To: Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice mailing list
April 25, 2023

About the Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee

The Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee was founded in 2006 and active through 2011. It was based in part on the experience of the Seattle Anti-Imperialist Alliance, It united  Seattle supporters of the Communist Voice Organize with other activists who wanted to put forward an anti-imperialist and pro-working class perspective in the anti-war, anti-racist, and other protest movements. One can find various leaflets from the SAIC by searching the CVO websste for SAIC.

From the unity statement of the Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee? (Sept. 17, 2006)

The Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee (SAIC) is a democratic committee of anti-imperialist activists in the Seattle area. It works to build the local anti-war and other progressive movements through raising their level of anti-imperialist consciousness, organization and activity. To date this has involved organizing a feeder march, protest contingents, discussions, postering, and the writing and distribution of leaflets designed to draw more people into political motion. Much of this would have been impossible had we not combined our efforts through SAIC.

But the SAIC still remains at the level of an attempt, an effort, to rally anti-imperialists of Seattle into the kind of force we think they can be. Meanwhile, imperialist wars and oppression continue, with more being planned. Thus we again invite all local anti-imperialists to join with us to deepen and spread the work crying out to be done. Further, we also seek to unite with groups and individuals outside the committee to build marching contingents, demonstrations and other activities while insisting on the right of all partners in such united actions to freely express themselves.

From the unity statement of June 2009

SAIC is composed of people with certain differing analyses of world imperialism and world political forces, and we seek to unite with others who will inevitably have still differing ideas. Thus, we strive to unite activists and groups with various ideas about what the imperialist system should be replaced with, but our organizational basis of unity simply consists of the ideas outlined in this document. When disagreements arise over how to implement the tasks implied by these ideas we struggle to seek truth from facts -- i.e. , to carefully investigate and analyze the issue in question. We seek to have as much consensus as possible through extensive debate and discussion. But when decisions need to be taken, the majority rules.

. SAIC works to arouse and unite the masses of people to struggle through its wide scale leafleting, organization of anti-imperialist feeder marches and contingents, and other independent work. We also seek unity of action against the common enemy with organizations and individuals outside the committee. In the coalitions or other forms used to build these united actions, we insist upon democratic proceedings, including the right of all participants to freely express themselves, to have fair representation on the speakers platform, etc.

On the dissolution of the SAIC, January 2012

As of January 13th, 2012, Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee has unanimously decided to disband. This decision was not the result of any political difference among us on our principles of unity, and we agreed that our last group activity would be to write this statement.

SAIC was organized in August 2005 as a working alliance between non-affiliated activists and Communist Voice Organization supporters determined to build up working class anti-imperialist consciousness and organization in the city, particularly in the anti-war movement. To do this we targeted the imperialist system (monopoly capitalism) as being the cause of Bush's and then Obama's wars abroad, as well as their reactionary domestic policies. We used tactics to win the broad masses away from illusions that the Democratic Party was anti-war and progressive. And while uniting with the various opportunist-led coalitions (e.g., ANSWER, SNOW, and World Can't Wait) whenever possible, we also fought to expose how they refused to do this necessary work, thereby weakening the movement. Additionally, we soon broadened our work to include other fronts of the class struggle.

Through all of our activity of the past six and a half years---feeder marches, contingents, co-sponsoring demonstrations, putting up posters, discussions, passing out some 124,000 copies of our many leaflets, etc.---we think SAIC has indeed won new comrades to anti-imperialism. In fact, along with the recent objective political developments that all progressives are excited about, we mobilized more people than we'd ever before mobilized to the October 7, 2011 anti-war demonstration. But alongside this our actual membership had been declining for several years, due to some combination of objective political conditions and our abilities as organizers. Then, the January 13 resignation of our last non-CVO member (mainly for reasons that take him away from all political activity) meant that we no longer an alliance organized on an anti-imperialist basis. The SAIC project had therefore come to and end.

With high regard to all, and forward with the struggle!

Former members of the Seattle Anti-imperialist Committee <>

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