Stitching together the threads of internationalism: London in anti-imperial organising

Abstract

In this article, based on a modified speech delivered as part of the ‘Radical internationalism and shifts in the global order’ panel at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50), an organiser both for Palestinian liberation and migrant rights scopes the potential for international solidarity in the metropole today. He contrasts a recent revival in solidarity during the ‘Corbyn era’ with times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when London was a hotbed of progressive internationalism as exiles sought refuge and freedom to think, write, organise and build links. He asks what we can learn from these experiences, and what the possibilities are of such concerted internationalism in London, and Britain more generally, today.

May the democrats of all nations unite in a fraternal phalanx for the destruction of tyranny and the universal triumph of equality.

– Thomas Cooper, Chartist

In September 2019, as part of The World Transformed (TWT) festival in Brighton, Sussex, an event took place that captured the essence of that extraordinary year of global revolt. In the festival’s largest tent, organisers from several national liberation and democracy movements gathered to share their experience of struggle and their peoples’ demands and strategies. Organisers from Eritrea, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Palestine, Sudan, Western Sahara, West Papua and indigenous Brazilian communities introduced their cause; provided updates on their movements’ activities; shared food, poetry, music and dance; and discussed the rebuilding of global anti-colonial coalitions.

The uprisings of 2019 constituted a high point in the growing challenges from below to the colonial, neoliberal order. What was dubbed the ‘Arab Summer’ saw enormous popular protests in Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and, perhaps most notably, the breathtakingly women-led revolution in Sudan, whose vibrant songs, poems and creativity were repeated in solidarity protests around the world. Such was the prominence and vibrancy of the London protests that the Sudanese government claimed that the entire revolution was being orchestrated by Sudanese communists from the Monkey Puzzle pub in Paddington. ¹ Meanwhile, in Chile, protests at a fare increase on the Santiago metro expanded into a wider challenge to the regime established by the Pinochet coup, eventually feeding into the 2021 election of a leftwing president and ongoing efforts to establish genuine democracy. Once again, women were at the forefront of these protests, and their song exposing patriarchy, and state and societal complicity in rape culture, became a global phenomenon. ²

The responses on the streets of London to these international rebellions were almost invariably led by diasporas and exiled political figures from the countries in question. At times, the protests came together, often by coincidence, meeting in Trafalgar Square, forming connections and friendships, or inviting speakers from other movements to address their rallies. However, for the most part, these interactions were limited to fleeting encounters in public spaces, a passing affinity often without deeper organisational connections or awareness of previous efforts at cross-communal anti-colonial organising.

Yet the history of Britain, and London in particular, has a long tradition of fostering just such connections and shared political struggle. At different historical junctures the country has been host to large numbers of migrants and political exiles from around the world, becoming a unique space of interaction and political exchange amongst diverse nationalities and causes. This made Britain a key node of internationalist ideological production through the creation of linkages, organisations, a sense of common purpose between exiled activists, party cadres, intellectuals and artists. This history provides a live source of ideas for thinking about the place of imperial metropoles, such as London, Paris, Brussels or Lisbon, in internationalist struggle.

This piece provides some notes for developing a more solid internationalist infrastructure today, and examines the role of London in that process. It starts with an overview of current issues within cross-communal internationalist organising, before drawing on the experiences of previous generations arriving in London as exiles in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, ³ and then as students, artists and intellectuals in the interwar years of the twentieth century. Both times, those arriving suffered the vicissitudes of London life – racism, poverty and the travails of exile – as well as discovering the city’s possibilities, turning it into a hub of literary output, exchange and collective political work.

Emerging from the Corbyn project

Down the road from the 2019 TWT event, at the Labour Party Conference, the same dynamic internationalist energy was making its way on to the Conference platform. The previous year, the Conference had been rocked by powerful speakers and motions in support of Palestinian rights, who were met with rapturous applause and thousands of flags being waved from the floor. ⁴ In 2019, speakers on Palestine were joined by others from Kashmir, Yemen and Western Sahara, representing a rare moment in which anti-colonial causes found their way into something akin to the political mainstream.

