1968: A Social Movement Sui Generis

Abstract

This contribution starts out with a brief survey of key events in 'global 1968', which is defined as a social movement mobilization cycle lasting, approximately, from 1956 to 1976. After a discussion of key overall determinants engendering this particular moment of crises and opportunities, '1968' is then analyzed as the very first-ever transcontinental revolt, a tripartite rebellion linking up protest movements in various parts of the world: radical students and workers in First World countries, anti-bureaucratic dissident currents in the Second World; and national liberation movements in the Third World.

Further Reading

Serious attention to the Long Sixties has only become a mainstream historiographical concern since, roughly, the thirtieth anniversary of ‘1968’. Two attempts at an overall survey, both published in 1998, set new standards for investigation: Arthur Marwick, The Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and the ambitious project edited by Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker, 1968. The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also in 1998 appeared the still today superior pictorial history of global 1968, Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins (eds), 1968. Marching in the Streets (New York: Free Press, 1998). The only major English-language analyses with a transnational remit to emerge from the fortieth anniversary celebrations have been Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of 1968. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and the edited volume by Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave, 2008). New standards for a global vision may be established by Samantha Christiansen & Zachary A. Scarlett (eds), The Third World in the Global 1960s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012). Until 1998, autobiographical testimonials were the key literary products casting light on the background to the societal upheavals under discussion here. Rather than listing them separately, I will mention the few truly noteworthy English-language (auto-)biographies in the relevant paragraphs below. An early and enormously useful and evocative series of interview excerpts with activists of the sixties generation from around the world was Ronald Fraser, 1968. A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988). A recent study based on similar oral history techniques is Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring (eds), Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

For ‘The Belgian Contribution to Global 1968’, see my article with this title in the Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 35 2005), pp. 597–635. Still the superior English-language study of the Italian Sixties is Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990). There exists no truly satisfactory English-language monograph of the Sixties in Germany; perhaps the most fruitful key to West and East Germany realities is now Susanne Rinner, The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). On the French May, the standard reference work remains Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), first published in 1970. For a very recent stimulating survey of the British dimension of 1968, see Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left. Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Greece has now been covered in two first-rate English-language studies: Kostis Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the ‘Long 1960s’ in Greece (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), and Nikolaos Papadogiannis, Militant Around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2015). No English-language monographs exist on 1968 in Poland or Yugoslavia. On the Prague Spring, Z. A. B. Zeman, Prague Spring: A Report on Czechoslovakia 1968 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) is still the optimal introduction.

A wealth of publications covers the American Sixties. An inevitably highly selective list of recommended titles includes Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation. Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), for the crucial prehistory; Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden. American Culture in the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), first published in 1977; still the best insider account of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the much neglected Fred Halstead, Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War (New York: Monad, 1978); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980); and, last but not least, the two gems penned by Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night. History as Novel—The Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994), first published in 1968, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the American Political Conventions of 1968 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). The Asturian-Mexican historian and journalist, Paco Ignacio Taibo, has written what is probably the very best of the large number of autobiographical accounts to emerge from any national context, his memoirs of the Mexican student movement, translated as 1968 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003). The best English-language compendium volume to Taibo’s literary narrative is now Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico. Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Some essential English-language volumes on the important but much-misunderstood phenomenon of cultural non-conformity in the run-up to 1968, as well as its aftermath, are: Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel. Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber & Faber, 1971); Dark Star (ed.), Beneath the Paving Stones. Situationists and the Beach, May 1968 (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2001); Mike Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s—Chimes of Freedom (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); John Tytell, The Living Theatre. Art, Exile and Outrage (London: Methuen Drama, 1995); Jon Wiener, Come Together. John Lennon in His Time (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Tom Behan, Dario Fo. Revolutionary Theatre (London: Pluto, 2000); Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up. The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Pimlico, 1998); Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London: Verso, 2000); and the sole English-language study of the enormously influential Dutch Provo revolt, Richard Kempton, Provo. Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007).

There exists only one truly transnational survey of the much-neglected working-class dimension of 1968 in English, Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno (eds), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (London: Macmillan, 1978). For some excellent local, regional or national studies, note the outstanding Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit. I do Mind Dying. A Study in Urban Revolution (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), first published in 1975; Ralph Darlington and Dave Lyddon, Glorious Summer. Class Struggle in Britain, 1972 (London: Bookmarks, 2001); and a key work on the today almost completely forgotten highlight of post-1968 radical protest culture in Europe, Nancy Bermeo, The Revolution Within the Revolution. Workers’ Control in Rural Portugal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). A marvellous reconstruction of the much-neglected working-class dimension of the Prague Spring remains Vladimir Fišera, Workers’ Councils in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1969: Documents and Essays (London: Allison and Busby, 1978). Last but not least, the recent study by Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London: Verso, 2011), a pathbreaking monograph on a formative labour movement in the global Sixties, is likely to become a key reference work for some years to come.

There exist preciously few English-language book-length studies on the central contribution by Christian activists to the spirit of 1968. As there are virtually no such monographs on continental Europe to date, I take the liberty of listing my The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). There are, by contrast, a number of solid studies of radical Christian activism in the United States, notably James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties. The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); Sara M. Evans (ed.), Journeys That Opened up the World. Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–1975 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); and the recent study by Mark S. Massa S. J. with the optimistic title The American Catholic Revolution. How the 1960s Changed the Church Forever (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Last but not least, I wish to note a series of interviews with the leading post-Second World War Marxist intellectual and activist Ernest Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: NLB, 1979). This long out-of-print paperback provides an excellent point of entry into the mindset of a generation of far left activists which accounted for a crucial portion of the volatility, promise and inner drive behind the social movements of ‘global 1968’. My own assessment of ‘1968’ as a virtuous interactive cycle of three different sectors of global anti-elite revolt owes much to the closely related analysis put forth by this Flemish Trotskyist.