Voices of 1968

Documents from the Global North

Salar Mohandesi, Bjarke Skærlund Risager, Laurence Cox

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780745338088
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786803467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The year 1968 witnessed one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century, as social movements shook every continent. Across the Global North, people rebelled against post-war conformity and patriarchy, authoritarian education and factory work, imperialism and the Cold War. They took over workplaces and universities, created their own media, art and humour, and imagined another world. The legacy of 1968 lives on in many of today's struggles, yet it is often misunderstood and caricatured. Voices of 1968 is a vivid collection of original texts from the movements of the long 1968. We hear these struggles in their own words, showing their creativity and diversity. We see feminism, black power, anti-war activism, armed struggle, indigenous movements, ecology, dissidence, counter-culture, trade unionism, radical education, lesbian and gay struggles, and more take the stage. Chapters cover France, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, Britain, the USA, Canada, Italy, West Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Japan. Introductory essays frame the rich material - posters, speeches, manifestos, flyers, underground documents, images and more - to help readers explore the era's revolutionary voices and ideas and understand their enduring impact on society, culture and politics today.

1

United States

Despite Cold War anxieties, the 1960s in the United States began with great optimism. The American economy was the strongest in the world, the United States had reached the height of its international powers, and faith in the government seemed stronger than ever. John F. Kennedy, the youngest American to be elected President in his country’s history, ended his famous 1961 inaugural address with a rousing, patriotic call to action: “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” While his assassination in 1963 came as a shock, his successor, Lyndon Johnson carried the torch forward with the “Great Society,” a set of social programs designed to improve education, expand health care, and alleviate poverty.

Despite this idealism from above, discontent stirred below. While the government saw itself as the leader of the free world, American society was in fact profoundly unequal. Throughout the country, African Americans faced discrimination, disenfranchisement, segregation, and outright violence. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy was lynched in Mississippi. In 1958, a poll found that 44 percent of whites said they would sell their homes if a Black family moved next door. Even after the landmark Brown v Board of Education ruling in 1954, many institutions in the South remained formally segregated, and interracial marriage remained illegal in some states until 1967.

African Americans had long organized against racial discrimination, and through the tireless efforts of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually secured major gains, such as civic equality with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and political inclusion with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But Black struggles were by no means monolithic. While some fought for equitable access to the existing system, others, especially Black nationalists, called for a transformation of the system itself. Channeling the energy of Black urban rebellions exploding across the country, like Watts in 1965, they adopted a more combative politics. Looking to anti-colonial struggles abroad, they saw African Americans as an internal colony and understood their own struggle as part of a larger internationalist revolution. The most famous representative of this current was the Black Panther Party, formed in 1966.

Black struggles inspired white students across the country, many of whom first cut their teeth in the civil rights movement. By the 1960s, a student movement began to coalesce in the United States, led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In its founding manifesto, The Port Huron Statement of 1962, SDS articulated a sense of alienation from not only mainstream American society, but also what it considered to be the outdated ideas of the Old Left. Instead, they called for a New Left based on the idea of “participatory democracy.” Born of the gap between the celebratory discourse of the country’s leaders and the stark realities of American life, SDS soon took a radical turn, taking a leading role in opposing the Vietnam War, protesting the modern university, and fighting for a more equitable society. At its height in the late 1960s, the group claimed nearly a hundred thousand members.

At the same time, many young people began to search for an alternative to the mainstream culture of their parents. What would eventually become the counterculture arose from a paradox at the heart of American society: despite enjoying unprecedented affluence, many American youth felt a deep sense of emptiness, malaise, and meaninglessness. Rejecting the passionless world of routines, some sought to invent a new set of values through art, psychedelic music, underground newspapers, communal living, drugs, and sexual liberation. Although the “hippies” remained an extremely marginal phenomenon, countercultural sentiments spread widely, challenging many deeply-held mores.

The backdrop to this turmoil was the Vietnam War. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam, dispatching young Americans to fight in a country few could find on a map. Although most Americans initially supported their government, the war quickly became a deeply divisive issue. Young men burned draft cards, students occupied universities, and hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets. Despite growing opposition, at home and abroad, Johnson continued to escalate the war, driving many antiwar activists further to the left. Refusing to be complicit in their country’s war abroad, some activists began to think seriously about opening a new front in the “belly of the beast.”

Although the year 1968 did not culminate in a single explosion, as in France, the United States did experience a prolonged wave of activism that was no less transformative. The year began with the Tet Offensive, which gave the lie to imminent victory. The war, and the Offensive in particular, not only damaged Johnson’s credibility, it threatened to tear the Democratic Party apart. Losing control over his party, Lyndon Johnson astounded the country by announcing on March 31 that he would not seek reelection. Less than a week later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking urban rebellions across the country. Later in April, protesting students occupied academic buildings at Columbia University, signaling a new level of militancy in the student movement. In June, Americans witnessed yet another assassination when Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down after winning the California Democratic Primary. In October, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. In August, Chicago police mercilessly beat demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention; inside, the Party fractured, as younger delegates tried to push the Democrats in a more leftist direction, while white Southerners began to rethink their party loyalties. In the end, Party insiders handed Vice President Hubert Humphrey the nomination, even though he never competed in a single primary, leaving many antiwar delegates disillusioned with the entire process. In the general election, Richard Nixon, who ran on a law and order platform, emerged victorious.

