When Supporting Liberation Movements Becomes Uncritical Cheerleading of Bourgeois Leaders

Lessons for Ukraine & Palestine from the Second Chinese Revolution

In December 2024, Palestinian Authority security forces launched their largest military operation in years—not against Israeli occupation forces, but against Palestinian resistance fighters in Jenin refugee camp. Backed by the United States and Israel, the PA’s crackdown on the Jenin Brigades marked what analysts called “the most fierce inter-Palestinian fighting since the 2007 Battle of Gaza.” Resistance groups immediately accused the PA of functioning as a proxy counter-insurgency force, doing the work the Israeli Occupation Forces had failed to accomplish themselves.

This wasn’t an isolated betrayal. It was the latest confirmation of a pattern socialists have confronted throughout the history of national liberation struggles: bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships, even those nominally leading anti-imperialist resistance, will ultimately prioritize their own class interests and relationships with imperial powers over genuine liberation. The Jenin operation provides a contemporary parallel to the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, when the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang turned its guns on the communist workers who had brought them to power, executing thousands in collaboration with foreign imperialists.

For the international socialist left navigating the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine since 2022, this historical lesson poses an urgent strategic question: How do we provide unconditional solidarity with oppressed peoples’ struggles for self-determination while maintaining political independence from the treacherous leaderships claiming to head those struggles? The failure to navigate this question—falling into either uncritical cheerleading for bourgeois forces or refusing to support legitimate national resistance—has fractured left organizations worldwide, exposing deep ideological divisions and producing measurable organizational consequences.

Three Strategic Positions: Mapping the Ideological Terrain

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have forced left organizations into three distinct camps, each with profoundly different strategic implications:

1. Principled Internationalism: The Independent Class Position

This position, rooted in Leninist analysis, demands supporting genuine struggles for national liberation and self-determination while maintaining fierce political independence from their bourgeois leaderships. It means unconditional solidarity with oppressed peoples’ right to armed resistance combined with sharp critique of the class limitations and betrayals of those leading the struggle.

Organizations holding this position support sending weapons to Ukraine to resist Russian invasion while simultaneously opposing NATO expansion and Zelensky’s neoliberal regime. In Palestine, they provide unconditional support for resistance against Israeli occupation and genocide while critiquing both the Palestinian Authority’s active collaboration and Hamas’s authoritarian, religious-nationalist limitations. The goal is channeling solidarity to independent working-class forces within these movements—what the Fourth International calls “solidarity from below.”

Key adherents: The Fourth International and its sections (including Anti*Capitalist Resistance in Cymru and England, Solidarity in the US, MES in Brazil, and Radical Socialist in India), Ukrainian socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, parts of the DSA International Committee.

2. The Anti-Imperialist Trap: Uncritical Cheerleading for Bourgeois Leadership

This deviation manifests when necessary solidarity with national liberation struggles degrades into uncritical political support for the forces leading them. It occurs when internationalists, correctly identifying imperialism as the primary enemy, then fail to maintain political independence from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships.

This can take multiple forms: defending authoritarian measures by governments under imperialist attack as “necessary for national defense,” minimizing the class war these leaderships wage against their own workers, or treating any critique of Hamas, the PA, or the Zelensky regime as “objectively” serving imperialism. The trap operates through a chain of faulty logic: because these forces are fighting imperialism (or claim to be), and because imperialism is the main enemy, therefore we must support these leaderships politically, not just the peoples’ struggles they claim to represent.

The historical precedent is the Communist International’s disastrous strategy in China (1925-1927), when the Comintern directed the Chinese Communist Party to subordinate itself politically to the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang. The result was the Shanghai Massacre—the national bourgeoisie choosing class preservation over national liberation, collaborating with imperialism to slaughter the working-class movement.

Contemporary manifestations: Organizations or tendencies that defend the PA’s “security coordination” as pragmatic necessity, treat Hamas’s authoritarian governance as irrelevant to solidarity work, minimize Zelensky’s anti-labor offensive as a distraction from supporting Ukrainian resistance, or argue that any public critique of these leaderships “objectively” aids imperialism.

