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1 Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein, The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of
the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015),
239–43, 249–59.
2 Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, An Open Letter to the Party Written in a Polish Prison
(London: Socialist Review, 1969), 8, 51–63.
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The original draft was confiscated but a redraft was circulated in secret from
hand to hand and internationally.
Political Revolt
Although written more than 4,000 miles apart, these texts came out of
a certain global context. World War II had been over for twenty years,
but there was a feeling among many young people that many of the legacies
of Nazism and fascism were still present. On either side of the Cold War
divide, liberal democracies or people’s democracies flourished, but both the
American and Soviet regimes might be criticized as military-industrial-
security regimes geared to developing nuclear weapons, motivated by anti-
communist or communist ideologies and setting firm limits on individual
freedom. Opposition to this stalemate came less from political radicals
in Europe than from the American South where the civil rights movement
took off, and from the Third World of underdeveloped Latin America,
Africa and Asia where peasant and urban revolutions against corrupt local
regimes supported by American imperialism spread like wildfire in the 1960s.
Opposition also came from global cultural movements of young people
challenging their parents’ generation and the postwar world in general and
providing a broad context of discontent and creativity in which more political
avant-garde protest could flourish.
These texts also reflected other protest movements in the 1960s in that
they occupied a broad and diverse political field between anti-Stalinism on
the one hand and anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and anti-racism on the
other. Stalinism, seen to be embodied by official communist parties, stood
for militarism and bureaucracy, purges and the Gulag system. Protest
was revolutionary, and revolutionary often meant Marxist, but Stalinism
was deemed the opposite of revolution. A Marxist revolutionary might be
a Trotskyist, inspired by the Bolshevik avant-garde of 1917, a Maoist, inspired
by the Long March and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or a Castroist or
Guevarist, inspired by the leaders of Third World revolutions against
American imperialism. Not all revolutionaries, however, were Marxists.
They might be anarchists, hating the dictatorship of the proletariat and loving
the councils movement that swept across Europe from Kronstadt to Spain at
the end of World War I. They might be architects of the New Left, which
broke with communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and
developed libertarian Marxist ideas. They might be militants of the civil
rights movement in the United States, which in turn inspired many protest
24
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
3 Rudi Dutschke, Jeder hat sein Leben ganz zu leben. Die Tagebücher, 1963–1979 (Cologne:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), 31–32.
4 James Mark and Anna von der Goltz, “Encounters,” in Robert Gildea, James Mark and
Anette Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 150–51.
25
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to Marxism: “[W]e were fighting for what they were rejecting,” he later said;
“For us democracy was a dream – but for them it was a prison.”5
Protesters had a wide variety of means of protest at their disposal, and
often divided between those who favored only nonviolent protest
and those who were prepared to resort to violence. In societies that
were basically democratic, protest tended to be peaceful, symbolic, even
subversive, unless and until it came up against state violence. In other
societies, marked by the legacies of fascist and Nazi Europe, imperial and
colonial power, and white supremacism, violent action was much more
likely to be an option. Disagreement on this question broke out between
protesters in the same country and between those in or from different
countries. Greek students who fled the brutal colonels’ regime to study in
France, for example, commented that the May events were little more
than a fiesta.6
The term “1968” is a shorthand for a range of political activities that took
the world by storm from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. They began with
the peace movement against the Bomb and the civil rights movement
against segregation in the United States and other powers in which white
domination was entrenched, such as South Africa. By the mid 1960s they
were shaped by the repercussions of Third World revolutions against
European colonialism and American imperialism, culminating in agitation
over the Vietnam War. After the crushing of the events of 1968, some
protesters went down the route of violence, inspired by the Palestinian
uprising, while others turned away from violence and engaged in more
cultural forms of protest.
