How Leftists Can Build Solidarity
Towards Movement Building and Against Shame
I recently came across an essay from a well-known Marxist meme page titled “Imperial Privilege Despite Minority Status.” The title alone tells you the argument: some leftists in the Global North focus too heavily on identity politics while ignoring class, particularly class shaped by imperialism. The author claims that minority groups in wealthy imperial countries benefit from imperialism and often overlook the suffering of working-class people in the Global South.
There is some truth here. We’ve all seen left spaces where identity becomes the only frame of struggle, just as we’ve seen left spaces where class is treated as the only thing that matters. But what troubles me is not the substance of the argument; it’s the implication that the solution is to remind people of their privilege until they fall in line. That approach misunderstands what building a movement actually requires. You cannot shame people into internationalism. You cannot guilt people into class consciousness.
History makes this clear. Take the Black Panther Party. They never needed to be lectured about their “privilege” within the United States to understand internationalism. They saw their struggle as directly connected to the struggles of colonized and oppressed peoples across the world.
We have vowed not to put down our guns or stop making Molotov cocktails until colonized Africans, Asians and Latin Americans in the United States and throughout the world have become free. . . . We want to tell the people who are struggling throughout the world that our collective struggle can only be victorious, and the defeat of the murderers of mankind will come as soon as we create a few more Vietnams, Cubas and Detroits. . . . The Black Panther Party recognizes the critical position of black people in the United States. We recognize that we are a colony within the imperialist domains of North America and that it is the historic duty of black people in the United States to bring about the complete, absolute and unconditional end of racism and neocolonialism by smashing, shattering and destroying the imperialist domains of North America. In order to bring humanity to a higher level, we will follow the example of Che Guevara, the Cuban people, the Vietnamese people and our leader and Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton. If it means our lives, that is but a small price to pay for the freedom of humanity.
Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin (pg. 270)
The critical question is: how did the Black Panther Party identify with and build solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South?
They saw the plight of Black people in America related to the plight of exploited peoples seeking liberation within the Global South. Their identity and class position did not dissuade them from correctly seeing their oppression intertwined with the oppression seen worldwide.
If we were to remind the Black folk of their privileges within the United States, would that actually improve their situation? Would that make a material difference in their lives? Would that have made them more likely to relate to other oppressed groups? Or could we lean on the lived experiences of oppressed people in the Global North to build solidarity with those in the Global South?
This is the danger of reducing internationalism to privilege discourse: it turns solidarity into a competition over who suffers more. Instead of uniting people against capitalism and imperialism, it encourages fragmentation and constant moral judgment. Yes, the Global South faces extreme super-exploitation. Yes, imperial countries benefit materially from that system. But none of this erases the exploitation that exists within the imperial core itself, and none of it justifies treating working-class people in the U.S. or Europe as enemies rather than potential comrades.
To defeat chauvinism and nationalism, we need proletarian internationalism, not guilt. Lenin was clear: revolutionary politics must evaluate struggle in terms of class interests and the global fight against imperialism, not narrow national or identity-bound perspectives. Our task is to broaden people’s horizons, not beat them down.
The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: “The character of the war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the ‘enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of ‘my’ country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realise that he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.”
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladmir Lenin
Real international solidarity doesn’t come from scolding; it comes from helping people understand that their liberation is tied to the liberation of others. It comes from expanding perspective, deepening analysis, and building movements that unite people around shared material interests rather than dividing them by moral hierarchies.
What Real Solidarity Requires
If the left is going to build a movement capable of confronting capitalism, confronting empire, and confronting the global systems that bind us, then we need to understand solidarity as more than a sentiment or slogan. Solidarity is not a moral posture; it is a practice, a set of commitments, habits, and political choices that knit people together across identities, borders, and experiences.
The liberal tendency to reduce solidarity to “acknowledging privilege” can’t get us there. Privilege discourse alone does not build organization, change material conditions, or forge international bonds. At its worst, it encourages guilt over clarity and self-flagellation over strategy. Real solidarity is not about who apologizes the loudest. It is about who shows up, who builds, who organizes, and who understands the actual structure of the struggle.
So what does real solidarity actually require?
1. Start from shared material interests, not moral accusation.
Working-class people in the U.S. and working-class people in the Global South live different realities, but they are shaped by the same system: global capitalism driven by imperial extraction. Hunger in Detroit and hunger in Dhaka share a root. When we begin with common material interests, people understand that solidarity is not charity or moral performance; it is survival. Shaming people for not already knowing this shuts down conversation; connecting their struggles to global structures opens it.
2. Use identity to illuminate, not divide.
Identity is essential. It helps us understand how oppression is lived, such as who gets policed, underpaid, displaced, or excluded. But identity becomes counterproductive when we turn it into a hierarchy of suffering or use it to police one another rather than confront the system itself. Real solidarity acknowledges differences while insisting they must be understood relationally, not competitively. We don’t need to erase identity; we need to connect it to political economy.
3. Tie local struggle to global struggle.
A rent strike in the Bronx is not isolated from a general strike in Argentina. A protest against militarized policing in Minneapolis is not separate from a protest against U.S.-funded militarization in the Philippines. The same imperial core that exploits labor abroad enforces austerity, policing, and dispossession at home. Solidarity requires seeing that capitalism is a global system and therefore demands a global response.
4. Fight chauvinism with political education, not guilt.
National chauvinism, racism, and U.S. exceptionalism are real obstacles. But they cannot be defeated by scolding people for their privilege. They are defeated by showing how the empire harms the oppressed and the ordinary people who live within it. Political education grounded in history, economics, and lived experience is how consciousness shifts. Lectures don’t radicalize people; struggle and clarity do.
5. Build movements where people see themselves as part of a global class.
Capitalism is international. Imperialism is international. Our movements must be international as well. When people understand themselves as part of a global working class, not just an isolated identity group or national constituency, solidarity stops being symbolic and becomes strategic. It becomes the basis of coordinated action rather than moral alignment.