Daniel Lazare seems to be more interested in defending the ideal of internationalism than in defending the Palestinians in a life or death struggle. He warns that Cosmonaut’s “policy” is leading to disaster, but he makes not a single recommendation as to what workers and socialists in the West should actually do. For a Marxist, slogans are only one side of revolutionary politics, and far from the most important side. As soon as we descend from our high-minded principles and article-writing to the real world, we are confronted with the impotence of mere sloganeering. There are already more than enough sectarian grouplets buzzing along the edges of the protest movement with pamphlets proclaiming “Internationalism!” For those to whom “internationalism” is more than an empty word, our tasks as socialists are very simple: support the Palestinian movement for national liberation, join in the mass actions against the genocide in our own countries, and fight for the labor movement here to take this issue up.
Workers around the world are calling for an end to this genocide. Dock workers in Italy and in Barcelona and Belgian logistics workers are stopping all military cargo to Israel. Longshore workers in the US have shut down all West Coast shipments from Israeli shipment company Zim. Indian trade unions are opposing the attempts to replace Gazan workers with a hundred thousand low-wage Indian workers. In the US, a significant layer of labor activists has managed to push their unions to take up the defense of the Palestinians, and public opinion in the unions has evidently moved far enough to the left that the union bureaucracies feel the need to respond to the pressure. The demand that these unionists have rallied around is BDS — pushing beyond mealy-mouthed statements deploring violence from all sides to actual material opposition to the war.
Union locals around the US are passing BDS resolutions over the opposition of the trade union bureaucracies. In the UAW, a layer of perhaps a hundred or so activist workers, including a number of Palestinian and Arab workers, has been fighting for the union to support BDS, and has succeeded in passing resolutions at several locals. The International Executive Board avoided any mention of Palestine as long as it could, but finally, on December 1, responded to internal pressure by endorsing a ceasefire. Significantly, the UAWD reform caucus also recently passed a BDS resolution, including plans for a BDS education campaign in the union.
These are small steps forward, but if the unions can be pushed to substantively oppose the Zionist military machine in any way, or even to verbally challenge the Zionism that dominates the AFL-CIO, that means something. Workers’ solidarity to stop the genocide — that is what internationalism means in practice in this situation. Marxists orient themselves to the mass movement as it is, not to abstract moral principles detached from the class struggle.
So one big consequence of the Gaza crisis is that it has caused some movement in labor. On the other hand, there is a mass protest movement, which is being led primarily by Palestinian groups. Now, these groups, of course, are oriented to national liberation — they are not Marxist — but nevertheless they have formed close ties with activists in the labor movement and that in turn has created a material link between worker organizations and the national liberation movement, i.e. an actual basis for international solidarity, not in the pages of a magazine but in the real world.
Lazare focuses on Hamas in order to stake out an independent class position (or that is what he thinks he’s doing), but I believe this is misguided. No, Hamas is not the masses — the masses directly take the stage of international politics only in revolutionary upheavals; in normal times, the class struggle is refracted through organizations. Hamas is only one moment of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It owes its central role today to the failure of the Israeli left to oppose colonialism — to the racism of the Histadrut, the exclusion of Palestinian labor from Israeli production, the integration of the Israeli working class into the apartheid system, and the destruction of Palestinian socialist organizations by the Israeli state — more fundamentally, to the still-vast strength of world imperialism. In these conditions, the anti-colonial struggle naturally takes a nationalist form. Since Lazare recognizes that Hamas is not the masses, he should also recognize that the actions of Hamas do not invalidate the Palestinian struggle for liberation. And if he wants to condemn Hamas, he will have to also condemn the Palestinian communists in the PFLP, which also has a long history of violent struggle and today (paying no mind to the Lazarean conception of “internationalism”) fights alongside Hamas.
If Christopher Carp will permit me a quotation, it is instructive to recall the position of revolutionary Marxism in an earlier stage of anti-colonial struggles. Marx, addressing the Indian Rebellion of 1857, writes:
The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable — such as one is prepared to meet – only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion…
However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.
Today, we can say clearly that the conduct of Hamas on October 7, however infamous, is only the reflex of Israel’s own conduct in Palestine, that torture has formed an organic institution of the Israeli state, and that the atrocities of October 7 were ultimately brought about by Israel itself. And we must unequivocally take the side of the liberation struggle, even as we point to the future possibility of a joint struggle of the international working class against capitalism and imperialism more broadly.
Nationalism is the ideology of our epoch. There is a powerful material basis for it, and so it dominates both the left and right and will continue to do so until capitalism nears its end. Here, revolutionaries face a contradiction: If we, as Marxists, allow ourselves to be completely subordinated to left-nationalism, we will have abandoned our principles and our ability to play any independent role, but if we confine ourselves to slogans and abstractions about internationalism, we will be abstaining from the real struggle. The only resolution to this contradiction is revolutionary practice — we have to fight for a Marxist position within the mass movement.
I should say, in closing, that I find the response to Lazare by Rob Ashlar to be really unserious. Ashlar starts off with a full paragraph of hysteria, calling Lazare “white supremacist scum,” “no better than Joseph Goebbels,” etc, then immediately throws around some Stalinist language about “social-fascism.” We should be clear: Lazare’s position here is that of a social chauvinist, not a fascist, and certainly not an “ultra-leftist.” Next, Ashlar treats us to a long string of oversimplifications: he makes an amalgam of geopolitics, equating the wars in Ukraine and Palestine as both essentially being anti-imperialist struggles; he puts forward a puerile domino theory of anti-imperialism; he trivializes the violence of October 7 in revolting terms as “a delightful twist of fate”; he calls anti-imperialist struggles “democratic” (an essentially meaningless and disorienting label); he claims Israel is on the brink of military defeat, which belies the fact that Israeli and US imperialism are far from being a spent force; most importantly, he endorses nationalism as the hegemonic form of anti-imperialism, and celebrates the Islamist resistance as the future liberator of the Middle East. I will not attempt here to refute each of these positions, but only to stake out a different one: Ashlar should remember that Islamist nationalism has come to dominate the anti-imperialist struggle in the region only due to a long period of reaction. This is only a conjunctural situation, and a future proletarian revolution will be compelled to break out of the shackles of both imperialism and bourgeois nationalism. Our first responsibility today is to the defense of the Palestinians, but let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved into left nationalism. If Ashlar wants to call that position “left-wing” communism, I’ll happily accept the label.
-Peter Ross
