1968: Lessons Learned Did the left learn from 1968? Dissent asked veterans of a turbulent year
Gornick, Vivian
AT AN SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group "the Diggers" burst into the middle of Tom...
...The anecdote is significant...
...Agency, the sixties declared, was the name of the game...
...Out of this impassioned sense of newness there erupted an explosion of hidden grievance from sections of the body politic—women, gays, students— that had either never, or not in a century, been driven to open rebellion...
...FoR ME, 1968 is not a year, it's a symbol of one of the more remarkable "disruptions" in American life: the kind that has acted repeatedly to remind us that the world is what we ourselves make it...
...I know that when it was my turn, in 1970, to respond directly to the verbal intemperateness of exploding feminism—Love Is Rape, Marriage Is Oppression, You're Sleeping with the Enemy— I could do so as quickly as I did (I still remember the grin spreading itself across my ultra-respectable face as I thought, "Yea-a-ah...
...It was as though the insight had been newly minted, that's how powerful it seemed in 1968...
...Then, when I realized that the wild14 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 SYMPOSIUM ness was coming out of women who had once been SDS, the initiation was complete...
...Todd Gitlin later wrote that in its wake the New Left failed to "outgrow the student movement...
...For SDS, the arrival of the counterculture wildmen was a disaster...
...Her newest collection of essays, The Men In My Life, is forthcoming in the fall from MIT Press...
...For Abbie Hoffman, the conference had been "monumental," an event he gladly added to his résumé of political action...
...If you think that the New Left was the sixties, the disruption is anxiety-provoking...
...This is how we feel...
...If, on the third hand, you think—as I do—that the sixties was the beginning of thirty years of politics in the street that changed the self-description of people around the globe, you realize that the conference and the outburst together are the meaning of the decade...
...AT AN SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group "the Diggers" burst into the middle of Tom Hayden's keynote speech, screaming that the people in the room didn't have the balls to make a revolution, they'd piss in their pants when the violence erupted...
...Again, it was the combination of influences at work that made the outbreak so electrifying...
...The no-more-nice-girls extremity easily struck a welcoming note in my acclimated ear...
...And now that we know how we feel, this is how far we intend to go, how many bridges we're willing to burn The sixties was never a matter of revolution in the classical sense of replacing one system of government with another...
...The world we now occupy is the one still exhausting itself in what I think is a useless effort to close the box...
...to see the blacks, gays, and women in our midst take the historical lesson: when politically despised, you either fight on your feet or die on your knees...
...They made millions around the world feel what they knew: the damnable injustice of being born into a body categorically destined for exclusion from the human enterprise...
...What began with a listing of the crimes of imperial capitalism evolved into an individual need—the personal was indeed political— to understand the way that sex, race, and class have so indelibly separated us not only from our fellow creatures, but from ourselves...
...The decade altered forever the shared sensibility of Western culture, and opened a Pandora's Box of hope and anxiety...
...Essentially, that meant the right not to feel exiled from oneself...
...VIVIAN GORNICK is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute this year...
...While the conventionally organized left delivered the analysis, it was the over-the-top counterculture brashness that pointed directly at the places where it hurt...
...made ordinary citizens cry out at other ordinary citizens, Don't you get it...
...In my view, the liberationist movements of the sixties are America's enduring contribution to twentieth-century internationalism...
...Let's have more of that") because for so long I'd been hearing Abbie Hoffman chant, "Kill Your Parents, Burn Your Money, Masturbate In the Streets...
...To not exercise agency was to be written out of history by those who do exercise it...
...it was always a matter of achieving the democracy we thought was our birthright, not only as Americans but as world citizens...
...We lived, in the sixties, to see this centurieslong urgency made conscious once again...
...If you think the sixties only included the left, it is alarming but vital...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
