The context behind Zohran’s betrayal: decades of Chomskyite efforts to cultivate a non-communist left

To understand Zohran Mamdani, and why he acts as an impediment to revolutionary struggle, we need to look at the last generation’s effort to cultivate a non-communist left. Such an effort has been underway ever since communism became a serious threat towards capitalism, but in the post-Soviet era, left-wing anti-communism has taken on a new character; one that’s particularly suited to the agenda of color revolutions, which have come to be the predominant type of imperialist psyop. This is the agenda that Zohran advanced when he attacked Venezuela and Cuba last month, and the forces which incentivized him to promote such blatant imperial propaganda are the same ones that have influenced other major figures of the compatible left. One example being Noam Chomsky, the pivotal shaper of academic leftism who we recently learned has been compromised in critical ways.

Chomsky is so relevant to the present moment because according to the Epstein communications records, Chomsky had been close friends with Epstein, and received financial support from an account tied to him. This doesn’t prove Chomsky participated in Epstein’s crimes, but it does show he’d become entangled in circles that make their members constrained in what they can say or do. This reveals a critical part of how the non-communist left has been propped up: by elevating personalities which aren’t supposed to step out of their role within imperialist propaganda. And especially during the last decade or so of his life as an active participant in the discourse, Chomsky filled such a role; for one example of this behavior on his part, he was among the “progressive” voices who called for intervention in Syria, with the rationale being that this was necessary to protect the Kurds.

This “save the Kurds” justification was, famously, the same reasoning that Christopher Hitchens used to argue that the Iraq invasion had been righteous. And that Hitchens had origins in Western Marxism, particularly of the Trotskyist variety, further shows the centrality of “State Department socialism” within projects which advance U.S. hegemony. To combat the non-communist left, and thereby make way for an authentic working-class solidarity movement, we must examine how this inauthentic left could gain such prominence.

Losurdo provides us with great clarity on this. He identifies how even among the tendencies in the “collective west” that do still call themselves “Marxist,” the pro-imperialist ideology has become predominant. Such was the problem he described in Western Marxism: How It was Born, How It Died, How It can be Reborn. Wrote Losurdo:

Reduced to a religion, and indeed a religion of evasion, Western Marxism cannot provide an answer to the problems of the present, particularly the worsening of the international situation. We have seen what has happened in the past few years. On the occasion of the war against Libya in 2011, authoritative organs of the Western press recognized its neocolonial character. Neocolonial and bloody. An eminent French philosopher, very distant from Marxism, observed, "today we know that the war resulted in at least 30,000 deaths, against 300 victims of the initial repression" carried out by Qaddafi. According to other estimates, the toll of the NATO intervention would be even greater. And the tragedy continues: the country has been destroyed, and people have been forced to choose between desperation at home or fleeing to the unknown, which could be fatal.

I am not aware of any exponent of "Western Marxism" or of "Libertarian Western Marxism" that denounced this horror. Indeed, a personality such as Rossana Rossanda, who, as the founder of the communist daily Il Manifesto can be included in the category of "Western Marxism" or "Libertarian Western Marxism," went to the very threshold of calling for armed intervention against Qaddafi's Libya. It is a threshold that Susanna Camusso, Secretary-General of the CGIL—a union federation that has left long behind its onetime links to the Communist Party and to Eastern Marxism—happily crossed over.

It’s this culture within today’s academic and dogmatic opportunist “Marxism,” the culture that aligns with U.S. hegemony’s interests, which makes up the foundations for the politics Zohran represents. We know that Zohran’s meeting with Trump was corrupt in nature, rather than something tactical, because Zohran has shown he’s behind the Trump White House’s schemes for new aggressions against Latin America’s workers governments. The anti-worker policies that Zohran has embraced on a practical level, like refusing to re-hire workers who got fired over the unjust Covid work rules, are downstream from these pro-imperialist positions. 

We have yet to see if this means he’ll break his promise to implement BDS in New York City; but if he does, we will need to use it as an opportunity to provide an alternative path for his supporters. A path in which anti-Zionists and class-conscious Americans revive the authentic Marxism, the Marxism that serves as the ultimate weapon of revolutionary solidarity.

