Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights (Wildcat) - Softcover

Striffler, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745399193 ISBN 13: 9780745399195

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

How and why has solidarity changed over time? Why have particular strategies, tactics, and strands of internationalism emerged or re-emerged at particular moments? And how has solidarity shaped the history of the US left in particular? 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Striffler is the Director of the Labor Resource Center and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He is the author of Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights (Pluto, 2018), and In the Shadows of State and Capital (Duke, 2002).

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Solidarity

Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights

By Steve Striffler

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2019 Steve Striffler
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-9919-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 US Empire, Anti-Imperialism, and Revolution, 21, 
2 The Caribbean under US Occupation, 45, 
3 The Cuban Revolution and the Cold War, 71, 
4 South American Dictatorships and the Rise of Human Rights, 94, 
5 Central American Solidarity in Reagan's America, 125, 
6 NAFTA, Fair Trade, and Globalization, 143, 
7 Zapatistas and Global Justice, 165, 
8 Corporate Campaigns and Sweatshop Activism, 181, 
Conclusion, 202, 
Notes, 209, 
Index, 231, 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745399193
• ISBN 13: 9780745399195
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland