The pro-Palestine movement’s future is in organized labor, & U.S. workers can be reconnected to anti-imperialism

The next stage of the anti-Zionist struggle must be based within worker organizing. It will either take on this new form, or stay trapped in a cycle of stagnation and defeat. The Gaza student encampments were necessary for forcing the Palestinian genocide into the center of the discourse, but now the movement needs to shift towards different strategies and tactics. The movement cannot remain confined to the campuses, it has to expand into the broader masses. And these masses exist within the unionized workers, as well as the wider proletariat that’s not (yet) organized.

That the antiwar movement wasn’t already deeply connected to organized labor prior to October 7 is the reason why the pro-Palestine struggle ran into a wall. Without a broad base outside the inner activist circles, a movement is going to falter, and then it’s going to fragment. This is the conclusion Norman Finkelstein has come to upon investigating the student organizing spaces, and inquiring about why the Gaza occupations fizzled out after spring 2024:

By the summer, the encampments had been wiped out. And also, which was completely predictable, when you don’t have a broad movement, and you just are left with the core, everybody knows at that moment, the core begins to fragment. The so to speak “ultras” start gaining a too loud voice, and things fall apart. And I spent time, while I was speaking around the country, asking what happened to the encampments, and everybody said the exact same thing. First of all, people were obviously very scared by what happened at Columbia. The consequences, which now are much bigger than they were back then. And then on top of that, the fragmentation that set in when the core starts fighting over relatively trivial points.

For the struggle to have avoided this setback, it would have needed to take advantage of the working class discontents from after 2008. Amid the economic disaster, the established left orgs could have been proactive in assisting and leading the workers within their struggles. And 2008 isn’t the earliest point in which such a project could have been started; the nature of capitalism is to have regular crises, and if these orgs had wanted, they would have started recovering U.S. labor’s vitality decades ago.

Since this isn’t how history has gone, the only thing we can do is begin to correct these mistakes today. And to understand the nature of this task, we must look at the history of how the American worker movement got crushed. With this context, it becomes apparent why the orgs that facilitated the Gaza protests weren’t willing to rebuild the workers movement. It’s totally necessary to hold orgs like PSL to account for their insular way of operating, but these orgs are not the central cause of the issue, only a symptom.

It’s not simply that the leaders of these orgs have an opportunistic character; it’s that these orgs were set up to fill a particular role in the effort at undermining mass movements. They’re what replaced the original U.S. proletarian movement, which was connected to the global anti-imperialist struggle and therefore anti-opportunist. For our ruling class to capture our social movements, and make them dominated by orgs that are detached from the masses, organized labor itself needed to be neutralized. And the way the capitalists did this was by turning America’s unions into weapons against the globe’s anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles.

A pivotal moment in this labor-based imperial sabotage was when the CIO, the U.S.-Canadian union federation, initiated a split with the anti-colonial World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949. In structural terms alone, this created a division within the global workers movement that fundamentally weakened it. This problem won’t truly be rectified until the worker institutions from the empire’s heart get reconnected with those from the peripheries; which is not a task that can be carried out within the confines of bourgeois law. Because another part of this sabotage campaign was when our government made it a crime for U.S. unions to link up with international communist organizations.

Now that U.S. labor was overwhelmingly isolated from the workers in the exploited countries, the next step was to psyop America’s workers into joining with the counterrevolutionary effort. In 1955, after McCarthyism had emerged, the CIO and the AFL carried out a merger. It was ostensibly about uniting to beat back the growing right-wing attacks, but it was also expressly done with the aim of rallying U.S. workers towards fighting communism. And this narrative manipulation worked, with the mid-20th century having been an era when communism was highly unpopular among the U.S. masses. The post-war rise in living standards was absolutely a factor in this, but the prevalence of anti-communist ideology would not have been as substantial if not for this campaign to change the culture of U.S. labor organizing. This was the factor that caused U.S. labor to discard its communist, anti-imperialist ties from the previous generation, and become a tool for the wars the hegemon was waging.

It was this hole in U.S. revolutionary politics that allowed the CIA to replace the actual workers movement with the anti-Soviet “New Left;” that let left-wing anti-communism, alienation from the masses, and the dismissal of class struggle become so normalized within modern “socialist” spaces. Groups like PSL have the role of aesthetically imitating what a genuine popular movement would look like, while keeping the struggle confined to a leftist niche. Of course these groups haven’t prioritized building a workers movement; organized labor in this country became thoroughly co-opted generations ago, and groups that are driven by self-interest won’t pursue the hard task of correcting this problem.

Union organizing is not an adequate solution on its own. Our tasks are to repair the fissures created by the imperial union split, bring the workers movement into the pro-Palestine struggle (among all other anti-imperialist struggles), and give U.S. workers the means for overthrowing their capitalist dictatorship. These things can only be done if we escape the reformist traps that enabled the state to undermine the workers movement in the first place.

McCarthyism wouldn’t have been able to happen if the communist movement had remained as strong as it had been previously, and kept building on that strength. It was because of the policies of Earl Browder, who sought to liquidate the party into something subservient towards capital’s liberal wing, that the communists were left too weak to handle repression. To rectify this error, and all the other errors it’s since led to, we must carry out this worker organizing project while truly acting like revolution is our goal.

We have to commit to building these ties with the union workers, and to constructing an independent organizational force for the proletariat. The more successful we are in this, the more the state will target us, and as this happens we must be ready to adapt. We must make the preparations to keep operating no matter what, even in an environment where our work has been made fully illegal. The idea which set back the U.S. communist movement was that we can win by compromising with the ruling class. We must reject this notion, and stay on the revolutionary path. This is the sole path that can let us overcome the imperial state’s crackdowns, and fulfill our role in the global liberation project.

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