ANARCHISM IS COMPLICIT WITH ZIONISM

The title of this article states a fact.

I will elaborate and prove this in three sections.

1. Anarchist Influence has Damaged the World Intifada

The so-called Student Intifada of youth uprisings around the world in solidarity with the national liberation war and defense against genocide of the Palestinian Resistance has been largely a “leaderless movement.” This sort of description is often given as praise — it shouldn’t be.

In some locales (ones I have visited), revisionist sects like the so-called “Party for Socialism and Liberation” (Dengite, Reformist, etc.) have tried to usurp leadership positions for themselves, steering occupations and encampments away from militancy and toward their usual process of complete liquidation into the bourgeois political apparatus disguised as critical opposition. The Left line of the Intifada has struggled hard to pull university students out of boardrooms where bourgeois university officials jerk them around and waste time — PSL pushes them back in. Largely, luckily, the students haven’t appeared receptive to their capitulationist line.

The alternative so far, though, has not been better: in the absence of a genuine mass-line and democratic-centralist leadership, what emerges is an implicit leadership of the most popular cliques within the movement in a given zone. Because this leadership is not official, is not democratically elected nor centrally consolidated, is not even acknowledged as such, it cannot ever be criticized or held accountable for poor decisions — it is thus altogether impossible for a movement of such a structure to be democratic. And if it is not democratic, going to the masses with questions and returning to them with answers attained through centralized democratic struggle, then it cannot practice the Mass Line leadership method, cannot become a genuine mass movement. This sort of bad practice gets laundered in the form of the nonsense anarchist theory of community self-organization into “affinity groups.” I will not beat around the bush with it: the theory of organizing in “affinity groups” is only cliqueism by another name. Every group of friends is an “autonomous” cell, there is no line set by democratic struggle and centralized resolution, and there is no unity of line to apply. This disastrous a model of organizing cannot really be called “organized” at all.

In a movement working on the anarchist model of loosely correlated alliances of cliqueist affinity groups (the de facto organizing model for the petit-bourgeois and semiproletarian youths and students making up the main marching columns of the Intifada), large actions are small wins, but large campaigns over a long period are impossible — many cliques may join together to strike a devastating blow today, but they will do poorly at organizing a long-term plan for several in a row: one will do the real planning, and do it poorly because they are detached from all but their own members, while the rest drift away to do smaller, largely pointless measures until called back for the next big “spontaneous” strike.

And it is also a grim uphill slog for a movement organizing along these lines to move beyond these petit-bourgeois and semiproletarian youths and students, for them to go amongst the People and unite the broadest possible progressive masses into a movement against capitalist-imperialism and the ruling big capitalists and institution of imperialist capital. Because, of course, the organizing model of the “affinity group” — i.e. the little clique of friends, the barkada — does not let in members who do not already have a friendly “affinity” with its existing members. So, the cliques of young student radicals-- however nominally sympathetic in ideology they may be-- do abysmally at spreading agitation and organization to older workers, to the mid-aged petit-bourgeoisie, to the unionized industrial, agricultural, and service workers, etc. A youth-chauvinist attitude, in which the young- -i.e., the members of given cliques of youth — simply must be the most revolutionary, and must march break-neck ahead in disdain of the old and tired, replaces real class-conscious politics, real understanding of the large majority of humanity who share interests contradicted against those of imperialist big capital, and real Mass Line organizing of a broad movement. People over thirty must be cops. Workers who modulate their desire to take action with their need to keep their jobs to survive are simply not radical enough. Etc. Youth cliqueists can make a few grandiose sweeping gestures against the enemy; they cannot organize the protracted democratic and mass campaign that a true revolution requires.

This aimless and headless organizing of dreamy youth cliques, in place of ironclad democratic unity behind the centralized-democratic Leadership of the most advanced elements of the most revolutionary class (the proletariat) in a militant Communist Party, this dullheaded organizing style that anarchism maintains, spreads, and promotes, through its dogmas about “affinity groups” and “rejecting authority,” is a negation of genuine potential to seize revolutionary power and wield it against the enemy. Students, no matter how sincere their politics, no matter how correct their lines, no matter how good their intentions, will not make the revolution. The broadest masses and principally the proletariat must make the revolution with and through the leadership of their militant and militarized Communist Party. The best role the students and youth intellectuals can take in this process, as the OBRSG correctly proclaimed in a recent pamphlet distributed amongst some of the Intifadists by the most advanced and correct contingent of the student movement, is that of advance scouts¹. This means that, though they venture ahead of the rest of the movement, scouting out the way for them to follow, they must be attuned to the needs and the interests and the consciousness of the broadest masses — not alienating them with adventurism, cliqueism, and chauvinism. But it is those exact terminal flaws that the anarchist-dominated style of organizing and leadership has brought into the so-called Student Intifada, at least in the US. In this way the influence of anarchism has retarded the revolutionary value of the Intifada.

