Revolution between History and Memory: A Conversation between Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker

July 2, 2024

Revolution between History and Memory: A Conversation between Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker

This is an edited transcription of a conversation held in the context of the Comparative Literature Theory Colloquium on March 8, 2024, at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University.

 

 

Gavin Walker: The idea for this event was to have a dialogue around the themes in Michael’s new book, The Subversive Seventies (2023), which constitutes a powerful resurgence into our memory and political thought of the social movements of the 1970s; in particular the movements more or less adjacent to Marxism, especially the more intense ends of those movements, such as the armed struggle movements. Partly, I think, Michael’s guiding theme in this book was to think about a decade that oftentimes escapes from us under the force of the 1960s. So, this is one of the things that we wanted to do a dialogue around. I did a book just a few years before on the long Japanese ‘68 called The Red Years with Verso, and in this and Michael’s book, we were both trying to think about how to remember these movements, how to think of them in relation to contemporary political thought, and how to not bury them, how to not just entomb them.

I wanted to begin by posing a question for Michael: Could you situate this book within the development of your own work and explain why it took the form it did? Last night I asked Michael whether this was indeed the first book he had written alone, rather than with Antonio Negri, since his first book on Gilles Deleuze, which I read a very long time ago, it seems now. So, I’m wondering if you can situate a little bit for us how this book occurred, why you took it up, why it took the form it did, and how these questions emerged for you.

Michael Hardt: First of all, the anecdotal and personal, which is probably the least interesting. It is true. I’ve written books with Toni for a long time, and writing the first book alone in a long time . . . it’s lonely. I don’t know how the rest of you do that. I was so used to writing with someone else and having that kind of collaborative thing. Maybe the collaboration seems strange to other people, but this solitude seems strange to me. But more to the substance of it, one of the things in this book that’s maybe continuous with the work I did with Toni is the assumption—a very basic one—that there is not a division of labor between activists who act and intellectuals who think, but rather that in movements, activists collectively produce concepts and do theory. And the kind of theory that is done in movements sometimes has to be read differently. It has to be translated, maybe, for the kind of theoretical practice that we do. So that was in some ways, as Gavin said, part of doing this: to talk about a continuity of movements across a decade (which is always a kind of false delimitation) but also internationally (I was trying in the book to read revolutionary movements from as many countries as I could; and Gavin was in fact super helpful for that in the context of Japanese movements), and to think about the concepts they produced. And at that level, there’s a certain kind of continuity, or at least that was the wager: that certain concepts like liberation or autonomy worked not only among movements in different sectors—among feminist movements, gay liberation movements, anti-racist movements, workers movements—but also internationally; that similar concepts emerged and were working together.

The other way would be a making sense of the 1970s, as Gavin said, out of the shadow of the 1960s. There are a number of different ways in how the sixties overshadow the seventies in our popular memory about revolution. One of the things I would say, and this is maybe just an opening claim or hypothesis, is that while the revolutionary movements of the 1960s are important and transformative, they essentially belong to a previous era. And the movements of the seventies are really the beginning of our own. There’s one way you could approach that by looking from the other side—which isn’t the primary focus for me—that the forms of domination born in the 1970s are the ones that we’re still under. Think of all the discourses about neoliberalism beginning in the 1970s, say in ‘73 in Chile or ‘78 with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and so on. Also in economic terms, you can think about the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and about deindustrialization in the dominant countries. You know, these are all ways in which the seventies were a turning point. The real point that seems most important to me is in the movements themselves: the 1970s were posing or recognizing political problems that are still our problems today. And that’s what in some ways intersects with this notion about the production of concepts, you know, that the concepts these movements produced or recognized are still our own. So anyway, you were asking about the continuity from the work with Toni, our collaboration. I think that’s at least part of it.

GW: One other question that I thought would be interesting to pose at the very beginning, just in terms of thinking about the title of the book, is the basic idea that the seventies are subversive. Subversion is a term that has already featured in your work with Toni, and it has a certain aspect coming from his earlier work as well, in texts like Domination and Sabotage, the question of subversion, but subversion rather than revolution, subversion rather than the liberatory seventies, the revolutionary seventies. It’s an interesting choice to choose subversion, because we don’t often think of the sixties necessarily as subversive. We think of the sixties as the expansion of, for instance, the conception of the family, free love, creative energies, all of these things, which are actually quite wholesome. Subversion is not so wholesome. It’s more destructive, almost, a form of refusal in a way. Why the subversive seventies particularly? What’s the chain that links subversion in all of these instances?

