The Imperative to Organize: What Palestine Needs from Us Now

[Photo Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP]

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso and Salma Hamamy

On October 7th, the Islamic Resistance Movement — a Palestinian political and military organization based in Gaza better known as Hamas — began a multi-faceted attack against the settler colony of Israel. The operation included aerial rocket launches and on-the-ground operations. The attack marked only the latest bout of Palestinian resistance against the sieges, occupations, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that have fundamentally characterized the Israeli state, an entity built on these very atrocities since its founding in 1948. With a dreadful immediacy, Israel responded to the attack in kind, and then some.

The war crimes and genocidal exploits that have unfolded since the fighting began are too multitudinous to list in full. But suffice it to say that Israel has unleashed an endless shower of hospital and school bombings — collective punishment galore. As of December 18th, Israel has slaughtered almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of whom were women and children. Meanwhile, the Israeli death toll stands at about 1,200. 

Immediately following October 7th, the United States predictably offered Israel — its client state — unconditional support. Soon thereafter, they expanded the gesture by offering military contributions and punishing domestic dissent. In contrast, the American public has largely opposed their government’s pro-Israel posture. An estimated 300,000 protesters marched on Washington in support of Palestine last month. The event featured speakers such as writer Mohammed El-Kurd, musician Macklemore, and lawyer Noura Erakat. It brought together groups from 22 states including California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Two of the largest labor unions in the country — the United Auto Workers and the American Postal Workers Union — have voiced their support for a ceasefire in the region.

Waves of pro-Palestine advocacy have overtaken social media, much to the chagrin of executives and algorithmic gatekeepers. Popular methods of demonstrating solidarity also include calling, emailing, and faxing politicians, donating to pro-Palestine organizations and humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, boycotting pro-Israel companies, and attending protests and direct actions such as strikes and walkouts. These tactics have all made major headway in nurturing a greater collective consciousness in the United States that supports the Palestinian cause and feels evermore compelled to apply liberatory praxis wherever systemic oppression rears its hegemonic head.

Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza worsens by the hour. The twice-renewed humanitarian pause that began on November 24th ended on December 1st, doing little to ameliorate the displacement, destruction, and brutality that Israel has subjected Gazans to for over two months now. The moment demands an additional layer of action on the part of comrades living outside the occupied territories. Beyond the more traditional forms of activism, we must also embody the organizer spirit in our daily lives. In other words, allies of the Palestinian cause must view our various social relationships and networks as breeding grounds for heightened awareness and collective action. 

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Individualized actions done in unison may spark a wave. But organized actions done in community build a tide. As agents in this transformational moment, we now have a responsibility — to our Palestinian comrades and to ourselves — to organize our immediate surroundings, ensuring that no stone goes unturned. Workplaces, friend groups, family units, neighborhoods, and the like all provide pre-established groupings within which communal awareness and collective action can grow. Beginning with the most promising group, the first step is to start organizational conversations with fellow group members.

These interactions can take many forms, such as further publicizing one’s support for Palestine, pushing back against pro-Israel rhetoric and apologia, wearing clothing that physically depicts solidarity with the Palestinian cause (e.g., keffiyeh), etc. But, generally speaking, the aim is to establish an accurate conception of the individual’s stance on the issue in question, making sure to note any potential gaps in knowledge or qualities that stand out as particularly ripe for agitation. These gaps may include an ignorance of Palestinian history, American ties to Israel, or Israeli ties to imperialist efforts abroad. Ripe points of agitation may include intersecting issues (e.g., the role of co-opted queer liberatory rhetoric in Israeli propaganda), points of reference (e.g., Israeli settler-colonialism as compared to its American counterpart), or personally relatable phenomena (e.g., labor exploitation as seen in both the occupied territories and the United States political economy).