2. Anarchist Ideas Negate Correct Understanding, Negate the Rightful Demands of the Palestinian National Movement

“The removal of national oppression, the securing of equality between nationalities, the removal of the privileges of the ruling classes of the dominant nation, the ending of bans and restrictions on language, equality between nations in every sphere and the recognition of equality in the right to establish a nation-state are all democratic and progressive demands.”

• İbrahim Kaypakkaya, The National Question².

The struggle of the Palestinian masses today is in the form of a national liberation struggle. The principal contradiction at contestation in Palestine is one of national oppression, in which all the progressive indigenous classes, while remaining contradicted against one another, find their disagreements insignificant in the face of a contradiction against the colonial oppressor. The national question has reached greater acuteness than class struggle in Palestine because the presence of massive imperialistic capital, imported from the big imperialist hegemons (first Britain, then North America), and a state apparatus of entirely foreign character enforcing its rule and its profits, has forestalled the development of any indigenous Palestinian economy. The feudal situation of the fellahīn (peasants), defining feature of Palestinian economic life under the Ottoman period and the focus of much of the very earliest communist literature of Palestine (in the “first generation” of the original Palestinian CP), was largely annihilated by colonialism and especially the Nakba of 1948 — a people once intimately linked with the land, which was at once their homeland their primary means of production, are now largely dispersed across the world or ghettoized in the least arable quadrants of that homeland — but never supplanted or negated and abolished by an indigenously developed Palestinian capitalism and an indigenous industrial proletariat.

Nor is there really in any sense an “Israeli proletariat,” or for that matter an “Israeli bourgeoisie” for them to be defined in contradiction against. Because the capital of the Zionist state and its economic life is like the proboscis of some great parasite: it is not held in the country of occupied Palestine, but abroad by huge monopolists of the imperialist powers (principally the US) for whom “Israel” is little more than a colossal death camp and military base, who inject it into that land by force of arms. It has not yet — in part because of the might of the Resistance — really taken root as a semicolonial economy of Palestine, with its own patriotic and comprador sections of bourgeoisie; it exists purely as an outpost of foreign capital.

We should as communists recognize the limits of what can be achieved in a national liberation campaign which is not also a socialist campaign, against capitalist-imperialism and for communism. The limits of a national liberation war which is “won” but won without a proletarian leadership and an agenda for revolutionary development toward socialism (which is the only way any country may truly be free from the capitalist-imperialist world parasitic economy) are observable in Algeria, in the 26 semicolonized counties (as compared to the 6 directly-colonized) of Ireland, and in the Philippines before the emergence of the communist-led revolution in the late 60s: the quick reassertion of colonial rule and the economic dominance of foreign monopolist finance-capital, its essence the same as ever, only restructured into semicolonialism, allowing “self rule” in unimportant matters for the colonized populace only so far as to streamline and make more efficient the real political-economic rule wielded by the imperialists.

However, we must also recognize what the concrete conditions of struggle in fact are in a given moment, and react to them appropriately. It is never our place to, by pure force of dogmatic will, make the situation of the moment different than it is, make it one we like better — this is pure idealism.

The present onus of the Palestinian national movement is the assertion of the existence of the Palestinian nation as a free subject, the negation of the forces which negate its national right. The people of Palestine wage their struggle in a broad coalition toward this victory, led by Hamas and by the combined politico-military Resistance and their military Joint Operations Room. This victory is progressive because it will:

• end a genocide
• destroy the material state apparatus of Zionism, striking a hearty blow against imperialism generally, and
• free the way for open development of the distinct economic life of the Palestinian nation, enabling the emergence of the revolutionary consciousness of the Palestinian proletariat and the conditions which will give rise to a socialist revolution, the ultimate and final liberation of the Palestinians from capitalist-imperialism, of which Zionism is one enforcer.

The achievement of this victory entails the foundation of a Palestinian national state. Probably, assuming it occurs in the near future, the government of this state would be a coalition government in which the makeup and proportion of governing factions would resemble closely, but not exactly, the existing makeup and proportion of groups in the combined Resistance.

