In Solidarity, Steve Striffler addresses these key questions, offering the first history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the present day. Striffler traces the history of internationalism through the Cold War, exploring the rise of human rights as the dominant current of international solidarity. He also considers the limitations of a solidarity movement today that inherited its organisational infrastructure from the human rights movements.
Moving beyond conventionally ahistorical analyses of solidarity, here Striffler provides a distinctive intervention in the history of progressive politics in both the US and Latin America, the past and present of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the history of human rights and labour internationalism.
In Solidarity, Steve Striffler addresses these key questions, offering the first history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the present day. Striffler traces the history of internationalism through the Cold War, exploring the rise of human rights as the dominant current of international solidarity. He also considers the limitations of a solidarity movement today that inherited its organisational infrastructure from the human rights movements.
Moving beyond conventionally ahistorical analyses of solidarity, here Striffler provides a distinctive intervention in the history of progressive politics in both the US and Latin America, the past and present of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the history of human rights and labour internationalism.
Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights
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Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights
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Overview
In Solidarity, Steve Striffler addresses these key questions, offering the first history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the present day. Striffler traces the history of internationalism through the Cold War, exploring the rise of human rights as the dominant current of international solidarity. He also considers the limitations of a solidarity movement today that inherited its organisational infrastructure from the human rights movements.
Moving beyond conventionally ahistorical analyses of solidarity, here Striffler provides a distinctive intervention in the history of progressive politics in both the US and Latin America, the past and present of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the history of human rights and labour internationalism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745399195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2019 |
| Series: | Wildcat |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
US Empire, Anti-Imperialism, and Revolution
From the beginning of the 1800s through the early 1900s anti-imperialism was the driving force within (progressive) us-based internationalism in relation to Latin America. The prominent, mainstream, version of this current was rooted primarily in a liberal political class that associated imperialism with Europe and foreign colonies. Understood this way, us politicians, sectors of the intelligentsia, and the core of an emerging labor movement opposed those who pushed for us empire. They were "anti-imperialist" in that they wanted Europe out of what was increasingly seen as an "American" hemisphere, and that they were opposed to the United States establishing its own overseas colonies.
This current was itself quite differentiated. Some felt us military intervention was a betrayal of us history and democratic values, while others grounded their opposition in a broad commitment to peace. For still others, opposition to overseas colonies was rooted in more reactionary motives, like not wanting to incorporate "tropical peoples" into the nation-state because either they would dilute the genetic pool or they could never be assimilated. Despite internal differentiation, this opposition nevertheless mobilized against proponents of empire who pushed for a stronger us military presence overseas.
This was an oddly imperial form of anti-imperialism which was by and large not internationalist, was often racist and paternalistic, rarely engaged in active solidarity with Latin Americans, and typically worked from an understanding of imperialism that was defined primarily in terms of us military intervention. Assuming that the United States had fundamentally good intentions, and that the overall presence of the United States in the region was benevolent, mainstream anti-imperialism generally took it for granted that the United States should intervene in all sorts of ways that extended American power in the region. If the United States simply refrained from establishing foreign colonies and kept rogue corporate actors in check, a greater American presence in the hemisphere would be good for the United States and Latin America.
A more radical anti-imperialism also emerged during this period, however, and in some ways predated its mainstream counterpart. Revolutionary or emancipatory internationalism shared in the opposition to us intervention, but pushed anti-imperialism to the left in two important respects. First, it tended to define imperialism not only in terms of us military intervention, but as a larger system of oppression that negatively impacted people in both Latin America and the United States. How that oppression was understood — in racial, class, or antidemocratic terms (or some combination) — could vary, but it was seen as central to how the United States operated at home and abroad. Second, the revolutionary current also tended to be more internationalist in the sense of understanding the fight against imperialism as a collective project to be carried out with allies in Latin America. Overall, then, what this meant is that revolutionary anti-imperialists began to see themselves as advancing a collective project to transform the world.
Chapter 1 begins and ends with revolution and revolutionary internationalism. As a world event that ushered in the 1800s, the Haitian revolution generated an international solidarity which recognized that global processes of colonialism and slavery had profoundly shaped the world, and that people living in very different places had all seen their lives negatively disrupted by forces and people of European origin. In the United States, this internationalist impulse was often led by African Americans who suggested that people of African descent throughout the world, and colonized peoples more broadly, could engage in a collective struggle to radically transform the world. Such visions sought to deepen and extend notions of freedom and liberation associated with the French and American revolutions.
