A Luta Continua: Lessons in Global Solidarity Zine Series

A Luta Continua is a zine series by James Kilgore, produced with Community Justice Exchange and visual artists Vic Liu and billy dee.  The series explores the history and complexities of  international solidarity for activists based in the US. 

The first addresses the question: What is international solidarity?

The second  volume explores the story of a flotilla from South Africa to Palestine as a way to interrogate current global solidarity.

The third examines anti-imperialist solidarity in response to the US-led war in southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. 

Background on A Luta Continua Zine Series

For 27 years I was a fugitive from US law enforcement.  Those were decades of fear, loneliness and at times desperation but also moments of great learning, an opportunity to build relationships with family and comrades from around the world. I spent 18 of those years in Zimbabwe and South Africa where I taught in schools and did popular education for socialist trade unions and radical community organizations.  I also became a life partner and a father of two sons. 

International solidarity was a key component of political work in the region. In Zimbabwe the government and working class people provided cover for activists fleeing the horrors of the neighboring apartheid state.  The unions in South Africa adopted the old IWW slogan from the early 1900s, “an injury to one is an injury to all” as part of their logo. They put solidarity in action, marching for the liberation of Palestine, for the liberation of the peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the autocrat Mobutu Sese Sekou, against the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. When I was finally arrested in South Africa in 2002, local people did not treat me as a “terrorist” fugitive but as a good samaritan and comrade.

Fast forward 23 years, and I have been imprisoned and released, and worked to crush the system of mass incarceration on local and national campaigns. The work has gone up and down, with the flow of mass mobilization and popular opinion.  But at some point I realize that the politics of fighting mass imprisonment keeps getting narrower in focus. In most circles of radical prison reform, even the circles of abolition, people talk very little about anything that happens outside the US. We are not aware of mass death by super exploitation in the Congolese cobalt mines that bring us the material for our cellphones and tablets. We don’t worry too much when people in Haiti drown in massive floods and hurricanes.  While we want people to feel our pain, we often don’t recognize the suffering of others. We chant slogans like “nothing about us without us,” but all too often we are only about us, not about our comrades and fellow sufferers in the dungeons and olive orchards of the world where the US is dropping bombs or supplying the drivers of genocidal campaigns and poverty.  Moreover, we do too little to support our own political prisoners here in the US who have spent 30, 40, even years behind bars fighting for a transformed society. 

All this has prompted me to take a step back, to remember what “an injury to one is an injury to all” demands of us. If we are to move forward as a movement of radical or revolutionary change, if we are to really progress down the road of abolition, we need a global perspective, like what has characterized our movements and global movements in the past. The spark of this international solidarity has been lit by the efforts of activists to demand a ceasefire and liberation in Palestine. But it is not enough. We need to push faster forward. We need to not only imagine a world without prisons, wars and super exploitation, but imagine how we build organizations that can make that happen and then set about building those organizations. 

As part of this effort, we have created these zines to remind us of the need for international solidarity, to help us refresh our memory of the history of people in the US and beyond in building campaigns and organizations driven by connecting the dots of freedom fights around the world. The global response to the genocide in Gaza 2023-24 provides powerful evidence of the potential of this spirit of internationalism to rekindle the kind of global consciousness needed to confront the imperialist military and the onslaught of climate catastrophe. Studying past campaigns of international solidarity offers some support in determining our direction.