For many on the revolutionary left, 1917 is an unpleasant apparition, a ghost that haunts us still. Our perspective is different: 1917 lives in our thoughts and actions, our theories and our sensibilities, because it remains a testimony to human agency and the irrepressible potential of revolution. The Bolsheviks, so often castigated as incarcerated in their slavish adherence to the determination of objective conditions, were nothing if not believers in the importance of the subjective factor in the making of history, evident in their own trajectory. The revolution that catapulted the Bolsheviks to power contradicted the prevailing European Marxist orthodoxy which mapped an evolutionary path to revolution based on the logic of capitalist development, and followed on the heels of disastrous dissolution of the Second International as its leaders chose to abandon their anti-war stance to align themselves with their own national bourgeois states.
It is today more important than ever for revolutionary leftists to confront both the possibilities posed by the Revolution of 1917 and the ways in which its outcomes seem to have soured the meaning of socialism in the mouths of those with an appetite for a politics of emancipatory transformation. On the one hand, our times cry out for the need to transcend capitalist oppression, exploitation, and degradation. Those same needs galvanized the pre-First World War revolutionary left in Russia and elsewhere, and structured the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, Revolution’s current capacities and claims, associated with 1917 being overtaken by a Thermidorian Stalinization, have seldom been held in disregard by so many, including a considerable section of the ostensible left.
As Geoff Eley writes: ‘Revolutions no longer receive a good press. The calamity of Stalinism and the ignominious demise of the Soviet Union have been allowed to erase almost entirely the Russian Revolution’s emancipatory effects.’1 Against the sense that revolution might transform the human condition has come resignation, articulated by one militant ‘68er, Régis Debray, whose sad autobiography declared that ‘Revolution now arouses among us, not just in the lineage of its victims but that of its authors and beneficiaries too, the same repulsive images as revolt or jacquerie in eighteenth-century drawing rooms’. The revolutionary project was now written off curtly: ‘Two centuries, millions of corpses, one complete rotation: for nothing.’2
Our view of the ‘long revolution’, needless to say, differs from Debray. We also recognize that the heritage of revolution is highly differentiated: it both precedes and follows 1917, and cannot be characterized by a unitary and homogenous mobilization across time and space, for political differences between and within communism, socialism, anarchism and syndicalism, were not unimportant. Anarchism itself fragmented into disparate tendencies, some embracing revolutionary collectivist ideas, others stressing individual freedom and autonomy, though Emma Goldman perhaps embodied the coalescing of these strands. Marx and Engels railed against utopian socialists, but others combined elements of the scientific and the utopian in both analytic accents and practical orientations.
William Morris captured something of this combination in his defence of revolution in the 1880s. It was Morris’s purpose, whether he addressed audiences large or small, to ‘stir [them] up not to be contented with a little,’ to persuade them that they must either struggle to be free or remain mired in enslavement.3 It was the duty of those ‘who believe in the necessity of social revolution . . . first to express their own discontent’, drawing in others, second ‘to learn from books and from living people’, and third ‘to join any body of men honestly striving to give means of expression to revolutionary discontent and hope’. Lenin and the Bolsheviks separated themselves from such utopian socialist appeals, but the world communist movement spawned by 1917 did not entirely abandon these sensibilities. No advocate of Lenin, E.P. Thompson staked out the ground of widening revolutionary struggle in Out of Apathy (1960):
The point of breakthrough is not one more shuffle along the evolutionary path, which suddenly sinks the scales on the socialist side . . . Certainly, the transition can be defined, in the widest historical sense, as a transfer of class power: the dislodgment of the power from the ‘commanding heights’ and the assertion of the power of socialist democracy. But this point cannot be defined in narrow political (least of all parliamentary) terms; nor can we be certain, in advance, in what context the breakthrough will be made. What it is more important to insist upon is that it is necessary to find out the breaking point, not by theoretical speculation alone, but in practice by unrelenting reforming pressures in many fields, which are designed to reach a revolutionary culmination. And this will entail a confrontation, throughout society, between two systems, two ways of life.4
However divergent the lines between various revolutionary projects, Thompson, like many nineteenth-century socialist figures and twentieth-century dissident communists, embraced revolution as ‘immediacy’; as the necessary project of posing radical, root-and-branch, social transformation as essential to human liberation, indeed survival.
In the pages that follow we address the heritage of 1917 and its broadened understanding of revolution, exploring themes such as women’s liberation, sexuality, reproduction, and the family, as well as campaigns for racial equality, class mobilizations, and the complex representation of resistance and struggle in various artistic and literary genres. While not everything we discuss bears the direct and unmediated imprint of 1917, it is difficult to imagine the range of resistance and the richness of varied developments without appreciating the heritage of revolution. We explore such themes in specific historical periods where the impact of 1917 registered in different ways. Whatever the peculiarities of these local manifestations, however, our outline could well be generalized to other national and regional contexts. As co-authors we actually disagree on important aspects of what might fall under the discussion of 1917’s meanings,5 but in such contention lies the real political scene of the current left; our differences are an acknowledgement of the theoretical and practical divisions that plague socialists serious about the project of replacing capitalism with a realizable social order that can deliver the necessary utopian promise of revolution.
From the time of Flora Tristan, the French socialist and feminist who in 1840 lamented her exile from civil society as a ‘pariah’ because she believed in the emancipation of both women and the working class, to later experimentation within socialist communes and organizing by anarchists, syndicalists, communists and defiant sex radicals, revolution provided a hopeful pathway to sexual and gender equality. After 1917, Russia was initially a model against which all defined themselves. Without experiencing an intense bourgeois or social democratic struggle for suffrage, as happened in many European countries, the Bolsheviks moved swiftly from proclaiming women’s equal citizenship to a social revolution. In no small part because of pressure from feminist revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai, who saw familial and sexual liberation as a sine qua non of social emancipation, and Clara Zetkin’s previous success with semi-autonomous organizations of socialist women, the Bolsheviks set in motion a massive educational campaign to bring women to political consciousness through a Women’s Commission or Zhenotdel.
By 1920, this work was also internationalized when women from nineteen countries met to discuss a lengthy set of ‘Theses on the Communist Women’s Movement’, a blueprint for the emancipation of women within communism. Soviet reforms abolished illegitimacy and provided women with access to divorce, birth control, abortion, equal pay, and land and property rights. There were even legislative changes that advanced sexual freedoms dramatically, such as the decriminalization of sodomy in 1922, a remarkably progressive attitude to homosexuality given the prevailing European repression of same-sex practices. At the core of this revolutionary programme was the understanding that sexual practices had to be freed from the conservatizing clutches of church and state and that fundamental to the liberation of humanity was the alteration of women’s labour: women’s paid work was a means to economic independence and socialized domestic labour – communal kitchens, laundries, and crèches – would challenge women’s oppression within the family.
Extensive studies have examined the rise and demise of women’s Soviet emancipation, including the immense barriers to any transformation of gender roles: the resilience of patriarchal social norms and religious belief, the hard reality of civil war and lack of economic resources, and the prioritization of other political issues over gender equality. By the end of the 1920s, equality, other than encouraging women’s labour force participation, was on the backburner; the Zhenotdel was abolished, and the International Women’s Secretariat came under the rigid control of an increasingly Stalinized Comintern Executive. A singular emphasis on women’s integration into productive labour left Russian women with both a double day and a double sexual standard.
Yet as Eley notes, the Bolshevik reforms initially conveyed a salutary lesson: this was ‘Western feminism’s maximum program to which no government in the West ever came close’ to realization.6 Even if the revolutionary left’s faith in change ultimately exceeded what had been achieved, the Bolshevik Revolution unleashed an unprecedented debate both within the wider left and throughout communist parties themselves. The apparent Soviet commitment to thoroughgoing change, especially the recognition that housework had to be transformed and sexual freedom addressed, was seen as an important feminist ‘breakthrough’.7 The revolution electrified socialist, communist, and even some liberal women who saw it as proof that transformative change was possible: if an underdeveloped country could take such extraordinary steps, why not Western industrialized ones?
Political tourists to the Soviet Union already committed to communism were usually uncritical acolytes of changes to women’s status, but socialist and liberal women also wrote convincingly about the possibilities they glimpsed inside the new Russian society, from socialized childcare to family planning and opportunities for higher education. This positive assessment, even on the part of liberals, galvanized right-wing opponents in the United States, including a contingent of conservative women who took up the political cudgels of antifeminism paired with gendered understandings of class struggle: ‘Miss Bolsheviki has come to town, / With a Russian cap and a German gown, / In women’s clubs she’s sure to be found, / For she’s come to disarm America.’ Assaults on the ostensible ‘nationalization of women’ and stereotypical Soviet-inspired ‘Bureaus of Free Love’ were of a piece with the infamous ‘Spider Web Chart’, first published in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent (1924), that linked liberal women’s groups to a network of Bolshevik-connected clubs, causes and campaigns.8 Right-wing women’s anti-Bolshevik, anti-socialist and anti-pacifist mobilizations had some success stalling and rolling back moderate feminist social reforms.
