidarity. On principle, Arab workers in Palestine could not be excluded from Jewish labor organizations.
Remarkably, it was Ben-Gurion himself, soon after his arrival in Palestine, whose speech on behalf of a Jewish-only workers’ movement helped establish that position for Poale Zion at Jaffa. Ben-Gurion then chaired the committee that adapted Borochov’s Feb. 1906 Poale Zion manifesto ("Our Platform") to the needs of the Palestinian Poale Zionists. Gershon Shafir sees this as the beginning of what became an apartheid socio-economic system, politely dubbed the "dual economy." However, the battle between Marxist internationalism and Zionist ethnic exclusivism was replayed down through the years and throughout Ben-Gurion’s career. Ben-Gurion only gradually managed to shrug off the demands by Marxists outside Palestine to establish a Jewish-Arab workers’ coalition. The climax came with Ben-Gurion’s separation of his nationalist wing of Poale Zion from the Left-Marxist faction of the World Poale Zion organization in 1920. In the 1920s, Ben-Gurion defeated two left-wing movements that challenged the Histadrut, after the young Marxist-oriented radicals of the 3rd Aliya arrived. Since then, the vision of binationalism based on an alliance between Arab and Jewish workers has been a recurring theme of the Zionist left, but it has been too small and weak to threaten the status quo.
Ber Borochov's Rewriting of the Marxist Narrative
It may be useful to summarize the basic issues raised by Ber Borochov’s Zionist restatement of Marxist theory in 1905-06, from his Poale Zion headquarters in Poltava, Ukraine. It was an innovative effort to legitimate Jewish nationalism in Marxist terms. For all subjugated peoples, Borochov argued, the class struggle was inseparable from the nationalist struggle. And for the Jewish "nation" in particular, there could be no class struggle without an actual territorial base. "Territory" was one of several "conditions of production" Borochov inserted into the classic Marxist context of the tension between the "forces" and "relations" of production. And Palestine, he argued, was the inevitable territory for massive Jewish settlement, because its lack of development provided more opportunities than anywhere else. Significantly, Borochov’s 1906 "Our Platform" text carried a determinist argument—the beginnings of capitalist development were already at work in Palestine, and the task of workers was to strengthen their organization during the period of capitalist development, until the opportunity for a takeover appeared. However, the expected mass immigration to Palestine simply failed to materialize (see the Frankel handout, p. 388) . The labor movements became increasingly demoralized until, from 1910 on, the WZO agreed to fund Jewish worker settlements on the land it bought from Arab landowners. Hard-line Marxists called this dependence on WZO funding a class betrayal. As I have already noted, their demand that members reject the WZO broke the world Poale Zion movement into leftist and nationalist factions. By 1920, Ben-Gurion had abandoned his early belief in Marxist theory. The task he and Katznelson addressed was to keep as many Poale Zion members as possible on their side of the world Zionist movement, as allies and potential recruits.
Significantly, Frankel shows that Borochov’s political position shifted radically through the years, both before and after writing "Our Platform." Frankel suggests that the Socialist Zionism Borochov promoted in Feb. 1906 was probably a strategic move, to appeal to young Russian activists in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution. We know that for the previous four years, Borochov had been working with Ussishkin’s Hovevei Zion movement, which had a strong base in his hometwon of Poltava. Borochov had become its most prominent touring spokesman. (See the 3-sheet handout from Frankel’s Prophecy & Politics that covers, in sequence, Borochov’s General Zionist work under Ussishkin [336-339], his 1906 Marxist argument [346-349] and various explanations for the shift [358-9]). Frankel describes Borochov’s early General Zionist position (1901-1905) as a summons to a generation of young activists to serve the Jewish people in Palestine. In Ussishkin’s words, "The young generation is awake, is thirsting for self-sacrifice." This voluntarism is precisely what Berl Katznelson believed, and came to represent. As I have suggested, it seems best to call it utopian socialism. Behind Katznelson and his Galilee workers' communes was a long 19th century tradition of anarchist and collectivist experimentation. This was the tradition Zionism drew upon most naturally and successfully. We see it emerging within the WZO itself, in Franz Oppenheimer’s promotion of cooperatives. (He defended this social model as his vision for Zionist development at the 1903 WZO Congress). In The Jewish State (1897), Herzl advocated a New Society based on the collective ownership of land owned by the Zionist Organization. As it turned out, Marxist class issues had to be displaced by nationalism before Zionism could succeed.
