Deep History master Linebaugh

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55:11 / 55:11
Transcript
1:07
Hello and welcome to another  episode of India & Global Left.  Today, we have with us a very special  guest, Professor Peter Linebaugh.
1:16
Professor Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in   British history, Irish history, labor history and the history  
1:24
of the colonial Atlantic. He was also a student of the   British labor historian E.P. Thompson. Today, we are having him to discuss his
1:34
recent work on Palestine, an essay titled  Palestine and the Commons or Marx and the
1:40
Musha. Professor Linebaugh,  welcome to India and Global Left.
1:46
Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Glad to be speaking with you.  We found your recent work on  Palestine very, very interesting,
1:53
particularly for placing the land context  at the center of what you analyze.
2:00
So if before we start, we kick start, maybe if you could give us a   little bit about the title itself, Palestine and the Commons or Marx and the Musha,
2:11
what went into the making of the title? The two themes.  One theme is the struggle for liberation in Palestine in the midst of this genocidal war.
2:22
And the second theme is the is the theme of the commons, as expressed  
2:30
at the end of Karl Marx's life when his interest in the subject  
2:37
was renewed, though, actually. His interest in the commons  
2:45
began with a study of criminality, a so-called criminality in the 1830s.
2:54
And the Musha is an Arabic term for common agrarian practices  
3:03
that were prevalent in Palestine. And with the Musha are not only these practices,
3:10
but community values of sumut  or resilience at the Musha.
3:22
Well, I should say right away  that I'm not an Arabic speaker,  nor am I a scholar of Palestine. I have learned from scholars  
3:31
of Palestine and am rapidly under the fierce heat of the
3:38
genocidal war in Palestine,  like people all over the world.  I've turned my attention to Palestine  to see its worldwide significance.
3:48
And and then I brought to that subject  the traditions that I have lived  with, which have, as you noted in your
3:57
introduction, largely Atlantic,  and they concern forms of human
4:04
resistance and struggle against  privatization, against capitalism,
4:10
and from its birth several centuries ago. And out of that, I formed the notion  
4:18
of the commons or commoning, to use a verb to express an action  
4:25
in creating a common life. And to turn and to see,
4:31
just by accident, I had some old documents from the Palestine Exploration  
4:36
Fund from the 1890s. And there, to my astonishment,
4:41
I saw that the Musha was  described as a form of communism.
4:48
Now, these were Anglo archaeologists  and anthropologists doing that writing.
4:54
But at the same time, of course, in a  different context, Karl Marx was also
5:00
investigating again what the  commons meant and how it related to
5:07
communism. So  I brought these two subjects  together in a tentative way.
5:15
Most of the Anglo-Anglophone writing  about Palestine that I came across
5:22
was largely political, diplomatic and military in its lens,  
5:30
in its approach, quite understandably, because to this day, it's very,  
5:36
it's very difficult to learn what are the actual material basis of life in Gaza and in the West  
5:45
Bank and in Palestine as a whole. It's very, very difficult.
5:53
So. Yeah, we want to   get into Palestine, but just for a moment, since you are a historian of the UK and  
6:03
also colonial Atlantic and we generally live in the left tradition, we do read and  
6:11
discuss a lot about the commons. I mean, an enclosers,  Marx's capital, he wrote about the enclosers. That was very, very central to what he was doing.
6:22
But also later down, I remember reading Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote that Marx's  
6:28
capital is more like an analytical story. It's probably not the most accurate history.
6:35
So I wanted to start as a   background for this conversation by asking you, what were the commons in the UK and the  
6:46
US and what did enclosure basically do in so far as restructuring social relations?
6:54
Yeah, OK. It's a very broad question, but it is, you know,  
7:00
to take the second part first enclosure,  it can be divided in two ways. It's a legal process and it's a physical process.
7:12
As a legal process, it denotes and delimits private property
7:19
to the exclusion of all  others with claims to its use.
7:26
So that's the legal side and there's  a struggle over the legal side,  but we can discuss that later if need be. The other side of enclosure is physical.