The peace movement generally applied peaceful methods, but there were
differences between Western Europe and Japan. In Britain, the Committee
for National Disarmament (CND) organized marches from London to the
nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston from 1958, reaching
peak numbers in 1962. In West Germany, where the United States had
a powerful military presence, and where Hiroshima was compared to
Auschwitz, the Kampf dem Atomtod organized Easter Marches from 1960,
mobilizing 100,000 people in 1964.7 Under the umbrella of labor and
5 Ibid., 144.
6 Kostis Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the
“Long 1960s” in Greece (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 62.
7 Holger Nehring, “Searching for Security: The British and West German Protests
Against Nuclear Weapons and ‘Respectability,’ 1958–1963,” in Benjamin Ziemann
(ed.), Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA During the Cold War
(Essen: Klartext, 2001), 167–87.
26
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
8 Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, vol. II, Resisting the Bomb: A History
of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 42, 91, 244; Volker Fuhrt, “Peace Movements as Emancipator Experience:
Anpo tôsô and Beheiren,” in Ziemann (ed.), Peace Movements, 79–80.
9 Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (London:
Souvenir Press, 2011 [1958]), 71–85.
10 Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 56.
27
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robert gildea
would cleanse them of their sense of powerlessness and bind them in their
struggle for liberation.11
There was a direct link between the civil rights and the student
movement. On campus, students were increasing in number and in poli-
ticization, but were frustrated by narrow academic subjects, hierarchical
university structures and generalized bans on political activism. In the
autumn of 1964, students who had taken part in the Freedom Rides
returned to their home universities. At Berkeley they set up tables on
Telegraph Avenue to publicize SNCC’s work and collect donations. When
this was banned by the university authorities, the administrative building
was occupied on 2 December 1964, triggering a strike by 10,000 students.
The university was forced to concede the principle of free speech, and
a model was provided for other campus struggles both in the United States
and elsewhere.12 At its Frankfurt Congress in September 1967, the West
German SDS declared its solidarity with Black Power, hoping to see
American imperialism dismantled from within.13
In communist bloc countries, the grip of Stalinism had been under-
mined by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech, but the limits on
reform were dramatized by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian
uprising of that same year. Restrictions on free speech in the universities
were demonstrated in Poland by the arrest and trial in July 1965 of
Modzelewski and Kuroń . Leadership passed to a younger generation of
students around Adam Michnik, who set up a group called the
Commandos. Their aim was to infiltrate or disrupt meetings of the
official Communist Youth organizations and turn them toward sharper
criticism of the regime. In Czechoslovakia, the communist party was
much bigger than in Hungary and Poland, its 1.5 million accounting for
10–12 percent of the population, and its Stalinist control was rigid after
having seized power in 1948. Nevertheless, the system was increasingly
questioned by economists such as Ota Šik, who argued the benefit
of market forces against five-year plans, jurists such as Zdeně k Mlynář
who promoted the rights of civil society against the party-state, and
28
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
14 Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971), 35, 59–88, 106–16; Jan Pauer, “Czechoslovakia,” in Martin Klimke
and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 165–66.
15 Z. A. B. Zeman, Prague Spring: A Report on Czechoslovakia 1968 (London: Penguin, 1969),
80–82.
16 Horn, The Spirit of ’68, 75–80.
17 Sidney G. Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 151–52; Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in
Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 79–96.
18 Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Mai 68. Un mouvement politique (La Bussière: Acratie, 2008), 93–102,
203–05.
29
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bloc found room to criticize the USSR for not going far enough in its support.
The powerful slogan was that young activists should bring the revolution
back home to Europe and the United States. The question was: Would that
revolution be real or symbolic?
