A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Chapter 10

  The new world disorder

  Most who looked at the advanced capitalist countries in the mid-1960s believed that the system had shaken off the problems of the inter-war years. It was no longer plagued by ever deeper slumps, endless economic uncertainty and political polarisation between revolutionary left and fascist right. US sociologist Daniel Bell proclaimed ‘an end of ideology’. Since the means were now available for the ‘organisation of production, control of inflation and maintenance of full employment’, he claimed, ‘politics today is not a reflection of any internal class division’. 294 Bell wrote for Encounter magazine, which was financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But even those who hated the CIA could come to very similar conclusions. So the German-American Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote that ‘an overriding interest in the preservation and improvement in the institutional status quo united the former antagonists (bourgeoisie and proletariat) in the most advanced areas of contemporary society’. 295

  It seemed that history, or at least the history of class struggle, had come to an end – except perhaps in the Third World. It was a notion reformulated, without any acknowledgement to Bell or Marcuse, three decades later by the US State Department official Francis Fukuyama. Yet the period between the mid-1960s and early 1990s was marked by a series of social upheavals, sudden economic crises, bitter strikes, and the collapse of one of the world’s great military blocs. Far from coming to an end, history speeded up.

  There were three great turning points in the second half of the twentieth century – in 1968, in 1973–75 and in 1989. Together they demolished the political, ideological and economic edifice of the Cold War era.

  1968: the sound of freedom flashing

  The year 1968 is usually referred to as ‘the year of student revolt’. It was indeed a year which saw student protests, demonstrations and occupations across the world – in West Berlin, New York and Harvard, Warsaw and Prague, London and Paris, Mexico City and Rome. But there was much more to the year than this. It witnessed the high point of revolt by black Americans, the biggest ever blow to US military prestige (in Vietnam), resistance to Russian troops (in Czechoslovakia), the biggest general strike in world history (in France), the beginning of a wave of workers’ struggles that were to shake Italian society for seven years, and the start of what became known as the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The student struggles were a symptom of the collision of wider social forces, although they were to feed back into and influence some of these.

  The eruptions of 1968 were a shock because the societies in which they occurred had seemed so stable. McCarthyism had destroyed the left which had existed in the US in the 1930s, and the country’s trade union leaders were notoriously bureaucratic and conservative. Czechoslovakia was the most prosperous of the eastern European countries and had been among the least affected by the upheavals of 1956. France had been firmly under the dictatorial rule of de Gaulle for ten years, the left was doing badly in elections, and the unions were weak. Governments came and went in Italy, but they were always led by Christian Democrats, who relied on the Catholic church to herd people to the polls on their behalf.

  Much of the stability was due to the sustained economic growth these countries had experienced. Yet this very growth created forces that undermined the stability, and these forces split the political and ideological structures wide open in 1968.

  In the US at the beginning of the long boom the majority of the black population were where they had been at the end of slavery – they were sharecroppers in the rural South, where the local state and white racists used the gun, the bullwhip and the noose to compel them to accept their inferior position. The boom speeded up the movement to the cities to seek work in industry. By 1960 three-quarters of blacks were city dwellers. Sheer concentration of numbers began to create the confidence to stand up to the racists and the state. In 1955 the refusal of one woman, Rosa Parks, to sit in the segregated area at the back of a bus ignited a massive bus boycott that shook the old power structures of Montgomery, Alabama. In 1965, 1966 and 1967 there were black uprisings in the Northern cities like Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit. In 1968 virtually every ghetto in the country went up in smoke after the assassination of black leader Martin Luther King, and a large proportion of young blacks began to identify with the Black Panther Party, which called for armed self-defence and preached revolution.

  The ability of the existing order to stabilise itself in France and Italy in the late 1940s – and to sustain itself in fascist Spain and Portugal – had depended on the fact that a large proportion of the people of these countries were still small farmers, who could be bribed or intimidated into supporting the status quo. The ideological expression of this was the hold the highly conservative Catholic church exercised in many regions. The long boom changed this. By 1968 very large numbers of men and women from peasant backgrounds were concentrated in factories and other large workplaces across the countries of southern Europe. At first they tended to bring their rural prejudices with them, opposing unions or supporting conservative Catholic unions. But they faced the same conditions as older groups of workers who remembered the struggles of the 1930s and the great strikes at the end of the war – the relentless pressure to work harder, the bullying of foremen and managers, and the pressure on wages from rising prices. In 1968 and 1969 they were to fuse into a new and powerful force to challenge the system.

