You encountered the disease that is western Marxism. Marxists in the belly of the imperial core have historically been divorced from meaningful practice, and gravitate towards chauvanism and inaction due to benefiting from the status quo. They just want to critique society, not actually change it, and that shows in how they shut you down.

Israel is a settler-colonial genocidal state, and as such will not have a working class uprising unified with Palestinians. It needs to be cut off from support, and will dissolve when that happens. It’s propped up by the US Empire to serve as a giant millitary base, it’s like saying you need to beat the millitary by raising class consciousness like a magic spell. Utterly foolish.

Theory is good. Not only is it good, it’s necessary. All of the best revolutionary parties in history have dedicated themselves to uniting theory and practice, as each sharpens and informs the other. To not study theory and only practice is to try to take on the job of an engineer with no prior study. You might find some success, but it will be held back. To only study theory and never practice is to turn revolution into a mental exercise and hobby, only interacting with itself on the mental landscape. It’s idealism.

To unite theory and practice is to find the most effective paths and put them to use, using what you learn through practical experience to reshape your understanding of theory and write new theory. This is the Marxist-Leninist method. This is what works.

If you want somewhere to start with reading theory, in a manner that builds up over time, I recommend my intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. Good luck! Try to find a better org next time, there are decent ones in the imperial core (though few are truly great).

Please forgive me being a little simplistic because I’m about to go to bed, but the answer to

Is this what reading theory does to people?

…is no, that’s what being British does to people. Jokes aside, British socialist/communist parties, at least the ones I’ve heard of, are notoriously awful when it comes to solidarity with the people their governments are oppressing. I’m sure others will come in with more comprehensive answers, but this is all I’ve got right now.

Britain is a black hole from which no good thing can emerge. Although this type of dogmatism from leading figures is not unique to them; I instantly smiled at the chapter leader coming in clutch with the worst take possible and suddenly changing everyone’s mind. We wouldn’t want to get too radical now would we lol.

They have simplistic takes because their understanding is simplistic. Unfortunately it’s not just a problem in Britain but across Europe and North America whole. When I was starting to get into marxism I asked the chapter leader, a philosophy teacher, that I didn’t understand dialectics and he said “I’ll let you know” (we never ended up talking about it). He probably didn’t understand dialectics either, he wasn’t even a communist lol.

They get left to their own devices and never progress and then run around in circles. The solution to ‘Israel’ is pretty simple, give the resistance tanks and missiles for one thing. The entity is a settler-colony and this is perfectly in line with marxist theory it’s just that they don’t understand anything beyond proletariat and bourgeoisie so they start to hallucinate things like an ‘israeli proletariat’ lol.

theory is important because it gives us tools in our arsenal to get to the bottom of things and pull on the actual thread that will unravel the entire machine, but it’s not magic either (and dialectics teaches us that with contradictions) and there’s a possibility to ‘overcorrect’ in either direction, either focusing too much on praxis without theory or theory without praxis.

Raising class consciousness is not necessarily wrong (it’s also a pretty basic thing to say), it’s just, how do you want to do that? Life’s not a video game where you click buttons to increment variables. So if he meant anything other than go agitate people in the streets of London to demand lower rent in “Tel Aviv” he needs to specify lol otherwise it’s just empty posturing. Theory helps find how to effectively agitate but theory is best consumed with comrades, unfortunately it’s often an individual responsibility in western orgs.

A lot of these orgs only exist to justify their existence and good comrades end up either folding and losing all the revolutionary light in their eyes or leave and become disillusioned with organizing.

the one people I expected total solidarity from are talking exactly like liberals but with Marxist language

You are completely right about this, and unfortunately this liberal garbage is probably something you will run into a lot. Anything and everything that has genuine revolutionary potential is constantly being coopted by liberals, either through literal covert infiltration with intention, or unintentionally by useful fools who have fallen for the radlib lines and mistaken them as socialism. You may still be a relatively new socialist without much theory under your belt yet, but you already hold a more principled and revolutionary position than the leader of the meeting you described, who is carrying water for the zionists whether that person realizes it or not.

Is this what reading theory does to people?

No, it’s what failing to engage with or refusing to understand theory does to people. Any of the good theorists make it clear that theory is nothing without praxis (and praxis is just blind flailing without theory).

I am fully aware that ultimately, they’re kind of right; class consciousness is vital to kicking out imperialism and uprooting capitalism, but for fk’s sake what are we doing for the people currently dying or being starved to death right now through the evils of the system?

