by Chris Harman and others, "Socialist review", May 2008
The events of 1968 inspired a generation and shaped struggles around the world for years to come. Chris Harman, a student activist at the time, looks back at this tumultuous year
Occasionally one year can cast a spell over the decades that follow.
1968 was such a year. Supporters of capitalism still bemoan its impact
40 years on. Nicolas Sarkozy on the eve of his election declared he aimed
to eradicate the "harm" that it had done. Before him it had been Tony Blair
who blamed "the 1960s" for what he sees as the ills of society today.
Yet you would have great difficulty understanding why the year was
so significant from most of the media coverage. It has been dominated by
renegades from the left who have turned into right wing fogies, with the
likes of Martin Kettle and David Aaronovitch regretting their youthful
folly. Interspersed with them has been the occasional ageing hippy recalling
with nostalgia overindulgence in drugs and sex. At best what happened is
presented as a euphoric student rebellion against conservative social mores:
a time of dropping out, dropping acid and, perhaps, challenging old sexual
stereotypes.
There are very different reasons for commemorating 1968. It was one
of those moments in history when it suddenly seemed that the coming together
of many different acts of revolt could overturn an exploitative and oppressive
society in its totality.
The year began with a devastating blow to US imperialism's attempt
to crush opposition to its puppet regime in the southern half of Vietnam.
There were armed risings against US troops in every city in the country,
the brief seizure of part of the US embassy in Saigon, and a battle for
Hue, the country's former capital, that lasted for weeks. Television screens
across the world featured a US general admitting of one town, "We had to
destroy it in order to retake it."
Blown apart was the arrogant assumption of the US ruling class that
it could crush resistance anywhere in the huge chunk of the world it dominated.
The consequences fed back into the heart of US society. The Democrat president,
Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), had looked forward only a few days before
to a triumphant re-election; the Tet Offensive meant that an anti-war candidate,
Gene McCarthy, enjoyed unexpected success in the New Hampshire primary
in March while Johnson declared that he would not be standing again.
While this was happening, the rival imperialist power in Moscow was
also taking a hammering. The Stalinist regime that had ruled Czechoslovakia
since the Second World War split apart, allowing students, intellectuals
and workers to organise freely and discuss genuinely socialist ideas for
the first time, while across the border in Poland students occupied the
universities and fought back against police attacks in the streets.
When we demonstrated against the Vietnam War on 17 March in London,
there was not just revulsion at the barbarity of US imperialism - with
the chant, "Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids have you killed today?" - there
was also the feeling that we could fight and win amid a world in turmoil.
It was the most militant demonstration anyone could remember as tens of
thousands of us tried to break through the police lines outside the US
embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Just two and a half weeks later came the assassination of Martin Luther
King in Memphis. People rose up in every black neighbourhood in the US,
attacking symbols of authority, with young African-Americans turning away
from the civil rights movement's goal of peaceful integration into existing
US society towards the overtly revolutionary ideas of the Black Panthers.
A week after this there was a similar eruption of angry militancy among
West Germany's students at the attempted assassination of one of their
leaders, Rudi Dutschke, after a hate campaign by the right wing Springer
media empire. Tens of thousands took to the streets with red flags in an
attempt to close down its newspapers.
May was the most amazing month. What began as a small group of activists
defending themselves against a police attack outside Paris's Sorbonne university
escalated into a "night of barricades" involving tens of thousands of students
who drove the police from the area and caused trade unions to call a one
day stoppage and demonstration in solidarity. That then showed millions
of workers their potential power. Strikes and occupations spread, closing
down radio, television, airports and cutting petrol supplies, until the
whole country was paralysed by a general strike of up to ten million workers
that had grown from the bottom up.
France's President de Gaulle had ruled with dictatorial powers for
ten years, brought to power by parliament panicking in the face of the
threat of a military coup. Now he was visibly humiliated. People in their
millions laughed at his speeches denouncing the movement. The strikes made
it impossible for him to implement a referendum that was meant to bring
it to an end. The world's media talked of "France's May revolution".
