Introduction, goals, campaign ideas
The goal of this initiative is to coordinate and instigate actions against the current global wave of authoritarianism, patriarchal backlash, social conservatism, racism and xenophobia, attacks on labour and intensified environmental destruction.
Beyond working on campaigns and doing various actions, we want to build lasting, resilient transnational networks of communication, translation and collaboration.
As part of this effort, we aim to organise exchanges between grassroots activists, critical scholars, journalists, and others, from different parts of the world, with the goal of bridging the inevitable gaps in our understanding of each other’s conditions, motivations and struggles.
We want to talk to people from all over the world and learn about local conditions, what people need, and what solidarity would look like from their perspectives.
We are open to discussions and political alliances with a wide spectrum of emancipatory currents and social movements.
Here are a few ideas for campaigns we would like to work on, together with other international networks and local groups:
- Halting the slide – deepening democracy globally
- Challenging the gender and sexual politics of the new global authoritarianism
- Debt cancellation from Zambia to Ukraine
- Rejecting reactionary decolonialism
- Resisting multiple racisms, globally coordinated
- Against extractivist authoritarianism, against eco-nationalism: Global solidarity in the face of climate crisis
We don’t expect everyone we’d be working with on a campaign to agree with us on everything. But we think it’s important that, in a collaboration, everyone knows where the others in the coalition are coming from. That’s why we have written the following brief text (reading time about 10 minutes), which is meant to give you a rough idea of where we stand on a few important social and political questions.
Keywords
Patriarchy
Gender, sexuality and family are central to current global and transcultural attempts at preserving, enforcing and expanding unjust social orders, be it in the “West” or in the name of “African Values” or “Asian Values”. Male domination, the exploitation of women’s labour, sexual violence against women and girls, the enforcement of rigid gender and sexuality norms, and so on, have been around for a long time in many societies. Different forms of domination are enmeshed with one another, but let’s be clear, patriarchy is not a byproduct of some other system, and the struggle against it is a central issue.
Political Authoritarianism
We don’t just want to defend democracy; we want to deepen it. In the long term, we want a thoroughgoing process of democratisation of all aspects of society, including the economy and households: towards a global polity arising from the free association of radically democratic, egalitarian and self-governing collectives.
That said, especially at this juncture, it is vital to defend what has been achieved in many parts of the world in terms of political democracy: relatively free and fair elections, freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly, separation of powers, judicial independence, rule of law, accountability and transparency in governance, protection of minority rights, etc. These are valuable tools for protecting the vulnerable, and they also make it possible to organise for a better world beyond the limits of the status quo.
We want to talk to people resisting democratic backsliding in countries in which political democracy still has some purchase, as well as in countries where political democracy seems like a distant dream.
The Economy is a Dictatorship
In our view, to be effective in our opposition to political authoritarianism, we must not lose sight of authoritarianism in the economic sphere. There are of course major differences in the rights, freedoms and conditions that working people in different societies enjoy, but it remains true that workplaces the world over are dictatorships, not democracies, and unaccountable elite control of the economy is a feature of all societies on this planet today. Political authoritarians do not always walk in step with those who control the economy, but they often do: political authoritarianism undermines the struggle for social and economic rights (which is why authoritarian projects are so generously funded by oligarchs).
Supremacism
We have no love for nation-states in general, and certainly not ones created through conquest, expulsion, slavery and capitalism, of which the United States is surely among the very worst.
We don’t like the current enemies of the US any better, though. We call out Han supremacism in China and Great Russian chauvinism in Russia just like we call out white supremacism and nationalism in the US, Jewish supremacism in Israel, or Hindu supremacism in India.
Russian imperialism is weaker than US imperialism, and Chinese imperialism currently has more modest aims than the US variant, but that doesn’t make them any better, either. The regional influence-mongering of Iran is weaker than Israel’s subimperialism, but not fundamentally different. Etc.
We’re in solidarity not only with peoples oppressed by regimes currently friendly to the US, but with all peoples – including, for example, the populations of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger currently living under pro-Russian military dictatorships, the peoples of the Russian Federation, the PRC and Iran, of Vietnam, Myanmar, Cuba and Nicaragua, etc.
