During its reign as the dominant global superpower, the US imposed its will and wreaked imperialist havoc around the world. But as the power of US empire declines and the global order is restructured, hypernationalism and violent competition between imperial and regional powers are surging around the world, like they did before the great world wars. Can an internationalist, working-class movement of movements for peace, prosperity, and self-determination help humanity avoid a future of imperialist plunder, planetary destruction, and escalating violence? In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, cohosts Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith speak with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez about the dire need for such a movement in our terrifying new age of global disorder, and they discuss movement-building lessons that have emerged from the conversations they’ve hosted on the podcast so far in Season One.
Additional resources:
- Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, & Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry
- Ukraine: A people’s peace, not an imperial peace (joint declaration by ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, environmental organisations, and groups in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and for a self-determined social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine)
Credits:
- Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Blanca Missé:
I am Blanca Missé and I welcome you to Solidarity Without Exception, a podcast on working people’s struggles for national self-determination in the 21st century and what connects them and us.
Ashley Smith:
And I’m Ashley Smith, also a co-host of Solidarity without exception.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at the Real News Network, which is the proud producer of our new podcast, solidarity Without Exception, co-hosted by the brilliant Blanca Mazza and Ashley Smith and co-sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network. Well, Ashley Blanca, it is great to see your beautiful faces and hear your beautiful voices again. It feels like a decade has passed since we were all together recording episode zero of this podcast back in February. But such are the times that we are living in and in fact, I think that makes the case more than anything for why we need this podcast in these discussions now more than ever in our roiling changing world. And I just want to say up top that it’s been a real pleasure listening to the episodes that you guys have done working with you guys collaborating on this important series.
A huge special thanks to Alina Nehlich for her brilliant audio editing, everyone working behind the scenes to make this show a reality. I just wanted to say that up top and I wanted to let listeners know that the reason you’re hearing me on solidarity without exception feed is because we have been talking as a group and we thought it would be really great to have sort of a slight intermission in our usual programming here to give ourselves a chance to talk as a group about how the series is going to reflect critically on the episodes that we put out, the way that we framed the show we’ve been asking for and listening to your feedback on the series so far. And in the spirit of making this as collaborative and useful for our audiences possible, we wanted to take this opportunity to check in together.
And after putting out five great episodes co-hosted by Ashley I Blanca, we wanted to give Ashley I Blanca a chance to turn the mic around and offer some more of their own thoughts on how the series is going, like key points from the episodes that they want to highlight, things that we want to change or improve on. So that’s really the point of this episode here. And if you guys appreciate this of episode, you like it, you want to hear more of it, please let us know because I cannot stress enough that we really, really want to hear from you all listening and we truly want to hear your feedback because we want to know if this work is useful for you, if it’s helpful, and how we can keep improving it to better serve, inform, and empower you in your struggle for a better life and a better world.
That’s the whole point of this. And so please, if you haven’t already, reach out to us, let us know your thoughts, send us your questions, and we will record more episodes like this where we respond directly to them. And you can do that by emailing us at contact C-O-N-T-A-C t@therealnews.com and we’ll get right back to you. So with all that upfront gang, I want to kind of dive in here and I want to sort of take the next hour or two, break this discussion up into three parts. The first one, giving you both a chance to sort of offer your top level reflections as co-hosts of this series. Now that we’ve got a number of episodes under our belt in the second section, I want to sort of dive into some specific questions that have emerged out of the episodes that we’ve published so far and then with the time that we have in the last section, maybe zooming out a little bit and sort of talking critically and collaboratively about the key themes of this show and how we see those themes themselves changing or our approach to the show and what folks can expect in the coming episodes, like any changes that we want to make to that approach.
So that’s kind of what I’d like to do here. And to start off in the first section, I want to give you both a chance, like I said, to reflect on the series so far and to give your own self evaluated report card on the first batch of episodes when the three of us recorded our big introductory episode for this podcast back in February. Again, that was episode zero. If folks haven’t listened to it in that episode, we really dug into where the concept for the show came from, why we felt this kind of series and these kinds of discussions are so urgently needed in our world today and what objectives we would be trying to achieve in the coming season. Now as of this recording, like I said, you guys have got five meaty great published episodes of Solidarity without exception under your belt episodes, focusing on Ukraine, Syria, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Sudan. So I wanted to ask, do you guys think that so far we are making good on the promises that we made to listeners back in episode zero about what this series would be? Is there anything that you feel we’re falling short on or has the process of recording these conversations made either of you sort of rethink how we framed and approached the project in the beginning?
Ashley Smith:
My 2 cents on that is that it’s actually confirmed whatever weaknesses the initial episodes have had, the outline, the framework that we laid out in episode zero because Trump, if anything, has accelerated and intensified the process that brought us to this series because essentially what Trump has done is abandoned the historic role of US imperialism, which has been really since the end of the Cold War, overseeing a neoliberal order of free trade globalization to now retreating to protectionism, carving out a sphere of influence and collaborating even if antagonistically with the other two states that are in the US crosshairs Russia and China and allotting them their sphere of influence and a kind of concert of great powers. But the first concert of great powers in the 19th century led to World War I and World War ii, it’s not a very good strategy. So if anything, the competitive dynamic between these three powers is intensifying and the US retreat from super intending the order has meant that all states are now turning to beggar thy neighbor policies, trying to figure out what role and function they have in global capitalism and engage in an arms race globally that we haven’t seen really since the Cold War and impose austerity measures on the workers with inside their countries to pay for that armament on a global scale.
So it’s a very frightening moment in which workers around the world are being exploited by the great powers that run the system to arm those great powers in a fight for the division and division of the world capitalist market. And that raises the question of how we build internationalism and solidarity with struggles for national self-determination across the board all at the same time. That project now seems more urgent than ever with the impact of the Trump program. Now I think the weakness in reflecting is how to make what seems foreign and far away immediate for people so that it really connects with working people here in this country and see how their destinies are bound up with these questions of national self-determination and class struggle in other countries around the world. And I think that’s a tremendous urgency as we go forward is to draw out those deep connections so that people don’t see or fall into a trap of US nationalism and thinking, I just got to take my own piece of the pie because it’s overwhelming at home and how can I think about questions abroad? Well, the reality is with the kind of race between the great powers now that’s going on, what happens abroad will come back home with a vengeance. That is, I think what Nora Kott quoting a air called the Boomerang Effect is real, that what happens in Palestine for example, has an impact in the United States. The genocide in Palestine leads to a squelching of civil rights and civil liberties here in the United States. So what happens there affects us here. And I think that’s true for every single country around the world.
Blanca Missé:
I agree with you, Ashley. I will add something about what is the meaning of being anti-imperialist and internationalist, right? Because the beginning of first episode, I mean in solidarity with that exception when solidarity with all the struggles of working people for self-determination, and we’ve made this parallel between Palestine and Ukraine, from Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime. And of course I know we still have to deliver on Palestine, which is something I think we’re going to talk about. But I think it’s been clear many of our hosts have expressed very vocally solidarity with Palestine, and that’s been a threat, right? When we select speakers who want speakers who are in solidarity with all of the struggles. But I think this question of being an internationalist also means because we are in a very strong imperialist power, what has been the superpower of imperialism for decades that we cannot see all politics in the world as only mediated by the United States.
