The General Defense Committee has added anti-imperialist work to our core projects. This document is, in many ways, aspirational. We hope that this document will help build the foundation that will allow us to turn our words into practice. Our work is to engage in revolutionary solidarity with the working classes of the world.
We take a resolute anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position that links the international role of the U.S. empire to the domestic war against poor people and working-class, Black and Brown peoples in the United States.
The liberation of oppressed nations and people worldwide is the first condition of our own emancipation. Resistance to U.S. imperialism abroad weakens the dominion that the ruling classes have over the people here. Anti-capitalist resistance here weakens U.S. rule abroad.
The struggle against the U.S. empire requires us to fight internally for Black and Indigenous liberation, for land reclamation, and against all attempts to imprison and displace the masses.
Black people in the United States have historically been the vanguard of revolutionary internationalist movements. The lessons we learn from Black liberation movements are central to understanding the way forward for a revolutionary anti-imperialism in the United States.
Living in the belly of the beast puts us in a unique position to fight imperialism at home. This looks like both building a mass movement at home and taking steps to weaken the war machine. Confronting the empire at home through anti-capitalist organizing is anti-imperialist work, as it creates another front that the ruling classes have to contend with.
By making connections with the wars abroad we are also making connections to the wars at home, and vice versa. Work rooted in/with the people builds a mass organized to resist exploitation and defend the gains won through struggle. Our mass work must be guided by the horizon of a global anti-capitalist revolution which smashes the walls and borders built and maintained by imperialism.
U.S. imperialism demonizes anti-colonial struggles as “threats” to our way of life, while it relies on constant theft and war to make us dependent on exploitation, extraction, and oppression abroad.
While imperialist, capitalist wars seek to divide the global organized masses, anti-imperialism breaks patterns of exceptionalism and isolation. By uniting our struggles, we become part of the global revolutionary movement. We realize the fight for liberation here is bound to the liberation of oppressed people everywhere.
Capitalism demands exploitation throughout the world and drives our world’s ecological destruction. U.S. imperialism is the dominant political, military, economic, and cultural power within the world-system, and thus the main enemy of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world.
We recognize imperialism is a world system. As revolutionaries who reside or are settled in the United States, our primary work is against the U.S. empire.
We struggle for the revolutionary overthrow and abolition of the imperialist world-system and all forms of exploitation and oppression.
Imperialism is a threat to every revolutionary struggle for national liberation, Black and Indigenous liberation, economic justice, environmental protection, and all movements for social advancement.
U.S. imperialism deceives us into thinking of ourselves as members of a ruling nation and seeks to make us accomplices to its dominion abroad. It makes us unwilling participants in its constant expansionism and requires our passiveness to the struggles of colonized and occupied people across the world.
Today the world revolutionary movement is led by the masses of the Global South – Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean – and those struggling for self determination within the colonial U.S borders. These struggles are connected, and there can be no genuine self-determination for Palestine, for African nations, for the world, unless the power that the U.S. holds is uprooted.
We must engage in any and all forms of struggle against the enemy, and must defend all those people engaged in this fight.
We fight for more solidarity, more struggle and more collaboration to confront the enemies of human liberation. We want to build an anti-imperialist struggle on the ground of everyday people. We Fight to Win!