Calling for a Global Approach to Countervailing Oligarchic Power
By: Meena Jagannath. Meena argues for global strategies that trade U.S. exceptionalism for an international analysis that takes seriously the ever-reaching power of the wealthy elite.
“Globalization meant that rule by theft and the rule of law were co-existing. Such tension could not be maintained indefinitely. One system would have to dominate, leaving the other as a façade.” Tom Burgis, Kleptopia
When building organizing campaigns, we often focus on mapping power within particular state or local bounds in the United States — that is to say, our analysis of political decision-making, the interests at stake, flows of capital, the applicable law and forums for action rarely goes beyond the U.S. This is understandable, since those of us involved in organizing, policy advocacy, and electoral work in the U.S. witness the wealthy most visibly thwarting democracy by wielding their influence and resources to drive government decision-making at the local, state, and national levels. But to build enough power to effectively countervail the power of the wealthiest of these influence-peddlers - the oligarchic class - we must understand how power operates beyond the borders of the U.S.
The crux of the problem is this: many of the channels that allow people and corporations to accumulate and keep their wealth tend to fall outside the purview of the campaigns we wage at the local or national levels. Thus, if our campaigns only design strategies to countervail the power of oligarchs within the U.S., we miss the fact that oligarchs are able to amass wealth and exert power in a way that defies borders, given that our present global economic system largely insulates markets from national concerns and allows oligarchs to shelter their wealth in myriad ways. Oligarchs operate in our global economy solely to continue to grow their wealth as a global economic class, and do so in ways that preserve racial hierarchy.
The economic and racial inequality we observe at all levels are rooted in a system of racial capitalism that uses racial identity as the basis for subjugation, exploitation, and extraction. While racial dominance was most starkly perceptible during the periods of slavery and colonialism, racial hierarchies are now perpetuated globally through uneven trade regimes, extractive industries, exclusive/racially discriminatory policymaking, clientelism, a refusal to provide reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism, and other mechanisms that allow the ill-begotten wealth of imperial powers, their corporations, and their oligarchs to remain and grow.
Of course, we take as a crucial starting point that mass membership organizations are necessary to construct countervailing power. At the same time, if we are able to understand how oligarchic power consolidates itself beyond state and national borders, we can begin to see how mass membership organizations must relate to one another globally to build the requisite power to confront it. We have the opportunity to sharpen our strategies to produce more just conditions for working class and marginalized people worldwide if we expand our analysis to consider a number of global factors, including:
(a) the reality that our economy depends on global supply chains that subsidize the cost of labor and materials for U.S. corporations;
(b) much of that value is captured by the oligarch class in both the U.S. and around the world, with the resulting wealth mostly hidden in offshore accounts or behind complex legal arrangements to avoid taxation or transparency;
(c) the multilateral institutions that structure and govern our global economy (e.g., the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) facilitate the extraction and capturing of global wealth (at the behest of a few rich countries, especially the U.S.);
(d) these multilateral institutions were built on neoliberal ideological foundations that serve to maintain relationships of dependency of the global south on the global north and undermine progressive projects for redistribution of wealth to produce greater social and economic equality; and
(e) this relationship of extraction preserves a global divide between the global north and the global south that has its roots in racial hierarchy (white supremacy, casteism, and others) and colonialism.
The challenge is that there is no clear blueprint for how communities can organize globally in this way. We have to work across borders, cultures, languages, political systems, ideologies, time zones, socioeconomic status, degree of development, uneven technological access –– to name a few barriers. But if the masses filling the streets in outrage at the genocide in Gaza signals anything, it is that the sentiment of solidarity in the face of grave injustice is still strong and ready to be channeled into powerful actions that attack the structural roots of these problems. Indeed, now is the moment to ask ourselves a few questions that might nudge us towards more structural solutions: How can we defy and transcend a border regime that masks opportunities to build solidarity and power among workers, tenants, farmers, and poor folks around the world? What are we leaving on the table strategically by not thinking about how oligarchic power is organizing itself globally? How can law be deployed to support efforts to reduce the power oligarchs have over the global economy and grow democratic power across borders? What is possible if we begin to understand law’s role in constructing our present global economy and could we propose alternative institutions that challenge that legal framework at its root?
