We Stand for Peace and Justice Preamble

In solidarity with the people of Gaza, we demand the immediate disclosure of and divestment from any ties to Israeli genocide, apartheid, and occupation. We commit to strengthening the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement.

We demand our governments, public and private institutions, and corporations take all possible measures to force an immediate and permanent ceasefire, provide reparations, and initiate and sustain a massive humanitarian response in Gaza.

In solidarity with students, workers, political prisoners, and activists standing up for justice, we condemn repression and authoritarianism in all its forms.

We Stand for Peace and Justice

We see an organized anti-worker, anti-people of color, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, anti-ecological, imperial, carceral, surveillant, authoritarian reaction proliferating around the world. We reject it.

This dangerous trend often calls itself right-wing populist but is arguably more accurately termed neo-fascist. It preys on fear and manipulates warranted anger. It exploits and misleads with false promises and outright lies. It obscures the true blame for peoples’ suffering and alienation: capitalism, authoritarianism, racism, and sexism. Instead, it scapegoats the already marginalized. It represses and denies.

At the same time, however, we also see courageous responses that have emerged and are proliferating around issue after issue, on campus after campus, and in community after community, workplace after workplace, and country after country. These responses challenge the vicious lies, and the vile policies of fascism. They reject right-wing regression and repression. We support those responses.

But to ward off an international, multi-issue, reactionary assault beyond rejecting what is obviously vile, shouldn’t we also be explicitly internationalist and multi-issue? Shouldn’t we reject a drift into fascism while also seeking positive, forward-looking, participatory progress?

To those ends, and to promote unity and mutual aid, we the undersigned affirm that:

• We stand for the growing activism on behalf of progressive change around the world and support these positive campaigns for a better world, and against all reactionary usurpers of power and their lies, manipulations, and policies.
• We stand for peace, human rights, and international law against the conditions, mentalities, institutions, weapons, and dissemination of weapons that breed and nurture war and injustice, and in particular genocide.
• We stand for healthcare, education, housing, and jobs against war and military spending.
• We stand for internationalism, indigenous rights, and democratic policy against empire, dictatorship, and political and religious fundamentalism.
• We stand for justice against economic, political, and cultural institutions that promote imperialism, economic and power inequities, corporate domination, neoliberal public policies, privatization, wage slavery, racism, gender, and sexual hierarchy, and the devolution of human kindness and wisdom under assault by celebrated authority and enforced passivity.
• We stand for participatory democracy and autonomy against authoritarianism and subjugation.
• We stand for prisoner rights and against prison profiteering.
• We stand for personal privacy against surveillance.
• We stand for freedom against repression and control.
• We stand for national sovereignty against colonial occupation and apartheid.
• We stand for openness and accountability against brutal regimes and against electoral subversion, government and corporate surveillance, and corporate media manipulation.
• We stand for equity against exploitation by corporations of their workers, consumers, and communities and by empires that subordinate countries.
• We stand for solidarity of and with the poor and the marginalized everywhere.
• We stand for diversity against homogeneity and for equity against racism.
• We stand for multicultural, internationalist, and community rights, and against cultural, economic, and social repression of immigrants and other subordinated communities in our own countries and around the world.
• We stand for sexual freedom and gender equality against sexual repression, misogyny, and cis hetero-patriarchy.
• We stand for ecological wisdom against climate catastrophe and the destruction of forests, soil, water, air quality, and the biodiversity upon which all life depends. We stand for the rights of nature and ecological sanity against ecocide.
• We stand for a world whose political, economic, and social institutions foster solidarity, promote equity, maximize participation, celebrate diversity, and encourage full democracy.
• We do not settle for a least common denominator single issue or single focus approach.
• We seek a massive movement of movements with a huge range of concerns, ideas, and aims, united by shared positive aspirations.
• We will enjoy and be strengthened by shared respect and mutual aid while we together reject sectarian hostilities and pointless posturing.
• We stand for and pledge to work for peace and justice.

We Stand was originally published at ZNetwork.org.

Initial signers of the We Stand statement:

Michael Albert                                    Bridget Meehan

Lonnie Atkinson                                Matic Primc

Renata Avila                                       Justin Podur

David Barsamian                                Don Rojas

Peter Bohmer                                     Boaventura de sousa Santos

Patrick Bond                                       Steve Shalom

Fintan Bradshaw                                Alexandria Shaner

Urska Breznik                                     Norman Solomon

Steve Early                                           Cooper Sperling

Bill Fletcher Jr                                      David Swanson

Kathy Kelly                                           Yanis Varoufakis

Arash Kolahi                                        Brett Wilkins

Bob McChesney                                  Greg Wilpert