MH: You know, it might have been a mistake, but in some ways this is an attempt to recuperate the terms of the enemy, in the same way that “queer” was the kind of transformation of a denigration into an affirmation. I think there was similar work done to translate subversion in the movements of the seventies, because that was another way in which the forms of power were putting everything together. You know, like feminists were subversive and they were seeing subversives everywhere. Anti-racist struggles were subversive. Workers were subversive. This expansive category, which did translate into and function in many different national contexts. So, that kind of reversal. Maybe that would be one way of thinking about it. I mean, in what sense it might be a mistake—I’m not sure that’s the right word—is that subversion itself seems to only point toward the destructive element, like you were saying. Undermining forces, structures of power. And I think that’s super important, but I’m much more interested in the propositional aspects, the construction of new democratic forums. And, in some ways, subversion doesn’t exactly capture that. So, maybe it could be—but it doesn’t have the alliteration, so I’m not sure if I would go with it—the liberational seventies, the revolutionary seventies. Maybe you should have counseled me earlier.

GW: On the other hand, I think it’s interesting that your example about this comes from queer movements, comes from this kind of politics that was emerging in this moment of the seventies. And you have a chapter in the book, a fascinating chapter, on gay liberation and Michel Foucault in particular. I think that there’s something interesting about that turn in Foucault’s work at that moment, something affirmative and not just negative. Foucault’s term for this is “uprising” (soulèvement). This idea that in fact, an uprising can be an uprising of your refusal to integrate into a dominant conception of sexuality, or a sort of refusal to participate in some aspect of the dominant order. And that has a creative or positive aspect, too. It’s not solely negative, in the sense of carving out spaces. I think in some sense, that was an aspect of the more intense kind of refusal that characterized the seventies rather than the sixties. In contrast to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as an emblematic phrase of the sixties, the movements in the seventies kind of tuned in and refused, retaliated, rather than simply dropping out, or in fact took up the gun, as many of your chapters discuss.

MH: One note before going back to the gay liberation movements . . . you know in some ways you can periodize gay liberation in the U.S. strictly from Stonewall to the first case of AIDS. The seventies very much correspond to that phase, at least in the gay liberation movement. But before that—I think we are going to come back to it, and I’m interested in what other people have to say about it—a stumbling block for me in working on this project (and you just brought it up in a way) was that the armed struggles, especially the clandestine armed struggles of the 1970s, were so spectacular that they effectively eclipsed all of the other movements that seem much more interesting to me. And so it’s hard to focus on mass and democratic and creative movements, when the spectacular actions of those clandestine groups were taking up all of the attention. You know, at the time and also in retrospect. In Italy for instance, the 1970s and 1980s are colloquially known as “the years of lead,” a name that only recognizes them as an era of armed struggle and state repression. I think the “lead” is on both sides in that respect. But this eclipses all other movements that I think were much more interesting, involved many more people, and were much more inspiring. So anyway, sorry for these parentheses, and I will come back to the questions about armed struggle or violence or however we should think about it. One of the things that interested me about the discourses at the time and many of the participants in gay liberation movements—I’m thinking of the gay liberation in the U.S., and also in Britain, and then France, a more or less corresponding group—was that they were quite clear that yes, it was about sex. But sex was only a part of it, which meant that the Gay Liberation Front was supposed to be allied with or articulating with the anti-war movement, the workers’ movements, the anti-racist movement. They were very conscious about this. Tragically many of the other groups were not as welcoming of the Gay Liberation Front as the GLF was of them. But that was, I think, the GLF’s notion of a larger political project. Many of you have probably read Foucault’s interview with Gai pied, “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Anyway, it’s one interview he gave about gay liberation as a phenomenon, in which he insists that gay sex is not what really disturbs dominant culture. What really disturbs dominant culture is the new affective life that is being produced in gay communities. And then he makes this list that is reminiscent of the lists in Karl Marx’s early writings, where he lists new forms of camaraderie, friendship, and intimacy, and it’s a very long list of different affects. And what was revolutionary about the gay liberation movements for him was this production of a new social form, you know, a new sensorium. I think with Marx and Foucault, we’re talking about similar things. And I think it explains what interests me here. At a certain point, when he’s trying to explain communism as the positive supersession of private property, Marx says that what will be revolutionized are all of our senses, by which he means the organs through which we engage with the world. And all those organs include smelling, tasting, feeling, but also acting, loving—you know it’s a long list of things.[1] I think that’s very much like what Foucault was thinking about, and what seems to be revolutionary about the gay liberation movements: not just that you could have sex whenever you want with whomever you want. All that is an important part of it, but what is actually transformative is something more than that.