Being betrayed by a leader who posed as an ally to the workers is the initial entry point into Marxism for most people who end up becoming Marxists. It was how the bulk of modern America’s new generation of communists came to where they are, as most of them started out hoping for Bernie Sanders to lead a real working-class movement. Lenin talked about the importance of this learning experience for the masses; he explained why communists must let the false socialist leaders bring about their own demise, and discredit themselves in the eyes of the workers who’d initially gravitated towards them. The way that Lenin said communists can do this is by demonstrating how we actually would be open to an alliance with the reformists, if only the reformists were to stop opportunistically sabotaging hopes for a united front:

If the Hendersons and the Snowdens reject a bloc with the Communists, the latter will immediately gain by winning the sympathy of the masses and discrediting the Hendersons and Snowdens; if, as a result, we do lose a few parliamentary seats, it is a matter of no significance to us. We would put up our candidates in a very few but absolutely safe constituencies, namely, constituencies where our candidatures would not give any seats to the Liberals at the expense of the Labour candidates. We would take part in the election campaign, distribute leaflets agitating for communism, and, in all constituencies where we have no candidates, we would urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate and against the bourgeois candidate. Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and Gallacher are mistaken in thinking that this is a betrayal of communism, or a renunciation of the struggle against the social-traitors. On the contrary, the cause of communist revolution would undoubtedly gain thereby.

Applying this strategy to the social democratic movement as it exists in today’s America, or to any other bourgeois populist trend, does not look exactly like this. It wouldn’t be productive for us to advocate voting blue, any more than it would be productive for us to have advocated voting Trump; this is because the modern American communist movement holds far less leverage than Russia’s communists did in Lenin’s time, and U.S. electoralism is much better able to compromise a mass movement. The Democratic Party is where movements go to die, and this makes it unwise to treat the Democrats the same way that Lenin treated the Labour Party. 

However, we can apply Lenin’s strategy by going into the masses who’ve been drawn towards social democracy. A top priority are the DSA members who’ve gotten disillusioned with the Zionists in their organization’s leadership; if we reach them, we will be able to not just grow the communist movement, but cut off academic leftism from being able to influence the most important parts of its target audience. We can win over the pro-Palestine Gen Z masses, who the academic left and the “soft” Zionists are anxious to capture right now. This part of the masses already mostly supports Palestine’s armed resistance, and the false left is trying to de-radicalize them; but such a mission is highly impractical. We are the ones who have the advantage in this battle, because we align with the pro-resistance beliefs of Gen Z.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

American communism’s strategic status: poised to win the Gen-Z masses, but in urgent need of defense

It’s because American communists are poised to win millions to our side that our government is sure to treat us as the next biggest threat. We are coming to have a great new strategic advantage, yet within our movement there are tactical vulnerabilities that the enemy can exploit. We must assess the factors that are both for and against us right now…

—The acceleration of our societal collapse since the beginning of Covid has created a generation which has every reason to embrace communism. The only thing that could reduce Gen Z’s migration rate to Marxism is a success for the far right, because Americans who came of age in the post-Covid era are only going to seek out what’s most radical. And not as many of Gen Z will join with the far right as recent media narratives have suggested, because the youth’s support for Trump 2.0 has been greatly overblown; among politically conscious Gen Z-ers, the prevailing ideology is one which supports the Palestinian armed resistance. This means most of communism’s potential recruits in Gen Z are already halfway there to Marxism.

—The far right still must be taken seriously, because it has the potential to exploit the incel aspect of Gen Z’s crises. A real danger is that as the proportion of “excess men” grows, these left-behinds will be brought to neo-Nazism. One movement that we could compare today’s American neo-Nazi paramilitaries to is Boko Haram, which gains recruits from the men in Africa’s Sahel region who’ve been “left behind” the same way that many men in our society have. An American Boko Haram scenario would look like Atomwaffen gaining widespread support from the left-behinds, and waging an insurgency. We should take this prospect seriously, because though the far right is a minority within the post-Covid generation, the ideology of Atomwaffen is dedicated to accelerationist destruction. And in the absence of a working-class movement that keeps gaining strength, this destruction will be what defines the next era.