With Labour’s defeat at the 2019 general election, however, these causes lost one of the few politicians who had ever spoken publicly in support of them. Jeremy Corbyn’s replacement as party leader, Keir Starmer, managed to alienate many minority groups by reversing Labour policy on Kashmir and Palestine, refusing to meet with community organisations and strengthening Labour’s ties to Israeli apartheid and the extreme-right regime in India (to give but two prominent examples). ⁵ Once again, anti-imperialism was cast into the political wilderness, minority groups told that their demands for human rights back home were unpalatable to the British electorate and must be expunged from the Labour Party platform. Most recently, in February 2023, local constituency Labour parties were informed that they were not allowed to renew affiliation with a raft of BAME, environmental, anti-monarchy and anti-imperial groups – such as Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Republic, Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Somalis for Labour – without the consent of Labour Central Office. ⁶

This reversal of fortunes has important lessons for orienting internationalist work in Britain today. Many read the anticipated election of Corbyn into Number 10 as a shortcut to building international solidarity, expecting he would be able to change policy from the top, once in office. It quickly became apparent, however, that it was precisely his record of uncompromising internationalism that most terrified sections of the British establishment and elements within minority groups in Britain attached to colonial and extreme-right political projects abroad. The concerted campaign against Corbyn led to the marginalisation of many of these liberation causes from the public arena, and an attempt to replace an internationalist anti-racism with an individualised and essentialised form that elides colonialism and structural racism from its purview, emphasising barriers to individual advancement over institutional racism. Attention was thereby drawn towards addressing the effects of a ‘racism that discriminates’ in the form of online comments, personal insults, and so forth, and prioritised above – and often set against – the ‘racism that kills’ in the form of police violence, imperialist wars and the poverty created by racial capitalism. ⁷

The understandable decision to work and hope for a Corbyn-led Labour government came at the expense, however, of creating and consolidating links between BAME communities, migrant groups and anti-colonial causes and the construction of a powerful internationalist movement. Other than the event described above, and other smaller scale initiatives, public letters and conferences, London’s vibrant anti-imperial scene was not able to find a form for a more sustained intercommunal engagement. Instead, advocacy remains directed towards political parties and government, but without building connected popular organisations that could give force to anti-colonial demands. ⁸

The present set of circumstances is the outcome of powerful organisational and ideological forces that brought about the collapse of the Third World solidarity of the mid-twentieth century. The global anti-colonial revolution, known as Third Worldism, ⁹ was a diverse coalition of national liberation movements, socialist and postcolonial states that shared the objective of ending colonialism and worked together materially, culturally and politically to bring that about. These revolutionary movements were not only internationalist in outlook, but also in practice, establishing relations with sister struggles and extending their political work to imperial metropoles to advocate for their causes and to organise diaspora and exiled communities living there. Migrant organisations in Britain were part of this global revolution and it provided them with shared political principles, practical objectives, cultural references and a counterhegemonic worldview.

In the words of Sivanandan reflecting on the early 1970s,

. . . the struggle of Gandhi and Nehru, of Nkrumah and Nyerere, of James and Williams, of Du Bois and Garvey, and the ongoing struggles in Vietnam and ‘Portuguese Africa’ − Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde – and the struggles for Black Power in the United States of America. They were all part of our history − a beautiful massive texture that in turn strengthened the struggles here and fed back to the struggle there. ¹⁰

There was a time when migrant initiatives, community organisations and trade unions operating in Britain made direct reference to this shared worldview as a framework for coordinated political action across communities.

These expressions of Third Worldism in Britain relied, to a certain extent, on the ideological output and material infrastructure of national liberation movements and states working in collaboration. The pressures of the post-independence political and economic order, changes in foreign policy positions of key sponsoring states and various imperialist machinations worked to dismantle many of the structures on which Third Worldism relied. ¹¹ Cold War politics gave way to globalisation, the seeping of the market into almost every area of the world, the imposition of structural adjustment and austerity in return for loans and quasi-investment. And the issue of individual human rights came to replace Third World vistas of liberation, ending up as nothing more than a geopolitical bargaining chip. ¹²