After the us civil war, this us-based internationalism — rooted in anti-colonial, anti-slavery solidarity — channeled its energy towards Cuba's decades-long struggle for independence during the second half of the 1800s. Seeing the end of slavery in the United States as but one step in a broader struggle, sectors of African Americans helped coordinate international support for Cuban rebels. They advocated against direct us intervention, which they suspected would lead the United States to occupy the island and impose a Jim Crow style of rule on the Cuban people. They argued instead that Cubans were more than capable of repelling the Spanish by themselves if given material aid. Likewise, although sectors of the broader left were initially skeptical of the Cuban struggle because of the support it received from more mainstream actors in the United States, they too eventually became some of Cuba's strongest supporters.
The attraction of the Cuban struggle went well beyond African Americans and the left, however, and produced a more moderate anti-imperialism which was pushed by a broad range of politicians, intellectuals, pacifists, religious leaders, labor organizations, and the like. This differentiated current supported Cuban independence from Spain for a multiplicity of reasons, including to advance us business interests on the island. The use of us troops to push the Spanish out and control Cuba was debated, and solidarity with Cuban rebels was understood in fairly instrumental terms. All of this was shaped by widespread support throughout us society for Cuban freedom from Spanish rule.
By the start of the 1900s, Marx's growing presence was felt as revolution swept over Mexico, and along with it a radical, cross-border, labor solidarity rooted in socialist and anarchist traditions. Here, like Haiti, international solidarity with Mexico was an avenue for developing a revolutionary praxis that saw collective struggle as a path not simply for replacing governments, but for restructuring society. That revolutionary solidarity emerged in a border region defined by the conspicuous presence of us capital and a particularly aggressive and exploitative form of economic development is not entirely surprising.
The point here is not that solidarity during this period was deep or wide, evolving neatly in any particular direction, or somehow more ideologically pure or radical than what came later. It was that not only did mainstream anti-imperialism keep more aggressive calls for a colonial empire in check, but forms of revolutionary internationalism began to emerge and promote transformational political projects, visions, and agendas. Such projects were, to be sure, incomplete, inconsistent, and muddled on a number of levels, but they nonetheless assumed that the world should be ordered in fundamentally different ways. They were political not simply in the sense of being partisan, or in the recognition that power and wealth were unequally distributed, but in that they were implicitly or explicitly grounded in collective notions of liberation that would usher in a new world.
Global Inequality, Global Solidarity
The massive global inequalities produced by colonialism, slavery, and the industrial revolution generated ideas and movements about human equality and justice, about the place of collective action in transforming society, and about what solidarity across borders might look like in a modern world. Part of what made these issues so urgent, and part of what made the modern world so revolutionary in terms of creating inequality and challenging it, was that colonialism, slavery, and industrialization all worked to draw or force millions of people out of traditional societies. Modern forces ruptured these worlds in profound ways, disrupting rural societies that had their own inequalities and hierarchies, but that nonetheless often possessed quite distinct worldviews and forms of social organization which led people to openly challenge the new reality of global empires, capitalist expansion, and violent displacement on ever-increasing scales.
The formation of the United States was itself very much part of this broader process of imperial reach, colonial expansion, and violent dislocation. The us government shifted from treating Native American tribes as foreign entities and signing treaties with them, to incorporating them as domestic subordinates. African Americans went from being excluded from citizenship to being granted it, but in compromised ways. Latin America shifted from colonial status to independence, with northern Mexico subsequently being incorporated into the United States, creating a new population of second-class citizens and semi-incorporated Native American groups. All of these processes and policies, in turn, created opportunities for solidarity between allies within the United States and colonized, incorporated, and/or enslaved peoples within and around the emerging nation-state.
In this sense, although international solidarity — as solidarity among people of different countries or nation-states — could not be based in the United States prior to 1776, the formation of the United States itself generated opposition that created opportunities for transnational solidarity between colonized peoples and sympathetic colonizers (or between slaves and white allies). Put another way, the earliest examples of us-rooted "solidarity" that proposed a different form of social organization, and linked those inside and outside of the United States against empire, were those connected to Africans and Native Americans before and after 1776. Those who opposed the policies and practices of imperial expansion and slavery were (at times) challenging the very basis of the emerging nation-state, and/or listening to voices within Native-American and slave communities that offered alternative visions of organizing society.
The extent and nature of such solidarity can, of course, be easily overstated. The widespread belief in white superiority, and a deeply entrenched paternalism, made forging real solidarity between white allies and Native Americans or enslaved people extremely challenging during this period. In the case of Native Americans, it was not really until after western expansion had been essentially completed, and most Native Americans massacred through genocidal campaigns, that much in the way of "solidarity" emerged. And even then, reformers held a wide range of perspectives, with some advocating that (the remaining) Native Americans should be sovereign and independent, and others pushing for assimilation, education, and enhanced rights within the system. Either way, it was generally assumed that "Indians" needed to be civilized and their societies rehabilitated through the introduction of Christianity or other modernizing projects. Likewise, white abolitionists also framed their work with slaves in quite varied, but often paternalistic, ways which generally assumed white superiority.