—The far right’s recent pivots are a reaction to communism’s growing potential. In these last several months, some of the biggest figures on the far right—namely Nick Fuentes—have abandoned the most radical parts of their audiences in order to gain favor among the conservative mainstream. As soon as Fuentes began defending the Zionist entity on the biggest issues within recent discourse, he came to be accepted by social fascists of the Red Scare Podcast variety, and by the more presentable “alt” media sources like Tucker Carlson. That Fuentes judged this pivot to be in his best interests, at the same moment when the Zionist establishment greatly escalated its attacks against dissent, shows our ruling class is aiming to de-radicalize many of the same Gen Z-ers who it’s targeted with the pro-Hitler psyop. The Zionists who have Fuentes on a leash see him as useful controlled opposition, but they’re now having him try to make his audience back into normie conservatives. This has to do with a fear that they’ll become anti-Zionist in an organized sense, at which point communists would easily be able to reach them.

—This maneuver is also another step towards the Boko Haram scenario, whether its orchestrators intend it to be or not. With Fuentes and his camp now abandoned by the hardcore Hitlerites who’d previously been following him, this creates room for more committed pro-Hitler forces to rise. The neo-Nazi trend that our deep state has fostered was only meant to be a way of keeping Gen Z men apathetic; they weren’t supposed to act on their Hitlerite beliefs. But this trend could spiral out of the control of those who engineered it. We must intensify our efforts to discredit Hitlerism, and expose its nature as a creation of finance capital. Most importantly, though, we must build an alternative radicalization path, one which allows Marxism to act as a means for asserting agency over history.

—Our government wants an American Jakarta Method, and it will get one unless we act to defend our movement. The Jakarta Method was the strategy for anti-communist mass murder that Indonesia’s U.S.-installed dictatorship used, and our ruling class seeks to apply this strategy to America. This is how the enemy will respond to the rise in American communism, and the enemy wishes it could have already carried out a purge against the country’s existing revolutionary movement. The only things that have so far delayed such a purge are the U.S. Constitution, and the relative weakness American communism still has. As soon as millions start becoming class-conscious on a greater level, we will see our ruling class act out in ways which are desperate, but are nonetheless exceptionally dangerous.

—Self-defense does not mean adventurism, and we urgently need to combat the ultra-leftist elements that practice adventurism. The effort by our ruling class to cultivate adventurism is actually a critical part of how America’s Jakarta Method will be carried out, and of how it’s already being carried out in its earlier stages. What our class enemies are doing is roping leftists into adventurism via the “antifa” psyop, then using the ensuing chaos as a pretext for even-greater violence from the police, the National Guard, and ICE. There’s also the mass shootings that have been brought about through fed-run online Satanic cults, which are tied in with both neo-Nazism and ultraviolent wokeism. (The name for this synthesis is American Azovism, which is the project to import Ukraine’s Nazi collaborationist ruling ideology.) The goal behind all of these tactics is to terrorize Americans, particularly class-conscious Americans.

—America’s path to working-class victory will be a protracted fight, but we can turn this to our advantage. Amid all the obstacles and perils we’re facing, this is the most important part of the story that I want communists to internalize: the protracted nature of the struggle ahead is something we can use as an opportunity for rallying more of the people behind our cause, and for deepening our own insights and experiences prior to the eventual victory. If the reality we must confront is that America’s second revolution won’t simply happen in an instant, and will take long-term efforts to bring into being, then our only path forward is to build a working-class infrastructure with stronger foundations. We must use this time to ensure that when the imperial state falls, it will be replaced not with an Atomwaffen state, but with a proletarian dictatorship. And the fact that we’re so many steps away from the imperial state’s fall gives us more time to outmaneuver the Hitlerite militias, which have the inherent disadvantage of being violently hostile towards the masses. 

For communists, it is “dual power or bust”; either we’ll construct the infrastructure that can serve the needs of the masses, and provide them with leadership, or we’ll lose this battle and need to regroup.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

Zionism’s agents want us fatigued over Gaza, but Palestine’s resistance shows us how to keep fighting

The recent strategic gains of Palestine’s resistance, and of the global movement that’s aligned with it, give us the lessons we’ll need to keep fighting amid Zionism’s next attacks. This has to be our takeaway from the latest genocidal acts that our government has orchestrated in Gaza, where amid an ongoing blockage of the Rafah crossing and regular bombings since the ceasefire, the occupier took 22 more lives in a Gaza airstrike last week. We are seeing the latest repeat of a cycle, the same cycle that the aggressors brought about during the first ceasefire from January to March of this year. In this routine, the White House and the occupier make a show of supposedly having agreed to “peace,” continuously violate the ceasefire, and then re-start the normal levels of mass murder. 

