What did Jacobin magazine write about Elias Rodriguez, the Latin American hero of last month’s attack in Washington? Nothing, as if nothing had happened. But the same magazine celebrated Luigi Mangione, who assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. American progressives are hypersensitive to armed resistance in our country. Weapons are used exclusively for their own purposes, “weapons exclusivity,” and of course, their subsequent distribution exclusively to U.S. allies.
Not only do they want us to resist genocide peacefully, but they also want to: first, liberate us, not for us to do it (and therefore we must appeal to the conscience of American voters and the American working class, which, regardless of its ethnic background, elected Donald Trump. Perhaps we haven’t appealed enough to the American working class, which Jacobin considers sacred even more sacred than our blood and takes precedence over our very existence, as is clear from its articles). Second, they call for arming Ukraine with all the military technology available to the United States against Russia (American Trotskyist leftist magazines are full of articles boasting that leftists on the front lines in Ukraine are at the forefront of the fighters; bear witness to the American working class that we were the first to fight Washington’s enemies. But the same magazine doesn’t boast about the operations of the heroes of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades in the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
Thus, one of the most absurd statements today is solidarity with both Palestine and Ukraine. The left’s litmus test today is not the keffiyeh or the colors of the watermelon, but rather the question of whether you support armed resistance against Israel and support sending money and weapons to it (as you do in the case of Ukraine). Will Jacobin magazine send money and weapons to the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, or at least grant legitimacy to those who wish to do so? To support the transfer of American military technology to Ukraine while expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people without resisting them is the essence of imperialist progressivism, and undoubtedly more dangerous than Trump’s blatant fascism.
This question should also be posed to Lula da Silva (although his positions are better than those of all Arab leaders combined, there is an intellectual flaw in his approach to the Palestinian issue. This flaw exists in his approach, as does that of many who once embraced armed resistance in Latin America before coming to power—Mujica, Rousseff, Petro, and others). In the months leading up to October 7, Jacobin magazine, The Guardian, and others were engaged in describing the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime. This meant, “We liberate you, and we see the time and method appropriate for this.”
But to liberate yourselves, even worse, through armed violence, and to dare to decide when to do so, cannot be granted intellectual and moral legitimacy (since this is the mission entrusted to them in the imperial metropolis). It’s true that we don’t support crushing your resistance with imperialist force, but we will not grant any legitimacy to your armed resistance against imperialism. You, imperialism and its armed resistance, are equally bad (this is the essence of the genocidal whitewashing that makes it possible to understand it academically and as institutional material).
Since the beginning of the war, there has been a consistent policy in Jacobin, The Guardian (the American edition written by “respected” American progressives), and others, to trivialize our resistance and every operation it carries out. When it becomes clear that serious blows are being carried out by the resistance, the achievements of the resistance are presented in boring installments over months so that the reader doesn’t sense them. The frightening thing is that these platforms are the best we can find in American society; to this degree, it is an imperialist society, where its progressives are worse than its fascists, because they make the reality of the world even more opaque for us, the peoples of the peripheries who are fighting for some clarity.
Our armed violence is a counter to the ambiguity of the global order (to which American progressives contribute) with the ambiguity of death, our Heideggerian approach to engaging with the international order. What is required is not a “more moral” stance toward these platforms, but rather a limitation of their ability to control the opinions of our local “elites” (whose power is unacceptable), because their power has a genocidal dimension, even among the most committed to moral discourse. In light of the Israeli-American attack on Iran, what did Jacobin find? It turned out to be a war “no one wants.” Jacobin magazine is the mediator between imperialism and the left around the world.
The left around the world questions the US administration’s rhetoric about the peoples of this or that region, and Jacobin then jumps in to present the same rhetoric with a leftist accent, making it easier for the world to embrace it. (Washington wants to fight Russia because of the power struggle. Jacobin comes along and says, “Well, we have to fight Russia because it isn’t Marxist, not because it’s an adversary of Washington.” The same rhetoric will be repeated about Taiwan tomorrow.) From propagating the theory that Israel founded Hamas to eliminate the secular Fatah movement (some segments of the Latin American left have been convinced of this nonsense as a result of Jacobin’s commendable efforts), to demonizing Hezbollah and stripping it of any liberal character (the same applies to Iran today), to nostalgia about the 1970s in the Arab world, as if there weren’t any armed Marxist resistance factions in Palestine today, and yes, they could be supplied with weapons now.
