Watts 1968 and All That

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1968 and all that...

Michael Watts Prog Hum Geogr 2001 25: 157 DOI: 10.1191/030913201678580467 The online version of this article can be found at: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/25/2/157
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Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 157188
The Progress in Human Geography lecture
1968 and all that . . .

Michael Watts
Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2308, USA
Abstract: The year 1968 was a global insurrection but the geography of its genesis and of its legacies remains poorly understood. In relation to the outpouring of work critical of the events of the sixties, and of 1968 in particular, by commentators on the political right and left, this essay attempts to rethink the nature of these global events and traces three paths from 1968, each of which represents a distinctive globallocal articulation. It is argued that, while there are many different sorts of 1968s, what they each bequeathed was a rethinking of the politics of the possible, and they unleashed a long march through the institutions which have left an indelible mark on the politics of the contemporary era. The essay concludes with some reflections on the legacy of 1968 for the idea of radical democracy and of real Utopias. Key words: geopolitics, nongovernment, radical democracy, real Utopias, sixties, social movements.
Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, ones gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumont on the inner wall of the circus like structure [of the Waterloo Panorama]. This then, I thought, as I looked around about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was (Sebald, 1996: 12425). So let us not talk falsely now, The hour is getting late. Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding (1968)
Even though all visible traces are gone, said Umberto Eco of 1968, it profoundly changed all of us (Newsweek, 22 December 1986: 49). In Ecos paradoxical formulation a revolutionary moment that leaves no trace is a larger, and now dominant, narrative of the sixties in which the tropes of failure, defeat and melancholia figure centrally. The year 1968 was a failed, indeed a doomed revolution that came to haunt a generation. In short, the epitaph of 68 has been written many times over. I want to offer a geography of this faceless revolution, to chronicle and inventory its invisible traces in our time and, in so doing, to see in 1968 and its aftermath not a death narrative but, if I may deploy the title of David Harveys (2000) new book, Spaces of hope.
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Eulogy for a sixty-eighter
On 22 January 2000 my friend and colleague Bernard Quinn Nietschmann passed away after a long struggle with esophageal cancer. He was 58 years old. Mr Barney (an appellation traceable to his days on the Miskito coast) was a spellbinding speaker and teacher, a consummate cultural geographer and, latterly, a tireless activist. In the tradition of Berkeley geography, Barney was a great and committed fieldworker, but he was equally a fine wordsmith and an exceptionally gifted photographer. He put his uncanny ability to integrate image and text to great effect in his scholarship long before it became academically fashionable to do so. All these skills were much in evidence in his classic but, in my view, radically underappreciated book, Between land and water (1974), an arresting account of the transformation of fishing livelihoods among Miskito communities along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua during the Somoza period. Like all great studies it simultaneously illuminated the power and originality of a particular theoretical vantage point cultural ecology in his case but also its limits, its silences and its failure fully to grasp the crisis he sought to explicate. The tenor and character of his work changed dramatically in the aftermath of the Sandanista victory in 1979 when he was radicalized, not by the revolutionary rhetoric of the FMLN but rather by the Sandanista and Reaganite policies in relation to indigenous peoples. From the early 1980s onward he became less an academic in any standard sense of the word than an activist and public intellectual, committed to what he called Fourth World Peoples struggles. It was a political epiphany that landed him in deep trouble with the left, and the Bay Area Sandanismo in particular. In the face of some adversity he adopted, nevertheless, a principled position one which with hindsight can be seen to have been quite correct which sustained him through the second half of his professional life. Much ink has been spilled on the theory of action research but Barneys working life provides a model of collaborative and participatory practice that we could all do well to emulate. His Maya atlas (1997), produced in conjunction with the Toledo Maya Cultural Council and the Toledo Alcades Association, is a wonder of committed, critical and engaged scholarship. These personal reflections upon a life lived have an affinity to the subject of my remarks namely, the 1960s and alternative ways of practicing politics. Barney Nietschmann was, unequivocally, a sixties man. He seemed to me to operate most comfortably, indeed to flourish, on the margins and at the periphery of the mainstream. An intellectual guerilla, and a brilliant hit-and-run artist, Barney was