“The Pipeline”
Imperialism, National Chauvinism, and the Israel Situation
Now we must speak of the world proletarian revolution; for the separate national fronts of capital have become links in a single chain called the world front of imperialism, which must be opposed by a common front of the revolutionary movement in all countries.
– J. V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, 1924[1]
1. Introduction
No Communist should be listening too intently to the words of Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian “journalist” who has been an “anti-establishment” liberal “shock jock” on the internet for the last decade. However, we bring a pair of tweets she made on April 30th to the attention of the comrades, because it is clear that a large portion of our movement is at risk of being just as ignorant as she is.
Context: her posts are in response to a violent stabbing of two Jewish men in the UK,[2] which has been portrayed by the media as a hate crime and an example of anti-Semitism.[3] Whether racially motivated or no, Miss Johnstone has fully taken the side of the stabber, and the theoretical alliance she makes with him is an especially good example of what is colloquially known as the “liberal-to-fascist pipeline,” which is a true phenomenon within the system of capitalist-imperialism that is only now beginning to be understood by the masses, and thus understood in very backwards ways. We must understand this phenomenon however, but not just so that we can dunk on the liberals. It is sad, but true that this “pipeline” is right at the socialist movement’s doorstep, sucking in and turning reactionary many would-be comrades; specifically those who bow to the national contradictions of our imperialist system, and are ignorant of, or confused on, the underlying economic contradictions that sit underneath and dictate the form of all national contradictions.
If you are confused reading this now, let’s shake some of the rust off your dialectical materialism as we explore the “pipeline” in more detail. First, we’ll let one enthusiastic “pipeline” traveler showcase it for us, and afterward explain the material motions of our current global situation that make the “pipeline” a growing concern for all progressive-minded people, and especially the Communists.
[3Johnstone, Caitlin (@caitoz). “So two Jewish people...” & “That guy’s going to get...”. X. 30 Apr 2026. https://x.com/caitoz/status/2050005730888126816.
Let’s not waste our time and effort dissecting every piece of this drivel. I’m sure Miss Johnstone will go on to write much worse things even (and probably already has), but we can leave a complete critique of her literary body to the rearguardists who like to milk every reactionary utterance for its perceived imports. As Marxists, we are concerned with the trends of the masses, and about the material forces that influence those trends. We reveal these trends to the people, and we guide them in appropriate actions towards each particular trend so that they are aware of the forces that influence their lives, and are given sound strategy to navigate them. We bring up Miss Johnstone’s posts, not to pick apart a backwards “thinker” for cheap applause from an intellectually impoverished crowd, but to raise the understanding of that crowd, to move through their “oohs” and “awes,” building a foundation of knowledge so they know and understand, clearly and in a practical way, that, yes, what so many people on the so-called “left” preach but hardly understand is, indeed, true, and happening at an alarming rate: the liberals are turning reactionary the world over, and the same way they inevitably always do, by bowing to national antagonisms and, according to their class interest (which is to keep capitalism intact, and thus to reject materialism and all class theory in the final view), sucking up the reaction of the bourgeoisie who promote them.
2. The “Two Sides” of the “Pipeline”
We won’t spend too much time either on the most obvious reaction directed against Palestinian, Iranian, and other national and cultural groups in the “Middle-East,”[f1] which is true, pernicious, and promoted by Western capital. The people of the Arabian peninsula and the colloquially known “Middle-East” more generally have never had peace ever since so-called “Great Powers” first developed their economies beyond the borders of their own nations. The region has been, and continues to be, a hotbed for the most rapid, brutal, and persistent imperial aggression, with the bourgeoisie of Israel, the United States, and the NATO alliance turning it into their personal playground for rapid accumulations, investments, and, especially, profit, all gained from the stolen land and labor of the indigenous population. The deplorably racist sentiments against the Arab ethnicity, Persian people, and other groups in the so-called “Middle-East,” which is pushed forward by Israel, the United States, and other mostly European powers – powers representative of one side of our “pipeline” in question – is in line with the violent aims of capitalist-imperialist accumulation in the region, and a phenomenon which is highly encompassing, dominant, and readily understood to everyone who cares to understand. Miss Johnstone understands the chauvinism of these powers, and even of the existence of at least this oneside of the “pipeline” too. That is why she puts herself opposite it, agitating against anti-Arab bigotries and chauvinism and becoming a vocal opponent of both Israel and the United States. But, in doing so, and because she is a liberal without a class perspective, she rides the “pipeline’s” other side, the weaker and less prominent side that is born from the Palestinian perspective of the conflict, and births chauvinism towards the nationalities of the imperialist countries they oppose.
