1968: Lessons Learned Did the left learn from 1968? Dissent asked veterans of a turbulent year
Fuecks, Ralf
NINETEEN-SIXTY-EIGHT has become a political myth that won't go away. The debate on its interpretation continues and continues. The year marks a historical break, comparable to the beginning of...
...The personal is political" was a principal slogan of 1968...
...Part of the movement drifted into a conspiratorial world of armed struggle and left a trail of blood...
...In the West, things were different...
...It is perhaps not a coincidence that SDS in German meant Sozialistischer Studentenbund Deutschlands (Socialist Students' Association of Germany), while in the United States...
...The aim was to implant democracy more deeply into society...
...It is true that the protest movement of that year did not lead to a dramatic overturn of the political order like the French or Russian revolutions...
...Advocacy of socialism often came with all sorts of theoretical misconceptions, such as equating capitalism with war and fascism...
...There were democratic revolutions in 1848, but they ended in the restoration of authoritarian states, particularly in German lands...
...The year was a catalyst of the new women's movement and gay rights...
...A new political direction emerged in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and it played a decisive role in forming a more self-confident civil society that looked the state "in the eye...
...Among the fundamental changes was an expansion of the political public...
...militant leftists in both of them were suspicious of political institutions and imagined themselves as descendants of the "antifascist resistance...
...There was no "Chinese Wall" between such "red terror" and other groups of the radical left at the time...
...Open systems transform opposition into innovation...
...The intellectual beacons for stuDISSENT / Spring 2008 n 13 SYMPOSIUM dent protesters in the 1960s—Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Bloch—were grandmasters of anticapitalist capitalism...
...Above all, "1968" stands for a new political culture of democracy in practice, which also includes numerous selfadministered projects and a plethora of nongovernmental organizations that have changed the political landscape...
...While some did opt for revolutionary violence, the vast majority set up anti-authoritarian children's day care centers...
...The American civil rights movement and its culture of nonviolent opposition had immense influence, as did new forms of political action that spread to Europe from the United States...
...ATHIRD FAR-REACHING change lies in the politicization of the private sphere...
...This is bad teleology...
...reformed schools...
...Imagining that a new form of fascism threatened, all means were justified...
...or embarked on the long march through parties and parliaments...
...Democratic virtues were, of course, not invented in 1968...
...published alternative newspapers...
...But in the 1960s, calls arose for democratization of schools and universities, for co-determination in industry, and for a deeper citizen involvement in the political process...
...Making this connection may seem to be an exaggeration at first glance, but the cultural and political upheavals that resulted from "1968" have been truly revolutionary...
...Radicalization often came with a distancing from libertarian and emancipatory politics...
...Constitutional democracy was established following the collapse of old orders in 1918, but lacked a stable foundation...
...But all this led also to unpredictable developments...
...The protest movements were precursors of a new global public...
...If the premise of '68 had been to call for realization of the ideals of democracy in the face of repressive reality, the radical groupings within the movement committed themselves to an anti-imperialism that itself took on authoritarian traits...
...The tragic gravity of the Prague events went far beyond the symbolic actions and theatrical stage-managing of student protests in the West...
...Demands for equal treatment now feature claims based on ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation...
...However, in terms of the cultural and political changes set in motion by the movement, it was highly successful...
...In other words, "1968" ended up giving Western societies powerful innovative momentum, extending from the triumph of popular culture and social emancipation of women to the emergence of new forms of political participation...
...There was a second long-term wave of SYMPOSIUM change initiated by the 1960s: the expansion of democracy...
...all while '68ers created their own images to put political messages across and promote collective awareness: sit-ins, demonstrations, blockades, happenings, open-air festivals...
...The emancipation movement of industrial workers was socialist in nature as was the opposition to World War I. Most anticolonial movements adopted socialist ideologies, too, after 1945...
...These ranged from hippies and spiritualists, Maoists and orthodox Marxists, to citizens' action groups, feminist projects, third-worldists, pacifists, and those engaged in diverse forms of militancy...
...Problems Anyone who defends the emancipatory and democratic aspects of 1968 must also address its problems...
...A flood of publications studied international questions, links were forged across borders, international congresses were held...
...The left radicals of 1968 often created an unholy brew out of all this, one that worked against the best modern values of the West...
...In this sense, identity politics conflicts with the idea of a republic of equal and free citizens, who formulate and express their political will in open debate...