7:36
That is, it's the development  of fences or walls or barriers
7:42
or even something the English  call a haha, which is a ditch.  Instead of raising a fence, it builds a ditch
7:53
around the limitations of the enclosed field. So those are two aspects of enclosure.
8:03
Historically, contrasting America with England,
8:11
I think the first thing that comes  to mind, of course, is the scale.
8:16
The American scale is far greater. It's a whole continent.
8:22
England, after all, is just a small part of the British Isles, a few islands off of  
8:28
the northwest coast of Europe. So that's one big difference.  And there's a second difference, which  has to do not with space, but with time,
8:38
that enclosures have different temporalities. So, for example, it just took a few years
8:46
to establish the 30 foot wall  in Palestine, separating,  excluding Palestine from Israel. In the United States, the enclosure of land
9:00
begins with its delimitation or  with its surveying, which took place  in the 1790s under the aegis of Thomas Jefferson. So that's that's a bit more than 200 years old.
9:12
Whereas in England, the enclosures, again, both legally and physically,
9:22
took place over several  centuries, several more centuries.  We could even go back to the time of  the Great Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
9:32
So that that would put it many centuries ago. So it's far more slow in England.
9:41
And that that pace accompanied  the formation of the nation state.
9:48
It accompanied also, well, in both cases, different forms of violence.
9:58
And I think the process of enclosure can never be separated from the  
10:03
process of violence. And that violence   generally accompanied state formation. In America, it was an essential part
10:14
of settlement or the  development of settler colonies.
10:22
In England, it was not so much settlement, but
10:28
we think of it as an expropriation. We think of those who used to live
10:34
on the commons or with common rights as commoners of different kind,
10:43
whether in the highlands of pastoral  economy or in the lowlands of
10:49
riverine or beach or coastal properties or in in what in England would be called waste
10:58
or in America, it would be called wilderness. Both of those terms, waste and wilderness,
11:05
are terms of the settlers,  terms the enclosures would use,  just as they would use the term barbarian  or savage to refer to the commoner.
11:17
We might instead refer to indigenous people or so the English language,
11:28
especially in law, but also in the  development of settler civilization,
11:36
whose whose main prop, I think, whose main foundation, apart from the land itself,
11:45
is different forms of racism, different forms of of exclusion to regard those being  
11:56
expropriated as subhuman and thus permitting
12:02
forms of violence that reach now the  scale that we see in Gaza of deliberate
12:10
famine, destruction of habitat and genocide.
12:19
So just to sum up, I think the difference between England and America
12:28
is one of scale and also of speed. And this the issue of speed, of course, continues.
12:37
So things get faster and faster. You look at the expropriations
12:44
in in the in a in the former Soviet Union. They will take place over a generation.
12:53
This was a debate in the 1920s that expropriations since World War Two
13:01
have been very rapid wherever, wherever we look,
13:08
whether it's the Philippines  or Indonesia or or Zambia or
13:14
I don't know the history of the tribal  lands in India as well or forms of
13:20
the common in India as well. But again, to repeat the the removal
13:27
and destruction of the commons  is essential to privatization  and generally privatization from the  standpoint of those who profit by it.
13:37
They call it not privatization, but an  improvement or development or progress.
13:46
But from the standpoint of  the vast majority of people  who lose subsistence, it results in genocide.
13:58
So let's come to Palestine then. Well, I'll come to the
14:03
colonizing project in my next  questions, but just as a start,
14:09
tell us a little bit about the  late Ottoman period, 19th century  and what the land system was from what I  picked up from your essay was that there
14:19
was a side by side evolution of  the system where the Miri system,
14:25
which was the state land  where the state collected tax,  it existed side by side with the  Musa land, which was more or less
14:32
a collectivized form of social  relation, as I understood it.  So tell us a little bit, walk us through the land system in the late Ottoman period.
14:44
Well, again, I have to say that I'm not a  in the first place, a scholar of Palestine.