Opposite the interest of NATO and Western capital, the “pro-Palestine” side of the same “pipeline” in question reflects the interest and chauvinism of specifically the bourgeoisie in the “Axis of Resistance,” who are relatively weak on the global stage, but have found increasing support from the imperialists in the BRICS+ alliance, an alliance of supposedly “anti-imperialist” bourgeois nations who are increasingly being dominated by Chinese capital. The chauvinism they display towards nationals under NATO and Israel is, of course, completely understandable and even progressive in many ways. Palestine and Iran require widespread national sentiment to put up a defense against their oppressors in a complete and whole-society way, which, due to the violent antagonisms between their own “nations” and those of the aggressors’, breeds also chauvinism towards the nationalities of their aggressors. When it targets Americans, “the Resistance’s” chauvinism has more progressive character, since the United States is the most dominant imperial power in the world currently and, even while purely national chauvinism towards Americans (or any nationals) is not progressive for a socialist revolution (and thus, not for a Communist), chauvinism directed at Americans, for now at least, serves a progressive role in eroding the still dominant myth of American exceptionalism, and of serving as a crude foil by which American chauvinism, which is, in our current period, a far bigger and more deadly beast than that displayed by any other nationality, can be directly confronted in a general way within the masses.
However, things are different when we look at the national chauvinism targeting Israeli nationals. The “nation” of Israel has insidiously attempted (and succeeded in many ways) to tie the international Jewish cultural group to their deplorable national project. Thus, the chauvinism directed at Jewish people by the defenders of Palestine, though understandable and a direct response to the genocidal aggression of the Israeli state, lands on far more heads than just imperialist Zionists, and antagonizes an entire global population of Jewish workers who have (and often want) nothing to do with Israel, and whose national identifiers mark them for oppression the world over, even while that oppression is at a relative low today.
It is the “pro-Palestine” side, the more junior “side” of the “pipeline” that we focus on in this article because anti-Jewish sentiment plays a very dangerous, reactionary, and peculiar role in the capitalist-imperial system, and it is inexcusable for us as Communists or even progressives to engage in this kind of supposed “Palestinian solidarity” given the deadly consequences that will inevitably come by its normalization. More than this however, if we understand that the national chauvinism of both sides of a national contradiction builds reaction and, ultimately, fascists, we will be fully prepared to counteract the reaction caused by all national conflicts, and vastly more capable of revolutionary tasks. Communists know that the motions of capitalist-imperialism are always creating specifically national movements due to the high-degree of violence inflicted on certain nationalities over and against others in the course of production. We Communists must educate the people on this fact, and on the fact that every conflict between “nations” (in addition to generally being in the interest of the bourgeoisie and not the working class) births a “liberal-to-fascist pipeline,” along with national chauvinists who serve as its fascistic “right wing.” We reveal these facts about nationalism to the people so that they know why they need a class view, and why nationalism, the rivalry of the capitalists, and the countries they control are expired features of the productive forces – riddled with contradictions – on their way to the ashbin of history due to our global system of production and exchange.
