A New Beginning Out of Montreal: Black Power, Situationist Constellations, and the Caribbean Imaginary
This historical essay was originally written for an art exhibit called Blues Klair that dramatized the political events discussed. Thanks to Vincent Meesen and Michele Thierault for their encouragement to contribute.
Vincent Meessen’s exhibition Blues Klair reminds us of the historical intersection of the Black Power and Situationist movements and the explosive Caribbean imaginary it produced. The global spark of these radical perspectives was ignited in Montreal, Canada, in 1968–69. The Black Writers Congress (BWC) of 1968 and student protests of 1969 at Sir George Williams University (SGW, now Concordia University), both of them led by Caribbean sojourners, met with repression, produced international controversy, and led to insurgent moments for the next decade in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Grenada.
Trinidad’s Bukka Rennie was among the forty-eight students jailed after the SGW revolt. Rennie, after writing for and editing the Montreal Black community newspaper Uhuru (1969–70; Swahili for freedom), and Grenadian Franklyn Harvey, having written for and edited the theoretical journal Caribbean International Opinion in 1968, which emerged at the same moment as the BWC, soon mapped out a “new beginning.” Inspired by the ideas of the Trinidadian Pan Africanist and independent socialist CLR James, they organized a federation-from-below of workplace councils and popular assemblies as a new form of government. These ideas caught fire in the Caribbean and resonated among unsung workers.
Fundi, a native of Jamaica who spoke of workers’ self-management in Rasta idioms, responded to events by proclaiming himself a Caribbean Situationist. Born George Myers, he was best known as Joseph Edwards. Fundi’s fugitive social criticism animated the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (1968–83) and echoed reverberations up and down the Caribbean archipelago.
A refrigeration mechanic and formerly an Unemployed Workers Council activist, Fundi led a wildcat strike of meatpacking workers and organized independent sugar workers’ councils in Jamaica in 1968–69. Confronting the authoritarian link between Caribbean trade unionism and electoral party politics, he also anticipated in the early 1970s the challenges of the Grenada Revolution (1979–83). Fundi created a Situationist alternative mapping of the Caribbean that lent personality and prominence to labor strikes, army mutinies, and land occupations. This map also included related Canadian rebellions.
This constellation of voices, beginning in Canada and in dialogue with the Antillean tropics, is present in Blues Klair, which exhibits neglected inspirational memories and may foreshadow the future.
Black Power and Situationism
The Black Power movement (1965–75) included the Black Arts, Black Studies, and Africa solidarity movements, and insurgent movements against the white supremacist police state in North America as embodied by Huey P. Newton’s Black Panther Party. Situationism was initially a European and later a global art movement that, informed by its forerunners Dada and Surrealism, and aspects of anarchism and Marxism, stirred the French Revolt of 1968. It was alert to how even trade unionists, socialists, and communists supported an obtuse politics that defined freedom as choosing one’s masters and managers through voting and was afraid of popular self-emancipation. Blues Klair delves into these instincts and expressions. A philosophy founded by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, Situationism proposed a libertarian socialism. While both the Cold War and Marxism sustained justifications for the one-party state and the welfare state, Situationism rejected both of these and professional intellectuals as the embodiment of culture and government, suggesting that emancipation was instead to be found in everyday life.
Black Power, consistent with the Age of the Third World, called into question the denial of citizenship rights to people of color on a world scale. A trigger for questioning authority, Black Power, informed by socialism, searched for new identities and community control. Still, it did not always push for the designing of a new society. In response to racial disparities of power, it often desired equal opportunity to enter the rules and structures of the existing hierarchy. This was a creative conflict.
Situationists added to libertarian socialism notions of art as popular self-expression — a type of psychology and geography for destroying the old politics. Condemning the autocratic rule of the capitalism and consumerism that they felt such politics produced, Situationists saw media and celebrity as pacifying the masses. They viewed art as a means to explore the unconscious inner world and global cultures of the human personality.
Black Power, like Situationism, was a popularizer of the liberation traditions that came before, while also functioning as an original progenitor of subversive education and agitation. Situationism was attractive to post-colonial revolt where it suggested that civil rights and colonial independence were not what they first appeared. Situationism is a vibrant thread within the Blues Klair exhibition; it asks us to peel back the congealed layers of representation accumulated by compromised freedom movements of the past so that we can transcend their spectacle.
Out of Montreal
Montreal was a center of radical activism in 1968–69 yet also showed signs of racism and conservatism. The movement against the Vietnam War was gaining momentum. Thousands of young US draft-dodgers came through the “underground railroad,” where safe-houses offered temporary measures until new lives as students or workers could commence.
If Montreal was divided but globally engaged, many in Quebec, distinguished by a francophone culture, also viewed themselves as a conquered nation. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) raised a popular demand for sovereignty and waged violent attacks on the Canadian state.
In June of 1967, mere months before the BWC, the Six-Day War highlighted the problem of Zionism and imperialism. Countless in Montreal rallied around Israel, and many Jewish youths fundraised and pledged to join the Israeli military. This revealed the contradiction in how the historically oppressed articulated self-determination in a manner that subordinated Palestinians and served as the frontline of US empire in the Middle East.
In February 1968, H. Rap Brown, then Chairperson of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), incarcerated in a New Orleans prison, went on a hunger strike. Writing a famous open letter to Black people everywhere, he articulated a new humanity as a political prisoner, the need to avoid compromises with authority, and the fascist nature of the US government. Black Caribbean students from Sir George Williams University and McGill University, fifteen in number, marched to the US embassy in Montreal with placards demanding Brown’s release. An embassy photographer menacingly took full face-shots of each of the fifteen individuals.
Then, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. The largest demonstration held outside the US in support of his strategy of non-violent protest for civil and human rights took place in Montreal. It was organized by Caribbean students and was joined by many activist groupings. It was in this atmosphere that the BWC was organized from October 11 to 14, 1968.
The Montreal Black Writers Congress of 1968
Many of those who initiated the BWC were active in Montreal and Caribbean social movements. Most of the convenors were not prominent speakers at the gathering and their names may be obscure to history. The Congress gathered together what world history now recognizes as renowned thinkers like CLR James, Trinidad’s Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) who came from the Southern civil rights movement in the US, and Guyana’s Walter Rodney. All, in various ways, globalized the Black Power movement.
The BWC was held at the Leacock Auditorium of McGill University and was notable for a burgeoning but incomplete awareness. Where power was being seized, the dynamics of liberation and the terms for a new society still needed clarification. The organizers did not intend that the BWC be a mere intellectual pursuit. The editorial published in the BWC program laid out a battle against white racism, the empire of capital, and cultural domination.
Friday night began with a message from the BWC’s co-chairperson Rosie Douglas, then a student at McGill, who later became prime minister of Dominica. Rocky Jones, a well-known activist from Nova Scotia, kicked off the program dealing with the topic “Canada and her Black Community.” That was the opening salvo on October 11.
On Saturday morning the themes included black-white confrontation, the psychology of race, and the forerunners of the modern revolt. Traversing Saturday and Sunday, James’s presentations on the Haitian Revolution, the political economy of slavery, and Negritude were applauded. On October 13–14, subjects covered included pre-colonial African civilizations, African-American contributions to US history, racial discrimination in Britain, Black Power, capitalism, and the Third World.
After each speaker, the floor was open for discussion. Controversies arose. Representatives of every known political tendency were present at the BWC. People came from all over, determined to get their voices heard. Disputes emerged about the meaning of Marxism, demands for Black-only caucuses, the repudiation of violence or its strategic and ethical uses, and the need to decenter Europe in world history.
Carmichael’s talk on “Black Power” was the most controversial. Beginning with a quotation from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that “the heart has a mind of its own,” he lectured for more than an hour and ended with the statement “we must get guns.”
An African history professor, Rodney maintained an audience among ordinary people. Following the BWC, the author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Groundings with My Brothers was banned from returning to Jamaica, setting off the “Rodney Riots” in Kingston. This was a revolt against a post-independence government that had embraced past rebels, such as Marcus Garvey, as muted symbols. The meaning of this rebellion, led by obscure Rastas and Rudies, was that middle-class electoral politics was bankrupt. This inspired the Caribbean New Left across the region.
The Sir George Williams University Student Revolt of 1969
The SGW events, variously remembered as the “Anderson Affair” and the “Computer Riot,” began as a challenge to a racist professor who held back students of color by assigning them artificially poor grades. This movement, led by Grenada’s Kennedy Frederick, was confronted by the police and white racial violence. The protesters occupied the campus computer room. When cornered with tear gas, they broke the windows to breathe. A cascade of computer cards and paper fell to the street from the ninth floor of their campus building. In such surreal scenes reminiscent of a parade, student protesters in the hands of the police were jeered on the streets by white racist and fascist voices proclaiming “Let the niggers burn!” and “Send the niggers back home!”
Afterward, the Caribbean students at SGW sought to attain their diplomas and positioned themselves to make a living. They initially protested discrimination and appealed for reform. Institutional racism delayed their onward progress and finally threatened their very lives. While some went on to be politicians, professionals, administrators, and bankers, others felt compelled toward more radical questioning. A closer look at the Blues Klair exhibition may capture this prophetic spirit.
Mina Shum’s film Ninth Floor reconsidered for a Canadian national audience these events at SGW. Bukka Rennie (with St. Vincent’s Rodney John, who was also a BWC organizer, and Anne Cools, native of Barbados) is among the voices that make the film worth watching. Perhaps because the producers of the film hoped for support from non-profit foundations and public television, however, Rennie’s voice had to be restricted in what is, finally, a circumscribed presentation.
The repression of the SGW protesters sparked the Black Power revolt of February–April 1970 in Trinidad and Tobago; it was quite multi-racial bringing together Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians. Students, workers, and the unemployed rebelled against Canadian institutions in the Caribbean nation. Unfolding into a state of emergency and an army mutiny, the insurgency almost toppled the government of Eric Williams. Williams, the author of Capitalism & Slavery, was generally viewed as a progressive; yet many of the rebels were inspired by James, who had assisted this statesman in the movement for colonial freedom, a decade before.
The Political Legacies of C. L. R. James
Both Carmichael and Rodney are recalled as viewing race and class differently, yet both saw James as illuminating the African world before the Age of Black Power. But their condemnation of white imperialism and view of the Third World as substantially poor and powerless, except for those who seized state power, impacted how they discussed revolution. Both saw the relevance of Marxism to Black liberation as primarily a materialist reading of history that should inform national liberation and post-colonial state planning.
Revolt against white power was a radical democratic project and was inconsistent. Even where concerned with neocolonialism and critiques of the Black middle class, many of this generation did not finally reject hierarchy. In contrast, Rennie, Harvey, and Fundi received James’s heritage differently. Defying the spectacle of independence and proposing new forms of governance below official society, they proclaimed that ordinary Black people could govern directly.
In 1968–69, James disagreed with Carmichael and Rodney that the ordinary people of the imperial centers in Europe, Canada, and the US were contaminated by the white supremacy and empire of their rulers. For James, the French revolt of 1968 and the global anti-Vietnam War movement were confirmation that he was correct. Carmichael and Rodney could not improve upon James’s masterful discussion of world revolution, in which the Haitian, French, and Russian revolutions were placed in conversation with the age of Third World national liberation. James was an original theorist of direct democracy and workers’ self-management as well. It was these ideas, conceived as an autonomist Marxist vision, that formed a kindred spirit to Situationism.
More famous for his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, James had earlier become known as a theorist of Black autonomy within the Leon Trotsky movement. Now, as the elder mentor of the Black Power movement, James seemed clairvoyant to all. His encouragement to question the new search for a Black vanguard party, as embodied by the Black Panthers and others, is not widely known, which reminds us that James did his best (though he did not always succeed with the generation at that time) to place the threads of labor’s self-emancipation in conversation with Black Power.
James’s Facing Reality (1958), co-authored with Grace Lee Boggs and Cornelius Castoriadis, was a volume of autonomist Marxist philosophy and political economy. It was subtitled “where to look for the new society and how to bring it closer,” and proposed popular self-management as the socialist revolution. Coupled with projections for Africa and the Third World that were not yet a break with elite party politics, this book has been recognized as having anarchist and Situationist affinities.