14:52
And the answers to your question remain open. There are fine
14:58
Ottoman historians, Turkish historians who know whose work is more available in the English  
15:06
language. But  and again, I want to repeat what I said  before, the agrarian and economic history
15:15
of Palestine is not as advanced,  at least in the English language,
15:21
as the political, military, diplomatic,  cultural, literary, religious
15:28
sides to Palestine. But from my understanding, since the Ottoman
15:36
Empire and its hegemony and domination of Palestine,
15:44
as among its other provinces  from Egypt up to Turkey,
15:53
a region that British imperialists would   call the Levant or the East,
16:00
the Ottoman Empire had these wished to wish a tributary system where
16:10
where cultivators had to  supply through a tax system,
16:16
a certain amount of their income and a certain number of bodies for the military.
16:26
So under the Ottoman Empire,  Palestinians were subject to tax and conscription and to seek some way of avoiding these.
16:41
The Musha system developed, making, providing a kind of cloud or
16:50
a veil against individuality  and against individualism.
16:55
So then any, say, particular olive tree or orange grove could not be identified with a  
17:03
single person or even with a patriarch, but instead belong to a collectivity
17:13
that fell under the name of the Musha, which had was not only a defensive organization, but was  
17:21
also a productive organization. It had means of periodically  
17:28
redistributing land among among its users. And here I want to emphasize that the Musha  
17:37
is largely an agrarian phenomenon. And it's only
17:44
after the Zionist project that some  elements or qualities of the Musha
17:49
are adopted in in urban conditions or suburban conditions.
17:58
It was most long lasting in  pastoral areas or in highlands,
18:05
but perhaps 80 or 70 to 80  percent of land of Palestine
18:12
was cultivated under this system of the Musha or under these  
18:17
practices called the Musha. And the Ottomans sought in 1858 with a land law to
18:27
to install forms of land title.
18:34
They called it reform, but it meant resistance and   recalcitrance and was not was ineffective, though it did provide the  
18:45
basis where settlers from Europe, from Central Europe or from France or from England
18:54
would seek to privatize some land. And the first two steps in that  
19:00
are to have title to it. So there's a legal system.  So they need to negotiate with the Ottoman powers. And then the other side is to have the
19:10
agreement of those who live  there, of the villagers.  And that was far more difficult to obtain. And it was the basis of  
19:20
continual resistance through oh, from at least the 1860s through the
19:29
to the British Mandate after 1917  and then to the Zionist project
19:36
and to Israel after the Nakba of 1948. These forms of collective, cooperative,
19:49
agrarian life have a long persistence.
19:54
But I think it's a mistake. But again, let me say that
20:02
much more work needs to be done on this. If you come from English history,
20:09
you have the advantage of  centuries of village histories,  of parish histories. This does not exist,  
20:18
to my knowledge, in Palestine. So one's left with the archives of the settlers
20:28
or with oral history and family history. Again, this is,
20:34
you know, my impression. Does that help?
20:41
Yes. So essentially,
20:47
what happened eventually is is a very violent and perhaps  
20:54
a rapid attempt of privatization of these collectivized lands.
20:59
And you talk a little bit about the process of registration and improvement of land,  
21:05
I just wanted to have a brief response from you on this,   because I think it's very essential to understand the hegemony of this  
21:15
narrative of land improvement or land reform and so on and so forth in terms of  
21:21
setting the motion of privatization of land or creating a land   market and so on and so forth. So tell us a little bit about this
21:28
narrative of land improvement and registration. Well, the
21:40
the improvement means means, I emphasize in the article that I wrote
21:51
the process of cartography,  cartography or mapping.
21:57
Just like I think in the Asian subcontinent,  it was Everest who developed the.
22:05
The triangulation, right? For mapping the subcontinent
22:12
in the USA or in Turtle Island of North America, it was a surveying done in the 1790s
22:23
that creates the maps. And produces the grid.
22:29
Sorry, France was also at the leading  edge of the surveying at that moment.
22:35
France was? Yeah. That's interesting.  Interesting. And in England, I mean,  
22:42
the main instruments are the theodolites. Right.  Organize angles and the  chain to organize distances.
