As communists, the thing we gain from countering the KKE’s labor Zionist position is to put to rest a highly damaging, anti-Palestinian trend within our movement. This is the trend towards believing that even though the Zionist right-wing is Jewish supremacist, the “left-wing” Zionists still fundamentally represent a part of the workers movement. As the Zionist entity prepares for new escalations, and the imperial narrative managers seek to get Gaza out of the discourse, those who seek to popularize labor Zionism pose an urgent threat. If we expose the dishonesty of their position, though, we will make communism into a much greater force within the pro-Palestine movement; which will connect the workers struggle with Palestine to a much greater extent.
The labor Zionist view, born from the idea that Palestine’s colonizers can be proletarians despite them truly being a slaver class, was embraced by the Soviet Union up until 1967. The USSR’s leadership came to the pro-Zionist position in spite of Stalin, who decried Zionism as inherently reactionary; when the vote was held on whether to create a Jewish state in Palestine, Stalin was outvoted, and the communist movement went in an unfortunate direction which we’re still trying to pull it away from.
Prior to the Holocaust, Zionism had been a fringe ideology, relegated mainly to the Jewish bourgeoisie. When the Zionists exploited Hitlerism’s crimes, though, many within the workers movement became won over by the Zionist arguments about “Jewish self-determination.” Massive parts of the global communist movement would reject Zionism the whole way through, with Mao’s China and socialist Korea having stood with Palestine from the start. But plenty of other communist formations got brought into labor Zionism, and the reason behind this was that these formations had fallen into a crude economist mindset. They’d embraced the economistic attitude that reduces everything to a narrow set of fights within the workplace, whose logical conclusion is that as long as somebody works, they’re automatically of the proletariat. By this reasoning, the Jewish colonizers who worked were proletarians, and they deserved solidarity.
This is the exact view that the KKE’s leadership has articulated in regard to the supposed Israeli “proletariat.” In the KKE’s statement on October 7, it frames the colonizers as victims, ones whose interests are supposedly in great contradiction with those of the settler-colonial capitalist class:
The USA and the EU found their much-needed ally in the Israeli bourgeoisie and in its state, which gave them the right of arbitration together with the other bourgeois classes of the region, which also wanted to enhance their position. This geopolitical game, which has been played out in even more dramatic terms since the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, has as its victim an entire people, the Palestinian people, who have been promised a homeland all these years but whose dream remains unfulfilled. The people of Israel are also paying the prise because they are victims of the policies of the Israeli bourgeoisie and its state…The KKE has expressed its full solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, for the need to have their own state and to be masters in their own land. At the same time, it emphasized that the Israeli people are also a victim of the policies of the bourgeois state of Israel and the reactionary Netanyahu government.
This statement was met with hostility by certain forces of the “World Anti-Imperialist Platform”, which do not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, nor the existence of the Israeli bourgeoisie and the Israeli people, calling it a US base that must be destroyed. These forces refuse to see that the root cause of everything that the peoples are experiencing is the barbaric exploitative system in its current stage, the monopoly one, where the struggle between the monopolies and the bourgeois classes is intensifying and is being waged by all means, for the exploitation not only of the workers of their countries but also of other countries for raw materials, transport routes for the commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares. And the bourgeois state of Israel and its bourgeoisie is such a geopolitical foothold for the USA and the EU and not only a military base.
When you understand which historical tradition the KKE draws its ideas from, it makes perfect sense that the KKE would take this stance. When the KKE says it upholds the Soviet Union, it isn’t taking its guidance from Stalin, no matter how much it may assert that it does. Instead it’s taking guidance from the opportunistic, economistic political actors who voted to create “Israel” in 1948, and who then carried out Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaign. The great irony is that while these charlatans posthumously stabbed Stalin in the back, they were dependent on him, even after his death. Even though this faction within the Soviet leadership was against Stalin and “Stalinism,” at the same time it took advantage of the worldwide love for Stalin, using his image to justify the effort at assisting in Palestine’s colonization.
It was Stalin who had won the war, and led the USSR to reach its unparalleled achievements; so when the USSR’s leadership sought to persuade other communist formations towards the notion of a “progressive” Israel, they were relying on the goodwill which Stalin had built up among the world’s exploited peoples. In order to sell their pro-colonial agenda, they needed to pass their position off as Stalin’s, even though privately Stalin was in conflict with them. Stalin couldn’t speak up, because publicly denouncing your party’s decision is against the rules of democratic centralism; so the propagators of crude economism could act as if labor Zionism is synonymous with Stalin. Which is the same thing that the KKE’s camp within the communist movement is doing today.
Of course the proponents of the “Israelis are proletarians too” position are glad to align themselves with Stalin, and to put forth all the rhetoric that’s associated with Stalin’s legacy; yet they’re really carrying forth the agenda of those who tried to destroy this legacy from the inside.
It’s this context, wherein the crude economists adopted a method for cloaking their anti-Leninist agenda, that lets us understand what kind of opponent we’re dealing with in the KKE. It shows why the proponents of labor Zionism lack an authentic connection with scientific socialism, even though they wear the faces of history’s great Marxists. And when we see that labor Zionism is disconnected from the science of Marxism-Leninism, it becomes easier to see the true roots behind its ideas. This is a trend that comes not from serious investigation into the conditions as they are, but from a shallow and superficial notion of what “workers struggle” means.
In this view, anyone who works is necessarily a proletarian, no matter what role they actually play in relation to production. It doesn’t matter that the entire basis for “Israeli” wealth is theft from the Palestinian people, and that all of those who enjoy full rights within the Jewish supremacist state therefore are direct benefactors of the Palestinian slave economy.
That the KKE promotes the labor Zionist view is a significant problem for the workers struggle, because the KKE controls numerous other communist parties around the globe. And as long as the KKE maintains this status, the global workers movement is going to have a barrier towards becoming connected with the Palestinian struggle. This is the kind of problem within the communist movement which can be exploited by those who argue that the workers don’t need communism, and that we can somehow win the class struggle while discarding Marxism (with the next step in this reasoning being that we should give up class struggle itself). A version of the communist movement that’s been captured by opportunists is one which will only keep failing. To rescue the workers movement, we must bring back Marxism as it was actually practiced by Lenin and Stalin—which is to say a Marxism that comes from constant learning.
The KKE is not interested in learning. It recycles a narrative about “progressive” Zionism that came from the most ideologically deficient elements inside the Soviet leadership, and repeats a position about returning to the 1967 borders that has absolutely no practical usefulness within today’s reality. This position of course was also never sound from the perspective of basic international solidarity, as the pre-67 borders were themselves a violation of Palestine’s rights. But inevitably the Zionist entity would attack again, and these borders would change, because Zionism’s nature is to aggress.
The KKE paints a picture of a Zionism that’s compatible with the revolutionary struggle, which is a very dangerous thing to do. However, it also makes the KKE so far removed from the Palestinian liberation struggle that no one who’s connected with this struggle would follow the KKE. The danger is not that the KKE will de-radicalize the pro-Palestinian working masses, but that it will keep the communist movement relegated towards an opportunistic little corner within politics. When we free Marxism from the KKE, we’ll be able to make Marxism into a dynamic force inside the Palestinian struggle, giving Palestine organized assistance from the world’s workers.
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