This is from the book that I’m writing, which will be titled “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.” The image above is from when a Palestine banner got forcibly taken down at a Sanders event.
At this moment, the biggest type of threat that revolutionary politics faces from the left is social democracy. As Stalin concluded, “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Which makes it more accurate to describe this ideology as “social fascism” (a label that many communists have historically used for social democracy). Unlike anarchism, Sakaism, or any of the other left ideologies which claim the “socialist” label, social fascism doesn’t even try to uphold the leftist ideal of being revolutionary. In this way, it’s worse than any other kind of left-wing idealist error. Social democracy’s goal is to reform the capitalist state, which means it will always work to crush those who seek the capitalist state’s overthrow. And in the imperialist countries, it will always take a pro-imperialist stance, because a capitalist state that’s imperialist can by definition never stop being so.
Unsurprisingly, in the post-October 7 era it’s this ideology that’s come to be the primary form of left-wing controlled opposition. There was a time during the Biden era when the Sakaism-aligned “ultra-lefts” got boosted within our discourse much more, because they were useful for spreading the narrative that Russia’s Ukraine operation is “imperialist.”
At that point, the PSL had much more relevance, as did anarchism. But when Palestine became the main foreign policy issue, even those elements of the radical left got sidelined. Now, the imperial state doesn’t want to elevate any type of left-wing ideology that’s aligned with the Palestinian resistance. When it comes to the left, today’s U.S. empire instead seeks to promote a modern version of labor Zionism, which is what our “progressive” politicians have to offer. The pro-colonial nature of this ideology is apparent within the policy records of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, social democracy’s two main faces in the United States.
Despite their posturing against the Zionist entity’s worst excesses, they’ve both voted to fund the Zionist entity’s Iron Dome missile system, putting them functionally on the side of the occupation. The deeper issue, though, is the fundamentally chauvinistic worldview which guides the way they treat Palestine. From Sanders, the figure who catalyzed the rise of the modern U.S. social democratic movement, we’ve seen a particularly revealing series of statements on the Palestine question.
At a town hall in 2014, when Sanders was being confronted by supporters of the Palestinian resistance, Sanders said: “Hamas is very clear. Their view is that Israel should not have a right to exist.” When this remark provoked cries of “bullshit!” from the crowd, Sanders changed the subject, saying: “the issue of Gaza is not the only issue right now in that region. As some of you may have noticed, there is a group called ISIS. You know what ISIS is?”
Sanders was arguing that the workers needed to side with the empire against a greater enemy. This is an argument that a growing number of the American masses reject, because ever-more workers are getting pushed out of the “middle class” and losing the material incentive to side with such opportunism. Yet our ruling class has managed to make Sandersism into the only type of left-wing politics that’s mainstream. The capitalists have been able to do this because there’s no longer any real left in the United States, and there hasn’t been one for a long time. This is why though I use the “left-wing” terminology for social democracy, it doesn’t truly represent the left. Social democracy is left-wing in the sense that it’s not as far to the right as most other ruling class ideologies, but functionally it’s right-wing.
For this ideology to have gained the role that it now has, the capitalists first needed to gut the U.S. left, like they gutted the unions. Which they could do by taking advantage of the influence they’d already gained over the labor movement, and using this movement’s right-wing elements to alienate the left from the workers.
This process—where the capitalists engineered a reactionary trend within the working class, and then exploited the leftist reactions to this trend—was indispensable towards making our social movements as weakened as they are today. Every idea comes from somewhere, and the ideas that hold cognitive power tend to do so because they’re a response to real events people have experienced. When the members of the anti-Vietnam War movement experienced attacks from the labor aristocracy, manifested within the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, the response from many leftists was to become demoralized about reaching the working class.
None of these developments were organic, though. And this proves the left’s reaction towards them to not be rationally grounded. They were all outcomes of strategic maneuvers by capital. And we must remember this fact in order to avoid becoming demoralized all over again, and believing the U.S. masses are somehow fundamentally incompatible with a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement. We also can’t dismiss the idea of movement-building itself, and conclude that there’s no way an effective or authentic popular struggle could arise again. Just because our social movements have been co-opted, and turned against the workers, doesn’t mean they’re doomed to forever have this role. These are the things that those who’ve orchestrated these events want us to think.
