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1968: year of revolution
Factory and university occupations in France. The
US civil rights movement and rage at the Vietnam war. Upheavals in
Italy, Pakistan and Northern Ireland. Revolt in Stalinist
Czechoslovakia. Brutal repression in Mexico. The events of 1968 sent
shockwaves around the world, inspiring workers and youth, striking fear
into the capitalist establishment. To introduce this special anniversary
edition of Socialism Today, PETER TAAFFE takes an overview of 1968, a
year of international revolution.
SOME YEARS STAND out as historic turning points:
1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968, 1989. Some, like 1989, signify a turning
back of the wheel of history, but others are clearly identified with
revolution. 1968 is of the latter. This was a tumultuous year when the
floodtide of mass revolt swept over the narrow confines of capitalism
and threatened the very foundations of the system.
The high point was undoubtedly May-June 1968 in
France, the greatest general strike in history, when ten million workers
occupied their factories in a month of revolution. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote of periods in history when decades appear like
‘one day’ in their apparent tranquillity and then there can be days in
which the events of 20 years can be compressed. This was the case in one
month in France in 1968.
But it was not the only arena of colossal social
upheaval, a year of revolution in fact and, to a lesser extent,
counter-revolution throughout the world. Even to those who lived through
and participated in these events, to merely recall their number and
scale is breathtaking. Alongside France we also witnessed a mass
movement in Mexico, drowned in blood in the infamous massacre of
Tlatelolco Square. The official death toil was 300 but in reality was
much more, possibly 1,000.
This was also the year when the 10,000-day war in
Vietnam changed decisively in the Tet offensive of the National
Liberation Front, when the conviction of the inevitable defeat of the
strongest military machine on the planet at the hands of ragged peasants
took hold. On 4 February in Atlanta, in prophetic words, Martin Luther
King declared: "I’d like somebody to mention that Martin Luther King
junior tried to give his life to serving others". He was murdered two
months later. In March, Eugene McCarthy came within 230 votes of
unseating the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson. Four days later Robert
Kennedy announced that he would be entering the 1968 presidential race,
only to suffer the same fate as Martin Luther King.
In August, the privileged bureaucratic elite of the
‘Soviet Union’ deployed 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops to put an end to the
‘Prague spring’. A few days later, students were battered by mayor
Daley’s ‘Democrat’ police in Chicago as they cried: ‘The whole world is
watching’. And irony of ironies in this year of revolution, right-wing
Republican candidate Richard Nixon was elected president after
hypocritically promising to end the Vietnam war: ‘peace with honour’.
Britain also witnessed growing opposition to the right-wing Labour
government of Harold Wilson, both on domestic and foreign policy issues
like Vietnam, with tens of thousands marching in Grosvenor Square
against the war.
Not only in the advanced industrial countries did
turmoil prevail. In Indonesia, China – through the so-called ‘Cultural
revolution’ – and Pakistan, which in the movement of workers and
peasants had a parallel with France, society seemed to be convulsed with
waves of opposition reaching almost every corner.
1968 also signified the renaissance of culture –
particularly affecting artists, musicians, students and the middle
layers in society – but more importantly, the re-emergence of the
working class after the seeming torpor and social stability associated
with the ‘rebirth’ of capitalism in the post-1945 period. It should
never be forgotten that the revolutionary events of 1968 developed
despite the 1950-75 world economic boom not having exhausted itself.
Indeed, Paul Krugman, in his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal,
quotes author Tom Wolfe writing of the US economy in 1968 as a ‘magic
economy’.
Wages had risen for most, the minimum wage in the US
in 1966 was $8 an hour in today’s terms (higher than today’s $5.15).
Eighty per cent of the population had health insurance and Johnson’s
presidency had been compelled to introduce legislation such as the Civil
Rights and Voting Rights acts. This, however, was only one side of the
US boom because, as a result of the colossal increase in the cost of the
Vietnam war, social welfare was cut back. Young people were in revolt
while a million black Americans considered themselves revolutionaries.
