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2001 25: 157Prog Hum GeogrMichael Watts

1968 and all that...

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The Progress in Human Geography lecture

1968 and all that . . . Michael WattsInstitute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2308,USA

Abstract: The year 1968 was a global insurrection but the geography of its genesis and of itslegacies remains poorly understood. In relation to the outpouring of work critical of the eventsof the sixties, and of 1968 in particular, by commentators on the political right and left, this essayattempts to rethink the nature of these global events and traces three paths from 1968, each ofwhich represents a distinctive global–local articulation. It is argued that, while there are manydifferent sorts of 1968s, what they each bequeathed was a rethinking of the politics of thepossible, and they unleashed a long march through the institutions which have left an indeliblemark on the politics of the contemporary era. The essay concludes with some reflections on thelegacy of 1968 for the idea of radical democracy and of real Utopias.

Key words: geopolitics, nongovernment, radical democracy, real Utopias, sixties, socialmovements.

Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn tothe horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marineartist Louis Dumont on the inner wall of the circus like structure [of the Waterloo Panorama]. This then, Ithought, as I looked around about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective.We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was(Sebald, 1996: 124–25).

So let us not talk falsely now,The hour is getting late.

Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding (1968)

‘Even though all visible traces are gone,’ said Umberto Eco of 1968, ‘it profoundlychanged all of us’ (Newsweek, 22 December 1986: 49). In Eco’s paradoxical formulation– a revolutionary moment that leaves no trace – is a larger, and now dominant,narrative of the sixties in which the tropes of failure, defeat and melancholia figurecentrally. The year 1968 was a failed, indeed a doomed revolution that came to haunt ageneration. In short, the epitaph of ‘68 has been written many times over. I want to offera geography of this faceless revolution, to chronicle and inventory its invisible traces inour time and, in so doing, to see in 1968 and its aftermath not a death narrative but, if Imay deploy the title of David Harvey’s (2000) new book, Spaces of hope.

Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 157–188

© Arnold 2001 0309–1325(01)PH318XX



158 1968 and all that . . .

I Eulogy for a sixty-eighter

On 22 January 2000 my friend and colleague Bernard Quinn Nietschmann passed awayafter a long struggle with esophageal cancer. He was 58 years old. ‘Mr Barney’ (anappellation traceable to his days on the Miskito coast) was a spellbinding speaker andteacher, a consummate cultural geographer and, latterly, a tireless activist. In thetradition of Berkeley geography, Barney was a great and committed fieldworker, but hewas equally a fine wordsmith and an exceptionally gifted photographer. He put hisuncanny ability to integrate image and text to great effect in his scholarship long beforeit became academically fashionable to do so. All these skills were much in evidence inhis classic but, in my view, radically underappreciated book, Between land and water(1974), an arresting account of the transformation of fishing livelihoods among Miskitocommunities along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua during the Somoza period. Likeall great studies it simultaneously illuminated the power and originality of a particulartheoretical vantage point – cultural ecology in his case – but also its limits, its silencesand its failure fully to grasp the crisis he sought to explicate. The tenor and character ofhis work changed dramatically in the aftermath of the Sandanista victory in 1979 whenhe was ‘radicalized’, not by the revolutionary rhetoric of the FMLN but rather by theSandanista and Reaganite policies in relation to indigenous peoples. From the early1980s onward he became less an academic in any standard sense of the word than anactivist and public intellectual, committed to what he called Fourth World People’sstruggles. It was a political epiphany that landed him in deep trouble with the left, andthe Bay Area Sandanismo in particular. In the face of some adversity he adopted, nev-ertheless, a principled position – one which with hindsight can be seen to have beenquite correct – which sustained him through the second half of his professional life.Much ink has been spilled on the theory of action research but Barney’s working lifeprovides a model of collaborative and participatory practice that we could all do wellto emulate. His Maya atlas (1997), produced in conjunction with the Toledo MayaCultural Council and the Toledo Alcades Association, is a wonder of committed, criticaland engaged scholarship.

These personal reflections upon a life lived have an affinity to the subject of myremarks – namely, the 1960s and alternative ways of practicing politics. BarneyNietschmann was, unequivocally, a ‘sixties man’. He seemed to me to operate mostcomfortably, indeed to flourish, on the margins and at the periphery of the mainstream.An intellectual guerilla, and a brilliant hit-and-run artist, Barney was deeply suspiciousof power and authority. And his sixties credentials were impeccable. He completed hisgraduate training in Madison – a center of student political activism in the USA –during the mid-to-late sixties and spoke with characteristic elan about the enragés whofamously bombed a local bank (he had been tipped off!). Bill Denevan tells the story ofhow Barney walked out on his final in 1967, scribbling on the examination script: ‘moreimportant things are happening in the streets.’ During the famous teaching assistantstrike of 1970 – the foundational moment for the union drives now underway at NewYork University, at the University of California system and elsewhere – Barney stoodfirm on the picket line when Glenn Trewartha and Richard Hartshorne, two formidableand formidably conservative personalities, attempted to enter Science Hall, the home ofthe geography department. If the sixties, whatever else they may have bequeathed us,entailed a loosening up of the rigidities of academia, then Bernard Nietschmann was



assuredly in the vanguard of the movement. To experience his teaching and hisacademic modus operandi as I did in the early 1970s at Michigan was to bear witnessto a remarkable, in its own way revolutionary, spectacle. It condemns one, orcondemned me at any rate, to a life of nostalgia, to spend much time in the incompleteand messy museum that is our memory of the past.

That said, I suspect that Barney would not have agreed with much of what I have tosay now, and perhaps would have had little interest in it. He became very disenchant-ed with both the left and with social theory of any stripe as the nineties wore on and hewas, by temperament, much too disposed to look forward to future worlds rather thanto cast a glance backward as I am about to do.

II A great rehearsal

Suddenly it was obvious that those long-ago utopian efforts to change the shape of the world [1968] were ayoung people’s rehearsal, preparatory to adult events that only came later (Berman, 1996: 16, emphasis added).

‘Twas in another lifetime,full of toil and blood . . . blackness was a virtue,and the road was full of mud.

Bob Dylan, Shelter from the storm, 1974

On 31 January 1968, in the early hours of the morning of the third day of Tet (theVietnamese New Year), Vietnamese liberation forces, across a front 600 miles long,launched an assault on 140 major cities and provincial towns in South Vietnam. It wasan auspicious beginning to the year. The year 1968 proved to be the annus mirabilis asTime magazine christened it, a year that defined and in some ways signaled the end ofthe 1960s. To glance through the new glossy coffee-table book – 1968: marching in thestreets (Ali and Watkins, 1998) – produced by Tariq Ali, is a salutary experience not onlybecause it is a coffee-table book, rendered as such by a central figure in the British NewLeft, but also because it returns us to the 12 months of turmoil and heady bedlam thatwas ‘sixty-eight’. The year 1968 was, like 1848, a world historical moment. To use Ali’svernacular, 1968 was ‘a year that those who lived through it, on either side of thepolitical divide, will never forget’ (1998: 7). With his customary bluntness, and it needsto be said with an ear for the bon mot, Abbie Hoffman put it thus: ‘living in America Iexpect to get killed . . . .’ (cited in Avedon, 1999: 4).

In his marvelous account of that year, Ronald Fraser (1988: 354) noted an anti-author-itarianism that challenged ‘almost every shibboleth of Western society’. Yet for all itsmerits, his is an unnecessarily parochial judgement, one which underestimates theglobal resonance of sixty-eight. The year 1968 felt as if the Tet offensive detonated aseries of explosions around the globe, all somehow linked together in some sort ofinexorable, and often terrifying logic. The Vietnamese war, said Göran Therborn (1968: 10), has produced a ‘simultaneous multiplication and radicalization of resistanceto it’. A final verdict on the legacy of the cataclysmic events of 1968 is surely not in, but nobody questions their gravity and historical significance. A simple, and verypartial, historical inventory of that legendary year still retains its astonishing shock-value:

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160 1968 and all that . . .

The Tet offensive and the massacre at Mai Lai, the assassinations of M.L. King and Robert Kennedy, the Mayévénements in Paris (including the strike of 10 million French workers), ‘Socialism with a Human Face’ inPrague, Warsaw and Belgrade, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the high-tide of the Chinese CulturalRevolution, the Medellin convention that launched Liberation Theology, students’ rebellions in Tokyo, Delhi,Berkeley, Rio and Berlin (indeed just about everywhere), the massacre of Mexican students in Tlateloco Square,Regis Debray’s imprisonment in Bolivia (and marriage in jail), growing turmoil and civil strife in Ireland andPalestine, the debacle surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the so-called hot winter in Pakistan(and later in Italy), the early stirrings of feminist protest surrounding the Miss America Contest in Atlantic City,the end of American growth liberalism, the collapse of the British pound, and the first rumblings of a majoreconomic crisis, and, lest we forget, the election of Richard Nixon and the move across Washington, from thePentagon to the World Bank, of a beleaguered and morally contorted Robert McNamara.

Just to blink was to miss something, said Christopher Hitchens (1998: 101). Fortunemagazine, surveying the events of spring 1968 judged, with good reason, that Americansociety had been ‘shaken to its roots’ (quoted in Horowitz, 1970: 185).

And then there was the pure spectacle of it all, what James Miller in Democracy is inthe streets (1994: 5) called the ‘carnivalesque atmosphere of confusion’. Bakhtinianrevelry flooded the streets, calling forth a new politics of display, a desire to do politicsdifferently. Need I remind anyone that the late sixties produced Jerry Rubin, AlanGinsberg and company attempting to levitate the Pentagon; the Yippies causing havocon Wall Street by throwing money on to the floor of the exchange; the StrasbourgSituationists denouncing boredom; the Dutch Provos unleashing pandemonium inAmsterdam by releasing thousands of chickens in rush-hour traffic; the Diggersdeclaring love a commodity; and not least Ed Sanders and the Fugs setting off on theirmarch on Prague to masturbate on the Soviet tanks? As Charles Dickens (1964: 9),describing another revolutionary moment in A tale of two cities, put it: ‘it was the best oftimes, it was the worst of times, . . . the season of darkness, the Spring of Hope . . . theepoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light.’

