Marxist Philosophy and the Gaza Genocide

When I worked as a bricklayer’s assistant one of my tasks was to set up the scaffolding. Scaffolding is the platform bricklayers use to work from. Scaffolding must be sturdy or the entire building project will risk collapse. Depending on the job, we would set up 5 to 10 stories of scaffolding. It was a bear of a task that often took a full day to complete. If my scaffolding was wobbly or shaky I’d get yelled at—which I always hated—or worse, if the scaffolding was poorly constructed it could be the cause of a great catastrophe.

When we think about anti-imperialism and specifically the Palestine liberation struggle we need to think about the scaffolding that we work from. In the United States, one of the most important social movements that intersects with the wider class struggle is the struggle for Palestine liberation. I am a long-standing advocate for Palestinian liberation, and like many of us, it has been very difficult to witness the ways that pro-Palestine activism has interacted with the wider American civil society and university system of protest and liberal outrage politics. Since the very start of Israel’s genocidal offensive in the wake of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th 2023, the predominant liberal institutions have proven to be inadequate stewards of Palestine action. The left has failed to effectuate any viable change in regard to the genocide Israel has waged on Gaza because the left operates on the scaffolding of the Democratic Party and its alliances with AIPAC and the Israel lobby prevent any true action to be taken beyond the bounds of the agendas set by these institutions.

A consequence of the left’s reliance on liberal-left institutions is the tendency to make pro-Palestine activism appear as if it is siloed off into a subculture leftist discourse that is sheltered from mass appeal. Palestine becomes a victim of the culture war and this has the effect of pacifying Palestine as a moral outrage discourse. We cannot forget that the scaffolding system of the Democratic Party and its NGO network proved inept in delivering a cease fire, let alone any deeper justice for Gazans facing the genocide during the Biden era. It was as if mass movements had died, as if the people as an autonomous public force had vanished as a global agent. It is as if the masses possess no force unto themselves.

Palestine is ...