When “Hard Hat” New York City construction workers descended upon a Vietnam protest, and physically assaulted the demonstrators while chanting fascistic “patriot” slogans, this bloody counter-protest had not been spontaneous. It was carefully coordinated by the construction bosses, who gave their employees paid time off for this planned day of political violence. The monopolists, and their collaborators in the lower rungs of the capitalist class, had leveraged the influence which they’d managed to gain over the workers, turning some laborers into actual weapons against the anti-imperialist cause.
Faced with this reality, much if not most of the U.S. left concluded that the workers were not the revolutionary subject. That to succeed, organizers would need to turn exclusively towards groups other than the proletariat. Which has translated into petty-bourgeois radicals reaching out to students, or to members of the criminally oriented “lumpenproletariat,” as a substitute for going into the working class rather than an addition to this. There’s also been a tendency among leftists to prioritize members of the professional managerial class, as the PMC are often among the liberals who orgs like PSL tail after.
Another trend within modern leftism has been to appeal towards people based not upon their roles as workers, but upon their roles as minoritized individuals, with sexual or gender minorities being a prominent part of this target audience. Which has made it so that whatever workers the established left orgs end up reaching, the fact that they’re workers is incidental. And since class has been de-centered, these workers aren’t given a leadership that’s willing to give them serious direction in the proletarian struggle.
The expectation that the workers couldn’t be brought into revolutionary politics became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because so many organizers allowed themselves to become demoralized during that moment, they didn’t sufficiently capture the era’s revolutionary mass energy. The Vietnam War didn’t end because of the protests; it ended because the imperialists couldn’t handle the sustained strength of Vietnam’s freedom fighters. (A crucial factor behind this victory was the international anti-imperialist united front, but within the United States, that front was far weaker than it could have been.)
The Black Panther Party was successfully destroyed, falling apart when its most prominent personalities were taken away. Much of the era’s campus radicalism was diverted towards individualist activities—such as drug culture—to the effect that collective organization didn’t become nearly prominent enough. Over a decade after the Hard Hat Riot, the state of the class struggle had become so bleak that the Settlers argument made sense to many.
The outcome was that the worldview of bourgeois liberal academia had seeped into the common mentality of organizers. As Michael Parenti wrote in 1996, this is a view in which class gets treated as secondary to identity, and those who emphasize class are seen as dismissive of those who face identity-based discrimination:
Many who pretend to be on the Left are so rabidly anti-Marxist as to seize upon any conceivable notion except class power to explain what is happening in the world. They are the Anything-But-Class (ABC) theorists who, while not allied with conservatives on most political issues, do their part in stunting class consciousness.
The “left” ABC theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that? Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most U.S. writers and commentators have yet to discover the subject. While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who dominate intellectual discourse in this country—yet another hallucination they hold in common with conservatives.
This is where petty-bourgeois radicalism gets its analysis: from the institutional voices that consider class to be just another identity, and that treat “Marxism” as something detached from any actual class struggle. Most importantly, they encourage a suspicion towards anybody who centers class, stigmatizing this practice as a betrayal against minoritized people. When an organizing culture is informed by this perspective, it’s easy to rationalize doing things that will isolate you from the masses, or to misjudge the sensibilities of the people; because if the people don’t share the beliefs and mentality of the in-group, then it’s on the people to catch up with you. This is a “Marxism” that’s based not in dialectical analysis, but in a general grievance against society. It’s the attitude that would make Sakai’s antagonistic view towards America’s workers appealing, and it defines how today’s left operates.
