To sustain the momentum of the pro-Palestine movement that’s emerged this year, we need to build an alternative organizing model to the one which presently dominates in the United States. Because this is the model that’s been ensuring, now for many decades, that spontaneous popular uprisings don’t bring long-term strengthenings of revolutionary politics. Should we let this history of defeats repeat itself once again, we’ll be without sufficient mass backing at a time when the state’s attempts to crush us are greatly intensifying.
It’s because of the inward focus of established socialist orgs, like ANSWER, that the Iraq protests couldn’t maintain their energy. That great loss is the reason why up until this last year, the younger generation was still quite politically apathetic. For most of the young people participating in the Gaza protests, this is something they’ve needed to be newly compelled to do, because their conditions have left them without serious avenues for revolt.
They’ve joined with the pro-Palestine movement because that’s their moral imperative. But if they continue to not have viable organizing options, they’ll become burnt out from activism, like they so often have under the present main organizing model. That being the model which copies the identity-based posturing of the Democratic Party, merely restating the typical Democrat rhetoric in a “radical” way.
This is a way of operating that makes the Palestine protests confined to a niche; that renders them only able to connect with the Democratic Party’s core base. Tens of millions of conservative-leaning Americans who support peace in Gaza are being alienated from the pro-peace demonstrations themselves, because ANSWER has taken control over the marches and decided what kinds of rhetoric they produce. Consequently, the idea these protests have conveyed is that unless you’re a left-liberal, then you’re not welcome in this movement. This is not how to win the struggle, because it’s a practice that cripples the struggle by excluding many of its potential allies.
The left doesn’t own the antiwar movement, nor should it. Those of us who are on the left end of the ideological spectrum need to recognize that we don’t represent the entirety of the people who are revolution-compatible, and that gatekeeping movements in our favor undermines us by rendering us isolated and ineffectual. That’s what these dominant activist leaders are never going to take into account, as they’re satisfied with being ineffectual so long as they can maintain an organizing entity.
The young people’s will to fight the ruling elites is there; the only thing preventing them from becoming lifelong devotees to the struggle is a lack of principled movement leadership. Good leadership does exist, though, if you know where to look. And it has the potential to lift my generation, along with the slightly younger one that’s emerging, out of their state of historical powerlessness.
So many of these young people have been trapped in political apathy, and in terminally online habits, due to an unwillingness to lead them by the figures who should be their mentors in the class struggle. Brian Becker, ANSWER’s leader, has stated that he doesn’t see ending the wars as realistic, and that he sees antiwar activism as merely a means for making more people into organizers. Because this organizing is done for the sake of organizing in itself, inevitably many of those who join his project get too discouraged to carry on, as they realize they’re involved in a circular process. If the late Marcyist tendency Becker represents were a route towards overthrowing the state, then developments like the Iraq demonstrations, the George Floyd uprising, and this year’s Tyre Nichol protests would have brought about lasting new strength for the communist movement.
This is a way of operating that’s designed to fail. If PSL and the other orgs in its vein grew too big, this would defeat their purpose of holding a monopoly over the protest cage. When a communist movement gets large enough to make up the broad masses, it becomes impossible for opportunistic figures to dominate, and comes to have real potential for winning. The goal of the “left” as it exists in today’s USA is not to win, but to perpetuate the movementist cycle. The cycle where these orgs use spontaneous protest outbreaks to give themselves more donations, and (some) more members, without truly advancing the struggle. The leaders of these projects are trying to run a business, not become transgressive actors in history.
These communist leaders who fear victory for communism are so prevalent because we’re under circumstances where an effective, mass-based workers movement in the USA was suppressed decades ago. The way the ruling class sustains this victory is by using its COINTELPRO tools, which it developed as part of the initial suppression effort, to perpetually wage war against those who try to rebuild what we’ve lost. But we have control over how effective these tools are able to be. Because COINTELPRO centers around creating distrust among the members of the struggle, spreading rumor-mongering about those the state seeks to destroy. And if we learn to resist these deceptions, we’ll be able to build an alternative to the synthetic, compatible left.
In the social media age, when the discourse can be so easily influenced by proliferating vague rumors and pitting different factions against each other, these narratives have come to primarily consist of innuendos which portray the targets as secret fascist agents. The “Land Back vs patriotic socialism” discourse psyop is a major way in which this manipulation has lately been carried out. It’s created a dichotomy of competing sects that, though at least somewhat based within real disagreements, is used to unnecessarily divide the anti-imperialist movement.
Most of those in the camp that’s been labeled the “patsocs” don’t identify with that name, and the ones who do tend to be extremely online and disinterested in building organizational power. Most patriotic socialists base their ideas not within Strasserism, as the discourse psyop claims, but within the proletarian patriotism argument Michael Parenti put forth. And this means when you talk to them about the USA’s colonial project in good faith, you find they’re quite receptive to such ideas; that’s been my experience with Caleb Maupin, the “patsoc” who’s been perhaps most widely vilified in this way.
These efforts to magnify real or perceived contradictions in communist spaces are how the social media manipulators have been working to dissuade developing radicals from a serious anti-imperialist practice. Because every organization that’s been supporting both Palestine and Russia, or working to unite the different tendencies among U.S. hegemony’s opponents, has gotten labeled as “patsoc.” Thereby, it’s been classified as untouchable within conventional leftist circles.
How do I know it’s possible for communists of the variety that’s especially focused on anti-colonialism to collaborate with those calling themselves patriotic socialists? Because the African People’s Socialist Party has shown this to be possible by working with Maupin’s org the Center for Political Innovation. The party has done this for the same reason it’s aligned with Russia: that as its members have explained, they’ll work with anyone who shares their desire to defeat the USA’s colonial institutions. That CPI has a different analysis on some aspects of our conditions doesn’t mean the org and its partners aren’t threats to the ruling class.
The same applies to the Libertarian Party in its present form, which opposes aid to both Ukraine and “Israel.” If someone seeks to combat the war machine, and dethrone the unelected intelligence officials who truly run our government, then they’re a strategic ally at this stage in the struggle.
I keep saying these things because they’re crucial for Marxists to grasp in order to be effective. The forces of liberal tailism don’t want us to think strategically. They want us to only care about fitting in with the radical liberal online cliques which many new Marxists get assimilated into. Even though not every actor in these spaces claims allegiance to Brian Becker, the effect they have is to shield him from being exposed for his opportunistic activities. Their role is to obscure the reality that the most important debate at this stage in the struggle is not over whether to call white people settlers. The most important debate is over whether to keep the movement isolated, or to expand it to the real masses.
The members of the political fandoms we see on left Twitter are not the real masses, even though they claim to be. The real masses are far outside this little realm, which means we must expand our practice beyond that realm. We can only build a relationship with the people on the basis of rejecting insularity, elitism, sectarianism, and the narcissism of small differences. We must adopt an equivalent of the movement-building model that U.S. communism had during its successful 20th century era. Then we’ll be able to go beyond what those communists did, and overthrow this country’s capitalist dictatorship.
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