The first breakthrough was the Cuban Revolution against the American-
backed regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Its leader, Fidel Castro,
immediately became a figure on the world stage, as did his young comrade-
in-arms, the Argentinean Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “The liberation of Cuba, in
this moment of revolutionary thought, is found in the hands of the people,”
reported Jean-Paul Sartre, who visited Cuba in 1960. The war was
“a people’s war, a guerrilla war,” emancipating a “semi-colony.”19 Régis
Debray, a brilliant student of the École normale supérieure in Paris and
member of the Union of Communist Students (Union des étudiants commu-
nistes, UEC), who had written an article on the Cuban Revolution for Sartre’s
Les Temps modernes, was invited by Castro to attend the Conference of the
Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America,
known as the Tricontinental, in January 1966. He took the opportunity to
write a study of guerrilla warfare, and his best-selling 1967 book Revolution in
the Revolution? highlighted the tactic of foquismo, actions by a vanguard (foco)
of revolutionaries who could provide impetus for wider peasant uprisings.20
But revolution was not child’s play, That year, following Che on his cam-
paign against the Bolivian government, Debray was captured, tried and
sentenced to thirty years in prison, although he was released after four
years following a worldwide campaign led by Sartre.21
If Latin America provided romance, Africa proved tragedy. The “winds
of change” that swept the continent in 1960 brought independence to
many countries, but also the fightback of neocolonial forces. The
Sharpeville massacre of black demonstrators protesting against the pass
laws in South Africa on 21 March 1960 brought into being a worldwide
anti-apartheid movement.22 Patrice Lumumba came to power in the
Congo when the Belgians suddenly granted independence; he was welcomed
as a “black Robespierre” by Sartre.23 When he was overthrown and murdered
19 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 111, 157.
20 Régis Debray, Révolution dans la Révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique
Latine (Paris: Maspero, 1967).
21 Le Procès Régis Debray (Paris: Maspero, 1968).
22 Hakan Thorn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
23 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Préface,” in Jean Van Lierde (ed.), La pensée politique de Patrice
Lumumba (Paris: Présence africaine, 1963), xx.
30
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
24 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 73.
25 John Gerassi (ed.), Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 368.
26 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 125.
27 James Mark, Nigel Townson and Polymeris, “Inspirations,” in Gildea, Mark and
Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968, 97.
31
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32
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
32 Gerard J. DeGroot, “Left, Left, Left: The Vietnam Day Committee,” in Gerard
J. DeGroot (ed.), Student Protest: The Sixties and After (London: Longman, 1998), 85.
33 Niek Pas, “‘Six heures pour le Vietnam.’ Histoire des Comités Vietnam français,
1965–1968,” Revue historique 302 (2000), 157–85.
34 Rudi Dutschke, Écrits politiques, 1967–1968 (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1968), 77.
35 Gerassi, Venceremos!, 420–22.
33
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Cultural Revolt
Political activism in the leadup to 1968 took place within a much wider
framework of the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. These provided
a broader youth constituency into which this activism could tap but which
might also offer a challenge to movements – not least communism – that
were seen to be too narrowly political and not in step with social and cultural
movements.36
These movements practiced a lifestyle revolt or cultural rebellion that
may be seen as forming three concentric if overlapping circles. The first
and widest circle was the emergence of a youth culture that was situated
between mass culture and counterculture, and largely defined by enthu-
siasm for rock music, jeans and mini-skirts, and later the hippie long skirt
and long hair. This in itself was a rebellion against conventional family
values and social respectability. Youth enthusiasm was kindled by the
arrival of the Beatles at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1963 and in the
United States in February 1964. In Mexico, Spanish-language cover
versions of Elvis gave way in late 1964 to bands like Los Dug Dugs,
doing English-language cover versions of the Beatles, and with this came
a fashion for long hair and mini-skirts known as La Onda, the wave.37
Political conflict was often not far away. The Rolling Stones concert at
Berlin’s Waldbühne in September 1965 led to clashes with police, while
attempts by the East German authorities to suppress performances they
thought ferried American cultural imperialism in October 1965 triggered
youth riots in Leipzig.38
The second circle was the world of hippies and dropouts. The hippie
subculture, which began on the west coast of the United States, aimed to
build an alternative society in which war, violence, racism and poverty were
replaced by peace and love. It reached a high point with the Summer of Love
1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, with free music, art,
medical care and transport offered by the Diggers, and with the Monterey
Pop Festival in California in June 1967, which featured Jimi Hendrix,
36 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United
States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
37 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 64–65, 93–114.
