The Coloniality of Solidarity - why the Western Political Left always gets co-opted.

https://blackagendareport.com/index.php/coloniality-solidarity-iran-imperialist-aggression-and-western-lefts-blind-spot

Overcoming the coloniality of solidarity constitutes a formidable challenge, necessitating rigorous self-reflexivity, a deliberate interrogation of material positionality, and a conscious recalibration of ideological dispositions. The binary oppositions between ‘regimes’ and ‘peoples’ in the Global South – once a central analytical framework within comparative political science in the imperialist core – have been uncritically adopted and normalized among certain leftist formations in the Global North. This discursive tendency manifests in prevailing attitudes toward states such as Iran, Nicaragua, Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Syria, and Venezuela, where reductive categorizations persist.

This is the point at which Ajl’s cautionary argument, in relation to Iran, assumes critical significance: ‘By separating “the regime” from “the people”, the US–Israeli propaganda justifies state collapse in the name of the people. You cannot defend a people by adopting the rhetoric used to justify their destruction’ (Ajl Citation2025). This separation, now common in Western Left discourse, fetishizes an abstract ‘people’ while rejecting the actual institutions that make their survival possible. In the Global South, and in Iran in particular, patriotism can be a working-class ideology because the state is the shield against imperialist dismemberment. It is the state that funds hospitals, operates power grids, sustains education systems, and maintains the armed forces capable of defending those functions. To demand solidarity with ‘the people’ while refusing to defend the state is, in effect, to adopt the imperial premise. It mimics imperialist discourses that those institutions are illegitimate and expendable.