The New Dark Age

Wednesday, 27 May 2026 — Vijay Pashad

The Working-Class Does Not Have the Time for Disunity (part 5).

Vijay Prashad

(This essay is part 4 in a series called ‘The Working-Class Does Not Have the Time for Disunity’. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here. More parts will appear in the next few weeks).

(Belgium)

The working class cannot become a unified political force while sections of it identify with imperialist forces. This is one of the central lessons of socialist politics and nowhere is this clearer today than in Palestine.

For the Left, Palestine is not simply a humanitarian issue or a question of foreign policy. It is a political question that cuts directly into the problem of working-class unity itself. The genocide in Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian land, and the full military backing provided by the United States and its allies reveal how hyper-imperialism operates in the contemporary world. But they also reveal how ruling classes attempt to divide workers politically, morally, and ideologically.

Capitalism does not rule through economics alone. It also requires political narratives that fragment collective consciousness. Workers must be persuaded to identify with ‘their’ state, ‘their’ ruling class, and ‘their’ geopolitical interests even when these directly contradict their own material conditions. Imperialism depends on this ideological process. Without it, it would become far more difficult to sustain military occupations, arms industries, sanctions regimes, and endless wars.

(Indonesia)

Palestine exposes this contradiction sharply.

Across the Western world, governments that claim there is no money for housing, healthcare, public transport, education, or decent wages suddenly possess unlimited resources for weapons, military aid, surveillance technologies, and geopolitical intervention. Austerity applies to workers, but not to hyper-imperialist warfare. The United States spent about $35 billion on the ongoing war against Iran in 2026 – this amount could eliminate half of the monetary poverty globally. The same political elites who lecture workers about fiscal discipline support billions in military funding for Israel without hesitation. This matters because imperialism reorganises social priorities internally as well as externally. Militarisation strengthens ruling-class power domestically. Resources are transferred away from social reproduction and toward military industries, border regimes, intelligence systems, and police capacities. Fear and nationalism become tools for disciplining populations experiencing economic insecurity and social fragmentation.

The question of Palestine therefore enters directly into the internal politics of working-class life.

When workers are encouraged to identify with imperialist projects abroad, they are simultaneously encouraged to abandon solidarity at home. National chauvinism replaces class politics. Violence becomes morally acceptable when directed against populations constructed as inferior, backward, or threatening. Entire categories of people become disposable.

(Ireland)

This ideological logic does not remain confined to Palestine. Once normalised, it returns inward. States that justify unlimited violence abroad invariably expand coercive powers domestically. Surveillance increases. Protest is criminalised. Police powers expand. Dissent becomes suspicious. Already, across Europe and North America, solidarity with Palestine has been met with censorship, dismissals, repression of student movements, restrictions on demonstrations, and attacks on trade union activists. This is not accidental. Anti-imperialism threatens ruling-class legitimacy because it exposes the relationship between capitalism, militarism, and state violence.

For the working class, Palestine reveals the international character of capitalist accumulation. The occupation is not sustained only by ideology. It is sustained materially through arms corporations, technology firms, logistics networks, diplomatic alliances, and financial flows. Weapons tested in Gaza are marketed globally. Surveillance technologies developed through occupation circulate internationally. Military and corporate interests become deeply interconnected.

In this sense, Palestine is not isolated from the broader structure of global capitalism. It is one concentrated expression of it. This is why the issue has resonated so widely across the Global South. Large sections of humanity recognise in Palestine a familiar structure of domination: dispossession backed by military force and justified through civilisational rhetoric. For countries shaped by colonialism, apartheid, occupation, and foreign intervention, Palestine is legible immediately because it resembles historical experiences that remain unresolved.

(South Africa)

South Africa’s response illustrates this clearly. The comparison between apartheid South Africa and Israeli apartheid is not rhetorical excess. It emerges from historical memory. Many South Africans recognise forms of racial separation, territorial fragmentation, military repression, and dehumanisation that formed part of their own experience under racial capitalism. Solidarity with Palestine therefore develops not from abstract morality, but from political recognition. This matters enormously for working-class unity because capitalism continuously attempts to divide workers through race, religion, nationality, and citizenship. Palestine disrupts these divisions by forcing a political question: do workers identify with structures of domination, or with those subjected to domination?

The answer is decisive because no stable working-class movement can emerge while sections of workers align themselves politically with imperialist violence. A working class that accepts the dehumanisation of Palestinians today can be persuaded tomorrow to accept the dehumanisation of migrants, refugees, minorities, or dissidents at home. Once solidarity becomes conditional, fragmentation deepens everywhere. This is why anti-imperialism is foundational for socialist politics. It is not an ‘international issue’ separate from domestic struggle. It concerns the political formation of the working class itself.

The Palestinian struggle has also generated important contemporary forms of international solidarity. Dockworkers have attempted to block arms shipments. Trade unions have debated refusing logistical cooperation with military supply chains. Student movements have organised encampments despite severe repression. These actions matter because they move beyond symbolic outrage toward practical forms of collective politics. They also demonstrate something important: workers occupy strategic positions within global systems of circulation. Ports, transport systems, communication infrastructure, manufacturing chains, and logistics networks are operated by labour. Imperial power ultimately depends on the organisation of social labour. This creates the possibility, at least potentially, for international solidarity to move from rhetoric into material disruption.

(Chile)

At the same time, Palestine has exposed the weakness of large sections of the contemporary Left. Many progressive organisations speak about justice domestically while retreating into ambiguity when confronted with imperialist violence internationally. Others reduce solidarity to moral performance without confronting the political and economic structures sustaining occupation and war. But the problem cannot be reduced to inconsistency alone. The deeper issue is that anti-imperialism requires political clarity about capitalism itself. It requires recognising that militarism, colonial domination, racism, border regimes, and economic exploitation are interconnected parts of a single world system. Without this analysis, solidarity easily becomes fragmented into disconnected humanitarian concerns rather than organised political struggle.

Working-class unity cannot be constructed on abstraction alone. It emerges through political struggle around concrete realities. Palestine has become one such reality because it concentrates fundamental questions about capitalism, colonialism, state violence, race, sovereignty, and international order into a single visible crisis. The importance of Palestine for the Left therefore lies not only in solidarity with Palestinians themselves, although that remains essential. Its importance also lies in what the struggle reveals about the present historical order and about the conditions necessary for rebuilding working-class politics internationally.

A fragmented working class cannot confront globally organised capital. But unity requires more than shared economic suffering. It requires political consciousness capable of identifying the structures that produce exploitation and violence internationally. Palestine forces that confrontation with unusual clarity. For that reason, anti-imperialism is not peripheral to working-class politics. It is one of the conditions for overcoming the divisions upon which capitalist power depends.

(India)

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Sign up for the weekly newsletter from the institute, the most recent being on the concept of ‘slow to mature’ – about how revolutionary processes must hasten to develop institutions and capacity quickly in perilous circumstances.