Full Automated Palestinian Luxury Communism from the River to the Sea? (UNLOCKED)

Some thoughts on the uses and limits of maximalist demands.

Let’s think about a wide range of political ideas, like:

• Workers’ control of the means of production

• Police and prison “abolitionism”

• Family “abolition”

• “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” or other visions of a fully marketless socialism

• A single democratic state in Israel/Palestine, with equal rights for everyone, “from the river to the sea”

There are important differences between different items on this list. But what they all have in common is that they’re left-wing ideas that are well outside the realm of near-term political possibility. No politician who wants to win is going to be campaigning on any of them in a presidential election any time soon. That’s what I mean by “maximalist demands.”

Are all such demands worthless? Should they all be embraced? Are some valuable and others not? Why?

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One option is to say with Bismarck that “politics is the art of the possible” and dithering about the shape of utopia is a waste of everyone’s time. Even Lenin said communists should position themselves at the farthest left wing “of the possible.” (Of course, when he said that he had good reason to think Europe-wide socialist revolution was a fairly imminent possibility.)

Another is to say that the Left should constantly go for broke—that we should “demand the impossible” a la the Situationist International. Back in 2020 when various forms of “abolitionism” were in the air, I’d see people sometimes explicitly arguing that we should always set our demands at 11 as a bargaining position—that if we “shift the Overton Window” in the most radical direction we could, we’d be more likely to get medium-sized reforms.

The view I laid out in Jacobin in 2020, and which still seems right to me now, is that this approach makes very little sense. Making ambitious demands only gets you anywhere in a process of negotiation when you have a way of exercising enough power that your opponents have to meet you halfway, and if your demands are obviously half-baked and poorly-thought-out that makes it harder rather than easier to win over a majority of the population to your cause.

But the Situationists and the Overton Window people being wrong doesn’t necessarily mean Bismarck and Lenin were entirely right.

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Some of the debates I’m gesturing at here play out on the level of strategy and rhetoric. But there’s a parallel debate between academic political philosophers that plays out at a higher level of abstraction.

“Ideal theory” is the branch of political philosophy that’s all about thinking about what would count as justice, and in which this is treated as a separate issue from how to get from here to there or whether such a route even exists. Think about Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” or G.A. Cohen’s “socialist equality of opportunity” principle.

Some political philosophers object to “ideal theory” as an unhelpful abstraction. They don’t reject the project of reasoning through normative judgments but they think this should be done in some sort of “non-ideal” way. The critics of this group—and I tend to think they have a point—argue that everyone has at least an implicit ideal theory banging around in the attic and informing their normative judgments, and you might as well acknowledge its existence and take it out into the sunlight where you can take a good look at it and see if it actually makes sense.

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I’d resist some of the maximalist demands listed above not because they’re unrealistic but because I don’t think they’re desirable. I suspect, for example, that not having a publicly owned entity tasked with enforcing laws (whether or not you call that entity “the police”) or not having a form of involuntary confinement for people from whom the public needs protection (whether or not you call the involuntary-confinement places “prisons”) would at best be a recipe for a whole lot of vigilantism and lynch mob justice. And if you say, as many “abolitionists” do in my experience, “well, we’re not saying there wouldn’t be any such entity, just that it would be so different that the same word wouldn’t apply” then I would strongly advise you against doing the rhetorical equivalent pulling the pin out of your grenade and stuffing it into your own mouth by calling what you have in mind “abolishing” prisons and police.

Like it or not, working-class people of all races worry about street crime, and no normal person believes the abolitionist mantra that cops don’t stop crime and only ever make things worse. Phrases like “police abolitionism” and “prison abolitionism” paint a picture of Mad Max for poor people and private security for rich people. And if you start backpedaling with “well we’re not saying to abolish them right now, under capitalism” or “we hope that crime will wither away after the revolution,” all you’re revealing is that you haven’t thought very much about that word “abolish.”¹

If you stop calling it “abolitionism” and just call it “let’s-hope-that-when-we-change-society-in-other-ways-all-crime-will-wither-away-ism,” I guess I don’t have a problem with that. I’m not optimistic that you’re right, mind you. Some forms of interpersonal violence sure seem to have non-economic roots. But a difference in highly speculative predictions about the distant future isn’t really a political difference and who knows—maybe I’m wrong.

Similarly, I think the only honest answer to the question, “How will family arrangements evolve under radically altered economic circumstances?” is, “How the hell should I know?” Maybe the arrangements people will start going for will be totally different. Who knows!

But if “family abolition” means anything, it means thinking a goal of left politics should be somehow intentionally socially engineering those arrangements away from the current model. And that’s not only deeply stupid on a rhetorical/political level—although good god is it that—but deeply illiberal in a way that bothers me as a matter of principle. The left project should be about giving people the material resources they need in order to live their lives how they want to live them, not yelling at them for making the wrong choices.