The extraordinary events of 1968 had a radicalizing effect. The majority of Americans now saw the war as a mistake. University occupations became more common. Student groups increasingly embraced the idea of revolution. Marxism, indeed Leninism, gained popularity. Workers’ struggles grew in number and intensity. In fact, after having condemned the working class as bought off, many young activists firmly turned their attention to the class struggle, with some going so far as to find work in steel mills, auto plants, or mines to help organize the working class for revolution. Others, like the future Weather Underground, called for armed struggle. Although more committed than ever to revolutionary change, activists increasingly fell into sectarianism, a turn most powerfully symbolized by the collapse of SDS amidst a frenzy of factionalist in-fighting in 1969.

Nevertheless, the late 1960s also saw a diversification of emancipatory struggles. The Black Panther Party, which unveiled a range of “survival programs,” such as free breakfast, medical clinics, dental programs, GED class, and research into sickle cell anemia, emerged as a model for other groups. Puerto Rican radicals formed the Young Lords Party, Mexican Americans created the Brown Berets, Asian Americans the Red Guards, poor whites the Young Patriots, and Native Americans the American Indian Movement. In some cases, these groups cooperated with one another. In Chicago, for example, the Panthers, Young Lords, Brown Berets, the Young Patriots, and others formed a multi-racial, anti-racist “Rainbow Coalition” for radical change.

Lastly, as in other countries, new social movements took shape in these years, such as women’s liberation. Born in part as a reaction to the pervasive sexism within radical movements ostensibly fighting for radical change, women’s liberation not only fought against sexism, winning important battles like the legal right to abortion, but redefined the meaning of politics. Oppression, feminists argued, made itself apparent in hidden ways, in gestures, comments, interpersonal relationships. Politics, therefore, was not just something that happened at the ballot box or in the streets, but also in seemingly private spaces. Alongside the women’s movement emerged a host of other new movements, such as gay liberation, a renewed interest in environmentalism, or immigrant rights.

Figure 1.1 The first issue of Triple Jeopardy, the paper of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a revolutionary socialist organization of women of color. 1971.

By the early 1970s, many of these leftist ideas, once confined to a minority, won an even greater audience. Countercultural attitudes went mainstream, strikes became even more frequent, and gay and women’s liberation overturned traditional ideas. At the same time, defeat in Vietnam weakened American global hegemony, the decades-long economic boom finally ended in recession, and Richard Nixon became the first President in U.S. history to resign the office in 1974. The old order was deeply shaken, opening the political space for alternatives. But the movements of the left were in no position to take advantage of the crisis. By the mid-1970s, intense repression, factionalization, burnout, and the changing international context pushed many of these movements into terminal decline. One of the greatest challenges for activists in the American context was the question of diversity, and despite some attempts, activists failed to build lasting coalitions that could unite diverse social groups into an inclusive, unified force. In the end, it was not the left that mastered the crisis of the 1970s, but a resurgent right, in the form of Ronald Reagan.

THE INCREDIBLE WAR (1965)
Paul Potter

In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam by deploying marines to the Republic of Vietnam in the South and authorizing a massive bombing campaign against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North. The following month, on April 17, 1965, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first major national demonstration against the war. They expected a few thousand protesters. To their surprise, around 20,000 attended, making it the largest peace protest in American history to that date. One of the highlights of the day was the following speech by SDS President Paul Potter. Here he develops one of the core themes of the 1960s and 1970s: the need to focus not simply on reforms, but to change the larger “system” that makes war, inequality, and oppression possible in the first place.

* * *

Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with no design for external conquest, that sought primarily the opportunity to develop its own resources and its own mode of living. If at some point we began to hear vague and disturbing things about what this country had done in Latin America, or China, or Spain and other places, we remained somehow confident about the basic integrity of this nation’s foreign policy. The Cold War with all of its neat categories and black and white descriptions did much to assure us that what we had been taught to believe was true.

But in recent years, the withdrawal from the hysteria of the Cold War and the development of a more aggressive, activist foreign policy have done much to force many of us to rethink attitudes that were deep and basic sentiments about our country. And now the incredible war in Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestiges of our illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American foreign policy. The saccharine self-righteous moralism that promises the Vietnamese a billion dollars while taking billions of dollars for economic and social destru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• What Was 1968?
• 1. United States
• 2. Canada
• 3. Mexico
• 4. Japan
• 5. West Germany
• 6. Denmark
• 7. France
• 8. Italy
• 9. Britain
• 10. Northern Ireland
• 11. Yugoslavia
• 12. Czechoslovakia