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Originally published in Tempest. In this contribution to Tempest’s 2025 education series, which has been lightly revised for length and clarity, David Camfield discusses working-class internationalism as an alternative to both nationalism and the kind of anti-imperialism that politically supports oppressive regimes in conflict with Western imperialism. I think the starting point for thinking about internationalism is to think about nationalism. Today we live in a world where nationalism is everywhere. We all grow up inside nationalism one way or another. Of course, that’s going to look very different in the U.S. or Canada than in Palestine, Iran or Venezuela.
But most of us learn to see the world in nationalist terms as we grow up, and the whole idea that underpins nationalism is that nationalism is all about, to use an academic phrase, an imagined community. The idea is that we are all members of the same nation, no matter if you’re Jeff Bezos or someone working in an Amazon warehouse. There is supposedly something that unites all members of the national community, regardless of what the real differences in their lives are, whether they’re differences of wealth, power, or anything else. And so we often assume nations are just the way things are. But this is actually not the case. It hasn’t always been that people have lived in nations and thought of themselves as members of nations. Nations are not ancient or natural ways of humans organizing themselves. So it’s important to pause to think about how nations and nationalism came to be. When people tell stories about nations that make it seem like a particular nation has always existed or has existed since antiquity, that’s a modern story that’s being told, and that’s a kind of retrospective projection—projecting back into the past something that wasn’t really there. If you actually look into human history, you find that nationalism is a modern phenomenon. Nationalism was originally the ideology of rulers who were building new states in the modern era and coming into conflict with their imperial opponents. Think about the formation of the United States out of the southern colonies of British North America, and later the Canadian state out of British North America’s northern colonies (the term “the Canadian state” makes the point that it’s a multinational state made up of Canada—the dominant nation—, Quebec, and Indigenous nations). There were also people who were becoming the rulers of new states who were in conflict with pre-capitalist ruling classes— for example, in the French Revolution that created the modern French state or the creation of states like Italy and Germany out of what had previously been many smaller jurisdictions. The ideology that there was a community that bound together everyone, rich and poor, in these nations was a new thing. As the Italian politician Massimo d’Azeglio famously put it in the 1860s, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” People were speaking different languages, and there wasn’t a single national culture. And so the people ruling these new states had to actually create, from the top down, this new way of organizing society. They did this to try to unify the population under their rule, to secure their rule over the direct producers—the workers and peasants who actually produced the wealth of society. They were also often doing this in the midst of conflict with other forces, other states. So, again, nationalism has not always been there. These states were created before nations were created. It’s not that there was an ancient nation that then created a state. Another way that nationalism came to be so important was as a way of mobilizing a unity of people across social classes against imperial or colonial domination, usually under the leadership of the middle class or sometimes actually capitalists. We can think of Ireland, for example, which was Britain’s first colony, or India fighting for its national liberation from British colonial rule, or Mexico’s and Cuba’s struggles against U.S. domination. These are all examples where you had modern nationalisms that arose as part of these struggles against imperial or colonial domination. In these examples, nationalism was what was used in order to unite forces against colonial domination. It was a part of the struggle for independence and national self-determination. But whether you have nationalism coming out of experiences like the United States or the Canadian state or France or Italy on the one hand, or whether on the other hand it arose as part of national liberation struggles, it served the leaders of these nationalist movements, who were either ruling classes already or groups that were trying to become new ruling classes. They needed to devise a unifying ideology. They had to have common symbols that people would identify with— flags, rituals, a common language, and so on—that would replace older, smaller-scale identities and cultures that people had connected with or understood the world through. This was a process of inventing traditions in which these nationalist leaders had to construct these ways of unifying people who had very different interests as all members of this new national unity. If you look into the history of the nations, you can see how this was done. Because nations haven’t existed for all time, all nationalisms have something in common, and there’s always the question of who is going to be included or excluded from the nation. Who’s going to get to count as a member of the nation, and on what terms are people going to be members of the nation? Are women going to be full members of the nation or not? Patriarchal domination put its stamp on many nationalisms, and women then had to fight for inclusion or equality within these nationalisms and nations. Are queer people counted as members of the nation? Are speakers of a language that’s not the dominant national language members of the nation? In white-majority or white-dominated nations, are non-white people members of the nation at all, are they second-class members of the nation, or are they equal members of the nation? There are fights about all these things, about who counts, who’s included, who’s excluded. That’s true of all nationalisms, whether they’re nationalisms of a powerful imperialist state or nationalisms of an oppressed nation. This takes us to another really important point, which is that although all nationalisms have something in common – they’re all imagined communities that unite people across lines of oppression and across class lines – they’re not the same politically. There’s a really important difference we have to recognize: the difference between the nationalism of nations that are dominant in the imperialist world order we live in and the nationalism of oppressed nations. The nationalism of the United States, of course, is a prime example of the nationalism of an oppressor. Canadian nationalism is also the nationalism of an imperialist power. On the other hand, there’s the nationalism of Mexico, which is oppressed by U.S. and Canadian imperialism. Within the United States and the Canadian state, there are the nationalisms of Indigenous nations, which are oppressed by settler colonialism. In the U.S. there’s also the distinct phenomenon of Black nationalism. Within the Canadian state, there’s also Quebec nationalism, which is the nationalism of a nation that’s still politically subordinated within the Canadian state but oppresses Indigenous peoples within the borders of Quebec. These are all politically different from U.S. nationalism and Canadian nationalism. Nationalisms of the oppressor, like U.S. and Canadian nationalism, are 100% reactionary. There is absolutely nothing good about the nationalism of an oppressor nation. But it’s a little bit different when it comes to the nationalism of the oppressed because these nationalisms can be progressive to a limited extent, to the extent that they express struggles against oppression. That said, the nationalism of the oppressed is still nationalism, so it has the problem of bonding people together across class lines. Working-class people and ruling-class people are all supposed to be members of the same national community – the exploited and their exploiters!. But the nationalisms of the oppressed, because of the way that they’re related to struggles against oppression, are often the way that people are going to express their opposition and wage their fights. Even if these nationalisms of the oppressed have their problems, it would be a terrible mistake for socialists to dismiss them. For example, consider Mexican nationalism. It was a way for the capitalist class and state authorities to bind together the population into the project of building the modern Mexican nation-state. This was done at the expense of workers, campesinos, and Indigenous peoples. At the same time, these very people have expressed their opposition to U.S. domination of Mexico in nationalist terms. But the Mexican ruling class has also used nationalism to try to prevent workers and the oppressed from organizing independently and fighting for change. Nationalisms are all nationalisms, but not all nationalisms are the same. We have to be able to politically distinguish between nationalisms of the oppressor and nationalisms of the oppressed. As supporters of socialism from below, we should never be nationalists, even when we’re in solidarity with people who are fighting against oppression in nationalist ways. This brings us to working-class internationalism. This is the alternative to nationalism. The key idea of working-class internationalism is that working-class people, wherever they are in the world, have common interests, and that our loyalties should be to our class everywhere, not to any nation. Old slogans, which go back to the 1800s, like “workers of the world unite,” come out of this tradition. In countries like the U.S. and the Canadian state in the early twentieth century, when people who were not citizens were talked about as aliens, there were slogans like, “No alien but the capitalist,” which is part of this tradition of international solidarity. Working-class internationalism is completely compatible with support for national liberation movements against imperialism. But there’s always been a debate about this too. For example, Rosa Luxemburg had a different take on this than Lenin did. This has always been a politically debated issue among supporters of socialism from below. But it’s certainly possible, I think, to be a consistent supporter of both working-class internationalism and also of national liberation struggles against imperialism and settler colonialism. Working-class internationalism was born in the 1800s. In the second half of the 1800s, you had the first international working-class organization, the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), which Karl Marx was part of. But there are a lot of other examples. Famously, in Britain, textile workers in places like Lancashire and Yorkshire, who themselves were suffering a great deal during the U.S. Civil War when the Union navy was blocking Confederate exports of cotton to Britain, exhibited strong support for the struggle against slavery. They did so even when it meant being thrown into unemployment. This is part of the long and proud history of working-class internationalism that we need to know, celebrate, and explain to people. Unfortunately, this tradition is not well known today. Later in the 1800s, there was the so-called Second International, the Socialist International, which was set up by people who considered themselves to be supporters of the ideas of Marx and Engels. World War I was a tremendously important turning point as an appalling war between imperialist powers about how they would divide up the world. Most leaders of parties affiliated to the Second International capitulated to nationalism and supported their respective states in the war. Socialists who opposed that war and then went on to support the Russian Revolution of 1917 were supporters of a renewed working-class internationalism. Most believed that it was necessary to have socialist revolutions that would be carried out by workers’ councils, which would create a much more democratic way of working class people running societies than any parliament. They united in what was called the Communist International (Comintern), often called the Third International, an organization of revolutionary socialist parties committed to working-class internationalism. What came later, in the late 1920s through the 1940s was what some people call the “midnight of the century,” to use a phrase of Victor Serge, with both fascism and Stalinism acting as tremendously powerful counter-revolutionary forces. These forces dealt terrible blows to working-class internationalism. But they didn’t manage to kill it, fortunately. In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, working-class internationalism has continued in various forms. You can go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when people in advanced capitalist countries supported the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. In the Canadian state in the 1980s there were workers who engaged in hot cargo actions—they wouldn’t handle goods coming from South Africa. In 1986, this took the form of a week of action where telephone workers wouldn’t deal with calls coming from South Africa. Mail processing workers wouldn’t sort the mail from South Africa. In Ireland, a small group of grocery workers went on strike for three years, between 1984 and 1987, because of their refusal to handle South African goods. In the twenty-first century, we saw May Day 2008. On that day on the west coast of the U.S., the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) struck against the occupation of and war in Iraq that the U.S. was carrying out. And throughout the late twentieth century into the twenty-first century, there’ve been all sorts of significant cross-border solidarity initiatives between workers in the U.S. and workers in Mexico, supporting independent Mexican unions and other organizations of people in struggle in Mexico. There haven’t been nearly enough of these moments, of course, but they’re there and we need to know that history and try to promote such efforts today. Even if working-class internationalism is no longer as strong as it was when it emerged in the middle of the 1800s, it has never died. This is a tradition we’re a part of. We need to know it, celebrate it, and extend it. But from the late nineteenth century on, nationalism gained ground inside the workers’ movement, challenging working-class internationalism. After all, nationalism is part of the dominant ideology of most capitalist societies. People are taught nationalism at home, at school, in their churches and other religious institutions, and so on. The ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class. Nationalism is the most important form that this takes in the world. So of course working-class people are going to be affected by that. But there’s also another aspect of the problem, and that is reformist politics. Most of the time, working-class people who want to change society for the better are going to think about doing so in terms of reforms within the existing social order, rather than replacing capitalism with a new kind of society. If your understanding of the kind of change that needs to be made is limited to social reforms within the confines of the framework of capitalism, which will be carried out by existing state institutions, you’re going to see the world through the eyes of the existing state. And you’re likely going to accept the framework of the existing state and the nationalism that goes along with that. Supporters of working-class reformist politics may have a different idea of what the nation should stand for than their employers do, but they’re still going to be seeing the world in nationalist terms. Of course, we have to make an important distinction between different kinds of reformism. Not all reformism is the same. Most working-class people who want change for