Internationalism and solidarity today

The following is a transcript of remarks delivered at Making Worlds Bookstore, Philadelphia, on November 9, 2021.

I’m going to ask for your patience and possibly forgiveness at the outset.  I haven’t done any public speaking in a while, a practice that has always been a source of mixed feelings for me.  I normally speak off the cuff about the topic at hand, or about a million offhand topics, but for this event I decided to compose my thoughts.  I want to be precise to the degree that I’m capable.  It seems unkind, anyway, to subject you to a bunch of tangents that may or may not amount to something coherent.  I’m more interested in the ensuing discussion and so I’ll try to give us something useful to think about. 

When the folks at Making Worlds approached me about doing an event, they proposed something around Indigenous solidarity and it was difficult to pass on that kind of opportunity.  It’s a rich, complex topic, with an endless assortment of possibilities, something we all ought to embrace, because possibility is the only tangible resource in the marketplace of ideas these days.  Indigenous solidarity is also subject to a lot of misinformation and hostility, so we can approach the topic by demarcating material politics from orthodoxy and myth. 

U.S. exceptionalism, that enduring psychosis indivisible from conquest and plunder, is the greatest progenitor of orthodoxy and myth.  It is ubiquitous in the American psyche.  Even leftist discourses are often tethered to U.S. exceptionalism. 

What does it look like for a leftist discourse to be tethered to U.S. exceptionalism? 

It looks like a magnetic attraction to elections and good citizenship and civic responsibilities, as if systemic illness can be cured by a more mindful diagnosis.  It looks like that inevitable regression of thought-leaders into libertarian fantasies of individual salvation as a kneejerk response to crisis.  It looks like invasive anxiety about sedition and disorder.  It looks like anything, really, that can only imagine revolution as something unimaginable. 

More than anything, the beating heart of U.S. exceptionalism rarely slows down enough to alter deeply ingrained habits of perception.  When we discuss colonization or imperialism or racism, where do we end up, no matter where we started?  Contemplating the destiny of the party who enjoys greater structural power, right?  Think about it for a second.  Replay some noteworthy conversations you had recently.  Which party acted as the gravitational force of group rhetoric?  The Black speaker or the aggrieved white audience?  The Palestinian or the ambiguous liberal Zionist?  The Native or the settler?  You might not have even noticed at the time, but it happened, didn’t it?  Doesn’t it always?  It’s too easy to fall back into concern for demographics that unquestionably occupy the category of human.  But what about the white landowner?  But what about the Israeli refusenik?  But what about the politician’s career?  But what about joe sixpack’s sensibilities?  Only after sorting these essential matters do we get to the downtrodden, if our interest hasn’t already been exhausted. 

Conversely, if you’re the type who insists on the primacy of the downtrodden, think about how many times you’ve tried to refocus interlocutors who always drift back to what Black liberation will do to American democracy, back to what Palestine means to Jewish Americans, back to what becomes of Sally and Johnny and their suburban utopia in a land back scenario.  It rarely works, does it?  You keep insisting and they either ignore you or grow defensive.  You become a purist, a wrecker, a fantasist, a connoisseur of the circular firing squad. 

Why is the first impulse always to worry about reproduction of common sense, to worry about the colonial entity, to worry about the settler?  Precisely because it’s not an impulse.  It’s a lifetime of coercion pretending to be organic.  Treating chauvinism as impulsive is one way that settler common sense so easily sells itself as objective and universal.  This is U.S. exceptionalism in action and those who work hard to avoid it are reviled for their irrational attachment to unreality.  It’s a ritual ostracism, compulsive and relentless, intended to warn potential dissidents against any attempt to traverse a colonial state of exception. 

Exceptionalism doesn’t prevent people from seeing a world on the edge of being destroyed.  It prevents them from imagining a solution beyond the system implicated in the world’s destruction. 

