[This talk was delivered at a Green Left Weekly cocktail night on February 27, 1998.]

The memorable year 1968 – a momentous year for the left and the newly radicalising young people of the time, and an almost historical, legendary year for the young rebels of today.

A popular slogan was coined at the time: “We are the people our parents warned us about!” Well, they’re still the people your parents are warning you about, except for those parents who themselves were part of it at the time, who radicalised then, and kept their ideals and fire and hopes alive.

The second half of the ‘60s as a whole was a period of political awakening, rebellion, the radicalisation of youth, but 1968 stands out as a special memorable year. It’s best remembered by the revolutionary upheaval during May-June in France. But it’s also the year of:

The Tet Offensive in Vietnam;
The mass revolt of the students of Mexico City;
The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia; and many other acts of rebellion around the world.

• The Tet Offensive in Vietnam at the start of 1968 dealt a huge blow to Washington’s confidence that their military juggernaut could win the war. Their half a million troops finally repulsed the Vietnamese freedom fighters from the cities, but at huge costs. The offensive demonstrated the lack of support for the puppet regime; it broke the will of sections of the US ruling class; and it gave heart and inspiration to opponents of the war around the world.

• France May-June 1968 showed the possibility of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. In France, the events of May-June brought the country to a revolutionary crisis. It began with a student upsurge on one campus, spread to all students, tertiary and secondary, and then drew in the working class, with a 10 million strong general strike that brought the government to its knees. It was the closest thing to a revolution in an advanced capitalist country that we’d seen, and might have succeeded but for the treacherous role of the Communist Party and the trade union leadership.

• In Mexico escalating demonstrations of students for democracy, against repressive actions by the state, culminated in demonstrations of half a million. On October 2, 10 days before the Olympic Games were due to open, the regime carried out a brutal massacre, killing more than 100 students. The eyes of the world were focussed on these events, which prompted students, workers, peasants in other countries into action also.

• In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring, the reform movement within the government and Communist Party to bring about a socialism with a human face and eliminate the Stalinist distortion of socialism, was crushed by the intervention of Russian tanks. Not only in Czechoslovakia, but around the world, people rose up in opposition. Here in Sydney we helped organise a march to the Czech Consulate in protest.

• And there were other actions by workers and students in Italy, militant nationalist struggles in Northern Ireland, a demonstration of 100,000 against the Vietnam War in London, big antiwar demonstrations in the USA, and the high-profile if ultraleft and futile demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention; the Red University in Belgrade, students taking control of their university, the Naxalite movement developed in India; many upheavals in countries throughout Latin America.

1968 saw action across the globe, encompassing all social sectors: Students and workers in advanced capitalist countries, and in the Stalinist deformed workers’ states, workers and peasants in the Third World.

And we could see the inter-relationship. Vietnam and the Cuban Revolution radicalised the students in the West; anti-racism and anti-colonial struggles spread to other issues; student revolts spurred workers into action; actions in the advanced capitalist countries gave encouragement and support to peoples of the Third World struggling for their liberation; student struggles in the West and the Vietnamese revolution sparked and emboldened workers and students in Belgrade and Prague.

1968 was a memorable year here too.

• Anti-Vietnam War and anti-conscription demonstrations, demonstrations of solidarity with Czechoslovakia, France, Cuba,…
• We had a counter-Orientation Week at Sydney Uni. The theme was, Don’t get caught up in their system. We screen printed many fancy posters; We had guerrilla theatre on the front lawn, depicting the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Vietnam by US and Australian imperialism, and the people’s fightback. We disrupted the regiment displays. We disrupted the Vice-Chancellor’s address to new students in the great hall. This one really made the papers. We got a volunteer, a rather fit comrade, to strip, don a gorilla mask, and run down the aisle, up past the stage, and out the side door. On his back we’d painted, “Don’t get caught up in the system”. On the front was “The more I make love, the more I make the revolution”. It had the desired effect of deflating the pomposity and bullshit. Some of the V-C’s flunkeys up the front tried to catch him, but we’d taken the precaution of greasing him thoroughly all over, so he slipped through their grasp, and we had a getaway car at the side door, with its number plate covered, that raced him away off campus.
• Our How Not to Join the Army pamphlet, published by Resistance. Police raid on our Goulburn Street bookshop. High School Teach-in, poster.
• Student Underground started publishing. HSSAWV [High School Students Against the War in Vietnam]. 100 schools in Sydney

The ‘60s youth radicalisation in Australia and around the world was a rebellion against all the accepted traditions and conservatism. It was a political and cultural rebellion that burst out of the old constrictions on sex, dress, music and politics. Many of the changes in social and cultural mores might be taken for granted today. But it was a big turnabout at the time.