The equality ledger in the USSR was increasingly contested as Stalinism was consolidated, but the revolution nonetheless inspired imitations, departures and elaborations. Interpretation of women’s emancipation varied according to different national contexts, histories, cultures, and the strength of particular national communist parties, as well as their relationship to rivals on the social democratic left. In Mexico, the Communist Party did not even attempt to establish a women’s department until 1931 due to other organizing priorities and Mexican communists’ complex tussle for ‘revolutionary authenticity’ with the nationalistic Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI] and its ‘revolutionary’ state.9
In the smaller Canadian and American parties, directives from the International Women’s Secretariat were seen as welcome advice from seasoned revolutionaries, though instructions were refracted through local conditions and needs, and sometimes stymied by leadership apathy. Nonetheless, for women recruited from previous suffrage and socialist activism, international revolutionary direction provided hope for those who longed for a new politics that promised to transcend a past littered with the dead ends of bourgeois or social democratic feminisms, constrained as they were by discourses of individual liberal rights or a parliamentary preoccupation with protecting the working-class family through legislative enactments.
Soviet inspiration, advice, and prodding helped to bring into being a new semi-autonomous Canadian organization of left-wing women, the Women’s Labor Leagues; an agitational women’s paper, The Woman Worker, that addressed issues of social/sexual as well as material subordination; and perhaps most importantly, advocacy for the legalization of abortion and birth control, issues largely side-stepped by the earlier Canadian socialist left. Birth control issues were similarly brought to the fore in the UK by birth-control advocate and communist Stella Browne, who was ultimately disappointed to discover that the British Communist Party did not welcome a revolution in familial and sexual roles as promoted by Alexandra Kollantai.
Many American feminist historians have been highly critical of the revolution’s impact on the women’s equality debate within the Communist Party USA, claiming that issues of emancipation and women’s special oppression suffered at the hands of an apathetic Party leadership given to sexist denigrations and masculinist understandings of politics. Others, however, concede that the early Bolshevik experiment ‘empowered’ new female converts to revolutionary communism. Housewives mobilized around cost-of-living issues, women contributed to campaigns of solidarity such as Friends of Soviet Russia, and women workers organized in the needle and garment trades. Moreover, in the 1920s the majority of female communists in the US were immigrants whose first language was not necessarily English; their perspectives and practices have been obscured due to historians’ lack of facility with language-based sources.
Internationalism, later corralled and corrupted by the Comintern, offered at first a critical sense of possibility for dialogue, not only through official channels like the International Women’s Secretariat, but via a host of other institutions and organs. The Ukrainian paper for communist women, Robitnystia (Working Woman), published in Winnipeg, Canada after a similar paper closed down in Cleveland, Ohio, circulated through the Ukrainian communist diaspora in the Americas, connecting Russia’s revolution to North American women’s emancipation. Edited by a communist émigré playwright from the Ukraine, Myroslav Irchan (Andriy Babiuk), it was intended for a working-class female constituency often denigrated and labelled illiterate and backward. It provided working-class women with a voice in the emerging revolutionary milieu, generating an entirely new critical discussion of partriarchy and male chauvinism, dubbed ‘porcupinsim’,10 mobilizing engagement with the issue of gender equality through the cultural genres of fiction, drama, and personal storytelling. As in the early days of revolutionary Russia, culture was conceived as a midwife to transformational consciousness. If this kind of cultural production had contradictions, it was not just that it was not ‘feminist’ enough; the paper was also tied to Soviet priorities and orchestrated nationalist sensibilities as a means of sustaining and deepening communist solidarities, not unlike the immigrant labour upheavals of the First World War era in the United States, which both contributed to intensifying class conflict and sidelined that struggle into problematic mobilizations.
The decade of the 1920s witnessed significant setbacks for the revolutionary left, including the defeat of the German Revolution (1923), an event that overdetermined the possibilities for the Communist International and structured the Soviet Union’s drift to Stalinization. The failure of the German Revolution, accompanied by setbacks for the revolutionary left in Austria, Hungary, and Italy, occurred before Russia’s 1917 revolution had the opportunity to truly free itself from the imperialist encirclement and deforming containments of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. The ravages of a debilitating, Western-supported civil war weakened the Bolshevik Revolution and, with no support forthcoming from a central Europe undergoing capitalist restabilization, the early 1920s saw Soviet industry struggling to rebuild, its working class exhausted. With the agricultural sector decimated, the peasantry was disaffected. The revolutionary state, caught in the vice of crisis, was drifting towards bureaucratism as Lenin’s health deteriorated in 1922. With the leadership vacuum created by the leading Bolshevik’s death in 1924, the stage was set for Stalin to consolidate power and secure authoritarian rule for a bureaucratic caste, a political apparatus of retrenchment orchestrated by a regime increasingly reliant on brutalizing force. ‘Socialism in one country’, a programme counter-posed to revolutionary internationalism and the class struggle initiative of ‘permanent revolution’, was in the making, corresponding to a resurrection of officially-sanctioned chauvinism; the ‘show trials’ and political purges of the 1930s were the last chapters in a book of banishment first written over the course of the mid-to-late 1920s, which included the enforced marginalization and final exile of Trotsky. Along the way, any revolutionary role the Communist International could have provided to insurgent forces around the world proved spent, as indicated in Stalin’s course in China, where revolution was derailed in 1926-1927. As Perry Anderson concluded, the 1920s saw the sorry denouement of classical Bolshevism as ‘Marxism was largely reduced to a memento in Russia . . . The most advanced country in the world in the development of historical materialism, which had outdone all Europe by the variety and vigour of its theorists, was turned within a decade into a semi-literate backwater, formidable only by the weight of its censorship and the crudity of its propaganda.’11
Within the advanced capitalist political economies of the west, especially a United States not ravaged by the First World War’s destructions, the fortunes of the profit system soared materially and ideologically. Class struggle took a decided turn for the worse. Employers’ groups, as Chad Pearson has shown, upped the ante of aggressive rhetorical and practical assault, placing ‘dangerous foreigners’ and the proverbial ‘agitator’ in the crosshairs of a direct retaliatory attack. ‘Socialism, syndicalism, communism, and other mental and moral diseases are among our inheritance from the cesspools of foreign thought,’ declared one authority favoured by the National Association of Manufacturers.12
Reaction reigned triumphant, ushering in an era of repressive backlash, components of which included heightened surveillance of targeted dissident groups, mass deportations of ‘alien radicals’ (the annual count of those expelled from the United States climbing to 38,000 by the end of the 1920s) and a rash of criminal syndicalist trials that, in California alone, netted 500 arrests and 164 convictions by 1924.13 Such developments accelerated the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) conservatism and anticommunism, and provided critical nails in the ongoing construction of the coffin of revolutionary syndicalism, epitomized in the Industrial Workers of the World, and helped seal the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. The orthodox holiday of the international revolutionary working class, May Day, was subjected to counter-mobilization as bodies like the American Defense Society attempted to reclaim 1 May, promoting Loyalty and American Day events: patriotism was cultivated as an antidote to the ‘deep-seated conspiracy against civilization’ associated with ‘communism, IWWism or Bolshevism’.14 There was even an attempt to re-label May Day a National Child Health Day.
The convergence of these and other trends ensured that trade unions and militant minorities of labour radicals could not sustain the global workers’ revolt of 1916-1923 which, by 1929, was a distant memory. The ossified United States craft unions of the late 1920s were pale reflections of the tumultuous trade unions of the First World War era that, even in defeat, had taken on powerful capitalist enterprises, rattling the cage of class containment. By 1928, according to one of the dons of the American Wisconsin School of industrial relations, Selig Perlman, the AFL was governed by a ‘psychology of . . . “defeatism” and complacency’.15
This context, in conjunction with the conservatizing Stalinization of the Communist International, wrote finis to much of the revolutionary optimism that infused the immediate post-1917 years with a sense of imminent possibility. Within the Comintern, reliance on an increasingly mechanical Marxism turned ideas towards economism, on the one hand, and a mechanical philosophical ‘diamat’ on the other, structuring programmatic decisions around the foreign policy needs of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s personal authority dovetailed destructively with such developments. And among Marxists who remained committed to developing the revolutionary theoretical arsenal, this context of limitation conditioned a break with the classical nineteenth-century fusion of conceptualization and actual engagement with class struggle. This ushered into being a 1920s retreat into aestheticization that would gather force over the course of the twentieth century, culminating in a ‘Western Marxism’ animated by philosophy but increasingly distanced from revolutionary political practice.16 The Comintern’s original influence, one of healthy advice to national sections, withered over the course of the 1920s and 1930s: flexibility in the application of socialist analysis and principles hardened into a refusal to allow socialist and feminist ideas to flourish freely in productive tension and debate, stifling revolutionary initiative and innovation.
Race, like gender, received a new leftward lease on life in the United States in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Socialists in North America, it has long been recognized, failed to give race either its analytic or political due until 1917 pushed communists to the forefront of the revolutionary movement. Guided by the Communist International, communists in the United States began to grapple seriously with what was then called ‘the Negro Question’. Like so much else, Stalinism deformed this engagement. It helped frame the discussion about race in non-Marxist, almost absurdly nationalist ways, conceiving of African-Americans not as the most oppressed of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic United States working class, but as a separate nation. This was most evident in the discussions at the Negro Commission of the Sixth World Congress of the CI (1928), out of which came the codification of the ‘Black Belt Nation’ thesis. This posited the need for revolutionary communists in the United States to struggle to build a ‘Negro Soviet Republic’ in the American South’s black belt, where the population density of African Americans supposedly established a claim to nationhood. Aside from a few African American advocates such as Harry Haywood, the notion of a Black Belt Nation had little appeal among the oppressed black population of the United States, whose struggles for jobs, equality, and an end to Lynch Law and Jim Crow structured much of everyday life. That said, the attempt to actually conceptualize the oppression of American blacks in ways that accented the need for revolutionary transformations convinced many that the Communist Party USA, unlike past socialist organizations, was treating the race issue seriously rather than subordinating the struggle for Negro rights to the class question.