3. The Opposite Error: Refusal to Support Legitimate National Resistance

Some left organizations refuse to support genuine national liberation movements because they object to the political character of their leadership. This can mean characterizing Ukraine’s resistance as simply “inter-imperialist proxy war” and refusing to support it, or arguing that Palestine solidarity should be conditional on Hamas adopting democratic politics.

The Revolutionary Communist International’s position on Ukraine exemplifies this problem—they declare the war reactionary on both sides and refuse to support Ukrainian armed defense because the Zelensky government is bourgeois. While they’re right that Zelensky’s government is bourgeois and neoliberal, they draw the wrong conclusion: that internationalists shouldn’t support Ukraine’s defense.

This approach fails to recognize a basic reality: bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces often lead national liberation struggles, and they are frequently the legitimate representatives of oppressed peoples in those moments—even if politically compromised. The task isn’t to withhold support until leadership becomes sufficiently revolutionary. It’s to support the liberation struggle unconditionally while working to build independent working-class alternatives that can eventually provide better leadership.

Key adherents: Revolutionary Communist International, ultra-left groupings, some “anti-imperialist” currents that refuse support for Ukrainian resistance.

The organizational consequences of these deviations have been stark and measurable.

Palestine: When National Liberation Leadership Becomes Counter-Revolution

The Palestinian Authority’s Active Betrayal

The PA’s Jenin operation wasn’t merely passive collaboration with occupation—it was active military suppression of resistance. PA security forces, equipped and trained by the United States, killed several Palestinians including a 12-year-old child and resistance commander. The operation’s purpose was transparent: the Fatah-led PA seeks to position itself as the “responsible” Palestinian leadership capable of governing post-war Gaza by demonstrating its willingness to liquidate armed resistance that threatens Israeli security and US regional interests.

This counter-revolutionary function has deep roots. The PA’s security apparatus routinely arrests journalists, activists, and political rivals in the West Bank. Its 2017 Cyber Crime Law weaponizes vague definitions to suppress free speech and dissent. But the Jenin operation elevated this from political repression to military counter-insurgency in direct collaboration with the occupying power.

The strategic lesson is unmistakable: the PA exists primarily to manage the occupation, not to end it. Its administrative structure, born from the Oslo Accords’ class compromise, serves to stabilize Israeli control and protect Western financial interests. The PA’s survival depends on suppressing the very resistance necessary for genuine liberation.

Yet some on the international left have defended or minimized this collaboration, arguing that critiquing the PA “divides the movement” or that security coordination is a “pragmatic necessity” given the PA’s weakness. This is the anti-imperialist trap in action—allowing necessary solidarity with Palestinian people to degrade into apologetics for a leadership actively betraying them.

Hamas: Critical Support, Not Uncritical Cheerleading

Hamas presents a more complex challenge for principled solidarity. Unlike the PA, Hamas is genuinely leading armed resistance against Israeli occupation and genocide. This resistance deserves unconditional support—the Palestinian people have an absolute right to defend themselves by any means necessary, and Hamas is currently the primary organized force conducting that defense.

However, unconditional support for the resistance does not mean uncritical political support for Hamas’s leadership or program. Emerging from the Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Palestinian and Gulf capitalists, Hamas’s petty-bourgeois class character and religious-nationalist ideology impose severe limitations on the liberation struggle.

Its governance in Gaza since 2007 has been authoritarian, suppressing criticism and blocking the emergence of independent working-class organization. Hamas actively seeks to prevent the development of socialist leadership that could advance a comprehensive program serving workers and the poor masses. Its program is rooted in reactionary interpretations of Islam that reject secular politics and democratic freedoms—limitations that will prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian people to full liberation even if it achieves national independence.