At home in Britain, the links between imperialism and racism, and racism with class exploitation, were becoming lost. They were replaced by religious or sectional political formations that, whilst often having their own liberatory elements, could not constitute the ideological foundation for creating a broad-based movement. These tendencies towards fragmentation were accelerated, in the British context, by the provision of state funding towards migrant religious leaders in order to undermine socialist and Third World-orientated alternatives, a process that Arun Kundnani traces to 1980s Bradford, whose city council ‘legitimized the mosque leaders as a new class of community leadership . . . hoping they would become conservative allies in a process of undermining the younger radicals’. The official language of multiculturalism that accompanied this process was thus ‘more about managing ethnic identity than dealing with institutional discrimination’. ¹³ This had the dual effect of professionalising and NGO-ising what had, at one time, been grassroots community organisations and reinforcing identity-based formations around community ‘uncles’ who looked up towards the state and funders, rather than horizontally towards groups engaged in allied struggles.

Whilst London remains a unique hub of interaction between different movements and peoples, migrant organisations are increasingly fragmented and operate outside a unifying framework. However, similar challenges have been confronted by generations who, in previous centuries, made London their home and the launching pad for global revolutionary struggle. It was from London that bold international initiatives would attempt to stitch together the common threads of internationalism.

The nineteenth-century exiles

For migrants, refugees and exiles arriving in London, the city has served many functions. For some, it was meant to be a brief stop-off to drum up support for their cause, raise funds or regroup after a revolutionary setback. Others arrived as students intending to stay a few years but drawn in by the rich social and cultural milieu or, simply having nowhere else to go, decided to make the city their home. In either case, as their stays in the city extended, such arrivals began examining their political role vis-à-vis their struggles, and what actions they could begin to take in the metropole.

One particularly significant group of exiled revolutionaries arrived in the city in the aftermath of the 1848 uprisings in Europe, known as the Springtime of Nations, that saw attempted uprisings across Europe, the most significant of which took place in Denmark, France, the German Confederation, Hungary, the Italian states, Poland, Russia and Wallachia (Romania). Britain also had experienced revolutionary activity that year, in the gathering of tens of thousands of Chartists on Kennington Common on April 10, carrying with them a petition of two million names in support of the six points of the People’s Charter. British authorities were so alarmed by the rally that they mobilised cavalry, swore in tens of thousands of special constables, and stationed cannon at Buckingham Palace, all overseen by a then elderly but still formidable Duke of Wellington.

What was intended as the pinnacle of years of Chartist organising, however, turned out to be a disappointment to the organisers, and a relief for the political establishment, as the strength of the state’s response, political indecisiveness on the part of demonstrators and the inclement weather limited the size of the rally. The perceived failure of the 1848 mobilisation led to an expansive debate about the direction of the movement, its principles and its strategies in the face of state intransigence to popular demands. In was into this arena that large numbers of revolutionaries from Europe came, fleeing the conservative reaction to their revolutionary efforts on the continent.

The list of those arriving post-1848 reads like a who’s who of nineteenth-century revolutionary politics, with Karl Marx, Giuseppe Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth and Alexander Herzen amongst many others all enjoying extended stays in London. England was often their last port of call, as increasingly reactionary regimes in Brussels and Paris expelled revolutionaries from their midst. The reasons for Britain’s extension of hospitality are much debated, ranging from its desire to destabilise its continental competitors, to the British dislike for regulation trumping its dislike for foreigners. ¹⁴ Whatever the British state’s motivations, by the end of the 1840s London had become the centre of activity of a range of exiled groups from the continent, which, according to a French intelligence report of the time, included ‘French social democrats, a socialist democratic committee of German refugees, a Hungarian democratic society, a section of the Polish Democratic Committee, and an Italian national committee’, amongst many others. ¹⁵

Many of the exiles enjoyed extraordinary levels of popularity among the British public. Hungarian leader Kossuth was met by thousands wherever he went, including a reported crowd of 500,000 who turned out to see him in Birmingham, which would have constituted the city’s entire population at the time. ¹⁶ Similar scenes greeted the arrival of Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi who disembarked in Portsmouth in 1856. The sheer extent of popular fervour for revolutionary causes in the period is striking, and extended to sustained critiques of empire and slavery. This can be seen, for example, in the anti-slavery campaigning of the Chartists, the reception of Frederick Douglass in Britain (who delivered more than 280 packed-out lectures over the course of his 19-month visit) and the mass consumption of anti-slavery novels, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the first London print edition of which sold more than 200,000 copies. ¹⁷