This underlines the Marxist analysis that revolutionary or
pre-revolutionary situations are not the result of economic factors
alone but can be ushered in by political events.
The Vietnam war was acting to rot the economic and
social foundations of US imperialism, the mightiest in the world, that
could not pursue a policy of ‘guns and butter’. In the process, it
destroyed Johnson’s presidency, dramatically demonstrating the advance
of mass consciousness in 1968. Previously, the undoubted economic
progress of substantial layers of the population, not just in the US but
in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, led the capitalists to conclude that the
social stability of their system was guaranteed, apart from a few
leftovers from the past which could be dispensed with by skilful ‘social
engineering’.
Writing off the working class
BUT THIS WAS to miss the process of change which was
taking place below the surface. They were not the only ones to sin on
this score. Many Marxists had fallen into the trap of impressionism,
concluding that the industrial working class was reconciled to
capitalism, was to be written off or, at the very least, was quiescent
and therefore ineffectual at that stage in the struggle against
capitalism.
The forerunners of the Socialist Party in Militant
disputed this. We defended – and do still today – Marx’s emphasis on the
role of the organised working class in the socialist revolution. This is
the only class, organised and disciplined by large-scale production,
that can develop the necessary social cohesion and combativity to carry
through the tasks of the socialist revolution. This still holds true
today, despite the deindustrialisation that has taken place in Britain
and other advanced economies. The ‘new’ layers of the working class
include, for instance, civil servants and teachers who, under the whip
of neo-liberalism, have been driven into embracing methods of the
working class like strikes!
The peasantry, by its very nature, is divided into
different strata, the upper levels tending to merge with the
capitalists. On the other hand, the lower levels or small farmers are
closer to the working class and, through economic ruin, tend to fall
into the ranks of the working class. The same holds for the modern
middle class, both in urban and rural areas.
But many Marxists concluded prior to 1968 that the
working class was conservative, some had been ‘bourgeoisified’ and
therefore were no longer the main agents of social change. This led them
to seek salvation elsewhere, with Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, by
implication recognised as an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’, Mao Zedong in
China, or Fidel Castro. The latter had presided over a very popular
revolution with elements of workers’ control but not with the workers’
democracy which existed in Russia at the time of the October revolution.
The position of Militant at that stage collided with
those like the adherents of the Trotskyist United Secretariat of the
Fourth International (USFI). The leader of this organisation, Ernest
Mandel, spoke in London in April 1968. We challenged Mandel’s thesis
that so long as the US dollar remained stable, the situation in Europe
would not fundamentally change for at least 20 years! The USFI and
Mandel had concluded that the epicentre of the world revolution had
shifted, at least for a time, to the former colonial and semi-colonial
world.
Militant always sought to explain the significance
of events in this region of the world, involving as it did two thirds of
humankind in the splendid movements of national liberation in the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, from a world point of view, the decisive
forces for socialist change were still concentrated in the advanced
industrial countries which would have to link up with the movements in
the neo-colonial world.
This did not at all imply that we thought that the
world should wait until the workers of Europe, Japan and North America
were ready to move. We gave full support, both in general and in action,
to the national liberation struggle, even when it was under the
leadership of bourgeois or pro-bourgeois forces, such as in Algeria at
the time of the struggle against the French. But, as the experience of
the Bolsheviks in Russia prior to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 had
demonstrated, in periods of seeming quiescence, it is vital to defend
the role of the working class as the main agency of socialist change,
even when that is not apparent on the surface.
Intellectual shift & capitulation
MOST OF THESE forces which claimed to be Marxist or
Trotskyist at that time were based primarily upon the radicalised
students and intellectuals who had developed in the period up to 1968.
The intelligentsia can play a key role in the development of the
working-class movement, as the history of the Russian workers’ movement
demonstrated. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, never mind Marx and
Engels, evolved from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie.