The race issue in the United States in the period from 1917-1925 was dominated not so much by Communist Party considerations as by the massive influx of black southerners to the urban-industrial centres of the north. The ‘Great Migration’ culminated in the explosive growth of Chicago’s ‘black metropolis’ and New York City’s Harlem, with segregation contributing to a vibrant black literary and musical aesthetic – dubbed the advent of ‘the New Negro’ – in which creative understandings of racial oppression and human liberation joined culture and politics in a profoundly anti-capitalist critique of racism that went far beyond calls to improve race relations or allow blacks to pursue the rites of citizenship.
Intensified working-class revolt and a renewed wave of racist violence characterized the immediate postwar period, providing the impetus for what Barbara Foley calls a ‘red-black’ politics that co-joined critiques of capitalism and racism: ‘massive class and antiracist struggles,’ she argues, ‘erupt[ed] in the wake of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution’.17 The leftward turn in political discussion concerning race was expressed not only in the radical black press but also in more mainstream ‘Negro’ and white liberal forums, though it found its strongest articulation in left-wing African American publications like The Messenger, founded by socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen in 1917. This radical editorial duo welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution as ‘the Banquo’s ghost to the Macbeth capitalists of the world, whether they inhabit Germany, England, America or Japan. It is a foreword of a true world democracy. The Soviets represent the needs and aims of the masses.’18 Other more ‘Afrocentric’ publications like The Crusader, paper of the African Blood Brotherhood, which would eventually find itself associated with the Communist Party, linked global imperialism to racism and advocated a ‘multi-racial revolution’.
Explaining the violence faced by African Americans in their everyday lives, red-black revolutionaries like Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore situated racial oppression in an imperialist global system, explored class relations of exploitation, denounced capitalist profit and a regime of expropriation and accumulation, and did what they could to unmask the ideological obscuring of working-class common interest. A unique Harlem figure, Hubert Harrison, was, like so many of these red-black dissidents, a product of the Caribbean diaspora. Arguably the leading left-wing black intellectual in the United States, he embraced an array of causes, including birth control, the IWW, the Socialist Party (as an internal critic) and The Voice, a radical First World War era ‘race’ paper. More than any other figure he galvanized ‘race consciousness’, insisting that it necessarily had to accompany ‘class consciousness’ in the making of revolution.19
As Foley suggests, however, the revolutionary origins of the ‘New Negro’ movement would not survive the repression unleashed by the red and black agitations of 1919. Hopes for an interracial movement of opposition were dashed in a rash of racist pogroms. As the postwar strike wave peaked in 1919, over twenty race riots erupted. In Chicago, one of these racially charged urban implosions took the lives of twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites, leaving the epicentre of black employment, the Chicago Stockyards, under military occupation. A voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay, penned an anguished poetic response, capturing an African American mood simultaneously resistant and resilient, but also resigned: ‘If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, / While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursed lot.’20
Just as deportations and a nativist assault on immigrant radicals drove the ‘alien’ other into retreat, by the mid-1920s the ‘New Negro’s’ revolutionary beginnings faded from view, overtaken by understandable culturalist, pluralist, and nationalist sensibilities. What remained was an artistic attachment to an African American folk experience, tied to southern slavery, but stripped of the oppositional cosmopolitanism that could have challenged the limiting appeal of the kind of race separatism that would animate both Garveyism and the Communist Party’s call for a Black Belt Nation. The organic connection of workers’ revolution and the eradication of racism would nevertheless prove difficult to disentangle. It surfaced again and again in myriad movements and civil rights struggles, among them the pan-Africanism of Comintern-affiliated George Padmore in the 1930s or the fertile contributions of C.L.R. James to a widening array of issues. Among the contentious topics James addressed over the course of decades of revolutionary reassessment were the 1917 revolution’s degeneration and the relation of this denouement to capitalism, colonialism, and anti-imperialist struggles in the Caribbean, as well as the nature and meaning of working-class self-activity.21 In the 1960s, the dialectic of race/class struggle was wrestling inside the Black Power movement, evident in the development of Malcolm X as well as in sectors of the Black Panthers.22 Small wonder that, from the early 1920s on right-wing commentators were quick to decry the ‘communist conspiracy’s’ so-called enlistment of the ‘negro masses’ in its nefarious ‘campaign to bring about the overthrow of the government’ of the United States ‘by violence’.23
By the time of capitalism’s collapse in the Great Depression of the 1930s, revolutionary politics within the Soviet Union and in its many satellite communist parties was withering on the vine of Stalinist programmatic indecision, which lurched from right, to left, to right in the oscillating ‘turns’ of Comintern directive. With the expulsion of dissident communists and the Soviet declaration of its ultra-left ‘Third Period’ in 1928, it was difficult for left oppositions of various kinds to gain much ground. This of course did not mean that revolutionary ideals inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution simply evaporated, either inside the official Communist movement or outside of it, on its margins. Revolutionary fervour persisted, nurtured within the small space regional and national parties attempted to carve out for locally relevant organizing. Revolutionary ideals in the Depression decade also took shape in other dissident communist configurations and parties, including Lovestoneites, Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, and even some socialist groups caught between the revolutionary impulses of the 1930s and their continuing adherence to social democratic strategies and tactics. In the latter camp were groups like the American Workers Party, which rallied Conference for Progressive Labor Action intellectuals/activists and was led by the long-time peace campaigner, A.J. Muste.
Revolution’s relevance seemed obvious to many amidst the global crisis of world capitalism announced with the startling meltdown of 1929. The collapse of stock markets, the closing of workplaces and the resulting massive, unprecedented unemployment, loss of homes and farms, and the inability of many western governments to face the crisis with anything other than retrenchment and austerity, put capitalism on trial. That the Soviet Union, in spite of its internal domestic repression, seemed to be weathering the storms of economic crisis rather well reinforced the notion that something was obviously wrong with the profit system. Sophia Dixon, an early founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a Canadian party that declared its intent to replace decrepit ‘capitalism’ with a system of socialist cooperation, articulated the growing sense of impending crisis and the need for political imagination: ‘it seemed as if the capitalist system was simply crumbling before us and our task was to find and build a new system which could replace the old.’24 The shape of global crisis varied across regions and from nation to nation, with the complexity of political cultures and their configurations of race, ethnicity, and gender complicating matters, but the sense that a Marxist analysis of capitalism’s inevitable weaknesses and working-class/popular resistance were absolutely necessary animated insurgent groups worldwide.
Established communist parties led struggles of the unemployed in the early 1930s and, with the turn to the Popular Front in 1935, played vital roles in industrial union drives. Too often, however, the labour upheaval of the 1930s in the United States and Canada is tied to the CIO sit-down strikes in the automobile sector in 1936-1937, heralded as orchestrated by the far-seeing break from AFL craft unionism initiated by United Mine Workers of America boss and Congress of Industrial Organization front-man, John L. Lewis. But Lewis, who would rather cynically utilize communist organizers to good effect in the late 1930s and 1940s, had actually taken his cues from a 1934 strike wave organized by revolutionaries active within AFL unions. Their resolute battles against recalcitrant employers and trade union bureaucrats led to bloody conflicts in industrial cities, transport centres, west coast ports, and southern mill towns. These 1934 uprisings had the character of Rosa Luxemburg’s mass strike and were led, often with startling success, by Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, Musteites in the American Workers Party, and the Communist Party USA.
With the nationwide attention given to the Trotskyist successes in organizing the previously largely unorganized teamsters and coal yard/market workers of Minneapolis, for instance, Lewis and many others were struck by the fact that an ossified International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local with less than 200 members in 1932-1933 managed, under revolutionary leadership (that included the trio of militant Minneapolis Dunne brothers as well as New York-based Left Oppositionists James Cannon and Max Shachtman) to grow explosively over the course of 1934. It took three strikes within a concentrated seven or so months of intense class struggle, but the Trotskyist-led General Drivers Union stared down a Farmer-Labor Governor, locked horns with an obstinate and hostile municipal administration, ran rings around Washington-dispatched mediators, duked it out with police and vigilantes, mocked National Guardsmen, and finally defeated a cabal of trucking employers. Eventually the union boasted a membership of 7,000.25
Revolutionaries in Toledo, under the guidance of Muste, his labor lieutenant Louis Budenz, and a dedicated corps of unemployed organizers and agitators made similar if less spectacular gains in the Toledo auto-parts industry, breaking through organizational impasses the United Automobile Workers had failed to crack previously. On the west coast, Communist Party labour leader Harry Bridges found himself ‘swept along in the flood’ of Longshoremen’s militancy, which resulted in pitched battles with police and National Guardsmen, hospitalizing and injuring hundreds while leaving two strikers and an onlooker dead. The bitter, explosive class struggles of 1934, animated by revolutionaries who in one way or another were inspired by the events of 1917, pitted workers against employers and their reactionary associations; a Rooseveltian façade of liberal governance, with its structures of accommodation and incorporation; and ultimately the armed might of the capitalist state.