The anti-imperialist trap manifests when solidarity activists treat these limitations as irrelevant or when any critique of Hamas’s ideology or governance is characterized as “objectively” serving Zionism. This position—often justified by appeals to “not dividing the movement”—actually weakens solidarity by preventing the development of working-class alternatives within Palestine that could transcend religious nationalism’s inherent constraints.

The principled position recognizes Hamas as the legitimate (if politically limited) representative of Palestinian armed resistance in this moment, deserving full material and political support in the struggle against occupation, while simultaneously working to build independent working-class forces that can eventually provide leadership beyond Hamas’s petty-bourgeois nationalism.

Ukraine: Neoliberal Shock Therapy Under Cover of War

The Ukrainian struggle against Russian imperialism demonstrates how bourgeois leadership exploits national crisis to advance ruling-class interests—even while leading a genuinely defensive war that deserves unconditional support.

Legislative Class War Against Ukrainian Workers

The Zelensky regime has used martial law as cover for the most sweeping rollback of labor rights in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history. In March 2022, Law 2136 streamlined mass dismissals, allowed employers to unilaterally extend the work week to 60 hours, and changed work duties without consultation. This was followed in August 2022 by Law 2434-IX (formerly Bill 5371), which stripped an estimated 70% of Ukrainian workers of collective bargaining rights and union protections.

The law applies to all companies with fewer than 250 employees, shifting labor relations from collective agreements to individual contracts. This creates a two-tier labor market where most workers face arbitrary dismissals and weakened unions lose their ability to veto workplace decisions. International trade unions condemned the law as causing “irreparable damage to industrial relations” and described it as a “persistent attack on trade unions motivated by oligarchs behind the ruling party.”

Additional wartime measures allow employers to unilaterally suspend collective agreements and eliminate the obligation to pay average salary to workers mobilized for military service—directly shifting the war’s financial burden from capital to the working class. Combined with suspended labor inspections, this deregulation has created widespread non-payment of salaries and illegal dismissals with complete impunity for employers.

As Vitaliy Dudin, chairperson of Sotsialnyi Rukh, explained: “If Russian aggression poses an immediate threat to workers, then labour reform, which is being implemented under the cover of war, threatens to disenfranchise them in the context of the growing crisis.”

The IMF Debt Trap and Asset Stripping

Western financial “support” for Ukraine comes with brutal strings attached. The IMF and World Bank mobilized $38 billion in financing by November 2023, conditioned on traditional neoliberal “market reforms.” The result: Ukraine’s poverty rate surged from 5.5% to 24.1% in 2022, pushing 7.1 million additional people into destitution.

The debt burden is staggering. By August 2024, the cost of servicing public debt nearly equaled total expenditure on social welfare and health combined. Meanwhile, IMF loan conditions require accelerating privatization of state assets. The Ministry of Finance is preparing major state-owned banks—Sense Bank and Ukrgasbank—for sale to private capital. This constitutes fire-sale asset stripping during wartime, ensuring that “reconstruction” means large-scale privatization and plunder by international capital.

Political Repression of the Left

The Zelensky government has also used martial law to suppress domestic opposition. In March 2022, the regime suspended 11 political parties, including marginalized left-wing groups like the Socialist and Progressive Socialist parties. While these parties held little power before the war, and some of them were simply surrogates for the Kremlin rather than authentically left-wing, their official banning confirms the regime’s drive to eliminate any organized political opposition bearing the label of socialism.

The Anti-Imperialist Trap on Ukraine

This three-pronged attack—legislative assault on labor, financial subjugation to Western capital, political repression of the left—must be exposed and opposed by any genuine solidarity movement. Yet segments of the international left have fallen into the anti-imperialist trap by minimizing or dismissing these attacks as secondary concerns that “divide the movement” or distract from the primary task of supporting Ukrainian resistance.

Some argue that critiquing Zelensky’s neoliberalism “objectively” serves Russian propaganda. Others suggest that Ukrainian workers’ struggles for labor rights should be suspended until after military victory. Still others characterize opposition to IMF conditionality as unrealistic given Ukraine’s desperate need for financial support.