Facing Reality suggested that all previous forms of Marxist organization had historically failed and encouraged the recognition of the self-organization of everyday people. In fact, James thought that, instead of vanguards speaking in the interest of working people, workers should edit their own newspapers. Perhaps mediated by a cadre that propagated the destruction of hierarchy, totalitarian bureaucracy was broken by the autonomy of workers, women, the colonized, and people of color. Facing Reality rejected the one-party state and the welfare state, and proposed a rupture with “the self-confessed bankruptcy of official society.”
Further, Facing Reality proclaimed that there was something wrong with alienated progressives attaching themselves to mass revolt in the name of a cultural front, only to seek to reconstitute domination. In this regard, James’s ideas had affinities with Situationism. Still, both James and Situationism preserved a subtle, voyeuristic look upon popular struggles. “Every cook can govern,” a famous Jamesian adage, was both a Leninist and an Athenian notion. James’s aesthetic of popular government might be reconciled with, or misunderstood by, elites seizing state power.
Shortly after the French Revolt of 1968 began, without overstating the influence of the Situationists (as Castoriadis’s ideas in Socialisme ou Barbarie were probably more significant, as recalled by student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit), their graffiti and provocations formed the revolt’s psychology. Some of the spray-painted slogans, such as “Demand the Impossible” and “Occupy,” were drawn from the annals of anarchism. One such slogan implored the masses: “It’s painful to suffer the bosses. It is even stupider to pick them.”
These frameworks tentatively bridged the instincts of Caribbean student rebels in Canada and those of obscure Caribbean workers at the time. They slowly came to resonate with post-civil rights, post-colonial activists still struggling to achieve their own authority from white dominion.
New Beginning Movement
Following the Canadian events and the initial Black Power uprising in Trinidad — in which BWC organizers Raymond Watts and Wally Look Lai, both of whom had studied with James in London in the 1960s, played an obscure and essential role in stimulating events before escaping into exile — the New Beginning Movement (NBM, 1971–80) was formed, with Bukka Rennie returning as the group’s leader and Franklyn Harvey working as an activist in both Trinidad and Grenada for a time. Initially, NBM was a coordinating council that defended political prisoners during the state of emergency declared by Williams and advanced a transitional program based on direct democracy and workers’ self-management, in which ordinary people held the reins of government. It evolved into an autonomous Marxist radical political organization that criticized electoral politics as something designed to capture the masses’ popular sovereignty.
The former editor of Uhuru in Montreal now became the editor of New Beginning, as well as leader and coordinator of its workers, students, and unemployed activists. Rennie encouraged a diverse array of industrial and community voices to create their own publications and start popular assemblies. Harvey taught radicals in Grenada about the importance of James’s direct democratic ideas; they were already familiar with his Pan African notions. He also helped Maurice Bishop inspire the Movement for Assemblies of the People, a forerunner of the New Jewel Movement, and coordinated, from Canada, a Caribbean federation-from-below, circulating Documents of the Caribbean Revolution and editing Caribbean Dialogue.
In the mid-1970s, this network of Caribbean activists, who began their work together in Canada, reconsidered and debated the meaning of Marxism, the influence of James, anarcho-syndicalism, and other ideas. Some reoriented their politics in a more orthodox direction. Edwards decided to take on the name Fundi — the Caribbean Situationist — and renewed the libertarian socialist spirit of the Caribbean New Left that Rennie was attempting to foster.
The Caribbean Situationist
The significance of Fundi as a Situationist was his concept of the worker who was unmediated by those who desired to bring rebellion to an end through reforms or who argued that a more complete social revolution was not possible. Situationism reminded people that socialists could function as heirs to the bourgeoisie and that developmental discourses could lend a false civility to the mutilation of everyday people’s lives.
Stimulated by the collective memory of James’s and George Padmore’s struggles with Stalinism, their activism in Pan African circles in London in the 1930s, and James’s Facing Reality, Fundi sought to make his own profound intervention. In a 1973 fugitive recording of an LP (long-play record) titled None Shall Escape, Fundi explained why the struggles of Caribbean workers were often demeaned and obstructed by Caribbean communists who claimed to be the vanguard but feared insurgency.
