Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution
352
Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution
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Overview
Student movements challenged authorities in almost every country, giving the insurgency a global character, and contemporary feminist, Latino, and gay liberation movements all came to life. A focus on the French general strike of May 1968 and the U.S. movement’s high point in 1970—from the May campus strike to the revolt in the military, workers’ wildcat strikes, the national women’s strike, the Chicano Moratorium, and the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Convention in September—reveals the revolutionary aspirations of the insurgencies in the core of the world system. Despite the apparent failure of the movements of 1968, their profound influence on politics, culture, and social movements continues to be felt today. As globally synchronized uprisings occur with increasing frequency in the twenty-first century, the lessons of 1968 provide useful insights for future struggles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629634395 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 738,175 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Kathleen Cleaver is former communications secretary and first woman on the central committee of the Black Panther Party. A longtime activist for human rights, she is currently a professor of law at Emory Universityand is writing her autobiography, Memories of Love and War.
Carlos Muñoz has been a central figure in the struggles for civil and human rights, social justice, and peace in the United States and abroad since the 1960s. He played a prominent leadership role in the Chicano civil rights movement. Dr. Muñoz is a Vietnam War veteran, a member of Veterans for Peace, and is active in the immigrant rights movement. He is the author of Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, which has been published in a revised and expanded edition.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The New Left as a World-Historical Movement
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite — Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom.
— G.W.F. Hegel
Worldwide episodes of revolt in 1968 have generally been analyzed from within their own national contexts, but only in reference to the global constellation of forces and to each other can these movements be understood in theory as they occurred in practice. Particularly since World War II, it is increasingly difficult to analyze social movements from within the confines of a nation-state. The events that catalyze social movements are often international ones. The May 1970 nationwide university strike in the United States is remembered mainly because of the killings at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, but it was enacted in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia as well as to repression of the Black Panther Party.
The international connections between movements in 1968 were often synchronic, as television, radio, and newspapers relayed news of events as they occurred. In May 1968, when a student revolt led to a general strike of over nine million workers in France, there were significant demonstrations of solidarity in Mexico City, Berlin, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Berkeley, and Belgrade, and students and workers in both Spain and Uruguay attempted general strikes of their own. Massive student strikes in Italy forced Prime Minister Aldo Moro and his cabinet to resign; Germany experienced its worst political crisis since World War II; and a student strike at the University of Dakar, Senegal, led to a general strike of workers. These are instances of what sociologists have called "contagion effects" (and what I consider "eros effects"); they remain to this day understudied, a moment of neglect which stands in inverse proportion to their significance.
It was not by chance alone that the Tet offensive in Vietnam occurred in the same year as the Prague Spring, the May events in France, the student rebellion in West Germany, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the takeover of Columbia University, riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the pre-Olympic massacre in Mexico City. These events were related to one another, and a synchronic analysis of world social movements in 1968 validates Hegel's proposition that history moves from east to west. Global oppositional forces converged in a pattern of mutual amplification: "The whole world was watching," and with each act of the unfolding drama, new strata of social actors entered the arena of history, until finally an internationally synchronized insurgency against war and all forms of oppression emerged. In 1968 and 1970, crises of revolutionary proportions were reached in France and the U.S. These climactic points involved intense struggles between uprisings and reaction, a pivot around which protests ultimately lost momentum as "repressive tolerance" shed its benign appearance.
Looking back half a century later, we can say that 1968 signaled an enormous historical transition. The world today is changing faster than ever before in a dizzying process seemingly without outline. Yet 1968 gave us unusual clarity. As one observer put it:
History does not usually suit the convenience of people who like to divide it into neat periods, but there are times when it seems to have pity on them. The year 1968 almost looks as though it had been designed to serve as some sort of signpost. There is hardly any region of the world in which it is not marked by spectacular and dramatic events which were to have profound repercussions on the history of the country in which they occurred and, as often as not, globally. This is true of the developed and industrialized capitalist countries, of the socialist world, and of the so-called "third world"; of both the eastern and western, the northern and southern hemispheres.