Each of these positions represents a failure to maintain political independence from bourgeois leadership. The correct position—articulated powerfully by Sotsialnyi Rukh—is that supporting Ukrainian armed resistance and opposing Zelensky’s class war are not contradictory but complementary struggles. Ukrainian workers are fighting on two fronts simultaneously: against Russian imperialist invasion and against their own ruling class’s exploitation of war to impose brutal neoliberalism.

International solidarity must support both struggles, channeling aid to independent Ukrainian labor and democratic movements while advocating for weapons deliveries without the neoliberal conditions that subordinate Ukraine to Western financial imperialism. This is what “solidarity from below” means in practice.

Historical Validation: The Second Chinese Revolution (1925-1927)

The necessity of maintaining political independence from bourgeois nationalist leadership isn’t merely contemporary analysis—it’s a lesson written in the blood of defeated revolutions.

During the Second Chinese Revolution, the Communist International directed the nascent Chinese Communist Party to enter the Kuomintang, the national bourgeois party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Comintern believed this alliance was necessary to prosecute the national revolution against foreign imperialism and warlord fragmentation. The CCP was instructed to subordinate its independent program to the KMT’s nationalist agenda, effectively providing the bourgeois party with working-class legitimacy and organizational capacity.

Chinese delegate Liu Yen-Chin warned that the national bourgeoisie would be revolutionary only until it conquered power, whereupon it would turn conservative or reactionary. When threatened by revolutionary upheaval from below, he predicted, the bourgeoisie would seek compromise with imperialist powers to preserve their class rule.

The prediction proved devastatingly accurate. In April 1927, the KMT executed the Shanghai Massacre, murdering thousands of communist workers and trade unionists who had brought them to power through general strikes and armed uprisings. The national bourgeoisie chose class survival over national liberation, collaborating with foreign imperialism and domestic militarists against their own working class. The Chinese Revolution was defeated for decades because the Communist Party had subordinated its political independence to bourgeois nationalist leadership.

The parallel to contemporary struggles is unmistakable. The PA’s Jenin operation demonstrates that when Palestinian nationalist leadership faces the choice between advancing genuine liberation and preserving its administrative role within the occupation framework, it chooses the latter—collaborating directly with the occupying power against armed resistance. Zelensky’s anti-labor offensive shows Ukrainian bourgeoisie exploiting national defense to impose the class restructuring it couldn’t achieve in peacetime, using the war as cover for brutal neoliberalism.

Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, was ultimately forced to split from the Comintern because Stalin demanded he silence criticism and politically capitulate to the official line. Trotsky and the Left Opposition advocated for the CCP to maintain military unity with the KMT against imperialism and warlords while preserving complete political and organizational independence. Their vindication came too late to prevent the massacre, but the strategic lesson remains absolute: working-class movements must support genuine national liberation struggles unconditionally while maintaining independent organization and political discipline to survive their bourgeois leaderships’ inevitable betrayals.

The Organizational Price of Uncritical Support

The ideological pressures of 2022-2025 produced measurable organizational consequences, demonstrating that falling into the anti-imperialist trap isn’t merely a theoretical error—it produces concrete damage to movement-building capacity.

The Democratic Socialists of America: Electoral Opportunism’s Cost

The Democratic Socialists of America provides quantitative evidence of how uncritical support for compromised leadership erodes organizational strength. In late 2021, DSA-endorsed Representative Jamaal Bowman voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome system with $1 billion and participated in a trip organized by liberal Zionist group J Street. This betrayal of DSA’s official support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement sparked bitter internal conflict.

The National Political Committee chose not to censure or expel Bowman, opting instead for a strategy of internal pressure to move him leftward. The leadership’s rationale reflected the anti-imperialist trap’s logic: Bowman was fighting for progressive policies domestically, his district had significant pro-Israel sentiment, and maintaining DSA’s Congressional presence required tolerating some foreign policy compromises. This decision to provide Bowman political cover—treating his votes as tactical necessity rather than fundamental betrayal—represented the organization choosing access to bourgeois electoral politics over programmatic principle.

