The “new left” that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s was inspired by the multiple struggles for liberation from colonial rule that broke out in the post-war period and by other revolutionary movements outside the industrialized West. From Algeria to Vietnam, from Cuba to China, could the global struggle against imperialism provide the redemption that the Western proletariat were rejecting?
There was—and is—a lot riding on this struggle. If these liberation movements failed, were co-opted or ossified, who else was there to turn to, given that the Western proletariat was usually a dead loss? This desperate hope has meant that it has been very difficult to face up to inconvenient realities of what these liberation movements really consisted of or turned into. Too often, the heroic liberation fighter became a repository for Western fantasies and desires. Those, like Sartre, who found hope in Maoism found it difficult or impossible to confront the atrocities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The undemocratic outcomes of revolutionary regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are explained as the result of their continuing imperialist subversion. The kleptocracies that were born out of decolonialization in Africa are received similarly, or in embarrassed silence. Desperately, selected Islamist movements are treated as if they are anti-imperialists with unfortunate rhetoric in the “red-green” alliances that were forged in the 2000s. So strong are the hopes that there is precious little recognition that, while imperialism exists and must be opposed, those at the sharp end of revolutionary transformations are not simply the creatures of Western leftist fantasies.
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