Marx & Rawls vs. Nozick & the "Land Back" Left (UNLOCKED)

Is justice about turning back the clock to some past distribution of property or creating a more equal society going forward?

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for Jacobin that generated quite a bit of intra-left controversy. It was my nineteenth article for the magazine on Israel/Palestine. I’ve gotten plenty of hate mail over the years for the first eighteen, but always from ardent Zionists. This was the first one that generated a fair amount of disagreement from people who are broadly within my “camp.”

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Some contemporary Zionists try to steal their ideological enemies’ thunder by arguing that Jews are the original inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, and so the creation of a Jewish ethnostate with a right of return for all Jews everywhere but none for Palestinian refugees can be justified as a kind of long-delayed act of decolonization.

There are (at least!) two ways of resisting this argument.

The first and probably the most common is to argue for some kind of statue of limitations on indigeneity. If too much time has passed since most members of a group lived in an area, they’re no longer “indigenous” to that area. Surely the Palestinians are the really indigenous ethnicity.

The second is the approach I took in the article, which is to treat that status as a normative irrelevancy. My longstanding anti-Zionism is based on moral universalism. The ethnic cleansing in 1948, and all the ways that Palestinians have been denied rights since then, can be condemned on the basis of rights everyone should have, just for being a person—regardless of who is or isn’t “really” indigenous.

While the primary target of my article was the Zionist argument outlined above, I also took a couple shots in passing at what I called, tweaking Babel, “the anti-Zionism of fools” and attributed to a “misguided—and, I hope, relatively small—segment of Palestine solidarity activists.” I gave two examples. One involved social media posts I’ve seen in which people mock '“white”-looking Israeli Jews with Ashkenazi surnames with dunks about how it really doesn’t seem like they’re “indigenous to the Middle East.” The other was about the casual verbal inflation whereby all Israeli Jews, and not just the ones who live on West Bank settlements, are referred to as “settlers”—even though the vast majority were born in Israel.

One of the reasons the article generated so much backlash was that some leftie academics on Twitter managed to telephone-game my article into a “critique of settler-colonial analysis” even though the idea that Zionism writ large is a “settler-colonial” project wasn’t criticized (or even mentioned) in it. I actually think there are some pretty clear senses in which the description fits. But unless any such analysis necessarily entails that every single individual Israeli Jew should be referred to as a “settler” or that it’s important to portray them as interlopers in the region, nothing I said was even implicitly a critique of “settler-colonial analysis” per se.

Some people told me that if the Israeli state is “settler-colonial” we should use the word “settler” to describe anyone whose “structural position” places them on the top of the state’s ethnic hierarchy. This strikes me as a dubious linguistic choice. These days, calling people “settlers” tends to carry with it the connotation that their presence in the place they’re “settling” is illegitimate—even if some academics insist that ordinary speakers shouldn’t hear that connotation. If all you’re trying to say is that everyone should be structurally equal, why court this confusion?

A more interesting objection, and the one I want to focus on in what follows, is that which ethnicity counts as “indigenous” is a normatively important question because we need Palestinian indigeneity to ground our support for their right of return. Many critics of the article seemed to take it for granted that such a connection exists.

But why?

It seems to me that “no human being should ever be displaced from the place where they live because of their ethnicity, and no one should be barred from migrating back to the place from which they were removed if that does happen to them” is pretty plausible as an absolutely general principle. A scenario I’ve posed many times in the last few weeks to many left critics of my article goes like this:

Imagine an alternate timeline where the first Arab families arrived in Palestine just a year or two before (or even a year or two after!) the first wave of Zionist settlers showed up in the 1870s—but where everything after that point played out in exactly the same way. Like—read Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and insert those hundred years of dispossession into the hypothetical.

Would the Nakba and the subsequent denial of the right of return to the victims of that ethnic cleansing have been any less objectionable in this timeline?

I think the closest to a straight answer to this question I’ve gotten from anyone is one particularly insistent Twitter critic who, after the third or fourth time I posed this hypothetical, finally said the Nakba refugees’ right of return would be “less salient” in this timeline than in ours. You can judge for yourself how straight an answer that is but, to the limited extent that any actual position is being expressed there, it strikes me as a pretty reactionary one.

An alternate route that the critics could go would be to insist that even without temporal priority, the refugees in this scenario would be “structurally” indigenous. That would be consistent with much of the rest of what they say but, interestingly, I haven’t seen any of them go this route—maybe just because it’s too intuitively obvious that their use of the “i” word would at this point have lost all touch with its standard popular-level meaning.