38 Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt,
1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 158–60; Mark Fenemore, Sex,
Thugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 177.
34
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
The Who, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.39 This counterculture was
political in that it battled with police over illegal drugs and resisted the
draft for the Vietnam War, but also created separate spaces away from
possible repression.40 Hippies followed the hippie trail to Mexico, Morocco,
Afghanistan, Kathmandu in Nepal and ultimately Goa in India, for midnight
bathing and more on its Anjuna beach.41
The third and most intense circle was linked to the anarchist or libertar-
ian Marxist critiques of advanced industrial society and linked cultural and
political analysis. It drew on analyses of advanced industrial society by the
likes of Herbert Marcuse, the German-American thinker whose One-
Dimensional Man was published in 1964. Marcuse argued that advanced
industrial society was highly productive and increased affluence but at the
same time was scientifically and bureaucratically managed, promoted
commodity fetishism and commodified culture through the mass media.
Ordinary people were pacified, persuaded to conform and rendered insen-
sitive to exploitation and mass slaughter. Individuality, creativity and
critical thought were stifled. In opposition to this state of affairs, he argued,
free play should be given to the imagination to bring about social
transformation.42
In the mid 1960s a number of groups emerged to challenge the existing
order by provocation through art, spectacle or “happening.” The idea was to
shock society through theatrical, symbolic gestures that were transgressive,
collective and short-lived. In Amsterdam, the so-called Provos made
their mark on 10 March 1966 when they threw stink bombs to disrupt the
wedding of Princess Beatrix to a German diplomat who had fought in the
Wehrmacht.43 In West Germany the Subversive Aktion group, founded by
Kunzelmann, planned to throw puddings at US vice-president Hubert
39 Detlef Siegfried, “Music and Protest in 1960s Europe,” in Klimke and Scharloth (eds.),
1968 in Europe, 57–70.
40 Joseph H. Berke, “The Creation of an Alternative Society,” in Joseph H. Berke,
Counterculture (London: Owen, 1969), 16, 40; Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time:
From World War II to Nixon. What Happened and Why (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1976), 319–29.
41 Luther Elliott, “Goa Is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social
Emplacements,” in Graham St. John (ed.), The Local Scenes and Global Culture of
Psytrance (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 26.
42 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London and New York: Routledge, 1991
[1964]).
43 Niek Pas, “Mediatization of the Provos: From Local Movement to a European
Phenomenon,” in Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder and Joachim Scharloth (eds.),
Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 157–76.
35
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44 Maria Č erná, Joan Davis, Robert Gildea and Piotr Osę ka, “Revolutions,” in Gildea,
Mark and Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968, 116.
45 Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 85;
Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998).
46 David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1988), vii.
36
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
47 Jerzy Eisler, “March 1968 in Poland,” in Carol Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker
(eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
244–50; Č erná et al., “Revolutions,” 109, 113–14.
48 Boris Kanzleiter, “1968 in Yugoslavia: Student Revolt Between East and West,” in
Klimke, Pekelder and Scharloth (eds.), Between Prague Spring and French May, 84–92.
49 Horn, The Spirit of ’68, 142.
50 Lumley, States of Emergency, 181–213; Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, 168.
37
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51 Maud Ann Bracke, “The Parti communiste français in May 1968: The Impossible
Revolution?,” in Klimke, Pekelder and Scharloth (eds.), Between Prague Spring and
French May, 64–83.
52 Č erná et al., “Revolutions,” 121–22.
38
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
53 John Daniel and Peter Vale, “South Africa: Where Were We Looking in 1968?,” in
Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke (eds.), 1968: Memories and Legacies of Global Revolt
(Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009), 142.
54 Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129, 160–70.
55 Raskin, For the Hell of It, 155. 56 Zolov, Refried Elvis, 127.
57 Eric Zolov, “Protest and Counter-Culture in the 1968 Student Movement in Mexico,”
in DeGroot (ed.), Student Protest, 80.
39
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58 Sarah Stokes, “Paris and Mexico City: 1968 Student Activism,” D.Phil. thesis (Oxford
University, 2012), 291.
59 Annick Lempérière, “Le ‘mouvement estudiantin’ à Mexico (26 juillet–2 octobre
1968),” in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68. Une histoire
collective (1962–1981) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 291–98.
60 Stokes, “Paris and Mexico City,” 321.
61 Daniel Bensaïd and Henry Weber, Mai 68: une répétition générale (Paris: Maspero, 1968);
Alain Brossat, “La Zenkakuren japonaise: modèle pour les étudiants occidentaux?,” in
Artières and Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68. Une histoire collective, 68, 102.
62 Tout! Ce que nous voulons: Tout! 1 (23 Sep. 1970). 63 Č erná et al., “Revolutions,” 128.
40
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64 Jeremy Varon, “Crazy for the Red, White, Blue and Yellow: The Use of the NLF Flag in
the American Movement Against the Vietnam War,” in Ziemann (ed.), Peace
Movements, 235–36.
65 Stokely Speaks, 139–40. 66 Bourseiller, Les maoistes, 163.
67 Jeremy P. Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction
and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004); Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State:
A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995); William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington,
MA: Lexington Books, 1990).
68 Robert Gildea, Gudni Jóhannesson, Chris Reynolds and Polymeris Voglis, “Violence,”
in Gildea, Mark and Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968, 274–76.
41
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home,” “two, three, many Vietnams” and “revolution within the revolu-
tion” were understood symbolically and rhetorically, these violent
groups took them literally. They saw themselves fighting the Vietnam
War and Palestinian struggle on European and American soil, and also
refighting the battles of anti-Nazi and anti-fascist resistance against
regimes they saw as only nominally democratic and still run by politi-
cians, soldiers and corporate bosses marked by that era. Although they
prided themselves on acting for “the people,” in the Third World as
much as in Europe, they enjoyed very little popular support and were
treated by the media simply as “terrorists.”
The descent into terrorism not only alienated the wider public from
those who were sometimes call “the monstrous children of 1968,” but also
divided the revolutionary movements themselves. When the PLO took
Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 and
eleven of them died in the ensuing battle, the GP, whose leadership was
predominantly Jewish, denounced the attacks and increasingly distanced
itself from violence. It became inspired by strike action that revived among
skilled workers faced by layoffs as economic recession bit. The most
famous was the Lip watch-making factory strike of 1973 in Besançon,
when the workers took over the factory in an early version of autogestion.
In conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre, the GP leaders concluded that the
way forward was “a partial, local and in part symbolic taking of power” and
subsequently dissolved themselves.69 In Poland, shipyard workers went on
strike at Radom in 1976 but this time, unlike in 1970, had the support of
intellectuals such as Modzelewski, Kuroń and Michnik, who formed the
Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR),
which was a forerunner of Solidarity. In Greece, students occupied the
Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, with the support of workers, and
though the uprising was brutally repressed by the colonels’ tanks, the
regime did not have much longer to last.70 In South Africa, black students
organized by Steve Biko’s SASO formed a Black People’s Convention to
undertake youth and community work in black communities. This led the
way to strikes by 100,000 South African workers in 1973, to the trial of nine
SASO activists in 1975–76 under the Terrorism Act and ultimately to the
Soweto uprising of June 1976.71
69 Philippe Gavi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Victor, On a raison de se révolter (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974), 254–55.
70 Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship, 256–92. 71 Dubow, Apartheid, 166–89.
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robert gildea
77 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 84–87, 233–34.