The fact that the jury on 1968 is still out 30 or so years on must surely turn to somedegree on the enormous complexity, perhaps the incomprehensible diversity, of whatwas a global insurrection. Some commentators, among them Paul Berman (1996), seethe events of 1968 as sufficiently disparate that only their unanticipatedness and dramaprovide a (rather spurious) sense of coherence and unity. In China students andworkers were lodged in the vanguard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutioninstigated by Mao to block the ‘capitalist roaders’; in Mexico students bravely protestedthe autocratic political monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) andwere savaged as a consequence; in the USA, the imperialist war in southeast Asia, civilrights struggles and the alienated culture of consumer capitalism supplied the fuel forthe fire of personal emancipation. Prague, Paris, Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Berlin, Calcuttaand Caracas were different yet again. Inevitably, others have seen in 1968 a radicalfailure, tragically flawed Utopian movements that indeed were bound to fail. But theevents of ‘68 were revolutionary not because governments were, or might have been,overthrown but because a defining characteristic of revolution is that it abruptly callsinto question existing society and presses people into action. Sixty-eight was, to quoteSaint-Just, a revolutionary theorist of an earlier epoch, a ‘public moment’, an instancein which the social contract is ‘simultaneously reviewed and reconstituted throughaction’ (cited in Feenberg and Freedman, n.d.: 147). Walter Benjamin (1967) says inReflections that revolution is the moment – a moment of danger and urgency – when thehuman species traveling in the train of history reaches for the emergency brake. It is ametaphor which, for the long months of 1968, retains its allure.



Of course there is no singular 1968 any more than there is a monolithic entity calledthe sixties. But the events of the era, and of 1968 in particular, were a disruption, aderangement of the complacent bourgeois dream of ‘unproblematic production, ofeveryday life as the bureaucratic society’ (Sayres et al., 1984: 2). All of which is to saythat a return to the period, and to the inventions and reinventions of ‘68, is perfectlydefensible and desirable because so much was at stake. The sweeping politicalchallenges posed during the sixties, to say nothing of the innovations of the New Left,constitute a veritable treasury ‘whose present dilapidation impoverishes us’ (Caute,cited in Lasky, 1988: 12; see also Caute, 1977). Yet so much of what the radicals andactivists rendered as a new politics, an ‘anti-institutional struggle . . . which transformsthe publics of classical bourgeois society into critical publics’ (Donolo, 1970: 57), hasbecome so wrapped in cant and the worst sort of revisionism, so clouded by theadmitted excesses and confusion of the times, so discredited by the defeats andreversals that followed the turmoil of 1968, and so silenced by the perils of nostalgia (inwhich the new generation of activists are rightly loathe to participate), that it hasbecome impossibly difficult to reclaim what was, and indeed what remains, so radicaland relevant about the sixties. Rewriting the sixties during the 1980s produced whatJulie Stephens (1998: 4) calls ‘the death narrative’: a revolutionary and emancipatoryproject dashed on the shoals of political immaturity and idealism. Sadly, the fact that somany of the sixties generation themselves have retreated from, or are reticent to returnto, the period (see Klatch,1999) has ceded the territory to the public intellectuals of theNew Right – Roger Kimball, David Frum, David Horowitz, Gertude Himmelfarb – andtheir formidable publishing apparatuses, for whom the sixties is an object of reproach,marking the decline of just about everything. Yet none of the sixties anxieties andconcerns have receded of course (how could they?); the ur-texts of 1968 – by the likes ofCohn-Bendit, Debord, Oglesby, Fanon – retain their exhilaration, excitement andfreshness. Public moments never recede.

So I want to speak about 1968 but also about ‘all that . . . ‘. The codicil ‘all that’ standsin for two things. In contradistinction to 1968, it refers to the sixties, that long decade asFred Jameson (1988) sees it, stretching from about 1958/59 to 1972/73. ArthurMarwick’s massive new encomium of the period, The sixties, provides a shopping list ofthe distinctive features of the decade (1998: 17–20): new subcultures, the growinginfluence of youth, new forms of popular culture (TV/music), massive improvementsin material life, racial, class and family upheavals, new forms of self-expressionespecially fashion, civil and personal rights, multiculturalism, and what he sees as thedialectical oscillation between a liberal ‘measured judgement’ and extreme reaction.The mere mention of the sixties, and the counterculture and the New Left, arousesstrong emotions on both sides of the Atlantic. No other event in American life – not thethirties or the second world war – is continually capable of calling leading politicians toaccount (did you fight, did you flee, did you inhale?). Both George W. Bush and Al Gorehave, in the recent presidential election, been put to this very test (The New York Times,22 June 2000: A29). For Allan Bloom, the self-appointed arbiter of American culture andtaste, the sixties ideologues were crypto-fascists, as destructive as the Nazis. A counter-cultural bacillus infected and permeated society with all sorts of new ideas andgenerated, as a consequence, a culture of confrontation. ‘Enlightenment in America’, heopined, ‘came close to breathing its last during the sixties’ (1987: 56). The year 1968marks, then, a sort of condensation of the convulsive transformations incubated

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162 1968 and all that . . .

between the late 1950s and the oil crisis, the economic recession and the dollardevaluation of the early seventies. It is a period which, as Jameson’s (1988) essaybrilliantly reveals, encompasses a sort of homologous coherence across politicalphilosophy, cultural production, economic cycles and political practice. Johnson’sdecision to bomb North Vietnam, Dylan’s decision to go electric at Newport and theappearance of Pynchon’s Crying of lot 49 were somehow all of a piece.

From the vantage of the Euro-Atlantic economies, the sixties movements contained anumber of striking paradoxes. First of all their anti-materialism emerged at the veryapotheosis of a stunning postwar consumer boom, the exalted golden age of‘spectacular growth’, as Marshall Berman calls it (1974). John Updike’s marvelous poem‘Superman’ captures both the suffocating material abundance and the alienationwrought by American Fordism at full throttle:

I drive my car to the supermarketThe way I take is superhighA superlot is where I park itAnd Supersuds are what I buy

Secondly, the sixties attack on liberalism – recall the spell-binding speech by SDS leaderCarl Oglesby: ‘think of the men who engineer the war – who study the maps, givecommands, press buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge . . . thePresident. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They all areliberals’ (cited in Kazin, 1995: 210; emphasis added) – occurs precisely at the high tide ofwhat Randall Collins (1996) calls ‘growth liberalism’, at the very zenith of the GreatSociety. And not least, the shock troops of the insurrection were, as Alain Tourraine(1970) and others noted at the time, the professional classes, the intellectuals andstudents and conspicuously not, the national strike in France in 1968 notwithstanding,an insurgent working-class or indeed a vanguard left party as such. To put it crudely,one might say that it was the social rather than the economic contradictions ofconsumer capitalism – what was referred to then as authoritarian or repressivecapitalism – which burst into the open.

These sixties paradoxes are part of the indisputable sense of division and rupturewhich pervades the period. In this sense Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin inAmerica divided (2000) are right to draw a parallel between the 1960s and the 1860s – thatis to say with the American Civil War. Norman Mailer’s brilliant ‘novel’ The armies of thenight (1968), based on his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, made thesame point (Mailer noting that there was now a side he could join). The 1960s plungedAmericans ‘back into anguished scrutiny of the meaning of their most fundamentalbeliefs and institutions . . . They reacted with varying degrees of wisdom and folly . . .all those things that make us human’ (Isserman and Kazin,2000: 12). ‘All that’ gesturesto this anguished scrutiny, to the wisdom and folly of a period of civil war, in somerespects a global civil war.

There is, however, a second meaning of ‘and all that’ taken from a book of the samename: 1066 and all that (Sellar and Yeatman, 1931). A stock-in-trade of British school-childen since the 1930s, it is a magisterial spoof of English history, of the production ofhistorical knowledge and historical convention, and the practice of teaching about thepast. Entries are short, epigrammatic and very funny:



Enclosures: At the same time was the Agricultural Revelation which was caused by the invention of turnips andthe discovery that Trespassers could be prosecuted. This was a good thing, too (1931: 94).

At the end of each chapter are test questions:

1. Sketch vaguely with some reference to the facts the South Sea Bubble2. Write not more than two lines on Napoleon Buonaparte3. Ruminate fiercely on Lord Cardigan (1931: 116)

As the authors put it, the object of this history is to console the reader. ‘No other historydoes this. History is not what you thought it is. It is what you can remember’ (1931: vii).1066 and all that was intended to debunk the view that history was one damn thing afteranother, to challenge the idea that historical narrative is a taken-for-grantedcompendium of ‘the facts’. So my invocation of ‘and all that’ in this second sense is toalert us to the complexities of historical reception and meanings of historical events.Ideas, practices and events of momentous import are always fought over and contestedbut there is the ever-present danger that they become, as Beatrice Webb once said ofAdam Smith’s ideas, ‘the gospel of the employer’ (she actually said: ‘by what silentrevolution of events could the scientific expression against class tyranny andoppression of the many by the few be changed into the Employers Gospel of the 19thcentury’ – cited in Rothchild, 1992: 88). The 1960s in particular tend to travel poorly. Bywhat silent revolution, then, could they be transformed into the neoliberal gospel of the1980s, into Marwick’s aperçu that, from its very inception, 1968 was proto-capitalist,‘imbued with the entrepreneurial, profit-making ethic’ (1998: 13), or into Mazower’sjudgement in Dark continent that 1968 ‘created a fragmented and bitterly dogmatic Left,tempted by violence and unwilling to comprehend the scale of capitalism’s triumph’(1998: 319)? The death narrative achieves its final victory by positing what Carl Boggs(1995) calls a ‘total break’ as popular struggles purportedly came to an explosive andsudden halt between 1968 and 1970. Perhaps this revisionism explains a particular formof sixties silencing and forgetting. It is as if 1968 is the buried child, to use the title of aSam Sheppard play and another sixties man, the product of an excess, of a capaciouslibido best forgotten.