the better look to reformism to enact that change. Their reformism is pragmatic. It arises because people don’t believe that a revolutionary transformation of society is possible. This is different from the commitment to reformist politics that comes from the leaders of reformist political parties, the leaders of official unions, and the like. They’re committed to reformism not in a conditional or pragmatic way. For them, reformism is a coherent ideological commitment fully consistent with their interests as a distinct social layer because the explosion of a social revolution would endanger the organizations and institutions they run. They’re going to be committed to nationalism because they’re deeply committed to reformism. World War I, as I mentioned earlier, was a really important turning point because it was the point at which workers’ movements that on paper were committed to international solidarity and opposed to war saw, in most cases, the leaders of their unions and political parties actually support their own national rulers in the inter-imperialist slaughter that happened between 1914 and 1918. When the commitment to internationalism was put to the test, in most cases it was found wanting when it came to the important political parties and unions of the working class. Another historical development that we need to understand around all of this is how Stalinism was a very negative influence on working class internationalism. Socialists and other radicals all around the world rallied to defend the Russian Revolution of 1917 against counter-revolution. A bunch of countries, including the U.S., were sending military forces to overthrow the new revolutionary government that had been created by the working-class revolution. A way for people to express international working-class solidarity was to oppose military intervention against the Russian Revolution. But problems arose whenever supporters of the Russian Revolution in other parts of the world were uncritical in their support of the Bolsheviks who had led that revolution. This became a really significant problem from about 1923, when the politics of the ruling layer that had consolidated itself in the USSR really became counter-revolutionary. Those rulers adopted the slogan of “socialism in one country,” which cloaked the reality that their project had become economic development in Russia, which could only be carried out by exploiting workers and peasants. Instead of hanging on in isolated Russia in the hope that revolution elsewhere would come to the rescue of the Russian Revolution, the new rulers in the USSR subordinated world revolution to their project of national economic development. By the end of the 1920s, these leaders had consolidated as a new ruling class. They ensured that Comintern parties around the world were subordinate to them, both in terms of supporting the domestic policies of the new ruling class in the USSR and also its international policies. What did this mean? Consider Spain in the 1930s: There was a fascist military coup in 1936, and the working class and peasants rose up against it. What then happened was a civil war between fascist and anti-fascist forces and at the same time a social revolution within the non-fascist territories of Spain. That revolution was ultimately suppressed by the leadership of the anti-fascist side, with the Spanish Communist Party and the rulers of the USSR playing an important counter-revolutionary role. At the very same time, the Comintern was calling on people around the world to support the struggle against fascism in Spain. In the same vein, after the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 the rulers of the USSR became very concerned to try to build an alliance with governments in Britain, France, and other countries against Nazi Germany. So they told Communist Parties in European colonies that it was more important for them to support this foreign policy alliance effort than it was to fight against colonialism. In other words, the rulers of the USSR directed them to subordinate the struggle against imperialism to the USSR’s foreign policy objectives. This became even clearer in 1939, when the USSR signed a treaty with Nazi Germany. The alliance between these two countries was an extraordinarily disorienting political experience for many, many people on the left who’d looked to the USSR as an anti-fascist force. This was followed by the invasion of Poland. Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and the USSR invaded from the other direction. They carved up Poland between them. The USSR then also militarily expanded into the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, conquering them. Communists around the world were told that they had to support these acts of aggression in the name of international working-class solidarity. Stalinism was actually gutting the meaning of international working-class solidarity. After World War II, there was the Cold War—the face-off between the USSR and the United States and its allies. This was an inter-imperialist conflict. There were also a number of national liberation struggles that were happening around the world at this time. The message that the rulers of the USSR sent this time, a message which became very influential as a way of thinking about politics, was that the world was divided between what they called an anti-imperialist camp, which they led, and an imperialist camp. That became how left forces that supported the USSR saw the world. Most of the rest of the left lined up with the US and other Western states in the name of “democracy” against “totalitarianism.” Here we see the development of two different ways of seeing the world as fundamentally divided between good states and bad states. Even though these were very different political visions whose supporters clashed with each other, they had this two-camp view in common. Both visions replaced thinking politically about the interests of the international working class (including national liberation) with thinking about the interests of a group of states – which meant the interests of ruling classes. The ideology of the new ruling class in the USSR, Marxism-Leninism (which had nothing to do with the ideas of Marx or Lenin), changed the meaning of internationalism for many people on the left around the world. Instead of consistent international working-class solidarity and anti-imperialism, “internationalism” came to mean being aligned with some states against Western imperialism. Later, in the late twentieth century, when the USSR collapsed and when China opened up to the world market and adopted a kind of market Stalinism, there was tremendous disorientation among people on the left who’d accepted that “internationalism.” Where does this leave us today? The United States doesn’t have the power that it once had in the world. It is, of course, a very powerful state, but it is also in decline. We also see the rise of China relative to the U.S. and to other imperialist powers. Russia has emerged as a regional imperialist power as well. And all around the world, we see the rise of hard right and far right nationalists of one kind or another. So, whether it’s in the U.S., Europe, India, the Philippines, wherever it is, these kinds of right- wing nationalist forces are growing. And then on the U.S. left, we have, on the one hand, people who end up saying that if only the U.S. had a different government than the Trump administration it could go back to being a force for good in the world, promoting “democracy” against “authoritarianism.” It’s a way of saying that although there may be criticisms to make of the U.S., the left should see the U.S. as a force for good or potential force for good. We can hear this from Bernie Sanders, for example. Nationalism is also common on the Canadian left. There’s an old term dating back to the early twentieth century for this kind of politics: social patriotism. It’s putting a left gloss on U.S. or Canadian nationalism. In this kind of thinking, there’s a way of seeing the world that divides it into so-called democratic countries, which are supported against the undemocratic ones like Russia and China. This is a way that the left ends up tailing behind Western imperialism. On the other side of the coin is a kind of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” politics. Here the idea is that people on the left should politically support governments in conflict with the U.S., such as the former Assad regime in Syria, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Chinese ruling class, or even Putin’s Russia, treating them as supposedly anti-imperialist forces. This kind of politics flows from an understandable hatred of the U.S.—a disdain or revulsion people feel for what the U.S. does in the world. But being anti-U.S. is not the same as being anti-imperialist. Such “enemy of my enemy is my friend” politics ends up seeing the world in U.S.-centric terms. Whether people are for or against the U.S. becomes the way that you assess them politically, rather than actually thinking about the global capitalist world we live in and where particular forces fit in that. What’s the alternative to these terribly flawed kinds of politics? We need to renew internationalist anti-imperialism, which means thinking globally about how there’s a class antagonism, everywhere in the world, between exploiters and exploited. Socialists should be on the side of the exploited everywhere, in every country. At the same time, the world is organized in an imperialist hierarchy. It has the U.S. at the top, but there are other imperialist powers too, including the Canadian state. We should be opposed not just to U.S. imperialism but to all forms of imperialist power and subordination. International anti-imperialism is about being guided by the principle of consistent internationalist working-class solidarity and consistent anti-imperialism. So internationalist anti-imperialism inside the U.S. starts with unflinching opposition to U.S. nationalism. It means being opposed to the tariffs the U.S. state may want to impose. We’ve seen this become even more of an issue under Trump. Unfortunately, the United Auto Workers’ leadership supported Trump’s auto sector tariffs. This is a strategy that ends up saying that the jobs of U.S. autoworkers are more important than the jobs of Mexican or Canadian autoworkers. In the Canadian state, internationalist anti-imperialism starts with opposition to Canadian nationalism. Socialists need to argue against workers aligning with their employers and governments in economic and geopolitical competition. What we need is international working-class solidarity, not competition. The interests of workers in the U.S. are not advanced when workers align with their employers or with the U.S. state. Instead, U.S. workers need to forge bonds of solidarity with workers in other countries. That’s an example of how to concretely apply internationalist working-class politics. The same is true in the Canadian state. Additionally, we need to be opposed to U.S. and Canadian support for Israeli settler-colonialism – and to Israeli settler colonialism itself. This means we hold a position of unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. That doesn’t mean giving political support to Hamas, Fatah, or any other existing Palestinian political current. Socialists have to make a distinction between being in unconditional solidarity with a national liberation struggle and politically supporting specific political forces within any national liberation struggle. When it comes to U.S. attacks on Iran, we’re unconditionally against any imperialist aggression and intervention. But that doesn’t mean giving any political support whatsoever to the rulers of Iran, who came to power as a result of their counter-revolutionary suppression of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In this situation and others like it, being opposed to any imperialist aggression is elementary. Yet that doesn’t mean politically endorsing the government of the Iranian capitalist state or any other state in conflict with the U.S. Instead, in Iran we should support the very courageous embattled forces that are fighting for democracy, independent democratic trade unions, women’s rights, the rights of oppressed nations, and so on. When it comes to U.S.-China rivalry, socialists must refuse to line up with the rulers of the U.S. in their increasingly intense economic and geopolitical competition with the rulers of China. We must oppose all forms of anti-Chinese racism and the demonization of China. But at the same time, we shouldn’t in any way support the rulers of China. We have to refuse the idea that China is anything other than a capitalist society. And we want to be in solidarity with people fighting for change from below within China. Along with this, we should defend the right of Taiwan to self-determination. Taiwan is a potential flashpoint for the U.S.-China rivalry. We need to support the right of the people of Taiwan to determine their own future. That includes opposing both any effort by China’s rulers to annex Taiwan and attempts by the U.S. state to subordinate Taiwan to its own interests. Finally, I’ll just mention Ukraine and the Russian invasion. This is a clear example of Russian imperialism. Supporting the right of people of Ukraine to determine their own future without conquest and domination by Russia is important. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean in any way politically supporting the Ukrainian government – it’s a neoliberal government that’s completely aligned with NATO and Western European imperialism. What’s complicated about the war in Ukraine is that it’s a war of national self-defense by Ukraine against Russian imperialism that’s caught up in the rivalry between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism. So there are two dimensions to the war. This means the character of the war could change. If Western imperialist forces became more directly involved it would then become mainly an inter-imperialist war rather than what it is now, which is mainly a war of self-defence against Russian imperialism. If that were to happen, we’d have to change our stance and favor the victory of neither side. However, at present we should favor a victory for Ukraine, without politically supporting the Ukrainian government. There are two specific pitfalls we need to avoid with respect to Ukraine. One is seeing the war in Ukraine as only or mainly a conflict between Western imperialism and Russia. That’s geopolitical reductionism. It negates Ukraine’s self-defence against Russian aggression. Another mistake, which we see some leftists in Europe making, sadly, is opposing Western imperialism, Chinese and Russian imperialism but treating Russian imperialism as worse than other imperialisms. So some leftists are supporting European governments spending more money on military expenditures, and some of them justify it in the name of anti-fascism. They say that Western Europe has to build up its military power against the threat of Russian fascism. They’re unfortunately being driven by their fear of Russian imperialism into lining up with the imperialism of Western capitalist powers. This is a really unfortunate drift and we need to challenge these comrades about it. To wrap up, let’s remember the core idea of socialism from below: when working-class struggle happens, it has a logic to it, a tendency that if the struggle keeps on growing and advancing, people find themselves in situations in which they have to grapple with organizing in new democratic ways in order to take the struggle forward. This might happen within the context of a strike: You have a situation where you have a strike happening on a large scale, and then you have the question of how are we going to make sure that food delivery still happens? And how are we going to still keep public utilities going and so on. When we realize that we can’t rely on the official leaders of the movement, people may begin to organize new democratic forms, organize themselves to do what these forces can’t or won’t do. We saw this in Sudan, as people were building a democratic mass struggle against the military regime. New democratic forms have the potential to spread and to become more advanced, and then they actually pose a challenge to the ruling class.You can have a situation in which on-the-ground struggle grows into these new democratic structures created by people through their own activity. We can call this dual power: a new form of power, which could become the way that people rule and organize societies themselves, pitted against the existing power of the capitalist state and employers. This isn’t something which is imported into the struggle by socialists. This is something that comes out of the experience of class struggle. It reaches new heights, poses these new problems, and people come up with new solutions to those problems, new ways of organizing. And that’s the seed of a new society. It has the potential to grow and develop into the basis of ways in which people take control of society into their own hands and begin a transition to a totally different kind of society. This is the idea at the core of socialism from below. This is what the process of the working class emancipating itself looks like. And it’s from that perspective that we come at the question of internationalism. International solidarity and consistent anti-imperialism are necessary parts of the struggle for workers’ self-emancipation. That struggle for self-emancipation doesn’t have borders. We live in a capitalist world that has never been so interconnected as it is now. The fate of people in one part of the world system is bound up with the fate of people in other parts of that system. By supporting internationalism from below, or working-class internationalism and consistent anti-imperialism, we’re recognizing that reality. We’re trying to rise to the challenge of living in this world that we find ourselves in. But we don’t have a dream of a different society that comes out of nowhere. Our gamble is that these struggles from below for people to free themselves have this potential within them to create the basis of a new society. by David Camfield