22:51
And it's a painstaking process that's imposed on the surface of the earth.
22:59
In order to produce maps and the maps are the the representation of the earth for  
23:07
the purposes of privatization, for the purpose of delimiting   different plots or or lots of land. And in English history, this goes  
23:20
back to this time of Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare's time back in the 1590s,
23:30
if not earlier. In Ireland, it it's a 19th century project,
23:37
though there's efforts to do it in  the 17th century with William Petty
23:42
and the Down Survey, it was called. And of course,  
23:49
Ireland gives us a great deal of of comedy about the the foolishness and the mistakes  
23:58
that the settlers make. And  in Ireland, as in Palestine, or as in Native America or  
24:08
wherever this process takes place, it's not just the land, but it's   also the culture of the people which has to be undermined,  
24:16
subverted and destroyed. And this is often accompanied   by the imposition of patriarchal relations. So because women are the basis of the community,
24:30
the basis of the future survival of  the village, as well as of the land,
24:38
the the reproduction of of the  human beings and the preservers
24:45
of the memory of the land is generally in  the hands of women, just as in the past.
24:51
It's the seeds for next year's  planting were in the hands of women.
24:57
I think this is a story that the world knows largely from the struggles in India
25:04
and in Bangladesh and elsewhere, thinking of Vandana Shiva, thinking of Maria Mies,
25:13
who have brought this to to  our who have emphasized this.  And so it's a pleasure to to recognize a little bit of what I've learned from them.
25:28
This is an essential part of privatization as the also the installation of patriarchal relations,
25:37
which goes with private property. I was also thinking of sorry for the intersection.
25:44
I was also thinking of when you spoke  about gender and women in terms of
25:50
vis-a-vis privatization, angles  came to my mind in what he wrote  about the agricultural  revolution in his origins of
26:00
state, private property and family. Although it goes way,   way back into the first agricultural revolution. Well, it goes back to the yes, it does. It does.
26:12
And this is why it's the why the women are at the  
26:18
forefront in gender terms, anyway, of the preservation of the   commons and of opposition. Opposition to privatization.
26:29
But I wanted to bring in another point  that, you know, I said that in Palestine
26:35
we spoke about mapping. We also in my article speak about Hebraization,
26:45
that is the renaming of places. So this is a big part of the story  
26:51
in Turtle Island here in the USA. So which, you know, is present  
26:57
as I speak, I don't know whether to refer to North America, to the USA or to Turtle Island.
27:02
The geography of planet Earth is also soaked with settler
27:11
languages, and those languages will conceal much that's that was part of commoning practices.
27:24
But so in addition to naming,  in addition to cartography,
27:30
there is a theme that was not stressed  in the Palestine and Commons or Marx
27:35
and Musha article that you kindly  referred to, and that is violence.
27:41
That is war and the development of torture,
27:49
punishment, hanging as an aspect of privatization, as an aspect of the  
27:58
formation of the commodity. It's inherent
28:04
to that process. And here is where I would,
28:09
I think I might part company with  the brilliant historian Eric Hobsbawm
28:15
that you quoted at the beginning. I think that  this is emphasized in Karl Marx's Capital, the relationship between  
28:24
privatization and violence. So I think that offers us not only a
28:33
analytic framework, but also a historical one. Now, to be sure, at the time that he wrote,
28:41
the knowledge of history was not as  great as it is now, you might say,  because of several generations  of investigation into commoning,
28:51
into law and into punishment and into violence. But certainly you cannot imagine the  
28:58
colonization of Ireland, the colonization of Massachusetts,   the colonization of New England without a continual struggle that is a violent struggle.
29:10
Again, often of war, but not only of war, also of the criminalization of forms of commoning.
29:20
And this process of criminalization  is essential to privatization.
