Photo: A pro-Palestine protest outside the New York Times offices in Manhattan. Credit: Wyatt Souers
On Aug. 4, the New York Times published a remarkable article acknowledging a fact that the U.S. ruling class has generally preferred to obscure: Despite the massive military destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza over the last 10 months, the Palestinian resistance is nowhere near extinguished. To the contrary, the article acknowledges that Hamas is actually recruiting new fighters. The same is likely true for other Palestinian resistance organizations because it is a fact of history that oppression breeds resistance.
Parallel to the resistance in Palestine, a historic mass movement within the United States has completely transformed consciousness about Palestine in this country. For example, a CBS News poll from June revealed that 61% of people in the United States now think that the Biden-Harris administration should stop sending weapons and supplies to Israel, and 78% percent of people say Israel’s war in Gaza is a factor in deciding who they will vote for in the presidential election. For 76 years, the U.S. government’s support for Israel has been an unshakeable pillar of its imperialist foreign policy. The last 10 months have put an unprecedented strain on that arrangement.
Nearly 7,000 miles away from Gaza, in the past week, U.S. imperialism has escalated its attacks against another one of its long-standing targets: the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Following Venezuela’s presidential elections on July 27, the U.S. government and corporate media have waged a unified, all-out disinformation campaign in an attempt to delegitimize the elections and overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.
This attack against Venezuela is the first new major imperialist escalation that the U.S. government has launched since the mass movement for Palestine began. How those of us who have been mobilizing for Palestine analyze and respond to this moment can be crucial in shaping the path of the general revolutionary and progressive movement here in the U.S.
The lifecycle of an imperialist intervention
At the beginning of any imperialist intervention, the U.S. ruling class wages a massive information war to bring its working class to the side of imperialism — or at the very least, confuse us into inaction. If the ruling class was honest about their actions being driven by a desire to maximize their power and profits throughout the world, they would face a vigorous opposition. Instead, they conceal their true motivations, crafting propaganda designed to tug on our heartstrings, often focusing on issues like human rights or democracy.
The Palestine movement can remember this well. In the weeks after the Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, U.S. politicians and the corporate media peddled lie after lie in attempts to demonize the Palestinian resistance. Maybe most egregiously, President Biden stated on Oct. 11 that he saw and confirmed “pictures of [Palestinian] terrorists beheading children.” The next day, the White House was forced to walk back these claims. Biden never saw these photos because they do not exist. And yet, this lie was aggressively peddled by corporate media outlets in October. This lie and others created an environment in which it was extremely difficult for people in the U.S. to stand with the Palestinian people against occupation and genocide. Those who did were slandered and threatened by politicians, the media, schools and employers.
Because the capitalist class controls the corporate media narrative in this country, its information wars are typically very effective in shaping mass consciousness. But oftentimes, their narrative can only stick for so long. As people in the U.S. begin to witness the destruction caused by an imperialist intervention, the ruling class narrative can quickly collapse. Again, this dynamic is familiar to the movement for Palestine. As social media was flooded with coverage of Israel’s rampage in Gaza — the wanton murder of as many Palestinians as possible, the destruction of hospitals, universities and homes, and the vile, racist remarks stated by Israeli officials about Palestinians — people in the U.S. began to question: How can it be that the U.S. is concerned with human rights in the Middle East if it is providing money, weapons, and diplomatic cover to facilitate Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people? This established the basis for more and more people to join the movement for Palestine.
This is not an unprecedented phenomenon. Throughout modern history, from Vietnam to South Africa and Afghanistan to Iraq, we can observe multiple instances in which popular opinion in the U.S. turned against an imperialist intervention. When this happens, imperialism goes into overdrive in order to make its unpopular intervention seem like an outlier or mistake so that future imperialist projects are not opposed by the U.S. population from the onset. We can see some elements of the U.S. ruling class attempting to do this with Palestine by blaming Netanyahu and Israel’s current far-right government for the massive destruction in Gaza, rather than acknowledging that the oppression of Palestinians is a precondition for the existence of Israel, and has thus been the central feature of every Israeli government since 1948.
This is the context that makes imperialism’s current assault against Venezuela so significant. Can the millions of people whose consciousness has been transformed by the struggle for Palestine apply the lessons learned about the U.S. government’s role in the world to the struggle in Venezuela? Or will imperialism succeed in recovering ground it has lost in the battle of ideas over the last 10 months with its information war against Venezuela?
Developing an internationalist perspective
One of the hallmark chants of the mass movement for Palestine has been “In our tens, in our millions, we are all Palestinians!” This is reflective of an important contribution the movement has made: engendering a widespread consciousness that the movement in the U.S. must be internationalist because the interests of working-class people in the U.S. are directly tied to the interests of the Palestinian people.
