"We start by not ascribing to either the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Costa Rica, but we have used their legal devices to unmask and denounce the old Peruvian state. […] For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in the human as a social product, not the human as an abstract entity with innate rights. 'Human rights' do not exist except for the bourgeois human, a position that was at the forefront of feudalism, like liberty, equality, and fraternity were advanced for the bourgeoisie [fighting against this feudalism] of the past. But today, since the appearance of the proletariat as an organized class… with the experience of triumphant revolutions, with the construction of socialism, new democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it has been proven that human rights serve the oppressor class and the exploiters who run the imperialist and landowner-bureaucratic states. Bourgeois states in general… Our position is very clear. We reject and condemn human rights because they are bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, and are today a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally Yankee imperialists."

Nearly a decade after the emergence of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanction (BDS) Palestinian solidarity movement (which, following the anti-apartheid South African model of first world activism, proposes the international boycott of Apartheid Israel) what was once seen as a tactical approach to Israeli apartheid is now being treated––at least in some significant quarters of the left at the centres of global capitalism––as tantamount to revolutionary strategy. Talk of bourgeois rights, upholding a naive conception of international law, and all the hallmarks of capitalist legality has been shifted from the realm of means to the kingdom of ends. This elevation of the tactical use of bourgeois rights, along with a general confusion of what it means to be an internationalist, should give us pause. And we should be especially worried when we find ourselves speaking of a legal tactic and the dubious propositions of the capitalist discourse of "human rights" as the telos of anti-imperialism in the case of Palestine.Before going any further, I should probably point out thatI support the BDS movement. Indeed, a decade ago I was heavily invested in solidarity organizations that were responsible for developing what would become the apartheid analysis of Israel and the BDS tactic. I was involved in groups that eventually produced (though with the sadly typical activist falling-outs and ego clashes) the first Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) in Canada; I was on the executive of the union local that brought the first anti-apartheid BDS resolution to its provincial convention and succeeded (due to the speeches delivered there by CAIA activists) in getting passed. [I am speaking here of the monumental and controversial "Resolution 50" of CUPE Ontario.]Moreover, I recall the rightist back-lash the BDS tactic caused amongst the left… It was a line of demarcation which was denounced by some socialist organizations (such as the SWP/IS) as "ultra-left" since it alienated [racist and zionist] workers––and I always did find it amusing that a tactical appeal to the mechanisms of bourgeois legality could be called "ultra-left". It was also a line that was rejected by those theoretically impoverished marxists who imagined that the only solution to Israeli Apartheid was a unity between the proletarian colonized with their colonizing counterparts (or even worse, and extremely chauvinist, that a "backwards" Palestinianneeded to be led by an advanced Israeli working-class), the kind of analysis typical of people who are unable to provide a concrete analysis of a concrete situation and treat historical materialism like it is Plato's theory of forms.In any case, I think it is very important to balance the following critique with the qualification that the BDS movement remains tactically important and that, despite of its liberal limitations, its significance in exposing opportunism, chauvinism, euro-communist foolishness, and straight-out racism should not be forgotten. The very fact that speaking about boycotting Israel will drive zionist reactionaries into a furious rage is worthy of approval. Nor do I have much patience for those "critiques" of BDS that pretend to be left but in fact are nothing more than chauvinist excuses to back away from supporting anti-colonial self-determination. Thus, my critique here should not be mistaken as an argument for the abandonment of BDS as a tactic.When the possibility of BDS was first proposed in the Palestinian solidarity movement in North America and Europe, it was done so in the context of an emerging apartheid analysis and, by comparing Palestine to South Africa, the tactic of BDS logically followed. At this period in Palestinian solidarity history a demarcation line was drawn between those who believed in a "two state solution"––which at that time wasin this activist context––and those who (like myself and my then comrades) who believed in a "one state solution". Groups like Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) fell apart because of this line-struggle. Groups like Al-Awda emerged to represent an anti-colonial version of the one state solution. Eventually, after teach-ins and "Israeli Apartheid" events, the one state line was victorious, CAIA was founded, and the BDS tactic became hegemonic in the pro-Palestinian left.Unfortunately, the hegemony of BDS was a moment of two-steps-forward-one-step-back. For