I
Sometime in early May 1968 I found myself in Paris, where one of the offshoots of UNESCO had organized a giant conference on ‘Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought’ to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Like most such gatherings, its obvious function was to give a number of academics a free trip to an agreeable tourist centre; and, like most conferences on Marx, especially those to which a platoon of ideological bureaucrats from the USSR contributed extremely boring papers of no interest, it encouraged participants to get out of the conference hall and into the streets. But on 8, 9 and 10 May the streets of Paris – at least those of the 5th and 6th arrondisse ments – were full of demonstrating students. By sheer chance, the commemoration of Marx’s anniversary coincided with the the climax of the great Paris student rebellion. Within a day or two it was to become more than a student rebellion, namely a nationwide workers’ strike and a major political crisis of the regime of General de Gaulle.1 Within a few months ‘the events of May’ were recognized as the epicentre of a bicontinental outburst of student rebellion, crossing political and ideological frontiers from Berkeley and Mexico City in the west to Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade in the east.
As I write this, I look at the pictures of those Paris days in the anthology of 1968 photographs, published as a volume thirty years later. 2 Several of the most impressive were taken on the final day of the Marx Conference – I can still recall the sting of tear-gas after the burning of the Latin Quarter – but my most lasting memory is captured in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s undated picture of a massive student march of protest – a vast, overwhelmingly male, tie-less, clenched-fist concourse of juveniles, still, almost without exception, with the respectable short bourgeois haircuts of the pre-hippy age, almost concealing the presence of an occasional adult face. Yet these occasional adult faces are what I remember most vividly, because they represent both the unity and the incompatibility of the old generation of the left – my own – with the new. I remember my old friend and comrade Albert (‘Marius’) Soboul, holder of the chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, upright, solemn-faced, dressed in the dark suit and tie of an academic grandee, marching abreast of men young enough to be his children who shouted slogans of which he profoundly disapproved as a loyal member of the French Communist Party. But how could a man in the tradition of Revolution and Republic not ‘descendre dans la rue’ on such an occasion? I remember Jean Pronteau – still a senior Party member at that time – who had commanded the 1944 Paris insurrection against the Germans in the Latin Quarter, telling me how moved he was by the sight of barricades going up, spontaneously, at the exact corner of the rue Gay-Lussac where they had been built in 1944, and no doubt where they had been during the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. If noblesse oblige , then so, surely, does a revolutionary tradition.
And indeed, nothing shocked me more at the time than the meeting to which I and several other visiting Marxists from the UNESCO jamboree were invited by, was it the Institut Maurice Thorez or some other academic adjunct to the French Communist Party?, at which points of Marxist interpretation were to be discussed, while the students marched. Nobody appeared to take cognizance of what was happening outside. I caused a few moments of awkwardness by pointing this out. Did we have nothing to say, I asked, about what was happening on the very streets through which we had passed on our way to the meeting? Could we not at least declare our general support? Alas, thirty-four years later I cannot for the life of me remember whether those of us who felt as I did managed to shame the gathering into making such a declaration. It seems unlikely.
The Magnum 1968 collection includes another picture that encapsulates at least part of my feelings at the time. (It is also, I need hardly add, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that genius at catching the historic moment.) An elderly member of the middle class stands, with arms folded behind his back, looking reflectively at a poster-covered Parisian wall and a rough wooden door – presumably to some yard or building site. The top layer of posters has been half-stripped from the wall, leaving breeze-blocks and older movie posters half-visible. On the door there is an accumulation of political posters – a Communist Party poster on top of some text about student power, a half-torn sheet calling for struggle for a democratic society opening the way to socialism, and on top of it all a large graffito written with the basic armament of the 1968 revolutionary, the spray-paint can. It reads ‘Jouissez sans entraves’, which the editors have translated bashfully as ‘Let it all hang out’. (It really means: ‘Let nothing stop orgasms’.) We cannot tell what Cartier-Bresson’s elderly citizen made of the walls of Paris, which were the chief victims and public witnesses of the student revolt. My own reaction was sceptical. As every historian knows, revolutions can be recognized by the vast floods of words they generate: spoken words, but in literate societies words written in enormous quantities by men and women who do not usually express themselves in writing. By this criterion May 1968 was something like a student revolution – but its words record an odd kind of revolution, as anyone could see who watched the walls of Paris at the time.