originally published by Tempest En français: archivesrevolutionnaires.com Donald Trump’s recent threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on Canada if it “makes a deal with China” is making more people in the Canadian state1 worry about his “America First” administration’s bullying. Some also fear that in the future, Trump might try to act on his past talk about Canada becoming part of the U.S. This fear can easily lead people to support the “elbows up” Liberal Party federal government headed by Mark Carney in spite of its commitment to austerity targeting public services and the workers who deliver them, expanding fossil fuel extraction and mining, implementing anti-migrant policies, and dramatically boosting spending on the military. To help us navigate these increasingly stormy political waters, the Left needs a compass. While Trump is unlikely to follow through on his latest tariff threat, we can expect that this won’t be the last time that his administration or a more coherent future MAGA government in Washington uses economic pressure to try to get Ottawa to comply with its desires. So, how should the Left respond to “trade war” or other forms of economic friction between the two countries? John Clarke lays out the basic approach: The working class has to operate in a context that is dominated by its class enemies. We didn’t generate the rivalries among them or draw the borders between states, but we have to advance our interests under the conditions imposed upon us. Our class has nothing to gain from the trade war and no responsibility to find solutions for Canadian capitalism. Our viewpoint should be shaped by hostility to ‘our’ capitalists and robust solidarity with workers in the U.S. and Mexico. People in the U.S. and Mexico should adopt the same viewpoint: hostility to their employers and working-class solidarity across borders. International solidarity, not competition! Helping “our” bosses and governments compete with their rivals in other countries is a road to lower wages, worse jobs, weaker workplace rights, social programs, and environmental protections, and attacks on the rights of Indigenous nations. Once we accept that capitalist goal, anything seen as a barrier to higher profits becomes a problem. Nationalist fervor also leads to more hostility–often racist–against anyone who’s “unpatriotic” or who “doesn’t belong.” The federal Liberals’ approach to the Trump administration, “despite being represented as the alternative to U.S. dominance… in fact mirrors core elements of Trumpism. It proposes a militarized economy that will require the gutting of social, education and health services,” as James Cairns and Alan Sears point out. Any meaningful left politics must oppose and organize against this, “refus[ing] to reproduce Trump’s agenda of militarization, resource extraction and attacks on working-class people.” It can’t be said too often that it’s not the Left’s job to help Canadian business owners or whoever governs in Ottawa. Our task is to foster the power of unions and social movements to defend people against them and fight for a better world, with the ultimate aim of revolutionizing the society they rule. We shouldn’t propose policies to help them manage capitalism. Instead, “The left must develop and fight for an alternative political and economic vision,” as Todd Gordon argues. When economic turbulence hits, we should fight for better income support measures for laid-off workers. We should challenge workplace closures, inspired by the example of Ex-GKN workers in Italy: Faced with layoffs, they occupied their car parts plant and have been campaigning for its conversion into a workers’ cooperative that would recycle solar panels and make cargo bikes. We should demand the creation of well-paying secure public sector jobs as part of a radical Green New Deal, along with other reforms that chip away at social and ecological injustice. In Gordon’s words, “Such an agenda… can be realized only if we develop a strategy centred on mass struggle, and only if we refuse to limit our collective vista to the defence of Canada.” That’s how the Left should respond to economic bullying by the U.S. But what about any future U.S. moves to alter the political relationship between the U.S. and Canadian states? The first thing that needs to be said is that despite Trump’s bluster, it’s very unlikely that the U.S. will try to annex Canada. There would be a lot of downsides to annexation for a MAGA government even if the new arrangement gave Canada a status similar to Puerto Rico’s, in which citizens wouldn’t have the right to vote in U.S. elections. MAGA leaders definitely wouldn’t want nearly 30 million new eligible voters, most of whom would support public health care, same-gender marriage, abortion rights, trans rights, and other rights that the far right hates. Fearmongering about a U.S. invasion and annexation has bad effects: it stokes Canadian nationalism and makes people more likely to accept whatever the government in Ottawa says it needs to do for the good of Canada. Less unlikely than annexation but still improbable is a future U.S. move to impose some kind of political arrangement short of annexation that formally ties the hands of the government in Ottawa in some ways, rather than just relying on economic pressure to get what it wants. Even if they’re improbable, the Left needs to have an orientation to such possibilities because of how many people in the Canadian state are talking about them. In the U.S., it’s obvious: The Left should oppose any and all such moves by Washington. They’d be imperialist aggression against a junior partner. In the Canadian state, the starting point should be recognizing that the Canadian state is a settler-colonial capitalist society built on and sustaining the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. In addition, it is a state built through the conquest of what is now Quebec, which still does not have the right as a nation to freely determine its relationship to the multinational federation. Although most Canadian nationalists deny it, so-called Canada is also an imperialist power within the global capitalist order. The record of what Canadian companies and governments do in relation to countries of the Global South is damning. Happily, more people on the Left at least partially grasp that the country we live in is a predator in relation to most of the people of the world than was the case during 1960s through the 1980s, the heyday of Canadian left-nationalism. It’s when people consider Canada in relation to the much more powerful country to its south that they often lose perspective. The first socialist principle that’s relevant here is that in conflicts between imperialist powers like the U.S. and the Canadian state, the Left shouldn’t back either side. What’s true about conflicts between the U.S. and China or Russia over resources for their capitalists and the political influence of their governments is also true about conflicts between the U.S. and the Canadian state (or another country that’s weaker than the U.S. but still in the imperialist tier of the global system). From the standpoint of the working class and oppressed people globally, such conflicts can only be harmful. Aligning with Canada’s rulers in their disputes with the U.S. is always to the detriment of working-class people here. “When elephants fight it’s the grass that gets trampled,” as the saying goes. This means that the Left shouldn’t champion “Canadian sovereignty.” Everyday people don’t rule the Canadian state – the owners of corporations and top state officials make up the dominant class in this capitalist society. “Canadian sovereignty” is their rule, not ours. It’s exercised at the expense of Indigenous nations, Quebec, and workers of every nation it touches. Opposing annexation–incorporating one country into another by force–is also a socialist principle. It’s not that we’re in favor of defending nation-states, their borders, their flags, or their myths. Everyone who’s against the power of capital should be an internationalist who aims to build solidarity between working-class people of every nation. Opposition to annexation is a basic question of democracy: the merger of countries should only happen when the people who live in them democratically decide to merge. Any future move by the U.S. to directly dominate the Canadian state–changing the relationship between what are now two independent states, one much more powerful than the other, with jurisdiction over societies that are extensively economically interconnected–or even annex it should be opposed by the Left. Why? Because its practical effects would include more attacks on social programs, union rights, equality rights, and other gains won by the past struggles of workers and oppressed people. In spite of being utterly inadequate from a socialist perspective, for the most part these are stronger north of the Canada-U.S. border than south of it. Many workers, women, queer, trans, and racialized people who live north of the border know that conditions for people like them are worse in the U.S. They don’t want to live in a country run by the hard-right Conservative Party of Canada who like a lot about MAGA politics even if they think it goes too far. They really don’t want to live in a country much more subordinated to the U.S., let alone in an expanded U.S.A. Fear of their lives getting worse can easily lead them to buy into maple leaf nationalism and support the Liberals as a lesser evil than the Conservatives. The Left should respond to that fear by organizing against what the Liberals are doing today to manage capitalism and by popularizing a radical alternative agenda. Mostafa Henaway is right: “The strategic question now is how to build a mass, multiracial, working-class resistance to Carney at the scale required, capable of sustained confrontation.” We should also oppose, in an internationalist way, any future move by a far-right U.S. government for direct domination or annexation. If the U.S. ever makes such a move, people north of the border should rise up against the aggression with mass protests, strikes, and occupations and fight for a better society–not to defend the status quo–and call on everyone in the U.S. who’s against the far right to do the same. Such opposition mustn’t involve allying with any of Canada’s rulers. Instead, we would argue for it to be conducted in an internationalist spirit, fighting for a world in which ordinary people can flourish, a world of freedom and ecological rationality. Our allies are everyday people in the U.S. and elsewhere who are fighting the far right and the liberal capitalist decline that fuels it. Originally published in Canadian Dimension. Clarifying key points from recent critiques The following article is a response to “Contested legacies, possible futures” by Herman Rosenfeld, published in Canadian Dimension on January 5, 2026. I thank Herman Rosenfeld for writing his long review of my Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left in an appreciative and comradely tone in spite of what he rightly calls his “substantial disagreements” with some of its arguments. Rather than engage with those disagreements, I’d like to clarify a few points, particularly regarding certain views that Rosenfeld mistakenly imputes to me. The main thrust of Red Flags’ analysis of the USSR from 1928-1991, China from 1949 until the end of the 1970s, and Cuba from 1959 to the present is that these “Actually Existing Socialist” (AES) countries were class societies in which the central political bureaucracy of the party-state was a ruling class that exploited the direct producers. Rosenfeld gives short shrift to the book’s crucial argument that AES countries were class societies that were not in transition toward communism, focusing instead on the secondary argument about how to characterize their socio-economic nature (in my view, a kind of state capitalism, in which the logic of capital operates in a distorted way). With respect to my reflections in the book on the prospects for engaging a transition to communism in the future, Rosenfeld insists on my hostility to the political party as a vehicle for socialist politics. This is a misrepresentation. In the book’s brief concluding discussion of “a few essential elements of a viable communist politics for our time,” I contend that breaking with capitalism and starting a transition to a classless and stateless society of freedom (communism) remains possible in our time and advocate practising “communist politics.” However, I explicitly refrain from any attempt to outline what such a politics should look like. And nowhere do I “eschew all forms of electoral participation” by socialists. Nor do I advance any argument against the importance of “even explicitly socialist political parties.” For the record, I wish socialist forces in Canada were strong enough that it would be worthwhile running candidates in elections to at least help ongoing efforts to build working class power in workplaces and communities and popularize socialist politics. And as I have written elsewhere: [E]ven reformist parties are sometimes part of the process through which the working class develops as a political force. For that reason, it’s a mistake for radicals who support working class struggle to refuse to ever get involved in parties that don’t share all our ideas. Anarchist socialists take that stand. Most Marxist socialists, myself included, don’t. We believe that it’s important to learn from and try to influence important political experiences that large numbers of worker activists are going through. On another important issue for the left today, Rosenfeld maintains that “calling opposition to NATO ‘anti-NATO neo-campism’ is particularly problematic.” It would indeed be a serious problem if Red Flags equated all opposition to NATO with anti-NATO neo-campism. However, the book just doesn’t make this conflation. It devotes a single page to discussion of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of opposition to NATO because many Marxist-Leninists today adopt this stance.
