Portside

In the weeks after October 7, abolitionist and civil rights activist Angela Davis offered some pointed advice to people on the left during an Al Jazeera interview: “If we are not prepared to think critically about what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem … we will not only be unprepared to understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis; we won’t be able to understand the world around us [and] the many struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe.” She went on to add that, “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we’re talking about imperialism, settler colonialism, transphobia, homophobia, the climate crisis.”

For Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, it could be useful to look more deeply at the history of international solidarity in U.S. movements, particularly in the last three decades. At various points mass mobilizations on global issues have gained a high profile: the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and beyond in 1999-2000, participation in the semi-annual World Social Forums beginning in 2001, the anti-Iraq war movement in the early 2000s, the support for the pro-democracy Arab Spring of 2010, and a series of international responses to austerity budgets and increasing inequality that eventually exploded into Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Subsequently, the 2010s erupted in reaction to the police-perpetrated killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, and dozens of other Black people. Mobilizations in response to these murderous police actions precipitated the formation of Black Lives Matter and culminated in the global reaction to the murder of George Floyd, where 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica took to the streets.

All of this built networks of personal relationships at the grassroots level and left permanent marks in the consciousness of millions, in some cases impacting the agendas of elected officials like “The Squad.” Still, it left a remarkably small residue of organizational infrastructure on which to grow a movement informed by internationalism. Instead, without an organizational center, we face the rise of far right and fascist formations across the globe coupled with the spiritual withering of center-left parties in France, Germany, Britain and of course the Democratic Party in the U.S.

Even more disorienting has been the fall from grace of national liberation movements. The degeneration of the organized global majority countries, in particular the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement with its New International Economic Order, has left an enormous void. National movements and states that people on the left revered in the past, such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa have either descended into webs of corruption, eschewed progressive policies for neoliberal and repressive paradigms, or both.

But the present actions in support of Palestinian liberation have reestablished hope in the possibilities of global solidarity. The hundreds of thousands of people coming onto the streets and social media are a clearcut indicator of belief in the power of collective action and imagination to make change regardless of how overwhelming the odds. While college campuses have been on the forefront of these actions, they have also included a considerable nonstudent cohort, including many Black and Brown people. Moreover, unlike in most U.S.-based campaigns of international solidarity, those directly impacted, namely Palestinians living in the U.S., have played an important leadership role in crafting this movement.

As the struggle continues, we need to contemplate the obvious: “What next?” In doing so, several key questions emerge. The most urgent, of course, is how to bring a halt to the mass murder and, once there is a permanent ceasefire, how to rebuild Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other areas devastated by murderous Zionist offensives. But there is also a need to ask more strategic questions: What have we learned from this situation that can steer us down a liberatory path rather than simply resting until the next eruption? We need a strategy to avoid the decline of activism that has ensued after each of the previous mobilizations.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed several activists who have been involved in prior campaigns of international solidarity. The cohort was intergenerational, though the majority were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement or the Black liberation struggle during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I asked them to focus on their own experiences and, in particular, offer explanations for the decline of international solidarity within left movements and the failure of more recent mobilizations to gain a permanent foothold.

In our discussions, organizers mentioned five main factors that affected the capacity to sustain internationalism in left movements. Perhaps most frequently noted were the organizational forms that emerged during these protests. These comments fell into two categories: the professionalization of political struggle and the lack of structure and leadership.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s largely relied on building a grassroots political base. In some cases, members paid dues, while leaders typically received modest pay or none at all. Puerto Rican independence fighter Alfredo Lopez contended that foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur, Soros — entered the movement space, relabeled it “social justice” and put forward a more moderate agenda. In the words of Chicago activist leader and historian Barbara Ransby, “Social justice becomes a job … where people are under the surveillance of philanthropy.” According to Lopez, these foundations “steered us away from international consciousness.”

Illinois youth development practitioner Posey described this process to Truthout as a “movement capture” which stresses “navigating the 501(c)(3) bureaucracy, not looking at how we connect with others people’s battles against U.S. imperialism.”

Cory Greene is co-founder and healing justice/NTA organizer of H.O.L.L.A., a New York-based community specific and healing justice focused “grassroots youth/community” program. He professes that his organization “stands on the legacy of the Black liberation movement.” He stressed the need for “institutional memory, to know how to pull on your lineages to heal.” He argues that the state and the nonprofit industrial complex has colonized these precious legacies or seriously diluted them.

By the same token, several organizers also believed that the absence of a clear-cut structure often undermined the potential continuity of these movements. Vincent Bevins, in his overview of mass protests in the 2010s, If We Burn, argues that the model adopted by most organizations, based on nonhierarchy, consensus decision-making, spontaneity, and large meetings in public spaces such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, obstructed the pathway to creating the type of structures, relationship-building and planning required to sustain a movement. Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz summed it up for Truthout like this: “For the last 30 years I get my hopes up that something is going to happen, and the only thing happening is a sort of anarchism but they didn’t have a program. [They] just talked about getting rid of the state.”

A second, frequently forgotten factor in the decline of international solidarity was the demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist bloc.” While the class nature and political practice of the Soviet Union were often controversial within the left, the existence of a counter pole to Western imperialism was a constant reminder that building a global political power with an anti-capitalist agenda was possible. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies included the building of a global solidarity network of nations, funding and political support for left-wing national liberation movements in southern Africa and Central America as well as backing for liberation support work in the U.S. and Europe.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was the continued Soviet backing of a Cuban Revolution that faced an intensive embargo by the U.S. Support from the USSR included $1.7 billion to retool Cuban industrial infrastructure from 1976-80 and military assistance of $4 billion in the mid-1980s. The Cubans themselves, with Soviet support, initiated their own solidarity efforts in southern Africa in the 1970s, sending thousands of troops to Angola to help successfully repel a major offensive of the South African military against Angolan freedom fighters.

Dunbar-Ortiz told Truthout she recalled that the fall of the Soviet Union “scared me to death.” She said some of her leftist friends were overjoyed, but she had worked in international structures like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization where she saw the concrete assistance the Soviet Union was giving to freedom fighters in the global majority countries. In hindsight she added, “I think it had a bigger impact than any of us ever analyzed.”

Thirdly, the U.S. state restructured its domestic and international strategy. Through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO, the government targeted key activists who advanced a radical internationalist agenda with a variety of tactics: assassinations such as the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, infiltration of movement organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society and the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the “legal” framing of political activists like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

They also shifted their strategy for imperialist intervention. As former political prisoner David Gilbert highlighted to Truthout, the U.S. opted for a “hybrid” model in which the U.S. supplied weapons and other hardware, but the bulk of the troops in places like Gaza or Iraq come from partner countries in the region. This reduced the extent to which the U.S. population felt the pain of war and quelled desires to protest its continuation. A byproduct of this was a shifting of the international political attention of the left away from the military-industrial complex and the quest for peace. The fall of the Soviet Union instilled false confidence among many activists that the threat of world war would disappear with the weakening of the U.S.’s main enemy.

The fourth issue mentioned was the ideological triumph of a technology driven culture of neoliberalism and individualism. We live in the age of the new robber barons — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and private equity funds that control much of global society with capital flows, surveillance and consumerist technology. This is reinforced by narratives that encourage the worship of wealth and increased power for internationalized capitalist firms. The media and often our cultural icons promote the narratives of the rich and superrich. Collective and cooperative efforts are seen as unrealistic or futile.

Migrant rights activist Maru Mora-Villalpando stressed to Truthout that the development of free trade agreements and their institutionalization in global bodies like the World Trade Organization promoted and advanced this ideology. In Mexico, for example, the installation of a free market in land ownership via the North American Free Trade Agreement has opened up ownership of Mexican agribusiness to U.S. transnational corporations, undermining local power.

Intimately linked to the advance of the neoliberal model has been the demobilization of organized labor. While we are seeing a resurgence in quarters such as with Amazon, Starbucks and the United Auto Workers, the percent of the U.S. private sector labor force that is unionized plummeted from 20 percent in 1983 to just over 11 percent in 2023. Unions can become important vehicles of internationalism. Most belong to global federations, which in key industries can create structural links that facilitate solidarity actions around boycotts, sanctions and labor issues.

Though certainly all unions do not take such stances, these international ties were highly active during the anti-apartheid movement, with workers often refusing to unload goods coming from or going to South Africa. They also played an important role during Occupy and the general strike in Oakland, California, and even today we see the longshore unions refusing to load and unload ships connected to Israel.

Lastly, interviewees stressed the complexity of solidarity. Ransby noted the importance of asking what “a liberation movement is for, not just what it is against” as well as avoiding the liberal view that “it is their struggle.”

New York attorney and organizer Jindu Obiofuma noted the importance for activists in the U.S. to recognize their positionality. She stressed that solidarity “begins with humility.” For her, in the U.S. this means “decentering what it means to be in the belly of the beast.” She noted a tendency for folks in the West to act as if they are “telling people fighting for liberation in other countries how best to fight for their lives based on principles rooted in their own analyses and experiences.” She stressed that for Western activists, especially white people, solidarity requires setting aside notions of white supremacy and American exceptionalism and “stepping back from yourself, doing what it is that the people you’re in solidarity with tell you to do and understanding that might come with some risks.”

Ultimately, witnessing the genocide in Palestine has forced many on the left to view the global political economy through another set of lenses. Activists are connecting dots of the military-industrial and prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity — connections that had often disappeared behind the pressure of the system to isolate struggles and sectors of the oppressed population into silos.

The powers that be strive to push all left history, including that of international solidarity, off the map and replace it with the triumphalist narrative of the “Google world.” Poet June Jordan once said that how we respond to the Palestinian struggle is a “litmus test for morality.” Learning from the past is key to passing that test.

[James Kilgore is a father, partner, activist and writer based in Urbana, Illinois. He is a Building Community Power Fellow at Community Justice Exchange and director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program. He is the author of seven books, including Understanding Mass Incarceration and Understanding E-Carceration, four of which were drafted during his six-and-half years in prison. His latest is co-authored with Vic Liu, The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration.]

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