Such efforts will provide a clear portrait of the group’s relationship to said issue. With this layout in mind, subsequent organizing conversations and broader discussions of majority opinion can begin. The hope is that, as this process unfolds, group consciousness will gradually increase, previously unaddressed imperatives will become glaringly obvious, and collective action will inevitably form. From here, discussions to determine group-wide initiatives will become ever more commonplace, until they eventually culminate in a collective decision to pursue a democratically agreed-upon program. 

This organizational method embodies the full meaning of collective action where the reach of individualized initiatives falls short. It penetrates our existence as atomized subjects of imperial capitalism by forcing a collectivization of ideology, commitment, and praxis. It also creates a sociopolitical infrastructure through which we can continue to wield collective action going forward, whether it be for Palestine or for any other issue.

The engagement with the Palestinian cause we’ve seen from Americans in the last couple of months most definitely comprises a host of noteworthy waves, many of which have significantly toppled political affiliations and institutional prestige across sectors. But, now, only the embodiment of an organizational spirit by each and every one of us will do the work of constructing a tide — one that may just push us over the revolutionary edge into a world where Palestine is free, from the river to the sea. 

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Salma Hamamy is a Palestinian student-activist and the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, known as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

Black Power in China: Mao’s Support for African American “Racial Struggle as Class Struggle”

By Ruodi Duan

Republished from Fairbanks Center.

With funding from the Fairbank Center this past summer [2017], I visited four archival and document centers in greater China: the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Guangdong Provincial Archives, and the University Services Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Through official state memos and event proceedings, my aim was to reach a more nuanced understanding of Third World internationalism as performed and construed in local, post-1949 Chinese contexts.

My earlier research of Chinese newspapers and other periodicals from the 1960s and early 1970s suggested that — contrary to Frank Dikötter’s argument — racial difference in Maoist China did not merely become subsumed under class categorization: it crystallized and defined it. As my research develops, however, I am beginning to see a more complex reality of rhetoric and action during the era.

The archival sources I examined this summer, for example, indicate that even as the Chinese state — in print, culture, and through performed acts of solidarity — fleshed out the dynamics of racial hierarchy within the U.S. and presented itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial nationalism, it ultimately threw its weight behind a strategy of “race struggle is class struggle.” In effect, the People’s Republic publicly acknowledged and denunciated the salience of race to world politics while attempting to harness that insight to a broader campaign for global socialism. The achievement of global socialism would therefore be the sole and inevitable path towards dissolving racial inequities.

The annotated itinerary of African American leftist leader Robert F. Williams’ 1964 trip to China most tellingly sheds light upon this dynamic; Chinese party officials kept detailed tabs on Williams’ “ideological progress,” remarking that a previous visit had first opened his mind to the correct notion that “[white] racial nationalism cannot be countered with [black] racial nationalism.”

“Proletariat of the world, unite,” propaganda poster by Chen Yanning, Lin Yong, Wu Qizhong, and Yang Xiaoming, 1968

At the Shanghai archives, the 144 pages of microfilm on a 1964 all-city conference to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Chairman Mao’s “Statement Supporting Black Americans in Their Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination”— featuring drafts of speeches from worker, student, and women leaders — also proved illuminating. This motley collection of speakers drew explicit parallels between Chinese historical experiences of semi-colonialism and contemporary black American movements; they decried race-based discrimination and lauded national liberation movements but nonetheless, frequently harkened back to Mao’s dictum that “racial struggle is fundamentally a matter of class struggle.”

This may not be as paradoxical as it might initially seem. Indeed, it was practical for China’s internationalist strategy to espouse deeply sensitive readings of racism in world affairs and history while advocating non-racial solutions. The inferences to racial semi-colonialism in pre-revolutionary China as a condition comparable to contemporary black America only heightened the desirability and efficacy of a certain political trajectory: working-class revolution as the antidote to the abuses of racial capitalism. It is precisely the yoke of racial oppression that would spur African Americans to take dominant roles in the anti-capitalist, anti-American campaign. The success of such an effort would allow for race to disappear in the U.S., just as it purportedly had in China. In effect, black nationalism would be refashioned into a weapon of international class struggle.