Prior to 1968, no one knew and few could have guessed what was in store for world history. Without warning, worldwide movements spontaneously erupted. At the beginning of the year, President Charles de Gaulle hailed France as an "infallible beacon for the world," but within months the country teetered on the brink of revolution. If he had known what kind of beacon France would be in 1968, he might never have delivered his New Year's Address. After weathering the revolutionary crisis two years later in the United States, President Richard Nixon (popularly known as Tricky Dick) in his State of the Union address in January 1971 called for a "New American Revolution ... as profound, as far-reaching, as exciting as that first revolution almost 200 years ago." While some people scratched their hands in bewilderment, many more understood Nixon's Orwellian universe to mean "peace" was war, and "revolution" was counterrevolutionary repression.
Without warning, global turmoil of 1968 erupted against both capitalism and real-world socialism, against authoritarian power and patriarchal authority. The New Left opposed both state "socialism" and American "democracy." In its best moments, the movement challenged the entire universe of capitalist patriarchy — and in doing so, gave future generations an enduring vision of freedom. Although 1968 is often used as shorthand for the New Left, insurgencies were not confined to one year. The 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, which catapulted Martin Luther King to national attention, did not consider itself a "New Left" movement, but in essential aspects, it certainly was. The 1980 Gwangju People's Uprising (which ultimately brought parliamentary rule to South Korea) took place long after the New Left was supposed to have died, but it too carried New Left features. There was a self-described "New Left" in France as early as 1957, and a "New Left" insurrection in Sri Lanka in 1971.
Despite its brief appearance in history, the New Left regenerated dormant traditions of self-government and international solidarity. In Europe and the United States, after decades of cultural conformity, the possibility of revolution once again was widely discussed — and acted upon. At the same time, the meaning of revolution was enlarged to include questions of power in everyday life as well as the quality of power won by past revolutions. If the idea of revolution in an industrialized society was inconceivable for three decades prior to 1968, the kind of revolution prefigured in the emergent praxis of the movement was unlike previous ones. The goal of revolution was redefined to be decentralization and self-management of power and resources — destruction, not seizure, of militarized nation-states embedded in an international web of war and corporate machinations.
By enunciating the desire for a new world society based on cooperative sharing of international resources (not national or individual aggregation), on a communalism based upon enlarged social autonomy and greater individual freedom (not their suppression), and a way of life based on a new harmony with nature (not its accelerating exploitation), the New Left defined a unique stage in the aspirations of revolutionary movements. A new set of values was born in the movement's international and interracial solidarity, in its rejection of middle-class values like the accumulation of wealth and power, in its fight against stupefying routines and ingrained patterns of patriarchal domination, and in its attempt to reconstruct everyday life, not according to tradition or scientific rationality but through a liberated sensibility. In crises generated by insurgencies in 1968 in France and 1970 in the United States, these values were momentarily realized in spontaneously produced forms of dual power.
The tempo of modern history has been so rapid that what was new in 1968 seems to be as far away from us today as all the rest of history. Although no obvious trace of the movement seems to survive, once we review key events of 1968, it should become clear that, far from ending in failure, the New Left's very success contributed to its disappearance. To give just one example: in the 1960s, only a few people supported the right of South African blacks to rule their country. Today apartheid is a distant memory.
World-Historical Movements
Periods of crisis and turmoil on a global scale are relatively rare in history. Since the French and American Revolutions, it is possible to identify less than a handful of such periods of global eruptions: 1848–49, 1905–7, 1917–19, and 1968–70. In each of these periods, global upheavals were spontaneously generated. In a chain reaction of insurrections and revolts, new forms of power emerged in opposition to the established order, and new visions of the meaning of freedom were formulated in the actions of millions of people. Even when these movements were unsuccessful in seizing power, immense adjustments were necessitated both within and between nation-states, and the defeated movements offered revealing glimpses of the newly developed character of society and types of class struggles that would follow.
Throughout history, fresh outbreaks of revolution have been known to "conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language." The movements of 1968 were no exception: activists self-consciously acted in the tradition of past revolutions. Public statements issued by French insurgents during the May events invoked the memory of 1789, 1848, the 1871 Paris Commune, and the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917. Outsiders confirmed what seemed like the collapse of time:
In the Paris of May 1968, innumerable commentators, writing to celebrate or to deplore, proffered a vast range of mutually exclusive explanations and predictions. But for all of them, the sensibility of May triggered off a remembrance of things past. By way of Raymond Aron, himself in touch with Tocqueville, readers of Le Figaro remembered February 1848; by way of Henri Lefebvre, French students remembered the Proclamation of the Commune in March 1871, as did those who read Edgar Morin in Le Monde; French workers listened to elder militants who spoke of the occupation of factories in June 1936; and most adults, whether or not they had been in the Resistance, relived August 1944, the liberation of Paris.
