Eventually, our mass working class movement must be international. Not simply international in the sense that workers around the world are fighting capitalism where they’re at—but international in the sense that workers are coordinating and supporting each others’ efforts across borders to defeat the international capitalist empire. How do we achieve this kind of substantial internationalism?

There are a few basic strategies that I can think of, with varying amounts of power to build international solidarity and international working class power.

1. Intentional, Explicit International Political Coordination

Clearly, some intentional meetings to coordinate across borders could help. But beyond niceities in the social sphere and political advocacy against imperialist wars, sanctions, tariffs, and blockades, we need material goals and projects that exhibit and develop our practices of international solidarity. The following points describe the two main material practices of building international solidarity that I think will ultimately be most effective at doing this.

2. International Solidarity Strikes to Disrupt a Global Production Chain

Much of working class organizing structure is deepened in the experience of struggle. We will become an international working class movement when we coordinate together to more effectively achieve our shared international goals.

One of these goals can be seen in the practice of solidarity strikes. One of the go-to examples of solidarity strikes for me is When McDonalds Came to Denmark. When McDonalds tried to get away with not abiding by a sectoral labor agreement with the hotel and restaurant union, there was no legal recourse. But there was recourse in the power of workers to withhold their labor, which they did en masse:

In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.

In addition to wreaking havoc on McDonalds supply chains, the unions engaged in picketing and leaflet campaigns in front of McDonalds locations, urging consumers to boycott the company.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989.

This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

excerpt from When McDonalds Came to Denmark
by Matt Bruenig

Even within a single nation, these sympathy strikes are incredibly powerful at disrupting supply chains and winning worker demands. But supply chains are international, with global capital shifting quickly to find a source of cheap labor and lower operating costs.

International sympathy strikes would be one of the pinnacles of our international working class power. We would prevent the shipment of goods and raw materials and halt production for necessary things earlier in the supply chain. We would prevent things from being sold, even if they’re already produced.

The power of the international working class, to disrupt these global supply chains, is, of course, conditional on the demands of the working class. It is a powerful weapon, and has the potential to achieve demands beyond mere bargaining agreements between capitalists and workers. That is, it has the potential to change who has effective control of particular sectors of means of production.

Just as we might shut down our participation in supply chains that involve slavery or child labor, these strikes could make entire sectors inviable insofar as they cling to capitalist exploitation. We could use our power to force the adoption of a system of socialized healthcare, and leave capitalist healthcare in the past.

A mass international strike—one that isn’t targeted on a particular sector—might be one of the final acts of the revolution.

It is imperative, therefore, for our politicians to make solidarity / sympathy strikes legal—within and across nations. Strikes are meant to better our conditions as workers—how can you say that the well-being of my fellow worker does not affect me? I don’t even mean this in a merely moralistic sense—the worse that other workers in other sectors get treated, the worse conditions that my employers accurately think they can get away with. What could I do in response to that? Leave to a different sector where they treat me worse? All our working conditions are linked together through the competitive mechanisms of the labor market.

Even without the legality of it, solidarity strikes will still happen—they’re just much harder to organize. Without the option of sympathy strikes, we would see unnecessary hurt as people try to bare worsening conditions—until they can’t take it anymore, and respond with a wildcat, international strike.

3. International Sectoral Strikes

Whereas the previous section about international solidarity strikes was about targeting up and down a particular supply chain (a vertically integrated strike), this section is focused on the breadth of labor that goes on strike (a horizontally integrated strike).

The previous section was inspired, in part by my knowledge of Matt Bruenig’s blog post. The idea of this section comes from looking at analyses of the ongoing (at time of writing) WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

In the last WGA strike, in 2007-2008, studios responded by producing way more content that didn’t require writers: reality television. In the present strikes in the USA, some studios are likely to respond by amping up production of international shows. More shows from South Korea, England, and India, among other things are likely to come out of studios like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple as they drain the strike fund of union workers in the USA.

Clearly, this is a problem for USA writers and actors. The most obvious solution would be for writers and actors in other nations to also go on strike simultaneously. Then the studios of AMPTP would really feel their profits take a hit, because they can’t simply outsource their production.

A horizontally integrated international strike is difficult to pull off—it’s already difficult to gather the solidarity to get a sector to go on strike within a nation, let alone internationally. It has more potential to kick off when a technological development of the forces of production threatens the entire labor market of a sector. In the case of the writers and actors strike, the technological development is in the shift to streaming platforms (which has been an opportunity for studios to hit the reset button on residual negotiations) and significant developments in Artificial Intelligence that threatens to replace much of their labor in a few years. These technological developments will be shared internationally. They affect and threaten all writers and actors, not simply in the USA—and therefore, it’s easier to build international solidarity.

Another detail makes the writers and actors strike have more potential to spread to international labor markets: as a cultural product, these writers and actors are in less competition with each other. Americans probably have a level of desire to see American culture, and UK viewers to watch UK culture, and so on. So although studios can ramp up international production, this is unlikely to carry on indefinitely. This is very unique compared to many other systems of globalized production: the ethnicity of the workers has an effect on the ultimate product.