The truth is that the characteristic posters and graffiti of 1968 were not really political in the traditional sense of the word, except for the recurring denunciations of the Communist Party, presumably by the militants of the various left-wing groups and factions, almost invariably descended from some Leninist schism. And yet, how rare were the references to the great names of that ideology – Marx, Lenin, Mao, even Che Guevara – on the walls of Paris!3 They would later appear on badges and T-shirts, as icons symbolizing the overthrow of systems. The student rebels reminded theorists of a long-forgotten Bakuninist anarchism, but if anything they were closest to the ‘situationists’, who had anticipated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ through the transformation of personal relations. That (and their very Gallic brilliance in devising memorable slogans) is why they became the mouthpieces of an otherwise inchoate movement, although it is almost certain that hardly anyone until then had heard of them, outside a small circle of left-wing painters. (I certainly had not.) On the other hand, the 1968 slogans were not simply the expressions of a drop-out counter-culture, in spite of an obvious interest in shocking the bourgeoisie (‘LSD tout de suite!’). They wanted society overthrown and not simply side-stepped.
For middle-aged leftwingers like me, May 1968 and indeed the 1960s as a whole were both enormously welcome and enormously puzzling. We seemed to be using the same vocabulary, but we did not appear to speak the same language. What is more, even when we participated in the same events, those of us old enough to be the parents of the youthful militants patently did not experience them as they did. Twenty postwar years had taught those of us who lived in the states of capitalist democracy that social revolution in these countries was not on the political agenda. In any case, when one is past fifty, one does not expect the revolution behind every mass demonstration, however impressive and exciting. (Hence, incidentally, our – and everyone’s – surprise at the disproportionate political effectiveness of the 1968 student movements which, after all, overthrew the presidents of the USA and, after a decent face-saving interval, of France.) Moreover, for us brought up on the history of 1776, 1789 and 1917, and old enough to have lived through the transformations since 1933, revolution, however intense an emotional experience, had a political objective. Revolutionaries wanted to overthrow old political regimes, domestic or foreign, with the aim of substituting new political regimes which would then institute or lay the foundations of a new and better society. Yet, whatever drove most of these youngsters on to the street, it was not this. Unsympathetic observers, such as Raymond Aron (seeing himself in the role of de Tocqueville commenting on the Paris of 1848), concluded that they had no objective at all: 1968 was simply to be understood as collective street-theatre, ‘psychodrama’ or ‘verbal delirium’, because it was merely ‘a colossal release of suppressed feeling’.4 Sympathetic ones, such as the sociologist Alain Touraine, author of one of the
first and still one of the most illuminating books written about those extraordinary weeks, thought their implicit aim was a reversion to the pre-1848 utopian ideologies. 5 But one could not really read utopia into the general antinomianism of slogans such as ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, which probably came as close to expressing what the young rebels felt – whether about government, teachers, parents or the universe. In fact, they did not seem to be much interested in a social ideal, communist or otherwise, as distinct from the individualist ideal of getting rid of anything that claimed the right and power to stop you doing whatever your ego and id felt like doing. And yet, insofar as they found public badges to pin on private lapels, they were the badges of the revolutionary left, if only because they were by tradition associated with opposition.
The natural reaction of old lefties to the new movement was: ‘These people have not yet learned how to achieve their political objectives.’ That is presumably why, referring to the French title of my book Primitive Rebels, then recently published in Paris,6 Alain Touraine, who had every sympathy with the 1968 rebels, wrote on the fly-leaf of my copy of his book ‘Here are the Primitives of a new Rebellion’. For the purpose of my book had indeed been to do historic justice to social struggles – banditry, millennial sects, pre-industrial city rioters – that had been overlooked or even dismissed just because they tried to come to grips with the problems of the poor in a new capitalist society with historically obsolete or inadequate equipment. But supposing the ‘new primitives’ were not pursuing our ends at all, but quite different ones? Because it was so clearly and passionately on the side of the eternal losers I wrote about, my own book, available in English since 1959, had given me more street credibility among the Anglophone ‘new lefts’ than Party members usually enjoyed. Nevertheless, I was astonished and a little baffled to be told by a colleague from the University of California, Berkeley, the epicentre of the US student eruption, that the more intellectual young rebels there read the book with great enthusiasm because they identified themselves and their movement with my rebels.
