Single issue movements are open to reactionary entryism and rearticulations. The anti-war movement during the Bush Administration’s reign of terror was in large part coopted by the Democratic party, the ANSWER Coalition (and similar groups), conspiracy theories, right wing populism, and nationalism. This has made me wary of a lot of what passes for contemporary anti-imperialism.
Supporting authoritarian regimes abroad to oppose US hegemony didn’t make sense at the height of US hegemony and the height of the Cold War. As US power declines and multi polar hierarchical relations fill that power vacuum–with new authoritarian competitors for hegemony emerging– that kneejerk reaction makes even less sense. In turn, a lot of the US anti-war movement has become a cartoon of itself; prescribing and supporting authoritarian regimes abroad as a strategy against US empire, a strategy that was not warranted during the height of the US empire. The idea of a leftist who supported Saddam Hussein and was not just against the Iraq War was not just a Fox News fantasy but something that actually existed. We can see their modern incarnation in the Assad Solidarity Network which constitutes the mainstream of the US anti-war movement in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.
Support for states abroad is often under the guise that the states being supported are socialist states. The so called socialist states–from Leninist statecraft to Scandinavian socialism– have historically been some ratio of state to capitalist power that calls itself socialist. To the degree that a state is socialist it is no longer a state. For socialism to exist, power must be in the hands of communities and workers directly; that is politics and economics must be commonly owned without political or economic ruling classes. A state is defined by a political ruling class that enforces centralized rule over and above the people. A socialist state is a contradiction in terms; not a Hegelian or dialectical contradiction but a logical self-contradiction (the conflation Marxist-Leninists often make between these two kinds of contradictions is astounding!!!). To the degree that a state actively fosters its own self abolition and the development of common ownership of the means of production, it can be somewhat meaningfully called a socialist state even though it is not itself socialist. However, such a state has not existed in the 20+ attempts at Leninist states and the 20+ attempts at non-Leninist yet ostensibly socialist forms of statecraft. Instead what we see is a tendency for ostensibly socialist states to preserve capitalism and the state rather than abolishing both. The USSR alone helped quash at least five different socialist experiments: From the soviets that were privatized by the state in 1918 and 1919 under the name of a Soviet Union, to the quashing of the Kronstadt uprising, to the destruction of the Free Territory, to the actions against the anarchosyndicalist revolution in Spain, to the tanks being rolled in against Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956.
Nationalism, through its national class unity against the non-national others, is too often supported by leftists as a potentially progressive force against empire. This is particularly strange given that the nation state model has from its inception spread class relations, empire, and eventually capitalism (as market relations and commercial networks expanded and the capitalist mode of production developed in the 16th century which then transformed into industrial capitalism in the early 19th century, which then transformed into a capitalist world system). It is not too uncommon for the nation state to be confused with self determination of persons. What sometimes passes for self determination is merely the freedom of states to be states–or nation states to be nation states. Such a “self determination” necessarily over, above, and against, the self determination of people acting collectively and directly. Furthermore, self determination is often praised without qualifiers as if it doesn’t need extra aspects–such as general egalitarianism– to round it out as a principle.
It is one thing to support ostensibly communist and socialist states and it is another thing altogether to support states that do not even put on the veneer that they are socialist or communist. This can perhaps be seen most clearly in the Syria conflict where the Syrian state, the Russian state, and the Iranian state have done over 90% of the killing. US anti-war leftists often invoke a kind of Iraq War metaphor to condemn the US in the conflict. Whatever one thinks of the role of the US in Syria, it is just not an applicable metaphor to claim the US is doing to Syria what the US did to Iraq unless one is operating with their own alternative set of facts. In fact, it is a more apt metaphor to say that the Assad regime is doing to Syria what the US did to Iraq (although even that is extremely crude).
Although US hegemony is declining, the US and allies are still #1 in a lot of terrible things internationally: from overall military occupations throughout the world, to overall military power, to supporting 73% of world dictatorships, to assisting and enforcing economic imperialism and capitalism throughout the globe (the system that has caused the most killing and harm to people and the biosphere as a whole), etc. We desperately need a movement for opposition against US empire, imperialism more broadly, hegemony, and multi-polar forms of hierarchy. The more demoralized and ethically bankrupt opposition movements to US intervention become, the less they deserve to be supported. As long as Stalin supporting and Assad supporting groups like the ANSWER coalition are orchestrating key anti-war demonstrations–while people who actually oppose Assad are condemned as stooges for the US empire– the less anti-war movements actually oppose war. The More the US anti-war movement is particularist in a fixation on the US and friends rather than being universalist against multiple vectors of war, empire, and hierarchy more broadly, the more it will be a “fuck you dad” kind of geopolitics that advocates for authoritarian regimes abroad rather than actually being committed to opposing empire and harm caused by the US and all other sources of arbitrary and hierarchical rule.
The New Municipal Agenda 