The empire wants to make Gaza the new global normal. We all must learn from Palestine on how to fight back.

Above: “Workers and laborers of Palestine Persistent struggle on the path of national liberation,” from the PFLP

Gaza is at the same time a place where the greatest acts of human depravity have been committed; and a place where the greatest examples of human resilience and heroism can be found. The more the enemy tries to annihilate the Palestinian people, the harder they fight back, and the more they come up with ingenious ways to turn the enemy’s own tools against it. The resistance has taken advantage of the weaknesses in the occupier’s surveillance technology, used the leftover materials from the occupier’s bombs to build new weapons, utilized the bunkers that the occupier created, and crippled the occupier’s economy. As our ruling class works towards bringing Gaza’s suffering to more parts of the globe, freedom fighters all around the world must take example from the Palestinians. 

Their story has shown that when you refuse to appease your oppressors, and instead commit to resistance by all methods available, you will put yourself on the path to victory. Such a mode of practice is not bravado, because it requires that the revolutionary forces fully account for the oppressor’s strengths. And the enemies of the Palestinians do have plenty of strengths; the question for the resistance has been how to exploit the oppressor’s weaknesses, of which there are also many.

The U.S. empire has turned Gaza into a testing ground for new methods of sadism and mass murder, hoping that the global proliferation of these methods—and the sight of Gaza’s horrors—will dissuade the world’s peoples from rising up. This was a crucial part of the Zionist entity’s motivation for perpetrating the genocide: to restore the deterrence powers of the entity (and Washington by extension) through showing everyone what happens when you resist. Yet even now, after Gaza has experienced an apocalypse, the resistance within Gaza hasn’t gone away. The liberation forces have only grown stronger, and the Gazan people have proven they won’t be coerced into leaving their homeland. This means that should the entity try to re-invade Gaza, the Palestinians will bring their oppressors even closer towards final defeat.

The imperialists and their proxies are doing all they can to expand their destructive campaign. They’ve made the West Bank into the extermination effort’s next location, with the Israeli Offense Force intensifying its assaults against the area’s people. The entity’s next plans include annexing all of Syria’s southern region, taking southern Lebanon, and officially annexing the West Bank. Yet even if the entity and its imperial backers succeed in these things, this will not prevent Zionism’s unraveling; if anything, it will make the entity’s downfall come faster. Because the entity’s strength is limited, and if it expends itself in too many areas, this will bring about its demise.

The internal breakdown that Zionism has been undergoing will not be reversed; it’s only going to worsen. The entity’s economic, energy, demographic, and military morale crises have only begun, and a crucial reason for this is the Palestinian resistance. That’s the incredible nature of what the Palestinian liberation fighters are doing: even when their people have had everything taken away from them, and they’ve become confined to a tiny enclave, they continue to bring their oppressors ever-closer towards defeat. 

That Gaza has been made so isolated further demonstrates the invincibility of the resistance. Gaza is a small tip of the land that the Palestinians used to have, trapped between the Nazi state of “Israel” and the fascist collaborator state Egypt. In the last year, Iran’s alliance to resist Zionism has largely fallen apart; Syria’s destruction left Lebanon far more vulnerable, while “Israel” became able to invade Syria and accelerate Palestine’s extermination. But if and when the entity picks another fight with the Palestinian resistance, this is going to make the aggressors experience bigger blowback than ever.

The entity cannot handle Syria and Gaza at the same time; that’s why it agreed to the ceasefire. The hegemon would also become overwhelmed by a new fight with Gaza’s liberation forces; Washington is trying to secure control over Syria so that it can pursue its larger strategic goals, and this plan would be ruined by a new Gaza confrontation. It would bring Washington even further from its goal of war with China, forcing it to put more resources towards the impossible mission of subduing Palestine.

Gaza’s resistance can’t be eliminated, and this is because the resistance has been able to exploit its status as a guerrilla force; it’s turned the limitations of its circumstances into a strength. Hamas, PFLP, and the others in Gaza’s resistance coalition have not been able to operate with an official army; the Palestinians in Gaza haven’t even truly had a state either. Over the decades, the occupier has done everything it can to make sure Gaza can’t develop, isolating and strangling it in an attempt to make its people overthrow Hamas. But the people have remained resolute in their efforts to defy the oppressor, and this is shown by their unwillingness to carry out some sort of anti-Hamas color revolution. In turn, the coalition has been able to carry through its plans; it’s put the occupier into a death spiral, and made it inevitable that Palestine will get a state regardless of what the Zionists want.

