The left in the United States faces a series of urgent questions: How do we stop a genocide in Palestine funded by our own tax dollars? How do we engage with or confront electoral politics? How can we get beyond the insularity of our own context to learn from each other?
Truthout caught up with Harsha Walia at this year’s Socialism Conference, a yearly convergence of over 2,000 people on the left hosted by Haymarket Books in Chicago, to discuss some of these questions. Walia is an organizer, anti-violence worker, and the award-winning author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. She lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she is involved in migrant justice as well as feminist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist and anti-imperialist movements.
In this exclusive interview, Walia discusses building supportive containers for new organizers in this moment of heightened mobilization for Palestine, celebrity culture and the U.S. presidential election, and what we can all learn from international struggles.
You, Kelly Hayes and Robyn Maynard designed a session for the Socialism Conference called “World Building Workshop: Abolition, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” At it, you invited participants to discuss the infrastructure our movements need, any recent wins or stumbles, how we can connect across struggles and how we can manage principled disagreements. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to do that session?
We were really wanting to think about how do we build between and across movements. We all know struggles are connected, but on the ground, it may not always feel that way. Perhaps some organizers are cross-pollinating with each other, but largely the fact that we even identify as part of different movements suggests that to some degree we identify as people who are perhaps involved in anti-imperialist organizing, or others identify as abolitionists. Or we may identify as all of them, but we are most involved in a particular movement. So, it was trying to really take that theory of “struggling is interconnected” to “how do we put it in practice?” What are the tangible ways in which people across diverse movements can find unity? Not a unity that demands uniformity or a big tent where everyone has a race to the bottom, the most simplistic analysis. But points of material unity where specific communities can find synergy with each other and also have tactical disagreements.
We wanted to work through questions like “You’re my comrade, but I disagree with you and now I don’t know what to do with it. And I don’t know if we can organize together or not,” which in my experience, are the things that lead to the most burnout. We’re not burnt out because we’re all up for 14 hours pulling off a thing. We rest after that, right? We all know struggle demands time of us. We’re burnt out from various tensions or dynamics between comrades or across organizations, or across tactics or across strategies. And so those sticky things are the things that we need to constantly surface, and not wait until it’s a crisis to try to address in terms of building structures of accountability, and building structures of courageous conversation. Building structures that acknowledge that disagreement is part of life, it’s going to be part of our movements.
There’s just been so much increase in mobilization in the last year around Palestine, and we’re in a moment, like 2020, where a lot of new people are coming into the movement. Is the drive to have this conversation now partly because of that?
For sure, I think that crises are accelerating in a particular way now.
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I think the acceleration of violence and fascism and the technologies that facilitate the acceleration of that violence are accompanied by our metabolizing of that violence in unique ways. It’s important to emphasize that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, but it’s also not unique; it’s the event that is the most documented and visible to us as genocide. Moments of acceleration are not new, but people are understanding, witnessing and metabolizing that violence in different ways because of, say, social media. Which is the same as the uprisings [for Black lives] in 2020. That allows for our movements to very quickly scale up globally because we’re all witnessing the violence. Even as we may be far by distance, we have proximity and we have access to information from the ground in ways that really allow us to mobilize. But I think the flip side of that is we metabolize in a different way.
Really intense mobilization coupled with really intense grief creates the conditions for experiences of feeling demobilized. And not knowing how to build for the long haul. Because the other thing that happens in these moments is that of course we are rapid response mobilizing, of course we are trying to do everything that we humanly can as people of conscience to interrupt and end violence, while at the same time figuring out: How do I do that while I’m supposed to be building infrastructure for the long haul?
Movement-building also involves watching out for all these new people so they don’t jump into the deep end unprepared and then get hurt, in a moment when experienced folks are also dealing with crisis.
What are the tangible ways in which people across diverse movements can find unity?
Yeah, and I think orienting people to the long haul. How do we think long term? How do we act long term? How do we care for one another and ourselves in the long term, right? How do we not burn out? How do we think strategically? And orient people to that. Because that I think is the deep end that is the hardest. There’s a learning curve about learning theory but we can all figure that out. The learning curve for how to be and participate in movement is a different learning curve.
I’m sure we could probably talk about that all day — how to have activism be part of your life, and not this extraordinary moment that just destroys people and chews them up. Conflicts within movements can make people think: “This is a thing that I did when I was 21. I don’t have time for the drama anymore.” But we need those people. The world needs those people.
Yeah, and like you put it, this is part of our lives. For it to be part of our lives requires a reorienting of our lives in relationship to these systems that tell us our life has to be something else. As we know, capitalism and colonialism and violence drive us to think that our lives are individualistic. That we have to be competitive, that we are independent. And if not, we are a burden. We see the collapse of collective infrastructure because of capitalism, but also it seeps in individually. And so much of orienting ourselves to movement as life is: How do we build infrastructures that are long-term and durable? And where we shed some of those ways of thinking. It’s not about being independent or burdened, we are actually interdependent. This is not about competition, this is cooperation.
But cooperation doesn’t mean I just go ahead with everything somebody says. It means I also learn how to have principled disagreements. So, how to find those ways of being is not easy, and I underscore that. Because it’s not that I can just take myself and come into movements; instead, we have to shed so many ways of being and thinking about how we relate to people. We have to learn that we’re not in relationship to somebody else in only extractive ways, but it also doesn’t mean I have to be your friend.
I’m curious about your take on the rightward shift of border politics and generally increased militarization in the U.S. I think there was some shock at how militarized the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was in particular. How are you thinking about that?
One of the linchpins of the rise of escalating global fascism around the world — of which the U.S. is a part, but is not exclusive to the U.S. — is xenophobia. I’m always hesitant to generalize about the rise of global fascism, because there are contours that are specific to each location. For example, in India, it looks like Hindutva fascism. It is fascism, but its contours are different. But one of the uniform strands across global fascism that I feel very confident in articulating is anti-migrant xenophobia.