Both anarchists and Marxists are believers in the abolition of national distinctions as something ultimately both inevitable and necessary, and in some sense good, in the future development of human history. But it is very necessary to understand the historically contextualized roles of nations. In the antagonistic contradictions of/between nations, there are invariably oppressed and oppressors, powers which dominate and whose national movements are assertions of domination and nations whose national movements are negations of domination. This is why Lenin said: “In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.”³

Although Marxists understand that:

1. The existence of nations is historically contingent — nations exist only when the conditions for them to be defined in contradictory relation to one another exist, and these exist only under a particular stage of historical development.
2. In the course of further historical development toward full-stage communism, i.e. the resolution and dissolution of all the antagonistic social contradictions of class society, the conditions for the existence of nations must likewise be sublated and abolished.

Nevertheless, we see also how the existence of nations and the right of nations to assert their self-determination is pivotal in this further historical development. There will never be a world beyond the antagonistic confrontation between nations if there is not, first, the negation of the dominant nation’s tyranny by the assertion of the national movements of the oppressed nations.

That the existence of nations is historically contingent and dependent upon a confluence of relationships between opposites, as all existence is, does not make nations “fake.” Before there can be a unified communist world there must be the historical process of wars of national liberation, and progress toward socialism in Palestine and toward communism in the world is contingent upon the progress of the national liberation war.

States and nations cannot be abolished at a stroke by declaring them “fake,” expecting material reality to bend to perception, like idealists in the manner of Hume or Derrida. History must advance by concrete struggle, including the righteous struggle of the oppressed to establish democratic national states in negation of the imperialist domination contradicted against their interests, before we can reach a point at which such abolition is even really concievable.

Yet in every trench of struggle in the Intifada in which anarchist ideas have taken an outsized role, sooner or later, one will hear venomous-toothed rumours spreading that, really, establishing states at all is part of the problem, that, really, Hamas ought to read Bakunin, that really, what is needed is a “no state solution.” All of this spits in the face of the Palestinian national movement themselves and their agenda, which is for [state] sovereignty of the nation, against Zionist and imperialist colonial rule. The highest and only rightful duty of the Intifadists in solidarity with Palestine anywhere else in the world is to stand together with that movement, not to pooh-pooh its priorities and undermine its agendas.

The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist international communist movement supports the Left line within the Palestinian national movement, represented by the PFLP, among others, in developing the national movement toward the establishment of a Palestinian national economic life which can have its own socialist revolution; we also support Hamas, which has been given the leading role by the democratic will of the People, and all other non-traitorous factions of the Resistance. But anarchism sees fit to inject its nonsense where it does not belong, instead of fully supporting real material movements of the subjugated colonized masses.

3. The Zionist State is Aware of these Complicities, and Maneuvers to Take Advantage of Them

This brings us to point three, my most outrageous — but, we shall see, quite true! — claim, and my reason for writing.

The Zionist state apparatus is aware that anarchism is a deleterious, poisonous element within the Left that stands against capitalist-imperialism, and it seeks to weaponize it intentionally against the principled fighters of that cause. This cannot be taken to mean that anywhere near most anarchists are paid Mossad actors; most, I am sure, are simply stupid. However, evidence exists to plainly establish the efforts of the Zionist state apparatus to weaponize anarchistic politics against the Palestinian national movement.

In May of 2024, the Anarchist blog “SerenityNow.today” began posting. Its mysterious authors declared:

THE CURRENT FRAMING OF THE CONFLICT IN GAZA, [incorrect comma use original] IS LACKING A PROPER ALTERNATIVE VIEWPOINT FROM THE POLITICAL LEFT. IT SEEMS THAT [there should be a comma here] LIKE MANY OTHER CONFLICTS IN HUMAN HISTORY, [this phrase is confusing. ‘like many other conflicts’ should be followed by something specifying this one, instead of a generality around ‘people’] PEOPLE EASILY AND FOOLISHLY TEND TO ANALYZE THE SITUATION ACCORDING TO COMMON AND CONSERVATIVE NOTIONS. THE CURRENT WAVE OF SO-CALLED SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIANS’ CLAIMS ON ONE HAND, AND THE WESTERN EMPIRE BACKING ISRAEL ON THE OTHER, IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME COGNITIVE FAILURE AND [the word ‘and’ is doing nothing here] USING OUT-OF-DATE CONVENTIONS AND IDEAS.

