Version imprimableAn internationalist project capable of contesting imperialist warfare in practice can only be constituted through particular social struggles rooted in their own local spatio-temporalities. Such a project, we argue, must therefore confront head-on the many forms of campism: positions and tendencies that back any force opposed to Western imperialism and its allies—whether China, Russia, or the Iran-led so-called “Axis of Resistance”—regardless of that force’s internal domination or imperial and regional interventions.
The critique of campism now might appear to some as “counterproductive” in the midst of Zionist genocide in Gaza, the expansion of settler colonialism in the West Bank, and full-scale regional warfare – from the repeated bombardments of Lebanon and Yemen to the annexation of parts of Syria and the 12-Day War against Iran. Not despite but precisely because of this bloody imperialist warfare we think it is necessary to criticise campism now, when the need to constitute an anti-imperialist bloc as a united political force is greater than ever.
Campism is not only detrimental and divisive for heterogeneous liberation struggles rooted in specific local and national spatio-temporalities; it also undermines their articulation and synchronisation in the form of internationalism. It thwarts the real possibilities unleashed by the objective contradictions of the current war conjuncture for critically reconstructing an internationalist politics. Campism further remains blind to multiple imperialisms beyond the historical West, as well as to regional formations of empire at the margins, since actors such as the United Arab Emirates tearing apart Sudan are not mere Western proxies but agents in their own right, seeking to control and reconfigure transnational circuits of accumulation that crisscross national borders.
Campism is, of course, not the only barrier to internationalism but it must be named and debated openly, as one of the key obstacles to any renewed internationalist politics.
Campism is a dead end for internationalism.
Campism of the Fools
Campism becomes appealing on various grounds, from ideological and nationalist to strategic and decolonial. The foolish logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” constitutes only one among many shades of campism: a variant that separates geopolitics from internal social relations, turning a blind eye to the repressive and reactionary character of the forces it supports while celebrating their opposition to the West.
The genealogy of what we call “campism of the fools” can be traced back to the Cold War and the emergence of “tankie” communists who defended the deployment of Soviet tanks to crush the uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Today’s tankies conceive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not as an openly Eurasian-colonialproject – theorised by the likes of Alexander Dugin – but as a mere negative reaction to NATO’s eastward expansion. The same logic, which reduces the active geopolitical ambitions of non-Western powers seeking to reshape the world market in their own image to a merely passive “victim” of Western imperialism, has dominated many readings of the Syrian revolution. There, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia kept the dictator Assad in power and brutally repressed the popular uprising of the Syrian people, resulting in around half a million dead and some 12 million displaced, while the critical voices of Syrians and activist-thinkers who emphasised the reactionary, imperialist, and interventionist character of these forces were largely ignored by campist currents.
We borrow the phrase “campism of the fools” from Fred Halliday’s description of the 1979–81 US embassy hostage crisis in Tehran as an “anti-imperialism of fools”: a form of anti-imperialism that celebrates any blow against the United States while ignoring how, in that case, the hostage crisis was used by the new Khomeinist forces to crush leftists, dismantle workers’ and popular councils, and impose reactionary and patriarchal measures such as compulsory hijab on women, in order to consolidate their power. As the feminist activist Jaleh Ahmadi, who participated in the 8 March 1979 protests against compulsory hijab, later wrote: “Khomeini’s fist that had been clenched to smash into the mouth of the Great Satan, America, came crashing down instead on the heads of the women of Iran”.
By separating anti-imperialist struggle from other social struggles, this mode of campism renders anti-imperialism abstract. The logical consequence of such abstraction is that leftist opponents and social struggles within supposedly “anti-Western” states—such as the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran—are dismissed as mere creations and conspiracies of Zionism and imperialist powers, even as feminists of the uprising send solidarity messages from prison, declaring that “Palestine taught us that resistance is a way of living”.
Undermining social struggles, in turn, feeds ideological practices of justifying domination through the mask of anti-imperialism. In this mode, the “free gifts” of history – colonial pasts, collective traumas, and anti-colonial struggles – are appropriated as legitimising instruments of repression in the present, in a way that echoes how Israel mobilises the long history of antisemitism and the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe. If postcolonial states justify their own crimes via “anti-imp washing”, Israel dresses its genocide in Gaza in the colours of the queer rainbow flag – pinkwashing – and frames its attacks on Iran as “liberation” carried out by a supposedly heroic female fighter pilot in the name of “feminism”. To speak of the dialectic between these two ideological operations is not to equate or homogenise the radically asymmetrical relation between Israel and Iran but to insist that they mirror and reinforce one another against the horizon of liberation.