In June it was the turn of the students of Yugoslavia to precipitate
their country's biggest political crisis for 20 years as they battled with
police in Belgrade to chants of "Down with the Red bourgeoisie."
Defiant salute
August saw the Brezhnev regime in Russia set out to crush the ferment
in eastern Europe by sending its tanks into Czechoslovakia and kidnapping
the country's leaders - and get a shock as it met massive passive resistance
from virtually the whole population. Meanwhile, anyone who believed in
"American democracy" got a sharp lesson as thousands of police viciously
attacked anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic Party convention
in Chicago as it chose the pro-war nominee, Hubert Humphrey, as its candidate
despite him not winning in a single primary.
The Olympic Games were in Mexico City in October. They were the occasion
of a massacre much worse than any we have yet seen this year in Tibet.
Police cornered a demonstration of tens of thousands of students in a square
away from the city centre and opened fire from surrounding buildings, killing
hundreds. They forbade the press from reporting what had happened. The
world's media and politicians chose to ignore the blood flowing in the
streets. Instead they reserved their condemnations for victorious black
US athletes who gave defiant clenched fist black power salutes on the podium
- and were immediately banned from sport.
That month also saw an event whose consequences were to ricochet through
British politics for the next 30 years. The armed Northern Ireland police
force viciously attacked demonstrators from the nationalist ghetto of the
Bogside in Derry who demanded civil rights. Inspired by the rebellions
elsewhere in the world demonstrators fought back - the beginning of a great
revolt against the sectarian statelet Britain had established when it partitioned
the island in 1921.
But there was more to the year than just a series of exciting events.
Each upsurge of struggle inspired those involved in the next, creating
the sense of an international movement. People who otherwise might have
regarded their struggles as over particular grievances saw they had much
more general significance.
As with any great upsurge of revolt, no one expected it. The 1950s
and early 1960s had been one of those periods in history in which the structures
of existing society seemed frozen. The ruling powers had contained and
rolled back the rebelliousness and ferment of the inter-war and wartime
years. The US and the USSR had divided the world between themselves, not
only geographically but also ideologically. If you did not accept the inhuman
behaviour and dogmatic utterances of one you were expected to line up with
the inhuman behaviour and dogmatic utterances of the other. Russian dissidents
were thrown into labour camps or psychiatric hospitals, US dissidents were
driven from their jobs by the Un-American Activities Committee, imprisoned
like Dashiell Hammett, expelled from the country like Charlie Chaplin or
deprived of their passports like Paul Robeson.
The time when the CIO unions in the US had been a radical force was
long since past; the union movements in France and Italy had been divided
and their power apparently broken; Britain's union leaders were the bastions
of the pro-US and pro-nuclear weapons right wing inside the Labour Party;
the National Union of Students was part of a CIA international front.
A stultifying conformity pervaded social life. The family was taken
to mean the man working while the woman toiled in the home waiting on him
with complete responsibility for childcare. Women were expected to kowtow
to men, young people to look up to their elders, black people to be thankful
when occasionally they were not discriminated against. In the Southern
part of the US, black people were still subject to the separate and unequal
"Jim Crow" status which denied them voting rights and any redress against
racist thugs and police.
Liberal and Labour apologists for the system claimed its remaining
ills could be cured by peaceful and patient endeavour for small reforms
within existing structures. They spoke of an "affluent society" that was
delivering rising living standards, of an "end of ideology" and the demise
of the working class as it embraced "middle class" consumerism. It was
a message which even influenced adamant opponents of the system like the
German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse. He portrayed a "one-dimensional"
society of people so enmeshed in the ideology of "consumerism" as to rule
out any revolt in its advanced industrial heartlands.
Hardly noticed by anyone were changes beneath the surface of society
that were undermining the existing structures and ideologies which justified
them.
