This month, the website of Illinois “progressive” Democratic candidate Kat Abughazaleh revealed many things about where socdems stand on foreign policy. I speak about Abughazaleh’s platform as being representative of a wider trend (even though Abughazaleh has lost the election) because there is evidence that the most prominent “progressives” share that platform’s pro-imperialist positions. AOC has critiqued Trump for not getting rid of Venezuela’s revolutionary government, as part of a broader complaint about Trump impeding Washington’s ability to fight “authoritarianism.” Zohran has denounced Venezuela and Cuba, as well as condemned Iran’s government in a self-undermining criticism of Trump’s war. It’s obvious that socdems are advancing the imperialist project; the problem we face is how to stop them from successfully co-opting our popular struggles, and neutralizing these struggles at a critical moment.
One way that these opportunists are evading backlash against their pro-imperialist agenda is by quietly backing away from certain chauvinist rhetoric, at least when they find that this rhetoric is hurting them too much. According to a tweet by Ryan Grim from Breaking Points, Abughazaleh’s site originally included the statements: “There is no acceptable scenario that leaves Hamas in charge of the Gaza Strip…The State Department must work with the National Democratic Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other foreign capacity-building entities to aid in the reconstruction of Palestine’s civic institutions, in partnership with the United Nations.” The site was changed after Grim’s post, with the platform now claiming that it’s opposed to any interference in Palestine’s political solution.
The attempt at damage control is clear to those who’ve been paying attention; but the issue is that unless we seriously intervene against this brand of “left-wing” imperialism, it will be able to deceive many people. We must provide the people with a guide to identifying this opportunism. Lenin provided such a framework; he pointed out how “progressive” chauvinists claim to be principled for a time, then default to supporting imperialist war and colonialism at the decisive moments:
Long before the war and for the first time in world history, the socialists of all the countries now engaged in hostilities gathered together and declared that they would make use of the war “to hasten the downfall of capitalism” (the Stuttgart resolution, 1907). In other words, they recognised that objective conditions had matured for that “hastening of the downfall”, i. e., for a socialist revolution. That is to say, they threatened the governments with a revolution. In Basle (1912) they said the same thing in still clearer terms, referring to the Commune and to October-December 1906, i. e., civil war. When war broke out, the socialists who had threatened the governments with revolution and had called upon the proletariat to bring about that revolution began to refer to what had happened half a century before, and today are justifying socialist support for the governments and the bourgeoisie! The Marxist Gorter is absolutely right in comparing, in his Dutch brochure, Imperialism, the World War and Social-Democracy (p. 84), “radicals” of the Kautsky type with the liberals of 1848, who were courageous in word and traitors in deed…
Let us hope that Potresov, Kautsky and their adherents will propose that the Stuttgart and the Basle resolutions be replaced by something like the following: “Should war break out despite our efforts, we must decide, from the standpoint of the world proletariat, what is most to its advantage: that India be plundered by Britain or by Germany; that the Negroes of Africa be taught the use of “firewater” and pillaged by the French or by the Germans; that Turkey be oppressed by the Austro-Germans or by the AngloFranco-Russian alliance; that the Germans should throttle Belgium or the Russians, Galicia; that China be partitioned by the Japanese or by the Americans”, etc.
Sure enough, the Abughazaleh platform called for the U.S. to continue supporting Taiwan against “Chinese aggression,” which is the narrative Washington uses to justify its attempt at dividing Taiwan from the rest of China. Of course the socdems were going to adopt this position after the imperialists carried out their “pivot to Asia,” the strategy for containing China so that U.S. hegemony can be extended.
There is an aspect of this left-wing anti-communist campaign that’s even more insidious. This is the aspect where these socdem politicians are propagating the “Uyghur genocide” lie, and using Palestine solidarity to demonize China. A way we can counter this manipulation, in addition to debunking the CIA’s Uyghur narratives themselves, is by pointing out how these same “progressives” support Israel.
When they claim to be against Israel, this only means they’re against the Netanyahu faction within Zionism. The position of Zohran, and the others who share his stance on Palestine, is that Israel has the right to exist in Palestine as long as it’s sufficiently progressive (which is implied in his statement that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state). This isn’t a position that even partially moves things in the right direction; it’s a way of gatekeeping and undermining the pro-Palestine movement. This becomes apparent when one understands the nature of the Zionist settler-colonial structure, in which the “progressive” colonizers play a role of sanitizing Zionism while Israel expands its genocidal violence.
Our problem is that at this stage, the antiwar and pro-Palestine movements haven’t yet found a way of defending against these kinds of “soft” Zionist infiltration attempts. They’re also vulnerable to actors like the pro-regime change Iranian diaspora, who can easily trick liberal-minded individuals into repeating their atrocity propaganda against the Islamic Republic. This applies to the discourse around every other country Washington is targeting, from Venezuela to China to Cuba; all of these places have seen the most reactionary parts of their populations move to the United States, and agitate for imperialist wars.
It’s an identity-based kind of political deception, which perfectly fits with the woke imperialist brand that the socdems seek to make predominant. To combat this deception, we have to do what the Palestinian resistance has done: investigate the class interests of the different political elements which one is dealing with. Something Palestine’s communists did after the 1967 Zionist expansion was take a look at which class elements within Palestinian society most align with their cause. They had to face that the bourgeois minority is not as compatible with the liberation struggle as the working masses, so they built the next stage of their movement on a more proletarian-centered foundation.
We can’t wage a resistance while ignoring the distinctions in class interests among the different groups that call themselves left-wing; this is what the liberals do when they listen to Iranian diaspora agitators, without considering which side they represent within the class war. When we take class into account, the path forward becomes all the more clear.
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