Strategic Campism in the Face of Emergency
While the campism of fools abstracts geopolitics from internal social relations, “strategic campism” openly concedes the reactionary character of the forces it supports, yet still extends them conditional support in the name of wartime emergency.
Strategic campism has been brutally visible in Lebanon. In the 2019 kellon yaʿni kellon (“all of them means all of them”) uprising, Hezbollah acted as frontline enforcers of the counter-revolution, playing a central role in the suppression of protesters. After 7 October 2023, as Israel’s bombardments of Lebanon intensified, a familiar discourse returned with new force: that Hezbollah must be backed as the only effective deterrent against Israel, despite its deeply sectarian, authoritarian role inside Lebanon. Here the logic is not one of ideological affinity but of a supposedly higher strategic necessity: “we need Hezbollah now”. All other struggles are told to wait in the name of emergency, forcing many to accept Hezbollah as the “lesser evil”.
A paradigmatic case relates to the early years of the 1979 Revolution, when two opposed left strategies in Iran confronted the real threat of U.S. imperialism. On one side, the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party called for a “United People’s Front” with “the steadfast fighters on the path of Ayatollah Khomeini,” branding women, leftist, and minority struggles as divisive “imperialist plots” that endangered national unity. On the other, the National Democratic Front (NDF) insisted that only deepening the revolution’s democratic content and defending the fundamental rights of the people could secure its anti-imperialist endurance. When the Islamic Republic, under the banner of anti-imperialism, crushed the NDF and other leftist and minority movements, the Tudeh Party not only remained silent but at times endorsed this repression—until the same machinery eventually turned against its own leadership.
Today, when life is increasingly reduced to sheer survival and threatened with annihilation through AI-mediated forms of genocide, people will use any possible means just to stay alive. As the transnational network of the Peoples Want’s Internationalist Manifesto emphasises, it would be foolish to expect them to “wait passively” while they are massacred. Armed resistance in Palestine – or, for that matter, in Kurdistan or Ukraine – may adopt different tactical methods of survival in order to sustain their national liberation, including temporary financial and logistical support from the Islamic Republic of Iran or from other states. Our critique of campism is not launched from a puritanical moral standpoint that evades the real contradictions of real struggles. However, when warfare leads social struggles to place their survival strategically – and not only tactically – in the hands of reactionary forces, that enforced reliance risks foreclosing the very possibility of liberation if dependency on those forces becomes the only political horizon. In the absence of real internationalist support, a struggle may begin with temporary tactical reliance, only to see that dependency harden over time into a strategic and integral part of its politics.
Embracing the real contradictions of real struggles also requires attending to how this very state of emergency – the Israeli threat – is instrumentalised by reactionary forces to justify, authorise, and normalise exceptional extra-juridical violence. Far from relativising the notion of emergency, the key question is who declares it, with what political consequences, and how the response can ground a durable front against it. Assad has long invoked Israel and “Western plots” to legitimate the crushing of the Syrian revolution. During the 12-Day War, some on the Left backed the Islamic Republic of Iran in the name of opposing a supposedly “greater evil” under the pressure of wartime emergency. The state, however, weaponised that same urgency to carry out an unprecedented wave of mass deportations of Afghan migrants, accusing them of “espionage for Israel”. According to the United Nations, more than half a million Afghans were deported from Iran in the sixteen days following the end of the Israeli aggression.
From Nationalist Campism to Decolonial Campism
Today’s dominant forms of campism arise less from lingering Cold War imaginaries than from the internal contradictions of South–South solidarity itself, shaped by the entanglement of postcolonial nationalism with emerging configurations of geopolitical alignment.
Parallel to the proliferation of contemporary war regimes, nationalist campism intensifies: a political orientation that systematically privileges the form of the nation—territorial integrity, sovereign centralisation, national security, and positional leverage within the international order—over the substantive content of nationhood understood as democratic representation, social rights, and collective self-determination. This logic has been sharply visible since the Syrian war, when the Islamic Republic of Iran justified its intervention with the formula, “We fight in Syria so that we do not have to fight in Tehran”, which has since crystallised as the central ideological core of Iran’s pro–Axis of Resistance discourse.