Robert F. Williams meeting Mao Zedong in 1964.

The Chinese endeavor to cultivate political alliance with the African American left was meticulous, targeted, and effective. In Inner Mongolia, Williams expressed his amazement as students and workers gathered to perform African American fight songs for him in factories and on the streets. At the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, he asked to be photographed with sacred Tibetan texts as testament that the Chinese way would continue to tolerate, if not honor, religious traditions. He and his wife made arrangements for their two children to study in China, and Robert carried on extensive political discussions with senior Chinese officials on the role of Cuba in the Sino-Soviet Split.

Members of the Black Panther Party hold up Mao’s “little red book.”

Huey P. Newton meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai in September 1971.

Moving forward, I plan to continue charting the depictions and functions of China in African American social movements for civil rights and Black Power, with sensitivity to the complexities and nuances within the Chinese receptions to black nationalism. This is a dynamic, ever-evolving story that roughly paralleled but did not absolutely correlate with either political currents within China (such as the Cultural Revolution) or African American civil movements. Teasing out these multi-faceted dimensions of black nationalism in China will expand our broader historical knowledge of racial nationalism as a force in the Cold War international arena, and especially of the civil rights movement as an event of truly global inspirations and consequences.

Ruodi Duan is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department researching race and ethnic studies in the Cold War, with a focus on Chinese depictions of African American social movements. This article received an “honorable mention” in the Fairbank Centers 2016 Travel Essay Competition.

The Gathering Storm: Donald Trump and the Hollowed-Out American Heartland

By Sean Posey

During the winter of 2016, the ever-present visage of Donald J. Trump remained burned into television sets and computer screens across America. In the well-manicured lawns of the modest working-class homes of Austintown, Ohio, situated in long-struggling Mahoning County, "Team Trump. Rebuild America" signs began popping up everywhere.

Formerly a sparsely populated farming community, Austintown grew as a working-class suburb in the decades after World War II. Steel and autoworkers could commonly afford vacations and college tuition for their children; the community, in many ways, symbolized the working-class American Dream. By 1970, Austintown, along with the neighboring township of Boardman, was part of the largest unincorporated area in the state. [1] The township's population peaked in 1980 at 33,000. Today, however, it's a very different place. Job losses in the local manufacturing sector and the graying of the population led Forbes to label Austintown as the "fifth-fastest dying town" in the country in the midst of the Great Recession. The township's poverty rate had already reached nearly 14 percent in the year before the meltdown of Wall Street.[2]

The 2016 Ohio Republican primary in Mahoning County witnessed the largest shift of Democratic voters to the Republican Party in decades. "Most of them crossed over to vote for Donald Trump," remarked David Betras, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman.[3]

This used to be Democrat country. But like so many other places in America, the brash billionaire's message is remaking the local political landscape. Trump narrowly lost the Ohio primary to incumbent Governor John Kasich. However, he won the majority of Republican primary voters in Mahoning County and in neighboring Trumbull County, home to the city of Warren - one of the most embattled municipalities in the state. Winning his home state should have been a given for Kasich; instead, Trump pushed the twice-elected governor to the brink.

Ohio is not the only place in the heartland the Trump tornado is sweeping through. Scores of America's most insecure communities are joining the once prosperous Buckeye State in flirting with or joining the mogul's camp. Yet, for as much attention as has been paid to Trump and the often controversial movement behind him, far less has been said about the cracking core of a country that is currently looking for a savior, any savior, in such enormously troubled times.

Years before America's most famous real estate and reality television personality descended a gold escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, long-time journalists Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson began a cross-country journey to document America in the wake of the 911 attacks.