In reaction to these irrecoverable defeats, the enemy is trying to eradicate the Palestinians. At this point, the Gaza blockade is simply about trying to exterminate the people, because it’s become clear that they’ll never acquiesce to the enemy’s demands. And because the resistance has operated with that same uncompromising mentality, where you’ll take on any and all sacrifices to defeat the enemy, the resistance has become more of a threat than ever.

Gaza’s fighting forces, as well as Gaza’s people, are in place to devastate the imperial structure. A moment is coming in which the hegemon’s forces become split between Syria and Gaza, foiling its wider geopolitical schemes. When that moment comes, it won’t represent the empire’s final defeat; but it will create a crisis that the empire can’t handle. The global capitalist system has long been preparing for a crisis like this, and a large part of this preparation has been to “Israelify” police states around the world. 

The Zionist entity has developed new, high-tech methods for surveilling and coercing the Palestinians. These technologies and police training models have then been exported to numerous capitalist states, both in the core imperialist countries and in the Global South. Palestine’s colonization has been instrumental in the rise of our techno-tyranny, giving the ruling class unprecedented tools for restricting the masses. But all peoples can defeat this system of control, even when this system has taken on its most extreme form.

Gaza has proven we can all fight back. This is the message we need to take away from all we’ve seen since October 7: even when the enemy does all it can to crush a people, the people are capable of winning in the end.

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Extermination is Trump’s goal for Gaza, & the U.S. cold war strategy depends on this goal’s success

The U.S. empire has concentrated its aggressions against the Palestinians, and against the other peoples the Zionist entity is assailing. Everything the Trump White House’s neocons wish they could do in East Asia, they’re doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and increasingly Iran. They view the Palestinians, and the peoples of these other countries, as obstacles in the path towards a viable war with China; Washington has found itself weighed down within West Asia, and it’s trying to solve this through extermination. Through starving Gaza’s people, and ultimately carrying out a re-invasion where even more Gazans are slaughtered. 

That’s the true purpose of Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the Palestinians: to exterminate the Gazan people. Gazans are determined never to leave, and the occupiers know this, so the plan for them is annihilation. The Nazi state of “Israel” has made this absolutely clear; it’s sent leaflets to Gazans that threaten them with extinction, saying they’ll only get life-saving aid if they flee. In preparation for when “Israel” resumes its pre-ceasefire levels of violence, it’s been regularly violating the ceasefire, bombing Gaza wherever it feels it can get away with this. It wants to maintain an absence of true peace, and then launch its next big assault.

This is the final solution that the Trump administration and Netanyahu have for Gaza. They believe the very existence of Gaza’s people poses a threat towards Washington’s strategic interests, so they’re putting everything into eliminating these people. If we thwart this genocidal campaign, the enemy’s other schemes will be thwarted, and the imperial state will be brought much closer towards getting overthrown.

There are clear weaknesses within the imperial enemy, even as it goes on the offensive. And the event that’s exposed these vulnerabilities is the same event which represents Washington’s biggest recent victory: the fall of Syria. When the U.S. overthrew Assad, the empire faced a choice: keep up the previous degree of attacks against Gaza, or divert its resources towards securing control over Syria. In mid-January, the imperial strategists settled on the latter option. By that point, “Israeli” society had long been in a state of severe crisis, and the imperialists knew “Israel” would collapse if it continued putting so much focus onto Gaza. So Washington had its Zionist proxy pivot towards Syria, seeking to thereby put maximum pressure upon Russia. The next goal is to gain major concessions from Russia, and thereby divide Russia from China. That way, the PRC would be left without its biggest partner, enabling Washington to start war in East Asia.

Now, as Trump’s White House is carrying out the Ukraine negotiations, more than ever it needs the ceasefire arrangement to hold. Trump engages in bluster about being tough on Hamas, but the truth is that the imperialists are frightened of what the Palestinian resistance could do. They’re scared of what will happen to their cold war plans if things go back to how they were before the ceasefire. So they’re trying to starve as many Palestinians as possible, and put off the moment when they’ll have to face Palestine’s resistance again.

