D2. Socialism

The situation on the military front is grim. Despite certain tactical achievements, high hopes for the counter-offensive were not fulfilled. Instead, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, has openly acknowledged a stalemate. The national polls indicate emerging exhaustion. The global community is losing interest, aid packages are stalled, truck haulage is blocked. Winter is here, and so are Russian missile strikes at the energy infrastructure.

It is not better politically, either. Ukraine’s Left, which looks more like a constellation of NGOs, activist groups, and local union leaders than a coherent movement, is effectively sidelined and marginalized. The mainstream opinion corridor resembles a weird mix of linguistic chauvinism and unrestrained neoliberalism. Rally ‘round the flag’ effect decreases but still holds: the president, the army, and volunteers enjoy the highest level of trust. The predominant majority of the Ukrainian population don’t want elections citing their costs, limitations of the martial law, the lack of safety, and the inability of a significant share of Ukrainians to vote.

Who or what to fight for then?

It would be naive, of course, to demand unreserved solidarity from the international Left. There is so much injustice in the world, and standing with Ukraine does not always look that appealing. After all, one doesn’t have to dig deep to find their public officials instrumentalizing fear and steering hatred or corporate lobbyists dreaming of destroying everything social. Likewise, it is easy to point to the aspiring neo-feudals eager to keep the borders shut so their serfs won’t escape or the middle-class xenophobes calling for the disenfranchisement of residents of the occupied territories. In some truly Orwellian fashion, president Zelenskyi himself unequivocally backed the occupying power of Israel, as if forgetting how his own country is suffering from pseudo-historic claims by its neighbor.

Ukraine’s Left … is effectively sidelined and marginalized. The mainstream opinion corridor resembles a weird mix of linguistic chauvinism and unrestrained neoliberalism.

Needless to say, no solidarity is expected with such figures. But keep in mind that many contrasting fates are entangled today. The Left ought to act for the working people! The farmers from Kherson who till the mine-laden soil. The train drivers from Kyiv who deliver vital supplies on run-down trains. The underpaid nurses from Lviv who attend to the sick and the wounded. The Russian-speaking miners from Kryvyi Rih who fight to protect their hometown. The construction workers from Mykolaiv who clear dangerous rubble to build anew, but struggle to feed their families. Support them, the invisible majority, whose voice is rarely heard but who have nowhere else to go. The establishment, on the contrary, should be watched as closely as possible.

How to support?

Numerous initiatives have already taken root, each being an example of what is possible. International advocacy efforts of European Network in Solidarity with Ukraine, resolute backing by the Nordic Green Left, united voice of the Danish trade unions, speaking tours of the Ukrainian labor leaders, capacity building for Sotsialnyi Rukh, syndicalist organizing of Ukrainian workers in Stockholm. The scope of potential action is vast, but some points come up consistently in the discussions.

Raise your voice on how your tax money is spent!

Ukraine’s dependence on external support is hardly a secret. Nobody wants their taxes to end up in somebody’s bank account in Switzerland rather than serve those in need. Then, it is only logical to pressure to include  social clauses in aid conditions and public procurement or point to unfair practices where they exist. Aid for reconstruction should go hand in hand with green jobs, living wage, union oversight, contractor’s liability, protected employment, and a healthy and safe working environment!

Call for debt relief!

Ukraine’s external debt exceeds $93 billion. Over the years, borrowing was an easy way out for governments to avoid challenging the status quo and meddling with oligarchs. Most recent loans already have stricter requirements aiming at counteracting state capture, and things are changing. But the amount of debt hanging over is already used as a pretext for justifying austerity. Moreover, it reproduces dependency, where rebuilding is funded by new loans. What is earned is spent on repayment instead. One could question how fair it is for the people of the devastated land to pay for the ruling class’s faulty policy decisions at all. Yet even more important is to remember the main lesson from the success of the Marshall Plan: war-torn countries need grants, not loans.

Do not ignore the problems with democracy and human rights!

When the invasion started, citizens of all social backgrounds lined up in front of the recruitment centers. Almost two years later, it is no longer the case. The primary tool for military recruitment is mobilization with all its troubles. But for people to risk their lives, they must be sure that it is fair and that they or their families will be cared for if something unfortunate happens. They must be offered the stakes in defining the country’s future. But why would the government care if there is an easy way out? Under the pretext of the defense duty, en-mass round-ups on the streets or public transport will continue to proliferate unless you pay attention.

The Ukrainian military conducted operations in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Photo credit: Ukraine Ministry of Defense.

The same goes for solving a demographic challenge after the war or reintegrating Donbas and Crimea. Not closed borders, not ramped-up propaganda, but decent wages, affordable housing, and social security could convince people to stay or return. Not arrogant moralizing, trustworthiness tests, or re-education camps but mutual respect, recognition of human dignity, and shared responsibility for rebuilding could enable reconciliation.

Support the unions!

They are the only established mass organizations that exist specifically for wage earners. Even if they are not the most militant but overly bureaucratic and helpless or even only semi-alive, there is nothing else. Institutional recognition of unions’ special role in postwar development could revitalize them and incentivize a union drive. It would also establish a credible agent to battle corruption and social dumping. Obviously, some trade unions will be immediately taken over by opportunists. But this is also the reason to account for internal democracy and autonomy of their local chapters or the space for independent union activity.

Agree to disagree!

Some things Ukrainians believe in may seem wrong or irrational to you. You could be correct, but the very same concepts might have different meanings. In modern history, Ukraine only had periods of peace. Its right to exist is openly questioned. Ukrainians have long been disappointed in their rulers and often lack leverage over them other than rising up once in a while. Then, there is no wonder a greater trust in international involvement exists. Choose your battles and focus on what we have in common!

Build connections: person to person, city to city, association to association!

The people’s movements worldwide have accumulated enormous political experience you can share. Traditional Left narratives are discredited in Ukrainian society because of their misuse. So, the people you connect with may not be politically educated, but this is where praxis matters more—extending your hand to fight together with a small-town mayor who cares about his citizens, a local union leader who is frustrated by indifference and powerlessness, or a recent immigrant who was cheated out of wage. Engaging those already here will be particularly relevant for years and can make a difference. Whether they stay or return, they will be equipped with this new experience.

No doubt, the Left should do more than just send arms, but it is a bare minimum not to oppose. The right to defend yourself is meaningless without the means to fight.

There may be nothing revolutionary in such simple points. The calculation, however, is that many small steps can lead to incremental change by creating necessary conditions and carving out space for the progressive agenda. But to facilitate this, the Left needs credibility and trustworthiness, which would be virtually impossible for those who undermine weapons supply.

No doubt, the Left should do more than just send arms, but it is a bare minimum not to oppose. The right to defend yourself is meaningless without the means to fight. Refusing weapons provision is threatening Ukraine’s survival as a country. Remember that the availability of arms is not the same as their use. Even if the war ends at the negotiating table, having weapons won’t leave Ukraine at Russia’s mercy, neither will Ukraine be helpless if Putin decides to violate the truce.

Fighting until victory? Stalemate

For the situation as it is, there are no prerequisites for a quick resolution. The Russian army does not fully control any of the regions it has occupied, except for Crimea. Yet all of them are now mentioned in the Russian Constitution as an inalienable part of Russia. Ukraine is equally bound by its Constitution. Stepping back and bending down risks provoking serious internal troubles only the right-wing would benefit from. Then, if no force can prevail, a risk exists of sliding into a prolonged, low-intensity conflict. It basically means even more destruction and less hope for the eventual revival. The best discussion to have in this case would be about securing civilian lives, integrating refugees, and lowering consequences for the world by, for example, setting UN demilitarised zones at the nuclear power plants.

Russia’s defeat

The best guarantee of future peace is a democratic Russia. While Russian imperialism is undoubtedly weaker than its rivals, challenging the U.S. hegemony neither makes it more progressive per se nor a lesser evil for those who live next door. Even before Russia’s turn to expansionism, life in Ukraine was marked by their constant interference in the political and economic life, their fight for cultural domination, and their projection of military power, including through having military bases in Crimea.

The hope has always been that forcing Russia to withdraw would catalyze a change within. This is why Ukraine keeps fighting. But it has costs. Foremost, the undeclared but horrific numbers of the dead and injured. The question is how much longer Ukrainian society can afford such sacrifice and what the consequences will be. In this struggle, support is a matter of raising the costs for Russia, so it folds earlier, and lowering them for Ukraine, so it survives. That’s why both the Ukrainian and Russian Left have been calling for stricter sanctions, a full stop to oil and gas imports, and timely provision of modern weaponry.

Truce

The sides might decide to probe a possible armistice. But we have to bear in mind that Ukraine is a smaller and weaker state, devastated by this war and experiencing serious demographic issues. The greatest fear about a ceasefire is to end up forgotten and alone. Then, nothing would stop Russia from launching another attack whenever they are better prepared. To have the slightest prospect to withstand, Ukraine would have to turn into a military camp and yet still live in a state of permanent insecurity. Precisely this is the most significant factor of the overwhelming support for NATO membership, as a deterrence, as a guarantee of peace. The only possible alternative would be a binding deal of similar effect. More than ever, your credible voice and support would be necessary to navigate this.

Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst

In the end, solidarity with Ukraine doesn’t have to be a sign of virtue. It is a rational response. If the legitimacy of the “spheres of influence” is recognized, what choice would smaller states have other than joining one of the blocks? If nuclear powers can dictate their will, who would ever choose disarmament then? If the dependency on fossil fuels allows emboldened autocrats to blackmail the world, what is left of democracy? If Ukraine falls, what would prevent criminal employers and mafia networks in your country from taking advantage of millions of traumatized and dispossessed people?

Ultimately, if the worst thing happens, it will be yet another nail in the coffin of global peace, contributing to the growing instability. In the new world of competing smaller imperialisms, marking the decay of the U.S. empire, we will have to prepare for the darker times and lay the conditions for the eventual revival. The least we can do then is maintain links and not see each other as enemies, even if we end up in the competing camps. Let’s follow Joe Hill’s advice and not waste any time mourning. Let’s organize!

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Ashley Smith: Hi, everyone, I just wanted to welcome you to this panel “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime.” My name is Ashley Smith. I’m a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network, which is the sponsor of this program.

Before we get into the panel, I just wanted to highlight the series that Haymarket Books is running on Palestine and read what they’ve described as the urgency of this educational process during the mobilization against the genocide that Israel is carrying out in Palestine.

Haymarket writes,

Today we are confronting a watershed moment in the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. As an internationalist left around the world, we must take a decisive stance in support of Palestinian liberation. Haymarket Books and partners are organizing an urgent series of online events to provide education in the context of current events. At Haymarket, Palestine has always been at the core of our political and intellectual project, and we believe free and accessible political education is crucial to solidarity efforts.

The situation is dire. As media outlets spread lies and misinformation, politicians and journalists are paving the way for Israel to carry out mass genocide in Gaza. In the West Bank, settlers are armed and carrying out pogroms. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom,, and across the global north are putting in place chilling measures to crack down on solidarity with Palestine. The Israeli state is killing thousands Palestinians with impunity, and Palestinians everywhere are being silenced. We are entering a new era of struggle for Palestine, and until Palestine is free, none of us is free. Join us for a series of urgent conversations about the history, politics, and stakes of Palestinian liberation.

In this context, the Ukraine Solidarity Network is proud to sponsor this panel. Israel has launched a genocidal war against Palestine at the very same time Russia continues its imperialist attempt to annex Ukraine. This panel will challenge the selective solidarity that haunts the Left and argue for solidarity between Palestine and Ukraine’s struggle for liberation and self-determination.

I’ll introduce our fantastic panelists in the order in which they’ll give their opening remarks. First, we have Dana El-Kurd, who is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. Daria Saburova is a PhD candidate at Paris Nanterre University, and is a member of the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine. Ramah Kudaimi is a Syrian American and has an MA in conflict resolution from Georgetown University. And Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian left-wing activist and author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God. With that, Dana has introductory comments.

Dana El-Kurd:I’d like to begin first by laying out what the scope of this attack has been. As of a few hours ago when I checked these numbers, the assault on Gaza had killed over 9,000 people, over 3500 children. More than half of all homes in the entire Gaza strip have been destroyed or damaged. These numbers do not include the 1400 killed in the October 7th attack as well as the 200 or so taken hostage.

There’s plenty of evidence at this point that Israel has engaged in war crimes: the use of white phosphorus bombs, indiscriminate bombing, and the targeting of hospitals, schools, bakeries. What we’re seeing is an unprecedented level of destruction and death in the Gaza strip. But it’s not the first. This is the seventh major assault, I believe, since 2008. And, so, we have to consider what that means, that this has been a pattern of behavior that’s escalating.

I just want to make a few quick points. It’s important for people to recognize that what’s happening in Palestine has global ramifications, and I don’t mean it can cause regional war or conflict, even though that’s also the case. First, we’ve seen the war’s  impact on protests and immediate unrest across the region in particular, so there were protests in Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Iman, Qatar, Iraq, Yemen, all over the region. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of mobilization. Some part of that is going to be directed at the authoritarian regimes, but some part of that is also going to be seized on by authoritarian actors, so this is a dangerous kind of situation that we’re facing. Another reason that it has global ramifications is because this kind of festering violence erodes essentially any safeguards, however imperfect, we have to constrain states and human security.

A student of mine made the joke that this is like a Geneva suggestion rather than a Geneva Convention. And I think it is a very valid point. I think it shows that international institutions that were created and intended for collective security have failed to accomplish such safeguards. The selective application of those safeguards is a serious problem. It has taught all the wrong lessons to authoritarian factions. We’ve seen Russia invade Ukraine and hold sham elections in certain parts. And I think this is the pattern that we’re facing as a result of this kind of behavior on the global stage.

I just want to end on one point. Palestinians and Syrians are the political proletariat of the world. Without sovereignty, even at this point without the right to subsistence, we are faced with authoritarian control and ability to take away basic human dignity and expel people. It’s spreading as a mode of behavior. So, I’m thankful to Haymarket for bringing us together, so we can continue to have these conversations about how to strategize our way out of this and exert pressure on decision-makers or articulate a different vision of world security.

Daria Saburova: I would like in this very short introduction that I have to talk about why actually we put forward these equivalents, these analogies between Ukraine and Palestine, which I also did in a recent article that I wrote, why Ukrainians should support Palestinians.

I just want to say to begin with that I don’t think there’s actually a requirement for my situation to be equivalent to yours for me to be in solidarity with you. We are seeing across the whole world demonstrations for Palestine. Precisely for the countries that are not experiencing occupation and war right now, where there are no restrictions on demonstrations, it is much easier to organize solidarity with Palestine than it is the case in Ukraine, obviously. So, I don’t think there’s a need for equivalence for solidarity.

Then the second point is that I do agree with some people who refuse to make those analogies, to make those equivalences, for scientific reasons. I do not think that from a scientific historical point of view there’s any sense in comparing Palestine and Ukraine. This is absolutely not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about a political and strategic analogy. So, what we are looking at is occupation, imperialist aggression, and settler colonialism. Of course, the scale is not the same, but in Ukraine also from 2014 there have been Russian citizens, hundreds of Russian citizens, moving to Crimea. And this tendency is going to continue in the occupied territories, and this demographic strategy is very conscious on the Russian side to prevent Ukraine from ever bringing those territories back to Ukraine. There’s also, as Dana said, in both cases, indiscriminate bombing and genocidal actions with absolutely no regard for humanitarian law. So, these things we find in both cases.

We are talking about a political and strategic analogy [between Palestine and Ukraine] … [W]hat we are looking at is occupation, imperialist aggression, and settler colonialism.

There’s also just the simple experience of people who experience occupation, people who experience displacement, people who experience bombings.

So why do we need to put forward these analogies politically and strategically? First of all, because the U.S. and even the Ukrainian government have been comparing Ukraine to Israel. Actually, the opposite analogy doesn’t come from our side. It comes from their side. So, we need to counter that analogy that they are making between an oppressed state, occupied state, and an occupier state.

The second reason is because this analogy can point out double standards on multiple sides. Obviously, there is a double standard among Western governments who help us to struggle against imperial aggression in Ukraine but who back Israeli colonial violence. This can also help us to address the Ukrainian government’s double standards, but it can also finally help to address the double standards among those on the pro-Palestinian Left, for example, who support the Palestinian resistance, but who are very anti-Ukrainian, and vice versa. Some people on the Left support Ukraine but do not support the Palestinian resistance. I think this is a very important point for us to make.

To finish this brief introduction, I would like to say that precisely today, there is a collective Ukrainian Palestinian solidarity collective that published a letter already signed by more than 120 Ukrainian researchers, artists, and activists in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, our website has been attacked because of publishing this letter; at the moment it is not available. But we will try to put it back online as soon as possible.

I’ll read some passages from it to finish.

We Ukrainian researchers, artists, political labor activists stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected and resisted Israeli military occupation separation, settler colonial violence, and apartheid. We write this letter as people to people. Dominant discourse at governmental level and solidarity groups that support the struggles of Ukrainians and Palestinians often have solidarity with everyone who is opposed, oppressed, and struggling for freedom.

