This is from part of the book that I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.”
After the “Indian wars” ended, and the United States transitioned into a global imperialist power, the country’s white workers came to have a different relationship towards their bourgeoisie than the one they’d initially had. When the land theft process was still actively happening, the white workers and the capitalists had more of a shared interest, but then the primary contradiction changed. The USA’s central conflict shifted from the colonized vs the colonizers, to the monopoly capitalists vs the proletariat. It was in the late 19th century when capitalism reached its monopoly stage, and also when the country’s workers gained an unprecedented level of consciousness. A consciousness that existed among not just the colonized proletariat, but also among the workers who had used to be settlers.
It’s correct to speak of the USA’s settler-colonial era in the past tense because settler-colonialism is not something which remains immutably fixed to a country, regardless of how much that country’s conditions have changed. Since the U.S. was founded, its class struggle has taken on an extremely different dynamic than that which it originally had; a dynamic that’s defined by our modern circumstances of monopoly capitalism, and the multi-racial workers struggle that’s emerged from this new reality. We must clarify this distinction between old America vs. new America, because if we continue treating the U.S. as if it were in its old form, we won’t be able to effectively fight the imperial state.
By the end of 2024, the psychic impacts of the Gaza genocide had caused settler-colonialism to gain a greater presence in the discourse. The idea that the modern U.S. is a settler state like “Israel” had become more prominent, at least within left circles. But as the Marxist J. Sykes wrote in response to this development, such an analytical framework actually works to obscure our opportunities for mass education and mobilization. Observed Sykes: “if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the ‘settler working class’ as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.” Sykes concluded that when one considers what settler-colonialism actually looks like, and investigates the conditions of today’s United States, this analysis simply can’t be applied to modern America:
U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of “primitive accumulation” during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States…
In a relatively short span of time, the U.S. went from being a colony to an imperialist power. The old colonial system based on the export of commodities was transformed into an imperialist system based on the export of capital. The financial oligarchy which came to dominate the U.S. sought to solve its growing crises through the oppression of whole nations and peoples, at home and abroad, in order to extract super-profits to prop up its rotten system. The multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities found themselves with a common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class. Thus, a united front against monopoly capitalism, based on the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nations, became both possible and necessary.
It’s because of this evolutionary process within U.S. capitalism that the North American continent’s revolutionary struggle is manifesting in a fundamentally different form than that of Palestine’s struggle. In the USA, the fight is between a multiracial working class, and a monopolist class that’s now coming into conflict even with the lower levels of capital. In Palestine, the fight is between a colonized people and a ruling racial aristocracy. There is no Jewish proletariat in occupied Palestine, like there’s a white proletariat in the United States; in Palestine, the proletariat only exists among the Palestinian slave laborers. Therefore, the majority of the USA’s people share a mutual class interest with the Palestinians, as most U.S. Americans are of the proletariat.
Our interest is not in the continuation of the Zionist project; the colonizers and settlers in Palestine aren’t on our side in the class war. Yet our ruling class has managed to lead U.S. organized labor into defending Zionism, keeping the country’s workers tied to a settler project even though settler-colonialism ended here generations ago. All of the developments in Palestine’s favor that we’ve seen throughout U.S. unions have happened in spite of this hegemonic control which the pro-imperialist side holds. Zionism, imperialist wars, and neo-colonial exploitation are by default what the labor bosses support; that so much pro-Palestine sentiment has emerged from union workers shows how big the contradictions are between the labor leaders, and the workers who they’re supposed to represent.
With this context, it’s apparent that the pro-Zionist psyops which have targeted the U.S. labor movement are not simply appeals towards an inherent kinship between U.S. and “Israeli” workers. If the white working class were settlers, then these two groups would have the same interests, and not as much narrative manipulation would be necessary. To recruit U.S. union workers into defending Zionism, and into supporting the pro-imperialist meddling which U.S. unions have long assisted, our ruling class has needed to convince these workers that their interests are synonymous with the bosses. Which is an idea that necessarily translates into supporting Zionism, and all other parts of the imperial project.
