Richard Wolff, a Marxist who always talks about class, has no clue that the Israeli upper class commits ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to control the Israeli Jewish working class

This is a problem with Marxism, not just Richard Wolff, who is an otherwise nice and well-intentioned person

Watch the video here.

Richard Wolff, a famous U.S. Marxist intellectual, speaks for more than an hour in this video (recorded 100 days after October 7, 2023) about Israel and Palestine. Wolff talks about class virtually the entire time. So it is, frankly, amazing that nowhere in this long talk does Wolff come even close to mentioning the connection between Israel’s seven decades of violent and brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the fact that Israel is a class society.

The connection between class and the ethnic cleansing is, however, the virtual elephant in the living room. I discuss it in detail here, where I prove the following. The billionaire Israeli ruling class has been committing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and treating them horrendously in the West Bank and Gaza for a CLASS purpose. The purpose is to make the Palestinians so angry at Israel that they can be easily portrayed to the Israeli working class as a frightening bogeyman enemy that wants to kill all the Jews. The Israeli ruling class pretends to be protecting ordinary Israelis from the Palestinian enemy, and thereby is able to control the Israeli Jewish working class. This is how the Israeli upper class prevents the Israeli Jewish working class from seriously aiming to challenge the power of the upper class that severely economically oppresses Israeli working class people.

If you want to see an example of what is wrong with Marxism, despite its focus on class, then I suggest you listen to Richard Wolff avoid even hinting at the crucial connection between class and ethnic cleansing that I discuss in my above-linked article as he talks about Israel and Palestine at length from, as he emphasizes, a Marxist perspective.

These demonstrations by the Israel working class in 2011 were explicitly against economic oppression of the working class and numbered 450,000 with the support of 85-90% of the Israeli public. Wolff doesn’t mention these huge working class demonstrations, but does mention the smaller demonstrations in 2023 that were against making Israel’s Supreme Court weaker.

The Problem is Not Just Wolff, It’s Marxism

There are, to my knowledge, no Marxists who discuss the elephant in the living room, i.e., the fact that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is done by the Israeli billionaire ruling class for the purpose of controlling and oppressing the Israeli Jewish working class. Why do Marxists avoid this KEY fact? (Read why it is a key fact for enabling the anti-Zionism movement to succeed here.)

The answer is this. Marxists don’t think that capitalists need to control working class people. Marxists are big on talking about how working class and capitalist class people have conflicting objective INTERESTS. But Marxists never talk about THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT, namely that capitalists and working class people have conflicting subjective VALUES (meaning their ideas about right and wrong, such as equality versus inequality, democracy versus domination of the many by the few, mutual aid versus pitting people against each other to control them, concern for others versus greedy self-interest, etc.) Marxists don’t talk about this fact because they don’t believe it is true! Marxists don’t believe working class people have different moral values from capitalists.

Marxists believe that working class people have the same subjective values as the capitalist class, namely self-interest (with the self-interest of one conflicting with that of the other, for example wanting higher versus lower wages.) Marxists believe that working class people are de-humanized by capitalism, that they lack “class consciousness” and subscribe to the “hegemonic” ideology of the capitalist class: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. In the Marxist view, the capitalists have no need to control the working class because working class people accept capitalist values and are just “sheeple” who are “complicit” with all the crimes of capitalists against other people. Marxists would simply never dream that Israeli capitalists have a need to create a bogeyman by ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for the purpose of controlling the Jewish Israeli working class. This notion would just never even occur to them. The only reason Marxists can conceive for why Israel commits ethnic cleansing is the same notion that non-Marxists give—that it’s all about selfishness: Jews wanting to steal land and homes from the Palestinians, and using the Biblical “God gave the land to the Jews” nonsense to justify it.

Because Marxists don’t think that capitalists have any need to do anything to control the working class, they remain blind to the fact that the reason capitalists do terrible things, such as waging wars, is to control their own working class. Capitalists waged WWII for this purpose, as I show here. Read here about many more examples of this.

This is why Richard Wolff, a very smart Marxist, goes on and on about Israel and Palestine and how horrible the current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is without ever mentioning the KEY fact—the anti-working-class PURPOSE of the ethnic cleansing (the most recent manifestation of which is Israel’s decision to commit genocide of Palestinians in Gaza rather than to grant Palestinians their Right of Return, the granting of which would result in peace and the utter disappearance of Hamas.) The actual purpose of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide has clearly never even occurred to Wolff. That is because he is a Marxist.

Egalitarianism is Anti-Marxism

I am an egalitarian, and hence an anti-Marxist. Read why in these articles:

Egalitarianism is Anti-Marxism

WHY I AM CRITICAL OF "THE LEFT" AND NOT JUST CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS

COMMUNISM (Also please read the articles it links to)

Read here about how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement.