There has never been a year like it: unrest, rebellion and revolution. Tariq Ali, at the forefront of the action 40 years ago, looks at how we still live with the consequences of 1968.After the shallow, fading Cold War decades - the middle period - of the last century, an invigorating fever gripped the world.
Its effect was so strong that even today, 40 years later, conferences are being organised, and essays, documentaries and books are being produced to mark the event.
The tale has been told many times and in many languages, but it refuses to go away. Why? A banal reason could simply be biology: the '60s generation is now in its 60s and some of its members are big in publishing, television, cinema, etc, especially in the West. This could be their last chance to remember, because 10 years from now most will be dead.
In France the debate was revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin.
"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relativism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics." He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for immoral business practices: the cult of money, short-term profit, speculation and the abuses of finance capitalism.
The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses".
So we are really responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism, et al. Give us a break, Nicolas.
The dreams and hopes of 1968: were they all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe, etc - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, nurtured, improved and crafted into a chair or a table or a bed. Something useful for the present.
"You're like fish that only see the bait, never the line," we would mock in return. For our side believed - and some of us still do - that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others - the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be regulated and reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few, and that socialism without democracy could never work.
Above all we believed in freedom of speech. The events of 1968 were, apart from everything else, an elegy for the print revolution.
A libertarian bulletin published by French students in 1968 sounds old-fashioned when so many live in cyberspace but at the time was a hymn to the written word:
"Leaflets, posters, bulletins, street words or infinite words: they are not imposed for the sake of effectiveness ... They belong to the decision of the present moment. They appear, they disappear. They do not say everything; on the contrary, they ruin everything: they are outside everything. They act, they think in fragments. They do not leave a trace ... as speech on walls, they are written in insecurity, communicated under threat, carry danger in them, then they pass by along with the passers-by, who pass them on, lose them or even forget ..."
ALL THIS seems utopian now to the men and women whose minds have become a market dominated by futures buried in the past and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, they now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.
The Western world appeared tranquil after World War II. The complacent and self-satisfied Western European elites stagnated during the Cold War: they never had it so good. Eastern Europe was less quiescent: an uprising in East Berlin in 1953, an insurrection in Budapest in 1956 and upheavals in Poznan and Prague some years later had shaken the gerontocracy in Moscow.
The crisis of the old empires was typified by the wars in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The French and Portuguese refused to leave without a fight. The result was a set of brutal wars, defeats which created a severe crisis in the mother countries, leading to the 1958 collapse of the Fourth Republic in France and a growing crisis for a senile Bonapartist dictatorship in Portugal.
The war in Vietnam was entering its third and final phase. Occupied by France, later Japan, briefly Britain and then France again, the Vietnamese had honed the skills of popular resistance to an art form that wasn't pretty or decorative. And in 1957 the leaders of the United States, convinced by the superiority of the white race and determined not to let the Vietnamese communists unite the country, replaced France as the colonial power and began to send in soldiers to shore up their local puppets.
What was remarkable about 1968 was the geographical breadth of the global revolt. It was as if a single spark had set the entire field on fire.
The eruptions of that year challenged power structures north and south, east and west. Each continent was infected with the desire for change. Hope reigned supreme.
It was the war that caught the attention of the world. Despite half a million soldiers and the most advanced military technology ever known, the US could not defeat the Vietnamese. This fact triggered an anti-war movement inside the US and infected the military. "GIs Against The War" became a familiar banner. And I remember sharing a platform with black veterans of the war in Berlin. "I ain't gonna go to Vietnam because Vietnam is where I am," one of them chanted to massive applause. Their direct heirs today are the "Military Families Against the War" in Iraq.
In 1966-67 I spent six weeks in Indochina at the height of the bombing and saw the devastation and the daily deaths of unarmed civilians. These remain etched in the memory. How can one forget? Agitating for a different world and for solidarity with the Vietnamese was the logical outcome for many in that generation.
And then, to our utter amazement, France exploded in May-June of that year, making it an uncommonly memorable and beautiful summer. Ten million workers on strike, the largest in the history of capitalism; factory occupations during which it became clear that the workers knew how to run the factories much better than any boss.