Depending on which particulars of your post you’re referring to, I would say that no, those who were disagreeing with you were not kind of right. Yes, class consciousness is vital to eventually being able to smash capitalism and end imperialism, but playing nice with fascists will never benefit the spreading of class consciousness. Class consciousness is not the “be all and end all” of socialist organizing, it is something that comes as a result of hard work and actions taken, and people seeing what that really means. Like… What was the better method to raise class consciousness in people concerned with the situation in Gaza, was it passing out pamphlets to the Zionists who like you said are gleeful to watch Palestinians die, or was it seeing working class people become heroes on a flotilla trying to bring food and medical aid to starving masses of children, then getting illegally kidnapped at gunpoint off their boats and held in torture-detention centers because of their efforts to bring aid? That is what helps radicalize people which in turn is a major fount of class consciousness. Tell your dipshit meeting leader that if they want to spread class consciousness, they need to take some action that has a genuine material chance to help the Palestinian people, or at the very least express solidarity with them especially in ways that show some smidgen of willingness to make personal sacrifices. Tell them that no matter how much you try to get Zionists to read Marx, it is going to do fuckall so long as those Zionists want to eradicate the most systemically oppressed people on earth and steal the now empty homes of the mass murdered. We will never get anywhere trying to appeal to the last shreds of humanity (the “better angels”) of settler-colonialists, let alone the genocidaires. Ask your meeting leader, Why did the communists fight to liberate the concentration camps in 1945 when they could have been appealing to the Nazi’s sense of worker solidarity?

Surely, we can do more than telling them to sit down and listen to theory.

Anyone who would say that we should be doing has not understood the fucking purpose of theory in the first place.

Sounds like they have their head in their asses regarding the Maccabi fans as these are the same fans with links to the IDF, with confirmed human rights violators in their presence, who caused riots in Amsterdam. Banning them is the only sensible solution. Nothing ‘oh they are innocent bystanders’ about them. Ffs they chanted to kill all arabs in Amsterdam.

No, this is the exact opposite. They haven’t read enough theory. This is categorical ultra-leftism at best, straight social democracy at worst.

It’s not that they “view the entire world through theory” and that’s a bad thing, it’s that they’re just throwing a general trueism [class consciousness] at a problem to handwave it away because it feels bad to their “common morality.” [That being the idea that “cultural boycotts” are bad because they are bad].

And no offense intended towards you, since I know you’re getting started, but it is extremely important to view the world through a marxist lense and avoid moralism [not saying you can’t oppose things on personal moral grounds, or that the genocide isn’t horrific]. Here it did lead you to the correct analysis, that Palestinians must engage in a violent anti-colonial struggle and liberate themselves from the Israeli genocidal apartheid state. Additionally, actions like boycotts and such can be a way to help palestine by isolating Israel and Israelis.

However, without a Marxist analysis, you might come to incorrect conclusions. I.e, positions on the special military operation in Ukraine, the recent “gen z” protests, etc.

“[With the Marxist-Leninist attitude,] a person applies the theory and method of marxism-leninism to the systematic and thorough investigation and study of the environment. He does not work by enthusiasm alone but, as Stalin says, combines revolutionary sweep with practicalness” - Mao Zedong

You can’t see class in a vacuum like that, the global context matters and the so called working class of Israel is actively participating in a genocide to get their share of land, very similar as the working class of England during the british empire years.

The leader seems like a zionist plant. Ask him if he’d excuse a current nazi guard from spitting on jews while he was on vacation. Would he just try to get him to see the light?

Then spit in his face

the “working class of “israel”” obtaining class consciousness will entail israelis actively fighting against the settler-colonial and genocidal oppression of palestinians so that they no longer benefit from those things.

In the best case scenario (assuming good intentions from the person/people in question) it’s what happens when they are exposed to class dynamics, but have no understanding of colonialism and imperialism.

Imperialism is the primary contradiction (the first priority, to put it another way), not a lack of local communes. I think China understands this and it’s part of why they’ve spent so much time engaging with capitalist trade dynamics in order to shift the global power balance, rather than declaring every capitalist state an enemy of the working peoples of the world.

It is, I would argue, much easier for someone living in the imperial core to develop an interest in better conditions for the working class than it is for them to develop an understanding that they live within a violent apparatus with tendrils across the world and that much of what they do have is linked to some form of exploitation of another country and people. The first one is not far from what unions already advocate for, without even challenging capitalism itself. The second one means understanding that not every claim to a nation-state is valid, that territorial regions and who controls them were not set in stone millennia ago but instead have shifted sometimes dramatically over time, and that the primary driver of that shifting in recent centuries is colonialism and further, imperialism.

One of the fundamentals of colonial narrative that lingers to this day, is the idea of civil and savage. This feeds into the western chauvinist sense of superiority. That they are capable of seeing something “those other people” are incapable of seeing. Thus you get nonsense like him saying “North Koreans” are propagandized. As if it’s impossible that he himself could be propagandized into thinking they are propagandized. But you see, he’s “smart”, so it can’t be him who is being hoodwinked!

And of course it is more convenient for a person like that to run with “better conditions for the working class but not anti-imperialism or decolonization”. The first one might be fairly achievable for them without even bucking the system much. The second requires a significant paradigm shift.