GW: I think that what you just said brings up another set of questions that come up in a number of chapters in your book; such as the articulation between these practices. The term “articulation” itself has a very interesting valence in the 1970s, not only with the Althusserian moment, but also with Stuart Hall’s work, for instance the articulation of modes of production. There is also the question of the articulation between the social movements and theory itself, which has something to do with how your book approaches those social movements, not to simply remember them and thereby seal them into eternity (the discourse of trivia: “the seventies were titillating and full of cool stories”), but rather, to emphasize their actuality today, to remind us that the seventies social movements should bring a certain politics to us now. After all, the questions that they faced and that you touch on are in no way questions that aren’t ours at present. The question of how to live the good life, the question of imperialism, the question of racism, the question of societies structured in domination, etc. So, I wonder also if there is something in those theoretical moves that we associate with the seventies—Hall and the concept of articulation for instance— that also has to do with your method and thinking about this. I’m very interested in trying to do the type of historical work that doesn’t simply say: Let’s list a series of interesting radical alternatives that existed at one time, and then we can simply walk away from it and say, there was once a moment when things were interesting. This is a useless way to treat the sixties or the seventies, or even the eighties—not that people are in a rush necessarily to write this sort of book about the eighties. We’ll talk about that. But I think that question of the articulation between doing theory and doing forms of historical analysis is something really important in your book, because the goal is to think with these social movements, to think with the concepts that they produced.

MH: I want to talk about articulation in a slightly different form. What you’re saying is right and interesting, but let me shift a little bit, and then we will come back to it. What interests me most about this concept of articulation is something I am not taking from the people using this term. For me it derives mostly from U.S. socialist feminists in this period in the late 1970s, who were interpreting or proposing the notion of capitalist patriarchy. And there are two sides to this. On the one hand, to understand capitalist patriarchy, you can’t think of capitalism and patriarchy as two structures of power where one is prior to the other, as if it were capitalism with patriarchal characteristics, or a theory of patriarchy that capital is part of. And there were many debates of course at the time, such as radical feminists maintaining that, of course, patriarchy is much longer lasting, and Marxists of various sorts saying that capital is the dominant form. And then there are Zillah Eisenstein and Iris Young theorizing capitalist patriarchy by saying there can be no priority between the two structures. We have to understand them without thinking of them as a hierarchy for articulation to take place. And similarly, for the movements, the feminist movement and the anti-capitalist movement, the only way for them to articulate is if we understand that it’s not one having priority over the other. I think notions of racial capitalism at the time were similar to that line of thought. And we have to think that way today too. You know, this part of the book might be a silent polemic against the “class-first” reading, or against other notions that grant priority to one structure of domination or one movement over others.

And let me give another example that interested me. It’s essentially the same form, but in a different framework and situated around multiple racializations. I’m thinking here of the well-known Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State University, then at Berkeley, and at City College. It’s a little bizarre because you know they’re all U.S. Americans who call themselves “third world,” but I think what the term “third world” did for them is that it allowed them to think about diverse racializations on equal footing or as an overarching frame. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University was comprised of five student groups: a Black student union, a Latin American student union, a Mexican student group, a Filipino student group, and a Chinese student group. So, as you know, the student strikers demanded the creation of ethnic studies programs, which did happen, and the admission of more students of color, etc. That was the practical side. It seems to me important that the Black students weren’t at the center of it and the others were in some ways junior partners: instead, there was a kind of non-hierarchical construction. I wouldn’t say equality, because equality would assume that there is some sort of measure by which you could say that Black suffering and Mexican American suffering are equal. Well, they’re not equal in any measurable sense. It’s in fact a strategic decision to say that there be no priority. I was also interested, for instance, in the Black Consciousness Movement, how this political concept of blackness developed. There was this fascinating transcript of a trial in which Steve Biko—the most prominent figure within SASO (South African Students’ Organisation) and within the Black Consciousness Movement—was called as an expert witness to explain to this apartheid judge what Black Consciousness was about. And one of the explanations he gave was about what it means to be Black: He starts by saying there is no such thing as a Black policeman. If you’re a policeman, you’re not Black. South Asians, the South African “colored” population, etc., they are Black if they’re part of the movement. So that notion that multiple racializations count as Black, as long as one doesn’t have any priority necessarily among them, is what I would call a political multiplicity, although that’s not their term. Or we can think about it rather through this notion of articulation. In an essay by Young from Women and Revolution[2]—an edited volume which, along with Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, was foundational for socialist feminism in the U.S. at that time—she says essentially that it would be impossible for the movement, impossible for us to organize if we allowed for a priority of one over the other. The notion of articulation that I consider, even if these socialist feminists were not using that term and it is probably different from the Althusserian source, is about the creation of what I’m calling multiplicities, which are formed by the strategic proposal to do away with priority. But I want to emphasize that it is a strategic proposal. It’s not like there’s any empirical basis for this equality, something that you could verify. It’s rather an organizational project that refuses priority and allows for articulation. I think that has a great deal of relevance for certain organizational projects today.