Throughout the 1930s, such conflicts inspired and blurred into other campaigns. The Communist Party, for instance, was in the forefront of struggles against racism, although in periods of ultraleft sectarianism, such as those that saw mobilizations against the ‘lynch mob’ atmosphere surrounding the trials of the Scottsboro Boys, much was squandered in the building of effective united front campaigns. Rank-and-file Communist Party members in Britain, Canada, and the United States constituted the backbone of the volunteer battalions that fought against Franco’s forces in Spain, putting their bodies on the line in an armed struggle against fascism and for democracy. On the ground of most advanced western capitalist nations Communists conducted revolutionary educationals, held May Day rallies, celebrated anniversaries of the 1917 Revolution and the Paris Commune, walked picket lines, defended those arrested and serving time as class war prisoners (and supported the families of incarcerated victims of bourgeois ‘justice’), and demonstrated for the causes they believed in.
It is impossible to miss the widening reach of international communism and the Revolution of 1917, as well as the interest in all things Soviet, in glancing at some of the 1930s titles of the Left Book Club, a London popular frontist endeavour; these publications ranged from The Paris Commune of 1871 (1937) to The Position of Women in the USSR (1937) to I Went To the Soviet Arctic (1939). Indeed, art, literature, theatre, poetry, music, and representation became an increasingly contested area for the articulation of revolutionary anti-capitalism, so much so that Michael Denning considers what he calls ‘the cultural front’ in the United States a more important mobilization than the Comintern-declared Popular Front policy that helped frame the radical aesthetic of the 1930s.26 Some of the Depression-era recruits to revolutionary communism, both children of working-class immigrants and middle-class intellectuals, returned to questions associated with the revolutionary avant-garde of 1917, addressing how art and politics were related: how might culture stimulate the revolutionary imagination and inspire anti-capitalist thinking? Workers’ theatre, from its early incarnation as the amateur self-activity of unemployed workers, to later, more professional left-wing theatre groups, flourished as a reflection of 1930s dissent.
During the Congress of Industrial Organization upsurge of 1937, for instance, life seemed to be imitating art. Mark Blitzstein’s ‘proletarian opera’ The Cradle Will Rock staged an impromptu performance about organizing in ‘Steeltown, USA’ in defiance of Works Project Administration [WPA] cuts to relief funding, and Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty opened at New York’s Group Theatre, its rallying cry, ‘STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!’ echoing picket line chants. These themes of working-class upsurge reverberated as never before in a growing body of left-wing fiction, poetry, art, photography and cultural criticism.27 Commercially successful and eminently Popular Front productions had often been preceded by militant Third Period agitprop performances, such as the Progressive Arts Clubs of Canada’s Eight Men Speak, which took direct aim at the political persecution of the Canadian Communist Party in the early 1930s.
This cultural arena, especially as expressed in Canadian journals like Masses and New Frontiers, was also a particular focus of women’s revolutionary activity, stimulating new discussion about socialism and women’s emancipation. Writer and later renowned poet Dorothy Livesay, and theatre director ‘Jim’ (Eugenia) Watts tried to create a revolutionary alternative culture that exposed the exploitation, suffering and oppression of capitalism – for workers and families – contrasting the profit system’s impoverishing impulses to the possibilities of communist collectivism. The means to this end was the creation of a class ‘for itself’, this consciousness developed by resistance nurtured in unions, welfare rights organizations, anti-fascist agitation, peace mobilizations, and cultural activities and productions of all kinds.
Not dissimilarly, in the United States communist women’s cultural production also flourished in the form of poetry, fiction, journalism and political commentary, from better known authors like Meridel LeSueur, Agnes Smedley and Tillie Olsen to lesser-known writers documenting particular local struggles and issues. While communist women’s cultural production was subsequently critiqued by feminists for its containment within a workerist ‘male-dominated’ paradigm, a ‘masculine-modeled Marxism’,28 the attachment to and embrace of the possibility of revolutionary change, including a vision more attuned to women’s domestic and sexual liberation, was very much part of this dissident oeuvre.
In Mexico, a cultural front also took shape in the 1920s, gathering ideological power during the Depression: the influence of Mexican communism was enhanced, according to Barry Carr, because of a vibrant circle of ‘vanguard artistic and cultural movements, especially the revolutionary mural movement’.29 By the time of the Popular Front, when Mexican communist women transitioned from the sectarian isolation of the Third Period to make common cause with (ruling party) PRI women in building an alliance against fascism and for women’s suffrage and demands for secure livelihoods, a feminist political-cultural rapprochement was emerging. Communist women accustomed to singing the Internationale at their own meetings created a new hybrid culture that integrated the symbols and sensibilities from the internal Mexican revolution with established and long-understood forms of identification with the external socialist revolution, a process that temporarily, at least, facilitated a distinctly revolutionary ‘culture of feeling’ specific to the Mexican locale.30
Capitalism weathered difficult storms in the 1930s and 1940s, triumphing, seemingly, over the crisis of production/accumulation/unemployment signaled by the global depression of the 1930s. One part of the solution to that devastating collapse was the international conflict of the Second World War, which resolved a crisis in the productive sphere of capitalist social relations only through the accelerated growth in economic activities related to armed confrontations among nations. That said, armament Keynesianism alone could provide no long-term fix for capitalism’s internal contradictions. But it showed the way forward.
Arms production did help bankroll, in the advanced capitalist west, the emergence of a welfare state that, if never as all-encompassing as it was proclaimed to be, nonetheless closed some of the cracks through which too many of the disadvantaged had historically fallen. It also promoted the first truly far-seeing acknowledgement (never, of course, generalized among all employers) of the need for a state-orchestrated system mediating the relations of antagonistic capital and labour, now referred to as the postwar settlement. Not surprisingly, as the hot war of 1939-1945 cooled in armistice, and the longer deep-freeze of capitalism vs. communism hardened global relations into a new Cold War, one part of this postwar settlement was an intensified domestic war on communist dissidents inside the capitalist economies of the west, the nadir of this process reached in American McCarthyism. One crucial area of this political house cleaning was, understandably, the increasingly important trade unions. By the 1950s, revolutionary dissidents, be they Communist Party militants or adherents to smaller organizations of opposition like those of the fractured landscape of Trotskyism, were largely exiled from the labour movement.
If western capitalism gave the outward appearance of a settled stabilization, this 1945-1965 period would see revolution resurgent in what was then commonly referred to as the ‘Third World’.31 Anticolonial revolutionary movements in this ‘Third World’ were inextricably linked to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A Tartar Muslim minority within Russia, led by the secular socialist Sultan Galiev, charted a course for an independent Muslim Communist Party and a predominantly Muslim state in the Middle Volga and the Southern Urals. Galiev championed a revolution that challenged the Great Russian chauvinism of Czarist Russia in the hopes of creating an alternative that trod lightly on religious freedom, but ultimately facilitated the gradual secularization of the Muslim masses whom he believed were trapped within an impoverished Islamic traditionalism. He initially proved useful to Joseph Stalin, but his ideas were soon cast aside; the Muslim Communist Party was stripped of its autonomy, and the promise of a large Muslim Republic rescinded. Eventually Galiev would come to believe that the socialist revolution would not necessarily resolve the problem of nationalities; that Muslim oppression had simply been reconfigured under Stalin; and that a Communist Colonial International, independent from the Soviet Third Communist International, was needed. Driven into a more nationalist Muslim position by Stalin’s policies, he distanced himself from the dialectical, Bolshevik understandings of class and nationalism. Galiev soon found himself banished from Stalin’s inner circle. He was the first high-ranking Communist Party figure ordered arrested in the Stalinist repression of the 1920s. Marginalized, rearrested, and eventually sentenced to ten years hard labour, Galiev had disappeared by 1940.32
The anti-colonialism of the 1945-1965 years was born under the shadow of this mixed legacy. On the one hand, as Tariq Ali and Fred Halliday have argued, the struggles for national liberation characteristic of the colonial world in this period had in fact been made possible in some ways by the promise of 1917. The making of a revolutionary workers’ state, however transitory, had declared that capitalism’s hegemony might well be broken at its weakest link. Increasingly, in the post-Second World War period, that vulnerable point was exposed: revolution might be reborn, in an age of triumphant capitalism, at precisely that corroding conjuncture where imperialism consolidated relations of super-exploitation incapable of rooting oppressed populations in allegiance to regimes of accumulation that drained and dispossessed far more than they developed. On the other hand, the very timing of this anti-colonial insurgency, poised as it was between the devastation of Europe during the Second World War and the escalating Cold War, ensured that the postwar American Empire took shape in part through its ideological counterrevolutionary overdrive. As the colonial revolution took inspiration and in some cases material support from the homeland of the original Bolshevik experiment, the legacies of 1917 worked themselves into a profusion of ‘Third World’ conflicts in new and complex Cold War ways. The United States, previously animated by a more localized view of its sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine, now broadened its post-Second World War Cold War reach to a global containment of communism.33 Revolution’s persistence conditioned counter-revolution’s reaction which, in the case of the US, was considerably widened.
