AOC’s anti-resistance “pro-Palestine” politics is Zionism’s best chance for maintaining the occupation

To find an alternative to AOC’s “democratic socialism,” we must investigate why exactly these politics are harmful to Palestine, and all other areas in the popular struggle. Putting forth such an alternative is an important part of critiquing social democrats, because without presenting a credible solution, we’ll fall into ultra-leftist patterns. When I decry social democrat politicians as a Marxist, I am doing so with the awareness that these figures are the only version of “socialism” which their supporters have overall been exposed to. And to draw these working-class Americans away from social democracy, which is now a highly urgent task, we must explain which forces of popular revolution the socdems have set themselves up against.

In global terms, these forces are the mass movements that have been waging wars of resistance against U.S. imperial aggression, with the Palestinian resistance being the foremost struggle that leaders like AOC oppose. We know they oppose this struggle because every one of these “progressive” leaders, when they’ve come across opportunities to align with Palestine’s fight for liberation, have done what the occupier prefers. They’ve served as “progressive” launderers for Zionism at a moment when Zionism is in unprecedented existential danger, is surrounded by a world that hates it more than ever, and needs spokespeople who can put a friendly face on it.

Because the bulk of Gen Z have come to understand why Zionism is irredeemable, every time these politicians betray the Palestinian cause they further alienate themselves from their primary base. Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to continue funding the Zionist occupier’s “defensive” military equipment, and Zohran has taken the Zionist position by affirming the occupier’s supposed right to exist. Now, AOC has again shown a lack of commitment to fighting against aid to the occupation by stating that due to existing U.S. foreign aid policies, “I believe the Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system, which has proven critical to keep innocent civilians safe from rocket attacks and bombardment.” This was how AOC qualified her pledge not to continue voting for the Iron Dome aid, which evidently still comes with a fundamental desire to counter Gaza’s resistance coalition; AOC’s language clearly implies that this choice comes from a confidence in the occupier being able to wage its colonial war without her help. When this changes, AOC will get behind the occupier, along with every other “soft” Zionist leader.

Because of how transparent AOC’s opportunism is, it’s harder for AOC to keep up a “pro-Palestine” image than it is for someone in Zohran’s position. These figures are always going to play a gatekeeping role in relation to Palestine, though. And one indication of this is that Zohrah still doesn’t appear to be pursuing his campaign promise of having New York City implement BDS. 

Instead he’s taken a position in the middle, and revoked a previous anti-BDS measure while not going all the way. And we should draw attention to this failure, as it illustrates how much of an impact these figures would have if they were to truly act principled on Palestine; NYC adopting BDS would have a gargantuan domino effect, encouraging other cities to do the same. It was exciting prospects like this one that gained Zohran such a large base. Yet these prospects are not materializing, which isn’t something Marxists are glad about; we we don’t want it to be true that the biggest “socialist” faction is obstructing the fight against the Gaza genocide. We aren’t here to be ankle-biters against these leaders, but to offer a mode of struggle where the popular masses are truly in control.

I’m not just talking about my own communist party the ACP; a party is only a vehicle for advancing the interests of the masses, who are the core drivers of the struggle. And in the case of the Palestinian liberation struggle, the primary masses who we must account for are the Palestinian people themselves. This is something that the Palestinian community’s internal critics of reformism and capitulationism have stressed. One example of this is a statement from March 10, attributed by Al-Akhbar to numerous Palestinian and Arab thinkers. They explain how

Concepts of liberation and the national project must be formulated from the real material conditions of resistance environments: the refugee camp, the village, the prison cell, the trench and the tunnel. We reject imported liberal frameworks and ready-made formulas designed according to the preferences and interests of comprador forces and the colonial core. These models are used as tools for social engineering to freeze and neutralize Arab social and political forces from the real struggle, while the enemy continues to pursue its goals ruthlessly to their conclusion. True liberation begins with dismantling epistemic colonialism as a prerequisite for full liberation…

This charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents, and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures.

This is the posture that the Palestinian resistance takes, and our own movements must adopt the equivalent of this posture in order to succeed. We have to take example from Palestine’s liberation movement, and the other Global South struggles, by rejecting the false allies who are collaborators with capital. 

After the 1967 Zionist land grab, Palestine’s communists concluded that they had to identify who their cause’s core allies were among the different Palestinian economic classes, with the enslaved proletarians and the imprisoned masses being the ones they decided to prioritize. And this reckoning with the question of class has allowed the struggle to get much further since then. In the case of the American popular struggle, applying this practice looks like aligning ourselves with such working-class forces within Palestine and all other countries, while recognizing who our foremost class allies are domestically.

We must reject the compatible left politics that seeks alignment with the professional-managerial class, which is the element that these pro-imperialist “progressives” most seek to serve. There are indications that our ruling class will soon act to expand the PMC by bribing many more U.S. workers with imperialist super-profits, thus creating a larger social base for the empire’s next wars. But this strategy will fail if we don’t cede the working class to the socdems, and bring them into the proletarian struggle before our enemies intercept them; while also reaching into the parts of the American masses who won’t be given these benefits. Rural America is where we must especially look while undertaking this mission, because though our ruling class can rebuild the labor aristocracy, liberalism inevitably exacerbates the contradiction between the metropole and the countryside.

It is in these parts of the masses where we’ll find the most reliable allies of the Palestinian resistance, and of the wider effort to overthrow monopoly financial rule. The socdems seek to build an alliance between the bourgeoisified American workers—who they may soon create more of—and the comprador elites who protect Zionism with the rhetoric of progress. We will overwhelm them from below, building an alliance between those who share an interest in the imperial order’s destruction.

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The plan to nuke Iran, and then put a “humanitarian” face back onto the U.S. empire

Above: the “earthquake bomb” that Israel dropped on Syria in December 2024.