The hope of the extermination’s perpetrators is that this time, the pro-Palestine movement will be more fatigued than it was then, letting them speed up the killing. When one looks at this from the perspective of the resistance, though, they are not of the mindset to become fatigued about fighting for Palestine. Because by connecting our movements to the actual Palestinian struggle, and learning from the experiences of Palestine’s freedom fighters, we find that the picture before us is not static. The enemy may be able to repeat its past tactics, but it cannot turn back the historical process, and reverse the Zionist unraveling which got accelerated with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

One piece of context which has been kept from us by the imperialist media, and that becomes visible when you follow the activities of the resistance, is that both ceasefires were truly the product of Palestine’s strengths in fighting back. Every time the occupier and its Washington backers have pulled back, it’s been due to the efforts of those who are combating it, with Gaza’s armed resistance coalition being by far the biggest counter-force. Especially amid this latest ceasefire, it’s apparent that the occupier’s concessions are proof of Hamas having essentially already won. The efforts to colonize Gaza have obviously not stopped, but the fact that the occupier still hasn’t managed to fulfill its goals in Gaza is itself proof of an irreversible Palestinian strategic victory. All future escalations by the occupier can only have the effect of further weakening Zionism, and a key reason for this is that Gaza has shown it will never be subdued. The aggressor’s investment in Gaza will never pay off, and its crimes can only continue backfiring.

The resistance coalition couldn’t have gained this level of strength if it hadn’t embraced a practice of principled, sustainable reconciliation among former factional enemies; a practice that every revolutionary movement must learn from. As Noel Bamen explains in his essay which debunks common myths about Hamas, it is not true that Hamas has sabotaged the Palestinian left; what’s happened is that it’s responded to sectarianism which its past opponents on the left haven’t truly been able to justify, and then successfully unified with these forces. Writes Bamen:

For its part, Hamas despaired of the left because whenever and wherever Hamas clashed on the ground with Fatah, the left would either stay neutral or implicitly support Fatah, as Khaled Hroub describes the counter‐​perspective. He notes further that after the elections of January 2006, Hamas’s relationship with the Palestinian left have further deteriorated. None of the three small leftist groups which won seven seats in total in the PLC agreed to join Hamas’s government. Hamas blamed them for foiling its efforts to form a national coalition government. And thus ultimately also for the power struggle with Fatah, which led to the split between Gaza and Ramallah….The left must indeed wear this shoe. And even during the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, the PFLP clearly positioned itself against Hamas and condemned the coup d’état.

Since then, however, the relationship has improved significantly. As early as 2011, Hroub speaks of closer relationships with the PFLP and DFLP.  In recent years in particular, the Islamic and left‐​wing liberation organizations have grown ever closer on the basis of their joint resistance to the Zionist and Oslo regimes: Leftist and Islamic students carry out joint actions at universities in the West Bank, communists and Islamists fight side by side in cross‐​organizational and cross‐​current brigades in the West Bank and the same is true in Gaza within the framework of the Joint Operations Room of the resistance factions as well as the Al‐​Aqsa Flood. Organizations such as the prisoner solidarity network Samidoun or information projects such as Resistance News Networks are also an expression of these cross‐​current unity efforts.

This story is so important for global liberation movements to study because it shows that even while existing under a genocidal siege, a country’s organized masses can heal divides among themselves, and use this unity to achieve victories that they previously hadn’t been able to reach. In fact, it’s because of how extreme Palestine’s subjugation is that there’s been such a strong will to find unity, and thereby overcome the internal problems which had been holding back the struggle. That exploitation and state violence are most extreme for the Global South is a key part of why its revolutionary movements are so far ahead of the ones in the imperial countries; it’s a product of the principle that Stalin explained in The Foundations of Leninism, where the countries most liable to first experience revolutions are the ones in which global capital’s chain is weakest.

The Palestinian struggle has been able to take advantage of the weaknesses within Zionist capital. Prior to Al-Aqsa Flood, the economy of so-called “Israel” appeared strong, but as soon as the resistance advanced its anti-colonial war, the Zionist structure began to crumble. The occupier’s resources became spread too thin, its economy experienced major capital flight, and former Zionist allies in the Global South like Colombia exacerbated the damage to “Israel” by cutting it off from important energy imports. Normal life for the Jewish colonizers in Palestine couldn’t continue, these colonizers began moving back to their real home countries, and the panicked Zionist state had to create a law that banned them from leaving. 

