Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/left-internationalism-in-the-heart-of-empire Aziz Rana ▪ May 23, 2022 American leftists need an internationalist vision that universally and effectively joins anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian ethics.
Foreign policy decision-making was not driven by working people or their interests but by security experts and corporate elites. It was built around pro-business market goals and continuous military intervention in ways that intruded into the domestic sphere, whether through expensive and disastrous wars or the expansion of corporate rights that undermined the global position of labor.
Taken together, these policies eventually propelled cycles of conservative retrenchment and privatization, which only intensified after the Cold War. By the end of the century, the neoliberal austerity American elites had pursued abroad—from Eastern Europe to Latin America—had become the foundation of domestic politics too, decimating whatever remained of working-class achievements. In the end, the state’s ties to business alongside the enormous growth of the security apparatus exacerbated inequalities everywhere.
Thus, working-class and minority groups at home should develop an independent foreign policy that emphasizes solidarities with workers abroad or historically colonized populations. This alternative internationalism, unlike liberal internationalism, sees the American security state as a roadblock to the global common good, and thus in need of fundamental transformation....
efforts aimed to replace Cold War rivalry with a multipolar regionalism committed to overcoming exploitation and dependencies in the global economy.
Today, however, little remains of this internationalist institutional infrastructure. Internally, after claiming power, liberation forces too often collapsed into authoritarianism or plutocracy. Indeed, just as liberals must reject a romanticized presentation of the Cold War past, leftists too should avoid their own distinct nostalgia. Externally, American political elites and their strategic allies systematically destabilized movements and nonaligned political formations. Left international institutions didn’t simply recede; they were confronted and defeated by force...
The revival of democratic socialist politics in the United States has created incipient links between movement organizations at home—whether the Movement for Black Lives, the Sunrise Movement, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, or the Democratic Socialists of America—and organizations overseas. Bernie Sanders himself has been involved in conversations with the likes of Yanis Varoufakis about what it would mean to build a Progressive International. But much more needs to be done to conceive of the types of revolutionary, or “non-reformist,” reforms that would shift the existing terms of international power by facilitating global left institutional strength. ..
In the final analysis, any left internationalism in the United States faces the challenge of the symbolic importance to American life of the country’s hegemonic role. For nearly one hundred years, Americans have become accustomed to a global project that William Appleman Williams called “empire as a way of life.” The political culture takes for granted that the security state, even if flawed at the edges, is precisely what liberal internationalism assumes it to be: the rightful agent of transformative world change.
Any committed version of left foreign policy requires steadily giving up on the symbolic and practical power of American primacy: the idea that the U.S. state should be at the center of all global matters. All of this suggests that left foreign policy involves creating the conditions for the meaningful dispersion of power.