Within this framework, the postcolonial national sovereign is recast as a pivotal figure mediating the relation between inward-facing logics of violent homogenisation and pacification and outward-facing logics of interstate strategic alignment in an expanded field of competitive warfare. What had once been deemed necessary to advance anti-colonial struggles—“national unity”—was reworked into a doctrine of “national security” that imposed a homogeneous, monolithic spatio-temporality, organised around a defensive contraction against an imperialism imagined as a single undifferentiated camp. This national spatio-temporality crushed the plurality of classed, gendered, racialised, and ecological struggles into the singular temporality of a seemingly permanent national emergency. Everything was thereby subordinated to the so-called “primary struggle” between nation and imperialism, routinely justified through a continuous state of threatened “national security” presented as the precondition for all else.
Along the external axis of postcolonial state formation, the strategic South–South alignments forged in the postcolonial era further consolidated the rationality of nationalist campism. The 1955 Bandung Conference stands as the symbolic juncture where this logic of South-South alignment was normalised: the radical, militant language of anti-imperialist struggles by oppressed peoples was recoded into the vocabulary of economic and cultural cooperation between postcolonial states. This shift from anti-imperialist militancy to postcolonial statecraft laid the groundwork for today’s transformation of multipolarity from an objective-critical into a normative category. By absorbing revolutionary forces into the competitive logic of the inter-state system, and ultimately into inter-polar rivalries, it transformed a horizon of liberation into a framework of geopolitical management.
The so-called “Bandung spirit,” despite its undeniable inspirational force in advancing anti-colonial struggles and its dissuasive effect during the Cold War, has increasingly been redeployed as ideological fuel for contemporary campist celebrations of multipolarity—treated as an inherently positive and self-evidently emancipatory alternative to U.S.-led unipolarity. In this view, multipolarity is celebrated as “balance of power” and “enhanced autonomy” for Global South states. A critical conception of multipolarity, by contrast, names not a solution but the deepening crisis of hegemony—marked by permanent crisis, escalating militarisation, fragmented sovereignties, and proliferating war zones. It is precisely the non-critical approach to Bandung’s legacy by authors such as Vijay Prashad, and the reduction of internationalism to a cooperation platform of non-Western state sovereignties, that enables today’s campist discourses to present projects such as China’s imperialist project of the Belt and Road Initiative as the following: “The start of a new confidence, or ‘new mood’, in the Global South since the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America no longer had to rely so fully on the institutions of the Global North for finance and technology.”
This kind of nationalist or multipolar-normativist campism is closely linked to another contemporary formation that we might call decolonial campism which redefines imperialism in culturalist terms, detaching the concept from its historical-material foundations and thus from the concrete living conditions of ordinary people. Unable to break from structural dependencies of the world market, some postcolonial sovereignties sought to compensate for their material derivativeness from Western modernisation— their copy-modelled military apparatuses, bureaucratic institutions, and developmental planning models—by asserting a distinctive cultural–spiritual identity through appeals to cultural authenticity, civilisational exceptionalism, or religious uniqueness.
“Imperialism” is semantically inflated by decolonial campism into a spectral shape-shifting menace, discernible at once in manifestations of so-called backwardness and of development: in illiteracy and drug addiction as much as in university education; in women’s unveiled hair as much as in the wearing of a tie—as was clearly visible in post-revolutionary Iran during the 1980s. Today, within such a framework of decolonial campism, the uprising of Iranian women in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement is directly identified as the product of Western liberalism—and therefore, by definition, as an expression of imperialism.
In this cultural turn, figures such as Ali Shariati, with his call for a “return to the self,” Jalal Al-e Ahmad, with the notion of gharbzadegi (Westoxification), and Sayyid Qutb, with his diagnosis of “modern jahiliyya,” (moral and spiritual ignorance and bankruptcy of modern society) among others, helped articulate a discourse of “cultural invasion”, “identity crisis”, and “spiritual decline” which—regardless of its analytical adequacy in accounting for global structures of domination—was readily appropriated by postcolonial states as an all-purpose signifier. It was deployed arbitrarily to stigmatize difference and suppress dissent, even as these same states imposed neoliberal reforms and embraced some of the most predatory variants of capitalism—a plainly evident contradiction, already apparent more than forty years ago, when Maxine Molyneux and Fred Halliday observed that “the anti-imperialism of Khomeini or Hafiz al-Asad” offered no emancipation from capitalism but merely “the replacement of rule by one capitalism with another.”