Further, I have to say that I am puzzled by the reviewer’s discussion of the Marxist-Leninist popular front strategy in positive terms. Rosenfeld refers to “encouraging working class resistance to speed-up and wage controls during the Second World War in the face of government enforced anti-strike laws, supposedly to support the war effort.” In fact, it is well-documented by historians that after the rulers of Nazi Germany broke their alliance with Stalin’s government and invaded the USSR in 1941 Communist Parties in the US and Canada became uncritical supporters of their governments and actively opposed strikes and workers’ resistance to employers’ efforts to intensify their work. These parties even supported the racist wartime internment of people of Japanese heritage. This orientation was the result of these parties’ application of the popular front strategy, central to which is the idea of building an alliance that encompasses a so-called “progressive” wing of the capitalist class—supposedly represented at the time by FDR and “New Deal” Democrats in the US and Mackenzie King’s Liberals in Canada. And finally, for the record, rather than referring to Gramsci “as a Stalinist” as Rosenfeld claims, the book very briefly mentions him as one of a number of “thinkers and currents lacking a radical systematic critique of Stalinism [that] also have ideas that can contribute to a communist politics for our time.” David Camfield is a professor in the Labour Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. by David Camfield
Originally published in Spectre We are living in a historical period deeply shaped by global capitalism’s Long Depression and by the worsening ecological crisis caused by this mode of production. These processes underpin both the sharpening rivalry between the West, China, and Russia and the dynamic of asymmetrical radicalization in which the right is growing stronger, the neoliberal centre is weakening, and an uneven resurgence of left radicalism lags far behind. In the current moment, left-wing forces are pulled politically either toward the stance of the rulers of the West or toward various often-reactionary forces in conflict with Western states. This results in a tendency to both pro- and anti-Western campism. Worryingly, the pull to either campism remains much stronger than the influence of insurgent popular struggles that encourage consistent internationalism, anticapitalism, and anti-imperialism. In addition, responses to pernicious anticommunism tend to adopt a sympathetic or celebratory stance to so-called “socialist” countries rather than evaluating them from an emancipatory perspective. When so much needs to be understood about the force of these dynamics in this context and about many other distinctive and important aspects of the world today, why would anyone want to devote time to reading two US socialists writing between the late 1940s and the turn of the century, especially given their preoccupation with the “Russian Question” (the social-political character of the long-gone USSR) and the politics of Communist Parties? In spite of what some readers will perceive as the irrelevance of the texts by Phyllis and Julius Jacobson compiled by Paul Heideman and Kent Worcester in the over 550-page long reader Third Camp Socialism, these writings are both of historical interest and (in some cases) real political value today.1 The aim of this essay is neither to laud nor to polemicize against the authors. Rather, I aim to examine their Marxist commitments from the vantage of our moment in history. The Jacobsons’s analyses of the USSR, other “socialist” societies, and Communist Parties were flawed in nontrivial ways, and their socialist politics had other notable weaknesses. Nevertheless, they had a profound grasp of the indispensability of democracy for both the transition to communism and the development of working-class movements capable of launching such a transition. They also consistently maintained a resolute internationalist opposition to both the US ruling class and its geopolitical rivals, resisting the enormous pressure to accommodate one or the other. Indeed, situated as they were between Stalinism and Stalinophobia, both the Jacobsons’ failures and resolute successes in navigating between these political poles are instructive for contemporary Marxists in today’s context of increasing geopolitical rivalry. Julius Jacobson (1922–2003) and Phyllis Garden (1922–2010)—who switched to using her husband’s last name in the 1960s to avoid trouble with the US Social Security system—became Trotskyists in New York City in their teens.2 They were part of the large minority of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) that broke away in 1940 to form the Workers’ Party (WP). The split was caused by the minority’s opposition to policies they found unacceptable—unconditional defence of the USSR (whose rulers had just signed a pact with Nazi Germany) and support for its invasions of Poland and Finland—and by disagreements on the character of socialist organization.3 The WP renamed itself the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1949. As Julius later wrote, after the war the WP/ISL “went into a more or less steady decline” (a decline, it must be noted, experienced by all left forces in the USA of the time).4 In a Cold War climate intensely hostile to radicalism, “[t]here was not only a decline in membership but a gradual erosion of the movement’s revolutionary ideological perspective”—a drift noticeable in the group’s foremost leader, Max Shachtman.5 At Shachtman’s initiative, the ISL dissolved into the social democratic Socialist Party in 1958. In 1961 Julius and Phyllis launched the journal New Politics (first series 1961–76, second series 1986–). Their goal was to use the publication to communicate the “Third Camp” politics of the early ISL “[i]n an open forum with others” on the left who championed neither capitalism nor Stalinism.6 The Jacobsons’s project was motivated by their opposition to Shachtman’s (and most other former members of the ISL’s) support for US imperialism against the USSR and abandonment of the politics they once supported: revolutionary-democratic socialist opposition from the standpoint of the exploited and oppressed to both capitalism and Stalinism (understood as a noncapitalist class society, or bureaucratic collectivism). Most of the articles contained in Third Camp Socialism were originally published in New Politics. Most of the essays are credited to Julius but, as the book’s preface recognizes, he and Phyllis collaborated very closely in developing their ideas and writing. The writing is mostly very clear, well-crafted, and often lively—the product of learning to engage seriously with ideas at a young age in a vibrant working-class “infrastructure of dissent” afforded by the socialist organizations of the 1930s, rather than university classrooms.7 Third Camp Socialism is organized into five parts, each with a brief introduction by the editors: “Social Movements,” “Left Debates,” “The Russian Question,” “War and Peace,” and “Students and Teachers.” The reader also includes an editorial preface useful for readers unfamiliar with the authors and the WP/ISL, as well as an interesting interview with the Jacobsons.8 The major themes of the compilation are the character of the USSR and its influence on world politics, the CPUSA, the Cold War, US imperialism, fighting racism in the US, and defending civil liberties. There are also noteworthy defences of young New Leftists and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics against criticism by Irving Howe (the founder of the journal Dissent who had quit the ISL as he moved rightwards). The book also includes Julius’s memorable short essay “The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman,” which conveys the admiration and affection many young Trotskyists of the 1930s felt for Shachtman as well as revulsion for the “moral and political death” represented by his becoming a renegade.9 Historical insights and blinkers People interested in the history of the radical left in the US will find much of interest in Third Camp Socialism. Julius edited the magazine Anvil from 1949 to 1952 (soon renamed Anvil and Student Partisan after a merger) and his articles give the reader a sense of student politics in the early years of the Cold War, before the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s. The same is true of political debates in the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s and the extent of racism in US unions in that decade. Phyllis’s review essay on the memoir Scoundrel Time by blacklisted Hollywood writer Lillian Hellman identifies the “almost complete political amnesia” and retrospective self-justification of this former longtime sympathizer of the CPUSA. Identifying these problems with participant accounts of the Red Scare is a helpful corrective to many people interested in left history today, who remain insufficiently attentive to them.10 Thanks to the interview with Phyllis and Julius, they also illuminate aspects of the life of the organization and two of its leaders, Shachtman and Hal Draper. A significant feature of these politics is the combination of an unsparing opposition to racism coupled with a lack of recognition of the importance of Black self-activity. In contrast, such a recognition had been expressed by CLR James in 1948, the year after he left the WP: “the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own;… is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation… and… has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States.”11 A substantial 1961 article on socialism in the United States written by Julius for British readers emphasizes how the ease with which US workers won basic democratic rights in the 1800s “removed from the experience of the American working class their necessary participation as an independent, revolutionary political force.” This judgment ignores how Black and other racially-oppressed workers of non-European origin had to fight long and hard for such rights. It also fails to consider the political consequences of their struggles, insight into which was available at the time thanks to W. E. B DuBois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and other historical studies. Finally, it also exaggerates how easily most nineteenth century European immigrant workers won these rights.12 This article is also oddly dismissive of the historical significance of the Industrial Workers of the World. Considerable attention is given in Third Camp Socialism to the CPUSA. The Jacobsons’s emphasis on the party’s undemocratic Stalinist conception of socialism, functioning, and political culture will likely douse the enthusiasm of readers only familiar with its members’ energetic involvement in union and community organizing and with the anticommunist repression they faced. An article by Phyllis challenges “revisionist” historians who celebrate the accomplishments and initiative of CPUSA members, especially in the Popular Front years from 1935–39, reminding readers of the lack of “freedom of thought” and the “censorship and, no less tragic, self-censorship” of members.13 In her judgment on the party’s conception of socialism, Phyllis asks: What was the effect of the Party on socialist consciousness?… In one word, disastrous…it lowered socialist consciousness by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working-class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist, a view shared by reactionaries quick to point to Soviet society and say with delight: ‘That is socialism! Socialism means repression in every sphere of life.’… Thousands who were attracted to the Party and joined its ranks were cruelly disillusioned by the experience, lost to the socialist movement.14 Unfortunately, the power of the Jacobsons’s unsparing Marxist critique of the CPUSA’s politics is weakened by its exaggeration of the party’s regressive character and the idea that the party was alien to US society. Julius wrote of “Stalinism’s historic mission to destroy the organization and image of socialism”—a formulation that confuses Stalinism’s very real and very harmful impact with a supposed “historic mission.” In 1961 he commented on the elimination of the “restrictive influence” of the CPUSA “as an obstacle to socialism.”15 But the marginalization of the CPUSA by the repression of the “Second Red Scare” that began in 1947 and lasted a decade did not improve the prospects of supporters of anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism, for whom the influence of anticommunism in US society remained a major obstacle. Years later Julius characterized the CPUSA as “not a movement of the American left but a totalitarian incubus that fed on labor and progressive organizations, functioning in the left and against it.”16 This aspect of their analysis is inaccurate and can fairly be dubbed Stalinophobic.17 This is even more curious given that the Jacobsons rejected Stalinophobia—at least as they understood it—characterizing it as a “political virus” that saw “all of politics…through the prism of anti-Stalinism” and led those in its grip to side with capitalism against Stalinism.18 Nevertheless, their particular Marxist critique of Marxist-Leninist forces outside of the “socialist” societies treated these parties as nonproletarian forces intrinsically alien to working-class movements—that is, as embryonic bureaucratic collectivist ruling classes. This view is not shared by most anti-Stalinist Marxist analyses; such parties are better understood as rooted among workers or peasants and committed to a politics that equated socialism with the kind of society established in the USSR. This Stalinophobic error is not original to the Jacobsons. They adopted Shachtman’s theory developed after the end of the Second World War, which concluded, as Peter Drucker puts it, that “even in countries immune to direct Soviet control, Stalinism was a qualitatively greater danger than any other force.”19 Readers should look elsewhere for guidance on understanding Communist parties.20 According to Samuel Farber’s apt judgment, “The Jacobsons only partly recognized, and lagged behind in politically assimilating, the changes that had taken place [after the decline of the political influence of the CPUSA and the USSR in the 1950s], often lacking a sense of proportion in overestimating the influence of Stalinism.”21 Lasting political value What gives the articles compiled in this volume their enduring political value is the commitment to an emancipatory Marxism that burns at their theoretical core. The foremost expression of this commitment is their understanding that the democratic control of society by the working class is indispensable for transition towards a classless and stateless society of freedom (communism in Marx’s understanding). A society not ruled by the direct producers themselves cannot be in transition to communism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the longest chapter of the book, “Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist,” a piece that every Marxist should read. Here Julius, while acknowledging Deutscher’s “brilliant literary style,” conducts a forensic examination of his observations and predictions about the USSR and Mao’s China. Crucially, Jacobson demolishes Deutscher’s claims that there is “a law of revolution which dictates that…it becomes the responsibility of a small elite to establish its dictatorial rule over the masses in order to smash the old order and consolidate the revolution, thereby permitting the eventual realization of the revolution’s long-term social objectives” and that supposedly socialist “benevolent dictatorship[s]” are justified by their “growth of the productive forces” in spite of their lamentable oppressive features.22 Read today, this critique of Deutscher’s thinking provides a devastating challenge to political defences of the Chinese and Cuban governments and, more broadly, to the view that societies organized along the lines first established in the USSR at the close of the 1920s were, notwithstanding their defects, in transition to communism. It makes clear that state ownership of the means of production does not necessarily make a society better than capitalism. Jacobson also shows that transition towards communism cannot happen when the direct producers have no control over how their labor is organized and allocated; working-class rule through radically democratic institutions is indispensable. However, in spite of their explicit rejection of it, their writing on the USSR is needlessly weakened by Stalinophobia. The USSR’s ruling class caused the deaths of millions of people, not “tens of millions.”23 Moreover, calling the USSR a “Slave State” is inaccurate even though there was large-scale forced labor under Stalin.24 Their frequent use of “totalitarian” to describe the USSR without explaining (except in one very brief comment) the difference between their use of the concept and the more common meaning given by anticommunists is at best unhelpful.25 Referring to Stalin as an “oriental despot” is dubious.26 To claim, as Julius did in 1962, that “the West is certainly preferable to the East,” sits uneasily with the socialist stance of “Neither Washington Nor Moscow” he and Phyllis adopted from 1940 on.27 This tendency in their outlook was in part a product of the mistaken WP/ISL view that capitalism was in decline and Stalinism, “the most immediate and forceful threat to capitalism,” was rising. 