Regarding our specific “pipeline” in question, it is growing along with the growing national conflict faced by the Palestinians. As this conflict continues to become more antagonistic, reaches a higher pitch, and grows wider, it ceases to be a purely regional conflict and takes on international character. This is because it takes on international capital, splitting the world’s bourgeoisie into increasingly hostile camps. This split is not random, and certainly not due to their moral or ideological position on Palestinian liberty, but on the position of their respective capital in question, and along the multiple poles of imperialist accumulation, with the biggest and most dominant two being the NATO and BRICS+ alliances today, which are dominated by the United States and China respectively. In suite with the broadening of the conflict, and pulled along by the greater influence of the bourgeois classes who agitate their every interest amongst the people, the liberals and the masses of society generally are widening their understandings of global politics beyond a critique of the Israeli state alone. This critique, even when including Israel’s open political allies on the geopolitical stage, is becoming increasingly insufficient at explaining the problem of escalating violence, bigotry, and reaction the world over,[f2] and so they must adopt a broader view. The liberals need an international position in order to resist an international enemy. In lieu of the correct class view however, “international Zionism” and idealist witch hunting for conspiracies that Israel is supposedly behind are becoming the shaky and bigoted “answer” the liberals have stitched together to meet the problem. Idiotic, non-material terms, or, we should say, terms whose only material quality is their falling decidedly square on the heads of the actual global Jewish population – terms like “cultural Zionism,” “spiritually Israeli,” and others that conflate Judaism with reaction generally – are becoming more popular, and, even while these ideas are a response to Palestinian genocide and represent “good intentions” in at least some cases, they are convenient scapegoats, detracting from materialism and the economic critique of capitalist-imperialism, lending themselves completely to racism and reaction.
Miss Johnstone acts within this bad trend, as well as the “liberal-to-fascist” pipeline, by politicizing, in a spontaneous and liberal way, individual violence against Jewish persons who, as far as Miss Johnstone or anyone in the public knows, has nothing to do with the Palestinian genocide; namely, civilians in the United Kingdom. Despite whatever angle Israeli media and the NATO alliance more broadly wants to take on the story, Miss Johnstone rises above none of her opposing chauvinism when she downplays the stabbing (saying “no one died”) and even valorizes the attacker, removing him from personal culpability and painting him as a force of nature due to his history of mental illness.[f3] While it is probably true that news of the stabbing would not be international without the influence of Israel, Miss Johnstone would not have viewed the stab victims so callously had the victims not been Jewish, and had she not defined herself, through the course of her “journalism,” as a vocal proponent for Palestinian national liberty. It is good that she is on that side of the conflict, the side of the oppressed, but she has twisted herself into a force of oppression for other nationals, particularly the already vulnerable international Jewish population, and this is a dialectical reality neither she nor many liberals are likely to understand.
3. Nationalism and Imperialism
Israel acts in the interest of capital and never alone – no country ever does. No single cultural group, especially the oppressed Jewish people, have the ability to conquer or dominate the rest of humanity or even very many humans, relatively speaking. So long as they stand on their own or in any combination of nationalities, a movement of such kind will inevitably disintegrate due to the contradictions caused by the differing national markets and differing interest of the bourgeoisie attached to them. Reactionaries do always lose, but why, and why is nationalism still alive today?
Within the global capitalist-imperialist system, nationality is the only social unifier within the masses remaining[f4],[f5] in bourgeois liberal society, and so it is utilized by capitalists to maintain their market and state, even though both (not to mention the relations of the people underneath them) become more and more integrated within the global market, making nationalism as a concept and motive force of human life more and more irrelevant as a result. That is why, despite all the posturing of the reactionaries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to unify around nationalism at all, even while the bourgeoisie will continuously prop it up for the people’s slaughter.
