We who support the Palestinian people in their freedom struggle, and who seek to end the U.S. hegemony which makes their oppression possible, have enough reasons right now to be optimistic. The path towards victory for our cause has become so much clearer during the last couple years alone, and all the time developments occur that give us further clarity. The struggle has advanced enough that we can discern the broad outline of how we’re going to be able to win. What we need to do is correctly interpret these signals that recent events have given us, and complete the tasks that are required.
When George Galloway won the race this last month to become a member of parliament, this showed us something equally important to the other lessons anti-imperialists have gotten from recent events. It proved that we don’t just need to build a united front against NATO and Zionism, as the Rage Against the War Machine coalition has done. We also need to build a popular workers party. A force whose members would go far beyond those within RAWM or any other specifically antiwar formation, because it would be not just antiwar but pro-labor. This would mean bringing in the unions. This would mean bringing in the many anti-imperialist left-wingers who haven’t so far joined with the network RAWM represents. It would mean bringing in many more of the conservatives and libertarians who’ve recently gained a proto anti-imperialist consciousness. It would mean establishing connections with great amounts of the rural masses, so that the revolutionary forces in the cities come to no longer be isolated.
Galloway and the others in the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) have done the U.K. equivalent of these things, following the same mass-focused mode of practice that RAWM’s communist members have. This is a sign that the USA’s anti-imperialists have been going in the right direction, because Galloway’s embrace of such a strategy is what’s let him win. Like these U.S. communists, Galloway has rejected pan-leftism, the orientation that’s focused around building influence within the left (or what’s considered to be the “left”). He hasn’t followed his country’s Trotskyists in disavowing everybody who the professional managerial class left-liberals view as untouchable, a practice which translates to keeping the communist movement perpetually weak.
The Trot and Trot-adjacent leftists categorically dismiss the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, on the basis that it has the wrong stance on gender. Galloway has been working with the CPGB-ML, though, because unlike the Trots he has a good sense of what’s needed for advancing the cause. (He also shares CPGB-ML’s socially conservative stance, but even if he didn’t it would be correct to ally with the party.) When the police decided to make CPGB-ML the first org that they charged with “hate speech” over protesting Zionism, this confirmed that whatever the org’s views on gender, it undeniably represents a threat to the imperial order. For the purposes of somebody who seeks to end the rule of international monopoly capital, the GPGB-ML’s stance on gender isn’t relevant to whether somebody should work with it.
And for the left anti-imperialists who’ve been led by liberals to believe that groups like CPGB-ML are “reactionary” because they’re socially conservative: remember that reactionary politics don’t necessarily mean social conservatism. Being reactionary means opposing the progression of history, which simply isn’t true for CPGB-ML. The reactionary position in this case is to be against the alliances necessary for advancing the anti-imperialist cause.
If you’ve followed how the established left in the U.S. has reacted to the rise of our own antiwar united front, it’s easy to see how this applies to our conditions. And the practice that’s let Galloway disrupt the Zionist establishment isn’t just one of rejecting Trotskyist sectarian purity politics. It’s also one of crafting a message which is capable of appealing to the broad masses, rather than to a clique like the Trots do.
Galloway has been speaking to the people’s sense of shared interests as Brits. The left opportunists who oppose him have been arguing that this language is inherently “right-wing.” (Here the Trots are promoting national nihilism, where all patriotic sentiments are shamed as being “reactionary.”) Galloway has been using his extraordinary speaking skills to move people towards acting in solidarity with the Palestinians. Those who seek to tear him down from the “left” have been putting forth polemics defending Israel’s “right to exist,” while using this to also defend NATO’s proxy war against Russia. Galloway has been articulating a sincere outrage towards monopoly capital and its evils. His “socialist” detractors have been shilling for the colonial war machine which depends on continued austerity for Britain’s workers.
Unsurprisingly, Galloway has succeeded, while these detractors have remained in their position as marginal appendages for the Labour Party’s neoliberal wing. Though both the WPB and the pseudo-left Trots talk about the struggle of the workers, the people have been able to see that the WPB is where true hope can be found. Because the WPB isn’t controlled by the liberal establishment, like the Trots are. The gap in success between Galloway’s party, and these Blairite-aligned “socialists,” is so huge that the latter group’s attempts to discredit Galloway come across as bitter articulations of veiled jealousy.
For example, the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) has tried to justify its efforts at pitting trade unions against Galloway by asserting that Galloway “is really not left-wing on Israel-Palestine.” It was a perfect example of begging the question, as this statement was made out of nowhere without any attempt to substantiate it. And given that Galloway has compared Israel’s genocide against Gaza to the Holocaust, as well as stated “Israel” has no right to exist, it’s possible that these Trots simply made up this narrative out of nothing. Alternatively, they view his anti-Zionism as the problem, and seek to portray liberal Zionism as the proper “left-wing” stance.
Otherwise, they attack Galloway for having a conservative tendency within his rhetoric, and on certain policy positions. Which are only deal-breakers if your priority is not to advance the pro-Palestine movement, but to tear down your political competitors. Galloway is undeniably a major positive force for the pro-Palestine cause, as is evident from the concerted smear efforts against him by the imperialists. But because the Trots view the WPB as a threat to the monopoly which they seek to hold over the realm of pan-leftism, they’re portraying Galloway’s social views and aesthetics as unforgivable offenses.
This is the same thing that the U.S. counterparts of the British Trots are doing to all authentic anti-imperialists. They’re pointing to ways in which the mass-focused movement leaders have violated the official code of leftism, and trying to push them out of the class struggle by calling them reactionaries. No amount of these smear efforts will change how these “leftists” are tools for the state, while the ones they attack represent the people’s interests. The pan-leftists are working to reinforce the imperial order, whether by directly endorsing imperialist wars (like the AWL does) or by choosing inter-org competition over what’s best for the revolutionary cause.
The project to bring the masses into a collective effort at overthrowing the capitalist state is still only at its start in the USA. Here we’ve recently built an antiwar united front, but we have yet to bring in most of the revolution-compatible elements outside this front’s member orgs. Even in Britain this project is still incomplete, as the WPB is operating within bourgeois “democracy” and the people have yet to get the capabilities needed for revolution. If we keep building on our recent gains, though, we’ll get victory. We’ve already been able to show the imperial order’s “left” agents that it’s impossible for them to police the discourse, and in Britain the pseudo-left has lost its organizing monopoly. Now it’s time to advance the struggle to its next stage, and build a much broader and stronger revolutionary force.
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