It suited the British state to present itself as representing an enlightened imperialism and a model of freedom and democracy set against ‘continental despotism’. Some anti-slavery campaigners appear to have been struck by the comparative lack of racism when visiting from the US, while Czech exiles openly admired Britain’s form of government. ¹⁸ Many socialist writers, however, were not so easily won over and saw the British duplicity in offering them asylum for its own benefit, while still others were shocked by the stark inequality and poverty they encountered in Britain. ¹⁹

Political expediency elicited varying orientations towards the British state and practices of internationalist organising. Some like Kossuth used any means to push the cause of Hungarian freedom. An observer, writing in 1851, describes how, ‘Kossuth has played his cards admirably. He has talked constitutionalism with mayors and aldermen, free trade to Cobden and the middle classes, and genuine democracy to the multitudes assembled on Copenhagen Fields.’ ²⁰ Frederick Engels, however, saw this as duplicitous: ‘In Marseille he shouts Vive la Republique, in Southampton, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.’ ²¹ Kossuth, for his part, criticised the Italian leader Mazzini for taking the opposite position, accusing him of prioritising republicanism above the national question and adopting a partisanship that set back the cause of national independence on the continent. Kossuth argued instead that ‘patriotism must confine itself to keeping alive the aspirations for independence’ and be willing to accept assistance ‘even from the devil’ [emphasis in the original]. ²²

Yet Mazzini was well aware of the need to carefully navigate the international political scene in the interests of his national struggle. For example, in establishing his internationalist People’s International League (PIL) in London in 1847 he intentionally excluded Irish nationalists in order not to alienate the British state support so essential to the Italian Risorgimento. ²³ This tension between the needs of a national liberation struggle, on the one hand, and partisanship regarding progressive internationalism, on the other, would be a recurrent theme both in the nineteenth century and subsequently. Mazzini nevertheless continued his internationalist engagement with other democrats, often speaking on behalf of the Polish uprisings and developing writings aimed at ‘speaking to the English Nation, not to those who govern it’. ²⁴

It has been claimed that exiled revolutionaries in Britain were instrumental in radicalising British Chartists by importing their militant continental ideas. ²⁵ However, as Claeys has argued, the balance sheet is a little more mixed. For whilst the exiles certainly contributed to internationalising the British radical movement, figures such as Kossuth and Mazzini in fact helped draw people away from socialism because of their preoccupation with continental despotism and monarchical absolutism, and propagation of republican nationalism. ²⁶ In Claeys’ telling, this stymied the development of socialism that had otherwise been growing within Chartist ranks, and was not offset (in this period at least) by the activism of the much less influential socialist exiles.

For most exiles, particularly those who had participated directly in the revolutionary events of 1848 and before, distance from their nations’ affairs was a jarring experience. One response was to focus on the publication of journals and newspapers in order to influence events in their homeland. Such efforts were often frustrated by the difficulties in distributing these publications, which were stopped at the borders or censored so heavily as to lose their original meaning. One interesting example, however, was the newspaper L’Homme published in Jersey by a group of French exiles that included contributions from a number of exiled communities, and which called for a ‘République universelle démocratique et sociale’ within a United States of Europe. ²⁷ Limited as the impact of the newspaper may have been back in France, it represents an interesting early example of an internationalist media. Indeed, these were perhaps the greatest achievements of revolutionaries in their time in London. Separated from the people whose cause of freedom they fought for, and often facing dire poverty themselves, their most viable route to continued political organisation was to propagate their cause and establish wider European formations.

