Above: a mercenary makes a heart sign to the people in Gaza’s “humanitarian aid” cages while the fence bulges from overcrowding. (Telegram via BBC.)
U.S. imperialism has not been able to carry out an extermination of Gaza’s people because Washington is strong. It’s been able to because the international workers movement is weak, which has let the global capitalist class successfully carry out a new holocaust. In terms of its military dominance, as well as its ability to sway the Global South on issues like Ukraine or Gaza, the hegemon has objectively been in decline; but as long as the proletariat doesn’t regain its strength from the 20th century, and carry out a new wave of workers revolutions, Washington will have numerous openings to inflict Gaza-level violence upon the peoples of the world.
Through emphasizing this reality, I seek to combat the idealistic iterations of antiwar or “multipolar” politics, which have instilled a widespread sense of hubris about where the globe’s liberation struggles stand. My core critique of the “multipolarist” stance is that it doesn’t account for the class struggle, instead propagating a logic in which the shift away from unipolarity will by itself defeat monopoly finance capital. Gaza is proof on its own that this mindset is mistaken, as well as dangerous; the coming of multipolarity has not been able to stop the Palestinian genocide from accelerating, nor has it prevented serious blows against the resistance like the fall of Syria.
The genocidal offensive that the empire has undertaken in West Asia is a reaction to the anti-imperialist movement’s gains, and in that sense it shows the enemy’s weakness. This offensive has still been able to bring about the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, though, and millions more lives are in danger from it. The 21st century’s world has a massive workers state in China, but China isn’t in a position to liberate the concentration camps; it’s able to do a lot of good, just not enough for the Palestinians. I don’t make this observation to encourage despair; my goal is to help orient our popular movements around the practical realities that we must confront in order to be effective. And with the obstacles that we’re facing, becoming effective will require taking example from the Global South forces that have been building successful resistance movements.
There are many things that popular movements all around the globe can learn from Gaza’s resistance, despite Gaza’s situation being exceptionally extreme in the degree of the empire’s violence. For example, Gaza has taught us the limitations on the enemy’s power. Gaza’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood proved that even the most advanced surveillance systems can be worked around by resistance forces, meaning there are always ways to continue your org’s operations amid whatever repression you may face.
In the United States and the other imperial countries, repression is a major threat that these movements can expect to meet, and they’re already experiencing many unprecedented efforts to criminalize their work. To continue making connections with the masses amid the crackdown, these imperiled organizers can also learn from their counterparts across the formerly colonized world. It’s these movements in Latin America, Africa, and south Asia which have needed to navigate conditions that aren’t as extreme as Gaza’s, but are certainly more extreme than those of the first world. As the technologies from the Gaza genocide get exported across both the Global South and the imperial countries, we all need to learn from those who’ve been battling against this violence from the front.
A practice that I’ve advocated for is to master “secret work,” as the Communist Party of South Africa instructed its members to do; and this is certainly a necessary task, but it’s only a way of giving one’s organization insurance against emergencies. The primary way that Global South popular movements have defied neo-colonial repression, and made inroads with the masses, is by giving these masses viable outlets for defying their governments. Bolivia’s popular struggle from this last decade is a good example of this; and amid Bolivian socialism’s recent setback, this recent history provides instruction in how to overcome the crises our movement is now experiencing.
When Bolivia’s popular revolutionary forces have succeeded in defending against the reactionaries, the methods these forces have used are ones reminiscent of those from Palestine’s liberation struggle. After the CIA carried out a coup against president Evo Morales in 2019, Bolivia’s masses could only fight back against the dictatorship by abandoning reformism’s illusions. They engaged in armed struggle, seizing large parts of the country from the dictatorship; they also utilized the power of the country’s unions and other collective workers orgs, involving the broad masses within their protest actions. The resistance had demands, namely for the government to hold new elections; but it was fully prepared to continue advancing the people’s war if these demands weren’t met.
This is what it looks like when a people are faced with reactionary violence that’s too direct for reformism to be seen as a serious option, and when the revolutionary institutions are strong enough for the people to actually have recourse. It’s not that an effective revolutionary movement is guaranteed to emerge when repressive violence gets bad enough; for the people to effectively resist, there also must be a robust structure of popular power.
In Bolivia, this power was strong enough in 2019 for the people to defeat a coup regime, but it hasn’t remained strong enough to defend against the insidious destruction which capital brings. A new Movement for Socialism Party government was voted in, but this government represented the party’s U.S.-aligned wing, and has therefore failed to adequately build upon the gains made by Morales. It’s let capitalism’s crises afflict the masses while not mounting a serious class-based defense against this problem, so the masses have rejected the new version of MAS. Now Bolivia is going to return to a fully liberal, neo-colonial paradigm, leaving the working-class forces weakened and without the immediate conditions for a new people’s war.
The entire world is seeing the ramifications of these kinds of working-class setbacks. Because the popular masses haven’t yet recovered their organizational fortitude, the capitalists are being enabled to carry out an extermination. Will the popular reaction to this madness lead toward new mass radicalization? In many ways it already has, but whether this translates into restored mass power depends on what each of us do. We have to respond to these catastrophes by staying focused on the core revolutionary goals for this moment: build up workers power, build up the international united front against imperialism, and give the capitalist world’s masses the means to overcome their respective bourgeoisies.
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