The founding of Israel itself is a good example of how imperialism and the capitalists stand above nationalism,[f6] and utilize it for their own purposes; how nationalism has become even more clearly their property. The fact of the matter, and the truest story about the matter, is that in 1948 certain Jewish bourgeois and their hangers-on in the Jewish lower-classes, deluded as they were with reactionary nationalist fervor, were “promoted” into hegemonic power in the Middle-East in order to maintain imperialism’s wider interests in the region. Despite many ignorant Americans, fascists, anti-Semites, and the policy of Iran state media, which loves to portray Americans and the world more generally as victims of Israel,[f7] Israel was created and is actively maintained by the international capitalist class, primarily by its members in the United States. Why? To protect their interest in the oil-rich regions of the “Middle-East,” which, in addition to being a huge source of one of the most primary resources used in production today, is also a historical region where energetic capitalist-imperial accumulation (investments, returns, the selling of weapons, and the rapid snatching of indigenous land, labor, and resources into the imperialist camp) has been happening for decades (for reasons far too numerous to go into here). Israel continues to support (and be supported by) American and “Western” imperialism today, even as it pursues its own imperialist agendas in the region on behalf of its own bourgeois class. It is because, especially these days, Israel is effectively in a war for its survival, requiring greater and greater quantities of weapons, supplies, and funds to carry out this war, that the American people and the American government see the shadow of Israel looming more and more over their own country. This is not Israel “puppeting” the United States, but Israel, a puppet of the United States and the capital behind it, becoming larger, more expensive, and unruly as it is forced to aggressively pursue its vile settler-colonial project or be crushed by the weight of the dialectical opposition to that project, which is developing alongside it, finding allies, and becoming more capable, as it always has been, despite the minor “valleys” of relatively “peaceful” co-existence in the overall trend. This opposition is stronger now than it ever has been, reflected clear as crystal in the missiles exploding on Israel’s national ground.
The reward Zionist reactionaries received when they “won” their “homeland” was a death sentence – for many Palestinians in the most direct way, which is obvious to everyone, but also for the majority of Israelis in the final (and not too distant) view, which is obvious to a Marxist, and is being proven true in real-time. There is no question that the contradictions plaguing an active 21st century settler-colonial ethno-state in the populous “Middle-East” will end not only with the collapse of Israel, but of Zionist reaction itself to a significant degree. Every person (especially the lower classes) within Palestine and Israel is unsafe due to these conditions; conditions which are only beginning to be understood by sections of the masses, but will become more understood as they become more antagonistic.
4. Anti-Semitism and the Reactionaries’ Myth
While Israeli bourgeoisie and their supposedly “Jewish” state are carrying out the genocide of Arab people with reckless abandon, understandably muddying the public’s understanding of Jewish oppression and doing a tremendous disservice to the already beleaguered Jewish international population, anti-Semitism is a historical fact, not invented by Israel and not “artificially manufactured,” as Miss Johnstone suggests. This is true even while Israeli bourgeois are undoubtedly weaving conspiracy after conspiracy, and, yes, certainly promoting the news of the stabbing in the UK according to their own national interest.
The existence of global anti-Semitism and the oppressed status of Jewish people is only “debatable” by people who have already been degenerated by reaction to a significant degree; these, in fact, being most represented by politically aware fascists. The fascists promote a hyper-nationalist, mystical (don’t laugh; the power of idiots is real!), and idealist system in which the phenotypes of people, along with their nationalities, are hierarchically categorized, with the whole paradigm set up as opposing the “pure” nationality or race, the dominant one in the country that the fascist movement represents. In these disgusting theories, Jewish bogeymen play a central role even today, and not simply because fascists are racists in a one-sided way, but because anti-Semitism fulfills a practical purpose organizationally in their deplorable racial hierarchies.
There are many more besides the fascists who say (though, of course, not scientifically) that there is a disproportionate amount of Jewish people who are capitalists and media bourgeoisie in the Western European countries; that Jewish people own the commanding heights of the economy at a disproportionately greater rate when compared to their number in the general population. This is not a study that has ever been performed, or ever should be performed, but, nonetheless, when this “fact” is revealed to degenerated sections of the masses and promoted as part of a reactionary theory, it antagonizes national conflicts within the masses,and organizes them not only against “the Jews” and their supposed servants in the other minorities, allowing for accumulation against the lower-classes, but against also the high-levels of the liberal economy and state that acts against their movement, building an incredibly backwards and reactionary “critique” of “capitalists” by shoving their “evil rich Jew” caricature onto any bourgeois that oppose the fascist project. The fascists of the last century organized their societies and militarized them against the masses, maintaining the rule of capital and enriching themselves off of both the misery of the new slave-like lower classes they had created, and the decaying imperial market around them, carrying out the latter by making alliances with some members of the big capitalist-imperial financier class while liquidating those in opposition through combined political power and the use of racist ideas of Jewish conspiracies. In doing so, they created a complete racial theory of counterrevolution that is still alive and active. Any anti-Jewish sentiment today inevitably slides right down the “pipeline” and into this living tradition of active fascist organizing.