It turned out that Zionist capital couldn’t stand on its own, which was always obvious when one considered how its entire “strength” always came from being propped up by U.S. finance capital. The power balance in Palestine, and in the world as a whole, got thrown into question amid unexpected gains for the Palestinian revolutionary forces.

The collapse of Zionist colonizer society has continued since the ceasefire, which is another piece of context that proves the success of the resistance. It also demonstrates another way in which the perceived advantages of the enemy are an illusion. The occupier, and the global hegemon that it relies on, are not as in control as they want us to believe. When they repeat their routine of faking interest in “peace,” then using a ceasefire as an opening for more attacks, they are not operating from a place of security. They’re using whatever methods they can to terrorize Palestine and the world, and thereby make Washington appear strong when really it’s not; which is the broader strategy that’s been behind all of the Trump White House’s imperialist aggressions. 

I am not advocating for bravado when I say these things; bravado is something we need to avoid, we can only recognize victories that our side has objectively gained. I only seek to illuminate the parts of this story that the Zionists want hidden, and that give us a real sense of the strategic situation. If we study how the Palestinian resistance has gained victories, if we study the historical materialist principles that determine how revolutionary struggles succeed, then we will not have to go into this fight’s next phase while flailing in the dark. We will have a guiding light, even as the imperial state further intensifies its efforts to crush us. Our movement can survive the next crackdowns, and provide critical parts of the global support that Palestine will need to triumph.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

Trump’s war on Nigeria, the empire’s pivot towards “rightist” politics, & the need to revive Black Power

The aggression against Nigeria is one of the signs that we must reorient the antiwar movement, and our broader popular struggles, around pan-African liberation in particular. That if you are a participant in the class struggle, and especially if you call yourself a Marxist, any path forward will have to involve reconnecting our struggles with the politics of the Black Panther Party. This is the practical way that we can respond to Washington’s latest maneuvers towards a Nigeria intervention, where it got Nikki Minaj to speak at the UN about there being a supposed targeted violence campaign against Nigeria’s Christians. It’s this narrative, based on selective reports of the country’s violence, which indicates a broader U.S. imperialist pivot towards “rightist” and “trad” politics. The best answer to this is to revive America’s most effective tradition of revolutionary politics; the trend that the U.S. government has historically put the greatest effort into crushing.

When I talk about responding to the ruling-class rightist push by fully embracing left-wing politics, I am advocating for the opposite of ultra-leftism. At this moment, ultra-leftism of the adventurist kind is undergoing a major revival, and we must combat this trend alongside the “trad” imperialist current. The way that we can do this is by putting forth a synthesis between the politics of racial liberation which pan-Africanism represents, and the class-centered politics that’s been brought back into the mainstream by the MAGA communist movement. 

This was actually something that the Panthers themselves did, prior to when MAGA communism had gotten the label it has now; when this class-centric practice wasn’t being called MAGA communism, Fred Hampton was describing it as a kind of Black politics that deals with the white masses:

You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that’s anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, “Well, I can’t dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle.”

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class—the oppressed—those other class—the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways, but as soon as you start talking about class, then you got to start talking about some guns. And that’s what the Party had to do.

This is how we defeat the Nigeria war campaign, and all other schemes of our ruling class: by restoring the status of the African liberation movement as the center of American working-class politics. Which, according to Hampton, entails reaching the same parts of the American masses that today make up the MAGA base. It’s this part of what the Panthers did that’s been lost on the American communist movement since the Panthers were destroyed; when the Panthers were gone, the ones who came to dominate communism were the same unserious leftists who had been attacking the Panthers for reaching out to the white workers. 

In response to this problem, communists have introduced a means for breaking our movement out of the insular leftist niche, that means being MAGA communism. Since MAGA communism’s beginning in 2022, though, its original advocates have largely shifted away from that particular label, because at this stage it’s redundant; MAGA’s style has become something ubiquitous within American politics, and we need a new way to differentiate ourselves. This has to do with the right-wing cultural pivot among our ruling class, and the conservative virtue signaling that the empire is doing by claiming to care about persecuted Christians; because the elites have pivoted away from wokeness, and back towards the Reaganist style of politics, anti-systemic politics can now only succeed by bringing back the old left. Or rather a version of the old left that’s been fused with the model of the Panthers, and that’s incorporated the lessons we’ve learned since the end of the Panthers.

