Campism: How Communist Doctrine Became the DSA’s Israel Problem

Mirah Wood, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee, recently described the images she finds emotionally moving: Palestinian fighters “in their little slippers” approaching Israeli tanks on October 7, 2023, the day of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. In a clip of a call circulated by the watchdog Canary Mission, Wood called the massacre “a shot really into the heart of empire itself.” Wood sits on the same International Committee whose members, The Times reported, were flown to China as VIPs, coached to avoid Beijing’s sensitive subjects, and asked to sign a pledge to “support, defend and build understanding of Chinese socialism.” Wood’s enthusiasm for October 7 and her committee’s enthusiasm for Beijing are not unrelated; they reflect the doctrine of “campism,” which now shapes the policies of New York, the largest city in the United States, under a DSA mayor.

What is “Campism”?

Campism divides world politics into two competing camps — an “imperialist” camp led by the United States, and an “anti-imperialist” camp that opposes Washington. Socialist loyalty automatically belongs to the anti-imperialist camp, regardless of what its members do to their own people. The Cold War term was coined for leftists whose loyalty to the Soviet Union survived Moscow’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which produced the related slur “tankies.” Campism requires treating any state opposing the United States as, by definition, on the right side of history.

The theory behind the term is sourced in basic Leninism. Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, building on the British economist J.A. Hobson, argued that once capitalism exhausted profitable investment at home, it would be forced to conquer foreign markets and labor to survive; American power and defense spending are read, in that lineage, as instruments of conquest rather than defense. Mid-century theorists — Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank — extended the argument into dependency theory: a wealthy “Core” permanently extracting from a “Periphery,” with the IMF and World Bank enforcing the debt relationships that move wealth upward. Campism is what happens when that theory becomes a foreign-policy reflex: support whichever government resists the Core, whether socialist, authoritarian, or theocratic, because resistance to Washington is treated as evidence of its own virtue. That is the frame Wood is speaking from when she calls a massacre a wound to “empire itself.” It is the same frame that put DSA delegates in Xinjiang, describing forced-labor reports as “scandal stories.”

Bandung’s Wedge

Throughout the 20^th century, the flagship cause of campism has become Palestine. At the 1955 Bandung Conference, 29 Asian and African states used the concept of a “Third World,” a nominally “Non-Aligned Movement,” which usually had ties to the Soviet Union or aspired to socialism, to create solidarity. Israel was excluded, though it was led by Labor Zionists, because of its American alignment. Egypt’s pan-Arab president Gamal Abdel Nasser, standing with China’s premier Zhou Enlai and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, put Palestine on the agenda. Representing the cause was Ahmad al-Shuqairi, a Palestinian diplomat then serving as an Arab League functionary, who in 1964 became the PLO’s founding chairman. Bandung’s final communiqué endorsed the rights of “the Arab people of Palestine” and, more consequentially, recast the self-determination of an indigenous people with thousands of years of unbroken connection to the land- the Jews- as European colonialism transplanted onto Asian soil. That recasting gave the Palestinian cause its standing inside the Non-Aligned Movement as a movement standing against Israel, a Western-aligned democracy, a case which was made to represent the entire Core-Periphery system the theory described.

Mao Made It Explicit

In March 1965, Mao Zedong told the first PLO delegation to visit Beijing, led by Shuqairi, exactly what Israel represented:

Israel and Formosa are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the continent, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you, and Formosa for us. Their goal is the same… The Arab battle against the West is the battle against Israel.

To Mao, Israel was not a land dispute. It was the West’s forward garrison, and destroying it meant weakening the West itself.

Beijing backed the theory with material. China was the first non-Arab power to recognize the PLO (1965), and it supplied direct military aid, light weapons, and guerrilla warfare training to groups such as Fatah, the PFLP (People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). After the Foreign Languages Press cleared Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung for international release in 1966, an Arabic translation followed in 1967, printed with Cairo and Beirut publishers for circulation inside Pan-Arabist networks. The timing followed the Six-Day War, which discredited conventional Arab armies and pushed militants toward Mao’s alternative: people’s war from below. The Little Red Book became training-camp curriculum for two rival Palestinian guerrilla factions, the PFLP and DFLP, in Jordan and Lebanon. George Habash, the physician who founded the Marxist-Leninist PFLP in 1967, called China “our best friend” around 1970. Nayef Hawatmeh’s 1969 splinter from Habash’s group, the DFLP, absorbed Maoism as doctrine so thoroughly that opponents nicknamed him “Nayef Zedong.”

Campism today: the Threat of Multipolarity

Campism’s current expression is the push for a “multipolar world,” a term shared by DSA’s China Working Group, the Kremlin’s ideologists, and Tehran. Foreign-policy critics — not only conservatives but center-left realists — note where this leads: DSA platforms call for withdrawing from NATO, dismantling security treaties with Japan and South Korea, and sharply cutting U.S. defense spending. These changes will not distribute power more fairly; they will open vacuums that authoritarian states stand ready to fill. A framework treating the United States as the default aggressor has no tools left to counter real expansionism by Russia, China, or Iran, since it assigns them the anti-imperialist role by definition.

The gap between theory and consequence is visible in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves. U.S. naval presence keeps it open, and every economy dependent on that oil, including the American one, depends on that presence remaining credible. A smaller, less credible United States does not produce a freer world; it produces a world where whichever regional power controls the chokepoint sets the price of energy for everyone downstream. The states’ socialist campism treats as natural allies against “empire” — China, Russia, Iran, and its proxies Hamas and the Houthis — offer no more open alternative: surveillance in Xinjiang, executions in Tehran, blockades of Red Sea shipping lanes. Withdrawing American power does not redistribute freedom. It removes the one actor with both the incentive and the capability to keep sea lanes, alliances, and markets functioning.

One Doctrine, Not Two

DSA has grown into America’s largest socialist organization, its ranks helping elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside a wave of down-ballot candidates nationwide. The doctrine romanticizing October 7 as an anti-imperial victory is also sending DSA delegations to Xinjiang as VIPs and asking them to sign pledges. The campism framework DSA inherited from Bandung and Beijing has become a tool of subversion in American politics as the DSA begins to dominate the Democratic Party, becoming a default lens on the world.

Sources

1. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).
2. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902).
3. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke University Press, 2004).
4. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003).
5. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).
6. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 111.
7. John K. Cooley, Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (Frank Cass, 1973).
8. Hashim S. H. Behbehani, China’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East 1949–1979 (Kegan Paul International, 1981).
9. Max Kendix, “DSA Members Pledge Support for Chinese Communist Party After VIP Trip,” The Times, July 30, 2026, https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/dsa-china-vip-trips-communist-party-jn9nt9kbf.
10. Canary Mission on X, https://x.com/canarymission/status/2084353610671124729?s=20
11. Dan La Botz, “Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Origins of Campism,” New Politics, Winter 2022.