Still, suppose we must offer some postulation for why the shadow of “the Jewish bogeyman” is so clear a post for the backwards mysticism of the reactionaries to rally around, but we will make this deplorable task as brief and as comprehensible as possible, and hopefully never speak of it again. We can make the educated guess (and many others have as well) that the disproportionate amount of Jewish persons in media and finance industries in the “West,” if such a pattern does exist, would be due to Jewish persons being relegatedto these industries through the course of history. Media and finance are dominating industries today, but they were once puny, insignificant, and relatively unprofitable at one period of time; media even more so since it is a relatively new industry entirely.
In the feudal relation, which preceded capitalism, wealth was wholly hereditary, and power passed from family head to family head as per the laws of feudalism. Markets themselves were extremely local, where they existed at all, and money was rare. The serfs produced for themselves and their lord, who represented the ruling class and had life and death rights over all his subjects by birth. In early feudalism, the lords received their goods as tribute, the physical goods produced by the peasant-serfs, which they would use for armies, bribery, feasts, socializing, etc. The Christian rulers, who dominated the feudal relation, enforced Christianity, so it was that the Jewish people in Europe, who could not often be a subject of a Christian king (at least one in good standing) and definitely had no hope of owning land or productive forces (which was nearly impossible even for “good” Christians) often gravitated to speculation, to trading, and, eventually, to “money-lending,” forced to get by in the relatively mobile, new, undeveloped, and not even very profitable early feudal markets that were taboo to Christians, and ostensibly “outside” the general economic structure, even while they would grow into dominating forces of global production over the centuries.
And that is how history developed – turning against feudalism to bury it entirely and enshrining speculation, market motions, and, to a much lesser degree, regarding the sphere of ideological production today, the American “Hollywood” entertainment industry as driving forces of societies the world over in the system of capitalist-imperialism. This was no even march of history, however, and the chasm certain Jewish speculators would create as they ascended their families into the moneyed class from their merchant beginnings enflamed the “proto-national”[f8] antagonisms of “good” “Christian” Europe, and especially the ire of the decaying ruling class of feudalists. While the myth of “the international Jew” controlling society is certainly false, and even the supposition that Jewish people are overrepresented in the economy is threadbare at best, pogroms, the systematic murdering of Jewish people, along with the confiscation of their property, is a historical fact. When we look at the development of any European or “Western” nation, genocidal acts are routinely committed against the Jewish population, with capitalist-imperialism and the world market spreading this trend well beyond the confines of Europe. The dialectics of history are such that Jewish people specifically, as a religion that has grown up opposite dominant Christianity (a contradiction Marx talks about in “On The Jewish Question”[6]) and as a “nation” without a nation (a contradiction Stalin talks about when defining “national autonomy” in Marxism and the National Question [7]), have often been integrated into society not as a full member, but as dialectical opposition to the members, fulfilling particular roles in production not fillable by the majority of society due to their prejudices, and thus becoming a target of that prejudice itself. This is, in fact, the role that all minorities play within capitalist-imperialism to some extent, but, regarding the Jewish population specifically, this has been played out in a complete way, even while it will continue to play all the way up until the overthrow of the imperial system, since every petite-bourgeois reactionary movement has been granted sound and lasting theory from the fascist movements of the last century.
History now must contend with the fact that there is, within the superstructure, ready-made theory on how to draw ridiculous anti-Semitic patterns in the productive forces, form demented racial hierarchies of supposed “enemies,” and terrify the whole reactionary world with horrifying stories that entice them to kill and destroy in defense of their “nation,” demanding that all society subordinate themselves to the crudest and most inhuman form of capitalist dictatorship in the process. Moreover, it must contend with the fact that these theories will always be propagated by the unsettled and reactionary petty bourgeois the world over until their defeat under socialism. Until fascism is defeated at the root, it will strike against every nationality, but it strikes against Jewish people in a very central way, despite some Jewish bourgeoisie’s taste for fascism in the form of Zionism and the Israeli settler-colonial state.