Such periods of the eros effect witness the basic assumptions and values of a social order (nationalism, hierarchy, and specialization) being challenged in theory and practice by new human standards. The capacity of millions of peopleto see beyond the social reality of their day — to imagine a better world and to fight for it — demonstrates a human characteristic that may be said to transcend time and space. During moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at the same time as dominant values of society (national chauvinism, hierarchy, and domination) are negated. As Herbert Marcuse so clearly formulated it, humans have an instinctual need for freedom — something we grasp intuitively — and it is this vital need that is sublimated into a collective phenomenon during moments of the eros effect.
Dimensions of the eros effect include the sudden and synchronous emergence of hundreds of thousands of people occupying public space; the simultaneous appearance of revolts in many places; the intuitive identification of hundreds of thousands of people with each other; their common belief in new values; and suspension of normal daily routines like competitive business practices, criminal behavior, and acquisitiveness. Though secular, such moments metaphorically resemble the religious transformation of the individual soul through the sacred baptism in the ocean of universal life and love. The integration of the sacred and the secular in such moments of "political Eros" (a term used by Herbert Marcuse) is an indication of the true potentiality of the human species, the "real history" which remains repressed and distorted within the confines of "prehistoric" powers and taboos.
The reality of Paris at the end of May 1968 conformed less to the categories of existence preceding May (whether the former political legitimacy of the government, management's control of the workplaces, or the students' isolation from the "real world") than to the activated imaginations of millions of people who moved beyond a mere negation of the previous system by enacting new forms of social organization and new standards for the goal-determination of the whole system. Modes of thought, abolished in theory by empiricists and structuralists, emerged in a practical human effort to break out of antiquated categories of existence and establish nonfragmented modes of Being. Debate ceased as to whether human beings were capable of such universal notions as justice, liberty, and freedom. Rather, these abstractions, concretized in the actions of millions of people, became the popularly redefined reality.
The May events, like the Paris Commune, Gwangju Uprising, and other moments of revolutionary upheaval, established a new reality where living human energy and not things was predominant. From this perspective, they can be viewed as a taste of the joy of human life, which will be permanently unleashed with the advent of a new world system qualitatively different than anything that has ever existed. With the end of "prehistory" and the beginning of "human history," human imagination will be freed to take giant steps in constructing a better world. "All Power to the Imagination," written everywherein May 1968, will become inscribed in the lives and institutions of future generations.
Two years later, the United States underwent its most significant crisis since the Civil War. While a majority of workers did not join, a rupture even more acrimonious and violent than in France took place. U.S. geographical size and the racial fragmentation of its citizens contributed to obscuring the magnitude of five months of climactic confrontations. Beginning in May with a university strike of more than four million people, a simultaneous battlefield revolt incapacitated the U.S. military, the first Gay Pride marches openly dared to take public space, women organized a general strike, Latinos mobilized in the streets as never before, and a rainbow alliance of about ten thousand people responded to the call by Black Panthers and assembled in Philadelphia, despite police terror, to write a new constitution. Insurgents' visions of freedom are contained in their actions, yet the Black Panthers' Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention (RPCC) also gave explicit details of the conscious outline of a free society.
With hindsight, we may debate today whether May '68 and May–September '70 were revolutionary crises, prerevolutionary situations, or simply "moments of madness," but in both cases self-understood revolutionary movements involving hundreds of thousands of people mobilized millions of supporters who decisively fought to overthrow the Establishment. In the U.S., unlike France, the forces of order used murderous force to crush the insurgency.
Historically speaking, it has often been the case that a particular nation has experienced social upheavals at the same time as order reigned elsewhere. Coups d'état, putsches, and armed takeovers of power within the confines of a particular nation are to be expected. In 1968 (and 1848 and 1905), there were seldom successful seizures of power despite the movement's global character. Nonetheless, social convulsions in these periods profoundly redirected world cultures and political trajectories. Spontaneous chain reactions of uprisings, strikes, rebellions, and revolutionary movements signaled massive proliferation of movement ideas and aspirations, a crucial aspect of their world-historical character.
