As activist bubbles expand, resistance to all oppression is no longer taken for granted by international solidarity groups

~ Alex Cuzzolino ~

Protests and demonstrations are filling the streets of European cities, with unrest growing day by day, and more people willing to take a stance or simply show how tired they are of the system we are confined in. This rise in awareness is expanding our bubbles, and what was before a discourse confined in small movements organising in small spaces in the centre of the Empire is now a bigger, larger conversation.

In Denmark, where I am organising at this time of my life, internationalist solidarity movements have never been very loud. For that I blame the earlier generations of movements in the Nordic countries, which were focused more on environmentalism, and the mainstreamed work of the Unions. However, the start of the genocide in Palestine from 2023 lit the spark and multiple instances of resistance and international solidarity took place across the country. These groups have grown exponentially in the past two years, encouraging other people to organise their own groups when capacity to onboard new people to existing ones ran low.

The expanding of the bubble has been fast-coming, perhaps even a bit too fast, catching us off guard. It has has resulted in a multiplicity of groups that, while fighting for the same cause, do not necessarily agree on the political baseline. This is not, of course, necessarily a negative thing, but it becomes so when it creates dichotomies and our struggle is no longer intersectional.

For the sake of supporting the anti-imperialist fight above all, some parts of the most recent solidarity movements ended up siding with terrorising regimes that have been taking away the freedom of their citizens for ages, forgetting that two things can be true at once, and that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

This tendency is extremely visible to those who are willing to look at it: too much of the most recent solidarity movements in the West tend to point at the US for all that is bad in the world, and lead their politics based on the false idea that everyone acting against US is implementing a valid form of resistance.

With this thinking they are confusing the principle of solidarity between peoples seeking freedom and dignity, and a supposed solidarity found in loyalty to factions of states and governments.

US imperialism is bad: it does not mean that Maduro’s regime in Venezuela was good, just as it does not mean that the State of the Ayatollahs is the last bulwark of the fight against imperialism. Israel has historically infiltrated protests to push its own imperialistic and colonial agenda: it does not make the protests in Iran a Mossad operation, nor does it validate Western leftist movements’ support for dictatorships.

Why do we find it so difficult to prioritise the agency of peoples over that of States?

While it would be easy to point our fingers at tankies and internet trolls, I think what we are witnessing more deeply is a lack of intersectionality in the solidarity movements. It is a loss of complexity in the conversation brought about by the urgency of the moment we find ourselves in.

One of my first solidarity causes was with Rojava, the Kurdish region of North-East Syria and the Women’s Revolution taking place there. In the Western activist bubble where I was, solidarity with the people of Rojava and their revolution meant solidarity with all oppressed people, as well as feminism, anti-capitalism and ecology. Without this, people can end up supporting the oppressors instead of the oppressed based on a simplified Western understanding of the fight against imperialism.

The lack of intersectionality within the movement helps nobody but the Empire, and we who are at the centre of it, with all the privileges that derive from it, have the responsibility to keep the conversation nuanced. Bringing back complexity to how we talk about solidarity means managing to detach ourselves from the black or white conversation, rejecting all the forced dichotomies that make us think “if not this, then that”.

We need solidarity that is not just international, but also intersectional.