But the good news is, the more anti-imperialist efforts succeed in imperialized places, the more the western empire declines and the more empty it becomes what people like this are standing on. One day, like Wile E Coyote in Looney Tunes, they will look down and realize they’re in midair. And then they will look at the screen with self-aware fear and hold up a sign saying, “Gulp.” Others will turn to fascism, still in denial and ignorance of what the world is, and believing themselves entitled to a world where they get special treatment as a favored type of person, even if they have to commit mass murder to maintain it.

The think the fundamental problem (besides the obvious Western Chauvinism) so many Western Leftists seem to have with Israel is that they don’t understand what state of development it’s in as a settler-colony.

Palestine is to the Israeli proletariat what Ireland was to the British proletariat in Marx’s time. So long as this remains true the only thing a class conscious Israeli comrade can do is to either leave and stop participating in the Zionist Project outright or find some way to aid the Palestinian Resistance.

The average American prole is capable of class consciousness because there is no conscious recognition of the fact that we live in a settler-colony. When we conceptualize Amerindians we don’t think of the present but the past. Settlers, Manifest Destiny, native tribes, etc. are these things from ancient history; not lived experiences of the modern day. I’d wager most Americans probably haven’t even met an indigenous person and when they do they often mistake them for being foreign immigrants. Much of the controversy around indigenous representation stems from the fact that we don’t want to acknowledge who owned the land our house is built on because it’s an uncomfortable topic to broach even if we didn’t have any ancestors who directly partook in the various genocides and massacres. For many of us these are crimes from a hundred years ago committed by people long dead. We can’t conceptualize it as anything else. The Amerindian has been excised from our mind and our status as settler-colonists goes unrecognized at a conscious level even if subconsciously we’re fully aware of it. Where the indigenous people can never forget what we’ve done to them we already have forgotten & buried it.

For Israeli proles none of this is true. The massacre of that Palestinian family happened yesterday, your brother helped do it, and you personally bought the land the family lived on afterwards. You saw nothing wrong with it and have no moral qualms about mocking the survivors. Modern Israel is closer in its development as a settler-colony to 1800s America than the modern USA; the Israeli proletariat are fully aware of their settler-colony and are happy to support its unyielding expansion so long as they continue to benefit. There is no plan to cease expansion; the Zionist Project openly envisions a Lebensraum stretching from the Nile to the Tigris. Their Manifest Destiny is still in full-swing and until it finally ends there’s no chance at awakening class consciousness in a proletariat that is being bribed by ample war spoils and any Arab unfortunate enough to live within the Israeli war path has no time to wait for Kautskyists in the West who’d rather sit on their hands because they care more about helping Israeli labor aristocrats instead of a subaltern people being exterminated by the 21st century Wehrmacht.

The leader of the group sound a lot like a Kautsky type socialist. The kind Lenin would roast to death. Your stance on Israel-Palestine is materially correct. The org is a socdem org leaning heavily towards labor aristocracy and the average member there seems to be very alienated from the what’s actually happening in Palestine.

The leadership of the org could be infiltrated by the cops and government employees.

But no, we should keep working to raise class consciousness among a people who have gleefully documented their hatred for the Palestinians for all to see.

This exposes their enormous ignorance on the topic of Zionism and the reality in occupied Palestine. Plenty of “Israelis” have class consciousness, that’s not the issue, the issue is that their class consciousness extends exclusively to settlers like themselves and completely excludes Palestinians who they view as subhuman. A western “leftist” org that does not oppose all forms of Zionism, especially so-called “Labor Zionism” is not leftist at all, they are just larpy radlibs.

They have this idea in their head about “Israeli leftists” that just does not correspond to reality. They need to be exposed to what these so-called “Israeli leftists” sound like when they talk about Palestinians. There is a reason that these “Israelis” do not and cannot develop a class consciousness that includes Palestinians, because just like libs in the imperial core who support imperialism because they benefit from it, the “Israeli left” benefits from the genocide, apartheid and land theft.

Is this what reading theory does to people? Unable to see and experience the world as it is, but every single event must be passed through the lenses of what Marx said over a century ago?

If anything this has to do with them reading absolutely insufficient theory, and only engaging with theory in the most superficial way possible, in a way that lets them continue to ignore imperialism and colonialism because addressing those things would expose their own ingrained chauvinism. If they bothered to even read Lenin they would not hold this vulgar and infantile “all we need is to raise class consciousness” position. Lenin himself explicitly addressed people like this, he wrote entire polemics against them. These people are just modern Kautsky-ites.

An integral part of reading Marxist theory is reading about and understanding capitalism’s relation to imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc., because these are all part and parcel of the global economic, military but also ideological structures which maintain capitalism.

The Palestinian liberation struggle is of vital importance for the global class struggle precisely because it represents the convergence point of so many of the atrocities of capitalism and imperialism. Any leftist org that refuses to engage with the brutal reality of Palestine and chooses to whitewash (or pinkwash) the genocidal nature of Zionism is no leftist org that i would ever want to be part of as a socialist and an anti-imperialist. In fact it may even be dangerous for me to do so, if one of them should decide to denounce my anti-Zionism as “anti-semitism” or “Hamas support” to the police.