Towards An Internationalism of Concrete Universalities
As the warfare moves to the centre of the reproduction of a deeply fractured capitalism, the historical necessity of an explicitly anti-imperialist internationalism becomes more and more evident. By internationalism we do not mean an abstract form of global organization standing above local politics, suspending feminist, ecological, labour, and queer struggles. On the contrary, as Palestine after 7 October has shown, internationalism is necessarily mediated by particular struggles embedded in their own local politics; it can only exist as a concrete universality that is woven out of these situated struggles, rather than imposed over them.
University encampments; struggles for disarmament and boycott; and counter-logistical disruptions of the transnational circuits of accumulation that enable Israel’s genocide in Gaza – from general strikes and port blockades in Italy to the maritime interventions of the Freedom Flotilla – were not carried out from an abstract moral stance of a vague humanist empathy. They emerged from the felt necessity of objectively shared destinies between each of these struggles and Palestine. “We are not liberating Palestine, Palestine is liberating us” – a slogan chanted from the streets from Algeria to Italy – aptly captures the spirit of internationalism as the political form that synchronises and coordinates heterogeneous struggles of liberation on the basis of their common grounds, resonances, and mutual solidarities, without campist subsumption of their singularities under a supposedly “higher” anti-imperialist cause.
Solidarities with Palestine are “meaningful” for people because they can immediately grasp that Israel’s genocide in Gaza bears directly on their own lives. When dock workers in the port of Ravenna in northern Italy took action to block the loading of weapons destined for the port of Haifa – a concrete node in the logistical chain of genocide, now partly owned by an Indian company – they did so not simply out of an abstract opposition to Israel, but out of a refusal to let their own labour be mobilised for genocide and to accept the transformation of their workplaces into infrastructures of war.
Today, the abolition of Zionism is one of the conditions of possibility for the liberation of all oppressed classes. However, this universality remains abstract, ineffective, and ultimately reactionary insofar as it is detached from the concrete particular struggles through which any such universality could actually be realised. By positing opposition to Israel as the primary struggle and relegating all others to a secondary rank, campism in fact undermines the very basis of anti-imperialist struggles.
By siding with one pole of a war, campism is not only detrimental to each liberation struggle taken separately, but also to their mutually intertwined relations, which are the very precondition of internationalism. Through support for, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran, campism marginalizes not only the feminist, anti-colonial, and egalitarian actualities of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, but also its potential internationalist articulations with other struggles in the region. By elevating opposition to Western imperialism into the “primary contradiction”, all other struggles are deferred to an indefinite “not now”. Campism thus imposes a false synchronization: heterogeneous struggles with distinct horizons, urgencies, and rhythms are subsumed under a single wartime rhythm. By contrast, internationalism affirms a different politics of time, not governed by the nationalist injunction “first national security, then everything else”. During the 12-Day War, Iranian students, teachers, workers, feminists, and political prisoners (including the Kurdish militants on death row, Pakhshan Azizi and Varishe Mordai), together with explicitly internationalist diasporic organisations, affirmed a counter-synchronisation that linked Woman, Life, Freedom to Palestine. Their insistence that justice is indivisible counters both the Islamic Republic’s cynical instrumentalization of Palestine and the campist logics that separate anti-imperialism from struggles against authoritarianism at home.
Internationalism, both as a concept and as a political form, has never been an “add-on” to local and national struggles, but constitutive of class politics as such, rooted in the sociality of capital itself as an intrinsically global relation that reproduces itself through the world market. Today, as the world market is reorganized along multipolar and logistical lines, campism appears increasingly out of sync with its own historical time. The task ahead is to renew internationalism capable of disrupting the circuits of war and accumulation and defending the corridors of life—a task that can only be advanced through the concrete articulation of struggles, not through the abstract universality of campist alignments.
Source: Portolan
