It’s the fortieth anniversary of 1968, so be prepared for a lot of media retrospectives on the golden age of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Our parents probably had to tolerate a lot of nostalgic reminiscences of Vera Lynn and the Blitz; perhaps it is only fair that we are constantly reminded that their generation were young once and that they took acid and had lots of sex. And orgiastic activities were doubtless better in those days because you didn’t have to worry about AIDS or having your pills spiked with ketamine, did you?
At various points in ‘68, however, students seem to have emerged from their opium dens to defy their governments and declare solidarity with the oppressed in society. Student riots in France inspired the biggest general strike in world history, leading to a near insurrectionary crisis; hundreds of students were massacred in Mexico City after threatening to disrupt the Olympic Games; and even in apolitical America, the government had to call in the army to prevent anti-war protestors occupying campuses and disrupting the elections.
This legacy is more contentious. Leading conservative Thomas Sowell argues that “campus riots flourished where the authorities failed to use their authority to preserve order”. The authorities effectively surrendered to the students, leading to the “creation of whole departments devoted to ideological indoctrination”.
Translated, this means that students demonstrated against conformism in the education system. They argued that universities reflected the white, middle class, male prejudices of most academics; they argued that History courses should include the genocide of the Native Americans as well as the transcendent liberalism of the American Constitution; they asked why the canon of Western literature was overwhelmingly rich and male. And students won, on issue after issue. There are still a lot of white middle class males on the faculty, but, thanks to the students of ’68, they sometimes acknowledge the existence of women, black people, and the poor.
It is odd that conservatives should identify “political correctness” as the vilest legacy of 1968. The leaders of these campaigns were, in most cases, incorporated into establishment politics; some of the most militant feminists who once called for the abolition of patriarchal institutions and sexual liberation now sit on government committees and university senates. I assume they are not enjoying the fruits of sexual liberation in the phallic headquarters of official academia.
The major enemy of the ’68 student movement was conformity. And yet most of its leaders conformed. Individuals are constantly under pressure to betray their principles, and many did. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the guru of the French rioters who brought De Gaulle’s regime to its knees, is now a keen enthusiast for war and an equally fervent admirer of capitalism. The lessons of 1968 for students today must be drawn from the method, not the individuals.
Campuses across the world were effectively surrendered to the student movement throughout 1968. In France , Prime Minister Pompidou had to admit that he “preferred to give the Sorbonne [University] to the students than to see them take it by force”. Students did not gain this level of autonomy by making deals in senate rooms with university management. Instead, they used their numbers, their spontaneous anger, and their keen grasp of the wider political context to win control over their own education. Crucial to these spontaneous eruptions was the solidarity shown between students, third world nationalists, and working people.
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Students around the world took special inspiration from events in Vietnam . On midnight January 30th, 1968 forces of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) launched the “Tet Offensive”, an uprising planned with meticulous detail and secrecy against a brutal American occupation. Strategic targets throughout South Vietnam were assailed with mortar attacks and ground assaults. A day later, NLF forces attacked the American embassy in Saigon .
The operation failed in its initial goal: to inspire a mass uprising against the Washington-backed regime. The Vietnam War would continue for seven years until the capture of Saigon in 1975, at the cost of millions of lives. However, the willingness of peasant guerrillas to die in great numbers for their liberation inspired a generation of Western student radicals. On campuses throughout the Western world, “Victory to the NLF!” was 1968’s favourite slogan.
In Britain , the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organised demonstrations in London against Harold Wilson’s support for the war. Seventy five percent of marchers were students. At London School of Economics, perhaps the most militant campus in the country at that time, the student movement began with protests against the Labour government’s collusion with the racist regime in Rhodesia. Protests intensified in 1966 when the university appointed a director with strong links to the regime.
A pattern emerged on campuses where protests in solidarity with third world movements would end in rioting over student conditions, or vice versa. It was only by asserting their right to speak out against university management that students realised that actually, they didn’t have very many rights. This accounts for the fact the feelings of spontaneous anger that seemed to erupt every time the authorities used force to break up anti-war demonstrations.
Nanterre University, the centre of agitation in the French May riots, was a particular case in point. It was built in the early 1960s as an extension of the Sorbonne in the suburbs of Paris to accommodate the expanding student population. The first struggles at Nanterre focused on seemingly parochial issues, such as the ban on men visiting women’s dormitories. In November 1967 10,000 students participated in a student strike over issues like this; however, consciousness about wider issues was relatively weak. Only 142 students participated in a campus occupation staged around the Vietnam War the following March.
Things only escalated into open confrontation when the university authorities, reacting to a minority of anti-war protestors, surrounded the Sorbonne with riot police and arrested 500 students. At this point, students became increasingly conscious both of their own power (as measured by the scale of repression required to police even small groups of activists) and of the connections between the authoritarianism of the university authorities and the oppression enforced by the state.
By James Foley
Photo: Francois Lafitte
