1968 in the United States
* USA How does one assess the comparative significance of the celebrated year "1968"? Alan Wald assesses the mixed experiences of progressive forces in the USA 30 years ago. The year 1968 was an authentic turning point in the class struggles of Europe, East and West. Most famously, the Prague Spring provoked an invasion of Soviet tanks and the toppling of a government, while the May revolt in France brought barricades to the Latin Quarter and a general strike of ten million.
In the US, to be sure, the events of that year were compelling and traumatic. On the military front there was the sensational Tet offensive, an unprecedented co-ordinated attack by North Vietnam on military bases and US-controlled cities in South Vietnam. There was also the My Lai massacre, which, when exposed two years later, constituted a major blow to the moral authority of the US war effort. Then there were the assassinations of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The murder of the latter set off rebellions of African Americans in 168 cities, and is usually cited as the transitional moment in the evolution of the African American liberation movement to its phase of Black Power militancy.
Finally, the US radical student movement entered its most active phase. Between January and June of 1968 there were 200 major student demonstrations, fiftynine of which featured building occupations. Among the most remarkable was the Columbia University strike, which raised crucial issues of anti-Black racism (the university was constructing a new gymnasium against the wishes of the neighbouring Harlem community, ties between the university and the war machine, and democratic governance.
The brutality of the New York police attack on the protesting Columbia students and faculty shocked the nation, and many of the radical demands were won. The student movement was also the central component of the violently-repressed mass demonstration in August of that year at the
Democratic Party national convention in
Nevertheless, the combined events of
1968 hardly posed the issue of "power" on a national scale in the fashion of Paris and
Prague. The Tet offensive, after all, was defeated. The post-King Black movement, while more militant, was also more frag mented and, harassed by police infiltration, frequently succumbed to ultraleftism. The national student movement,
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NEDEJ SE which achieved its most visible expression in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), claiming a hundred thousand members, blew apart in the spring of 1969; it never recovered a semblance of its earlier organisational coherence.
The protest at the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago failed to win the nomination for the "peace candidate" Eugene McCarthy, and the autumn 1968 election witnessed the victory of Richard Nixon. In fact, in that same election, the open racist George Wallace and his American Independent Party polled 14% of the vote. Nixon and Wallace together attracted 57%, indicating a tilt toward conservatism in the majority of the US voting population. The 1968 election is usually interpreted as a right-wing backlash inauguration the first major realignment in party politics since the Great Depression and the prelude to the "Reagan Revolution." Changing consciousness
Among radicals, 1968 was certainly the turning point in the consciousness of a substantial layer of New Left student activists, myself included, who began to revise their earlier views about the Left." Many of us concluded at that time that a political leadership for revolutionary-democratic transformation must be based on the multinational working class, educated around a socialist programme, and organised in a professional manner. But such conclusions flowed mainly from our observation of positive events in places such as France and Italy, not of any authentic revolutionary successes in the US. much as we may have admired the fighting spirit of the Black Panther Party, Young Lords, American Indian Movement, Brown Berets, and other impressive developments.
Still, it is noteworthy that a crucial sector of the New Left broke free of the view of agency associated with the influential Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, which saw a permanently co-opted working class as the source of the problem while students and aggrieved minorities held the sole solution. Many activists took a fresh look at the history of class struggles in the US, the current state of the trade unions, and the legacy of Communist and Trotskyist movements. They began to assemble a vision of the US workers as the potential agent of revolution, and especially of African American workers, already in motion in places such as Detroit, as a playing a unique leadership role in coming struggles.
Yet there is a way in which the focus on 1968 in the US tends to over-privilege the white student experience. Most of the US struggles for which that year is remembered involve campus-based radicals, very often at the most elite schools, taking over buildings, working for Eugene McCarthy in a "children's crusade, " and mobilising en masse for the protests at the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago.
The fixation on 1968 also tends to reduce the Black Liberation struggle to images of martyrdom and urban violence. In reality, the political history of the Afri can American movement rotates around a number of key axes starting with the civil rights movement in the 1950s and including the rise of Malcolm X in the early 1960s. The semi-autonomous dynamic of the Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American struggles are somewhat margi nalised by a fixation on 1968 as well.
Defining moments in the Gay Libera tion movement and Women's Liberatin movement are more likely 1969 (th Stonewall rebellion) and 1973 (the Sug reme Court Decision to legalise abortion
In general, efforts to find a single year in which these social movements were at the height of power, or in which they underwent some transformative experience, distort one's capacity to understand their specificities and intricacies. Alice Echols, for example, in Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75 (1989), theorised the rise and decline of the militant wing of the new feminist movement along a continuum of events and episodes mainly between 1968 and 1973. Alternative perspectives
Little that occurred in 1968 can be assessed without the qualifying information about the year or two that followed. For example, even if the student movement was riding high in 1968, it underwent a major crisis in 1969. 1969 was also the year of Woodstock, the ultraleft "Days of Rage" in Chicago, the assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the Native American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, and similar events that give the 1960s its reputation as
If mass mobilisations against government policy are a criterion of political potency, 1969 must also receive special attention as the year of the Vietnam Moratorium (including the Chicano moratorium in Los Angeles) in October, plus a massive march against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC in November. And it is certainly arguable that the high point of mass student protest came neither in 1968 nor 1969 but in May 1970; at that time 60% of the nation's 2500 campuses were the site of demonstrations in the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia, and of the shootings of students at the institutions of Kent State and Jackson State.