However, they had broken, personally but above all politically, from the
milieu from which they came. They generalised, summed up, the experience
of the working class in the form of perspectives, programme, strategy
and tactics, as well as organisation. They were sticklers for
theoretical clarity, particularly on the issue of the social forces
involved in revolution, the type of organisation needed by the working
class, the laws of revolution and everything that flowed from this. They
had nothing in common with those ‘intellectuals’, many of them
‘Marxists’, who could change their ideas, as Honoré de Balzac put it,
like a man changing his clothes.
In fact, Marx and Engels, presently hailed by even
bourgeois writers as ‘perceptive sociologists’, were invariably
denounced in their time as ‘disruptive elements’, particularly by their
‘socialist’ opponents. Because they had a theoretical anchor, a method,
they were inoculated against the episodic moods and fashionable theories
which can complicate, to say the least, the struggle for clear
understanding in the workers’ movement. Intellectuals are not an
independent factor in history but reflect, sometimes in advance but very
often in the rear, the movements taking place, sometimes subterraneously,
at the base of society.
Witness their baleful role following the collapse of
Stalinism and the ideological campaign of the bourgeoisie for the ‘free
market’. With the exception perhaps of Latin America – where a layer of
socialist intellectuals held out against the barrage of hostile
propaganda – the overwhelming majority in the intellectual milieu of
Europe and America, penetrating even into the neo-colonial world, either
capitulated or accommodated themselves to a pro-capitalist position. Not
just Francis Fukuyama but the overwhelming majority of intellectuals
acquiesced to the idea that ‘ideology’, and therefore the class
struggle, was dead.
Even now, as we daily witness more and more masonry
falling off the financial architecture of world capitalism, journals
such as the London Review of Books carry articles that constantly refer
to the ‘post-ideological age’ and a barely concealed contempt for the
socialist project. Alain Badiou incredibly writes: "Marxism, the
workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the
proletariat, the socialist state – all the inventions of the 20th
century – are not really useful to us any more". (1) Yet if there is one
overriding conclusion from 1968 it is that the absence of a real mass
‘party of the proletariat’ allowed the French bourgeoisie to derail the
revolution. Moreover, without the creation of such a force, favourable
opportunities will be lost in the future. No doubt an eruption of mass
working-class movements from below – which will take place as a
consequence of the worst recession that impends since the Great
Depression of the 1930s – will force this intellectual layer to adapt as
they did in the past and many of them will jettison their present
positions.
Why France?
A VITAL PART of the process of the socialist
revolution is preparation, ideologically, politically and
organisationally. The outlook of most of the students and intellectuals
who participated in the 1968 events was socialist in colouration; some
were even Marxist or Trotskyist. This was because of the rumblings from
below in the factories and workplaces and also because there was a
‘socialist’ model, at least in economic terms, in the planned economies
of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, albeit hobbled by bureaucratic,
one-party totalitarian regimes. Nevertheless, the prevailing view of
most of the organisations that based themselves upon the intellectual
strata wrote off the working class, or any prospect of events like that
of May-June 1968 occurring.
They were not alone. On New Year’s Eve 1967, Charles
de Gaulle, the 78-year old president of France, stated: "I greet the
year ’68 with serenity". Reflecting the confidence of French capitalism,
he continued: "It is impossible to see how France today could be
paralysed by crisis as she has been in the past". Sean O’Hagan comments:
"Six months later, de Gaulle was fighting for his political life and the
French capital was paralysed after weeks of student riots followed by a
sudden general strike. France’s journey from ‘serenity’ to
near-revolution in the first weeks of May is the defining event of
‘1968’, a year in which mass protests erupted across the globe, from
Paris to Prague, Mexico City to Madrid, Chicago to London". (2)
But it was not an accident that France erupted into
revolution, whereas neighbouring countries like Germany did not. If the
fashionable theory at the time on the role of students as the
‘detonator’ was correct – of a conscious policy of confrontation with
the bourgeois state to ignite working-class revolt – it would have
developed first in Germany. There, the student movement was on the same
or even a higher level than in France. The assassination in 1967 of
Benno Ohnesorg, a student protester, by a police officer had produced a
widespread student revolt and brought to prominence the
Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS – Socialist German Students
League).