Take a look at the leftist pundit class, the academic luminaries, the social media influencers.  They spent six years glorifying Bernie Sanders.  A lot of them boosted Tulsi Gabbard.  They’re obsessed with the Squad.  They hold forth about Syria, about China, about Iran, about Venezuela, and yet in the end they’re all the same kind of liberal.  When it matters, they all cape for whichever Democratic savior is in fashion.  Ultimately, the differences around which they stage so much conflict are superficial, or at best cosmetic, and have more to do with capturing market share in a competitive subscriber economy than with any kind of revolutionary sentiment. 

Exceptionalism doesn’t prevent people from seeing a world on the edge of being destroyed.  It prevents them from imagining a solution beyond the system implicated in the world’s destruction. 

I begin with this rant to arrive at an unpleasant but straightforward conclusion:  everything we know about virtually anything is evanescent and unstable.  And so everything needs to change.  It’s going to change, anyway, whether we like it or not.  Sally and Johnny won’t be able to enjoy their idyllic suburban life forever, or even very far into the future.  We are in the early stages of a cataclysm.  The changes are coming—those that aren’t here already.  That’s the one thing we have to recognize.  There’s no halcyon restoration on the horizon, no magic technological solution, no back to normal.  Easy fixes are beyond reach.  Our task is to aim for the least amount of suffering and to initiate a new epoch that doesn’t prioritize extraction and profit over the well-being of life on this planet. 


During the first week of September, I went on a bike ride with my wife and son and my brother-in-law and his family.  I live in Northern Virginia, which is car-heavy, but the area has terrific bike and recreation trails that were underused until the pandemic.  We decided to ride along a creek that flows out of a nearby reservoir—which, much to my amusement, they like to call a “lake.”  I’d been on the path a number of times.  When my son learned to ride a bike, we used to cycle down the trail and stop periodically to wade in the creek.  Mid-Atlantic summer gets hot and humid, but the journey was never especially unpleasant. 

Well, on the family outing, something immediately felt off when we entered the woods alongside the reservoir.  It was unusually muggy, especially for the end of meteorological summer.  I was sweating like a busted fire hydrant.  It was one of those itchy sweats, too, as if fire ants were slip-sliding down my back.  My lungs were wet and heavy.  The foliage sagged with dampness and tree trunks showed a deeper shade of brown.  It felt like I was in the goddamn Everglades.  Mosquitoes were everywhere, biting us through our shirts.  I kept expecting to see alligators in the standing pools of water lining both sides of the path. 

Those standing pools were also unusual.  Sure, they might appear after a round of thunderstorms, but not so extensively and never so consistently.  It had been raining a lot, same as the past few years.  Monthly rainfall totals for the DC area were up, with several records getting broken.  I’m the type who finds rain depressing, so it’s something I noticed.  Beyond my aversion to rain, I was concerned at a more galactic level.  It didn’t feel right.  The world as I understood it, based on its climate patterns and ecological character, was no longer the same.  It didn’t feel right.  I don’t know what else to say. 

Was I just getting old and crochety?  Or was something objectively different about the feel of things, about the entire atmosphere?  It’s hard to talk about, because most people perceive it as complaining about the weather.  I’ve spent plenty of time in my life complaining about the weather and even in this familiar grievance everything feels different.  In any case, it’s not complaining about the weather.  It’s about perceiving changes in the weather that portend a near-future of very bad things. 

Perhaps that near-future is actually the present.  Lord knows a lot of very bad things are already in evidence.  The usual assumptions about good governance no longer hold up to reality.  But reality can be a difficult site of analysis.  Capitalism pretends that its solutions to the very problems it created are uniquely humane and ethical.  We’re no longer in any position to dicker around with such nonsense.  The only thing capitalism will provide is the ability to feel smug and self-satisfied in the moment of our demise.  It has neither the intention nor the ability to stop that demise, however. 

I share this experience of biking in an abruptly tropical mid-Atlantic because it’s important to acknowledge and claim our feelings of disorientation.  Those feelings aren’t an alien concept to students of Indigenous Studies, anyway.  Our unquiet earth has been a major theme in Native literature for many decades:  Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Linda Hogan’s Power, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, and so forth.  Indigenous activists throughout the Americas have been sounding the alarm about an impending ecocide and have been at the forefront of efforts to disrupt normal patterns of extraction and consumption, the hallmarks of imperialism.  This activism, dangerous and unpretentious, is intended to benefit all of earth’s living creatures.  It is a resistance focused on survival, justice, empathy.  The people devoted to national liberation aren’t talking about winning any fucking elections. 