The goal is not to re-create the old workers movement, or to re-create the Black Panther Party; this can’t be done anyhow, like no one will ever be able to simply replicate the Soviet Union. What we must do is apply the practices from the past that have been shown to work—like seriously building ties with organized labor, taking the lead in organizing the workers, and putting central emphasis on Black Power—in the ways that best fit the conditions we’re navigating now. 

All of the past movements fell short in their own ways; the Communist Party of the United States failed to avoid being crippled by those who sought to liquidate it from within, and the BPP emphasized lumpen-style displays of armed strength while not sufficiently accounting for Black labor. The movement that succeeds will be one which synthesizes the effective aspects of the past efforts, and treats their mistakes as guides to figuring out the best path forward. This is the complete picture that we need to gain in order to properly utilize the insight which has already become well-understood among our ranks—namely the fact that identitarian leftism has kept the communist movement trapped in a bubble. We know that this is true, and more Marxists are realizing that this means we need to reach the MAGA base. To take our efforts to the next phase, though, and prevent our enemies from winning as they launch their new offensives, we have to bring about a new iteration of the politics the Panthers represented. 

As Hampton’s statements show us, these Black Power politics are actually compatible with the politics that we would now call MAGA communist, and that the unserious leftists would call class reductionist. It’s a synthesis between the Black Power aspect and the class aspect, which of course are one and the same. The better we understand this synthesis, and the more we study the history of how it came into being, the greater a resistance we’ll be able to mount against the unmasked chauvinistic aggression that’s coming from our rulers.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

The workers movement must defeat the KKE’s push to insert labor Zionism into pro-Palestine politics

The Communist Party of Greece (KKE), and its affiliated orgs, are working to normalize Zionism within the workers movement. The KKE made this clear two years ago, when it put forth the statement that the “Israeli people are also a victim.” The KKE’s reasoning for this was that Jewish Israelis include people who work, meaning their interests have been hurt by the Netanyahu government’s neoliberal policies. To assert that this alone means these Israelis are of the proletariat is absurd; they directly benefit from Palestinian slave labor, making them not just labor aristocrats but members of a slaveocracy. There can be no Jewish proletariat in Palestine for as long as Palestine remains occupied by a settler state, and its Jewish population continues having an extractive role within the slave economy. This is the reality that blows apart every single argument for labor Zionism, the ideology which seeks to fuse a twisted version of workers politics with Zionism’s mission for permanent ethnic cleansing.

It’s pertinent to bring up the KKE’s post-October 7 statement today because right now, when the Palestinian struggle is trying to avert more genocidal aggressions following the Gaza ceasefire, the KKE’s labor Zionist camp has started upon a redoubled effort to normalize its ideas within the workers movement.

A warning sign for this new, insidious threat towards the Palestinian cause appeared last week, when the Communist Party of Israel’s leading member Ofer Cassif gave a speech at the Communist Party of Britain’s 58th Congress. One of Cassif’s core arguments was that “The Palestinians have no time to wait for one state,” and therefore “Those who support a one-state solution actually deny the Palestinian people their national self-determination.” We know that this narrative is propagated by the KKE both because the KKE has explicitly advocated for a return to the pre-1967 borders; and because one of the KKE’s allied publications In Defense of Communism has uncritically platformed Cassif’s statement.

To explain to the workers why they shouldn’t side with the forces which take these positions, we first need to clarify the difference between the labor Zionist vision for Palestinian statehood; and the plan for statehood that’s put forth by the Palestinian resistance. Hamas also supports the creation of a Palestinian state alongside so-called “Israel”; however, this of course doesn’t mean Hamas is not still anti-Zionist. Therefore when Hamas and the other members of Gaza’s resistance coalition push for a two-state solution, what they’re functionally doing is working to create the conditions for a full end to the Jewish state. 

If we actually get a Palestinian state, in the long term this will mean the total collapse of Zionism, even if the Zionist entity can’t realistically be abolished in one step. A Palestinian state will allow Palestinians to recover from their demographic losses, taking away the Jewish majority that the Zionists have built up; and when the colonizers have lost their demographic advantage, their ethnic supremacist project will become untenable.

