You encountered the disease that is western Marxism. Marxists in the belly of the imperial core have historically been divorced from meaningful practice, and gravitate towards chauvanism and inaction due to benefiting from the status quo. They just want to critique society, not actually change it, and that shows in how they shut you down.

Israel is a settler-colonial genocidal state, and as such will not have a working class uprising unified with Palestinians. It needs to be cut off from support, and will dissolve when that happens. It’s propped up by the US Empire to serve as a giant millitary base, it’s like saying you need to beat the millitary by raising class consciousness like a magic spell. Utterly foolish.

Theory is good. Not only is it good, it’s necessary. All of the best revolutionary parties in history have dedicated themselves to uniting theory and practice, as each sharpens and informs the other. To not study theory and only practice is to try to take on the job of an engineer with no prior study. You might find some success, but it will be held back. To only study theory and never practice is to turn revolution into a mental exercise and hobby, only interacting with itself on the mental landscape. It’s idealism.

To unite theory and practice is to find the most effective paths and put them to use, using what you learn through practical experience to reshape your understanding of theory and write new theory. This is the Marxist-Leninist method. This is what works.

If you want somewhere to start with reading theory, in a manner that builds up over time, I recommend my intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. Good luck! Try to find a better org next time, there are decent ones in the imperial core (though few are truly great).

America Marxist Leninist here

Class Consciousness is about supporting the proletariat and recognizing how one’s class affects them. This is not a call to support every working-class person even if they are far-right, Neo-Nazi, and or white supremacist. If a leftist supports Israel, they are not a leftist. The working class of Israel can be compared to the working class of Apartheid South Africa and the working class of European colonial empires.

Eurocommunism is trash, the European Union forces its member countries into adopting free market capitalist policies. It is a corrupt system that can not be fixed from the inside.

As an America myself, I can tell you that Americans will never submit their guns. All violence is bad and while I think you can get rid of bombs, you can never get away of guns in the United States.

No, this is the exact opposite. They haven’t read enough theory. This is categorical ultra-leftism [edit: I meant left-communism, but theyre similar concepts] at best, straight social democracy at worst.

It’s not that they “view the entire world through theory” and that’s a bad thing, it’s that they’re just throwing a general trueism [class consciousness] at a problem to handwave it away because it feels bad to their “common morality.” [That being the idea that “cultural boycotts” are bad because they are bad].

And no offense intended towards you, since I know you’re getting started, but it is extremely important to view the world through a marxist lense and avoid moralism [not saying you can’t oppose things on personal moral grounds, or that the genocide isn’t horrific]. Here it did lead you to the correct analysis, that Palestinians must engage in a violent anti-colonial struggle and liberate themselves from the Israeli genocidal apartheid state. Additionally, actions like boycotts and such can be a way to help palestine by isolating Israel and Israelis.

However, without a Marxist analysis, you might come to incorrect conclusions. I.e, positions on the special military operation in Ukraine, the recent “gen z” protests, etc.

“[With the Marxist-Leninist attitude,] a person applies the theory and method of marxism-leninism to the systematic and thorough investigation and study of the environment. He does not work by enthusiasm alone but, as Stalin says, combines revolutionary sweep with practicalness” - Mao Zedong

Reading all the responses from you guys have made me realise I’m not going crazy. I genuinely appreciate your comments. Currently at work, I’ll respond more when I get home later.

I’ll definitely keep reading theory, as I see now that it was never really about the books. They just can’t let go of their plastic solidarity.

But no, we should keep working to raise class consciousness among a people who have gleefully documented their hatred for the Palestinians for all to see.

This exposes their enormous ignorance on the topic of Zionism and the reality in occupied Palestine. Plenty of “Israelis” have class consciousness, that’s not the issue, the issue is that their class consciousness extends exclusively to settlers like themselves and completely excludes Palestinians who they view as subhuman. A western “leftist” org that does not oppose all forms of Zionism, especially so-called “Labor Zionism” is not leftist at all, they are just larpy radlibs.

They have this idea in their head about “Israeli leftists” that just does not correspond to reality. They need to be exposed to what these so-called “Israeli leftists” sound like when they talk about Palestinians. There is a reason that these “Israelis” do not and cannot develop a class consciousness that includes Palestinians, because just like libs in the imperial core who support imperialism because they benefit from it, the “Israeli left” benefits from the genocide, apartheid and land theft.

Is this what reading theory does to people? Unable to see and experience the world as it is, but every single event must be passed through the lenses of what Marx said over a century ago?

