It’s best to present this call to action as a coalition-building project, because though it involves the ACP, not all of my audience are communists and most aren’t ACP members. The most effective mass strategy for the party and its supporters is to emphasize how our politics align with all people who seek to end the Palestinian genocide, especially the millions of Gen Z-ers who support Palestine’s resistance. They already share our stance on the question of whether Palestinians have the right to fight back; they’ve made that leap within their consciousness. And now that DSA has shown how pro-Zionist it is, we within America’s communist movement need to show we’re the right alternative to this imperialist “socialism.”
To bring in the radicalized younger generation, we’ll need to combat the liberal efforts at obfuscating what anti-Zionism means. Anti-Zionism is a very specific position; it means opposing the idea of having any form of a Jewish state on Palestinian land. Anti-Zionism is not what the DSA has to offer, even though a slight majority of the DSA’s delegates recently voted for an anti-Zionist resolution. Within the DSA’s petty-bourgeois liberal leadership, there is a substantial element that doesn’t want to be perceived as pro-Zionist, but is Zionist in practice, as this element condones the statement that “Israel has the right to exist.”
This is a statement that’s been affirmed by the DSA’s candidate Zohran Mamdani, who’s among the prominent Zionist DSA members which have adopted this particular rhetorical strategy. It’s a strategy where they don’t claim the Zionist label, but concede to the Zionists on their core argument about Jews needing a state in Palestine. It depends on the perception that “Zionism” is not a concrete political stance with a clear goal, but rather a vibe; if someone is outwardly bigoted towards Arabs, they’re a Zionist, but as long as they give off an inclusive vibe, they’re not a Zionist.
This is one of the sneakier ways that liberal or “progressive” Zionists have been trying to recapture pro-Palestine sentiment. It’s far from a universally shared approach among these Zionists, though, and the DSA’s infamous convention vote exposed this divide among the left opportunists. The 43% of the delegates who said no to affiliating with the “anti-Zionist” title could easily have taken a more underhanded route, and claimed to be anti-Zionists so that they could push their agenda covertly. But they chose the brazen path, and this is because they fall under a particular type of liberal Zionist category; one that’s more closely aligned with the most outward Jewish supremacists than liberal Zionists want to portray themselves as. Which helps us show the pro-Palestine masses how harmful of a role the DSA’s leadership is playing, and why we must build a pro-resistance united front.
The DSA leadership’s argument for not expelling these delegates is that doing so would cause too much trouble; which parallels every other argument that reformists make for helping strengthen the reactionary forces. Supposedly Zohran needed to take a pro-Zionist stance for the sake of political expediency; supposedly the Palestinian resistance should stop fighting back for the sake of “peace.” This is the kind of reasoning that drives those outwardly reactionary delegates, as well as the many covertly reactionary DSA leaders who align with Zionism while not stating as such. When the pro-resistance youth see what truly motivates these opportunists, and what kind of trap the opportunists are trying to set for the pro-Palestine movement, the DSA leadership will lose the influence it now has.
The only reason why the opportunists in DSA still have enough relevance to be worth treating like a threat, as opposed to the other kinds of left opportunists, is that DSA’s leaders are able to fill the role of a “left” current which advances outright pro-Zionist politics. The imperial state needs such a current to become the only mainstream iteration of the left, because then there won’t be any presence for those who support Palestine’s resistance. Which is where the ACP comes in. ACP, and those who are willing to work with it, are our best option for building an authentic and principled pro-Palestine movement. This is because the politics of the ACP are true American working-class politics.
These are politics that come from the studying of America’s unique history with class struggle, and with anti-imperialist solidarity. To carry the lessons from this history into our present-day struggle, you don’t even need to be in the party; you merely need to investigate what our forebears in this country’s liberation movements have done, and apply this knowledge to our modern conditions. The ACP represents a larger, global project for constantly improved practice, where all the participants are striving to translate the insights gained from past struggles into new victories. This is why the party’s official ideology is Marxism-Leninism unified tendency, which incorporates all of the positive aspects from past and present existing socialism.
For the party’s founders to have come to the stage where they would form a party, they first needed to formulate a mode of operating which could prove itself to be based within this learned experience method. They had to show their path to be superior towards that of the left opportunists in the CPUSA, who’d subverted democracy within their own org to keep it aligned with the Democratic Party.
Throughout its first year or so of existence, the new communist party has brought results in a way that these Democrat tailist orgs aren’t capable of doing. We’ve seen its cadres assist the people and lead workers struggles in much more serious ways than any of the other biggest U.S. socialist orgs have. Which gives the party further credibility as a revolutionary vehicle when its leaders build ties with the anti-Zionist resistance forces.
This is the most important historical lesson that the party has applied, and that others must apply in order to succeed: we must center the actual class struggle. The DSA leadership treats class struggle as an entirely theoretical notion, focusing instead on how to gain more favor from the liberal wing of capital. Only a political current that’s centered around fighting for the working class is capable of defeating the bigger ideological threat, that being the far right. The “Jewish question” is the new major trend that the feds are boosting, with the goal being to divert anti-Zionist sentiment into a controlled opposition project.
Only the ACP’s mode of practice can effectively combat this malign ideological force. Whether or not you personally are in the party, if you share its commitment to working-class politics I consider you part of this same trend. Together, let’s win the next phase in this battle.
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