The letter also states that Palestinians have the right to self-determination and resistance against Israeli occupation, just like Ukrainians have the right to resist Russian invasion.

Ramah Kudaimi:My family is from Syria, so I spent a lot of time organizing for Palestine in the United States. It’s very important in this moment–with everything going on, the fissures we’re kind of seeing as different hypocrisies are becoming clear–to reflect both on how we as a movement have not been able to get where we want in terms of ending wars and occupation. We also need to reflect on what we need to do to end these terrible tragedies and move forward in terms of building the kind of world we want to see that is free of racism and where everyone is liberated.

We’re seeing these hypocrisies on the Left. We have the people who celebrated Assad for many years on the argument that Assad was leading a resistance, and that is why he needed to shut down and destroy the revolution in Syria in order to continue to be the one who is in charge of protecting the Palestinian cause. [Yet Assad’s] nowhere to be found; he’s currently found bombing Syrians. So that’s one hypocrisy, and the other is the Western liberal hypocrisy, which lets the leftist folks come into our movements and say, see, we were right about all this. Guess what, they have been right. They were right in terms of saying no one would ever show up for Palestine like they did in Ukraine, and we have to grapple with what that means in terms of being able to push back on these claims of these folks.

I want to focus on the specifics of the U.S. What we’re seeing, again, in terms of liberal democracy, the Democrats, Republicans, too, is the racism that’s been out front, the Islamophobia, and the really shameless way that the White House has been dealing with this. Last night they announced a national strategy to counter Islamophobia while they are actively stroking it every single day. When Biden puts out false claims and propaganda about what happened on October 7 and when he questions the death toll of Palestinians. This is not Trump in the White House, you know–this is Biden.

So, we need to be very clear that this is a moment of drawing lines. We need to  figure out our role in the U.S. I think we’re seeing a resurgence of the “war on terror” framework, which never went away, even though people declared the war on terror over many times in the last several years. The idea of well, Israel has a right to defend itself, Hamas is a terrorist group. We know what terrorism means; it only applies to Muslim people. No matter how they expand the definition, what they mean is Muslims, especially in the last two decades. It is so important to push back on that.

And then there’s the widespread repression we have seen. I feel that every Palestinian, Arab, Black, Brown, Muslim person thinks so much about everything they type and everything, every word we say while Zionists are openly making calls for genocide. They are not going to lose their jobs or tenure; they are not going to get doxxed. We have so-called civil rights organizations like the Anti Defamation League showcasing how what we have failed to get rid of is now coming back to haunt us once again.

People are being fired, hotels are canceling major conferences of organizations, the list goes on and on and on. It’s very hard to organize in this moment. This is why it’s very important that everyone who is able to speak up in solidarity with the Palestinian people. It doesn’t have to be that difficult. Think about the ways you already are plugged into progressive causes and how you can connect Palestine to those. Especially now, the sad fact is that we have to push so hard for a humanitarian demand for a cease-fire. Finally we have a senator this morning who said it, Dick Durbin. Shockingly it’s Dick Durbin and not Bernie Sanders. Again, there are questions of where we are in our left spaces, and how the cease-fire now demand needs to push us toward ending U.S. military funding, because we know Palestinian liberation cannot happen as long as the U.S. is pushing the funding and weapons to it. If Syrians under bombardment in Idlib are coming out in solidarity with Palestinians, if folks in Ukraine are able to do so while under occupation, no one in the U.S. has an excuse to not take action.

Joseph Daher:The need for international solidarity is proven day by day. It’s important to know while we’re all looking at the genocidal war of the Israeli occupation army on the Palestinians, authoritarian regimes are taking this opportunity to increase bombardments in the last month. For example, in the Syrian attack on Idlib, more than 60 people have been murdered by the Assad regime. The  Russian regime is bombing, as well as that of Turkey, which further bombed the northeast, benefiting from this opportunity. These forces are profiting from the immunity given to Israel to further their attacks on civilians whether in Idlib or in the northeast.

I think it is important to say that our destinies are linked wherever we are, from Ukraine, from Syria, to Lebanon, to Palestine. And it’s a crucial movement, I believe. More than ever, the right of oppressed people to resist has to be defended. This is especially the case when we look at the Palestinians, because since October 7, Western powers from the U.S. to  the EU have continuously condemned Palestinians and refused even a basic cease-fire after more than 9,000 people are dead, including more than 4,000 children. They are still saying Israel has the right to defend itself, as if history started on the 7th of October.

History started even prior to the first catastrophe and now we’re witnessing the second catastrophe for the Palestinians, even though it also always has been a continuous process since 1948 of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. This is not something new we’re witnessing, unfortunately. The scale of it is much deeper, the violence is much deeper, but it’s not new.

Our destinies are linked wherever we are, from Ukraine, from Syria, to Lebanon, to Palestine. And it’s a crucial movement, I believe. More than ever, the right of oppressed people to resist has to be defended.

This comes as no surprise for people who always have stood among the oppressed. Colonialism has a long history, whether it is  U.S. history as an imperial state, the history of other imperialist states in the region, including Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They always deny the right of resistance of the oppressed, defining those struggling against colonialism, occupation, and authoritarian structures, as terrorists who must absolutely be crushed. This has been the case in Nigeria as well.

We can remember the African National Congress, the Irish Republican Army, the PLO, prior to the agreement. Liberals love to talk about Mandela. They don’t look at the actual history of Mandela, the terrorist who was not only ignored, but also condemned by most of the Western states and liberals who condemned the use of violence. The point is, it’s not the oppressed that decides the way they resist, but it’s the occupier, the colonizers and their infrastructure that imposes the violence and creates the context of violence for the oppressed. In this light, we can also speak about the Kurds’ struggle and the PKK, the struggle of the Armenians, et cetera. The list is so long. We shouldn’t be surprised by the defense on the part of Western states of the Israeli apartheid, racist, and colonial state.

The Gaza Strip, historically has been a very important place for resistance. It has always been a really deep problem for the Israeli occupation.

From this perspective, it’s really important to refuse the mainstream West’s condemnation of the Palestinians. This is something I think we should really be clear about. Supporters of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, emancipation, we have to reiterate that despite the attacks, despite being accused of being terrorists, that the oppressed have the right to oppose an apartheid colonial regime and authoritarian structure.

This  obviously does not mean that–and I believe myself to be a revolutionary humanist–we cannot be critical of political parties such as Hamas or any kind of Palestinian political parties, or that we accept any action, military action, or attacks on civilians. Every death of a civilian, except maybe Netanyahu, is a tragedy.

More generally, the violence used by the oppressor to maintain the structures of domination and subjugation should never be compared or put on a similar level as the violence of the oppressed.

But the scale of the violence must be understood in historical context. And the first to blame for every civilian that is dead today is the Israeli state. They created the current situation and the scale of violence. We have to be clear that the issue does not originate with Hamas.

After the 2001 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was trying to characterize Hamas as Al Qaeda. Today there’s a similar attempt. But the problem is not the etiology [origins, development] of Hamas. Because the marchers have killed — these marchers have returned were pacifists. Come from all kinds of various etiologies.

At the same time, when there’s an attack on the Palestinian cause in the West, it’s an attack on the democratic rights of all progressive actors, of democratic parties and organizations. The attacks on the BDS have to be seen as an attack on any attempt to resist not only Israel but our own states. This is very important.

The way the Palestinian cause has been attacked in Britain has been a way to destroy what was the left wing of the labor party. Today you have at the head of the labor party someone who is justifying the genocidal war on the Palestinians.

More generally, the violence used by the oppressor to maintain the structures of domination and subjugation should never be compared or put on a similar level as the violence of the oppressed.

And this is something basic, I believe. The resistance of the Palestinians have resulted in new demonstrations in neighboring countries and in the region, not only condemning Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but also the authoritarianism of their own states and their ties with Israel, whether direct or indirect.

In this context, we must reiterate our support of the Palestinians to resist, to live, and to exist.

The most important task for the people outside of the region, like us today, is to win progressive unions, progressive rules, to support the campaign of BDS, and to demand a cease-fire straight now. No security in this region, and I mean security in a social justice way, not like in a geopolitical perspective, can be achieved without the realization of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian, which means the end of occupation, colonization, and the right to return.

We cannot have complete freedom without the freedom of the Palestinians and all the oppressed.

AS: Thank you so much, Joseph, and thanks to everybody for those opening comments. I think they set the scene and the issues very clearly and dramatically.

I want  to start with a question that delves a little bit deeper into what Daria was speaking about, which is the equivalences that have been played out in a geopolitical framework. The Biden administration and other governments, including that of Zelensky’s in Ukraine, have drawn an equivalence between Ukraine and Israel. What’s wrong with that, and what has been its impact geopolitically and domestically in each of the concerned states? Isn’t the parallel better between Ukraine and Palestine? (And that doesn’t mean equating the two countries, but suggesting that they are in a similar position of resisting occupation.)

RK:

Obviously, Israel is not Ukraine in this situation. Israel is the occupying force. So, if they want to make the parallels, it is with Russia that the parallel is appropriate. That comparison is difficult for the Biden administration, because of the demand for weapons. Biden  wants to send weapons to both Ukraine and Israel. I think the plan is to send $14 billion in weapons to Israel. And he knows that Republicans are not interested in more weapons to Ukraine, but they are fine with weapons to Israel. Tying weapons for Israel to weapons for Ukraine is a way of getting his agenda to pass in Congress.

The deal with Israel also includes more funding for building the wall, something Biden promised he would not do. There is a continuing failure of the Biden administration to abide by its promises. Most sickening is the abandonment of humanitarian aid to Gaza. At some point, there was language about helping to relocate people in Gaza to a neighboring country. But we know, it’s very open, that the plan here is to complete the genocide of Palestinians by pushing the remaining Palestinians off their land. An important reminder:  Seventy percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees who literally live miles away from their homes that they were kicked out of in 1948.

So that’s the practical level. The other is the ideological level. Again, they want us to just think October 7 was the start of this history. Oh, a state got attacked, just like Russia attacked Ukraine a year and a half ago, and obviously longer before that even. And also here, Hamas attacked Israel. So, just like Ukraine has a right to defend itself, Israel has a right to defend itself. They want to pretend that the rest of the history doesn’t matter; it’s not important.

They are looking for the sound bites. Sometimes, the sound bites are ridiculous, which is why they are losing a lot of the rhetorical war. This is why they are desperate. Every couple of hours someone in the [Biden] administration puts out a ridiculous tweet about how we care about Muslims, we care about Palestinians, we’re against antisemitism and Islamophobia. Like a fifth grade understanding of these things, whoever is tweeting them.

The claim, made by Putin and Biden, that Hamas is ISIS is absolutely ridiculous. It’s very important to push back on the analogy between Israel and Ukraine. It is ridiculous how Europe is reacting to Ukrainian refugees versus how they were acting to Syrian refugees. It is ridiculous that the U.S. is opening its arms to Ukrainian refugees, versus how it treats folks at its own border with Mexico.

Ukrainians deserve support. How do we advocate for that support while demanding that the West react with the same support to others? It is a hard case to make at this moment.

AS:Thanks, Ramah. I wanted to ask you, Dana, to come in on the same question about the Biden administration’s drawing this equivalence between Ukraine and Israel. What’s the problem with that equivalence, and isn’t the parallel better between Ukraine and Palestine?

DEK:It’s very clear: Ukraine isn’t occupying anyone else’s land. Palestinians aren’t some outside group, certainly not an invading imperialist power. They are a present national group in a place that has two national groups because of a historic injustice.

I think the crux of the conflict is different, as well. It’s framed this way to emphasize the supposed dichotomy of the West versus East, civilized versus not civilized. It’s not valid. The letter by the solidarity group points out clearly that Western support to Israel confirms, and I’m quoting here, an unjust order and demonstrates double standards in relation to international law. It’s absolutely a hypocrisy that erodes the natural solidarities that can emerge between people involved in both of these issues.

AS: Thanks, Dana. Daria, I’m sure you want to get in on this, because you touched on it in your opening remarks, but go ahead.

DS:I just want to add that there is this question of arms. And there’s a very good article that came out yesterday on Open Democracy. Ukraine is worried that Israel’s attack in Palestine will bump them down in the U.S. agenda. American diplomats are also kind of pointing out this analogy, because they want to get arms in the same package as Israel. They are very afraid of losing military support from the West and from the West turning completely its support to Israel’s colonial aggression on Palestine.

So there’s this pragmatic consideration behind the Ukrainian government’s actions. There’s also, as Dana said, this very obnoxious discourse pitting European white people versus some barbarian axis of evil. This is a discourse that also is being pushed forward in the media in Ukraine. But we also have to know that what we are reading in the media is not fully and actually representative–even the majority–of the Ukrainian population, the Ukrainian working classes. I have done research this year in Ukraine. I spent three months in Ukraine doing interviews with working-class people. And this is absolutely not the discourse that the working class people are defending.

There are much better parallels between Ukraine and Palestine. I even think that despite historical differences, we can still point out that the aggression against Palestine today actually has to be considered in the context of a 75-year history; similarly, the aggression against Ukraine has to be considered in the context of a very, very long history.

Although it would be absolutely incorrect to say that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was a colony of Russia or Moscow,  there were elements of national oppression of Ukrainians, including during Soviet times. And there were episodes that can be characterized as having a genocidal character, as the great famine of the 1930s killed several millions of Ukrainians.

So we are talking about the histories of two oppressed peoples, very different histories, but histories of two oppressed peoples. I think this is where our analysis and our solidarity have to come from. We need to avoid a counterproductive and dangerous geopolitical discourse that considers struggles for emancipation as a football match where we support one team, but we don’t support another team. That’s not how it works. I think Joseph made a very good point about how all of these wars affect and diminish emancipation struggles all over the world. In spite of all these polemics going on, we have to try to unite these struggles.

AS:Thanks, Daria. Joseph, do you want to come in with any comments on this?

JD: To continue what Daria was saying, what is really important is to orient on struggles from below and solidarity from below. The main problem has been, for sections of the Left, especially talking about campism, to see the world through geopolitical rivalries. We should choose a side. We should choose the lesser evil, instead of the bigger evil. When you look at Russian bombs or U.S. bombs or Israeli bombs or Syrian bombs, I don’t think there’s any difference in the end. People suffer from it, they suffer from military tyrannism. This does not mean we do not take into consideration in our analysis that the U.S. is still the most important imperialist power in the world. Obviously not.

But we don’t distinguish between oppressed classes. And this is a political compass that needs to be brought back as the main principle for a Left that believed that change from below is possible, as we witnessed at the beginning of 2011 in the revolutionary processes of the Middle East and North Africa. Radical change from below is possible. It is obviously very difficult, as we’ve seen over the past decade, especially as authoritarian regimes learn methods of oppression from each other. They learn how to combat struggles from below. What we need is to learn from each other’s experience and struggles and to know that the defeat for our camp, the camp from below, is a defeat of all. The most important thing now is the demand for a cease-fire.

We cannot deny that one of the challenges for the Left, for example, in the Middle East and North Africa, is to build an independent, progressive camp. It must be independent from Western states, Israel, and authoritarian regimes on one side, allied with the West. It must also be independent on the other side, as well, of what, bluntly, is an axis that is not our ally. We must remain independent of states and movements that repress their populations, for example Hezbollah in Lebanon. Remember the role that it played during the Lebanese uprising in 2019. Even with regard to Hamas, we said we defend the right of resistance, but this does not mean we support the political parties today leading these kinds of forces.

This will be one of the main challenges for the Left. If we continue to have sections of the Left that only concentrate on choosing one culprit over the other, this is the road to defeat and suffering for the popular classes of the whole region. We have to be very careful.

AS:Thanks, Joseph. You just raised the question of cease-fire, which is, obviously, the main immediate demand that is being raised about stopping the genocidal war in Gaza. And it raises the question of cease-fire comparatively in the two cases.

In the midst of both these wars, one by Russia against Ukraine and, the other by Israel against the Palestine people, the question of cease-fire has come up. In the case of Gaza, almost everyone with any kind of principles supports the call for the immediate cease-fire of Israel’s war, along with other demands like ending the siege, ending the occupation, and ending apartheid.

In the case of Ukraine, though, those who support its struggle do not support the calls for the cease-fire that we’ve seen, especially in the western countries. What do you think of this contrast? How should we think about the cease-fire demand in concrete rather than abstract terms?

DEK:We’ve been talking about similarities and shared solidarities and the fact that these are national groups in both cases that are struggling to survive against the state actor that denies their right to exist. But there are also, obviously, differences not only in the crux and the nature of the conflict, but also in terms of the types of violence and capabilities and what kinds of conflicts emerge from those types of violence.

With Ukraine and Russia, these are two countries engaged essentially in conventional warfare. Ukraine has an army, whereas in Israel and Gaza, it is a matter of  one country pummeling a stateless population with some militant groups that engage in irregular warfare. And I’m grateful to Joseph for articulating the condition that leads to Palestinian resistance, which is the dynamic and unsustainable status quo while still not justifying any use of sadistic violence or anything like that.