"On one trip," Maharidge writes, "I drove from Chicago to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In places like this, the abandoned shells of factories, all broken windows and rust, make this country look like it was bombed in a war. In other places it's as if an economic neutron bomb hit-with trees and houses intact but lives decimated, gone with good jobs."[4]

Traditionally, this part of the heartland represented the economic engine of industrial America, filled with good-paying jobs in manufacturing. However, the great economic dislocations of the past forty-odd years have rendered much of this landscape a void, one more akin to the developing world than that of the United States. Even for the more outwardly normal communities, as Maharidge mentions, looks can be deceiving. Heroin is hitting the inner core of the country with a hammer force, destroying young lives already beset by economic insecurity and the end of upward mobility.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the declining life expectancy for a large swath of working-class whites, one of Trump's key constituencies. For the past sixteen years, death rates have risen for Caucasians between the ages of 45 and 54 and also for those between the ages of 25 to 34. [5] These are notable exceptions to the overall increase in life expectancy for all groups, regardless of race or ethnicity. While working class whites in Europe continue to experience increases in life expectancy, their counterparts in America are dying from drugs, suicide, and despair.[6]

The relationship between growing white death rates and support for Trump appears in the voting data. "Trump seems to represent a shrinking, in part dying segment of America," writes Jeff Guo in a detailed analysis of election results for the state of Iowa.[7] This holds true for other states as well. Guo goes on to demonstrate that, with the exception of Massachusetts, "the counties with high rates of white mortality were the same counties that turned out to vote for Trump." Many of these same voters are located in former industrial centers which themselves, in many ways, are also dying.

The deindustrialization of America first appeared in the Northeast and then in the former "Industrial Belt" (now dubbed the "Rust Belt" for the region's numerous decaying factories), stretching from Central New York to Illinois and Wisconsin. However, offshoring and free trade agreements have also severely damaged manufacturing centers in the "Right to Work" states of the South. Anger over free trade deals is driving much of Trump's populist economic rhetoric; a similar, though smaller effect, is being felt with Bernie Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side.

Despite regional changes, overall employment in manufacturing remained at a steady level until the end of the 1990s. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and the granting of "most favored nation" status to China (along with China's entry in the WTO in 2001) greatly undermined American manufacturing employment, which has almost continually declined over the past two decades. Aside for the traditional Rust Belt states, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi are among the top ten states in terms of loss of total share of manufacturing jobs.[8] Trump won all but Kansas during the Republican primaries. His campaign also looks to be pursuing a "Rust Belt strategy" for the general election, which could see the wooing of disaffected former Reagan Democrats and independents who will never embrace the Clinton candidacy. So, if Trump were to falter in states with large Latino populations, he could (in theory) potentially take economically troubled swing states like Ohio (no Republican has won a general election without it) and Michigan. Trump's appeal with working class voters could put traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in play as well in November.

Much is being made (rightfully) of the violent clashes at Trump rallies-often connected to the nativist and authoritarian overtones of the campaign itself. Yet far less attention is paid to the outlet Trump is providing by borrowing populist strains from the political left and right. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, who is facing increasing hostility from the party elite, the Democrats appear unwilling to tap into the mounting frustration over inequality, free trade deals, deindustrialization, and stagnant wages.

After their apocalyptic defeat in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic elite began to push for the transition from a labor-oriented party to one rooted in the professional (upper) middle class. The process greatly accelerated under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It brought the party electoral success, but as the upper 10 percent of the country prospered-including the new elite professional class loyal to the Democrats-economic conditions deteriorated for the party's old base and for the majority of the country at large.

In Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, the acerbic author takes a painful look at the effect of the unmooring of the Democratic Party from its roots in the working class: "Since 1992, Democrats have won the plurality of votes in every single election except one. For six of those years, they controlled Congress outright. But on matters of inequality they have done vanishingly little: They have stubbornly refused to change course when every signal said stop."[9]

It is indisputable that Republican policies during the same period also greatly increased inequality; however, the old liberal class of Franklin Roosevelt's party should have been the antidote to supply-side poison. They failed. And while the Republicans are paying the price for offering disaffected white workers the wages of identity politics (while advancing policies that destroy their livelihoods) the Democrats are likely next in line for the blowback.