THE CURRENT PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT, LED BY THE ‘WOKE’ CULTURE, HAS NOT PRODUCED, SO FAR, A GENUINE OR UNIQUE WAY OF [missing word here- ‘making?’ ‘achieving?’] POLITICAL CHANGE.

ESTABLISHING ANOTHER NATION-STATE OVER THE OTHER IS NO SOLUTION, [that comma should be a semicolon] IT WOULD [not?] ENRICH THE REGION OR THE WORLD WITH JUSTICE, IT WOULD JUST PERPETUATE A NEW FORM OF INJUSTICE. IN ORDER TO TRULY FORGE A SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, WE NEED TO APPLY A NEW SET OF IDEAS AND ACTIONS. REPLACING ONE ETHNO-RELIGIOUS STATE STRUCTURE WITH THE OTHER CANNOT BE QUALIFIED AS ‘PROGRESSIVE’ IN ANY WAY OR FORM. TO TRULY MAKE A DIFFERENCE, LET’S ELEVATE [elevate what? missing object noun] ABOVE THE DELUSION OF POWER STRUCTURES, MY [wtf is ‘my’ doing here?] IT BE NATIONAL, ETHNIC OR RELIGIOUS, LET’S REDEFINE OUR POLITICS TO BENEFIT ALL OF HUMANITY. [terrible writing all original].⁴

Disregarding obviously conservative or liberal buzzwords (“woke culture,” etc.), this manifesto is cleanly in line with anarchist claptrap I have heard uttered in support of a “no state solution” right on the streets in the midst of so-called Student Intifada demonstrations. The website also featured such exciting articles as “Boom Crash Opera” and “How Hopelessness Became Boring.” It seems there was also a link to “join” whatever organization nominally ran it, though I cannot find an archived copy of the page linked to.

This website, it has been revealed, by a Zionist publication no less, was created by a media relations company called STOIC, paid by the Zionist state to do so. It is the work of the Zionist “Ministry of Diaspora Relations”- meaning, i.e., that it was created to mislead those abroad — particularly anti-Zionist Jews — into choosing anarchism over principled national-liberationism.⁵ Unfortunately, a look at the writings, deeds, and spoken words of some of the most vocal and prominent actors within the Intifada in North America today shows that this objective has all too much been achieved, whether through this website or not.

It is possible, of course, that the Zionist state has some other reason to have created this website- like, for instance, some kind of honey-pot operation to monitor and track anti-Zionist actors, akin to that the FBI deployed against the North American communist movement in the 1970s by trying to lure persons into the so-called “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party,” where they could be monitored, divided, and neutralized⁶. If this were the purpose, probably the evidence would be in that “join” page which has not been archived. But as things stand, I see no evidence of such use — nobody appears to have been tracked, doxxed, etc. through this website, which would be the case if its purpose were a honeypot. Rather, we must conclude the obvious answer: the Zionist state apparatus is working to propagate anarchism because anarchism is useful to it!

The infantile and counterproductive ideology of anarchism must be purged out of the global Intifada in solidarity with Palestine if it is to progress further as a revolutionary movement. Ultimately, the greatest thing that can be achieved here in the core of the capitalist-imperialist economy for the peoples of the colonized world is our own revolution against our ruling classes, to liquidate their institutional finance capital which parasitizes the world, freeing us here in North America and those abroad in the colonies alike to build new, socialist economies free of exploitation. This can only be achieved following a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.

STAMP INFANTILE ANARCHISM OUT OF PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS!

FOR A PROLETARIAN CLASS-LINE IN THE STUDENT INTIFADA!

ADVANCE THE MOVEMENT AGAINST CAPITALIST-IMPERIALISM TOWARD RECONSTITUTING A MILITARIZED MARXIST-LENINIST-MAOIST COMMUNIST PARTY IN NORTH AMERICA!

PEOPLE’S WAR UNTIL COMMUNISM!

☙Sources & Citations❧

1. “Center Palestine by Centering Revolution,” Oakland-Berkeley Revolutionary Study Group, 2024.
2. The National Question, İbrahim Kaypakkaya, 1972.
3. “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation,’” V.I. Lenin, 1922.
4. From “SerenityNow.today.” Archived at the Wayback Machine, archive.org.
5. The Zionist publication in question is the Times of Israel. The article is “Diaspora Ministry funded fake social media posts to spread pro-Israel content — NYT,” ToI staff, 2024.
6. This is discussed in Heavy Radicals: the FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists, the wonderful history of the RCP-USA from the 60s to 80s by Aaron J. Leonard, 2014.