It’s horrible to ignore the oppression Jewish people have faced and continue to face on account of their nationality, just as it is horrible to ignore the oppression Palestinians, Iranians, or any ethnicity or nationality faces when they are violently targeted by the imperialists in the capitalist system. It is especially shameful for a “Communist” to be ignorant of the fact that a conscious section of fascists are actively working to portray every evil of our capitalist system as the result of powerful Jewish conspiracies, and working also to remove the historical record of Jewish oppression entirely. Obviously we have no support for Israeli nationalism, or their settler-colonial state, but for a Communist to forget or sideline the anti-Semitic feature of fascist organizing, and to ride the “pipeline” of the liberals themselves for cheap nationalist “solidarity” and applause from a widely ignorant “anti-Israel” crowd is to bow entirely to spontaneity, to be an opportunist from the viewpoint of the class, and to risk becoming a reactionary oneself (don’t forget that we are what we do!).
The fascists are already finding their “Jewish bogeyman” an easy idea to propagate due to the evils being done in the “Middle-East” by mostly American and Israeli capital in the name of Judaism, and they don’t need any help from Caitlin Johnstone or anyone else; especially a “Communist.” Jewish people in the UK or anywhere, as a group or individuals, cannot be held responsible for the sins of the Israeli settler-colonial nation, just as no actually thinking person could say that the Arab ethnicity represents, or has concrete ties to, fundamentalist Islamic terror groups. It is reprehensible to dehumanize Jewish people or any minority in such a way, or to twist the news of violence against them with conspiracy, as admittedly, the Israeli government and her allies, the “Axis of Resistance,” Miss Johnstone, and the fascists have all done with this story in different ways.
5. Conclusion
Unlike all the reactionaries and Miss Johnstone liberals of the world, Communists know that nations of all varieties raise up financiers and capitalists of all nationalities and cultures. We resist the system that produces bourgeoisie and nationalism wholesale, agitating against all national chauvinism and defending always the rights of every minority and of the whole working class to live in peace. This is why we advocate for the real and lasting peace that eliminates all nations and classes, and that can only come from a socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will carry society through the contradictions of both capitalist-imperialism and socialism to usher in the communist mode of production.
It is her chauvinism – not solidarity – that makes Miss Johnstone annoyed at hearing news of Jewish stab victims. The “liberal-to-fascist” pipeline, or, as we should say, the national contradiction, has already degenerated her to the point that she cannot accept the stabbing of two Jewish bystanders in a correct way, seeing them properly as victims of violence that exists decidedly outside the purview of Israeli national power. Instead, and like all reactionaries, she must put forward her own version of “fake news,” declaring the situation not only the result of a perpetrator who was “unlucky” and “off his meds” (a disturbing orientation to take towards a stabber), but also portraying it as a “moral panic” concerning “manufactured” anti-Semitism.
We will see many more similarly blatant chauvinistic sentiments against both Jewish people and Arab people alike by the participants of this “pipeline.” Let’s not, as Marxists, ever be confused at where it ends. Many, and on both the Israeli and Palestine poles, will follow chauvinism and reaction all the way down to conscious fascism, and it is our job, as Marxists, to struggle against this chauvinism with a materialist and class view of the situation.
The Jewish bourgeois are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeois. The Jewish worker is our brother.
Any kind of hatred against any nation is inadmissible and shameful.
– V. I. Lenin, “Decree on the Council of People’s Commissars on the Uprooting of the Anti-Semitic Movement,” 1918 [8]
Footnotes
[f1] In actuality all national chauvinism is directed at a vast international grouping of nationals, since every nation today is itself a grouping of many different nationalities. Thus it must always take on international character, making chauvinism incapable of staying regulated against any one or group of nationalities in the course of global conflict, even while it must necessarily make delineations amongst the nationalities to regenerate itself.
