“On Fronts and Fissures: Labour Internationalism and Struggles against Colonial Racial Fascism” by Alberto Toscano is the text of a talk delivered in December 2024 at the invitation of the Simon Fraser University Labour Studies program. It is now published for the first time as an original feature on Communis.

Labour Internationalism and Struggles against Colonial Racial Fascism

George Padmore’s and C.L.R. James’ was a Marxism that needed to be ‘shaded or completed’ by Black anti-colonial radicalism, to use Césaire’s phrasing, or ‘stretched’, to employ the famous formula by his former pupil in Martinique, Frantz Fanon.

—Alberto Toscano

Anyone who does not wish to discuss imperialism should also stay silent on the subject of fascism.

– Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship

Interfere with the foreign policy of the country? Sure as hell! That’s our job, that’s our privilege, that’s our right, that’s our duty.

– Harry Bridges, International Longshore and Warehouse Union

You have talked of ‘the White Man’s Burden.’ Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.

– Amy Ashwood Garvey, speech at a rally for Ethiopia, Trafalgar Sq, London (1935)

There has been a hopeful trend in recent theories and historiographies of fascism and anti-fascism – themselves spurred by anti-racist and anti-colonial political movements – to reorient our understanding of these phenomena in terms of their intimate entanglement with histories of racial and colonial (or settler-colonial) capitalism. This has meant understanding the ‘historical fascism’ that emerged on European soil in the interwar period as entangled with the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism, but also attending to the differential experience of fascism along axes of race. Theorisations of, and political opposition to, colonial racial fascism have always entailed tracing the circulation of fascist methods and ideologies between colonies and metropole, heartland and frontier, but also, especially in the wake of formal decolonisation and desegregation in seeing how societies deemed liberal by some could be structured as fascist for others.

In this brief reflection on the place of labour internationalism in the anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle, I will also be telling a story about two childhood friends from Trinidad, George Padmore (aka Malcolm Nurse) and C.L.R. James, who in the 1930s – responding to the Italian Fascist invasion and occupation of Ethiopia from the centre of the British Empire – drew on the uprisings, strikes, organising and spontaneity of Black and colonial workers across several continents to articulate what the historian Minkah Makalani, expanding on this view of ‘black radicalism as issuing from the colonial fracture in Western radical thought’, has termed ‘black radical internationalism, an intercolonial project that viewed Marxism as a dynamic political theory capable of ushering in a future classless society’ (In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939). This was a Marxism that needed to be ‘shaded or completed’ by Black anti-colonial radicalism, to use Césaire’s phrasing, or ‘stretched’, to employ the famous formula by his former pupil in Martinique, Frantz Fanon. Turning to this moment also allows me to correct the impression, which might be drawn from my book, that radical theories of fascism were the emanation of a handful of towering militant intellects, and to underscore that the likes of Padmore and James were responding to, while also trying to steer and shape, mass antifascist practice.

As I noted in Late Fascism, Padmore had written in his 1936 book How Britain Rules Africa of about settler-colonial racism as ‘the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today’. He would go on to see in South Africa ‘the world’s classic Fascist state’ grounded in the ‘unity of race as against class’. Padmore’s anatomy of what he termed ‘colonial fascism’ thus anticipated the memorable depiction of fascism as the boomerang (or choc en retour) effect of European imperialist violence in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

How had he arrived at this position? Padmore, who had left Trinidad to study at Fisk University and then Howard, entered into the Communist movement in the United States. As Makalani suggests, he could develop his own brand of internationalist pan-African Marxism, after having broken with the Comintern in 1934, ‘because US black radicals a decade earlier had pushed questions of race and black people’s importance to world revolution, thus creating a context in which organizing in Africa assumed importance within international communism’. As Robin Kelley has observed, notwithstanding its profound and often tragic shortcoming, the American Communist Party, ‘offered African Americans a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived.’