If the Bolsheviks had struggled and failed to resolve simultaneously the inextricably entwined dilemma of revolution – class exploitation and national oppression – the anti-colonial insurgencies of three decades later were often cast in terms that promised a reckoning with the older Bolshevik project. Thus, Régis Debray, surveying the long march of revolution in Latin America which encompassed unsuccessful guerrilla struggles in Argentina, Paraguay, Santo Domingo, Columbia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, and Brazil (1959-1964), as well as the victorious Fidelista Cuban Revolution (1959), concluded (somewhat incongruously) that if Soviet-inspired communist parties were often a brake on the creation of Guevara-like revolutionary foco in the countryside of the rebellious peasantry, there was nonetheless an organic link between ‘Third World’ uprisings and Leninism.
It is impossible to disconnect the waves of revolutionary, anti-colonial struggle that convulsed not only Latin America, but also China, Korea, and Indochina in the immediate post-Second World War period from the influence of 1917 and the Soviet Union, even if Stalinism continued, as it had for decades, to squander revolutionary possibilities and bear responsibility for catastrophic defeats. Yet there were advances. If capitalism remained entrenched in Taiwan, South Korea, and South Vietnam, post-revolutionary societies were established, and their influence – particularly in the case of China and North Vietnam – on the emergence of western youth movements of a revolutionary bent in future decades would be extraordinary. Other radical mobilizations in the Far East were put down with brutal suppression, including in the Philippines and Malaya. Particularly violent was the case of Indonesia, where an anti-communist bloodbath led by right-wing General Suharto and aided by CIA intelligence resulted in the decimation of the Soviet-aligned Communist Party, with hundreds of thousands of PKI members and sympathizers slaughtered and President Sukarno placed under permanent house arrest.
In Africa, the Algerian independence struggle, victorious in 1962 and memorialized in Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic advocacy of the cathartic consequences of revolutionary violence, was but one of a number of revolts – anti-colonial, nationalist, and socialist. These included struggles in Kenya and the extended Emergency during the 1950s; the independence struggle led by Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo in 1960; the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, where monarchy was overthrown, the Suez Canal nationalized, and a pan-Arab unity movement born; the most explicit anti-imperialist and African socialist initiative, the Ghanaian Revolution associated with Kwame Nkrumah, a founder of the Organization of African Unity and committed Pan-Africanist; and the long-drawn out wars of national liberation associated with Portugal’s disintegrating colonial presence in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tome.
The significance of the anticolonial struggles of this era was thus evident as early as 1955 with the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries, where decolonization topped the list of concerns. By the time of the Accra Conferences of 1958, there could be no mistaking the extent to which an ongoing struggle against colonialism linked ‘the new and politically self-conscious Africa’ to comrades in progressive European movements.34 The struggle for Africa would figure importantly in the tumultuous 1960s.
This set the stage for an experiment in African socialism. Jitendra Mohan outlined in the 1966 Socialist Register how this ferment was an affirmation of ‘orginality’, ‘distinctiveness’, and ‘independence’. But there was also often a rejection of ‘ideology’ and refusal of the ‘tyranny of concepts’, perhaps too easily represented as European colonial imports. Mohan suggested that in the explosion of 1950s and 1960s African socialism, developments often dominated by indigenous elites pressured struggle in the direction of non-alignment with either capitalism or communism. The claim was routinely made among such African elites that their societies were ‘classless’. This in Mohan’s view tended to produce a ‘socialism’ that was at best an ‘ill-tempered alloy of good intentions and bad plans’.35
The results were often less than exemplary: military coups decapitated the path to socialism in Ghana and elsewhere; the beginnings of an independence struggle in Malawi were truncated by Prime Minister Dr. H. K. Banda, who cultivated ties to imperial Britain and white South Africa; while in Congo-Brazzaville a rhetoric of ‘champagne Marxism’ coexisted with corruption and close ties with colonial power in France. Nonetheless, as the Arusha Declaration of 1967 in Tanzania suggested, and much of the history of struggle in South Africa confirmed, anti-colonialism in Africa was often inseparable from calls for self-reliance, greater democratic participation, mobilization of the poor landed and urban masses, and an expansive theorizing, culminating in movements and even uprisings that marched under the flag of socialist possibility. Too often, to be sure, and especially as the global capitalist economy constricted in crisis as the 1970s unfolded, this socialist sensibility seemed strangled as the material foundations of neocolonial production and exchange withered under pressures of declining markets for Africa’s raw materials and massive increases in the costs of import necessities, especially pronounced with the ‘oil shock’ of 1973.
This objective limitation was mirrored by similar constraints in the subjective sphere, especially where armed insurrection consolidated vanguard forces, such as the Mozambique Liberation Front, or Frelimo. Frelimo has been interpreted as verification of the validity of Frantz Fanon’s theories on the salutary consequences of anti-colonial violence. As the leading contingent in the struggle for independence in Mozambique, Frelimo fought a protracted war against opponents, including South African advocates of apartheid, eventually declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist Party and consolidating a one-party state in which the danger of authoritarianism was ever-present. Yet Frelimo, as John Saul suggests, did not so much stifle popular initiative as fail to encourage it sufficiently:
After independence the scale became infinitely vaster, the stratum of middle-level cadre too thin on the ground and too ill-trained, the challenges – not least South Africa’s ongoing war – literally overwhelming . . . Not surprisingly, even the most solid senior leaders have been reduced under such circumstances to fire-fighting a seemingly endless series of emergencies rather than finding time to concentrate on the slow, patient, ongoing political work which would serve to consolidate a firmer political basis for the revolution.36
Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) captured well how exploitation and oppression had come together under the anti-colonial banner, ‘Natives of all under-developed countries, unite!’ While cognizant of the advanced capitalist world’s exploitation of the resources and labour of the ‘Third World’, Sartre also wrote of the abstract philosophical assumption of universality which served as cover for this plunder: ‘On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans, who, thanks to us, might reach our status a thousand years hence . . .’ This history of colonialism enslaved some and allowed others ‘a simulacrum of phoney independence’. Capitalist colonization has ‘multiplied divisions and opposing groups, fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies’. Fanon’s book, Sartre concluded, announced the inevitable making of ‘Third World unity’, a work in progress that would culminate in a ‘national revolution’ that ‘must be socialist’.37
This message resounded throughout the ‘Third World’, but it also boomeranged back on the ‘First World’, as Sartre (if not, perhaps, Fanon) intended, especially via the ‘Black’ and ‘Red Power’ movements of African American and Indigenous resistance that exploded into prominence in the United States and Canada in the 1960s. Both Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver venerated Fanon, as did Pierre Vallières, theoretician of Quebec’s Front de Libération du Québec [FLQ]. And Indigenous activists of the era, from Lee Maracle [Bobbi Lee] to Harold Adams, were unequivocal in seeing Fanon as central to their recognition of the need for a revolutionary challenge to colonialism.38
Perry Anderson once summed up the conjuncture of the 1950s as encompassing four structural components: ‘a struggle between capitalist and socialist economic systems, a contest between imperialist and indigenous national systems, a conflict between parliamentary and authoritarian political systems, and a confrontation between technologically equivalent and reciprocally suicidal military systems.’ Thus, ‘International class struggle, defence of democracy, revolt against colonialism, arms race: each slogan indicates one “moment” in the Cold War and denies the other. The reality is their infinite imbrication and interpenetration.’39
Revolution signalled the nature of this constellation of structural impasse. As the Swedish New Leftist Göran Therborn suggested insightfully in a brief 1968 essay, ‘From Petrograd to Saigon’, the ties that bound developments of this period inextricably together were inevitably located along the axis of revolutionary thought and practice that reached across the span of capitalism vs. socialism, testing the triumphalism of a post-Second World War ideological acquisitive individualism ensconced in the nation states of the developed northern hemisphere and the increasingly constricted material base of actually existing socialism, now claustrophobically contained within the obvious limitations of Stalinism.40
Untainted by troubling attachment to Stalinism’s debilitating influence, this reigniting of the fires of revolutionary possibility had been evident in the emergence of the first British New Left in the late 1950s. The Suez Crisis was then seen as evidence of an ossified capitalist imperialism and its reluctance to give up the ghost of empire, while the USSR’s 1956 invasion of Hungry and the subsequent suppression of dissent tarred the Stalinist state with a like brush of brutalizing ‘First World’ subordination. A few years later, the second American New Left unfurled its 1962 banner, the Port Huron Statement, breaking from complacency, refusing the perverted dreams of Stalinism, decrying poverty and deprivation amidst affluence, insisting on an end to the policies of nuclear arms deterrence, embracing both the colonial revolution abroad and the civil rights revolution at home, and shunning the ideologies of anti-communism and the consumerism of the marketplace. Seeking ‘the unattainable,’ this New Left proclaimed it was doing nothing less than avoiding ‘the unimaginable’.41
The birth of the New Left, whether in Britain or America, was thus inseparable from the ossified structures of a Cold War world frozen in rigid oppositional blocs. But ‘Third World’ movements of national liberation unsettled Marxist-Leninist understandings of class struggle just as they challenged the hegemonic hold of imperialism and capitalism throughout the global South. In this changed political climate, the language of revolution shifted gears. While it referenced 1917 and its antecedents, refusing the logic of a post-Second World War ‘free world’ animated by a regime of accumulation and an ideology of acquisitive individualism, it simultaneously rejected the bureaucratized ‘Soviet Marxism’ of a USSR now associated with Stalinist atrocity, laid bare for all to see in Khrushchev’s revelations and the tanks that rolled into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. As Herbert Marcuse noted in Soviet Marxism, the machinery of state power, West and East, was now ‘bereft of any emancipatory dimension’.42
As the Vietnam imbroglio, with its pressures on both the ethical-moral standing of the state and the Keynesian balance of guns or butter, propelled the domestic American political economy towards crisis, the United States was impaled on the ever-sharpening horns of youthful protests, inner-city black insurgencies, and a war across the world that it could not win. For the first time since the mass industrial-union struggles that reached from the late 1930s into the late 1940s, young workers exploded in rebellious antagonism, upping the decibel level of class struggle in articulations of alienation that were followed, in the next decade, by mobilizations of racialized and women workers intent on securing some of the benefits of labour organization.43
The Soviets fared no better. Their backing of ‘Third World’ liberation movements rang most hollow in European satellites such as Czechoslovakia, faced with ‘Moscow Diktats’ suppressing workers’ strikes or student protests, while stifling a rising tide of nationalist resentment at Soviet subordination. As workers and students organized job actions and sit-ins, the demonstrations of discontent took on the trappings of a rebellion: the USSR responded ultimately with repression and its own ‘occupation’, military-style. Harkening back to 1917, revolutionary graffiti proclaimed, ‘Lenin awake, Brezhnev has gone mad!’ With the Soviet Union, like its capitalist counterpart the United States, plunged into escalating crises culminating, by the opening of the 1980s, in the layers of challenge associated with Poland’s Solidarnosc, the stage was set for the implosion of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the late 1980s and 1990s.44
By that time the ideological arsenal of counter-revolution had been well stocked with the defection, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, of a significant cohort of erstwhile leftists to the camp of a revanchist right. This ‘turn’ was, of course, reinforced and sustained by the myriad ways capitalist hegemony consolidated amidst the disciplinary regime of routine crises that reached from the fiscal distress of western capitalist states in 1973 to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. Trade unions were assaulted, social movements driven inward in their embrace of particularity, and critical analysis retreated into an eschewing of the very ‘master narratives’ necessary to make sense of a new world order that proclaimed ‘an end of history’, a coded erasure of revolutionary possibility.