in order to become relevant and possess political force at the centres of global capitalism, it had to capture the imagination of the pre-dominant labour aristocracy and liberal human rights activists. That is, BDS is precisely a tactic designed to produce a broad-based coalition amongst leftists and left-liberals. Arguably this is its strength––and it has done a lot to make Palestinian self-determination more palatable for a public that has generally evinced a lot of anti-Palestinian chauvinism––but it also produced a tendency amongst the left to think of Palestinian solidarity only according to these tactical terms.But we need to take a step back and examine the originary ideology of BDS, the way in which the one state solution was seen by these organizations, though admittedly incoherently, that preceded the development of the BDS tactic. First of all, organizations such as the defunct Al-Awda generally believed in a one state solution that was. Secondly, these organizations often adhered to an unapologeticline culled from Fanan and the analysis of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). When the two state solidarity activists were speaking of Hanan Ahsrawi and Yasser Arafat, we were speaking of Leila Khaled and George Habash; when the two state solidarity activists were quoting Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, we were quoting Ilan Pappe and Adel Samara. Again, there was an incoherence to our understanding of politics here, which was what prevented a revolutionary internationalist understanding of the one state solution from being clearly articulated, but these were the set politics of the original understanding of the one state solution. (As an aside I consider it rather amusing when some activists who once called us "ultra-left" and "against what the Palestinians really want" are now BDS spokespeople who cannot stop talking about the importance of a one state solution.)When the one state solution became popular––or when, as my partner has joked, "we [Palestinians] started being honest and openly speaking about what we'd all believed for years"––and Israel was conceived of as an "apartheid state" then, based on this apartheid model and the fact that South African self-determination was popularized through BDS, groups such as CAIA produced a similar approach to Palestinian solidarity… something to produce a real effect in Palestine was the hope, just as it had seemed to produce a real effect in South Africa. Here is where the first erroneous way of understanding the tactic of BDS emerged: the mistaken belief that boycott activism around South Africa caused apartheid to fall, hence the corollary assumption that BDS could become the strategic means for ending Israeli colonialism.Aside from being an imperialist logic sublimated in an anti-imperialist politics, the idea that a solidarity movement based on economic sanctions within the mechanism of international law and human rights––a mechanism that emerged through imperialism and is connected to the daily working of imperialism––can liberate people elsewhere is historically dubious. Afrikaaner Apartheid did not fall because of the world-wide boycott movement but because of the actions of the ANC within South Africa. Granted, the anti-apartheid movement gave the ANC some breathing room but it was not, in the final instance, the reason for this apartheid's dissolution. Nations are not liberated by humanitarians in imperialist nations, though arguably the internationalist activities of progressives in these nations are extremely helpful; national liberation stands or falls based on the revolutionary movement within the country under consideration.Interestingly enough, this same imperialist logic about how boycott activism caused Afrikaaner Apartheid to fall is replicated by some of the supposedly "left" critics of BDS in order to mock Palestinian solidarity activism. The argument goes something like this: 1) BDS activism surrounding South Africa was responsible for the end of colonial apartheid in South Africa; 2) South Africa post-apartheid is a neo-colonial state with a comprador bourgeois class in command; 3) Therefore, BDS activism is counter-revolutionary since it can only produce neo-colonial regimes. Indeed, organizations such as the International Bolshevik Tendency, Spartacist League, and International Marxist Tendency have made much ado of this argument, obsessively pointing out point (2) and claiming point (3) due to the erroneous presupposition of point (1). Such a critique is utterly off-base, and just as ahistorical as the claims made by those who imagine that boycott activism can end oppression elsewhere.Obviously the state of South Africa following the end of Afrikaaner colonial hegemony ended up being little more than a comprador-capitalist regime where the former leaders of the ANC became a new ruling class and were more than willing to accept the dictates of the IMF and the WTO. This imperial collaboration, however, has little to do with the boycott movement and everything to do with the composition of the ANC as a revolutionary organization. The opportunist line won out in this organization, mainly because it was never a socialist organization to begin with. None of this meant that the ANC was not an anti-colonial movement worthy of support, worthy of being treated as, when the main contradictions in South Africa were between the colonizer and the colonized. What it does mean, however, was that the ANC could not transcend a basic level of anti-colonial politics and become truly revolutionary in the communist sense. But this