Book Review:
"1968: A Student Generation in Revolt"
by Ronald Fraser and others
(Chatto & Windus, #14.95)

The upheavals of the latter half of the Sixties have had a curious record of 
publication. An initial cycle of books and pamphlets, starting with the rush 
of "specials" after the significant events (notably the May-June events in 
France), purported to explain what had happened or merely recorded the 
images, but shed little light. More considered books (notably Alfred 
Willener's "The Action-Image of Society: On Cultural Politicization" (1970)) 
used techniques ranging from the statistical, through discussion, to 
description of the cultural background, aiming to situate and socialize the 
energy which had flared so suddenly and brightly.

Entering the Seventies, the glare largely dissipated, whether in comparison 
to the widening wave of contestation affecting Western societies in the first 
half of that decade, or in a growing disillusionment with the aims and 
methods of the movement. The events of 1968 lived on mainly in the memories 
of the libertarian left, as the Situationists' finest hour. The tenth 
anniversary of the events produced little in the way of commemorative 
material: a brief article here, a reprinted pamphlet there.

The situation on the twentieth anniversary could hardly be more different. 
Distance, in time and possibility, magnified the fascination. Christmas 1987 
brought the first pre-emptive strikes. The New Statesman must have bemused 
its residual Fabian readers (not to mention sensible Kinnockites) with the "I 
Love You!!! Oh, Say It With Cobblestones!!!" colour supplement. Britain's 
one-time revolutionary enfant terrible, Tariq Ali, reminisced about 
celebrities and airport lounges.  

However, if Sixty-Eight nostalgia there must be, Ronald Fraser is the best 
person to produce it. Fraser is probably Britain's best known oral historian, 
committed to a method described thus in the book under review: "Through 
protagonists' memories, we sught to recreate not only those events but, more 
importantly, their meaning to those who took part in them, the lived 
experience."

His "Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War, 1936-39" (1979) was a 
notably successful project of this kind. By interweaving narratives by 
participants of all political groups, he achieved a text which gave substance 
to movements relegated to the footnotes of more orthodox histories. The 
better historians of these years had differentiated the movements on the Left 
(Republican, Anarchist, Trotskyist, Communist). Blood of Spain made the 
reader aware, perhaps for the first time, of the justifications which 
Carlists and Falangists perceived in their beliefs and actions, and their 
subsequent resentment at the imposition of Francoist orthodoxy.

More recently, Fraser's "In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnerfield, 
1933-1945" (1984) was an autobiographical enquiry into his rÜle as child of 
the manor, providing a fascinating narrative on the interface between psyche 
and class. Again, the oral historical approach assisted in his elucidation of 
the actual facts and social relations between family and servants on the 
estate.

So Fraser was well-placed to lead an international team seeking to apply such 
techniques to testimony of participants in "the movement", with the intention 
of clarifying the confusion of events.

What, then, is the fascination of 1968? Was it a blast against social stasis 
which nearly brought the walls tumbling down? An explosion of unchannellable 
energy? The return of human-scale relations repressed since the 1920s (such 
as feminism and ecology)? An implosion of politics and culture? A speech of 
the speechless? A mad, medieval festival?

The background is that of a society where conflict on social goals had been 
both made manifest in the Berlin Wall and subsumed within the West in the 
drive for growth and prosperity. This was truly the age of the car - the 
symbol of consumer prosperity, but also of ongoing automation of production 
processes. So, while the struggles in the car plants prefigured the labour 
shakeout to come, material prosperity and full employment appeared to have 
been realised. Management of society would be a matter of all sides pulling 
together. As Willener put it: "(In) a Europe that had found a new 
equilibrium, one found images of society relatively well established and 
logically-distributed over a whole populationˇ"

Young people occupied a peculiar new place in this society. On the one hand, 
they had a higher disposible income than others (and more, relatively, than 
ever before or since). The formation of a youth culture market feeding on 
this money was also their accession to a new form of citizenship, at an age 
when they were otherwise being treated as mere apprentices. "Consumerism made 
possible new types of relationships and awoke people's fantasies and desires 
to break with old ways of life" (Laura Derossi, p64) Identity and community 
grew from shared interest in a particular set of commodities, and from a 
corresponding disdain for those choosing a "straight" set of commodities. By 
the end of the decade, such commodity identity would be all, the movement 
nothing.

