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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/on-the-fetishization-of-international-law">english.almayadeen.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">On the fetishization of international law</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Carlos L. Garrido</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">December 6, 2025</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p>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.</p><div><ul id="gmail-content-slick-0"><div aria-hidden="false"><li>
<a href="https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2025/12/6/4cfc99c3-9cc2-46a6-af15-15bd18bb7f94.png?width=1000" tabindex="0"><img src="https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2025/12/6/4cfc99c3-9cc2-46a6-af15-15bd18bb7f94.png?width=1000&preset=w700" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img"></a>
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)
</li></div></ul>
<p>A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting
a post cheering on the US\u2019s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that
\u201cyou are violating international law\u2026 you are on notice.\u201d</p>
<p>While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it
is much more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions
behind such a statement.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies
carried out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to
defend \u2018American values\u2019 are, of course, escapades to defend and expand
the dominance of American finance capital.</p>
<p>My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point here.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In this time, \u2018international law\u2019 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.</p>
<p>But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was
it \u2018international law\u2019 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 \u2018No\u2019.</p>
<p>And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous
1979 speech in front of the United Nations: \u201cWhat is the purpose of the
United Nations?\u201d Or, even further, what is the purpose of international
law?</p>
<p>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 \u2014 if I may be bold \u2014
the whole of the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected
international law?</p>
<p>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 \u2018basic
rights\u2019 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?</p>
<p>And so, let\u2019s 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 \u2018international law\u2019 broken at will by the \u2018usual suspects,\u2019 to borrow
an expression from <em>Casablanca</em>? Do you not feel the almost
cartoonish naïveté of such invocation in the face of its continued
irrelevance in shaping world affairs?</p>
<p>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 \u2018international law\u2019 have
over the US empire\u2019s constant violation of it?</p>
<p>It isn\u2019t simply the case that international law isn\u2019t 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 \u2018gap\u2019
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.</p>
<p>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 <em>in the last instance</em>.
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.</p>
<p>This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US,
listing the slew of violations they\u2019re actively committing to
international law, and stating that \u2018you are on notice.\u2019 On notice, from
whom? Who will hold the US accountable? This fetish-object of
\u2018international law?\u2019 Will an army of the United Nations halt the US\u2019s
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?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>International law will not save us. Treating international law
fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of
the system and its judicature.</p>
<p>Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight.</p></div></div></div>
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