1968 – An excess of history – PR9

Late August 1968 – Czech students are hurling Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks on the streets of Prague as they vainly seek to repel a Soviet invasion of their country. Thousands of miles away in Chicago young demonstrators are engaged in equally fierce street battles with the city’s police as they try to protest against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic Party Convention in the city.

 “Revolution”, Leon Trotsky once memorably said, “is an excess of history”. Forty years ago history indeed seemed to come rushing in through every available window and door as 1968 played host to a series of tumultuous events, most notably the student protest and workers’ general strike that rocked France in May.

But 1968 did not come out of the blue. The movements that exploded across the world’s, then novel, TV news media, were rooted in struggles earlier in the decade: the black civil rights movement in the US and the struggle for Algerian independence in the early 1960s; student protests in Holland, Italy and West Germany from the mid-1960s.

But these events coalesced and reached a deafening crescendo in 1968, which acted in turn as catalyst, speeding up history and opening up a whole pre-revolutionary period in the next decade. 1968 was indeed a year full of revolutionary potential, which is why today’s world leaders and their media look back at the year in fascination and horror. Have they learned the lessons? Have we?

The centre of the storm

The Vietnam War had been the galvanising factor for a worldwide protest of youth. Virtually every night on TV screens across the world people watched the blanket bombing of North Vietnam, the napalming of villages in the South, the public executions, and even Bhuddist monks burning themselves to death in peace protests.

President Lyndon Johnson, elected President in 1964 as the “peace candidate” against the Republican hawk Barry Goldwater, had proceeded to escalate the war. In 1964 the US had 23,000 “military advisors” supporting the corrupt and dictatorial South Vietnamese regime. By early 1965 Johnson had authorised the mass bombing of North Vietnam, and by the end of the year had 185,000 troops fighting the NLF (National Liberation Front – what the US called the “Vietcong”) in the South.

By the end of 1968 nearly half a million US troops were fighting in Vietnam and more than 48,000 US servicemen had been killed. The average age of a US infantryman in Vietnam was 19 years, with a disproportionate number being black and latino – and of course working class. This was a war fought – and opposed – by young people.

The US had seen many big demonstrations against the war in 1967 and several were violent and subjected to police attack. Anti-war activists were already questioning the tactics of non-violent direct action taken over from the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and this was to lead to more militant self-defence tactics in 1968.

Yet until 1968 the protests had little effect on the self-confidence of the US administration and military that it could win the war. A firm bi-partisan consensus existed behind President Johnson who had been elected in a landslide victory. Then in February the NLF launched its Tet offensive against the South – an onslaught that stunned the US military and the American public. The guerrillas even penetrated the US Embassy and pictures of dead US Embassy guards flashed around the world. Despite being a military disaster for the NLF, which took enormous casualties, it was a body blow to the US administration’s propaganda of a “war being won”. Public opinion turned and it was increasingly seen as an unwinnable war during 1968.

The repercussions in the US were immense. The anti-war movement had been growing through 1967 especially on the campuses. American students were being drafted as cannon fodder. Some 45,000 young people a month were being called up in early 1968 and in July President Johnson abolished the graduate deferment programme to call up 150,000 students hoping to do graduate studies over the next year.

All this took the anti-war movement onto a new level in 1968, occupying campuses across the country and targeting defence industry contractors. Thirty colleges or high schools a month on average were erupting into boycotts of classes, campus occupations and vigils. The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) became a leading force on campus and in the “New Left”. From a small organisation founded in 1960 it grew to 30,000 in 1967 and almost doubled again in the next year. It worked as part of what was often called the “New Left” – by 1968 this included the “Yippies”, an anarcho, direct-actionist organisation whose radical spokepersons were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin – they proclaimed “make revolution for the hell of it”. It also included a growing, separatist, Black Power movement, and a fledgling women’s liberation movement. This uneasy coalition was itself part of a broader and less militant anti-war movement coalition that extended into the Democratic Party itself

The fact that 1968 was a presidential election year added special intensity and focus to the anti-war ­movement. ­Sections put their hopes in the Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy who declared his intention to stand on a anti-war platform against Johnson for the Democratic nomination. McCarthy ran Johnson a close second in New Hampshire primary in March and by the end of the month Johnson (who in 1964 secured the largest popular vote in modern times) decided he was unelectable due to the war and withdrew.

