Rejecting "community" and centering Palestine
Organizations in Occupied Turtle Island organizing under the label of Palestine solidarity take various tactics and ideological positions. A great portion of these efforts are negative, representing leftist organization-building and guilt-soothing for populations who benefit from imperialism.(1)
Still, there is much to be appreciated in Palestine solidarity organizing. The fact that as a class, U.$. workers are wedded to imperialism as a labor aristocracy(2), does not mean that select individuals and segments of the same class, such as youth, immigrants and members of oppressed nations, don’t have a righteous impulse to rebel against genocide.(3) Further, drawing the line between practicing manufactured discontent to gain social capital (for example, peaceful, permitted and policed “solidarity” marches, or gathering social media clout) versus genuine rebellion (involving significant self-sacrifice) can be a difficult strategic question and a complicated moral matter. It’s the job of communists to answer these questions, drawing those who can be allied in a united front under the leadership of the global proletariat.
In the United $tates, only small percentages of the country ever will protest for progressive causes, and usually only a few thousand people are liable to turn up at anti-imperialist protests, if we’re lucky. But even this small size of protest crowds can be confusing. We see large events put on in the name of helping Palestine and, ignoring the lack of ideological unity required for such crowds, perceive that there is a strong movement against genocide here. To move how? Against which genocide? You’ll find that the larger the event, the less likely it is for such questions to be answered.
Let’s examine one specific way this numbers game is lost among the U.$. left. A very common protest narrative goes something like this: X city/institution is partnering with Israel. That partnership uses funds which could otherwise be spent “on our community” (healthcare, jobs, public resources). Therefore, we must divest from Israel and invest back into “our community”. The messaging behind agitational work tells the organizers, audience and onlookers at protests the purpose and goals of the work: they represent the ideology pushing our practice forwards. Here, this oft-repeated messaging about divestment explains that everyone should join the cause to reclaim what is theirs from an immoral misappropriation.
This narrative about redirecting resources away from genocide and towards “community” can be found in endless settler-left slogans such as “build more schools, not bombs!” or “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!” All such ideas revolve around the mythos of the Amerikan “community”: a fictitious multi-national concept in which, abstracted from the violence at the base of the Amerikan colony and the national conflicts therein, we can imagine harmonious and communal ways of life involving sharing our resources. This imagination goes back to the root of settler consciousness in Occupied Turtle Island which imagines a “Thanksgiving” where the colonists shared food with the First Nations rather than poisoning, raping and murdering them by the millions.
An almost identical narrative is wielded by referencing the “tax dollars” spent on Palestine-solidarity campaigns’ targets, begging Amerikans to rise up against a supposed misuse of money which is otherwise rightfully owed to them. This relies on the same conceptual basis as a “community.” If we believe this narrative then absent specific policy mistakes (such as funding Israel) there would exist the basis for peaceful redistribution of the spoils of genocide and imperialism, and this would be a righteous redistribution. At the base of these common yet mistaken ideas are 1) a genuine impulse towards fascism by U.$. citizens who wish to become even more wealthy compared to the Third World, and 2) ignorance regarding the source of global wealth disparity to begin with.
We cannot resolve #1, the fascist impulse among a majority here, without overturning imperialism and settler-colonialism entirely. To address #2 however, we can study how “communities” in Occupied Turtle Island are literally built and sustained off of genocide, slavery and imperialism, especially regarding the “average jo.” There are two main groups in the United $tates: the settlers and the oppressed nations. Euro-Amerikan settlers have been a consistently reactionary group for the past five centuries as their life here is founded on slavery and land theft.(4) They are the numeric majority of the U.$. population and have consistently subjected the First Nations, New Afrika and the Chican@ nation with oppressive, genocidal campaigns.(5)
These oppressed nations on the other hand vacillate between progressive and regressive tendencies depending on proximity to the spoils of imperialism. Independence movements among oppressed nations represent a progressive impulse wishing to sever connections with U.$. imperialism, whereas participation in DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) initiatives, reforming political parties and redistributing wealth to the oppressed nations represent an integrationist trend which serves to either enlarge the (petty-)bourgeoisie of these nations at the expense of their oppressed masses or incorporate swaths of the nation into the capitalist-imperialist world system.(6) Overall there are substantial parts of oppressed nations here who still face genocide while other portions steadily receive a bit more of the imperial pie.
To the extent that anyone here enjoys it, the First World lifestyle includes housing, food, medicine, transportation and extensive leisure-time bought from the blood of indigenous peoples and manipulation of global labor prices which under-pay workers in the Third World and deprives them of basic necessities.(7) An over-accumulation of profits in the United $tates has led to excess money supply and higher domestic wages: the surplus available to create a complacent consumer base beyond the settlers alone.(8) This is why wages here are approximately 10x normal wages in Palestine. Thus while some U.$. workers suffer under national oppression, they are almost all economic oppressors of the Third World.(9)
So if we convince the majority here that they are actually impoverished through imperialism, or would be enriched through its end, we are misrepresenting the facts and tarnishing the cause of Palestinian liberation. When imperialism inevitably falls, internationalist forces in the imperial core will probably be encircled by fascism: citizens here attempting to cling to lifestyles and social roles which can no longer exist, led by whichever elements of the bourgeoisie can rally them around new extractive outlets to replace old imperialism. The faster we can pull away from self-interested economic thinking here, the faster we will eventually construct socialism. The more here who search for their own best interest through the fall of imperialism, the longer such a task will take.
United front work in the imperial core on behalf of the global proletariat will involve grappling deeply with the labor aristocracy and the settler nation. We must investigate this majority’s interests as they unfold in street protests, unions, universities and even prisons. We shouldn’t reject them wholesale: we should condemn their economic gluttony while simultaneously uniting those who will commit to fighting on the behalf of the international proletariat. We must educate each and every Amerikan who will listen about how their wealth comes from genocide and how their lives will change when imperialism finally falls.
Having rejected the fantasy of an abstract, multi-national Amerikan “community,” we could instead support the many progressive causes belonging to the oppressed nations here who have suffered under genocide like Palestine. But such campaigns must be specific in their slogans and selection of organizing base, as well as how to relate to those with varying proximity to imperialism. Connecting progressive campaigns such as those against police brutality, which predominantly affects oppressed nations, to Palestinian sovereignty is a righteous cause. Trying to connect Palestine to the reactionary dissatisfaction of everyday Amerikan workers, especially settlers, is a recipe for fascism and genocide.
Notes:
1. A
Million Tiny Fleas “The Anti-War Movement that Wasn’t” Substack, Jun 13
2023.
2. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb
2012, pg. 9.
3. The
Dawnland Group, “A Polemic against Settler Maoism”, MIM (Prisons)
website, June 2024.
4. Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the
White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb.
5.
Maoist
Internationalist Ministry of Prisons, “Proletarian Feminist
Revolutionary Nationalism” June 2017, pgs 96 – 108.
6. Labor
unions from oppressed nations integrating with settler and imperialist
labor unions is an important historic evidence of this trend. See:
Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from
mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb, pgs 152 – 174.
7. Jason
Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, Intan Suwandi,
“Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global
South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015,” Global Environmental Change,
Volume 73, 2022.
8. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class”
Kersplebedeb 2012, pg 200.
9. Undocumented migrants, prisoners,
homeless people, and the chronically unemployed lumpenproletariat are
generally not economic oppressors.