To understand how the country’s unions came to have this role of corralling workers into backing empire, it’s crucial to remember that U.S. union bureaucrats did not need to be psyoped into helping capital. From the start of when organized labor came to have a prominent role, the ones leading it always sought to prove themselves as being among the bourgeoisie’s most loyal friends. This was the goal that drove Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder. In 1918, after the Wilson administration had just sacrificed U.S. workers for a world war, imprisoned those who’d spoken against this war, and helped start off the attacks against the world’s first workers state, Gompers declared: “In America, the labor movement stands behind the government, and behind President Wilson. We stand behind him not because he is president, but because he is right and because he is a spokesman for freedom and democracy for all the nations of the world.”
Gompers and his contemporaries within the labor leadership were innately hostile towards communism, and when the Soviet Union came into being, they immediately joined in the effort to destroy it. During the early 20th century, though, they hadn’t yet won total victory. The communists were still able to hold mainstream influence, and with the economic collapse, they managed to gain great policy leverage over the Roosevelt administration. It was at that same moment, though, when Browderism emerged to start inflicting grave damage upon the workers struggle. This was when the idea of subordinating the workers movement towards one wing of the capitalists, in exchange for supposed immunity from future crackdowns, became dominant within the communist movement itself.
It was this breakdown in the Communist Party’s resolve and principles which helped allow for that same capitulationist mindset to drive how the unions acted. Just like in Browder’s CPUSA, the union leadership embraced a strategy of capitulation. The unions agreed not to strike during wartime, and as a reward, the administration granted them new protections. This allowed them to greatly expand in membership, which at the time seemed to many like a vindication of the reformist strategy.
Then the U.S. ruling class took full advantage of this trend towards appeasement. As soon as World War II ended, and Washington could abandon its alliance with the Soviets, the U.S. enacted the Taft-Hartley Act. Through this law, it illegalized numerous traditional union practices, including the one where workers from different workplaces can collaborate in a strike action. This enabled the U.S. government to easily shut down strikes, in ways that even many other imperialist governments can’t. Taft-Hartley has been invoked many times to force workers to settle for far less than they’ve asked for, like when Carter used the Act against the United Mine Workers during their 1977-78 strike.
Taft-Hartley’s passage should have been the capitalist assault that shook the workers movement out of its reformist complacency, and provoked an uprising against the labor bureaucrats. But despite the efforts of principled communists like Foster, the damage from Browderism had been too severe. The proletarian movement couldn’t overcome the post-war attacks on the unions, nor the anti-communist onslaught that soon followed.
The AFL leadership, which had already been heavily engaged in anti-communist activities prior to the war’s end, would successfully carry out its next schemes for sabotaging the proletarian movement. The CIO, which had been in conflict with the AFL because it was originally communist-friendly, would be turned towards anti-communism. The CPUSA would be made marginal, and keep going in a more reformist direction; and U.S. unions would be cut off from the Global South connections which the WFTU had given them. This let the CIA easily turn these unions into tools for its Cold War interventions, courting their leaders to make sure they would support the wars and participate in the foreign meddling. (Which really just meant giving the union leaders more resources and guidance in their preexisting anti-communist efforts.) It also let the reactionary union leaders more effectively enforce the Zionist ideology’s dominance over labor, delaying the emergence of a mainstream pro-Palestine movement in the United States.
In their effort to sell these imperialist schemes to the workers, the reactionary forces could certainly take advantage of how America’s white workers had used to hold a settler role. Throughout the effort to neutralize the unions, racism had a crucial role in undermining worker solidarity, as it does today. But in the 20th century, after the U.S. had reached a stage beyond settler-colonialism, this racism needed to take on a different character. No longer could the capitalists factually argue to the white workers that their interests were in maintaining settler-colonialism, because that framework no longer applied to their objective conditions. When our ruling class uses racism in today era, it’s not done with the purpose of rallying whites in defense of their settler holdings, like Netanyahu does when he appeals to the Jewish settler movement. It’s done in order to manufacture division between different parts of a multi-racial working class.