This is how the imperial project undermines itself: it’s working towards multiple goals that conflict with each other. The Zionist fanatics want to re-invade Gaza, yet doing so would split Washington’s focus at a crucial moment. It would put the imperialists into a military quagmire that’s too big for them to handle, forcing them to make East Asia less of a priority. That’s the danger which appeared for Washington when Assad left, and decreasing its Gaza involvement was the only way to solve the problem. But it’s certain that the Zionist entity will end up fighting a Round Two with the Palestinian resistance. And when this next confrontation comes, it will break the enemy’s forces.

The Palestinians have brought this struggle so far, and they’re in place to strike the enemy even harder. We are at an unprecedented moment of the anti-imperialist fight, where a guerrilla movement inside a destroyed land strip has become in place to thwart the hegemon’s biggest geopolitical scheme. Amid this hope, though, there remains a great risk: the risk that the Nazi state will succeed in murdering hundreds of thousands more Palestinians. Even though the resistance is poised to devastate the enemy, this victory may come at the cost of Gaza losing a much greater percentage of its people. The aggressors won’t be able to fully exterminate the people, but they could annihilate an extremely large number of them; even larger than the number of Gazans who they’ve already murdered.

Such a price for our cause’s success would be unacceptable. We cannot make the Palestinians collectively sacrifice themselves; we must resist this genocide with more ferocity than ever, and ensure that Gaza’s people won’t have to die for the rest of the world’s sake. We cannot wait for when the re-invasion happens to carry out our next pro-Palestine mobilizations. The extermination effort is ongoing; every day the Nazi state is murdering more Palestinians through engineered malnutrition, weaponized diseases, or attacks from the Israeli Offense Force. 

This month, there’s been a global new wave of protests against the genocide; but so far during Trump’s term, the media has managed to keep Gaza out of of the discourse, aside from when it’s had to report on Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan. The genocide’s perpetrators are concealing their latest crimes, perpetuating the myth that “peace” has been reached while distracting from the death camp conditions they’ve created within Gaza. To fight for the Palestinians effectively, we’ll need to rebuild the pro-Palestine movement in a different form, with a strategy that’s different than simply relying upon protest momentum.

We have to establish aid between our local communities and Palestine; an example of such a project is when Boulder, Colorado established a sister city relationship with Nablus in the West Bank. My hometown in Humboldt County, California has an active Palestinian sister city movement, and such movements could spread to other areas if we work to make that happen. We have to bring the pro-Palestine struggle into worker organizing; we must introduce Palestinian solidarity efforts into the unions, while building independent labor orgs that can advance the cause more freely. We have to prepare our orgs for the state’s next repressive attacks, and create structures that can operate underground. This need for organizational security applies to all areas of the struggle, but Palestine is the issue that the state is using to try to criminalize all types of dissident activities; so the Palestinian struggle must be what compels us to prepare for a crackdown.

These are among the actions we’ll need to take in order to avert an even bigger genocidal onslaught. The enemy will try to carry out such an onslaught, but we have the chance to disrupt it. If we can sabotage the effort at eliminating Gaza’s people, the entire global liberation struggle will be advanced towards a new stage. This is a test of our solidarity; should we pass the test, countless lives will be saved, and the enemy will be fatally weakened.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Fascist Ukraine’s defeat is a triumph for the Soviet spirit, & a prelude to global workers victory

Above: Communist Party of Ukraine members rallying to defend a Soviet statue while Kiev’s fascist regime was beginning its crackdown on dissent

In May 2023, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation made a statement that articulated the needs of this era’s anti-fascist struggle. I believe the party’s words are worth revisiting, because they can help us advance this struggle amid the new stage it’s since entered into. Wrote the CPRF:

The key to success is the unity and cohesion of the peace-loving forces of the planet. A victorious resistance to world reaction can only succeed if it is worldwide. We are deeply convinced that our international solidarity can safeguard humankind against the Fascist threat and the slide into the abyss of a world war. We declare it firmly here in Byelorussia. On this sacred land the sense of inseparable link between the past, present and future is particularly acute. Dear friends, in the flaming days of the Second World War a great militant alliance was formed against Fascist barbarism – a union of communists and patriots, fighters against tyranny and democrats. It was created in spite of social and ideological differences, and different political and religious views. This is the bidding of the time. The new era of trials calls for unity of actions of all the people of good will. Let us then unite in the struggle against neo-Nazism, reaction and militarism! Long live he united front of progressive forces!

