The Limits of Solidarity in US History

I begin with a question: How do we define "solidarity" politically and historically? In his book with that word prominently in its title, Steve Striffler rightly recognizes that the term is, at times, difficult to pin down. Its "defining feature," at least in the case of US activists and Latin Americans, "has been its ideological differentiation, lack of institutional continuity, and inconsistent presence" (5). He acknowledges the difficulty of defining it in any specific moment, for it is a "contested and somewhat vague concept which continues to mean different things to different people who are often advancing quite distinct goals and visions" (16). Context is everything: Solidarity "can be a claim, aspiration, argument, political vision . . . or all of the above and more" (16). Striffler is relatively ecumenical in his book, which includes a large cast of characters, many of whom share little in common with one another, whose thought and action qualify them as being in solidarity with Latin Americans. In some cases, they embraced support for "anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggles" (18); in other instances, they promoted "more racially rooted claims . . . against a global system of exploitation" (18). In his chronologically sweeping book, he offers a genuinely useful catalogue of the myriad individuals, organizations, parties, sects, and movements that challenged US occupations, interventions, and domination of the Caribbean and Central and South America.

How did the impulse toward solidarity, capaciously defined, manifest itself over the course of the two centuries or so that Striffler covers in his book? Striffler finds anti-imperialism directed largely against European powers to be the "driving force" (21) within US-based internationalism vis-à-vis Latin America from the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. The Haitian Revolution fired the imagination of many, particularly slaves and free men and women of color in the United States; it "generated an international solidarity which recognized that global processes of colonialism and slavery had profoundly shaped the world" (22). Decades later, some Americans—particularly members of the Industrial Workers of the World and other radicals—opposed the US war against Mexico and sided with revolutionaries on the other side of the border. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) spearheaded liberal opposition to the US occupation in Haiti and Nicaragua in the 1920s, while those in the communist orbit "built alliances to both oppose occupation and (at times) act in solidarity with people from the region" (48). New Leftists, thrilled by the Cuban Revolution, protested US policies, joined Venceremos Brigades, and traveled to the island to work in sugar fields in a "model" of solidarity with Latin America (88). And then there is the rise of human rights work, the 1980s solidarity movement with Nicaragua and El Salvador, fair trade and anti–free trade activism, and more, all of which Striffler discusses in these pages.

Does the notion of solidarity do justice equally to all of these movements? I think not. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century examples in Striffler's book come with relatively few details about what his protagonists actually believed or did, and, when those details appear, their beliefs and actions might better be described as "solidarity lite" (if they are solidarity at all) or, more simply, anti-interventionism. That characterization applies to the efforts of the heterogeneous anti-imperialists of the Spanish-American War and the NAACP's campaigns against US involvement in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua as it does to the approach of a portion of the Central America movement in the United States in the 1980s.

The solidarity that Striffler approves of most is not the anti-interventionism just described but the celebratory identification with and material and ideological support for revolutionaries in Latin America by radicals in the United States. Starting in the early twentieth century with the Wobblies and then various communist groups, left-wing organizations advanced a genuine, sharper-edged anti-imperialism, not just anti-interventionism, and its proponents laced it with a dose of an evolving anticapitalism. They moved toward an "understanding of internationalism rooted in working-class revolution—whereby they started to see themselves as part of a worldwide...