It must be said at the outset that all the caveats about law’s historical role in preserving dominance and oppressive systems, as well as its inherent limitations to produce justice, apply here. It is also beyond question that organizing and social movement building are essential components to systemic transformation at any scale.
I lay out the problem below (albeit not exhaustively) in three main parts, and include a couple examples in each section about the ways we might –– as a movement ecosystem –– incorporate this analysis to strategically bolster our work in building democratic power. I begin by noting that the anti-democratic ideology of neoliberalism is embedded not only in the U.S. political economy but also in the fabric of our overall global economic system. Thus, there is a level of policymaking that happens out of the reach of national or subnational organizing contexts. I then discuss the importance of recognizing the global root causes of local problems, and the potential of using this analysis to build trans-local campaigns. The third part addresses the extent to which regressive, conservative forces are organizing globally at the behest of (or with the support of) a class of wealthy elites, and how we must build a new internationalism of people’s movements for democracy to confront rising authoritarianism and militarism.
The global landscape is complex, so I make no pretensions as to the comprehensiveness of what I lay out here. My hope is simply that this can be the humble start of a longer collective discussion about how we can galvanize more power as a community of global movements for justice by interlinking our struggles across borders.
1. Neoliberalism is baked into our present world order, limiting people’s movements’ ability to win
“Exit is for losers. Good capitalists know the real game is capturing the existing state, not creating a new one.” – China Miéville
For decades, neoliberal policies have been exacerbating the precarity of low-wage workers, women, young people, students, tenants and many others for whom a strong public sector and social services are essential to maintaining stability and exiting poverty. But neoliberalism at the global level long preceded the 1970s rise of neoliberalism in the U.S.
Neoliberalism is virtually written into the blueprints of our present global economic system. Historian Quinn Slobodian sketches an excellent account of this in his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. He outlines how, in the late 1930s to early 1940s, a handful of economists he calls the “Geneva School” began structuring a plan for the world economy as empires were falling and the global economic order was in flux. As decolonized countries began entering a newly forming international community, the Geneva-school neoliberals –– who eventually banded together as the Mont Pèlerin Society –– went about devising ways of protecting existing economic interests. At their root, these proposals posited that markets had to be supported by institutions at the global level –– a superstructure of laws and institutions to insulate markets from the democratic demands of people. Indeed, markets did not need to be freed from the law altogether, but they needed to be protected by a web of laws that would be out of the reach of people’s movements and limit the concessions democratic governments could make to them. In other words, we would not do away with the state; the state’s role would be to enforce those laws existing at the supranational level to facilitate the freedom of markets, the flow of capital and functioning of business.
Their ideas played a significant role during the flurry of reorganization of the world order following World War II, which included the establishment of multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the Bretton Woods system parallel to the integration of new states into the global political and economic order through the gradual process of decolonization (see this piece for some key background on this). The dominant features of their proposals entailed the primacy of private property rights –– above all other rights –– and market supremacy under Western liberalism, even as newly decolonizing states (and labor and progressive movements within many states) challenged the basic assumptions of the liberal world order. The rise of the Chicago School of neoliberalism under Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the entrance of figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan later created the political conditions for neoliberalism to mature and flourish under the “Washington Consensus.”
Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital builds on this story, detailing the ways law has been used to create new and different forms of capital that benefit the wealthy, as well as the armor and institutional structures to protect their accumulation. She discusses, for example, how corporate law and mechanisms such as the limited liability corporation allow big corporate entities to create a web of subsidiary companies to evade liability and taxation while making outsized profits for their parent companies. In another example, she describes how the law’s creation of intellectual property rights, protected internationally through mechanisms like the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS agreement) and the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, have given companies additional legal channels beyond their domestic forums to assert violations of their IP rights and claim millions of dollars in damages.