This description that I’m offering here is using political science concepts to describe types of capabilities and types of conflict that emerge from that.

So, given that’s the case, the violence and the escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine cannot be resolved by repelling a foreign force; it can’t be repelled through a military option. A cease-fire means reducing the human cost and accepting that there is no military option to resolving the underlying drivers or crux of this conflict.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for someone who has principles around justice and the survival of these national groups that are under attack to say cease-fire in one case and not to support cease-fire in the other.

On the other hand, a cease-fire in the Ukrainian and Russian case means ceding ground to Russia and beginning negotiations at a point where they are creating new realities on the ground as starting points for negotiation. And that’s why I think it’s perfectly reasonable for someone who has principles around justice and the survival of these national groups that are under attack to say cease-fire in one case and not to support cease-fire in the other.

AS:Daria, do you want to come in on this?

DS:Dana explained it very well from let’s say the objective point of view in terms of differences in capabilities in conventional warfare. But another starting point is what people are asking for. Ukrainians clearly did not ask for a cease-fire when the war started. What they asked for was arms.

We also have to look at the slogans accompanying the slogan for cease-fire in both cases. In the case of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the demand for a cease-fire is accompanied by a demand to end the of occupation. In the case of leftist demonstrations for a cease-fire in Ukraine, they were accompanied by demands of seizing military aid to Ukraine.

From this point of view, we also have to remember which side we are demonstrating from. For Palestine, we go out to demonstrations, because we demonstrate in the countries that support Israeli colonial genocidal war on Palestine. These are the countries that we can act upon. These are the countries that we address our demands to. When we go out in those same countries to ask for a cease-fire and to seize the military aid to Ukraine, we go out in the countries that support the oppressed side. If we were in Iran or Russia, we could have gone out on the streets to ask for a cease-fire,to ask for Russia to stop bombing Ukraine, but it is not for us to make those demands on the side that is resisting the occupation. This is where the difference also comes from.

AS:Thanks, Daria. Ramah, do you want to come in on this and then Joseph, and then I think Dana wanted a couple sentences. Go ahead, Ramah.

RK:I think just to reiterate Daria’s point about who’s making the call and whom we are saying we’re in solidarity with. I think in the context of the U.S. anti-war movement these last ten or fifteen years, the Left  saw its role as just to make sure the U.S. isn’t “doing harm.” There was an argument, “We don’t care what people on the ground are calling for.” That’s why the Left acted the way it did in Syria. That’s why it acted the way it did in Ukraine.

I think what’s powerful about Palestine,  due to there being many, many Palestinians in the U.S., in the diaspora, is that the Left has been able to shift very significantly in the last ten or fifteen years to being in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people have asked for BDS, you do BDS. The Palestinian people asked for an end to military funding, you do that. It’s not perfect. We still have to answer the argument that a cease-fire is not enough. Some people ask why we are even calling for a cease-fire at this moment. The question is, whose calls do you follow? Anti-war folks in the U.S. that think they know better than folks in Ukraine, or Ukrainians? We should take the example that has been set in terms of solidarity with Palestinian people and apply it to all of these other struggles, as well.

AS:Thanks, Ramah. Joseph, you want to come in?

JD:I would add that the calls for a cease-fire have also been associated with important calls by the Palestinian trade unions with regard to arms collaboration or arms trade with Israel. We saw a couple of trade unions successfully stopping arms production and protesters attacking arms manufacturers doing deals with Israel. These are important examples of international solidarity that I think have to be put forward. In these struggles from below, we have common interests. It does not mean that we are living in the same conditions, but we have to build struggles from below that can challenge the collaboration between western states and Israel.

Regarding Ukraine, it is problematic for the Left to call for a cease-fire as if both sides were equal in an inter-imperialist war. From that perspective, you would be calling on Ukrainians to ask their government–not only ask, but struggle against their own government–to lose the war. This is the problem with seeing the issue as one only of inter-imperialist war.

It is problematic to argue for a cease-fire as if both sides are equal, or as is these were only inter-imperialist wars. As leftists, we think that Ukrainians should struggle against their own government in order to lose the war. Inter-imperialist war is a key issue, but the point is to support people who are oppressed. Our analysis should not be based primarily and solely on what the U.S. interpretation of the cause.

In these struggles from below, we have common interests. It does not mean that we are living in the same conditions, but we have to build struggles from below that can challenge the collaboration between western states and Israel.

This was a problem in the Syrian refugee process. People were attacking the process because of the actions of certain western states. No, our struggle goes to people who are oppressed, and tomorrow the ability for Ukrainians to win this war will allow for the working class to organize, raise their voice, in a Ukraine that is not occupied by Russia. This is basic. So, when taking into consideration the calls for cease-fire, we need to get past the geopolitical perspective that ignores the people fighting for their liberation and emancipation.

AS:Thanks, Joseph. Dana, you wanted to add something to this discussion, so you can go ahead.

DEK:I wanted to  mention the concept of peace and the term “peace.” When there are peace protests for a cease-fire in the German capital demanding the cease-fire in Russia or Ukraine, they hijack the term “peace.” What they mean by peace is not a liberal peace. What they mean is a peace through authoritarian force through the maintenance of violence, through creating and systematizing violence and not fighting against it. I just wanted to make that point, that when we see the “peace camp,” we call it out.

AS:Thanks, Dana. I wanted to turn to a question about the history of Ukraine’s relationship to Palestine, because in your article, Daria, you really made some important points about the history of actual solidarity between Ukraine and Palestine. I wanted to give you a chance to draw that out. What formal political position has Ukraine’s government taken in the past in U.N. votes or diplomacy, and how has that shifted in the recent case? Because it seems quite different from what Zelensky did in expressing solidarity with Israel. It seems upside down and backwards,  maybe for programmatic reasons on his part, but I think as you pointed out, not really in keeping with the history. What has  the relationship historically been in the U.N. and diplomacy towards Palestine, and what are the differences between the official leaderships of the two nations and the broader populations in terms of attitudes towards each national population struggle? So, Daria, why don’t you kick that off?

DS:To be clear, I don’t defend the Ukrainian government, the government that came to power in 2014. I just want to point out the history of its statements to show that, even for the Ukrainian government, the parallels between Ukraine and Palestine have not been completely ignored.

In order to be consistent with their own claims on occupied Crimea, they actually supported the Palestinian cause in the U.N. during these last ten years, and there has been a lot of tension around these questions precisely in the U.N. between Israel and Ukraine.

In 2014, Israel did not support a resolution that condemned the Russian annexation of Crimea. Two years later, Ukraine supported a resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. And even now during this last year, Ukraine voted on several resolutions that condemned the Israeli nuclear program and Israeli colonization. They voted 79 percent against Israel, and the rest abstained. So, they never voted for Israel. And this was also the case with the last U.N. resolution on cease-fire.

What we are saying in our letter is, if I may read,

We reject the Ukrainian government statements that express unconditional support for Israeli military actions and consider the calls to avoid civilian casualties by Ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs belated and insufficient. This position is a retreat from the support of Palestinian rights and condemnation of the Israeli occupation, which Ukraine has followed for decades, including voting in the U.N. Aware of the pragmatic geopolitical reasoning behind Ukraine’s decisions to echo western allies on whom we depend for our survival, and we see the current support of Israel and dismissing Palestinian rights to subjugation as contradiction to the own commitment to human rights and fight for our land and freedom. We as Ukrainians should stand in solidarity not with the oppressors, but with those who experience and resist oppression.

I wanted to use my article as an instrument to push our own government to become consistent with its own positions, starting with 2014 at least. I think this is a good political strategy to push inside Ukraine for Palestinian solidarity.

AS:Excellent, thank you, Daria. Dana, would you like to add anything to that?

DEK:

From the Palestinian side, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, there was polling from the Palestinian territories, where a slim majority, but a majority, blamed Russia for that invasion. But there is a sizable group that also has the opposite view. We can discuss why, but I think a lot of the narratives around NATO and some of the disinformation around the Ukrainian-Russian conflict definitely have permeated not only the Left, but the Palestinian left in particular.

AS:Excellent, thank you, Dana. I’ve got Ramah and then I see you, Daria, you can come in, in a second. Ramah, do you want to chime in on this? No, Joseph, got anything to add?

JD:I think there’s also an argument to be made much deeper that we don’t judge a liberation cause according only by its leadership. Otherwise, if you look at the Palestinian leadership, it’s not great, honestly, between the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, et cetera. Similarly, our judgment about the Ukrainian struggle should not be a referendum on Zelensky. My political compass is about supporting the people who are oppressed. Similarly in the case of the Syrian revolution. I think we had one of the worst political leaderships claiming to struggle for liberation against an authoritarian regime, but that allied itself, for example, with the Turkish state and supported the occupation and the ethnic cleansing of a region that is mostly inhabited by a Kurdish population.

The key argument is always to look to groups who share common interest with us on the Left, struggles from below, rather again to looking to repressive political leadership in a world where the Left is weaker. We can have all the criticism and need political criticism of the world liberation movement, but they were much better in many aspects. Today, it’s a different political period, but this should not change our basic principles to support the self-determination of oppressed people.

AS:Thanks, Joseph. Daria, I think you wanted to add some more comments.

DS:When we present the previous position of Ukraine on these questions, it is not to say, look, we were better before or Let’s support that Ukrainian government who voted in support before. It’s a strategic argument about winning public opinion and actually pushing our own government to be consistent with itself. It’s just part of the strategy.

One thing that we have to say is that if Ukraine has supported Palestinian rights and has condemned illegal occupation in Palestinian lands, it’s because Ukraine has consistently taken into account its own security problems with support for territorial integrity. In the case of Azerbaijan, Ukraine supported them in what happened because there was this question of territorial integrity. So, supporting territorial integrity is not always progressive. It is maybe a perspective on a certain level of international law. It’s not a perspective, as Joseph said, on fights from below.

This is just a strategic argument about the broader public opinion in Ukraine.  Unfortunately, there is a very vast pro-Israel consensus, but why? People don’t know the history of Palestine. I know that when I lived in Ukraine–I moved to France many years ago–I didn’t even know about the existence of Palestine. This is not a question that is actually often discussed, so I think, now with this new phase of the war going on, with this new aggression going on, the information that you can find in the Ukrainian-speaking public space is just not adequate.

You can’t blame people if they don’t have the right information. What we need to do right now is to inform people, which was the purpose of this letter that we published. First of all, we discovered that there wasn’t an absolute consensus. There are so many people that started sending us signatures, actually, Ukrainian Palestinian folks. We really hope that this letter will create at least some debate and be the beginning of an information campaign in order to build that solidarity from below, for the absence of which people shouldn’t be blamed because they don’t know.

AS:Thank you, Daria. I want to go to two last questions, what Joseph called geopolitical reductionism, where you choose between empires big and small instead of standing in solidarity with all peoples and their struggles for liberation without exception. So, I just wanted to pose a couple of questions around that topic, because I think it’s of decisive importance for forging an internationalist Left. Russia, with the tacit support of China, has carried out this imperialist invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, China and Russia have both called for a cease-fire and posture as friends of Palestine, despite having deep economic and diplomatic relations with Israel. For its part, the U.S. has supported Ukraine in its struggle for liberation, but backed Israel, its apartheid regime, occupation, and current genocidal war. What does this mean for the relationship of these two national liberation struggles with the various imperialist powers? You can kick it off, Ramah. What do you think this means?

RK:I think at times this obsession with geopolitics gets in the way of us being able to organize people to people. I think there’s space for us to discuss how sometimes folks have to depend on an imperial power to get arms, whether it’s various rebel groups in Syria who got arms from the U.S., or, Ukraine getting arms from the U.S. Who’s providing the kind of resistance in Palestine arms? Most obviously Iran, and that is a complicating factor in all this.

I know Syrian folks who wrong-headedly condemn Hamas as backed by Iran on the nonsense idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Within our own circles, too, we have to fight back against this idea. The biggest way that we can hold the line on these things is to be the most principled we can be in our solidarity. We are against all imperialism, all occupations, and we understand that sometimes folks depend on these imperial powers for arms and diplomacy, but that doesn’t take away agency from any of these people. Everything became, you’re all agents of the U.S., and that’s it. There is a refusal to recognize that there exist imperialist powers outside of the U.S. There is this idea that actually the multipolar world is a good thing because there is competition among imperial powers. But it’s fake competition.

We are against all imperialism, all occupations, and we understand that sometimes folks depend on these imperial powers for arms and diplomacy, but that doesn’t take away agency from any of these people.

Let’s be real. The powers have no problem working with each other. Syria is a very clear example how these imperial powers said a lot of things against each other and in reality are coordinating to make sure that while bombing Syria, they weren’t bombing each other. I think that’s a point to bring up again and again. Not the U.S. versus China and Russia; they are on the same side against the people across the globe. We need to push on that in the same way we’re pushing on Biden’s hypocrisy. Putin is up there, [speaking of the ] poor children [in Gaza]– okay, [yet he is] literally killing the children in Idlib right now. What’s important is the balance of how we talk about the geopolitics, recognize the geopolitics, while keeping our main focus on what’s happening to people on the ground and recognizing their agency.

One other thing about disinformation, propaganda, and social media. We knew that when Elon Musk took over Twitter, things were going to be bad. It didn’t start with Musk, of course. I sometimes think those early days of the revolutions against the Arab regimes, where people felt they were actually connecting across social media platforms, and then all the regimes decided, this is the way we’re going to use to push our propaganda. There need to be ways to do important political education like these types of talks to push back on this, because it really seeps into our communities. Again, it’s not only about these terrible tankies–our communities are being exposed to this propaganda and eating it up, because they are trying to figure out, if this person is a hypocrite, then I should listen to this other person. So what is our role then to push back on all that?

AS:Thanks, Ramah. Joseph, do you want to come in on this question?

JD:There is an additional element: Most of these imperial powers will instrumentalize these kinds of causes for tactical and strategic issues to increase their own political influence in their geopolitical and imperial rivalries.. As soon as they don’t need these particular causes–the men and women, and children–they will abandon them. We’ve seen this again, and again in the past and we’ll see it again in the future, maybe in Ukraine as soon as the powers believe that they reached a limit regarding how far the Ukrainians should push; they might attempt some form of cease-fire. But we’ve  seen also in the past, for example, regarding the Kurdish issue. The U.S. has, for example, in Syria, assisted the same democratic forces, which is led by the PYD, the assistant organization of the PKK, against the war that killed thousands of civilians.

But [with the issue of Syria] being invaded by the Turkish army, the U.S. did not intervene. Similarly, the U.S. might support the PYD in Syria but still consider the PKK in Turkey as a terrorist organization. Just as the Kurds were abandoned in northern Iraq in 2017, I believe, they were completely abandoned.

We have to be clear that even though they might instrumentalize a particular cause, it should not distract us from the agency of the people on the ground struggling for liberation and emancipation. I think this is where we should stand, because otherwise we cannot make links between our own struggle, which is the only way in a regional, international perspective to truly reach liberation.

AS:Thanks, Joseph. Dana, did you want to come in on this?

DEK:I think the problem is one of values. I think that’s been touched upon. Campist propaganda is influencing people who are absorbing that worldview. We need to articulate our values and clarify the issues. What is the difference for someone who lives under Israeli bombardment, versus Idlib, where they are also under rubble. You have to make it simple and easier to absorb.

In addition, we have to stop accepting this narrative that these international powers, be they the United States or anybody else, their hierarchical relationships have anything to do with oppressed values. Even if the U.S. is talking about democracy, they are supporting Ukraine because it’s strategic for global security vis-a-vis Russia.

Western leftists who are pro Ukraine but not pro Palestine haven’t come to the realization that standing against state aggression and war crimes and occupation everywhere is also strategic. So, it’s a problem of articulating strategy, I think, as well.

AS:So, a final question that I wanted to get you to address, which is more specifically about the Left. The problem over the last 15 years in response to the Arab Spring is one of selective solidarity on much of the international Left, of supporting revolutions and revolts in countries that are allied to the U.S., but not supporting them in countries that are not aligned with the U.S.

Much of the Left has fallen into this trap of selective solidarity, and many have, in this current situation in the last few years, not supported Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Others, by contrast, have not supported Palestine and its struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. What do you all think of this pattern, and what’s the alternative to this kind of selective solidarity that seems to be dominant on whole sections of the left? Maybe, Daria, you can start with that.

DS:For me, it’s heartbreaking, because I can be extremely angry when I see how the media coverage of the attack on Palestine has been completely Orwellian, especially in the first few days, but that perspective doesn’t come from my own camp. When the bad ideas come from your own camp, it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking when comrades stay in their dogmatic positions, despite the experience that comes from the ground, and it just doesn’t work.

But it is also heartbreaking to see those who support Ukraine on the Left who don’t support Palestine as much. And I think that in this case it’s more related to this opposition that’s been put forward these last few weeks between a noble Ukrainian resistance, which, you know, only uses the methods that are allowed by the international law. And then the Palestinian resistance, which is, you know, already completely characterized as terrorism and all of those sorts of labels.

For me the biggest problem in our emancipation movements is this division of struggles following the polarization of the world.