28 It also flows from the group’s inadequate theory of Stalinist societies and the relationship between their mode of production and global capitalism (matters not illuminated by anything found in Third Camp Socialism). Finally, it needs to be noted that the chapter “Reflections on Fascism and Communism” in this collection misses the specificity of the Nazis’ exterminationist racist project, a weakness also reflected in discussions of the Second World War in other chapters.29 Another aspect of Phyllis and Julius’s politics is their intransigent defence of civil and democratic rights—including those of CP supporters—that makes no concessions to liberalism. In 1953, in the face of McCarthyism, Julius wrote that “socialists have a dual responsibility: they must demonstrate how [the] fight for the truly liberal values is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, for socialism; and, second, in a more concrete manner they must emphasize the validity of democratic values which are being called into question by liberals and negated by politicians.”30 The relevance of this argument should be obvious at a time when already-weakened rights are under attack both by the right and its liberal “opponents,” including governments in London, Paris, and Ottawa. The authors are equally consistent in their anti-imperialism up to and including the “War on Terror” at the end of their lives, with Julius writing scathingly in 2002 of “ex-leftists beating a hasty retreat from radical traditions and politics as they wave the American flag, write briefs extolling the virtues of their newly discovered patriotism, and diligently devote their intellectual energies to the patriotic mission of convincing as many who will listen that an imperialist war is a just war.”31 Their anti-imperialism is notably untouched by the logic that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend,” This attitude—which embraces any and all enemies of the US state—was common in their times and persists in ours. Regrettably, the Jacobsons erred in the opposite direction in denying that the war against US imperialism in Vietnam was in any sense a national liberation struggle because it was led by Stalinists.32 The intergenerational solidarity—unwavering but not fawning—seen in their defences of the New Left and Millett against Howe is exemplary for older radicals today who recognize their obligation to defend young radicals against media vilification and punishment by university administrators and state authorities. Also of value are their discussions of the USSR’s relationship with Nazi Germany before the 1941 Nazi invasion, the USSR’s role in the Second World War, and the interimperialist character of that war. These subjects are frequently obscured both in mainstream histories and in accounts sympathetic to the USSR. The Jacobsons’ reflections are useful given the political salience of these topics for both anticommunists and Marxist-Leninists today. Above all, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson were US Marxist political writers of their times. Much of the writing compiled in Third Camp Socialism is still worth reading today because of what it offers to Marxist analysis and political thinking despite the Stalinophobia that mars it in places. This testifies to the strength of the authors’ theoretical formation and the depth of their commitment. I do not think the same could be said were there to be analogous new compilations of writings by their counterparts of the same generation who were at the helm of publications like the social democratic Dissent and “Third Worldist” Monthly Review. The pressures on leftists today to align with Western states or with their rivals—especially China with its rulers’ impressive state-steered capitalist development project—will not be overcome by delving into the writings of twentieth century anti-Stalinist Marxists. But anticapitalists who are at least open to critical evaluation of the “socialist” societies will benefit from reading at least some chapters of this book, which will appear in a paperback edition from Haymarket Publishing in 2026. It would be unfortunate if the length of this volume deters some potential readers from exploring its contents. Although the reader is not free of repetition, the editors’ decisions about what to include are mostly unobjectionable in a book intended for library acquisition. But the sheer size of Third Camp Socialism makes it less appealing to the readers who will benefit most from sampling what it contains; for their benefit, a more stringent approach to selection that emphasized the authors’ very best work would have had merit. Readers should also be aware that, in spite of its title, the perspectives on offer in this collection are not entirely reflective of the politics of the current originating with the WP, a fuller understanding of which requires sampling the writings of at least Shachtman (before his rightward drift) and Draper as well as major documents of the WP/ISL. I believe it would be an error to think that an updated version of the politics of the WP/ISL could be adequate for our time; too much has changed in the world, and even at its best this socialism had significant shortcomings, some of which have been touched on in this review. That said, people who see the need for a liberatory socialism for our time can still learn a lot from the best ideas of this current. by David Camfield Published in Midnight Sun Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge, around 10,500 workers, went on strike from August 16 to early in the morning on August 19. The workforce is 70 percent women and mostly young – three-quarters of them have fewer than five years of seniority. They are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) because Air Canada was once a federal Crown Corporation that was then privatized. Workers had been on strike for only a few hours when the Liberal federal government intervened. The jobs minister told the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) – the federal labour board in whose jurisdiction workers in air transport fall – to direct the union to end the strike and order that the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. This intervention was widely expected, since the Liberals have done this before on several occasions, using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. On most of those occasions, union officials simply complied, but this time they didn’t. The workers stayed on strike. CUPE National President Mark Hancock tore up the CIRB back-to-work order in front of a cheering crowd of strikers at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The message from CUPE’s top officers and those of CUPE’s Air Canada component was clear: the only way the strike would be settled would be through negotiations. This was undisguised defiance of the order under Section 107, whose legitimacy CUPE officials rejected. Hancock said he was willing to go to jail if that’s what it came to. This can happen. CUPE National President Grace Hartman did time in jail back in 1981 for not ordering Ontario hospital workers who were on an illegal strike to return to work, and Jean-Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was jailed in 1978 for not telling members to respect a back-to-work law passed to end a postal strike. The Air Canada strike was absolutely solid, which was no surprise because the strike authorization vote had been 99.7 percent in favor, with a 94.6 percent turnout. Flight attendants were strongly in support of the key union demands: significant wage increases to make up for all the erosion of their wages’ buying power under the previous contract – which had been a ten-year collective agreement! – and an end to the unpaid work that’d long been accepted in the industry: the norm according to which flight attendants are paid only for the time the plane is in the air, not for any time they spend on the plane while it’s on the ground, before or after a flight. Although the strike completely grounded Air Canada flights and was disruptive for travellers, there was a lot of sympathy for the flight attendants. CUPE officials had laid the groundwork for this with effective public communications efforts focused on the issue of unpaid work. Members of other unions and other pro-union people started to join the picket lines. For many active union members, leftists, and, I think, lots of other working-class people, seeing Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order and insisting that the strike wouldn’t end until the union had negotiated an agreement was electrifying. For anyone who’s been dismayed by the federal government’s use of Section 107 to snuff out strikes and worried about how that gives the idea to provincial governments that they could add similar provisions to the provincial labor laws that cover about 90 percent of workers in the Canadian state, CUPE drawing a line against the back-to-work order was really inspiring. The Canadian Labour Congress put out a statement on August 17 demanding that the order be withdrawn. It pledged financial and other support for the strike, and “unwavering solidarity” if the government took legal action against CUPE. No surprise that it was vague about what action that commitment would translate into, but it was still unequivocal support for a law-defying strike. And it called on the government to pledge not to use Section 107 against a strike again and to remove that section from the law as soon as parliament next sits. The strike continued into Monday, August 18, with bargaining suspended, but that evening it was announced that the union’s bargaining team would be meeting with Air Canada. Early in the morning on Tuesday, they announced a deal had been reached and the strike was over. CUPE’s statement made it sound like a great victory had been won: Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge have reached a tentative agreement, achieving transformational change for our industry after a historic fight to affirm our Charter rights. Unpaid work is over. We have reclaimed our voice and our power. When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back – and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on. That’s how most people who supported the strike are thinking about the outcome, but it didn’t take long before facts came out that paint a different picture. An offer they couldn’t refuse? The tentative agreement that flight attendants ended up with gave them a choice between ratifying the deal and rejecting it, in which case annual wage increases would be determined by arbitration, but everything else that was negotiated would end up in the collective agreement anyway. That’s not at all how the collective bargaining process usually works. Unionized workers have the right to vote to accept or reject a tentative agreement in its entirety, unless binding arbitration is being used to determine outcomes. But in this case, very unusually, because the CIRB had declared the strike was over in legal terms, workers were presented with a ratification vote that didn’t allow them to actually reject the deal. CUPE officials agreed to a settlement that denied workers that right and prevented them from going on strike again to fight for a better deal in this round. They didn’t win a negotiated tentative agreement that workers could accept or truly reject, which would have treated the back-to-work order as a dead letter, let alone force a withdrawal of the order. As for what was in the four-year tentative agreement, there were wage increases. For people with fewer than five years of seniority, it was 12 percent in the first year, and for the rest, 8 percent. After that, it was 3 percent, 2.5 percent, and 2.75 percent. (This was far less than what Air Canada pilots – mostly men – got in 2024 in the first year of their new contract: 26%.) There was also partial ground pay, for an hour or just over an hour per leg of a flight, depending on the width of the plane body, with percentages rising from 50 percent of flight attendants’ in-flight hourly pay rate this year to 70 percent in 2028. Those were gains, absolutely, but they don’t mean unpaid work is over or that this is a transformational change. Flight attendants showed what they thought of the proposed negotiated wage increases by how they voted in the ratification vote that ended on September 6: 99.1% voted to reject, with a 95% turnout. While voting no when there was no prospect of going on legal strike again was obviously an easier decision for workers than in a situation where that refusal would’ve sent them back to the picket lines, the overwhelming rejection expressed a clear sentiment: anger with Air Canada, the federal government, and, for some, CUPE. Arbitration is unlikely to result in significantly better raises. Although it’s hypothetically possible that flight attendants could still respond to the arbitrator’s eventual decision on their annual pay increases by going on a wildcat strike that defies the law and their union officials, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There would have to be really strong organization among rank-and-file workers outside of the official union structure, with confident militant rank-and-file leaders, preconditions that seem doubtful right now. There’s some evidence that as the collective experience of the strike recedes into recent memory, flight attendants are instead expressing their anger at the employer in individual ways. For example, the Instagram account @unfair_canada reports that “flight attendants [are] booking off [sick] in record numbers.” CUPE’s Air Canada Component posted on Facebook that “there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of disciplinary meetings for social media posts, particularly screenshots taken from the Air Canada Flight Attendant Discussion Board on Facebook. These posts are leading to discipline, up to and including termination.” All in all, I think the outcome was a partial and complicated win. Workers won real gains in pay, but not the right to reject a deal and fight for a better one. What happened seems unlikely to be a big deterrent to the federal government using Section 107 to end strikes in the future. And a situation where workers didn’t have the right to reject the deal presented to them was clearly advantageous for Air Canada – and for CUPE officials. The company got a guarantee that the strike wouldn’t resume, and union officials got insulation against rank-and-file pressure to fight for a better deal and lead more strike action. Also, making a deal that workers can’t genuinely reject is bad for union-building. It’s not democratic. It took the decision about whether the deal was good enough out of workers’ hands. This isn’t going to encourage the most militant workers who were really inspired by striking to get more involved in the union. A bigger victory was definitely possible. Air Canada was completely grounded. They were losing a lot of money, so they were under a lot of pressure. Management was completely unprepared for what happened. They expected the federal government would intervene and then CUPE officials would tell workers to comply with a back-to-work order. During the strike, CUPE put out an online graphic with a quote from an interview that Air Canada’s CEO Michael Rousseau did with BNN Bloomberg on August 18. Rousseau said, “Well, we thought, obviously, that Section 107 would be enforced, and that they wouldn’t illegally avoid Section 107.” If the strike had gone on longer, I think flight attendants could have achieved a much bigger win for themselves and for the working class as a whole. Even if they hadn’t forced the government to rescind the back-to-work order, they could have won a deal with bigger gains that treated the order as a dead letter – a deal that workers could ratify or truly reject. That would have been an amazing precedent. And if there had been sympathy job action by airport workers or any workers at Air Canada’s main competitor WestJet – slowdowns, calling in sick, or not crossing picket lines – other employers would have been freaking out behind the scenes and leaning on Air Canada to settle. I don’t know whether any sympathy action would’ve happened if the strike had lasted longer, since it’s illegal and most workers today have no experience of doing it, but it’s not impossible that at least a little bit could have happened, especially if the government had moved to punish CUPE for defying the law. Aina Kagis, former CUPE Regional Director for Saskatchewan, sees the way this “inspiring” strike was ended as “an excruciatingly disappointing outcome for the flight attendants” and “an opportunity squandered.” According to Kagis, “CUPE’s leadership could have nurtured the flight attendants’ militancy, creating momentum for growing militancy within the labour movement.” A missed opportunity for building momentum So why did CUPE officials end the strike the way they did? For the top people at CUPE National, I think the main goal was to negotiate a settlement with some gains for flight attendants. They didn’t want to have everything decided by an arbitrator. After the government intervened, that was still their overriding goal. Winning a political victory against the use of Section 107 against strikes, which would have been a victory for the working class as a whole, was secondary. Once the strike forced Air Canada back to the bargaining table, union officials dropped that objective and focused on the main goal. They did so because, above all, they’re committed to collective bargaining. That legally regulated, tightly controlled process is at the core of what the layer of full-time union officials, both elected officers and staff, do. It’s their key function, along with handling grievances, which is how disputes over workers’ rights in collective agreements are dealt with in between rounds of collective bargaining. I think the top leaders at CUPE have shown they’re prepared to support militant action if that’s what it takes to preserve conventional collective bargaining. That makes them different from the heads of many other unions. Blatant government intervention with back-to-work orders and legislation undermines conventional collective bargaining. So CUPE’s leaders are sometimes willing to support workers challenging that kind of attack on bargaining or even lead the challenge, as they just did. They’re willing to sometimes use militant tactics to fight for goals that aren’t radical. That militancy is constrained by the fact that defying the law can lead to massive fines for unions. This can damage unions as institutions, and even threaten their ability to operate. For the union officialdom of full-time officers and staff, that’s a different kind of problem than it is for rank-and-file union members, because the former depend on the union machine in order to keep on functioning as officials. So once CUPE’s top officers saw a path to getting a deal that would end the strike and defuse the threat of big fines or criminal charges against them for defying the law, they went for it. This isn’t the first time they’ve done it. In 2022, when CUPE’s Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) was in bargaining and then was hit with preemptive provincial legislation to stop them from striking, they defied the law and struck anyway. Other workers began organizing sympathy strikes to support OSBCU. Yet, as soon as Ontario premier Doug Ford said he’d withdraw the law if the strike ended, CUPE National officials and other union officials put pressure on the president of OSBCU to accept the offer and go back to bargaining without the power of striking workers and their many supporters as leverage. And that’s what happened. From a distance, the outcome of the Air Canada strike can easily look like what CUPE National said it was. So lots of people probably think it was simply a tremendous win. That will encourage union activists to use it as a positive example. They can say, “Look, CUPE defied the law and won; that’s what we should prepare to do if we have to.” That’s good. It’s good that flight attendants showed you can have a strike that’s popular and that defies the law and wins, even though it causes inconveniences for lots of people. It’s good that Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order was all over the news. But what actually happened wasn’t what it looks like from afar. To me, what happened confirms that we can’t rely on the union officialdom to fight to win in a consistent way, even when the officials are more militant. Union members who want unions that are really militant, democratic, and solidaristic need to organize themselves on their own and work to change our unions. We need to build caucuses, groups of members who take to heart what the Clyde Workers’ Committee said in Scotland back in 1915: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.” An earlier version of this article was published on tempestmag.org. For more on the Air Canada strike, check out episode 57 of the podcast Victor’s Children. Originally published in Tempest.
