Above: the October 2023 Damascus solidarity gathering for Palestinians and Syrians, which was attended by the World Federation of Trade Unions
Since Trump announced his plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, the pro-Palestine movement has experienced a new global upsurge. In New York City, London, and Melbourne, fresh protests have come into being. The orthodox Jewish community has taken on a prominent role in this revival of the anti-Zionist fight, with religious Jews in New York standing defiantly against the Zionist counter-protesters. The bad news is that the media has so far succeeded in orchestrating a blackout of these demonstrations; you won’t find much reporting on last week’s New York protests when you try to look them up on a U.S.-controlled search engine. The good news is that these developments prove there continues to be mass momentum behind the Palestinian liberation cause; which means that those who seek to build sustained power for this movement will keep finding ever-more allies among the masses.
This isn’t a surprise. In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, popular sentiment greatly shifted in Palestine’s favor a while ago; at least since the spring of last year, when the bulk of our society had gotten exposed to the footage of Zionism’s atrocities, the pro-Palestine side has decisively won the narrative war. The problem the struggle then encountered was that it lacked the structural strength needed for turning this support into something effective. The Gaza ceasefire came about due to the resistance successes of the Palestinians themselves; not because of the pro-Palestine movement in the empire’s core. By the time the ceasefire happened, the imperialist media had managed to keep Gaza out of the discourse’s center for half a year.
By mid-summer, the protests had become insubstantial enough that the media could ignore them, and the news cycle shifted towards election-related distractions. With less scrutiny now being on them, the genocide’s perpetrators accelerated the slaughter. By the time Washington overthrew Syria’s government in December, the Zionist entity was in place to expand the genocide with impunity. It invaded Syria, violated the Lebanon ceasefire without any worry of repercussions, then worked with Trump on an official and openly stated plan for expelling Gaza’s people.
The pro-Palestine backlash we’re seeing now is an attempt to recover from the massive setbacks the movement has seen throughout this last year; the state’s counterinsurgency against our efforts has succeeded for the time being. The way we must respond to these losses is by pivoting towards a new strategy. A strategy where we’re no longer reactively gravitating towards the default methods in modern organizing, but rather constructing a solid base of institutional power.
The pro-Palestine movement faltered after the initial protest wave because like every other social movement in modern America, this movement is far too reliant on protests. Protests are only one aspect of what we need to do. If you make them your sole means of advancing a struggle, that struggle will suffer as soon as the protests inevitably experience a lull or a crackdown. It will even be put in peril when the protests become more frequent, as they have this month, but the media decides to orchestrate a blackout of them. To make the pro-Palestine movement resilient, and able to keep gaining more leverage against the state, we need to bring the struggle into worker organizing. We also need to bring more of the workers into labor organizing, which our class enemies have pushed to the margins throughout the last half-century.
Many of the unions have already demonstrated solidarity with Palestine, but this alone of course hasn’t been enough to stop the genocide; so we need to take on a much more active role in organized labor. We need to re-learn the art of worker organizing that defined what U.S. communists used to be, and that can still be studied via reading lists on America’s labor organizing history.
As William Foster emphasized in his book American Trade Unionism, a crucial part of this task is to bring in the unorganized workers; and in the 21st century, we’ve come to have new technological tools that can greatly advance this goal. It’s because of social media that the Gaza genocide has been able to have such a massive impact on the popular consciousness. And it’s through social media that we can organize the unorganized; or at least social media is an important tool in this task. Anti-labor media psyops are a crucial reason behind why the bulk of the workers have abandoned the unions; individualist neoliberal narratives, combined with the political bankruptcy of the unions themselves, have combined to create mass apathy around class struggle. The ruling class has weakened the unions, while using this to reinforce the idea that worker organizing isn’t worthwhile; but through social media counter-narratives, we can bring the proletariat back into organized labor.
By organized labor, I do not necessarily mean the unions themselves, though it is crucial for us to build connections with them. I also mean worker organizations that the workers build up on their own; ones that have the goal of overthrowing the capitalist state, rather than trying to reform capitalism. (Thus avoiding the old mistake of trying to create “dual unions,” which Foster warned about at length.) Union organizing is not enough. To win on Palestine, and on every other front, we’ll need a hybrid practice where we work both in and outside the unions.
For an example of such a project, we can look to the American Communist Party, which was founded just last summer but has already advanced the struggle significantly. The ACP has members who are within the unions, and they’re using these unions to further mass education on Palestine. This is extremely productive to the cause, and the more proletarians the anti-imperialist movement can bring into this kind of union work, the better off the struggle will be. It’s only one aspect of what the party is doing, though.
The party is constructing an independent organization for the workers; one that’s a serious party-building project rather than an online “paper party,” because all of its cadre activities are in-person. It’s building substantial connections with the broad masses, via its efforts to serve our communities. It’s assisting the workers in their strikes. Through these efforts, ACP creating a real source of power for the working class; one that’s capable of providing support to the workers in all of their fights, whether these fights are about Palestine or anything else.
The more strength that alternative worker institutions like ACP gain, the better positioned the struggle will become in all areas. Revolutionary parts of the unions, like the anti-imperialist WFTU, will become more able to combat our ruling class; and revolutionary forces outside the unions will gain power along with them.
To ensure that ACP and this struggle’s other assets continue making such progress, we’ll need to resist the state’s next crackdowns. If we can fortify our cadres and networks against repression, the USA’s people will keep having access to the tools for defeating their ruling class; and the Palestinian people won’t lose their allies from inside the empire. The struggles of both peoples are inseparably connected, as are the different parts of the mission we must undertake. The pro-labor social media project is tied to the pro-Palestine information war, and worker organizing is tied in with the anti-imperialist struggle. The tasks of mobilizing against repression, and establishing clandestine networks, are thereby interdependent with all other tasks.
If we account for every facet of this mission, we’ll overcome the present obstacles. However effective our enemies are in countering our movement as it exists today, the strategic situation is changing. New forces within the struggle are rising, and they’re on their way to bringing this fight towards its next stage.
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