Free blacks and enslaved Africans, by contrast, consistently challenged these views, arguing that the American revolution itself should deliver freedom to all. Indeed, it was in many ways among free blacks in the United States during this revolutionary period that the seeds of a black internationalism rooted in the idea of universal emancipation were planted. What emancipation would look like was not always agreed upon and would evolve over time, in part because its religious and secular foundations could be quite varied, but it often went well beyond abolition to include liberation for colonial and oppressed peoples the world over.
Haiti
The first instance of us-based solidarity across international borders within the Americas occurred not long after 1776, and was sparked by the Haitian revolution. The Haitian revolution (1791–1804) was a struggle by blacks to overthrow colonialism/slavery and claim full citizenship before a world audience. As such, it inspired and actively fomented rebellion and revolution across the hemisphere. It was also an early precursor to post-Second World War anti-colonial movements which took revolutionary nationalism in internationalist directions.
us-based attempts at solidarity with Haiti were constrained, in part by the difficulty of travel during this period, and in part because white reaction to the Haitian revolution was defined largely by fear and horror. The threat posed by the revolution to slavery and colonialism, the bulwarks of European and us power and wealth, made it intolerable. Indeed, one response to Haiti was what Ashli White called "transatlantic racial solidarity," a counter-revolutionary solidarity, as whites in the United States raised funds and tried to help refugees fleeing the revolution. Most "white observers saw Haiti as a place of equality perverted and run amok." Mainstream opinion, fueled by stories of black violence from white refugees fleeing Haiti, confirmed the idea that blacks "were a separate and degraded people" who could not possibly manage an economy, much less run a country or develop a functioning civil society. For its part, the us government would not recognize Haiti's independence until 1862.
For many blacks, however, Haiti served as a revolutionary inspiration, and it is here — in the early expressions of what we came to think of as black liberation — that the modern origins of a revolutionary solidarity within the Americas can be found. As Michael West and William Martin argue:
For the black international, the events in Saint Domingue were iconic. The Haitian Revolution represented a culmination of decades of armed struggle by enslaved Africans in the Atlantic world, even as it heralded exciting new developments in the black quest for universal emancipation. Like no other event before or since, the Haitian Revolution electrified African-descended people all over the Americas, the enslaved majority along with the nominally free minority. Haiti became the bellwether of black freedom in the Atlantic world, albeit one that would not be replicated, although not for want of trying. Haiti's symbolic value to black internationalism was a primary reason for the hostility and isolation it faced from slaveholders and white powers everywhere.
Haiti inspired by example, contributing to rebellious impulses in the United States in the form of the Pointe Coupee Conspiracy in Louisiana (1795), Gabriel Prosser's revolt in Virginia (1800) and Denmark Vesey's rebellion in Charleston (1822). The Haitian revolution's anniversary and heroes were celebrated by African Americans throughout the 1800s, allowing them to connect "the fate of their own freedom with emancipation of people in Latin America and the Caribbean." As Frederick Douglass told an audience at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Haiti was "the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century." For sectors of African Americans, anti-slavery and anti-imperialism were deeply intertwined, and animated a collective struggle for an expansive vision of liberation.
Although broader solidarity was severely constrained by the fact that Haiti terrified most whites, there were a few white abolitionists who recognized and applauded the revolutionary potential of Haiti, seeing it as part of a longer democratic push. In a series of three essays entitled "The rights of black men," Abraham Bishop of Connecticut offered support for the Haitian rebels which prefigured many of the arguments of later-day solidarity movements, including an interesting blend of secular and religious ideas. "Like a handful of other antislavery advocates," historian Tim Matthewson writes, Bishop "sympathized with the antislavery thrust of the Haitian revolution because he saw it as part of the great global revolution which began in 1776 and would soon sweep away the last vestiges of barbarism and slavery." Bishop began by justifying the need for armed struggle on the part of the slaves. "They are asserting those rights by the sword which it was impossible to secure by mild measures." Abolitionists, Bishop claimed, were hypocrites if they failed to extend support to revolutionary Haiti. Important as such dissident voices were in articulating a more radical form of liberation, Bishop and fellow abolitionist Theodore Dwight were rather lone voices among us whites.
Latin American Wars for Independence and the US Invasion of Mexico
The Latin American wars for independence from Spain were understood in a more positive light by most people in the United States than was the Haitian revolution. Although Haiti continued to trouble, the universal ideals of freedom and democracy that the United States was theoretically founded upon continued to inspire, and were the lens through which Latin American independence was understood during the period from 1810 to 1825. As Caitlin Fitz has so ably documented, people in the United States not only paid considerable attention to Latin American independence, but "took republicanism's southward spread as a complement to themselves, seeing it as proof that their own ideals really were universal." In celebrating Latin American independence, then, Americans were celebrating themselves.
(Continues…)
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