Revisting the global and local upheavals of 1968 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
“A long march through the institutions”1 was shouted in marches in Germany, “all power to the imagination”2 was chanted in Paris, “USA=SA=SS”3 was graffitied in the walls of Berlin, and “We are all German Jews”4 was heard in France and Italy. What these triumphant mottos represent is what is commonly referred to as ‘the revolution of 1968’, a cluster of rebellions mainly carried out by students in cities around the world that marched against antidemocratic and authoritarian regimes, hierarchical bureaucracies, communist totalitarianism, consumer society and, in general, contemporary culture. It is the culmination of diverse social and cultural processes and changes throughout the 60s. The degree of wide-ranging impact of 1968 is debated, some even argue that it is the “greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal social transformation in human history”5. Nevertheless, what is most intriguing about 1968 is the intersection of its global, transnational and local components, which produce different experiences – and frustrating results – worldwide, topics we will study in the present essay.
How 1968 Changed the World: Movements Making History, History Making Movements
1968: A Global Approach, 2020
As activists in social movements, we live in the shadow of the "long 1968", the wave of struggles that shook the world from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This is as true in Prague or Derry, with their very different movement histories, as it is in Paris or Chicago, in Bologna or in Mexico City. How we challenge power today, what movements we ally with, how we think about possible futures and how we organise ourselves still depends on the decisive historical moment that was 1968. This article does not seek to celebrate (or condemn) 1968, but to understand a legacy which shapes our own movement landscapes-in order to be better able to think forward to another, more successful attempt at transformation.
The Questions of 1968: Background, Context and Retrospect
2018
The fiftieth anniversary of the May 1968 events in Paris, and of their less spectacular analogies elsewhere in the West, has attracted worldwide comment and re-evaluation. Much less is said about 1968 in the erstwhile communist world. That part of the story was, admittedly, confined in the main to one country, and came to a more brutal end than anything on the other side of the iron curtain. But closer examinations of the Western 1960s and their sequel have increasingly stressed the limits, illusions and paradoxes of these historical experiences. The protest movements were short-lived; if they had an impact, it was of a very different nature than what they had aspired to, and variations from country to country were much more important than they seemed at the time; neither protagonists nor interpreters came anywhere near an adequate grasp of the world-changing processes at work in the wider environment. Explaining the differences of cultural memory in East and West in terms of relati...
The Road to Democracy: The Political Legacy of “1968”
International Review of Social History, 2011
SummaryOver the past forty years, the social struggles of the “long 1960s” have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that thepoliticallegacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.
2018
As Marx says at the beginning of The CommunistManifesto the class struggle which runs throughhistory is ‘an uninterrupted, now hidden, nowopen fight’. It does not move in a gradually rising steadyline upwards. Rather it rumbles on at a subterraneanlevel, taking hesitant steps into the light followed byretreats back underground and then renewed surges.Sometimes it oscillates sharply up and down, andsometimes it explodes. It is always a battle: they attackus and we resist; we resist and they counter attack.The war is always waged on many fronts – economic,political, ideological and military - and over manydifferent issues, small and great.