How often have we heard from the supporters of Ukraine that we should listen to the words of the Ukrainian left, as if their nationality or proximity to the war privileged their political views and pre-empted our own? Should we contract-out our politics to every nationality? What is this other than identity politics gone mad?
The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC) has one such author we should apparently listen to, writing not about Ukraine but about Palestine (is this not a breach of the decree?) Or do the Ukrainian leftists who support their own state have some special insight into all struggles that claim to be ‘anti-imperialist’?
Let’s look at what this article says: ‘Side with progressive forces in Israel and Palestine for a lasting peace’.
It declares that:
‘On October 7 a new round of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation began with rocket fire by Hamas. The whole world turned its attention with horror to the atrocities of terrorists against peaceful citizens of Israel and other countries. However, for now, while everyone is debating the need to strike back as hard as possible, progressive forces around the world should focus on a plan to achieve lasting peace.’
Just as the war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, so did the conflict in Israel and Gaza not start on October 7 2023, as everyone knows, or should know, because it is literally impossible to understand either by reference to these dates, by regarding them as providing the context for comprehension of what is going on.
The whole world did not turn ‘its attention with horror to the atrocities of terrorists against peaceful citizens of Israel and other countries’; for a start the attack by Hamas also included attacks on the Israeli military. This is not to ignore or excuse or support or defend the killing of Israeli civilians. Among many people there is an understanding of where these desperate (in every sense of the word) attacks came from.
Neither is ‘everyone . . . debating the need to strike back as hard as possible’. Certainly not the targets of this ‘strike back’, not those who are genuine socialists, and not those hundreds of millions who understand the circumstances of the Palestinians in Gaza and who sympathise and solidarise with them and their struggle. Only from the point of view of Zionism and western imperialism is there a debate about how hard to strike back.
‘For now’, the progressive forces around the world should not ‘focus on a plan to achieve lasting peace’ but should focus on how they might stop the pogrom and ethnic cleansing of Gaza that can only entail a murderous catastrophe. To think that right now we need a plan for lasting peace is to indulge in cynical pretence, putting one’s head down while death is dealt all around.
The article states that ‘Israel has the right to self-defence and can retaliate against terrorists’, while Its concern with Israeli tactics seems mainly to lie in their being counter-productive, not their purpose or consequences. Even the failure of previous negotiations is blamed mainly on the Palestinians.
It declares that ‘the international community should support progressive forces willing to make concessions for the sake of peace’, the same international community that has sat back while Israel has expanded while ensuring the expansion through massive financial and military support. The same ‘international community’ that any self-regarding socialist would immediately recognise as imperialism.
It states that ‘the international community should promote the creation of new progressive political movements in Palestine that would not involve either the corrupt Fatah or the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists.’ Imperialism is called upon to intervene to ensure that the Palestinians get the leaders and representation that they deserve – what imperialism thinks is appropriate.
No such exclusions are put on the far right, racist and fascist representatives of the Israeli state. These so-called ‘new progressive political movements in Palestine’ should then ‘be willing to make concessions for the sake of peace.’ One has to wonder just what more concessions the Palestinians are expected to make to remedy their exile, their poverty, prevent their ethnic cleansing and make themselves acceptable both to imperialism and Zionism.
What is the point of a solidarity campaign that claims to be anti-imperialist but cannot agree what imperialism is and so cannot agree on when or why or how it should be opposed?
A separate article on the USC site denounces ‘the anti-social ferocity of Ukrainian neo-liberals’ and states that ‘the recent statements of Minister of Social Policy Oksana Zholnovych about “destroying everything social” and “taking Ukrainians out of their comfort zone” have caused significant public outcry and a wave of criticism.’ But this is the same government and state that the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign supports, that defends its right to determine the future of its population! The State and regime it wants to see armed to the teeth and have its writ run over millions more citizens.
The pro-Israel article is probably inspired by the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) component of the USC, while its Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR) ally has stated that ‘The root cause of the violence is the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. Palestinians have borne the brunt of the death and destruction of the last 75 years.’ Yet this organisation supports the western powers without which its favourite capitalist state would already have been defeated. It supports the intervention of these powers that have for the ‘last 75 years’ helped ensure the continuing destruction of the Palestinian people. It needs the military support of the United States that is also siting off the coast of Gaza. No doubt the AWL, in turn, thinks the ACR is defending reactionary terrorism.
