For A Nuanced Anti-Imperialism of Solidarity

Four Theses on Internationalism for DSA

By Sam Heft-Luthy

Sam Heft-Luthy is a member of the Red Star caucus, redstarsf.org , of DSA. He is a former co-chair of DSA San Francisco and the Secretary of California DSA, californiadsa.org

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings new scrutiny to DSA’s international solidarity work, some DSA members are making the same familiar calls for anti-imperialism of a “new” (old) type for the left. The Collective Power Network caucus of DSA folded under the weight of its own contradictions last year, leaving few organized national factions standing behind what the Red Star caucus believes to be the actual majority position of DSA members on international issues: unrelenting opposition to all US military- and intelligence-guided intervention, principled but measured analysis of semi-peripheral capitalist powers in contradiction with Western imperialism, and generous, guided inquiry about global socialist experiments.

In our advocacy for Convention Resolution #14, Committing to International Socialist Solidarity  three Red Star members, including myself, wrote about the principles and historical views that guide Red Star’s work to activate and further develop this majority position. Rather than offer another explanation of our internationalist principles, I want to offer a few points as interventions to the current conversation:

1. Rejecting the idea that the left got it wrong

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an escalation of global contradictions, but it does not change the fundamental analysis that existed in the days before February 24, or the tasks of American socialists under these conditions. DSA’s original statement on the conflict released before Russia’s invasion, correctly laid out these historical conditions:

The Russian Federation was and remains a capitalist power on the semi-periphery. The United States was and remains the linchpin of a global system of imperialism, a qualitative leap from the time of Lenin and World War I, including global systems of finance, military alliances, and intelligence operations that seek to remake the whole world in its image. And Ukraine was and remains a laboratory in the experiments of US empire as it seeks to enforce this world order at the expense of Ukrainian life to keep the Russian capitalist project down. 

An insistence that a negative response to either of DSA’s statements from the bourgeois press and Democratic establishment means that the American left “got it wrong” about Ukraine is misguided. We should not fool ourselves to think that if we had just had a better message it would have played stronger with the White House’s Rapid Response Director. The conditions that created this crisis are still with us, and the conditions that make the American state hostile to socialism are ascendent. We can’t simply trick a hostile media apparatus into giving us good airtime if we play it right; that triangulation is the game of the commentariat, and it’s one we as socialists should refuse to play.

2. For a nuanced anti-imperialism of solidarity

Among segments of DSA who seek to register dissent from the organization’s majority position, there’s an assertion that DSA’s current international orientation is one that “lacks nuance.” The two main arguments advanced are usually: 1) that the current orientation over-indexes on the US’ role in the imperialist world order, or 2) that it focuses on “states” over the realities of class dynamics within geopolitical entities.

We reject both of these framings. As our caucus wrote in March : “Anti-imperialism as a frame for opposition to war, far from being a naive or simplistic position, considers the whole long, bloody, and ongoing history of violence from the US-ian pole.” Capitalist development post-World War II simply would not have been possible without the ascendent US empire choking out socialist projects from Italy to Nicaragua, or even those it perceives as a threat to its global order, like Russia or Iran. This was and is often done by supporting conservative and fascist forces, a pattern that continues with Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi terror groups likely trained by the CIA ready to receive a significant portion of the military aid that Bread And Roses’ Neal Meyer asks socialists to consider supporting the provision of . 

The second argument, the distinction between “state solidarity” and “class solidarity” is a long-standing one in left circles. The argument generally goes that a geopolitical focus means that we ignore the class dynamics that cohere into a given government under the modern nation-state framework.

But as we stated in our article in support of Resolution #14 — it’s not naïveté about conditions in Cuba that leads to our support of their project, but a considered analysis of the difficulty of building socialism 100 miles off the coast of Florida and the difficult choices they face under US embargo.  Even engagement with larger and more contradictory socialist projects like China requires a clear-eyed understanding of class history and what actions might make sense for socialist forces under that country’s conditions. To refuse to start from principles of solidarity when engaging current socialist parties holding state power would be to avoid the hard work of reckoning with the difficult decisions needed to win the world we want.

3. The International Committee’s positive steps toward democratic representation

In his recent article in The Call, Jeremy Gong, a longstanding proponent of the minority position on international work and opponent of Resolution #14, wrote that “The current International Committee (IC) has been dominated by a ‘campist’ tendency.” However, there’s little articulation of who, concretely, this tendency is represented by, or what decisions made at DSA’s various Conventions by the highest body of the organization might be guiding the development of our vehicle for socialist diplomacy. 

By most measures, the IC reflects the democratic will of the convention and has an intra-committee democracy that ensures it continues to do so. The IC has transformed since 2019 to establish a robust and well-organized leadership structure appointed by the NPC and developed a membership list that has grown to over 600. Resolution #14 at the 2021 Convention, which was broadly recognized by both its supporters and its opponents to be a referendum on the continued direction of DSA’s International Committee after its re-foundation, passed with 65 percent of the delegates at the 2021 convention. 

The IC consistently reflects this breakdown in more contentious votes. For example, last year a motion made to sign DSA on to a statement of condemnation for “Intimidation of Civil Society Organizations in Hong Kong” broke down along similar lines, with a vote open to the Asia and Oceania and Labor Subcommittees, and the IC-wide China Working Group, ultimately voting 11 to 31 against signing onto the statement. The majority sentiment in that debate was to exercise caution at joining on to a statement signed largely by global labor NGOs and anti-Chinese political formations like “Students for Hong Kong” and the magazine Lausan Collective. Some have pointed to this as a “stifling of dissent,” but the vote occurred after significant internal deliberation, a meeting, and a vote open to a wide range of members. We see all of this as a positive sign of DSA’s ability to analyze and reflect the membership’s will on important questions.

4. Opportunities for improvement: participatory education and chapter connections

Despite the IC’s presence as one of the better-constructed organs of DSA’s national apparatus, the IC suffers from many of the same problems as the rest of the national organization.

While the IC does a good job of representing the membership as it exists now, there is more work to be done to build a more activated and educated membership that can improve our current analysis and engagement. The IC can also do more to understand and guide the chapter work that represents the majority of DSA’s concrete activity. That means building stronger connections and activating members on international work through chapter partnerships and liaisons for mobilization work. It also includes providing chapter-level support for educational programs that reflect DSA’s nationally-developed positions, consistently briefing DSA’s endorsed office-holders about a socialist perspective on world events, and ensuring that chapters have the resources needed to  quickly spin up international solidarity movement work as emerging situations arise.

While our statements should be airtight and reflect the majority’s general will, internal education can and should be more exploratory in nature, with less pressure to “get it right” every time. Building better structures to understand where the membership is with political education can inform the IC’s work and ensure that the democratic mandates which come together at national conventions are even stronger and more unified in their composition. Although I don’t agree that this critique should be taken as a call to stop our IC’s current work, I think it will be necessary to go beyond the stage of development we’re at in the present moment, and strongly agree with calls to improve internal political discussion throughout DSA.

International solidarity work reflects a crossroads for DSA. Will we be a disciplined mass organization that can reflect and sharpen working-class consciousness or a communications vehicle to trick the ruling class into supporting social reforms that go against their basic class interests? For all those who believe in the vision of the former, I hope these interventions are useful for articulating the currents within DSA and how we can ensure we live up to them.