Palestine Solidarity and the Class Struggle: Beyond the Partisan Divide
Jonathan Brown
Abstract
This article advances a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States, arguing that its current liberal and culture-war framing has rendered it politically impotent. Jonathan Brown contends that reducing the Palestinian struggle to a partisan issue within American polarization — aligned with the Democratic Party and progressive identity politics — obscures its true nature as a question of imperialism and class. Drawing on Lenin and Mao’s theory of contradictions, Brown demonstrates that American polarization operates primarily through non-antagonistic, cultural divisions that fragment workers while concealing the antagonistic contradiction between labor and capital. He critiques the Left’s reliance on race, settler-colonial, and Ukraine analogies as moralistic distortions that invite Zionist co-optation and alienate working-class Americans. Instead, Brown proposes a class-based anti-imperialist strategy that transcends liberal and conservative divides by linking Palestinian liberation to the material interests of American workers. The paper concludes that the American Communist Party must lead this struggle by framing Palestine as a front in the global war against U.S. monopoly capitalism and by aligning with the emerging multipolar world as a necessary step toward socialism.
Keywords
Palestine solidarity, Zionism, imperialism, class struggle, political polarization, multipolarity, culture war, liberalism, Marxism–Leninism