  The stability of Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s was also the result of a booming economy. Growth of around 7 per cent a year had given a feeling of self-assurance to the ruling bureaucracy, while allowing substantial increases in real wages. The rate of growth slumped in the early 1960s, leading to a build-up of frustrations at every level of society and to splits in the ruling bureaucracy. Leading figures in the party forced the president and party secretary Novotný to resign. Intellectuals and students seized the opportunity to express themselves freely for the first time in 20 years. The whole apparatus of censorship collapsed and the police suddenly appeared powerless to crush dissent. The students formed a free students’ union, workers began to vote out state-appointed union leaders, ministers were grilled on television about their policies, and there was public discussion about the horrors of the Stalin era. This was too much for Russia’s rulers. In August 1968 they sent massive numbers of troops into the country and dragged key government figures off to Moscow under arrest.

  They expected to be able to crush the dissent overnight, but the immediate effect was to deepen and widen it. There was limited physical resistance to the Russian tanks, but enormous passive opposition. Russia was forced to allow the Czechoslovakian government to return home with a promise to bring the dissent under control. It was nine months, interspersed with demonstrations and strikes, before this promise was fulfilled. Eventually Russia succeeded in imposing a puppet government which silenced overt opposition by driving people from their jobs and in some cases imprisoning them. Stalinist state capitalism was to run Czechoslovakia for another 20 years.

  Yet the ideological damage to the Stalinist system was enormous. Internationally the events revived the doubts people on the left had felt in 1956. Most of the Communist parties of western Europe condemned the Russian occupation, if only because doing so made it easier to collaborate with social democratic and middle-class political forces at home. Among young people moving to the left it became common to denounce ‘imperialism, East and West’. In eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, the membership of the ruling parties became less and less bound by any real ideological commitment – joining the party was a career move, no more and no less.

  Even the problems which the US faced in Vietnam were to some extent a product of the long boom. It was the Tet Offensive which pushed the war to the centre of the world stage in 1968. But Tet was not an outright defeat for US forces. The US boasted at the time that it had retaken control of the cities – even if, as a general admitted in one case, ‘We had to destroy the city in order to s
ave it.’ Tet represented the turning point in the war because it persuaded key sections of big business that the US simply could not afford the cost of maintaining control of the country. The US was spending no more on the war than it had in Korea. But the intervening boom had seen the rise of Japanese and West German capitalism, and the US could not afford to meet the challenge of their economic competition as well as pay the cost of a land war in Vietnam. As it was, the war gutted President Johnson’s scheme for a ‘Great Society’ programme of welfare expenditure which he hoped would make his reputation and provide long-term stability for US society.

  Finally, in all the advanced capitalist countries the long boom had led to a massive increase in the number of students. Everywhere the state sponsored a huge expansion of higher education as it sought to increase the competitiveness of its national capitalism. In Britain, where there had been only 69,000 students at the outbreak of the Second World War, there were almost 300,000 by 1964. The growth also produced a qualitative change in the make-up of the student population. Whereas in the past it had been drawn overwhelmingly from the ruling class and its hangers-on, it came to be composed mainly of children of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, of workers. The colleges in which the mass of students studied were increasingly large, patterned on uniform designs and concentrated the students in much the same way as workers were concentrated in workplaces. Student protesters in Berkeley, California, complained of ‘knowledge factories’.

  Students came together in these places for only three or four years, before moving on to very different class destinations in wider society. But the conditions in which they found themselves could create a community of feeling and interest, capable of driving them to collective action. Something else could have the same effect – the ideological tensions in wider society. These existed in a concentrated form in a milieu in which thousands of young people – as students of sociology, literature, history or economics – were expected to absorb and articulate ideological themes.

  It meant that issues raised in wider society could be explosive in the colleges. So, for example, the student struggles in Berlin grew out of the police killing a protester during a visit by the despotic Shah of Iran; in the US they grew out of horror at the war against Vietnam and in solidarity with black struggles; in Poland they grew out of protests against the imprisonment of dissidents; in Czechoslovakia as part of the opposition to the Russian occupation.

  Struggles which began over student issues rapidly generalised to tackle the whole character of society. This was shown most dramatically in France. The authorities reacted to small-scale student protests over conditions by shutting the whole of Paris University and sending in the police. Growing numbers of students, horrified by the police violence, joined in the protests until the police were temporarily driven from the whole Left Bank of the city on the ‘night of the barricades’ (10 May). The student movement came to symbolise successful opposition to the whole order over which de Gaulle reigned, with its authoritarianism and willingness to use armed police to break strikes and protests. Responding to pressure from below, the leaders of the rival union federations called for a one-day general strike on 13 May – and were astonished by the response. The next day, emboldened by the success of the general strike, young workers initiated an occupation of the Sud Aviation plant in Nantes. Other workers copied their example, and within two days the entire country was undergoing a repetition of the occupations of 1936–but on a much bigger scale. For a fortnight the government was paralysed, and much of the discussion in those parts of the media which continued to appear was of the ‘revolution’ that was occurring. In desperation de Gaulle fled secretly to the generals commanding the French armed forces in Germany, only to be told his job was to bring the agitation to an end. That he was able eventually to do so was only because promises of wage increases and a general election were enough to persuade the unions and, above all, the Communist Party to push for a return to work.

