Remembering 1968
John Molyneux
‘It was the best of times! It was the worst of times!’
No! Actually it was the best of times – closer to Wordsworth
(‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, And to be young was very heaven’) than
to Dickens. At least that is how 1968
was for me and how it has remained for fifty years.
Every so often there is a year
which casts a spell on a generation. Afterwards simply to mention it brings
innumerable images to the minds of many people who lived through it. 1968 was
such a year. There are millions of people throughout the world who still feel
their lives were changed decisively by what happened in those 12 months.
So begins Chris Harman’s The
Fire Last Time:1968 and After, the best book ever written on that
extraordinary year, and every word of it applies to me. Since a narrative
account of ‘my ‘68’ would far exceed the requested length for this article I’m
structuring it around some of the ‘innumerable images’ that mention of this
extraordinary year brings to my mind.
The first is of the Bowery, the skid row of downtown Manhattan.
The Bowery in 1967
I found myself on the Bowery at Christmas 1967. I was a
student visiting New York on a three week trip and on my first night I was
robbed in my hotel room. This forced me
to make my way down through Manhattan to the Bowery in search of accommodation
in a $1 dollar a night flop house. As a new student I had just met people with
socialist and Marxist ideas for the first time, and the extreme inequality I
saw in New York as I walked past the corporate wealth of the sky scrapers and
Madison Avenue to the utter degradation of the down-and – outs on the Bowery
both shocked me and resonated with the ideas I had recently encountered. I also
grasped, half intuitively, that these two poles were two sides of the same
capitalist coin – of the same alienation as I would later learn from Marx.
Capitalism I decided was simply unacceptable; I would become a socialist.
Returning to my University in Southampton I got involved in
left politics in the Uni and in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which leads to
my second image: the mounted police charging against Vietnam protestors in
Grosvenor Square.
Grosvenor Square, 17 March 1968.
A group of about ten of us from Southampton Uni travelled to
London for the demo in a minibus. We arrived at Travalgar Square to find it absolutely
filled with Vietnamese flags – a truly beautiful sight, aesthetically as well as
politically. After speeches the march of
many tens of thousands headed down Charing Cross Rd and Oxford St towards the
US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in Mayfair.
We were met in South Audley St. with a line of cops blocking
the entrance to the Square, but ten or twenty thousand people all pushing is quite a weight and the
police cordon soon broke. We swept triumphantly into the Square in
front of the embassy. Fearful that the embassy would be stormed, and such was
certainly the mood of the crowd, the police counter attacked on horseback. This
was my first major protest and the first time I’d seen anything like this. It
was very scary, especially seeing a demonstrator who had been kicked in the
head, but I was in awe of the protestors who stood their ground and fought
back. Of course the media reported the whole thing as an example of outrageous
violence by extremists – never mind the violence of My Lai, napalm and the rest
in Vietnam.
This was a time when something world shaking seemed to
happen every few days – on 4 April Martin Luther King was assassinated and
there were across the US – but my next image comes from Paris and is a
barricade made of cobblestones.
In early May we started to get reports of students clashing
with the police in the Latin Quarter, the student area, of Paris. The protests
began over issues such as overcrowding, mutual access to male and female
dormitories and, of course, Vietnam. The French riot police, the CRS, were
known for their brutality and the fighting was fierce. On 10 May it culminated
in ‘the Night of the Barricades’ when local people came to the aid of the
students. This was followed on 13 May by a general strike of 10 million workers
in solidarity with the students. I decided to take myself to Paris.
When I got there, around 17 May, I found a society at a
standstill, paralysed by the power of the working class. I made my way to the
occupied Sorbonne. There was no actual street fighting going on but the debris
of the struggle was everywhere, in particular piles of these huge cobblestones
that had been dug up to build barricades and to hurl at the cops. You could
also see the walking wounded on the streets with their heads bandaged by the
improvised infirmary in a wing of the Sorbonne.
I stayed overnight on the floor of an occupied room with
about 20 others. Asking round the room I was surprised to discover that none of
the others were actually Sorbonne students but mostly young workers who had
been inspired to join the struggle. What they mostly talked about was how their
consciousness had been dramatically changed over the previous few weeks from
passive acceptance of the system to outright rebellion.
The next day I made my way, not far, to the Odeon, France’s
National Theatre, which had been handed over to the students by its famous
director, Jean Louis Barrault, and turned into a permanent
round the clock debating chamber
The occupied Odeon.