By the time of the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago and with Bobby Kennedy assassinated, McCarthy and the anti-war delegates had no hope against the Democratic Party machine that was backing Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey. Richard J Daley, Mayor of Chicago, would ensure that the anti-war demonstrators who targeted the convention were “dealt with”. Viewers across the US and the world were able to watch on live TV as Daley’s police thugs and National Guardsmen laid into protesters and bystanders with clubs and mace gas outside the Hilton Hotel, where delegates were staying.

Later a national commission into the violence blamed the day’s bloody mayhem on a “police riot” which hospitalised more than 100 and resulted in at least 500 street casualties. But at the time most Americans supported the “get tough” line against the students. When an anti-war convention senator, Abraham Ribicoff, protested at the police “Gestapo tactics”, Daley responded in his usual robust way, shouting from the floor “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home”! Not surprisingly Hubert Humphrey emerged from the disastrous convention 12 points behind the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, who went on to win the presidency.

Despite the repression at Chicago, it did not dent the growth of the student and anti-war movement. Mayor Daley had given the anti-war movement a taste of the violence routinely handed out to the black civil rights movement during the previous few years. Indeed, in Chicago in April 1968 the police repression of the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis was more brutal.

Indeed, the convergence and overlapping of the anti-war movement and the black civil rights movement was a feature of 1968. Martin Luther King had until that year kept his distance from the anti-Vietnam War movement but started to espouse its cause in the Spring of 1967. His assassination in April not only sparked violent riots and protests across the country but accelerated the move away from the non-violent resistance strategy and strengthened those who preached armed self-defence against the racist state, like the Black Panthers.

But it was the anti-war movement that remained centre stage on the campuses. Nixon’s 1970 extension of the war to Cambodia saw the biggest protests ever and the shooting dead of four student protesters at Kent State University, Ohio. It was only after this, and Nixon’s moves to negotiations with the North Vietnamese (which resulted in US withdrawal in 1973) that led to a decline in the movement.

Western Europe

“London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – we shall fight we shall win!” went the popular slogan of 1968 student demonstrations. Again it was the Vietnam War that was the catalyst for the internationalisation of student grievances across Europe in 1968. On 17 February 1968, in the middle of the Tet Offensive, the German SDS (German Socialist Students) hosted the International Vietnam Congress with delegates from across Europe and from North America.

In 1968 the German student movement SDS (steeped in years of working to unearth Nazis in post-war German society) represented more than 300,000 students across West Germany in a 108 universities and had organised regular protests against the war. One of its main leaders was Rudi Dutschke – in April he was shot three times and grievously wounded in an assassination attempt.

Thousands participated in the Congress sessions in Berlin under a huge NLF flag and a picture of Che Guevara with the slogan “the duty of a revolutionary is to make revolution”. While there was a noticeable political division between the Europeans’ defeatism (i.e. “victory to the NLF”) and the North American “bring the troops home” line, the event was a huge spur to the rest of the European anti-war movement, which learned valuable lessons from the German movement about organisation and demonstration tactics. The Congress was followed by the biggest ever post-war anti-US rally seen in Berlin.

Protests escalated across the world. In February 1968 students from several US colleges went on four day hunger strike against the war. In the middle of this strike tens of thousands of French protesters, mainly students, marched in Paris in solidarity with the NLF. And in Japan, home to the US fleet that was used to wage war in Vietnam, the militant student organisation – the Zengakuren – turned out thousands to block a US aircraft carrier from docking to carry out repairs.