And I say that because for example, because the work of education we need to do is also for the American audience, for working class people in the US to gain more knowledge and understanding of the different powers and the different political dynamics and class struggle methods all over the world. Specifically as Ashley said, in a world today where we have new players entering the scene. And I think that was very clear in the interview we did on Sudan, how to make sense of what’s happening in Sudan. Struggles today are not anymore. You have one bad oppressed, the United States and an oppressed people or like you had Europe. The world today is more complicated and mainstream news are not explaining you this. They’re trying to sell you always a viewpoint that will advantage the us and we are trying to undo this viewpoint and give a more complex set of things.
So I do think, for example, in the episode on Sudan, we try to unpack, and I was asking Nbra, can you explain Sudan for dummies, right? Not that we are dummies, but we are ified. I have no idea what is the RSF? What is this process at beginning 2013, then 2018, then 2019, then the civil war in 2023 and now we’re here and how to make sense of this. So I think that one of the challenges we had, and maybe what we need to get better at is giving context to struggles of national liberation self-determination for which there is not already a pre-given context. For example, the Puerto Rico episode was wonderful, but there is already a pre-given context to understand the struggle for national liberation of Puerto Rico in the us. And so then when Rafael comes in, he’s so eloquent, he’s just hitting all the key points and bringing the thing home.
But there is a previous context, I don’t know. I mean for the Philippines it’s a little bit harder for Sudan, it’s a little bit harder. And so of course we’re touching points where we maybe were assuming that there was more knowledge than we were able to give. Also, we’re limited in one short episode. And that’s something we want to make sure that we can keep bringing these guests and ask them to explain their struggles. Because I think one of the strong points of our episode is more we’re talking about being in solidarity with those who experience exploitation, imperialism and oppression. We want to privilege them framing their struggles. I mean, of course we ask them questions, sometimes we ask them questions that for them are not relevant and that was very clear in the episode of Ukraine. I mean, you guys keep asking us these questions, but we want to talk about this other thing.
And so how do we establish this internationalist dialogue between how we in the US see the world and the thing that is preoccupying, all of us who are deeply committed to the struggle for social justice against imperialism. We are committed to that. I know many of our audience is committed, but we have different questions we bring and they have different questions they bring and I think it’s how do we mediate that in the show? We’re trying to do that and we’ll continue to do that. And so every time we get feedback, we reflect on it and we try to figure out a way to do it better.
Ashley Smith:
I’ll just add one thing that I think is really important and it’s the challenge of a podcast and it’s episode by episode. We’re talking about dynamic situations that change very quickly. And so for example, the discussion of Syria that we had a couple of months ago is a different discussion today because the dynamics on the ground change, the regional dynamics, the international dynamics, and I think that makes it a challenging thing. So in some ways we need to do updates and we might want to think about as we go forward is like an assessment. Does the analysis that was laid out hold now with new conditions, new situations? Are there different arguments that have to come to the fore? Like for example in Syria, the question of transitional justice, which the new regime has refused to deal with, that is the horrific crimes of the Assad regime against the people, the various peoples of the country of Syria has opened the space for regional players and international players to intervene and try and pretend to represent the interests of an oppressed group within the country.
And so the domestic angle of the movement to transform the country has an impact on the regional and international dynamic and opens the door for the powers that screwed up Syria to begin with, to play a nefarious role yet again. So it’s hard in one episode to capture a very dynamic situation. And I think what this shows is that these are just open doors for people to explain and think and explore some more. And they’re not a closed book where the final answer has been delivered. The only other thing that I would add to this is that we’re overcoming ignorance by design. That is the US state. Its media networks, not real news, but the mainstream media has organized people in a state of ignorance by design so that it builds barriers to think from the standpoint of oppressed people, whether they’re oppressed by the United States, whether they’re oppressed by Russia, whether they’re oppressed by regional power or whatever. There’s very little international education that people get through normal channels and that’s why Real News Network really matters and why podcasts like this open people’s minds to a different conception of what’s happening in our world and how we can build solidarity across borders.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s beautifully put by both of you, and I couldn’t agree more. I mean this is the perennial struggle doing what we do. The way that we do it here at The Real News, we do our best to stay current, but we understand that the movement time moves differently than the news cycle in today’s digital media ecosystem. And so if we’re constantly chasing the news cycle, no one’s going to ever be able to keep up, let alone do anything and build anything with the information that they’re getting. The only thing you can do is just consume it and then move on to the next soundbite, headline, scroll further up on your newsfeed, so on and so forth. So we are in a lot of ways kind of going upstream against the forces of immobilization, super saturation of information, misinformation, bad information, all that stuff.
So none of that is an excuse like Ash and Blanca said, that is our job and we want to constantly improve upon it, and we promise you that we are always giving it our best. We can’t promise you that we’re always going to get it perfect, but we very much share all three of us on this podcast and everyone here at the Real News Network we share in that spirit of and keep continuing to push ourselves to be better for you. And so that is really the spirit of what we’re doing here. But I would also just sort of add that one thing that really came out of your responses to that first question is one of the real struggles in accomplishing that when we’re trying to make this podcast approachable, digestible, useful for working people predominantly in the English speaking world here in North America, uk, Australia, so on and so forth.
And so with that comes the need to sort of educate a deliberately miseducated population on these national struggles that many of us have no context for, like you were saying, Blanca. But I think one of the real successes of the show so far from episode zero all the way through to now is that you guys and your guests are really helping to provide frames of analysis that empower people to process the new information they’re getting on these stories even if we don’t have the capacity to give critical updates on them. And you sort of laid the groundwork in that Sudan episode, for example, and even earlier in the Puerto Rico episode, like Raphael, the guest there sort of laid out what one of the key frames is. Our position is that the people of that country should determine the future of that country for themselves, not that they should be bending to the will of outside forces.
That is the frame that I think helps people sort of understand the news cycle as it’s unfolding. And in the Sudan episode, you and your guests did explain that this is a race right now. The forces within Syrian society that are not uniform, that are even conflicting with each other are racing to establish power and advance their interest, yada, yada, yada. And so putting those two things together, I myself have felt watching what’s going on in Syria, I’ve been wrestling with that, but I feel like this show has given me a better frame to understand the fact that the best that I can hope for is that the people of Syria advance the cause of their own self-determination. And I also understand that that is not my place to tell them what to do or how to do it. It is also there’s nothing that I can actually do if the people or the factions within the population decide a direction that I don’t agree with.
We can talk a little more about that maybe later in the episode of what do we do when that happens, when we entrust the people of another country who are fighting this valiant struggle for national liberation, they take it in a direction that we don’t want. I mean, so what do we do with that? But again, I think the show itself has really helped provide better frames of solidarity, frames of internationalism through which people can understand the developments as they come in these stories. And so I wanted to actually build on that because the next question that I got for you guys is a question that’s as much about our method for approaching these episodes as it is about the content of the episodes themselves. When we were planning this series, we made the very deliberate choice to prioritize as the tagline for the show says, working people’s struggles around the world for national self-determination in the 21st century and what connects them and us.
And with that decision came the understanding that each episode would only be able to go so far in explaining these deep nationally specific histories and all these contemporary nuances of each country, each conflict. I mean really each one would need its own full season of episodes to really do it justice. So I wanted to kind of tug on that thread a bit more and ask how you as hosts are navigating that as you work on these episodes. And what would you say to our listeners about what we lose, but also what we gain by taking this approach to the nation’s people and struggles that we’re covering in these episodes. Like say for instance, we got listeners who are really digging the Ukraine episode and the way that we’re talking about it, for instance, but they understandably may still really want us to devote more time and real discussion to on the ground realities that they’re reading about the Nazi factions of the population in Ukraine and looking closer at what Zelinsky government has done. Admittedly, we did address those, but we didn’t address them. We didn’t give them more airtime than we felt was needed at the time. But I guess for folks who want to hear us talk about that more while we’re also talking about the frames of solidarity without exception and how working people can show solidarity with Ukrainians, people in Sudan, so on and so forth. What would you say to folks out there listening who maybe have that note for us and want to hear us respond to it?