Which leads necessarily to the question: why disinter the body of 1968 now? Whyshould I be interested in exhuming the child of the sixties myself, 30 odd years on,during an era in which, to quote Perry Anderson’s recent and forbiddingly bleakassessment of the current political conjuncture, American capitalism has ‘resoundinglyreasserted its primacy in all fields’ and ‘virtually the entire horizon of the 60s generationhas been wiped away’ (2000: 10)? Revolutionary figures – Che, Fanon, Mao – seem asremote, if I may return to 1066 and all that, as Ethelred the Unready. Well, one reason isan accident of history. When I was asked to give this lecture three years ago (1998) wewere in the midst of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of 1968. I thought then andnow that these treatments were by and large trivial. Endless fluff on French ‘formerMaoists’, now well heeled capitalists, comparing cars at the Opus café during thesoixante-huitards anniversary; or the return of so-called ‘Prada-Meinhoff’ radical chicfashion; or former activists like Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Health, braying that‘68 was ‘the last great exercise in style’ (Newsweek, 1 June 1998: 45). In keeping with thistradition of trivialization, Hollywood now has on offer its own celluloid analysis ofAbbie Hoffman and the sixties in the appalling film by Robert Greenwald entitled ‘Steal

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164 1968 and all that . . .

this movie’. Recent history has not been kind to the 1960s. The industrial boom of ‘sixties books’ has continued unabated. On this side of the

Atlantic one thinks of Todd Gitlin’s The sixties (1987) and The twilight of common dreams(1995), Paul Berman’s A tale of two Utopias (1996), Maurice Isserman and MichaelKazin’s America divided (2000) and Richard Avedon’s big picture book The sixties (1999).In Europe, Arthur Marwick (1998), Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman (1987), HeinzBude (1995), and Luisa Passerini (1996) have all weighed in with their own tomes.Sixties as memoir and nostalgia is not an exclusively Euro-American preoccupationeither. There are already a clutch of new books published in Mexico on 1968 promptingthe local critic Hector Aguilar Camin to proclaim: ‘I’m sick of the inventions of ‘68’(Newsweek, 28 September 1998: 34).

What characterizes this prodigious output is a curious combination of defeat anddeviancy. On the one side (the left) stands a failed political project and on the other (theright) stand the excess, decay and depravity of a successful cultural revolution. The sixtieshold a special place for the neoconservatives not only because it drove them to the right(indeed the sixties launched the New Right) but also because it marked the loss of civilityand the ‘gradual slouch toward Gomorrah’ as Judge Robert Bork described the period(cited in Kimball, 2000: 14). It was a ‘delirium’ of the postwar generation, a pathologyof youth and immaturity:

Out of this ragtag and bobtail culture, sanctioned by their friendly neighborhood psychiatrist, blessed by thestage army of defrocked priests, defended by jurists weary of the law, and cheered on by aging intellectuals andpoets longing for lost puberty, they went on to the ultimate four letter obscenity: the bomb (home made) (Lasky,1988: 3).

Across the Atlantic, Roger Scruton (1998: 49) also deploys the language of infantilismand childishness too: the sixties were a sort of arrested development, ‘a refusal to passover into adulthood’ in which ‘jerks and junkies . . . enjoyed their fifteen minutes offame’. Among former New Left activists like David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh andPeter Collier who fled the movement the animus is palpable (Farber, 1988). Collier talksof ‘an oedipal revolt on a grand scale; a no-fault acting out . . . we were politicalKatzenjammer kids whose mischief turned homicidal somewhere along the way’ (citedin Staples, 2000: 10). In some Parisian intellectual circles there is a neo-Toquevillianreading of the sixties echoed by David Brooks in Bobos in paradise in his claim that ‘thecountercultural sixties and the achieving 80s [have combined] into one social ethos’(2000: 34). The one realm, he says, where the language of sixties radicalism remains isbusiness: Bohemia is the culture of the ruling class (‘bobos’) reconciling the bourgeoislove of order with the Bohemian love of emancipation.

Gertude Himmelfarb’s One nation, two cultures (1999) and Roger Kimball’s The longmarch (2000) are simply the latest salvos in this sixties boomlet. Roger Kimball’s angryand bitter ideological rant traces a successful cultural revolution back to the excessesand moral depravity of the Beats. ‘To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago,’says Kimball (2000: 274), ‘we live in that moral and cultural universe shaped by theSixties.’ Like Communism, the 1960s was, he says, ‘born wrong’. In Himmelfarb’saccount the hegemonic counterculture became dominant by ‘defining deviancy up’,that is to say, liberating people from the stabilizing, moralizing and socializing‘bourgeois values’: ‘[T]he cultural revolution denigrated those virtues – work, thrift,temperance, self-discipline – that are conducive to economic improvement and social



mobility; . . . and the Great Society . . . drew [minorities and the poor], into a closedsociety of chronic dependency’ (1999: 19). This double-movement eviscerated theculture of the 1950s – Himmelfarb’s model of moral and ethical rectitude for everythingfrom sex to religion to absolute standards of truth – and relegated it to a ‘dissident’inferiority. Quite why on earth anyone would seek to restore the culture and sentimentsof 1950s Kansas or Florida is entirely bewildering. But I digress.

But even those who identify in some way with left, while recognizing that the 1960sincubated something healthy and politically worthy (feminism, sexual tolerance, envi-ronmentalism, civil rights), are also quite disillusioned and sad. Marshall Berman (1974:36), in his stunning Faustian account of the sixties, sees the street activism as a ‘mirrorimage of the hotshot stock operators’ on Wall Street: high risk, extravagant and built onflimsy foundations. Michael Kazin in The populist persuasion (he was a ‘68er himself)says the 1960s radicals tore off the ideological blinders worn by past friends of thepeople and ‘donned some thick ones of their own’, that the movement ‘discredited theold order without laying the political foundation of a new one’ (1995: 218). Issermanand Kazin’s final verdict resonates with many of the former denizens of the New Left:the 68ers were ‘flawed but earnest idealists’ (2000: 12). Even Regis Debray (1978), therevolutionary theorist of the Left Bank, the architect of foco guerilla theory and liberatedzones, and someone who might be expected to cast a nostalgic glance toward thesoixante-huitards, now claims that 1968 stabilized class relations; it was, to use hislanguage, a ‘giant servo-mechanism’ that accomplished ‘the opposite of what [it]intended’ (1978: 51). Deluded Maoism produced, in short, the free market.

And for those liberals like Arthur Marwick who can see something good in just aboutanything, the solution is to forget politics, or at least organized politics, altogether andsee the sixties like Himmelfarb and Kimball as a cultural revolution but as a redemptiveone, echoing Philip Larkin’s great poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’:

Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty three(Which was rather late for me) –Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles first LP

But here too the sixties came up short. Emancipatory rhetoric succumbed to a ‘preoc-cupation with every nuance of the private psyche’, a culture and politics ofconsumption, most especially of an encounter culture of ‘consumption of narcissisticcontemplation, personal selfhood and the stroking of the victim role’ (Burner, 1995:222–23). The contraflow is no more than a trickle. There are those renegades like BillReading, author of The university in ruins (1997), who emphasize (rightly) the positiverepercussions of the sixties for the university (see Antipode, 2000); there is theoccasional lost soul like Chalmers Johnson, former cold warrior and Vietnamwarmonger who, in his new book Blowback (2000), has apparently discovered thedownside of American imperial power and now wishes in fact that he had stood withthe anti-war protest movement during the sixties. But in general the historical canvas isblack and foreboding, and the assessment bleak and pessimistic.

A diagnosis of failure is, of course, perfectly understandable because 1968 proved tobe a sort of climacteric. Within a few years the bubble of revolutionary rhetoric hadburst. All the signs were reversed, says Perry Anderson in The origins of postmodernity,

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166 1968 and all that . . .

‘all the political dreams of the sixties were snuffed out’ (1998: 91). The May revolt wasabsorbed without trace as political identities splintered, the Czech spring and socialistreformism were smashed, the luster of the guerilla movements tarnished, and theflashes of labor unrest in Europe dimmed by the late 1970s. Soon enough the vitality ofthe students’ movements had either soured or drifted into violence and terror signaledby the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction, Front Line and the Red Brigades. It is to beexpected that the guerillas fared no better (Daniels, 1989) despite the continued roar ofrevolutionary overthrowal during the 1970s in Nicaragua, Iran and elsewhere. CheGuevara, the iconic sixties revolutionary, has been the subject of three massive and, forthe most part, unflattering studies (Anderson, 1997; Castañeda, 1997; Taibo, 1997), andnow appears as a fanatic, consumed by overwhelming hatreds, whose words, saysAlma Guillermoprieto, ‘are foolish and empty now’ (1997: 104). Even Jorge Castañeda(1993) in Utopia unarmed, who has a sympathetic ear for the sixties rhetoric, drawsattention to the abject failure of the left in Latin America in the wake of the 1960s, astunning catalogue of defeat in which Communist ideas were ‘congenitally alien’ (1993:25) to the region, in which liberation movements lacked internal democracy, and oppo-sitional politics were crippled by clandestiny.

Whether the voices emanate from London or Paris or New York or Mexico City, thedeath narrative reigns supreme. A final nail in the historical coffin of the sixties ishammered home by Sunil Khilani (1993) who sees the events of 1968 in France as agesture of pure ‘nothingness’, ‘made by and for intellectuals’, concluding, in exuberanthyperbole, that ‘it would not be unjust to see 1968 as an interpretation in search of anevent’ (1993: 122). The year 1968 was, in sum, nothing at all. As befits someone who isconcerned to show how the revolution was exorcised by poststructuralism, 1968 was afree-floating signifier in search of content. It was a sort of grand fiesta of bullshit. It isthis nihilistic and trivial fate that I seek to contest.