This means that when our class enemies work to recruit today’s workers into pro-imperialist, anti-communist efforts, they can’t try to appeal towards these workers merely on a racial basis. They could do this during the slavery era, when the bourgeoisie’s most reactionary wing was able to rally many of the white workers around defending the chattel system. But even back then, there was a substantial element within white society which joined with the oppressed in fighting for progress, unlike is the case in “Israeli” Jewish society. This is because the United States has always been a country where internal revolutionary forces are in conflict with the reactionary forces. Its founding was brought about through an anti-colonial revolt; one that actually had a progressive impact, unlike the foundation of “Israel” did.
There’s a reason why “Israel” hasn’t had a John Brown, or an Abraham Lincoln: its settler society is far too unified behind the goal of continuing Palestine’s colonization. So is not the case for the white workers in the USA, who’ve always been experiencing a push-and-pull between different class influences. It was never even true that slavery benefited the white workers; the vast majority of white people had no real material stake in it. Therefore, the settler role that the white workers formerly had came not necessarily from their relationship to the enslaved Africans; but more so from their relationship to the indigenous peoples, whose lands they were often helping steal. When that stage in the country’s evolution concluded, though, the relationship changed, and the entire U.S. working class came to have more potential for multi-racial proletarian revolt.
To psyop the modern U.S. working class into joining with the imperial project, the capitalists have had to bring the workers into a “common house” with their employers. Within the class collaborationist worldview that the opportunist labor actors promote, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can reach a “class peace,” where they’ve come to coexist inside the same big “world of labor.” This was the narrative that the CIO’s anti-communist elements used when they portrayed the communists as threats towards labor unity, and sidelined them in favor of the most reactionary labor forces; in this view of workplace organizing, the workers can only hope to get a better deal by making friends with the bosses, who they supposedly share a common interest with. The communists, then, are a foreign infiltrator force that’s trying to sabotage this essential class partnership.
It’s a belief system that the ruling class has needed to try to sell not just to the white workers, but to the workers as a whole; and this has required a type of propaganda that’s designed to target a multi-racial audience. In a stage where the former settlers have joined the ranks of the proletariat, the workers can only be effectively psyoped if all of them have this propaganda directed at them, regardless of their race.
The ruling class wants workers of all backgrounds to embrace the mentality that their interests are synonymous with those of their bosses; this “inclusive” pro-imperialist ideology is propagated by both of the major capitalist parties. What the narrative managers seek is for U.S. workers to collectively view themselves as being among the aristocracy of labor, the class of workers in the imperialist core which receives special patronage through the exploitation of the peripheral countries.
That the labor aristocracy grew so much with the post-war U.S. economic boom is part of why many of the workers became loyal to imperialism at that time. The anti-communist labor forces were able to point to the great improvements in conditions that the most socially advantaged workers experienced, and sell them a narrative about how class struggle posed a threat towards this shared worker-capitalist prosperity. But to try to explain the imperialist labor takeover through this factor alone would be utterly reductive; much more needs to be said about this, or one will end up concluding that U.S. workers have been led down this path due to some innate flaw on their part.
To truly explain how imperialism and Zionism were able to take control of U.S. labor, we can’t say “it’s because white workers are settlers,” or “it’s because Americans are labor aristocrats.” Neither of those statements are even true, at least not for the most part. Even if most of the U.S. white workers could at some point be called settlers, they can’t anymore, despite what the radical liberal “Settlers” thesis says; when J. Sakai wrote his famous 1983 polemic Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, he didn’t anticipate that there would be as much multi-racial worker radicalization as there’s been since then.