If anything this has to do with them reading absolutely insufficient theory, and only engaging with theory in the most superficial way possible, in a way that lets them continue to ignore imperialism and colonialism because addressing those things would expose their own ingrained chauvinism. If they bothered to even read Lenin they would not hold this vulgar and infantile “all we need is to raise class consciousness” position. Lenin himself explicitly addressed people like this, he wrote entire polemics against them. These people are just modern Kautsky-ites.

An integral part of reading Marxist theory is reading about and understanding capitalism’s relation to imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc., because these are all part and parcel of the global economic, military but also ideological structures which maintain capitalism.

The Palestinian liberation struggle is of vital importance for the global class struggle precisely because it represents the convergence point of so many of the atrocities of capitalism and imperialism. Any leftist org that refuses to engage with the brutal reality of Palestine and chooses to whitewash (or pinkwash) the genocidal nature of Zionism is no leftist org that i would ever want to be part of as a socialist and an anti-imperialist. In fact it may even be dangerous for me to do so, if one of them should decide to denounce my anti-Zionism as “anti-semitism” or “Hamas support” to the police.

You can’t see class in a vacuum like that, the global context matters and the so called working class of Israel is actively participating in a genocide to get their share of land, very similar as the working class of England during the british empire years.

Getting in contact with soc-dem/eurocommunists, for the first time, I see 😅 I’m from Latin America, living in Portugal and we hear some very similar speeches around here. To get theory about that, I’d suggest you get into Lenin’s critique of Kautsky and/or Hoxha’s critique of Eurocommunism.

Now, about the problem at hand. Since you’re in Britain, I think there’s little to be done regarding raising class consciousness of people in Gaza/Israel and little to be done regarding directly stopping the bombs. For me, this sounds like a very idealistic view.

You guys need to do what’s at hand: the banning the of the Israeli soccer fans is pretty good. Also is attending all pro-Palestinians demonstrations that happen near you, distributing leaflets, speaking for the masses in Britain and raising class consciousness around English people so that they pressure their own State on cutting ties with this genocidal state. The general strike in Italy is a good goal to promote, in my opinion.

And in this process, you will gather more people to fight the same fight, towards the final goal which is ending capitalism, the regime that allow genocides like that to happen.

Sounds like they have their head in their asses regarding the Maccabi fans as these are the same fans with links to the IDF, with confirmed human rights violators in their presence, who caused riots in Amsterdam. Banning them is the only sensible solution. Nothing ‘oh they are innocent bystanders’ about them. Ffs they chanted to kill all arabs in Amsterdam.

The leader seems like a zionist plant. Ask him if he’d excuse a current nazi guard from spitting on jews while he was on vacation. Would he just try to get him to see the light?

Then spit in his face

Theory deepens your solidarity with the oppressed, not whatever happened here.

You have to remember whatever the uniform people decide to wear for themselves, more often than not, their opinions reflect their relative class interests and marxist-leninists (MLs) have moved beyond a simplisitic bourgoisie vs proleteriat framework, understanding for example here that western proletriat and labour aristocrats engage in class collaboration with their bourgoisie against the proleteriat of the global south.

Furthermore, from a marxist-leninist perspective, national liberation struggle will mean collaboration between the oppressed proleteriat and their petite-bourgoisie/bourgoisie against the oppressor including the oppressor’s proleteriat who engaged in this normalised violence.

This whole thing where one postulates proleteriat of the oppressed and the prolteriat of the oppressor unite together like some Benetton advert against the bourgoisie is some idealistic nonsense you will only hear from the Western Marxist (whatever the colour of said western marxist) partly because it ignores the material gains that the oppressor’s proleteriat get from subjugating the proleteriat of the oppressed.

Brainwashing ain’t a thing; people instead seek narratives as license for their bigotry for which they get material gains for:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Marxism is a science.

https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

What you described is a disease of the Westerner. The cure for which MLs are still working on (click on my username, order by most controversial to find the most relevant topics to get a flavour of different opinions on this).

In the best case scenario (assuming good intentions from the person/people in question) it’s what happens when they are exposed to class dynamics, but have no understanding of colonialism and imperialism.

Imperialism is the primary contradiction (the first priority, to put it another way), not a lack of local communes. I think China understands this and it’s part of why they’ve spent so much time engaging with capitalist trade dynamics in order to shift the global power balance, rather than declaring every capitalist state an enemy of the working peoples of the world.

