Why the Working Class Strategizes Against Genocide

Reactionaries tell workers to “shut up and dribble” rather than take a position on Gaza. That’s because they don’t want workers to act according to their interests.

International solidarity has always been a worker interest. Peace is a worker interest. And opposing genocide, by extension, is a worker interest.

These interests are in direct tension with the priorities of MAGA’s intellectual cadre. Take, as a latest example, Oren Cass, a one-time adviser to private equity presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Since the Trump years, Cass has positioned himself as one of the “post-liberal,” MAGA-aligned, heterodox economic advocates on the right. He’s part of an elite milieu that talks about the working class when promoting “post-neoliberal” policy ideas that do nothing to actually strengthen the working class in the imbalance of power between labor and capital.

MAGA-heterodox economic thinkers want to ensure the rich get richer. The way they advance that cause is through a revival of industrial manufacturing, decoupling from China, a permanent war economy, and a sufficient share of the national income to sustain a patriarchal social order—one in which white male workers earn just enough that women will stay at home doing uncompensated domestic labor.

Theirs is an agenda of economic nationalism that is the very definition of reactionary, seeking to build a future economy based on how they imagine an older social economy to have been. It’s dangerous, minority-dispossessing nostalgia that takes advantage of the fact that a prior generation of economic policies—which these very same people promoted—have immiserated masses of people (including many working-class white males).

The interests of reactionary forces, which Cass appears to represent, are antithetical to those of the labor movement.

But what normal people know, and which Cass either feigns ignorance about or else simply does not grasp, is this: When you understand you’re complicit in systems that actively kill large numbers of innocent people, you have a responsibility to do something. You do not just go about your life as if everything’s cool.

Even bracketing off the moral imperative for solidarity, there are several strategic imperatives for workers to stand united in opposition to the slaughter of Palestinians.