Search results
This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.
and solidarity as the new revolutionary subject. It was, crucially, also revolutionary thought and praxis from the Global South – Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Guevara and Mao among others – that dislocated left politics from their Communist Party moorings and decentred both Soviet Marxism and Europe in the radical imagination of May ’68 militancy. 22 The trajectories and local translations of anticolonial
cultural production leads us to is therefore not only the problem of choice, but the very question: what is a revolutionary subject? We have come to believe that the working class is no longer the revolutionary subject, who, as a result of the internal contradictions of capitalism, will lead the way to communism and the eventual withering of the state. Today’s world of institutionalised cultural activism is anxious to demonstrate affinity with ‘all of the above’ struggles, and so has a tendency to foresake political ideology and replace it
Leninist-minded, were operaisti (workerists) or else were influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.4 As a result, they tended to identify the revolutionary subject with the Italian male factory worker. This was not mere faith in the revolutionary texts. In Italy, unlike other Western European countries, students occasionally achieved the goal of joining forces with the workers, particularly in the north of the country where large plants, such as FIAT, were located. The year 1969 saw massive strikes in the factories, and the most radical workers often put forward
least from his study of utopia, that socialism was a goal rather than an end state. Socialism was movement, not stasis. Others, seeing the incorporation of the proletariat into the Western system of spoils, and needing to identify an alternative revolutionary actor, looked to the peasantry or to guerrilla war, or, even more hopefully, to students, in their search for the revolutionary subject. The young Marx had imagined the proletariat as the negation of bourgeois society. Now the negation had to be located elsewhere, with the outsiders. As Frantz Fanon understood
his labor power. 15 For the Crusader , the historic role of black labour has placed the black worker as the ideal revolutionary subject to wage battle against both capitalism and a vampiric imperialism which imperils black labour and black life: No race has less of the idle non-producing rich than the Negro race. No race would be more greatly benefited proletariat than the Negro race, which is essentially a race of workers and producers. With no race are the
with their own concerns and ideals, Mao and the Red Guards seemed to provide a blueprint for a revolutionary culture and art in service of the people, while shifting the focus of the anti-imperialist struggle: from the industrialised metropolises to the vast territories of the Third World, and from the white factory workers of the Leninist tradition, to a more elusive revolutionary subject that was often – but not exclusively – identified with the peasant and the colonised. Art and images were paramount in the dissemination and reception of Maoism’s revolutionary
marxistes-léninistes (UJCml) (later Gauche Prolétarienne (GP)), Vive la Révolution, Révolution!, Ligue Communiste, and other far-left groups through the ‘long 1968’ understood the O.S. immigrant worker to be an exemplary revolutionary subject. Making up a multinational workforce without formal citizenship rights (such as right to vote in French national elections – or even until the early 1970s – in trade
normality’ ( 1993 : xxvi), his work of the 1940s and early 1950s shows little interest in dismantling governmental power structures, or in making alliances with other revolutionary subjects. At this point in his career, mainstream society was largely something to resist, not to overthrow. The drawback with this position, as Pascale Gaitet has pointed out, is that when the State exerts its authority, transgression yields to obedience ( 2003 : 138). In Our Lady of the Flowers , for instance, the cross-dressing anti-heroes of the book, lose all too quickly their feminine
illuminating the inextricable interrelationality of individual and public affect, aims at transforming the political subjectivities and intersubjectivities of women and men and in so doing creating revolutionary subjects. Clare Hemmings describes Goldman’s counter-politics as a place of ‘intense feeling and reimagined relationships’ and a ‘space for exemplary joy against the odds’. 103