These were bound to find expression first among young people. At all
times in any society they are more likely to kick back against oppressive
and exploitative conditions than their elders, worn down from bearing the
weight of the past. Such kicking back grows in magnitude the greater the
contrast between the official conformism and the conditions in which people
live. And students are especially sensitive to the contrast in present
day capitalism. They are herded together in their thousands and expected
to become proficient practitioners of ruling ideologies that make little
sense. They also find it much easier to argue out and give organised expression
to their feelings than do workers, even young workers, since they are not
bound to machines or office routines eight hours or more a day.
So it was students who were the first to move in 1968, giving the impression
that expressions of more general social crises were a specifically student
issue - the impression that so much media coverage of 1968 seeks to perpetuate.
Already the early 1960s had seen some dissent. There had been mass
demonstrations against nuclear weapons in Britain; thousands of black and
white students had taken part in the civil rights movement in the US; French
students had resisted the Algerian War. There was a new flourishing of
such activity in 1966 and 1967, with the first protests against the Vietnam
War in the US and Britain, the radicalisaton of German students after the
police killed a demonstrator on a Berlin protest, the adoption of the concepts
of black power and armed self-defence by African-American student activists,
revolts against professorial authoritarianism and appalling conditions
on the Italian campuses. The impact of 1968 was to gel these different
movements together.
The Tet Offensive brought the sudden realisation that those who ruled
over us were not all-powerful. So it was that in the first months of 1968
there was a rash of protests in Britain, mainly by students, against Labour
ministers for supporting the Vietnam War and against Conservative politicians
like Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys and Patrick Wall for their racism. These
were initially minority protests of perhaps a couple of hundred students.
But a couple of years earlier they would not have been bigger than a couple
of dozen. When the authorities tried to discipline protesters, hard arguing
and insistent agitation by these minorities were able to swing previously
liberal "moderates" - and even some outright Tories - into supporting the
radical position.
In the early months of 1968 the student movements in Germany and Italy
were much bigger than anything happening in France. French activists complained
to one of our comrades that they did not have a movement like ours in Britain.
The language of the movements was increasingly revolutionary but usually
in terms of "student power" and students as "the new revolutionary class."
Those who were more radical looked to the notions spread by Che Guevara
(who had been murdered by the CIA only months before) that revolution would
come from armed actions in the most remote areas of Third World countries
and that Western workers were "bought off" by "consumerism". This could
divert them from making connections with wider numbers of people here.
This began to change with the May events in France. People suddenly
saw the possibility of revolutionary change much nearer home and one which
came from below, involving the mass of people. The media concentrated on
the student battles with the police in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But
by the third week of May the spectacle of the working class holding to
ransom the government of a major capitalist country had an impact on those
fighting back against the system everywhere.
Great revolts cause a fantastic widening of people's horizons. Those
who would have laughed at the idea of revolution in 1966 - or at least
deemed it impossible - were taking it seriously in the summer of 1968.
When Britain had its biggest Vietnam demonstration, in October 1968, the
most popular slogan alongside "Victory to the NLF" (the Vietnamese liberation
movement) was "We will fight, we will win, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin";
the most popular placard was of a clenched fist with a spanner and the
words "Workers' Control".
Only a small minority within the student movement anywhere became committed
revolutionary activists - but that minority was many times bigger than
that of only six months before. The ideas of a much wider number of people
were turned upside down by the experiences of the year. They began to listen,
argue and discuss, and to read Marxist texts which had been all but excised
from university syllabuses. The forms of social conformism that had underpinned
the old ideas were also challenged.
Some of the changes were superficial but symbolically important, as
when male students gave up wearing suits and shaving for jeans, beards
and long hair.
There had been a very small counterculture on the margins of mainstream
society in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a mixing together
of those into hallucinatory drugs, left wing or pacifist ideas, avant-garde
theatre or poetry, folk music and eastern religions. This counterculture
had begun to find a wider audience with the "summer of love" in 1967 and
the rise of the hippies. Its audience grew much greater because of the
events of 1968, but also more political. It even began to influence the
western world's dream factory in Hollywood, with a new wave of directors
and actors producing films previously unimaginable. But in the process
it was easy for people to confuse changing their own lifestyles with the
revolution.