What Sakai did was speak to the profound frustrations that U.S. communists from that time were feeling over the failures of the country’s workers movement, and give them something to blame: the allegedly innate reactionism of the white workers. Using this logic, Sakai concluded that the white workers would fail to radicalize even as neoliberalism continued driving down their living standards:
As U.S. imperialism stumbles faster and faster into its permanent decline, once again we hear the theory expressed that some poverty and the resulting mass economic struggles will create revolutionary consciousness in Euro-Amerikan workers. The fact is that such social pressures are not new to White Amerika. For three decades – from 1890 to 1920 – the new white industrial proletariat increasingly organized itself into larger and larger struggles with the capitalists. The immigrant European proletarians wanted industrial unionism and the most advanced among them wanted socialism. A mass movement was built for both.
These were the most heavily exploited, most proletarian, and most militant European workers Amerika has ever produced. Yet, in the end, they were unable to go beyond desiring the mere reform of imperialism. The mass industrial struggles of that period were important in that they represented the highest level of class consciousness any major stratum of European workers in the U.S. has yet reached. And even in this exceptional period – a period of the most aggressive and openly anticapitalist labor organizing – European workers were unable to produce an adequate revolutionary leadership, unable to defeat the settler labor aristocracy, unable to oppose U.S. imperialism, and unable to unite with the anticolonial movements of the oppressed nations. We can sum up the shortcomings by saying that they flirted with socialism – but in the end preferred settlerism.
Sakai’s argument is premised on the notion that Browderism, and its parallel reformist ideologies within the unions, would have lost out if not for the selfishness of the white workers. That if these workers possessed a truly proletarian class character, they would have kicked out the class collaborationist elements within their leadership. How believable is this argument, though, when so many of the workers movements throughout the Global South have also “failed” in this way? When the CIA-labor alliance was also able to destroy, divide, or co-opt so many unions and communist parties across the formerly colonized world, rendering the workers defenseless against the ensuing Cold War coups and further delaying revolution throughout these places?
Sakai himself admits that the white workers of those past eras were authentically proletarian, like these Global South workers are; so if an authentic proletariat will always be able to swiftly thwart attempts at reactionary sabotage, as Sakai’s argument implies, why haven’t all of the Global South’s workers won yet? The answer is that as in all cases, it’s not fair to blame the victims. Whether the victims can defend themselves depends on whether they have the means to do so, and so often they don’t.
This reality about the nature of class war exposes Sakaism’s circular reasoning; because capital successfully beat down the masses in the 20th century, Sakaism says the masses are inherently reactionary. By this logic, the U.S. pro-Palestine movement’s failures thus far have not been due to any mistakes the established left orgs have made; the movement has failed simply because Americans are too materially invested in imperialism. That most Americans actually have been changing their minds on Zionism shows how much potential we have for mobilizing the masses. The bulk of the USA’s people are increasingly willing to unlearn imperialism’s indoctrination, and ever-more of them are looking for ways to fight their capitalist dictatorship. We can’t provide them with the means to fight if we dismiss them as enemies.
Sakai could point to evidence that most U.S. workers were labor aristocrats in the early 80s, but since then the conditions have massively changed. After half a century of neoliberal shock policies, the U.S. labor aristocracy has come to be solidly in the minority. Moreover, the U.S. workers were never universally labor aristocrats; there were millions of mid-20th century Americans who faced active hostility from the system under which they lived, meaning the potential for building a mass proletarian movement was there; the problem is that this movement got steered away from a principled place, and thereby became fatally vulnerable to the state’s attacks.
To attribute this defeat towards the character of the U.S. workers themselves is to distract from what our ruling class has done, and thereby effectively cover for the schemes of capital. This is what we lose when we embrace such essentializing narratives: the ability to truly know our class enemies, and to figure out how they can be defeated; not apply an oversimplified analysis that lacks real basis in reality.
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