Caribbean Labour Solidarity is pleased to launch a special issue of the journal Socialist History

Speakers Francisco Dominguez, Ozzi Warwick and Ben Gowland

An update on Latin American Politics – Francisco Dominguez

The History of Socialism in the English-speaking Caribbean, Ozzi Warwick

Black Power and Socialism in the West Indies, Ben Gowland

Socialism in the English-speaking Caribbean has a long history. Its antecedents can be traced to the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s, Caribbean politics were driven by socialist ideas and socialist leaders. By the mid-1930s, powerful mass movements emerged in most territories of the English-speaking region, organised and led by workers and socialists. This provided the basis for the independence movement, leading to independence in the 1960s and ’70s. The emergence and development of socialism in the English-speaking Caribbean emerged from both class struggle and the struggle for self-determination, manifested in Caribbean nationalism and the anti-colonial struggles.

Black Power in the Caribbean emerged in the late 1960s in the context of the global upsurge in revolutionary activity often associated with 1968 and the various socialist-inflected protest movements that emerged at that time. Black Power groups and thinkers in the West Indies deployed a socialist analysis of the post-colonial nation-states of the region which gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s.