Wave of occupations
There were more profound challenges to the old conformism, even if often
mixed up with the lifestyle approach. It was in 1968 that the Women's Liberation
Movement was born as women activists began to challenge the sexist assumptions
which the young men who had been radicalised brought with them into the
new movements. The next year saw the first open organisation of gay people.
Very important for the future was the way activists drew lessons from
the French events, lessons which led them to take up revolutionary Marxist
ideas which had only been held by handfuls of people previously. They saw
that it was not just "the people" in general that had shaken French society,
but the workers.
The new student revolutionists of Italy (a fair number converts from
the Catholic student organisations) turned to the factories and played
an important role in the workers' strikes which swept the country in its
"hot autumn" of 1969 (sometimes called its "May in slow motion"). The slogan
of Students for a Democratic Society in the US had been "Half the way with
LBJ" in 1964; at the end of 1968 its activists declared themselves to be
"Marxist-Leninists". In Britain students went from occupations and demonstrations
to leaflet the docks and the factories.
Such efforts were to be immensely important in the years that followed
1968. The French slogan after May had been "Ce n'est qu'un début"
- it's only the beginning. And across the world as a whole it was only
the beginning. 1969 saw student demonstrations transformed into a mighty
rising of car workers in the Argentinian city of Cordoba and an autumn
wave of occupations and strikes in Italy. 1970 saw the biggest yet wave
of student protests in the US after Nixon and Kissinger extended the Vietnam
War to Cambodia and the national guard shot students dead at Kent State
University, Ohio. 1972 saw a great upsurge of popular struggle in Chile
and, at the end of 1973, an occupation by Athens students which turned
into a huge popular uprising that caused the Greek military dictatorship
to collapse six months later. 1974 saw a coup which overthrew the 40 year
old fascist regime in Portugal and opened up 18 months of ferment with
revolutionary characteristics. 1975 saw a rising tide of struggle against
Spanish dictator Franco that caused his heirs to begin to dismantle his
fascist regime within months of his death. And in Britain we went through
the biggest wave of industrial struggle for half a century, culminating
in the fall of the Tory government of Edward Heath.
Students who had been radicalised by the events of 1968 were able in
these years to find common cause with a layer of workers and together create
networks of activists committed to social revolution in the factories,
mines, docks, offices and schools.
The importance of such networks was one other lesson of the May events
in France. For, if de Gaulle was helpless in the face of the rebellion
from below through most of May, at the end of the month he finally found
a way to bring it to an end. He relied on the cowardly willingness to compromise
of those who dominated the official structures of the working class movement.
Union leaders were prepared to end the general strike by getting workers
back to work, one section at a time, in return for partial concessions.
And the political leaders were so thrilled by the prospect of a general
election that they urged an end to the strikes, even though by doing so
they broke the momentum of the movement and enabled de Gaulle to win the
election.
That pattern too was repeated elsewhere in the years that followed,
culminating in agreements by official leaders of the workers' movements
in 1975 and 1976 to campaign against strikes in the interests of "partnership"
and social peace with the "social contract" in Britain, the "historic compromise"
in Italy, and the "Pact of Moncloa" in Spain. Employers were not slow in
seizing the opportunity to begin rooting out socialist activists and inflicting
severe defeats on workers' movements that had once threatened them.
As the workers' movement went down, so did the other movements born
of 1968. By the 1980s capitalism in crisis was taking bitter revenge on
the hopes of that year, and by the 1990s a new conformism seemed all dominant,
embodied in Blairism and neoliberalism.
There are differences with old conformism of the 1950s and early 1960s.
