Many people seem to not have realised that, in that coincidence of opposites that frequently defines moments of historic crisis, the recent escalation of zionist aggression against Palestinians has been simultaneous with Palestinian struggle advancing in new forms. As IbnRiad on twitter has highlighted;
The Resistance with a capital R here refers to the Alliance of Palestinian Forces, a coalition of a variety of groups including Hamas, the PFLP (and various offshoots), and others. The role of some of these factions, and their collaboration with local states such as Iran and Syria, has proven controversial for some leftists in the West. AngryWorkers, a collective that made a name for itself by advocating for independent direct worker led autonomous organising groups and attempting such projects among so-called “gig economy” workers in london, recently wrote;
The Palestinian state powers undoubtedly have less military power and international state support in comparison to Israel – but that doesn’t make them ‘better’ or more worthy of support. This may shock the ‘anti-colonial’ left. On the one hand, we have the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority dominant in the West Bank, recognised by international capital, and, on the other, we have Hamas in Gaza, backed by Iran. Both are utterly bourgeois parties
It is worth pointing out here that a significant proportion of AngryWorkers are, by their own admission, middle class; in another place they have described how they were “floating around in Berlin” or “worked in NGOs for ten years” before seeking to “plug in to” the working class, while their social scene continued with office jobs, PhDs, and pursued “high-flying careers”. This position is not, in itself, something I would condemn; it should not be undertaken lightly, and earning the trust of actually precarious workers, proving you’re not just slumming it, will be long, slow, hard work, but what else is there for middle class people? However - if Hamas are a “bourgeois” party, they also possess the broad support of the Palestinian masses.[1] Is there nothing AngryWorkers should learn from this? Or is their job only to lecture people facing genocide about “nationalism” - from the comfort of a consumer lifestyle, common in different ways to rich and poor alike in the West, fed by colonialism?
Once we begin to think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient, we will encounter few surprises. (Edward Said)[2]
Ironically, the dogmatic polemicism of AngryWorkers against solidarity with Palestine is not only an example of the orientalist projection described by Said. It also clearly demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of class struggle in the so-called ‘united kingdom’. Just a few weeks ago, many of us watched in real time as a crowd of people - neighbours, anti-raids and anti-evictions organisers, casual leftists, and passersby - gathered and stood against ICE and the police to prevent a deportation at the Battle of Kenmure Street. This was not the first time this has happened, but it also does not happen every day - and significantly, it is rare that it attracts such headlines. Even more than the people that were gathered there, for many people watching across this island, this was a moment when they saw that it was possible to fight back against border imperialism, and saw how it might be done.
Just anecdotally, numerous organisers, both in Glasgow and elsewhere, have attested that the Battle of Kenmure Street was neither a purely spontaneous emergence of popular resistance, nor a planned top-down operation. Anti-raids and anti-evictions organising in Glasgow goes back decades, and over that time they have built networks of supporters, disseminated information on border imperialism and how to fight it, and trained people with skills to aid this work. What happened in Pollokshield, like the uprisings, strikes, and assaults on the border across occupied Palestine this past month, was totally dependent on mass numbers of feet on the street, but it was not a spontaneous event. It was the product of long, hard struggle over years and years, often seeing very little fruit, as organisers led training workshops, distributed educational material, raised awareness, and built relationships. These organisations did not create the victory by themselves - successful action only appeared at the dialectical coincidence of this long groundwork, the slow formation of conditions of struggle, with the surge of popular resistance. And even if not everyone present saw these events in such terms, this is an example of leadership in the Leninist sense; one group of people with specific knowledge and skills deployed these tools in such a way that a larger group of people were able to act in a way they were not able to before. And whether leftists recognise it or not, these battles against border imperialism - continuous in certain aspects with the struggles against imperialism in occupied Palestine and elsewhere - are a form of class struggle, in fact, one of the primary forms taken by class struggle in an age defined by imperialism.
Our conditions are very different from those of zionist apartheid. But if our solidarity across this difference is to materially change the conditions of struggle, both in the imperial core and in the (neo)colonies, Kenmure Street demonstrates that we will need to absorb the lessons of Palestinian struggle.
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[1] This means Palestinian workers, the vast lumpenproletariat in Gaza, the West Bank, and camped beyond Palestine’s borders, and yes, a small petit bourgeoisie, totally without power - if you think there is a Palestinian bourgeoisie in its own right, you have not yet understood the reality of colonialism. See Mahdi Amel’s ‘The Colonial Mode of Production’ in Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings (Brill: Leiden, Boston, 2021)
I will also take this footnote to say that in the same place, AngryWorkers specify that some of their members were already in blue collar work. My aim is not to dismiss the collective on a class basis, as I hope I have made clear, but simply to point out the contradiction in class across national divides that plagues their analysis. In the process, I hope to extent this common Leninist talking point to a reading of some strategic and tactical questions in the core.
[2] Orientalism (Penguin: London, 1977), p. 95.
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The final paragraph gestures towards Stalin’s The Foundations of Leninism, where he defines Leninism as ‘Marxism of the age of imperialism’. The primary source for the concept of leadership defined here is Lenin’s What is to be done? The understanding of class struggle is informed by these sources, alongside the original introduction to J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of a White Proletariat, recently republished by LOOP:
Originally the term “proletariat” (a term which came from the Roman Empire and was certainly not invented by communists) referred to the lowest free class in a European society. Marx and Engels in the early 1800s in Europe used it to refer to the industrial workers – a small class in that period which was far more exploited, far more desperate and disorganized, far more lashed by capitalism than the older, more stable peasant class. Today some socialists use the term “proletariat” primarily to refer to workers in basic industry. That would be true for some nations in some periods. But it isn’t universal dogma or unchanging reality (there are no such things).
My thinking here is also influenced by Nawal El Saadawi’s critique of Western responses to class struggle in the Iranian Revolution, which you can find in the English language preface to The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World.
There are other aspects of both ongoing events in Palestine, and Pollokshield, that I have not discussed here.