This four-decade long retreat, coerced on the one hand and acquiesced to on the other, now blinds us to the extent that revolution remained very much on the agenda throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s despite the tarnishing of 1917’s accomplishments through Stalinization. Revolution seemed the antidote, at times like May 1968, not only to capitalism and its discontents, but to actually existing socialism and its shortcomings, with students and workers, feminists and Marxists, drawn to the legacies of revolt associated with 1917 and other instances of insurgent upheaval. The umbilical cord reaching from 1917 to 1968 was easily discernible, even in the postmortems. Thus the New Left Review introduced an issue devoted entirely to the 1968 events, with essays by Ernest Mandel, Jean-Marie Vincent, André Gorz, André Glucksmann, and a reprinted 1908 essay of Lenin’s on the student movement, with a statement that confirmed how revolution, lived out in anti-colonial uprisings and wars of national liberation in the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s, was now grasped as necessary, even possible, in the heart of the imperialist metropoles.45
The events of May ’68, moreover, while often associated with Paris alone, were but one of a number of 1968-1969 socio-political explosions that reverberated throughout the world, and that included mass protests, often quite violent, in London, Rome, Berlin, Chicago, New York, various central and eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain, and throughout the developing world. In Kingston, Jamaica riots broke out as the government refused to allow the Marxist historian Walter Rodney to return to his teaching post at the University of the West Indies; student protests in Mexico City culminated in the Tlateloko massacre; Brazilian guerrillas escalated their war against the military dictatorship; and in Pakistan the People’s Party opposition movement of oft-jailed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, guided by an ostensibly socialist platform, galvanized students and workers in struggles that routinely broke out into the streets and proved deadly.
New concerns animated many such struggles. Bureaucracy, suggested Isaac Deutscher in the 1969 Socialist Register, now occupied a pivotal place in the analytic imperatives of socialist thought since it was impossible to deny that the apparatus of governance in all societies, regardless of their social and political organization, was contributing to widespread malaise, now fashionably described as ‘alienation’. This was something Marx had not anticipated, stressed Marcuse, who concluded that revolution was now more than ever before mandatory. Its ‘re-examination’ as something more than ‘a merely abstract and speculative undertaking’ was critical if the ‘subordination of man to the instruments of his labour, to the total, overwhelming apparatus of production and destruction’ was not to reach the point ‘of an all but incontrollable power’ that was ‘objectified’ and ‘self-propelling’, dragging the ‘indoctrinated and integrated people along’ behind a ‘mobilized national interest’. Deutscher, too, recognized revolution’s ongoing significance, stressing that in spite of Stalinization and ostensible de-Stalinization, ‘Whatever may be the malaise, the heartsearchings and the gropings of the post-Stalin era testify in their own way to the continuity of the revolutionary epoch’. For Deutscher, decades of totalitarian rule inside the Soviet Union had ‘robbed the people of their capacity for self-expression, spontaneous action, and self-organization’. That said, Deutscher acknowledged that even Trotsky, just before his assassination by a Stalinist agent, insisted that ‘the revolution had not come to an end’, concluding that, ‘The great divide of 1917 still looms as large as ever in the consciousness of mankind’.46
What of womankind? A revitalized women’s movement, which burst on the scene with considerable force in the late 1960s, had been galvanized within the New Left, but also in the house of labour and the anti-nuclear movement that began in the late 1950s and soon morphed into anti-war protests and support for anti-colonial revolutionary movements in Vietnam and elsewhere. Many histories gloss over or marginalize these multiple origins, their understandings constrained by what is often mislabelled ‘second wave feminism’. Given that the wave terminology fundamentally ignores communist, anarchist and socialist women’s organizing, especially between the interwar period and the 1960s, it is not just historically flawed but deeply biased against forms of revolutionary feminism, which remained globally vibrant in these decades.
Nonetheless, a renewal in women’s self-organization and a more expansive theorizing about colonialism, socialism and feminism was apparent by the late 1960s. As much as this push for a theory and practice of women’s liberation was indeed indebted to Marxism and the struggles of revolutionaries in the past, feminism’s development in this period was not unambiguously sympathetic to older communist traditions: if anything, revolution in this realm was situated ambivalently with respect to the heritage of 1917.
Thus Juliet Mitchell’s decisively important ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, published in the New Left Review in 1966, was premised on the notion that ‘The struggle for women’s equality has always been seen by socialists as part of the struggle for socialism’. Mitchell alluded lightly to 1917, drawing far more on the writings of Marx and Engels and juxtaposing them to the utopianism of Charles Fourier, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. She did reference Lenin’s remarks to Clara Zetkin, accepting that inasmuch as the struggle for sexual freedom was an important component of a ‘wild and revolutionary’ encounter with repression, it was nonetheless perceived by many orthodox Marxists as ‘quite bourgeois . . . a hobby of the intellectuals’ and thus foreign to the ‘class conscious, fighting, proletariat’. This did not curb masculinist New Left critiques of socialist feminism, rooted in confident assertions that the emancipation of women would only take place through ‘class struggle, subsuming feminism and at the same time transcending it’.47
The 1960s women’s liberation movement, conceived in part within the New Left but also born in a proliferation of feminist consciousness-raising groups, women’s collectives, and mobilizations/campaigns for abortion, workplace and other rights, grappled from its beginnings with revolution and its contradictory heritage. Canadian socialist-feminist Margaret Benston, a member of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus, was prompted by her readings of Marx, Mitchell, Marcuse, and the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel to pen what would become one of the most influential short texts of socialist feminism, ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation’. Travelling across Canada in mimeographed versions, Benston’s essay, once in print, leapfrogged around the globe, translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, German, and Japanese. It resonated internationally with the writings of Selma James and Mariarosa Della Costa about wages, housework, and the capitalist mode of production. In Italy sections of the women’s movement called themselves Benstonistas.48
But the tensions in the New Left around feminism were nonetheless acute, and prompted women to ponder their relations with male brothers and lovers as well as the revolutionary heritage that all such activists inevitably found themselves debating. The Canadian New Left grouping, the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), gave rise to a quintessential feminist document, ‘Sisters, Brothers, Lovers . . . Listen’.49 Accenting liberation and love, alienation and anger, conformism and creativity, the document insisted on the necessity to ‘act as though the revolution had occurred by our relationships with one another’. Those relationships, inside SUPA, were anything but egalitarian.