29:28
Yeah, this is so interesting because when I read earlier,
29:35
I thought the revisionist kind of position on  enclosure was that so the classical  position was that violence was very,
29:44
very integral, the classical Marxist  position, not the Smithian classical  position, but the classical Marxist  position was that violence was very,
29:52
very integral and Marx wrote  spectacularly about the violence.  And then I think there was a period in  time where there was a revisionist trend
30:01
that say, oh, perhaps Marx  exaggerated the aspect of violence.  It was a slower process, maybe not as violent. And what you are now saying is that maybe we  
30:10
have moved even further and we think that violence was much more central.
30:16
I want to give you a moment to respond, but also club this with the story of Palestine.
30:22
I think something that struck me while  I was reading your essay was that
30:28
you mentioned that by 1947, only 20 percent  of the land was settled with a title.
30:35
And I was thinking whether the extreme violence that we get in the  
30:40
case of Palestine and settler colonialism tries to expand throughout  
30:46
Palestine, increasingly in West Bank. I was thinking if it was or if it  
30:51
is partly the resilience of collectivized ethos against  
30:58
private property, that that that describes the need for such a massive scale of violence.
31:07
Sure. I think so.  The massive violence is. As a reflection, as a requirement by the
31:19
privateers in order to do their dirty  deeds, in order to to steal land
31:28
or to expropriate, as they would prefer to say, or to develop, to take it even more mystifying.
31:40
And what they mean by development is the imposition of  
31:45
market relations on a global scale. And now it's not just it has to  
31:54
do with mineral rights, of course. So it's not just the surface of the earth
32:01
and agriculture we need to think about,  but also what lies beneath the earth.
32:10
And when it comes to Palestine, this is essential, not particularly to the potential gas  
32:19
fields lying in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Palestine, but of establishing
32:28
a political toehold within  historically one of the largest
32:36
sources of petroleum or of  or of energy on the earth.
32:44
So the 1948 Nakba and the establishment  of Israel must always be seen in
32:51
relationship to the Saudi American pipeline that opens up on the in the eastern  
33:01
Mediterranean at the same time in 1949. And this accompanies a huge rearrangement  
33:09
of the of the capitalist economies of Europe and and the USA, which is  
33:19
beginning to substitute oil and gas for coal. This is part of the story of imperialism  
33:28
after World War Two. Which isn't to say   that it hadn't attempted before, but as a global matter and as a  
33:40
matter of understanding the state of Israel, Israel can be seen as a outlying fortress
33:48
for the interests of petroleum production. Now, I don't want to be
33:57
a reductionist and reduce  everything to the price of oil,
34:03
but I think the whole world knows that  since the world runs on fossil fuels.
34:12
That this plays an important part  in the story of the expropriation
34:19
and establishment of a technical military outpost in the eastern Mediterranean, and that's  
34:27
the state of Israel. Yeah, this is very good.  So what we have discussed so far  is privatization, modernization and
34:37
kind of accumulation, whether it's primitive accumulation or whether it's successive  
34:42
cycles of accumulation. I think the kind of we   are coming to an end, the sort of. The element that we haven't discussed so
34:52
far is Zionism. And when I read your paper,
34:58
I was struck that your story of Zionism  didn't begin in late 19th century,
35:04
which is the usual discussion of Zionism. You start with, in fact,  
35:10
Christian Zionism and Cromwell, and then weave together, you know,  
35:16
the centrality of that project, along with imperialism,   colonialism and capitalism. Tell us a little bit about
35:24
Christian Zionism, Cromwell,  and why did you begin it there?
35:31
Yeah, I began it there as a hypothesis. You know, now I'm speaking as a retired
35:37
professor and I'm mindful  of my colleagues who so I
35:44
produce it, who have a conventional,  who represent conventional knowledge.
35:50
And so it's. But Oliver Cromwell was the leader  
35:57
of the English republic that put an end, a leader of the aggressive English  
36:04
bourgeoisie of the mid 17th century, I think a few years before Calcutta is formed.
36:14
So it was under  him that Charles Stewart had his head chopped off. And this is such an important
36:26
element in world history,  certainly in European history,   because it showed that power was not divine.
