When the conventional sources of organizing leadership support the Palestine protests, and then work to exclude everyone who threatens their monopoly over the protest cage, they’re doing the same thing Lenin warned against: “All worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element’, of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about ‘overrating the importance of ideology’, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’. But this is a profound mistake.”
In our present situation, the equivalent view is one which assumes the pro-Palestine movement will sustain its momentum even if organizers don’t try to reach the average person, and only try to engage with the left-liberal activist niche. The implied idea being that the majority of the people are going to become allies of these organizers, even though such actors have deliberately isolated themselves from the majority.
This is the insidious threat that exists towards the pro-Palestine movement at the moment: the attitude that it’s enough to perpetuate the movement as it exists, without bothering to get out of the movement and into the masses. The upholders of this practice might claim it hurts the cause to put forth these critiques of them, but advancing this ideological struggle within the movement is what’s absolutely necessary for making the cause succeed. The mass mobilizations we’ve seen on Palestine have happened in spite of these leaders, not because of them. These actors have only been attaching themselves to a great spontaneous event, and then working to prevent this event from bringing about a strengthening for revolutionary politics.
If we allow this moment of anti-imperialist energy to be squandered—like the left has squandered all the similar moments from the last several decades—then it will mean a failure for revolutionary politics at a time when they can’t afford to fail. It will mean the U.S. empire gets enabled to commit many more crimes in its decline than would otherwise be the case, first against the Palestinians and then against the people of the core.
These human costs are what’s going to come from making the struggle stay inert, and keeping anti-imperialism confined to a place where it can’t adequately connect with the people. If we want to win, we’ll need to act like the majority of the country’s people are revolution-compatible. We’ll need to follow Lenin’s advice of raising as many people as possible to the educational level of the trained cadre members.
This is why the current within the U.S. communist movement that seeks to bring back a mass-focused practice is the same current which has supported Russia in Ukraine. In a war between the Russian people and fascism, as well as between multipolarity and U.S. hegemony, the pro-Russia stance is the only coherent revolutionary stance. Which means the socialists who disavowed Russia’s operation were doing the class struggle in the core a disservice, as well as forsaking their duty to support the Donbass people’s struggle for liberation. (With those two things being synonymous.)
Refusing to take a principled internationalist stance out of fear of alienating the left-liberals did nothing besides let these socialists keep support from people who are fundamentally incompatible with revolutionary politics. It was symptomatic of a wider pattern in which these socialists tailor their rhetoric entirely to the Democratic Party’s core base. Which would be counterproductive in any case, but during our time it’s particularly wrong. Because liberals have been getting increasingly loyal towards imperialism throughout the new cold war, which means tailing them inevitably makes you shift ever more to the right on foreign policy.
The irony is that many of the Americans who lean right on domestic issues are becoming more to the “left” on foreign policy than the dominant “socialist” voices. With the political realignment that’s occurred during the last decade, there have come to be far more conservative-leaning people than there used to who are compatible with the anti-imperialist cause. These people’s sympathy for Russia alone makes them better anti-imperialists than the anti-Russian leftists, and that plenty of them also support a Gaza ceasefire has further shown this. Those in this demographic aren’t all-important, but they’re still an instrumental part of the cause’s success; without them, we wouldn’t be able to get majority support for ending aid to Ukraine. So the conventional left’s disregard for them, in favor of the liberals who’ve been influenced by Russiagate, has imperiled the struggle.
Their sectarian practice isn’t just perpetuating needless divisions within the anti-imperialist movement; it’s also communicating to the broader masses that the antiwar movement’s main representatives aren’t interested in bringing them in. It’s indicative of the broader problem with these movement leaders: that they’re satisfied with having an ineffectually small support base, as long as they can maintain their activist business model.
The rationale behind this self-confined way of operating is that those on the “left” are necessarily more valuable, simply by virtue of their being on the left. But if this view had any truth to it, we would have seen the U.S. left respond to the new cold war by shifting moreso away from its preexisting alignment with imperialism. Not embrace this brand of politics even further, as we’ve seen it do. The surveys showing that more Democrats have lately come to support military interventions are reflective of how leftists, the supposed radical alternatives to the Democrats, have been increasingly vilifying Russia as “fascist.” Which represents a break from whatever dialectical methods of analysis they claim to believe in.
Even though many of these people claim to be pro-China, they’re rendering their “support” for the PRC meaningless by at the same time opposing the PRC’s biggest strategic ally. And that’s in addition to the inherent wrongness of opposing Russia’s effort to demilitarize the fascist Ukrainian U.S. coup regime. These actors don’t care about fighting fascism, or else they would bother to learn what fascism truly looks like.
If we want the pro-Palestine movement to succeed, we need to take example from the few orgs in this country that have practiced solidarity with both Palestine and the Donbass. These orgs are confident enough to be consistent in this way because they recognize the capacity for the USA’s people to develop beyond reactionary ideas. They don’t compromise on anti-imperialism out of the dogmatic belief that taking a principled position would alienate too many of the people.
We’re seeing the ability of Americans to gain a full anti-imperialist consciousness demonstrated right now, with their reaction to the Gaza genocide. Because most people here haven’t yet been educated on the settler-colonial nature of this situation, a majority of them aren’t so far outright saying they support Palestine, but it’s clear that this is only because they don’t yet know what that would mean. If they were mostly incompatible with the anti-imperialist cause, a solid majority of them (including at least half of the MAGA base) wouldn’t be in support of a Gaza ceasefire. They’re already halfway to where they need to be.
It’s become clear that only a minority of the USA’s people are obstinate pro-Zionists, like how only a minority of them are obstinately anti-Russian liberals. These elements represent relatively small parts of the people, compared to the majority which is too detached from politics to have a highly strong view on such matters. We can condemn those in this majority for being undereducated due to their conditions, or we can do our duty as revolutionaries, and work to share our anti-imperialist knowledge with them.
I empathize with the impulse among modern U.S. communists to think pessimistically, because we exist under conditions where a real communist movement hasn’t existed in this country for decades. It’s our responsibility, though, to overcome this mindset so that we can bring the things we’ve learned to the people. As Parenti concluded: “The only countervailing force that might eventually turn things in a better direction is an informed and mobilized citizenry. Whatever their shortcomings, the people are our best hope. Indeed, we are they.”
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