Such is the problem of leadership that the pro-Palestine movement faced when October 7 came, and mass mobilization was crucial to stopping another Holocaust. No matter how urgent the situation was, the orgs which were supposed to be guiding the movement couldn’t escape their baggage when it came to the masses. There was a fundamental mismatch between how they related to the masses, and where the masses were at; and this wasn’t even because the people were obstinate about supporting “Israel,” because so many formerly pro-Zionist Americans have given up their old beliefs. With a left that didn’t know how to take advantage of this consciousness shift, the right-wing aspect of the movement sabotage could easily succeed. The second Trump administration could sell itself to many as being a genuinely anti-establishment force, one that was supposedly doing all it could to help the Palestinians.
All of these compounding failures make sense when we know which events produced them. The left could be psyoped because the workers movement was psyoped, and in the absence of strength from either of these elements, a controlled opposition “dissident right” was able to emerge. This was the purpose of the counterinsurgency which our ruling class waged against the “old left” after World War II: to make it so that when the imperial system reached its next crises, there would be no political force with the will or the ability to turn those crises in a revolutionary direction. In the landscape that this scheme created, the imperial state can easily cultivate ideologies which funnel pro-Palestine Americans into supporting opportunism, both of the left-wing and right-wing kinds.
Sakaism would say that this is inevitable, and that Americans are innately inclined to gravitate towards opportunistic political camps; but this outcome couldn’t have happened if not for careful social engineering. Social engineering that started with the proliferation of racist anti-solidarity sentiments among certain elements of the workers, and developed into the class collaborationist “common house” anti-communism. Then it reached its apex when the left and the communist movement, which were supposed to fight the reactionary forces, themselves became co-opted.
The transformation of the American left into a weapon for counterrevolution was a psyop so effective, it successfully held back the re-emergence of any strong revolutionary movement for around five decades. And this psyop could only succeed after American labor became sufficiently captured, letting the ruling class display this co-optation towards leftists and communists as “proof” of the masses being fundamentally reactionary.
That this display became most brazen and effective during the anti-Vietnam War backlash, which was a pivotal moment in the history of our social movements, is no coincidence. Every step of the campaign to dismantle the left was strategic, and like the campaign to gut the unions, it truly started much earlier than the end of World War II. The death of the U.S./Soviet alliance was only when the reactionary forces could start more openly activating their plans, which had already been in motion for generations.
When it came to the mission of capturing the political left, the operation’s original initiators weren’t the labor bureaucrats. Gompers, and the other late 19th century white chauvinist union bosses, were an extension of the right-wing forces that sought to extend the Confederate legacy. The social class they represented was not the same class from which the left emerged. The left, or at least the core part of it, came from the radical intelligentsia, which had played a crucial role in driving the revolts against the feudal order. Whereas the settlerism-aligned segregationists were on the side of the British empire—which sought to keep America tied to the old feudal patterns—these intellectuals were reacting towards that regressive inertia.
They wanted to break society out of its old structures, which at one point put them on the right side of history. They were instrumental in bringing about the bourgeois revolutions, and this made them a positive force during that stage; but the question then became whether they could escape the patterns of bourgeois thinking and behavior. Whether they could progress beyond idealism and individualism, and embrace the dialectical philosophy which would be required for bringing the next phase of revolutionary progress.
Zionism, which the left was supposed to lead a movement against, represents an attempt to bring the old settleristic values into the modern era. And because of how self-evidently anti-human these values are, the left has an easy time arguing against Zionism. The problem comes when the left is tasked with building an actual popular movement; when it’s called to challenge institutional power in a serious way, and bring the broad masses into a sustained mobilization effort. In the form that the left has taken within today’s United States, it’s counterproductive to that mission, keeping our social movements isolated to the petty-bourgeois radical bubble.
Almost two hundred years ago, serious revolutionaries like Marx and Engels were fighting against that era’s equivalents of these ideas. There were already actors within the left who sought to keep leftism bound towards bourgeois idealism, and thereby functionally opposed to further revolutionary gains. And one of the most toxic among these actors was Michael Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who argued against state socialism on the basis that such a system would advance Jewish schemes. Wrote Bakunin: “What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralisation in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail.”