It’s only through such an effort, where the globe’s people unite against the U.S. empire like they united against Nazi Germany, that we’ll be able to build on the struggle’s recent gains. The defeat of Banderite Ukraine—which truly happened a long time ago—represents a major victory for the global proletariat. The Banderite ethnic cleansing plan, where Ukraine would have forcibly transferred Russian speakers out of the Donbass, has been foiled for good. It’s been foiled because Russia’s workers movement successfully pressured the Kremlin into launching Operation Z. This military effort is an extension of Russia’s Great Patriotic War, and it’s largely been motivated by the memory of Hitler’s atrocities against the Soviet people.

Russia’s second victory over Nazism has required an effort to revive the Soviet spirit; to fight for proletarian re-empowerment amid the loss of the socialist system. When Euromaidan happened in 2014, Russia’s political order was not yet at a stage where the government wanted to take sufficient action against the fascists. It would ultimately reach that stage, but the workers first had to intervene. The anti-fascist forces in Donbass, such as the region’s mine workers, first had to lead a separatist movement. Then Russia’s communists needed to carry out a pressure campaign, and make clear to Putin that assisting the Donbass people was in his best interests. 

Fascist Kiev banned Ukraine’s Communist Party, but then the workers of the broader post-Soviet sphere mobilized to defeat the new Nazi menace. And thanks to this outside intervention, Ukraine’s revolutionary forces are on the path towards victory, at least in the long term. Ukraine continues to be controlled by the junta which has been behind the country’s Hitlerite policies, and when Zelensky is out, the fascist deep state will remain. Yet Ukraine’s dissidents and persecuted minorities have been brought closer towards getting liberated, because the state they live under has become severely weakened. 

Their dictator has talked about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” where policing has been greatly intensified; but with how much chaos the fascist state must now deal with, such an extreme repressive plan could make the state collapse under its own weight. The junta is now tasked with governing a state whose military got crippled long ago, and that’s alienated its own population through aggressive conscription methods. The Ukrainian and U.S. deep states will now need to figure out a replacement for Zelensky, and the transition isn’t likely to be a clean one. I can’t speak to how the popular resistance inside Ukraine plans on taking advantage of these developments, as it’s been forced underground and must stay quiet; but this is a major opportunity to strike against the fascist state from within.

These events have also created an opening for the proletarian struggle worldwide. On a global scale, Russia’s victory has meant the further discrediting of liberalism, and therefore another vindication of communism. It’s exposed the weaknesses of the liberal order, and also its moral bankruptcy; the workers of the NATO countries see that their governments would rather invest in an unwinnable war than solve our living standards crisis. That’s the mindset which many proletarians in the imperialist countries have come to as a reaction to the Ukraine conflict. Most of them haven’t even needed to learn the true history of the war to know that NATO should be opposed; they’ve only had to notice the most surface-level facts. When the workers have won, we’ll be able to make the story of Banderism’s atrocities against Donbass into something that’s taught in the schools; but the working masses have already in large part rejected the Ukraine psyop.

So far, Turkey is the NATO member country that’s been experiencing the largest proletarian struggle since Operation Z began. The Ukraine war was what ruined Erdogan’s plans to stabilize the economy, so now Turkey’s workers have been set on a path of relentless revolt. The metal workers have been refusing to work in defiance of Erdogan’s order banning them from striking, and wildcat strikes are spreading across the country. These uprisings are an extension of the Turkish people’s formidable, militant backlash against their government’s assistance of the Gaza genocide; which gives Turkey’s class struggle a strongly anti-imperialist character, and thereby makes it effective.

Because Turkey’s workers are rebelling not just against their own bourgeoisie, but against the imperial hegemon as well, they’re in place to help thwart the hegemon’s next scheme. The Trump administration is trying to bring Russia, Iran, and China’s other strategic partners into the USA’s orbit, leaving the PRC isolated. Turkey is crucial to this plan, because if Russia becomes dependent on Turkey, Washington will become better able to make Russia capitulate. That’s how the U.S. has hoped Russia will react to Assad’s overthrow: by making concessions, and becoming friendly with the U.S.-Turkish aggressors. But if Turkey’s reactionary state is going to face an ever-greater threat from its own people, then it’s going to be in a weaker place both diplomatically and economically. How can a state gain the leverage to win other countries to its side when that state is in internal disarray?