Blanca Missé:
Well, I want to take this on because preparing the episode on Ukraine was challenging. We have 15 minutes for an episode and we want both to cover what’s happening in Ukraine and the history of the Ukrainian oppression by Russia because there’s a whole debate to start with that Ukraine is fake nation. So we need also to restore the idea that this isn’t people who has been oppressed and occupied and we wanted to enter some of these polemics. And I have to say I chose the question of weapons and NATO and aid, and I ask a couple of questions on that. We did not touch upon the question of far right forces because there are Nazi forces in Ukraine, they’re not overwhelmingly superior to any other European country or even less the us. It’s not like Ukraine is known in Europe for having far right forces or even far right forces in government.
Like is Acra case of Hungary? I wonder why people will save, gets occupied tomorrow. We should not defend them because there’s Orban is there, right? The US takes and occupies. Oh no, it’s the far right government. But I think what was interesting for me because I did ask the question of weapons and NATO and strings attached, and I prioritize this because we have a commitment of being extremely critical in opposed to our own imperialism in the United States. So if I had, our principle of being anti imperialism begins with being against our own power state that oppresses other people. So there was no way we were going to do an interview of Ukrainian guests who were fighting for the national liberation of their country from the US and not address this issue. And it was very interesting because I brought the question of the dead, the European Union like nato and then is they were very critical.
They say, yeah, we understand these folks are trying to take advantage of us, et cetera. But what I was the most surprised is how critical and demolishing they were against Zelensky and the Ukrainian ruling class. I mean, I was surprised myself in the interview, and maybe we could play a clip, right? When they say that the biggest fans of neoliberalism and destruction they said are the Ukrainian political and economic elites themselves. And they were saying that even that the plans as Zelensky was imposing before the occupation, before the war began were even three steps ahead. The neoliberal fantasies of the European Union because he’s trying so hard to sell out the country to the US and to get Ukraine to join the eu.
Speaker 4:
But I also want to say that we must not enter into a little bit simplistic analysis to interpret what happens through the prism. There is an almighty west imposing neoliberal conditions on poor Ukrainians. As sad is it is worse than that because the most radical and crazy funds of neoliberalism are the Ukrainians Ukrainian political and economical elites themselves. I think they are on the top of this pyramid in terms of neoliberal, imaginary and fanaticism. And in comparison with them the requirements for example of the European unions in regard to Ukraine that for example, Eric, he says that yes, these are neoliberal requirements, but they seem rather humanistic in comparison of what the Ukrainian government does itself. In fact, the European commission pressures the Ukrainian government to threaten the social dialogue and not to crush the unions and this kind of thing. But I think, well, the Ukrainian government, it is not very smart to say in the least because it is trying.
What is actually doing is trying to win a war of such a magnitude while sustaining the fantasy of a neoliberal economy and the neoliberal economy. It is based on deeply individualist, social imaginary on deregulated economic system. And it is evident that is simply not suited to the demands of defense because the defense requires solidarity all at all levels of society and they promote reforms like the regulation of labor law, et cetera. And these reforms, of course, they weaken the workers rights and obviously destroys the little trust that the workers still had in the state because there is a trust, the state is kind of fulfilling, tries to fulfill its duty of the defense of the society, but it is eroding very quickly. Its legitimacy. And Ukraine’s existence depends on the collective effort, on the resilience of its citizens collectively resilient. But the government itself is weakening actively the very foundation of this society and it’s a horrible situation.
Blanca Missé:
So I think those discussions, maybe we should have elaborated more. I mean there’s a big discussion, should Ukraine join the European Union or not? And should we condition our support to the Ukrainian self-determination movement to whether the decisions they make in relation to the EU or the weapons they use from nato, et cetera, which goes back to what the unconditional solidarity means. And so when we’re thinking, for example, the analogist with Palestine and we say we’re unconditional solidarity with Palestine, we’re not thinking, well, only if Hamas is not leading the movement, only if they’re not using weapons from such and such, only if they’re not killing civilians only if then yes, but no, we’re not saying that. So of course we are designed to have selective solidarity. So then suddenly for some struggles we ask a lot of questions. And then for others we don’t ask.
And all of us are not designed equally because we all have different influences for different governments from different upbringings, from different communities. But there was an effort we made to deal with this question, but at the same time, I know, well, we could have spent 50 minutes discussing the state of the far right. And the fact that you have neo-Nazi militias, I, they’re very small, but they’re fighting for the freedom of their country, right? They’re in the front. You also have anarchist militias. You also have, I mean the overwhelming forces that the territorial defenses are led by unions, the trade unions who are connecting and sending and weaving the uniforms and sending the food. And there is all these tremendous working class solidarity from below. And I felt, well, if I have one regret, it’s like maybe we didn’t bring this more to the forefront that the war has, the demands that the trade unions have right now are to nationalize industry to appropriate the oligarchs, the Russian oligarchs, the Ukrainian oligarchs to oppose all of the privatization of the land and the cuts.
That’s the demands they have. And maybe we did not, our guests didn’t bring that so much, but they were extremely critical with the top down neoliberal capitas policies that their own government is expressing. And I just want to finish with this, that to be so critical in the middle of a war is not a small thing. Just imagine that your country is being occupied, right? You have a government fighting for liberation, and how much are you publicly going to criticize the government that is unifying the military to get, I mean, we also need to be aware of these nuances when we’re demanding that our guests take X, Y, and Z positions that they’re fighting in this case in the middle of a war of liberation. I wonder what Ashley has to say about this question.
Ashley Smith:
Yeah, I totally agree with what Blanca laid out. And I was just in Quebec for a conference and I would be terrified if the method that some people are predisposed to do is judge a resistance by its least attractive characteristic instead of see the overall resistance. And luckily the Quebec trade Union activists and the Quebec left that I hung out with didn’t use that standard to judge the United States because if there’s anywhere in the world where there’s a dangerous far right in power and shaping not only its country and the lives of working and oppressed people inside its country, but the entire world, it’s the United States. So if the Quebec activist had taken the approach of saying, because you’ve got a right wing government, I will not extend solidarity to the struggle of working class people and oppress people for their liberation and transformation of their society, that would be a catastrophe for the American labor movement because the American labor movement is bound up with the labor movement in Quebec and the rest of the Canadian state in Mexico and globally.
And so what we need to stand for, and obviously the US is not an oppressed nation, but it’s a useful thing to think about a method of how and when and the mechanisms you extend solidarity. And the basic approach should be we should be for the unconditional support of people’s right to self-determination. But that doesn’t mean you support all the players in that struggle, and you can have an openly critical attitude towards the right wing in any particular country. And its struggles because we’re trying to build progressive solidarity globally. And that will include having a critical posture towards the problems, weaknesses, structures of exploitation and oppression in other countries. And so I just think, thank God that Quebec comrades didn’t judge me by Donald Trump because otherwise internationalism would be instantly screwed. A second thing I think about the question is obviously we have an enormous US propaganda machine where the US ruling classes, the US bosses, the US elite and the US government’s view of things is transmitted through mainstream media, the educational institution, et cetera, and has a huge impact on people’s consciousness.