GW: In that sense, the whole discourse on articulation had on the one hand maybe the Althusserian valence, but on the other hand also the one you’re talking about, the refusal of priority as a strategic decision. It’s also a kind of organizational decision, and that type of articulation ties all the way back to the Gramscian discussions on building institutions, counter-institutions, and forms of counter-power that are not simply refusals but are in fact ways to propose a strategic inversion of common sense, of what exists. The Third World Liberation Front did not make these decisions in order to simply self-identify and then sit around and feel very pleased about having no order of priority. They were precisely demands to create counter-institutions that would persist. And so, they were strategic and organizational demands. In that sense, I think, articulation is also an important memory of the social movements in the seventies, which were devoted to that idea of persistent organization rather than simply to single-issue demands that would quickly peter out as forms of organization.

There’s a noteworthy order to your book: the first large chapter is on gay liberation and a chapter shortly after is on liberation theology, a very interesting segue. I think that this element of the 1970s social movements is quite forgotten now, even if it should not be. As far as the history of Marxism is concerned at present, the moment of liberation theology—despite Michael Löwy’s recent meeting with the Pope—has possibly not remained the most topical discussion, but I was very struck in particular by those things you mentioned in your chapter, such as Ernesto Cardenal’s work of reading the Bible together with the Sandinista militants and recording these conversations. Where does the whole question of liberation theology fit into this book? I mean, it’s certainly a type of “subversion” of the church. But where do you see it as something still relevant for us today?

MH: Well, first and parenthetically (I seem to be doing too many of these), it does seem to be about reading the movements of the 1970s from present perspectives. What I’m about to say is a little bit wrong. I’m just warning you. I feel like our political aspirations have been downgraded in the last fifty years, and it has partly to do with the notion of liberation: one of the things that so many different movements at the time share is the idea that liberation is the goal. So, feminist liberation, workers’ liberation, Black liberation, gay liberation, liberation was the end game. And the notion of liberation—which maybe we can talk about later, how I see it differently from emancipation or some other notions of freedom—is a very high aspiration. And in many ways, it seems to me that today—this is the part that’s not exactly right—those aspirations have been downgraded from Black liberation to Black Lives Matter, or from workers’ liberation to $15 minimum wage, or from feminist liberation to gender equality, and from gay liberation to, I don’t know, gay marriage. I think this formulation is not quite right, but one of the things that’s useful to me is to recognize the audacity of liberation. That’s I guess what I want: to recapture, to recognize that audacity and pursue it. So, that was the parenthesis. Back to liberation theology: one of my difficulties was figuring out what to do about the Iranian Revolution. Susan Buck-Morss is right there. Here is what I would say: I think it’s important not to only evaluate movements based on what comes next. One of the things I cite is from the introduction to Robin Kelly’s Freedom Dreams, where he says that “too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves.”[3] I think that’s helpful. That’s a start. I guess I can say a little bit more about what to judge things by later. It seems to me unhelpful to read the revolutionary insurgencies in Iran in the 1970s just with an eye on the Islamic Republic of Iran that came afterwards. There were in some ways two levels of understanding for me: one was to understand how much of a communist presence there was within different groups during those revolutionary struggles in 1970s Iran. And the second one was how much Islamic theological basis there was for many of the groups. In some ways these issues were separated, but many of the groups were both communist and Islamic. I tried using my understanding of the liberation theology in Nicaragua as a kind of standpoint for this. We can easily understand and digest the fact that Christian or Catholic liberation theology travels around Latin America and was a part of the Sandinista revolution, and an Islamic theological intersection with Marxism in a more or less parallel way is happening in Iran at the same time. Maybe that provides a way of understanding. I mean, why don’t we think these two revolutions together? They both are oppositions to autocratic governments that are supported by the U.S. They’re both happening at almost exactly the same time in 1979. They’re both done, like I said, with a deep theological basis in their communist projects. They both feature religious figures who right after the revolution take up office. In the original Sandinista government, there were priests. So why can’t we see this parallel between the two situations more easily? Is it that Catholicism and Islam are so divergent that we can’t understand Islam in this way? That provided me a way of trying to recognize the utopian possibilities that were permeating the different Mujaheddin in Iran in the seventies. And to recognize their force. In some ways it helped me consider the inspirational figure for many of the revolutionaries in Iran, Ali Shariati, who did creatively bring communism and Marxism, or at least a certain notion of communism, together with an innovative interpretation of Shia Islam. He was inspirational for the movement. You mentioned Cardenal—he’s not the intellectual figure that Shariati is—but in some ways you could recognize him as a similar kind of inspirational figure. I am posing as a hypothesis that these movements having a theological basis, having religious foundations, doesn’t make them reactionary. I thought it might help others and maybe help me work through Catholicism. I have no love for Catholicism, let me tell you. But it seemed to help me understand, because I didn’t grow up understanding Islam. In that way it helped me understand or helped me try to argue that we should see the Iranian revolution as a revolutionary uprising, as a project of liberation, as a real project.

