ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on the dialogue that arose between the generation of activists on the streets in May 1968 in France, with their roots in European history, and the struggles for national liberation which were at their height in the late 1960s. I will re-examine the issue of Western Marxism and its relationship with Third World revolutions in context, in the form it took in a given period and in specific movements. This sheds light on the way militant knowledge and political visions were forged. It also enables us to measure the extent of the conceptual evolutions that (some) militants underwent over a thirty-year period, including the enrichment of notions (such as the revolutionary subject), the rejection of formulas deemed too restrictive (such as strategic models), the emergence of concepts initially ignored by most of us (such as open history), and a new understanding of the extent of certain questions (such as the plurality of forms of Marxism). My ambition is not to retrace the development of an entire generation.
Having specialized in the Far East, rather than Latin America or the Middle East like most of my comrades, I will make particular reference in the present chapter to South-East Asia and China. Works of theory played a part in our intellectual journey.2 But so did being
confronted with political events past and present. In a period of radicalization, our analyses were fed by direct contact with activists more than by our university studies. Few of us had time to complete a doctoral thesis. Thus, in the present article, I will draw constantly on both thematic elements and concrete examples. The present article will illustrate the evolution of concepts through six
major themes: open history, strategy, the revolutionary subject, the national question, discordance, and the internationalization and regionalization of Marxism. Other themes deserving of discussion include social formations, political alliances, systems of organization and the relationship between political parties and social movements, the process of bureaucratization before and after the conquest of power, and the concepts of solidarity and internationalism. However, these themes deserve separate treatment beyond the scope of this chapter.
