The United States doesn’t currently have a draft, but some people talk of an ‘economic draft’ i.e. that those in desperate poverty tend to join up, tend to be targetted by recruiters, and end up making up a far larger proportion of the military than they do of the national population. Given the intersection of race and class in all aspects of US society, this ends up meaning that blacks make up a far greater proportion of the US military than they do the national population. Basketball, boxing, rap. Drug-dealing, low wage shitty jobs. The military. These are the cliched options of blacks in poverty.

Legendarily, in recent times the proportion of those recruited who are black has fallen substantially, and the number of blacks being recruited has dropped, something seen as reflecting both a recently increased sense that military service entails a real risk of serious injury or death, and opposition to current US military operations, particularly in Iraq.

In fact, of course, blacks in the military now have, particularly in the lower ranks, a relative parity of income and status not common anwhere else in the US, with a comparatively extremely high rate of access to health-care and retirement income, and relatively high rates of access to higher levels of education. Also the highest rates of interracial marriage of any section of the black population. And, of course, high rates of killing and being killed by foreigners, overwhelmingly not white, to serve ‘the national interest’.

It would be impossible to consider the political economy of the US, and the US military, without considering issues of race. And in considering the ‘material interests’ of people, it would be absurd to consider race as simply an illusion or false consciousness. I take this as a conventional banality.

survival is a material interest

It had been a while, but recently I’ve had a few of those exchanges in which I end up feeling that principled internationalism and anti-statism are being deployed to refuse to engage with reality, rather than as a way to confront it. And, as the topic is Palestine, in which I begin to suspect that the motives for this avoidance are not mere dogmatism, but also anxiety about being seen as anti-Semitic or pro-terrorist, often a concern where questions of anti-Zionism and Israel are concerned. It just seems easier, I suspect, to condemn all nationalisms equally and leave it at that.

But this is only easier from a certain kind of outside. From the perspective of, say, an unemployed Palestinian in the West Bank during, say, Fatah’s rule in the Palestinian Authority, certain other realities may have seemed to demand engagement, every day.

As a predominantly ‘bourgeois’ nationalist force, Fatah, in its politically dominant strand, would have been content to end up administering a sort of Bantustan under Israel and call it a nation-state, or at least a long-term path to one. Thus they wanted the usual forms of control over the population, as states and administrators do; they also need this population to administer and control. You can’t manage the exploitation of a population that doesn’t exist. The risk of insubordination faced was not just that of all states, of course, because the issue of Israel was ever-present, but essentially Fatah would have liked to have simply faced the normal problems of a potentially rebellious population common to ’stable’ capitalist states.

The relation of the Palestinian proletariat to the Israeli state was and is quite different. The Israeli state and capital faces risks of insubordination but largely does not need or want this population, not for labour, not for consumption, not for capital. From the imaginary perspective of such a West Bank unemployed Palestinian, what the Israeli state seems to not only want but actively plan and try to bring about is his or her absence, by death or departure doesn’t really matter. Making conditions for Palestinians more and more intolerable is part of a hope that these Palestinians will just disappear.

This has been true since well before the advent of routine suicide bombings or the existence, let alone prominence, of Hamas.

And so one dominant bourgeois force would aim for subordination and exploitation and call it development, while the other would aim for decimation and call it peace.

Neither is very attractive, but such differences are real and manifest every day, and the perception of these realities does not require one to be irrationally infected by nationalism or a love of states. It would be odd if restricting the Israeli state’s ability to pursue such projects wasn’t seen as in the interests of ‘the proletariat’, if it wasn’t a concern of ‘internationalist’ revolutionaries. But it should be also odd if opposition to all nationalism and all states was used so as not to have to notice these rather stark distinctions.