36:37
In other words, God was not  going to intervene to preserve  Charles Stewart or James Stewart or  any or the hierarchy of aristocratic,
36:46
military, feudal power that of  which they were the pinnacle.  They were the top. When you chop off  their head, it's not only a biological
36:57
action of anatomy, but it's also a  political action against a feudal  hierarchy and the introduction of a  new class forces of sometimes called
37:09
the bourgeoisie or the capitalist  class, which now aggressively is
37:16
sailing around the world. Settling Ireland,   settling Massachusetts, capturing Jamaica, warring against other European commercial  
37:29
powers like the Dutch for India, for Indonesia, this happens in the  
37:35
middle of the 17th century. And part of that project
37:41
is religion. They bring a new story for human beings,
37:48
a new spiritual story that we can be  saved only when the Messiah returns
37:57
and the Messiah will return once the  Jews have been restored to Palestine.
38:03
Then, according to Christian theology,  as represented in the Book of Revelation
38:08
or the apocalyptic book, as they call  it, the last book of the Christian Bible,
38:14
the Jewish return to Palestine is a  precondition for the second coming  of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is  necessary for the salvation of mankind.
38:24
So it's under this missionary aggression
38:32
that Christian Zionism is formed and Oliver Cromwell's advisors
38:40
were such Zionists. And it happens at the same time that the
38:46
Jews are permitted to return  to England in the 1650s.
38:52
1649 is when Charles has his head chopped off. And this is the time also
38:59
of the wars in Massachusetts against  the native people and the settlements
39:05
that form the first European  colonies in North America.
39:11
This is, I think, the reason I wanted  to stress this was to show that
39:17
the Zionist project is integral  to the capitalist project.
39:24
That Christian, I mean, today it's clear the basis of the wealth of Israel comes  
39:30
from American Christian Zionism. It doesn't come from APEC.
39:36
It doesn't come from the bulk of the money. It doesn't come from Jewish interests  
39:42
in North America. It comes from Christian   Zionists who form part of the right wing of Trump and others, part of the reactionary forces  
39:58
in the USA. So that's why I wanted to  
40:03
begin the story of Zionism with Christianity and then to begin the story of Christianity  
40:10
going back to the birth of aggressive capitalism. So it's not just a Jewish  
40:15
story and it's not just a 19th century story, even though here I want to mention  
40:20
the name of Andreas Mahm, who has done great work,  fabulous work on understanding how the  destruction of Palestine is essential
40:30
to the destruction of the earth, that both  these are accompanied at the same time.
40:36
I hope very much that that you will be able to interview him sometime on your program.
40:44
But so that's why I spoke of this  theology, which is largely bonkers.
40:53
I mean, it's largely absurd, but it's powerful because  
41:01
people in times of disorder and despair look for a Messiah, look for a single person.
41:11
And here is a very old messianic tradition that can be called on.
41:19
And once you get into that, to the nets  and traps of theology and scripture,
41:28
it becomes complex. And before you know it, there is genocide.
41:37
Whether that takes place in the schools of North America or in in Northern Ireland.
41:46
And I know I don't know the story  of India and Pakistan well enough
41:51
to understand how Zionism or  missionary activity affected
41:58
imperial developments in that part of the world. But I do think it's important that we  
42:05
take a longer view and to understand that Zionism has been essential for many centuries
42:12
to the capitalist and imperialist projects. That's a part of accumulation.
42:20
There is a similar trend going on  within the scholarship now about  really after the rise of the  Hindu nationalists in 2014,
42:29
now scholars are going back deeper  into history to understand the roots  of Hindu nationalism or for a very long  time because of history of colonialism.
42:42
The nationalist movement was understood  along economic lines as a movement
42:48
that brought different forces  together against imperialism.  But there is increasingly  now more and more focus on
42:56
the use or the aspects of how religion  was used and how these things were
43:04
marshaled and restructured into  building nationalistic ideas.  And now people are being more critical about that. I think towards the end,
43:16
I wanted to hear your thoughts a little bit on the resistance movement.
43:24
What does this tell us? Is there an element of hope?  You begin your essay by mentioning  the Zapatista movement in Mexico.
