Slagmark

The degree of generosity with people's time and energy was extraordinary - from radical archivists, present-day activists, scholars and librarians working in the field and not a few veterans of 1968. These memories matter!

The project wouldn't have been possible without the efforts of so many different #radical #movement #archives in different countries dedicated to keeping the #memory of our movements alive, increasingly of course online.

The range of countries, movements and types of text we covered proved a major challenge - there is a good reason why we had to restrict it to the global North. It would take a team of at least half a dozen if not more to include the global South with any degree of credibility.

I was left feeling hugely grateful to the activists of the long 68, even when I didn't fully agree with them or the outcomes weren't what had been hoped and struggled for. What they did helped to shift hugely powerful structures and make a better world possible.

Colin Barker wrote this: "Here are voices from the marvellous year of 1968, as they spoke then. Some speak to projects we still struggle to realise half a century later. If a few are slightly mad, most are empowering, we know them as our own. We are their inheritor."

It was really interesting to test out some of the texts in a workshop with #activists at the @UlexProject and see just how many of them really spoke to people in movements today, in all sorts of ways.

Doing the book was invigorating and overwhelming in pretty much equal amounts. And daunting to do something like this when so many participants are still with us, and our movements are still in many ways in the shadow of 1968.

We dug out #manifestos and #posters, #song lyrics and #graffiti, #flyers and #transcripts, #speeches and #strategising. All from the #activists of the movements - not journalists or opponents - and from the heat of the conflict.

#Indigenous and #migrant struggles, #feminism and #LGBTQ liberation, #students and #socialism, movements around #discrimination and basic services, #strikes and #barricades, #counterculture and #squatting, #guerrillas and radical #education - so many voices...

It covers #Czechoslovakia and the extraordinary #Prague Spring, then- #Yugoslavia's student uprising, the less-well-known experiences of #Denmark and #Canada, the not-so-#postcolonial stories of #NI and #Mexico, and the dramatic #Japanese history.