Life in exile provided a unique opportunity to do just this. The period produced a number of bodies such as Mazzini’s Central European Democratic Committee (CEDC) which was a continuation of his vision of a federation of democratic states set out in the manifesto of Young Europe issued in Switzerland in 1834. ²⁸ The CEDC built on the work of two other British internationalist groups, the Democratic Friends of All Nations and the PIL, both established at the end of the 1840s, whose activities included propaganda, financial assistance for refugees, charitable initiatives, debate amongst different exiled groups, coordinating activities and, inevitably, issuing manifestos and statements. ²⁹ Both within and outside these formations, there was constant exchange and collaboration, such as when Polish democrats and Irish nationalists organised a joint demonstration in opposition to Britain’s warming relations with Russia and the treatment of Poland. ³⁰

Mazzini’s great rival and critic at the time, Karl Marx, was also active in London from where he helped found the Society of Fraternal Democrats during a visit in 1845. The Society was established, as the ‘poet of Chartism’ Thomas Cooper put it at its launch event, to call, ‘Democrats of all nations [to] unite in a fraternal phalanx for the destruction of tyranny and the universal triumph of equality’. ³¹ The Society differed from Mazzini’s formations in giving a greater weight to the importance of a social revolution alongside the political revolution proposed by Mazzinian democrats. The work of the Society was carried over into the formation of two other political groupings, the Communist League (1847), for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, and later, the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA, 1864). In between these two initiatives, and in some ways helping to bridge them, was the International Committee established by British radical Ernst Young in 1855 which claimed to represent various German, French, Polish and Chartist factions, and which ‘proposed to organize an International Association for mutual support in the fight for a universal democratic and socialist republic’, however this never took place and faded away after a few commemorative events and the brief publication of a bulletin. ³²

Despite the short-lived nature of most of these organisations, their influence was nevertheless considerable. For example, Mazzinian organisations have been credited with introducing novel conceptualisations of democracy and internationalism in their articulation of a vision of European (and in some formulations universal) freedom. ³³ The IWA, meanwhile, lay the groundwork for the flourishing communist movement that would transform global politics from the early twentieth century to the present. ³⁴

Others, however, had a different perspective on life in exile. Russian socialist Alexander Herzen, for example, describes the stultifying effects of the physical distance from political struggle on the group of exiled revolutionaries surrounding him: ‘they have not and cannot have the naive passion for the struggle which . . . gave vivid colouring to the most meagre generalisations and body to the dry outlines of their political framework’. ³⁵ He paints a depressing picture:

the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities and recrimin-ations: only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs, and they are all older together and bonier and more gloomy . . . and still the same things are being said over and over again. ³⁶

This view was no doubt in part informed by Herzen’s own experience of being publicly attacked by Marx in 1854 on account of his alleged Russian patriotism, with Marx refusing to join an international committee onto which Herzen had been elected. This dispute hadn’t been resolved by February 1855 when Marx refused to attend a meeting of the International Emigrants Committee at which Herzen was to speak, to celebrate the revolutions of 1848. ³⁷ Yet, for all its shortcomings, Herzen nevertheless became reconciled with his life in London, admitting he had come ‘to love this fearful ant-heap, where every night a hundred thousand men know not where they will lay their heads’. ³⁸

Black London in the interwar years

In the period between the wars, London would again contribute to the incubation of revolutionary activity but this time by Black anti-colonial leaders and intellectuals, who turned the city into a key node in the development of Black internationalism. ³⁹ Those passing through the city, such as George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta were to play a major role in the global anti-colonial revolution and the development of pan-Africanism and Third World anti-colonialism.

By the first two decades of the twentieth century, London already had a considerable history of international Black activism. The first Pan-African Conference had been held there in Westminster Hall in 1900, ⁴⁰ while there existed two publications, the African Times and Orient Review, that circulated pan-Africanist ideas. ⁴¹ There also existed the moderate League of Coloured People (LCP) that advocated racial equality, both in Britain and globally, and which produced its own journal The Keys. ⁴² Perhaps the most organised anti-colonial Black organisation in this period was the West African Students’ Union which published a journal, WASU, that first appeared in 1926. ⁴³ The African Progress Union, founded in 1918, included Black members from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean working predominantly in the field of education. ⁴⁴