by David Camfield Flight attendants at Air Canada (AC) and Air Canada Rouge, around 10,500 workers, went on strike from August 16 to early in the morning on August 19. The workforce is 70 percent women and mostly young—three-quarters of them have under five years of seniority. They are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) because AC was once a federal Crown Corporation (a publicly owned company) that was then privatized. Workers had been on strike for only a few hours when the Liberal federal government intervened. The jobs minister told the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), the federal labor board in whose jurisdiction workers in air transport fall, to direct the union to end the strike and order that the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. This intervention was widely expected, since the Liberals have done this before on several occasions, using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. On most of those occasions, union officials simply complied, but this time they didn’t. The workers stayed on strike. CUPE National President Mark Hancock tore up the CIRB back-to-work order in front of a cheering crowd of strikers at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The message from CUPE’s top officers and those of CUPE’s Air Canada component was clear: The only way the strike would be settled would be through negotiations. This was undisguised defiance of the order under Section 107, whose legitimacy CUPE officials rejected. Hancock said he was willing to go to jail if that’s what it came to. This can happen. CUPE National President Grace Hartman did time in jail back in 1981 for not ordering Ontario hospital workers who were on an illegal strike to return to work, and Jean-Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was jailed in 1978 for not telling members to respect a back-to-work law passed to end a postal strike. The strike was absolutely solid, which was no surprise because the strike authorization vote had been 99.7 percent in favor, with a 94.6 percent turnout. Flight attendants were strongly in support of the key union demands: significant wage increases to make up for all the erosion of the buying power of their wages under the previous contract—which had been a ten-year collective agreement!—and an end to the unpaid work that’d long been accepted in the industry. This work is just part of the job for flight attendants, who have only been paid for the time the plane is in the air, not for any time they spend on the plane while it’s on the ground, before or after a flight. Although the strike completely grounded AC flights, and was disruptive for travelers, there was a lot of sympathy for the flight attendants. CUPE officials had laid the groundwork for this with effective public communications efforts focused on the issue of unpaid work. Members of other unions and other pro-union people started to join the picket lines. For many active union members, leftists, and, I think, lots of other working-class people, seeing Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order and insisting that the strike wouldn’t end until the union had negotiated an agreement was electrifying. For anyone who’s been dismayed by the federal government’s use of Section 107 to snuff out strikes and worried about how that gives the idea to provincial governments that they could add similar provisions to the provincial labor laws that cover about 90 percent of workers in the Canadian state, CUPE drawing a line against the back-to-work order was really inspiring. The Canadian Labour Congress, the equivalent of the AFL-CIO in the U.S., put out a statement on August 17 demanding that the order be withdrawn. It pledged financial and other support for the strike, and “unwavering solidarity” if the government took legal action against CUPE. No surprise that it was vague about what action that commitment would translate into, but it was still unequivocal support for a law-defying strike. And it called on the government to pledge not to use Section 107 against a strike again and to remove that section from the law as soon as parliament next sits. The strike continued into Monday, August 18, with bargaining suspended, but that evening it was announced that the union’s bargaining team would be meeting with Air Canada. Early in the morning on Tuesday, they announced a deal had been reached and the strike was over. CUPE’s statement made it sound like a great victory had been won: Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge have reached a tentative agreement, achieving transformational change for our industry after a historic fight to affirm our Charter rights. Unpaid work is over. We have reclaimed our voice and our power. When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back—and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on. That’s how most people who supported the strike are thinking about the outcome, but it didn’t take long before facts came out that paint a different picture. The tentative agreement that flight attendants will be voting on only gives them a choice between ratifying the deal and rejecting it, in which case wages will be settled by arbitration, but everything else that was negotiated will end up in the collective agreement anyway. That’s not at all how the collective bargaining process works in the Canadian state. Unionized workers have the right to vote to accept or reject a tentative agreement in its entirety, unless binding arbitration is being used to determine outcomes. But in this case, very unusually, and because the CIRB had declared the strike was over in legal terms, workers have been presented with a ratification vote that doesn’t allow them to actually reject the deal. CUPE officials have agreed to a settlement that denies workers that right and prevents them from going on strike again to fight for a better deal in this round. They didn’t win a negotiated tentative agreement that workers could accept or truly reject, which would have treated the back-to-work order as a dead letter, let alone force a withdrawal of the order. For people with under five years of seniority, it’s 12 percent in the first year, and for the rest, it’s 8 percent. After that, it’s 3 percent, 2.5 percent, and 2.75 percent. And there is partial ground pay, for an hour or just over one hour per leg of a flight, depending on the width of the plane body, with percentages rising from 50 percent of the hourly pay rate this year to 70 percent in 2028. Those are gains, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that unpaid work is over or that this is a transformational change. The ratification vote is ongoing, from August 27 to September 6, online and by phone, and I expect that some won’t vote at all because of their disappointment, anger, and resignation from knowing that even if they reject the deal, they won’t be allowed to fight for a better one. But because expectations were high, maybe a majority will vote no. Although it’s hypothetically possible that flight attendants could reject the deal and then go on a wildcat strike that defies the law and their union officials, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There would have to be really strong organization among rank-and-file workers outside of the official union structure, with confident militant rank-and-file leaders, preconditions that seem doubtful right now. All in all, I think the outcome is a partial and complicated win. Workers won real gains in pay, but they don’t have the right to reject a deal and fight for a better one. What’s happened seems unlikely to be a big deterrent to the federal government using Section 107 to end strikes in the future. It’s worth pointing out that negotiating a deal that workers don’t have the right to actually reject had advantages both for the company and for CUPE officials. The company got a guarantee that the strike wouldn’t resume, and union officials got insulation against rank and file pressure to fight for a better deal and lead more strike action. Also, the outcome of a deal that workers can’t genuinely reject is bad for union-building. It’s not democratic. It took the decision about whether the deal was good enough out of workers’ hands. This isn’t going to encourage the most militant workers who were really inspired by striking to get more involved in the union. A bigger victory was definitely possible. Air Canada was completely grounded. They were losing a lot of money, so they were under a lot of pressure. Management was completely unprepared for what happened. They expected the federal government would intervene and then CUPE officials would tell workers to comply with a back-to-work order. During the strike, CUPE put out an online graphic with a quote from an interview that AC’s CEO Michael Rousseau did with BNN Bloomberg on August 18. Rousseau said, “Well, we thought, obviously, that Section 107 would be enforced, and that they wouldn’t illegally avoid Section 107.” Air Canada was completely grounded.If the strike had gone on longer, I think CUPE could have won a much bigger win for flight attendants and for the working class as a whole. Even if they hadn’t forced the government to rescind the order, they could have won a deal with bigger gains that ignored the back-to-work order—a deal that workers could ratify or truly reject. That would have been an amazing precedent. And if there had been sympathy job action by any airport workers or any workers at WestJet, which is AC’s main competitor, like slowdowns, calling in sick, or not crossing picket lines, other employers would have been freaking out behind the scenes and leaning on AC to settle. I don’t know if any sympathy action would’ve happened if the strike had lasted longer, since it’s illegal and most workers today have no experience of doing it, but it’s not impossible that at least a little bit could have happened, especially if the government had moved to punish CUPE for defying the law. So why did CUPE officials end the strike the way they did? For the top people at CUPE National, I think the main goal was to negotiate a settlement with some gains for flight attendants. They didn’t want to have everything decided by an arbitrator. After the government intervened, that was still their overriding goal. Winning a political victory against the use of Section 107 against strikes, which would have been a victory for the working class as a whole, was secondary. Once they forced AC back to the bargaining table, they dropped that objective and focused on the main goal. Why did they do that? Above all, they’re committed to collective bargaining. That legally-regulated, tightly-controlled process is at the core of what the layer of full-time union officials, both elected officers and staff, do—that, along with handling grievances, which is how disputes over workers’ rights in collective agreements are dealt with in between rounds of collective bargaining. I think the top leaders at CUPE have shown that they’re prepared to support militant action if that’s what it takes to preserve conventional collective bargaining. That makes them different from the heads of many other unions. Blatant government intervention with back-to-work orders and back-to-work legislation undermines conventional collective bargaining. So they’re sometimes willing to support workers challenging it or even lead that challenge, as they just did. They’re willing to sometimes use militant tactics to fight for goals that aren’t radical. We need to remember that defying the law can lead to massive fines for unions. That can damage unions as institutions, even threaten their ability to operate. For the union officialdom of full-time officers and staff, that’s a different kind of problem than it is for rank and file union members, because they depend on the union machine in order to keep on functioning as officials. So once CUPE’s top officers saw a path to getting a deal that would end the strike and put an end to the threat of big fines or charges against them for defying the law, they went for it. A knowledgeable CUPE person put it to me this way: “You have to hand it to National for playing their cards so well—they effectively posture as bold militants to the membership and public, while effectively containing struggles within status quo parameters. They get their cake and eat it too.” This isn’t the first time they’ve done it. In 2022, when CUPE’s Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) was in bargaining and then was hit with pre-emptive provincial legislation to stop them from striking, they defied the law and struck anyway. Organizing toward sympathy strikes to support OSBCU started to happen. As soon as the provincial premier said he’d withdraw the law if the strike ended, CUPE National officials and other union officials put pressure on the president of OSBCU to accept the offer and go back to bargaining without the power of striking workers and their many supporters as leverage. And that’s what happened. From a distance, the outcome of the Air Canada strike can easily look like what CUPE National said it was. So lots of people probably think it was simply a tremendous win. That will encourage union activists to use it as a positive example. They can say, “Look, CUPE defied the law and won, that’s what we should prepare to do if we have to.” That’s good. It’s good that flight attendants showed you can have a strike that’s popular and that defies the law and wins, even though it causes inconveniences for lots of people. It’s good that Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order was all over the news. But what actually happened wasn’t what it looks like from afar. To me, what happened confirms that we can’t rely on the union officialdom to fight to win in a consistent way, even when the officials are more militant. Union members who want unions that are really militant, democratic and solidaristic need to organize themselves on their own and work to change our unions. We need to build caucuses, groups of members who take to heart what the Clyde Workers’ Committee said in Scotland back in 1915: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.” For more on this strike, check out episode 57 of the podcast Victor’s Children. Originally published in Midnight Sun
The fall of the state projects sometimes called “actually existing socialism” (AES) in Eastern Europe and the USSR from 1989–91 was widely interpreted as the end of communism and any other project of constructing an alternative to capitalism. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors by the Chinese military fed into the same view; if the Chinese Communist Party survived as a ruling party, unlike its counterparts in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was only through bloody repression. Around the world, parties that supported AES lost much of their support. Radical left forces that were highly critical of AES but considered it better than capitalism also suffered. Over time, the widespread perception that the alternative to capitalism had failed reduced the appeal even of radical politics that held that AES societies had not been in transition to communism at all. This belief in a historic failure fed into the mood expressed in the saying of unknown origins reported by cultural studies scholar Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Nevertheless, the realities of capitalism fuelled global surges of anti-capitalist sentiment and politics in the short-lived global justice movement that began in the late 1990s, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–09 and the austerity drive that followed, and more recently in response to climate change, how states handled the COVID-19 pandemic, and racism. This sentiment has often boosted support for reformist socialism: the left social democracy of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Bernie Sanders and the kind of politics dominant within the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, and the like. Today there are also many people who dream of freedom, of liberation, of a future more radically different from the present than what left social democracy seeks. However, they often think politically in terms of abolition, feminism, trans and queer liberation, degrowth, and/or anti-capitalism without also being communist (the point is not whether people use the term “communism” to name the society for which they wish to fight but what kind of society they wish to see established). The mood captured by Jameson is still very widespread. All strands of communist politics have also been affected by how their political magnetism has been depleted by the ending of what we can call the classical workers’ movement over the closing decades of the twentieth century, decades in which employers and states inflicted major defeats on the global working class. Of course, there are still unions and, in some places, other mass organizations of the working class. What no longer exists almost anywhere are, as I once described them in an article for the online edition of the magazine Salvage, “configurations of workers’ organizations with a strong relationship to at least a small but significant minority of the class that affirm a commitment to the