Having played a role in the CPUSA’s Black mass organization, the American Negro Labour Congress, Padmore moved to Moscow to become the head of the ‘Negro bureau’ of the Red International of Labour Unions or Profintern, and then to become the editor of the Negro Worker, the publication of the International Trade Union Committee for Negro Workers (ITUCNW), working from Vienna and Hamburg, where in 1933 he was arrested and then deported by the Nazis. The ITUCNW and the Negro Worker were products of the so-called Third Period of the Communist International, an ideological phase marked a class-against-class line, and the denunciation of social-democrats as social fascists but also by a forceful orientation towards anti-colonial and Black struggles (this is also the period of the so-called Black Belt thesis, calling for the self-determination of African-Americans as an oppressed nation in the US South). It was a moment marked by international conferences organised by Willi Münzenberg for the Communist International such as the 1^st International Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism (Brussels, 1927), the League Against Imperialism (Frankfurt, 1929), and so on. As the general secretary of the Red International of Labor Unions Alexander Losovsky declared: ‘the revolt of the Black Continent against imperialism is only beginning, and … our job is to make use of this huge amount of combustible material’ and become allies to ‘these vast masses seething with hatred against their oppressors’. This moment enabled a Marxism centring Black workers by mandating support from member parties, while also curtailing it by framing mobilisation in terms of class-against-class/social fascism party lines, and also smothering independent theoretical work. As Makalani notes, the ITUCNW ‘merged Third Period rhetoric with an intercolonial focus,’ and Padmore, in the Negro Worker, ‘could argue for the Comintern as a base from which African workers and intellectuals could receive important organizational training while also criticizing the common view many Communists held of Negro and colonial work’.

The Negro Worker published letters by workers from Nigeria, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, Liberia, as well as articles by the Malian communist Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté articles on organising ‘Negro, Indo-Chinese and Arab sailors’ in French ports. Padmore also took to the magazine to celebrate the establishment of trade union committees in Guadeloupe, Haiti, Senegal, Cameroon, Panama, St Lucia, Madagascar. As Holger Weiss has observed, Padmore ‘and the other integral ITUCNW activists constructed an impressive transnational formation, which contested the global processes of interwar capitalism and established spatially stretched alliances and political networks spanning metropole and periphery.’ One political flashpoint for communist-led Black and anti-colonial labour internationalism under the shadow of war and imperialism came in autumn 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. As Weiss narrates, this triggered the ‘Hands Off China’ campaign, through which the Communist International sought to organise a global trade-union boycott of Japan. Central to this initiative were seamen and dockers, no doubt the key constituency for the black labour internationalism that Padmore and James would try to mobilise outside of the Comintern in the context of the Abyssinian crisis. As Weiss notes:

The core group to be mobilized were the anti-war cells of dockers and seamen, their task being to block shipments of ammunition and war material to the Japanese troops in China. To further strengthen the campaign, the European Bureau of the Profintern issued in February 1932 a direct call to all metal and harbor workers to prevent the transportation of military supplies destined for the use against China and the Soviet Union.  At this point, the “Hands off China” campaign had been incorporated by other communist organizations, such as the League Against Imperialism, the International Union of Seamen and Harbour Workers, and the ITUCNW […] The Negro Worker was to carry a call to the black toilers in the African Atlantic to join the “Hands off China” campaign in each issue during the spring of 1932. In March 1932, it rallied behind a resolution of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers and urged black dockworkers and seamen to stop the transportation of war material to Japan […] The Negro Worker surveyed the geographies of colonialism and imperialism through the labor regimes which marked the uneven development of global capitalism, and in doing so also plotted the different trajectories and strategies of anti-colonial struggles (like the position of maritime workers in the “Hands off China” campaign).

This was an internationalism sensitive to global imperialist chains but also to concrete maritime and logistical chokepoints, and to the solidarities and subjectivities that could be made in political struggles at the nerve-centres of a global system of trade. We can’t underestimate how much, as Gabriel Winant has observed, ‘seaborne radicalism helped to make the Left throughout the twentieth century’, including in its ranks ‘the young Ho Chi Minh, the novelist Claude McKay, the poet Langston Hughes, the Philadelphia longshoreman and Wobbly Ben Fletcher, and the itinerant black Communist Lovett Fort-Whiteman’. In their recent and important contribution to a critical revision of our theories of fascism, The Black Antifascist Tradition, Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen tell the story of the Black communist Harry Haywood, who, having fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (like many Black leftists), enrolled in the Merchant Marine in 1943, explaining his decision as a tribute to the multiracial National Maritime Union. As Hope and Mullen note the union’s wartime push for domestic civil rights legislation (the antilynching bill and a Fair Employment Practices Commission against racial discrimination in the workplace) had grown out of its anti-fascist internationalism, including refusing to sail ships to Italy during the invasion of Ethiopia.

