Reflections on 1968

In 1968, the world abounded with young idealists: student radicals, third world guerillas, disaffected intellectuals, Dany Cohn-Bendits, Rudi-Dutschkes, and Adam Michniks. They came out en masse in 1968 – symptomatic of the “eros effect,” as theorized by George Katsiaficas – initially to challenge local authority structures, and ultimately to attack oppression and injustice everywhere, especially in imperialist, hyper-capitalist, Communist, and underdeveloped societies. In the global revolution that ensued, the New Left – as this emergent vanguard of the socialist movement came to be known – recognized that its own interests lay in the equality and freedom of self-determination of all people: instinctual needs that, when realized, might culminate in utopia.

And yet, while the events of 1968 were wider in scope – politically, culturally, and geographically – than the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, they ended nonetheless in disappointment, disillusionment, and shock. In popular memory, the failure of 1968 is attributed to any of several factors, like the overwhelming resistance of the state, the degeneration of revolutionary fervor into counterrevolutionary hedonism, and the lack of mass support from the working classes for the student movement. This last factor needs to be considered in detail, not least because it has provoked unwarranted criticism of the working class as an apathetic collective force resistant to revolutionary change. In reality, no single explanation can account for the breakdown of the student-worker alliances that manifested, to varying degrees of success, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The socio-political context in which each movement originated was significantly different from every other, so that each must be assessed and respected on its own terms. What these movements all had in common, however, was the student movement’s ability to identify existentially with oppressed peoples around the word, and in particular, with the working class. An alliance between these two parties, as national governments feared, could pose an irresistible threat to their dominance.