It’s due to this mortal threat which Palestinian statehood poses towards Zionism that when liberal or labor Zionists ostensibly advocate for a two-state solution, they never intend to actually assist in bringing about a Palestinian state. The only way that Palestine can ever practically get a state is if the resistance wins, and forces the occupier to give up enough stolen land for Palestinian statehood to again be viable. When “Israel” carved up the West Bank into an archipelago of isolated Palestinian enclaves, this rendered a Palestinian state unreachable, making it so that victory for the resistance is the only way another state could come into being. The “moderate” Zionists claim to want a second state, but because they oppose any realistic path towards undoing the West Bank’s carve-up, they will always act as impediments to that goal; which perfectly fits with the role they fill, because a two-state solution would in practice doom Zionism and these actors want to maintain Zionism.

The way in which the KKE obstructs the practical route towards Palestinian statehood is by asserting that Palestine somehow can get a state amid the present border map, and therefore supposedly the resistance won’t need to prevail in order for such a state to be viable. The KKE says:

…approaches such as that of MeRA25 (Y. Varoufakis) and its international alliance Diem 25, which opposes the two-state solution since 2021, arguing that it is now impossible for a Palestinian state to exist given that the Israeli settlements have created a fait accompli that must be accepted, kowtow to Israel’s aggression and accept the reality imposed by its military power and that of its allies. This approach, which calls on us to renounce the right of the Palestinian people to establish their own state on the borders that existed prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital, which is the most widely accepted international demand (145 states have recognized it), and to turn the Palestinian question from a “national question into a human rights question” is in fact an acceptance of the Israeli occupation; an acceptance that the Palestinian people will not have a homeland, as long as some “human rights” are granted to the Palestinians under occupation.

The labor Zionists are putting forth a false promise, asserting that Palestine will be capable of creating a state without first attaining the military victory which would reconnect the West Bank archipelago. It’s how we know the KKE does not support the Palestinian resistance in a principled way, despite whatever it says. It’s also what exposes Cassif’s position as being the stance which truly opposes Palestinian self-determination. Unless somebody’s stated support for Palestinian statehood is accompanied by real solidarity with Palestine’s liberation struggle, the role they’re playing is to further normalization, and to assist in the efforts by “soft” Zionists at capturing the pro-Palestine movement. 

Cassif showed this when he framed his argument around the idea that there’s been a “takeover of fascism in Israel,” which is another labor Zionist narrative that we need to steer the workers away from. However passionately Cassif denounced the crimes that have been committed by Netanyahu’s government and by the West Bank settlers, he started from the premise that these crimes are aberrations within Zionism, brought about by extremist forces that are distinct from what was already there. 

Any knowledge about the history of the labor Zionist movement lets us see how dishonest this narrative is. The labor Zionists were the ones who carried out the first stage of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing; the fact that the Nakba was the design of the “Marxist” Zionists tells us where labor Zionism truly stands. When Cassif accurately describes the settler murderers as “Nazis,” coming from him this rings hollow, because the politics Cassif represents is essentially just as Nazistic as that of the “extreme” Zionists. Labor Zionism’s narrative about being the righteous kind of Zionism falls apart upon any scrutiny; but this doesn’t mean the labor Zionists aren’t an urgent threat, because their absurd and contradictory political brand serves a particular role in the genocidal project. 

Their role is to make the pro-Palestine movement defanged, and connected with pro-normalization forces like the KKE, the CPG, or the Communist Party in occupied Palestine. “Marxist” politics will never again become dominant within the Zionist state, which is why today’s labor Zionists can make themselves appear separable from the crimes of their movement’s forebears. Modern labor Zionism is a marginal current that’s designed to make Palestine a marginal issue by proxy, drawing Palestine supporters and the class-conscious workers into its project of controlled opposition. 

If we can keep this current’s influence out of our movement, while continuing to build a workers movement which acts in solidarity with the resistance, we will be able to add upon the large strategic gains which Palestine has already won in these last several years.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

Hitlerism is a destructive lumpen reaction. Marxism comes from the proletarian drive to construct.

To know where Hitlerism gets its views on how history works, we can look to Proudhon, whose idealistic perspective would form the basis for fascism. The connection between Proudhon’s anarchist polemicism, and the ideological journeys of Hitler, Mussolini, and other defining fascists, becomes apparent when one examines the particular kind of infantile thinking which these fascists represent. This is an infantile mindset that was popularized specifically by Proudhon, and by the others who propagated the notion that the state is something fundamentally personal. The core of their worldview is that the state comes not from a practical need to facilitate the present mode of production; but rather from a conspiracy by those who brought the state into being. 