That Bakunin embraced these views doesn’t mean everyone who identifies with anarchism does the same. What it shows is that anarchism, and leftism more broadly, can be made to advance the most reactionary ideas and goals. Anti-Jewish conspiracism comes from a worldview that’s fundamentally idealist; that’s unwilling to investigate what actually shapes history, and instead looks for simple explanations and solutions. It’s this framework of thinking that led Benito Mussolini to go from being a leftist, to building a movement based around counterrevolutionary warfare. From aligning with anarchist values—and enough communist values that he once fell in the same camp as the Bolsheviks—to advancing an ideology which was seemingly anarchism’s opposite.
The reality was that when Mussolini went from an anarchist to a fascist, he didn’t actually change his core beliefs. And neither have the many other former leftists who’ve since followed him into fascism, or who’ve embraced “leftist” reactionary variants like social fascism. There is a pipeline from believing in “anti-capitalism” or “revolution” from an idealist point of view, where somebody seeks to subvert material reality for the sake of “justice;” to embracing anti-social, reactionary belief systems that share such a disregard for historical and present facts.
This is how Murray Bookchin, who many anarchists today take ideological guidance from, could justify preaching Zionism from a supposedly egalitarian perspective. Bookchin painted Zionism as a peaceful and equitable project that was interrupted by Arab aggression, believing that even though certain Zionists are racist, the true Zionism always matched the ideal he had in his mind: “For years I had hoped that Israel or Palestine could have evolved into a Swiss-like confederation of Jews and Arabs, a confederation in which both peoples could live peacefully with each other and develop their cultures creatively and harmoniously. Tragically, this was not to be. The United Nations resolution of 1947, which partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, was followed by the invasion of the country by Arab armies.”
These armies only intervened after the Zionist entity had crossed into the designated Palestinian lands, and the interventions never even went into the lands that were supposed to be for the Jews. Yet this doesn’t matter to the Zionists who use the “Arabs started it” argument; at least not to the ones who don’t change their stance after being exposed to any new information. The idea behind Zionism is to attain an idealized vision of “justice”; one that its loyal adherents stick to, no matter how much evidence there is that it’s not the right solution.
When leftism shares fascism’s infantile view of what justice looks like, there arises such a danger of fascist radicalization among leftists. And anarchism as it’s been historically practiced, especially in the United States, has involved a propagation of that view. This was essentially admitted by the anarchist thinker William Gillis, who in 2022 wrote an essay interrogating the idea that fascism sprung out from anarchism. Gillis was responding to the argument from Stephen B. Whitaker that fascism has “anarchist-individualist” origins. Which is an idea that Gillis of course denies, but he does concede to Whitaker on one important point: the one about how the anarchist movement’s members have tended to adopt essentializing beliefs about the alleged purity of human beings. Gillis talks about how an important part of Whitaker’s reasoning is
that anarchism is centrally defined by the belief that human nature is good. This – as I’ve repeatedly tried to emphasize to contemporary anarchists – was the widespread takeaway for decades after Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (one of the few anarchist texts to survive in influence and circulation in the US after the Palmer raids). It wasn’t just the warped takeaway of liberal critics, but it was also sincerely what much of the rank-and-file movement came to believe over these decades. Watch documentaries of old anarchists that persisted through the 40s and 50s and you hear repeated explicit references to this. Humans are essentially good in our core nature and we’ve lost sight of that and been warped by social institutions. This generation of the movement took very strongly to Wilhelm Reich (silly orgone and all) because he was a prominent figure pushing this same simplistic perspective.
This phenomenon, where so much of the western left came to a fundamentally mistaken perspective about “human nature,” is a crucial part of what made the left fail the pro-Palestine cause. It’s the belief system that’s led the left—not just anarchists, but also many who consider themselves communists—to adopt the strategy of “voluntarism.” Voluntarism being the expectation that if a group of dedicated individuals flock to a radical cause, and take drastic actions, this in itself will bring revolution.