The bottom line is that the global economic system that corporations and rich individuals depend on to make and keep their wealth is designed to be out of the reach of people organizing within any one set of borders. We may theoretically accept that certain macrostructures, principles and institutions must exist to keep a globalized economy stable and predictable. However, the institutions supposedly charged with this task –– heavily influenced by neoliberal ideology –– have made it such that economic success in this global economy depends on adopting the likeness of neoliberal capitalist economies like that of the U.S., while undermining or denigrating the ability for states to experiment with alternative theories of economic organization (e.g., one that does not center the importance of private property, above all). And the present system punishes –– through things like embargoes, trade sanctions, or credit rating downgrades –– countries that make a choice to enact land reform or nationalize key industries in the interest of advancing economic prosperity for their people.
Why is this important to those of us in the U.S.? Even though the U.S. has largely benefited from the present architecture of our global economy, the benefits have not inured to the majority of our population. We have seen too many instances where the most vulnerable people, typically racialized, have lost the most. These extend from the dot-com bubble and 2008 financial crisis to the more recent supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the food and energy crises produced by the war on Ukraine and displacement from climate and conflict shocks.
The result: those who were either originally privileged by colonial expropriation, exploitation, and slavery at the time of design of our present system (e.g., former colonial powers, industrialized nations and corporations based in the Global North and their wealthy patrons) or those who later came into power and wealth by corrupt means or with corrupt intentions (e.g., cronies who were able to come into private ownership of formerly state corporations, like the oligarchs who emerged in post-Soviet states) have a system that allows them to stay on top. They continue to benefit from ongoing protection and advantage afforded by a macro-environment designed to undermine the ability of states to exercise regulation over, access to, and redistribution of the wealth begotten from their natural resources or other sources of wealth because their legal systems are written at the behest of corporate interests.
We must organize ourselves in such a way as to deal with the superstructure and laws/legal frameworks that protect it in order to actually get at the source of oligarchic power and countervail their power. But this does not mean that we abandon our local fights. Rather, this should agitate us to understand the relationship of our local fights to forces that operate at other scales –– and at the global scale in particular –– because there may be impediments at that level that are limiting our ability to fulfill local demands.
Treaty Negotiations as a Domain for Movements to Formalize Demands and Create Protective Legal Frameworks
There are multiple ways that movements can do this. One avenue is for movements to get involved at the point at which treaties and agreements are negotiated and institutions are built. This includes trade agreement negotiations, negotiations to restructure debt, and processes of setting global tax policy. While some entities, like trade unions, might have a seat at these tables, most of civil society is shut out of these talks, leaving the streets as the only forum for expressing critique.
The movement building at the time of the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1990 represents a powerful example of this. The plan for the WTO, heavily influenced by the prescriptions of neoliberal thinkers, set off an anti-globalization movement that culminated in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and similar protests against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami, Florida and Mar del Plata, Argentina in the mid-2000s. These mass mobilizations served as a reminder that these institutions could not exist at a total remove from the democratic demands of the people.
But we have not seen similar levels of opposition to multilateral trade agreements in recent years. We should rekindle interest in movement building (across borders) when trade policies are renegotiated or established. They continue to be important and powerful sites of policymaking, such as setting environmental and labor standards as well as protective measures for local businesses. What comes out of these spaces also has implications for migration, since uneven terms of trade or exploitative labor standards sometimes serve as the basis for the degradation of economic opportunities in the global south, which pushes people to leave their home countries for the promise of greener economic pastures in the U.S. and other places in the global north. And labor unions, which have long been active in the negotiation processes of these agreements, would surely benefit from more robust (and coordinated) involvement of other movement sectors across the geographies implicated along supply chains and migratory routes.
Holding the U.S. Accountable for its Disruptive Role in Achieving Global Tax Justice and Corporate Accountability
Though seemingly inaccessible, global fiscal policy making is another domain that movements should explore because of its potential for both solidarity-building and reducing economic inequality both within and among countries. In particular, we can learn from the work the Tax Justice Network has been doing to advocate for fair global tax policy that centers economic equality both within and among countries. Their research details how tax havens and lax tax policies that allow corporations to avoid paying their fair share in taxes result in a siphoning off of funds that would otherwise support governments’ efforts towards greater social and economic justice.
More recently, at the urging of advocates, human rights experts have called attention to a flawed global tax agreement that favors the rich and multinational corporations in the global north by insufficiently cracking down on tax havens and the offshoring of corporate profits, depriving countries of tax revenue along supply chains. For many decades, global tax policy has been set at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a multilateral institution whose member states comprise mostly of the wealthiest countries in the world. This means that countries in the global south and the lowest income countries have virtually no say in how global taxation is structured, and therefore the policies tend to favor wealthy countries like the U.S. and UK and their corporations.