In the NATO countries, the proletarian struggle’s immediate task is to sabotage the war machine by bringing such perils upon our capitalist states. The end goal is to overthrow these states, but until we’ve managed to do this, we must undermine Washington’s war goals. There is a real danger that the U.S. will make Russia capitulate; though Russia’s objective national interests are in staying aligned with China, there’s a faction of Russia’s ruling class that wants to sell the country out. Only through class struggle, both in Russia and in the NATO countries, can this prospect be averted.

The Russian workers have already made great progress, but the imperial enemy won’t be defeated until we in the U.S. carry out our own proletarian campaign. A campaign that weakens the war machine as much as possible prior to the revolution; while working towards the state’s overthrow at every step. BRICS cannot win this fight on its own, and multipolarity was never the end goal for communists. Multipolarity was only a necessary step in the path towards global workers victory. To build on Operation Z’s gains, we’ll have to take on a highly active role within the class war. Russia’s workers have done this, Turkey’s workers have done this, and now we must do this.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Why we’ve picked this battle: the pro-Palestine struggle’s unbreakable nature, & how it can end the U.S. empire

This is the first chapter from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the pro-Palestine movement failed to stop a holocaust, & how it can still win.” The book will greatly elaborate on its ideas, but this summarizes the arguments it’s going to put forth.

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If anyone is listening to me in the world, I say to them I wish you would stop the war for the sake of the children. For the sake of these flowers. For the sake of these wonderful people.

—Khaled Nabhan

Among all of the souls the U.S. government has helped “Israel” murder in Gaza, certain victims have become widely known, like Anne Frank did. So many of this genocide’s targets have been able to have their stories told to the world because today, we have the technology to make such stories instantly accessible to the bulk of humanity. Therefore a lot of the Gaza genocide’s victims have already come to have a legacy that’s comparable to Frank’s. A legacy where someone has been able to live on in the memories of millions, and thereby helped inspire people towards fighting against genocidal beliefs, even though they themselves didn’t survive the extermination.

These victims who’ve captured global attention include Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl who “Israel” murdered by shelling her family’s car while they were fleeing Gaza City; Shaaban Ahmed Al-Dalu, the 20-year-old software engineering student who “Israel” burned to death while he was on an IV; Wafa Aludaini, the Palestinian journalist who “Israel” murdered in an airstrike along with her husband and their two children; and the victim whose story has personally had the biggest impact on me, that being Reem Nabhan. 

Reem was three years old when “Israel” murdered her, and during the little time that she’d had with her grandfather Khaled, she had been able to experience the love of somebody who deeply cares for a child. She’d also known what it’s like to have a sibling, Tarek, who “Israel” murdered along with her in an airstrike a month into the genocide. You can find photos of all three of them, living like a family should live. There’s a picture of Khaled holding up Reem while they’re in the streets, with Reem playfully putting her hand on his beard; there’s a picture of Reem and Tarek posing under an archway, with Reem looking at the camera pseudo-seriously and doing a peace sign; there’s a picture of Khaled with both of them, holding up Reem in one arm while putting his hand on Tarek’s shoulder. It’s these kinds of normal little things, so familiar to all of us and so easy to relate to, that have let everyone who’s seen them recognize themselves in the images. Or at least this is true for everyone whose hearts haven’t been destroyed by the dehumanizing propaganda against Palestinians.

The part of the Nabhan family’s story that captured the world’s attention was how Khaled reacted when he lost Reem and Tarek. While Khaled held Reem after the strike, he put her cheek to his, kissed her, and turned to the camera to say: “This is the soul of my soul.” Seeing this was enough to shatter people; and it wasn’t only about the loss the scene showed, it was also about the way Khaled processed that loss during this moment. Khaled knew Reem and her brother weren’t coming back, but this didn’t stop him from showing that love towards them again, the same as if they were still alive. Just because someone is gone, doesn’t mean they can’t keep giving you strength and comfort. Staying connected with them in this way will mean feeling the full scope of the loss, but it also lets you hold on to the soul of your soul. That’s something we can learn from Khaled. 