In great part, this practice is a product of the ideas advanced by George Sorel, the French left theorist whose arguments directly contributed to Mussolini’s ideological journey. From Sorel, we can see the same kind of flippant attitude towards violence that characterizes voluntarism. In one telling statement, Sorel asserted that “Revolutionary syndicalism keeps alive the desire to strike in the masses and only prospers when important strikes, accompanied by violence, take place.” Sorelianism doesn’t come from a serious analysis of what political struggle requires; for it to claim that violence must always be used, even when engaging in actions where violence would often backfire, encourages the worst kinds of adventurism. Sorelianism should have been made irrelevant a long time ago, but some of the most influential orgs in today’s social movements operate according to its ideas. And like every other self-defeating feature of the modern left, this problem didn’t come into being by accident.
When the U.S. empire began fully acting upon its anti-communist desires after World War II, it found itself with new advantages in the task of manipulating the left. Now that a full generation had gone by since the Palmer Raids, and the anarchist movement had adopted idealistic beliefs that came from limited access to information, it would be easy to rally much of the left behind the next counterrevolutionary campaigns.
This was what the imperialists did during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, when the contradictions between the communist movement and its left sectarian antagonists got fully revealed. Hungary represented a defining split within the left, where the “socialist” forces which sought to break up the existing workers states found a tangible project to mobilize behind. Murray Boockchin was one of the biggest figures within this movement, having vigorously campaigned to help ensure Hungary would defeat the Soviets. When Hungary failed to throw off communism, Bookchin concluded that projects like this could only succeed by becoming more “libertarian,” and further adopting “democratic” rhetoric. Said Bookchin in 1985:
You can’t translate this republican system into a proletarian dictatorship, if you’re a Marxist, on the one side, or into a syndicalist society, if you’re on the other, especially at a time when the trade unions in America are dying out on just the bread and butter issues. I believe we have to start speaking in the vocabulary of the democratic revolutions. We have to unearth and enlarge their libertarian content. I see no other answer- strategically, tactically, politically, economically to the problems that we face today. We can’t live in the past and simply repeat the traditional slogans of the great workers’ movements that are gone, and will not reappear again, in spite of Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
They’re not products of the enlightenment in the way the socialist and anarchist movements were in the 19th century. The latter came out of the French Revolution and out of the American Revolution. Now we live under the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution. The 20th century is simply living in the darkness of that Bolshevik success which was our greatest failure. It’s given us the cold wars, paralyzed all radical movements. You take sides: one side of the cold war or the other. We have to spring that trap and we have to break out of it.
This is why I say that many anarchists take example from Bookchin, even though self-identified anarchists overwhelmingly hate his Zionism: today’s default anarchist position is to support Bookchin’s color revolution agenda. To stand with whatever protest movements the NGOs foment, simply because these movements take on the aesthetics of authentic revolutions. We saw this when Washington activated its jihadist forces in Syria, and standard anarchist thinking remained uncritically supportive of Syria’s “revolution.” We saw this when so many anarchists cheered on Ukraine’s Euromaidan uprising, where the country’s U.S.-backed Third Reich sympathizers played a crucial role.
Whenever Washington gets its hands into a country’s social movements, it can count on the anarchist movement to stand behind these meddling projects. Because the Bookchinist view, where every uprising is seen as a positive even when it objectively serves imperial destabilization schemes, has won out within these kinds of radical spaces.
This problem within the left is much bigger than the anarchist movement; that anarchism has been de-boosted since October 7 shows it always had a disposable role in the color revolution psyops. The purpose of getting ultra-leftists to back regime change efforts is to strengthen the narrative control of the explicitly pro-capitalist forces, neutralizing any potential opposition towards the imperial worldview. When the CIA turned the National Student Association into a vehicle for U.S. foreign policy, as famously reported by Ramparts, such was the larger goal behind the operation: to make it so that even the “radical” political actors fundamentally shared the goals of the U.S. State Department.
