The news and the news media determine who gets to be considered “innocent” of crimes. Yet we know the zionist state makes use of “civilians” in order to further its goals. In a time of genocide, even reporters and propagandists can be found guilty under the Genocide Convention, which even the U.S. government claims to recognize (despite its name, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty making genocide an international crime, rather than a convention for genocidaires. One can be forgiven for mistaking it for the latter, however, as the United States, one of the most genocidal states in history, is a proud signatory to the convention. It  became a signatory to the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948). At the Nuremburg trials, those who enabled the genocide were found guilty and executed. The zionist state utilizes Hasbara, the method of propaganda in which state actors, embedded as civilians, lie openly about the actions of the regime to launder its image and erode public trust in Palestinian sources. If the zionist state continues to utilize “civilians” and Hasbara, then we should not expect any citizens who support its genocidal forces to be considered “off limits” to counterterror. 

This trick — claiming colonized people are already guilty — is one that the U.S. imperialists have used for a long time. From Palestine to Sudan, the West has robbed the people of their right to innocence. Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is said to be a violent tyrant — so the U.S. can plot to assassinate him and pillage his country. Who is really innocent? What are the true crimes? If you listen to the U.S. government, you’ll never know.

There is a cradle of popular revolution rising. The zionist genocide is not merely confined to the borders of the zionist state. In fact, it is a genocide being carried out with the policy protections and active support of the United States government and our ruling class. It is a United States genocide. The United States has determined to expand its military borders to the four corners of the earth; its bases are located throughout the entire world. Its tendrils reach into every economy in every country. In such a case, the front, the frontier, the border, is everywhere. There is no “rear,” there are no “civilian populations.” Take the words of the genocidaires as true: there are those who are for and those who are against it.

“There are no innocent civilians,” according to the zionist embassies.

Every act of resistance builds up friction inside the imperialist machine. It is right and brave to inhibit the empire from carrying out its genocidal tasks. Policy makers and imperial managers must be made to understand that they are not secure. They are not safe behind the walls of a U.S. border. There is no territory, there is no home, that cannot instantly become the frontlines of the fight. Only when the political actors and the ruling, owning, capitalist class realize that they cannot sit safely in their glass and steel towers and derelict the murder and massacre of millions across the globe will they relent, will they pause. For them there are only two considerations: 1) profit, and 2) geopolitical stability. That means the ability of the U.S. empire to continue supporting their businesses abroad and extracting profit. It can all be boiled down to profit and its continuation. If we want our collective voices to be heard, to be louder than the few additional dollars for the U.S. ruling class, then we must amplify them. We cannot speak, we must shout. We cannot talk, we must argue.

There is only one argument the enemy respects.

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

We’ve written a lot about the masses; we’ve written a lot about the advanced, the middling, the tailing — that is, what portions of the great mass of U.S. workers and small professionals are discovering their existence as a collective group with shared interests and goals. What we haven’t written about is the way in which people who are becoming disillusioned with capitalism, people who can see and feel that the social system and the way we live is wrong, brutal, inhuman, can be brought together. That task, the awakening of the discontented to the possibility of another world, another way of living, a real existence where people no longer exploit each other for economic gain, is fundamental to our mission of bringing about the advent of such a society.

Before learning theory, before studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Rodney, Cabral, people must want to learn. They must feel deeply that society as it exists is unjust.

The society we live in has worked out a kind of self-defense mechanism to deal with people who realize this. They get called burn-outs, idealists, unrealistic. The child of a professional family who doesn’t want to go into business as a CPA or a doctor or a lawyer is “troubled.” Because they’re told by everyone they know that what they feel is abnormal, that most people know the world is an unjust meat grinder, that they know the lifestyle the great majority of the people in the U.S. is based on the misery of others and they just choose not to think about it — this causes a kind of socially-induced sickness. The people who feel the most deeply and most humanly are constantly told that, far from being the most ordinary, they are defective.

In a sense, this is true. They are defective from the point of view of the architects and engineers of society. They are gears with broken teeth in the eyes of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that group of bankers and industrialists who own everything yet do nothing. In ever-greater numbers, people are beginning to realize that their feelings of discomfort are valid — that they should feel moral outrage at the existence of sweatshops making fast fashion and child-slaves in the Congo mining minerals for their iPhones. Allowing yourself to feel that feeling is the first step on the road to awakening class consciousness. The second step is making the connection between that feeling and the way society is structured. The third step on that path is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do something about it.

In an ideal world, one where we’d already built a powerful working-class party that had gathered up all the theoretically advanced Communists together, we would have not one but many newspapers. There would be a mass paper solely to address those people that are still waking or who are awake but not yet willing (or able) to take the last steps to being militant Communists and then a theory journal for those militant Communists to  debate the truth, the best way to overthrow capitalism, etc. Because our movement isn’t unified behind that kind of party (despite what the poseurs at CPUSA say), we have been mixing those types of articles here at the Clarion. Our core readership is mostly already-committed Communists.

But we can’t rely on people coming to Communism spontaneously. We have to reach the group of people who are being torn out of their social positions — people being sidelined. Revolutionaries going back to Lenin have been warning about the pitfalls of relying on spontaneous action; it was only through conscious development that the revolution of October was possible. Without intervention, lots of those children of professionals or the relatively well-to-do will do what comes naturally as the inevitable result of spontaneity: burn out, become despondent and chronically depressed, or turn into anarchists.

In all likelihood, that means you, the reader, are either the Communist militant who has the task of helping people you know move from realizing that capitalism is a theater of horrors to real class conscious Communism or you are someone who has seen that things are bad and getting worse. Maybe someone sent you this article so you could know that you are not alone.