...The protest movement of 1968 was never a uniform phenomenon, and its members went off in all directions...
...The political landscape of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was filled with antidemocratic movements and totalitarian ideologies...
...The revolution was destroyed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact...
...It was the Prague Spring—an event that is often ignored when we speak of 1968—that came closest to being the revolutionary overthrow of a regime...
...it stood for Students for a Democratic Society...
...The year marks a historical break, comparable to the beginning of the cold war or the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...The most virulent forms of "armed struggle" were in two postfascist states...
...The superiority of the capitalist democracies was demonstrated by their ability to absorb the momentum created by "1968," even against the will of the ruling elites who feared this would lead to the decline of the West...
...New media and new forms of action expanded the public sphere...
...founded free theaters, human rights groups, women's shelters, and citizens' action groups...
...Even if extraparliamentary oppositions in France, Italy, Germany, and America were all characterized by national contexts, they still constituted a cosmopolitan movement...
...The postwar democratic order was conceived as resting on state institutions whose democratic authority came from elections...
...What Changed...
...Relationships between children and adults, men and women became public issues, as did questions of sexuality, consumption, life forms, and lifestyles...
...Images of war from around the globe fueled campaigns at home...
...So too were political icons like Rosa Luxemburg or Che Guevara or Salvador Allende...
...RALF FUECKS, a former "post-'68 militant," chair of the German Green Party, and Bremen State Minister, is the Co-President of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, a Green think tank and international policy network...
...This probably holds more true for Europe than the United States...
...Domestic violence was no longer a taboo issue, patriarchy was pushed aside, paths opened for diverse personal approaches to life, and sexual minorities won equality...
...The ideological recourse to Marxism, the admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 12 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 and solidarity with the "anti-imperialist liberation movements" in Vietnam and Palestine disguised the fact that "1968" was actually reformist in character...
...The discovery of politics in everyday practice, the practical improvement of society from within and below, a cosmopolitan attitude, a passion for open politics, sustained social commitments, an insistence on self-determination and democratic participation...
...Liberal theorists, such as Karl Popper and Friedrich A. Hayek, were mostly beyond their purview...
...Media focus on the private life of politicians is one consequence of blurring the difference between public and private persons...
...In short, individual emancipation now had vast new potentials...
...While American democracy was premised on a self-aware civil society and republicanism, Europe faced a legacy left by absolutist states...
...It was only a matter of time until a system incapable of reform collapsed...
...Another is the emergence of "identity politics...
...Taken to an extreme, this tendency implies that everything in politics must be particularized...
...If there is an inherent link between 1968 and 1989 it is that the defeat of the Prague Spring would lead one day to the collapse of the Soviet Empire...
...In fact, communist hegemony in Eastern Europe was doomed from that moment...
...If the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement's spokespersons is the benchmark, the '68 generation failed...
...In fact, the idea of liberal democracy was still in its infancy on continental Europe...
...But it was only after 1968 that European political culture became more defined by grassroots involvement, by the activism of citizen groups and the idea of self-determination...
...Anticapitalism became more important than democracy for large sections of the European protest movement...
...Left-wing groups saw themselves as part of a worldwide revolutionary development...
...The Vietnam War, the American civil rights movement, the struggle against the colonial system in Southern Africa, the events in Czechoslovakia, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution outraged or inspired hundreds of thousands of activists and moved them to action...
...concerned themselves with alternative medicine...
...Socialist movements countered them (but lost in the end...
...A peaceful revolution began in Czechoslovakia, and it shook "really-existing socialism" to its foundations...
...As is often the case, there was great distance between the selfunderstanding of the historical protagonists and their impact on society...
...Even so, it is false and absurd to brand the '68 movement as a whole as the precursor of left-wing terrorism...
...We can see a direct link between 1968's counter-public, with its pamphlets, alternative newspapers and radio stations and publishers, and today's "Internet 2.0," which basically enables everyone to play an active part in global communication...
...These, too, are legacy of 1968—it's a lot...
...A protest movement can lose its way, and this did happen...
...The Soviet invasion buried hopes for "socialism with a human face...
...Visual media, such as photography and television, played decisive roles in spreading the protest movement...
...Neither Germany nor Italy had any adequate tradition of a civic political culture...
...Although this was fiction, it was also rousing...
...The extent of violence and counterviolence of 1968 is not comparable to the excesses of past wars and civil wars...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