In Britain the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) organised its second demonstration on 17 March – it was much bigger and more militant than anyone expected with contingents from Europe including the German SDS. The 30,000 strong march ended in a riot in Grosvenor Square as demonstrators burst through police lines and tried to storm the US Embassy – they were met with police horses and baton charges.

Such violent clashes with police had not been seen on the streets of London since the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s. A second demonstration of up to 60,000 people was held in October. It was covered live on BBC, presented by David Dimbleby, largely because of press speculation that the nation would wake up to find government buildings occupied and a revolutionary coup underway!

Occupations there certainly were in 1968, but of colleges not government offices. With students radicalised by Vietnam and used to demonstrating on the streets, the militancy spilled over to protests about university issues; student representation, discipline, sex segregation in halls, secret files on students, connections with racist Rhodesia, concerns about the curriculum – were all causes of occupations. They took place at Hornsey, Croydon and Guildford Schools of Art, at Essex, Birmingham, London School of Economics (LSE) to name but a few. At the LSE an ongoing dispute over a Director coming from Rhodesia led to several occupations and the tearing down of security gates, which led to the expulsion of students and the sacking of Robin Blackburn, a lecturer.

New left papers appeared like Black Dwarf; New Left Review had a new lease of life and was sold on every campus. A Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation (RSSF) linking together University Socialist Societies, often hundreds strong, was formed. The older far left groups like Tony Cliff’s International Socialists grew, alongside new ones like Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group (IMG) linked to the Fourth International. Exotic Maoist groups also sprang up, but never in the same strength as in German student movement.

As the movements spread they also deepened, in the sense that the political issues that were taken up went far beyond the war in Vietnam. Spanish students ended a generation of passivity in 1968 by protesting against the fascist Franco regime in April when the government organised a mass in commemoration of Hitler.

This forced the authorities to close Madrid campus for more than a month. In Italy, in March, Rome campus was closed for two weeks after regular clashes between students and police as the former protested against inadequate facilities and antiquated disciplinary controls. In May and June another wave of occupations took place following the Paris events – universities in Rome, Turin and Milan were occupied and a frightened government quickly promised reforms.

Eastern Europe: cracks in the monolith

Events in Eastern Europe during 1968 moved on a separate but parallel track to those in the west. Not surprisingly, as the Soviet bloc supported North Vietnam and denounced the US intervention in the country, there was no large anti-Vietnam War movement in Poland or Czechoslovakia and little by way of contact between the student movements of east and west.

An exception was the Ninth World Youth Festival held in the Bulgarian capital in July 1968. Normally a staid, monolithic Stalinist affair, this one was different. The New Left turned up in force – the SDS from Germany, anti-war protesters from the USA, Guevarists from Latin America. The festival soon became a battle of wills between the left and the Stalinist organisers, with the left organising counter-seminars and even unofficial anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, which were quickly closed down by burly Bulgarian militiamen.

These events reflected the turmoil in Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia had a new reforming CP leadership under Alexander Dubcek who had come to power at the start of the year. By March he was under heavy pressure from Moscow to place restrictions on the explosion of criticism and freedom in the Czech press – the beginning of the famous “Prague Spring”. Worse, as far as the Kremlin was concerned, trouble had spread to the Polish students.

Student protests in Poland had started at the beginning of the year with the closing of a production by a famous 19th century nationalist Polish playright. In March a few hundred Warsaw students held a protest under the slogan “No studies without freedom”. Five hundred plainclothes militia arrived wanting to “talk to the students”. They were armed with clubs and beat every student they could find. Within a few days thousands of students were on the streets of Warsaw chanting “Freedom” and “Czechoslovakia”. Students demonstrated as well in Gdansk, Cracow, Poznan, and Lodz and were similarly attacked. The students, inspired by the US movement, launched boycotts and sit-ins.