While the pro-imperialism of the AWL is more consistent this hardly makes the inconsistency of the ACR any better and neither is capable of a principled socialist approach. How they can maintain a united campaign against ‘imperialism’ is not really hard to understand. If articles defending the Zionist state are acceptable for the USC then this is entirely appropriate to the politics of such a campaign and both components.
They deserve each other.
Sráid Marx 
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Maybe you should differentiate the term imperialism. Break it down into political imperialism, economic imperialism, and social imperialism. Liberalism invented the notion of political imperialism and can live with the idea that States are often rivals in certain circumstances, one could equally argue that liberalism invented the opposition to economic imperialism, John A. Hobson was a liberal who connected imperialist politics to the presence of economic monopolies. Hobson as you know influenced the account of imperialism as devised by Lenin. The economists generally dislike the business monopolies that come to power because they curtail competition. One can conclude that the Liberals and the Marxists have much in common when it comes to imperialism.
Accept one feature of Lenin’s account is often overlooked, the hints and indicators he gives concerning social imperialism. Social imperialism is an expression of a divisions of labour among the working class, Lenin even spoke about the aristocrats of labour as did Engels before him. One might argue that Zionism is in fact a labour ideology, the expression of social imperialism, the division of labour and social rank within the working class.
On the British and Irish left a curious fact is that there is a rejection of social imperialism understood as an indicator of real divisions of labour and rank contained within the working class. I recall that the Irish version of the socialist worker tendency used to argue furiously against the concept of an aristocracy of labour as presented by Lenin, all the while holding on to the political and economic parts of Lenin’s theory of Imperialism. The justification came down to refraining from describing working class support for Right wing Unionism as belonging to something called social imperialism. All workers are exploited by capital therefore all workers are potential strikers and potential socialists. As Hegel once remarked all cats are black in the dead of the night. Yet the unionist or Orange ideology has acted as the agent of social imperialism in Ireland, in respect to the working class. This is why we even have a separate word for some workers, they self describe as loyalists.
Perhaps one should put a greater emphasis on what separates the workers both Jew and Arab, to the point that they fight over the terms of Two States, the agency of social imperialism rather than the political imperialism of external actors like the United States, that supposedly requires a gendarme in the region and Israel is its choice of master.
Social Imperialism by Bernad Semmel is a useful introduction to the topic.
Your invitation to breakdown imperialism would indeed make Marxism have more in common with Liberalism, which is why the invitation to do so must be rejected. Imperialism refers to a certain stage of the development of capitalism and opposition to it in this sense is not something liberalism can entertain. Equally, some have tried to employ the distinctions you draw to put forward the argument that we should support the Ukrainian capitalist state or the Russian in the current war. It is one more potential result of the methodology of bourgeois philosophy that seeks to understand phenomena through breaking it into separated component parts that destroys understanding of the whole.
All workers, as workers, have an interest in ending capitalism but, as we know, some workers are wedded to reactionary views that ultimately rest on material factors. These factors have to be explored concretely and the appropriate political conclusions drawn. This is obviously true of the division of Arab and Jewish workers in the Middle East but elaborating this is beyond what I want to address right now, although I hope to cover it in a future post.
I don’t think the presentation of “social-imperialism” here is correct. What it means, today, as with “social-patriotism”, is the use of kitsch socialist language and concepts to support/justify imperialist wars.
Lenin references Hobson’s critique of monopolies, but rejected the Liberal conclusions from it, as presented by Kautsky. Lenin opposed the liberal concepts of anti-monopoly laws, as utopian and reactionary. He would also have opposed the idea of “anti-monopoly alliances”, or “anti-capitalist alliances” with liberal bourgeois forces (Popular Fronts), as later pursued by the Stalinists. They are basically an application of all the old Narodnik ideas that Lenin spent years opposing in the 1890’s.
As Marx sets out, for example, in The Poverty of Philosophy, we can start from a position that capitalism is progressive, without in any way, thereby, failing to criticise its consequences for workers, and in doing so, point to the role of the workers, as being the truly revolutionary agent of change, in responding to the effects upon it. Similarly, as Trotsky describes, for example, in The Program of Peace, we can recognise imperialism – the stage of capitalism of monopoly capital, of a world economy, and drive to abolish nation states – as progressive, without, in any way supporting the particular means that capitalism uses to bring that about, via imperialist wars, annexations and so on.
Again, it is the struggle of the working-class, now as a global class to oppose those means, whilst continuing to drive towards the ends, that forms the truly revolutionary dynamic of the historical process. At no point, does it involve trying to turn back the positive results of either capitalism or imperialism, simply on the basis that they were achieved by means with which we wholly disagree.