So I want, then, to examine the events of 1968 from a particular vantage point whichis both geographical and historical: what was its geography, and what is its historicallegacy? In exploring these questions I want to pick up on the notion that 1968 was aharbinger, a great ‘rehearsal’: ‘The explosions of 1968 and their aftermath can beinterpreted as symptom of the fact that the system is approaching its historicalasymptote. The year 1968, with its successes and failures, was thus a prelude, better arehearsal, of things to come’ (Arrighi et al., 1989: 110–11, see also Singer, 1970). The year1968 almost looks as though it had been designed, noted Eric Hobsbawm in his tenthanniversary remarks, ‘to serve as some sort of signpost‘ (1978: 130, emphasis added). If1968 was indeed a rehearsal or a signpost of things to come, what exactly was it arehearsal for, what was it signaling? Was the student unrest anything more than themere reflection of a postwar generation coming of age? To what extent did it preparethe ground for the anti-state neoliberalism of the 1980s, or postmodern political disen-gagement (Callinicos, 1989)? Did this rebelliousness achieve anything more, as DonaldSassoon suggests in his magisterial history of socialism, than the weakening of thetraditional left without leading to any alternative (1996: 406)? Or do we conclude, withPaul Berman (1996: 19), that the ‘insurrection in middle class customs’ was a prelude forliberal democracy’s finest hour?

Suddenly it was obvious that the authentic political revolution of our era was now, not then . . . The radicalexhilarations of circa 1968; the awkward modulation from revolutionary leftism to liberal democracy on the partof rebellious-minded people around the world; the outbreak of a new and different revolutionary exhilaration



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in 1989; finally the unresolvable debate about world history and the idea of progress; these have been the fourmain stations in the political journey of the generation that came of age in the student rebellions of [1968].

Berman’s account is, I think, at once too easily fooled by the powers of hindsight, andtoo inattentive to the labyrinthine reverberations, and the long-term accommodationsand disruptions of revolutionary change (Wallerstein, 1990). What such accountsstudiously ignore is a sense of what was built, what German New leftist Rudi Dutschke,echoing Gramsci, called ‘the long march through the institutions’ (cited in Gitlin, 1987:422). The year 1968 bequeathed a ‘working against the established institutions whileworking within them’ (Marcuse, 1972: 55), a project to build counterinstitutions andliberated zones as Dutschke put it in his electrifying address to the InternationalCongress on Vietnam in West Berlin in 1968, and it is to the politics (and not to culturenarrowly construed) of this long march that one must necessarily turn to grasp thecomplex meanings of the political repertory that was to follow ‘the great rehearsal’.

How might the geography of 1968 be written? I want to approach the question interms of three geographical ‘moments’, and then turn to legacies that each generated.

III Moment 1: global insurrection, transnational politics

The insurrections of 1968 proved to be a global phenomenon; there was hardly anyregion of the world, noted Hobsbawm, ‘ which was not marked by the spectacular anddramatic events of 1968’ (1978: 131). According to a survey in Le Monde over 70countries had major student actions during that year (Figure 1). Between October 1967and July 1968 there were over 2000 incidents worldwide of student protest alone(Anderson, 1980; Katsiaficas, 1987); if one were to add the related worker actions andother nonstudent demonstrations each country in the world would, on average, havehad over 25 ‘incidents’ over the nine-month period. But 1968 was global in anotherregard, namely, the committed internationalism of the movements which were indis-putably multicultural in orientation and transnational in aspiration. The Parisiancommunards were internationalist through and through. Parisian enragé Daniel Cohn-Bendit was after all a German Jew; the Situationists certainly neither knew norencouraged any national identitification; and whatever one may say of the New Left itwas never parochial in outlook. Cross-border networks, transnational alliances and theglobal traffic in ideas – activists were often reading the same foundational texts byFranz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong – drew London,Mexico, Prague, Paris and Delhi into a revolutionary maelstrom. The year 1968provides a vivid illustration of what Keck and Sikkink (1998) call ‘activism beyondborders’. The American women’s movement inspired European counterparts; festivalsand protest brought students together across borders; the Polish Commandos wereafforded a heroic status by many among the New Left. It is revealing that none otherthan Vaclav Havel was at Columbia in the heady days of the 1968 occupation! Cross-border traffic in ideas – 1968 was without precedent as regards its participants readingand writing books (Hobsbawm, 1977) – was matched by a footloose revolutionaryvanguard, in tandem generating something like a radical diaspora unprecedented inthe twentieth century.

The Vietnam war functioned as a tremendous galvanizing force in the 1960s, a sort ofglobal catalyst, and this provides 1968 with its third source of global inflection. Göran



168 1968 and all that . . .

Figure 1 Major student disruptions, 1968–69Source: Adapted from Kidron and Segal, 1981



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170 1968 and all that . . .

Therborn, writing in the New Left Review, noted that ‘the dialectic of the war hastransferred the ideology of the guerillas into the culture of the metropolis’ (1968: 4). Hemight well have pointed to how opposition to the war stimulated student movementsin, for example, Belgium, Thailand and Sweden, and they in turn with the assistance ofthe mass media (‘the whole world is watching’), helped make the events resolutelyglobal. And lest we forget, the affairs of 1968 unfolded at a crucial juncture in the coldwar which had the effect of linking national and world affairs in radically new ways.As a result of the strategic reverberations within the global geopolitical system,‘fundamental shifts on the local, national or global level resonated with and grew outof each other’ (Fink et al., 1998: 2).

The centrality of colonial wars in two of the most important crucibles of sixtiesradicalism, France and the USA, raises a fourth sense of sixties globalism, what Jameson(1988: 180) calls ‘politicocultural models’ and the resistance to ‘wars aimed precisely atstemming the new revolutionary forces in the Third World’. Third worldism, for betteror worse, put on offer the ‘heroic guerrilla’ (the year of the heroic guerilla as FidelCastro dubbed it in his 1968 New Year speech), a mobile and transnational figure if everthere was one. For revolutionary theorist Regis Debray (1967), the guerilla foco(operation) was so mobile as to be beyond geography narrowly construed, occupyingthe space between town and country, operating as it were in the ‘wilderness’ of theSierra Mestra. Cuba, China, Vietnam and the postcolonial African states provided themodel of radical practice for the New Left and in this way 1968 helped shatter theEurocentric idea that ‘the advanced proletariat of the West [brings] socialism as a “gift”to the “backward” masses of the periphery’ (Amin, 1974: 603). The third world wasformative for not only the sixties New Left but also for those of the October traditionand, as Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 437) again reminds us, to the entire radical communitywho needed something more than social security and rising real wages as the pillars ofthe New Jerusalem. So often it was to the peripheral other – Ho, Mao, Fidel – that the1968ers turned for their reference points, their heroes and their hopes.1 Third worldismcorroborated not only a sense of revolutionary internationalism, but also confirmed thatthere were models of revolution and liberation outside, and beyond, both theCommunist and Social Democratic traditions.

Finally, the 1960s were inextricably part of a long boom that simultaneouslytransformed and coupled the world in fundamentally new ways. The sixties, saysJameson (1988: 186), is the period when capital ‘is in full dynamic and innovativeexpansion’. When Eric Hobsbawm in The age of extremes characterizes the period as ‘themost rapid and dramatic revolution in human affairs to which history has record’ (1994:286), he is of course referring to the extension of capitalist industrialization to largeportions of the globe. New clusters of capitalism merged in Latin America, northeastAsia and elsewhere; indeed the defining attributes of the original industrialization innorthwest Europe – proletarianization, urbanization, commodification – now became ‘aglobal experience’ (Callinicos, 1999: 258). A common ancestry in industrial modernityinstantiated the ‘common cause’ (the language is deployed by Fink et al., 1998: 3), fromwhich the well-spring of oppositional energies issued forth. Opposition to racial,patriarchal and economic exploitation, deepening the concept of freedom, enlarging thebase of radicalism and revolution, the extension of the democratic process, and anemphasis on direct action; these were the defining expressions of a global New Left(Katsiaficas,1987: 23–27). Freedom, justice and self-determination – a complete disaffec-



tion with ‘the system’, with a program of human relations, as Tourraine (1970) observed– resonated deeply between East and West, North and South.

IV Moment 2: the geopolitics of anti-systemic movements

If 1968 must be grasped in global terms it is equally clear that the uneven developmentof the world system also conditioned the composition and character of its diversemovements. I want to start with the now dated notion of three worlds – the first worldof advanced capitalisms, the second world of actually existing socialisms, and the thirdworld of what in the 1960s was dubbed ‘underdevelopment’ – and to suggest that thereare three corresponding geopolitical moments to 1968 (Figure 1). Arrighi et al. (1989) seethese moments as global oppositional, what they call ‘anti-systemic’ movements whichstand as counterpoints to a broadly construed Old Left (symbolized by the European,Russian and Mexican revolutions of 1848, 1917 and 1906). What emerged in the 1960s,in their view, might be read as a sublation of 1917, in the same way that 1848 was arevolution against the counter-revolution of 1815 (itself a sublation of 1789). In theirhistorical schema, the global New Left accused the Old Left of bureaucratic sins: ofweakness, of corruption, connivance, neglect and arrogance (1989: 102).

These anti-systemic movements, while sharing a fear of state authoritarianism, ofbureaucratic structures and of establishment powers, assumed a particular, colordrawing upon the geopolitical palate of three distinctive political economies: socialdemocratic consumer capitalism, party Communism, and postcolonial nationalism.2This trio of geopolitical articulations of 1968, each containing a complex history ofoppositional politics long predating the explosive events of the late sixties, might beglossed as follows. The first is an ‘Eastern’ moment represented by the Prague Spring.These movements are anti-party or anti-bureaucratic standing against the politicalclosure, party corruption and hyper-statism of the Communist system. This is in fact thehistory of all socialist states in the period, but the efforts to ‘de-Stalinize’ can be tracedclearly to the 1950s and 1960s experiments in self-management and decentralization inYugoslavia, to the Great Cultural Revolution in China and to socialism with a humanface in Czechoslovakia. Beginning with the Novotny mini-liberalization of 1962, theCzech movement envisaged a socialism that was democratic, pluralist, stable andefficient, a model whose significance stretched well beyond its borders. The ChineseCultural Revolution, unleashed in 1965 and reaching its mad zenith in 1968, is lessobviously an anti-systemic struggle. We now know it was in large measure a manufac-tured mobilization from above that ultimately degenerated into chaos, terror andfurther party consolidation. But Wang (1999) has shown, nevertheless, that at itsinception Lin Biao and Mao’s efforts to overcome the sclerosis of state socialism wereradically anti-bureaucratic. So-called New Trends movements bloomed albeit brieflyduring the period 1966–68, even if their aspirations were ultimately subverted andcrushed. That a search for new ways in the socialist bloc should lead to the Sovietinvasion of Prague on the one side, and to the consolidation of the party state and theTiananmen massacres on the other, should not, however, belittle the anti-bureaucratic,anti-systemic and popular democratic impulses of those who sought to reform fromwithin.