In Ten Days that Shook
the World John Reed describes the atmosphere in 1917:
Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle’s “flood of
French speech” was a mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches–in theatres,
circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters,
barracks–. Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares,
factories–. What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov
factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist
Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they
would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner
was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of
impromptu debate, everywhere…
The Odeon was a glimpse, on a much smaller scale of course, of the
same explosion of discussion. From there I found my way to the École des Beaux
Arts which had been transformed into a poster factory churning out the now
iconic silk screen posters of the revolt which were then plastered across Paris
. Of these many famous images I have chosen one that points to what really Made
May ’68 so important – the workers’ great strike and factory occupations.
It was
this power that made May ’68 not just amazing and inspiring street theatre but
a real challenge to the system, a real potential revolution.
By the
time I returned to Southampton I was convinced of three things: 1) revolution
was possible;2) the agent of revolution was the working class; 3) it was
necessary to build a revolutionary organisation in the working class to
challenge the leadership of reformist trade union officials and the old
Communist Parties, whom I saw opposing and selling out the May struggle by
working to end the strike as soon as possible. Sometime in June Tony Cliff
visited Southampton to talk to a group of about four or five students, and
argue more or less exactly this. I joined the International Socialists.
So many
other things happened that year but for reasons of space I will mention just
three. On August 20, by which time I was back home in London, Soviet tanks
rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.
From
the beginning of the year the Communist reformer, Alexander Dubcek, had been
announcing his intention to liberalise and bring in ‘socialism with a human
face’. Brezhnev and the Soviet Union were having none of it. The International
Socialists and others immediately organised a mass protest at the Russian
Embassy. This was important because it gave concrete expression to the IS
slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ and for me and others it meant that
anti-Stalinism was in our DNA. The invasion split the international Communist
movement and to this day Stalinists are known as ‘Tankies’.
Also in
the summer of 1968 I attended a national organising meeting of the Vietnam
Solidarity Campaign in Leeds to plan for a major demo in London in October. The
meeting began in Leeds University but after a red scare we were kicked out and
ended up, by various means, up on the nearby Yorkshire Moors. As far as I know
there is no photo of this but in my mind’s eye I can see the likes of Chris
Harman, Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali sitting round a hollow in the hills to
debate the route of the march until a bunch of farmers arrived with dogs and
clubs to turf us off their land. I
mention this because it was an example
of the kind of mad cap spontaneous ‘happening’ that characterised much
of the organising in that year. But the day also had its serious side. The IS
people argued that the Vietnam demo should go to the East End and the Bank of
England to link the struggle against the war to the workers’ struggle against capitalism.
They didn’t win that debate - the demo
went to Hyde Park – but my impression is they won many of the best of the ’68
generation to the perspective of going to the working class and the factories,
just in time for the big industrial battles of 1969-74.
The
last but one image I’m citing does not, unlike the others, relate to an event I
took part in. Nevertheless it is absolutely and symbolic of the period. This is
the image of Tommy Smith and John Carlos giving their Black Power salute on 12
October on the victory podium at the Mexico Olympics.
This
magnificent gesture of defiance is iconic in itself but also underlines the
immense importance of the Black American struggle throughout 1968 and in the
whole historical period. The civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X and Muhammed Ali, Black power and the revolutionary Black Panthers
transformed ‘the ideological panorama of the age’, to quote Gramsci. It was, of
course, the Civil Rights Movement in the US that inspired the Civil Rights
struggle in Northern Ireland which led to the famous demonstration in
Derry on 5 October.
The
issue of racism was never far away in 1968. I already mentioned the
assassination of Martin Luther King but there were also Enoch Powell’s viciously
racist ‘rivers of blood’ speeches in February and April which made race and
immigration into central issues in British politics. In May ’68 attempts were
made to demonise the student leader, Danny Cohn-Bendit , as ‘a German Jew’ and
‘foreign scum’ prompting the mass response ‘We are all German Jews’ and ‘We are
all foreign scum’.
Finally
I remember this poster from May.
The beginning of a long struggle. It certainly was for me
and for many of my generation. And many of us who came into the revolutionary
movement in that year have shown a good deal of staying power. Having seen
1968, I can never say, ‘It can’t happen’ and the important thing, of course, is
to use the history of ‘68 to inspire and inform a new generation of
revolutionaries today. The struggle goes on and now, if humanity is to have a
future, the revolution is more necessary than ever before.
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