The Discontents of Justice: The Third World Liberation Front as Theory in Practice
Senior Thesis in Political Science, Columbia University
Advised by Professor Karuna Mantena
Abstract: This thesis reconstructs the movement behind the 1968–69 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike at San Francisco State College as a theory of justice forged in struggle. Emerging amid the Vietnam War and the rise of Black Power, the Black Students’ Union (BSU) united the TWLF coalition of Asian American and Chicano student organizations, with the support of white students, in the longest student strike in U.S. history. The movement exposed the limits of recognition without power, asserting that multiracial movements require a coalitional strategy capable of expanding mass support while preserving the autonomy of oppressed groups.
I situate the university as a site of political struggle where questions of recognition and redistribution converge. Although this theoretical vocabulary emerged in the 1990s, it provides a critical framework for interpreting the TWLF’s radical synthesis, as it worked through these tensions in practice. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s two-dimensional theory of justice, Iris Marion Young’s politics of difference, and Glen Coulthard’s decolonial critique of recognition, I argue that the TWLF redefined recognition as a coalitional project of self-determination: a demand to redirect control over knowledge and material resources to oppressed communities through the construction of a counter-institution within the university itself.
Tracing the movement’s afterlives, the thesis explores the problem of translating socialist theory into practice under conditions of repression, backlash, and cooptation. I contend that the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies reflects a neoliberal absorption of identity politics that set the stage for contemporary backlash over affirmative action policies. By placing the TWLF within and beyond contemporary theoretical debates, this thesis reveals how the university remains a central battleground over justice, one that demands reuniting recognition and material redistribution through the transformation of the very structures of knowledge and power.