We also don’t think any population should ever be completely discounted as people who could be convinced to join in the project of building a better world – even if large segments of that population have a conservative and supremacist mindset and support terrible racist policies, as is the case in the US, the Russian Federation, India and Israel, to name only a few examples.
Colonialism
An important element of the new wave of authoritarianism we want to fight is the abuse of anticolonial or decolonial rhetoric. Authoritarian, socially conservative and nativist forces in formerly colonised countries pretend that the only bad thing that ever happened to “us” was that people from somewhere else came and ruled over “us”. That “we” already had male domination, class society, and other forms of social stratification (like caste) before colonisation, that some of “us” did quite well out of colonial arrangements, and that during decolonisation foreign elites were, in many cases, simply replaced by native elites who were just as rapacious, or only little better – these facts are denied or passed over in silence.
In India, for example, part of the Hindu right’s anti-Muslim racist project is to peddle a version of history that presents the presence of Muslim dynasties on the subcontinent as “Islamic colonialism”. The Hindu supremacists want to get rid of the dominance of English, a legacy of British colonialism, but only to replace it with Hindi, which lots of people (especially in South India, but also in many other parts of the subcontinent) don’t speak and don’t feel like learning. In other words, not every discourse that might at first glance sound “decolonial” or claims to be “anticolonial” is in fact emancipatory.
Cancellation of debts, an end to austerity policies enforced by the IMF, a new international economic order… these are all absolutely necessary for a transition to a better world – decolonisation is incomplete. But even a more complete decolonisation would not get rid of the forms of social domination that were present before colonisation. Decolonisation, therefore, is necessary, but not sufficient.
We also think historical injustices can’t be remedied by perpetrating new injustices. The Nakba of 1948 was a tragedy and should not have happened, but telling Israeli Jews to “go back to Poland” is stupid and racist. We have no fixed ideas on what should happen in Israel/Palestine, but it should not involve ethnic cleansing or indiscriminate violence, and it should lead to equal rights for all who live in the land.
Transversal Authoritarianism
The rise of xenophobia, militaristic nationalism, racism, antifeminism, and social conservatism crosses geopolitical and ideological boundaries. We see a ‘transversal convergence […] in the post-liberal conjuncture’.
The fight against the rise of the far right in the increasingly “flawed” political democracies of the Western bloc (movements, parties and regimes associated with, for example, Trump, Milei, Meloni, Netanyahu, Takaichi…) is central to our project.
But it is just as important to target movements and regimes that have a more ambivalent relationship to “the West”, such as the RSS and the Modi government in India; to push back against movements and regimes that currently position themselves as hostile to “the West”, such as Eurasianism and the Putin regime in Russia; and to support grassroots resistance against the ideologies and policies particularly of the Chinese state, but also of other pseudo-socialist dictatorships such as North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
Another, equally important, target of our work are conservative political interpretations of religion: MAGA-affiliated Christian Nationalism, Kahanism and Religious Zionist messianism, Russian Orthodox Nationalism, Islamism, Hindutva and Buddhist supremacisms all play important roles in the global rise of patriarchal authoritarianism and social conservatism.
The Planet
If any of the super-rich ever really believed in a future “for all mankind”, in recent years most of them seem to have definitely given up on the idea and are more interested in building bunkers and spaceships. Racists and nationalists in many countries see the solution to the problem of climate refugees in hardening national borders. Authoritarians amplify ecological denialism as part of their culture wars; oligarchs fund the assault on climate science; authoritarian regimes are closely entangled with fossil fuel and mineral extractivist businesses. If these elites and authoritarian forces (often in alliance) get their way, the outlook for humanity is bleak.
For the purposes of this statement, we don’t need to specify how exactly we think humanity should confront the climate emergency and all the other ecological crises.
What we do want to say is that confronting these crises cannot be avoided, that technological fixes are not enough, that we need just solutions that work for everyone on the planet, and that fundamental changes in how we live, how we produce food and how we relate to the land will be necessary.
We think social relations of domination and exploitation among people are inextricably bound up with relations between humans and the non-human world. Building a new society based on equality, autonomy and reciprocity among people will entail a radical change in our relationship to other sentient beings, to all forms of life and the world at large.
Contact
Our email is ophiuchus@riseup.net.