GW: I think one of the things that interested me a lot is that one link between those two questions in the 1970s is actually Foucault. Of course, we know that the peculiar reaction he received on writing these famous reports in the Corriere della Sera was: You know nothing about Iran. Why are you bothering to write this? You’re just mystified by a foreign place, and seeing something you don’t understand, and then talking about it. But what was interesting for Foucault’s work, and I think we talked about this a couple of years ago, was his whole discussion of what it was like to experience any kind of uprising. His point was that any sort of uprising was not only a revolution for a goal, for aims, but also a form of uprising as a strategy of the self and as a strategy of becoming open to making other struggles your own. And in some ways the vocabulary that Foucault uses to talk about the Iranian revolution is very similar to the vocabulary he uses when he gives that interview on “Friendship as a Way of Life” in Gai pied, which is a quite odd articulation itself in some ways, but it also shows, in that moment, the generalization of this strategy of uprising, or strategy of subversion. I wondered about the role of Foucault in your book, in fact. Because what strikes me is the role of the late Foucault, or even the middle-period Foucault, so after Discipline and Punish. After 1976, he begins to do the lectures at the Collège de France, the lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, Security, Territory, Population, etc. But then after those lectures in 1979/80, he turns to the subject, an intense shift toward the so-called “care of the self.” And he also comes up with this concept that he says characterizes all of his late work, “political spirituality,” a very interesting term for thinking about the seventies too: forms of commitment, the notion of askesis or having to sacrifice something in order to see something else, having to give up something to become a militant, for instance. What kind of role was Foucault playing in the book for you? Because he pops up a lot in really interesting places in terms of articulating these different struggles to each other.

MH: I was writing a book trying to theorize from the movements, and you keep pulling me back to the theorists! . . . So let’s not come back to Foucault, but more generally think about this concept of political spirituality. Which is the way I understand liberation theology. I understand emancipation to be essentially a process where we transform structures of power. And we get to inhabit a new social structure, although emancipation doesn’t involve a radical transformation of subjectivity. But liberation is in fact not only the transformation of social structures, but a subjective transformation, too. That’s one of the things that Foucault is interested in when he’s observing the events in Iran, the revolutionary process before the victory: the ways in which the religious basis held the promise of a subjective transformation, and the ways in which it would be transformative. It is not as if liberation would finally create the world in which we feel at home. Rather it would make a world in which we, as we are now, are not at home. We’d have to create a new subject for the object, and not in an individual way, where I only have to look into myself, but in a process of collective subjective transformation. I hope that these terms make sense.

GW: In thinking that tension between theorists and the social movements, that’s a very difficult question: how to think the history of the social movements as a form of theory, and how to think what the social movements undertook as the creation of concepts, as you said at the beginning. Part of that goes back to the question of why you chose to locate this study in the seventies, you know, as opposed to the sixties. We tend to associate the sixties now historically with this emergence of new concepts that then determine the rest of our lives for the next sixty years. But I think part of your wager in the book is to say that if we really understand the 1970s social movements, we’ll understand them as forms of theory for us today. If there’s something to be gained from them, it won’t be simply to say that, having read Shariati, we too should also make an articulation between Islam and communism today. It’s more a question of how to think about the creation of concepts for our moment. Can you talk a little bit about this question of reading the social movements as theory? I would say that I even see that as a kind of link going back to Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth and your work with Toni for many years: a form of doing theory under the impact or under the conjunctural force of the social movements.