[f2] “Racism,” “violence,” and “bigotry” are secondary contradictions that have the capitalist-imperial mode of production itself as their primary causation, and thus increase in step with the increase in the antagonism of that more primary contradiction.
[f3] We’ll note here that national chauvinism, as a primary chauvinism, will also lead to secondary chauvinisms in line, reflecting also on other groups. Miss Johnstone’s post also expresses chauvinism towards the mentally-ill, de-facto portraying them as violent if they are unmedicated.
[f4] “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.”[5] It’s worth clarifying that, while this quote from The Manifesto is right in saying that antagonism between peoples is vanishing, the peoples are still forced to antagonize each other due to the antagonisms of the bourgeoisie, who the people are chained to in numerous economic, political, and sociological ways. Even while social intercourse and the productive forces removes national distinctions within the masses, the bourgeoisie will still hold up their remnants, or event new ones for the people to destroy each over in war. This will not stop until the socialist revolution makes it stop, and replaces nationalism with the kind of international class solidarity that is conducive to the productive forces.
[f5] The nation is itself is a bourgeois development of the territorial and ancestral claims of lords under the feudal relation. As the bourgeoisie centralized their state and market post-feudalism, they turned all the subjects of ruling monarchs into “free” wage-slaves, supposedly united under their common ancestry as a “nation.” They still, however, required “the King’s” bureaucracy, his army, his dominion over the lower-classes, and his territory. How else would they suppress the lower classes, divert their labor into bourgeois profit, and defend their market against rivals? These “kernels” of the feudal relation that preceded liberal democracy are still alive and well within the liberal nation, which, despite no longer being a kingdom with subjects, reproduces similar oppressive power dynamics between a national state and its national citizens.
[f6] Nationalism is a secondary contradiction in relation to the primary contradiction of capitalist-imperialism.
[f7] This is in line with Iran’s war strategy. Iran cannot bite off both the US and Israel, and so they attempt to decouple them, focusing on the weaker and more accessible of the two (Israel) and biding its time on the stronger by producing “Anti-Israel” propaganda campaigns which paints the US as a misguided and foolish sidekick, but not as a conscious aggressor, which has the dual effect of isolating the current pro-Israel US administration from the rest of the country, dramatically reducing the US’ ability to carry out war, and also of potentially isolating Israel so they can be defeated.
[f8] It’s more accurate to say that this is a religious antagonism, but this wording mystifies the fact that religion was the primary unifier of the masses in the feudal period, to be replaced by nationalism in the age of capitalism and bourgeois democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Stalin, J. V. The Foundations of Leninism. Pravda. No. 24. 1924. J. V. Stalin: Works. Vol 6. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1953. Pg. 99.
[2] Specia, Megan. “Suspect in Attack on Jewish Men Faces Third Attempted Murder Charge.” The New York Times. 1 May 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/world/europe/uk-jewish-stabbings-attempted-murder-charges.html.
[3] Sandford, Daniel. “Antisemitism being 'normalised' and not taken seriously enough, chief rabbi tells BBC.” BBC. 29 April 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c3ve2nr60xzt.
[4] Johnstone, Caitlin (@caitoz). “So two Jewish people...” & “That guy’s going to get...”. X. 30 Apr 2026. https://x.com/caitoz/status/2050005730888126816.
[5] Marx, Karl. Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Feb 1848. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol 6. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. 2010. Pgs. 502-503.
[6] Marx, Karl. “On The Jewish Question.” Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher. 1844 Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol 3. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. 2010. Pgs. 146-174.
[7] Stalin, J. V. Marxism and the National Question. Prosveshcheniye. Nos. 3-5. 1913. J. V. Stalin: Works. Vol 2. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1953 . Pg. 322.
[8] Lenin, V. I. “Decree on the Council of People’s Commissars on the Uprooting of the Anti-Semitic Movement.” 9 Aug 1918. Lenin On the Jewish Question. International Publishers. 1934. Pg. 23.