creation by workers of a fundamentally different society.” What is more, “infrastructures of dissent” – defined by theorist Alan Sears as “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together” – are much weaker than they once were. In part because of these developments, popular discontent arising from changes in society that have worsened life globally for many people since the Great Recession is being tapped and moulded by rising right-wing forces. These include both fascist and other far-right organizations, which aim to do away with capitalist democracy altogether, and a larger set of forces that want to weaken it further. Together they make up an “array of antidemocratic and reactionary forces seeking to reassert class rule and privilege, to exit the crises of our times on terms set by capital, to bring a specific kind of order to an increasingly unstable world,” as theorists Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber perceptively observe in an article for the magazine Spectre. In these conditions, is communism a meaningful political project? Before addressing that question, one objection needs to be discussed: even if socialist revolutions happen, the global ecological crisis will make transition to communism impossible. Upheavals stemming from climate change lie ahead, along with other dimensions of the crisis, including more pandemic outbreaks. Humanity needs to shift to non-fossil sources of energy as quickly as possible – an enormous undertaking. Doing this while at the same time allowing imperialized countries of the South to improve the lives of their inhabitants will require reducing energy use in imperialist countries. The use of many non-renewable resources must also be reduced, agriculture transformed, food systems changed, and many forms of pollution stopped. According to some ecologists, people would not be able to both make such changes and also move towards communism, which they believe would involve ecocidal industrial growth. My response is that this is true for a transition towards “productivist” communism – one that would ignore or downplay the limits of our biosphere and retain most of capitalism’s technological structure and the wasteful, consumer goods-fixated, car-dependent, jet-travelling way of life spawned in the imperialist countries during the post–World War II economic boom and then spread around the world. But there is no reason to assume that people who had taken control of society and started to reconstruct it would take a productivist path. The extremely democratic institutions of self-government they would have created would provide an unparalleled framework for debating which priorities would shape the democratic planning of production and the reorganization of social life. Within that framework, and no longer shackled by capitalism’s ecocidal drive, it would be far easier than in any capitalist society to argue for ecological concerns to be prioritized. “Private sufficiency, public luxury” could be a principle in the transition to an ecological communism, which is a goal worth fighting for no matter how severe the ecological crisis gets. Without such a transition, capitalism will make it impossible to achieve all of the far-reaching changes that are urgently needed to address our dire ecological situation. Is There Any Hope for Communism? Returning to the question of whether communism is a viable political project today, it is not hard to understand what capitalism is doing to humanity and the rest of nature. Some of this was touched on at the outset of this book, and much has been written about it. Capitalism is doing what it is doing because of the essential character of its social metabolism. This is driven by its irrational logic: the competitive accumulation of capital on an ever-larger scale and at an ever-faster speed. Capitalism operates as it does not because of an imbalance that can be corrected but because of its inherent systemic imperatives. As the saying goes, “The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.” This is why it is necessary for humanity to move from capitalism to a better and entirely different way of organizing social life. Whether communism is possible is where the major problem arises. Even many sympathizers are skeptical because we have not yet had a historical experience in which people have really begun to reconstruct society in the direction of communism, yet we do have a history of defeated revolutions and the disastrous experience of AES. Moreover, we are all affected by living in an age in which there is a sense that history is over, that we live in a world of the eternal present, that the future will be like the present, but probably worse. This context clouds our ability to see that the world is not closed but “open, incomplete, unfinished,” as the Italian historian Enzo Traverso puts it. We can better appreciate that openness if we understand that the present is just a moment of history. Over time humans have organized societies in a wide variety of ways, even if societies have been structured by a limited number of modes of production. The status quo that we often take for granted did not have to be as it is. It is the outcome of events and processes shaped by clashing class and other social forces in particular times and places. It is not the inevitable culmination of laws of history that could not have unfolded otherwise. Nor is it the product of random chance. Consider just one counterfactual scenario: if the Russian Communist Party’s surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin had been overthrown in the early 1920s, it would have been replaced by a horrific counter-revolutionary military dictatorship: “The world would have had a Russian name for Fascism,” as Trotsky once put it. At the same time, communist politics would not have been distorted by Stalinism, and AES would never have existed. The history of the twentieth century would have been dramatically different. The status quo that we often take for granted did not have to be as it is. It is the outcome of events and processes shaped by clashing class and other social forces in particular times and places. It is not the inevitable culmination of laws of history that could not have unfolded otherwise. Nor is it the product of random chance. Consider just one counterfactual scenario: if the Russian Communist Party’s surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin had been overthrown in the early 1920s, it would have been replaced by a horrific counter-revolutionary military dictatorship: “The world would have had a Russian name for Fascism,” as Trotsky once put it. At the same time, communist politics would not have been distorted by Stalinism, and AES would never have existed. The history of the twentieth century would have been dramatically different. ---- This is an excerpt from the new book Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left (Fernwood Publishing), printed here with permission of the publisher. Originally published in Briarpatch Anti-communism is an asset for capitalism’s defenders. But it has not stopped the experience of living under capitalism from making growing numbers of people around the world, especially young people, increasingly critical of capitalism as a way of organizing society. Sometimes, and more often than was the case in the 1990s and at least the first decade of this century, anti-capitalist sentiment is also “anti-anti-communist.” This involves both rejecting anti-communism and adopting an attitude that is at least somewhat sympathetic to the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] and similar societies. It should not be difficult to understand why many people critical of capitalism think this way. After all, the capitalist status quo with which we are all too familiar is horrible. Its defenders demonize communism. Thus, sympathy for whatever capitalism’s champions denounce can come easily, especially for people unfamiliar with the societies that anti-communists portray as evil. Here I must pause to address the question of what to call societies organized along the lines first developed in the USSR (these societies are distinct from countries governed by parties that claim to be socialist in which private firms continue to control most economic activity, such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua). There is no term for them that is universally accepted. Anti-communists often call them “Communist” (as have a few anti-capitalist radicals critical of them). However, this term has generally been rejected by their governments and supporters, who have maintained that these societies were not yet communist but only moving in the direction of communism as they understood it. They described this social order as “socialist,” often using the term “actually existing socialism” for it. Many communists who are critical of these societies call them “Stalinist.” Some anti-communists have used the same term. For now, this book will refer to them as so-called “actually existing socialism,” abbreviated as AES. Here this is simply a generic neutral term for these societies, used without accepting the claim that these societies were evolving towards communism or any other claim about them. What they were and whether they were in transition to communism are crucial questions that this book addresses. Importantly, anti-anti-communism is distinctly different from a perspective that opposes both capitalism and AES as ways of organizing society rooted in domination. It is the latter response that is expressed by a phrase from the radical left in the 1960s: “The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ‘Free’ world’ is not free.” But where [Donald] Trump and [Joe Biden] put a minus sign, today’s anti-anti-communists tend to put a plus. When the subject is Communism, anti-anti-communists generally combine sympathy with at least some criticism of the perceived shortcomings of Communist societies and movements. But sometimes contemporary anti-anti-communism flows into outright endorsement of some version of Communism, whether that of [Joseph] Stalin or Mao [Zedong] in the past or China and Cuba today. Anti-anti-communism is not a new phenomenon. It was a feature of the culture of part of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. “We refuse to be anti-communist,” declared Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, central organizers in the mid-1960s of the emerging movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Many people in North America and Western Europe who took part in the movements of that time started by adopting an anti-anti-communist stance and went on to become involved with what was often called the New Communist Movement (NCM), a sizeable current of the radical left that looked above all to China for inspiration. Today, long after the disintegration of the NCM and the end of the Cold War between the U.S.-led “Free World” and the “Communist” states, anti-anti-communism has a somewhat different flavour, one that more often acknowledges problems in AES societies. Ethnographer Kristin Ghodsee and philosopher Scott Sehon present the situation this way: "On the Left stand those with some sympathy for socialist ideals and the popular opinion of hundreds of millions of Russian and east European citizens nostalgic for their state socialist pasts. On the Right stand the committed anti-totalitarians, both east and west, insisting that all experiments with Marxism will always and inevitably end with the gulag. Where one side sees shades of grey, the other views the world in black and white." In other words, Ghodsee and Sehon see anti-anti-communism (their source for which is anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who rejected anti-communism in the Cold War U.S.) as the alternative to a right-wing position. They do not acknowledge a third possibility: refusing both anti-communism and nostalgia for AES and being deeply critical of both capitalism and AES from a left-wing perspective that yearns for a better world. They are explicit about their criticisms of Communism: “this does not mean that we are apologising for, or excusing the atrocities or the lost lives of millions of men and women who suffered for their political beliefs.” After dissecting today’s anti-communism, they conclude: "Responsible and rational citizens need to be critical of simplistic historical narratives that rely on the pitchfork effect to demonise anyone on the Left. We should all embrace Geertz’s idea of an anti-anti-communism in hopes that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20th century might help us to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of both communism and capitalism." In her 2018 book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, which has been translated into over a dozen languages, Ghodsee argues that although “state socialism” ultimately failed, for much of the twentieth century it “presented an existential challenge to the worst excesses of the free market.” Its collapse led to the end of efforts to regulate markets and redistribute incomes. Moreover, these socialist experiments had many positive aspects. The state guaranteed citizens employment and housing. It provided public child care and implemented other measures to promote women’s education and participation in paid work, including in jobs that had traditionally not been done by women. “There was a baby in all that bathwater. It’s time we got around to saving it,” Ghodsee concludes. While those public services and rights undoubtedly existed, this way of evaluating them – “cherry pick[ing] from the Soviet policy pantheon,” as theorist Sophie Lewis puts it – treats them as if they can be considered apart from the oppressive features of AES with which they were entangled. This approach is similar to the one taken by people who argue that we should not be anti-capitalist because Western capitalist societies have positive aspects like civil liberties, multi-party elections, and unions through which workers can defend themselves against employers and fight to improve their pay and working conditions. As Lewis observes, Ghodsee never asks “the question of what an anti-capitalist, non-capitalist, post-capitalist society worthy of those names might actually look like.” In recent years anti-anti-communism has become more common on the left than it was for several decades after the collapse of AES. Often this is a diffuse mood that surfaces in social industry posts. But it also crops up in articles in widely read left-wing publications. For example, in 2022 journalist Liza Featherstone looked to the history of the East Bloc to criticize the U.S.’s failure to guarantee workers any paid vacation time. In an article on the Jacobin website, possibly the most-read English-language radical publication, Featherstone argued that Communism: "took summer vacation seriously. Long before any other industrialized nations, the Soviet Union’s Labour Code obligated employers to provide two weeks of paid vacation. The 1936 Soviet constitution specifically included a “right to rest.” To that end, the Eastern Bloc communist countries not only provided the time off but invested in affordable vacation spots for workers. In the late 1930s, the government increased spending on resorts, health camps, campgrounds, and other vacation spots, including spas. Some of these offered activities, such as volleyball or mushroom hunting." This kind of nostalgic response captures the spirit in which today’s anti-anti-communism engages with AES. The anti-anti-communist stance is quite different from one that is ruthlessly critical of social domination and assesses both capitalism and AES from that perspective — the approach once expressed in the previously mentioned slogan “The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ‘Free’ world’ is not free.” The soil of anti-anti-communism today is fertile ground for perspectives that are not just sympathetic to AES but enthusiastic about it. Writer Barnaby Raine observes that "there is a new if modest proliferation of radicals now who would have baffled 1990s commentators; young people in Europe and North America who want to sound like the old Communists. On podcasts and on social media, in political parties and in unions, they salute authoritarian state power past and present. They speak, they say, in the name of socialism. They amass thousands of followers online. They are not the dwindling band of pensioners who remember subsidised cruises on the Volga. They don an aesthetic of kitsch cheek or unsentimental realism or, somehow, both." Why does any of this matter today? There is a great deal at stake in how we respond to anti-communism and what we make of AES. If anti-communists are right, attempts to replace capitalism are misguided. If AES was, and in its remaining holdouts still is, a better way of organizing society, then anti-capitalists should look to such societies and the Communist political tradition associated with AES for instruction and inspiration. If AES is not such an alternative, anti-capitalists will need to look elsewhere. ---- *Excerpt for Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Left provided by Fernwood Publishing Originally published in Tempest.