Worse still, some leftist voices in our region are being used to whitewash imperialist rhetoric, rather than to encourage armed resistance or support and arm them to organize armed resistance. The ability of the Spanish-language magazine Jacobin to be virtually the only effective platform for the left in Latin America is an imperialist ability. It uses this ability to disseminate moralizing discourse about the genocide in the Gaza Strip (rather than systematic analysis) and, of course, to argue that Hamas and Israel are equal in their oppression of the Palestinian people (as does Bernie Sanders, the unabashed progressive knight).
Jacobin has the ability (on a global scale) to legitimize the armed resistance of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, precisely because it is an American magazine. But don’t expect that from it. It will only invite them to speak about their suffering under Israeli genocide, on the one hand, and Islamic hegemony over the resistance, on the other. Wait for how Jacobin will deal with Venezuela or Nicaragua when they are bombed by the United States. You’ll find the same evasive rhetoric about regimes that “claim” to be Marxist. In light of the Israeli-American attack on Iran, what does Jacobin find?
Branko Marketić is undoubtedly the best voice within Jacobin, but even his writing is subpar. The magazine is currently preoccupied with Zahran Mamandi’s conquests, while the real conquests of Elias Rodriguez are of no interest to it. The Guardian is quick to publish any pseudo-demonstration against Hamas in Gaza (the Guardian has a very sensitive democratic barometer; they conduct polls, even under pressure of genocide and starvation, to ask whether people are happy with the killing and starvation).
Of course, there are Jacobin names who also write for The Guardian, instead of denouncing it, which is the least left-wing belief. Jacobin magazine delegitimized our resistance under the pretext that it is not a Marxist resistance, but the magazine doesn’t have the nerve to publish any supportive material, even if the resistance is Marxist. Even more so, they will accuse the resistance of not being Marxist enough. Just look at how Jacobin delegitimizes the regime in Venezuela. All the talk is that it isn’t a Marxist regime, as it claims and alleges. In other words, even if a Marxist resistance were to arise, they would find that it “claims” to be so, because Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the true Marxists, not Nicolás Maduro or Daniel Ortega.
Jacobin’s discourse hurts us, but its discourse against the “establishment” (which I prefer to call the “imperial metropolis” to emphasize its status as a spatial and institutional unit and to make its analysis and the analysis of its institutions more coherent than the monstrous term “establishment”) is irrelevant and unrelated. The magazine’s discourse is aimed at us and our consciousness, not the decision-makers in Washington. What we read in Jacobin is not “cowardice,” or cleverness and deception of the American administration, but rather the real role of these people within the imperial discourse management system. What do we in the peripheries lose if Jacobin and its counterparts in the United States are shut down? Nothing.
Quite the contrary: the left around the world, especially in Latin America, will breathe fresh, methodological oxygen again, and the world and the global order will become more clear. Our voice, which American progressives want to hear in the wave of “decolonize X” and “listen to X” in some academic departments in the United States, is not our opinion of them or of the imperial metropolis that granted them discursive authority. For them, our armed resistance is not part of “listening to the locals.” They simply want to hold us accountable for what happens to us (contrary to their hypersensitivity to the suffering of their own people).
There is currently a trend in American universities that we have talked too much about colonialism and we should start paying attention to the “effectiveness” of the colonized—that they pampered oppressed peoples too much, and now we must hold them accountable. It’s similar to what Donald Trump is doing to US allies: We gave you a lot of money, now give it back. This is an American academic shift before it was fascist. American progressives have a share of our blood, and this fact must never go away. You’re being sarcastic toward us, not the American administration (of course, regardless of the “ageist” farce that the new generations are “different”).
source: Al-Akhbar