I think that for the Left, for the progressive forces, for feminists, ecologists, anticapitalists all over the world, it is a very important to continue defending the unity of popular struggles, anticolonial struggles, anticapitalist struggles, feminist struggles, all over the world, despite the geopolitical camp that people belongs to.

We also need to continue paying a lot of attention to experience, to what people say on the ground, rather than abstract geopolitical analysis.

AS:Okay, Ramah, I know this is in your wheelhouse, so why don’t you take it up?

RK:The slogan that always comes to my mind on this question is solidarity with people, not states. States are states. And the leaders of political factions are the leaders of political factions. We know what matters are the people.

Building this kind of activism can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be so difficult. Just think about how you relate to a progressive cause, and bring in these other causes with you. If you’re a teacher, there are so many books out there about Palestine you can bring your students. If you’re an artist, connect with artists in Ukraine.

There is so much space for that creativity for how you plug into movements, make connections. The connections are so important,whether it’s conversations like this, standing, being in solidarity. I’ve seen folks tweeting, we are seeing your marches. It’s wild to think that many people are understanding the violence and appreciating our actions. That they know the alternative, just being killed without anyone even bearing witness is worse.

The slogan that always comes to my mind on this question is solidarity with people, not states. States are states. And the leaders of political factions are the leaders of political factions. We know what matters are the people.

I remember, I felt a lot of that when Aleppo was being bombed in 2016 feeling that very few people out here were bearing witness to that. I think these simple steps are very powerful to take. Take your cues from the communities impacted, from the people. The states are going to do what they do. We do what we can to change state behavior. For folks in the U.S., keep contacting your members of Congress for a cease-fire now at this moment in time. But we know at the end of the day, it’s going to be us as the people living under these various oppressive systems who are going to change the world. We’re going to push these political leaders aside and really envision the beauty of what we can build.

AS:Thank you, Ramah. I’ve got Joseph, and then I’ve got some concluding remarks.

JD:Selective solidarity is not only heartbreaking. It’s also  political suicide.  It’s political suicide for the projects of liberation and emancipation;  moreover, it’s leading to a situation where you cannot stand with oppressed people. You can claim to be in support rhetorically, for example, claiming to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people. But these same people claiming to be in solidarity with Palestine became silent when the Palestinian refugee camp was being destroyed. When the civil rights of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been constantly crushed and  attacked, those engaged in selective solidarity cannot be constant in their support for Palestinian liberation. And this is why it’s not only heartbreaking, it’s political suicide. It leads to nothing. It leads to superficial support. It leads to no real support for the liberation and emancipation in this case of the Palestinians, but also other oppressed people.

AS:Thank you so much. And thank you so much to everybody on this panel. I think it’s been very powerful and analytically really sharp and gives an orientation for the world’s Left and how to build international solidarity from below with all popular uprisings, class struggles, national liberation struggles, and struggles of the oppressed. In all cases, I think it’s an important part of the universalist values that used to be at the heart of the Left, which really need to be restored. The Ukraine Solidarity Network that I’m part of is proud to be putting on this panel that draws the connections between the common struggles of liberation in Palestine, in Ukraine, and in many other countries around the world.

I think it points to an alternative to the kind of selective solidarity that we’ve seen dominate and really corrupt much of the Left, so that instead of standing without exception for all oppressed struggles for liberation, people pick and choose. And that’s not a Left that can win the leadership of the masses of humanity. And that’s what we need to strive to build. I just want to end by underscoring the importance of not just talking and reading books, but getting out in the streets and protesting, doing occupations of the governmental offices that are backing this genocide in Palestine, and doing everything we can to get the cease-fire now of Israel’s genocidal war.

People are engaged in mass civil disobedience all around the world in solidarity with Palestine, from the occupations of the train stations in Britain, to Grand Central Station here in New York City, where it was shut down by thousands of Jewish people in solidarity with Palestine. That’s the kind of internationalism that we need to forge in the heart of the U.S. state. That also goes for all other peoples fighting for liberation, in particular the Ukrainian struggle for national liberation and self-determination. Thanks to all the panelists, Daria, Dana, Ramah, and Joseph, and also to Haymarket Books for putting on this entire educational series.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

The following is a transcript of a session from the 2023 Socialism Conference, which put Paul Le Blanc, author of Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, in conversation with Promise Li and Cliff Connolly about the legacy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paul Le Blanc: Lenin’s actual name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. What sort of person was he? The free-spirited revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, once said of Lenin, I enjoy talking with him. He’s clever and well educated and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at. Angelica Balabanof, who worked closely with Lenin, was able to specify that from his youth, Lenin was convinced that most of human suffering and most of moral, legal, and social deficiencies were caused by class distinctions. She explained that Lenin was also convinced that class struggle alone could put an end to exploiters and exploited and create a society of the free and equal.

Lenin gave himself entirely to this end, and he used every means in his power to achieve it. Speaking from the right end of the political spectrum, Winston Churchill saw Lenin as his mortal enemy. Churchill hated what Lenin represented and even hailed Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship in Italy for its triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. Yet he wrote of Lenin, “His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone, it revealed the whole world: its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs. It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men.”

It is worth adding an insight from Max Eastman, who suggested that one of Lenin’s contributions in the theory and practice of Marxism was a rejection of people who talk revolution and like to think about it, but do not mean business–the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it. Animated by such convictions, Lenin helped build a powerful revolutionary movement in his native Russia, culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he and his comrades believed was the beginning of a global wave of socialist revolution.

Lenin was a key architect of modern communism, designed to bring about such an outcome. But does Lenin’s project offer anything useful for us in our own time, years after he died? This book, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution suggests an affirmative answer to that question and dispenses with six historiographical myths:

• One, Lenin favored dictatorship over democracy.
• Two, his so-called Marxism was a cover for his own totalitarian views.
• Three, he favored a super-centralized political party of a new type with power concentrated at the top himself as party dictator.
• Four, he favored rigid political controls over culture, art, and literature.
• Five, he believed that through such authoritarian methods a socialist utopia could be imposed on backward Russia.
• And six, flowing naturally from all of this, he became one of history’s foremost mass murderers.

This book rejects all such false characterizations while at the same time seeking to identify actual negatives, which inevitably can be found in Lenin and the tradition to which he was sent from. Faced with the complex swirl of Lenin’s life, times, and ideas, one can focus on matters and select ideas, adding up to a so-called Leninism, from which decent people must turn away. This book’s approach is different.

In her critique of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg emphasized her determination to distinguish the essential from the non-essential and critique the non-essential in a way designed to help advance the triumph of what was essential in Lenin’s revolutionary Bolshevism.

Without the accumulation of experience, cadres, relationships, and authority within the working class, a would-be revolutionary organization cannot actually become a revolutionary organization.

In this brief study, the focus is on what seems to me to be those essential qualities. Without the accumulation of experience, cadres, relationships, and authority within the working class, a would-be revolutionary organization cannot actually become a revolutionary organization. This can only be achieved through practical activism.

In some would-be revolutionary organizations,  members seem to feel that it is sufficient to develop and express revolutionary thoughts and revolutionary positions. These can be developed through discussions and study groups. But defining and expressing politically correct positions becomes primary for some would-be revolutionary groups. This may take the form of arguing against the capitalist ruling class or against non-revolutionary groups, or against other would-be revolutionary groups.

It is certainly the case that Lenin was fully prepared to engage in polemics and arguments, but what was primary for him was helping to mobilize practical struggles capable of materially defending and advancing the urgent needs of workers and the oppressed; struggles that not only make sense to people in the here and now, but also tilt toward mass revolutionary consciousness. If fought for effectively, Lenin argued, insurgency and power shift can ultimately bring about revolution. For Lenin, theory, education, and the articulation of principled positions were inseparable from such practical work.

Lenin speaks to workers in Moscow, 1920. Source: Picryl.

The Bolsheviks engaged in practical campaigns that helped to define them and created a practical framework of struggle in which they might form united fronts–and in some cases converge with other groups prepared to fight the good fight–and push toward victory. Only in that way could an organization of would-be revolutionaries become a revolutionary organization.

This approach was simply expressed in the explanation, quoted by Paul, of V. R. Dunne, leader of the militant and victorious Minneapolis Teamster Strikes of 1934: “Our policy was to organize and build strong unions, so workers could have something to say about their own lives, and assist in changing the present order into a socialist society.”

One key revolutionary principle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks involves the political independence of the working class and the refusal to subordinate the struggles of the working class to the leadership of pro-capitalist parties. “No democracy in the world puts aside the class struggle and the ubiquitous power of money,” Lenin noted, adding that while countries such as the United States held that capitalists and workers had equal political rights, in fact, they are not equal in class status. One class, capitalists, owns the means of production and lives on the unearned product of the labor of the workers. The other, the class of wage workers, owns no means of production and lives by selling their labor power in the market. Lenin warned that the so-called bipartisan system of the pro-capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, had been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, genuinely socialist party.

It is certainly the case that Lenin was fully prepared to engage in polemics and arguments, but what was primary for him was helping to mobilize practical struggles capable of materially defending and advancing the urgent needs of workers and the oppressed.

Another of Lenin’s principles involves opposition to all forms of racism, ethnic bigotry, and oppression based on gender or sexuality. A third involves opposition to imperialism and war. A fourth, becoming increasingly urgent in our time, is uncompromising opposition to the destruction of a livable environment. A fifth principle is a commitment to genuine democracy, ruled by the people, as essential both to our future world and within the movement to create that better future. A sixth principle involves an internationalist orientation: solidarity across borders and a commitment to global collaboration among the workers and oppressed of all countries.

The process of testing different perspectives and learning from actual struggles, accompanied by debates and sometimes even splits (and sometimes fusions), will be necessary on the way to creating a revolutionary party worthy of the name. Lenin insisted that we must at all costs set out first to learn, secondly to learn, and thirdly to learn, and then see to it that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life. But he insisted that we must learn through doing.

Lenin stressed that this learning takes place through actual struggles against oppression and exploitation, collectively evaluating that experience, and thinking through what to do next.

Promise Li:Thanks, Paul for the invitation to be in conversation about this work. I encourage everyone to purchase the book too, and I am excited to be in conversation with Linda, Paul, and Cliff too.

“We were mistaken,” Lenin said to a room of hundreds of party cadres in October 1921. The mistake he referred to was the massive effort to requisition surplus grain from peasants with little in return to aid the Bolsheviks’ civil war efforts. This error ultimately contributed to later food shortages. Lenin said that the Bolsheviks understood “the necessity for a prolonged, complex transition through socialist accounting and control from capitalist society to the masses.”

This jump to certain policies of war communism, as he reflected, violated this order. But as Lenin also said in 1917, “The fighting party of the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence in a mistake, refusal to admit and correct a mistake out of a false sense of shame.” I begin with this example not to relitigate war communism today, but to highlight an under-discussed aspect of Lenin’s political life, relevant for organizers today who are navigating a new age of crisis and catastrophe.

Indeed, as Paul reminds us, a cohesive understanding of Lenin’s work does not reveal a conspiratorial authoritarian. It also does not reveal a prophet capable of discerning correct solutions to every emergency. A quote from Lenin’s comrade, Lev Kamenev, illustrates this clearly. He said, “Every attempt to create any kind of handbook of Leninism, a collection of formulas applicable to all questions at any time, will certainly fail as we can only approach the real science of Lenin through a consideration of his complete works in the light of contemporary events.” To go further, I argue that there is much to learn not only from Lenin’s errors but also from the method of how he approached them and from the mistakes that he was unable to reckon with.

This approach underscores a central tenet of Marxist practice: a will to remain ruthlessly critical of our own political work and the traditions we inherit to rebuild the socialist movement at a time when it is sorely needed. Reflecting on the defeat of the 1905 revolution, a key prelude to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Lenin commented that to the proletariat, the study and critical assimilation of the experience of the revolution means learning to apply the methods of struggle of that time more effectually next time.

Errors undoubtedly have consequences, and in the work of revolution, these slips can mean fatalities and world historical setbacks. At the same time, they can allow movements to intervene more effectively in the next iteration of struggle. For Lenin, the reflection on errors is a necessary component of socialist organization, which gathers the masses around common political principles, analyses, and strategic orientations that advance the socialist program.

The point is to articulate different economic and social struggles in the sphere of politics itself. As Lenin wrote, “The ideal of a revolutionary militant is not the trade unionist with a narrow horizon, but the tribune of the people who fans the embers of subversion in all spheres of society.”

Vanguard parties, far from being instruments of bureaucracy, are meant to provide the most democratic means. They are tempered through struggle and experimentation for militants to congeal the lessons of different struggles into a revolutionary program. Programs and strategies are not static and must be calibrated to effectively respond to shifting political conditions.

Moreover, socialist organization, Bensaïd says, “makes it possible to test the validity of opposing positions” under consideration in practice. To test political strategies is to accept the possibility of error. We need organizational mechanisms that can maximize space for critical reflection and maintain the will to try things out in practice.

In a speech in 1922, Lenin noted that the Bolsheviks would certainly make a number of mistakes. He urged members to dispassionately examine where such mistakes have been made and show that we are not bound by prejudice. As Ernest Mandel emphasizes, this is the heart of Leninist organizational practice, not centralism for the sake of bureaucratism, but to maximize space for internal democracy.

Meeting of workers at the Putilov Plant in Petrograd, 1920. Source: Picryl.

Maximizing internal democracy requires respecting the rights of internal factions, ensuring complete freedom of speech for minority positions, and building rigorous processes to sort through collective mistakes and disagreements that are not afforded by the institutions of bourgeois civil society. The possibility of bureaucratization of the party, as Mandel and Bensaïd argue, underscores the role of independent social movements outside of the party as counterweights to check the authority of the party and expose its mistakes when this isn’t possible within it.

More importantly, reflecting on errors within an organization is key because no one person can solve everything. Lenin himself made a number of errors, some of which he never accounted for, and some of which he sought to combat and failed to do so. One can understand the atrocities of Kronstadt or other excesses of the Red Terror in the context of immense pressures, but should unyieldingly condemn them nonetheless.

Lenin was attuned to other growing errors, like of the party’s growing bureaucratism and erosion of inner-party democracy that quickened mass depoliticization. As Mandel notes, Lenin was unable to articulate a clear counter position to this. As Paul notes in a section of his book, Lenin was unable to solve some of the problems he confronted. The Bolsheviks and many other communist parties’ bureaucratism, and later totalitarianism, proved to be a catastrophe on a world historical scale for social movements.

The strangulation by Western imperialists’ encirclement, at different scales, certainly accelerated this regression, but it is undeniable that these regimes’ endogenous errors played a significant role. In The Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky argued that the “struggle of living social forces” needed to correct bureaucracy were meticulously crushed by different communist parties around the world in the 20th century.

The effect is a mass discrediting of communism among movements today in many regions–a disaster that bourgeois forces gleefully weaponize and fuel. Bensaïd puts the problem aptly:

We have to think about what happened to communism in the 20th century. The word and the object cannot be grasped outside of the times and the historical ordeals they were forced to endure. For most people, the massive use of the communist label to characterize, for one, free market authoritarian state in China will weigh much more heavily and for a far longer time than the fragile theoretical and experimental sprouts of the communist hypothesis there.

Bensaïd’s invocation of China is particularly relevant for me, growing up in Hong Kong and witnessing the absolute state of confusion about even basic political concepts like the left-right spectrum, thanks to the Chinese state, which has, in the minds of many people, identified socialism with the ideals of bureaucratic capitalism and the practice of it.

Such confusion informs the misguided popularity behind many non ideological and leaderless movements in recent global uprisings. The problems that Lenin began to note but failed to address in his last days have helped contribute to this unprecedented discrediting of the banner of socialism among certain masses that he, along with the First and Second International, did not fully anticipate or address in their programs and strategies.

We cannot rigidly recover the socialist programs of the past without adjustments, without considering innovations from new social movements since then. We must attend to new objective conditions, evidenced by the rise of new capitalist states outside of the traditional Western imperialist bloc.

The best method for accounting for these errors lies not in seeing Leninism as scripture but in considering, critically considering, his approach toward mistakes. Winning back the confidence of the working class towards a socialist horizon must build from an honest assessment of both errors and successes of the past that still structure a political terrain.

We cannot rigidly recover the socialist programs of the past without adjustments, without considering innovations from new social movements since then. We must attend to new objective conditions, evidenced by the rise of new capitalist states outside of the traditional Western imperialist bloc. We need to think carefully about how to articulate effective alternatives to reformism and spontaneity, for whom the legacy of socialist organization represents nothing more than totalitarianism or bureaucratism.

It is far easier to demonize the Bolsheviks’ experience wholesale as the ventures of ill-intentioned authoritarianism than to grapple with an uncomfortable truth: that while Lenin and his comrades were just as genuine communists as we are today in this room, they can also be responsible for the most catastrophic kinds of political errors alongside world historical successes. No one, including Lenin, can model the right path forward at all times. The capacity for victory comes with the capacity for error. But as Lenin says, “by analyzing the errors of yesterday, we learn to avoid errors today and tomorrow.”

