There’s a broader context behind the acts of fascist violence that the Zionist movement is unleashing upon the Gaza protesters: in the last twenty years alone, the globe’s anti-imperialist forces have been massively strengthened. This has made the Zionists and the imperialists more isolated than ever. It’s not just that the system in which we live has been collapsing, it’s that the ones resisting this system have been increasingly able to take control over history. And for the pro-Palestine movement to succeed, we’re going to need to connect it to that broader reality. To align our resistance against the Gaza genocide with the multipolar world, and thereby build a united front against our imperialist enemies.
Within the student protests, we can already see the ideological seeds for such a wider solidarity project. The weak “Hamas should be opposed, but I still support Palestine” position isn’t to be found throughout the rhetoric of the demonstrators. They aren’t playing the game of “condemning Hamas,” as they know this would undermine their goal. They’ve been chanting slogans like “globalize the Intifada,” showing their foremost concern is seeing the anti-colonial movement in Palestine succeed by any means necessary. The next step is to expand this sense of internationalism, applying such unapologetic anti-imperialist passions to the other parts of the fight against U.S. hegemony.
We communists need to use the pro-Palestine upsurge to increase the popularity of slogans like “China and Russia are not our enemies,” and “Hands off Korea.” We have to spread awareness of the Donbass people’s struggle against U.S.-backed Ukrainian fascism, and the other overlooked fronts within the anti-imperialist struggle. We must put forth such a complete analysis of Washington’s imperialist wars because if we don’t, then the pro-Palestine movement will be successfully divided from the struggle’s other parts.
There are plenty of left anti-communists, or “red libs” who oppose multipolarity, which are working to guide the thoughts of the people who’ve entered into this protest movement. They don’t want a united front, because that would conflict with their idealist conceptions of what this struggle should look like. They support Palestine because it’s the side that’s disadvantaged, but when a country actually succeeds at fighting off imperial control (like with Russia or China), they’re content to let the State Department define the narrative on that country. There’s a reason why many Palestinians have been demonstrating with pictures of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un: they understand how powerful it is to have well-armed, secure states backing the struggles of oppressed nations such as Palestine. That much of the U.S. left doesn’t understand this reveals a deficiency which needs to be rectified.
The project to turn the U.S. pro-Palestine struggle in a pro-multipolar direction is about making our resistance effort more than simply a rejection of the existing order. To defeat the imperial beast, we’ll have to also join in on the multipolar world’s effort at building a new system. Any revolutionary state that we create on this continent is going to have to connect itself to projects like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has proven essential for the development of countries that capitalism has ravaged. And at the present stage, any pro-Palestine movement we build is only going to be able to survive the fascist backlash by acting in unison with the globe’s other anti-imperialist forces.
Making communists and anti-imperialists divided, and preoccupied with secondary disputes, was a crucial part of how the hegemon set back its challengers during the 20th century. In the 1970s, Washington employed the strategy of harnessing the New Left, and of nurturing anti-Sovietism among the globe’s radical intelligentsia. So the communists movement became highly confused, and consumed with infighting. This pivotal step towards defeating the USSR was effective in the short term, but within a decade or so after the Soviet Union was dismantled, the resistance towards the hegemon simply regrouped in a new form. Russia proved unable to be kept as a U.S. client state, with the country’s people pressuring their new leader Putin towards increasingly U.S.-defiant policies. And with the explosion of Chinese industrial power, Washington’s challengers were able to get a great amount of economic force behind them.
The imperialists are now trying to halt this progress using those same tactics for dividing their opposition. This time, though, they can’t alienate any of the anti-imperialist countries from each other. That’s become apparent from how the Ukraine conflict has driven Washington’s challengers closer together. The inexorable shift towards Eurasia as the new global economic center has made it in everyone’s interests to orient themselves around China. And when the workers in the core countries have overthrown their imperialist governments, the whole world will embrace this new age. The only alternative to aligning with Eurasia is making oneself subordinate to a parasitic old order, and this still applies if somebody doesn’t support capitalism.
History has shown that when communists and anti-imperialists fail to act as one, their desire to overthrow capital is rendered irrelevant, because their actions have the effect of undermining the struggle. If we let the pro-Palestine cause be defined by the forces on the left which don’t seek unity with Eurasia, the effect they’ll have is to strengthen our enemies.
When the “left” opponents of multipolarity don’t try to argue Washington’s challengers are imperialist, they say that a multipolar world isn’t capable of bringing victory to the workers. Yet that they take this stance means they’re actively obstructing the effort to attain such victory. Of course the coming of multipolarity can’t in itself defeat our capitalist dictatorship. Instead the effect it has is to weaken this dictatorship, and strengthen all the forces that stand against international monopoly capital. There’s no way to refute this. So the forces that seek to divide the struggle point to the contradictions within the anti-imperialist countries, and pretend that these contradictions represent a bigger issue than U.S. hegemony. This is the tactic that PSL’s Brian Becker has used to argue against a pro-multipolar practice. What he does is reduce Russia’s anti-fascist operation to the individual personality of Vladimir Putin, erasing the efforts of Russia’s communists to pressure their bourgeois government into taking action.
This reasoning is, in essence, the same as that of the liberal gatekeepers who claim to support Palestine while denouncing Hamas. It’s an argument that pretends the peoples who the hegemon menaces have the option to act idealist, and to reject united fronts. Hamas is part of a coalition with the PFLP, the Palestinian communist resistance group. The communists are aligning with Hamas because if they didn’t, the anti-colonial effort would be made all the more difficult.
This cross-ideological coalition building is what anti-imperialism looks like when a colonial entity has encircled the indigenous population (like in Palestine), or when the forces of counterrevolution have taken control of the state for the time being (like in Russia). And if this need for a united front is present anywhere else, it absolutely applies to our conditions in the heart of imperialism. The enemy has us surrounded, and is now mobilizing its police and Zionist counter-gangs to try to destroy our movement. The USA’s student Gaza uprising is an opportunity to teach many more developing radicals about the winning strategies of their counterparts around the globe. We need to turn the passions of these demonstrators towards a comprehensive kind of anti-imperialist practice, making Palestine into a gateway to all other fronts in the counter-hegemonic struggle.
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