The same is true of other powers in the world, whether that be the European Union, whether that be Russia, China, smaller regional imperial powers like Israel, whatever, they churn out their own propaganda and that influences people and that means there’s a contest of narratives. So the Russian regime has generated this myth that the Ukrainian state is led by Nazis. Zelensky is a Jew. The idea that he’s a Nazi is just propaganda. And that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a far right in Ukraine. There is. And that’s why as we extend solidarity to Ukraine’s, right, to fight for itself determination, we support the left that is challenging that right internally in Ukraine because we don’t nor do the vast majority of people in Ukraine want a right wing future for a free and liberated Ukraine. They want a progressive future that’s anti neoliberal, that’s for popular control of the society, that’s about equality, democracy, the rights of oppressed minorities within their country.
That’s what the left in Ukraine is fighting for. And those are the forces, the trade unions, the feminist movement, the progressive forces that we have to ize with. And the final thing that’s important to underscore about the Ukrainian far right is its minuscule in government compared to the us. There is much stronger far right in the US and the entire Russian regime is far right. It’s one of the main sponsors of the international far right globally that has relationship with the A FD in Germany and many other far right governments throughout the world and openly supports the far right in the United States, including having a bromance between Putin and Donald Trump. So I just think that we have to complicate any stereotypes of the Ukrainian people as being far right nor their government, which doesn’t mean to say that they’re not a far right element in the society, but it’s not in government, it is in sections, the military, and we support the left against those forces as we defend the right of self-determination for the whole country.
Blanca Missé:
Yeah, I mean, I just want to add on this question that for example, one of the elements of polarization inside Ukraine was a question of Palestine because there is a strong relation between Ukraine and Israel. There’ve been some migration. So there’s people who have families there in the kibbutz and in the colon settlements, and Zelensky was the first one to be make the wrong connection. Ukraine is like Israel and in the resistance, the left wing forces, the unions, the feminists fought and it was a really, imagine you are having the bombs follow on you every day and you’re saying you want to have a discussion on Palestine because we need to issue a statement on Palestine. And they issued a statement on Palestine, so they forced a discussion of solidarity and that’s how we picked our guests. I mean, it was very clear we were not going to have guests the same way we organize a discussion of solidarity in Palestine, in the us, in the Ukraine solidarity network.
We say we cannot continue the solidarity movement for Ukraine without denouncing the occupation of Palestine and all the crimes of Israel. This discussion also happened in Ukraine in way more difficult conditions. And so maybe that should have been something that we could have elaborated more on the episode, but those discussions were happening, so they were publicly defiant their government and saying, we are on the opposite sides of the barricades. You are in this other country. That’s what they were saying. We support these other people and you support this government and we’re saying that Netanyahu is like Putin. That’s right. So I think that there’s a lot of political debates in the resistance movement, and I think sometimes we assume that they’re monolith and then so we need to agree with the heads or not. And so we also want to break from this mechanistic attitude and say, yes, they’re reactionary forces in progressive movements like they are reactionary forces in the trade unions in the us like the trade unions, some of them support Trump in the us.
Are we going to leave the union? Are we going to boycott the union or are we just going to join the union and have difficult political discussions with our coworkers while we fight for our contract? And so how do we deal with these contradictions? They’re not so different from the contradictions we have at home. So while we’re denying the fact that abroad they have contradictions are equal or sometimes more complicated because I just want to finish with this here. When you’re living under occupation or under dictatorship, all of these difficulties we even experienced in the US to fight for social justice, they’re amplified like the stakes of bringing a political debate that is divisive when you’re fighting for your survival is higher, way higher than we’re used to. And still they’re doing this fight because we are trying to find those who can illuminate us about how to fight for progressive causes against neoliberalism, against injustice in the middle of fighting for their own struggle for liberation and seizing these contradictions. So no guests are perfect. We are not perfect. We don’t have the answers to all the problems. We don’t think we’re superior and having this is the perfect standpoint, but we have a commitment to wrestle with these contradictions, not hide them. Otherwise we’ll not do this podcast
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well. And in the spirit of contradictions or seeming contradictions, I wanted to also throw a question at you guys that comes from one of our audience members who sent this question in. And to me, I think this reads as both a larger belief system question, like maintaining consistency in our belief system and our principles. But it’s also a question about the practical politics of what we’re doing in the real world day in day out. And the question really is how does someone say here in North America, working person in North America Square, the very sensible sounding and convincing position of someone like Joshua Mata, the general secretary of the Filipino Labor Federation, Centro, whom Ashley interviewed in episode four when he talks about the need for demilitarization and demilitarization as a critical cause for the left, for the labor movement for people of conscience everywhere to be pushing in that direction.
How do we square that with the very explicit calls for more arms for Ukrainians, that these were calls that were echoed by our guests in episode one, which make total sense, as you said, Blanca, they are literally fighting for their lives. And as your guest said, you cannot fight your enemy with pillows, you need guns. And so for the listener back here in North America who’s trying to kind of square both the need for global demilitarization and the sort of immediate case specific call from Ukrainians for more arms from the United States, how is a person to square that?
Ashley Smith:
Yeah, I think it’s a really important question, and I think it’s very important to recognize the different context because in the case of Joshua Mata’s argument for the South China Sea and the contest over claims to islands, sea areas, underwater natural resources, fisheries, territory, it’s not yet a war. It’s not yet an armed conflict. And Joshua’s argument is entirely to try and interrupt this conflict, which is growing from becoming a war. And we’re on the edge of it in whole sections of the South China Sea, not only between China and the Philippines, but between China and Japan, between China and Vietnam, China and other countries, because China is pushing outward and claiming areas that other nation states claim some of them who are explicit allies of the United States. So the danger of this local conflict becoming an international conflict between rival nuclear powers with the capacity to destroy the planet in that context, it makes perfect sense to make an argument for demilitarization as a regional argument that the entire region’s working class should take up from China to Vietnam to the Philippines, to the rest of the region.
And that’s very different from the situation of Ukraine where without provocation, Russia invaded the country after Ukraine had repeatedly, well, they demilitarized, they gave up their entire nuclear arsenal based on promises with the European powers and with Russia for security guarantees. So they actually did demilitarize and it didn’t stop Russian imperialism from intervening. So the situation is very different. Ukraine is under occupation of whole sections of its sovereign national territory faced with an invasion that wants to take the entire country and transform it into a semi colony, if not an explicit colony ruled by a brutal dictatorship. And they’re in the fight of their lives like the Palestinians are in the fight of their lives. And you can’t fight that with pillows. And so I defend the right of Palestinians, Ukrainians, any society, any people that are under the threat of military invasion and occupation to defend themselves that is just a internationally recognized.
And at the same time, we have to make an argument that true peace will not be delivered just by arms. Obviously the only thing that’s going to guarantee peace in Central Asia and eastern Europe is a regional working class movement to topple the government in Russia to challenge zelensky neoliberalism, to transform the European Union so that the society puts people and their lives and the environment and peace first. But that can only be done by a regional working class radical movement that changes the entire calculation. So it’s the same struggle at a different phase of development, and you have to judge each situation by its concrete specificity and not have an abstract playbook that you simply apply in every circumstance. I think it would be immoral to deny the right of Palestinians to have the right of self-determination, including securing arms from anywhere they can get them, whatever state, be it Iran, be it whatever, to get the arms to fight for their self-defense, their sovereign, right? And at the same time, I do think in the Middle East, the only thing that’s going to win a transformation of the region is like what we saw in the beginning of the Arab Spring, a regional revolutionary process to transform this horrific fossil capitalist economy into one that puts people in the planet first. But you have to first begin with the recognition that people have the right to defend themselves.