Similarly, we could ask, in a timeline where 1967 or 1973 had gone so very differently that Israel was conquered and there was ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews—would anyone dispossessed in that event (or for that matter their grandchildren) have a right to come back to live in the places from which they were driven? I’d say yes. I assume that most of my critics would say yes too.

And again: If you really wanted you could insist that as a result of the new situation Israeli Jews had become “structurally” indigenous. But there’s a reason no one I’ve posed these questions to seems to want to take this linguistic escape hatch.

Better, I think, to just grant that the right of all atrocity-refugees to return is a universal right. Honestly, I think any limitations on people’s ability to move around peacefully across national borders are hard to justify in principle. Even if you think, for one reason or another, that some such limitations are necessary, surely they represent a compromise between justice and some other value and the burden should be on anyone proposing an immigration restriction to give us a good reason why it should be imposed. And if there’s one group of would-be migrants to a given area who it seems most objectionable to keep out, it’s families who already lived there and were unjustly evicted. Even beyond this, the ugliest and most indefensible way of justifying any immigration restriction is precisely the one used by Zionists to oppose Palestinians’ right of return—that letting in too many members of the “wrong” group would add up to a “demographic threat” to the country’s existing ethnic composition.

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So far I’ve been responding to the views of those who seem to vaguely assume that settling who counts as Officially Indigenous is important for grounding the right to return. But a more surprising and troubling response was from people who told me that I didn’t really support that right if I thought everyone should have equal rights in a post-Zionist state. Instead, they argued, “real” right of return would mean displacing “settlers” throughout Israel/Palestine for the sake of “land back.”

But what would this mean?

Very few Israeli Jews live in houses once occupied by Palestinians, for example. About 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of the country during the Nakba. There are about seven million Jewish citizens of Israel today. In general, you’d expect more people to be living in any given house in a far poorer and less developed country in the 1940s than in a fairly advanced capitalist country like contemporary Israel. Many houses that existed in the 40s in any country don’t exist now—and in Israel the ethnic cleansing in 1948 often involved destroying entire villages. In the tiny minority of cases where Israeli homes were once Palestinian homes, if the original residents or their children or grandchildren did go through the court system of a post-Zionist state and get the house back, that seems totally fine to me. I may be a socialist, but I believe in a right to personal property.

Mostly, I’d just hope that whoever didn’t get the house—whether the Palestinian with the original deed or, say, some Israeli who bought it from some other Israeli fifty years ago and has lived there ever since—would at least get serious financial compensation because either way that person would be fucked over to a non-negligible degree by the court’s decision. But as a socialist what I care about most in this situation is that everyone is allowed to live in whatever area they want to live in, and everyone gets some kind of decent housing along with having the rest of their needs met.

In one or two conversations, though, when I’ve made these points people have asked me why I was restricting myself just to houses. Why not “land” in general? Like, if what was once a Palestinian farm is now an Israeli shopping mall, why does the shopping mall get to stay? Shouldn’t we be trying as hard as we can to give all the land back?

And the more I thought about that response the more obvious it got to me that, without realizing it, some of these left critics have landed on the wrong side of a fundamental divide separating left-wing egalitarian conceptions of justice from right-wing libertarian ones.

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To start to see the point, think about a case where large numbers of people were dispossessed from their land long before the 1940s. The last of the eight sections of Marx’s Capital is on the process of “primitive accumulation” by which the capitalist mode of production was born.

A big part of his argument throughout the book is that the fundamental dynamics of capitalist exploitation would be the same even in a far cleaner version of capitalism where everyone really was meticulously following all the official rules of market fairness. So we could pretend that the first crop of capitalists got their wealth by totally honest and reasonable means—he says at one point that we could even pretend they got it through doing wage labor and being really good at saving money—and the system would nevertheless have the class dynamics he describes (and reproduce those dynamics over time). But in the last section he tells the real story of the birth of capitalism in Britain, which is a horror story.

Most British people a few centuries ago were peasants with hereditary rights to their own little plots of land within larger estates. They were systematically and often quite violently driven off their land—without, as Marx says, "a farthing of compensation”—both to open up the land to more profitable uses and to create a pool of people so desperate to avoid starvation that they were willing to work in the kinds of factories that William Blake memorably called “dark Satanic mills.” At the end of the penultimate chapter of the book, Marx finally draws a revolutionary political conclusion.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

Whatever else you want to say about that—perhaps you think, for example, that Marx was being far too optimistic about how quickly and peacefully a transition to socialism could occur—the basic vision is quite clear. There’s no turning back the clock. But we don’t have to accept the capitalist status quo either. We can and should go forward to a better society.