This was every bit as threatening as the movement
that was to develop in France. However, the underlying social conditions
were different. The whole preceding period under de Gaulle’s
semi-dictatorial regime of the Fifth Republic had resulted in unbearable
tension within the working class. France was a country where, as the
tsarist intelligence commented in 1917 on the eve of revolution, ‘an
accidentally dropped match’ could ignite an explosion.
This ingredient was provided by the brutal
repression of the students, which brought a million workers out in a
general strike – reluctantly called by the trade union leaders – which
then led to workers going back and occupying the factories and to the
revolution that ensued. It was specific features which placed France and
the working class in the vanguard of the revolution at that stage.
Because conditions were different in Germany and Britain – even in Italy
which, in a sense, subsequently developed on a higher plane than France
– the ‘spark’ of student revolt could not provoke the same reaction as
in France.
But if France had succeeded – and it could have done
as the tremendous book by Clare Doyle, France 1968: Month of Revolution,
demonstrates – then Berlin, Milan and Turin, even London, would have
joined this movement. Even those ‘of 1968’, like Tariq Ali,
underestimate the situation in Britain at that stage. He commented
recently: "Compared with the ferment elsewhere, Britain was a sideshow".
(3)
Strife in the Labour Party
THIS IS TO underestimate completely the underlying
mood that was developing, not just in the protests against the Vietnam
war culminating in the clashes at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square,
but amongst the working class. The October Grosvenor Square
demonstration involved 100,000 people. In the preceding week, the
capitalist press, particularly The Times newspaper, gave the impression
that Britain was on the eve of insurrection. This was an exaggeration
but the sense of unease and opposition to capitalism was not confined to
the students. A series of strikes broke out, of sewing machinists at
Ford involving working-class women, symptomatic of what was to take
place later. In our journal, Militant (October 1968), we commented on a
‘Liverpool strike wave’. In Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement,
which exploded in October in Derry, was a direct reflection of the
worldwide revolt in 1968, particularly affecting young people, Catholic
and Protestant, who clashed with the sectarian Unionist state of that
time.
Moreover, within the Labour Party, the growing
militancy and support for Marxist ideas was reflected at the 1968 party
conference. There were, as Militant reported in November of that year,
"almost three million votes for an alternative socialist policy". This
was at a time when the Labour Party at the bottom was still a workers’
party, with a pro-capitalist leadership. Now, under Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown, it is a complete tool in the hands of the capitalists.
Then basic rank-and-file democracy existed, which
allowed ordinary local parties to move resolutions that could become
official party policy. One moved by Liverpool Borough Labour Party and
seconded by Bristol North-East constituency called for "taking into
public ownership… the 300 monopolies, private banks, finance houses and
insurance companies now dominating the economy, and… producing a
positive national plan anchored to socialist production". The conference
also carried by five million to one million votes "the repeal of the
anti-trade union legislation" of the prices and incomes policy.
This mood resulted in the head-on confrontation the
following year between the trade unions and the Labour Party left-wing
rank and file on the one side, and the cabinet of Wilson on the other,
over the infamous ‘In Place of Strife’ anti-union proposals. This
proposed ‘compulsory strike ballots’, ‘cooling-off periods’ and other
measures to curtail the power of organised labour. It was met by an
outcry amongst workers, provoking a series of warning strikes at local,
regional and national level. If the Wilson government had not retreated
it would have been broken, with an open split in the cabinet similar to
that in 1931, which led to the formation of the National Government.
