The Democratic Party’s plan to contain the coming workers upsurge is intertwined with liberal Zionism’s efforts to co-opt the Palestinian cause. It’s the working-class movement's treatment of the Palestine question that will determine whether the movement gains independence from the Democrats during its next phase; because the struggle against Zionism is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism, and being against Palestine’s colonization is still the most important litmus test within the class struggle.
These realities are self-evident, but our class enemies have methods for diverting the workers from what the struggle calls for. And the way they aim to divert us from the next critical tasks is by presenting a “soft” Zionism disguised as liberation, based around the “coexistence” narrative about what Palestine supposedly needs. This is how the labor bosses and the reformist politicians can capture the next working-class revolt; the counterinsurgency against this revolt will depend on how well these opportunists can sell the lie of a “peaceful” Zionism, one that’s being undermined by the “extremists” on “both sides” of the anti-colonial war.
It’s this narrative that the Democrat gatekeepers within the union bureaucracy will use to try to constrain our efforts, and justify shutting down their pro-Palestine constituents. As we go into organized labor, and put forth our agenda of boycotting the Zionist entity, we’ll be met with sympathetic overtures followed by underhanded sabotage. The labor leadership will prefer the version of the boycotts that only targets the West Bank settlements, as advanced by the UK and many other U.S.-aligned governments; and of course the gatekeepers will always want to include condemnations of Hamas in their statements. But our response must not be to give up on agitating within the unions.
This was one of the basic lessons from Lenin, as A. Lozovsky summarized in his 1924 guide for trade union militants. There are two particular lines from this text, pertaining to the radicalization of the working masses, that I’ve put emphasis on for the quotation. They refer to bringing the workers towards communism, which is of course my goal as a Marxist-Leninist; but their logic applies to any area of the struggle that you might want to bring the masses into. Says Lozovsky’s commentary:
There is a whole chapter in this book entitled “Should Revolutionists work in Reactionary Unions?” Lenin analyzes all the left arguments for quitting the reformist unions in this chapter. “We should have nothing to do with them because they do not defend the interests of the workers, we cannot support them because they are opportunists, no compromises,” the British lefts proclaimed. However, their leftism was in reverse proportion to their influence over the labor movement. And in the chapter dedicated to the British lefts, Lenin says: “You do not want to affiliate to the labor party, you do not want to support it in the elections, but the fact that the majority of the workers in England still follow the British Kerensky’s and Scheidemann’s the fact that they have not yet had the experience of having a government of these men, which experience was required by Russia and Germany to drive the mass of the workers towards Communism…
But Lenin does not stop here. He says: “The slogan, Without compromise, onward, never deviating from the straight path,” when this slogan is raised by an undeniably helpless minority of the workers which knows (or at any rate, should know), that the majority will shortly, in case of a victory of Henderson and Snowden over Lloyd George and Churchill, become disillusioned and come to the support of Communism (or in any case, to neutrality in most cases favorable neutrality, towards the Communists), it is clearly a mistaken slogan. It is just as if 10,000 soldiers threw themselves into battle against 50,000 enemy soldiers; this is a time when it is necessary to “hesitate,” to “deviate from the path,” and even “compromise” as long as there are reinforcements 100,000 strong behind you who cannot immediately join the battle. This is intellectual puerility and not a serious tactic of a revolutionary class.
It’s when we understand this longer game—where the people will join with revolutionary politics after experiencing the futility of reformism—that our mission within the unions is shown to be so much less daunting. If we’re willing to put in the work, and endure all the obstacles entailed within navigating organized labor, the reward will be to access critical revolutionary mass elements who we would otherwise never reach.
This work does not look like throwing “critical” support behind the candidates these Democrat union leaders are supporting, in the hopes of mechanistically replicating Lenin’s project to support the Labor party. This is what pro-Democrat Marxian groups like Geese magazine argue; their strategy is shown to be ineffectual by the fact that our socdems can’t truly win in the first place, since their strategy depends on the voters within the metropolitan centers, as well as by our lack of strong revolutionary organization compared to the communists from Lenin’s time. Without real power of your own, “strategically” supporting your enemies will only help them. The real lesson to take from Lenin’s statements here is that we must relearn the trade unionism skills which American communists lost a long time ago, and that we can only gain through historical study combined with direct experience.
What we must do is formulate a clear program of action for the unions, modeled after the American workers movement’s past mode of practice and applied to the situation of today. In 1926, after the capitalists had brought the labor bureaucracy towards severely compromising the unions, William Z. Foster described how the workers needed to respond:
As against the degeneration of the trade unions practically into company unions by the bureaucracy, the left wing must intensify its activities along the lines of our established policies. The Workers Party must carry on an extensive ideological campaign to awaken the membership to the great necessity for trade union work and to bring all the non-union members into the trade unions. Our party must thoroughly organize its fractions in the unions and the T.U.E.L. It must everywhere build the [Trade Union Educational] League into a broad, definitely organized left wing movement. We must stimulate the development of the so-called progressive bloc in the unions. We must make united fronts with the progressives on the basis of minimum programs of immediate needs of the unions. We must take advantage of the union elections to defeat the bureaucracy and to put progressives and revolutionists in key positions. We must redouble our agitation for the Labor Party, for the organization of the unorganized, and for amalgamation. We must relentlessly combat labor banking and the rest of the class collaboration movement. We must be the heart and the head of every struggle of the workers against their employers and the state. We must emphasize the struggle for world trade union unity
Right now, the most damning piece of evidence we can find for the yellow nature of the unions is their complicity on Palestine. The last time American unions made a major move on the Palestine issue was in 2024, with a joint union letter calling for an arms embargo on the Zionist entity; they certainly haven’t taken up the 2025 call from Palestine’s union federation to mobilize a full economic boycott. The labor bosses will continue trying to get away with this inaction, and will likely start following in the example of the other liberal Zionists who’ve been denouncing Netanyahu to rehabilitate Jewish supremacy’s image. This subservience to the empire won’t save them from the next crackdowns on organized labor, though. As the assaults on the working class escalate, the impulse of these labor leaders will be to fold, and let the unions become empty shells.
We must use this inevitable cowardice to expose the “coexistence” agenda’s true nature, and show the workers why they need to revolt against organized labor’s leadership. We have to draw the connection between the fake comprador “pro-Palestine” stance, and the absurd ideology of “class peace” between bosses and workers. This isn’t so we can create red unions, as Lenin and Foster clarified, but so we can build up independent working-class power that doesn’t split the labor struggle. It also doesn’t mean the crude economist behavior of fetishizing union organizing, as if it’s enough on its own. The path forward looks like strengthening the progressive forces inside the unions, while constructing the separate institutions that the workers will need in order to overcome the bureaucracy’s power imbalance.
A workers party is indispensable within this project; but it will only be able to properly serve its purpose after we’ve built the collectives that can represent the workers without them needing to be in a party. The Trade Union Educational League provides one historical model for this that we must learn from; another example is the unemployed councils, which this country used to have and we are now in severe need of. Within this mission of rebuilding workers power, there are a myriad of tasks; but we can avoid becoming overwhelmed by these tasks, because all that they really mean is a redirection of all the energy which is now going into futile reformist endeavors.
Many of us within the struggle have been funneled into reformism in the past, and we know the pain of putting serious work into something that turns out to be unserious. Our takeaway from this shouldn’t be that political work is a waste of time, or that every org is just trying to scam you; it should be that when we find a genuinely productive path, all of this regret about our mistakes will only make us more effective. We know the mission of today: combat liberal Zionism within organized labor, and give the workers organizational independence. When we stick to this objective, our work will only multiply the revolutionary struggle’s gains.
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