It is present in every right-wing fascist political agenda. That means that it also manifests in what people believe to be the center, because we know that one of the boomerang effects of growing fascism in every context is that the center also moves to the right. That is if one even assumes liberals are center. I’m using these terms loosely, but of course many of us would argue they’re flip sides of the same coin. So, to me what happened at the DNC is part of this: global boomeranging effects of anti-migrant xenophobia.
Building structures that acknowledge that disagreement is part of life, it’s going to be part of our movements.
I think the other thing to remember is that the Democratic Party laid the groundwork for what we know as punitive border policy. It was under the Clinton administration and then the Obama administration that we see things like the actual militarization of the border. It is under the Democrats that we see growing expansion of detention centers, and the “war on drugs,” and the war on migrants and the “war on crime” really solidified as a triad the Democrats have sharpened the distinction between the so-called good and bad immigrant. Increasingly, all they’re doing with each administration is just putting more and more people into the category of what they consider to be the bad immigrant. They’ve never actually been pro-migrant. So, for me, that trajectory is incredibly predictable.
This rightward shift corresponds — again, I don’t think coincidentally — with a particular version of capitalism that we know of as austerity. Austerity has created the conditions for the massive expansion of police and prisons by both actively defunding the public sector that provides social goods like health care and child care and education, while also actively funding the carceral arm of the state and empire. The war on the border coincides with that, because of course, one of the most obvious manifestations of austerity worldwide is massive fucking displacement — millions of people are being uprooted from their homes — and this is only exacerbated by climate change. The neoliberal (and carceral) response to that displacement is a crackdown on what they call the border crisis.
Here in the U.S., presidential election cycles are a difficult time to be on the left, with deep conflicts all around us over how to engage with electoral politics. Do you have advice or suggestions on how you navigate that kind of dilemma?
I offer this humbly, as someone who doesn’t live in the U.S., but one thing that’s interesting for me is that where I’m located, there is just less interest in the electoral cycles in Canada. Which isn’t to say that people don’t vote. People do their thing. But there are fewer debates in the context of the left about how to relate to electoral politics. Everyone is very well aware that people’s lives depend on how elections go, but there’s no fascination with candidates in the same way. Like, I think Americans were probably more fascinated by Justin Trudeau when he was first elected. No one I know paid attention to those photo spreads.
I think that is obviously part of the deep celebrity culture that is bred by consumerism. It is not about policy and instead about deep consumerism that creates these responses in people and wants people to project every possible fantasy onto humans in every election cycle. I think some of that is part of these longstanding debates about the limits of representational politics, but I also think it’s something bigger. Again, I offer this humbly because I have no idea what people are experiencing or the psychic effect of this — but I’d have to say as a principled organizer, I strongly believe that social movements have to be able to outlive election cycles.
I also want to remind people that every time there’s an election cycle people say, “Oh, hey, we’re gonna do this and then we’re gonna hold this person accountable.” And then oftentimes those very same people get mad when you organize to hold their candidate accountable. Because some kind of proximity has now been created through that process. So, I would really caution people that if you do get involved in electoral organizing, in any way, to remember that if your goal in going into this was: I’m going to do a thing, but then I’m going to hold them accountable, then actually do that. Because I have personally never seen that happen. I think because people then start to have these personal relationships with their candidate that makes it hard for them.
I live in a province, British Columbia, that currently and in the past has had a New Democratic Party (NDP) government, which putatively by American comparisons is a center-left party, and they have enacted all forms of violence on people. It has been much harder to organize against an NDP government because so many of my former comrades now work for this administration and it has defanged the movement in a particular way.
There are these larger debates about how we deal with elections, but I think there’s the microcosms of what it does to actual movements that I’m more interested in. Like what happens after an election and if that electoral organizer gets their candidate in, are they actually going to hold that person accountable? Are they still going to be part of movements trying to convince people that that person’s doing good shit when they’re not? There are these bigger conversations around the limits of electoralism, but I strongly believe there’s much more salient questions for movements. How do election cycles affect our movement?
I was looking again at your book Border and Rule and am impressed by how global your perspective is. Are there things happening elsewhere in the world that you think we should be paying more attention to? And how can we manage the overwhelm of trying to pay attention to everywhere?
For me, thinking about internationalism, both in terms of geographies around the world, and also thinking about movements, has not been overwhelming. I don’t know if this is the same for other people, but I have actually found that realizing that forms and systems of violence are connected makes it less overwhelming because it makes me feel like if I can challenge this wherever I am, it’ll mean I can contribute to the liberation of other people in some meaningful way. I think about, for example, how the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is one very tangible way in which we can contribute to so many different struggles. Obviously, the BDS movement comes under the leadership of Palestinian people. But, for example, there are so many reasons to boycott Starbucks, which is also on the BDS list. They exploit their workers and union bust here. They exploit farmers. And the list goes on. I think the importance of internationalism is to make sure that any struggle we’re involved in is contributing and in service to other struggles rather than undermining them.
The flip side of that, for example, is when people advocate for a Green New Deal and are advocating for green technologies. That means that their kind of community is no longer extracted from, but it’s creating extraction elsewhere. So much renewable energy, false technologies and greenwashing means that someone else is being harmed.
So, I think the idea of thinking internationally is not about just learning about each place, although of course we should. It’s not like a social studies class, but it’s to understand how our struggles are connected and how we ensure that the struggles we are part of are in service to liberation rather than undermining other people’s liberation. What the lens of internationalism offers is that we’re not alone. We are in global struggle and I have to make sure that what I’m contributing to this movement is in service to all people as much as I can make sure that that is the case.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.