Above: a protest from 2015, which mirrors PSL’s recent tactics in the Gaza demonstrations
By any honest assessment, how can it be true that the tactic of blocking traffic under our conditions comes from a sense of faith in the people? The defenders of this practice may say that they trust the people will mobilize in response to the attention which the traffic blockages create for the cause. But in the United States at this stage, no communist organization yet has the kind of mass support which is required for such tactics to be effective.
Blocking roads only works for Latin American mass movements because these movements have a real basis in the people. Without that relationship to the masses, PSL is unable to advance the liberation struggle through organizing these disruptive actions, making them have no effect other than to alienate the people. And, by extension, to hinder the Palestinian liberation cause. The goal behind employing this tactic is not to build a mass movement, but to generate attention that gets the org’s leadership more money.
This is the mindset of the leaders who came up with this idea: that the best thing to do is organize for its own sake, without regard for whether the organization is using its energy in a way which actually advances the struggle. And the way they’re able to rationalize such an inwardly focused way of operating is by embracing a fundamentally elitist view of the people. By perceiving the people as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as an ally which organizers need to do serious work to connect with.
That’s the conclusion one naturally comes to when they’ve consistently seen movements fail to gain sustainable mass momentum, and have a mentality which makes them averse towards introspection. If you don’t want to entertain the idea that what you’re doing needs to change, and you keep experiencing failure, all you can do is shift the blame. And the ones who these insularly focused left actors have come to blame are the collective members of our society. Even sixteen years after the 2008 economic catastrophe, when the USA’s workers entered into an ongoing depression, the standard left impulse is to keep portraying this country’s people as mostly being labor-aristocrats. The activists who don’t want to confront their own flaws have to act like the USA’s people are as materially well-off as they were in the mid-20th century, because this is what lets these activists maintain their self-perception as the ones who have the right idea.
Not all of these insularly focused leftists claim to hold this belief; that doesn’t make a difference, though, because all that matters are the effects of one’s actions. Going ahead of the masses, as the road blockage organizers have done, perpetuates the detached relationship with the people that U.S. communist orgs have had since the 1970s. As does the hostility which these same organizers have shown to hold towards any coalition-building project that isn’t confined to left-liberals. The Black Panther Party’s Rainbow Coalition was a true coalition, because it was genuinely diverse. It brought in people who had been racist, but became anti-racist because of their exposure to class solidarity. Through this effort to expand the movement into elements outside the established activist spaces, the Coalition made actual progress for the struggle.
The only “coalitions” that the New Left is interested in building are not authentic, as they exclusively have people who are already part of the initiated left circles. Which has made the class struggle inert, as no struggle can become a genuine threat when it wilfully handicaps itself.
The thought process behind such rejection of effective movement-building is the same as the reasoning the ruling class uses to justify exploiting and subjugating the people. To act in this way towards the people, you need to see the people as being in need of punishment. You need to have such little belief in the people’s ability to gain revolutionary consciousness, you’ve concluded they must be penalized simply for living in the center of imperialism. This is the same mindset that’s led PSL to disavow Russia’s special military operation, even though the org’s own publication has recognized that Russia is not an imperialist power and has reported on the fascist takeover in Ukraine. The org’s leadership has sided against Russia’s action, and has opposed multipolarity, because it doesn’t view supporting these things as politically expedient. Which comes from the belief that only liberals are valuable to the communist movement; because it’s not the broad masses who hold a stubborn hostility towards Russia, it’s exclusively the liberals and radical-liberals.
For the pro-Palestine movement to succeed, those leading it must advance a practice that’s designed to bring as many of the people as possible to revolutionary consciousness. Which doesn’t mean pursuing adventurist actions that overwhelmingly turn away apolitical individuals; it means implementing mass educational programs that tell the people the full truth about anti-imperialism, including the parts that upset the liberal minority. We need to follow Lenin’s advice of lifting the average worker up to the same educational level as trained cadre members. As Lenin wrote, when it comes to education, the workers…
…take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.
As shown by the recent speaking event in Portland by the Center for Political Innovation, one of the best ways to start off this consciousness-raising process is by bringing anti-imperialist ideas to the people in a way that lets passers-by engage with you voluntarily. Whereas PSL is coercing people into paying attention to it, CPI is simply making itself available. A pro-Palestine street preaching project with only a few participants, as we saw in Portland, is capable of expanding mass awareness in a way that PSL’s well-funded mass disruptions never could.
This isn’t merely a disagreement over tactics. It’s a disagreement over whether we should believe in the same masses which our cause depends on. There’s a reason why PSL and the other left forces in its camp have been attacking CPI, as well as all who work with it: these leftists see any actors who seek to build a genuine mass movement as a threat towards their organizing monopoly. The ideas behind this mentality of anti-popular hostility are self-reinforcing. Because to center yourself around such a goal as monopolizing the protest cage, you need to adopt an elitist attitude. You need to convince yourself that you have to be able to make decisions for the struggle without ever being challenged, since everybody else is wrong.
We must build a movement that sees itself not as above the people, but as a tool for the people to assert their material self-interests. These insular elements of the left may claim to share this attitude. But if this were true, these elements wouldn’t be doing things that the masses aren’t ready for.
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