This article is the introduction to a new History Workshop series called ‘Radical Horizons’. Over the next month, we will be publishing a number of articles on how various radical and internationalist traditions have attempted to overcome forms of domination and build alternative emancipatory futures.
What kinds of histories and stories might be useful for political struggle today – for radical and progressive social movements and for the huge crowds of people who want to overcome the enormous challenges we face? Our moment is one of deep crisis – genocide, authoritarian populism, neofascism, colonialism, wars and ecological destruction threaten humanity. One way to understand this moment is as an interregnum, a dark transitional period in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, to borrow the words of the Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Belief in the old world’s ruling order is lost, and ‘morbid’ symptoms arise. But rather than succumb to despair, we have to find ways to mobilise towards alternative horizons: to insist on envisioning and bringing into being, through struggle, other possible worlds.
I posed the question above to several scholars and activists working on the histories of a variety of radical and internationalist traditions. These traditions – from student movements to trans and disabled people’s liberation – are often studied within the boundaries of particular fields, historical periods, or geographical contexts. This series, by contrast, brings different examples together as part of a larger history of popular struggle. It asks: how have activists and movements attempted to overcome forms of domination using the ideas and tools available to them? How might insights about the past help us to not only make sense of the present, but to think constructively about the future?
This line of questioning is formed in the spirit of the expansive, boundary-pushing approaches to doing history from below of the History Workshop movement, led by the British New Left in the 1960s. History Workshop Journal has long championed ‘new ways of thinking about history’ to extend the boundaries of historical practice, often rooted in contemporary political concerns. For example, one early project of the movement was local history workshops, led in an effort to democratise historical knowledge away from academic gatekeepers. But a challenge was the issue of the often inward-looking, conservative and essentialising narratives associated with ‘local’ history. In a 1995 issue of the journal, radical geographer Doreen Massey powerfully argued that competing interpretations about the pasts of specific places serve to legitimise particular understandings of the present, in order to shape the future of what is to come. A closed-minded parochialism could be interrupted, and ‘progressive’ understandings of place prompted, by recognising how long histories of global interconnectedness shape the identity of any particular ‘local’ place.
In my doctoral research and current book project, I have found that a rethinking of both space and time can open up new possibilities for radical histories not just from below, but for below. I draw on the broader ideas of Massey, who showed us that space is open-ended, not bounded, and always becoming – the product of social relations and interactions constantly being remade. For the future to be open to new political possibilities, our understanding of time must also be open-ended, neither fixed nor determined.
To me, this means that in studying past social movements and struggles, rather than simply writing them (and their often defeats and failures) into the historical record, we focus not merely on what happened, but on what could have been. We should examine the past for the ways in which activists have attempted to overcome forms of domination and trace the other possible worlds they strove towards, even if they did not reach their intended outcomes. This approach to history resists the foreclosure of the radical horizons and utopian futures once envisioned and fought for. It insists on reactivating the ‘unrealised emancipatory potential’, in the words of intellectual historian Gary Wilder, of the progressive alternatives within internationalist projects that did not come to be. How might recovering the threads of potential and possibility in such projects be repurposed for our own roads towards emancipatory horizons?
In my work on Iran’s radical left in the 1960-70s, narratives of failure and defeat are found in many of the recollections, memoirs and studies written by former activists and scholars. To a large extent, these views have been shaped by the outcome of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which led to the decimation of the left by the post-revolutionary nation state. As I show in my research, studying the Iranian left in a transnational and global frame allows us to move beyond these conservative narratives. It lets us see their ideas and activities as part of a global story – shaped by the student radicalism of the 1960s, the rise of a global New Left, and the armed national liberation struggles across Asia, Africa and Latin America. More than this, I argue that it is necessary to search for the recoverable horizons of political possibility in this ultimately defeated past, which I locate in the forging of transnational connections between Iran’s new left and the Arab anticolonial revolutions of the 1960-70s.
Throughout the 1960s, a new generation of Iranian students and activists searched for a way out of the political deadlock and dictatorship in Pahlavi Iran. Most were students and intellectuals who had become disillusioned with the inertia of the old left, the communist Tudeh Party. Shaped by the global zeitgeist, many turned to armed struggle. A nascent new left formation of Iranian activists looked to the discourse and praxis of the transnational political project of Third Worldist national liberation – travelling to Algiers, Cairo, Havana and Beijing in search of possibilities for training and resources. In the Middle East, the core of the Third Worldist project for universal emancipation was the Palestinian national liberation movement. Also known as the Palestinian revolution (1967-82), it was led by the rising guerrilla forces of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) after the defeat of the Arab armies in the June 1967 war.
This connection would prove vital. Various clusters of Iranian activists forged transnational connections with the Palestinian revolution, as well as other revolutionary and anti-imperialist projects in and beyond the region. These included the Dhufar revolution (1965-76) in southern Oman and anti-imperialist states such as socialist Yemen, Ba’athist Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya. The expansion of transnational space beyond Iran’s borders – across refugee camps and radical publications to clandestine radio and solidarity committees – shaped Iran’s urban guerrilla movement and was central to its onset and sustenance in the 1970s, as activists acquired training, arms, resources and support to carry out activities in Iran.
Whether fighting alongside Palestinian guerrillas in revolutionary wars, or volunteering as medical solidarity activists in Dhufar, this expansion of transnational space for the Iranian left was motivated by national concerns, aiming to aid the ongoing movement in Iran. And yet, in the process, new non-national forms of consciousness, identity, solidarity and community were produced in the making of a left internationalism from below. Through border-crossing interactions, activities and encounters with Arab activists, they actively transformed and constructed a transnational terrain of struggle. Facing unanticipated challenges in exile, deeper solidarities and ties were forged between Iranian and Arab activists, who found ways of relating to one another and working towards a shared anti-imperialist future.
The attempts at mobilising on this transnational terrain were fraught with difficulties and obstacles. By the mid-1970s, the Iranian state had effectively crushed Iran’s urban guerrilla campaign, imprisoning and executing many of its leaders, members and supporters. The story could be one of defeat. Yet, the recoverable part in this history for me lies in activists’ attempts to forge transnational popular connections towards a shared emancipatory horizon. Overcoming national, linguistic and conceptual borders, they struggled down unexpected paths in their attempts to build an alternative future, cultivating new ways of being in the process. It invites us to consider what possibilities might emerge today if we, too, attempt to cross the various kinds of borders that divide and shape our present.
Over the next few weeks, articles in this series will explore the diverse practices, campaigns, tools, strategies and tactics used by activists and movements towards alternative, radical horizons. They will cover a range of different struggles – leftist, socialist, student, anarchist, trans and disabled people’s movements – to add to the inventory of diverse struggles and movements, and their attempts at resistance on multiple fronts, from which we may draw today. The aim is to help us understand the challenges that may lie ahead, the roads once travelled or missed, and the ones we might carve out and take, in trying to overcome the many obstacles we face.