Blanca Missé:
I just want to, I agree with what Ashley is saying about the different context, but also I think we need to add an extra difference between supporting the right of oppressed nations to have weapons to defend themselves and supporting NATO and armament. And I just say, well, this is a contradiction. Where are the weapons are going to come from? And I say this because this discussion has happened in the middle of the Ukraine war. I mean, we think we come here, we have this concern. Oh, the Ukrainians are not realizing that by demanding NATO weapons, they’re strengthening NATO under, of course, they’re realizing the contradictions. They live in the contradictions, they are smart and as worried about it that we are. And this debate inside the Ukrainian working class movement and it’s allies in Europe led to a huge breakthrough in June of 2024, which was a very important statement, which was a Ukraine, a people’s piece and not an imperial piece.
And they were trying to put forward a progressive way out of this war, which will not mean subordination to United States to zelensky new liberal planet, et cetera. And there they wrote something, and this was signed by Ukrainian resistance forces. They write something that was quite bold. They said, an effective military support of Ukraine does not require a new wave of armaments. We oppose NA or armament programs and weapons exports. Instead, the countries of Europe and North America must provide the weapons from their existing arsenals. And they also demand that the arms industry, instead of serving the profits interest of capital, be put under workers’ control. And I think what I say this because the contradictions of a war where you have humans making weapons to kill other humans, go back to the core of what is the society we’re living in and why are we making weapons to kill?
And what if the workers who are making weapons were to decide who uses their weapons and how much weapons we produce instead of the governments. So the idea that it is workers who are producing these weapons, who should be the ones deciding who gets the weapons fighting a legitimate defense fight and not an oppressive fight? So are the weapons we’re producing going to go to Palestine or they’re going to go to Israel, right? It is the decision of working people under unions because they’re the ones making it because Netanyahu does not go to work to make weapons. Workers who go to, we go to make ideology, labor, everything we produce, and that discussion is happening. I mean this discussion, and they even bring into the discussion the question of the ecological disaster. And they think, and we’re even thinking that in the end we’re going to have to retool the arm industry to kind of stop producing more carbon emissions and destruction and kind of shift to produce goods that are needed and decarbonization and environmental sustainable economy.
So in the war, because there were progressive forces trying to think through these contradictions, they were starting to put forward solutions that would say, okay, so right now we need weapons and we will get them forever, but why is the US producing more weapons? I mean, can we just get them the ones? Of course, the US is not going to agree to just give the ones they have, but it will be a way to disarm the US to arm the Ukrainian resistance. That’s what they were saying, disarm imperialist powers to arm resistant movements. That was a brilliant proposal they make and have this being discussed and led by those who make the weapons in the US and those who need the weapons in the resistant movement so they democratically can decide what weapons we make and what for those discussions. For us, these are very important educational moments in our history because this keeps happening over and over and over.
I mean, the question of needing weapons to fight the US got their weapons from whom to fight against the France financed deliberation movement against England and so on and so forth. Someone who has money gives you the weapons. So I just think that this discussion, if we take the contradiction and we go deeper, we realize which are the social forces that bring progressive solutions and what are the social forces that always bring reactionary solutions? Reactionary solutions is someone has to die. You need to pick the lesser evil. We cannot all have our, and the progressive solutions is like, no, we don’t all have to die. We just need to take control of the society and making democratically the decisions about what we do produce and how do we live together and how we deal with our conflict. So I do think that that’s a discussion that has happened, and I think maybe we need to amplify it more because it keeps happening over and over in all these national liberation movements.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I really appreciate you bringing to the fore. These are not questions that we in the armchair critic class are just creating out of thin air. These discussions are happening on the ground. They’re happening amidst the folks fighting for their own national liberation, fighting for their own survival. And so I think just moving forward, the more that we bring those out, the more that we can point our listeners to those resources, those statements, those accounts, those factions within liberation struggles that are addressing these issues. We’re going to keep trying to provide that information for you guys. But I really appreciate you guys bringing that to the fore here. And we only have about 15 more minutes, and as our episode zero showed, I could talk to you guys literally for hours, but we’ve given ourselves a time limit on this episode, and I want to get through a couple more questions with the time that we’ve got.
And Ashley, I’m going to put you on the hot seat real quick because I think this is a question that can seem really scary and because in the past it’s caused a lot of division, especially within what we call the left. But we want to show you guys that it’s actually not that fucking hard, pardon my French, to dive into the tough questions, address them openly, honestly, and still maintain our comradery, our solidarity, and sharpen our thinking every step of the way. So in that vein, I think the bad faith straw man version of this question would probably sound something like this, Ashley Smith, why are you such a trotskyist scold who just hates the people’s Republic of China? But in a good faith Steelman version of that question, and it’s surely one that some of our listeners genuinely have that version of the question would be, okay, China is a great power in the world seeking to advance its own national interests just like the other great powers do.
We can’t be naive about that. But at the same time, a listener may be rightfully saying, I don’t see China’s military invading countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine. I don’t see them wiping Palestinians off the map on my phone every day. I don’t see the Chinese government instigating coups and installing right-wing dictatorships and waging CIA led counterinsurgency campaigns around the world like we’ve been doing here in the good old US of A for centuries, even before the existence of the CIA. Is it fair to talk about China and the US under that same umbrella of imperialism? And if so, why? What would your argument be for that? And if not, what qualifications or caveats should we be giving here concerning how we’re talking about imperialism and how China fits or doesn’t fit into that discussion?
Ashley Smith:
Well, it’s a great question and I welcome it. I embrace it. I think it’s excellent that we have a debating culture on the left where the hard questions get grappled with. That’s a sign of a healthy left and a suppression of that debate and discussion will only lead to tears in the struggle because we need to be prepared to wrestle with these challenging questions. My co-authors and I tried to deal with a lot of this stuff in our book, China and Global Capitalism, which I encourage everybody to get a copy of, read debate, discuss with fellow comrades. And the first thing of many arguments we make in the book is that number one, the US is the biggest imperialist power on the planet, and especially anybody in the US has to see their first job. First and foremost job is combating US imperialism, which I think if you read what the Ukraine Solidarity network or certainly follow what I’ve ever written, most of what I write is screeds against us imperialism, because you have to take on your own ruling class and its determination to exert its power and influence to make profits at the expense of other people and oppressed nations around the world.
And the US certainly since the end of the Cold War has been an unrivaled imperialist power that has superintended absolute horror around the world, the imposition of structural adjustment, neoliberal economic policies, the commiseration of whole sections of the world through free trade deals like nafta, which wrecked peasant agriculture in Mexico, or you just go on and on about their economic policies. Same thing with military policies. It backed up its neoliberalism by becoming a global policeman, invading other countries, overthrowing their regimes to carry out their neoliberal offensive throughout the entire world. And all their geopolitics has been committed to that as well. So in every dimension, the US is the biggest enemy of the people of the earth. That is without question, but it is not the only enemy. And I think that’s important to recognize that we live in a global capitalist system in which every single country is capitalist, no matter what it calls itself.
The US calls itself a democracy. It’s not a democracy, even in its founding documents, it calls itself a republic. Every bit of democracy was won from below by working class people. If you look at every single society around the world, it’s capitalist without exception. That is the means of production. The factories, the institutions, the media, the office buildings where people labor are owned either directly by private capitalists or by the government, which is a form of state capitalism, not workers democracy. So by that definition, every single society around the world is capitalists. It’s based on exploitation and oppression for profit and competition in a world economy. And that applies to China as well. And China, since its shift to a free market strategy of development. Under the rule of Deng, Xing made a partnership with Western Capital to provide a cheap migrant labor force that had no political rights to organize independent unions as a cheap labor force for multinational capital.