It’s from this notion that the fascists created their warrior-crusader vision, where history is simply moved by willpower. And it’s this infantile narrative that Marxists can counter with our own vision, if we properly examine the class dynamics behind these beliefs. If we investigate the different material interests, and outlooks, that go behind the anarchist and Marxist perspectives on historical struggle. Because this distinction is what exposes today’s pro-Hitlerite voices as being advocates for senseless, wanton lumpen destruction, in contrast to the constructive working-class drive which Marxism represents.

When I describe the anarcho-Hitlerite ideological lineage as being lumpen in nature, I am talking about how these ways of thinking are detached from the cause of the workers. In order to arrive at their infantile ideas about how historical conflict works, the Proudhonists needed to come from a perspective that wasn’t guided by a proletarian experience. Hitler was a bohemian; his lifestyle was defined by idealism, and he was uninterested in the perspectives of somebody whose outlook is grounded within the reality of the worker. This was the same type of anti-proletarian thought process that Marx described in his rebuttal to Proudhon, where he identified Proudhon’s narrowly moralistic thinking as being petty-bourgeois in character. And it is appropriate to directly link Proudhon’s thinking to Hitler’s, because Proudhon’s crude anti-statism was driven by an obsessive hatred of Jews. 

Wrote Marx about the class origins of Proudhon’s belief system:

For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides – one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm. The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad. Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery…What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad. Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. M. Proudhon has nothing of Hegel's dialectics but the language. For him the dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad.

These petty-bourgeois kinds of reactions in many ways overlap with the lumpen kinds of reactions; these two trends aren’t exactly the same, but they share a lack of investment within the struggle of the proletariat. Therefore they lack a desire to analyze things in a practical, dialectical way. 

The anarcho-Hitlerite view is metaphysical, based within the idea that all traits throughout history are fixed and immutable rather than products of underlying conditions. Hitlerism sees civilization through the lens of genes—which are a metaphysical concept—rather than recognizing that civilization comes from humanity’s efforts to reckon with the contradictions in nature. It promotes a fantasy about excellence and progress originating from innate racial traits, denying how progress is won through advancements in the productive forces and the practical challenges they bring about. It’s because of this basic illiteracy about where social advancement comes from that today’s Hitlerites cannot coherently respond to China’s achievements. They can’t admit that communism is why China is winning; they’ve needed to create a narrative about how China is actually fascist, as they’re unable to face the objective superiority of the proletarian worldview.

China’s story is the ultimate proof that the anarcho-Hitlerite currents are nothing but poor imitations of what dialectics have to offer. They’re the substitutes that capital puts forth to try to divert us from authentic revolutionary politics, crafted by thinkers who’ve not wanted to truly confront reality. As Mao explained about where correct ideas come from, and why working-class thought is uniquely adept at leading us to these ideas:

At first, knowledge is perceptual. The leap to conceptual knowledge, i.e., to ideas, occurs when sufficient perceptual knowledge is accumulated. This is one process in cognition. It is the first stage in the whole process of cognition, the stage leading from objective matter to subjective consciousness from existence to ideas…Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth. Furthermore, the one and only purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.

If the worker’s only reason for gaining knowledge is to change the world, this means that only through a proletarian perspective can we break free from the system which finance capital has imposed on us. The worker has no choice but to confront reality; their only path forward is to unflinchingly investigate. Recognizing communism as the reason for China’s success is one critical part of this investigative process, as it’s the biggest evidence we can find for which practices have worked. Another part is to recognize the connection between what the far right believes, and the ideas that have come out of capitalist society’s most decadent, rootless, and shallow elements. 

The far right claims to be the antithesis of destructive lumpen politics, yet its entire basis is these politics. The metaphysical explanations that Hitlerism provides only make sense when one doesn’t investigate deeper, and the figures who came up with Hitlerism did so because they didn’t have a material reason to investigate deeper. They were not being compelled by the experience of labor, or by the philosophy of labor, that would shape somebody into seeking out a scientific approach towards learning. China has embraced this approach, and we are all able to see the spectacular outcome. America will embrace this approach as well, if it defeats the present ruling-class psyops that aim to rehabilitate Hitlerism. We have the tools to overwhelm these psyops; it’s up to us to find the most effective ways for using those tools.

————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.