Having both taught in the USA at the peak of the anti-Vietnam movement in 1967 and watched the Paris events in 1968, I wrote an equally uncomprehending article on ‘Revolution and Sex’ in 1969. If there was any correlation between the two, I pointed out, it was negative: rulers kept slaves and the poor quiet by encouraging sexual freedom among them and, I might have added, remembering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, drugs. As a historian I knew that all revolutions have their free-for-all libertarian aspect, but ‘taken by themselves cultural revolt and cultural dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces’. ‘The more prominent such things are’ – as obviously in the USA – ‘the more confident can we be that the big things are not happening’.7 But what if the ‘big things’ were to be not the overthrow of capitalism, or even of some oppressive or corrupt political regimes, but precisely the destruction of traditional patterns of relations between people and personal behaviour within existing society? What if we were just wrong in seeing the rebels of the 1960s as another phase or variant of the left? In that case it was not a botched attempt at one kind of revolution, but the effective ratification of another: the one that abolished traditional politics, and in the end the politics of the traditional left, by the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Looking back after thirty-odd years it is easy to see that I misunderstood the historic significance of the 1960s.
One reason for this was that I had been immersed since 1955 in the small and mostly nocturnal universe of jazz musicians. The world I lived in after hours in the second half of the fifties had already seemed to anticipate much of the spirit of the 1960s. This was an error. It was quite different. If there is anything that symbolizes the 1960s it is rock music, which began its world conquest in the second half of the 1950s and immediately opened a profound gap between the pre- and post-1955 generations.
It was impossible not to be aware of this gap, as when my wife and I, in Berkeley and San Francisco for a few days at the height of the ‘flower-power’ year of 1967, visited a former au pair of Andy and Julia in Haight-Ashbury, where she was then discovering herself. It was obviously marvellous for the girl, usually as level-headed a Netherlander as you could hope for, and fun to watch, but how could it be our scene? We were taken to the Fillmore, the giant ballroom throbbing with strobe lights and excessive amplification. I cannot even remember what Bay Area groups we heard – the only act that made any sense to me that night was one of the Motown girl groups – was it the Marvelettes or the Supremes? – which swung in the familiar way of black r&b. Perhaps this is not surprising. To enjoy that year in San Francisco one really had to be permanently high on something, preferably acid, and we were not. Indeed, by virtue of our age, we were a textbook illustration of the phrase ‘If you can remember anything of the 1960s, you were not part of them.’
Nor could the jazz world, with the rarest exceptions, understand rock. It reacted to rock music with the same sort of contempt as it had traditionally reacted to the Mickey Mouse music of the old pit and commercial bands. Perhaps even with greater contempt, since the men who played the most boring of barmitzvah gigs were at least professionals. Conversely, within a few years rock almost killed jazz. The generational gap between those for whom the Rolling Stones were gods and those for whom they were just a creditable imitation of black blues-singing was virtually unbridgeable, even when both sides might from time to time find themselves in agreement on some talent. (As it happens I rather admired the Beatles and recognized the fragments of genius in Bob Dylan, a potential major poet too idle or self-absorbed to keep the muse’s attention for more than two or three lines at a time.) Whatever the appearances, my generation would remain strangers in the 1960s.