But the young felt equal to their citizenship - and were often appalled when 
they saw the gulf between what the system promised and what it delivered. The 
war babies became aware of "unfairness", whether in Alabama or Saigon, and 
when they began protesting against these injustices, the brittleness of 
social power immediately became obvious (as did that of their heads). 
Internationally, the obscenity of the Vietnam War and its tacit support by 
other Western governments delegitimised their authority in turn in the eyes 
of their own young.

The book concentrates on those movement in which students played a major 
rÜle, but only in the Western democracies. The escalating movements in the 
USA, West Germany, France and Germany are therefore covered in great detail, 
but missing are accounts by participants in the movements in Czechoslovakia, 
Mexico, Poland and Yugoslavia. This is a pity, as these would have broadened 
the perspective on, for example, the influence of international youth culture 
in spreading an attitude of "We want the world and we want it NOW!"

That said, the chapter on the Northern Ireland student movement provides the 
most haunting material. Here was a politico-religious backwater sheltered 
from consumer pop culture. But TV film of the American Civil Rights movement 
caused a ripple which became a tidal wave: "Within the institutionalized 
discrimination of the state, we saw ourselves basically as black." 
(Bernadette McAliskey, p207). The Civil Rights Association (and then Peoples' 
Democracy) rapidly reached a point where they threatened (or were perceived 
to threaten) the very foundations of the legal authority. Dogmas being so 
central to the regional government's very rationale, a wrong-footed British 
government, although hardly sympathetic to Stormont, could apply little 
pressure on it.

The book records how badly it all went wrong after the Free Derry and Free 
Belfast episodes. "PD lost what it had once had - a solid movement of people 
who took action, and a well-attended discussion forum for the development of 
ideas. For a brief period, we were the leaders of the struggle and then we 
lost it in as many monthsˇ" (McAliskey, p214). Community self-defence was 
supplanted by the specialists, as the IRA, previously just as wrong-footed as 
the government, returned from the dead to establish hegemony over opposition. 
The result remains with us today, and nowhere is an emancipatory perspective 
visible. 

Those interviewed for the book were deeply involved in the movements of their 
respective countries, but with allegiances as diverse as Selma marchers and 
pro-Situationists. Their current situations are equally divergent: some 
languish in jails (like ex-Weatherman David Gilbert), others in parliaments 
(like Dieter Kunzelmann: Situationist turned Green Bundestag MP) - and many 
more on campuses. Most, however, still consider themselves to be "on the Left"

In the end, seeking the source for the continuing fascination of 1968, Fraser 
agrees with Willener, that its central meaning lies in anti-authoritarianism. 
That anti-authoritarianism was common to most aspects of contestation, but 
was equally denied by the fervour with which so many people yoked themselves 
to just another authority. Political grouplets sprang up, each with its own 
hierarchy and sacred texts. Gangsterism was a short step away: Some hardly 
needed actual state repression to take on a clandestine rÜle, fetishising an 
"armed struggle" which often debilitated any real movement. Authoritarian 
groups played with a realpolitik at least as unprincipled as that of Henry 
Kissinger.

To a large extent, the movements of 1968 provided a rationalizing impulse to 
societies whose technical over-rationalization had debilitated them of any 
internal corrective mechanisms. The Vietnam War, the prime example of 
rampaging technology, was ended; counter-bureaucratic forces were established 
in many areas of life. "ˇ(Like) many a subversive movement, this one ended up 
contributing in some respects to the modernization of the existing system, 
becoming integrated in it." (Elsa Gili, p324) But for those who lived through 
it, the lesson is that a possible break with the existing state of things 
remains ever-present: "Having lived through it, I can't ever say 'It will 
never happenˇ'" (Dany Cohn-Bendit, p7).

From Edinburgh Review