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Marx, of course, was writing a work of economic analysis—although in the service of a definite political program—rather than doing normative political philosophy. But his belief that the point isn’t to recover lost property relations but to move forward to better ones does implicitly put him on one side of a later debate between twentieth-century political philosophers.

John Rawls, famously, thought a just distribution of resources is the one that a rational person would sign off on if they were trying to get the best deal for themselves from behind the “veil of ignorance”—they would know all the “third person” facts about economics and sociology and the rest but they would lack the “first person” knowledge of who they would be in this society. There are subtleties here, and G.A. Cohen has an interesting and I think at least partly correct critique of Rawls from the left but basically this conception of justice gets you an obvious mandate for a pretty egalitarian economic set-up—as egalitarian as it could get consistent with a thriving economy producing enough that a roughly equal share of it would be worth wanting. There are big debates about how far from the kind of society we have now this theory of justice would take you but it’s pretty clear that a good Rawlsian would have to support pretty extensive forms of economic redistribution.

Robert Nozick disagreed.

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Nozick thought—or at least thought at the stage of his career where he wrote his most widely read book, Anarchy, State & Utopia—that Rawlsianism and other egalitarian views about what would count as a desirable distribution of wealth can be refuted like this:

(a) Imagine that everyone starts out with whatever share of society’s resources your egalitarian theory of justice says they should have, then:

(b) People spend their money how they please, without anyone coercing them, and this leads to:

(c) A very inegalitarian distribution of resources.

Nozick says that, to be consistent, the egalitarian would have to think (c) was unjust, but he considers this absurd, since all the steps leading there were just! Thus, he concludes, “liberty" disrupts “patterns”—in other words, any particular pattern of distribution can only be enforced by violating people’s liberty by, for example, doing a bit of redistribution every year on April 15th, which Nozick thinks would self-evidently be a terrible thing to do. The fundamental assumption that justice is about process rather than outcomes is in effect snuck in through the back door at the beginning of this argument and then reasserted at the end as if he’d derived it from premises that represent common ground between the two camps.

It’s important to note here that Nozick doesn’t object to all redistribution of resources. He even expresses openness to reparations for black people at one point—not because they’re poorer on average than white people, which he sees as an irrelevance, but because slavery and Jim Crow violated the rules of market fairness and thus led the descendants of the victims to be economically worse off than they would be if those rules had been respected. If someone is living in miserable, grinding poverty not due to historical injustices but simply because they drew the short straw in a series of free-market interactions, Nozick sees, perhaps, a tragedy—but no injustice.

He thinks injustice is about whether anyone’s Broken the Rules in the chain of cause and effect leading up to the present distribution, not whether the present distribution is equal or unequal, humane or inhumane, conducive to everyone flourishing and exercising autonomy or conducive to de facto domination and degradation, in the present tense.

Whatever else you want to say here, this much seems absolutely clear:

Rawls vs. Nozick. Marx’s vision of going forward to a new society by expropriating the expropriators vs. daydreaming of a return to some pre-capitalist idyll. The whole left-egalitarian tradition encompassing all its quarreling subtraditions vs. free-market process fetishists.

This is an absolutely fundamental philosophical divide.

This is Deuteronomy 30:19. “I have set before you life and death…”

Is the problem with the poverty and economic disempowerment of some people whose ancestors underwent particular injustices that these conditions came about in the wrong way? Or is the problem that poverty and economic disempowerment are never acceptable? Should the goal in Palestine be to reset the clock to the property relations of an undeveloped country in the 1940s, which were themselves severely inegalitarian? Or should we be trying to create better and more egalitarian property relations for everyone going forward?

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One of my critics points out that if Palestinians return, we wouldn’t want them to be siloed into “the ghettos inhabited by Arab Israelis.” Of course not! But we don’t want anyone to live in substandard or de facto segregated housing. The achievement of bourgeois-democratic rights for Palestinians would take Jewish/Arab inequality in Palestine to the place where black/white inequality in the United States has been since the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a place where legal equality coincides with material disparities.

But as thinkers like Adolph Reed constantly emphasize in a US context, the disparities aren’t the heart of the problem. We don’t want a society in which the right proportions of each group are living in the conditions of people at the bottom of the current hierarchy. We want to burn the hierarchy to the ground and create something better.