DSA membership peaked at 95,000 in 2021. By August 2023, membership had declined to 77,575—a loss of 17,425 members (18.3% attrition). This decline occurred precisely during the period when the organization couldn’t reconcile its anti-imperialist program with the actions of its elected officials and leadership chose to minimize rather than confront the contradiction.

The lesson is stark: a mass membership organization whose primary appeal rests on principled socialist politics pays an immediate price when it allows electoral tactics to dilute its core political line. Younger, politically-engaged members are highly sensitive to leadership compromises on anti-imperialism. When DSA’s leadership fell into the trap of treating Bowman’s votes as acceptable tactical compromise rather than fundamental betrayal requiring accountability, it eliminated the strategic justification for thousands of members to continue paying dues to an organization that couldn’t distinguish itself from mainstream progressivism on Palestine.

DSA’s Recovery: Principled Action Rebuilds Organization

However, DSA’s story also demonstrates how breaking free from the anti-imperialist trap rebuilds organizational strength. Following October 2023, as Israel escalated its genocidal assault on Gaza, DSA leadership shifted course. Rather than continuing to provide political cover for compromised elected officials, the organization mobilized nationally around clear demands for immediate ceasefire through campaigns like “No Money for Massacres.”

This represented a fundamental rejection of the logic that had governed the Bowman response. Instead of treating Palestine solidarity as something to be balanced against electoral pragmatism, DSA positioned it as the central organizing priority. The organization leveraged its mass base to pressure elected officials, organized demonstrations, supported union resolutions for ceasefire, and backed concrete legislative efforts like New York State’s “Not on Our Dime” bill targeting Israeli settlement funding.

The organizational results were immediate and measurable. DSA gained at least 2,400 new dues-paying members post-October 2023, growth explicitly linked to its pro-Palestinian position. By June 2025, membership had stabilized at approximately 80,000. This recruitment success demonstrates that political clarity, especially when aligned with mass action against genocide, is essential for reversing organizational decline.

The contrast is instructive: when DSA fell into the anti-imperialist trap by minimizing Bowman’s betrayal, it lost nearly 20% of its membership. When it broke free by adopting principled positions and organizing mass campaigns, it immediately began recruiting and stabilizing. The membership base was sending a clear message—they joined a socialist organization for principled politics, not electoral pragmatism that replicates mainstream progressivism’s compromises on imperialism.

Stop the War Coalition: When Opposing Imperialism Means Abandoning Liberation

Stop the War Coalition represents a different manifestation of strategic failure—not uncritical cheerleading but its dialectical opposite. Following Russia’s February 2022 invasion, StWC adopted a position that, while formally opposing the invasion, focused almost exclusively on condemning NATO expansion and opposing weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

StWC’s statement argued that sending arms to Ukraine risked escalating into war between NATO and Russia, and that the path to peace required diplomatic settlement rather than military support for Ukrainian resistance. This position was formally “anti-war” but failed to recognize Ukraine’s struggle as a legitimate national liberation movement deserving unconditional material support.

The organizational fallout was immediate and severe. High-profile Labour MPs John McDonnell and Diane Abbott publicly pulled out of StWC rallies. Labour leader Keir Starmer capitalized on the controversy, explicitly linking StWC endorsement to withholding the party whip, forcing MPs to reject the StWC position and embrace NATO.

This marked a definitive institutional isolation. StWC transitioned from a broad, influential front capable of mobilizing millions (as in the 2003 Iraq protests) into a marginalized operation unable to unite the working class around viable anti-war strategy. The failure wasn’t being “too anti-imperialist”—it was failing to recognize Ukrainian armed resistance as a legitimate liberation struggle that anti-imperialists must support unconditionally.

This demonstrates the opposite error to uncritical cheerleading: treating a genuine national liberation struggle as merely a proxy conflict between imperialist powers, thereby abandoning solidarity with the oppressed nation. Both errors—uncritical support for bourgeois leadership and refusal to support legitimate resistance—lead to organizational isolation and political irrelevance.