"If you read mainstream coverage of Donald Trump, it's all focused on the bigotry and intolerance," Thomas Franks writes, "but there is another element, which is [he] talks about trade and he talks about it all the time."[10] Where is the Democratic Party on trade? It took the Democrats and Bill Clinton to succeed where George H.W. Bush failed and get NAFTA passed, which devastated whole regions and cost the country 700,000 jobs.[11] President Obama and Hillary Clinton both championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership-which will also cost working class jobs-over the objections of labor. (Clinton has since tried to walk back her initial support.) According to analysis by The Atlantic, "The trade pact will increase the importation of competing goods, which will drive down the cost of U.S.-made goods, putting downward pressure on wages." Even Breitbart News, a stalwart conservative publication, condemns the TPP for its likely effect on the working class, while the Obama Administration relentlessly pushes for its passage:

The question that conservatives must answer in the on-going debate over President Barack Obama's proposal to rewrite the rules for the world's economy through the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether following General Electric's agenda to flatten the world's regulatory regimes to produce efficiencies in manufacturing and labor is in the interests of the United States? [12]

It is difficult to imagine President Obama ever uttering such words about a free trade deal.

Only Senator Sanders has rallied to the defense of labor and the sections of the country hard-hit by trade; Clinton by contrast is seemingly ready to turn her back on the traditional manufacturing heartland in the Midwest and parts of the South. In reality, the Democratic Party's record over the pasty twenty-five years on everything from trade to protections for labor is a fantastically dismal one.

The best strategy to counter Trump's rise would be to focus on the legitimate grievances of much of his constituency while countering his appeal to identity politics. Democratic elites who view the white working class as hopelessly racist are playing into Trump's hands (while also discounting the racism of the professional class). But while they dither, the thunder of a movement inspired by the storm that is Donald Trump continues to coalesce. And even if Trump disappears from the political radar tomorrow, the backlash he has inspired will live on.

From the crumbling factory walls of the Rust Belt to the shuttered main streets of the Deep South, a revolt is underway. The long forgotten "flyover country" is erupting in a paroxysm of anger and despair over the generations of decline that have battered once solid bastions of white working and lower-middle class America. With progressive voices replaced by neoliberal orthodoxy, no constructive outlets remain to channel the cacophony emerging from the heartland. With a fading Bernie Sanders and a rising Trump, the outcome might already be decided. If both parties fail to come up with economic solutions for decaying sections of the country's interior (and if no radical movements emerge from the grass roots), the potential for the worst possible right-wing backlash will remain. It is certain that America will never right itself until it deals with this crisis; if it does not, the forces of nativism and demagoguery will win the day. And from there, we will all reap the whirlwind.

Notes

[1] Charles Etlinger, "Mahoning Valley Faces 70s Crisis," Youngstown Vindicator, September 27, 1970.

[2] "Austintown 5th-Fastest Dying Town in U.S. Says Forbes," Vindicator, December 20, 2008.

[3] Peter H. Milliken, "The Elephant in the Room," Vindicator, March 20, 2016.

[4] Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Homeland (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), xlii.

[5] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "The Places That Support Trump and Cruz are Suffering. But That's Not True of Rubio," Washington Post, February 8, 2016.

[6] Olga Khazan, "Middle-Aged White Americans are Dying of Despair," The Atlantic, November 4, 2015.

[7] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump," Washington Post, March 4, 2016.

[8] Economic Policy Institute, "The Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs," January 22, 2015.

[9] Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016),9.

[10] CBC Radio, "It's not Bigotry but Bad Trade Deals Driving Trump Voters, Says Author Thomas Frank," CBC online site. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-16-2016-1.3493397/it-s-not-bigotry-but-bad-trade-deals-driving-trump-voters-says-author-thomas-frank-1.3493433 (accessed March 22, 2016).

[11] Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers," December 9, 2013.

[12] Rick Manning, "A Rebuttal to National Review's Claim that White Working Class Communities Deserve to Die," Bretibart News, March 17, 2016.