78 Interview with Annette Lévy-Willard, conducted by Robert Gildea, Paris, 6 Jun. 2007.
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Moscow by accepting NATO and the plurality of political parties. The Italian
Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) negotiated an “historic
compromise” with the Christian Democratic Party and gave parliamentary
support to its government. In the hope of one day being offered ministries it
took a hard line against the Red Brigades. This was not to last. The Red
Brigades’ terrorist campaign climaxed with the kidnapping and murder of
Christian Democratic president and former prime minister Aldo Moro
in April–May 1978, which weakened the PCI and destroyed its chance of
entering government.79
In 1975, in its eagerness to defend its borders through détente, the USSR
signed the Helsinki Accords on Security and Cooperation, and committed
itself to upholding human rights. This offered an opportunity to former
’68ers to use this as a stick with which to beat the Soviet Union.
Reinvented as “dissidents,” they tried again to introduce democracy into
the communist bloc. Former revolutionary Petr Uhl, jurist Zdeně k Mlynář
and playwright Václav Havel were among the signatories in January 1977
of Charter 77 which asserted the right of “all the citizens of Czechoslovakia
to work and live as free human beings.” This included “the freedom
to play rock music” denied to the Plastic People of the Universe.80
The regime was not ready to give ground, and in October 1977 Uhl and
Havel were sent to trial, while Mlynář fled to Vienna. However, the fuse of
the human rights bomb had been lit. Mikhail Gorbachev had studied law
with Mlynář in Moscow in the 1950s and talked with him about the
possibility of reforms in Czechoslovakia in 1967. In 1987, as he pushed
through glasnost’ and perestroika, he was interviewed by Mlynář, who said,
“In the Soviet Union they are doing what we did in Prague in the spring of
1968, perhaps acting more radically. But Gorbachev is General Secretary
and I am still in exile.”81
Change finally came to Eastern Europe with the Velvet Revolutions of
1989. The new leaders of postcommunist countries in Central and Eastern
Europe often traced a link back to 1968. Václav Havel, of course, became
the first president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, then of the Czech
Republic. Karol Modzelewski and Jacek Kuroń were leaders of the
79 Donald Sassoon, The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party from the Resistance to the
Historic Compromise (London, Francis Pinter, 1981), 223–30.
80 Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern
Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 46–47, 221.
81 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (London: Bantam Books, 1997), 623; Mikhail Gorbachev
and Zdeně k Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring and the
Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 44–46, 65.
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robert gildea
82 Kristin Ross, May 1968 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
James Mark, Anna von der Goltz and Anette Warring, “Reflections,” in Gildea, Mark
and Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968, 287, 336.
83 Mark, von der Goltz and Warring, “Reflections,” 315–31.
84 Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of
Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 193–200.
85 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, “Une barbarie peut en cacher une autre,” Le Nouvel Observateur
717 (22 Jul. 1978); Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives, 158–69.
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The Global 1968 and International Communism
Bibliographical Essay
A good overview of the subject is David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the
Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988). Overviews which have
a transnational but not necessarily global perspective include Ingrid Gilcher-
Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung. Deutschland, Westeuropa USA (Munich: Beck, 2001),
Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North
America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Paul Berman,
A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York
and London: Norton, 1996).
There are some very useful edited collections on this subject. The
ones with the most global reach are Carol Fink, Philipp Gassert and
Detlef Junker (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), and Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke (eds.), 1968:
Memories and Legacies of Global Revolt (Washington, DC: German Historical
Institute, 2009). Klimke has coedited two other important collections
with a European focus: Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds.),
1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder and
Joachim Scharloth (eds.), Between Prague Spring and French May:
Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980 (New York and Oxford:
Berghahn Books, 2011). Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel
(eds.), 68. Une histoire collective (1962–1981) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008),
focuses on France but links into wider themes.
Studies using the oral history of 1968 activists began with
Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1988). A new generation of research, with a mainly European focus,
although taking in global influences, is highlighted by Anna von der
86 Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Boulder and London:
Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 171, 185.
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