The second movement is a ‘western’ moment, represented by the New Left and the

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new anti-authoritarian or new social movements represented by Berkeley, Tokyo, Berlinand Paris. New Left traces are evident in the 1950s and especially in the debates overthe Hungarian invasion and ‘de-Stalinization’. By the 1960s, however, these earlierefforts to rethink the Communist project and the rigidities of the Octoberist traditionhad met up with an altogether different constituency disaffected with the mass Utopiasof any ilk (Buck-Morss, 2000). Anti-war impulses figured centrally also, but so didindividual liberation, sexual tolerance, civil rights, an expanded sense of freedom,opposition to cultural imperialism and ‘consumerism’ and a deep sensitivity tononclass forms of exploitation. Here too national diversity was marked; the Trotskyist,Maoist and anarcho-syndicalist groupuscules in Europe, with their critique of orthodoxCommunist Party practice and praise of auto-gestion, had no direct parallel in the USA,Brazil or Japan. A new politics of recognition (Fraser, 1995) provided a central plankfrom which these anti-authoritarian movements were pitted against the professionalpolitics of a stale social democratic consensus and of a crass consumer culture. Liketheir east European counterparts, they shared a hostility to ideological dogmatism (onboth right and left), to cultural uniformity and to bureaucratic authority.

And the third is a ‘Southern’ moment, or perhaps more properly Fanonite postcolonialmovements. Here the object of critique is the nationalism and institutionalized elitepolitics (the corrupt national bourgeoisie as Franz Fanon, would see it) of the firstgeneration of independent third-world states. The origins of such opposition alsopredate the sixties and can be traced to the postwar insurgents and guerillas in LatinAmerica and, indeed, to some of the anti-colonial movements in Africa, and Asia. Bythe 1960s the nationalist wardrobe looked worn and threadbare. A broad swath of LatinAmerican and African regimes had descended rapidly into military dictatorship, andthe first generation of political elites – whether Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egyptor Nkrumah in Ghana – were quick to abandon any serious commitment to populardemocracy. From this conjuncture emerged a veritable pot pourri of guerilla impulses –there were at least 30 major guerilla wars during the 1950s and 1960s! – student-leddemocratic movements, worker and union struggles, and a nascent ‘culturalism’ seenin the rise of the Muslim brotherhoods and aggressive ethnic communalism for whomcorrupt state apparatuses, and a questionable record of nation-building, provided thefuel for their political aspirations. Whatever their obvious ideological and tacticaldifferences, Maoist militants in Peru, middle-class students in Mexico City, Naxaliteorganizers in India and Muslim reformists in Cairo all shared a radical disaffection fromthe postcolonial state and the decrepit political cronyism of peripheral capitalism.

V Moment 3: local articulations

Sixty-eight was unequivocally global and regional yet it was necessarily, andirreducibly, local too. A number of commentators have noted national differences butthe fact remains that in an array of locations – from Prague to Peking, from Cairo toCape Town, from Berkeley to Berlin – each movement possessed a distinctive localidentity within the circumference of a global wave of New Left protest. Articulation, aterm I have taken from Stuart Hall (1996) which refers to the simultaneous rendering ofan identity (youth, student, hippie) and linking that identity to a political project(Maoism, self-management, participatory democracy), lends itself well to the geo-



graphical interpolation of multiple 1968s. Precisely how geography and articulationproduced particular identifications has been almost wholly ignored by geographers, alapse that is made all the more curious by the obvious geographical inspiration of keyactors (‘psycho-geography’ for the Situationists, the wilderness for foco guerillas) andpractices (the Parisian barricades or Chinese long march). This is not the place toattempt to catalogue how particular 1968s were interpolated in particular settings – anincomprehensibly massive task in any case. But I can at least sketch something of thevariety and the geographical specificity of such local articulations (see Dirlik, 1998)while retaining a sensitivity to the three geographies – the three moments – describedpreviously.

1 Japan

The 1968 student actions grew from shimin (citizen) movements of the 1960s (Kurihara,1998; Sasaki-Uemura, 1998). So-called Anpo movements were precipitates of therenewal of the USA–Japan Security Treaty which granted to the USA the right tointervene in the event of domestic unrest. A combination of cold-war politics and thedubious legitimacy of US hegemony in the region produced a violent internal strugglebetween ruling conservative and opposition parties which in turn stimulated a wholeraft of new social movements. Anpo simultaneously met up with four other sixtiesactions: the anti-Vietnam war movement (Beheiren), environmentalism (dating back tothe Minamata poisoning), farmers’ struggles (most notably in relation to the Naritaairport) and the communist and Trotskyist student movements which grew up aroundthe famous Uno Kozo school of Japanese Marxism.

2 India

The year 1968 was ushered in by a riot in Connaught Place in Delhi, part of a growingstudent mobilization during the 1960s whose highwater marks were 1966 and 1970.Much of this activity was explicitly seen as an attack on ‘comprador capitalists’ and ona deeply institutionalized and bureaucratic Congress Party pursuing its staidNehruvian socialist path. If Mao and cultural questions figured prominently in thesemovements, they were nonetheless diverse enough to include anti-English instructionin Rajasthan, and anti-Hindi attacks by Tamil students in Mysore. While the Indianmovements were national in scope they were especially active in Bengal around anincreasingly fragmented Communist movement. Yet in the Indian case it was peasantinsurgents that were to prove decisive, giving rise to the Naxalite guerilla movement(aided by Maoist militants from Calcutta) which drew inspiration from the nineteenth-century Indian jacqueries, from the 1940s rural insurgencies and from the politicalsuccesses of Marxist parties in Kerala during the 1960s (Nossiter, 1982; Samanta, 1984).

3 Egypt

February 1968 saw major student demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria after a longperiod of student quiescence. Student militancy was detonated by Middle East

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geopolitics and more precisely the devastating Egyptian defeat by Israeli forces in 1967.Furthermore, there was deep disaffection with Nasserite nationalism – what thestudents called the ‘intelligence’ and ‘military state’ – precipitated by, among otherthings, the failed land reform, endemic corruption and by economic recession. Later inthe year the movement was reactivated by the attempt to democratize the universitybut the tensions were left unresolved, only to re-emerge later in the 1970s (Dirlik, 1998).

4 Ethiopia

A March 1968 fashion show at University College Addis Ababa triggered an outburst ofviolence against female students and the first serious discussions of western culturalimperialism. A student movement that had hitherto addressed questions of academicfreedom now turned its attentions to the cultural dimensions of colonialism. By 1968‘Africanity’ had become the dominant idiom in which Marxist ideas (notably throughthe Crocodile Club founded in 1964) confronted the feudal relics of Emperor HaileSelassie’s regime. China and Cuba proved to be the key reference points whereas theSoviet model was studiously ignored. Transnational organizational links to Ethiopianstudents’ organizations in Europe and North America proved to be a distinctive featureof the Ethiopian protests.

5 Britain

The British New Left, which had its origins in the 1950s in the fallout from theHungarian invasion and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, encompassed threemajor political trends: dissident communism based on nineteenth-century nativeradical traditions, independent socialism, and theoretical Marxism of a continentalEuropean persuasion (Chun, 1996; Kenney, 1994; Elliot, 1998). Each contributed todifferent strands within the New Left (socialist humanism, Marxist culturalism,workers’ control), and intersected with a number of ideas of peculiar British inflectionand origin (for example, R.D. Laing’s psychoanalysis and Hegelian existentialism). TheVietnam war engaged a youthful anti-imperialist movement but the student movementwas shallow and in many respects unimportant. The ‘May Day manifesto’ of 1968(Williams, 1968), drafted by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and others associatedwith the New Left Review, has a very different tenor from comparable manifestos writtenin Paris (The ‘Amnesty of blinded eyes’) or the USA (the ‘Port Huron statement’).

6 China

In large part outside the global traffic of 1968, China experienced a disastrously violentand internally generated insurgency. Ironically, the Cultural Revolution acquired apolitical caché, and was ‘exported’ to Europe, North America, Africa, south Asia andelsewhere. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was a fabricatedrevolution from above, designed to cleanse opposition from within the party thatultimately got out of hand. What began as an invocation of ‘the oriental commune’ andself-reliance devolved into factionalism and internecine warfare between the Red



Guards, students, workers and party members across the country. In the name of egal-itarianism and mass mobilization from below, a staggering 17 million Red Guard youth– the children of Mao – went ‘down to the countryside’ between 1967 and 1978.

One could continue almost indefinitely but that is not the point. There were many1968s. Yet there is nothing in their site-specificity which might give reason to doubtwhat Fink et al. (1998: 1–2, emphasis added) call ‘1968 as a coherent historicalphenomenon . . . which explain[s] the simultaneity of the crises that erupted throughoutthe world’.

VI The Long March and the politics of the possible

Let’s categorically refuse the ideology of PROFIT and PROGRESS or other pseudo-forces of the same type.Progress will be what we want it to be. Let’s refuse the trap of luxury and necessity – the stereotyped needsimposed separately upon all, to make each . . . in the name of the ‘natural laws’ of the economy . . . (‘We are onthe way’, L’Amnistie des yeaux creves, Paris, May 1968).

A subject matter, moreover, whose features ran so far beyond the conceptual power of ordinary politics that itrequired a wild leap of the imagination to see that it was precisely politics that was being put in question(Oglesby, 1969: 6).