But the Chinese capitalist class was very smart in that it maintained ownership over key sections of its economy as state capitalist industries, as state owned enterprises that aim to compete on the world market within global capitalism, subject to all its laws of competition, and at the same time open up to private capital both internationally and within the country, so that you’ve had capitalist development within China that has turned it into an economic superpower. It’s the second biggest economy in the world. It has the second highest number of billionaires of any country in the world, second to the United States. And it’s transformed itself through its strategy of economic development from a simple sweatshop export processing platform for multinational capital to now having advanced high-tech capital that competes directly with Western capital. So for example, the best electric vehicle in the world is not made by Tesla, which creates crappy EVs, but it’s made by BYD at a cheaper price because workers are paid lower.
And because robots are essential to the construction of these electric vehicles, so high tech manufacturing that rivals the United States. So China has transformed itself into an economic superpower with the rise of its economic superpower. It’s become started to function as an imperial power. Its economy is so productive, it produces so much stuff, concrete, steel, high-tech, manufacturing, that it needs outlets, markets in the world that it can sell its products and it needs investment sites. So it started the Belt in Road initiative, which is a giant trillion dollars infrastructure development plan to export its surplus product to the world economy, and especially to the developing world and grant loans to those countries to pay for those investments and infrastructure. So now it is the biggest bilateral lender in the world, bigger than the us, directly bigger than the IMF and World Bank directly. So it’s become a holder of tremendous loans and it’s competing therefore for control of sections of the world economy with the us it’s getting into the US business and it’s modernized, its military, so that now it has the second largest military budget in the world at an estimate of over 300 billion a year, still far less than the $1 trillion US budget.
But that’s a huge military force, and they’ve begun to exercise that military force in the South China Sea as we went through in the episode on the Philippines. But it’s also exercised that force indirectly geopolitically in Hong Kong where it did crush a democracy movement through its surrogate government within Hong Kong and imposed police state repression within Hong Kong of a mass democratic movement. And internally in Xin Chang, it’s carried out a cultural genocide jailing through war on terror justifications, thousands upon thousands of Uyghurs and Muslims in the whole region, and turned them into a cheap labor force that is now being exported to factories and other sections of the country. So all those characteristics, economic superpower on capitalist terms, geopolitical influence, that it’s increasingly exercising a massive military and crushing of democratic rights to self-determination of Hong Kong, or threatening that with Taiwan, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
This is a rising imperialist power still far behind the United States. And that’s the most important thing is the us. Like Britain at the end of the 19th century is a declining power faced with rising rivals that are getting in on its game. That’s the moment we’re in now where the US has ruled the roost, but now we have rising powers, especially China. But now with Trump’s retreat, the European Union is starting to think about itself as an independent imperialist power. Russia obviously is doing that, and there are lots of regional powers that are now off the US leash that are beginning to exert their influence. So we have a very dangerous world of multiple imperialist powers, of middling powers that are exerting their own regional power, sometimes in cahoots with one or the other powers, often in opposition to them. And that makes a very dangerous world that we’re in.
And for me, the most important thing is challenging the United States and its attempt to hold on to its rule of the roost through nationalism, authoritarian nationalism in the Trump regime, which is whipping up in particular anti-Chinese racism with vengeance in the United States, checking whether the Chinese students are members of the Chinese Communist Party, expelling those students if they find any little bit of information expelling all sorts of people that have migrated from China to the United States denying like in Florida the right to buy real estate near strategic sites in Florida, which Ron DeSantis has done. So there is a danger of a kind of anti-Chinese racism, which I am very, very concerned about. So instead of doing that, we need to oppose the anti-Chinese racism, all the China bashing and expose the fact that actually the United States, up until very recently, were collaborating in the common exploitation and race to the bottom, not only of workers in China, but also workers in the United States who’ve been pitted one against the other in a race to the bottom. And instead, we should be building solidarity across borders between workers in the United States, workers in China, workers in the rest of Asia, and workers throughout the world, to challenge a planet that is being held hostage to global capitalism, imperialist competition, and so many crises that risk the survival of us as a species.
Blanca Missé:
I just want to add one small thing, max to your question about is China imperialist or how can you say China’s imperialist if it’s not deploying armies and occupying, right? I am a citizen of Spain and I consider Spain to be an imperialist country, right? I don’t see Spain every day invading countries and doing things. But let’s think about the relations Spain has with Latin America. They bought all of the banks, all of the utility companies. I mean, they’re minor imperialism relation to the US because one thing we need to understand is there are different kinds of imperialism, different sizes, different strengths. Spain is a imperialist power that has very strong financial banks, energy companies, telephone companies, and what they’ve done, they bought all the markets in Latin America, when you’re living in Argentina and you have no electricity because the electricity company or you have shut down on and off because electricity company has been bought by the Spanish who are not investing and the banks are charging you outrageous fees, you are oppressed by Spanish imperialism.
Of course you’re even more oppressed, you would say about US imperialism. But you have another power that is limiting your capacity to fully develop and blow as a nation because these foreign companies are taking the profits and moving them away and putting them in the pockets of rich Spaniards. But China is doing the same thing right now in Latin America. They say, oh, you have these big debts with the US who are horrible. We’re going to finance your debt. We’re going to give you a loan, and in exchange you’re going to give us access to their mineral resources and we are going to create a free zone with no taxes and we’re going to put our own factories and we’re going to make profit with your workers work. Well, that’s an imperialist intervention too. I mean, of course they’re not rolling out the tanks, they’re not doing the coups, right?
But they are limiting the sovereignty and the capacity of the Argentinian people, the Brazil, I’m just giving this example to fully develop and own the wealth they produce and be able to make the political decision. So of course when it comes to having an election, the US has interest there and Spain has interest and now China has interest there and they’re buying in different ways to control the outcome. So I think we do need to understand that there are different kinds of power. So you can call them imperialists or call them great power, whatever you want to call them. The question is, if you’re in Argentina, for example, are you going to defend the right of Argentinians to say no to all these economic encroachment and all these political encroachment and say, we don’t owe you this and we’re not going to pay this debt and we want to nationalize these companies and we want you off the mining and the exploitation of our natural resources because you’re destroying our country. And when you do this, you’re going to face US companies. You’re going to face Spanish companies, you’re going to face British companies, and today you’re going to face Chinese companies. And that’s the same in Latin America. And it’s also the case in Africa. You can put the label you want in it. The question is, are we going to support the struggles of these folks even if they come into conflict with Chinese great powers? And for us, the question is yes, solidarity without exceptions.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think those are brilliant and very helpful points. And I guess I would just, again, in as good of a faith and in as strong of a steelman version of this argument as I can muster, I would just maybe leave as an open question for us to continue addressing in this series and in all of our coverage is that doesn’t mean there are always going to be easy answers because, and I guess this is kind of a real politic question of like, well, what do we do if the majority of people in a given nation want the belt and road deal? What do we do with the fact that large portion of the Chinese population supports the government and the communist party because they’ve seen an explosion in a middle class that the world has never seen a rise in quality of life for a lot of working people?