1968 is somewhat compromised as a revolutionary year in US politics precisely because it was an election year. It is important to understand the stranglehold that the Democratic Party has had over radical politics from the 1930s until the present. Without instruments of political expression of their own, subaltern struggles in the US are invariably co-opted and demobilised by the appearance of liberal politicians who promise to embrace their cause so long as everything is subordinated to getting out the vote in elections.
Such was clearly the case in 1968, when the motor force of the radical movement was opposition to the Vietnam War. Eugene McCarthy's campaign to be selected as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate devoured the energies of thousands of activists, and the hopes and dreams of many more. Following the victory of Hubert Humphrey, who had no anti-war credentials, at the Chicago conrention of the Democratic Party, the movement stumbled and staggered into ecline throughout the autumn of 1968. By the time Richard Nixon took office, it ppeared to be almost dead. It was mainly
• secretary of State Henry Kissinger's ecision to bomb Cambodia that brought the mass movement back to life.
Crucial, too, from a Marxist point of view, is the evolution of the labour movement in 1968. A stirring and symbolic episode was King's trip to Memphis to express solidarity with striking AfricanAmerican sanitation workers at the time he was assassinated. Yet most of the U.S working class seemed quiescent, perhaps even hawkish, during 1968. Of course, some unions, especially traditionally Leftwing ones, supported the anti-war movement. But the 1970 physical attack by construction workers on New York anti-war demonstrators may be the best-known instance of labour activity around Vietnam.
From an economic perspective, the working class was not dramatically affected until the recession of 1969-1971. Then, in August 1971, President Nixon instituted a "New Economic Policy." This featured a wage and price freeze, federal controls, devaluation of the dollar, and a surcharge on imports. Another recession occurred between 1973 and 1975. A sequence of crests
1908, then, was a watershed year in the US, but only from certain angles and for certain groups. A more accurate recreation of the political terrain might show a sequence of crests, one building on another but, regrettably, never coalescing in a truly massive way so as to produce the kind of global "turning point" occurring in France. Without question, the aura of political passivity (which has been somewhat exaggerated) associated with the "Silent Generation" of the 1950s was decisively reversed; the new legitimacy of visible dissent has lasted to this day, despite the decline of the specific social movements appearing in 1960s.
In particular, if one treats 1968-71 as a bloc, it clearly marks the end of the "American Century" — the post-World War I era of nearly uncontested US power to do what it wanted in the Third World restrained almost exclusively by fear of Soviet missiles. There was, too, in that year a kind of exhaustion of liberalism as the Johnson administration, with its Great Society programmes, proved bankrupt in the face of racism, poverty and imperialist
These two developments created the basis for a resurgence of revolutionary socialist organisations in the 1970s. This is certainly the most neglected feature in the scores of scholarly books, memoirs and anthologies of documents that have been published on 1960s radicalism during the
The end of the Vietnam war left tens of thousands of radicalised militants without a focus for their political and organisational energies. Many had followed the path to socialist consciousness spearheaded by those of their contemporaries powerfully affected by the international events of 1968. Some now joined existing Marxist organisations that had distinguished themselves in the previous decade — especially the youth group of the Communist Party, the Young Workers Liberation League; the youth group of the Socialist Workers
Party, the Young Socialist Alliance; and the International Socialists (formerly the Independent Socialist Clubs).
Many more, however, were drawn to Maoism, partly under the illusion that Maoism represented a more militant trend and also because Maoism, originating outside Europe and in relatively close proximity to Vietnam, seemed more compatible with anti-racist and Third World Liberation struggles. With exceptions such as the Progressive Labour Party and Communist Labour Party, most Maoist (anti-revisionist) groups were started by former New Leftists as their own operations, not by veterans of the older generation.
Unfortunately, the US Maoist movements had tied themselves to a highly unstable regime that was capable of supporting reactionary governments and fomenting anti-Soviet conspiracy theories rivalling those of the famous Red-baiter Joe McCarthy. Their record of sectarianism and splits quickly surpassed even the shameful one of the US Trotskyist groups, and some of the Maoists re-introduced the indefensible practice of using violence against rivals on the Left.
By the end of the 1970s, many of those who in 1968 and its aftermath had learned the lesson of the need for Leninist organisation found themselves rethinking once again. Hardly a group that had benefited from the influx of the "generation of 1968" had gone without a central split in its cadre and dramatic loss of membership. including the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, and International Socialists. The majority of Maoist groups (some having evolved to pro-Albanian tendencies) simply vanished. In the meantime, a substantial section of the activists had returned to academia, where post-Marxism was becoming an entré to the super-star conference circuit. A veritable crisis had overtaken the 1960s generation to which it has neither entirely succumbed nor found
Through a strategy of "Regroupment," and a devotion to rank and file union and grass-roots community struggles, a range of activists have sought to keep the best traditions of revolutionary socialism -t hose of the 1930s as well as those of the 1960s — alive in the US. The crisis, however, cannot be resolved until a new generation of US militants female and male, gay and straight, Euro-American as well as African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American Indian — find common ground in common struggles against a system that indiscriminately oppresses all who are disunited. Only then will the meaning of 1968 in US political history become clarified, and its utopian Alan Wald is a member of Solidarity, an journal Against the Current, and most re of Trotskyism in the United States: Hi I Essays and Reconsiderations (Humani
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