Cliff Connolly: Very happy to be here. Thank you to Paul, Promise, and Linda for having me.

In my reading, the central thesis that I saw in Comrade LeBlanc’s new book is the well-documented and ever-relevant fact that Lenin, at every point of his political career, was a thoroughgoing champion of democracy.

This could not be a more timely or relevant intervention in the contemporary North American socialist movement. This phenomenon has been distorted by decades of Cold War propaganda and sect dogma. In other words, those who hate Lenin and those who love him have both misrepresented history in order to paint him as an autocrat who saw communism as separate from and superior to democracy.

In contrast to many sympathetic historians, comrade LeBlanc concedes and contextualizes the actions of Lenin and his party that may seem strikingly undemocratic at face value: suppression of the bourgeois press, political police, summary executions and more. This flows from a clear definition of Lenin’s conception of democracy and its differences from the commonsense definition propagated by bourgeois idealism. I quote here from Lenin in State and Revolution, “The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will, for the first time, create democracy for the people, the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, the minority.”

Bourgeois republics, the typical state form of capitalist oligarchy, must suppress the working class majority through institutions like police militarization, mass incarceration, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, the legalized political bribery that we call lobbying, constitutional checks on democracy like the electoral college, upper legislative houses, judicial review, and more, in order to prevent majority rule and maintain the tyranny of the capitalist minority.

In contrast, democratic republics, the only state form through which socialism can be established according to Marx and Engels, must suppress the capitalist minority through various means in order to make majority rule possible. Thus, suppression of counter-revolutionary elements must be pursued not in order to do away with democracy but in order to defend it.

Comrade LeBlanc’s book demonstrates the democratic nature of both Lenin’s political thought and the Bolshevik party structure. Two examples in particular I think are worth highlighting. The idea of the vanguard party and democratic centralism are as historically misunderstood as Lenin himself, and LeBlanc provides poignant clarification on both concepts.

The vanguard party is often explained by adherents and detractors as a party consisting of elite full-time socialists who plan out the revolution and direct their minions and the working class from the comfort of their party headquarters. This could not be any further from what Lenin described in his writings or what the Bolsheviks practiced in their daily routine.

This is obvious from the origin of the term “vanguard party.” It’s a military metaphor in which the vanguard is the unit at the front of the battle line, making first contact with the enemy forces and leading the rear guard into the fray. Confused historians and activists employ this term to describe the opposite behavior: officers studying maps and relaying orders from the command center.

This organizing model would be better termed the general staff party, in keeping with the wartime metaphor.

Democratic centralism is similarly misconstrued by friends and enemies of the socialist movement alike. According to contemporary conventional wisdom, it’s a method of decision making in which party leaders describe what each party member should believe and how they should behave, with members expected to obediently follow orders.

But LeBlanc describes the actual mechanisms of democratic centralism as they were practiced in the Bolshevik party. I quote from the book briefly:

The highest decision making body in the party was not a central committee or political committee, but rather the party congress or convention. The central committee was  elected by and answerable to the party Congress.The Congress was held every year or two consisting of elected delegates from every local branch of the party. These elections were to take place after a period of written and oral discussion and debate on the issues facing the party, and the decisions considered binding on the members and lower level organizations were made by the party congress.

Clearly the Bolsheviks were not the conspiratorial band of elite autocrats that they’re so often painted as. With Lenin leading the way, they forged a democratic mandate for power and conducted the world’s greatest experiment in proletarian democracy in the early Soviet Union. For those of us looking to build on their foundations for a just and livable future, there are several important lessons to be found in their successes and mistakes, as we’ve all noted so far.

Since we can only interact with Lenin as a historical figure, it’s important to look at how he was influenced by his own historical forebears. He saw the Narodniks, a group of Russian agrarian populists who predated his generation of socialists, as flawed but irreplaceable forebears of Russian social democracy.

According to Lenin, their sacrifices demanded not only high praise but also sharp criticism. Their mistakes would be in vain if future generations refused to learn from them. We should adopt a similar attitude to the forebears of American Socialism, the revolutionary abolitionists and militant trade unionists of the 19th century.

Both groups won historic victories in their respective struggles, and both groups were ultimately crushed before achieving their aims in the same year, 1877. The defeat of 1877 was twofold. Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the rise of Jim Crow, and those same federal troops were deployed the same year to crush the Great Railroad Strike that had galvanized workers in the North.

Marx had insisted years prior in Das Kapital that Black liberation and proletarian emancipation were inexorably intertwined in North America, and he was proven correct here in the most tragic manner possible. Had the revolutionary abolitionists and radical trade unionists united in a common organization with a common plan of action, each could have found success in support of the other.

Clearly the Bolsheviks were not the conspiratorial band of elite autocrats that they’re so often painted as. … Learning from our ideological ancestors’ mistakes and applying them to our organizing today is crucial.

The economic demands of the labor movement would only have been possible to realize under the thoroughly democratic political regime that the abolitionists fought for. The democratic state that the abolitionists intended to create could only be built with the support of the militant mass organizations of the working class. Yet both groups refused one another to their mutual destruction. Learning from our ideological ancestors’ mistakes and applying them to our organizing today is crucial.

We cannot hope to transform society without the advanced elements of the working class, the militant trade unionists, on our side. Neither can we hope to win material gains for the working class without a change in the political structure that we live under. Socialism and the labor movement must merge into one fighting organization, which cannot be achieved by either ignoring or tailing the organic demands of the proletariat. In practice, this means we have to win the working class over to the demand for a new constitution, one which operates on a genuinely democratic basis and enshrines socialism in law.

The idea that a revolutionary constitution is necessary for any meaningful transformation of American society is not new, and it is not my idea. It comes directly from the abolitionists responsible for the first great liberatory change in our country’s political economy. When John Brown forged his plan to march south and strike the slave power’s heart in Virginia, he worked hard to ensure that this plan had the backing of the whole abolitionist movement.

It caught on fast, and a convention was called in Chatham, Ontario to chart a thorough plan for revolution. The majority Black delegation not only adopted Brown’s battle plan but elected a government in waiting and ratified a draft of Brown’s  provisional constitution, which would radically reorganize society. Loyalty that abolitionists later went on to show to the federal government in the wake of the Civil War was eventually rewarded with the total abandonment of Reconstruction. The earlier revolutionary wing of the abolitionist movement was vindicated, and their assertion that their goals were only attainable when the slaver’s constitution was defeated was proved correct.

This is as true today as it was then, and we as socialists have a responsibility to carry the spirit of the Chatham Convention into the 21st century. A revolutionary movement for a new constitution is not only possible but also necessary for the construction of socialism in North America. Foremost among those calling for this course of action is Marxist Unity Group, a faction within the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member.

So allow me to close with a quote from our Points of Unity:

No one can truly be free if they are forced to bow to a reactionary constitution written by the dead. We want socialist leaders to erode the popular legitimacy of the U. S. Constitution through combative political agitation, never bowing to the old order, and always acknowledging the need for a working class revolution in the United States. The revolution will not base its legitimacy on the laws of the slaveholder constitution. We will base it on a democratic majority mandate for socialism. To win, millions of working people must be mobilized in their workplaces, at the ballot box, and in the street. We fight the constitution to win a democratic socialist republic in North America. Forged in revolution, this continental republic will strive for the global liberation of all working and oppressed people.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Picryl; modified by Tempest.

Russian imperialism’s war in Ukraine shows no sign of stopping. This summer and fall we witnessed dueling offensives, first one from Ukraine aiming to free its occupied territories, and a counter-offensive from Russia to seize more territory that is still continuing.

Moscow has just recently launched a massive rocket attack on Ukraine, targeting civilians and infrastructure on the New Year eve. While the Russian border city Belgorod became a target for retaliatory missile attacks. Russia has half a million soldiers on the front line to defend its occupation and will need more for the full offensive that could start in the spring.

Vladimir Putin and the Russian ruling class are determined to prosecute this war to the end. Putin made this clear in his annual public question and answer event “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin” on December 14, in which he answered carefully curated questions from the public for several hours.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin during the meeting with permanent members of Security Council in December 2022. Photo by Kremlin.Ru.

He said the goal of the so-called Special Military Operation remains the so-called de-Nazification and de-militarization of Ukraine. That means he intends to continue the war until he achieves regime change in Ukraine and the transformation of Ukraine into a Russian semi-colony.

To accomplish this, his regime is trying to stabilize Russian society, stoke political conflict within the US and NATO countries, legitimate his rule through the presidential election in March, and mobilize Russian troops for a new offensive in the spring.

Stabilizing Russian Society

The regime has engaged in an intense campaign to stabilize Russian society after the coup attempt led by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group last summer. Putin overcame this greatest challenge to his rule through a combination of carrots and sticks.

He offered deals for Wagner mercenaries to come back into the regime’s fold. A few army generals who were close to Wagner were arrested. In the case of Prigozhin himself, Putin had him killed in August in a rocket attack not far from Moscow that blew up the warlord’s plane.

He then broke up the Wagner Group itself, subsuming parts of it into the Russian Ministry of Defense and allowing others to be retained by Prigozhin’s son as well as other private military companies.

The continued existence of these companies may pose a problem down the line for the regime, especially if the war goes badly. That could lead to splits between the state and the companies over military strategy and tactics that could destabilize the regime again.

Also, Prigozhin’s coup showed the existence of the hidden dissent among the army officials. But for now, Putin’s cooptation and repression strategy has overcome the crisis precipitated by Prigozhin.

Putin has also been able to stabilize the economy at least for now. The West’s sanction regime has not damaged the Russian economy as much as expected. The regime and the country’s corporations have created various ways to skirt the sanctions.

[T]he sanctions have neither thrown the Russian economy into crisis nor prevented the state from prosecuting the war in Ukraine.

They have increased trade and investment through the neutral states like Central Asian ones as well as Turkey, the Arab Emirates, and many others especially in the Global South. These countries have bucked US pressure to abide by the sanction regime.

In addition, Russia’s state oil companies have established new export deals with many countries especially China, which has also kept the economy afloat. So, the sanctions have neither thrown the Russian economy into crisis nor prevented the state from prosecuting the war in Ukraine.

Despite the resilience of the Russian economy, it faces numerous problems. For example, inflation is growing and posing serious economic strains for most ordinary Russians.

In response, the Russian Central Bank just hiked up interest rates to bring it under control. But that may in turn cause the economy to slow down, increasing unemployment, furthering hammering working class people.

To maintain hegemony over the population, Putin has turned to repression and neo-fascist ideology. He has repressed almost all left wing dissent, especially anti-war activists.

At the same time, he has tried to win consent from the population through  Russian ethnic nationalism, demonizing any and all groups that threaten it. For example, he warned that Muslim migrants from Central Asia in Russia threatened the ethnic balance in the country.

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, outdid Putin in such Islamophobia. In a recent speech that could have been given by Trump or Enoch Powell, he warned against the civilizational threat posed by Muslims and migrants in general.

While the regime and Church are using such ethnic nationalism to cohere their base, it could backfire on them. Such bigotry could stir dissent among the country’s some 15 million Muslim citizens, which comprise 10 percent of the population.

Putin has also launched an intense campaign to enforce so-called traditional, family values. He has targeted feminists and LGBTQ people as threats to Russian society.

The regime is on the verge of imposing a total ban on abortion rights in the wake of outlawing it recently in private clinics. It has also announced a total prohibition of LGBTQ groups, events, and even nightclubs.

Putin has at this point been successful in stabilizing Russian society through repression and these ideological campaigns.

Conquering Ukraine

Based on that stability, he wants to escalate the war in Ukraine. His immediate goal is to seize the rest of Donbas region, which has symbolic significance in Putin’s imperial imaginary and his justifications for the war.

The likely spring offensive will unfold in stages. The goal is to take Kharkiv, the second largest city of Ukraine, and establish a new front at the Dnipro river.

The plan could be to divide Ukraine into two parts. First, Russia would annex all the territory to the east of the Dnipro. Second, it would attempt to establish the rest of the country to the west of the river as a neutral “de-Nazified” (Russia-dependent) state.

But that would only be a temporary goal. The Russian state remains determined to expand its empire into the rest of the post-Soviet space.

Stoking Conflict within the US and NATO

Putin is banking on the rise of the right in the US and NATO to undermine their opposition to his imperial expansionism. During his question and answer event, Putin also stressed that that the West is very much divided on aid to Ukraine.

He specifically cited the conflict between the Republicans and the Biden administration over the proposed aid package to the country. He made it clear that he would welcome a Republican victory, especially one by Trump, in the US presidential election, since the new administration would likely reduce if not stop all support for Ukraine and even withdraw from NATO.

He is also courting the far right in the rest of the NATO countries. He is stoking tensions with Finland, a new member to the pact. Following the example set by Belarus’ President Lukashenko, Putin has welcomed migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other countries and then encouraged them to enter the European Union through the Finnish border.

[Putin is] courting the far right in the rest of the NATO countries…He is doing this in order to provoke a crisis for the political mainstream and fuel the growth of the anti-migrant far right in Finland and the European Union in general.

He is doing this in order to provoke a crisis for the political mainstream and fuel the growth of the anti-migrant far right in Finland and the European Union in general.

He hopes their growth and success will undermine NATO from within. Thus, the Russian official media celebrated the recent victory of far right politician Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections, who ran on an Islamophobic, anti-migrant  platform.

Finally, Putin is attempting to exploit Israel’s brutal war in Gaza for his advantage against the US and its NATO allies, which have armed and supported Israel. Officially, Russia calls for a two-state solution, supports a ceasefire, and UN humanitarian relief.

Of course, this is all hypocritical. Russia is engaged in exactly the same kind of annexationist war in Ukraine as Israel is in Gaza. And, behind the scenes, Putin retains political, diplomatic, and economic relations with Israel.

But it is nevertheless exploiting Israel’s horrific war to rehabilitate itself, especially in the Global South, and weaken the US and NATO. He hopes that will enable him more space to prosecute his own imperialist ambition in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Mobilization and Draft for Spring Offensive

Putin’s commitment to that project will require him to impose a wider mobilization of troops and possibly a draft. He will have to recruit hundreds of thousands of new people to staff the military and carry out new conquests. This could pose big political problems for Putin.

He will not do any of this before the Russian presidential election in March. He and the rest of the state want to sustain a positive mood in Russian society until then.

After the elections, it is very likely they will increase mobilization to the front. At the moment only about 40 percent of Russian troops in Ukraine came from draft, while the rest are so-called volunteers made up of ordinary people who joined the military to make a better living.

Soldiers earn far more than ordinary workers. The official medium wage is about $600, but most people make about $300 a month. In the military, by contrast, soldiers can make between $2,000 and $3,000 a month.

So, for millions of Russians, especially in the desperate provincial industrial towns it, the military is an opportunity to escape poverty. That explains the success of securing so-called volunteers.

In reality it is a poverty draft. But the government uses it to redistribute wealth and establish a large sector of the population that benefits from the war. Of course, many have paid dearly, losing their mental health, limbs, and lives.

[F]or millions of Russians, especially in the desperate provincial industrial towns it, the military is an opportunity to escape poverty. That explains the success of securing so-called volunteers….In reality it is a poverty draft.

The situation for the people who are drafted is and will be totally different. They do not get paid very well and unlike professional soldiers, their term in the military and their tours of duty are not limited.

So, the draft has already provoked some protests, especially from families and relatives of those pressed into military service. They have organized petitions and even sent in hundreds of questions to Putin’s “Direct line” event. Of course, all of these questions were curated out and not posed to him.

This shows the basis for opposition to any new draft. It will likely take the form of spontaneous, self-organized protest. That would provide an opening for building an antiwar movement in Russia.

Rigged Elections to Legitimate the Regime

But all this would only develop after the upcoming presidential election. It of course will not be a genuine one. There will be no true campaigns or debates and the outcome is preordained. Putin will win.

But the election is nonetheless important for him to give his rule the air of legitimacy and demonstrate popular support for him and his war. The Kremlin media is already predicting the best results of his political career.

Estimates are that about 70 percent will turn out for the elections and among those 80 percent are likely to vote for Putin. Of course, we should not trust these figures nor the results of the elections.

The entire process is based on the suppression of the genuine opposition and the exclusion and imprisonment of dissidents like Alexey Navalny. Of course, there will be carefully vetted candidates allowed to run to give the appearance of democracy.

The vote itself will happen over three days in person and electronically. Both will be heavily policed by the state without any oversight by independent observers.

People have every reason to be afraid of the regime. It has crushed any public expression of dissent on the war and driven it underground. It has done the same to any and all activist groupings of any kind.

All election monitoring networks have been destroyed. For example, this summer the the biggest network called the Voice was banned and one of its main organizers thrown in jail.

So, these elections are the opposite of free, open, and fair ones. In fact, they are a means for the state to coerce the population into political obedience.

Most people employed in the public sector and state corporations will be forced to vote electronically in their workplaces. If you vote that way, all your personal data is available to the state.

So, both the state authorities and the bosses will be able to monitor votes and “correct” the outcome if needed. Nonetheless, voters will be given the illusion of choice.

