Summary
As defined by the editors of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, a society where workers collectively own and democratically control their labour and the value they produce — a classless society, free of exploitation and oppression, realized through the self-emancipation of the working class (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, lines 169-173).
Details
- The definition is set against “socialism from above”: Scandinavian social democracy, the former USSR and North Korea, and the current Chinese state, described as a capitalist dictatorship with some state-owned sectors (lines 169-175).
- Stalinism is defined as the false notion that socialism can be established in a single country, with a rigid stages approach — “stagism” — under which national liberation is fought first and socialism postponed; Khaled Bakdash’s 1944 boast that the Syrian Communist Party’s charter was “devoid of any mention of socialism” is its regional example (lines 173-175).
- Hal Draper’s “socialism from below” is the book’s name for its alternative: struggle from below, self-emancipation, and an explicitly international outlook (lines 177-179).
- Chapter 3 applies the definition negatively to the Arab regimes: their “Arab socialism” is described in Chapter 2 as top-down state-run economies with no semblance of workers’ control (line 583), and Chapter 3 argues the PFLP and DFLP were weakened by alliance with the Soviet Union and with regimes calling themselves socialist (lines 726-752).
- Chapter 4 uses the definition to test the Israeli working class and finds it a colonizing exception whose privileges Palestinian democracy would negate (lines 847-1045).
Related pages
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Hal Draper, Imperialism, Watchdog state, Secular Democratic State