It was indeed around Ethiopia that James and Padmore would come to develop a formidable political and intellectual partnership in London. First, they organised through the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFE) – an organisation which also included the Kenyan anti-colonial politician Jomo Kenyatta, the Guyanese activist T. Ras Makonnen, the Barbadian leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Association, Chris Braithwaite (aka Chris Jones), and Amy Ashwood Garvey, the Jamaican pan-Africanist and former wife of Marcus Garvey, who hosted much of IAFE’s activities at her Florence Mills Social Parlour. Then the IAFE was followed by the International African Services Bureau (IASB) and its journals The Sentinel and International African Opinion. It was in the crucible of this pan-African Marxist and socialist organising in London, connecting ‘metropolitan black anticolonialism’ and ‘diasporic liberation struggles’, and centering the struggles of Black workers (for instance in the 1937 strikes that rocked their native Trinidad), that Padmore and James developed their thoughts about colonial fascism and capitalist-imperialism, and about the kind of anti-colonial anti-fascist labour internationalism that could challenge them. As Cedric Robinson detailed in his essay on ‘Fascism and the Intersections of Capitalism, Racialism, and Historical Consciousness,’ Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia was a moment that crystallised a Black radical and popular ‘historical consciousness’ across multiple continents. This was by no means ex nihilo (in the US the invasion of Haiti, the repression of Garveyism and imperialist designs on Liberia had already seeded this response) but it marked an important caesura. As he writes, with an eye on the spontaneous mobilisations of Black Americans,

in the face of a long flirtation with fascism in the American press, and the open support for Mussolini by powerful fractions of capital, elements of the international Zionist movement, proto-fascist American demagogues like Father Coughlin, and Fascist Italian American groups, ordinary Black workers in the US, the West Indies, East, West, and Southern Africa mobilized in support of Ethiopia.

In Joseph Fronczak’s recent study of the emergence of the modern Left from the internationalist crucible of antifascism, Everything is Possible, he writes of how the Hands Off Ethiopia movement was a ‘grassroots affair from the start, the movement worked toward internal solidarity by working toward independence from the formal organizations that sought to divide and control it’. Through the Hands Off Ethopia movement, the imagination of internationalist solidarity was doubled by a kind of horizontal cognitive mapping. As Fronczak observes, ‘news of distant protests provided, in ways tangible and intangible, blueprints of practice that could be adapted to local conditions. What’s more, though, simply knowing of distant dissent provided sustenance of inspiration for more local agitation. By imagining their way into solidarity with the people of Ethiopia, antifascists everywhere were imagining their way into solidarity also with each other’.

For the thinkers and activists in the IAFE and the IASB, as well as from some white British socialists in the Independent Labour Party ILP) (of which James was a member, and whose publication Padmore edited for a time), to mobilise against Italian Fascism’s imperial designs in Ethiopia could not mean strategically or tactically siding with British imperialism. The polemical and analytical force of the ‘colonial fascism’ thesis has to be understood in this conjuncture, as a way of countering both the liberal-democratic pretensions of British (and French) imperialism by contrast with their European fascist rivals, and as an attack on a Comintern that had pivoted, for reasons largely dictated by Stalin’s foreign policy calculations, from its Third-Period extremism to a popular front support of ‘democracies’ and an emphasis on the League of Nations as the mediator of international conflicts.

