by Tony Judt
To an older generation of Marx scholars, and to the established Marxist parties, this perverse insistence upon the very writings that Marx himself had chosen not to publish seemed deeply unserious. But it was also implicitly subversive: if anyone could just go to the texts themselves and interpret Marx at will, then the authority of the Communist (and in this case also the Trotskyist) leadership must crumble, and with it much of the justification for mainstream revolutionary politics as then understood. Not surprisingly, the Marxist Establishment fought back. Louis Althusser—the French Communist Party’s leading theoretician, an internationally known expert on Marxism and a teacher at France’s École Normale Supérieure—built his professional reputation and passing fame upon the claim to have constructed a firewall between a ‘young’, Hegelian Marx and the ‘mature’, materialist Marx. Only the later writings, he insisted, were scientific and thus properly Marxist.163
What Communists and other conservative Marxists rightly foresaw was how easily this new, humanist Marx could be adapted to contemporary tastes and fashions. The complaints of an early-nineteenth-century Romantic like Marx against capitalist modernity and the dehumanizing impact of industrial society were well adapted to contemporary protests against the ‘repressive tolerance’ of post-industrial Western Europe. The prosperous, liberal West’s apparently infinite flexibility, its sponge-like capacity to absorb passions and differences, infuriated its critics. Repression, they insisted, was endemic in bourgeois society. It could not just evaporate. The repression that was missing on the streets must perforce have gone somewhere: it had moved into people’s very souls—and, above all, their bodies.
Herbert Marcuse, a Weimar-era intellectual who had ended up in Southern California—where he handily adapted his old epistemology to his new environment—offered a helpful conflation of all these strands of thought. Western consumer society, he explained, no longer rested upon the straightforwardly economic exploitation of a class of property-less proletarians. Instead it diverted human energy away from the search for fulfillment (notably sexual fulfillment) and into the consumption of goods and illusions. Real needs—sexual, social, civic—are displaced by false ones, whose fulfillment is the purpose of a consumer-centered culture. This was pushing even the very young Marx further than he might have wished to go, but it attracted a broad audience: not just for the few who read Marcuse’s essays, but for many more who picked up the language and the general drift of the argument as it acquired broad cultural currency.
The emphasis upon sexual fulfillment as a radical goal was quite offensive to an older generation of Left-wingers. Free love in a free society was not a new idea—some early nineteenth-century Socialist sects had espoused it, and the first years of the Soviet Union had been distinctly morally relaxed—but the mainstream tradition of European radicalism was one of moral and domestic rectitude. The Old Left had never been culturally dissident or sexually adventurous even when it was young: that had been the affair of bohemians, aesthetes and artists, often of an individualistic or even politically reactionary bent.
But however discomfiting, the conflation of sex and politics presented no real threat—indeed, as more than one Communist intellectual took pains to point out, the new emphasis on private desires over collective struggles was objectively reactionary. 164 The truly subversive implications of the New Left’s adaptation of Marx lay elsewhere. Communists and others could dismiss talk of sexual liberation. They were not even bothered by the anti-authoritarian aesthetic of a younger generation, with its demands for self-government in the bedroom, the lecture hall and the shop floor; all that they perhaps imprudently dismissed as a passing disturbance in the natural order of things. What caused far deeper offence was the emerging tendency of young radicals to identify Marxist theory with revolutionary practices in exotic lands, where none of the established categories and authorities seemed to apply.
The core claim of the historical Left in Europe was that it represented, indeed in Communism’s case incarnated, the proletariat: the blue-collar industrial working class. This close identification of Socialism with urban labor was more than just an elective affinity. It was the distinguishing mark of the ideological Left, separating it from well-intentioned liberal or Catholic social reformers. The working-class vote, especially the male working-class vote, was the foundation of the power and influence of the British Labour Party, the Dutch and Belgian workers’ parties, the Communist parties of France and Italy and the Social Democratic parties of German-speaking central Europe.
Except in Scandinavia, the majority of the working population had never been Socialist or Communist—its allegiances were spread right across the political spectrum. Traditional Left-wing parties were nonetheless heavily dependent on the votes of the working class and thus identified closely with it. But by the mid-1960s this class was disappearing. In the developed countries of Western Europe miners, steelworkers, shipbuilders, metalworkers, textile hands, railway men and manual workers of every sort were retiring in large numbers. In the coming age of the service industry their place was being taken by a very different sort of working population.
This ought to have been a source of some anxiety to the conventional Left: trade union and party memberships and funds depended heavily on this mass base. But even though the incipient disappearance of the classical European proletariat was widely announced in contemporary social surveys, the older Left continued to insist upon its working-class ‘base’. Communists especially remained intransigent. There was only one revolutionary class: the proletariat; only one party that could represent and advance the interests of that class: the Communists; and only one correct outcome to the workers’ struggle under Communist direction: the Revolution, as patented in Russia fifty years before.