The political side of the radicalisation remains a gain for the general mass consciousness as well – attitudes on women, racism, the Third World, the environment, sexual politics etc.

And the methods adopted for pushing these issues was radical too – protests, demonstrations, mass action, direct action, heroic acts by individuals and groups. There was a real flowering of protest and rebellion, a new feeling that “We can change the world”.

In the 30 years since 1968 there’s been an ongoing ideological battle, a tug-of-war for the soul of 1968. The capitalist rulers and their hired hacks – professors, journalists, newspaper and TV editors, priests and politicians – have been trying to reduce the ‘60s radicalisation to all its superficial elements. It’s been a battle between the style and superficial trappings, versus the substance, the political revolt of that time.

What made the period interesting to us and threatening to the bourgeoisie? It was the politics, not the lairy clothes. It was the psychological break from conformism and conservatism, not the particular style of music. (Though music can’t be completely separated from politics, and I do have some prejudices on this, recalling the rebellious and innovative music that’s associated with the ‘60s, and the all too often commercialised and conservative popular music of recent times. But that’s another argument…)

But the bourgeoisie now tries to reduce the 1960s to a certain style of clothes or music, and to denigrate and scorn. In this they’re aided by an apolitical, right-wing or “post-modern” youngish generation who seem to have replenished the less subtle Colonel Blimps who played this role for the ruling class in previous times. These types, who seem to have easily got jobs as hacks on the Sydney Morning Herald or Triple J, now reduce the ‘60s to flower power, The Beatles, and bell-bottomed trousers.

These types are right in the thick of a disgusting and conscious bourgeois ideological offensive against… “the baby boomers”. These hacks are usually silent on the threats of war, or the danger of environmental catastrophes, or the attacks on workers, women, welfare, but vent their spleen on “baby boomers”. This capitalist media offensive has at least two aims. Firstly, it’s a preparation, a softening up process, for further attacks on welfare. The bourgeoisie is continuing its neoliberal offensive, and has pensions in its sights. They want to push us back to the old days, where all social needs, including care of the sick, the young, and the elderly, were the sole responsibility of the family, not the state. So there are regular articles about the aging population, the baby boomer problem, and how we better be prepared for smaller pensions, or fewer pensions, or no pensions.

Secondly, it’s part of their continuing campaign to take back the ideological gains of the ‘60s radicalisation. The “baby boomers” are tarred with that outrageously idealistic period of the ‘60s, and better not continue any of that starry-eyed nonsense any more, or else risk the supercilious barbs of those who’ve adjusted to the reality that life is market driven, ruled by the dollar, and you better not challenge the system or its owners.

It goes hand in hand with their decades-long offensive against the “Vietnam syndrome”, the political gains we made through imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam. The mass of the American people were no longer willing to acquiesce in wars declared in their name against the peoples of the world, or countenance Washington’s military adventures overseas. The US ruling class has been trying to wind this back – that’s partly what the Gulf War in 1991, and their new attempts today, have been about. It’s not just reasserting American power to the people of the world, warning “don’t get any silly ideas of taking your own destiny in your own hands”. It’s also about reaccustoming the American people to that imperial mission, after such a setback in Vietnam.

But they haven’t won this ideological battle even yet. That was one message that came through strongly from the terrible political defeat dealt Madeline Albright, William Cohen, Samuel Berger and the US ruling class at Ohio State University just over a week ago. That propaganda disaster, beamed around the world on CNN, must have been an important factor in why imperialism’s hand was temporarily stayed, why bombs are not raining down on Baghdad right now.

So let’s make a toast to all those activists, heroes and martyrs of 1968 who did challenge the system:

• The French students and young workers, the youth who asserted an incredible imagination and audacity, and the 10 million who went on strike;
• the students of Mexico City, and the more than 100 who were slaughtered;
• the fighters for socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia, even though their hopes have been betrayed into a sordid capitalist restoration;
• and the Vietnamese revolutionaries, who so bravely fought for freedom and independence, losing hundreds of thousands of martyrs, but eventually humiliated the world’s mightiest imperial military power.

A toast to the generation of 1968, may we carry on their struggle, and may their dreams be fulfilled.

A toast to 1968.