Fundi situated this dilemma, and not simply racism, as a local phase of a worldwide problem. He saw Caribbean politicians who claimed to speak for labor or the nation as “misrepresenting self-management,” leading to uprisings. He rejected trade unionism subordinated to electoral politics and argued that rank-and-file labor, not distant bureaucrats, should control their dues. Speaking from a Black world perspective, while aware of white imperialism and of rebellions led by Europeans against their own hierarchies — such as the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, or the Spanish Civil War — he offered proposals for how ordinary Black people could govern. Situationism warned against the permanent delay entailed by not declaring the end of white settler-colonialism (though the global empire of capital persisted); for this sustained the violence of aspiring bourgeois rulers among administrators of color via a false anti-colonial nationalism and restricted radical internationalism.
In “Radical Perspectives in the Caribbean” (1983), Joseph Edwards (Fundi — the Caribbean Situationist) explained that the Black Marxist-Leninist view that ordinary people lived under hegemony and therefore could not be directly self-governing until a future historical stage, was a crime. Grenada was so small, he said, that, “you could run around the whole island and still be fresh.” This small but beautiful vision suggested a direct democratic experiment, not the central committee dictates of a vanguard party. The struggle for purported development, the accumulation of capital upon the backs of Afro-Caribbean labor, was a reconversion of the social revolution toward a spectacle.
The Grenada Revolution was too concerned with sustaining existing relations between wage labor and capital. Fundi suggested instead that Grenada should either burn its money or hand it out as souvenirs of a past history that had been overcome — a marvelous proposal. Rather, Grenada became a one-party state, with political dissidents brought to trial in non-transparent processes and state-dependent zonal councils that actually silenced popular sovereignty. Situationism warned about how the “sovereign” mutates deceptively in history.
Discourses about the Caribbean New Left generation are marked by thin lamentations over Grenada and the refusal to discard the subordination of society to minority rule. A deep discussion on experiments in popular self-management in Grenada and the wider Caribbean, and their betrayal, has been avoided in the scholarly record and mystified by the tragedy of the US invasion.
Mapping the Self-Directed Power of Caribbean Commoners
With the Montreal events, Fundi completed a circle. Fundi personified the reality that Black power meant nothing where it did not entail the self-directed power of Black common people, even where Black elites increasingly held coveted executive positions. Black power and anti-colonialism created a duality: reconstitution or exposure of the society of the spectacle.
Fundi’s map — his artistic contribution as a Situationist — resituated the Caribbean. It was no longer full of authoritarian nation-states controlled by global capital and divided by Hispanic, Dutch, French, and English colonial heritages. It was not the US’s backyard or Canada’s preferred destination for tourism.
Instead, each territory was located on the map by everyday people’s labor strikes, unemployed risings, army mutinies, and land occupations. This new map, mirroring the Pan Caribbean international imagined by NBM, included the archipelago from Cuba (with criticism of Castro from the perspective of workers’ autonomy) to Trinidad. This imaginary included Guyana, Central America, and North America, and the upheavals inspired by Caribbean people in Canada and the US. The instincts of this Caribbean federation-from-below are quite contemporary, if we know where to look for it and how to bring it closer.
Fundi placed the Caribbean rebellious spirit in Canada in conversation with regional insurrections and pointed toward a free society that the working class and the unemployed initiate and complete. In contrast, these Montreal events, like the global Black Power movement, are recalled as a touchstone for discourses on racial disparities, calls for reform, and greater institutional representation. But these, substantially, are miserable layers of misrepresentation that divert our eyes in a transition away from social revolution toward a system of race managers and ethnic patronage politics, a more culturally plural police state, and complicity with empire.
Blues Klair exhibits artifacts from everyday life that illustrate the elemental drive for popular self-government that emerged from these movements, ideas, and moments of danger. These fragments remind us of a kaleidoscope of fresh ways of viewing liberation, and scattered rebel seeds that may sprout again.
[This article was originally published in Vincent Meesen and Michele Thierault eds. Blues Klair. Montreal: Concordia University, 2021. The research endnotes have been removed for this presentation.]