What do we do with the folks who like that and want it? I mean, again, they’re not easy answers to this and we are fully devoted to dealing with that complexity. But I want to throw that out as something that I imagine is still a lingering question on folks’ mind as they themselves take the frames that we’re giving them and continue to navigate this very complex and violent world that we find ourselves in. I could genuinely talk about this question for another 20 minutes, but I want to just sneak in one more big question maybe, and it does tie into what we’re talking about here because it really comes to, I think the critical intersection of the project we’re undertaking here, the real value that we’re trying to add here and how we’re trying to empower folks with the information and perspective we’re giving so that they can go out into the world and do as much good as they can given the context and circumstances that we’re in.
So this is really a question about ideology and sort of maintaining consistency with our beliefs and our principles, both in terms of the positions that we believe are right and correct and good, but also how those principles and that consistency sort of help us navigate the real political terrain in front of us where sometimes the answers aren’t just like clear cut and we’ve got to sort of be thinking in practical terms as much as we’re thinking in long terms, kind of like you guys were talking about with demilitarization needing to be the essential long-term path to peace while understanding that in the immediate short-term reality, Ukrainians need weapons to defend themselves. Palestinians need, they got rocks, they got rockets. Everyone has a universal right to defend themselves when they’re being aggressed and attacked by an outside force like that is international law. That’s the point that we’re making here. So in that vein, I wanted to kind of throw this last question out. And we mentioned Joshua Mata, the union leader from the Philippines whom Ashley interviewed in episode four. And this question has really been nagging me ever since I listened to that interview, which was great. Joshua was a phenomenal guest. There was so much information and clear perspective packed into that interview, but it was specifically near the end of that conversation when Joshua says this, that I got hung up. So let’s play that clip real quick.
Speaker 5:
The problem for us now is that it’s so difficult for us to get the people to support, for example, the struggle of the people in Ukraine or even in Palestine. We hold rallies, we hold activities, we hold actions, but it’s this small community of activists and believers and not the general public. That is the kind of challenge that we have right now. And I attribute that to the fact that people are so burdened with day-to-day living that’s just difficult for them to, the bandwidth for solidarity, if you like, is so limited. And that is a challenge that we have to figure out how do we address that?
Maximillian Alvarez:
I remember feeling a very familiar feeling after I heard that clip, and it’s a feeling that I frankly feel often here in the United States. I can remember it vividly. I was parked in my car just sucking my teeth and angrily tapping my foot like the Grinch on Mount Crumpet. It’s that feeling when you hear someone speak such clear sense and it really hits you in the chest, it knocks you back. And then it is just swiftly followed by this blunt reality check that, oh yeah, this is not the view of anyone in power. The number of people who are mobilized by and organized around this worldview is actually quite small. And the masses of working people, even if they are sympathetic to these aims, these goals, these politics, they just don’t have, as Joshua put it, the bandwidth for solidarity, for struggle, for things like internationalism.
And the historian in me and the depressed guy in me would say that I just basically summed up a good chunk of the history of what we call the left. And of course, that word, that term has come up numerous times on this podcast. It’s come up in this conversation today. I think all three of us would describe ourselves as leftists. But that point from Joshua really kind of left me thinking like, is this what we want people to identify with a small, righteous minority with no power that can only bring a few people out to a protest when the laboring masses are not with us? It makes me think to a mantra that we repeat here at the Real News so often that we’re not trying to mobilize the left here, we’re trying to mobilize the working class because frankly, there’s just not enough left people or self-identified leftists to make a difference.
I mean, and really the left politics we have seem to mean nothing if they do not connect with the struggles of our fellow workers around the world and provide a way for us to struggle together, connect those struggles and build power to achieve the world that we’re talking about here, the world that we believe people deserve. So my question is really in that vein, again, really sort of a deep honest look at ourselves and the political project that we have here. I wanted to ask you guys, is it still useful in the 21st century in the world that we live in now to still talk in these terms left, right? What does left mean when we’re talking about this series and the principles that we’re communicating, the positions that we feel folks can take, the tangible ways they can show solidarity and the goals that we collectively want to achieve with that? Is the term left still useful there? If it is, let’s talk about why. If not, where do our own sort of leftist politics mean in this larger discussion that we are having with plenty of people, listeners across the country and around the world who maybe don’t identify as leftists but still want peace and want to show solidarity with folks in their struggles for national liberation? So let me toss that big juicy question at both of you guys as a way to sort of round out this conversation.
Ashley Smith:
It’s a huge question, but I think it’s very practical and urgent because if you think about where we are at, we are coming out of four or five decades of defeat on an international scale of the working class movement and of the left and in which the ruling classes, the bosses, the elite have cut our jobs, cut our social welfare programs. Like in China, there’s really no welfare state any longer. They used to have a iron rice bowl. There’s really no national health insurance to speak of, and people work in horrific conditions. And it’s like it’s the norm all around the world that people have been subject to this logic of a race to the bottom in which everybody has been impoverished to enrich the parasitic minority that rules each and every country without exception all around the world. And so in many ways, we all are in a state of emergency to different degrees and some it’s existential like in Palestine or Ukraine or other countries under the boot of direct military occupation and invasion.
But we’re all in an increasingly common situation of being ruled by a horrific parasitic elite that has vacuumed up all our wealth at our expense without exception all around the world. That produces two things. One, exhaustion because people have to deal with the reality of working crappy jobs for low wages and no benefits as an international phenomenon, and that is pulverizing to a logic of solidarity within a country and beyond a country. That’s a fact. But that position of commonality also makes possible precisely because we live in global capitalism now in which each and every aspect of our economy are globally integrated so that we have a situation of interdependence and we see people in different parts of the world in common positions. It opens up the possibility of what founded anything that could speak to why a left still means anything. And that’s what Marx wrote in the Communist manifesto.
Workers of the world unite You have nothing to lose but their chains, but your chains, that’s now more true than it’s ever been in the history of the world. And that’s not just a moral injunction, it’s a fact like workers in the United States have to build solidarity across borders. If you want to have a fighting union movement in the United States, you need to have solidarity with Canadian and Quebec Union workers fighting in a common auto industry, solidarity with Mexican auto workers who are part of the regional production chain of the automobiles that you’re working on. The inputs to those automobiles come from China. The magnets are based on rare earth mineral processing plants in China that desperately poor Chinese workers work in. So the fact of solidarity is there, and we can’t resist any of our bosses without challenging them all because they are globally integrated trading with one another.
That’s why Trump’s tariffs are nonsensical, because he’s disrupting the global economy that keeps capital alive right now, and that’s why it’s so dysfunctional. So I think you have an objective basis for solidarity, a reason why people have to be building solidarity. And then the other thing is people are showing the capacity for solidarity in the real world. I think of the question of Palestine in the United States, people in record numbers identify with Palestine, protest for Palestine, engage in boycott divestment and sanctions for Palestine. So you have an internationalism that’s being born in the US working class, and among regular working class people in the United States that recognize Palestine’s legitimate struggle for national self-determination, when the entire ruling class, both parties and the media demonize that instinct of solidarity. I’ve just been watching these commencement addresses by valedictorians across the country who are literally risking their diplomas and their careers to speak out for Palestine.
That shows you an internationalist awakening that’s going on. I would also say that’s true of Ukraine in the United States. The opinion polls are incredibly high for solidarity with Ukraine, struggle for self-determination. So I think it’s objectively necessary. There are reasons for people to organize around it, and people are undergoing this moral awakening and identification that’s going on that people are also recognizing it’s in their material interest. All the money that goes to arming Israel to carry out a genocide could go to jobs, healthcare benefits, vacations. Here in the United States, housing like where I live in Burlington, Vermont, nobody can afford housing. We need public housing. That money is being spent on killing people on a genocide in Gaza instead of improving people’s lives here. So I am tremendously hopeful that this idea of working class solidarity across borders with other working class and oppressed people struggle and nation’s right to self-determination is being reborn as an ethic of the new radicalization.