The next steps won’t feel like doing much at all because the truth is that this realization alone is not enough. You have to study. You’ve got to develop your understanding of how the capitalist machine works so you can help us all build weapons to take it down. Studying isn’t fun and it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything, much less setting out to make a revolution, but it is necessary. We can’t avoid our mistakes without reviewing them and we can’t bring down an enemy that we don’t understand.

We’ve got to get together, not just on our own, but in groups, and start to put together an organization that spans the entire U.S.-canadian empire, examine and report on its local conditions in each region, and create a plan to annihilate it root and branch. We have to plan to unite with all the oppressed peoples — each of the Indigenous nations, the Black nation — and get ready to strike.

The work has already begun: the All-Empire Workers’ League and other similar groups are preparing to create a Decolonial Communist Party.

You should join us.

You are not alone.

But we are (or must be) strict materialists. We do not take the world as we wish it to be, nor as we are told it is. We analyze the real conditions and act accordingly. A Communist Party that has liquidated Marxism-Leninism, that has objectively abandoned the class struggle, that is in real terms nothing more than a caucus of Democrats or, even worse, simply a carbuncle on the ass of the Democratic Party, is not a Communist party. It is not an agent of revolution. It is objectively a pillar of reaction. So what are we to do?

Firstly, you must come to understand and then accept the objective situation of your party. Over the past fifty years, the trajectory of the CPUSA has been circular, treading water and rehearsing the same pitiful play. By engaging in a holding pattern of tailing the Democrats to complete liquidation, followed by “reclamation,” only to tail the Democrats again, the CPUSA has deployed the exact same tactic on its own members that the Democratic Party has on the people of the U.S. Every party convention, like every U.S. election, is the most critical. Every cycle is the one in which the revolutionary-progressive forces stand on the verge of victory or absolute defeat. This cycle keeps otherwise revolutionary comrades constantly bailing out the CPUSA boat, focused on the CPUSA’s internal struggle (which never amounts to real change) rather than advancing the subjective conditions of the revolution. The objective conditions of revolution have been present for generations. We must reject the treadmill of the CPUSA conventions, the show of liquidation, the false outrage of “fighting fascism” and stop wasting time.

Keep in mind that the longer you remain in the CPUSA, the longer you give material aid to our class-enemies. You must steel yourself to disrupt long-established relationships, to lose old friends, and to break out of comfortable habits. You must be prepared to let go of the “progress” you’ve perceived the party making. This is perhaps the most difficult psychological hurdle to clear, but you must reject the sunk-cost fallacy that is telling you to keep pushing the CPUSA. Sisyphus was imprisoned by the gods in the ceaseless cycle of pushing the boulder up the mountain; in the CPUSA, the members are cursed by the revisionist leadership with constantly striving to purify the party. Unlike Sisyphus, you can leave. The boulder will never reach the top and you will never purge the party. The system in which you operate doesn’t allow it, it’s designed to keep you working on the boulder instead of on revolution. Set aside the boulder and the mountain both — they are illusions designed to occupy your time. The revolution has nothing to do with them!

Once you have managed to jettison the canard of party loyalty (parties earn loyalty through revolutionary action, they don’t deserve loyalty because they call themselves by a Marxist name), then you can really get down to work.

You must assess whether you know anyone who might also, either already or with a little help, see through the gauzy veil woven by the party’s bourgeois ideologists. You should begin to discuss the real qualities of the organization. Don’t take my word for it: examine the actual, verifiable record of the party’s behavior. Discount your personal feelings and attachments. Almost accomplishing a revolutionary purge of the leadership, almost adopting a correct line, etc., counts for nothing. The very same party ideologists could tell you with a straight face, and not even be lying, that the party has been almost revolutionary for 100 years. The resistance of leadership, however, grows exponentially as that “almost” nears the possible. Don’t give credit to feelings of near-victory; instead, examine the tools the party rearguard keeps in reserve to defeat you. Have they used them all? (They have not). In the final instance, would they simply expel you? (They would!)

Begin to record contact information. Although the party tries to prevent local groups from communicating (another worrisome practice designed to splinter dissent and isolate revolutionaries), use the channels you have available to reach out. Make contacts with other revolutionists. Cherish them, and keep them secret. Communicate often and plan together.

Prepare entire clubs to depart the party with you. Do not cede the organizational power you’ve built up to central leadership. Deny them the organizations you’ve built. Begin withholding dues and reports from the central party. Use every procedural trick you have. If anyone complains, remind them it’s not only what Lenin would have done, it’s what Lenin did. When you have secured as much as you can, enact a formal split. Vote as a club to break with the central party. They can’t stop you! Only then will you be free to pursue development and actual revolutionary strategy. And once you have made that terrifying leap, reach out. We’ll see you in 2025.

It is not enough to cry “Free Palestine” in a march or a protest. Your job isn’t done now that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, it’s meaningful that the ICC issued criminal charges against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. We are witnessing a seismic shift in European and Amerikan opinion of so-called “israel.” But never forget that the Hague is a useless child of liberalism. Remember that genocide and land theft of the Palestinian people has been on-going for 75 years, and in all that time not a single warrant was issued for any of the numberless zionist war criminals who have murdered, raped, and burned their way across Palestine.

By way of background, the ICC was established in 2002 with the purpose of investigating and prosecuting war criminals. In the 21 years since its inception the court has heard 31 cases, issued 46 arrest warrants, detained 21 people, 17 people remain at large, issued 9 summonses to appear,  issued 10 convictions and 4 acquittals and charges have been dropped against 7 people due to their deaths.

