Iranian comrades demand the closure of the Iranian embassy in London. Belarusian friends demand their country is kicked out of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a forum of governments and of employers’ and workers’ organisations from 187 countries.
Ukrainians demand more Western sanctions on Russia. Pro-Palestinian protesters demand we boycott Starbucks, cut links with Israeli businesses and end cultural and academic ties with Israelis.
Stop this, end that, break connections... Often unclear is exactly what these activists positively want and how that is connected to their boycott-type calls.
Iranian left-oppositionists want women’s freedom, workers’ rights and socialism. And the closure of the Embassy will help to bring those things about? How? No doubt the regime would be inconvenienced, as would many Iranian citizens who might need their Embassy’s services.
There is no connection between not buying latte in London and ending the war in Gaza. Refusing to speak to an Israeli physicist or anthropologist, or to read a book by an Israeli author (and without even asking their views on the war), is counter-productive, if only because it alienates many reasonable Israelis.
The biggest state-orchestrated sanctions package in history has been imposed on Russia to stop its war against Ukraine. Those sanctions have completely failed; Russia’s brutal onslaught continues.
We agree that weapons should not be sold to Putin’s Russia. Russia has its own large arms industry, so not selling doesn’t stop its war, but we agree. But refusing to sell burgers or clothes to Russia does not help Ukraine. Russia has tilted towards China and buys more goods from there. Or Russian people do without.
According to Dutch academic Nicolas Mulder, author of The Economic Weapon, sanctions have become the US government’s standard foreign-policy tactic since World War Two and especially since the 1990s, as easier and less risky than war. The tactic dates back over one hundred years, to World War One. Yet over all that time, sanctions have only rarely had the intended impact, by causing a regime to alter key policies or to stop a war.
Mulder stresses that it is important to distinguish between the effects of sanctions (sanctions have had an impact on Russia, which now has raging labour shortages, wage inflation, and 21% interest rates and sells oil at discounts to China and India) and the efficacy of sanctions (Russia continues its war on Ukraine, unrestrained). The pro-Ukraine-left’s focus on sanctions against Russia is particularly baffling given the existence of a clear demand which certainly would work if implemented: Western states should give Ukraine the financial support and weapons it needs to defeat Russia. The West clearly and easily has the capacity to do this, but chooses not to for its own political reasons.
Sanctions have been particularly ineffective against large states with sizeable economies. Russia has many of the natural resources it needs within its own borders. It has been able to reconfigure its oil and gas trade.
Sanctions are easy to comprehend and seem to offer a quick, painless result: this is, apparently, a “violence free” solution. And sanctions can be demanded easily, even casually, from an existing government, without the difficult business of having to create links of working-class solidarity.
Standard
Sanctions have become a standard, immediate, knee-jerk reaction of the liberal left as well as the US government. Unfortunately sanctions, if imposed, often have side effects which are unintended by those that support them.
US sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq in the 1990s had a serious impact on ordinary Iraqis and the country’s infrastructure. Transparency International (TI) suggests that sanctions led to malnutrition and shortages of medicines and basic foodstuffs. TI suggests two million people died as a direct result. But the sanctions brought no change in Iraq’s regime or its policies.
The current sanctions regime against Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons has not caused the regime to stop trying to build nuclear bombs (which it now says it can produce quickly if it faces an “existential threat”) nor have they altered Iran’s malevolent interventions across the Middle East. Last week Iran declared it would increase its defence spending by 200% in the next year.
The Iranian state has organised an extraordinary petrol-smuggling operation to circumvent sanctions. Perhaps 50mn litres of petrol is sneaked out of Iran every day. Smugglers use 2,000 litre tanks on vast convoys of pickup trucks; it is an enormous state-run, IRGC-operation. Vast amounts of crude oil are exported to China, despite the sanctions.
However, millions of working-class Iranians have been plunged deep into poverty by the sanctions.
On the left the myth about the effectiveness of sanctions is bolstered by a story, originating with the Communist Party, that sanctions against South Africa brought down Apartheid. In fact, Apartheid fell because of a mass anti-Apartheid movement inside the country at the centre of which was a radical, independent, non-racial trade union movement.
Like many others in the 1980s I refused to eat South African oranges. I moved my bank account to a bank that said it didn’t invest in South Africa. Nothing wrong with that. It made me feel a little more virtuous and pleased with myself. But my actions had no impact on ending Apartheid. None at all.
The connection between aims, demands and workers’ self-activity is pretty clear to me at the level of workplace activity. I am a teacher and an National Education Union (NEU) rep, so when my head teacher wanted us to work an hour more after school, one day a week, I told him we would walk out the following week at 4pm. Then we would escalate our action every week after that. He offered an extra week’s holiday, and we settled the dispute.
But at the level of international political struggle those direct connections seem to have been lost. It is a big job to fight an authoritarian regime. It can be outfacing. Activists say, “We’ve got to do something”. Boycotting and demanding sanctions seem the easiest thing to do. But let’s consider what might be effective. And effective from our working-class, internationalist perspective too.
Often sanctions will have unintended and unconsidered, but harmful, side effects. Sanctions on Russia, for example, have impacted significantly on the world economy. Russia has developed a transactional relationship with Iran, importing drones and, more recently ballistic missiles.
Russia has been pulled towards China and now — alarmingly — has 10,000 North Korean troops helping it to wage war on Ukraine. Political realignments have followed the unpicking of world-market links. Sanctions on Russia have made the world a more dangerous place.
As I stand outside the Apple store in Covent Garden, protesting against Apple’s use of forced Uyghur and non-union labour in Chinese factories to make their phones, well-meaning people ask, “So, we shouldn’t buy their phones?”
We had similar conversations twenty years ago when we campaigned against sweatshop labour through the No Sweat campaign. In that case the issue was clothes and trainers made by Nike, Gap and others in anti-union, ultra-low-pay sweatshop conditions. Indonesian activist Dita Sari pointed out that if Westerners organised an effective boycott of Adidas the first victims would be the factory workers who we were trying to help. They would be laid off and the union organisations in the factories which Dita Sari and her comrades were trying to build would collapse.
Better, we concluded, was to fight for union recognition in the sweatshops in solidarity with workers abroad. Rather than breaking links and raising barriers, we believe that we need more and better links, working-class links.
At my NEU branch an incoherent motion was moved demanding my local council, which “through the Local Government Pension Scheme has investments in companies complicit in genocide”, divest its funds. The Council is asked to end “all investments in companies linked to Israel, directly or indirectly,” as if such a thing is remotely possible.
It turned out that the companies “complicit in genocide” include Airbnb. Really? Airbnb rents holiday homes, it doesn’t kill people. A boycott makes sense, apparently, because any company operating in Israel, or even dealing at some remove with Israeli firms, is “complicit in genocide”. It seems people are now “complicit in genocide” merely for where they live and work, rather than what they do.
The rock band Radiohead has come in for a lot of criticism for playing in Israel. The band replied that they played in the US when Trump was President and no-one complained, so why not Israel with a Likud Prime Minister? To play in a country is not to endorse the government. By stating the obvious, Radiohead also made clear that the left has different standards for Israel than, say, for the USA.
If socialists want peace between Israel and the Palestinians — and we should, and we do — there must be a government in Israel that will make a peace agreement. So, logically, we should help those, like the Israeli leftists and peace activists in Standing Together, who are working to do that. That requires more and better links with Israel, rather than boycotts and ending all links.
For international workers’ solidarity, not bourgeois sanction regimes.
Comments?We welcome replies, corrections and debate pieces. Contact us