is not unique to the ANC; it has been the fate of other anti-colonial organizations since the 1950s, a possible fate examined by Fanon inas a "pit-fall" that every anti-colonial movement will encounter. Even without a boycott movement the ANC would encounter this "pit-fall", as other organizations had, and hence the political degeneration of its cadre post-apartheid should not be seen as the product of anti-apartheid activism. It's a bit like saying that, if the US was to pull out of Afghanistan due to the actions of an anti-imperialist front there, and this front eventually decided to plug Afghanistan back into the world market, that anti-occupation demonstrations and activities in the US and other imperialist nations were at fault: it's a ludicrous proposition. But then again, such a ludicrous proposition follows from the well-meaning belief that our activism here will liberate people elsewhere.Beyond this problem, however, is the problem of the logic behind conceiving of BDS as a revolutionary strategy rather than a tactic based upon historically contingent circumstances. It must be pointed out that, unlike the case of South Africa, the revolutionary self-determination movements in Palestine are currently disarticulated due to decades of counter-insurgency and counter-revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the last great period of anti-imperialist internationalism, organizations such as the PFLP succeeded in putting Palestine on the map with a variety of actions, some of which were carried out in connection with armed solidarity organizations in the first world. For a variety of reasons, which I will not get into here, these movements collapsed––and this––and decades of disorganization followed. Despite this disorganization there were moments of great rebellion (the first and second intifada, for example), but there was still an absence of a revolutionary resistant organization capable of overthrowing Israeli colonialism.It was within the above context that BDS was demanded by Palestinian intellectuals active in Palestine and in the diaspora; it emerged from a demand made by the oppressed, a way to support their self-determination, for a variety of reasons, some of which were in contradiction (i.e. some groups believed in the liberal discourse of international human rights, other groups thought that this discourse could be used to give them breathing room to rebuild, etc.). Generally speaking, however, the core of the Palestinian solidarity movement active at the centres of imperialism, in answer to this demand, conceived of BDS as a tactic to bring Palestinian self-determination back into the political lime-light, to rehumanize the Palestinian subject that had been made invisible by zionist ideology, and to force the mainstream left into recognizing Palestinians in the same way that they had recognized the victims of South African Apartheid.But if we misunderstand this tactical approach as a universal anti-imperialist strategy, then we have to ask, as pseudo-leftists who despise pro-Palestinian solidarity dishonestly ask, why we are not supporting the boycott of other imperialist satellite states, if not a boycott of the US, Canada, and every colonial/imperial nation. For if we treat the BDS approach as the key to liberating Palestine rather than a tactical practice based on the particular circumstances of the Palestinian self-determination movement, then we have to ask why we are not boycotting ourselves as well. And maybe weboycott-divest-sanction ourselves, but then if we do this then how can we have the power to "liberate" nations on the other side of the world through the boycotting powers we believe we possess?Finally, treating the BDS approach as the height of revolutionary internationalism leads to a confusion of liberal politics––international law, bourgeois "human rights"––with revolutionary politics. It is very hard for me to take a well-meaning young leftist at an Israeli Apartheid Week event seriously when they deliver a speech about how Palestinian rights are essential human rights codified by international law––this is not an explanation of the BDS line as a tactic within a revolutionary understanding of internationalist strategy; it's the a priori assumption that the bourgeois rights intrinsic to international law are somehow the key to liberation!The strategic revolutionary approach should be to use bourgeois rights in non-bourgeois manner when it is tactically convenient, but to always understand this is a temporary means and not a revolutionary ends. We should be aware that bourgeois rights have nothing to do with revolutionary necessity, with the fundamentalto transgress the limits of capitalism. Here we should recall what the PCP [the so-called "Shining Path"] said about human rights during the height of their peoples' war in Peru:So while we need to still endorse struggles such as the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement in support of Palestinian self-determination, we also have to understand that this is simply a tactical way of using "legal devices to unmask and denounce" Israeli Apartheid here at the centres of capitalism. At the most it will provide breathing room for the next round of Palestinian revolution. It is not by itself revolutionary; it is not by itself even close to the pro-Palestinian internationalism of yesteryear. And it won't at all succeed in making revolution at the centres of capitalism––something that, though clearly distant and requiring years and years of struggle, will do far more to support Palestinian self-determination than a boycott movement.