  Even before the May events the spread of student struggles internationally was leading to a new popularity for the language of revolution. But until May such talk still tended to be framed by the ideas of people like Herbert Marcuse, with their dismissal of workers. The characteristic slogans spoke of ‘student power’. May changed that. From then on there was a growing tendency to make a connection between what was happening and the events of 1848, 1871, 1917 and 1936 – and in some cases with what had happened in 1956. Marxist ideas, marginalised in mainstream intellectual life in the West for two decades or more, suddenly became fashionable. And 30 years later ageing intellectuals right across the western world were still enthusing over or bemoaning the impact of ‘the sixties’.

  It was not only culture in the narrow intellectual sense which felt the influence of 1968. So did many elements of wider ‘mass’ and ‘youth’ culture. There was a challenging of the stereotypes with which young people had been brought up. There were radical changes to dress and hairstyles, with the wide-scale adoption of fashions previously associated only with ‘underground’ minorities. The use of recreational drugs (mainly marijuana, amphetamines and LSD) became widespread. More importantly, a growing number of Hollywood films challenged rather than propagated the American Dream, and some pop music began to take up themes other than sexual desire and romantic love.

  In the US the initial ‘movements’ – the civil rights and black liberation movement, the anti-war movement, and the student movement – gave birth to others. They inspired Native Americans to take up the struggle against their oppression, and gays in New York to fight back against raids on their clubs – founding the Gay Liberation Front. The experience of the movements also led thousands of women to challenge the inferior role allotted to them in US society – and, all too frequently, in the movements as well. They founded the Women’s Liberation Movement, with demands questioning the oppression women had suffered since the birth of class society, and found an echo among women who had no direct connection with the movement. The fact that the majority of women were beginning to be part of the employed workforce for life and relished the independence it gave them was finding an expression.

  The new impasse

  The wave of radicalisation did not end with 1968. The biggest student protests in the US came in 1970. Colleges throughout the country were occupied in the week after National Guard troops shot dead students at Kent State University in Ohio for protesting against President Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. In Greece the student movement erupted in 1973, with the occupation of the polytechnic in the centre of Athens shaking the military junta which had ruled the country for six years, and helped to ensure its collapse seven months later. In West Germany the universities continued to stand out for several years as ghettos of left-wing (mainly Maoist) agitation in the midst of a generally apolitical country.

  However, there was an important shift in several countries after 1968. The students ceased being the centre of left-wing opposition. In Italy the workers’ movement became central after the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, when metal workers occupied their factories over wage contracts. In Spain, too, the workers’ movement played a central role from late 1970 onwards, so weakening the regime in the last years of Franco’s life that his heirs rushed through ‘democratic’ reforms almost the moment he died in 1975. In Britain activity by trade unionists, much of it in defiance of their union leaders, so damaged the Conservative government of Edward Heath that he called an election on the question of ‘who runs the country?’ early in 1974 – and lost.

  Students had sometimes been able ignite struggles which involved workers, but how the struggles ended depended on the workers’ organisations. This was shown clearly in France in May 1968, when the unions and the Communist Party succeeded in bringing the general strike to an end against the objections of the best-known student leaders. It was shown again in Italy, Britain and Spain during 1975–76. The Christian Democrats in Italy, the Tories in Britain and Franco in Spain were unable to
curtail the workers’ struggles by themselves. Governments could only do so by signing agreements with the union leaders and workers’ parties – called the ‘historic compromise’ in Italy, the ‘Social Contract’ in Britain and the ‘Pact of Moncloa’ in Spain.

  The effect in each case was to curtail the action of workers just as the long boom was coming to an end – lowering people’s guard just as a knockout punch was about to be directed at them.

  There was another area of the world where the student radicalism of the late 1960s led to a wave of workers’ struggles in the 1970s – the southern ‘cone’ of Latin America. The late 1960s saw a near uprising in the Argentinian city of Cordoba, 296 and a wave of land occupations which challenged the Christian Democrat president of Chile. In both cases the drive for change from below was channelled in constitutional directions.

  In Argentina it became centred on the demand for the return from exile of the post-war dictator, Perón. He had ruled at a time when high world prices for Argentina’s agricultural exports had translated into relatively high wages and welfare provision for its workers. People believed that his return would bring back the good times. It was a message repeated by rival Perón supporters of the left and right – and even by a powerful urban guerrilla organisation, the Montoneros. In fact his eventual return resulted in no gains for workers, but unleashed an onslaught by the right and by the military for which the left was unprepared. After Perón’s death the military felt strong enough to take power directly into its own hands. A whole generation of left-wing activists, numbering tens of thousands, were murdered or ‘disappeared’.