43:34
I'm assuming the context of NAFTA. I've been also reading a lot about
43:41
the Chinese Communist Revolution and what a disaster in some ways the  
43:49
project of Great Leap Forward was. So collectivisation, private property,
43:57
these are things I guess pretty much  up in the air, not very settled.  Land redistribution during the Communist Revolution was spectacularly successful,  
44:06
as I understood. But when things started   to be reintegrated into larger and larger blocks, there came a resistance from peasants and farmers.
44:17
So my question to you is if the Musha of Palestine teaches anything
44:26
for the rest of the world and  if you think there has been
44:32
developments like the Zapatista movement  in Mexico, if there are such developments  in Palestine, which perhaps the  media has missed out and so on.
44:42
Your concluding remarks on this segment.
44:49
Yeah, I've thought of it in terms of the commons or the commune.
44:57
The commons refers to mutuality  among those direct producers.
45:02
The commune refers to the state  or to the munis or to the city.
45:08
So it's the country and the  city, the commons or the commune.  And of course, the communist tradition,  
45:17
as we've known it in the 20th century, was centered on the city.
45:26
Its origin, let's say, would go  back to the Paris Commune of 1871 or
45:32
even the second commune of  the French Revolution in 1792.  But the commons is.
45:42
Is rural, is it's pastoral, it's maritime, it's. Not part of the arable field.
45:58
In its most resilient forms, you think of the Kurdish  
46:03
Highlands is where commoning is retained. What I learned from the Musha, I think,
46:14
is similar to what Karl Marx  learned from the Obchina  when Veras Asulich wrote him  saying, please, comrade Karl Marx,
46:24
even though this is your last year of  life, please tell us what you think  of the Russian commons or the Obchina. And Karl Marx could not answer her easily.
46:38
He tried five different long letters  to her and ended up discarding them.
46:45
Luckily, they're still available in  the Marxist archive in Amsterdam.  So that's how we know about them. But he ended up by saying to her  
46:53
in a very short letter, yes, the Obchina can be the basis of   social regeneration in Tsarist Russia. It will require a Russian revolution.
47:06
So he's not saying let's go back to the past. He's not saying that at all.
47:12
He's saying that the human values of  equality and of mutuality that were
47:20
available in the past are also available to  us now, but under different circumstances,
47:26
under different vicissitudes of  history, to use his own language.
47:34
And I think, you know, I don't,  far be it from me, to speak
47:42
about two Palestinian freedom fighters today. But one of our slogans at the encampments  
47:51
in North America and for me at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,   but also in Dearborn and in Ferndale and in Wayne State, one of our slogans is.
48:03
We are thousands, we are  millions, we are all Palestinians.
48:10
So Palestine has come to be one of those concrete universals where  
48:15
the whole world is watching. The whole world is learning from that experience.
48:21
And so our experience will  not be the same as that of
48:26
the orphans of Gaza, the widows of  Gaza, the wounded, the departed.
48:32
It will not be the same, but we  are learning from their struggle  and we are content to say we are our  own enlightenment, our own thinking
48:44
has arisen because of their struggle. And that's why we offer such solidarity as we can.
48:53
So for the Mushah, I don't really  have comments about the Mushah.  I mean, there's a wonderful scholar,  Leila Alkahili at the University of Lunt
49:03
in Sweden who has written about the  Mushah in Ramallah and in East Jerusalem,
49:11
what forms it takes there now against the separation barrier or the huge 30 foot wall.
49:19
There are people who write  about the Mushah in Palestine,  but what we need to do is to think  about our own past and our own struggle,
49:27
even when that is not part  of the traditional Marxist or  Leninist or Maoist conception of
49:37
or anarchist, you know,  thinking of Prince Kropotkin.
49:43
We need to think anew about how to organize human life
49:50
in the conditions with other  creatures on the planet,  as the planet itself is being endangered by the same forces of destruction that are  
50:01
befalling Palestine. Yeah.
50:08
I'm very tempted to ask you one final question completely unrelated to what we are discussing.
