That it’s the left in the United States which is most inclined to support Palestine, yet the most hostile towards Russia, is a problem for the same reason why “leftist” anti-Iran sentiment is a problem. When the primary ideological group that backs Palestine is at the same time affirming imperialist narratives about countries which are aiding Palestine’s struggle, this hinders revolutionary progress on all fronts. And we know that Russia and Iran hold a comparable importance towards Palestine because though Russia isn’t directly backing the armed Palestinian resistance, like Iran is, it’s using its own strengths to fulfill a different role. This role is to provide a counter-weight towards Washington on the wider global stage. Because of the strength and unity that Russia and China have attained over the last generation, the hegemon can’t anymore decide how the international sphere relates to the Zionist state. Palestine’s support is no longer isolated to revolutionary holdouts like the DPRK; it’s now coming from the bulk of the international community.
This is why when Palestinians have demonstrated in places like Hebron, they’ve displayed portraits of not just Kim Jong Un but also Vladimir Putin. This is why when Syrian students have held pro-Palestine rallies, they’ve carried not just Palestinian flags but Russian flags too. The U.S. pro-Palestine movement’s absence of parallel activities doesn’t represent a benign ideological difference, it represents a concerning lack of consistency.
Absolutely we should support the pro-Palestine demonstrations that are taking place, as they’re objectively a threat towards our ruling institutions. These institutions are going to have openings for dividing the global anti-imperialist struggle, though, if we don’t develop this country’s pro-Palestine effort towards a more advanced stage. To the same stage that these other pro-Palestine efforts are at, wherein their participants intuitively know the importance of combating U.S. hegemony.
To bring about this evolution, where we inject multipolarity into the pro-Palestine efforts while not discarding the gains from the struggle’s present stage, we have to understand how this initial stage has taken on such a form. The U.S. pro-Palestine struggle’s first big manifestation has occurred within the student element, as social movements often do. It was always logical that students would be the first ones to mainly lead the effort towards freeing Palestine, because Palestine is an issue that’s most explosive within the particular realm where students operate. That our government is facilitating a genocide against the Palestinians exposes the hypocrisy of the liberal “humanitarian” image which universities put forth. Now that this genocide has reached an unprecedented level, the students are striking at the academic authorities who claim to represent progress and justice.
We’re seeing an equivalent phenomenon in how the vast majority of the Democrat base has reacted with the appropriate disgust at their party’s backing of the genocide. This doesn’t match with the humanistic ideas that liberalism is supposed to uphold, so most liberals aren’t going along with the genocide’s justification narratives. And many of these liberals may end up defecting towards leftism by not voting Biden.
This mass radicalization is a good thing. The big obstacle towards these new leftists seeing their desires for justice realized is that “leftism” has long been captured by imperialism-compatible interests, interests which oppose any effective strategy for mass mobilization. The anarchists, the Marcyists, and the other main leftist currents of today aren’t willing to provide the pro-Palestine struggle’s many new members with a full anti-imperialist education. They essentially all oppose Russia’s anti-imperialist actions, and many of them go so far as to oppose China and Iran too. In the case of tendencies like the anarchists and the Maoists, which tend to see Washington’s challengers as imperialist, this is because of a genuine ideological alignment with the State Department. The Marcyists, represented by the PSL, are motivated by something different.
They’re aware that these countries aren’t imperialist, so they claim to support China and Iran. Yet they’ll never support Russia, simply because Russia is so unpopular among leftists and liberals. This creates a self-reinforcing problem, where the struggle’s participants stay illiterate on anti-imperialism, the Marcyists see this illiteracy they’ve helped perpetuate, and then they say this proves that supporting Russia would be too alienating. The only types of people who would be seriously alienated if communists take a pro-Russian stance are the obstinate radical liberals, and the “Blue MAGA” Democrats who are defending Biden on Gaza. Whatever the Marcyists may argue, it’s not worthwhile to cripple our efforts for the sake of winning over these elements. We can’t let a small minority of stubbornly NATO-aligned actors leverage the entire struggle.
Because the Marcyists center their efforts around the “left,” they see it as sufficient merely to promote themselves among the students, and to reaffirm what these students already believe. This limited vision for the struggle’s future, where the only role communists have is to tail the existing activist circles, is the losing strategy. It’s never sufficient to only focus on expanding communism into “the movement,” because the active members of any given movement will always be a minority within the broader population. You need to expand into the masses. And even within the movement itself, there isn’t sufficient awareness of what needs to be done. The students have been won over towards the pro-Palestine cause, but not towards the anti-imperialist cause more broadly. We can’t pretend this distinction doesn’t matter, and refuse to expose these students to knowledge about multipolarity’s crucial role.
Should we take that bold extra step, and put forth a program which not everyone in the movement will agree with, we won’t be maximally popular within these spaces. The Marcyists see this as an unacceptable cost, but it’s not. It’s merely the cost of doing what’s necessary for victory over our ruling institutions. The liberals who are determined to hate Russia represent only a fraction of the country’s people; the majority of the people don’t share their obsession with advancing Atlanticist interests. What most of the USA’s people care about right now is ending the economic warfare which our ruling class is waging against us. What most of them definitely don’t care about is providing endless funds for the proxy war against Russia.
The biggest ideological demographic in the country is not leftists or liberals; it’s the people who are politically unaffiliated. Combined with the libertarians, and the large elements within MAGA that have embraced antiwar ideas, this group could destroy the war machine’s ability to function. There are elements of the left which can join in on such a united front, but only if they’re willing to give up the anti-popular ideas that prevail within modern leftism.
Advancing a consistent anti-imperialist practice will only add effectiveness to our efforts at rallying the masses around their domestic material interests. These two facets of the struggle are actually the same, because U.S. imperialism depends on austerity in the core. This means that in order to merge the pro-Palestine movement with the broader anti-imperialist cause, we don’t need to convince all or most leftists to embrace multipolarity. We instead need to build an additional wing of the pro-Palestine struggle, one that’s centered around a popular mobilization project rather than around the left. It’s this project that can gain the people’s support, and drive history forward.
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