To these existing organisations were added several individuals and organisations which helped transform the political scene considerably. One that stands out was the Florence Mills Social Parlour above the International Afro-Restaurant, established and operated by Amy Ashwood Garvey. ⁴⁵ The location came to serve as both a political and social venue in which Black people could orientate themselves in an unfamiliar city, which was crucial for those newly arrived in the metropolis and separated from family and friends. The Parlour thus became an important meeting point for Black activists, and was held together by the energetic Ashwood Garvey who appears to have helped meld the group together by undertaking much of its social reproduction. This role – and the unacknowledged secretarial, research and editorial work undertaken by women behind the scenes – echoed the experience of Jenny Marx and other nineteenth-century women exiles who played a ‘Hausfrau’ role during their exile in London. ⁴⁶

The relative freedom enjoyed in London contrasted with the severe repression experienced back home. As British-Guyanese radical T. Ras Makonnen would later put it, ‘England had been the executioner of its own colonial empire’, for it ‘allowed these blacks to feel the contrast between freedom in the metropole and slavery in the colonies’. ⁴⁷ However this perception of ‘two Englands’, one of oppression and violence in the colonies, and another of the rule of law and justice on the mainland, has been criticised by Cedric Robinson who saw it as understating the extent of racism in British society. ⁴⁸ Regardless, these experiences seem to have sharpened the awareness of many as to the nature of colonial rule, the scope and possibility of activism in the metropole and, as we shall see, partly informed how they subsequently theorised capitalism, fascism and colonialism.

For these intellectuals and organisers, there was no pre-given notion of Blackness but, rather, it was a concept and affinity they were active in creating and shaping. Their presence in London, and their sharing of experiences of Black life in the Caribbean, Africa and the US allowed them to develop a broader picture of Black subjectivity and consciousness. It was these ‘conversations, alliances, and boundary crossings that [the metropole] made possible, as well as the tensions and conflicts such encounters produced [that] influenced the changing political commitments and personal identifications of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans’. ⁴⁹ Across the English Channel, Paris was unwittingly playing a similar role in providing a meeting point for Ho Chi Minh, future Chinese and Senegalese premiers Zhou Enlai and Léopold Ségar Senghor, and other leading anti-colonial revolutionaries in the French empire. ⁵⁰

Central to this developing Black discourse was the occasionally fractious relationship between Blacks from the Caribbean and from Africa: ‘debates and conflicts routinely erupted between Caribbeans, who considered themselves more educated and thus more modern than Africans, and Africans who often accused Caribbeans of mimicking whites’. ⁵¹ The topic of how the two groups could better cooperate was taken up in a 1936 WASU debate, producing a lively exchange of views on the need for Caribbean people to better understand the confines of their colonial education and to reconnect with the civilisation from which they drew their roots. In this sense, the discussion proved generative, whereas the same debate had split the movement in Paris. As C. L. R. James, a participant in the debate would later say of his time in London, ‘I began to gain in England a conception of Black people which I didn’t possess when I left the Caribbean’. ⁵²

This expanding sense of Blackness, however, appears to have largely been restricted to people of African descent, and principally within anglophone transnational networks. ⁵³ Common cause was rarely established between those who were non-white in the metropole and who shared a common experience of colonisation. One exception was the LCP, which although intentionally dominated by Black activists, nevertheless included a sustained engagement by South Asian members and regularly collaborated with South Asian organisations such as India House. Meanwhile George Padmore and other socialist organisers encountered South Asian organisers active in the Indian League, at one time proposing a body to be named the Colonial Marxist League, but that never came to fruition. Still later, a proposed Inter-colonial Labour Federation was suggested in response to worker uprisings in the Caribbean in the 1930s, although this too never took off. ⁵⁴ Despite expressions of solidarity with Asian struggles at the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945, therefore, Black internationalism in Britain remained largely concentrated on those of African descent, despite the existence of potential allies such as the Indian Workers Association. ⁵⁵ It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that the category of ‘political Blackness’ would be expanded through joint struggle and organisation in Britain. ⁵⁶

