By and large, Marxists around the world have supported and continue to support Palestine’s struggle for national liberation, with a notable exception: the left-communists. Perhaps made most infamous by Vladimir Lenin’s searing indictment, ‘Left’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, this socialist denomination has seen something of a reappraisal – if not outright revival – in certain corners of the Internet. Bearing a comfortable distance from more popular permutations of Marxist thought (Stalinism,¹ Trotskyism,² Maoism,³ and so on) makes its perspectives less beholden to the legacy of 20th-century socialism, which many young revolutionaries would rather not associate themselves with, for better or worse. Moreover, left-communism offers a far more romantic vision of socialist politics than many other ideologies, disposing of a concrete analysis for a concrete situation in favor of posing, as its key stance, a true commitment to the mantra “no war but class war,” a phrase they believe invalidates an honest Marxist endorsement of all struggles with a nationalist source.

Taking this ideological perspective to what they view as its logical conclusion, the left-communists extend their ire to all Marxists who support or participate in national liberation struggles, a difference of opinion with the majority of Marxists that they have been given ample opportunity to espouse and elaborate upon amidst the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. An aptly-named article from the Internationalist Communist Tendency, one of the premier left-communist organizations, leaves no room for doubt over their position on the matter: “Neither Israel, Nor Palestine: No War but the Class War.”⁴

Once again, that phrase’s refrain is used in opposition to a popular dichotomy, of which it denounces both ends. In a political atmosphere dominated by stern allegiances to one side or the other across many different conflicts (though perhaps most clearly in Israel vs. Palestine), the left-communist persuasion tries to offer some kind of middle road, a vision in which the workers of Palestine and Israel alike realize that the national bourgeoisie of each country are their true enemies, and redirect their animus accordingly. 

The left-communists of Internationalist Communist Tendency insist that this is the one true solution. “The only answer to the Israel-Palestine question is not a one state, or two state solution, but the destruction of all states, where responsibility for the future of the planet is out of the hands of capitalist profiteers.” Their radical vision of the universal working class has no room for nationalism of any kind, and those on the Left who would dare to align themselves with national interests – even the national interests of countries oppressed by imperialist powers – have given in to a doctrine of reactionary nationalism, thereby having effectively abandoned the worker’s revolutionary movement by refusing to “politically unite across all frontiers.”

If this form of class absolutism truly adheres to the “orientation towards the organization of revolutionaries based on Marxist methodology,”⁵ as the ICT claims, the majority of the Marxists would have to develop an entirely new understanding of nationalism, up to and including a re-evaluation of their support for Palestine. Unless national liberation and proletarian interests can be coupled, fighting for any country could very well be a betrayal of all workers. 

Marx and the National Question

For the left-communists, the Marxist answer to the question of nationalism can be answered in one line from The Communist Manifesto: “The working men have no country.”⁶ From this single sentence, the ICT constructs the basis of its global framework, which organizes the world in its totality as a continuous, uninterrupted war between all workers and all owners. In order for the workers to emerge from this struggle as the victors, they must form an international movement capable of rivaling the power of the capitalists, ignoring all national barriers in order to pursue the interests of their class, just as the capitalists have done in order to pursue the interests of their class.

Although this seems like an accurate, Marxist formulation,  the ways in which left-communists apply it to contemporary issues plainly ignore Marx’s understanding of the abstract “country” to which the quote from The Communist Manifesto refers. In fact, in the very next sentence of the manifesto, Marx contradicts the flawed understanding of nations and nationalism that plagues the ICT and left-communism as a whole. “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” 

National interests and the interests of the worker are, for Marx, not necessarily opposed. Although his initial conception of socialism was, like many other socialists of his era, defined by Eurocentric conceptions and occasionally hostile to non-Western progressive movements,⁷ the development of Marx’s revolutionary theory away from the utopianism of his contemporaries and towards the materialism for which he is far better known provided him with a deeper understanding of anti-colonialist nationalism’s role in the global struggle against capitalism. This understanding was most keenly displayed by his association with the Chartists, whom he referred to as “the politically active portion of the British working class” whose calls for universal suffrage during a period of British history when the ownership of valuable property was a prerequisite for voting rights were “a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent.”⁸ The Chartists’ campaign for the empowerment of British workers extended beyond the bounds of British Isles, with one of the movement’s principal theoreticians (the man attributed with eroding the young Marx’s colonialist bent ), Ernest Jones, frequently writing in support of the oppressed peoples throughout Britain’s various colonies. Both Notes to the People and People’s Paper, Chartism’s primary press organs, published Jones’s scathing critique of European colonialism, identifying the abuses committed against the citizens of Mexico, Haiti, Sri Lanka, and, in particular, India, the primary signifier of Britain’s cruelest injustices.⁹

These insights into the true nature of colonialism had obvious effects on the young Karl Marx. While many other contemporary progressive thinkers continued to cling to the notion of the British empire as a benevolent spirit of democracy and civilization that granted dignity to the most impoverished corners of the Earth, Marx came to view the overseers of the empire as agents acting to further capital’s international power at all costs, noting that the “historic pages of their rule…report hardly anything beyond…destruction.”¹⁰ Only a proletarian revolution in Britain itself or a national revolt undertaken by the colonized peoples en masse could, according to Marx, deliver the exploited subjects of the British empire from the “inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization.”