Imperialism-compatible radicals have always been viewed as dispensable by the ruling class, and this will become apparent as more and more leftists get targeted over the issue of Palestine. The ultra-left was never meant to become one of the hegemonic ideological camps; it was just a tool for reinforcing the ideologies which the empire seeks to elevate the most. And the timeline of the CIA’s project to infiltrate student activism was consistent with this reality. According to Ramparts, most of the CIA’s funds to the Association’s international activities had been dispersed since 1950, implying that this effort had started even earlier than then and had truly become substantial during the start of McCarthyism. The CIA hadn’t done this in reaction to the later outbreaks of campus activism; it targeted the student movement practically in tandem with its effort to weaponize the unions.
In this pre-Hard Hat Riot era of left-wing psyops, the focus of the CIA and its left-wing ideological assistants was on making the political left more reformist. There wasn’t yet that post-Vietnam leftist culture of alienation from the workers, so the psyops hadn’t fully won so far; but there was widespread fear of state repression, which the class collaborationists used to promote their agenda. This was what Max Shachtman, former Trotsky associate and advocate of the “Third Camp” position in World War II, did when he pressured the Socialist Party into working with the Democrats.
Up to that point since the war, Shachtman and his supporters had mainly been aiding in the effort to de-radicalize the unions, having used their positions within the UAW to support CIO purges of communists. Then in 1958, when the “Shachtmanites” joined the Socialist Party of America, they made their case for class collaboration using the argument that this strategy would let the SP radicalize Democrats. If the socialists worked within the Democratic Party, the Shachtmanites reasoned, they would be able to push the party left.
It was this rationale for capitulation that would be carried into the 21st century by the Democratic Socialists of America, which is being driven by the former members of Shachtman’s now-dissolved International Socialist Organization. The other modern org that can directly trace its ideological lineage to Shachtman is the Socialist Party USA, which replaced the old SP after it dissolved in 1972. For as marginal as the SPUSA is, the State Department “socialism” that it grew out of has become the dominant left-wing ideology, because it’s the current that’s still being boosted at this stage in the class war. And this elevation of the most reformist left elements could only be so effective after the crippling of all other types of leftism. As well as the co-option of communism, to the point where “Marxism” has become another word that bourgeois academics use for reinforcing liberal hegemony.
The pivotal moment in this ideological takeover came during the same era when the CIA first established itself within student spaces. What the CIA did in those first post-war years was inject the left with critical theories, ones which the bourgeois intelligentsia had formulated as a response to the last generation’s events. These were the narratives that depicted Marxism-Leninism and fascism as both falling under the “totalitarian” umbrella, and that therefore had the effect of depicting social democracy as the only path for those on the left. When Arendt, Adorno, Foucault, Marcuse, and the other intellectual propagators of the “totalitarianism” theory tore down communism, social democracy was the system they were acting to elevate.
There were of course still leftist currents, like anarchism, that opposed state socialism while aspiring towards revolution through different means; but these currents have never been boosted by our ruling class in the way that social democracy has. Moreover, these currents haven’t been able to exact change on a scale anywhere close to that of history’s existing Marxist-Leninist projects, so they weren’t able to sufficiently stand on their own anyhow. It was Marxism-Leninism that posed the most tangible threat towards capitalism, so that was the ideology which the imperial state centrally focused on undermining.
In the post-Vietnam era, when the U.S. communist movement had gotten more thoroughly defeated, the social democratic Shachtmanites gained the most relevance compared to all the country’s other left currents. And soon they would get one of their camp’s candidates into a major office when Sanders became mayor of Burlington in 1981, which preceded his career in the Senate.
The rhetorical tactic that Sanders uses to justify his assistance to the Zionist entity, where he postures as being against the human rights violations while denouncing all real efforts to resist the occupation, was what the Shachtmanites utilized as well. For as much as Shachtman decried the Zionists, when Palestine’s neighbors intervened to combat the ethnic cleansing he capitulated towards the Zionist narrative on this event. The Workers Party, Shachtman’s outfit at the time, proclaimed that “Invading [Israel’s] defenses and threatening their independence came the reactionary onslaught of some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world, the semi-feudal oppressors of the Arab people. This reactionary invasion was launched with but one end in view—precisely to deprive the Israeli people of their right to self-determination.”