An easy heuristic is to look at the tendency towards monopoly: is the tendency of the business to increase its vertical integration, or its horizontal integration? Insofar as the sector’s profits benefit from vertical integration versus horizontal integration, that balance will help signal how beneficial a vertically-integrated strike versus a horizontally-oriented strike will be.

4. Socialist Nations With Economic Power in the Global Production Chain

Powerful capitalist nations use blockades, tariffs, boycotts, sanctions, and direct intervention to impose and maintain the capitalist economic system over other countries. They can do so because they have something that cannot easily be replicated in other nations: well-kept trade secrets of the manufacturing processes (how to build a loom, how to produce 7 nm microchips, software source code for highly technical programs), or access to raw resources (lithium, oil).

By using violence to set up these production processes, and then leveraging access to these parts of the production process, deeply capitalist countries make demands of other countries to also create pro-capitalist environments. These states are encouraged to create a nation of workers deprived of control over the means of production, with access to their means of survival and social reproduction held out of reach unless capitalism’s profit-motive demands are met.

We might imagine a future where socialist countries have enough power in crucial supply chains, and are able to carry out international relations in similar ways. Economic power like this is not tied to profit-motive demands—Russia (which is not a socialist nation) leveraged their oil extraction to try to pressure Europe and the USA during their invasion of Ukraine.

Socialist nations could condition their economic participation on requirements around worker rights, unions, and worker-ownership—things which the socialist nations would have already proven to be viable. The proletariat of the targeted nation would likely develop class consciousness as they see how their government is acting against their interests—denying them their freedom as workers, rejecting things that would benefit the nation, simply to maintain their capitalist hierarchy.

But we’ve seen how sanctions tend to backfire—it feels like a collective punishment for something that powerful people do to the normal citizen, and puts economic pressure on the citizens to disrupt their government in a way that is reminiscent of how powerful people use economic power to coerce the normal citizens. But this is more of a reaction to sanctions imposed by capitalist nations—it might be different if socialist nations provided a genuinely cool alternative.

The effectiveness of these sanctions also depends on how responsive the government is to its citizens, and it seems like if the government were responsive, and socialist nations provided a good example of what was possible, then that targeted government would have already become socialist, with no need to be targeted by sanctions. At best, then, perhaps sanctions from a socialist nation on capitalist nations would only be beneficial as a final straw that breaks the camel’s back to motivate a viable socialist revolution in the capitalist country—and should be strategically timed as such.

On the other hand, BDS worked as a strategy against South African apartheid—it is possible for these pro-social sanctions to work. But we should not expect that the strategy is inherently effective; the effectiveness depends on the economic, social, and political conditions in the targeted country.

Capital, in protection of its goals of accumulation, obviously will not want any non-profit-oriented influences to crimp on the profit motive. Capitalist nations will seek economic independence from any countries which are willing to flex their economic influence to achieve non-capitalist international goals. We already see this with the USA diversifying in their energy production and where they buy oil, to become less reliant on Russian oil. The USA has also been moving more of the computer chip supply chain out of Taiwan, in caution of an invasion from mainland China.

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I believe that points 2 and 3, about international strikes, are the best ways to begin creating a materialist’s conception of mass-working class international solidarity. Some bureaucratic changes around international policy are nice, but the revolution must be led by the mass working class. Finding the ways that the international proletariat are already materially connected, and using those connections to weaken capitalism and build practical alternatives—that is the strategy for developing an international mass proletarian movement against capitalism.

We might also build international connections which are aimed at building up the international socialist alternative. But here we must be careful that the working class organizers of capitalist nations don’t get co-opted by already-existing socialist nations who have less knowledge of the conditions for successful revolution in the other particular capitalist countries, and who might put too much emphasis on supporting their existing-socialism such that we are less effective at building working class power everywhere the working class exists. Basically, don’t repeat the mistakes of CPUSA.

In any case, the international proletariat should be “international” in more than the mere conceptual sense. We must build our international struggle in material ways; just as we criticize people who simply speak out at their government, we should not simply try to idealistically spread our analysis of the moral wrongness of imperialism. Our guiding focus must be on building material forms of solidarity, and in this post I have described two styles of international strikes which could do that. We might also imagine fruitful international coordination of socially-controlled production across borders (such as an international system of worker cooperatives which support each other).

What does this look like in practice? It is fine to largely focus on building power in a more geographically / structurally immediate sense, because you would need that to achieve anything with significant international benefits. But we should keep in mind our materialist international analysis, even as we are focused on building worker power in our sectoral, regional, and national economies. There will be opportunities and choices which will affect the long-term strategy of building international solidarity, and we should tip those decisions in the correct way. To give a basic example, trade unions might consider anti-immigration or anti-social exclusionary politics to reduce non-union competition on the labor market, or lean into nationalist rhetoric to argue against outsourcing to more exploitable workers in other countries. In moments like these, we must keep in mind the long-term goal of a strong international working class—building that internationalism is the only way we can achieve the multi-generational goal of world-wide communism, and a truly significant advancement in equality of access to a flourishing life, freedom, democracy, and community for all.