MH: Yes, that’s true. I guess I have two thoughts on this. So let me try. One is related to the last part of what you said: that’s definitely the way Toni and I thought of our work. I remember I used to say things that Toni actually disliked. Once I was trying to explain in public—this was after our book Empire was published, and Toni criticized me for it—that our book is completely unoriginal; the movements have already thought exactly what we were saying in the book. So, it was after the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the 2001 Genoa G8 protests, and so on. And I said that those who misunderstood the alter-globalization movement were those who saw U.S. imperialism as the sole driving force of the global order. And if they thought that, they should have been at the Pentagon or the White House! But instead, they were experimenting with the networks of new forms of power. The WTO one week, the G8 another week, the World Bank and the IMF yet another week. They were trying to theorize these articulated global structures of power. And so, I thought, well, those movements were working out the same kind of concepts and organizational terms they were also refusing, and I do think this is still true today. Or at least, the movements I’m most excited about are the ones refusing centralized leadership and trying to experiment with new forms of organization that function—horizontally is not really a good word. So, I said that in some ways they were already using the key concepts that Toni and I were working with.

But let me try something else that also comes back to what you were saying at the beginning, because it does have to do with this legacy of theorization. When I finished the manuscript for this book, I showed it to a friend of mine who is older than me. I was alive in the seventies, but I was not politically conscious. I guess some people, some teenagers—I was in junior high school—were politically conscious at that age, but I wasn’t. So I showed it to this friend of mine, who said: “Michael, it was very inspiring and everything, but we lost. All these things you’re talking about, we lost.” And I think that is an important thing to consider. It’s probably true of every single movement I’m talking about in this book. In some way, they lost. In response to his—should I call it criticism? I’m not sure . . .  His response was depression. I thought it was useful to make a distinction between movements that failed and movements that were defeated. And from my perspective, when a movement fails, the failure is based on an internal flaw. And hence, in some ways, it poses a dead end. Whereas movements that are defeated didn’t lose because of an internal flaw. They lost because of a superior exterior force, they were repressed. I would say that defeats are not a dead end, defeats are open to the future, they would in fact pose a kind of platform from which we can start again. This is where I’m coming back to what you were saying. In some ways, it’s the organizational proposition, in some the operations, but in many ways what’s important are the concepts they’re proposing, the political problems they recognize. I would say even that this notion of articulation, which I was trying to explain earlier, is a fundamental political problem. Already in 1977, in the Combahee River Collective’s statement that everyone knows, they say, we are an anti-racist group and a feminist group and we learned also to be anti-imperialist . . . they come with a long list. But the mode of articulation among those things is that they recognized it as a project. And I think it remains our problem still. It’s a real political problem. But those are the things that last going forward, so it’s not just a matter of studying the past for its recovery, but rather recognizing what it does for us today, what can be accomplished with it, how it is still, not just relevant, but vital to what we’re doing.

GW: Right, and regarding that question of failure and defeat, one has to say: Yes, the social movements failed in their ultimate goals of a world liberated from the domination of capital, of imperialism, nobody can possibly say these things have been achieved today. But one of the things that’s interesting in thinking about the history of failures and defeats is also the idea of treating defeats as types of engines or laboratories of the social movements themselves. Even in the case of the Russian question, going back to Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky and so forth, 1905 can be seen as a preparation for 1917. So the notion that defeat is that which follows the event, and the defeat therefore destroys the possibility of the event, is only one way of seeing it. One can also see defeat as the pre-evental, in the sense of being a defeat that structures a new politics. I think that your book also does something very interesting with these social movements in not simply recounting them and saying in exhaustive detail “so-and-so undertook this action,” as if this would give us something meaningful we could use today, rather than just trivia. Instead, you really show us this question of what defeat can teach us, how defeat can be a laboratory of concepts, a laboratory of thought, a laboratory of practices and articulations as experiments. The thing about articulations is that they may work, and they may fail. Not everything can be easily articulated to something else. Anybody who has experience organizing in anything knows that very often you try to put people from antithetical directions together, and not only does it not work, it destroys everything. But reading these struggles’ conjunctures of strategy, tactics inverts the division between the history of the movements and the theory of this work. That aspect is one of the most interesting things to me. I wanted to—not to draw you back to the theorists, of course!—but I wanted to go back to perhaps the most basic of all historical problems in some ways, which is periodization. What’s interesting about the division you trace is that many of the 1970s movements were reactions to the earlier laboratory of defeat, which was ‘68, globally speaking, the expanded ‘68. Immanuel Wallerstein, after all, famously considered 1968 to be the first truly global revolution after 1917. What does it mean for us today if we’re now living in the wake of the 1970s rather than the wake of that epochal moment that was ’68?

