Paper short abstract:

I investigate the activities of the Marxist-Leninist Liberation Support Movement in the US and the extensive amount of first-hand information they produced and circulated in order to raise-awareness about the struggles and the post-colonial futures imagined by the MPLA, Frelimo or PAIGC

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims at pluralizing the understanding of socialist solidarities by bringing into focus a small US and Canadian activist network - the Liberation Support Movement (1968-1982). Despite the strong anti-communist atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s and against the governmental stance on southern Africa liberation, this small group with Marxist-Leninist basis toured the US and Canada, distributing information and raising funds in support of the "vanguard movements" of Southern Africa. The connections with the MPLA, Frelimo and PAIGC, among others, were forged through the visits of LSM activists to guerrilla zones and liberated areas in the different territories as well as their encounters with anticolonial leaders in revolutionary hubs like Dar es Salaam. The extensive collection of oral histories they compiled and disseminated through pamphlets and other media voiced the demands of these liberation movements and contributed to spread their ideological approaches towards revolutionary nationalism, thus calling upon the emancipatory claims of the black population and migrant communities in the US and Canada. I argue that the rhetoric and visual representations used in the LSM's communication materials remind of those previously employed in other solidarity campaigns of socialist internationalism, although merged or even disguised under more prominent appeals to independence and Third World revolution. Hence, the paper sheds light on another side of informal socialist solidarities that were not rooted within the socialist block or any socialist country but still shared certain principles and alternative ideals that paved the way for transnational exchange and cooperation