There will be other, carefully vetted candidates allowed to run from parties in the loyal pseudo-opposition like the Communist Party. All candidates permitted to run have aggressive, pro-war positions.

No genuine anti-war candidates and parties will be allowed on the ballot. So, they really pose no challenge to Putin, nor do they give voice to any anti-war sentiment. They will run against one another splitting the 20 percent of vote not going to Putin.

The Russian opposition, which is either underground or in exile, is debating how to approach the election. Navalny’s supporters have already called for a vote for any candidate besides Putin.

That’s not a bad strategy. It at least offers people, who are very atomized and afraid, a chance to express their opposition in however distorted a fashion.

Resisting War and Fascization

People have every reason to be afraid of the regime. It has crushed any public expression of dissent on the war and driven it underground. It has done the same to any and all activist groupings of any kind.

This is part of the fascization of the regime. It is not just propaganda; it is trying to impose a brutal form of dictatorship and change society in a fundamental way. ​The LGBT ban and restrictions on abortion rights, anti-migrant hysteria and strict censorship against any criticism of the regime are aimed at homogenizing society and turning Russia into a closed “state-civilization.”

In these conditions, the task for the international left remains opposition to Putin’s imperialism, solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance, opposition to Western imperialism, and support for struggle within Russia from below against Putin’s neo-fascist regime.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

Driving around the metro Detroit area, whether for business or pleasure, I often pass by the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, on 12 Mile and Woodward. The Shrine was infamously the home parish of Michigan’s second most prominent Nazi sympathizer, “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin. The most prominent is still Henry Ford. Indeed, it would be difficult for anyone to be more pro-Nazi than the auto tycoon, recipient of the Nazi Grand Cross of the German Eagle, although Coughlin certainly tried.

Father Charles Coughlin served as parish priest of the Shrine from 1925-1966. The church gained early notoriety when Coughlin reported in 1926 that the Ku Klux Klan left a burning cross on church grounds. This would not be a fantastic occurrence. The Klan was very popular in Metro Detroit and almost succeeded in electing their candidate, Charles Bowles, as mayor in 1925. It was only due to thousands of disqualified write-in votes that Bowles lost. However, Coughlin biographer Donald Warren casts doubt on the cross-burning story. When he was writing Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio, a collector of Coughlin memorabilia presented him with the alleged burned cross. It showed no signs of being even singed.

Regardless of the veracity of the story, it showed Coughlin’s talent for drumming up publicity. He made skillful use of media to get his message out. Beginning in 1926, Coughlin broadcast his Sunday sermons on the CBS radio network. The network then dropped him in 1931 when Coughlin began addressing controversial political topics during the worsening Great Depression. Coughlin’s show was picked up by the Detroit radio station WJR, which became the key station of Coughlin’s independent network. The network grew, claiming 26 stations by October 1932 and 58 by January 1938. Coughlin’s talks were mass media. It’s estimated that at the height of his popularity, a third of the country listened to his broadcasts. Hollywood offered to fictionalize his biography in the unmade film The Fighting Priest, with Coughlin playing himself.

Coughlin began as a staunch supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. He coined the phrases “Roosevelt or Ruin” and “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” Soon, Coughlin began to break with the President on issues like U.S. membership in the World Court, coining silver currency, and recognition of the Soviet Union. In 1934, he created his own political organization: The National Union for Social Justice. The National Union’s sixteen-point platform was inspired by the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno calling for government regulation of business, the right of workers to form unions, and a progressive income tax. Notably absent was any defense of civil liberties or a democratic government.

The National Union supported and was supported by various politicians. One of the biggest boosters was Cleveland Democrat Congressperson Martin L. Sweeney. Sweeney led a colorful life in office, including allegedly using his influence to protect his cousin Francis Sweeney, a prime suspect in the still unsolved Cleveland Torso Murders, and opposing the appointment of Jews to the federal bench. Other supporters included Representatives William Lemke, Thomas O’Malley, and William Connery plus Senators William Nye and Elmer Thomas, all of whom sent congratulatory letters to the 1935 National Union convention. Detroit area Coughlin supporters included former Detroit mayor Frank Murphy and Congressperson John Dingell Sr.

In light of Coughlin’s later explicit fascist sympathies, some of his pronouncements at this time take on a sinister tinge. When Coughlin gave his preference for “gentile silver” over gold, he was criticized for dabbling in antisemitism. Coughlin’s 1931 sermon “Prosperity” attacking the Treaty of Versailles was informed by information provided by Congressperson Louis T. McFadden, one of the earliest Congressional supporters of Adolf Hitler. During a Fall 1930 broadcast against communism, Coughlin despaired at “the anarchy, the atheism, and the treachery preached by the German Hebrew, Karl Marx.” He regularly attacked “international bankers,” often emphasizing their Jewish surnames. Despite this, Coughlin continued to find support from some Jewish leaders both in Detroit and nationally.

In 1936, Coughlin launched a full frontal assault on Roosevelt through the Union Party, an organization also supported by old age pension advocate Francis Townsend and Gerald L.K. Smith, who was in the process of devolving from the late Senator Huey Long’s lieutenant to “America’s No. 1 Fascist.” The three had difficulty collaborating, with Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, deriding the Union Party as a creature of “two and a half rival messiahs.” The Party nominated North Dakota Congressperson William Lemke for President and former Boston district attorney Thomas O’Brien for Vice President. Their platform was essentially identical to the National Union of Social Justice platform. It was around this time that Coughlin launched the newspaper Social Justice as another avenue for his message.

During the 1936 election, Coughlin’s remarks about Roosevelt grew increasingly vituperative. At times it seemed like he and Smith were competing over who could hurl the most invective at the President. Smith exclaimed, “We’re going to get that cripple out of the White House!” At the Townsend Club Convention, Coughlin, not to be outdone, called Roosevelt a “betrayer“ and a “liar” and dubbed him “Franklin Double-crossing Roosevelt.” Even if Coughlin had been forced by clerical superiors to apologize for these remarks, he soon outdid them. At one rally he warned, “When an upstart dictator in the United States succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, when the ballot is useless, I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets.” At another, this one in Rhode Island, Coughlin promised “more bullet holes in the White House than you could count with an adding machine” if Roosevelt were to be reelected.

All this blood and thunder was for naught. Roosevelt won a landslide reelection and the Union Party got less than two percent of the vote. As small as this share was, it was still larger than that of the Socialist, Communist, and Socialist Labor Parties combined. The party failed to attract supporters of other electoral reformists such as the Wisconsin Progressive Party, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, and End Poverty in California, who all backed Roosevelt. The reasons for the party’s failure are numerous. It wasn’t on the ballot in over a dozen states, the demagoguery of Smith and Coughlin likely repelled voters, and Lemke was a much less charismatic candidate than Roosevelt. Smith described Lemke, his own candidate, as “a complete composite of unattractiveness.”

During a Fall 1930 broadcast against communism, Coughlin despaired at “the anarchy, the atheism, and the treachery preached by the German Hebrew, Karl Marx.” He regularly attacked “international bankers,” often emphasizing their Jewish surnames. Despite this, Coughlin continued to find support from some Jewish leaders both in Detroit and nationally.

During a Fall 1930 broadcast against communism, Coughlin despaired at “the anarchy, the atheism, and the treachery preached by the German Hebrew, Karl Marx.” He regularly attacked “international bankers,” often emphasizing their Jewish surnames. Despite this, Coughlin continued to find support from some Jewish leaders both in Detroit and nationally.

Although Coughlin promised to retire from broadcasting if Lemke received fewer than nine million votes, he was soon back on the air. His relationships with several groups changed when he returned. Previously, Coughlin had supported and received support from what could be termed the American labor aristocracy. AFL President William Green suggested sending a delegate to the National Union’s 1935 convention. James L. Ryan, president of a New York metalworkers union stated, “Father Coughlin is a messenger of God, donated to the American people for the purpose of rectifying the outrageous mistakes that have been made in the past.” Coughlin played a leading role in the Detroit-area Automotive Industrial Workers Association, one of several competing auto workers unions before the rise of the UAW.

Yet, Coughlin strongly attacked the growing CIO. He viewed it as Communist-dominated, saying in an interview that “the C.I.O. is pretty well contaminated with leaders who are Red in thought and action.” Social Justice preached that “Catholicism was as incompatible with the CIO as Catholicism was incompatible with Mohammedanism.” In The Shrine of the Silver Dollar, John L. Spivak reports both that Coughlin attempted to form a “company union” at Ford (the Workers Council for Social Justice) and that the priest offered a bribe to UAW president Homer Martin, on behalf of Ford, to split the CIO. In 1939, Coughlin attacked an International Ladies Garment Workers Union resolution to set up an anti-fascist defense guard.

Even more apparent than Coughlin’s shift on labor was his overt antisemitism. If Coughlin had any plausible deniability before, it was soon dispelled. In a radio broadcast after Kristallnacht, Coughlin minimized the Nazi persecution of Jews, saying “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” During the latter half of 1938, Social Justice reprinted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At a 1938 speech in the Bronx Coughlin crowed “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” The books sold in the Shrine reflected this as well. One of the titles was Rulers of Russia by Irish Priest Dennis Fahey, which Coughlin had the exclusive right to reprint. Fahey’s book explained that “The real forces behind Bolshevism in Russia are Jewish forces, and Bolshevism is really an instrument in the hands of the Jews for the establishment of their future Messianic kingdom.”

As early as 1936, sensing Lemke’s imminent defeat, Coughlin expressed sympathy for fascism: “Democracy is doomed. This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads-I take the road to fascism.” These sympathies continued throughout the rest of his time in public life. Like nearly all Catholic officials, Coughlin supported Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, despite or even because of their reign of “White Terror.” In 1939, he proclaimed, “Practically all of the sixteen principles of Social Justice are being put into practice in [Fascist] Italy and [Nazi] Germany.”

It’s interesting to note that after Coughlin’s antisemitic and pro-Nazi utterances, federal elected officials continued to contribute articles to Social Justice. One was isolationist Senator William Borah. Borah’s anti-war feelings may have had a monetary source. When novelist Gore Vidal asked his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore, about the source of several hundred thousand dollars found in Borah’s safety deposit box after his death, Gore said the money was from “[t]he Nazis. To keep us out of the war.” Another was Congressperson George Dondero, who actually had Coughlin as a constituent. Dondero served as Mayor of Royal Oak, Michigan for a spell and later defended the Nazi war criminals of I.G. Farben. The current Royal Oak Middle School used to be named after him. A third contributor was Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundeen, himself basically a Nazi propaganda agent.

Coughlin’s efforts also were championed by some from the world of arts. Architect Phillip Johnson went on to design the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a reporter for Social Justice. Johnson joined the Wehrmacht in their invasion of Poland and described the burning of Warsaw as “stirring.” Poet Ezra Pound, a resident of fascist Italy, was another Coughlin supporter declaring, “Coughlin has the great gift of simplifying vital issues to a point where the populace can understand their main factor if not the technical detail.” Novelist Hillarie Belloc, a definite anti-Semite, was a contributor of articles to Social Justice.

A man selling newspaper copies of Father Coughlin’s Social Justice in the 1930s in New York City. Photo Credit: Library of Congress.

The last organization Coughlin was affiliated with, after the demise of the National Union and the Union Party, was the clerical fascist Christian Front. The Front was particularly strong in New York and Boston. After Kristallnacht, New York’s WMCA refused to carry Coughlin’s program. Fronters picketed outside with signs saying “Buy Christian; vote Christian,” and “Send Jews back where they came from-in leaky boats.” In The Nation, James Weschler described the Front’s tactics for selling Social Justice in New York: “Throughout the week the salesmen are located at strategic, crowded points throughout the city, screaming antisemitic slogans…” Weschler described how Fronters assailed theaters that promoted the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy and how even children were conscripted to sell Social Justice. Boys were instructed to start crying that “A big Jew hit me!” to help drum up sales and sympathy.

The Christian Front was most infamous for the trial of the so-called “Brooklyn Boys,” seventeen men tried for attempting to overthrow the government. Although they were acquitted by a sympathetic jury, FBI files revealed that they were in possession of rifles pilfered from the National Guard and had engaged in military drilling for their planned coup. Frances Moran, head of the Boston Front was recruited as a German agent and the Boston Front continued its activities throughout World War II.

By this point, many who had earlier aided Coughlin were fed up. The National Association of Broadcasters, representing 428 radio stations, pulled the plug on his radio network in 1939. The next year, his voice could only be heard on two radio stations, and his ecclesiastical superiors ordered him to retire to the pulpit and cease his political activities. Social Justice continued to run with Coughlin’s assistance, although it was barred from the mail after Pearl Harbor due to its sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini. Coughlin’s shrill, hateful voice was finally silenced.

There were numerous questions raised as to whether Coughlin was being paid off by the Nazis during his career. He certainly had his share of foreign entanglements. Decorated General Smedley Butler, author of the classic pamphlet War is a Racket, passed along to the FBI that he received a phone call from Coughlin urging him to lead an army to overthrow Mexico’s government. Coughlin believed that the secular, nationalist regime of Lazaro Cardenas was pro-Communist and was persecuting Catholics. Coughlin wrote on several occasions to Benito Mussolini, offering Social Justice as a forum for the dictator. Warren’s biography does support the contention that Coughlin received funds from Germany, from the Foreign Office, the Detroit Consul, and other sources. It’s also true that Coughlin’s listeners were very generous in supporting his activities so how much of a difference Nazi funding made is unknown.

Coughlin’s influence can be later seen in right-wing talk radio and somewhat in the careers of Protestant televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Even after his death in 1979, he remained a hero of the U.S. far right.

Although Coughlin was ordered to cease involvement in politics, the subject maintained his interest. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had a strong supporter og Coughlin when he ran for President as the Republican candidate in 1964. In his 1969 book Bishops Versus Pope, he inveighed against “loud-mouthed clerical advocates of arson, riot, and draft-card burning. They are swingers who suffer so terribly from an inferiority complex that they reach madly for the brass ring of popular recognition which dangles on the merry-go-round of secularism.” Readers might be surprised to learn that, per Coughlin biographer Sheldon Machus, the priest purchased $500 worth of Israeli bonds in 1955. The bonds were to prop up a nation he considered a bulwark against communism. This instance is further evidence that support for Israel can easily coincide with anti-Semitism.

Coughlin’s influence can be later seen in right-wing talk radio and somewhat in the careers of Protestant televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Even after his death in 1979, he remained a hero of the U.S. far right. Willis Carto of the antisemitic Liberty Lobby lauded Coughlin in his 1982 book Profiles in Populism. One of the clearest heirs to Coughlin is the Ferndale-based anti-LGBTQ hate group Church Militant. In a 2019 article, the group sang Coughlin’s praises as an opponent of the welfare state and Communism. They avoided the swastika-covered elephant in the room of Coughlin’s fascist sympathies. The group has also recommended Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to members and gave a fawning interview to avowed Christian nationalist Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The conspiracism, xenophobia, and antisemitism of Coughlin can now all be found within Church Militant. In this sense, perhaps the Radio Priest never died after all.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Library of Congress; modified by Tempest.

Sean Larson has written a long response to our short article in which we criticized author Jonah ben Avraham for his denunciation of those who, while organizing against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians, also condemned Hamas’s attacks on civilians on October 7. Larson’s response is unfortunately as problematic as the piece we criticized.

Larson charges that we “forefront” criticism of Hamas. On the contrary, in almost everything we have done in the past three months we have in fact “forefronted” the horror being faced by the people of Gaza. Larson’s objection is actually not to our “forefronting” criticism of Hamas, but to our mentioning it at all. We only wrote our initial article on ben Avraham because he suggested that to criticize Hamas atrocities in any way was to be “pro-settler.”

Larson suggests that we are moral monsters who, had we lived in earlier times, would have supported slavery and colonialism. He puts us in the current conflict on the side of Israel and the United States and against the liberation of the Palestinians. We are excoriated for having had the temerity to raise criticisms of Hamas while writing “from the imperial core.”

In almost everything we have done in the past three months we have in fact “forefronted” the horror being faced by the people of Gaza. Larson’s objection is actually not to our “forefronting” criticism of Hamas, but to our mentioning it at all.

Perhaps we ought to introduce into this discussion an element of realism. What do we and Larson actually do here in the imperial core? As activists on the Left we write, speak, and demonstrate demanding a ceasefire, opposing U.S. military aid to Israel, and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. The one difference is that we—but not Larson—also criticize Hamas for its reactionary politics and its murder of civilians, though this in no way inhibits our participation in the current movement. Perhaps Larson and ben Avraham should tone down their accusations of people being “pro-settler” or pro-colonial.

We know that Tempest agrees with us that one can support the victims of U.S. imperialism without blindly endorsing their politics. Tempest shares our criticisms of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Russia and China today and disagrees with those whose justified defense of the oppressed led to vicariously identifying with and adopting the politics of Third World revolutionaries to the extent of sometimes setting aside the Left’s historic demands for democracy and for humane values even in the course of revolution. Tempest also agrees with us that the enemies of our enemy are not automatically our friends, an unfortunate tendency that led to a reluctance to criticize the crimes of Stalin during the Cold War or Russia, China, or Iran today. We and Tempest both support movements from below, without blindly endorsing all who challenge Washington or its allies. We support progressive forces from below, not reactionary or fundamentalist ones. But ben Avraham and Larson, in their denunciation of any who criticize Hamas, seem to have lost their way, abandoning this tradition and replacing it with uncritical support for reactionary leaders and groups.