That’s where our attention belongs: on the people doing the indispensable work of survival.  It requires effort to focus our attention where it belongs, though, because those with enough power to decide what kind of activism matters, from astroturfing NGOs to socdem media, sure as hell aren’t going to put any spotlight on sites of meaningful insurgency.  So it’s up to us, as individuals and social beings, to find inspiration among the creatures unloved by power.  We can provide and receive the simplest kind of love among one another:  the kind that honors our need for safety and freedom.  That love exists in the refugee camps of Gaza, in the resource-rich villages of the Amazon jungle, in the water-poisoned households of Flint and Standing Rock.  We have to put aside the pursuits that generate rewards in the imperium and make ourselves students of their example.  The only hope I’ve felt over the past few years didn’t come from AOC’s ascension to a colonial governing body or from Palestinian representation in Congress and the NYPD, but from Black protestors burning down a police station and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza which fought the Zionist entity to a standstill.  The old Fanonian idea that we recover dignity through struggle rings truer than ever, for resistance is the only thing that gives me life these days.  All the gabbing I see in the public environs of the North American left is at best depressing.  I daresay I’m far from alone. 

Ours is an era of illness and ecocide.  And ours is a society that confuses rebooted culture wars with intellectual culture.  We haven’t begun processing the widespread trauma from COVID, which of course is ongoing: the disease not only transformed social and economic relations; it also altered most of the familiar ideological categories we could at least superficially rely on before.  This on top of massive death and anxiety and the dissolution of untold personal relationships.  The pandemic has accelerated a longstanding sense of uncertainty.  But that uncertainty is ironic and unacknowledged.  These days more people seem absolutely certain about the right solution without any real understanding of the problems they aim to solve. 

I wish I could offer suggestions that might rise above cliché or truism, but the language we use to inspire activism can be a cipher for the very uncertainty we purport to counteract.  Organize!  Resist!  Make a revolution!  All this stuff is well and good, but in what capacity do we organize, and to what end do we revolt?  These are terms that sound nice in the rah-rah confines of social media, which reward insipidness and sloganeering, but say nothing to the indigent classes who would gladly let rich neighborhoods burn if the pundits they’ve never heard of were serious.  People who profit from the status quo will run interference for power at the moment of truth, no matter how grandiloquent their language.  We have to recognize who’s even viable as a revolutionary before we get too optimistic about the revolution. 

We have to opt out of spaces in thrall to the narcissism of Western common sense.  We have to know when we’re boosting the lowkey guardians of our dispossession. 

Professors and podcasters and politicians are limited by their very status.  Maybe instead of nebulous pronouncements about decolonization and resistance, we should speak more precisely—you know, be explicit about burning down police stations or launching rockets or sabotaging pipeline equipment.  But the great majority of us can’t do that.  Talking that kind of noise will get respectable members of society into a lot of trouble.  Only those already loathed by respectable society have the luxury of naming their desires and tactics.  In the end, we have to keep asking, “Who has incentive to be serious about an uprising?”  We might do well to also ask, “Which aspect of this person’s comportment suggests any willingness, at all, to do right by the downtrodden, to do anything other than conform when it actually matters?”  We have to make judgments about reliability and trustworthiness.  We have to opt out of spaces in thrall to the narcissism of Western common sense.  We have to know when we’re boosting the lowkey guardians of our dispossession. 

My dim view of the institutional North American left arises from a lifetime of observation.  Thousands of times I’ve seen the same messianic compulsion to exhort the lesser peoples of the globe, Indigenous nations in particular, from Palestine to the Salish Coast. 

“This is what they need to do.” 

“This is what they ought to avoid.” 

“That kind of resistance is unhelpful.” 