Merely to recount these events shows just how far
removed the Labour Party now is from that period. The underlying
situation was such that a successful revolution in France would have
spread like prairie fire. British society was in ferment, with the
effects of the May-June events being felt even at the summits of the
Labour Party. Richard Crossman, who at times had stood on the left of
the party, commented in his diaries: "Isn’t it true that we are now in a
revolution which may actually succeed? I’d always thought it would have
been very exciting to have lived through 1848 and now I find we are
living through the most momentous year I can remember since the war…
East and west of the iron curtain, establishments are being challenged
and new forces emerging from below with little care for the concept of
parliamentary democracy as we know it. They are in revolt against a
parliamentary democracy which was an ideal in 1848 but is now part of an
established oligarchy, part of the establishment in the West, just as
communism is part of the establishment in the East. These uprisings this
year are in both cases anti-establishment. Strangely, when I think about
this, some of my depression goes away". (4)
Italy’s hot autumn
IF THIS WAS at the top, imagine the quickening of
the pulse, the expectations of change, amongst young people and the
working class in neighbouring countries where the May-June events struck
like a clap of thunder. In Italy, for instance, Paul Ginsborg, a noted
historian of that country, traced the effects of 1968 in the ‘hot
autumn’ of 1969. He wrote: "There followed the most extraordinary period
of social ferment, the high season of collective action in the history
of the Republic. During it, the organisation of Italian society was
challenged at nearly every level. No single moment in Italy equalled in
intensity and in revolutionary potential the events of May 1968 in
France, but the protest movement in Italy was the most profound and
long-lasting in Europe. It spread from the schools and universities into
the factories, and then out again into society as a whole". (5)
A glimpse of the power of the working class has been
given by Rossana Rossanda, one of the founding editors of the left-wing
newspaper, Il Manifesto. She wrote of June 1969: "The paradox was that
the Italian ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 was just beginning. Instead of starting
up as usual after the holidays, factory after factory was being occupied
by the workers, with the massive Fiat plant in the lead. Yet the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) was entirely concentrated on our case [their
impending expulsion from the PCI]. The hot autumn was the largest, most
sophisticated industrial struggle since the war – not just a strike, but
a matter of the workers taking the entire production process into their
own hands, elbowing the management hierarchy aside. And these were not
an experienced cohort, tested by decades of repression, but young
workers, often without qualifications, whose education had come from the
chaotic development of the society they had grown up in; who had taken
something from the resounding student protests of the year before and
made it their own.
"Was it revolution the young workers had in mind
when they marched in through the factory gates and took over the
assembly lines? The decision ran like a spark from plant to plant: they
fought to change their workplace, to keep it in their hands. They shook
off the habit of obedience. When they spoke in the assemblies, the union
leaders had to queue up for the microphone like the least skilled
worker, just as at the Odéon in Paris the year before – but without that
sense of atomization. They were in their own place; they talked about
how things had been done up till now, what they could not take, how
things could be done. The stakes were very high; for capital there could
hardly be a greater challenge. The media knew it. At first they were
pleased to see the PCI and the unions bypassed, then they were
frightened". (6)
These events struck terror into the Italian ruling
class: "Symptomatic of the climate of the time was the confession, many
years later, of one of the principal stockbrokers of the Milan Stock
Exchange, Aldo Ravelli, a man not given to easy panic: ‘Those were the
years in which – I am telling you to give you some idea of the
atmosphere at that time – I tested how long it would take me to escape
to Switzerland. I set out from my house in Varese and got to the
frontier on foot’." (7) Ravelli never had to make the walk in earnest
because the leaders of the mass working-class organisations in effect
saved capitalism. But they were compelled to ride a tiger as almost a
decade-long opposition from the masses developed within Italy.
Massacres in Mexico & My Lai
NO LESS IMPORTANT was the effect in the neo-colonial
world. The events in Mexico of October 1968 stand alongside France and
Italy in the sharpness of the struggle. Although little commented on
internationally at the time, they were the most bloody of the year. They
were pushed into the background by the invasion of Czechoslovakia (then
the Czech Republic and Slovakia were united in one state under the iron
heel of the Stalinist regime) just a few days before. As Ed Vulliamy has
commented recently: "Historians write of the black gloves held aloft by
medal-winning American runners at the Mexico Olympics. They write less
about the white gloves worn by the Olympia Brigade of the Mexican army,
tanks behind them and the helicopters aloft, which fired on students,
families and workers, in the Tlatelolco neighbourhood of Mexico City on
2 October, a week before the Games". (8)
Anticipating the bloody Argentinian junta of the
1970s, the Mexican ruling class resorted to the tactic of the
‘disappeared’ by dumping the bodies of the murdered at sea. So etched
into the national psyche of the Mexican people are these events, it
meant that "the revolution in 1968 would be more enduring there than
anywhere else in the world". Castro, however, kept silent, "failed to
lift a finger in support of Mexico 1968 or any of its descendants",
partly because the Mexican bourgeois government was the only one to
recognise the Cuban regime. More importantly, however, a new revolution
in Mexico with the working class in the lead would have resonated
powerfully within Cuba itself with demands for real workers’ democracy.
