ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses sixties liberation in reference to two events—the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America Congress in Havana, and the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London. It considers liberation, a central aspect of political discourse in the 1960s, and its fate in the upsurge of the political. The chapter describes the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s but primarily to the post-2008 confluence marked by the Occupy movements, the "square" and "spring" movements, and various anti-austerity agitations. Throughout the world sixties, liberation was the goal and measure of radical and revolutionary activity. Mao Zedong described the goals of liberation in China as the overthrow of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. A premise of the conference was that liberation in its multiple registers—Third World, spiritual, sexual—was connected. The political syntax in the movement was not one of liberation from a repressive force or authority per se, but rather one of emergence and self-constitution.