Some epochs of class struggle are world-historical and others are not, a distinction noted by Antonio Gramsci, who used the terms "organic" (relatively permanent) and "conjunctural" (occasional, immediate, almost accidental) to describe the difference. The apparent climax and disappearance of the New Left led many observers to conclude it conformed to what Gramsci called conjunctural, arising as a unique product of the post–World War II baby boom, the injustice of Jim Crow segregation, or the prolonged intensity of the war in Vietnam. In the twenty-first century, with international acceptance of feminism's goal of gender equality, a global consensus against racism, and growing insurgencies against capitalist inequality and environmental devastation, the organic character of 1968 is evident.
Even in failure, world-historical movements define new epochs in cultural, political, and economic dimensions of society. They present new ideas and values that become common sense as time passes. They qualitatively reformulate the meaning of freedom for millions of human beings. Massive and unexpected strife and international proliferation of new aspirations signal the beginning of epochal change. During the dramatic outbreak of revolts and reaction to them, new aspirations are passionately articulated and attacked, and progress occurs in weeks and months when previously it took decades and half centuries. History does not unfold in a linear direction or at an even pace. As Marcuse observed, "There is no even progress in the world: The appearance of every new condition involves a leap; the birth of the new is the death of the old." He forgot to add that the birth of the new, after its period of celebration and youth, moves into maturity and then decays. In order to appreciate this, let us review what is meant by world history.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Global Imagination of 1968"
by .
Copyright © 2018 George Katsiaficas.
Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Table of Contents
Tables and Maps xi
Foreword Carlos Munoz xiii
Preface Kathleen Cleaver xv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The New Left as a World-Historical Movement 7
World-Historical Moments 10
1848, 1905, 1968: Historical Overview 18
The New Left: A Global Definition 23
Chapter 2 A Global Analysis of 1968 37
The Tet Offensive 37
Che's Foco Theory 45
Student Movements of 1968 47
Asia 58
South Korea 58
China 61
Japan 63
The Philippines 66
Thailand 67
India 69
Pakistan 70
Bangladesh 71
Sri Lanka 71
Iran 73
The Arab World 73
Tunisia 74
Egypt 74
Iraq 75
Turkey 75
Pacific 76
Australia 76
New Zealand 77
Africa 77
Nigeria 78
Senegal 78
South Africa 79
Congo-Kinshasa 80
Ghana 81
Zimbabwe 81
Zambia 82
Ethiopia 82
Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau 83
Burkina Faso 83
Europe 84
West Germany 84
Italy 89
Spain 93
The Netherlands 95
Denmark 96
Belgium 96
England/UK 96
Greece 98
Portugal 99
Eastern Europe: New Left vs. Old Left 99
Yugoslavia 100
Czechoslovakia 102
Poland 108
Latin America 113
Mexico 114
Columbia 117
Peru 117
Venezuela 117
Argentina 118
Uruguay 119
Brazil 120
Chile 121
Theology of Liberation 122
North America 123
Canada 123
The Caribbean 123
Jamaica 126
Barbados 127
Trinidad and Tobago 128
Bermuda 132
The United States 134
Onset of Counterrevolution 134
From Civil Rights to Revolutionary Internationalism 140
Emergence of Latino Opposition 146
The Working Class 153
Global Women's Liberation 154
Chapter 3 Revolution in France? May 1968 173
Global Connections 176
Roots of the May Events 178
The Workers 182
The New Working Class 184
Capitalist Relations of Production 186
Cultural Poverty of Consumer Societies 187
The Political Meaning of May 1968: Internationalism and Self-Management 194
Patriotism and Internationalism 194
Authoritarianism and Self-Management 197
Limits of Spontaneity 200
Some Implications of May 204
Chapter 4 Revolution in the United States? May to September 1970 211
The Largest Strike in U.S. History 219
Black Panthers Go to Yale 220
The Campuses Erupt 224
Murder at Jackson State University 227
Form of the Strike 230
Legitimation Crisis 233
Tactical innovations 234
Cultural Dimensions of the Crisis 238
Revolt within the Military 243
Women's General Strike 247
Latinos Mobilize 251
The Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention 255
The Panthers Split 264
Workers and the Crisis 268
Restoration of Order 273
Chapter 5 The Global Imagination after 1968 287
Global Uprisings after 1968 289
Some Questions for Revolutionaries 295
A Centralized Party? 295
Premature Armed Struggle? 298
Psychic Thermidor 300
Reforms and Revolution 302
Rebellion or Revolution? 304
Documents: Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention 309
Index 329