Larson writes that perhaps our “most egregious assumption … is that socialists in the United States are the proper referees of anticolonial movements the world over.” What we actually believe is that socialists everywhere, while showing solidarity, also retain the right to critical thinking. As Marx put it: “Doubt all.” We claim no special role, but believe like other socialists of the last two centuries that we should not remain silent in the face of atrocities that violate socialist values. At one point, Larson describes the horrible crimes carried out against Indigenous people in North America and tells us that some of the responses involved atrocities.

He writes: “In the view of La Botz and Shalom, should socialists condemn the Dakota and other brave Indigenous warriors and insist on the use of the “legitimate means” of peaceful protest and moral appeal during the ethnic cleansing of Turtle Island?”

Larson here implies that we equate “legitimate means” with “peaceful protest and moral appeal.” But these terms are not at all equivalent. We are not pacifists, and we believe violence can be justified in the struggle for freedom from oppression. (As we said in our article: “Palestinians, like all oppressed people, have the right to resist, including by armed force, by all legitimate means.”) But that’s not the same as claiming that all violence is justified. Violence in and of itself is not illegitimate. Killing noncombatants is.

We are not pacifists, and we believe violence can be justified in the struggle for freedom from oppression…But that’s not the same as claiming that all violence is justified. Violence in and of itself is not illegitimate. Killing noncombatants is.

Our difference is that he and ben Avraham think the way to build support for a ceasefire is to  insist we don’t care about the means used by Hamas and that those who condemn the killing of civilians are “pro-settler.” We, on the other hand, believe that appealing to people’s humanity is one of the best ways to convince them to oppose Israel’s ongoing massacre. We also believe it is important to demonstrate that Hamas’ action have not been in the best long-term interests of Palestinians. Larson says we are wrong to suggest that Israel is winning the war (though we said no such thing), but in any case, the war has been catastrophic for Palestine, and should it become a regional war, it would be disastrous for the entire World.

Does condemning Hamas’s crimes mean that we are enabling Israel’s ongoing mass murder in Gaza? Not at all. We believe that just as it is wrong to kill Israeli civilians because of the crimes of their government, so too it is wrong to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians because of Hamas’s crimes. By urging silence on Hamas’s immoral behavior, Larson and others are sending the implicit message that they worry that Israel’s murderous response would be justified if Hamas had engaged in war crimes. No. Nothing justifies Israel’s onslaught. Some of our comrades have told us that they think we were too dismissive of the slogan “by any means necessary,” because, they say, since it is never necessary to kill children and other noncombatants, adherence to the slogan would preclude what happened on October 7. Point taken. But for Larson and some others, what is really meant by the slogan “by any means necessary” is “by any means at all.” Killing hundreds of people at a rave meets neither the “legitimate means” standard of international humanitarian law nor the standard of necessity, let alone the standard of morality.

Larson argues that one must take into account the context of the Hamas attacks. We fully agree. History didn’t begin on October 7. One needs to understand the long history of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, apartheid, and dehumanization to appreciate what brought Palestinians to this point. But understanding context is not the same as refusing to criticize. Consider the behavior of Zionists in 1947-48. The context for the atrocities they carried out during the Nakba was the fact that Jews had just come through the Holocaust. We understand that, and are even sympathetic, but we nevertheless believe that it is appropriate—indeed necessary—to condemn their horrific treatment of Palestinians. Understanding and justification are not the same. We in the Palestine support movement have been warning for years that Israel’s policy would lead to an explosion. But we can’t ignore the agency of Hamas’s leaders in choosing the policies they did.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument; photo by Yuval Madar.

Larson analogizes Hamas’s attack to the resistance of the Warsaw ghetto, because it seems members of the latter once threw grenades into a lounge and a coffee shop (his source doesn’t report any casualties). If we don’t condemn the Warsaw fighters, says Larson, how can we condemn Hamas? But what an awful analogy. The scale of the killings and the balance of victims matter. The Warsaw resistance overwhelmingly aimed its weapons at soldiers, while most of Hamas’s targets were civilians. The scale of slaughter, on a larger scale, is also what makes Israel’s assault on Gaza so horrific: it isn’t a civilian here or there who is being killed, but a pace of civilian deaths with “few precedents in this century” (New York Times). We will not win popular support for a ceasefire, let alone for our more long-term aspirations for justice in the Middle East, by betraying the humane values that have always inspired the Left.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

I found the article “What would it take to win in Palestine?” by David Camfield and Charlie Post a real missed opportunity to discuss the current conjuncture. In many ways, it reads as if it could have been written forty or fifty years ago.

I don’t see a possibility of breaking any section of the Israeli Jewish working class from the Zionist order, any more than it was possible to win over sections of the white working class in South Africa. While you acknowledge that in the article, the piece does still quote Moshe Machover approvingly that Zionism cannot be overthrown without the participation and consent of a section of Jewish workers. How do you square this circle?

I also worry about the notion that Palestinians should avoid harming Jewish Israeli non-combatants. These non-combatants are settlers in Palestine ‘48 (Israel) and in the occupied territories, serve in the Israeli occupation force; thus, they  are part of the state machine involved in committing genocide. They are hardly civilians. In fact, the one major group not involved in the colonial armed forces are Orthodox Jews, whose leaders call for the expulsion of all Palestinians (and worse).

Clearly, you are correct in arguing for a regional revolutionary strategy, and, yes, the role of the Arab working class in Egypt and elsewhere is crucial, but Marxists have argued that for years. Moreover, it is likely that renewed working class struggle in the Arab metropolises will shift opinion among the settler community even further to the right rather than leading to a fracturing of the settler working class.

We are currently in the midst of the largest popular movement in my political lifetime, at least in Britain, at the center of which are hundreds of thousands of young people and in which Palestinians and people of color, particularly young women, are playing a leadership role. Yet the article has no Palestinian voices, other than from the past. There is no engagement with the debates in the current movement about the way forward, no sense of the anger and passion on the streets and the role this movement can play in weakening the resolve of the rulers of the imperial heartlands who are backing genocide.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

In early December, the Los Angeles branch of Tempest Collective co-organized a Palestine teach-in at All Saints’ Church with Pasadena City College’s Anti-War Club, Middle East and North African Students’ association, and other campus and community allies. The event drew around 70 attendees at its height, featuring presentations from Tempest members, Anti-War Club students, and a local Palestinian community member who came from Gaza. We publish here an edited transcript of Tempest LA member Denée Jackson’s speech on centering solidarity with Palestine from the position of intersecting identities.

I want to begin by sharing my identities to position myself in this conversation. I’m biracial—Black and white—queer, Jewish, working-class, and a woman. Intersectional solidarity is important to me. It’s life for me and for my people who identify with multiple marginalized identities. Many of these identities, as some of you may know already, have been weaponized by Zionists in their propaganda to support the genocide of Palestinians. So, what I’m going to be talking about today is solidarity, and I will begin by talking about Black solidarity with Palestine.

In the 1960s, Black liberation struggles were fighting for basic human dignity, which Black folks have never had in the United States. There were many movements going on at the time, such as the Civil Rights Movement.

I want to quote Martin Luther King Jr., who has been weaponized by Zionists to say that he supports Israel. And indeed, he was once in support of the State of Israel and had a trip scheduled with a delegation to the Holy Land. It was interrupted by the Six-Day War, and so he canceled his trip. Later he was quoted in an interview saying that Israel should “give up the land” back to the Palestinians. Today, we have all kinds of social media to figure out what is happening on the ground in Palestine. In 1967, that wasn’t the case. But once he learned about what was happening and raised his political consciousness, King knew better. He knew that solidarity with Palestinians meant land back. Also, the Black Panthers used an image of Leila Khaled, who was a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I highly recommend reading her biography. The Panthers used her image to articulate their politics around the global struggle against colonial powers, because they knew that it was the same colonial powers that oppressed folks all over the world.

I also want to share a victorious example of Black-Palestinian solidarity. In Detroit in the early 1970s, Palestinians and other Arab Americans took inspiration from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to create their own organization. In 1973, they went on strike to pressure the United Auto Workers (UAW) to divest from Israeli state bonds. Today, the UAW is the largest union to sign on to a ceasefire resolution, building on this legacy of workers’ solidarity for Palestine.

We know Black folks in the United States were stolen from their ancestral lands, just as Palestinians have been displaced from theirs. Neither group has ever been given equal opportunities in life, and similar structures of oppression are shared between Black and Palestinian peoples. So, I want to talk about abolition as a step toward liberation led by Black people in the United States, which also means applying abolitionist principles to a free Palestine.

I want to call in a couple of books that have really helped to define my identity as a pro-Palestine abolitionist: Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us and Angela Davis’ Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.

So, first, what is abolition today? Abolition is completely eliminating systems of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. It’s not just “don’t give them any more funding,” but completely destroying them because we know that policing and prison are death-making institutions and they serve to reproduce violence, even though we’re taught that they are supposed to promote safety.

Surveillance companies and punitive tactics in the United States operate the same as those in Israel. Israel is central to the militarization of police forces globally, and in the United States, police chiefs to campus police have been trained by Israeli forces.

Solidarity is the principle that I want life for myself, I want my basic needs met and safety, and maybe I even want to thrive. And therefore I want that for every single human because I know that my liberation is completely bound to theirs.

We also know that reformist alternatives to prisons don’t work: house arrests and probation-these are not unlike the harsh carceral systems in Gaza that also limit life. So, again, we need complete elimination. This is one aspect of abolition, but the other important piece is building up new institutions with love. We advocate for safe housing, youth programming, training up street medics, first responders, and transformative justice practitioners. We create these things at the same time as we abolish those things. And a lot of the time it’s trial and error. We try and fail, and we try again, because we know that anything is better than this current system that we have right now.

So when we apply this to Palestine, we need to remember that we are fighting not just for a ceasefire and an end to the ongoing violence. We are fighting for Palestinian liberation. It’s about building the structures that would support life in Palestine, too. And this is what differentiates our vision—the abolitionist vision—from the Democrats’ vision, which waters down what ceasefire means (if they even talk about ceasefire at all). We’re talking about liberation.

As a Black Jewish person, I also want to make a connection to Jewish solidarity with Palestine, and how Zionists are not for Jewish liberation, whether for Jews in Israel, Jews in the diaspora, and especially for those of us with multiple marginalized identities. I want to draw one parallel to pull in why we will never win liberation under capitalism and colonialism. In the United States, settlers armed white folks to protect property, particularly human property—enslaved Africans—and then created the police force to also protect their property and therefore their capital. And after the Holocaust, when Zionists settled in occupied Palestine, Israel also armed Jews to massacre Palestinians—thus committing atrocities that they themselves had experienced only a few years earlier.

They militarized Israelis to first steal property with lethal force and then protect their property with lethal force. And today they’re arming settlers in the West Bank to shoot and displace Palestinians. Zionists turned Jews into murderers and said you can only be free if you oppress and kill other people. That is not liberation. Anti-Zionist Jews today are crying “Not in our name.” Not in our names should Zionists have ever been allowed to steal Palestinian land and murder Palestinians. As a Black person with ancestors who were enslaved in the United States and a Jewish person with ancestors who came to New York to survive the Holocaust, I will absolutely never support genocide against any humans in my name.

A note about solidarity in general: Solidarity is not transactional. It’s not showing up for someone just because they showed up for you, or showing up for someone with the expectation that they must show up for you in the future. Solidarity is the principle that I want life for myself, I want my basic needs met and safety, and maybe I even want to thrive. And therefore I want that for every single human because I know that my liberation is completely bound to theirs.

James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis, “If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” History teaches us this is true. This is what imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism do: they create hierarchies of life and dispose of people who are at the lower rungs of these hierarchies, particularly poor people, people with disabilities, people of color, and people who live in places where capitalists want to extract natural resources.

I would like to end with hope. Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” We have to practice it, especially when it’s not easy at the moment. We have to have hope that change is possible. We have to build independent grassroots organizations, which I see us doing—and we can do more. We have to divest from this two-party system. Democrats will never win us liberation. We have to boycott and divest from U.S. corporate entities that support Israeli occupation. And we have to have hope that we will free Palestine.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: “Palestine sunbird standing on a fence,” Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.

It has been a little over three years since the beginning of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. Given the intense conservative backlash in the wake of the movement, 2020 in some ways feels like a distant, foggy memory. Since those protests, and especially more recently, I’ve found myself thinking about that summer—both struggling to remember what it felt like and asking myself a number of questions: How did it feel to be out on the streets? How open was the political moment for a more radical social transformation? What did we think was possible? What were the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the movement? What impact were the protests going to have moving forward, and how were things going to change?

With the benefit of hindsight, we perhaps have partial answers to some of these questions. There is still much that the Left has to discuss in order to make sense of what happened; in a way, it feels like this momentous, historic series of events took place, and then things just returned to “normal,” if we understand normal to be the dystopian times in which we are living. Although the opening created by the movement that summer has closed for now, things will undoubtedly never be the same. Whatever shortcomings they contained, the protests altered the discourse, logic, and trajectory of American society.

For there to be an anthology of essays, many of which were written in real time during the uprising, is invaluable. The discussions we can have as a result of these contributions and how they help us tap back into our own individual and collective experiences of this time period cannot be overlooked.

For these reasons, The George Floyd Uprising edited by Vortex Group represents a significant contribution to our collective memory, understanding, and experience of the summer of 2020. The collection brings together numerous accounts from and about the uprising, ranging from June 2020 to May 2021. As the editors acknowledge, the contributions are far from homogeneous: “in spite of a shared commitment … [the] authors diverge around a number of key political, social, and strategic questions,” including those of “race and identity, abolitionism and reform, the role of weapons and ethics,” and more (5-6).

For there to be an anthology of essays, many of which were written in real time during the uprising, is invaluable. The discussions we can have as a result of these contributions and how they help us tap back into our own individual and collective experiences of this time period cannot be overlooked. At the same time, knowing what we know now, it is clear that some of the contributions were overly optimistic about the potential for the protests to mark a revolutionary moment. “At the risk of sounding naive,” writes Idris Robinson, “I sincerely believe that the riots that we have all witnessed and hopefully participated in this summer have opened the window to insurrection and even a full blown revolution” (76). Additionally, a number of the political and strategic conclusions lend themselves to criticism.

The authors of the book provide analyses and first hand accounts from New York City, Portland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and Louisville, and engage with topics including tactics and strategy, the role of identity, race, and class, the cooptation and repression faced by the uprising, the absence of the organized Left from the struggle, the question of organizational forms, and more. There is so much we have yet to discuss and learn from what happened in the summer of 2020, and this book represents an important resource for doing so.

Political Conclusions from the Struggle Context

As noted above, the authors of the various contributions approach the events of the summer from a number of different perspectives based on where they were, in what capacity they participated, and the distinct political views they brought with them into those experiences. That said, there are a number of shared observations and conclusions that authors draw throughout the anthology. These political conclusions imply, or rather highlight, an element of universality across the struggles (despite the differences between each place) and are worth examining in some detail.

An important starting point is the larger context in which this uprising occurred. While the uprising itself was specifically a response to racist police violence and inequality, it was also about “class, capitalism, COVID 19, Trump, and much more” (26). At the end of May 2020, when the protests first erupted after the murder of George Floyd, the country had been in lockdown for over two months. At least 36 million Americans were on some type of unemployment, “essential workers” were risking their lives daily to provide essential services and to increase the profits for the capitalist class, and millions were facing eviction due to their inability to pay rent. Many people faced or experienced precarity in a way they had never before, creating a situation in which the contradictions and shortcomings of the capitalist system—which prioritizes profits over human need—became more apparent to increasingly large portions of the population (41). It was this larger context that created an even more combustible terrain on which the uprising would unfold.

Healthcare workers join a march for Black Lives in Seattle on June 9, 2020. Photo by Backbone Campaign. A Black-led, multiracial uprising

A number of authors make two related and important observations about the nature of the uprisings: It was the Black proletariat that initiated and sparked them and served as their most militant element. In these ways, it provided leadership to the movement. At the same time, however, the uprising was multiethnic/multiracial, and it would be inaccurate to say it was simply a Black rebellion or Black uprising.

The fact that the uprising was Black-led and also deeply multiracial is important for several reasons. First, it highlights the fact that in the United States, “the Black struggle has served a singular role in American radical politics, often acting as the igniting element that sets wider layers of society into motion” (6). Crucially, though, while “the Black proletariat is the most revolutionary of the US proletariat … it can’t defeat capitalism on its own” (210). It is imperative for anyone interested in overthrowing and dismantling capitalism to “respect and support the autonomy of the Black revolutionary struggle” in order to ensure that the desire for multiracial solidarity does not “come at the expense of Black liberation” (29). In other words, it will be necessary to simultaneously respect and support the uniqueness of the struggle for Black liberation, born of the foundational role of anti-Blackness in this country, while also connecting that struggle to larger struggles that aim to move beyond capitalism.