Indeed, the participants in the Mexican events stood for a ‘second
Mexican revolution’, seeking to complete what the revolution of 1910,
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata had been unable to carry through.
Not least concerned about what was happening was the
US ruling class. It is always wary about the pivotal role of Mexico,
both for its effect on the USA’s Latino population, but also as a
gateway to Latin America. In 1968, the US ruling class had enough on its
plate with the social convulsions set off by Vietnam. One reflection of
this was that 3,250 young people went to prison on the grounds of
conscientious objection to the war. An estimated quarter of a million
others avoided the draft into the armed forces and one million committed
draft offences. Yet only 25,000 were indicted. One study found, "The
number of eligible Americans who managed through student and
occupational deferment and other factors to avoid military call-up
totalled 15 million".
As a result, as historian Arthur Schlesinger junior
wrote, "the war in Vietnam was being fought in the main by the sons of
poor whites and blacks, whose parents did not have much influence in the
community. The sons of influential people were all protected because
they were in college". (9) First place in the ranks of these ‘chicken
hawks’ – those who avoided the draft but supported the war – were George
W Bush and his ilk.
Vietnam was the main motivating factor in provoking
the movement of youth internationally in the period preceding 1968 but
which broke out in mass proportions that year. The unspeakable violence
meted out by the US ruling class by cowardly B-52 bombers and Agent
Orange was typified by the massacre at My Lai that year, the horrific
details of which were only revealed later. Two hundred unarmed
Vietnamese civilians were officially accepted as being murdered but a US
army author estimated that 700 were massacred. The punishment for the
main instigator, Lieutenant William Calley, was three days in military
prison.
International scope
THE UPRISING OF the youth in 1968 was indeed
worldwide, not just in Paris or Berlin but in many other countries.
Indeed, the movement of the students in Italy was arguably the most
important in seeking to link up with the working class, and nowhere else
in Europe did they manage this so successfully. Some dismissed the
actions of these young people as antics or, as the French sociologist
Raymond Aron put it, ‘the play acting of spoilt rich kids’. Undoubtedly,
for some who participated it was a case of ‘revolutionary measles’, from
which they recovered before they were reintegrated into capitalist
society. But others sincerely wished for a break from the deadening
conformity of capitalist society and alienation that Marx spoke about.
The idea that the producers were reduced to cogs in the vast machine of
capitalism took hold even during an economic upswing, which fuelled the
revolt of the youth.
Many of these young people were, potentially, yeast
for the rise of a new mass movement. In Italy, for instance, it has been
estimated that there were 100,000 members of ‘far left’ organisations
between 1968 and the end of the 1970s. This was a period of colossal
experimentation, not just in politics but also in the arts, music and
culture in general, which held out the prospect of liberation for the
new generation that was impossible within the rigid confines of
capitalism. There were ‘excesses’ in the movement, largely because of
frustration, which in Italy flowed from the bureaucratic dead hand that
the PCI sought to impose on the movement. But in the great swirl of
‘autonomous’ movements, groups and organisations were layers of young
people who were looking for a clear road in order to change society.
The PCI leadership, however, was looking towards an
‘historic compromise’ with the main party of the Italian bourgeoisie at
that stage, the Christian Democrats. Coming up against this swirling,
mostly positive movement from below, PCI dignitaries mobilised to crush
autonomous movements in the universities, sometimes using ‘muscular
workers’ to defeat the students. This, in turn, led to ultra-left
gestures, some of them extremely harmful to the struggle for socialism
and liberation, for instance, the development of terroristic ideas in
the ‘Red Brigades’ and other armed groups. A generation was tragically
lost to struggle who could have regenerated the Italian workers’
movement on a much higher plane, through the development of a mass, or
at least large, alternative party to the PCI on clear revolutionary,
socialist and democratic lines.
