[News] It is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/on-the-fetishization-of-international-law>
On the fetishization of international law
Carlos L. Garrido
December 6, 2025
------------------------------

Carlos Garrido explains how appeals to international law in the face of US
empire and Zionist crimes function as a political fetish, powerless against
a global system built to violate it, and argues that liberation cannot rely
on institutions structurally designed to uphold imperial domination.

   - [image: International law will not save us. Treating international law
   fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of
   the system and its judicature. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul
   Chamas)]
   <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2025/12/6/4cfc99c3-9cc2-46a6-af15-15bd18bb7f94.png?width=1000>
   International law will not save us. Treating international law
   fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of
   the system and its judicature. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul
   Chamas)

A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting a
post cheering on the US’s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that “you
are violating international law… you are on notice.”

While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it is much
more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions behind
such a statement.

It is clear to anyone capable of seeing two fingers in front of them that
the bellicosity the criminal US regime is demonstrating with Venezuela has
nothing to do with narco-trafficking, and everything to do with Venezuela
having the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Few people could be
genuinely stupid enough to actually believe the formal reasons given for US
foreign policy initiatives.

Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies carried
out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to defend
‘American values’ are, of course, escapades to defend and expand the
dominance of American finance capital.

My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point
here.

What is, instead, much more ambivalent is how many of those critical of the
US imperial regime come to relate to and treat international law.

In the last two years, the world has witnessed, chronicled on all of our
phones, the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. There could not be a
greater surplus of images from Gaza which ought to chill the spines of
anyone with an ounce of humanity.

In this time, ‘international law’ and its various institutions have
condemned these actions, to greater or lesser degrees. From the South
African-led International Court of Justice genocide case, to the
International Criminal Court investigation of "Israel" for a slew of
violations, from extermination to starvation and collective punishment, to
UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council investigations and
condemnations, there were hardly any stones of international law left
unturned.

But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was it
‘international law’ that did it? Considering the slew of Zionist violations
of the ceasefire, I think it is not irrational to say that the answer to
both is ‘No’.

And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous 1979
speech in front of the United Nations: “What is the purpose of the United
Nations?” Or, even further, what is the purpose of international law?

What good is international law and the institutions that claim to uphold it
when one country and its lackeys can regularly violate it with impunity?
When has the United States, "Israel", or — if I may be bold — the whole of
the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected international law?

Is not the very system this 14% of the world, which foolishly considers
itself to be the world as such, one premised on the violation of any sense
of sovereignty? On the violation of any sense of ‘basic rights’ other than
those of the capital-owning class which personify the system? Are the
rights and freedoms here defended not precisely of the kind which have as a
constitutive component the absence of any real rights, freedoms, or
sovereignty for the bulk of humanity?

And so, let’s return to the prominent global Marxist scholar, which I would
like to intentionally retain unnamed since my goal is not to mock them as
an individual, but to ask some critical questions about a framework of
thought he and so many critics of US imperialism share. My questions are
the following: what is at stake in continuously invoking an ‘international
law’ broken at will by the ‘usual suspects,’ to borrow an expression from
*Casablanca*? Do you not feel the almost cartoonish naïveté of such
invocation in the face of its continued irrelevance in shaping world
affairs?

Is international law here not treated precisely as a fetish object? That
is, as a reified entity that is ascribed mystical powers onto it, all the
while ignoring the real global relations which shape its function? What
weight, in the real world, does ‘international law’ have over the US
empire’s constant violation of it?

It isn’t simply the case that international law isn’t working. That is too
simplistic an understanding of the gap between the formally enumerated law
and reality. We must, instead, see this distance, this gap, as constitutive
of reality itself. International law under conditions of US hegemonism and
super-imperialism is the global judicature that formalizes this system at
the level of law, functioning as an integral mechanism of its reproduction.
This is, frankly, emblematic of the Marxist understanding of how judicature
is related to political economy. Bourgeois international law will always
have a ‘gap’ between the enunciated ideals it formally upholds and the
actual workings of an international order still dominated by
capitalist-imperialism. This gap is not a mistake that can be fixed through
reforms, it is constitutive of the system itself. It is a symptom, to put
it in Lacanian terms, that cannot be removed without at the same time
removing the system for which it is a symptom.

As within the nation, the struggle for rights, and the appeal to existing
legal frameworks to defend their exercise, is an integral component of the
class struggle. However, for Marxists, there should be no naïveté and
infantilism involved in our analysis of the ultimate nature of these
institutions, of what interests they serve to reproduce *in the last
instance*. Central to the importance of waging the fight at this level is
showing the mass of people its fundamental impotence in providing true,
concrete freedom and sovereignty for the working and oppressed peoples of
the world.

This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US, listing
the slew of violations they’re actively committing to international law,
and stating that ‘you are on notice.’ On notice, from whom? Who will hold
the US accountable? This fetish-object of ‘international law?’ Will an army
of the United Nations halt the US’s war efforts on the coast of Venezuela?
Will international law be used to unite countries against this belligerent
actor, pressuring it with global economic ostracization? If international
law has failed to do any of this since its emergence, what good is it to
make calls upon it today?

As a state, I can understand having to keep up the pretense of legal
formalism, but for individual scholars, journalists, and critical thinkers,
is this finger-wagging appeal to the hollow authority of a fetish-object
really the correct way to proceed? Is it not as if one is appealing to the
authority of a paper that the US has cleaned itself with, and left with all
its filth on the floor?

International law will not save us. Treating international law
fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of
the system and its judicature.

Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up
with a pen to a gunfight.
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