"A new solidarity movement is emerging. From Los Angeles to Sao Paulo, from Minneapolis to London, Black Lives Matter is a cry and demand heard around the world.
The message of this movement is powerfully simple: Stop killing Black people-in their homes, in the streets, and traveling by sea to safer shores. Yet in its simplicity it contains the seed of a radical transformation in our planetary system, raging against a racist dispossession machine to bring about collective and communal liberation everywhere.
The last decade has seen a radical shift in two terrifying directions: turning inward and taking drastic action. A new cohort of authoritarixs has rejected international cooperation in a retreat into the nation-state and its ancient myths of blood and soil. A new set of surveillance technologies has made us retreat further, reinforcing and militarizing state control over our communities. In addition, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced us into greater isolation, introducing in some cases the threat of a permanent state of emergency and associated martial law.
Around the world, protest movements are rising and spreading. In the streets of Santiago, young Chileans demonstrated against the widespread conditions of poverty, precariousness and police violence. Across India, millions of activists faced racism and anti-Muslim violence from the Modi government. And in Lebanon, demonstrators have challenged the closure to demand their basic rights to food, water, health care and education.
These are the planetary conditions in which protests have erupted across the United States. However, there is something exceptional about these protests - if only that they expose a deep rift in the doctrine of "American exceptionalism". We cannot ignore the particular hypocrisy of the hegemon, which boasts to the world of its "mission accomplished" and the freedoms granted while oppressing its black, brown and native populations in its own land. Nor should we overlook the openness that these protests have generated to break with this hegemonic power and move towards a decolonized and multipolar world.
An opening is an opening, not a guarantee. The scenes that have emerged from these international protests are those of a system at a breaking point. But there is no guarantee of the direction in which it will break down. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the reactionary forces and their ability to seize the current opportunity to advance their repressive vision of "LAW & ORDER! (LAW & ORDER!), as President Trump so succinctly tweeted.
Our challenge, now and as always, is to organize: to turn these spontaneous expressions of solidarity into an enduring international movement to dismantle institutions of racist state violence and investigate human rights abuses by U.S. police departments, its prison system, and in particular its military.
That is why we founded Progressive International: to make solidarity more than a slogan. The marches in cities like Auckland and Amsterdam have sent an important signal to the US Government that the world is watching. But witnessing is not enough. Our task is to demonstrate the ways in which our solidarity can go beyond borders to give meaningful support to people fighting unequal battles in thousands of places around the world.
That means learning from the struggles of people against state violence, as in the case of the Lebanese activists who compiled a toolkit for protesters across the United States. That means providing resources, where possible, to support victims of police violence and their families. And it means identifying our respective roles in this planetary system, wherever we live, and delivering justice in our own communities.
Not all solidarity is equal. All too often, expressions of outrage about what's happening "over there" serve as a mask to ignore, dismiss, or somehow minimize the ritual violence that occurs here. Those Europeans marching to withdraw funds from the Minneapolis police could demand that their own governments stop funding Frontex, the EU border authority responsible for illegal expulsions and deportations across the Mediterranean.
The same thing happens in the opposite direction. The expansion of the US empire through the unlimited financing of its military-industrial complex has caused a boomerang effect in the country itself, arming the local police forces with the same equipment that the US has deployed in its endless wars abroad. If the protests in the United States are to give rise to a new sense of solidarity among its citizens, they must be extended to all the populations that have suffered from US imperial aggression and sustained occupation, especially the native populations on whose dispossession the nation itself was founded.
The infrastructure of the racist police is already international. Law enforcement agencies in the United States are trained by the Israeli army. U.S. arms producers supply police forces throughout Brazil. US companies provide the Indian government with surveillance technology. And American methods of stop-and-frisk (detention and search) in minority neighborhoods have been exported around the world.
The task of our Progressive International is to take stock of this international infrastructure - to listen to the activists and organizers who have dedicated their lives to this struggle - and to work with them to dismantle it: brick by brick, dollar by dollar, police department by police department."
Signatories:
Noam Chomsky, Hilda Heine, Ece Temelkuran, Gael García Bernal, Áurea Carolina, Celso Amorim, Renata Avila, Srecko Horvat, Scott Ludam, Carola Rackete, Yanis Varoufakis, John McDonnell, Andres Arauz, Alicia Castro, David Adler, Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Ertuğrul Kürkçü, Nick Estes, Paola Vega and Eli Alcorta Gomez
Link to Progressive International:
https://progressive.international/
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