The movement in Eastern Europe, to some extent,
mirrored that in the West. This was presaged by the Prague spring, the
ejection of Stalinist hardliners from the leadership of the Czechoslovak
‘Communist’ Party. The replacement of the Stalinist creature, Antonin
Novotný, by Alexander Dubček did not
mean, however, a switch to workers’ democracy, as was presented even by
some Marxists at the time. Dubček’s
‘socialism with a human face’, which received mass support in
Czechoslovakia and beyond, did not in reality represent a real step in
this direction. It is true that the loosening of the reins of Stalinism
led to huge political ferment in which the ideas of workers’ democracy,
many of Trotsky’s ideas, demands for a free press, democratic control
and management of industry, were thrown up and debated. But Dubček
represented the process of bureaucratic reform from the top to prevent
revolution from below.
This could not be tolerated by Moscow’s Stalinist
bureaucracy. In Poland in 1956 it had been compelled to accept Wladyslaw
Gomulka coming to power. Gomulka, like Dubček,
represented a more liberal and nationalist bureaucratic regime. At that
stage, Moscow had its hands full with the Hungarian revolution, with its
ideas of real workers’ democracy, which represented a mortal threat to
the Stalinist regimes. But Czechoslovakia in 1968 was developing against
a profoundly changed world situation. To allow Dubček
to persevere would have opened the floodgates in all the states of
Eastern Europe that were seething under the stranglehold of Stalinism.
The crushing of the Prague spring was therefore deemed unavoidable by
Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and was acceded to even by Castro, who
weighed in after some delay in support of the Russian tanks in Prague.
This laid the basis for the mass disillusionment with Stalinism and a
blow to the idea of a planned economy upon which it rested, not just in
Czechoslovakia but throughout Eastern Europe. As subsequent events in
Poland showed, it also fuelled support for the idea of a return to
capitalism.
1968 therefore had an international scope, in the
same way as 1848 and 1917. The ruling powers today wish to banish the
spectre of 1968. First place amongst these, appropriately, is the French
bourgeoisie, represented by the words of Nicolas Sarkozy. He boasted
during his presidential campaign last year that his victory would banish
the ghosts of 1968: "May ’68 imposed intellectual and moral relativism
on us all…" he declared. "The heirs of May ’68 imposed the idea that
there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth,
falsehood, beauty and ugliness. This heritage of May ’68 introduced
cynicism into society and politics". Incredibly, he even claimed that
1968 helped "weaken the morality of capitalists, to prepare the grounds
for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes and rogue bosses".
(CounterPunch, 4 June 2007)
No, these are the endemic features of capitalism
which the generation of 1968, both then and subsequently, have tried to
eradicate by preparing the ground for the completion of 1968, the
socialist transformation of society. The French bourgeoisie inveighed
against the French revolution, the heroic Communards of 1871, the
sit-down strikes of 1936, as they did and do today against 1968. As with
those previous events, they will not succeed in extirpating the example
of this, the great year of revolution and near-revolution. It is the
task of socialists to keep the traditions of 1968 alive but also to
learn from the deficiencies of this movement, in order to prepare the
socialist future for humankind.
References:
(1) Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left
Review, January-February 2008
(2) Sean O’Hagan, Everyone to the Barricades, The
Observer, 20 January 2008
(3) Tariq Ali, Where Has All the Anger Gone? The
Guardian, 22 March 2008
(4) Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet
Minister, Hamish Hamilton (1977), pp76-77
(5) Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy,
Palgrave Macmillan (2003), p298
(6) Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade in Milan, New Left
Review, January-February 2008
(7) Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents
1980-2001, Palgrave Macmillan (2006), p40
(8) Ed Vulliamy, True Voice of the Revolution, The
Observer, 20 January 2008
(9) Michael Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day
War, St Martins Press 1981, p313
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