The old suppressed open discussion of sexuality; the new extols its transformation
into a commodity. The old confined women to the home; the new witchhunts
mothers who will not work for poverty wages. The old believed in the right
of white Western governments to use bombs and tanks to subdue vast areas
of the world; the new preaches using them for mass killings in the interests
of "humanitarian intervention". The old believed in deference to the upper
classes; the new in the divine rights of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
Just as there was pessimism among much of the left in the 1950s and
1960s, so there is today. Neoliberalism had its shadow in postmodernism,
with its claim that any total challenge to the system is both impossible
and dangerous. Its stranglehold has loosened in recent years, but its paralysing
effects still linger on. And some of the older generation contrast their
own rebellious years with the supposed complacency of today's younger generation.
They forget that the millions who marched against the Iraq war are many
times greater in number than those who marched against the Vietnam War.
They forget how confused and sometimes demoralised the left was before
the French May. Above all they ignore the way the very dynamic of capitalism
itself, with its continual transformation of economic relations, forces
masses of people to rebel against it, even when they themselves least expect
to.
1968 showed a generation how such revolts can erupt, interact with
each other and enable millions to see the possibility of a new world. That's
something hated by the likes of Sarkozy and Blair. It is something the
rest of us should rejoice in.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Harman's The Fire Last Time and A People's History of the World
are available from Bookmarks bookshop
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1968 and me
Sherrl Yanowitz
Berkeley
Racism dominated life in the US in the 1960s. Segregation wasn't just
in the South, with black people being murdered when they fought for human
rights. De facto segregation was rife in the North. I was a student at
the University of California in Berkeley, with 30,000 students on one campus.
Our generation had grown up during the civil rights movement. In 1964
white students from Berkeley went on the Freedom Rides - to desegregate
interstate buses - and spent that summer teaching in Alabama and Mississippi
Freedom Schools. Many of my friends put their lives on the line doing that.
Every 18 year old man in the US had to register at a military draft
board ready to be shipped off to fight in Vietnam within weeks of being
called up. Working class youth, especially black youth, were the hardest
hit. But by 1964 politically active Berkeley students faced expulsion and
immediate call-up. I had a friend, Nicolai, who was drafted. He shot two
of his toes off during training rather than be shipped to Vietnam.
It was relatively easy to occupy draft boards, but the Bay Area was
a major staging point for the war with large naval dockyards. They were
boarding troops and loading ships with weapons and tanks. We would try
to march to the dockyards and stop the ships going; people lay down on
the railway lines to stop military trains.
On one demonstration we were stopped at the Berkeley-Oakland border.
The National Guard stood across the road with drawn bayonets. If they were
given the word I don't know if they would have charged, so that time we
had to retreat.
By 1968 it seemed the war had been going on my whole life. When the
US was defeated in 1975 I felt I had won. All my friends and I felt like
we were actually fighting the war alongside the Vietnamese.
Maggie Falshaw
West Yorkshire
I joined the Labour Party in 1964 when I was 14. Getting rid of the
Tory government after 13 years was worth celebrating. But Harold Wilson's
Labour government soon lost its attraction. At first I accepted it couldn't
do much because it only had a majority of four. Then in 1966 it was re-elected
with a majority of 96. My expectations rose, but soon so did my disappointment.
With some school friends I helped to set up a branch of the Labour
Party Young Socialists in Ossett. We raised money for the anti-apartheid
struggle in South Africa, and organised benefits for strikers like the
Hull seamen and the 145 engineers sacked and replaced by cheap labour at
the Roberts-Arundel factory in Stockport. Ossett is a small town. The only
political parties were Labour, the Liberals, "independents" (Tories) and
one Communist Party member. There was no viable alternative to Labour.
In the spring of 1968 I went to the Young Socialists conference. It
was a revelation. Here were people putting into words what I felt. One
of the best speeches was made in defence of Rudi Dutschke, a German revolutionary
student leader who survived an assassination attempt.
After the conference I approached the comrade who made this speech.
This was my introduction to the International Socialists, who later became
the SWP. I joined and have been a member ever since. 1968 was a real turning
point for me.
