It is vital to unpack what is happening; understanding Bernie Sanders’ position on Palestine reveals why he would also ultimately come to betray his promises to the working people of the United States — and the oppressed everywhere.
During World War I, Vladimir Lenin dedicated pages to exposing the mechanisms of opportunism. He showed methodically how opportunism reflects a position of class collaboration, taking, often surreptitiously, the side of the oppressor over the side of the oppressed. In doing so, opportunism sows confusion among the working class. It limits the development of coherent political positions, and ultimately resolves in actions that betray the working people in their moment of need.
Opportunism, Lenin showed, often comes wrapped in the language of class struggle. It promises to secure short-term gains for workers — higher wages, lower working hours, or better working conditions. But its class essence is bourgeois. In other words, it does not seek to challenge the ruling class, because it sustains a confidence in the ruling class that it does not extend to working people. And so it seeks not to liberate workers, but to redirect crumbs from the tremendous profits of the bourgeoisie towards them — a temporary and ultimately fruitless strategy of lowering the temperature of class struggle to preserve the ruling order.
That ruling order is imperialist. According to research carried out by Dr. Jason Hickel
and others, the old colonial powers of the Global North have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960. These super-profits, fueled by the systematic looting of former colonies, also sustain the exploitation of the workers in the imperialist heartlands. Sometimes, the workers are bought out with the kinds of reforms Sanders supports; or, their leadership is bought out, creating a “labor aristocracy” that acts as a brake on revolutionary consciousness within the labor movement. Other times, workers are repressed as the technologies of violence honed in the colonies come back home.
As an imperial outpost, the Zionist state is a central piece of the puzzle. Its existence prevents regional integration and suppresses the self-determination of its neighbors — sustaining a zone of imperial extraction where states lack the power or unity to build an alternative, sovereign political project. The weapons routinely tested on a caged Palestinian population then make their way back to the U.S., where they become the instruments that disperse protestors or police borders. This is what Aimé Césaire meant when he said that fascism is colonialism turned inwards.
“Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism,” Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution in 1917. In other words, opportunism is the repudiation of the very possibility of victory. So, when Sanders voices his support for the Israeli regime, he not only stands against the liberation of Palestine, but also against the very possibility of liberation anywhere. It is precisely because of this that Lenin described opportunists as the “principal enemy” of the proletarian movement — of the movement towards liberation.
History, of course, vindicated Lenin’s position. The same war-hungry Petrograd crowds that would have lynched him for his anti-war positions in 1914 welcomed him back as a hero in 1917, when the imperative of peace and liberation became blindingly clear to Russia’s working people. The work of exposition and organization had been done — by the Bolsheviks, and by the Bolsheviks alone.
It is essential that we are able to identify opportunism, analyze it, and oppose it because the liberation of all workers and oppressed peoples depends on us not being lured into its soothing trap. This is the trap that whispers of the “lesser evil”, pinning competing forces within the ruling class against each other to obscure their antagonism to the working people. Again and again, it whispers, “both sides”, seeking to erase or obscure the dialectical opposition between oppressor and oppressed. This is true whether it applies to the Palestinians and the Zionists or the Soviets and the Nazis.
Empire is undergoing a profound crisis — a crisis of military overextension, economic overproduction, and ideological delegitimization. If we are to take advantage of this moment to beat down the ruling classes in their moment of weakness, we need to resist not only the siren song of the fascists. We need to resist the gentler whispers of the social democrats, who seek to pull us back to a status quo that has proven, time and again, incapable of resolving the dilemmas of humanity.
As the Bolshevik Karol Radek implored the workers of Europe in 1922: “You proletarians of the capitalist countries, you have no fatherland to defend; you must first conquer the land of your fathers.”