Many of the students were children of party officials and they tried to take their case to the workers. One remembered how the student slogan “there is no bread without freedom” was ridiculed by the workers who pointed out to the contrary “there was no freedom without bread”.

The Polish CP managed to keep the two groups separated, launching an anti-Semitic campaign (under the guise of anti-Zionism) against some of the Jewish leaders of the students and within the party itself. By the end of March 1,200 students were imprisoned and tens of thousands of Jews, party members and intellectuals, had been forced to emigrate to Israel.

The Prague Spring was the next revolt to be crushed, with Russian tanks pouring into the capital in August 1968 and students and young workers taking the lead in a doomed resistance movement. Throughout Europe the New Left denounced the invasion – in London thousands of protesters marched to the Russian Embassy having shouted down George Brown, deputy leader of the Labour Party, as a hypocrite at the Labour organised rally (he was a well known supporter of the US in Vietnam). The August events were to give the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism as a dictatorship over the workers and students a new and growing audience.

The student struggle spread well beyond Europe and the US. In Brazil students regularly took to the streets to protest against the four year old military dictatorship. In Mexico, in the most violent student repression of 1968, at least 300 students protesting military occupation of Mexico City occupation were killed when the police and army opened up with machine guns on demonstrators for two hours. Student leaders were rounded up and ­“disappeared”. The Olympics nevertheless went ahead in Mexico City, providing the iconic image of two American medal winners giving the black power salute.

The repression of the Latin American dictatorships, facilitated by the CIA and US army trainers, re-enforced the guerrillaist turn of the Latin American left encouraged by the Cuban revolution and Che Guevara’s adventure in Bolivia in 1967. Tens of thousands of students were to take to the mountains and jungles in the continent throughout the 1960s.

Anti-capitalist politics

Politically the student movements of 1968 were incredibly diverse and eclectic. While they drew inspiration from each other, attempts at conscious international co-ordination were few and largely unsuccessful outside of the anti-war movement. Many of the (older) student leaders in the USA and France were not political virgins. SDS leaders like Tom Hayden had learned skills working in black voter registration campaigns in the US south earlier in the decade; others in France had been active in solidarity movements for the Algerian independence movement. They brought these organisational skills to the anti-war movement and the campuses.

The grievances the student movement took up varied widely; for freedom and against dictatorship in Latin America and Eastern Europe, against paternalism and censorship in Europe and America, for freedom of thought and curriculum reform, against racism, imperialism and war. These student movements were above all consciously anti-imperialist and to an important extent (especially in Europe) anti-capitalist. Like the anti-capitalist movement of the post-Seattle generation just over three decades later, the ’68 anti-capitalism embedded a critique of alienation, of capitalist consumerism, of the workings of the big corporations and the anti-democratic political institutions that worked to promote big business.

Herbert Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man” was devoured on European and US campuses alike after it appeared in 1965. In the USA, the influential Yippies very much prefigured the pink bloc activists of the 21st century anti-capitalist movement in that their chosen weapons were mockery and mischief rather than the militia and the molotov cocktail.

Apart from the small – and in 1968 (outside France) largely marginal – far left Trotskyists, the student movements of 1968 had no clear conception of how or whether to put the working class at the centre of events, nor what form of state should replace capitalist democracy. The ­student struggles were motivated by the barbarity of capitalism’s oppression of Third World peasants symbolised by Vietnam, and they did not at first relate to the workers of their own industrialised countries.

Indeed many of the European and US Maoists argued that the workers of the imperialist countries were “bought off”, that the real agents of revolution were the peasants or the super exploited blacks. Such ideas gained a foothold especially in the USA and Germany, where the workers’ movements remained passive, if not hostile, to the New Left. These were countries where capitalism was economically still expanding relatively rapidly, however unevenly the fruits of this growth may have been distributed.