To return, then, to the question of rehearsal, how might 1968 be understood as a globalprelude amidst its local diversity? I want to take seriously Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertionthat 1968 demanded ‘the enlargement of the field of the possible’ (cited in Feenberg,1998: 25). It unleashed a polemical and practical struggle – a wild leap of imaginationas Oglesby put it – around the very constitution of the political. The purpose of thesixties, says French historian of 1968, Herve Hamon, was ‘to change life in the socialarena, to distrust belonging to the State including the deadly closures that inevitablyissue from professional politics’ (1998: 11). The year 1968 addressed issues studiouslyignored by the dominant political tradition – the limits of reason, the meanings ofpersonal emancipation, and the unconscious origins of the desire of domination, par-ticipatory democracy and self-management. It unleashed, said Jürgen Habermas, ‘aprocess of fundamental liberalization’ (cited in Leggewie, 1998: 292).

Insofar as the public sphere was compelled to take account of private lives – toenlarge the space of the political – the 1960s were in some senses deeply individualistand libertarian (‘why don’t we do it in the road’), and it is to be expected that thepopulist elements within these discourses were articulated in quite disparate forms ofpolitical projection. Rebecca Klatch’s new book A generation divided (1999) showsprecisely that these libertarian currents produced in the USA the birth of a New Left anda New Right – with similar sorts of trajectories. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were both born in 1960, each harbored ahostility to the Vietnam war and to the state, and both disintegrated in similar ways in1969. A desire to ‘control ones own life’ contained a radical individualism susceptible,when circumstances changed, to a neoconservative subversion by the likes of MrsThatcher or Mr Reagan. Robin Blackburn lamented in his reflections on Britain: ‘insteadof controlling your own place of work it became a questioning of owning your ownhouse’ (cited in Fraser, 1988: 364).

And yet in their inclusiveness, the 1968 movements were a cri de coeur against the

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world system in which Old Left and Old Right had both failed. They provided anincubus for new sorts of activism across the political spectrum in which suspicion ofauthority, individual freedom, decentralization and anti-statism were all constitutive ofdoing politics differently. This was as true for ornery students in North America, whosuffused their anti-capitalism with a critique of a suffocating parliamentary politics, asit was for their eastern European comrades who wished to reform socialism and pushthe frontiers of human and political rights. Lin Chun’s (1996) synopsis of the BritishNew Left in the 1960s rightly noted a fresh surge of emancipatory and democraticUtopianism.

If the sixties inspired, to use Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s turn of phrase, ‘a radicaldemocratic tradition’ (cited in Fraser, 1988: 361), it immediately needs to be said thatthere was no single form of political practice corresponding to such a tradition. Whatdistinguished the movements were their multiple and hybrid forms – a striking illus-tration of what Hardt and Negri call the multitude against empire (2000: 394). Tosimplify matters vastly I propose to emphasize three important anti-capitalistexpressions within this radical democratic opening: the Marxist (seen, for example, inthe Maoist and Trotskyist Parisian groupuscules, some of the British New Left organiza-tions and postcolonial guerilla movements); the social democratic (for example, Charter77, many of the socialist dissidents, the reformist student movements such as SDS andsome democracy-orientated third-world anti-nationalist movements); and the anarchist(the Situationists, the Diggers, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers). Specific politicalquestions – feminism, the environment, race, disarmament – cut across these broadmovements making for enormously complex political hybrids, crossovers and inter-connections. Furthermore they differed, often dramatically, in their style of politics – theanti-disciplinary politics (no leadership, no platform, no organizations) of say theDiggers versus the vanguardism of some of the extreme left groupuscules – and in theirorganizational forms and tactics. Conflicts between them, needless to say, could beferocious (memorably between the Diggers and the mainstream of SDS), and oftendegenerated into excessive fragmentation and dispersal during the seventies. Yet theyall took seriously the idea of a sense of democratic incompletion, a call for a popularradicalism so to say. Its emancipatory impulses were expressed through forms of directaction, through ‘anti-disciplinary politics’ (Stephens, 1998), through new socialmovements and in the creation of new community organizations and civic institutions.

Guy Debord, who had little sympathy either for third worldism or many of the NewLeft homilies, famously noted that ‘the problem is not that people live more or lesspoorly; but that they live in a way that is always beyond their control’ (cited Jappe,1999: 158). And it seems to me that in seeking to extend control, the movements tookup, sometimes in defeat and sometimes by default, Dutschke’s metaphorical call tomarch through the institutions: to question cultural hegemony, to repeal the repressiveand authoritarian practices of dominant institutions, and to render political thosedomains that were conventionally seen to be beyond politics. The point, said theSituationists, was ‘to live instead of devising a lingering death’ (Situationists, 1970: 90).And it is to the new political practices, to the new organizations created (as much as oldinstitutions they attempted to reform), and to the enlarged role of civil society that thesixties legacy can be made to speak. Hilary Wainwright puts all this nicely intoperspective: ‘1968 led us to see that power comes through building organizations at thebase rather than restricting our political paths to the established institutions . . . These



sorts of transformations need new forms of political power’ (cited in Fraser, 1988: 364). We now take this complex mix of civic, popular-participatory and extra-parliamen-

tary politics for granted but perhaps we should not. The sixties were central to this wayof doing politics and as such they did not so much stop in defeat in 1968 as ‘disappear’underground, working on and through institutions, networks and new organization,building in their polyp-like activity a veritable reef of oppositional practice. WiniBrienes (1982), for example, has charted the affinities between the sixties activists andall manner of 1970s and 1980s community organizing in the USA, but the genealogyholds for Latin America where military rule forced militants and former revolutionar-ies into squatter movements, indigenous peoples’ struggles, and rural activism(Castañeda, 1993), as much as for the western European autonomen movements thatsprung up in the 1970s (and indeed which still flourish) in Italy, Germany and Belgium(Katsiaficas, 1997). Neither should we be surprised that the road from personalliberation to community organizing and direct action, the long march from self-deter-mination to associative and deliberative democracy (Cohen and Rogers, 1995; Hirst,1997), took the social and cultural sphere as politics. From his perch at Nanterre, AlainTourraine saw clearly that the consensus around capitalist growth and Keynesianwelfarism had witnessed ‘the progressive disappearance of the separation betweenstate and civil society’ (cited in Hobsbawm, 1977: 243).

The vast expansion of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) – one expression ofvoluntary self-government if not participatory democracy – is indisputably one part ofthe sixties extra-parliamentary legacy. The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil SocietyStudies estimates for a sample of only 22 countries that NGOs generated $1.1 trillion inrevenue, employed 19 million workers and recruited 10 million volunteers (Ryan, 1999).In contrast to Putnam’s (2000) claim that social capital has collapsed over the last threedecades, a deepening of associational and civic life is one of the hallmarks of the post-1968 generation. In 1960 each country had, on average, citizens participating in 122NGOs; by 1990 the number had lept to over 500. Significantly, two-thirds of the NGOsin western Europe have been founded since 1970. There are now in excess of 2 millionNGOs in the USA, three-quarters of which have been established since 1968. In easternEurope, 100 000 nonprofits appeared between 1989 and 1995; Kenya authorizes almost250 new NGOs each year. Among international NGOs the growth and proliferation areno less explosive. In 1909 there were 176; currently there are over 29 000, virtually 90%of which have been established since the 1960s (The Economist, 22 January 2000: 25–26).For someone like Melucci the emergence of such transnationally networked organiza-tions, a sort of global civil society, marks a rupture, a shift from the new socialmovements of the 1970s to ‘an overarching system of closely interdependent transna-tional relations’ (1996: 224) and new forms of governance and ‘partial government’. Asif to drive home the point, the Rand Arroyo Center, in a recent study sponsored by theUS Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, published a report entitled The Zapatista socialnetwar in Mexico, documenting the grave dangers of an ‘electronic horizontal network’of social mobilization which ‘confound fundamental beliefs’ in virtue of their ‘episte-mological’ approach to politics (cited in Morris-Suzuki, 2000: 63)!

It is wildly optimistic to see the vast and differentiated universe of NGOs as unam-biguously anti-capitalist, as unalloyed exemplars of radical and popular movements assuch (Morris-Suzuki, 2000). Some of the emancipatory zeal has been harnessed by theNGO community but the very existence of dubious hybrid entities such as BONGOs

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178 1968 and all that . . .

(business-organized NGOs) or GRINGOs (government-run NGOs), for instance,exemplifies the extent to which the porous boundary between state and civil society cansubstitute market-orientated individualism for the radical autonomy of communityempowerment. The fact that the World Bank funds NGOs does not alter the fact, nev-ertheless, that contemporary debates over associationalism, publicizing civil society,pluralizing of the state and voluntary self-governing can be read as the legitimate heirto the 68ers’ ideological commitment to a participatory democracy and to an ‘enlargedfield of the possible’ (see Arato and Cohen, 1992; Hirst, 1997; Habermas, 1999).

VII Three roads from Paris

In the present situation . . . the system’s integrative models of mass consumption and the search for socialadvancement . . . represent in reality the modern form of oppression, which is no longer materializedexclusively in the state. The instrument of capitalist power thus no longer resides so much in the latter as in thesubmission . . . to models of consumer society and to all the differentiated forms of authority that ensure itsfunctioning (Parisian leaflet, 1968).

If 1968 did indeed produce a long march through the institutions in which communityorganizations and voluntary self-government did redefine what was political, then thequestion of rehearsal can be broached from a different angle. Not from the vantage ofthe forward march of neoliberal hegemony or cultural revolution, but rather from thehigh-ground of democracy itself. In this way we might say 1968 was a rehearsal forthree events each of which, despite the geographical notation implied by my notation,must be understood to stand in for particular forms of political practice within a radicaldemocratic tradition. Each harkens back to a particular ‘road from Paris’: Marxist, socialdemocratic and anarchist.

