Notes on Campist Internationalism

This was a talk delivered at a panel on The Question of Internationalism: Between Marxism and Anarchism at the Historical Materialism Conference in London that took place on 9 November 2025. You can watch the talk here.

In April 2025, while Israel’s genocide in Palestine was unfolding in full force, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra coauthored a conjunctural analysis of our global predicament from an internationalist perspective. Their essay, “The Coming Post-Hegemonic World,” as well as “A Global War Regime” from May 2024 are timely contributions to debates on anti-imperialism, internationalism and liberation today. In these interventions, Hardt and Mezzadra contest statist, binary and geopolitical versions of internationalism within the global left that tend towards “campism.” They definecampism as “an ideological approach that reduces the political terrain to two opposed camps and often ends up asserting that the enemy of our enemy must be our friend.”

If, within the global left, “campist” versions of internationalism tend to view as the primary actors of anti-imperialism and liberation states like Iran, Russia, and China, Hardt and Mezzadra make the case instead for a new internationalism that “must emerge from below, as local and regional liberation projects find means to struggle alongside one another.” They insist “we should not expect leadership for liberation to arise from the Chinese state or even clusters of states representing the ‘Global South,’ such as the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” Rather, they contend, “resistance to the current forms of global rule and an effective rebellion must be rooted in social movements and struggles capable of envisioning a life beyond the rule of capital.” As a prescription for effective rebellion and resistance, this is a tall order on several counts. After all, which social movements today exercise the capacity to envision “a life beyond the rule of capital”? How should the global left relate to social struggles when they fall short of such a measure? If they have proved capable of delegitimizing Israel’s genocide in Palestine, how can social movements and struggles manage to stop the genocide without the support of states or armed forces?

Hardt and Mezzadra also emphasize that “internationalism is not cosmopolitanism, which is to say it requires material, specific and local grounding rather than abstract claims to universalism.” Nonetheless, what they advocate is a “a non-national form of internationalism” that mobilizes “against any form of nationalism.” And herein reside further difficulties. Arguably, the call to mobilize against any form of nationalism—whatever the nature of a given political context or the contingent possibilities a given nationalist mobilization may or may not entail—this call itself is an “abstract claim to universalism,” especially if it admits no exceptions. For one, how should the global left relate to anticolonialnationalisms, as advanced, for instance, with respect to Palestine? While the question of anticolonial nationalism is a long-standing if also vexing one for both Marxist and anarchist traditions, the rich histories of debate that attend this question appear strikingly impoverished today.

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Consider as one example a widely-read article from September 2024, “Palestine and the Ends of Theory,” where Marxist academic Max Ajl advances “campist” arguments when reprimanding numerous anti-Zionist activists and theorists of the left for their “discomfort with the national question” (613). Appearing to affirm in principle, if not also a priori, the political and military strategies of the national liberation struggle in Palestine as led by Hamas, Ajl denounces a multitude of activists and theorists, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, for their alleged “erasure or condemnation of the national movement [in Palestine], its chosen strategies, and its strategic partners,” foremost among them, Iran (613). Ajl accuses this multitude—including Hardt and Mezzadra and myself—of a damning list of failures ranging from Islamophobia to the rejection and mischaracterization of the Palestinian national liberation struggle as advanced by Hamas (613).

Any serious analysis involving Palestine today, Ajl summons, must engage with concrete military strategy, particularly with the logic of Hamas resistance operations in Gaza and do so within the geopolitics of the region (622). Yet, even within Marxist thought, he protests, “where the armed operations [of Hamas] are defended, this often occurs in moral form rather than embedded in their geopolitics” (619-620). Hardt and Mezzadra exemplify this tendency for Ajl. He finds that they “incoherently refer to the defense of the sovereignty of Iran, the major geopolitical and material supporter of the Palestinian armed groups, as ‘campism’” (620). This is puzzling. What Hardt and Mezzadra do assert is that “campism’s binary geopolitical logic ultimately leads to identification with oppressive forces that undermine liberation.” Rather than supporting Iran or its allies, they write, “an internationalist project should instead link Palestine solidarity struggles to those such as the ‘woman, life, freedom’ movements which challenged the Islamic Republic.”