Central to this identity formation in the interwar years was the 1934 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. For many Black activists, the Left’s inadequate response highlighted an arbitrary distinction between colonialism and fascism, the only difference being that one was directed at Black people and the other took place against Europeans on the European continent. The reaction to the invasion produced several organisations that cut across Black activism and the British Left, amongst them the International African Service Bureau (IASB) founded in 1937 and the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) from which it emerged. They often collaborated with white Ethiopian support organisations such as the Abyssinian Association and Sylvia Pankhurst’s New Times and Ethiopia News. Following in Douglass’s footsteps, C. L. R. James undertook a speaking tour to raise the issue of Ethiopia’s invasion while Amy Ashwood Garvey was busy ensuring that speakers on Ethiopian freedom were present on every progressive platform. The IASB, and later the Pan-African Federation founded in Manchester in 1944, were intended to expand the movement from solidarity with Ethiopia to the entire continent of Africa, and to act as a link between the continent and the wider diaspora. ⁵⁷ The invasion was a crucial moment in the formation of Black radical thought, serving as a rallying cry for African unity and sharpening fissures between many Black radicals and the international communist movement.

Once again, emerging divisions between individuals would impact on the progress of this work. Reflecting the disagreements between Kossuth and Mazzini described above, James became disaffected with what he saw as the IASB’s unconditional support for Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom he regarded as feudal (despite having written to the emperor himself offering his military services). This dispute led to James eventually leaving the group and taking a more definitive turn into Trotskyism. Yet the dispute again laid bare the contradictions within Black internationalism and questions related to the primacy of national unity faced by previous generations.

Reinvigorating cross-community internationalism in Britain

Today’s circumstances differ considerably from those faced by previous generations. Apart from the very different global contours of persecution and reasons for flight, the freedom and space for organising are shrinking fast. Attempts at international organising and solidarity are often tempered by increasing levels of state repression. ‘Counter-terror’ legislation, accelerating restrictions of free speech and assembly, clampdowns on what can be said and taught in academic arenas, intervention by the Charity Commission (which can cut off income streams and close down activities) and diktats by political parties have worked to inhibit the development of internationalist politics. ⁵⁸

Despite the climate, the above examples offer several important lessons for organisers today. In both case studies, detachment from struggles ‘on the ground’ created opportunities for deeper ideological work whose impact on the development of international democratic thought was enormous. This is the case both for the democratic internationalism of Mazzini’s political formations, Marx’s international communism and, as well, the Black internationalists of the interwar years – and this despite the short-lived nature of the collective political movements they established. In contemporary Britain, only the movements for climate justice and women’s liberation have engaged in similar efforts at shaping common experiences into a global theory and political framework for linking individual struggles to broader principles.

This ideological production was the outcome of two features of politics in both periods, made possible by the unique circumstances of metropolitan London. The first was a vibrant exchange of ideas that broadened understanding of the systems being confronted (despotism, capitalism and colonialism) as well as formulating shared subjectivities between those working to confront such systems. These affinities emerged from bringing together different struggles, and a profound engagement between groups about the experiences and strategies of each, and their consequences. There is ample scope for such work in Britain today, whether in the form of intergroup exchanges, collective learning initiatives or the retrieval and reformulation of shared histories of struggle.

Secondly, such exchanges often crystallised as a result of joint political work around shared interests or causes célèbres, such as Poland, Hungary or Italy in the nineteenth century, and Ethiopia in the twentieth. The scope for similar work, at present, is enormous, and remains an underexplored area of work amongst British-based communities and organisers. For example, justice campaigns for victims of the British suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion could build links with Indian community initiatives seeking an apology for the Amritsar massacre, Palestinian demands for colonial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, thereby strengthening each. Or initiatives such as the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) that united Balochi, Kurdish, Palestinian and Tamil communities in opposition to the anti-terror legislation in the early 2000s could be revived.

Much of the perceived impasse in progressive politics relies on an elision of a political history, distant and more recent, in which internationalism and international solidarity was the beating heart of political struggle in Britain. Politics was not, and is not, the image of insular self-interest and social conservatism currently being conjured by the Labour Party, but a kaleidoscope of internationalist political ideologies and traditions. These were, to a very large degree, shaped by the presence of exiles, intellectuals and cadres in Britain that helped develop new subjectivities in resistance to colonialism and despotism. Whatever the darkness and negativity of the present juncture, this history acts as a reminder of the liberatory potential of such organising, and an impetus to take up the mantle.