This view aligns with the ABC leftism of bourgeois academia, as well as with ultra-leftism in certain contexts. It comes from a twisted view of how to define what is “reactionary” and what is “progressive,” where even the most violently oppressive imperial projects are seen as preferable from a “leftist” perspective.
Part of this narrative’s argument comes from pointing to contradictions within the forces that oppose these projects (whether these contradictions are real or perceived), and concluding that the imperial forces must be in the right by default. The other part involves a dogmatic view of “self-determination,” where as soon as any state sees its borders encroached upon, that state must necessarily deserve to be defended. Which didn’t even apply in the case of 1948, as the Arab armies never passed into the lands the UN had said would be for the Jewish settlers. Moreover, the UN’s plan in itself was a violation of the Palestinian people’s self-determination; the Arab states only intervened when the Zionists broke the officially stated rules of their own colonization project, which was of course already unjust.
When social democrats like Sanders rationalize taking a pro-Zionist stance on the basis that “Israel” experiences attacks, while leaving out the context behind why those attacks happen, they’re drawing from these compatible left narratives about what “justice” and “progress” mean. They’re taking advantage of all the damage that the post-World War II compatible left theorists did, wherein “socialism” got successfully redefined as something thoroughly detached from anti-colonialism or actual class struggle. It was these theorists who, with the CIA’s assistance, maintained labor Zionism’s ideological dominance over the U.S. left even after the Soviet Union had changed its stance on Zionism.
They were instrumental in perpetuating anti-communist beliefs throughout “radical” academia. Which made it so that even many of the young people who became interested in socialism as a concept remained in agreement with the labor bosses on the question of Marxism-Leninism; and, by extension, on the question of Zionism as well. Even prior to the USSR’s anti-Zionist turn in 1967, the global communist movement was a major source of pro-Palestine activity; though the Soviet leadership hadn’t yet come to the right stance, Mao’s China was strongly anti-Zionist, and socialist Korea has always been a major backer of the Palestinian struggle. Had the American left remained tied to communism, it would have taken on a character that was far more anti-Zionist. But the left was separated from the global workers movement, letting our ruling class keep Palestine a marginal part of the USA’s discourse.
Sanders was one of those mid-20th century American youths who got set on the wrong path due to this engineered mis-education. His formative ideological journey consisted of gaining a proto-class consciousness, and then becoming more pro-Zionist and pro-imperialist. It was precisely because Sanders had become a “socialist” that his loyalty towards the Zionist project got strengthened; he described how when he moved to a kibbutz in his young adulthood, he was able to experience the “socialism” that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine had brought into being: “People there were living their democratic values. The kibbutz was owned by the people who lived there, the ‘bosses’ were elected by the workers, and overall decisions for the community were made democratically.” He never brought up the massacres and forced transfers from just a generation earlier that had made way for this inspiring project.
Kibbutzism is social fascism in its purest form, a “socialism” so nakedly supremacist and exclusionary that it perfectly parallels National Socialism. Yet at the present stage, the political actors who promote it are the most prominent “socialist” voices in our discourse. This is in part due to the monopoly over information that the capitalists hold for as long as they remain the ruling class; until the capitalist state is overthrown, it will maintain the advantage in the press, the airwaves, and the algorithms, letting it strong-arm the conversation. The other biggest factor to blame, though, is the refusal on the part of the left to break from petty-bourgeois radicalism. Even when a person or org rejects social fascism, they can act to keep our movements confined to the leftist niche, and separated from the bulk of the workers. This is why I critique the PSL: though PSL absolutely deserves our solidarity as it faces growing attacks from the state, we won’t get anywhere until we combat the compatible leftism which PSL advances.
The types of movement sabotage that I’ve covered in this chapter are of course not the only tactics our rulers use to undermine the people’s power. The construction of our modern policing and surveillance systems, where the state has developed methods for infiltrating, monitoring, and terrorizing political efforts, cannot be overlooked. The state’s violence may ultimately have a bigger role than we’re able to estimate right now, because the only reason why that violence hasn’t yet reached Jakarta levels is due to how weak our movements are in the USA. It won’t be until we’ve really started gaining strength that we’ll see how far the repressive state is willing to go. There is a subjective and an objective limit to how well a popular movement can fight against the state, and we have yet to find out what our objective limit is; to be tested on a maximum level, and experience the full extent of our enemy’s brutality.