deeply suspicious of power and authority. And his sixties credentials were impeccable. He completed his graduate training in Madison a center of student political activism in the USA during the mid-to-late sixties and spoke with characteristic elan about the enrags who famously bombed a local bank (he had been tipped off!). Bill Denevan tells the story of how Barney walked out on his final in 1967, scribbling on the examination script: more important things are happening in the streets. During the famous teaching assistant strike of 1970 the foundational moment for the union drives now underway at New York University, at the University of California system and elsewhere Barney stood firm on the picket line when Glenn Trewartha and Richard Hartshorne, two formidable and formidably conservative personalities, attempted to enter Science Hall, the home of the geography department. If the sixties, whatever else they may have bequeathed us, entailed a loosening up of the rigidities of academia, then Bernard Nietschmann was
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assuredly in the vanguard of the movement. To experience his teaching and his academic modus operandi as I did in the early 1970s at Michigan was to bear witness to a remarkable, in its own way revolutionary, spectacle. It condemns one, or condemned me at any rate, to a life of nostalgia, to spend much time in the incomplete and messy museum that is our memory of the past. That said, I suspect that Barney would not have agreed with much of what I have to say now, and perhaps would have had little interest in it. He became very disenchanted with both the left and with social theory of any stripe as the nineties wore on and he was, by temperament, much too disposed to look forward to future worlds rather than to cast a glance backward as I am about to do. II A great rehearsal
Suddenly it was obvious that those long-ago utopian efforts to change the shape of the world [1968] were a young peoples rehearsal, preparatory to adult events that only came later (Berman, 1996: 16, emphasis added). Twas in another lifetime, full of toil and blood . . . blackness was a virtue, and the road was full of mud. Bob Dylan, Shelter from the storm, 1974
On 31 January 1968, in the early hours of the morning of the third day of Tet (the Vietnamese New Year), Vietnamese liberation forces, across a front 600 miles long, launched an assault on 140 major cities and provincial towns in South Vietnam. It was an auspicious beginning to the year. The year 1968 proved to be the annus mirabilis as Time magazine christened it, a year that defined and in some ways signaled the end of the 1960s. To glance through the new glossy coffee-table book 1968: marching in the streets (Ali and Watkins, 1998) produced by Tariq Ali, is a salutary experience not only because it is a coffee-table book, rendered as such by a central figure in the British New Left, but also because it returns us to the 12 months of turmoil and heady bedlam that was sixty-eight. The year 1968 was, like 1848, a world historical moment. To use Alis vernacular, 1968 was a year that those who lived through it, on either side of the political divide, will never forget (1998: 7). With his customary bluntness, and it needs to be said with an ear for the bon mot, Abbie Hoffman put it thus: living in America I expect to get killed . . . . (cited in Avedon, 1999: 4). In his marvelous account of that year, Ronald Fraser (1988: 354) noted an anti-authoritarianism that challenged almost every shibboleth of Western society. Yet for all its merits, his is an unnecessarily parochial judgement, one which underestimates the global resonance of sixty-eight. The year 1968 felt as if the Tet offensive detonated a series of explosions around the globe, all somehow linked together in some sort of inexorable, and often terrifying logic. The Vietnamese war, said Gran Therborn (1968: 10), has produced a simultaneous multiplication and radicalization of resistance to it. A final verdict on the legacy of the cataclysmic events of 1968 is surely not in, but nobody questions their gravity and historical significance. A simple, and very partial, historical inventory of that legendary year still retains its astonishing shockvalue:
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The Tet offensive and the massacre at Mai Lai, the assassinations of M.L. King and Robert Kennedy, the May vnements in Paris (including the strike of 10 million French workers), Socialism with a Human Face in Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the high-tide of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Medellin convention that launched Liberation Theology, students rebellions in Tokyo, Delhi, Berkeley, Rio and Berlin (indeed just about everywhere), the massacre of Mexican students in Tlateloco Square, Regis Debrays imprisonment in Bolivia (and marriage in jail), growing turmoil and civil strife in Ireland and Palestine, the debacle surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the so-called hot winter in Pakistan (and later in Italy), the early stirrings of feminist protest surrounding the Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, the end of American growth liberalism, the collapse of the British pound, and the first rumblings of a major economic crisis, and, lest we forget, the election of Richard Nixon and the move across Washington, from the Pentagon to the World Bank, of a beleaguered and morally contorted Robert McNamara.