This is an excellent foundation for the movement, but it must be paired with ideological clarity. One of the common refrains stated in recent days by people who oppose the Bolivarian Revolution is that we must “listen to Venezuelans.” But of course Venezuelans, like every other people, are not a monolith. There is an intense class struggle playing out in Venezuela right now, with significant numbers of people mobilizing both in defense of and against the Bolivarian Revolution. The mobilizations in favor of the revolution have been completely ignored by the corporate media, but they are stronger and more widespread. This is evidenced both by Maduro’s electoral victory, and the massive pro-revolution street mobilizations that have been organized in the past week. Still, it is true that there have been anti-government mobilizations. To analyze this reality, we must remember that not all mass mobilizations are progressive. Consider the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection in the U.S., for example. In order to understand who our enemies, friends and comrades are, we must develop an ideological clarity that extends beneath the surface.
Understanding imperialism and why we must oppose it can serve as the basis for this clarity. As Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin first identified, imperialism is capitalism in its most advanced stage. Capitalism is a system in which the tiny class of people who control the majority of society’s productive resources constantly seek to expand their wealth and power. Under imperialism, this drive for profit is systematically internationalized. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been the top imperialist country in the world, and has sought to organize the global capitalist economy along lines that benefit the U.S. capitalist class. This entails opposing movements within the U.S. and around the world that infringe on capital’s ability to maximize profit.
An in-depth explanation of imperialism is beyond the scope of this article, but even with this simplified understanding, we can see that there is an international struggle between the interests of capital and the interests of working and oppressed people. In a short article titled “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” Lenin wrote:
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes.
Thus, the “North Star” for our internationalism should be identifying which interests lie on each side of any given struggle, and opposing the interests of capital while taking action in solidarity with the interests of the working class.
In the case of Venezuela, this orientation is very clarifying. The opposition is clearly aligned with the interests of capital. María Corina Machado, the central leader of the current coup attempt, is a staunch Zionist. She has promised that if the opposition is successful in overturning the Bolivarian Revolution, they will move the Venezuela’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Only five countries (including the U.S.) have established their embassies to Israel in Jerusalem because to do so is a flagrant violation of international law. In 2018, Machado also reportedly requested Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for a military intervention (i.e. coup attempt) in Venezuela. The Venezuelan opposition has close ties with far-right governments in Latin America, such as Javier Milei in Argentina, and of course is closely allied with the U.S. — the government that has imposed brutal sanctions that have devastated Venezuela’s economy and caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the country.
In stark contrast, Venezuela has one of the most pro-Palestine governments in the world, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide and supporting Palestine’s right to be recognized as an independent state. Since its beginnings in 1999, the Bolivarian Revolution has been an expression of the political aspirations of working-class Venezuelans. Venezuela’s Constitution, established by this revolution and approved by popular referendum, “guarantees the right to life, work, learning, education, social justice and equality, without discrimination or subordination of any kind; promotes peaceful cooperation among nations and furthers and strengthens Latin American integration in accordance with the principle of nonintervention and national self-determination of the people” and more. The revolution has implemented many social programs and a popular democracy in pursuit of these principles. Finally, since 2004, Venezuela has anchored the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which has served as an important body for coordination between governments and social movements that refuse to live under the dictates of U.S. imperialism.
These facts clearly illustrate who our interests as internationalists align with.
Tasks for the movement today
The Bolivarian Revolution is on the frontlines of the international struggle of working and oppressed people against imperialism. It is an effort to assert working peoples’ political power in a region that the U.S. has long considered its “backyard,” and that is why it is so viciously attacked by the U.S. state and its capitalist media. If the revolution is defeated, it will also be a defeat for the U.S. working class because it means the U.S. capitalist class is able to strengthen its position in the world at a time when it is desperate to retain control.
After enjoying over two decades of nearly unrestrained domination over the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. imperialism has begun to experience turbulent times in recent years. The proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has not panned out how U.S. imperialism hoped. Countries in the Sahel region of Africa have risen up to reject imperialism. Several left-leaning governments have taken power in Latin America in recent years as a result of popular movements. The Palestinian resistance and the parallel mass movement in the U.S. have widely exposed the criminal nature of U.S. foreign policy, and have damaged the credibility of the U.S. government on the world stage. The rise of BRICS countries, particularly China, is challenging U.S. hegemony in the global economy. U.S. imperialism is still extremely powerful and dangerous, but it is increasingly vulnerable.
Within the U.S., we have a crucial role to play in the struggle against imperialism from within “the belly of the beast.” A key task for our movement is to advance the mass consciousness that develops around one particular international struggle like Palestine to become a generalized anti-imperialist consciousness so that our movement is not fooled by imperialist attacks against Venezuela, or any other country fighting for self-determination. As the U.S. movement develops this internationalist, anti-imperialist consciousness, the days of U.S. capitalism will be numbered.
