Chris Cutrone returns with an essay titled “The alternative to genocide” and a challenge to socialists. Can you avoid petit-bourgeois illusion? Doug and Chris Cutrone discuss Guy Debord and value-criticism.

The alternative to genocide

Chris Cutrone

The alternative to extermination is slavery — labor. The only reason for conquerors not to kill the defeated is to put them to work — to make them useful. If they cease to be useful or prove to be more trouble than they are worth, they will be killed. That is the lesson of history.

The Keynesian economist Joan Robinson famously said that, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

The terrorism of the Second Intifada 2000–05 brought an end to Palestinian labor in Israel. Not entirely, but substantially: the Palestinians became disposable. That was actually the end. We have been living in its aftermath for the past quarter of a century. It is coming to a conclusion now. Hamas was elected, and that election is coming to fruition.

October 7 was a no-turning-back moment for Israel. Palestinian terrorism is to be utterly crushed in a way that has never been attempted previously. It will succeed. The only alternative to this will in fact be genocide — not rhetorically, but literally. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.

Hamas calls the Palestinians a “nation of martyrs.” Palestinian activists loudly proclaim that they will “never surrender.” It’s easy for them to say. In the meantime, mere survival will demand otherwise. The Palestinians will work. Or they will die. — They will work.

Before October 7, there was a modus vivendi in which Israel allowed tens of thousands of Gazans to work in Israel, supporting their families back home: tens of thousands more. After October 7, tens of thousands have been killed, with further tens of thousands grievously wounded: hundreds of thousands more are left bereft. Israel is teaching a horrifying lesson, and it is the lesson of the modern world, if not for all of history. It is a lesson not worth the teaching, because it is already known by everyone — at least by every worker: The alternative to labor — slavery — is extermination.

What does Marxism have to say about that? — What doesn’t Marxism have to say about it? Nothing and everything. But the point is not Marxism but socialism. And for Marxism that means the working class.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers in Israel and abroad: What do they have to do with socialism? They are the only ones in fact to have anything to do with socialism. Not upper- or middle-class or social-climber radicals — not nationalists or Islamists: workers. What they can and should do will decide socialism — or not. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the next day.

Palestinian workers should have gone to the Israeli kibbutzim not for hostile reconnaissance but labor solidarity: to work alongside Israelis and others, not target them for killing, as before October 7.

Hamas killed that possibility — the only possibility for socialism: in Palestine and everywhere.

Hamas recruits from the otherwise unemployed and unemployable: angry young (wo/)men. It seeks not workers but soldiers, as with any gangsters. — It does no good to point out that the same is true of the IDF: Israel is a state with compulsory conscription; Palestine is not. That’s the point. But Palestinians don’t need a state; and Israelis must overcome the need for theirs. This is not what Hamas wants: Hamas wants war. Hamas wants to be the state: and states mean wars. But the war is over — for a long time, now. A Palestinian state is either impossible or undesirable for the workers. But it is what Hamas might be getting them. The Israeli state is the Palestinian state: and the state means violence. Whether by Hamas or the IDF — the official or unofficial state: the state of war.

The Palestinians are a conquered people. Perhaps not for all time, but at least for now. This is not going to change — no amount of protest will change it. This is the reality. The only alternative to extermination is slavery. The only alternative to living with defeat is not living with it: dying from it. But there is an alternative to death: life. Life as a worker — it is actually preferable to death! Every worker knows this.

Pick your battles; and live to fight another day. — But Hamas denied Palestinians this option. Purposefully: if they cannot be lords, then there will be no subjects — only, there are: will they be allowed to live? Or will their defeated lords demand their death to honor them?

The idea of a “noble death” is an aristocratic one — perhaps it is also virtuous for priests. The point is that it is not for the people to die nobly: the people can only die miserably. This is what makes them ignoble and dishonorable: clinging to bare life at all cost, no matter the compromise of virtues. — Good!

What does Marxism have to say about that? It does not promise redemption but only possible change in mode of production: an exchange of miseries. And not out of morality but history: objective necessity. The only good is life itself; and the only change that is possible is in how the good of life is to be achieved.

There is no objective reason for an end to suffering, but only for transforming its necessity. Marxism is resolutely “materialistic,” placing “happiness” as the goal in the struggle for freedom — not principle.

Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus — Marx was a democratic epicurean. This is what is called “socialism.” “Communism” seems nobler — which is why Marx criticized it: Marx was not interested in the subjective communism of intellectuals, but the objective communism of workers. Will they have it?

Marx found in communism the scent of religion, and not from the “rose in the cross” but something baser and meaner, in the odor of priests and nuns wafting out of the cloister — the academy.

What are the children doing in their tents but practicing their religion? — It is best kept out of sight.

The alternative to genocide is the working-class struggle for socialism. Short of that, it is the struggle of the workers to survive in capitalism — and perhaps of intellectuals to abandon their illusions, whether in “communism” or whatever else: their sentimental projections onto the workers, who they can only value in their misery and wretchedness of victimhood, the direr the better. But that is their psychology.

Don’t listen to the priests or shamans or holy fools, for they are false prophets: The world is not ending.

Nietzsche was right about the priests tricking not only the nobles but the slaves into an evil ressentiment for tearing down the good. Thankfully, this was never so successful and was mostly ignored, confined to the middle class of Nietzsche’s own bourgeois milieu — that of today’s enraged protesters: Nietzsche was right about them. Nietzsche was right.

It is in fact necessary to surrender to your boss. It is not just, but necessary: necessary to live. Workers are not privileged to do otherwise: they are not bosses; nor do they want to be. They just want to live. Shall we let them? Or do we demand their sacrifice to our crazed ideas? Thankfully, they are not listening.

Only the bosses are listening: Be careful not to make the workers’ life harder in order to satisfy your own perverse desires and deranged visions. Keep them where they belong: in the monastery or nunnery — get thee there, and stay put in your chosen torture-chamber for the measurement of souls. Or else:

A healthy dose of philistinism would be salutary: The intellectuals need to get a job — make themselves useful in their labor. They can start by stopping their preaching of extermination as the only alternative to slavery: they can stop preaching “genocide,” which doesn’t help anyone but themselves; it doesn’t save anyone but their own “beautiful souls” — which the world can actually do without, thank you.

What the world cannot do without is the people sacrificed to the worshipping of false idols — including those of true religions. Let us not have a democide. Let the people struggle for socialism. Let them work.

There is an alternative to genocide. | §