In many ways the social earthquakes experienced in France and elsewhere occurred along a social historical fault line where backward cultural and political structures (Republican and “Dixiecrat” conservativism in the USA, the Fifth Republic’s rigid bonapartism in France, clerical-fascist dictatorships in Portugal and Spain) collided against the cultural and political expression of modern capitalism: universal civil rights for youth, blacks and women, freedom of expression, autonomy of education etc.

In themselves none of these demands was incompatible with capitalism as an economic system of exploitation. Yet for all this 1968 did see, if not revolutions, a pre-revolutionary crisis in France and the opening up of a deeply unstable and pre-revolutionary period in Europe.

The class dynamics of 1968

Students were the common denominator in many of the events of 1968. Whether in the US and British anti-war movement, May 68 in Paris, the Polish and Czech protests, students were the main social actors. This is not to say that the working class were complete by-standers – and in France for ten days they pushed to the fore of the action in their millions, revealing the class that had real power in society.

But the working class did not instigate the disparate actions. In France they followed the students; in the USA the working class was largely unresponsive to the campus based anti-war movement. In Poland the workers were manipulated by the Stalinist regime to oppose the student protests. In Mexico the grip of the PRI government on the labour unions meant the students’ heroic actions were not emulated by the workers. In Germany, perhaps the most politically and organisationally tight and advanced student movement anywhere in 1968, found little public sympathy amongst the West German working class – even its younger layers.

What brought students centre stage in the 1960s? In the first place there was a massive expansion of student numbers in higher education, welding together for the first time in western Europe, North America and in countries like Mexico, a large social strata, drawn not from privileged elites alone, but from middle class (and to a much lesser extent working class) backgrounds. This growth was a result of the huge expansion of capitalism after the Second World War, with its concomitant growth in professional classes and state bureaucracy and need for graduates and highly skilled technical workers.

This mushrooming of higher education provision brought hundreds of thousands of young people together in a festival of intellectual questioning and engagement, interrogating the accepted cultural and political beliefs of their parents and teachers, largely drawn from war time experience. The glories of the fight to rid Europe of fascism mattered less than the blatant suppression of national independence by the same US, French and British armies in Algeria, Vietnam and Malaysia. If the US could help bring democracy to dark corners of Axis Europe why did its rulers deny democratic rights to its own black population?

Yet this questioning and agitation was taking place against a background of an underfunded expansion of higher education, poor, crowded facilities and, above all, an authoritarian educational hierarchy on campuses across Europe and the US. Attempts to organise politically on campuses in the US were banned in many parts of the country in the 1960s. Italian students organised large protests against inadequate facilities in 1968, and saw their campuses closed down for weeks on end. In Paris, Nanterre’s overcrowded campus in the suburbs was the site of growing demands for a reform of the campus administration with its petty rules and oppressions.

So rapid was this explosion in student numbers that its dynamic could not be channelled into existing political institutions and parties, which were either unfit or antagonistic to their aspirations. In Mexico the students were the one stratum that existed and organised outside the framework of the ruling PRI state-run institutions. In Poland the student movement was not a creature of the ruling Stalinist party.

Of course, the grievances that pushed the students of various countries into mass action depended upon the national terrain. The anti-war and civil rights movement in the US, the authoritarian structures of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in France or the PRI’s equally suffocating regime in Mexico, the blanket cultural censorship of the Stalinists in Poland and the attempt at freedom of expression in Czechoslovakia. Yet binding these together at a deeper level, certainly in the west, was solidarity with the struggle of the NLF in Vietnam.

The legacy of 1968

1968 is rightly seen as a watershed moment in world history. The long period of stifling political reaction and social conservatism that accompanied the cold war was shattered for good. Youth would never be the same again, with students conquering political, social and sexual ­liberty that would have been unthinkable to the previous generation. Out of the 1968 movement came the movement for women’s liberation, gay and lesbian rights, and black consciousness and civil rights. Moral censorship in theatre, film and print was virtually swept away. For a year or two it really did seem as though “imagination was seizing power”. Of course this was not the case in Eastern Europe where the defeat in Czechoslovakia ushered in a period of deep bureaucratic conservatism and repression.