The Court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, grants the ICC jurisdiction over four main crimes.

• First, Genocide, “characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 
• Second, Crimes Against Humanity, “serious violations committed as part of a large-scale attack against any civilian population. The 15 forms of crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute include offences such as murder, rape, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, enslavement – particularly of women and children, sexual slavery, torture, apartheid and deportation.”
• Third, War Crimes, “grave breaches of the Geneva conventions in the context of armed conflict and include, for instance, the use of child soldiers; the killing or torture of persons such as civilians or prisoners of war; intentionally directing attacks against hospitals, historic monuments, or buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes.
• Fourth, “the Crime of Aggression, “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another State.”

On May 21, 2024 the ICC issued two warrants for the zionist leadership: one for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of israel, and one for Yoav Gallant, the Minister of “Defence” of israel. The warrants alledge that “from at least” October 8 2023, Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for: the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health or cruel treatment, wilful killing/murdering, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, extermination and/or murder, persecution as a crime against humanity and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity. The ICC Prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, states that there has been “widespread and systematic attack[s] against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy. These crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.”

You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from liberals and “leftists” who think that these warrants mean that the “adults” have taken charge and now all will be fixed. While there are many things wrong with our society, chief among them is the idea that we as individuals cannot do anything and we must hope and pray that the powers that be will finally take up the mantle of justice. History and current events continue to show us otherwise.

International law is predominantly used as a tool of imperialism and capitalism. Look no further than the austerity campaigns that the Inernational Monitary Fund has forced on Jordan and Pakiastan (just to list a few) or the current genocide in Congo where corporations are allowed to hire private militias to displace, starve and murder millions of people with impunity. Notably, since its inception in 2002 the court has failed to bring to justice any figures from major capitalist powers. This is not meant to downplay the importance of those war criminals that have been brought to justice, but it is clear that the ICC typically only issues warrants for individuals who are not part of the capitalist elite. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama immediately come to mind as perfect candidates to be tried for their roles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and drone strikes on civilians.

What is the basis of international law? Force. Ask any international lawyer what governing power can control the behavior of a “sovereign” state, and they will tell you: force. The fear of being invaded, of economic sanctions, of force is the only thing that backs international law. The NATO alliance, the progenitors of this regime, are not afraid of the ICC because no other country will ever force them to abide by its rulings.

Leaders from Africa have astutely pointed to the fact that until January 2016, the nine situations which the ICC had investigated were all exclusively in African countries. The ICC largely ignores war crimes when they are perpetuated by white and rich countries. Another glaring issue with the ICC is that it is “financed by contributions from its states’ parties” as well as “international corporations, individuals, and other entities”.

House Speaker Mike Johnson stated on May 22, 2024, that “if the ICC is allowed to threaten Israel’s leaders, we know that America will be next.” Anthony “Butcher” Blinken, the Secretary of State, told the melting dough-boy Lindsey Graham that he would support a bipartisan effort to sanction the ICC, not only for “israel,” but to protect future Amerikan interests.

On June 4th, 2024, the United State House passed a bill for sanctions against the ICC. It passed by a vote of 247-155. The “yea” vote included 42 Democrats. While it seems unlikely this bill will pass in the House, were the sanctions to be imposed they would “revoke any U.S. visas held by ICC officials and restrict them from making property transactions in the U.S.”

Of course war criminals like our leaders don’t want to see other war criminals face judgment. What would our Amerikan war criminals do if they actually had to face the consequences of their policy decisions? As Amerikans, it’s their god- and country-given right to commit war crimes with impunity. 

The very year the ICC was established, George Bush and his administration announced it was “renouncing” U.S. signature on the treaty” and “vetoed continuation of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia in an effort to obtain permanent immunity for U.N. peacekeepers” from the ICC. Additionally, “U.S. officials launched a campaign around the world to obtain bilateral agreements that would grant immunity for Americans from the court’s authority.” In a transparent act of Amerika’s violent imperialist interests Bush signed into law the “American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002.” This law authorizes “the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague.” Additionally, the law provided “for the withdrawal of U.S. military assistance from countries ratifying the ICC treaty, and restricts U.S. participation in United Nations peacekeeping unless the United States obtains immunity from prosecution.”

In order for there to be any true justice for Palestinians a much broader net of accountability must be cast. Netanyahu and Gallant are not the only people leading the slaughter in occupied Palestine. There are many “israeli” officials who are just as complicit. Law for Palestine has a database which is continuously updates its lists of “500+ Instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide.” This list includes the following categories: army personnel and officers, decision makers, and former government officials. This list would be a good start in terms of making a docket of who else should be airlifted and dropped in the center of a court that is actually meant to deal with war criminals. Those who are active participants in the genocide of Palestine are not limited to “israelis,” Biden is among many world leaders who continually provide aid and resources to the war criminals of “israel.”

Finally, as if any other proof was needed that international law is a smoke and mirrors show, a mere 48 hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a ruling requiring “israel” to halt its assault on Rafah and reopen the Rafah border crossings, “israel” launched over 60 additional air strikes on Rafah. (It should also not inspire confidence in international law that the ICJ chose not to rule for an immediate and/or permanent ceasefire.)

It is only through collective action that these many monsters will finally get a sliver of what they are due for the death and destruction that they have caused. If we want to look for a court system that is equipped to handle the zionist war criminal case list that should exist we will have to make it. The format of the Nuremberg trials would certainly be a good jumping off point. There, after the atrocities of WWII “199 defendants were tried, 161 were convicted, and 37 were sentenced to death.”