Just to blink was to miss something, said Christopher Hitchens (1998: 101). Fortune magazine, surveying the events of spring 1968 judged, with good reason, that American society had been shaken to its roots (quoted in Horowitz, 1970: 185). And then there was the pure spectacle of it all, what James Miller in Democracy is in the streets (1994: 5) called the carnivalesque atmosphere of confusion. Bakhtinian revelry flooded the streets, calling forth a new politics of display, a desire to do politics differently. Need I remind anyone that the late sixties produced Jerry Rubin, Alan Ginsberg and company attempting to levitate the Pentagon; the Yippies causing havoc on Wall Street by throwing money on to the floor of the exchange; the Strasbourg Situationists denouncing boredom; the Dutch Provos unleashing pandemonium in Amsterdam by releasing thousands of chickens in rush-hour traffic; the Diggers declaring love a commodity; and not least Ed Sanders and the Fugs setting off on their march on Prague to masturbate on the Soviet tanks? As Charles Dickens (1964: 9), describing another revolutionary moment in A tale of two cities, put it: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, . . . the season of darkness, the Spring of Hope . . . the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light. The fact that the jury on 1968 is still out 30 or so years on must surely turn to some degree on the enormous complexity, perhaps the incomprehensible diversity, of what was a global insurrection. Some commentators, among them Paul Berman (1996), see the events of 1968 as sufficiently disparate that only their unanticipatedness and drama provide a (rather spurious) sense of coherence and unity. In China students and workers were lodged in the vanguard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution instigated by Mao to block the capitalist roaders; in Mexico students bravely protested the autocratic political monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and were savaged as a consequence; in the USA, the imperialist war in southeast Asia, civil rights struggles and the alienated culture of consumer capitalism supplied the fuel for the fire of personal emancipation. Prague, Paris, Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Berlin, Calcutta and Caracas were different yet again. Inevitably, others have seen in 1968 a radical failure, tragically flawed Utopian movements that indeed were bound to fail. But the events of 68 were revolutionary not because governments were, or might have been, overthrown but because a defining characteristic of revolution is that it abruptly calls into question existing society and presses people into action. Sixty-eight was, to quote Saint-Just, a revolutionary theorist of an earlier epoch, a public moment, an instance in which the social contract is simultaneously reviewed and reconstituted through action (cited in Feenberg and Freedman, n.d.: 147). Walter Benjamin (1967) says in Reflections that revolution is the moment a moment of danger and urgency when the human species traveling in the train of history reaches for the emergency brake. It is a metaphor which, for the long months of 1968, retains its allure.
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Of course there is no singular 1968 any more than there is a monolithic entity called the sixties. But the events of the era, and of 1968 in particular, were a disruption, a derangement of the complacent bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society (Sayres et al., 1984: 2). All of which is to say that a return to the period, and to the inventions and reinventions of 68, is perfectly defensible and desirable because so much was at stake. The sweeping political challenges posed during the sixties, to say nothing of the innovations of the New Left, constitute a veritable treasury whose present dilapidation impoverishes us (Caute, cited in Lasky, 1988: 12; see also Caute, 1977). Yet so much of what the radicals and activists rendered as a new politics, an anti-institutional struggle . . . which transforms the publics of classical bourgeois society into critical publics (Donolo, 1970: 57), has become so wrapped in cant and the worst sort of revisionism, so clouded by the admitted excesses and confusion of the times, so discredited by the defeats and reversals that followed the turmoil of 1968, and so silenced by the perils of nostalgia (in which the new generation of activists are rightly loathe to participate), that it has become impossibly difficult to reclaim what was, and indeed what remains, so radical and relevant about the sixties. Rewriting the sixties during the 1980s produced what Julie Stephens (1998: 4) calls the death narrative: a revolutionary and emancipatory project dashed on the shoals of political immaturity and idealism. Sadly, the fact that so many of the sixties generation themselves have retreated from, or are reticent to return to, the period (see Klatch,1999) has ceded the territory to the public intellectuals of the New Right Roger Kimball, David Frum, David Horowitz, Gertude Himmelfarb and their formidable publishing apparatuses, for whom the sixties is an object of