1968 was a momentous year for the left and the newly radicalising young people of the time, and a 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 was a period of political awakening, rebellion, new ideas, the radicalisation of youth. But 1968 stands out as a specially 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 at the start of 1968 dealt a huge blow to Washington’s confidence that its military juggernaut could win. Half a million US 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 in May-June showed the possibility of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. The events 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 focused on these events, which prompted students, workers and peasants in other countries into action also.
In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring, the reform movement within the government and Communist Party to bring about “socialism with a human face” and eliminate the Stalinist distortion of socialism, was crushed by the intervention of Russian tanks. Around the world, people rose up in opposition.
And there were militant actions by workers and students in Italy, nationalist struggles in northern Ireland; a demonstration of 100,000 against the Vietnam War in London; big anti-war 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 uprising in India; and many upheavals in countries throughout Latin America.
Related struggles
In 1968, action across the globe encompassed all social sectors. And we could see the relationship. Vietnam and the Cuban revolution radicalised 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 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. There were anti-Vietnam War and anti-conscription demonstrations, demonstrations of solidarity with Czechoslovakia, France, and Cuba.
We held 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 guerilla theatre on the front lawn, depicting the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Vietnam by US and Australian imperialism, and the people’s fight back.
We disrupted the regiment displays. We disrupted the vice-chancellor’s address to new students in the great hall, with a comrade in a gorilla mask, painted with slogans and well greased!
Resistance published its “How Not to Join the Army” pamphlet, sparking a police raid on our Goulburn Street bookshop, with national publicity. This helped promote our successful high school teach-in.
Student Underground started publishing, and was distributed at 100 schools in Sydney.
The ‘60s youth radicalisation in Australia and around the world was a rebellion against all the accepted traditions and conservatism, and for a new, undogmatic and liberating left. 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, changing attitudes on women, racism, the Third World, the environment and sexual politics.
The methods adopted for pushing these issues were 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”.
Ideological battle
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 its superficial elements. It’s been a battle of the style, the superficial trappings, versus the substance, the political revolt.
What made the period so interesting to us and so 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).
But the bourgeoisie now tries to reduce the 1960s to a certain style of clothes or music, which they denigrate and scorn. In this they’re aided by apolitical, right-wing or postmodern members of a youngish generation who seem to have replaced the less subtle Colonel Blimps who played this role for the ruling class in previous times.
Many seem to have got jobs as hacks on the Sydney Morning Herald or Triple J, and now reduce the ‘60s to flower power, the Beatles and bell-bottomed trousers.
These types are right in the thick of a disgusting bourgeois ideological campaign against “baby boomers”. These hacks are usually silent on the threats of war, or the danger of environmental catastrophes, or the attacks on workers, women and welfare, but vent their spleen on “baby boomers”.
This capitalist media offensive has two aims.
Firstly, it’s a softening up process, preparing further attacks on welfare. The bourgeoisie are continuing their neo-liberal offensive and have pensions in their sights. They want to push us back to the old days, when all social needs, including care of the sick, the young and the elderly, were the sole responsibility of the family. So there are regular articles about the ageing population, the baby boomer problem and how we had better be prepared for smaller pensions, or tighter 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 they’ll risk the supercilious barbs of those who have adjusted to life that is market driven, ruled by the dollar, who know better than to challenge the system or its owners.
‘Vietnam syndrome’
It goes with their decades-long offensive against the “Vietnam syndrome”, the political gains we made through imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam. The mass of the US people were no longer willing to acquiesce in wars 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 US power, warning the people of the world, “Don’t get any silly ideas of taking your destiny into your own hands”. It’s also about reaccustoming the US people to that imperial mission.
They still haven’t won this battle. That message came through strongly from the political defeat dealt Madeline Albright 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 temporarily staying imperialism’s hand.
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 humiliating 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.
[This is the text of a talk to a Green Left Weekly cocktail night in Sydney. John Percy is national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.]