The political challenge is it’s not organized. It’s not deep enough in the mass organizations of the working class, the trade unions in the United States, and there’s a debate inside those unions that Blanca referenced before where you have prominent trade union leaders that are with Trump violating that logic of internationalism that’s necessary in this moment. People like Sean O’Brien at the head of the Teamsters, but also Sean Fein, who’s the head of the United Auto Workers Union, who supports the protectionism under the illusion that you can bring jobs back. That’s devastating, especially if you know the history of the UAW where in the 1980s, Vincent Chin, a Chinese man was killed because he was mistaken for a Japanese man by auto workers. That’s the price of embracing Trump and protectionism and US nationalism. And I think we have an argument to win inside the mass organizations of our side that our destinies are bound up with Palestinians, Chinese workers, workers in Mexico, workers in Quebec, Canada, workers of the world. But that’s an argument that needs to be embodied in organization coalitions and a new left that is genuinely internationalist without exception. I think the future of humanity depends on this.
Blanca Missé:
I fully agree with everything Ashley said, and I don’t want to repeat some of the stuff. I just want to talk about the challenge we have because the objective conditions of solidarity are there in the sense the way that our lives are more and more common in the sense that we’re all raised to the bottom and the ecological emergency and catastrophe is also bounding our destinies together. Now, the question is how do we break from an isolation or being a minority, right? And I don’t think any of us begins any of the struggles we’re embedded in saying, I am the left. Follow me. This is the right way to think, in the sense that demanding adherence to an ideology or a correct viewpoint, it’s not the way even to convince people to your viewpoint. I mean, we all have learned that what we need to do is connect with folks.
And what Joshua was saying, well, people don’t have the bandwidth when people say, I don’t have the bandwidth for this. They’re telling you, I don’t see how I am related to this struggle. I have my struggles of my own because we all have struggles of our own. And our big challenge, and we don’t have a magic solution, but this is what we’re working at every day is how we make it that my bandwidth is their bandwidth. It’s our bandwidth. How do we connect these struggles, right? And I think what has happened with Palestine in this country has shown us that, for example, when we frame the struggle for a Palestine in a way where we have a connection of reciprocity and the occupation, right, freedom for the Palestinians free Palestine, that’s a slogan nobody can oppose, right? We’re saying the debate is not whether you condemn or don’t condemn Hamas.
No, no. The question is, do the Palestinian people have the right to live free of oppression, free of bombs, have the right of their own of determination, yes or no? And so we ask clear questions and then we bring people together. And within the folks we bring together, we have a lot of debates in the universities. For example, we have been one of the epicenters of struggle. We have huge fights for academic freedom and civil liberties, and we’re bringing with us because we have been successful chunk of liberals and folks who do not identify as lefties or radicals or even as progressives who believe in the fundamental, the constitution, the right of free speech, but they’re drawing the connections that the same forces that are for the destruction of Palestine, they’re also silencing them in the universities. And so we’re just saying academic freedom for all free Palestine, we should be able to say, because if you want to speak against the police, you’re also silenced today.
If you want to speak against the deportations, you’re also, if you support the DEI, which means was a code name for racial justice and decolonization. So our job in the left unquote left is to be able to connect the struggles to draw these bridges. So it’s not like, oh, I’m in my thing. I’m in my little thing. I don’t have the bandwidth for something else. Let’s see how we connect them. Let’s see how we make sure that if we keep isolated, we’re going to keep defeated. But they’re the same forces like peeling us one after the other, and we are tired of repeating. If we do not defend the students, the colleagues, the workers who are getting fired from their workplaces because they speak up for Palestine, then the next layer is going to be those who speak for undocumented immigrants, those who speak for black people, those who speak for trans people and folks on understand this in the struggle, the players of who are the forces of oppression and who are the forces of liberation.
They’re being clarified in the United States. And the student movement did that. And I think that’s our contribution there is where we build the left, we build the left with those folks first fighting together in solidarity with unconditional solidarity, having clear what principles, and then having democratic political discussions between us and figuring things. All these contradictions were being laying out. We need to figure it out. We don’t have the answer to all of them. We have opinions. We have folks who have devoted a lot of time to study issues. Ashley is an expert on China. He comes to any event, he will connect how it goes with China. Other folks are experts on Latin America. They will come and connect the issue, what’s happening, and we’ll learn from each other. But we can only do that if we get our working people, the youth or press communities in motion, get them in motion through struggle because it’s through struggle that the contradictions make sense and we can solve them and address them, and we can bring all of this knowledge.
So for the people who are listening to our podcast, all of this makes no sense. If we’re not trying to connect this in a practical way about how this relates to me, how I relate to that, how do I unpack the idea that it’s out of my bandwidth? Maybe you don’t have the energy to do that. That’s a different thing. We all have limited energy. But to start seeing it that we are all in the same bandwidth where we’re all connected is already a game changer because it’s just even having a political conversation with your coworker, and next time you see a coworker who’s from Ukraine or from Sudan or just having a little conversation from the Philippines, that changes everything. That’s the beginning of building this connection among us in the United States because we’ve been so separated.
Ashley Smith:
I do want to just say something that Blanca you just said, which I think is really important. You cannot separate the world’s workers today because of migration. Everybody’s in everybody’s country all the time. It’s like in the United States, we have the world’s population. You have Palestinians, you have Ukrainians, you have Kashmiris, you have Sudanese, you have every country of the world. Because of us, imperialism has driven people from their shores into our confines of the American state. And so the question of internationalism, I think that’s really important to understand, and the response of the far right nationalist governments is to divide us, especially on the question of migration. So I think that the question of internationalism and solidarity begins at home, and that’s true of the Philippines, even where Joshua is. There’s American bases there. Well, not declared, but there are in fact American bases with war material and naval patrols, et cetera. So that the question of what’s outside and what’s inside is more complicated today than it’s ever been before because we’re integrated by global migration. We have the largest rate of international migration in human history right now, and that’s just another example of how we’re all being bound together. And it’s a question of building a struggle that’s capable of building the solidarity and winning.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Ashley Blanca, it has been so great getting to chat with you guys again. And I am genuinely looking forward to us having more conversations like this one as this series develops over the course of the year. And I really can’t wait to hear the new episodes that you guys have got coming out. And to everyone out there listening, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the Solidarity Without Exception podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, apple Podcasts, whatever. Subscribe to the Real News newsletter so you never miss new stories from us or new episodes of this very podcast. And please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with your coworkers, your friends, your family members. Share it on social media, share it in your union hall and get into conversations about it. Send in your questions about it to us.
Give us your feedback. Tell us how we can make this show and all of our productions more useful for you. And lastly, I just wanted to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We do not take corporate cash. We don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls. And we’ve got a small but incredible team of folks who are fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money to produce powerful, unique shows like Solidarity without exception. So if you want more vital storytelling, reporting and analysis like this, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. So just head on over to the real news.com/donate and donate today. We’re in the middle of our June fundraiser right now, and we really need your help. So don’t wait. Don’t expect someone else to do it. We need you to take that step, and I promise you, it really makes a difference. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you guys so much for caring for the Real News Network. I’m Maximilian Alvarez
Blanca Missé:
And Blanca Mise
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Ashley Smith. Thank you guys so much, and thank you all out there listening. Please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever without exception.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Blanca Missé, Ashley Smith and Maximillian Alvarez.