Although Marx was explicitly writing about India in these excerpts, the opposition to colonialism and support for anti-colonial nationalist movements abroad that he developed due to his involvement in Chartism was an essential aspect of his thought for the rest of his life. The reductionary nature of capitalist nationalism he wrote about in The Communist Manifesto, cited by left-communists as an indictment of all struggles with a national character, was merely a specific form of nationalism that Marx opposed. The “bourgeois sense” of the nation that Marx mentions in the above quote is an understanding of countries that rejects historical materialism in favor of mysticism and idealism, defining countries in terms of their “national character” instead of their actual economic and political characteristics.

Anti-colonial nationalism, on the other hand, oftentimes relies on materialist thought, including theorization on how the nation’s economic conditions contributes to its current status and continued exploitation. Naturally, such an understanding has generally led for anti-colonialism to coincide with generalized impulses for proletarian liberation. This historical trend was noticed by Marx in countries like China, Ireland, Algeria, and Egypt, all of which he supported when their people rose up against foreign interference and outright domination (the very same process now underway in Palestine).¹¹ Even if the mass movements in question were not explicitly socialist, Marx nevertheless viewed them as important chapters in the war against capitalism’s global expansion. After all, no working class can consolidate its class power and transform it into political power in a country besieged by foreign capitalists from all angles, with Palestine being yet another addition to the growing list of such countries. So long as the Israeli working class, aided and abetted by the United States, continues its colonization of Palestine, it is impossible for the Palestinian proletariat to achieve the “supremacy” Marx speaks of in his quote from The Communist Manifesto. Cooperation between a proletariat that exists in a country founded on the oppression of another country’s proletariat would be, in the words of socialist revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani when speaking of similar cooperation between Zionists and Palestinians, “a conversation between the sword and the neck.”¹²

Left-communists, despite their insistence on encouraging this anti-nationalist cooperation, at the very least aspire to develop a materialist understanding of nationalism, just as anti-colonialist nationalists tend to do. However, the over-simplistic assertion of the left-communists that every non-socialist country is an extension of capitalism and, therefore, can be used to divide the workers of the world into disparate, antagonistic factions is guilty of a non-materialist fault in analysis: the claim that nationalism, even in oppressed nations, is inherently and eternally reactionary.

The Imperial Element

However, as is understood amongst Marxists (left-communists included), Marx was writing at the beginning of capitalism’s transformation into a truly global economic system. The age of imperialism, the contemporary era, had not yet begun. While the anti-colonial nationalism that he supported arose in countries that were not yet capitalist, this is not so for Palestine. If Marx’s support for national liberation relied on a belief that such efforts prevented capitalism from establishing global hegemony, can it truly be said that support for national liberation is just as valid in the modern day, even though capitalism has already established said hegemony? 

Many on the Left answer in the affirmative, guided by an understanding that anti-colonialism, even if not opposed to capitalism as a whole, remains anti-imperialist, and thereby weakens the international power of the bourgeoisie while, at the same time, safeguarding the right of nations to self-determination which the vast majority of Marxists have historically championed. Left-communists, on the other hand, insist that all national struggles, even those of oppressed countries like Palestine, always end up at the service of the world’s imperialist interests. Even if Palestinian statehood is opposed by the largest imperialist force in the world, the United States, left-communists believe that upholding the formation of a Palestinian state merely serves the imperial ambitions of countries like Iran and China. 

Their claim necessarily implies that Iran and China are imperialist, a matter of complexity and consequence that has been hotly debated by socialists for quite a long time.¹³ Even if it could be comfortably stated that they were both imperialist countries, however, it would not make Palestinian statehood imperialist by default. Palestine’s national liberation struggle predates the support Iran and China now offers it on the world stage.¹⁴ Needless to say, if China, Iran, or any other country were to support Palestinian resistance only to one day collaborate with the bourgeoisie of Palestine against the workers, Marxists would have a duty to oppose them in this counter-revolutionary endeavor. Yet those who refuse solidarity with Palestinian nationalism under an assumption that this kind of exploitation may one day come to pass belays a concern with potential oppression that is greater than their concern for current oppression. To view this struggle as nothing more than an imperialist ploy by the United States’ adversaries would, once again, be an act of over-simplification on the part of the left-communists, not to mention an expression of not-so-subtle chauvinism. Can the left-communists truly claim to support human liberation if they deem those who fight against their extermination to be reckless pawns that are irresponsible enough to direct their country from one imperialist maw to another? 

