In a Nutshell

A recent essay by Florence Oppen in Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores, titled “What does unconditional support for the Palestinian liberation struggle mean?”, sets out an explicitly Marxist strategy for the pro-Palestine solidarity movement in Western democracies. The argument runs as follows: liberation struggles deserve “unconditional support” by “all available means, including armed struggle”; “bourgeois democracy” should be used instrumentally: its courts, parliaments, and speech protections treated as terrain on which to “expose the system’s hypocrisy” and “prepare the class for future confrontations”; demands that the oppressed adopt nonviolent methods are themselves illegitimate, reflecting “colonial, Orientalist, and Islamophobic stereotypes”; and the ultimate horizon is mass mobilisation organised outside bourgeois institutions altogether.

Our Take

Readers may notice that some of Oppen’s specific objections, i.e. to precautionary bans, to selective enforcement, to firings based on affiliation, produce conclusions that resemble ours in particular cases. The resemblance is superficial. Oppen’s reasoning is that repression is wrong when directed at a just cause, and acceptable as a class weapon when wielded by the right side. Our reasoning is that the procedural tests apply identically regardless of cause.

Our reasoning is procedural and symmetrical: precautionary bans fail proportionality tests, deplatforming on the basis of nationality fails the conduct-not-affiliation test, selective neutrality fails the mission-fit test, and those tests apply identically regardless of the particular worldview that is being defended.

The deeper architecture of Oppen’s essay is one we cannot endorse, on grounds that have nothing to do with the substantive question of Palestine and everything to do with how decisions get made:

• Institutions are treated as terrain, not as commons. Courts, universities, and parliaments are valuable in Oppen’s framework insofar as they can be used to expose hypocrisy and prepare the working class. This is the same instrumentalisation we criticise when it comes from governments, activist majorities, or right-populist movements. Attack-surface reduction has no political colour.
• Verdicts replace tests. A framework that resolves proportionality, due process, and minority protection in advance by designating an oppressor and an oppressed is not a framework. It is a conclusion looking for procedural cover.
• Rights defended as tactics are rights available to be discarded. Oppen is candid that “bourgeois” freedoms are useful preparation for “future confrontations.” Every faction that has held this view has eventually acted on it. The protections one claims for allies today are dismantled by opponents tomorrow, citing the same logic.

Readers across the political spectrum should notice the rhetorical move at the heart of Oppen’s essay: free speech, due process, and assembly embraced as tools, while the structure that makes them coherent is dismissed as “bourgeois.” The same operation is performed daily by actors with very different politics: by governments invoking national security, by institutions citing reputational risk, by movements of every stripe convinced their cause is the one that finally justifies the exception.