The political trajectories of the US and Europe were quite different after 1968. In the US, despite the mass movement against the war, the radicalism of the students and the militant black power movement, the working class as a whole remained largely unmoved, and un-radicalised – indeed, before the Tet Offensive, and even after it, sections of it were violently hostile to the anti-war movement.

North America in the 1960s was booming. When Johnson was elected in 1964 a poll asked whether Americans were “satisfied or dissatisfied with family income”: 64% of white respondents answered “satisfied” (compared to only 30% of black respondents). The economy had grown by 25% since 1961 and unemployment was heading below 4%. As a result the trade unions, the AFL-CIO, remained wedded to the Democratic Party and the status quo and faced few challenges from the rank and file.

Johnson’s “Great Society” welfare reforms and civil rights measures, left largely untouched by Nixon, were enough to satisfy the more reformist sections of the black protest movement, led by Democrats like Jesse Jackson. The militant black power wing, the Black Panthers, were ruthlessly suppressed by the FBI, its leaders slaughtered in armed raids or forced into exile. The students were placated by some liberal reforms on campus and the anti-war movement lost impetus once peace negotiations started in Paris in the early 1970s – the SDS quickly fell apart in warring factions after 1968.

But 1968 opened up a whole pre-revolutionary period in parts of Europe. Its economic background was the beginning of the end of the long post-war boom and the onset of a new period of economic downturn and sharp recessions. Britain and Italy, as two of the weaker economies in Europe, felt this most dramatically, having to go on the offensive against workers living standards. France had to seek to win back concessions it made in 1968, while Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, managed to avoid any serious economic or political conflict in the decade following 1968.

Despite the sell out of the ’68 general strike, in early 1969 the French workers were forced into action to defend themselves against austerity measures, dictated by de Gaulle’s attempt to defend the Franc through budgets cuts. The French far left, especially those claiming to stand in the tradition of Trotsky, developed as sizeable far left organisations in the aftermath of 1968, recruiting tens of thousands of youth who would previously have been attracted to Stalinism. The PCF, like other Communist Parties in Europe, went into a decline after 1968.

In the autumn of 1969 Italy was racked by workers’ struggles to defend their living standards and again a large far left outside of CP control developed both in the student movement and amongst young workers. In Britain there was a rising crescendo of workers’ struggles first against Labour attempts to legally hobble the trade unions (Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife”) and then under the Tory government of 1970-74, culminating in the downfall of Prime Minister Heath through a mass miners’ strike.

The far left organisations that grew in the post-1968 period in Britain, primarily the IS/SWP, were the ones that oriented to the working class, in particular to the burgeoning and militant shop stewards who played a vital role in beating off the attacks on trade unions in the 1969-79 period. The IMG/Fourth International that had built itself on a “student vanguard theory” (the idea that the students would continue to lead and “detonate” workers struggles) went into decline in this period.

In Spain and Portugal the student protests of 1968 were but a dress rehearsal for the mass working class protests against Franco and Salazar that brought an end to the dictatorships and restored parliamentary democracy in both countries in the mid-1970s. In Spain the ruling class managed a relatively smooth transition from Franco’s regime. In Portugal the radical Armed Forces Movement that ousted Salazar opened up a serious revolutionary situation in the country, one which was only brought to an end in November 1975.

The militancy of the working class in these mass struggles post-1968 meant that many thousands of the student radicals of 1968 were attracted to socialist and revolutionary organisations in the 1970s. The far left grew manyfold in the following decade and not just in Europe – perhaps as many as 100,000 were to be found in subjectively revolutionary organisations internationally. In contrast the bureaucratic and reformist Stalinist parties shrivelled. 1968 had breathed new life into Marxism and revolution after a long period of defeat and cold war when its adherents had shrivelled to almost nothing. Despite retreats and defeats in the following decades that legacy is still with us.

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:19