The state is a threat that we need to take extremely seriously. Should we in the U.S. respond to this threat like many communists of the McCarthy era did, though, and de-mobilize out of fear, we’ll have betrayed the Palestinians at the time when they need us most. Such a surrender from us would also grievously set back the global class struggle. And the established left orgs pose a danger of bringing about this de-mobilization; not because these orgs themselves aren’t engaged in “mobilizing,” but because the kind of mobilizing that they do consistently fails to create sustained momentum. Which the right opportunists can use to sell the idea that we shouldn’t even be engaged in on-the-ground movement building efforts.
This is the narrative that’s being put forth by the American exceptionalists and JQers who claim to be “anti-Zionist”: supposedly we can resist the genocide not by organizing, but by speaking “truth to power” online. It’s the modern version of an argument that was put forth by the most right-wing members of the Frankfurt School, one of the institutions that the CIA used for propagating anti-communist ideas throughout academia. As professor Gabriel Rockhill has written about how this ideological tendency viewed the student activism of the 1960s, Adorno
agreed with Habermas—who had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the “Nazi philosopher” (his description of Heidegger)—that this activism amounted to “Left fascism.” He defended West Germany as a functioning democracy rather than a “fascist” state, as some of the students argued. At the same time, he quarreled with Marcuse over what he judged to be the latter’s misguided support for the students and the antiwar movement, explicitly claiming that the answer to the question ‘what is to be done?’, for good dialecticians, is nothing at all: “the goal of real praxis would be its own abolition.” He thereby inverted, through dialectical sophistry, one of the central tenets of Marxism, notably the primacy of practice. It is in this context of turning Marx on his head that he repeated, once again, the ideological mantra of the capitalist world: “fascism and communism are the same.” Even though he referred to this slogan as a “petit bourgeois truism,” apparently acknowledging its ideological status, he unabashedly embraced it.
It was this position that won out within the debate, at least for the next couple of generations. When that era’s social movements were largely defeated, and the empire managed to implement neoliberalism without significant organizational pushback, much of the left effectively embraced Habermas and Adorno’s view on political practice. Many radicals gravitated towards Sakaism’s defeatist attitude about organizing the U.S. workers, and many former radicals became right-wingers. This late-20th century dark period for America’s class struggle was the era when Irving Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, and other prominent Trotskyists stopped calling themselves socialists so that they could become neoconservatives. It was also when many within the boomer generation sold out, as the stereotype goes, and went from hippies to Reaganites. When the left had failed, the response from many was to go reactionary. And what remained of the left was therefore able to be captured much more easily by the NGOs, as the left had isolated itself and therefore lacked a frame of reference beyond the circles the NGOs controlled.
There is a path out of this situation, though. There’s always a path out after you experience a revolutionary setback. The present-day right opportunist current which promotes de-mobilization on Palestine can only be effective because the pro-Palestine movement has fallen short on organization. What the established left groups truly do is engage in mobilization, which isn’t the same thing as organization; to organize, you have to build a structure with a sustainable presence inside your community, establishing deep ties with the broad masses.
If we fulfill this mission, we will bring in the many people who’ve gained consciousness on Palestine, but are fatigued over activism in its present form. We’ll thereby create the mass institutional structures that can combat the USA’s truly reactionary elements, which have coalesced around the hardcore Zionist movement. It was because these reactionary elements gained substantial power within the workers movement that the left became discouraged, leaving an opening for the right. And that mid-century reactionary takeover wouldn’t have been so successful if the communists hadn’t capitulated at a crucial moment, and embraced liquidationism. If we stay principled amid the current test, and remain on the revolutionary path, then we’ll be able to overcome the modern liquidationist forces that threaten our movement.
————————————————————————
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.