MH: Let me refer to one specific thing I want to bring into the discussion. This is on my mind in terms of what you’re saying, and I think it is a key question, at least when studying the political arc of the 1970s in the dominant countries. It was the decade when the industrial workers’ movement was transformed or defeated, through automation, through the outsourcing of production, and other means of destroying union activity. The question for me is whether we regard that as a tragedy or as an opportunity. And this is what interested me about many of the movements in the seventies: they recognize the end of the centrality of the industrial workers’ movement as an opportunity. In the U.S. and in Europe (Argentina is much more complicated because of the violence and dictatorship), prior to the undermining of the workers’ movement, there was a widespread idea that the industrial workers were the center of gravity of revolutionary struggle, so that other groups, students, professors, and others would line up behind the projects of the industrial workers. We were talking earlier about the 2023 film L’Établi (The Assembly Line) about students in France going to the factories. This happened. In the U.S., within socialist movements and many workers’ movements, from the 1930s onward questions were raised about race and gender, but most often posed as “the woman question” or “the race question” within the movement, still in some ways subordinated to the industrial workers’ struggle. In Italy, this was theorized as the end of the centrality of the industrial worker, the end of the idea that the industrial worker could lead the entire proletariat or the entire social process in a process of liberation. The movements that interest me viewed this not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity to try to organize this kind of articulation that I’ve been talking about. One of the things that I find very inspiring in Italy at the end of the seventies, although it is taking place in an atmosphere of very strong repression, was the attempt to construct networks between industrial workers’ movements and other sectors of the working class and feminist movements, gay liberation movements (not yet really with migrant movements), and trying to transform the possibility of revolutionary struggle.

For me, it’s a way of discussing class-first perspectives today. In some ways, it’s a varied field, I suppose, with at least two things going on. One is the possibility of reinstating the working class, now of course transformed, as once again the leading edge of a struggle that other movements can be somehow folded into. This would require a recognition about how the working class has changed and how that kind of struggle unfolds. Maybe this would be the summary point: there’s a certain nostalgia I would like to map, a nostalgia for the period when the working class and particularly the industrial working class could be the leading force. And I think what this nostalgia is for is a type of political clarity, a moment when we knew exactly what side we were on. This was my reaction to the French film I was just talking about, L’Établi, that produces a kind of nostalgia for the factory as the center of the movement. And in fact, what’s characteristic of the seventies is that politics is messy. In some ways, it’s almost impossibly troubled and so there isn’t that kind of political clarity, that’s impossible. But I think that’s a good thing actually, having to struggle with the difficulty of how a queer movement articulates with an anti-racist movement, and how both of these articulate with an anti-capitalist movement. Some of the movements in the 1970s were confronting this problem and I think it’s definitely still a problem of our own time.

GW: One thing that just occurred to me in those chapters on the workers’ movements in the book is also this question of how much the seventies workers’ movements suddenly had to adapt and change, particularly in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, in parts due to the force of this enormous change in the 1950s. We can think of the discourse of the Regulation School on the category of embourgeoisement, the idea that in fact the industrial working class was experiencing unprecedented wealth and security, which lead to the investment of the worker in the continuity of the firm. And this was seen as something that has to be politically negotiated. Of course, by the seventies, and especially now in the long historical view, we see the 1970s as the moment when all those hard-won gains of the workers’ movement were being emptied out. There was no longer a kind of embourgeoisement, but the precise opposite: a kind of reproletarianization of the working class. But I wanted to ask you to expand a little bit on that in terms of the question of articulation, and the composition of the working class in relation to the 1970s. What role do you see there for the possibility, the lessons of the 1970s, in terms of class composition for us today, or more specifically, the direction so associated with the history of operaïsmo and your own work on that expanded notion of class composition?

MH: You’re certainly right about that. And maybe we could say that it is another way of viewing this transformation. The attack on the industrial labor force in the 1970s was an opportunity rather than a tragedy. Because it does force us to think about what the working class is, and think it differently, in the sense that the class as a whole can’t be represented purely by industrial labor, even if in some sectors it functioned that way previously. Of course, the composition of the working class has changed since then. But already then the recognition was that industrial workers are not capable, not only of not leading, but also not representing the diversity within the class itself. I hope it is clear that, even when I’m making an argument against certain clusters of positions, I’m certainly arguing for the reconstruction of class struggle. It’s not an abandonment of class struggle on my part.