The example of France began to spread and worried the bureaucrats in Moscow just as much as the ruling elites in the West. They agreed that the unruly and undisciplined people must be brought to heel. Robert Escarpit, a distinguished Le Monde correspondent, expressed the mood well on July 23, 1968:
"A Frenchman travelling abroad feels himself treated a bit like a convalescent from a pernicious fever. And how did the rash of barricades break out? What was the temperature at five o'clock in the evening of May 29? Is the Gaullist medicine really getting to the roots of the disease? Are there dangers of a relapse? ... But there is one question that is hardly ever asked, perhaps because they are afraid to hear the answer. But at heart everyone would like to know, hopefully or fearfully, whether the sickness is infectious."
It certainly was. A "creeping May" took over in Italy and large anti-war demonstrations were treated as virtual insurrections by the British and German social democratic governments. Sweden was exceptional. Here the foreign minister, Olaf Palme, led a torchlight procession against the war to the US embassy and was never forgiven.
In Prague, communist reformers - many of them heroes of the anti-fascist resistance during World War II - had earlier that spring proclaimed "socialism with a human face".
The country was bathed by the lava of the resulting debates and discussions in the state press and on television. The aim of Alexander Dubcek and his supporters was to democratise political life in the country. It was the first step towards a socialist democracy and seen as such in Moscow and Washington. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement. Alexander Solzhenitsyn later remarked that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the last straw for him. Now he realised that the system could never be reformed from within but would have to be overthrown. He was not alone. The Moscow bureaucrats had sealed their own fate.
Later that year Mexican students demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule were massacred just before the Olympics.
And then in November Pakistan erupted. The students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US (sound familiar?). They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes and other social levels and despite the severe repression (hundreds were killed) the struggle increased in intensity and toppled Field Marshal Ayub Khan in March 1969.
The country was in such a state of excitement. The mood was joyous. The victory led to the first general election in the country's history. The Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan won a majority that the elite and key politicians refused to accept. Bloody civil war led to Indian military intervention and ended the old Pakistan. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.
There were ripples elsewhere including Gough Whitlam's opposition to the Vietnam War and his eventual election victory in Australia four years later, which marked a short break with the servility of the Australian political elite.
The collapse of "communism" created the basis for a new social agreement, the Washington Consensus, whereby deregulation and the entry of private capital into hitherto hallowed domains of public provision would become the norm everywhere, making traditional social democracy redundant and threatening the democratic process itself.
Full employment itself is now regarded as a utopia. The fact that no centre-left party today can even propose redistributive income taxes is an indication of how far their leaders have been forced to travel. These parties are without a compass. Their model is the Tweedledum-Tweedledee style of US politics.
Hope has been reborn in South America, where social movements from below have led to electoral victories in several countries, with Venezuela in the lead.
In the West itself an economic crisis beckons: societies cannot live off credit forever. The most significant shift we have witnessed has been a structural alteration of the world market: the Far East is now central to the future of capitalism. China today, like Britain in the 19th century, is the workshop of the world. The impact of this on world politics has yet to be felt. The half-asleep giant might wake up one day with surprising consequences.
Many of those who once dreamt of a better future have given up. Unless you relearn you won't earn is the bitter maxim they espouse and, ironically, the French intelligentsia is among the worst today and presides over a decline in that country's culture.
Renegades sit in every European government reminding one of Shelley's gentle rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
I think of another poet, the North American Thomas McGrath, who in the middle of the last century defended the radicalism of the 1930s. His poem Letter To An Imaginary Friend could apply just as well today to the '60s:
Wild talk, and easy enough to laugh.
That's not the point and never was the point.
What was real was the generosity, expectant hope,
The open and true desire to create the good.
Now, in another autumn, in our new dispensation
Of an ancient, man-chilling dark, the frost drops over
My garden's starry wreckage.
Over my hope.
Over
The generous dead of my years.
Now, in the chill streets
I hear the hunting and the long thunder of money ...
Tariq Ali was at the forefront of 1960s political activism and is a novelist, historian and political campaigner.
Sydney Morning Herald January 5, 2008
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