The Fourth International: Growth Through Independent Class Position

The Fourth International’s adherence to the principled position—unconditional support for oppressed peoples’ resistance combined with fierce political independence from their bourgeois leaderships—produced organizational cohesion and expansion during a period when other international left groups fractured.

The FI’s position on Ukraine unconditionally supports Ukrainian armed resistance and advocates for weapons deliveries to enable effective defense, while simultaneously opposing NATO expansion, condemning Western imperialism’s exploitation of the war, and critiquing Zelensky’s neoliberal offensive against Ukrainian workers. On Palestine, the FI provides unconditional solidarity with armed resistance while critiquing both the PA’s collaboration and Hamas’s authoritarian limitations, channeling support toward independent working-class forces.

At the 2025 World Congress, the resolution on Ukraine passed with a substantial majority (95 votes in favor, 23 against), demonstrating strong organizational unity around this framework. More significantly, the Congress witnessed substantial organizational consolidation and expansion, with the FI formally recognizing or expanding several sections, representing approximately 27% global membership growth:

• Argentina: Marabunta and Poder Popular joining together

• Britain: Anti*Capitalist Resistance and ecosocialist.scot forming joint British section

• Brazil: MES entering the Brazilian section

• India: Radical Socialist recognized

• United States: Solidarity formally becoming US section

• France: NPA-L’Anticapitaliste committing to strengthen the FI

This expansion during intense ideological crisis demonstrates that forces seeking strategic clarity are attracted to organizations that can navigate the anti-imperialist trap—supporting liberation struggles unconditionally while maintaining political independence from compromised leaderships. The FI’s growth validates that this isn’t an abstract theoretical position but a practical organizing strategy that builds stronger movements.

Solidarity From Below: The Fourth International’s Practical Model

The FI implements class independence through concrete practice, not merely programmatic declarations. The key mechanism is “solidarity from below”—directing political and material support to independent working-class organizations within oppressed nations rather than to state apparatuses or bourgeois leaderships.

In Ukraine, the FI coordinates through the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU), working closely with Sotsialnyi Rukh. This Ukrainian Marxist organization embodies the dual struggle: participating in armed resistance against Russian invasion while fighting fiercely against Zelensky’s anti-worker policies.

Sotsialnyi Rukh’s demands illustrate the independent class position in practice: complete military defeat of Russia, but also socially-oriented reconstruction of Ukraine and defense of common class interests “against Ukrainian, Russian and Western capitalists rather than geopolitical nonsense.” This approach ensures solidarity isn’t unconditional support for Kyiv’s state apparatus but active backing for people’s resistance and their independent class demands.

The model exposes the class contradictions of bourgeois leadership through the struggles themselves. When Ukrainian workers fight for labor rights while simultaneously resisting Russian invasion, it demonstrates concretely that the national bourgeoisie is waging class war even during national defense. This lived experience builds working-class consciousness far more effectively than abstract propaganda.

Ukrainian activists themselves have articulated this position powerfully. In their Letter of Solidarity with Palestine, Ukrainian researchers, artists, and labor activists rejected divisions created by imperialist discourse, affirming solidarity with all oppressed peoples struggling for freedom. They firmly condemned the Russian war of annexation while challenging Zelensky’s equivalence between Ukraine and Israel, arguing that the true parallel is between Ukraine and Palestine as struggles against colonialism and imperialism.

This class-conscious orientation frames conflicts through the lens of proletarian liberation, demanding unconditional but critical support for masses’ self-defense, distinct from the class interests of national bourgeois leaderships.

Strategic Application: What This Means for Organizers Today

The detailed contemporary evidence from Palestine and Ukraine, validated by historical lessons from China, mandates clear strategic implications for building effective movements.

Unconditional Solidarity With the Struggle, Political Independence From the Leadership

The core principle is simple but requires constant vigilance to implement: revolutionaries must provide absolute, unconditional material and political support to oppressed peoples’ struggles for self-determination and liberation, while simultaneously maintaining fierce political independence from and critique of the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces claiming to lead those struggles.

