The Subversive Seventies

Abstract

Abstract Progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which took place across the globe, provide an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action, even more than those of the 1960s. The sixties were a crucial historical turning point and we can certainly learn from those movements, both the victorious and the vanquished, but, fundamentally, they marked the end of an era. The seventies, in contrast, herald the beginning of our time. In response to the insurgencies of the sixties, new structures of power, many of which are now grouped under the name “neoliberalism,” were tested and institutionalized, and are essentially the same ones that rule over us today. The progressive and revolutionary struggles of the seventies, then, constituted an initial set of experiments for confronting our current conjuncture, a first test of the terrain. Feminist and gay liberation movements, worker and anticolonial struggles, and antinuclear and antiracist projects, along with many other liberation efforts developed in the seventies, offer us not only initial analyses of today’s structures of economic and political domination but also forms of critique and resistance most effective against them.