I believe it’s because of moments like these, where seeing the Palestinian people’s loss has reminded us of what we care about the most, that the movement for Palestine’s freedom cannot die. This isn’t a pronouncement on my part, it’s an objective observation: no matter how severe the state’s crackdown against Palestine supporters becomes, the pro-Palestine movement will always keep gaining new supporters and participants. That’s the conclusion which one of my close partners in the communist movement, who here I’ll call Mac, came to while we were talking in November of 2024. Said Mac: “The pro-Palestine struggle will never die, it’s impossible to kill. No amount of repression can end it. The thing that can make it fail, though, is if it gets guided in a direction that makes it ineffective.” And that’s the danger which I seek to investigate in this book: ideas, personalities, and institutions that can lead the pro-Palestine struggle astray, directing the people’s passion for this cause away from what can actually end the genocide.

Throughout the book, I will go into detail about which actions I believe are best, based on what I’ve studied and seen in relation to the pro-Palestine struggle. But for me to make these arguments in a credible way, first I must illustrate why I’ve concluded that the movement’s main initial methods have failed. Or rather why we should connect the objective reality that we’ve been unable to stop the genocide; with the strategies and tactics that the pro-Palestine movement has relied upon. 

There’s no question that we haven’t managed to stop our government from continuing the extermination. The January 2025 ceasefire deal did not come about because of the pro-Palestine movement, which had by then lost too much of its earlier momentum to have influence over White House policy; the ceasefire happened because of the Palestinian resistance itself, which had overwhelmed the occupier for the time being. And this means the Palestinians are now in a much worse place than they would be if the U.S. pro-Palestine movement were stronger. 

As I write this in February 2025, the Zionist entity keeps bombing Gaza to a lesser extent, while expanding its campaign of atrocities against the West Bank. And Trump has felt totally comfortable with calling for all Gazans to leave, which since they won’t leave amounts to a plan for starving them instead. Given all of these factors which Zionism still has in its favor, it would be no surprise if “Israel” were to start a new campaign of mass bombings, and re-invade the Gaza strip. Though the Palestinian resistance has gained a strategic victory by thwarting the entity’s invasions, and has driven Zionism much closer to internal collapse, the Palestinians have been left to fight this battle while lacking effective allies inside the United States. Which is arguably the most important place for Palestine to have allies, because it’s the U.S. that’s central in providing “Israel” with the means for extermination.

The question that Palestine supporters need to ask ourselves is whether the limitations our movement has run into are simply due to the circumstances we’ve faced; or because of how we’ve navigated these circumstances. We must consider the idea that we could have saved many of the genocide’s victims, or even most of them, if we had done things differently. It’s a painful idea to explore, but we have to explore it, or we won’t be able to adequately wage this struggle during the fight’s next stages.

We’ve made mistakes, and I include myself as among the ones guilty of this; it took me many years of navigating activist circles to recognize that the modern USA’s default organizing habits are counterproductive. The essence of the problem is that for the last half-century or so, our social movements have been operating in a way which keeps them limited; limited to the campuses, and to the non-governmental organizations which co-opt popular struggles. Whenever the NGOs succeed in taking control of a struggle, that struggle ceases to be a popular one, and becomes just another niche; which is the greatest danger the pro-Palestine movement faces at this moment. I’ll go into detail on these co-optation efforts later on, after I’ve thoroughly reviewed the pro-Palestine struggle’s setbacks since October 7. But until then, keep in mind that part of the story: at all times, the NGOs and their adjacent forces have been trying to shape the movement in their image, threatening to take away its vitality and its connection to the masses.

As I’ve looked at the timeline of this atrocity, I’ve come to realize just how totally we failed Khaled; because Khaled is one of the Gazans who would have survived if the pro-Palestine movement had built upon its initial strength, and answered his call for us to stop the killing. “Israel” murdered him on December 16, 2024, when he was only 54. This was half a year into the period where Gaza had been kept out of the regular U.S. news cycle. And it was in the week after Washington had managed to overthrow Syria’s anti-imperialist government, an event that further emboldened the Zionist entity. Had we resisted better, these factors may not have been present, and the entity would have encountered much more severe obstacles by the end of that year. We owe it to Khaled to learn from our errors. We owe it to everyone who’s no longer with us because of how long “Israel,” as well as our own leaders, were allowed to get away with these crimes.