This may seem remote from local policy fights, but research shows that tax havens and corporate tax evasion hurt all of us by depriving public coffers of the necessary funds to support social services and preserve public spaces like parks, libraries, schools, museums and more –– the foundations of democracy. Understanding the connection between global tax policy and resources for our services at home can help us build better campaign strategies. We can also demand that the U.S. stop obstructing efforts to set global tax policy in a more inclusive and equitable way. Under the leadership of a group of African nations, there have been efforts to demand that the process of setting global tax policy be taken out of the OECD and brought into a more inclusive forum like the UN under a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation to ensure that all countries have the ability to inform and set global tax policy. Movements in the U.S. should support the states in the global south making the demands that should ultimately serve to help all of us fighting for economic justice worldwide. Ostensibly, a firmer and more just tax policy will liberate previously hidden away funds for public use.
Similarly, the U.S. has long been a harmful oppositional force in efforts to negotiate and advance an international treaty on business and human rights –– an instrument aimed at finally creating a shared framework for holding multinational corporations accountable for the human rights violations, environmental harm and conflicts they have stoked around the world. While civil society groups in the global south have been engaged in the negotiation process for over a decade, there has historically been less involvement from U.S. civil society groups, in particular social movement groups. There is an opportunity in the U.S. to build transnational power to confront how corporations operate at home and abroad by being more involved in shaping a transnational accountability framework for the huge corporations that hurt us all and by putting pressure on the U.S. government to change its stance in treaty negotiations in coordination with movements abroad. Groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights are leading efforts to build a U.S. Treaty Alliance in this regard. This could lay the foundation for building transnational solidarity with countries that have long been pushing for such a treaty as negotiations move forward.
There are many more examples of places we could intervene as a U.S.-based constituency in international forums that are setting international policy. But one final point here is that we should work with countries in the global south to call out the way that financialization, international debt, and the lending practices of international financial institutions operate to entrench structural racial discrimination rooted in a past of colonialism and slavery for which there has been no reparative justice. We should hold institutions like the IMF accountable for the havoc they have wrought on countries in the global south because of structural adjustment programs in the past and continued conditionalities that prevent countries from being able to invest in their own initiatives for greater social and economic equality as well as climate resilience. But beyond accountability, those institutions must transform to reverse the harms they have done to developing economies.
2. Many of the issues we address locally have global root causes
Apart from the idea that our present multilateral institutions and global systems of governance constitute a macrostructure that protects the interests of oligarchic forces that remain out of reach of movements mobilizing at a national level, it is also the case that many of the issues we see manifesting at the local level –– housing insecurity, climate disasters, poverty, racism –– are symptoms of root causes that are global in nature. Thus, our ability to address a crisis like climate change, which knows no borders, depends on the extent to which we understand our policy and lifestyle decisions to be intertwined globally and how we can tie our struggles together across borders.
The COVID-19 Pandemic as an example of a global crisis requiring a global solution
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic touched all of us globally and demanded that we work together internationally to control the spread of the virus and save as many lives as possible. While inequities as to who bore the disparate burden of the fallout from the pandemic (racialized people, migrants, women, people with disabilities, among others) played out at the national stage in the U.S., another level of inequity as to the distribution of life-saving healthcare technologies played out globally. Regrettably, the institutions charged with managing the public health crisis at the global level or those with the power to facilitate technology, materials and knowledge sharing –– the World Health Organization, Gavi and, eventually, the World Trade Organization (WTO) –– failed to place international cooperation at the center of their decision-making. Instead, they operated at the behest of wealthy states like the U.S., the UK, Switzerland, and Germany, beholden to the pharmaceutical companies housed on their soil, which led to shameful hoarding of vaccines and other healthcare products and a refusal to share the know-how and technology that could help contain the spread of the virus. Thus, a handful of states used their power to delay, prevaricate, and ultimately thwart the effort of almost 130 countries to obtain a time-limited waiver of intellectual property rights (“TRIPS waiver”) for the COVID-19 vaccines, testing, and treatments at a time when it would have been incredibly helpful to global access to life-saving supplies. Not only did this prolong the pandemic worldwide and contribute to a number of unnecessary, avoidable deaths, but it also further entrenched the racially discriminatory divisions between the global north and the global south by enforcing a relationship of dependence and extraction between rich industrialized countries and the rest of the world.