Do not think that the battle is over simply because warrants for two people, in a “country” of 9.5 million, have been issued. As Robespierre said: “Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.”

That’s all it would take, indeed.

For any debate-bro logicheads, this ludicrous argument has a very simple and identifiable error. It’s called begging the question. Certainly, all it would take to bring down the capitalist order is a coordinated assault, the execution of a few key government officials and particularly awful capitalist robber-barons, the expropriation of their land and wealth, the establishment of a socialist legality and decolonial government, etc., etc. A simple matter!

The question is hidden. What would it require for every worker to militantly agree to go on strike, resist police attack, and prevent scabs from working? Why, not much. Only a total revolutionization of the labor movement.

Only the creation of a centrally coordinating body. Only the joining together of the various labor struggles into a militant political party of labor.

The primary weapon of the working class is organization. Each individual capitalist commands an enormous number of resources. Each capitalist firm is itself an organization designed to marshal and control those resources. When we confront these massive accretions of capital, of political power, of physical repressive violence, we confront them alone and singly unless we are organized. A single strike requires local organization; a mass strike requires mass organization across the entire economy. For a strike against one of the capitalist behemoths that now stand behind the U.S.-Canadian governments, that strike must attack all the bases of the capitalist firm at once. That cannot be done without a high degree of organization. But we cannot organize against capital from within the labor unions until the labor unions themselves are won back from their current class-collaborationist leadership.

We can identify, then, the series of steps needed to break the stranglehold of the labor bureaucrats — those who speak revolution yet perform obeisance to capitalist leadership like Sean Fain, and those who don’t speak revolution at all — on the labor unions. These are the very first and necessary steps toward any question of a mass strike.

1. Active revolutionists — those people now calling for a general strike every so often on the internet, as well as those trained Marxists within the unions who are truly revolutionary — in short, the radical union members, must begin the task of propagandizing and agitating to the rank-and-file, bringing them to the understanding that they are being betrayed by their leadership;
2. Radical union members must form internal organizations capable of challenging the stifling rules and the environment of anti-democratic suppression that now surrounds the election of union leaders and determination of union policy;
3. These organizations must engage in the sharpest possible struggle against their internal union enemies — the labor bureaucrats — and force the addition of new rules to their constitutions, namely: i) thorough and democratic discussion on every issue, with the membership being permitted to pass dictates to its officers, ii) recall provisions for treacherous officers and other officials, iii) caps on officer salaries to be no more than three times the average rank-and-file salary, iv) completely clearing out all current elected officials and employees of the union and replacing them with radical members.

Only when this struggle is won in at least a number of major unions can we begin to discuss formation of a mass strike committee and the enactment of a general strike across all industries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

This work can be begun in an uncoordinated fashion. Small cliques and groups of revolutionists within the labor movement can start the undertaking. However, for it to coalesce into a general strike, these cliques and groups must coalesce into the form of a dedicated, militant, revolutionary party of labor; a Communist party.

Less than 48 hours after the second largest bank collapse in U.S. history, a consortium of central bankers, regulators, and presidential appointees decided that the risk of another institution going the same way as SVB was so likely, and brought a risk to the entire financial system that was so severe, that—for the sake of the economy—they needed to cause the third largest bank collapse in U.S. history. Along with the news that they would be shuttering Signature Bank, they also announced that all deposits in the failed banks, even those that were uninsured, would be accessible to depositors, and that the FED would begin overvaluing collateral for loans in order to make cash more freely available to banks. These actions are only possible if the Treasury Secretary, FED, and FDIC all unanimously agree that there will be serious adverse effects on the economy or financial stability if they are not taken.

The original story that SVB’s collapse gave no cause to think the problem could spread was already disbelieved by many, and the dissolution of Signature Bank confirmed the doubts of those still on the fence. Unable to deny the problem completely, the political party in power began to play the blame game. Biden and congressional Democrats, now forced to admit that there is major risk to our banking system, tell us that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans, specifically the previous administration. As evidence, they point to a 2018 bill that rolled back bank regulations and set the reserve requirement to 0%.

Like every effective lie, this one contains elements of truth. It is true that in 2018 a law was passed that permitted banks to operate with no cash available for depositors to withdraw. It is true that this is a major liability for the financial system. It is true that the bill was passed by a majority-Republican congress and signed by a Republican president. What is also true is that the bill would never have made it to then-President Trump’s desk  without the sixteen Senate Democrats who voted to support it! The reporting at the time described the bill as a “rare bipartisan accomplishment” and an “unusual moment of political unity.” The Democrats who are currently in power would like you to forget this. Don’t worry! You’re in safe hands! But we remember the truth: this reckless deregulation was bipartisan. When it comes to putting workers’ livelihoods at risk for the sake of abundant loans and easy profits for the owning class, the owning class will always find bipartisan support in the state.

They repeated another message in every corner of the media that was covering the regulator’s responses to these bank collapses: taxpayers would not foot the bill for these “solutions.” Another sleight of hand by the economists who make a living with their forked tongues. As previously mentioned, one of these so-called “solutions” is to make cash even cheaper for banks by overvaluing the assets they offer as collateral. At a time of record inflation, the “regulators” charged with delaying this upcoming collapse have decided to make our money worth even less. Now to be clear, in a system doomed to periodic crises and showing us the first fits of its next, there are no good options that can prevent what is coming. But who can be surprised that they chose one that cheapens the dollar in your pocket so these empty banks can limp on just a little longer?