Alan Watts
Australia
I got involved in a left wing bookshop run by Bob Gould in Sydney, which
was at the centre of the movements of 1968. There were always anti-war
demonstrations going on. I remember one ended up outside a hotel where
US troops stayed. But we weren't anti-soldier: we had parties and sometimes
the soldiers came along. I was 27, and some of them were much younger than
me and in a terrible state from the trauma of war.
Once 15 of us went into the Blue Mountains, it was just a weekend away
on a jolly - drinking and political meetings. When we came back there were
newspaper reports about it claiming we were receiving Viet Cong guerrilla
training! Our trip was even raised in parliament.
There was a confidence among the Australian working class. They weren't
about to take any bollocks from the employers. The unions had negotiated
a deal that if inflation increased so did our wages. The English weren't
always that popular - we were "whinging poms" - so people could be guarded
and unfriendly in the factory. But, as with any situation, you have to
establish yourself.
When the government decided to break the link with inflation we organised
a strike, and I spoke at a mass meeting. We got the money, and after that
I was alright, not just a whinging pom.
Eddie Prevost
London
As a young docker in 1968 Eddie Prevost was faced with a dilemma when
his workmates went on strike to support the racist politician Enoch Powell.
He describes how the events of that year challenged his political beliefs.
I had joined the Communist Party (CP) when I worked for Briggs Motor
Bodies in 1958. I liked their position on imperialism and their then orientation
on the working class. As a 14 year old I had read the Daily Worker and
opposed the US in Korea.
When the Tet Offensive began, in January 1968, the bravery of Viet
Cong troops was inspiring. It confirmed my political position. However,
events in Czechoslovakia and France shocked and disturbed me. The sight
of Russian tanks in Prague seemed no different to US troops in Vietnam.
How could one socialist state attack another? I remember the chair of the
Royal Docks liaison committee arguing the CP line - that the Russians were
saving socialism from plots by the West. But the sight of ordinary workers
on the streets confronting the tanks gave the lie to this.
In France the role of the French Communist Party (PCF) in trying to
keep revolutionary students separated from the workers, and to mediate
their struggle with the capitalist state, seemed to fly in the face of
class realities. I increasingly questioned the CP's political programme,
the British Road to Socialism, which suggested that through electing left
wing Labour and Communist MPs the ruling class could be legislated into
oblivion. These factors led to my eventual break with the CP.
Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech further exposed the CP's
failures. The speech became a major topic in Britain. He received 110,000
letters, mostly supporting his position. In the Royal Group of Docks, where
I worked, it became apparent that things were going much further. The National
Front (NF) had organised some meat porters and dockers who were in the
process of setting up a meeting, calling for a strike in support of Powell.
Should we attend this meeting and oppose it? If we lost the vote, did
we go on strike? If we didn't, could it be used against us as an excuse
not to abide by future unofficial strike decisions? We were thrown into
confusion, and the CP was caught off guard. I decided, rightly or wrongly
(I was wrong), not to attend. I would go to work. There was no way I would
support a racist strike.
On the day of the meeting discussion in my gang was sharp and nasty.
But I stuck to my guns. Those events around Powell were among my worst
moments as a politically involved worker, but we learnt lessons we would
never forget. In the late 1970s we organised the fight against racism much
more successfully.
1968 showed that the cracks in state capitalist power were widening,
and that revolutionary struggle was back on the agenda, big time. That
was where my future lay. After the dock strike in 1972 I joined the forerunner
to today's SWP, the International Socialists.
Michel Certano
France
There had been an accumulation of grievances and unhappiness about working
conditions since 1966. In the first months of 1968 there were grievances
around our salaries, pensions and the return to the 40-hour week among
other things.
Despite a 15-year ban, the CGT trade union called on the workers to
march in Paris on 1 May. The government was scared of intervening and this
in return gave confidence to the workers.
Then the student movement, with their own demands, led the struggle.