The pan-African Marxists in the IASB would be relentless in attacking both the liberal-imperialist and the Soviet positions (with James, as a Trotskyist, particular caustic as concerns the latter). I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, the Sierra Leonean workers’ leader and former seaman, would declare that ‘[w]hen the British people talk of Fascism they should look not to Germany and Italy, but within their own Empire, where their ruling classes have filched the lands from the natives whom they have forced to work for them in wretched conditions and for less than starvation wages; where they have turned the whole land into one large concentration camp.’ In his 1937 book Africa and World Peace, Padmore would judge that ‘“Democratic” Imperialism and “Fascist” Imperialism are merely interchanging ideologies corresponding to the economic and political conditions of capitalism within a given country, on the one hand, and the degree to which the class struggle has developed, on the other.’ Reviewing James’s unsparing anatomy of Stalinism’s betrayal of Bolshevism, World Revolution, the ILP leader Fenner Brockway stated that the Soviet position – working with the League and allying itself with the European imperialist democracies – ignored ‘the operation over the greater part of [the British] Empire of a tyranny repeating in almost every respect the dictatorship of Fascism’. Elsewhere, Brockway would write, ‘Fascism is Capitalist dictatorship in developed countries. Imperialism is capitalist dictatorship in underdeveloped countries’ (‘Has Hitler Anything to Teach Our Ruling Class?’, New Leader, 29 April 1938).

But what did this mean in terms of political strategy? Here, we can turn to C.L.R. James, whose political writing in the mid-1930s tried to articulate the kind of Black radical anti-colonial labour internationalist politics that would not treat the ‘colonial fascism’ of the European democracies as the lesser evil to Mussolini’s designs on Africa. In October 1935, James writes in The New Leader, the paper of the ILP, about the glaring imperial cynicism behind Britain’s promise to defend Ethiopia’s independence through the League of Nations:

‘Gallant little Belgium’ was bad enough, but ‘the independence of Ethiopia’ is worse. It is the greatest swindle in all the living history of imperialism. The British government, having mobilised world opinion and many of its own workers behind it, has put a stranglehold on Ethiopia, as tight as anything Italian imperialism ever intended. The proposals of the Committee of Five expose the brazen lie that any independence is being defended. The document is short and concise. The public services of Ethiopia will be divided into four departments: Police and Gendarmerie, Economic Development, Finance, and Other Public Services. As usual with imperialist banditry masquerading under the name of law, the means of repression stand first on the list. Let us fight against not only Italian imperialism, but the other robbers and oppressors, French and British imperialism. …  Workers of Britain, peasants and workers of Africa, get closer together for this and for other fights. But keep far from the imperialists and their Leagues and covenants and sanctions. Do not play the fly to their spider. Now, as always, let us stand for independent organisation and independent action. We have to break our own chains. Who is the fool that expects our gaolers to break them?

Refusal of compromise with imperialism means for James, as it will continue for decades to come, workers’ autonomy. But the problem is not just British imperialism. For James, with the pact made by Stalin with the French PM Laval, and its explicit repudiation of the Leninist doctrine that the workers’ enemies were in their own country, the Communist movement had abdicated its anti-imperialist claims. When it argued for the application of sanctions against Italy solely through the mechanisms dictated by the League of Nations, it abdicated the very bases of labour internationalism and anti-colonial solidarity. Whence the need, in his words, ‘to expose the League of Nations as an instrument of Imperialism, to reject the idea of waging war for “democratic” countries against “Fascist” countries’. As Makalani observes, James’s ‘critique of Stalinism and the Third International hinged on Moscow’s failure to recognize the potential for proletarian revolution that Abyssinia represented’.

As James wrote in World Revolution: ‘The Soviet workers could have put an instant embargo on the oil that Russia sent steadily to Italy … The mass feeling … aroused all over the world … could have checked Mussolini and weakened him at home … Socialism in a single country had reached the stage where the leader of the international proletariat was as nervous of the action of the world proletariat as any Fascist dictator.’ In a sense, James is hearkening back to the ‘Hands Off China!’ campaign that Padmore’s Negro Worker had helped to coordinate. The party that he was himself a member of, the ILP, was riven internally by whether to adopt a policy of no sanctions (since these were seen to accelerate a potentially disastrous inter-imperialist war) and the idea of workers’ sanctions. As Theo Williams recounts, in Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation, in the context of the invasion of Manchuria the ILP had asked trade-unions and workers’ organisations to resist ‘provision of credit and the manufacture and export of arms and war materials of any kind to Japan’. In 1935, the Socialist League, a left faction that had remained in the Labour Party after the ILP disaffiliated in 1932, declared that ‘socialists “must seize the occasion not to demand international sanctions against Italy through the instrumentality of the League of Nations, but to create the will to employ working-class sanctions”.’ At the same time, the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity (also known as the 3 ½ International) declared that ‘the three tasks of the working class were a boycott of Italy, the prevention of the transport of armaments and munitions to Italy, and the prevention of the transport of troops to Africa’. Meanwhile, the London Divisional Council (of which James was a member) of the ILP wrote to its National Administrative Council: ‘War cannot be stopped by pious resolutions. Of what use is it presenting a petition to a prowling tiger?’.