As to proposals for a fully planned economy, my views is that, at least at this moment in history, we don’t really know how to coordinate production with fine-grained consumer preferences without market mechanisms continuing to operate in at least some parts of the economy. Soviet-style planning was more of a mess than the hammer-in-sickle-in-Twitter-bio crowd tends to admit. Adding mechanisms of democratic accountability to that basic economic structure would certainly have been an improvement—it’s hard to imagine Stalin letting famine rip through the Ukrainian countryside if he’d had to worry about carrying Ukraine in the next election—but I’m not convinced that it would have done much to solve the day-to-day frustrations of babushkas picking through the shelves at Soviet grocery stores.

You can tell me that you don’t just want Five Year Plans plus political democracy, you want some sort of radically participatory form of economic planning from the bottom up, but there are two problems there. First, it’s unclear that decentralized participatory committees and assemblies wouldn’t be faced with the same information and coordination problems as more centralized planners. Second, maybe this is just me, but during the few years that I was teaching full-time I spent so many hours in faculty meetings that the vision of Socialism As An Endless Series of Meetings makes me want to shoot myself in the head.

If future technological progress gives us super-algorithms that automate away all the meetings and we can just have Fully Automated Luxury Communism, I’m obviously all in favor of that. But I’d note that hoping that things work out a certain way isn’t really the same thing as having an actual proposal for what we would do if we had the power to do it.

I would argue, though, that ending capitalist property relations with some combination of nationalization and workers’ control of the means of production is possible even without decisively cracking the logistical obstacles to wall-to-wall economic planning. I’m working on a book with Bhaskara Sunkara and Mike Beggs right now where we try to think through some of what that might look like—see Mike’s excellent essay on the topic for a preview—but basically I think we can imagine a short-term-realistic form of socialism where the state essentially nationalizes the physical means of production and rents them out to worker-owned firms in the spheres of the economy where we do still need market mechanisms to get around calculation problems.

Meanwhile, we have abundant evidence from actually existing social democracies that marketless planning works just fine in domains like healthcare and education. Like most socialists who see some remaining role for markets, I also think the economy’s “commanding heights” (like banking and the energy sector) should be in state hands. And I’m all for being what we can call opportunistically communist—by which I mean forever being on the lookout for ways to decommodify more chunks of the economy whenever we can do so without unacceptable tradeoffs.

Even if I’m right that this kind of socialism is logistically feasible, though, I understand it’s still wildly outside of the present boundaries of political possibility. So why talk about it?

I don’t want to be edgy and radical for the sake of being edgy and radical. The reason I don’t think we should give up on talking about a future that goes beyond capitalism is that it’s obscene that we live in a society where some people have fundamentally different and better life outcomes than others because they were born into a higher rung of the economic ladder, or because they’re lucky enough to have been born with the particular cocktail of cognitive skills and dispositions that are helpful in being upwardly mobile and securing a spot in the Professional-Managerial Class. It’s massively unjust that some people are in a position to order others around because they have money and other people have to spend all day at work taking orders because they don’t. “Maximalism” about ending rather those deep structural realities rather than just alleviating some of their worst symptoms isn’t popular now, but giving up on it would be wildly historically premature. Lots of things that were once fringe ideas have since become a reality—see for example the abolition of slavery.

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The examples we’ve considered so far can be sorted into three boxes:

• Maximalist demands that aren’t worth wanting

• Maximalist demands that would be desirable if we could figure out how to implement them

• Maximalist demands that are desirable and that we do know how to implement if we had the political power to do so

I’d put the “abolitionisms” surveyed above in the first box (to the extent that their advocates are even serious about “abolishing” those things), Fully Automated Luxury Communism in the second box, and collective ownership of the means of production in the third.

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The particular “maximalist demand” that got me thinking about all this is the one encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” I know that some Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists, and bloody-minded superfans of Franz Fanon invest this phrase with meanings I’d find reactionary and unacceptable. But what about what, say, Rashida Tlaib means when she says it—which is certainly what I mean when I say it and what I’m fairly certain the overwhelming majority of people who chant it at western anti-war protests have in mind?

Here’s how I described that goal in my Jacobin article defending the slogan late last year:

[The slogan is] widely used by advocates of a single democratic state with equal rights for Israeli Jews, Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Thai and Indian guest workers, and everyone else who lives there.

…[It’s] never been clear to me what it means to say that a state has a right to exist. Did Czechoslovakia have a right to exist? The Confederacy? The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies? Particular national configurations rising or falling as existing states break up or fuse with other states is a common event throughout history and doesn’t always entail any sort of injustice.