During the night of 10 May the barricades went up, with some workers joining
them. The battle between the demonstrators and the police lasted for four
hours. There was massive repression and the next morning the CGT called
a one-day general strike for 13 May to protest at police violence. So on
13 May workers protested across France. This one-day strike was very strong
in Paris and in the other big cities.
We started the occupation of our factory at Renault Billancourt on
16 May. We held meetings every day where workers could vote on the continuation
of the strike. Workers at Renault had a long history of great struggles
and that's why it was so important to have these meetings.
I was 25 years old at that time, and we were occupying the factory
every day and night. This movement was exhilarating for us young people.
Then the students wanted to get inside our factory, but we refused because
it would have been used by the bosses as an excuse to send in the police,
as in 1938 and 1950 [when 6,000 police were sent to evacuate the factory].
Some 25,000 workers were on strike in our factory. Renault Billancourt
had the biggest concentration of workers. That was the reason why the strike
was so important.
President de Gaulle had to rush back from a trip to Romania because
we had started the occupation. The prime minister, George Pompidou, said,
"Now it's serious." Everyone knew what Renault represented. It wasn't some
small factory, it was the biggest factory in France which fought for most
of the social benefits like the third paid holiday week, the fourth, and
so on. All the benefits won at Renault eventually found their way across
the whole of France.
It's one of the reasons why the government and the bosses didn't want
to negotiate. They hoped to crush us. And if they did manage to crush us
it would have been an enormous defeat for the French working class. But
our victory gave confidence to successive generations of workers.
I think that's the lesson of May 1968 - the acquired confidence. And
that's why the ruling class today wants to reduce May 1968 to the barricades
and the change in morals, because working class confidence is too much
of a danger to be talked about.
Michel Certano's book Mai 1968 - Renault Billancourt (in French) is
available from www.i-editions.com
Mike Davis
San Diego
The earthquakes of Saigon, Prague and Paris shook even the most right
wing corner of Southern California. In 1968 I was an apprentice butcher,
cutting the tonsils and adenoids off beef tongues while dreaming that,
perhaps, "sous la plage, les pavés" (to invert the famous slogan
of that May). My wife and I belonged to a groupuscule (who didn't in those
days?) that was distinctive in being composed entirely of young working
adults: a couple of school teachers, a delivery driver, a secretary, some
telephone company electricians, and a Marine Corps conscientious objector.
Two nights a week we convened over spaghetti to plot our collective
escape to San Francisco (I ended up in LA instead) and to argue over "what
is to be done". In the midst of one particularly intractable wrangle over
Trotsky versus Mao, we decided to appeal to the highest authority available:
the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in La Jolla, San Diego.
He'd just returned from overwhelming, almost unnerving adulation in
Paris and Frankfurt, and seemed quite relieved to spend an evening quietly
emptying a beer keg and yarning about carrying messages for Rosa Luxemburg
in 1918. When we attempted to solicit his opinion about our internal dispute,
he laughed and urged us not to worry unduly about "theology": "The world
is on fire - just follow the light." We tried.
Eamonn McCann
Derry
For me 1968 was about the birth of the civil rights movement. Originally
a campaign for basic demands, it stands out as a significant moment in
the narrative of Irish history. The black civil rights movement and Martin
Luther King earlier in the 1960s had excited the imagination of people
here. The influence of the student movement and reports of militancy from
around Europe were also in the mix - Northern Ireland is not an isolated
place.
I was a Labour Party member then. The movement was very broad - a hubbub
of ideas, aims and perspectives, many of them half formed. There was the
student organisation, People's Democracy - an unformed, amorphous organisation,
which had advantages in the early stages of the struggle. But its great
disadvantage was that it was very difficult to carry things through or
to have any political growth or deepening understanding, since things would
change from meeting to meeting.
The situation in Northern Ireland as it has developed is very different
to other struggles in 1968. Here events detonated then gave rise to the
IRA's armed struggle and increasing sectarianism. But it's important to
remember there were other possibilities glimpsed in 1968. We have to try
and keep the memory of them alive and make them a reality.