1 1994 Chiapas

Subcommandante Marcos himself was not a sixties man (he was 11 years old in 1968)but this is not the connection I wish to suggest. Rather I want to identify a number ofother pathways from 1968. First of all, Chiapas was unthinkable outside of thedemocratic processes unfurled by the slaughter of Mexican students in TlatelocoSquare. In his massive biography of Mexico, Enrique Krauze’s notes that 1968 was ‘boththe high point of authoritarian power and the beginning of its collapse’ (1999: 736).Secondly, the genesis of the Chiapas rebellion must be traced to the maelstrom of the1960s, throwing together the church, Indian movements and left activism. The long fuseof the Zapatista Front was ignited by Bishop Ruiz and the Catechist ‘Apostles’movement (liberated by the Medellin episcopal assembly of 1968), by Maoist insurgentsin Monterrey and Chihuahua (established in the late 1960s) who helped form SLOP(with Ruiz) and Union de Uniones/Asociacion Rural de Interes Colectivo (ARIC), andof course by the burgeoning of Indian movements brought together in the 1974 Indianconference. The winding trail from the Armed Forces of National Liberation to theZapatista Army of National Liberation can, and must, be traced to the late sixties evenif, as Krause (1999a; 1999b) rightly shows, it was the period between 1983 and 1989when the Diocese, the Zapatistas (EZLN), SLOP and ARIC worked together that provedto be the revolutionary crucible in which the events of 1994 matured and ultimately



combusted. And not least, Chiapas is surely unthinkable outside the world market thatNAFTA anointed on 1 January 1994 which has its own sixties reference. The year 1968was in this sense a sort of apogee, marking the end of the golden age of capitalistgrowth, and the slide into crisis and recession of the 1970s. The dark times of capitalistcrisis had returned. The devaluation of the pound in 1967 and the subsequent run onthe dollar revealed the limits of President Johnson’s ‘guns and butter policy’ andshattered growth liberalism’s ascendancy. Overaccumulation, the growing deficitsassociated with the Vietnam war and the abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971 ledthe USA to destroy postwar international arrangements, laying the groundwork for therise of what is now called the IMF–Treasury complex and a regulatory environmentwhich conferred unprecedented freedoms for transnational capital. Global neoliberal-ism was not born in 1968 but was nourished by it.

2 1999 Seattle

This is not the place to review the police riot in Seattle, the politics of the destruction ofStarbucks or the nefarious activities of the Teamster–Turtle alliance, the Ruckus Societyor Direct Action Network (see Wainwright et al., 2000). What matters is the obvious factthat the Third Ministerial Conference of World Trade Organization of 29 November–4December 1999 served as a catalyst for an exceptionally well organized NGOmovement, transnational in composition, often virtual in political practice and excep-tionally effective at taking questions of governance (who governs the world regulatoryagencies and for whom?) into the public sphere. Whether the conference would haveproduced consensus even without the popular demonstrations is perhaps of less sig-nificance than The Economist’s observation that: ‘The battle of Seattle is only the latestand most visible in a string of recent NGO victories’ (11 December 1999: 20). It was thisgesture to the Earth Summit and the multilateral agreement on investment whichprompted a tremulous Dean of the Yale School of Management to describe the interna-tional NGO community – dubbed ‘the NGO swarm’ – as ‘no longer the ragtagprotesters of the sixties’ but a ‘powerful new force’, sending ‘nuanced messagessensitive to the anxieties of communities around the world’ (Business Week, 8 November1999: 24). Aided and abetted by the new technologies, the Seattle activists returned tothe street as part of transnational networks and alliances and, in echoing the spirit andcarnivalesque street practices of 1968, placed global institutional democracy firmly onthe agenda.3 The political repertoires were, transnationalism notwithstanding, right outof the 1968 handbook (Finnegan, 2000; Smith, 2000). Barbara Epstein (2000) has arguedthat Seattle differed from the sixties in its focus on global corporations (rather than thestate), and in the political pluralism across interest groups. But this contrast ismisplaced, I think, and Epstein severs the obvious connections between Seattle and the68ers’ rejection of ‘corporate liberalism’, their demand to democratize institutionsincluding the state (the WTO is after all a multilateral institution), and theircommitment to the tense community of doing street politics. Virtual organizing,transnational networking and the centrality of powerful regulatory agencies should notalter the fact that Seattle (and subsequently the Washington, DC, anti-IMF protest) wasBerkeley gone global – a multitude against Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

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180 1968 and all that . . .

3 1989 Berlin

Any account of the revolutions of 1989 would be radically incomplete without referenceto the structural weaknesses of the socialist economy, the brittleness of the neotradi-tional party system, the debilitating consequences of growing integration into theglobal financial system, the severity of the ecological crisis, the ‘Gorbachev factor’ anddistortions of the military build-up and the cold war itself. To see the fall of the BerlinWall written into the graffiti of the Latin Quarter requires perhaps a flight of fancyrather than clairvoyance. But the contiguities between Prague and Paris, between Berlinand Berkeley are tangible and compelling. The Czechs were always delighted to pointout, said Garton-Ash (1990: 151), ‘that ‘89 is ‘68 turned upside down’. The year 1968witnessed its own anti-communist moments in Warsaw, in Prague, in East Berlin, evenin Moscow. There had been such fractures in the Soviet edifice before (Hungary in1956), but the reformist and democratic impulses of 1968 were the same sensibilities toemerge in central Europe three decades later. Secondly, the New Left – whether theSituationists or the SDS libertarians – had no truck with old style socialism, with the‘old gray mares of Stalinism’, as Tom Nairn called them (Quattrocchi and Nairn, 1998:106). The French Communist Party, to take the obvious example, had shown itself in1968 to be congenitally incapable of seizing the revolutionary moment. The writing wasindeed on the wall. And not least, as Garton-Ash (1999) and many others have shown,Berlin in 1989 cannot be grasped outside the culture of dissent traceable to the sixtiesand early seventies. Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and the figures of Ferenc Fehrer,George Konrad and Adam Michnik were not simply exemplars of what Tismaneanu(1999: 4), with a tip of the hat to the sixties, calls ‘critical public intellectuals’, but theyalso stood at the ground zero of 1968 itself. ‘For my generation,’ said Michnik, ‘the roadto freedom began in 1968’ (cited in Jacoby, 1999: 11); even Gorbachev described himselfas one of the ‘men of the sixties’! The dissidents – Havel, Kuron and others were sixty-eighters – talked of ‘parallel polis’, ‘parallel public sphere’ and ‘dissident subculture’deploying the same vocabulary as Parisian and Berkeley radicals. In dress, appearance,in their internationalist links with other political communities in and outside Europe,they were New Left in temper (Tamas, 1999: 183). In this sense Paul Berman is partlyright when he says that ‘in regard to Communism’s ultimate collapse, Paris was the firstto fall’ (1996: 287). And Prague too.

Much could be said about these momentous events but I wish to return to the notion ofrehearsal and to the three iterations of popular radicalism. First, the intricate paths andcommon threads linking the late sixties to Chiapas, Berlin and Seattle are substantive inseveral senses: they are personal (in the figure of someone like Havel), organizational (forexample, the transmutation of the ARNL to the ZANL), political (the enduring concernwith radical democracy and critical publics) and ideological (the spirit of ‘68). Andsecondly, at risk of sliding into a rigid and unmerited typology of historical pathwaysfrom the past to the present, I want to propose each event as the product of a particular1968: Seattle as an heir to the anarchist movements and their anti-disciplinary politics;Berlin as an offspring of the social democratic, new social (dissident) movements; andChiapas as unfolding through the Marxist long march from guerilladom to the politicsof recognition. None of these paths can accommodate the internal diversity of theevents themselves. My purpose is rather to unload the deadweight of the sixties as



monolith, and to seek to restore to the times, and to the moment of 1968 in particular, aheterogeneity capable of bequeathing multiple legacies around a common vision and acommon cause (Macedo, 1997).

These three momentous events are not exhaustive or definitive of the long march(they are obviously archetypes). The nonviolent direct action movements in the USA ofthe 1970s and 1980s (Epstein, 1991), the new rural radicalism in Latin America(NACLA, 2000), the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil (Petras, 1997),or the burgeoning indigenous peoples struggles to which Barney Nietschmann devotedhis energies are equally relevant. Neither do I want to infer that 1968 harbors no otherimportant legacies. What was to become a worldwide women’s movement took off inthe sixties in the USA at the very moment that SDS lost its coherence and vision. RuthRosen’s book The world split open (1999) charts its exhilarating rise from Atlantic City tothe first Women’s Conference in 1975 and the UN Decade of Women. Whatever onemakes of its Malthusian overtones, the UN Population Conference held in Cairo in 1994can only be read as a signal victory for the feminist position on reproductive rights,namely, as part of a more encompassing platform including health, employment,education and civil liberties. Furthermore, the sixties crisis and what Richard Jolly(cited in Arndt, 1987: 108) of the United Nations Development Program called the‘growing questioning of Western consumer–urban–industrial models’ is indisputablykey to an understanding of the shift in development thinking from growth theory to‘redistribution with growth–basic needs programs’ during the 1970s. Gross nationalproduct is no longer the Holy Grail of development. Indeed the critique of growthdeterminism has now become an orthodoxy itself, enshrined in Nobel LaureateAmartya Sen’s Development as freedom (1999), but its conditions of possibility, so to say,were forged in the sixties. All this, and much more, is indisputably part of the wave ofsocial transformation that broke on the shores of Paris and elsewhere in 1968.

But the great rehearsal of 1968 articulated, more powerfully than anything else, thedemocratic question and the centrality to it of the nonparty tradition of radical politics.The sixties willed to us a revived sense of self-government and participatorydemocracy, both nationally and globally. None of this is to suggest that the communityof civic groups or the thickening of civil society through NGO activism is an unalloyedgood – ‘good living, warm and whole’, as Michel Foucault once put it (1988: 168). Civilsociety produces its own incivility in the name of community, association and identity.Nor is it my intention to roll the legacies of 1968 into the grand narrative of liberaldemocratic triumphalism and the End of History. To do so would return us to PaulBerman’s (1996) absurd notion that the sixty-eighters have all slowly come around tosee the blinding light of liberal democracy at its moment of triumph. In practice thepicture is more complex and sanguine. Perry Anderson put it this way: ‘Democracy isindeed more widespread than ever. But it is also thinner – as if the more universallyavailable it becomes, the less active meaning it retains’ (1998: 77). So how might therehearsal of 1968 bequeath a different sort of democratic theatre?