In this case, we aren’t even talking about Israel breaking up or fusing with some other state. The one-state solution embodied in the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” doesn’t involve changing current borders in any way. The contemplated transformation would be more like South Africa ceasing to be a “white state” in the 1990s.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for Israel to extend citizenship and legal and political equality to every single human being residing within its current borders.

I’ve seen people argue that the demand for a single secular state is misguided because no significant political party or armed faction in Israel/Palestine is currently making it. As a socialist, I’m pretty unmoved by that. I support workers’ control of the means of production in Canada, for example, even though I don’t see the NDP talking about—and under present circumstances radical anti-capitalism is surely advocated by a smaller percentage of Canadians than the roughly 1 in 10 Israelis and Palestinians who tell pollsters that a single state with equal rights for everyone would their preferred resolution to the conflict.

What about the alternative—a “two-state solution”?

If what we have in mind by that slogan is the creation of a real and viable Palestinian state, that’s not something even the most liberal governments in Israel’s history have ever considered allowing. By real I mean:

• Most obviously, not “demilitarized”—which would absolutely guarantee that a nominally independent Palestinian state would be constantly bombed, bullied and dominated by its extremely aggressive regional-superpower neighbor, and

• Not crisscrossed by settlement blocs annexed to Israel and Israeli roads patrolled by Israeli soldiers

It’s worth emphasizing that, even if a Palestinian state of this type were somehow created, the rump Israeli state would absolutely continue to be an exclusionary ethnostate. Even the most liberal Zionist prioritizes Israel’s “right” to “exist as a Jewish state,” which is an idea I categorically reject. No state has a “right” to ensure that it continues to have a particular ethnic composition. Only individual human beings have rights. And ensuring that Israel has a long-term Jewish majority within the green line tends to involve a lot of human rights violations and a distinctly second-class status even for “Israeli Arabs” who have (in most ways) formally equal legal rights. Palestinian families who were driven out in the 1948 ethnic cleansing aren’t allowed to return home to the towns and cities from which they fled while any Jewish person anywhere in the world is granted a sacrosanct right to “make aliyah.” Israeli Arabs who marry West Bank Palestinians aren’t legally allowed to live together with their spouse in Israel—allegedly for “security” reasons but in reality for demographic ones. This would all continue to be the case if a genuine two-state solution were implemented. Which, again, it won’t be any time soon.

Even during the years where the Rabin and Barack governments were nominally committed to the post-Oslo “peace process” there was never a point where they were willing to consider anything like a full retreat to Israel’s pre-1967 borders to allow the creation of a real Palestinian state complete with a Palestinian army and navy. In fact, these governments continued to build new West Bank settlements. And the level of liberalism displayed by these governments is a very distant memory now. At this point, even the low estimates I see tend to have about 5% of Israeli citizens living in the West Bank and it’s not out of the question that a serious attempt to remove all of them would trigger a civil war.

It would take a geopolitical earthquake of a kind it’s currently hard to picture to force Israel to agree to a genuine “two-state solution.” Under those circumstances, it seems like a bit much to say that we shouldn’t talk about the resolution we’d actually want because it’s even more unrealistic in the short term.

That’s not to say that I think we should make the perfect the enemy of the good if we got an earthquake of exactly the right magnitude to make a real two-state solution (but not a secular democratic one-state solution) viable. I’d rather West Bank and Gaza Palestinians be citizens of something than for them to spend another 56 years as completely rightsless non-citizen untermenschen. But whether we’re talking about turning Israel into a real multi-ethnic democracy or extending democracy to the workplace through collective ownership of the means of production, I do think that it’s worth getting clear on what we’d consider to be an actually just outcome—if only to use that as a north star while navigating the inevitable disappointments and tradeoffs of practical politics.

No one in the 1970s thought apartheid would fall as quickly or peacefully as it did in South Africa. It feels arrogant to me to completely rule out the possibility that history might unfold in the same way in Palestine. But even if it doesn’t, I still think being clear on the “maximalist” vision is worthwhile.

Here’s how I’d think about it:

A two-state partition that would likely freeze existing ethnic divisions in place for generations, as similar partitions did in Ireland the Indian subcontinent, might still be the lesser evil to continuing with the status quo until history provides a better earthquake.

Politics, whether international or otherwise, is full of heartbreaking tradeoffs. Sometimes the trade is worth making. But let’s at least be clear-eyed about what’s being traded away.

1. If someone in 1855 said, “well, I understand that we need to have slavery right now, I don’t want to get rid of it yet—the cotton industry would collapse!—but I think a super-duper long-term goal should be Imagining A World Without Slavery,” no one would have called that person an abolitionist.