How this emerging feminism related to the implosion of the New Left at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s is an important international history largely still untold. By the early 1970s, the New Left was in disarray and some socialist feminists who had struggled within it had gravitated to vanguard organizations, either Trotyskist or ‘new communist’ (often Maoist). Today’s conventional wisdom, so hostile to the revolutionary left, suggests that attention to gender and sexuality received a hearing in such parties but over time seemed destined to get short, revolutionary shrift. That said, there is no denying the extent to which the politics of women’s liberation fused with the legacies of revolution in a rebellious era.50
The theoretical and practical linkages between anti-colonial, Marxist and feminist thinking were articulated most visibly by feminists involved in the anti-war movement, some of whom made common cause across international borders with Indochinese women, arranging anti-war conferences on neutral ground in Canada or travelling to Vietnam to express their support. Revolutionary strivings were also visible in the Black women’s liberation movement which used theoretical touchstones from anti-colonial thought in their organizing, and in Quebec’s feminist movement, which by 1968 was linked to the impulses of revolutionary nationalism in francophone Canada as well as developments in ‘France, global anti-colonial liberation struggles, the cultural revolution in China, and American Black liberation struggles’.51 In their paper, Quebecoise Deboutte!, feminists analyzed the subjection of women as a product of capitalist and imperialist structures as well as gender ideologies, particularly the oppression of the private, patriarchal, heterosexual family. Revolutionary feminists not only drew on anti-colonial ideas, but subjected their own attachment to nation to the same indictment, critiquing the dispossession of Indigenous peoples as a project of primitive accumulation and a white Christian assault on Indigenous gender relations, presented as far more egalitarian than conventional contemporary socio-sexual norms.
The marriage of anti-colonial politics with women’s liberation might seem more clear-cut in African-American and Chicana organizing, or in Quebec, but efforts to create a revolutionary women’s liberation that recognized class exploitation and imperialism were also expressed in other women’s newspapers, writing, and organizing. Revolutionary ideals and heroic antecedents were routinely discussed, not necessarily favouring any specific tradition, but through exploring them all: anarchism, syndicalism, Marxism, socialism. However heterogeneous their definitions of ‘left’, there was a profound desire to develop theory that advanced the analysis of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and social reproduction, making the transformation of gender and sexual roles as earth shattering a prospect as the abolition of classes.
Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution was an exemplar of this kind of popular intervention. A rapprochement with Marxist and socialist ideas was sought, but without abandoning new insights on gender oppression, domestic labour, and sexual liberation. While women and the colonized shared certain features of cultural, symbolic and psychological marginalization, Rowbotham wrote, the ‘analogy’ of ‘sexual and racial imperialism stops there, partly because the colonizer’s women have themselves enjoyed the spoils of imperial domination’.52 The explosion of writing about various marriages, divorces and integrations of Marxism and feminism, along with the historical recuperation of the revolutionary thought of women like Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollantai, exemplifies such strivings for revolutionary recovery, the search for a reconciliation seemingly severed in Marxism’s and feminism’s New Left rupture.
The resurgence in such revolutionary thinking appeared to decline by the late 1980s. Certainly, American histories of feminism often appear to be built around a common narrative of feminists ‘leaving the left,’ abandoning masculine Marxism and its many flaws; even efforts to develop a socialist-feminist praxis were decreed ‘decimated’ by the 1980s, with the ultra-left cited as the villain. While it is incontrovertible that Marxism and the revolutionary left were politically and theoretically marginalized by the 1980s, this declension story ignores the complexity of the politico-intellectual climate. First, revolutionary streams of anti-imperialist, left feminism persisted in theory and practice, though they were less popularly known or promoted. Dilemmas that women revolutionaries struggled with since 1917, such as the transformation of social reproduction, remained very much alive. Second, the resilient resurgence of liberal and radical feminism has always been an American story, overshadowing but not necessary reflecting global feminist politics. Third, feminist revolutionary ideas were re-shaped within cultural paradigms that were appealing in terms of sexual liberation and identity politics, but which Marxist-feminists have argued reflected the dominant suppositions of ever more powerful forces of neoliberalism. As in so much, the ‘woman question’ in our times mirrors the trajectory of revolution’s reception.
How do we assess revolution’s currency in our particular moment? It is difficult not to accent the contradictory nature of recent developments.
To be sure, there are abundant signs that the revolutionary left and its attachment to the legacies of 1917 are on the decline. This has been evident not only with respect to the fortunes of socialist-feminism, but in terms of the general waning influence of revolutionaries and even leftists of all stripes in the labour movement, and of Marxism within the academy where, aside from pockets of influence, it is a marginalized voice. The implosion and decline of revolutionary organizations of the ‘new communist’ and Trotskyist kind, first evident in the 1970s and continuing over the next decades, is but one expression of this, as is the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union, now gone, and throughout once-Soviet central and eastern Europe, largely incorporated into the European Union (EU). In outposts of the planned economy, such as China and Cuba, moreover, the drift to capitalist restoration is discernible, if not yet able to be judged irreversible. The experiment of African Socialism, in which so much hope was invested in the 1960s, has slowly spiraled downward, the arc of politics trending towards authoritarianism. The long march of the Brazilian left to power, and the subsequent reckoning with the terror of right-wing military dictatorship, stalled in the morass of populism, concessions to austerity, and corruption that constituted Workers’ Party governance, a development hardly unique throughout Latin America. The promise of the Arab Spring, so electrifying in 2011, is in an undeniable blackout. Within an unstable EU, Greece’s Syriza, a coalition of the radical left constituted under the colours of revolutionary politics (red), ecological commitments (green), and diverse social movements (purple), suffered humiliation at the hands of the large national capitalist power brokers, headed by Germany. Even at the point of resistance, the mercurial politics of anarchist-inflected anti-globalization struggles that erupted in the years reaching from the Battle for Seattle in 1998 to the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations of 2011 fit uneasily, at the juncture of theory and practice, with the legacies of 1917. In any case, their concrete achievements have been ambiguous.
This however is not the sum total of what needs to be addressed, for capitalism will, inevitably, push people toward resistance. Within the advanced capitalist political economies of the West, for instance, economic crises have now become so routine – their calendar of catastrophe squeezed into shorter and shorter time-frames – as to be part of the fabric of everyday life. Arguably at no time since the Great Depression have the material conditions of so many been so bad. Precariousness and underemployment define the lives of youth, women, and peoples of colour; rampant unemployment erodes the prospects of the masses; and the ‘freedoms’ demanded in the name of globalization and privatization run rampant within states that have gone into ideological overdrive, taking their toll in the disruptions of a relentless restructuring. Adding insult to injury, racist, homophobic, and misogynist mobilizations are disfiguring political culture. Combined with the assault on trade union freedoms and the dismantling of the welfare state, the threat to hard-won material entitlements in the economic sphere and within the arenas of civil and reproductive rights is so staggering that it has prompted periodic populist and left-wing upheavals even within the conventional mainstream of political life.
These have shaken to the core the seemingly settled regimes of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States, where the presidential nomination process in 2016 was marked by tumultuous rallies, repudiation of ‘the Establishment’, and claims that a ‘political revolution’ is in the making. Popular discontent does not necessarily develop in left-wing ways, of course, and even when it unfurls under the banner of progressivism it is unlikely, without the kind of unambiguous socialist interventions decidedly lacking in our times, to take a path that is distinguishable from a politics of liberal platitude. Nonetheless, discontent is, in specific political formations of our times, leaning left, as indicated in many developments in the global South, within the Labour Party in Britain, and in Canada’s New Democratic Party, as dissenters have recently urged an ambiguous leap to counteract the party’s rightward shift and disastrous 2015 electoral showing. Across Europe there are unmistakable signs of this reconfiguration, although Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza must be set alongside the disturbing rise of anti-system parties of the extreme (even fascistic) right. As China’s bureaucratic elite charts an uncertain course in its intensifying industrialization and aggressive attempt to corner global markets, there are unmistakable signs that an insurgent working class is struggling to break free from the chains of its peculiar exploitation and oppression.
The point is not that we are on the verge of revolutionary breakthroughs. Far from it. But the volatility of the current moment, and mounting evidence that capitalism cannot forever balance the books of its antagonistic class relations, just as the contradictory essence of regimes straddling the socialist/capitalist divide unsteadily must eventually topple into one camp or the other, suggests not only the need for new political options, but the possibility that they might gain traction in wider circles of the dispossessed and the discontented. The task for the left is daunting, but one small part of what must be done is to make sure that the current conjuncture is in fact cognizant of the history of revolution and what it offers us in terms of political insight.
This is a daunting challenge since a central component of neoliberalism’s ideological project has been to stifle, suppress, and suffocate the heritage of 1917 and its commitment to ongoing revolutionary change. This is one of neoliberalism’s most significant successes: the extent to which it has extinguished revolution’s longue durée, the articulation of a commitment to the project that was first realized, albeit briefly and incompletely, in 1917, and that remains central to reconstructing the world in humanity’s best interests. For decades, even in the face of considerable anguished reassessment of the Soviet revolution, it proved impossible for the left to abandon understandings associated with the emancipatory aspects of 1917’s promise. This carried through into the upheavals of the 1960s, even as a ‘New’ Left distanced itself from much that was seemingly old, an endeavour that ultimately proved impossible.
As the global capitalist economy crashed in the 1970s, the anti-colonial independence struggles of the post-Second World War wound down, as did the spirit of ’68. As strike waves crested in the mid-1970s, trade unionism stalled, its generalized transnational momentum running headlong into a wall of material constraint, critical bricks of that barrier being widespread economic stagnation, soaring inflation, and mass unemployment. Further heightening the challenge to combativity was a resurgent right, which took to the hustings of mass politics with the message of neoliberalism, soon to be the reigning orthodoxy within the corridors of state power. This combined with other developments more internal to the platform, politics, and parties of revolution, eviscerated labour and the extra-parliamentary left.