A crowd gathers before a mural by Peyton Scott Russell the evening after George Floyd’s memorial service. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Some of the authors note that while it is easy to draw parallels between the George Floyd uprising and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s, they are qualitatively different in several important ways. First, “white workers were largely absent from the urban rebellions that took place” in the 1960s. While this isn’t necessarily to say that white workers, or workers as organized workers, participated in the George Floyd uprisings en masse, it was “a multiracial proletariat that rebelled” this time, making “comparisons of this rebellion to 1968 wrong” (29).

Furthermore, today, unlike the 1960s, there are a number of Black mayors, police commissioners, and district attorneys throughout the country. We have also seen the proliferation of NGOs and nonprofits, a number of which are Black-led. In other words, the struggles of the 1960s gave rise to new obstacles and contradictions that played an important role in the summer of 2020 and that were not present in 1968 or the 1960s more generally.

Repression, cooptation, and other challenges

It was in the interest of various groups and actors to crush the uprising. While these groups had a range of politics and deployed a variety of methods to defang, demobilize, and/or extinguish the uprising, they all set out to ensure the movement was as contained and limited as possible.

Of course, the far right, the state, the police, and similar actors set out to crush the movement as swiftly as possible, often opting for more openly violent forms of repression, including murder. The authors highlight the fact, however, that the reformist/progressive Left—including NGOs, nonprofits, the Black Lives Matter Foundation, and the Black middle class, and many if not most local politicians and community/religious leaders tied to those organizations—also played a central role in demobilizing the uprising.

“Black NGOs, including the Black Lives Matter Foundation,” write Shemon and Arturo,

hardly had any relationship to the militant phase of the rebellion. In fact, such organizations tended to play a reactionary role, often preventing riots from escalating and spreading. Black NGOs were the spearhead of the forces dividing the movement into “good” and “bad” protestors. The social base of Black NGOs is not the Black proletariat but the Black middle class and, most importantly, a segment of the radicalizing white middle class. (26)

Other authors also note that the Black middle class played a particularly reactionary role in the uprising, writing that it “uses Black proletarian struggle to advance its own cause” and arguing that a “Black led rebellion could only be crushed by a Black led counterinsurgency program” (187).

The Black middle class, though, is far from the only group which sought to limit the possibilities of the uprising and steer its achievements towards its own—less radical—ends.

Building on the false distinction between good and bad protestors, in which ‘good’ protestors were ‘peaceful’ and ‘bad’ protestors were ‘rioters’ who engaged in looting and property destruction (80-81, 84), the state and media widely spread lies about the “outside agitator” in what one author describes as “a phase of advanced misinformation.” This narrative aimed to further divide the uprising by race and identity. The media “simultaneously claim[ed] the movement had been ‘hijacked’ by white people, ‘antifa,’ and ‘insurrectionary anarchists,’ as well as by undercover white supremacists” (93). Not only were the participants, therefore, necessarily extremists, they were also white and coming in from the outside to sow and exacerbate discontent. Accordingly, Nevada writes that “the state used the fictional or exaggerated figure of the ‘white supremacist agitator’ to perpetuate anti-blackness and capitalist property relations” (103).

The “outside agitator” narrative also implied that Black people themselves were either not engaged in the protests or were not supportive of more militant tactics and forms of protest. This narrative has deep racist roots in this country’s history and “first began to take shape during the era of Black chattel slavery. The old racist story goes that slaves were happy until white abolitionists from the North excited them to revolt” (207).

“A counterinsurgency campaign has fundamentally altered the course of the movement,” writes Shemon, highlighting the fact that we cannot understand the waning of the uprising without analyzing the repression and cooptation that occurred (186).

Tactics (means and ends)

Throughout the book, various authors put forth analyses of a number of tactics and questions ranging from looting, property destruction, and the use of arms/weapons to how to engage with race and identity. The authors ask what constitutes abolition and how to actually win it.

All of the contributors who discussed looting supported it as a tactic, identifying “social” looting (80) and the caravans of looting in particular as requiring a high degree of “coordination, organization, and boldness of initiative” (181). On the question of property destruction, Nevada cites Idris Robinson when they write that “whenever property is protected, it is protected for white supremacist ends” (109), going on to argue that we should understand “every act of property destruction or looting as an expression of a grievance” (107).

A police car burns not far from Philadelphia’s City Hall on May 31, 2020.

On the question of arms/weapons, several authors argue that the use of arms represented a shortcoming, or mistake, from a strategic perspective. These questions were particularly relevant at the Wendy’s occupation in Atlanta, but were also pertinent in places like Kenosha and Louisville, as well. They argued that “the strength of the movement will depend on broad social support more than on purely military victories” (159) and that armed struggle alone is not terrain that we will be able to win on (153). Importantly, it wasn’t that arms in and of themselves were the issue, but rather the fact that the use of arms “tended to specialize itself, resulting in a form of social closure” and that

the more that armed violence detaches itself from other forms of struggle, the more it becomes something we treat as a specialized technical problem…[and] the more it will tend to become divorced from the intelligence and confidence of the crowd. (216)

Abolition is not a central topic the authors take up, but some raise questions around what constitutes abolition, as well as criticisms of “defund” as it relates to abolition. Shemon argues that revolutionary abolition was largely displaced by reformist abolition after the first week of the uprising. They write that reformist abolitionism is characterized by

the activity and politics of professional activists, NGOs, lawyers, and politicians and concerned primarily with “defunding,” policy, and legislative shifts … [and that] proposals to “defund” amount to little more than a monetary displacement from one section of the state to another. (190)

As it relates to the content of abolition itself, one author argues that, “Each structure fire contributed to the material abolition of the existing state of things” (22), whereas another argues that the “rebellion began not as an abolitionist politics centered on policy changes but as a viral contagion of demolitionist desire” (224), citing the burning of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis as an example of demolitionist and not abolitionist practice (231). Nevada argues that the neighborhood watch and citizen patrol groups that emerged in Minneapolis “cloak[ed themselves] in the language of police abolition,” but rather than prefiguring what would replace the Minneapolis Police Department, instead “assum[ed] the enforcement of the very same legal order here and now,” only with nicer faces (108-109).

The absence of the organized Left: lessons from the 2020 uprising

The role of the Left in the 2020 uprisings is generally underexplored throughout the book, which is revealing. There is widespread agreement amongst the authors that the organized Left—including socialist and other revolutionary organizations—played little to no role in the emergence, development, or deepening of the uprising. Shemon and Arturo write that the uprisings “transformed an entire generation [and] it is not the NGOs or the left, not even the revolutionary left, that has done this. It is thousands of brave young people acting on their own initiative …” (211).

I agree with the assessment that the organized/revolutionary Left played a negligible role in the uprisings; members of the organized Left did participate, but as individuals or small groupings rather than as part of an organized left as such. The anti-organizational conclusions that various authors draw, however, are a major weakness of the book.

The organized Left and revolutionary organizations are weak and, accordingly, played no significant role in the uprising … [but] the authors who argue that revolutionaries must adapt to these conditions by adopting their logic are confusing the symptoms of the problem for its cure.

One author argues that we must “embrac[e] a model of decentralization” because “the implosion of mediating institutions [is a] basic feature of our chaotic times” (139-140), while another writes that:

Twentieth-century proletarian revolution, [which] was imagined as a process whereby the working class would grow exponentially up to a crucial threshold, at which point it would become politically hegemonic, take power, and produce a new world out of the shell of the old … is no longer conceivable. (160)

Another author argues that our ability to

fac[e] the organizational problem with an understanding of fragmentation as a condition rather than a shortcoming will be crucial to allowing our movements to flourish—rather than decay—under the mark of leaderlessness. (149)

Several authors also question and problematize the role of class as both a framework of analysis and potential revolutionary subject. One author writes that the “crowd,” rather than class, is a more effective framework for understanding the uprising (12, 19).

Adrian Wohlleben takes this further, arguing that

it is difficult to imagine an insurrection in the USA today taking the form of a disciplined consolidation of marginal social groups—e.g., a crystallization of crowds into “classes” through solidarity … (230).

They argue that focusing on the sphere of production represents a strain of “ultraleft thought” (244), pointing instead to the Yellow Vest movement as an example of a contemporary uprising that put forth a new and potentially revolutionary logic. Namely, it focused on a “leading gesture” (in this case, putting on the yellow vest) which “becomes a vessel into which a broad swath of singular antagonists feel invited to pour their outrage, aggression, and ferocious joy” (227-228). Additionally, such movements “allow individuals to move alongside one another, while preserving their own respective reasons for fighting, thereby inviting each of us to trust in our own singular evaluation of the situation” (229). Rejecting class and notions of mass revolutionary parties, they argue that “it is considerably easier to imagine a viral contagion of actions that respond intelligently to their moment escalating into mass experiments in communist sharing on a variety of scales” (230).

I agree with the authors that the current conjecture is characterized by fragmentation, decentralization, and a lack of leadership. The organized Left and revolutionary organizations are weak and, accordingly, played no significant role in the uprising. That said, the authors who argue that revolutionaries must adapt to these conditions by adopting their logic are confusing the symptoms of the problem for its cure. This is not to say that we should simply attempt to reproduce or copy examples from the twentieth century. Today’s terrain is different and experimentation will undoubtedly be necessary as we work to rebuild a revolutionary movement. However, as we take stock of past successes and failures and examine them in light of today’s conditions, it would be a massive mistake for the Left to reject the importance of class, production, labor, and revolutionary organizations.

Importantly, several authors note that the absence of an organized Left had a negative impact on the uprising. In New York City, the riots and the more radical elements of the uprising melted away only a week or so after beginning. The New York Post-Left writes that the movement found itself “unable to develop new tactics in order to stay dynamic,” and therefore at “something of an impasse [that] currently lacks direction.” They continue, “pro-revolutionaries need to be durably organized to sustain their capacity through the valley to prepare for the next peak” (82).

Echoing this, another author writes that “there was no legible pro-revolutionary pole in the streets,” and that “the role of a revolutionary minority, those who help build the capacity and collective confidence of revolt, may become more important. In this sense the absence of a pro-revolutionary pole was felt” (174-175). Last, Shemon writes that “on the whole [proletarians] lack the mechanisms or institutions in racial capitalism to develop [proletarian multiracial] unity,” concluding that “without fetishizing organizations, some organizational forms will be needed to crystallize and concentrate this alliance” (193-194).

We need to highlight the conclusions that stem from these important observations—namely, that decentralization, a lack of leadership, and the absence of organizations limited coordination, tactical creativity, strategic clarity, and ultimately the potential of the uprising, rather than furthering or bolstering it.

One author argues that operating effectively in the current political moment requires “giv[ing] up politics” (101), but I would argue that the uprising taught us the exact opposite—we need explicitly revolutionary politics now more than ever. Depoliticization will only lead to further fragmentation, which will limit rather than foster our ability to build power and develop the knowledge, practices, and forms necessary to destroy capitalism.

Since the uprising, the Left, oppressed groups, and working people generally have been on the backfoot. In many ways, we have struggled to translate the uprising into tangible changes or power, at least in the short term. The powers that be, on the other hand, have responded with a highly organized offensive, and while there has been resistance to these attacks, the Left has been unable to meaningfully propose a clear alternative, let alone implement it.

It would have felt unthinkable in the summer of 2020 that just a year later, New York City would end up with a law-and-order, tough-on-crime, Black former-cop as mayor. The absence of an organized Left, though, has allowed Adams to carry out his anti-migrant, anti-tenant/homeless, pro-cop, anti-worker agenda. A revolutionary organized Left is deeply necessary to articulate and develop a real alternative to what’s currently on offer. A decentralized, leaderless, fragmented Left will not be able to meet the needs of the moment.

The 2020 uprisings were historic insofar as Black proletarians led a multiracial uprising that shook the country to its core in the midst of COVID-19 lockdowns, unemployment, evictions, and a social and economic crisis. Developing an organized revolutionary Left will be necessary in order to ensure that the next uprising is able to go further than that of 2020.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: Lorie Shaull; modified by Tempest.

The Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine in 2014, and its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, led to many fissures on the Left in the United States and internationally.

As a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network, an author of an early article about the struggles in Ukraine in 2014 (which I  recently updated), and as someone who has worked with Ukrainian and Russian public health researchers around HIV/AIDS and related issues for much of this century, I have been frustrated by the lack of a good books to ask others to read. It is therefore a pleasure to read Paul Le Blanc’s Making Sense of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, which is very short and can easily be read in ebook format.

Unlike such earlier books, such as War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies (reviewed critically on this site), Le Blanc’s study gives respectful consideration to the views of people who disagree with the author. Of particular note, Le Blanc (unlike Benjamin and Davies and most other commentators who support Russia in its war) presents the views of both Russians and Ukrainians. In this, he is in accord with the “nothing about us without us” principle that any analysis of an oppressed or otherwise suffering group of people needs to include their views. As anyone who has looked carefully at the history of Ukraine over the last few centuries knows, Ukraine has a long history of being oppressed by the rulers of Russia. The current attempt by Russia to seize the country is one of the most horrible, though still less destructive than the massive starvation that Russia’s so-called Communist rulers imposed on Ukraine and other parts of the USSR in the 1930s.

Le Blanc makes his position on the war clear from the outset. As he puts it:

• I favor the defeat of [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion and victory for Ukrainian self-determination.
• I oppose imperialism in all its forms—including Putin’s invasion, including NATO.
• I oppose capitalism and favor its replacement with genuine political and economic democracy everywhere: the United States, Ukraine, Russia, etc.

Le Blanc discusses the argument that the expansion of NATO instigated the attack. In doing so, he does conclude that Putin may have seen this expansion as threatening, but also points to other reasons for the invasion that were more important: the need of Putin and the capitalist Russian to deflect growing opposition within Russia and lay the basis for the repression of opposition by attacking a neighboring country; the “Greater Russia” imperialist mindset of much of the Russian ruling class (which in some ways analogous to the “Manifest Destiny” beliefs of U.S. rulers in the 1800s and since); and the principled anti-revolutionism that Putin widely expressed in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s attacks on Syrian revolutionaries and in opposing the Maidan uprisings in Ukraine in 2014.

Le Blanc’s discussion of the Maidan uprisings is perhaps too short. He points out that this uprising in no way attacked capitalism, which is true. He does not discuss, and perhaps does not fully understand, the extent to which it led to important reforms, including greatly reducing the ability of police to exact bribes from citizens in everyday encounters. He also does not note that, like other movements, such as the U.S. Civil Rights Movement during the first part of the 1960s, the Maidan movement had many possibilities within it in 2014. It did indeed include right-wingers, even some fascists, as the campists have fetishized, but it also included many socialists, anarchists, feminists, social democrats (who looked to German or other Western European welfare states), and others. I anticipated at the time that many of its participants might well have turned sharply to the left when the nearly inevitable financial crackdown by the International Monetary Fund and others hit in the spring of 2014, but Putin’s seizure of Ukraine foreclosed that possibility (as he probably intended) by strengthening Ukrainian militarism.

Le Blanc discusses the arguments that the anti-Ukrainian Left makes about Ukrainian reactionary fascism. In doing this, he confronts myths with realities. The fascist right wing has little support in Ukraine, there is a fairly strong fascist movement in Russia, and Putin and his allies are in many ways a pole of attraction for rightwing ultra-nationalism globally. He also, and rightly, describes the strongly neoliberal beliefs and actions of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government—and documents the struggles of Ukrainian socialists and unions against this.

In presenting these arguments, Making Sense of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine uses a number of long quotes from Russian and Ukrainian socialists who make many insightful observations about how the war is hurting both Russian and Ukrainian workers and about the necessity of supporting Ukrainians in their struggle against Russian oppression and destruction. Le Blanc ties this analysis to classic discussions among Marxists such as V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg about the right of self-determination and the role of socialists in such struggles.

Finally, Le Blanc discusses the issue of the Ukrainians’ asking for and relying on weapons from Western imperialist powers in their war of self-defense. Many on the Left who say they oppose the Russian assault have called for an end to arming the Ukrainians, and have argued that this dependency makes the Ukrainians tools of imperialism. Le Blanc presents useful historical background on this debate, including the fact that the Left globally was largely united in arguing that the Western powers should arm the Republicans in Spain against the Spanish fascists in 1936 and after—and that they should also send weapons to the Chinese nationalist forces under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek when Japan invaded China during this same period. I would add that the Left also supported providing arms to the reactionary government of Ethiopia when Italian fascism invaded that country.

The point Le Blanc makes is straightforward: Failing to support arming a people defending its right to exist is to make a mockery of saying you oppose the oppressors in their invasion. This clear argument is denied by much of the Left today when they call for ending arms shipments in order to further “negotiations” by the great imperialist powers to impose a settlement on the Ukrainians.

Le Blanc’s Making Sense of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is useful both for our own education and as a way to help educate others.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured image credit: World at Large News; modified by Tempest.