We within the U.S. pro-Palestine struggle have picked this battle because we see ourselves in those who our government wants to eradicate. And when it becomes apparent that our movement has made major mistakes, I trust that the struggle’s participants will work to correct these mistakes. Opportunistic forces will continue to try manipulating the pro-Palestine movement, but this movement’s base is within the people, and the people are not materially invested in the NGOs or the Democratic Party. 

These Palestine supporters haven’t sought out to steer the movement in the wrong direction; rather they’ve entered into an organizing environment that’s been thoroughly captured by corrupt interests. And now that the default methods have been exposed as ineffective, many will be inclined to pursue alternative methods. Methods that allow us to make this struggle into more than a protest movement, and build for it a strong, sustainable base within the masses. We need to bring the pro-Palestine cause into the unions. We need to establish worker organizations that function independently from the unions, and thereby can fight without self-constraint regarding Palestine or any other front of struggle. We need to build a united front between the different ideological camps which oppose the genocidal war machine. We need to construct networks within our communities that are designed to let us keep resisting the genocide, even in the event of extreme crackdowns. 

These are the practical steps towards ending this holocaust. And they align with a program for revolution because only revolution can truly make our cause succeed. That’s the reality the NGOs seek to obscure: the state that’s behind this holocaust cannot be reformed out of being genocidal. It’s a state whose purpose is to advance monopoly capital’s interests, and the only way to defeat these interests is by bringing this state’s end. There are things we can do to pressure the imperial state into slowing down its campaign of slaughter, and it’s necessary for us to disrupt the war machine’s activities during this pre-revolutionary stage. But we must always do so with revolution as our ultimate goal, using all short-term victories to bring that outcome closer. 

The monopoly-aligned forces that seek to co-opt this movement are selling a series of illusions; illusions about which political struggle methods can work, and how much effect one can have merely by holding the right intentions. A movement’s participants can share the most noble intentions possible, such as wanting to save defenseless people from aggression. But unless this intent of ours gets translated into actions that genuinely threaten the empire, we’ll keep failing the Palestinians. To act upon our desire for justice, we must reexamine the ways in which we’ve been trying to wage this fight. We know why we’ve picked the battle; now we have to do what’s needed for winning it.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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China’s communist tech triumph, & how it foreshadows techno-feudalism’s overthrow in the United States

The new feudalism is going to be defeated the same way the old feudalism did: a new productive paradigm makes the old one outmoded, prompting revolutionary upheavals. And socialism, the next dominant mode, will be something that’s actually capable of resolving feudalism’s contradictions. After capitalism overthrew feudalism, inevitably it ended up re-producing feudalism’s structures; capitalism reached its monopoly stage, and the monopolies created a lord-and-serf relationship with the workers. Now, after neoliberalism and the 2008 collapse have sped up the re-feudalization process, the lords of the 21st century have gained new tools for enforcing their rule. They’ve created tech monopolies, which have made it so that our personal data, information exposure, job security, employment prospects, and collective economic stability are ever-more connected to AI. AI that’s in the hands of the most sinister corporate entities on the planet, like Meta and BlackRock.

Techno-feudalism’s promise is that it will bring humanity to the next stage of evolution by giving us new tools; but as long as the lords control these tools, these tools will be used to reinforce all of our society’s inequalities. To divert attention away from these obvious contradictions in their system, the tech lords have employed a series of psyops; the main one they're now using is “Silicon Valley MAGA,” where Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have sold their oligarchic agenda as something anti-establishment. But this psyop will fail, because it isn’t supported by tangible reality. Right-wing big tech’s narrative about it fighting the deep state is an attempt to imitate the aesthetics of revolutionary politics, while it worsens the system’s evils. To find a technological project that’s genuinely revolutionary, we can look to China. 

In the PRC, the introduction of this century’s technologies has not brought about a dystopia, despite what the anti-Chinese “social credit” narrative says. In China, social media has become a means for proliferating content that actually enriches people’s minds; there’s a striking contrast between Chinese and U.S. social platforms, in that the former haven’t become dominated by content which harms people’s mental health. Instead, they promote content that’s designed to uplift the spirit; to help motivate someone towards living their life more fully, and embrace community, relationships, and creativity. The vast majority of Chinese internet users feel like social media has had a positive impact on their lives; which is what happens when this tool isn’t designed for profit, but rather for advancing the collective wellbeing. 