Someone always has to pay. As the capitalists are so fond of saying, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We know that. We’ve seen it. The question isn’t whether lunch will be free, but whether we’ll all bear our fair share of the cost. There is nothing fair in putting the cost of reckless deregulation and risky lending on people who had no say in either.

“This will not spread.” Days later, another bank falls.

The banking system is “safe and well capitalized.” Even as these words leave their mouths, they authorize unprecedented actions—actions that are only legal in a time of a major systemic risk.

They tell us “it was those guys not us” and think we are too ignorant to remember the bill they point to as evidence was heralded as a wondrous bipartisan achievement.

They tell us “the taxpayer won’t foot the bill” as they print even more money during the worst inflationary crisis we’ve seen in decades, devaluing taxpayer savings and income.

As they skip and jump from trick to deception to lie, the message they really would like us to hear is: “Don’t worry. Everything is fine. Keep placing your faith in us, and please, we beg of you, do not begin questioning whether things really are as fragile as they seem.” And on this point, they actually provide a shred of hushed honesty. While never their loudest message, here and there they have made it known that the drastic actions they are taking are primarily meant to “reassure depositors” and to lower the chance of people making runs on other empty banks. Biden even goes so far as to try to speak it into existence, as if by magic incantation, saying “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.” They care about what we think of all this. They care what we think because our trust in these lies is the last thread holding it all together.

The U.S. economy is bleeding, it’s hurt. It’s stumbling along on stilted steps, and the Federal Reserve needs to keep up the faith. That’s how all this works, right? Faith that the slip of paper, or the mark on the computer, means you have money somewhere that will be honored when you try to take it out.

Well, the working people are out of faith, and the capitalists are proving yet again that they never deserved it anyway.

Last month, from August 5 to 7, the State of Israel heightened its ongoing military conflict with Palestinian forces in the Hamas-governed Gaza enclave, provoking a low-intensity battle with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a minor far-right Sunni Islamist party, as well as smaller PIJ-allied factions. In an operation codenamed “Breaking Dawn,” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched a barrage of so-called “targeted airstrikes” into the Gaza strip, the densely urbanized Palestinian enclave bordering the southwest corner of Israel. PIJ and its allies returned fire, launching around 1,100 rockets into Israel, without definite targets.

The IDF airstrikes hit apartment complexes, a cemetery, and other public buildings and areas, and killed at least 35 people — 13 enemy combatants, 2 police officers, 5 uninvolved Hamas and Fatah operatives, and 15 Palestinian civilians, including 9 children — according to reports compiled by Ha’aretz. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is reported to have unintentionally killed 14 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children, with malfunctioning rockets that hit urban areas in Gaza, including a refugee camp; these reports, initially made by Gaza-based journalists, have been corroborated by the Associated Press. According to Al-Monitor. Of the 900 or so PIJ rockets that reached Israel, over 97% were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. No IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians were killed during Op. Breaking Dawn. By the end of the IDF–PIJ battle, at least 49 Palestinians had been killed, while as many as 360 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Overview of the IDF–PIJ Battle

The battle followed a series of recent escalations by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the occupied West Bank. On March 22, an ISIS operative carried out an attack in the southern Israeli city of Be’ersheva, killing four civilians before he was shot dead. Over the next few months, sporadic shootings, car rammings, and knife attacks were carried out by Palestinian militants, dubbed a “new terror wave” in the Zionist press, which altogether resulted in 19 Israeli casualties — mostly civilians, plus some border police and soldiers — according to Time Magazine. The IDF responded with mass arrests in the West Bank — over 500, according to the Times of Israel — sparking violent clashes. By the end of July, according to Al-Monitor, 53 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF. The epicenter of these escalations was the Palestinian city of Jenin, situated in the northern West Bank, where over 30 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF this year, including a famous Al-Jazeera journalist who was covering an IDF raid.

The “West Bank” is the area east of the 1949 Israeli–Jordanian armistice line and west of the Jordan River, designated by the 1992 Oslo Accords, along with Gaza, as the territory for a Palestinian state in the U.S.-formulated and internationally-endorsed “two-state solution.” Despite the formation of the State of Palestine in 1993, most of the West Bank is either directly controlled by the State of Israel or militarily occupied by the IDF, with Israeli administration based in the large swathes of the territory that have been settled by Israeli citizens since Israel’s victory in the 1967 “Six-Day War” — a situation that is condemned by almost all countries, international bodies, and relevant NGOs as an illegal occupation, violating international law. The only country that has consistently defended the occupation, aside from the State of Israel itself, is the United States of America, which has used its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to veto UN General Assembly measures, such as sanctions, against Israel. Successive far-right Israeli governments, as well as the current big-tent government, which includes “socialists” and a center-right Arab party, have supported continued settlement expansion and indicated plans to eventually officially annex most or all of the West Bank.

On August 1, the IDF raided Jenin and arrested Bassem al-Saadi, West Bank leader of al-Quds Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s military wing. During the raid, the IDF also shot and killed a 17-year-old PIJ militant, Dirar al-Kafrini, in a brief firefight.

In response, over the next few days, PIJ leaders in Gaza threatened retaliatory attacks against Israel: As quoted in the Jerusalem Post, Khaled al-Batsh, chair of the PIJ politburo, declared on August 3, “We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel.” Between August 2 and 5, the IDF and al-Quds Brigades prepared installations on either side of the Israel–Gaza border.

On August 1, as tensions escalated following al-Saadi’s arrest, Israel closed the Gaza border, interrupting fuel transport. By August 6, the lone power plant in Gaza was forced to temporarily shut down for lack of fuel. The residents of Gaza, who usually have access to electricity for only 12 hours per day, were reduced to 4 hours per day of electricity for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn.