Having moved to the US and joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party, James (generally writing under the pseudonym J.R. Johnson) would continue to link a refusal to identify an imperialist lesser evil with the strategy of workers’ sanctions. Challenging the efforts by the US government to rally African Americans for a coming European war, he would write: ‘‘If the fascists win, they will take the colonies back. If the “democracies” win, they will keep them. But whether “democracies” win, or fascists win, the Africans remain slaves in their own country.’ Writing in 1939 in the context of the official mobilisation in defense of Finland attacked by the Soviets in the ‘winter war’ (and contrasting it with the response to the assault on Ethiopia in 1935), James, in his column ‘The Negro Question’ for the SWP’s paper Socialist Appeal, recalls the events of four years before, framing them in terms of ‘working class action on behalf of Ethiopia’ thwarted and diverted by Communist and Labour Parties committed to the mediation of the League of Nations and collusion with imperialism. As he writes:

All the capitalists and the labor fakers were babbling about League of Nations – in other words, looking to the League of Bandits to arrest another bandit for doing what all the bandits wanted to do themselves. But the rank and file workers, and the leaders nearest to them, were saying that the seamen, who were carrying oil to Italy should, supported by the International Federation of Trade Unions, stop carrying that oil. If the workers stopped carrying it, both Mussolini and his brother bandits would be in serious difficulty, for these gentlemen fear nothing so much as the independent action of the working class. Eugene Jagot, official of the War Resisters International, a small political organization, went to the Brussels meeting of the International Federation of Trade Unions, to urge the trade union bureaucrats to sanction this international workers’ boycott.

He then recounts how this effort was blocked by the Soviets’ repudiation of independent internationalist labour action (i.e. workers’ sanctions). James then compares this with how efforts – which elicited mass enthusiasm – to enlist international brigades to fight against Mussolini’s troops in Ethiopia, ‘was rejected by the Ethiopian Government in order not to offend the imperialists, those same imperialists who were plotting its downfall’, namely Britain. Returning to this question in 1941, in Labor Action, the paper of the Workers’ Party, James would foreground what is once again a key question for labour internationalism and anti-imperialism, namely ‘fossil capital’ and the circuits of fuel and energy. As he recalls,

[t]he League was applying sanctions. But Britain was sabotaging the important sanction – the oil sanction – and Stalin, enemy of the workers, was selling oil to Italy. As long as Mussolini could get oil nothing could stop him. […] The British workers did not want Mussolini to conquer Ethiopia. But instead of taking action themselves by railway strikes, seamen’s strikes to prevent the shipping of oil to Italy, and by exposing all who were boosting the League, they made the fatal mistake of thinking that the capitalists in the League would do something for Ethiopia against Mussolini.

It was on this basis that James steadfastly opposed the enlisting of workers, and Black workers in particular, in wars whose function was to reproduce one imperialist formation or another.

Our moment rhymes disturbingly with past conjunctures of inter-imperialist rivalry and war, as well as of tendencies towards colonial and racial fascism; it also differs in profound and consequential ways, not least in the vast retreat of socialist, communist and workers’ movements from the arena of international conflict. But the question of how labour internationalism could work to challenge an imperialism that carries fascism in its genetic code remains on the agenda. One critical link between the 1930s moment of Pan-African Marxism, black internationalism and workers’ sanctions and the present is offered by the labour mobilisation against apartheid. In the late 1970s, for instance, Polaroid’s black workers – organised through the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement – mobilised against their company’s providing the apartheid regime with the film used to produce the passbooks which surveilled and discriminated against black South African. Meanwhile the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), formed in 1972 to challenge the indifference to the struggles of Black workers of the AFL-CIO, in 1974 became the first US labor organisation to call for a boycott of South Africa.

