How can we stop the carnage?
Countless mass demonstrations in cities around the world over the last two years have shown the residents of Gaza that, while governments everywhere have abandoned them, “the people” on every continent nevertheless are with them in spirit. Reports from on the ground in Palestine have confirmed that this has been important for morale, if nothing else.
The several hundred thousand people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge this month changed the political narrative in Australia, opening the space for more activism and less state repression and dealing a political blow to both the state government and the police. It showed that mass mobilisation is more powerful than the most radical-sounding phrases shouted by only a few people.
Ultimately, however, nothing we have done thus far has challenged Israel’s resolve. This is not a denigration of the effort but an acknowledgement of reality: the opposition is simply not powerful enough.
The previously widely touted Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran—when they even bothered with a show of military force in support of the Palestinians, have proven to be, at best, minor irritants to Israel. Activists in the West still placing their hopes in these groups are deluded.
If Israel were simply an outlier state—some middling, independent settler colonial project—stopping its grotesque violence might be easier. But Israel is not that. It is an integral part of the US-led global imperialist order. Membership in that order defines its character more than anything else and is the basis of its power and impunity.
The global imperialist order has long since ceased to be defined by race or colonialism. It includes not only “white” Western states but also a range of regional powers and previously colonised nations. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt all play key roles in the Middle East as part of the US-led order (just as Japan, the Philippines and Thailand do in Asia).
The ruling classes of various countries—those who control the states and most economic resources—have shared interests in being integrated into the US-led nexus of power. Some states might appear dependent or servile. But the global capitalist order is more akin to a series of exclusive golf clubs. Ruling classes sign up for the prestige, privileges, networks and deal making opportunities membership offers. In return, they agree to all the “gentlemanly” dress and decorum codes—and not to rock the boat of existing relationships.
It doesn’t matter whether the rulers are Arab, Asian, African or Latino—what matters is that they run a capitalist state in the interests of one of the competing imperialist blocs. Indeed, the United States ruling elite for decades has been a practitioner of “affirmative action”, with a keen sense that its informal empire needs to be as multiracial as possible if it is to have any popular legitimacy in a postcolonial imperial order in which white people make up maybe 15 percent of the globe’s population.
States like Israel and Australia need to be viewed in this light: components of the larger capitalist whole. Their governments cannot easily be disentangled from empire, which means that to defeat them, the entire edifice of global ruling class alliances must also be challenged.
There is either victory for all the oppressed and exploited worldwide, or any victory will be short-lived as the ruling classes coordinate to nullify the gains of any one group of people. And genocide, mass slaughter, oppression and exploitation will continue, just as they did throughout the twentieth century.
Because the abolition of capitalist imperialism is essential for securing fundamental and lasting social change, Marxists try to build revolutionary political organisations in every country. We need to build a counter-power to the elite imperialist clubs of the ruling classes—a global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist network of revolutionary parties.
The last 150 years of left-wing political activism have shown that anything else either fails on its own terms, exhausts itself or is undermined, incorporated or smashed by the capitalist ruling classes.
It’s true that building a revolutionary party today, as Socialist Alternative is attempting, has not stopped the carnage in Palestine (or anywhere else for that matter). But once the scale of the task is recognised, it becomes clear that simply taking a stand or bearing moral witness, though an important step in the right direction, will never be enough to defeat imperialism.
Without the smashing of the global capitalist order, history will repeat itself again and again. If there were an easier or more realistic path, we’d take it. Unfortunately, there isn’t. We have to rebuild an international socialist movement—a network of mass revolutionary parties in opposition to the ruling classes in every country.
We have no other choice. Join us—we have a world to win.