Many erstwhile dissidents, reeling from the failures of the New Left and growing increasingly disillusioned with Marxist ‘statism’, found themselves drawn to the tenets of this new ‘post’, neoliberal ideology, with its claim that all authoritarianisms – of the left or the right – could be curbed by invoking the self-management of the deregulated marketplace. Foucault was but one of many voices emanating from the ostensible left championing ‘the disappearance of terrorism, of theoretical monopolies, and of the monarchy of accepted thinking’, one part of which was revolution. Not for nothing had Jean-Paul Sartre said of Michel Foucault, as early as 1966, that he constituted, ‘the last barrier that the bourgeoisie can still raise against Marx’.53
André Glucksmann’s accelerated devolution from a May ’68 militant to an early 1970s member of the Maoist group Gauche Prolétarienne, to the author of the ‘new philosophy’ text The Master Thinkers (1977) which pilloried Marx, Hegel, Fichte, and Nietzsche as architects of the ostensible state-science-reason-knowledge-socialism complex that supposedly prefigured the gulag and the concentration camp, was but the most dramatic individual display of an influential politics indiscriminately congealing the Nazi and Soviet experiences – a position long associated with liberal Cold War repudiations of a rather elastic ‘totalitarianism’. Foucault, as Michael Scott Christofferson has recently argued, played a not insignificant role in shoring up the fortunes of Glucksmann and facilitating the wider drift of this new politics assailing ‘the state-revolution with all its final solutions’ in general.54 If French intellectual life seemed to take longer and more wildly venturesome strides in this direction, across the expanse of ‘critical theory’ in the 1970s and beyond, these positions gained a certain understated credence, lessening Marxism’s appeal. As Stephano Azzara has noted, ‘the victory of neoliberalism can be measured by the degree to which it has been able – sometimes explicitly but more often without anyone realizing it – to penetrate and restructure the vision of its opponents’.55
Bringing revolution and the emancipatory vision of socialist-feminism back in to the theory and practice of the left, reconnecting thinking and struggles with the legacies of 1917 and their longue durée, is thus one component of the contemporary challenge of our times. With neoliberalism so ascendant, continuity between the present of the left and its pasts has not only been broken, but has also in some measure been forgotten. Historical recovery is a small but important part of the renewal of the left. This does not mean repeating the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, condemning our practice and our analysis to remain in the shadows of earlier deficiency. Rather, revolution’s present, like its past, is necessarily subject to the same expansive understandings that have always animated the best in the conceptualization and concrete struggles of those who, like William Morris, imagine their purpose as revolutionaries to be to stir the people up and ‘not to be contented with a little’. We need, in our current times, a reinvigorated left agency, one that will turn the tides of destructive change – which for too long have been crashing humanity’s beleaguered shorelines – in entirely new, and socialist, directions. To do this is to extend the distinctive heritage of 1917, making it resonate with our present.
1Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. ix.
2Régis Debray, Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography, New York: Verso, 2007, p. 75.
3Quotes from E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, New York: Pantheon, 1977, pp. 305, 311.
4E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution’, Out of Apathy, Thompson et al., eds., London: Steeves and Sons, 1960, pp. 302-5.
5We diverge, for instance, on the not inconsequential question of socialist organization. One of us, a socialist-feminist, is more sceptical of Leninist understandings of mobilization, sympathizing with critiques put forward by Sheila Rowbotham and others in the 1970s. The other, a historian of Trotskyism, sides more with Neil Davidson’s recent position that we might do well to take Lenin more seriously. See Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, London: Merlin, 2013 (with new introductions to this third edition by each of the co-authors); Neil Davidson, “Is Social Revolution Still Possible in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 23, 2015, p. 144.
6Eley, Forging Democracy, 188.
7Elizabeth Waters, ‘In the Shadow of the Comintern: The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-43,’ in Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, Marilyn B. Young, eds., Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989, p. 33.
8Kirsten Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, esp. pp. 47-51.
9Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 50.
10Joan Sangster, ‘Robitnystia and the Porcupinism Debate: Reassessing Ethnicity, Gender and Class in Early Canadian Communism,’ Labour/Le Travail, 56(Fall), 2005, pp. 51-89.
11Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB, 1976, p. 20.
12Chad Pearson, ‘Fighting the “Red Danger”: Employers and Anti-Communism,’ in Robert Justin Goldstein, ed., Little ‘Red Scares’: Anticommunism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946, Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 135-64, with quote at p. 143.
13William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 181-272.
14Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960, New York: New York University Press, 2009, pp. 105-41.
15Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement, New York, 1928, pp. 204, 232, quoted in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 453-4.
16Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism; Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, New York: Verso, 2000.
17Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making Of The New Negro, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 7.
18Foley, Spectres of 1919, p. 50.
19Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
20Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” Liberator, 2(July), 1919, p. 21.
21Much of this history can be gleaned from Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Zed Books, 1983.
22See Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, New York: Viking, 2011; Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009.
23R. B. Whitney, Reds in America, New York: Beckwith Press, 1924, p. 189.
24Quoted in Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989, p. 94.
25Bryan D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934, Chicago: Haymarket, 2014.
26Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, London and New York: Verso, 1996.
27There is no better entre to this literary left than Alan Wald’s trilogy: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of a Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007; American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
28Kathleen Brown, ‘“The Savagely Fathered and Un-Mothered” World of the Communist Party, USA: Feminism, Maternalism, and Mother Bloor,’ Feminist Studies, 25(Autumn 1999), p. 539; Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Women and U.S. Literary Radicalism,’ in Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, New York: The Feminist Press, 1987, p. 5.
29Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992, p. 35.
30Olcott, Revolutionary Women, p. 135.
31See, for instance, Peter Worsley, The Third World, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.
32Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World, London: Zed Press, 1979, pp. 133-41.
33Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, London: Verso, 1983, pp. 81-133; Tariq Ali, Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali, New York: New Press, 2005, pp. 15, 28.
34Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order, Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2008; John Rex, “The Meaning of the Accra Conferences,” New Reasoner, 9(Summer), 1959, pp. 84-9.
35Mohan ‘Varieties of African Socialism’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register 1966, London: Merlin, 1966, pp. 228, 232.
36John Saul, ed., A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985, p. 101.
37Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface’, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove, 1966, pp. 7-26.
38Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 14, 197, 235; Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, esp. pp. 30-34.
39Perry Anderson, ‘The Left in the Fifties’, New Left Review, 29(January-February), 1965, p. 12.
40Göran Therborn, ‘From Petrograd to Saigon’, New Left Review, 48(March-April), 1968, pp. 3-11.
41Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
42Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.
43Ernest Mandel, ‘Where is America Going?’ New Left Review, 54(March-April), 1969, pp. 3-16; Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1978, pp. 584-5; Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, New York: New Press, 2010.
44Tamara Deutscher, ‘Voices of Dissent’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register 1978, London: Merlin, 1978, pp. 22-43; Pavel Tomalek, ‘The Student Action’, New Left Review, 53(January-February), 1969, pp. 13-22.
45‘Introduction’, New Left Review, 52(November-December 1968), pp. 1-8.
46Isaac Deutscher, ‘Roots of Bureaucracy,’ in Ralph Milliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register 1969, London: Merlin, 1969, pp. 9-28; Herbert Marcuse, ‘Re-Examination of the Concept of Revolution’, New Left Review, 56(July-August), 1969, pp. 27-34; Isaac Deutscher, ‘1917-1967: The Unfinished Revolution’, New Left Review, 43 (May-June), 1967, pp. 27-39.
47Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, New Left Review, 40(November-December), 1966, pp. 11-37; Quintin Hoare, ‘On Women: The Longest Revolution,’ and Juliet Mitchell, ‘Reply,’ New Left Review, 41(January-February), 1967, pp. 78-83.
48Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, pp. 297-9.
49Judy Bernstein, Peggy Morton, Linda Seese, Myrna Wood, ‘Sisters, Brothers, Lovers . . . Listen,’ in Women Unite! An Anthology of the Canadian Women’s Movement, Toronto: Women’s Educational Press, 1972, pp. 31-9.
50Sheila Rowbotham, Remembering the Sixties, London: Verso, 2001; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, London: Verso, 2002.
51Veronica O’Leary, ed., Québécois Deboutte! Une anthologie de textes du Front de Libération des Femmes (1969-1971) et du Centre des Femmes (1972-1975), Montreal: Rémue-Menage, 1982.
52Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World, London: Penguin, 1972, p. 201.
53Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre répond’, L’Arc, 30, 1966, p. 88, quoted in Michael C. Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free Market Creed, 1976-1979’, in Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism, London: Polity, 2016, p. 25.
54Foucault, ‘Une mobilization culturelle’, Le Nouvelle Observateur, 670(September), 1977, p. 49, quoted in Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism’, p. 38.
55Stephano G. Azzara, L’Humanité commune, Paris: Delga, 2011, p. 12, quoted in Daniel Zamora, ‘When Exclusion Replaces Exploitation: The Condition of the Surplus-Population Under Neoliberalism’, nonsite.org, 10, 2013, p. 24.