But for anyone not wedded to this version of European history, the proletariat was no longer the only available vehicle of radical social transformation. In what was now increasingly referred to as the ‘Third’ world, there were alternative candidates: anti-colonial nationalists in North Africa and the Middle East; black radicals in the US (hardly the third world but closely identified with it); and peasant guerillas everywhere, from Central America to the South China Sea. Together with ‘students’ and even simply the young, these constituted a far larger and more readily mobilized constituency for revolutionary hopes than the staid and satisfied working masses of the prosperous West. In the wake of 1956, young west European radicals turned away from the dispiriting Communist record in Europe’s east and looked further afield for inspiration.
This new taste for the exotic was fuelled in part by contemporary decolonization and the aspirations of national liberation movements, in part by the projection on to others of Europe’s own lost illusions. It rested on remarkably little local knowledge, despite an emerging academic cottage industry in ‘peasant studies’. The revolutions in Cuba and China especially were invested with all the qualities and achievements so disappointingly lacking in Europe. The Italian Marxist writer Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi waxed lyrical over the contrast between the miserable condition of contemporary Europe and the post-revolutionary utopia of Mao’s China, then at the height of the Cultural Revolution: ‘In China there are no signs of alienation, nervous disorders or of the fragmentation within the individual that you find in a consumer society. The world of the Chinese is compact, integrated and absolutely whole.’
The peasant revolutions in the non-European world had a further attribute that appealed to West European intellectuals and students at the time: they were violent. There was, of course, no shortage of violence just a few hours to the east, in the Soviet Union and its satellites. But that was the violence of the state, of official Communism. The violence of third-world revolts was a liberating violence. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously explained, in his 1961 preface to the French edition of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the violence of anti-colonial revolutions was ‘man recreating himself . . . to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to de
stroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.’
This self-abnegating admiration for alien models was not new in Europe—Tocqueville had long ago remarked upon its attractions for the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia of eighteenth-century France, and it had once played a part in the appeal of the Soviet Revolution itself. But in the 1960s the example of the Far East, or the far south, was now being held up for European emulation. Student radicals in Milan and Berlin were urged to imitate successful oriental stratagems: in a revealing combination of Maoist rhetoric and Trotskyist tactics, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke urged his followers in 1968 to undertake ‘a long march through the institutions.’
For their conservative elders, this casual invocation of extraneous models illustrated the undisciplined ease with which the venerable revolutionary syntax of old Europe was unraveling into an ideological Babel. When Italian students proposed that, in the new service economy, universities constituted the epicenters of knowledge production and students were thus the new working class, they were stretching the terms of Marxist exchange to the limit. But at least they had dialectical precedent on their side and were playing within the accepted rules. A few years later, when Re Nudo, a Milanese student paper, proclaimed ‘Proletarian Youth of Europe, Jimi Hendrix unites us!’, dialectics had descended into parody. As their critics had insisted from the outset, the boys and girls of the Sixties just weren’t serious.
And yet—the Sixties were also an intensely significant decade. The third world was in turmoil, from Bolivia to South-East Asia. The ‘Second’ world of Soviet Communism was stable only in appearance, and even then not for long, as we shall see. And the leading power of the West, shaken by assassinations and race riots, was embarking on a full-scale war in Vietnam. American defense expenditure rose steadily through the mid-sixties, peaking in 1968. The Vietnam War was not a divisive issue in Europe—it found disfavor all across the political spectrum—but it served as a catalyst for mobilization across the continent: even in Britain, where the largest demonstrations of the decade were organized explicitly to oppose US policy. In 1968 the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign marched many tens of thousands of students through the streets of London to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, angrily demanding an end to the war in Vietnam (and the British Labour government’s half-hearted support of it).
It says something about the peculiar circumstances of the Sixties, and the social background of the most prominent public activists, that so many of the disputes and demands of the time were constructed around a political agenda and not an economic one. Like 1848, the Sixties was a Revolution of the Intellectuals. But there was an economic dimension to the discontents of the hour, even if many of the participants were still oblivious to it. Though the prosperity of the post-war decades had not yet run its course and unemployment in Western Europe was at a historic low, a cycle of labor disputes throughout Western Europe in the early sixties hinted at troubles ahead.
Behind these strikes, and those that were to come in 1968-69, was some discontent at declining real wages, as the post-war growth wave passed its peak; but the real source of complaint was working conditions; and in particular relations between employees and their bosses. Except in the distinctive cases of Austria, Germany and Scandinavia, management-worker relations in European factories and offices were not good: on a typical shop floor in Milan—or Birmingham, or the Paris industrial belt—resentful, militant workers were overseen by intransigently autocratic employers, with very little communication between them. ‘Industrial relations’ in parts of Western Europe was an oxymoron.