Finally, on the morning of August 5, after last-minute UN and Egyptian negotiation attempts failed, the IDF launched what the Israeli government characterized as “preemptive strikes” on PIJ positions near the border, initiating the battle. 

Israeli Interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered the strikes without consulting his Cabinet, after obtaining the approval of the “left-wing” Attorney General of Israel, Gali Baharav-Miara, who signed off on all military actions short of a formal declaration of war. Lapid took his current position as “interim” Prime Minister in July — barely a month before authorizing Op. Breaking Dawn. He is, however, a veteran functionary within the occupation-state, having previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Strategic Affairs (which largely deals with efforts to counter the global, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Israeli state, Israeli industry and trade, and Israeli academic and cultural institutions). Many political analysts, both in Israel and around the world, have speculated that PM Lapid, who is behind in opinion polls ahead of the upcoming 2022 Israeli general elections, initiated Op. Breaking Dawn to drum up support from his right-wing militarist base, which currently favors former PM and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Likud Party by wide margins. Such cynical and violent political maneuvering is common in Israel. Palestinian lives are often taken in military operations ordered by Israeli politicians and military officials to boost their political clout.

In any event, Israel’s purported justification for “preemptively” bombing Gaza, namely to maintain “public security,” is clearly false. Given the near-perfect success rate of its U.S.-funded Iron Dome defense system in intercepting rockets, Gaza-based militaries present virtually no danger to Israeli civilians. Commentators in Israel and worldwide widely condemned the IDF strikes as unprovoked, as well as extremely disproportionate.

Moreover, as a matter of “military ethics,” it is standard procedure for Israel to carry out targeted assassinations of enemy combatants and politicians regardless of whether civilians may be harmed. A widely-cited 2005 article by two Israeli authors in the Journal of Military Ethics, titled “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” has served to entrench the practice, especially in “targeted airstrikes” against Palestinian militants in Gaza. When the IDF murders a 5-year-old girl, as it did in its “targeted airstrike” on Tayseer al-Jabari, al-Quds Brigades commander for northern Gaza, this is considered justified as an acceptable counter-terrorism casualty by Israeli politicians and the Zionist press. This policy has been repeatedly decried as “collective punishment,” a violation of international law, by most countries in the UN General Assembly, and is one of the many violations that have raised demands to have Israeli officials tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Al-Quds Brigades retaliated by 9:00 p.m. on August 5, several hours after the first IDF airstrikes. The PIJ was joined by military cadres from the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Maoist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), two minor Communist parties in Palestine.

On August 6, the Israeli Occupation Forces arrested another 19 members of the PIJ in the West Bank. The occupation carried out further raids, arrests, and assassinations of Palestinian militants and politicians in the West Bank for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn, storming refugee camps, forcibly arresting Palestinian freedom fighters, and starting gunfights that killed more Palestinian children.

After three days (66 hours) of IDF bombardment, Egypt, which often takes the role of mediator between Israel and Palestinian forces in Gaza, successfully organized ceasefire talks between Israel and PIJ. The ceasefire was brokered Sunday, August 7, and a representative of the UN Security Council confirmed the next day that the ceasefire had gone into effect on Sunday, shortly before midnight. 

In all, Op. Breaking Dawn and the violence precipitating its authorization has been the most intense in Palestine in just over a year — since May 2021, when Israel and Hamas, the party that governs Gaza, with support from PIJ, fought an 11-day battle. The May 2021 outbreak resulted in over 200 Palestinian casualties in Gaza — 128 civilians, according to the UN, and between 80 (according to Hamas) and 200 (according to Israel) militants — with over 2,000 people wounded, as well as 14 civilian casualties in Israel, inlcuding Jews, Arabs, and South Asian migrant workers. The battle coincided with riots in major cities, including Lod, Akko, and Jerusalem, characterized by bombings and arson attacks against homes, synagogues, and mosques, as well as racist lynch mobs, in which one Arab and two Jewish civilians were killed. Irregular fighting in the West Bank and along the Israel–Lebanon border resulted in the deaths of 28 Palestinian militants, one Hizbullah militant, and one Lebanese civilian. This outbreak followed months of protests in Palestine and worldwide over the planned evictions of several Palestinian families from their homes in the predominantly Arab, affluent, and historically politically influential Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, amid ongoing Zionist efforts to replace the current residents with a Jewish majority.

The Situation in Gaza

The Gaza strip, centered on Gaza City, is internationally recognized as part of the State of Palestine, but currently stands as a de facto state of its own, territorially and politically independent of both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. Gaza has its own government, military, and civil infrastructure. However, Gaza remains economically dependent on Israel, which, in partnership with Egypt, enforces a naval blockade of Gaza, and controls the territory’s fishing waters and energy supply. Much of Gaza’s workforce commutes to Israel for jobs. Gaza also relies heavily on foreign aid, primarily from wealthy European Union countries. The enclave has been governed by Hamas, or the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” a right-wing Islamist organization, since 2007, and various Hamas-aligned Palestinian forces also operate within the enclave.

The present situation began to take shape in 2005, when Israel unilaterally “disengaged” from Gaza, demolishing all Jewish-inhabited settlements and forcibly removing all Jewish residents from the territory. Full civil and military control over Gaza was then handed over to the State of Palestine.

Elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) were held in 2006. At that point, since 1993, when the State of Palestine was formed, Fatah, a centrist and secular nationalist party, had been the sole governing party, winning an outright parliamentary super-majority in the 1996 Palestinian PLC elections and the presidency in the 1996 and 2005 Palestinian presidential elections. However, in the 2006 elections, Hamas, running for the first time, won an outright majority (74 of 132 seats) in the PLC. This was despite concerted U.S.–Israeli efforts to fix the election in favor of Fatah: USAID spent millions advertising for Fatah, while Israel prevented Palestinian residents of eastern Jerusalem, projected to favor Hamas, from participating. (Eastern Jerusalem is claimed by the State of Palestine as its capital, but was unilaterally annexed by Israel in the 1980 “Jerusalem Law,” after being taken from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.) Additionally, electoral factions had formed within Fatah over allegations of corruption, splitting its ticket. Not only was Fatah unseated, but so was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the big-tent coalition of Palestinian parties that formed in 1964 to organize the Palestinian nation (including the diaspora) for international recognition, initiated the Oslo Accords, and helped lead to the formation of the State of Palestine.

Initial attempts to facilitate a peaceful transition of power failed. Although Hamas had officially taken leadership, Fatah officials refused to recognize its authority. Fighting broke out between Hamas and Fatah, starting with minor clashes and assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, and then escalating to a low-intensity civil war. By the time peace talks had successfully ended the fighting, Hamas had been forced out of the West Bank and retreated to Gaza, which it wrested from Fatah. Thus, since 2008, Gaza has been governed by Hamas, while the West Bank has been governed by the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is more aligned with Hamas than Fatah, and is actively pursued by the Israeli Occupation Forces, has made Gaza its base of operations, although it is also active in the West Bank.

No elections have been held in the State of Palestine since 2006, largely because Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and current president, is corrupt and increasingly unpopular. If an election was held in the near future, Hamas would almost certainly win an even larger majority than it won in 2006. The prospects of such a result are against the interests not only of Fatah and Israel, which has a stable working relationship with Fatah, but also the imperialist interests of the U.S., European Union, and Russia — the major parties to the “Quartet on the Middle East,” which has facilitated the “Israeli–Palestinian peace process.” The Quartet insists upon the fundamentally unjust, and increasingly unpopular, “two-state solution,” in which the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine remains divided between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine — one state that privileges a Jewish majority and another state that is almost exclusively Arab.

Hamas has waged four major battles in an ongoing “war of attrition” against Israel since it took power in Gaza. However, it stayed entirely on the sidelines during the August 2022 IDF–PIJ battle. “Our people are waiting for the Palestinian resistance to take the decision and retaliate.” So said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, on the night of August 5, 2022. IDF jets had already killed at least 10 people, three of whom were civilians, including a five-year-old girl named Alaa Qaddoum. 

Continued Raids in the West Bank

On August 9, two days after the Israel–PIJ ceasefire, the Israeli Occupation Forces raided the city of Nablus in the West Bank. Their target was Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a 26-year-old commander of a local cell of Fatah’s network of armed militias, collectively known as al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Al-Nabulsi stands accused of planning a number of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers and has been wanted by the occupation forces since February this year. Rather than surrender himself to arrest, al-Nabulsi and two others barricaded themselves in a residential building and prepared to fight to the death; in a final video stream, al-Nabulsi said he would die a martyr and implored Palestinians to “never forsake the rifle.” A firefight broke out between the occupation forces and Palestinian militants, and over 60 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were injured in the crossfire, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Fatah issued a statement on al-Nabulsi’s death, in which they declared that “the cowardly crime of assassination will only increase our people’s determination.” The PFLP said the resistance “has emphasized the failure of the occupation,” and Hamas hailed the epic heroism of those who died protecting al-Nabulsi. Armed resistance has become increasingly popular among Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly the younger generation, and the various parties and factions are responding to this trend. The more the Israeli forces intensify military pressure, the more closely the freedom fighters across the Palestinian political landscape — whether affiliated with Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, Hamas, or the PIJ — will be forced to stand together, and the more closely Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization will be drawn towards the necessity of reconciliation.

At the same, despite the official statements issued by the entrenched, corrupt, and stale Fatah leadership, the bravery displayed by al-Nabulsi and other young militants reveals the party’s growing unpopularity with the Palestinian masses. The revolutionary youth of Palestine are increasingly looking towards armed resistance, even in those cells attached to Fatah, rather than the “legitimacy” conferred by the U.S.-led “international community” for the party’s adherence to the unjust “two-state solution,” its two-faced collaboration with the State of Israel, and its total dependence on the import of financial capital from imperialist Western European state-sponsors.

The bigger picture: Israel and U.S. Imperialism

This explosion of Zionist militarism in the past year and more is the latest chapter in a century-long genocide that has its origins in the Zionist political movement that emerged in 1880s Western Europe.

Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, formulated the nationalist ideological framework, which he described as a “colonial” movement in his diaries, after witnessing the antisemitic “Dreyfus Affair” in France, and as a direct response to the so-called “Jewish Question” — i.e., what to do with the Jews in Europe? The proposition put forward by “racial” antisemites as early as 1750, that Jews are a parasite attached to the “white race,” and should therefore be removed from European society, was a pillar of later Nazi ideology and culminated in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Herzl’s utopia was a world in which antisemitism had been eliminated by reconstituting the Jewish people, then dispersed in diaspora communities across the world, as a nation-state in Palestine; a world in which the Jewish people were “normalized,” because they would have become like any “normal” European nation-state. (Of course, with historical hindsight, we know that the establishment of the State of Israel has done nothing to eliminate or diminish global antisemitism.) Amid fresh waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire and new antisemitic laws throughout Europe, the nascent Zionist movement managed to recruit large contingents of the Jewish bourgeoisie, liberal intelligentsia, and some rabbinical authorities by convincing them of the proposition that Jews needed to, and could successfully, leave Europe, as well as all other regions of the diaspora, for Palestine. The Zionists proposed a bargain with the colonial powers of Europe: In exchange for funding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Zionists would open what was then an underdeveloped, feudal region of the Ottoman Empire to Western European capital. Herzl initially attempted to convince the Ottoman sultan that the Jews would, in exchange for Palestine, develop the region and support and level out Turkish monetary policy. The sultan, mainly concerned with holding together his crumbling empire, could not afford to draw ire from Muslims and Arab nationalists in Palestine, and refused. The Zionist movement then turned to the powers of Europe, especially the British Empire. 

This evil bargain lies at the basis of the Zionist project. In 1947, nearing the end of the British Mandate, a civil war broke out in Palestine between the Jewish Yishuv (Hebrew for “community”), which included a mix of centuries-old Jewish communities and recent arrivals, and Arab nationalists, supported by armies from the surrounding Arab-majority states. By 1948, following the Israeli declaration of independence, the Zionists achieved their biggest success: the destruction of Palestinian civil society by the ethnic cleansing of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — half of the Arab population of Palestine at the time. This was the Nakba (Arabic for “cataclysm” or “catastrophe”). Since then, continuing to the present, the Israeli Occupation Forces have sought to “complete” the Nakba by utterly annihilating the last vestiges of Palestinian sovereignty and nationhood.

In the decades since the Nakba, Israel has sought abroad for sponsorship from the imperialist states, and found in the U.S. Empire a willing partner. In the post-war order, the ghouls at the heart of U.S. imperialist foriegn policy were willing to sponsor any state or group that could be used as a bulwark against the threat of Communism. At a time when Arab nationalism would dovetail with socialism and the development of Communism in the Arabic world — indeed, right as the growth of pan-Arabism threatened imperialist oil production — the Cold Warriors of the U.S. Empire stepped on the scene to back the Israeli occupation and genocide. This has been the status quo until today.

Those behind the occupation sit comfortably in their mansions in the Berkshires, their penthouses in New York City, their enormous ranches in the occupied U.S. countryside, and in the White House in Washington, DC. The architects of the Palestinian extermination, the Nakba, the Cataclysm, are the monopoly capitalists of the United States Empire and the lickspittle politicians that serve as their agents. Neither of the major parties differ when it comes to Israel and the occupation: both are wholly and entirely dedicated to completing the Palestinian genocide abroad, just as they are both dedicated to completing the Indigenous genocide at home.

But who are these capitalists? How are their interests served by the genocide? The U.S. embassy itself explains: “[c]ritical components of leading American high-tech products are invented and designed in Israel, making these American companies more competitive and more profitable globally.” Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and HP all have partnerships, research labs, or factories in occupied Palestine. Some 2,500 U.S. firms have their homes in Israel. Israeli capital coming into the U.S. in investments is approximately $24 billion USD. U.S. capital has established a “free trade” agreement with the Israeli occupation government, and trade between Israel and the U.S. was worth $50 billion USD in 2016. Israeli markets are inter-penetrated by U.S. products, extending the lifespan of U.S. capital. Thanks to the imperialized periphery, Israel has the highest concentration of engineers and PhDs per capita in the world: a veritable nation of petit-bourgeois technical experts, ready-made to provide war technology that will first be tested on Palestine before it is used abroad by the U.S. military.

The average factory worker in Israel makes 79,000 Israeli New Shekels per year — the equivalent of $24,162 U.S. Dollars. The average salary for a factory worker in the territorial U.S. in 2022 is $32,507. Capital can be put to use in advanced technical manufacturing in Israel for far cheaper than in the imperialist center. This means the more jobs that U.S. monopolists can export to Israel, the higher the general rate of profit. Advanced electronics can be manufactured there cheaply, and then resold in the imperialist heartland at the price they would have cost if they had been manufactured inside the US.

Perhaps most importantly, the colony of Israel stands at a crossroads of global oil trade, and from the military bases within its borders, the U.S. can exert pressure on its “allies,” like the US-backed dictators of Saudi Arabia, as well as its enemies, like the anti-US government in Iran.

It was none other than the leader of the current criminal regime in the White House, sitting U.S. President Joseph Robinette Biden, who once declared that Israel was so strategically key to the empire that “[i]f there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.” Every year since 1985, the illegitimate settler-empire of the U.S. has given the settler-state of Israel at least $3 billion U.S. dollars. In 2019 alone, the U.S. also gave Israel $4 billion U.S. dollars in military aid. The U.S. guarantees $8 billion U.S. dollars in loans. These numbers don’t even begin to capture the so-called “foreign military financing” provided to Israel on a yearly basis, or the fact that a large amount of the equipment in use by the IDF is American. Indeed, the IDF uses Gaza as a testing ground for advanced US-imperialist weaponry.

In every sense, Israel is now a colony of the United States, which provides its arms and armaments. The U.S. Empire has a vested interest in the colony, and in making sure it thrives at the expense of Palestinian lives. Israel, just as much as the United States, is the enemy of liberation everywhere. In exchange for Yankee weapons, the Israelis teach the Yankee police how to choke and kill; in Israel, they stand on the neck of Palestine. In the US, they stand on the neck of New Afrika.

The Zionist Israeli government is a single link in a vast chain wrapped around the throat of the world. That chain has its anchors in the United States.