VIII Real Utopias

Far from bring defeated, the revolutions of the twentieth century have each pushed forward and transformedthe terms of class conflict, posing the conditions of a new subjectivity, an insurgent multitude against imperialpower (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 394).

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182 1968 and all that . . .

When asked by Henry Kissinger for his assessment of the French Revolution, Chou-En Lai famously responded that it was ‘too soon to tell’. Surely this is no less the casefor the events of 1968, surrounded as they are in the mists of nostalgia, defeat, injuryand extreme partisanship. We are still burdened by misunderstandings, says HerveHamon (1998: 2). Perhaps. But is May 1968 as he says ‘simply an end’ in which thedemonstrators ‘have eliminated that which they thought they were reviving’ (1998: 2)?In eliminating their Utopian visions, the sixties in this account paved the way for post-modernism, and the postsixties disengagement with politics as such. Alex Callinicos(1989: 102) dismisses the sixties for precisely this reason:

The political odyssey of the 1968 generation is . . . crucial to the widespread acceptance of the idea of apostmodern epoch in the 1980s. This was the decade when those radicalized in the 1960s . . . began to entermiddle age. Usually they did so with all hope of revolution gone . . . [they] became members of the new middleclass . . . when the overconsumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism offered this class rising living standards. . . This conjuncture . . . provides the context for . . . postmodernism.

Aging sixties radicals, realizing that the revolutionary moment had passed, cut off theirponytails, disposed of their Ho posters and made for Wall Street. The fact that JerryRubin did indeed land up on ‘The Street’ is for Callinicos and his like a stunning con-firmation that the counterculture was co-opted. Revolution was, after all, good forconsumer capitalism. As Julie Stephens (1998: 94) put it, the link between commodifi-cation and the failure of sixties radicalism is written large in the death of the sixtiesnarrative. And yet this is a deeply suspicious death trip. It vastly exaggerates thepowers of co-optation, presumes a stunning duplicity on the part of the activiststhemselves, it radically misreads the abilities of the Diggers or the Situationsists to seethrough the veil of the market and not least rushes to judge the marketability of thesixties as an abandonment, as a cop-out, as middle-aged dejection. There is no need foran air-headed nostalgia either as Sheila Rowbothom’s (2000) new memoir pointedlypoints out. But I have stressed the idea of 1968 as a revival and a return, highlightingthe radical incompletion of democracy; an acknowledgement that democracy, to quoteNorberto Bobbio (1987: 57), has stopped short of ‘the two great blocs of descending andhierarchical power . . . big business and public administration. As long as these blockshold out against the pressures exerted from below, the democratic transition cannot besaid to be complete’. This language would not have surprised the enragés in Paris or themilitants in Prague or Sao Paulo. It marks something more than Oedipal self-indulgence, or indeed of culture as politics. Ideas of self-government, of participatorydemocracy, of self-management, even if not fully explored in 1968 and after, speakdirectly to ways of doing politics differently, of making democracy work better (Couto,1999).

None of this should be read as an unqualified hymnal to 1968. It was a sort of tragedy,as Marshall Berman (1974) says, born of militant activism; it did prefigure in some waysthe slide into encounter culture and political fragmentation; and the period l’après Maiwas in some regards a shift from paranoia to poststructural hysteria, as Starr puts it(1995: 183). But I have tried to reclaim what I think has been lost, even in the brillianceof Marshall Berman’s Faustian account of the period, namely, the political struggle tounite two logics of different provenance, one Marxist, the other libertarian. From thisstruggle – the enlargement of the field of the possible – emerged a number of sixtiesinnovations. It is a measure of the conservatism of our era and the capacity to silence



the past that such innovations are now seen to be so retrograde as to be almost anembarassment to articulate in public: the Situationists and their worker councils,anarchist auto-gestion, the Italian syndicalists and the autonomen movements, the DutchProvos and their Kropotkinist libertarian communes, the grassroots self-government ofthe Mexican student strike council, and the ‘oriental commune’ of the New Trends ofThought in the Cultural Revolution. But they are of a piece, in my view, with the ideaof ‘deliberative democracy’ as an alternative to neoliberal constitutionalism and civicrepublicanism (Bohman and Rehg, 1997). Deliberative democracy focuses on the ‘delib-erative deficit’ in democratic institutions (Gutman, 1999), that is to say, the process ofjustifying actual decisions to those who are bound by them. Its focus is the artifactualaspects of associations in which members fix the basic terms of social co-operationincluding authoritative collective decision-making, distribution of resources and so on.Running through this deliberative process is a concern with governance outsidemarkets and hierarchies and with questions of popular sovereignty, civic consciousness,distributional equity, political equality and state competence (Cohen and Rogers, 1995).

Much could said about these debates over ‘real Utopias’ – though curiouslygeographers have had little to say about them. At any rate, deliberative democracy, inits examination of self-government and association, carries the echo of 1968. And thesedeliberations are practical experiments. The autonomen movements in Europe arecertainly part of this radical tradition, as indeed are some of the projects described byDick Couto in Making democracy work better (1999) in Appalachia. My own preference, inkeeping perhaps with the third worldism of 1968, is to turn to what Sartre in describingsixty-eight called ‘something which came from the outside’. In particular I want to closewith a mention of two real Utopias, deliberative democratic experiments of the sort thatUnger (1998: 5) calls ‘democratic experimentalism’: the participatory budgeting inurban Brazil associated with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Abers, 1998; Santos, 1998),and the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning in Kerala, India, attached to theLeft Democratic Front (Isaac, 1999). Each of these experiments opens up thedevelopment process (urban budgeting, and ward-level development projects) byestablishing new forms of decentralized institutional and political frameworks(‘tinkering’, as Unger calls it). Both are examples of participatory democracy, or toreturn to Unger (1998), of three sources of empowerment: the institutional reconstruc-tion of government, the organization of the economy and systems of rights. At the heartof both participatory budgeting and decentralized planning is the dialectic of institu-tional and social change that is both liberatory and transformative. Democraticgovernance, whatever its institutional character, helps to redeem the events of 1968 andto locate it in the great sweep of history in which spaces of hope are constantly soughtand created (Harvey, 2000).

So the spirit of 1968 lives on, in part through the rehearsals which are now part of along-running repertory. The outcome and meanings of the sixties are not ‘treasures tobe unearthed with an exultant Aha!’ but as Gitlin notes ‘sand paintings, somethingprovisional, both created and revised in historical time’ (1987: 433). The year 1968provided a dystopian definition of revolution and a revived sense of radical democracythrough voluntary self-governing associations, and reanimated the idea of deliberativedemocracy. In reconstituting politics, 1968 was an exemplary case of what Edward Saidcalls ‘the unstoppable predilection for alternatives’ (1983: 247). Of course, I write thesewords at a moment when, if I can quote Hobsbawm (2000) one last time, Pope John Paul

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184 1968 and all that . . .

II is the only figure of authority to criticize capitalism to have listeners in any number.And any sense of self-government in my own village of San Francisco is dwarfed bytwenty-something billionaires, palm-pilot capitalists, IPO gurus and the recklesspursuit of money and consumerism that might make even Updike’s superman wince.Yet I take heart from the fact that even in Paris, the ground zero of radical defeat, noneother than Pierre Bourdieu has emerged as a resonant voice of anti-capitalism and aradical critic of untrammeled globalization. I come here, he said during his speech tostriking French workers in 1995, to defend a civilization, ‘to construct a social order notgoverned solely by the pursuit of self-interest and individual profit’. (Bourdieu, 1998:105). A sixty-eighter pur et dur. Yes, the matters to which 1968 spoke cannot be removedlike tonsils or a bad tooth. They have been anaesthetized and in a way hidden from con-sciousness says Gianni Statera, but ‘nothing excludes the possibility that they willsuddenly flare up again’ (1975: 272). We are still here, said Alice, and we sing still.

Acknowledgements

This essay was originally delivered as the Progress in Human Geography lecture at theAssociation of American Geographers Annual Convention in Pittsburgh on 17 April2000. I have deliberately retained the spoken and performative qualities of the originalpresentation precisely to capture the spirit in which it was written. I am grateful to PeterDicken for extending the invitation to me and to Sharad Chari for research provided.Allan Pred, Gunnar Olsson, Mary Beth Pudup, Jim Glassman, Kent Mathewson, SusieFriedberg, John Pickles, Derek Gregory, Ulf Strohmayer, Neil Smith and David Harveyshared with me their own reflections on the 1960s and all that. The year 1968 never failsto elicit strong opinion. David Harvey was of the view that I had ventured too far intothe dangerous territory called nostalgia. After reading the last chapter of his new bookSpaces of hope (2000), I can see that I am in good company.

Notes

1. Todd Gitlin (1987), in his memoir of the US sixties, dwells upon the student interchanges withCuba, the chic appeal of the guerilla for political praxis and, of course, the centrality of the liberationstruggles in southeast Asia, all of which acted as a political glue holding together a disparate set ofpolitical interests and visions. A north–south axis of solidarity actually displaced to a certain extentParis or Prague (an east–west axis), says Gitlin, because the latter was ‘neither sufficiently exotic norcharged with white-skin advanced-nation guilt . . . Vietnam and Cuba confirmed that we had beenright all along to feel displaced at home. And not only because the Third World revolutionariesseemed . . . more civilized than the napalming would-be civilizers’ (1987: 281).

2. Immanuel Wallerstein (1990) has described these movements as anti-bureaucratic, anti-author-itarian and anti-western (a term which seems to me not to capture what was at stake in themovements).

3. In that tradition, see Decadent Action (underbelley.emon.co.uk/decadent/docs/ sickcont.htm),and the Surrealist Movement of the United States ([email protected]).



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Documents

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monthly review press

oxford university press

harvard university press

chinese cultural revolution

yale university press

world split open

making democracy work