GW: The other thing that has come up already is this kind of question of how the armed movements, the armed struggle organizations, eclipsed so many other claims of the 1970s social movements. And yet the armed struggle movements were an extremely important part of this story and an important part of your book. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, the seventies as this season of political violence?

MH: When I was trying to work on this project, for many months that was the only thing I could write about, and I threw all that out because it was terrible. It distorted and prevented me from studying things that were much more interesting. But one can’t just ignore it. And the kind of groups I’m thinking of are the Weather Underground and some very interesting Japanese groups that you helped me understand, like the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front. But then of course the more well-known ones too: the Japanese Red Army Faction, the German Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades in Italy, a number of others. And there are a few things I would say about them, just as an introduction. To begin with, working on them, I feel like I understood better a common motivation of these groups, one that was driven by a moral indignity about the impunity of the state and its crimes. I think that’s something that all of them share. So, for instance, the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front, like many other groups, carried out a series of bombings, but they were meant to be pedagogical bombings. They acted like the conscience of the nation. They wanted to force the Japanese population to recognize what the Japanese state had really done, the colonization in Korea or ongoing celebration of war criminals. So, they would bomb monuments to raise awareness of the colonization in the North, for instance, as if each bombing was a kind of lesson in national history. And in some ways, the Weather Underground did a similar thing. After George Jackson’s death, they bombed the Bureau of Prisons in California; after Attica they bombed the Bureau of Prisons in New York, after the Chilean coup they bombed ITT. You get the idea. You know, for them, it was about the war in Vietnam and about racism, and anti-blackness in the U.S. They thought that they could teach the U.S. population. I think that’s also true, maybe in a different way, with the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades and other groups. There’s a certain kind of motivation that I understand, but I think they were mistaken in the possibilities. Because of their necessarily clandestine structure, they were separated from the kind of education that happens collectively in movements. They were separated from that field and couldn’t keep up with the way the movements were developing. They spun out of control precisely because they weren’t embedded in the movements, and they couldn’t be because they had to be clandestine. They made that choice; or rather, were forced to make that choice. Something we haven’t talked about at all are the forms of repression in the seventies that created a lot of these situations. But in any case, in some ways, these armed groups still function as emblematic of the era. So, I can’t get out from under them. But I still think one should try to hold them at a distance in order to see the movements that seem much more interesting to me. Because I don’t see those versions of armed struggle as things that can continue today.

In order to make it not a question just about violence or non-violence, it was important for me to give other examples of groups that were armed in self-defense, but still managed, through a kind of dual organization, to continue social and democratic projects on the one hand and have armed defense of the community on the other. The example that everyone will know about is the Black Panther Party and its well-known breakfast programs, the free clinics, etc., on the one hand, and of course armed defense of the community on the other. And I’ve been interested in similar kinds of party structures in Italy and Turkey. And those are things we can see today: in Chiapas, the Zapatista army certainly is an army. It’s not a super developed army, but they have a dual organization with much more focus on their community structures. But also, I would say in Rojava, in Syrian Kurdistan. They have no choice but to defend themselves with arms, and they manage nonetheless to continue innovative democratic projects at the same time. I think it’s not a question about violence versus non-violence. It’s about the modes that are necessary in certain situations.

GW: So just in conclusion, while not wanting to get us in big trouble for ending on the concept of “pedagogical bombing,” I wanted to ask you: Gilles Lipovetsky and Paul Yonnet famously said that the seventies’ motto was “everything now,” while the eighties’ was “nothing indefinitely.” What ended the subversive seventies?

MH: Maybe it’d be different in different sectors, but one of the most important things to think about are precisely these different forms of repression and how they were enacted in different countries. Just thinking about Italy, where they did not only pass emergency laws by which people could be held for two years without being charged, four years without coming to trial. They also constructed separate political prisons, had many thousands arrested and put in these prisons. That’s an efficient way to end a movement. And the forms of repression in the U.S. were different, but nonetheless effective. It’s not the only explanation for the end, of this way of conceiving a decade. But it’s an important one.

 

Notes

[1] See the section on “Private Property and Communism” in Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 293–306, in particular 299–300.

[2]  Young, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage.”

[3] Kelly, Freedom Dreams, ix.

 

Works Cited

Hardt, Michael. The Subversive Seventies. London: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Kelly, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart, Progress Publishers, and International Publishers, 1975.

Walker, Gavin, ed. The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68. London: Verso, 2020.

Young, Iris. “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage.” In Women and Revolution, edited by Lydia Sargent, 43–71. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981.