Tempest interviews David Camfield about his podcast Victor’s Children and its role in promoting the politics of socialism from below. David lives in Winnipeg, Canada and is a member of the Tempest Collective as well as being a member of the editorial board of Midnight Sun. His most recent book is Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left, an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian introduction to the history of the “actually existing socialism” of the former USSR, China, and Cuba. Tempest: Can you tell us a little bit about your political background? David Camfield: I came to radical politics in Ottawa when I was in high school in the late 1980s, mainly through the peace movement and Christian liberation theology. I was fortunate to meet the local branch of the International Socialists (IS), which I joined. In hindsight, the IS had real problems but I got a really good introduction to socialism from below politics and classical marxist theory from the group. Along with its version of Trotskyist orthodoxy I got a streak of commitment to heresy and thinking for ourselves, thanks to a few members. This was invaluable because it later helped me rethink the politics I’d learned in the IS. Movements around abortion access and the 1991 Gulf War were formative experiences for me, and feminist and queer liberation politics were important influences. I became part of a minority of the IS that concluded not just that the leadership of the IS Tendency (the international network to which the IS belonged) was wrong in important ways about what was happening in the world but that our approach to socialist organization, what we thought of as building a Leninist organization, was flawed. It’d contributed to sectarianism, undemocratic practices, and an internal culture with some really negative features. The IS had also failed to recognize that there was a crisis of working-class self-organization and that there was no vanguard layer of anti-capitalist militants in the working class. The minority left the IS in 1996 and formed the New Socialist Group (NSG). The NSG evolved and tried to build an organization of independent-thinking, non-sectarian organizers committed to renewing socialism from below politics by learning from movements and ideas they generated. The NSG did some good work, especially in Toronto in the years 2000-2003. I was active in Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, which waged a long but winning strike in 2000-01. In Winnipeg, where I’ve lived since 2003, things have often been pretty slow politically but I’ve been active in a number of activist and socialist projects. I became active in the faculty union at the University of Manitoba once the opportunity to do that arose. For a couple of years I was on the executive of the Winnipeg Labour Council when there was a short-lived opportunity to change it. Late in 2023 I joined the Tempest Collective after it decided to admit people in Canada, since the local socialist group I’d been in had come to an end and I didn’t think any of the multi-city Canadian groups would be politically hospitable for me. Tempest: You launched Victor’s Children in early 2021 and have just passed fifty episodes. What was the impetus for starting this project? DC:The political reason I started it was a concern with the weak presence on the Left of the kind of socialism from below politics I support, and because there wasn’t an English-language podcast promoting them. Various kinds of Marxist-Leninist politics had become more influential, and various kinds of Trotskyism were visible, but our kind of politics less so, especially for people new to radical politics. I wanted to promote what, from my perspective, are the best kind of politics for the future. Tempest:What are the major running themes across the episodes? DC:That’s an interesting question I haven’t really thought about. I guess one theme is understanding and responding politically to the changing capitalist world we’re living in – a world in which the U.S. and other Western states aren’t the only imperialist powers, in which China is increasingly important and a rising imperialist power. Some of those have been about particular developments in so-called Canada, while many aren’t. Another theme is questions that face radicals today, like moralism, sexual violence, whether we should take jobs as union staffers, and how radicals should approach workplace organizing, which is the topic of an upcoming episode. There have been some episodes on histories I think are worth learning about. Another theme has been offering a socialism from below critique of Stalinism and anti-Western campism. The most recent one of those has been about Domenico Losurdo’s awful neo-Stalinist book Western Marxism, which was recently published in English translation. A few episodes have been about theory—the one with the most listens so far is David McNally (who has the same political background as me) on “Dialectics Demystified,” probably because he can explain complex ideas so clearly. Tempest:Do you know who’s been listening and where they are? DC:Unfortunately, I don’t have much sense of who listens (I appreciate emails from listeners but they’re rare). Since the podcast began, about half of the listens have been from Canada, with Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg as the leading cities. Most of the rest have been in the U.S., with Chicago the city with the most listens. Next country when it comes to listens is the UK. Tempest:What have you learned from the guests, or from the experience? DC:I’ve learned a lot but it all goes into the flow of grist for my mental mill, so to speak, so it’s difficult for me to put my finger on what I’ve learned from doing the podcast specifically. I guess it’s confirmed my belief that there are socialists and other radicals who really want what Victor’s Children tries to offer and who don’t find enough of it out there: serious socialist politics and analysis—different from shallow “easy answer” politics and a lot of the other stuff that’s online—from perspectives that reject social democracy and Marxism-Leninism, presented in relatively accessible, non-academic ways. Tempest:Why the name, Victor’s Children? DC:The “Victor” in the name is Victor Serge (1890-1947), the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik-turned-anti-Stalinist-marxist writer. His Memoirs of a Revolutionary is an extraordinary book that influenced me—every socialist should read it because of how Serge writes about so many important experiences he lived through and people he knew or observed. Serge’s idea of “double duty”—“defend the revolution, combat its flaws from within”—and his commitment to lucidity are valuable for us today, I think. I hope the podcast allows the ideas of people who’re in some sense political descendents of Serge, whether or not they think of themselves that way, to reach more people who need these ideas. Tempest:What specific lessons or insights have you gained about Left media (social media) in producing Victor’s Children? DC:Only that too few supporters of socialist politics that are neither social democratic/“democratic socialist” nor Marxist-Leninist are making podcasts and producing content on YouTube and other platforms where lots of radicalizing people go for political ideas. Tempest:More than four years in, how does this project connect with your broader strategic perspective for the Left today? DC:I think that supporters of socialism from below need to be engaging in the battle of ideas in as many ways as we can that are useful, along with working constructively with other people in workplaces, in communities, and on campuses to strengthen broad organizing that’s as democratic, solidaristic and militant as it can be. Podcasts are one of many ways we should be engaging in the battle of ideas. by David Camfield
originally published by Briarpatch magazine Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have taken action to support Palestine. For many this has been their first experience of a social movement. Like all experiences of collective action large and sustained enough to deserve to be called a social movement, the Palestine solidarity movement involves a lot of learning as well as action. When people mobilize to change society, we inevitably face questions about how to understand what we’re up against and how to shift it. This hunger for knowledge among people within a social movement is the best kind of learning, one driven by the desire to make change, not to pass a course. Since autumn 2023 many people have been learning about the history of Palestine, the creation of Israel, Zionism, and settler colonialism. We’ve also been confronted with the question “how does Israel get away with so much violence?” Regrettably, some people have bought into the idea that a Zionist lobby has been able to get Western states to back Israel against the interests and will of those states. The line of thinking that lobby groups can influence supposedly neutral states is a staple of mainstream political science and, in this case, can easily slide into the anti-Semitic idea of powerful Jews wielding malign influence. Fortunately, plenty of people have also been encountering explanations that root Western support for Israeli state violence and settler colonialism in how global capitalism is organized: theories of imperialism. Political economist Adam Hanieh puts it well: pointing to the influence of the Israel lobby is “a false and politically dangerous viewpoint that gets the relationship between Western states and Israel fundamentally wrong.” Instead, “the unstinting support of the U.S. and leading European states for Israel” stems from how settler-colonial “Israel has been crucial to the maintenance of Western imperial interests – notably those of the U.S. – in the Middle East. It has performed this role alongside the other major pillar of U.S. control in the region: the oil-rich Gulf Arab monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia. The fast-evolving relationships between the Gulf, Israel, and the U.S. are essential to understanding the current moment, especially given the relative weakening of American global power.” Speaking to the U.S. Congress in 1986, Joe Biden was frank: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” It’s vital to recognize that Western support for Israel is so strong because of how the U.S. and other governments can rely on Israel to act against movements and governments that might challenge their interests in an important oil-producing region. It’s also crucial to see where this piece fits in the puzzle of a capitalist world that’s organized in a hierarchy of states locked in both economic and geopolitical competition. The U.S. sits at the top of this imperialist order. Below it are other imperialist states including the U.K., Germany, France, China, Russia, Canada, and Australia. Below them are sub-imperialist states with regional power, followed by most of the countries of the world. But some explanations of imperialism that people encounter have a major flaw: they deny that there are imperialist powers outside “the West.” They fail to grasp that, as the recent book China in Global Capitalism demonstrates, China is a rising imperialist rival to the United States. Russia, as well, while economically much weaker than China, still has considerable military might. Believing that only Western powers are imperialist fits with the outlook that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which appeals to some supporters of Palestine. That outlook leads people to bad places. One such place is refusing solidarity with or even empathy for people who’re oppressed by states whose rulers clash with the United States. Instead, we should side with oppressed people everywhere without politically supporting either Western powers or governments in conflict with them. Take the case of Ukraine. It’s reasonable to point to the hypocrisy of Western governments that oppose Russia’s war and occupation in Ukraine while backing Israel to the hilt. There’s also nothing wrong with questioning uncritical portrayals of the Ukrainian government, which is neoliberal, pro-NATO, and pro-Israel. Or with opposing how Western governments are using Russia’s war to justify higher military spending. Or with criticizing how the U.S. has used the war to try to weaken Russia. But none of this should get in the way of taking sides: we should be in unconditional solidarity with Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, as with all resistance to imperialism. As one slogan puts it, “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime!” In both cases – as in all struggles against injustice – we can be in solidarity with the oppressed without endorsing the political forces that lead them. In a recent interview, feminist and socialist Barbara Smith, a member of the Combahee River Collective in the U.S. in the 1970s and co-author of its influential statement, talks of trying “to practise solidarity without exception” rather than “selective solidarity.” “We can and must oppose occupation from Ukraine to Palestine as part of a common struggle for collective liberation,” Smith insists. This is the approach we should take in a world in which rivalry between imperialist powers is growing more intense. |
Content in this archive (blog) is also found on pages under Writings, where you can find links to where a piece was originally published, as well as a PDF files of each piece.
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