It is, I would argue, much easier for someone living in the imperial core to develop an interest in better conditions for the working class than it is for them to develop an understanding that they live within a violent apparatus with tendrils across the world and that much of what they do have is linked to some form of exploitation of another country and people. The first one is not far from what unions already advocate for, without even challenging capitalism itself. The second one means understanding that not every claim to a nation-state is valid, that territorial regions and who controls them were not set in stone millennia ago but instead have shifted sometimes dramatically over time, and that the primary driver of that shifting in recent centuries is colonialism and further, imperialism.

One of the fundamentals of colonial narrative that lingers to this day, is the idea of civil and savage. This feeds into the western chauvinist sense of superiority. That they are capable of seeing something “those other people” are incapable of seeing. Thus you get nonsense like him saying “North Koreans” are propagandized. As if it’s impossible that he himself could be propagandized into thinking they are propagandized. But you see, he’s “smart”, so it can’t be him who is being hoodwinked!

And of course it is more convenient for a person like that to run with “better conditions for the working class but not anti-imperialism or decolonization”. The first one might be fairly achievable for them without even bucking the system much. The second requires a significant paradigm shift.

But the good news is, the more anti-imperialist efforts succeed in imperialized places, the more the western empire declines and the more empty it becomes what people like this are standing on. One day, like Wile E Coyote in Looney Tunes, they will look down and realize they’re in midair. And then they will look at the screen with self-aware fear and hold up a sign saying, “Gulp.” Others will turn to fascism, still in denial and ignorance of what the world is, and believing themselves entitled to a world where they get special treatment as a favored type of person, even if they have to commit mass murder to maintain it.

The think the fundamental problem (besides the obvious Western Chauvinism) so many Western Leftists seem to have with Israel is that they don’t understand what state of development it’s in as a settler-colony.

Palestine is to the Israeli proletariat what Ireland was to the British proletariat in Marx’s time. So long as this remains true the only thing a class conscious Israeli comrade can do is to either leave and stop participating in the Zionist Project outright or find some way to aid the Palestinian Resistance.

The average American prole is capable of class consciousness because there is no conscious recognition of the fact that we live in a settler-colony. When we conceptualize Amerindians we don’t think of the present but the past. Settlers, Manifest Destiny, native tribes, etc. are these things from ancient history; not lived experiences of the modern day. I’d wager most Americans probably haven’t even met an indigenous person and when they do they often mistake them for being foreign immigrants. Much of the controversy around indigenous representation stems from the fact that we don’t want to acknowledge who owned the land our house is built on because it’s an uncomfortable topic to broach even if we didn’t have any ancestors who directly partook in the various genocides and massacres. For many of us these are crimes from a hundred years ago committed by people long dead. We can’t conceptualize it as anything else. The Amerindian has been excised from our mind and our status as settler-colonists goes unrecognized at a conscious level even if subconsciously we’re fully aware of it. Where the indigenous people can never forget what we’ve done to them we already have forgotten & buried it.

For Israeli proles none of this is true. The massacre of that Palestinian family happened yesterday, your brother helped do it, and you personally bought the land the family lived on afterwards. You saw nothing wrong with it and have no moral qualms about mocking the survivors. Modern Israel is closer in its development as a settler-colony to 1800s America than the modern USA; the Israeli proletariat are fully aware of their settler-colony and are happy to support its unyielding expansion so long as they continue to benefit. There is no plan to cease expansion; the Zionist Project openly envisions a Lebensraum stretching from the Nile to the Tigris. Their Manifest Destiny is still in full-swing and until it finally ends there’s no chance at awakening class consciousness in a proletariat that is being bribed by ample war spoils and any Arab unfortunate enough to live within the Israeli war path has no time to wait for Kautskyists in the West who’d rather sit on their hands because they care more about helping Israeli labor aristocrats instead of a subaltern people being exterminated by the 21st century Wehrmacht.

They sound like they have a profound lack of theory and have spent no time trying to understand settler-colonialism or imperialism or racial capitalism. Their “theory” is actually dogmatism.

the leader of that meeting to revert to type talking about how this conflict is a crisis of capitalism and how the “working class of Israel” need to attain consciousness as the reason they want Gaza is because the rent in the major cities in Israel are all so expensive which is what is encouraging expansion into newer lands,

That guy is not just a zionist he is probably a police informer put in place to destroy any possible potential of the group. Get out and try to lay low for a bit to get off their radar. Maybe warn some of the other members if you think they can be trusted.