“They’re being unrealistic.” 

“They can’t be so inflexible.” 

“Their government isn’t up to my standard.” 

“They need to do X, Y, and Z to earn my support.” 

“They have to meet people where they’re at.” 

That last one has always been a special source of annoyance.  Exhorting an oppressed group to meet people where they’re at consigns that oppressed group to the category of non-people.  The proverbial people of this formulation represent humanity itself and so the oppressed group must aspire to become half-human by conceding to the very logic of their inhumanity.  Without such concessions they will remain in an indefinite state of barbarity. 

These paladins of commonsense kowtow to one politician after another—Bernie, Tulsi, Ilhan, AOC—all the while demeaning anyone who expresses skepticism, an age-old liberal disciplining tactic, and then take up the mantle of a principled dissenter when the once-impeccable politician is sucked dry of social capital.  There’s an ironclad law of social climbing in the United States:  you can be the biggest revolutionary in the world between elections, but when it comes time to seat bodies in the imperium you’d better cape for one of the Democratic candidates.  Otherwise, you become disposable along with the earth’s wretched denizens for whom you advocate.  I don’t view this phenomenon as a habit to be broken.  It’s a colonial sensibility to be expunged.  We don’t have time to be disgruntled after the inevitable betrayal—not even a betrayal, really, more like an arc barreling toward its typical ending.  Nobody will give a damn who was right or wrong during the cataclysm, anyway. 

Again, what I describe is a fundamental aspect of U.S. exceptionalism with its fidelity to individual status in the information economy.  However we choose to speak of internationalism or solidarity or revolution or decolonization, the terms are worse than useless without a concomitant understanding of the phenomena they purport to describe. 


And so I’ve come to understand that North American sensibilities are anathema to internationalism.  It’s not that influencers and thought-leaders in this sphere have no interest in internationalism; they just lack the intellectual framework, and often the desire, to abandon the comforts of liberal normativity.  They are enamored of marketable rhetoric and end up depleting radical terminology of meaning.  Our conversations shouldn’t end with us mourning the decline of a once-promising system in need of redemption.  Capitalism is functioning as designed.  Colonization was never about improving the world.  It is now the decolonial that needs to be redeemed. 

What is internationalism, then?  We can reference lots of good definitions.  At its most fundamental, internationalism is a Marxist concept that posits an affinity among ruling classes; their affinity requires a corresponding solidarity among the oppressed.  For instance, workers qua workers share affinities that transcend borders and ethnicity.  They ought to unite for both strategic and moral reasons.  Capital is voracious and constantly seeks new markets.  It needs to encounter resistance at every turn. 

The term has evolved over the years to reference intercultural communalism and tactical alliances.  While internationalism retains a universal connotation, it has become more specific:  Ferguson and Gaza, for instance, or Standing Rock and Kashmir.  If the imperialist states like to bang on about shared values, the thinking goes, then so should the dispossessed.  We are stronger in one another’s company, capable of mutual validation, free to share and learn.  There’s also an ethical component to these current iterations, simple but powerful:  Palestine can’t properly be free while Hawaii is still occupied. 

Such pronouncements oblige us to consider liberation as a shared project.  It snaps us out of provincialism.  Most important, it demands focus on capitalism, the unifying feature of oppression, a task that becomes increasingly critical as the Twitch and Twitter professoriate process radical concepts into neoliberal buzzwords. 

We don’t need to separate settler colonization from imperialism or militarism.  They’re interconnected, and refusal to acknowledge and examine colonization limits depth of engagement with imperialism and militarism.  In fact, it puts a hard cap on one’s ability to make sense of capitalism. 

One interesting convergence between theoretical work and popular discourse is the notion of “land back,” much debated in online leftist communities.  On the one hand, the emergence of land back in today’s activist lexicon is a something of a victory for Indigenous communities, who have long presented the case for national liberation to often uninterested or hostile audiences in the West; on the other hand, it also reveals a continued stubbornness within the North American left to fully, or even rudimentarily, comprehend the primacy of settler colonization in the set of evils they otherwise abhor.  We don’t need to separate settler colonization from imperialism or militarism.  The three phenomena aren’t identical, but they’re certainly interconnected, and refusal to acknowledge and examine colonization limits depth of engagement with imperialism and militarism.  In fact, it puts a hard cap on one’s ability to make sense of capitalism. 