In Palestine, this means:

• Unconditional support for armed resistance against Israeli occupation and genocide

• Demanding immediate ceasefire, end to blockade, and full Palestinian self-determination

• Organizing BDS campaigns and confronting complicit institutions

• While simultaneously critiquing PA collaboration, Hamas’s authoritarian governance, and religious nationalism’s limitations

• Channeling solidarity toward independent Palestinian workers, women’s organizations, and democratic forces

• Building international campaigns that support resistance while creating space for Palestinian working-class alternatives to emerge

In Ukraine, this means:

• Unconditional support for Ukrainian armed resistance against Russian invasion

• Demanding weapons deliveries without neoliberal conditionality

• Opposing NATO expansion and Western imperialism’s exploitation of the war

• While simultaneously exposing Zelensky’s anti-labor offensive, IMF debt trap, and political repression

• Channeling solidarity toward Ukrainian trade unions, Sotsialnyi Rukh, and democratic movements

• Building campaigns that support national defense while amplifying Ukrainian workers’ struggles against their own ruling class

The anti-imperialist trap operates by collapsing this distinction—treating critique of bourgeois leadership as “dividing the movement” or “objectively” serving imperialism. But the historical lesson from China proves the opposite: subordinating working-class independence to bourgeois leadership is what divides and defeats movements. The Shanghai Massacre happened precisely because the CCP had abandoned political independence.

Reasserting the United Front Tactic

The primary method for implementing this dual position is the united front. In Palestine solidarity, activists must engage in broad campaigns—ceasefire demands, humanitarian aid, BDS—where masses are mobilized. These campaigns necessarily involve working alongside forces with different politics, including those who provide uncritical support to Hamas or the PA.

The united front doesn’t require programmatic unity—it requires unity in action around specific demands while maintaining organizational and political independence. Within these broad campaigns, revolutionaries openly but non-sectarianly articulate their critique of bourgeois leadership limitations while proving through practice their genuine commitment to Palestinian liberation.

The goal is exposing inadequate leadership through the struggles themselves. When activists channel concrete solidarity toward independent Palestinian workers’ organizations, women’s groups, and democratic forces, it demonstrates practically what working-class alternative leadership looks like. When Ukrainian solidarity campaigns amplify Sotsialnyi Rukh’s demands for socially-oriented reconstruction alongside military defense, it shows Ukrainian workers there are international forces supporting their dual struggle.

The DSA case illustrates this tactic’s power. When the organization shifted from minimizing Bowman’s betrayal to mobilizing mass campaigns around principled Palestine demands, it didn’t expel members who had defended Bowman—it created conditions for rank-and-file members to draw their own conclusions through practice. The result was organizational growth and renewed political clarity.

Avoiding Both Traps

The challenge is avoiding both the anti-imperialist trap (uncritical cheerleading) and its opposite error (refusing to support legitimate resistance). Both lead to political isolation and organizational weakness.

The anti-imperialist trap isolates revolutionaries from the masses they’re ostensibly supporting. When international solidarity activists defend the PA’s “security coordination” as pragmatic necessity, they lose credibility with Palestinians in Jenin who see the PA as collaborationist enemy. When they minimize Zelensky’s anti-labor offensive, they lose connection with Ukrainian workers fighting on two fronts. Uncritical cheerleading ultimately serves bourgeois leadership by preventing working-class alternatives from emerging.

The opposite error—refusing to support liberation struggles because of leadership limitations—isolates revolutionaries from mass movements entirely. Declaring Ukraine’s resistance “just inter-imperialist proxy war” or conditioning Palestine solidarity on Hamas adopting democratic socialism means abandoning oppressed peoples to their oppressors. This sectarian abstentionism forfeits any capacity to influence struggles toward revolutionary outcomes.