If this is the case, how could an internationalist politics of liberation strengthen effective resistance both to Israel’s genocide in Palestine and to Israeli/American aggression against Iran? Hardt and Mezzadra insist such a politics must transnationally connect anti-systemic struggles from below instead of directing its energies to “supporting” this or that state. In response, Ajl claims that Hardt and Mezzadra’s rhetoric lubricates regime change in Iran and categorizes their position within “the Western ideological ‘camp.’” “After all,” he asserts with respect to Hardt and Mezzadra, in a situation of open warfare, “it is logical … that one would join one of the two warring camps” (620). But is this quite the case—are there only two camps, two positions available to left internationalists at times of war? Must “the defense of the sovereignty of Iran”— or of China or Russia —entail what David Camfield criticises as campism’s “unwillingness to accept strong evidence about objectionable actions by ‘the enemy of my enemy’”[1]?  

Campism’s geopolitical anti-imperialism is both predicated on and symptomatic of the either/or logics that characterize our political predicament in the global left. I have criticised elsewhere the either/or logic of the support/condemnation binary with respect to Hamas. The argument holds in principle for Iran as multiple positions remain available to left internationalists beyond what the support/condemnation binary allows. Iranian feminists like Sima Shakshari and their anti-imperialist allies have developed a sophisticated feminist internationalism that openly opposes repressive policies and economic inequalities within the Iranian state while also rejecting external regime change, war, and sanctions.[2] The difficult question is: how can the global left approach “the enemies of our enemies” (such as the states of Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela) as well as anticolonial nationalist struggles critically, without undermining the effectiveness of the latter?

In a “campist” reading, the sort of left internationalism that seeks to move beyond binary and statist logics by linking, coarticulating, and learning from liberatory social struggles across national borders exhibits ignorance at best of the political and military realities of geopolitics. In the context of Palestine, Ajl names this kind of left internationalism that I have written about as “anarchist,” and treats it as “a masked way of expressing discomfort with the political texture of the current leadership of the Palestinian resistance movement, or indeed of leadership, period” (628). Even if that were the case, a question would nevertheless remain. In the global movement for Palestinian liberation, why should there be next to no room for expressing “discomfort” with Hamas or the Iranian state? In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, in both Marxist and anarchist traditions, such expressions of “discomfort” and disagreements over the role and significance of anticolonial nationalism and its leadership, and how best to forge strategic allyships and international solidarity were commonplace debates conducted with valour and rigour. Today, those debates are foreclosed by arguments that label those who attempt to initiate them as liberals, traitors, or members of “the Western ideological camp” who lubricate imperialist arguments for genocide, war, and regime change. Is the allegedly great risk of buttressing imperialist arguments worth the price of stigmatizing debate among comrades?

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Clearly, left internationalists should be careful about when and how to put forth our disagreements and criticisms. Nevertheless, I insist, recognizing the political role and geopolitical significance of a particular organization or state from an anti-imperialist perspective “does not require withholding critique of its tactics, strategy, and ideology. On the contrary, solidarity demands the articulation of such critiques [to] enable the political transformation and strengthening of our movements through mutual engagement with our political differences.” Too often, in “campist” versions of anti-imperialism and liberation, however, these political differences are collapsed into geopolitical and military analyses.

What if, instead of acting as though “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend,” left internationalists were to say, in Talal Asad’s formulation, “the enemy of my enemy may become my provisional ally,” especially when a people are undergoing genocide?[3] Today, the difficult question of internationalism cannot be resolved by making totalizing moral or political judgments about every state or only certain ones, say Iran, China, or Russia. At the same time, alliances forged in the context of our genocidal predicament need not lead to identification with or the affirmation of unchanging bonds that admit no criticism. If, as I have argued, internationalism does not require withholding critique of the tactics, strategy, and ideology of national liberation struggles and states acting as their allies, then the question becomes how and when, with what assurance and in what tone—and finally, to what purpose—that critique should be made. Fortunately, in a political context where such critique is by and large stigmatized among comrades, there remain a multitude of theorists and activists—among them Marxists and anarchists—who refuse the willed impoverishment of political debate in the name of binary geopolitical logics of the “campist” kind.

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