It also reveals structural absences in the way many commenters approach questions of internationalism.  Where are Indigenous peoples in our rolodex of concerns?  Indigenous histories?  Indigenous theories?  Any notion of solidarity that diverges from Indigeneity is bound to assume a managerial perspective.  How many times have socdem pragmatists or self-branded anti-imperialists suggested that Palestinians and Natives and Black people need to defer their aspirations in order to facilitate electoral success for members of the Democratic Party?  How many times have we been dogpiled and insulted for suggesting that it’s unethical to dispose of the least powerful among us simply to gratify a feeble political desire? 

No.  We’re not deferring shit.  And we’re not disposing of anyone presented to us as disposable.  Certainly not to grease some two-bit pundit’s naked quest for influence. 

Misunderstanding of land back derives in part from this attachment to political convention.  Even when the concept is understood, it’s sometimes only at a superficial level.  Land back isn’t an online phenomenon, some new phrase emerging from an intractable era of wokeness.  It is internet shorthand for a broad and rigorous set of Indigenous intellectual traditions.  It distills, and at times bastardizes, centuries-long liberation movements with land as their guiding principle.  Land back is a simple, straightforward term vague enough for widespread misapprehension.  I’m not going to waste time reassuring anyone that it doesn’t mean dragging white people out of their living rooms and putting them on the next ship to Genoa.  We covered the problems with that approach already.  The important thing to remember is that manifold struggles precede and contextualize the slogan.  

Read Robert Warrior.  Read Lee Maracle.  Read Leanne Howe.  Read Audra Simpson.  Read Glen Coulthard.  Read Aileen Moreton-Robinson.  Read Patrick Wolfe.  Read the breathtaking work of the Hawaiian liberation movement:  Noenoe Silva, Haunani Kay-Trask, Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua.  It goes on and on.  A huge body of work gives meaning to the term “land back.”  (My notion of “work” includes centuries of practice.)  None of this stuff is secret.  Nor is it esoteric.  It is perfectly comprehensible.  It tells us exactly what is needed to undo grave injustices.  This work isn’t breezily ignored because it lacks value, but because it requires people to rethink so many sacred commonplaces.  It demands that we no longer operate in states of exception. 

And, finally, what of solidarity?  Solidarity is a good word, but, like any word that is overused, it has become loose and evasive.  You cannot have solidarity without recognition—that is to say, without an incursion into other people’s concerns and sensibilities.  Solidarity isn’t simply about joining hands; it means changing your own attitude to fit with a broader vision of liberation.  You try to give of yourself and what you get in return is a more rigorous education.  You learn the essential skill of outfitting the universal with the specific. 

You can make a good argument that overcoming ignorance is the first step to a meaningful solidarity.  From there we can imagine the framework for a livable future.  Livability is contingent on a willingness to suffer and persist.  Left techno-modernists, anti-Indigenous on their face, will tell you that science can provide easy solutions to climate collapse and scarcity, that some exotic version of socialism will enable us to exist in luxury, but in reality they’re selling a glossy brand of colonization.  The future requires less consumption, individually and collectively.  It requires serious changes of lifestyle—not just of lifestyle, but of lifeways that require vigorous atonement and introspection.  We cannot continue viewing the earth as a source of abundance.  It has been made to overprovide for a tiny fraction of our species.  The bill for ruling class greed has come due in the world’s ghettoes and refugee camps.  Revolution is the only viable way to clear the ledger.  We need a future that values generosity and sacrifice.  We need a future that prioritizes inheritance of the meek and wretched.  If we even want a future, we need a future that is Indigenous. 

This article was originally published on Steven Salaita’s website on November 10, 2021.


Steven Salaita
Steven Salaita’s most recent book is Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine.


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