And this despite the fact that for a few years in the 1960s the language, culture and lifestyle of the new rock generations became politicized. They spoke dialects recognizable as deriving from the old language of the revolutionary left, though not, of course, of orthodox Moscow communism, discredited both by the record of the Stalin era and the political moderation of the Communist Parties. Anyone who reads the best book on the 1960s written in Britain, Promise of a Dream, by my friend and former student Sheila Rowbotham, will realize that for some years it really was almost impossible for someone of her generation (born 1943) to distinguish between what was personal and what was political. It was ‘the left-wing Alexis Korner’ – I remember him, dark and quiet in Bayswater – who inspired ‘the clear-cut throbbing sexuality of the blues bands’8 such as the Rolling Stones, whose Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ after a dramatic Vietnam Solidarity demonstration in 1968 and published it in the flamboyant Pakistani Trotskyite Tariq Ali’s new radical paper, The Black Dwarf (‘PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. WE WILL FIGHT. WE SHALL WIN’). Pink Floyd, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’, Che Guevara, Middle Earth and acid belonged together. Not that the line was totally erased. A subsequent holder of a Cambridge economics chair proposed that principled socialist men should protest publicly against the spread of Soho strip clubs, e.g. by stripping outside them. (‘The New Left Review men had told him he was being ‘‘puritanical and old-fashioned in his attitude to socialism’’.’) Wearers of ‘the sombre ‘‘struggle gear’’, increasingly worn … on the left’ shook their heads over an equally devoted militant who came to an occupation of the London School of Economics ‘in an olive-green bell-bottomed trouser suit, bought in my September spending spree’.9 Most of this passed the older left by, even though the young British radicals – perhaps thanks to my generation of red historians – were probably more deeply impregnated with history, especially labour history, than any other. We knew most of the chief activists as fellow-protesters, pupils or friends. I did not bother to read the Black Dwarf, although I was asked to write an article for it and naturally did so. People like me were mobilized by the young for such things as Vietnam teach-ins – I was put up against the spectacularly ill-chosen Henry Cabot Lodge, former American Big Brother
in Saigon in the Oxford Union teach-in of 1965 organized by Tariq Ali. Fortunately in my own college I did not face the bruising experience of a student occupation, a considerable strain on intergenerational relations, although I was invited to address a crowd of occupying forces in the Cambridge Old Schools by one of their leaders, the son of old friends. I think my suggestion that even the history of eras lost in the mists of antiquity such as the nineteenth century could be ‘relevant’ – the buzzword of the moment – disappointed them.
We did not understand how deeply even the unquestionably political ultra-left, the armed revolutionaries and neo-terrorists who emerged from the 1960s, were influenced by, indeed were part of, the ‘counterculture’. The Weathermen in the USA took their name from a song by Bob Dylan. The Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, lived in the German version of a counter-culture of outsiders by choice and behaviour.
My age group did not understand that the student generations of the West in the 1960s believed, as we had once done, though in a manner far less easy to specify as ‘politics’, that they lived in an era when all would be changed, because around them everything was already being changed, by revolution. We, or at least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bearing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost cosmic optimism of the young, as they felt themselves to be ‘caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion’.10 (One of its byproducts was the fashion for global revolutionary tourism, which was to see Italian, French and British left-wing intellectuals simultaneously converging on Bolivia in 1967 at the death of Guevara and for the trial of Regis Debray.)
Of course all of us were caught up in these great global struggles. The Third World had indeed brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s. The two great international inspirations were Cuba and Vietnam, triumphs not only of revolution, but of Davids against Goliaths, of the weak against the all-powerful. ‘The guerrilla’ – an emblematic word of the era – became the quintessential key to changing the world. Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, recognizable by their youth, long hair, beards and rhetoric as heirs of 1848 – think of the famous image of Che Guevara – could almost have been designed to be world symbols of a new age of political romantics. It is difficult to recall, and to understand even now, the almost immediate global repercussions of what in January 1959 was after all a not unusual event in the history of one Latin American island of modest size. Small, scrawny Vietnamese on jungle trails and in paddy-fields checkmated the giant destructive force of the USA. From the moment in 1965 that President Johnson sent in his troops, even middle-aged non-utopians such as myself had not the slightest doubt about who would win. More than anything else in the 1960s, it was the grandeur, heroism and tragedy of the Vietnamese struggle which moved and mobilized the English-speaking left and linked both its generations and almost all its usually feuding sects. I met contemporaries and pupils in Grosvenor Square, demonstrating in front of the American Embassy. I went on marches with Marlene and our small children, chanting ‘Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh’, like the rest. I was a declared sceptic about the Guevarist guerrilla strategy, which in any case proved uniformly disastrous (see chapter 21), but Vietnam remains engraved on both our hearts. Even at the very end of the century, the emotion was still there, and palpable in Hanoi, as Marlene and I watched a party of tiny, hard-bitten elderly men in formal suits, wearing their campaign medals, make their way under the trees to visit Ho Chi Minh’s home. They had fought for us, instead of us.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 31