The principled position recognizes that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces often are the legitimate (if politically compromised) representatives of oppressed peoples in specific historical moments. Hamas is leading armed resistance against genocide—that makes Hamas the representative of Palestinian self-defense in this moment, deserving unconditional support for that resistance. Zelensky’s government is leading national defense against imperialist invasion—that makes it the representative of Ukrainian sovereignty in this moment, deserving unconditional support for that defense.

But “legitimate representative in this moment” doesn’t mean “uncritical political support” or “suspension of class struggle.” It means supporting what these leaderships do right (armed resistance, national defense) while exposing what they do wrong (collaboration, neoliberalism, authoritarianism) and building alternatives that can eventually supersede them.

Building the Revolutionary International

The ultimate strategic goal remains establishing strong, globally-coordinated revolutionary organization that consistently upholds this dual position across all liberation struggles. The Fourth International’s 27% membership growth during this period demonstrates that such coordination is possible and attractive to forces seeking strategic clarity.

The crises caused by falling into the anti-imperialist trap underscore that the struggle for socialism is fundamentally international. Organizations that subordinate working-class independence to bourgeois nationalist leadership—whether through electoral opportunism like early DSA or through uncritical alignment with governments under attack—lose their capacity to lead working-class movements.

Only through disciplined international coordination can the working class successfully navigate the contradictions of national liberation struggles in the imperialist epoch, ensuring that necessary solidarity with oppressed peoples doesn’t degrade into subordination to their bourgeois leaderships.

Conclusion: Unconditional Solidarity, Absolute Independence

The period from 2022-2025 provides definitive evidence that the anti-imperialist trap—allowing necessary solidarity to degrade into uncritical cheerleading for bourgeois leadership—is not merely a theoretical error but produces immediate organizational damage.

The Palestinian Authority’s Jenin operation and Zelensky regime’s anti-labor offensive overwhelmingly prove that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships will betray liberation struggles to preserve their class interests. The PA literally collaborated with the occupying power to crush armed resistance. Zelensky exploited national defense to impose brutal neoliberalism on Ukrainian workers. These aren’t exceptional cases—they’re the predictable behavior of bourgeois forces confirmed by the entire history of national liberation movements.

The organizational data confirms that falling into the anti-imperialist trap costs movements dearly. DSA’s 18.3% membership loss following the Bowman crisis—when leadership chose to minimize betrayal rather than confront it—shows that mass bases reject uncritical support for compromised leadership. Conversely, DSA’s recovery through principled Gaza campaigns and the Fourth International’s 27% expansion demonstrate that unconditional solidarity combined with political independence is the formula for organizational growth.

For activists navigating today’s conflicts, the lesson is clear: provide absolute, unconditional material and political support to oppressed peoples’ struggles for liberation—support Ukrainian armed resistance, support Palestinian armed resistance, support every genuine national liberation movement against imperialism. But never subordinate working-class political independence to bourgeois leaderships. Never treat critique of Hamas, the PA, or Zelensky as “dividing the movement.” Never allow necessary solidarity to degrade into apologetics for collaboration, neoliberalism, or authoritarianism.

Adopt the dual struggle model articulated by Sotsialnyi Rukh and embodied in the Fourth International’s “solidarity from below”: fight unconditionally for national liberation while fighting simultaneously for working-class interests against all capitalists—domestic, imperial, and those claiming to lead liberation movements.

This approach ensures revolutionary movements remain tied to masses’ interests, securing both political distinction and long-term organizational viability. It avoids both the anti-imperialist trap of uncritical cheerleading and the sectarian trap of refusing to support legitimate resistance.

The wars in Ukraine and Palestine have tested the global left’s capacity to maintain this balance. Organizations that provided unconditional solidarity while maintaining class independence have grown stronger. Those that fell into uncritical cheerleading for bourgeois leadership or refused to support legitimate national resistance have fractured and declined.

The choice isn’t between solidarity and independence—it’s recognizing that genuine solidarity requires absolute political independence. The evidence from 2022-2025 proves it conclusively. Support every liberation struggle unconditionally. Trust no bourgeois leadership. Build working-class alternatives. That is the path forward.