  Even though the concerns of the left-communists over the possibility of Palestine’s continued subjugation  after achieving statehood are valid concerns for any nation newly-emergent onto the landscape of foreign capital, their choice to express these concerns by shouting down the pro-Palestine, anti-imperialist Left renders them anti-anti-imperialist, a double-negation that leaves them in ostensibly the same boat as the self-proclaimed anti-anti-fascists. Although, certainly, the disdain for imperialism most left-communists feel is genuine, directing it with equal harshness and venom at the possible imperialists of tomorrow and the actual imperialists of today makes the merely theoretical appear just as threatening as the events of the real world, an almost paranoid political disposition that does neither the left-communists nor the anti-imperialist movement as a whole any favors.

Most importantly, though, it harms the cause of the Palestinian people themselves. The ICT aspires to support the Palestinian working class without supporting Palestinian statehood, another impossible prospect they nevertheless hope to bring about. They firmly endorse the Palestinian proletariat and encourage them to rise up and overthrow the Palestinian bourgeoisie, and they critique this bourgeoisie as they would critique the ruling class of any other state, an approach that obviously neglects the fact that Paestine is, in fact, not currently a state. In other words, left-communists oppose Palestine’s ascension to statehood and, simultaneously, denounce the Palestinian bourgeoisie as the ruling class of Palestine. 

This is blatantly nonsensical. How can a Palestine that does not yet have a state still have a ruling class composed of the Palestinian bourgeoisie? How is the Palestinian working class supposed to successfully institute a workers’ state while having statehood denied to them? Why would the Palestinian workers ever choose to prioritize acting against their own, largely-ineffectual bourgeoisie while the foreign, Israeli bourgeoisie is the class currently oppressing them? The left-communists are not interested in answering this question with any rationale besides repeating the importance of class conflict beyond all other forms of liberation, a tired argument that denies historical detail in favor of faux-Marxist idealism, a tendency that could be said to unfortunately, represent much of left-communist ideology. 

Beyond Theory

Given that Marxism sprang up as an effort to combat unscientific, utopian socialism of the period,¹⁵ left-communists seek to defend and preserve the insights they gain from their reading of Marx as utter truths, a guide to liberation from which those involved in Palestine’s national liberation have strayed, at their own peril. 

Aside from representing a lapse into the aforementioned error of idealism that is deliberately ignorant of the real world, this view betrays a component of left-communist thinking that is often repeated in many sectors of the Western Left: arrogance. The suffering and deaths of innocents in Gaza and beyond, month after month, year after year, is more hardship than essentially any leftist fortunate enough to be born and raised in a developed country has had to endure. Yet many of these leftists, left-communists or otherwise, still feel a sense of expertise sufficient for them to justify their critique of the means and/or aims of various Palestinian political agents. Left-communists especially, whose vision of working-class collaboration beyond national lines borders on utopian, seem perfectly-content to encourage the Palestinian proletariat to align themselves with the Israeli proletariat, even though the latter only came into existence and only continues to exist based on the suffering of the former.¹⁶

This is a national relationship that few members of the Western Left have ever had to endure, yet some still feel qualified to dismiss it, despite how essential it is in the experience of the working class of Palestine. A French worker has rarely experienced a German worker directly benefiting from their exploitation, nor has an American worker felt so about a Canadian worker, nor an Australian about a New Zealander, and so on. Arguments for international collaboration between these workers are both logical and plausible.

But to say that the same relationship is true of the Palestinian worker and the Israeli worker is inaccurate, at best. Israel’s working class only exists because of the campaign of colonization enacted against Palestine. Without this attrition, there would be no Israel, and, therefore, no Israeli proletariat. A successful decolonization effort on behalf of Palestine will not and cannot come through Palestine forming a united class front with the same people who are actively contributing to their colonization. Proposing such a united front as the only viable solution for the Israel-Palestine quagmire, as the left-communists do, disregards the lived experience of Palestinians who have watched both their homes and families be destroyed to the sound of resounding cheers from the Israeli workers that materially benefit from the continuation of such destruction. Attempting to further justify the necessity of such an unlikely unity by drawing on revolutionary theoreticians that were writing about different situations in distinct historical periods represents an interest in “ideological purity” at the expense of human lives. 

This is not to say that Marxists must divorce revolutionaries of the past on matters of national liberation, far from it. In fact, it is the left-communists who prefer to overlook inconvenient messages of socialist theory that support these causes, such as the aforementioned quote from Marx, the sentiment of which is expounded upon by Rosa Luxemburg in Chapter 2 of The National Question.