This issue presented an opportunity for the human rights community and the access to medicines movement to come together to shed light on the injustice of inequitable distribution of and access to COVID-19 healthcare technologies. At the height of the spread of the Delta variant, in Spring 2021, a group of movement actors and human rights organizations multiplied their power by organizing for access to COVID-19 vaccines, testing, and treatment across the global north and the global south. The Global Network of Movement Lawyers, which I coordinate at Movement Law Lab, and ESCR-Net supported a coalition that included lawyers in the global north countries blocking the TRIPS waiver, lawyers and movement actors from the global south, access-to-medicines experts, and groups in the People’s Vaccine Alliance (now called the People’s Medicines Alliance). This coalition used a variety of legal and human rights levers to pressure the United Kingdom, Germany, U.S., Switzerland, and other countries to stop obstructing efforts to democratize global production of COVID-19 healthcare products to protect pharmaceutical companies’ intellectual property rights (and profits). Our petitions, particularly the one we submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), highlighted the problematic extractive relationship that intellectual property regimes perpetuate between the global north and the global south. The decision from the Committee was particularly significant for its recognition of the historical root causes of present COVID-19 vaccine and healthcare inequity both within and among States and how opposition to the TRIPS waiver sustains structural racial subordination. It also acknowledged structural racism as a global system which States have a duty to eradicate and established a jurisprudential hook regarding states’ extraterritorial obligations to not take actions that violate people’s rights under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination even outside their borders.
Though the TRIPS waiver was not ultimately granted because of the undemocratic and global north-centric nature of the negotiations process at the WTO (perhaps the outcome would have been different if there was more coordination with U.S.-based movements and those in other European countries), the various pieces of legal advocacy the coalition undertook resulted in numerous statements and interventions by UN human rights mechanisms. These statements have already been tied into the struggle for equitable healthcare access and will have potential implications going forward on a range of issues, such as the human rights obligations of countries for violations they cause outside of their borders, combating transnational structural racial discrimination, and demands for corporate accountability. Organizations are also continuing to fight for more space in negotiations of a pandemic treaty, which should include an automatic TRIPS waiver provision, to avoid the dynamic we experienced under COVID-19 and previous pandemics. That process, however, has stalled until 2025 as countries have disagreed on questions of IP waivers and collective funding of vaccine research and development in the event of a potential pandemic.
Nevertheless, the advocacy was historically important –– to both tell the story about how greed and corporate parrying took precedence over the lives of people in the global south and how organizations in the global north worked in concert with those in the global south to combat this dynamic. This kind of advocacy provides a blueprint for future multi-pronged transnational advocacy campaigns around issues of global concern, like climate change. The more we practice working with one another across borders and creatively using the forums we have at our disposal, the more we can both strengthen our muscles of solidarity and push for systemic solutions at the global level that match the global nature of the problems we are facing.
Housing, migration and climate change as potential areas of transnational campaign building
The issue of housing presents another particularly interesting arena for mass membership organizations to come together across borders. Given that housing markets are increasingly financialized and the subject of intense speculation, the forces of gentrification and rising rents often lay partially or totally out of the reach of local or state governments’ policy-making. What if we could identify common corporate landlord or investment company targets across not only U.S.-based jurisdictions but also jurisdictions abroad: in Spain, Brazil, and beyond? Given that the biggest housing investors and speculators are multinational in nature, we have an opportunity to join the power of our movements across borders to prevent investors from being able to shift their investment money to more landlord-friendly locations. In the same way as workers in local union shops can come together across the countries to strike at once, there are ways tenants unions could organize across contexts where they have an investor or corporate landlord in common. An understanding of the global capital propelling housing markets (including dirty money that oligarchs launder through real estate purchases) can help us build campaigns that get closer to the root of the problem.