This week, the UN’s Mohamad Safa resigned from his position to tell the world that Washington is strongly considering a nuclear attack against Iran. We should take the danger of this happening very seriously, and we must reckon with the apocalyptic harm that Zionism and imperialism have already inflicted on the region’s people during this war. The “worst-case scenario” has already come for all of the people in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran who Washington has murdered in these last few weeks alone. But when we see these mass-scale atrocities and plans for nuclear holocaust, we need to recognize just how desperate of a mentality our enemies are now operating off of. This isn’t the posture of a confident empire, it’s how Washington is acting when Iran has just taken away its ability to gain submission. The Axis of Resistance has dismantled U.S. hard power in West Asia, to a degree where the foreign policy heads are now deeply wishing to re-create Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Whether they actually will do this is hard to predict. Telling from the history of when the imperialists have been faced with existential dilemmas, it is clear that they now have two paths forward: take the assault to a nuclear level, or pull back. And it would make the most strategic sense for them to retreat, though this would come with perilous costs for the stability of the capitalist system. It would be a repeat of the shift towards pacifism that the rulers of the imperialist powers undertook after the first world war, when the destabilizing nature of their war-making forced the system into perilous compromises. 

Wrote Stalin in 1924 about why these compromises were so risky:

Would the bourgeoisie have undertaken this risky experiment with pacifism if it had not been compelled to do so; would it have done so of its own free will? Of course, not! This is the second time that the bourgeoisie is undertaking the experiment with pacifism since the end of the imperialist war. The first experiment was made immediately after the war, when it seemed that revolution was knocking at the door. The second experiment is being undertaken now, after Poincaré’s and Curzon’s risky experiments. Who would dare deny that imperialism will have to pay dearly for this swinging of the bourgeoisie from pacifism to rabid imperialism and back again, that this is pushing vast masses of workers out of their habitual philistine rut, that it is drawing the most backward sections of the proletariat into politics and is helping to revolutionise them? 

Of course, “democratic pacifism” is not yet the Kerensky regime, for the Kerensky regime implies dual power, the collapse of bourgeois power and the coming into being of the foundations of proletarian power. But, there can scarcely be any doubt that pacifism signifies the immense awakening of the masses, the fact that the masses are being drawn into politics; that pacifism is shaking bourgeois rule and preparing the ground for revolutionary upheavals. And precisely for this reason pacifism is bound to lead not to the strengthening, but to the weakening of bourgeois rule, not to the postponement of the revolution for an indefinite period, but to its acceleration.

Our ruling class knows to switch up its cultural propaganda mode every couple of years, alternating between the “trad” type of brazen right-wing politics and “progressive” imperialist politics. It is now looking like the next maneuver will be to push “democratic socialism,” and switch from the Trump administration’s unapologetic fascist violence to  “humanitarian” liberalism. The problem is that the empire can’t just go back to the Obama era, when the U.S. could destroy entire countries while domestic politics remained unaffected by these wars. Gaza has changed the way that an entire generation views foreign policy. What the U.S. ruling class faces is truly a new version of that whiplash which Stalin described, where the masses inevitably grow more radicalized by imperialist destruction and inconsistent rulership.

When the empire embraces the “progressive” image, this will not be something the bourgeoisie do of their own volition. It will be a reaction to the dangers that Trump 2.0’s brazen policy is creating for the imperial order. The point of Trump 2.0 was to fully take the mask off of imperialism, thereby letting our ruling class wage unrestrained war against both the Global South and the American workers. But this policy is not sustainable, because if the empire keeps attacking both of these populations, the system will collapse from within. And the history which Stalin discusses shows what the bourgeoisie do when they’ve just taken their provocations too far: pull back, and try to appease the masses within the imperialist countries through social-democratic reforms.

When we understand that this will be the next maneuver by our class enemies, we can effectively fight against their schemes, both in the long term and in the immediate battle. The Zionist right has already discredited itself, to the extent that the pendulum is beginning to swing away from the right and back towards the center. And the biggest ideological threat comes from the social fascists who seek to divert antiwar, class-conscious sentiments, not just from the left-leaning Americans but also the disillusioned MAGA supporters. 

The Democratic Party’s pseudo-populist wing has started on a campaign to draw in a real mass base by appropriating certain parts of revolutionary rhetoric—and, crucially, by getting rid of the woke rhetoric that keeps one’s political brand confined to the left. The next strategy of the Democrats will not be wokeness, but rather the promotion of classic welfare capitalism, with the goal being to rebuild the labor aristocracy.

If our enemies were to successfully restore the labor aristocracy, this in itself would be a bad thing for the anti-imperialist cause, as it would create more Americans with a major material stake in imperialism. However, Stalin’s analysis shows that the road to this restoration will be fraught with dangers for the system. As he explains, the embrace of “pacifism” and social democracy is an indication of advancement in the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, which has forced the bourgeoisie to try appeasing the people. And for this stabilizing effort to work, the bourgeoisie will also need to end its imperial onslaught. Which is where our enemies are caught in an impossible dilemma, because for U.S. hegemony to be sustained, Washington will have to wage a long-term series of wars and proxy wars against China. 

The social fascists will be tasked with this mission of intensifying imperialist warfare, at the same moment when pulling back is most important for the system’s internal survival. This contradiction will make the scheme fall, if we go hard enough in exposing and out-organizing the social fascists. Their strategy of warfare will be to activate a plan for unprecedented, catastrophically destructive color revolutions, designed to destabilize the Global South. We must not allow the ideology behind these color revolutions to go unchallenged. The next big task in the workers movement will be to struggle fiercely against the “humanitarian” regime change deceptions, showing them to represent the same evils that the Zionist right is advancing.

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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. 

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