In 1974, a collective of Surinamese migrants in the Netherlands took to squatting in an effort to break out of their deplorable housing situation. When faced with evictions, the squatters employed a variety of protest tactics, ranging from nonviolent marches and sit-ins to anti-capitalist songs and the forging of ties with the Dutch new left. This article examines the protest repertoire employed by these ‘Bijlmer squatters’—named after the neighbourhood in which they occupied a flat—and analyzes through which tactics this collective managed to increase its political clout in the face of exploitation and political voicelessness. The article does so by building on recent reinterpretations of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of political voicelessness, or ‘subalternity,’ and by bringing together developments in global history, history from below and social movement studies. After examining how the squatters adapted civil rights-style nonviolent tactics in their dealings with Dutch officials, the article scrutinizes the four types of solidarity that the squatters fostered behind the front line. The article concludes that the squatters’ locally specific reconfiguration of globally circulating tactics, combined with their efforts to construct political alliances, helped the movement in gaining political agency, even if the squatters’ situation was still largely determined by Dutch political ruling classes.
In 1956, a group of young Turkish poets and writers staged a public protest at Istanbul’s Tepebaşı Drama Theater. The protest against the literary establishment was later portrayed as a communist insurgence by the mainstream press. This article discusses the significance of the protest and its aftermath, and explores the importance of the Cold War context in understanding its long-term consequences regarding Turkish cultural and political history. While the cultural Cold War studies mostly focus on the centre, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and tend to reduce the Cold War’s cultural impact on the periphery to propaganda wars, this article argues that the Cold War’s repercussions on peripheral cultures are more nuanced than the conventional narratives. The public reception of the Tepebaşı Drama Theater protest is an illustrious example of the tensions between culture and ideology on the periphery during the Cold War era.
This article describes the history of the origins of the important principle of autogestion (autogestion in French, autogestión in Spanish, generally self-management in English) and straightening its often-confused origin story. Based in an examination of mid-twentieth century French scholarship, journals, and political documents, this article argues that the term did not arise out of Yugoslavia of the 1950s, or the French student movement of 1968, but from a collective of Algerian revolutionaries at the point of Algeria’s independence 1962-1965. Furthermore, the article corrects some English translations of the word in historical documents that have further confused its history and had an impact on how the principle was adopted in the English-speaking world. The origin of the term is important because within its grammar is the most important shift in leftist social movements of the twentieth century: the shift from “worker” or “peasant” as the revolutionary subject to a variety of collective selves in the “new” identity-based social movements of the 1960s and beyond. To recuperate autogestion’s origins as North African is to recuperate a portion of the importance of Global South activists and political thinkers to the 1968 student movements that have been so defining of our contemporary political landscape.
In the quarter century before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, German Social Democrats engaged in strenuous disputes about the most effective forms of political action. Central to this debate was the question of the utility of the “political mass strike,” a widespread work stoppage intended to achieve a political rather than an economic end, and potentially also to heighten workers’ consciousness of their political power. An aspect of the mass strike debate that has received less systematic attention is the role of anti-anarchist rhetoric, in particular regarding the “general strike,” in shaping the development of this intra-party conflict. Throughout the mass strike debate, German Social Democrats frequently came to explain their own ideology through the prism of their antipathy to anarchism. In associating the political mass strike with the anarchist general strike, Social Democratic reformists stigmatized the radicals in their own ranks who advocated the cultivation of workers’ revolutionary sentiments. On the other side, proponents of the political mass strike, such as Rosa Luxemburg, accused party moderates of succumbing, like anarchists, to a bourgeois mindset. Thus, throughout the Social Democrats’ mass strike debate, the accusation that one’s opponents adhered to an anarchist deviation from correct Marxist thought served as a tool to delegitimize their perspective. Insisting on the complete irrationality and folly of anarchists, and attributing to Socialist opponents those same failures, made the conflict sharper and more acrimonious, and less amenable to resolution, as it went to core issues of socialist identity.