Analogous scenarios can be drawn in many other realms: worker justice along global supply chains, climate and environmental justice, migration, rising authoritarianism, and anti-militarism. What is clear is that the ability to address these issues at their root requires that we analyze them in their global dimensions, analyzing the forces and conditions at the global level that give rise to the instabilities we see at the local levels. This certainly doesn’t invalidate the need to produce organizations, policies, and institutions that can challenge power and produce material wins at the local level. In fact, local mass membership organizations are the essential units of action that must relate to one another to produce and deploy power at any larger scale.
3. The Right is organizing globally, and oligarchic power benefits
But we need to go even further –– beyond the fact that a global perspective will yield a more accurate analysis of power and the root causes behind the crises we are trying to address at the local, national, and regional levels. Because not only do oligarchs benefit from environments with weak democratic institutions, low transparency, and a lack of accountability, but they also benefit from authoritarian political environments where democracy either does not exist or is under attack. The current political moment in which democracy is actively eroding in multiple contexts around the world should be of grave concern to us all.
This is especially the case because Right-wing populist reactionary forces that promote a politics of division, domination, corruption, militarism, privatization, and disinformation appear to be learning from each other’s authoritarian playbooks. We need look no further than Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s refusal to condemn Russia’s Putin, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ keynote speech at the Budapest-based global CPAC conference, India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-documented mutual adoration, and Steve Bannon’s relationship as advisor to Brazil’s ousted President, Jair Bolsonaro, since he fled to Florida. An authoritarian playbook is in circulation across regions and contexts, as we see extreme Right-wing parties coming into power in places like Italy, Sweden, and the European Parliament more broadly and authoritarian rule holding ground in Tunisia, El Salvador, and Turkey. This is an alarming trend for all of our movements.
In order to mask the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and other interlocking oppressive systems –– which favor those in power and the rich –– are failing the majority of the population, Right-wing authoritarians charge the oppressed as the cause of societal discontent, dislocation, crisis, and poverty. A politics of demonization, identity-based exclusion, and criminalization enforced by surveillance, policing, discriminatory policies, and militarized borders is spreading in a variety of contexts around the world. The scapegoats include migrants (racialized, of course), Muslims/religious minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, indigenous groups, drug users, as well as mentally ill and homeless people, among others. Dissident (Left) activists, artists, scholars, human rights/movement lawyers, and journalists are also targeted as actors contributing to an environment in which –– as they may put it –– deviance, insecurity, and moral degradation prevails.
By taking control of mass media channels and spreading disinformation over social media and other networks (e.g., WhatsApp), those in power have polarized constituencies, created echo chambers that legitimate their authoritarian policy proposals, and instilled a general sense of fear, outrage, and insecurity in the populace that favors repressive measures to maintain control and stamp out opposition.
All around the world, democratic backsliding in different contexts has led to manifestations of restrictions on (and violations of) civil and political rights of protest, free association, free press, free speech, privacy rights, voting rights, and non-discrimination. They have also created distinctions (as to gender, race, ability, and other identity markers) that lead to unequal access to basic rights like education, housing, healthcare, and other services. Public institutions, from schools and universities to libraries, museums, parks and public health systems, have been undermined or twisted to serve a Right-wing neoliberal agenda. The administrative state has been deployed to surveil, control, and punish individuals and organizations with missions to promote equality, anti-discrimination, collective rights, and environmental protection. At the same time, the bodies meant to provide oversight and accountability –– from the judiciary to ombudspeople and anti-corruption agencies –– are either gutted or transformed to ultimately serve the interests of those in power.
Essentially, the infrastructures that we rely on to resist are under attack globally by forces pushing an agenda that is white supremacist (or otherwise racially hierarchized), religiously fundamentalist and/or anti-secular, neoliberal, militarized, patriarchal and homophobic. The less legitimacy a regime has, the more it must resort to violent suppression of dissent, repressive measures to close down civic spaces, and distortion of public opinion and truth. It is clear that our movements at the local level opposing those forces worldwide must also relate to one another across borders and build bonds of solidarity in order to garner the power to counter this agenda. We are experiencing this in all corners of the movement, regardless of issue area or geography. The monopoly that states have on access to military and police power –– and the ways in which the elite have been able to marshal this power to protect their interests –– present a significant challenge to movement building and transnational solidarity. We must come together across issue areas, communities, and borders to confront this reality and develop new strategies of resistance.