Much the same was true in parts of the service and professional world too: France’s national Radio and Television organization, the ORTF, and the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, to take just two prominent cases, seethed with resentful technical staff, from journalists to engineers. Traditional styles of authority, discipline and address (or, indeed, dress) had failed to keep pace with the rapid social and cultural transformations of the past decade. Factories and offices were run from the top down with no input from below. Managers could discipline, humiliate or fire their staff at will. Employees were often accorded little respect, their opinions unheeded. There were widespread calls for greater worker initiative, more professional autonomy, even ‘self-management’ (autogestion in French).
These were issues that had not featured prominently in European industrial conflicts since the Popular Front occupations of 1936. They had largely escaped the attention of unions and political parties, focused as they were on more traditional and easily manipulated demands: higher wages, shorter hours. But they overlapped readily enough with the rhetoric of the student radicals (with whom shop-floor militants had little else in common) who voiced similar complaints about their overcrowded, poorly managed universities.
The sense of exclusion, from decision-making and thus from power, reflected another dimension of the Sixties whose implications were not fully appreciated at the time. Thanks to the system of two-round legislative elections and presidential election by universal suffrage, political life in France had coalesced by the mid-Sixties into a stable system of electoral and parliamentary coalitions built around two political families: Communist and Socialists on the Left, centrists and Gaullists on the Right. By tacit agreement across the spectrum, smaller parties and fringe groups were forced either to merge with one of the four big units or else be squeezed out of mainstream politics.
For different reasons, the same thing was happening in Italy and Germany. From 1963, a broad Center-Left coalition in Italy occupied most of the national political space, with only Communist and ex-Fascist parties excluded. The Federal Republic of Germany was governed from 1966 by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats who, together with the Free Democrats, monopolized the Bundestag. These arrangements ensured political stability and continuity; but as a consequence, in the three major democracies of western Europe, radical opposition was pushed not just to the fringes but out of parliament altogether. ‘The system’ seemed indeed to be run exclusively by ‘them’, as the New Left had for some time been insisting. Making a virtue of necessity, radical students declared themselves the ‘extra-parliamentary’ opposition, and politics moved into the streets instead.
The best-known instance of this, in France during the spring of 1968, was also the shortest-lived. It owes its prominence more to shock value, and to the special symbolism of insurgency in the streets of Paris, than to any enduring effects. The May ‘Events’ began in the autumn of 1967 in Nanterre, a dreary inner suburb of western Paris and the site of one of the hastily constructed extensions to the ancient University of Paris. The student dormitories at Nanterre had for some time been home to a floating population of legitimate students, ‘clandestine’ radicals and a small number of drug-sellers and users. Rent passed unpaid. There was also considerable nocturnal movement to and fro between the male and female dormitories, in spite of strict official prohibitions.165
The academic administration at Nanterre had been reluctant to provoke trouble by enforcing the rules, but in January 1968 they expelled one ‘squatter’ and threatened disciplinary measures against a legitimate student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for insulting a visiting government minister.166 Further demonstrations followed, and on March 22nd, following the arrest of student radicals who attacked the American Express building in central Paris, a Movement was formed, with Cohn-Bendit among its leaders. Two weeks later the Nanterre campus was closed down following further student clashes with police, and the Movement—and the action—shifted to the venerable university buildings in and around the Sorbonne, in central Paris.
It is worth insisting upon the parochial and distinctly self-regarding issues that sparked the May Events, lest the ideologically charged language and ambitious programs of the following weeks mislead us. The student occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent st
reet barricades and clashes with the police, notably on the nights of May 10th-11th and May 24th-25th, were led by representatives of the (Trotskyist) Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, as well as officials from established student and junior lecturer unions. But the accompanying Marxist rhetoric, while familiar enough, masked an essentially anarchist spirit whose immediate objective was the removal and humiliation of authority.
In this sense, as the disdainful French Communist Party leadership rightly insisted, this was a party, not a revolution. It had all the symbolism of a traditional French revolt—armed demonstrators, street barricades, the occupation of strategic buildings and intersections, political demands and counter-demands—but none of the substance. The young men and women in the student crowds were overwhelmingly middle-class—indeed, many of them were from the Parisian bourgeoisie itself: ‘fils à papa’ (‘daddy’s boys’), as the PCF leader Georges Marchais derisively called them. It was their own parents, aunts and grandmothers who looked down upon them from the windows of comfortable bourgeois apartment buildings as they lined up in the streets to challenge the armed power of the French state.
Georges Pompidou, the Gaullist Prime Minister, rapidly took the measure of the troubles. After the initial confrontations he withdrew the police, despite criticism from within his own party and government, leaving the students of Paris in de facto control of their university and the surrounding quartier. Pompidou—and his President, De Gaulle—were embarrassed by the well-publicized activities of the students. But, except very briefly at the outset when they were taken by surprise, they did not feel threatened by them. When the time came the police, especially the riot police—recruited from the sons of poor provincial peasants and never reluctant to crack the heads of privileged Parisian youth—could be counted on to restore order. What troubled Pompidou was something far more serious.