Communism has provided China with the foundations needed for outcompeting the imperial hegemon. And because of this deep societal strength, all other aspects of China’s technological innovations have an inherent advantage. When China has implemented AI in education, this AI is strengthening a school system that’s already spectacularly effective. When Chinese companies like DeepSeek create the globe’s winning AI products, this amplifies the PRC’s already unprecedented economic growth.

A growing number of the USA’s people have been noticing the successes of China’s societal model; and they’re becoming pro-China ironically in reaction to their government’s attempts at suppressing such views. In the last month, as the imperial state has tried to ban TikTok, many Americans have migrated towards another Chinese app: RedNote, or Xiaohongshu. As Carlos Garrido observed in January about the blowback from Washington’s war on TikTok:

Even with all the censorship on the American version of the app, this was not enough. Their control was tubular, and leakages to their censorship edifice became evident. Videos showing the truth about key geopolitical events, especially the barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, would continue to go viral, reaching millions of Americans. Such a disavowal of the ‘official narratives’ of the U.S. empire could not go unpunished. Banning the app completely was the only ‘solution’ the elite could come up with. These are the actions of a desperate empire in the midst of a deep crisis of legitimacy. As could have been expected, the intent to censor the truth by banning TikTok turned into its opposite, into the great migration onto the Little Red Book app by millions of American ‘refugees.’ Videos are now going viral of American creators saying quite explicitly that they will rather give their data to Xi Jinping than the U.S. government. The propaganda, clearly, is no longer working on a population struggling with paying bills and drowning in debt.

Our ruling class is accelerating its crackdown against these foreign technologies, working to complete the TikTok ban as soon as possible while illegalizing RedNote and DeepSeek. The goal is to isolate American society from information that threatens capitalism’s existence, whether this information is about the genocide or about socialism’s achievements. And the techno-feudalists are capable of implementing such a repressive plan, but this can’t save their system.

U.S. communists and our allies will continue using the new technologies to help shift mass consciousness. We’ll carry out social media campaigns to further expose the genocide, cultivate more American-Chinese solidarity, and bring the workers into labor organizing. Should our enemies succeed in shuttering our platforms and criminalizing our orgs, we’ll have to reckon with that obstacle; but even the most extreme repressive measures won’t reverse the breakdown of the capitalist productive mode.

Our ruling class is scrambling to mitigate a collapse, and the longer revolution gets delayed, the more this class will be able to damage our society. Capitalism has already made it inevitable that we’ll experience an ecological crisis, and see greater climatic disasters; the thing our class enemies will try to do amid these upheavals is wage a civil war against the country’s own people, wherein our communities experience ever-more violent crime and political terrorism. It’s how they aim to keep us divided and unorganized while they continue the corporate looting of our communities. There will be a growing amount of blackouts during these times, brought about by infrastructural collapse or even false flag sabotage attacks; the country’s people will be increasingly forced to survive through dire scenarios, resembling the cataclysms that our foreign policy has brought to so many other places.

Depending on how far this collapse goes, for many of us the 21st century’s technologies will be made inaccessible, as we’ll be navigating a scenario where large parts of the power grid have been destroyed. But these technologies will still exist; China is only going to keep building itself up, and innovating further. This American dark age also won’t last; not if we’ve gained the collective organizational power needed to win during the class war’s next stage. So many of U.S. imperialism’s victims have been able to triumph after getting thrown into truly apocalyptic situations. And they can often find ways of utilizing today’s technologies, even when the enemy has targeted electrical infrastructure. Palestine’s resistance forces have been fighting on the social media front, and winning, since the campaign to demolish Gaza began.

Ours is a global age of civil wars, and we’ve entered into this age largely due to the rise of techno-policing. The same new repressive technologies that are used against the Palestinians have been exported around the world. This means that as new revolutionary upheavals appear, more of the globe’s masses will need to adopt tactics like the ones the Palestinians have embraced. In the United States, the counterinsurgency will have the greatest strategic advantage in the cities, where police are best positioned to crack down and the techno-lords have the most control. In the rural areas, though, the revolutionary forces will be able to navigate more freely, and to provide crucial aid towards the struggles of those trapped inside the metropoles. Communists will be there to aid both the urban and rural masses in this confrontation with their oppressors.

Through the power of the collective, and through utilizating our new tools for revolt, we will isolate and defeat our capitalist dictatorship. And we’ll be able to do so while pointing towards the image of China, which shows what waits for us when we’ve won.

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