It is important to understand the relationship between oligarchic power and the repressive authoritarian state. While the extent to which an oligarch may be directly engaged with authoritarian forces differs, they largely benefit from the political environment they create because those forces actively undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law. Divisive, identity-based hatred also works in their favor by distracting the public from corruption, grift and clientelism (see, e.g., the recent draconian anti-LGBTQI+ law passed in Uganda, largely regarded as a measure introduced to take attention away from a mounting scandal involving the Museveni regime). Oligarchs do not stand to gain from strong democratic institutions and an educated populace.
Just as Right-wing authoritarian forces seem to be organizing and consolidating their power across borders, we need to think of our fight for democracy as a global one. While it is quite true that we have our hands more than full here in the U.S. with an authoritarian-tending Right-wing on the rise, it is a mistake to think that our work on this front should be confined to the U.S. Although we have the advantage of sharing relatively few territorial borders, the contagion of fascist-leaning political forces transcends borders –– especially since social media and the Internet facilitate flows of information across borders, languages and peoples.
There have been points in time when movements in the U.S. have been in close and ongoing communication with movements and leaders abroad. A key moment includes exchanges between Black radical thinkers from the U.S. and anti-colonial movements in Africa and beyond. There were strong solidarity efforts related to opposing the war in Vietnam, U.S.-triggered dictatorships and conflicts in Latin America, as well as Apartheid in South Africa. And while there is a galvanizing new internationalism emerging from efforts to support the Palestinian freedom struggle as the world watches Israel commit a genocide and prosecute an expanding war in the region, we have to situate that righteous and necessary support within an understanding of a broader context of rising militarism, xenophobia, anti-Black racism, climate instability, and religious fundamentalism worldwide that demands an intersectional internationalism.
Conclusion: De-exceptionalize the U.S. and build a new global movement infrastructure
A first step we need to take is to de-exceptionalize the U.S. There is both an internalized exceptionalism that comes from messaging we receive through our education system about the primacy of the U.S. and the way the broader culture reinforces the idea that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world. We also risk a different sort of exceptionalism that sometimes arises from the idea that if we fight for our freedom here it will automatically benefit the world. Of course, there are many ways that fighting the obstacles in the U.S. can create space for movements elsewhere to achieve their demands; after all, much of what I have laid out above highlights the historically obstructive and harmful role the U.S. has played in limiting the playing field for working class movements inside and outside the U.S. to thrive (we are in the “belly of the beast”). But we cannot assume that the benefit to people outside of the U.S. is automatic, and we can be more strategic and impactful if we undertake our actions in coordination and conversation with movements globally that have been negatively affected by U.S. conduct abroad.
In addition, we must build infrastructure for movements to act in solidarity with each other. Networks are key pieces of this infrastructure, since they serve to facilitate learning and exchange across geographies and language, and they help collectively build a broad analysis of the forces we are up against. They can jumpstart joint strategy and collective work and promote movement resilience by creating channels for responding rapidly to threats against any one of our groups. There are a lot of challenges to overcome in doing global solidarity work, such as unequal access to technology, language barriers, the cost of travel, visa restrictions, security concerns, among others, but if we can find a way to work through these challenges, the transformative potential is enormous.
The above attempt at framing the problem is certainly not exhaustive, but it is a starting point to engendering a politics of internationalism that is essential to consolidating people power against the oligarchic forces that work against us worldwide. We as organizers and advocates must analyze power at the global level in order to strategically structure our movements to countervail it.
The odds are long, but we must organize ourselves globally to confront the challenges before us. This is already being done in so many creative ways and thus we need to learn from these and do more to build the infrastructure for collaboration, learning, and collective work. As climate catastrophe looms and an anti-war, anti-militarism consciousness builds due to the ongoing genocides in Gaza and Sudan, spreading conflict in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, violent instability in Haiti, militarization of protest policing in Bangladesh and more, we should seize the opportunity to build differently and build strategically with movements across borders. Our future depends on it.