As the historian Peter Cole has recounted, one of the strongest echoes of the anti-racist and anti-fascist politics of labour internationalism in the context of the struggle against apartheid was spearheaded by maritime workers, in this case longshoremen in the Bay Area in 1984. Workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), in the wake of a film-showing of the anti-apartheid film Last Grave at Dimbaza organised by the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee, passed a motion not to unload South African cargo from ships. The union had a history of anti-fascist internationalism going back to the 1930s, when they refused to load supplies to both Japan and Italy, in the context of the invasions of Manchuria and Ethiopia. As Cole recounts,

[o]n November 24, 1984, the Dutch cargo ship Nedlloyd Kimberley docked at San Francisco’s Pier 80 loaded with goods from South Africa and other countries. Rather than do their job, the dockworkers — proud members of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) — refused to touch the South African auto parts, steel, and wine after they unloaded the rest of the ship’s cargo. For the next ten days, the union dispatched members to this pier who continued refusing to unload the South African products, essentially striking against apartheid. Each day, hundreds of other workers and community members provided support for these workers. Among those who spoke that week [was] legendary activist and longtime Bay Area resident Angela Davis.

It was in the wake of what proved to be the largest labor action against apartheid in the US that UC Berkeley students initiated their eventually successful movement for university divestment from South Africa. As Cole also recalls, ‘the ILWU officially condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Leo Robinson — Local 10’s leader of ILWU anti-apartheid activism — was among the most outspoken. The convention proceedings declared Israel guilty of “state-sponsored terrorism” and described Gaza as “the Soweto of the State of Israel.”’

We can also recall the forms of labour solidarity against the Chilean dictatorship. In the United Kingdom, ‘Engineering workers in Newcastle, Rosyth, Glasgow, and elsewhere … refused work on Chilean warships, while dockworkers in Liverpool, Newhaven, and Hull variously boycotted handling goods from or for Chile. The decision of six hundred unemployed Liverpool seamen to forgo work aboard a freighter bound for Chile, in order to uphold their national union’s policy, was celebrated throughout the solidarity movement.’ As Taj Ali has discussed in Tribune,

[i]n May 2021, an Italian port workers’ union refused to load an arms shipment destined for Israel. The workers, members of L’Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) in the city of Livorno, said they would not load the shipment after discovering it was destined for the Israeli port of Ashdod. ‘The port of Livorno will not be an accomplice in the massacre of the Palestinian people,’ they said in a statement. Later that week, South African dockworkers refused to offload an Israeli ship docked at the Durban harbour. The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) said the decision came after calls by the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) to refuse to unload Israeli ships and goods from seas and airports.

Recently, the Palestinian Postal Service Workers’ Union put out a statement of support for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) on strike. In 2008, CUPW passed the first motion by a Canadian national union in support of BDS, after having been the first Canadian union to pass a boycott resolution against South African apartheid. A section of the Palestinian postal workers’ statement reads:

This statement underscores the centrality of ‘worker-to-worker solidarity’ in an international Palestine solidarity movement that centres labour (in production, in logistics and circulation, in health and social reproduction), an argument which Rafeef Ziadah, Palestinian scholar and activist with Workers in Palestine, made a decade ago and has recently revisited. Writing in 2013, Ziadah also stressed the centrality of maritime labour to the struggle against Israeli apartheid:

One of the most inspiring trade union direct actions in the BDS campaign thus far has come from dockworkers’ unions. In the wake of the Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla in the summer of 2010 and after an appeal was issued by the Palestinian unions, the Swedish Dockworkers Union blocked more than 500 containers weighing approximately 500 tons during a week-long blockade of exports to Israel. Dockworkers in Oakland, California respected a labour and community picket by refusing to unload an Israeli cargo ship for 24 hours. These actions followed those of the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union which pioneered the boycott against Israeli maritime trade in February 2009, by refusing to offload a ship in Durban in protest of Israel’s war of aggression on the Gaza Strip.

While ‘workers’ sanctions’ against Israel’s genocidal actions are far from having attained a commensurate scale, scope and speed, they have spread in many different forms and plural geographies, and they can still draw some inspiration from the theoretical and activist traditions of anti-fascist and anti-colonial labour internationalism that I have sketched out here.

Featured image: Protesters wave Palestinian flags and chant on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House during a demonstration against the genocide in Gaza on June 8, 2024.  Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images. Courtesy of Truthout.

Alberto Toscano