 The national policy of the proletariat, therefore, basically clashes with the bourgeois policy to the extent that in its essence it is only defensive, never offensive; it depends on the harmony of interests of all nationalities, not on conquest and subjugation of one by another. The conscious proletariat of every country needs for its proper development peaceful existence and cultural development of its own nationality, but by no means does it need the dominance of its nationality over others. Therefore, considering the matter from this point of view, the “nation”-state, as an apparatus of the domination and conquest of foreign nationalities, while it is indispensable for the bourgeoisie, has no meaning for the class interests of the proletariat.¹⁷

The rejection of national liberation is an aim the left-communists incorporate into their vision of worldwide struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, claiming that all national interests are bourgeois in nature. Luxemburg, in addition to Marxists before and after her, oppose such a broad condemnation. Socialist theory has a wide breadth of explanations for why national liberation struggles occur that places them firmly in the global anti-capitalist struggle.¹⁸ As much as left-communists would like to view such conflicts as mere diversions from world socialist revolution, the march of history has shown this to simply not be the case. 

So long as capitalism remains, the world will remain sequestered into various nations, and ignoring the role that struggles within and between individual nations plays in the international proletarian movement due to a strict (and often incorrect) interpretation of Marxist theory undermines the value of praxis, implementing theory into the world through direct action as a guide, while still recognizing where the world diverges from the precepts of that guide and adjusting the theories accordingly. 

Marxism is a science, but science is not a series of static truths. It morphs, changes, and evolves after rounds of testing, falsification, and correction. By asserting that wars of national liberation have nothing to do with Marxism, the left-communists unnecessarily limit the socialist project to an ideological cult that follows a set of sacred doctrines to the letter, with no room for adjustment. Revolution can never be accomplished through such stubborn means. The world is a diverse arena; trying to impose Marxism upon it from above is contrary to Marx and nature alike.

Besides, the history of socialist thought, stripped of the contributions made by those who successfully married revolutionary theory with lives of action taken towards national liberation would leave Marxism far scarcer and weaker.¹⁹ Experience, though unquantifiable, is a device of infinite importance. Shirking the importance of national struggle in revolutionary movements is a privilege afforded only to revolutionaries without such experience, who reap the rewards of life in the imperial core, a status many left-communists seem to either unknowingly enjoy or intentionally ignore.

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1. Michael Fox, “Ante Ciliga, Trotskii, and State Capitalism: Theory, Tactics, and Re-evaluation during the Purge Era, 1935- 1939,” Slavic Review 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991): pp. 127-143.
2. Ibid.
3. Internationalist Communist Tendency, “Capitalism under the Red Banner: Seventy Years of the People’s Republic of China Communist,” Communist Review 8 (January 1990).
4. Internationalist Communist Tendency, “Neither Israel, Nor Palestine: No War but the Class War,” Leftcom.org, May 22, 2021, https://libcom.org/article/neither-israel-nor-palestine-no-war-class-war.
5. Internationalist Communist Tendency, “ICT Platform,” 2020, https://www.leftcom.org/en/node/36775.
6. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, February 21, 1848.
7. Gilbert Achcar, “Socialism and Colonialism,” Historicalmaterialism.org, June 13, 2023, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/socialism-and-colonialism/.
8. Karl Marx, “The Chartist Movement,” The Labour Monthly, 11 (December 1929): 726.
9. Thierry Drapeau, “The Roots of Karl Marx’s Anti-Colonialism,” Jacobin.com, April 1, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/01/karl-marx-anti-colonialism-ernest-jones.
10. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” July 22, 1853, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm.
11. Jack Woddis, “Marx and National Liberation,” Marxism Today (June, 1965): 166-172.
12. The Listening Post, “Ghassan Kanfani and the Era of Revolutionary Palestinian Media,” Al Jazeera.com, July 19, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2020/7/19/ghassan-kanafani-and-the-era-of-revolutionary-palestinian-media.
13. Minqi Li, “China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July-August 2021), https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/; Navid Shomali, “Iran’s theocratic government is not anti-imperialist,” Peoplesworld.org, April 15, 2024, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/irans-theocratic-government-is-not-anti-imperialist/.
14. Nasreen Abd Elal, “100 Years of Palestinian Popular Resistance,” The Nation, May 15, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestinian-resistance-nakba-100-years/
15. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880.
16. Daphna Thier, “What’s the matter with the Israeli working class?,” International Socialist Review 110 (September 2021), https://isreview.org/issue/110/whats-matter-israeli-working-class/index.html.
17. Rosa Luxemburg, The National Question, 1909, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question/index.htm.
18. Woddis, “Lenin on the National Liberation Struggle,” Marxism Today (April, 1970): 104-113.
19. Sara Salem, “‘Stretching’ Marx in the Postcolonial World,” Historical Materialism 24, no. 4 (2019): 3-28.