50:20
Probably it's also unfair, but I wanted to ask you briefly
50:29
on E.P. Thompson, given personal excitement of reading his work,
50:37
not just the making of the English  working class, but also some of many,
50:42
many other essays, so I want  to end it by asking you.
50:49
What was your experience with E.P. Thompson, and if you can just tell us the  
50:55
lessons you drew from from him in so far as
51:02
thinking about the future, the  Marxist tradition, because he was also
51:08
a revisionist, some people  didn't even like him for that,  but he challenged Marxism  as much as it defended it.
51:16
I think we are in a moment of history  where the left needs innovation.  There are many things that  are going on which are new.
51:23
So, yeah, the final comment, a reflection on E.P. Thompson.
51:30
Well, we were Edward and I were comrades.  That is, we were colleagues. It's true, I was I was his student,  
51:40
but I was an American from a different experience and I was able to bring to   our relationship what I had learned from African-American struggles, which were not  
51:49
available to him when we first met in the in the early sixties.
51:59
His his history   is especially dear to me because we share something of a history in the subcontinent,  
52:10
in India and in Pakistan. Both of our fathers in different ways
52:17
came from an imperial setting and resided  in India or in Pakistan for some years.
52:27
And also, I was a youngster  learning from the new left.
52:34
And he was one of its exponents of the new left. But if now in twenty twenty four,
52:43
thinking back to him and speaking to you now, what I remember from from Edward is this.
52:52
Our point now is not that we are on that we   are Marxists or that we are on Marx's side. The point is, is that he is on our side.
53:06
And it's that shift in perspective  that I think is essential.
53:11
And if you think about it  and allow it to to soak in,
53:17
it means that we are not subjects to Marx. We are not his subjects.
53:25
On the contrary, he among a vast number has helped and produced Edward, us and you.
53:40
What a brilliant note on that note  of optimism, Professor Leinberg,
53:45
thank you very much for your time. You're welcome. You're welcome.  It's been a pleasure.
US, Israel, Christian Zionism, British colonialism, Arab collectives, E. P. Thompson (w P.Linebaugh)
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In this video we have discussed the Musha' lands (مشاع) - the agricultural common lands in Ottoman Palestine owned jointly by the community and loosely taxed by the state. Prof. Linebaugh presents his thesis that at the heart of the Israel-Arab conflict is the question of Zionist settler colonialism attempting to destroy the rural Arab communal life. He has also argued that the roots of Zionism go back to Christianity, especially the 17th-century transformation in England that set colonialism in motion. We also asked Prof. Linebaugh about what the Palestinian struggle has taught the rest of the world. Finally, he discussed what socialism means for us at this moment in history.

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Introduction audio by Ronit Bannerjee (  / ronitbanerjee503  )
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11 Comments
Piety Piet duh Pious Poet
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3 hours ago
Link for donation: https://paypal.me/sankymudiar

Guys, we want to work full-time on this, but our financial woes keep us pushing away. If your wallet allows please drop us some support. We prefer the PayPal method since we don't lose half of the money, but you can also give us a super chat. If you are a large donor, we would obviously get in touch with you to give something back if we can. But if you can't no worries. Please like, share, and subscribe. That means a lot already
1
@heidi9547
3 hours ago
Excellent Conversation!
 Thank You!
6
@KirillySpace
1 hour ago
A pleasure indeed. Great to hear Peter Linebaugh
2
@ingridhildebrandt8053
1 hour ago
Very good analysis. As I always said: "Follow the money" to understand the real background of conflicts. It has always proofen right, despite what is beeing said about it.
2
@agnikollias6678
2 hours ago
Excellent  !!!!
2
@arturofernandez2330
36 minutes ago
Great interview. Thanks!
@ChristineEbadi
1 hour ago
Great interview
1
@Johnnyfever247
3 hours ago
1
@ingridhildebrandt8053
1 hour ago (edited)
I would like to understand better, if the big famlies in palestine of up to 40 and more people, has this to do with the organisation of the commens  in palestine?
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