reproach, marking the decline of just about everything. Yet none of the sixties anxieties and concerns have receded of course (how could they?); the ur-texts of 1968 by the likes of Cohn-Bendit, Debord, Oglesby, Fanon retain their exhilaration, excitement and freshness. Public moments never recede. So I want to speak about 1968 but also about all that . . . . The codicil all that stands in for two things. In contradistinction to 1968, it refers to the sixties, that long decade as Fred Jameson (1988) sees it, stretching from about 1958/59 to 1972/73. Arthur Marwicks massive new encomium of the period, The sixties, provides a shopping list of the distinctive features of the decade (1998: 1720): new subcultures, the growing influence of youth, new forms of popular culture (TV/music), massive improvements in material life, racial, class and family upheavals, new forms of self-expression especially fashion, civil and personal rights, multiculturalism, and what he sees as the dialectical oscillation between a liberal measured judgement and extreme reaction. The mere mention of the sixties, and the counterculture and the New Left, arouses strong emotions on both sides of the Atlantic. No other event in American life not the thirties or the second world war is continually capable of calling leading politicians to account (did you fight, did you flee, did you inhale?). Both George W. Bush and Al Gore have, in the recent presidential election, been put to this very test (The New York Times, 22 June 2000: A29). For Allan Bloom, the self-appointed arbiter of American culture and taste, the sixties ideologues were crypto-fascists, as destructive as the Nazis. A countercultural bacillus infected and permeated society with all sorts of new ideas and generated, as a consequence, a culture of confrontation. Enlightenment in America, he opined, came close to breathing its last during the sixties (1987: 56). The year 1968 marks, then, a sort of condensation of the convulsive transformations incubated
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between the late 1950s and the oil crisis, the economic recession and the dollar devaluation of the early seventies. It is a period which, as Jamesons (1988) essay brilliantly reveals, encompasses a sort of homologous coherence across political philosophy, cultural production, economic cycles and political practice. Johnsons decision to bomb North Vietnam, Dylans decision to go electric at Newport and the appearance of Pynchons Crying of lot 49 were somehow all of a piece. From the vantage of the Euro-Atlantic economies, the sixties movements contained a number of striking paradoxes. First of all their anti-materialism emerged at the very apotheosis of a stunning postwar consumer boom, the exalted golden age of spectacular growth, as Marshall Berman calls it (1974). John Updikes marvelous poem Superman captures both the suffocating material abundance and the alienation wrought by American Fordism at full throttle:
I drive my car to the supermarket The way I take is superhigh A superlot is where I park it And Supersuds are what I buy
Secondly, the sixties attack on liberalism recall the spell-binding speech by SDS leader Carl Oglesby: think of the men who engineer the war who study the maps, give commands, press buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge . . . the President. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They all are liberals (cited in Kazin, 1995: 210; emphasis added) occurs precisely at the high tide of what Randall Collins (1996) calls growth liberalism, at the very zenith of the Great Society. And not least, the shock troops of the insurrection were, as Alain Tourraine (1970) and others noted at the time, the professional classes, the intellectuals and students and conspicuously not, the national strike in France in 1968 notwithstanding, an insurgent working-class or indeed a vanguard left party as such. To put it crudely, one might say that it was the social rather than the economic contradictions of consumer capitalism what was referred to then as authoritarian or repressive capitalism which burst into the open. These sixties paradoxes are part of the indisputable sense of division and rupture which pervades the period. In this sense Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in America divided (2000) are right to draw a parallel between the 1960s and the 1860s that is to say with the American Civil War. Norman Mailers brilliant novel The armies of the night (1968), based on his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, made the same point (Mailer noting that there was now a side he could join). The 1960s plunged Americans back into anguished scrutiny of the meaning of their most fundamental beliefs and institutions . . . They reacted with varying degrees of wisdom and folly . . . all those things that make us human (Isserman and Kazin,2000: 12). All that gestures to this anguished scrutiny, to the wisdom and folly of a period of civil war, in some respects a global civil war. There is, however, a second meaning of and all that taken from a book of the same name: 1066 and all that (Sellar and Yeatman, 1931). A stock-in-trade of British schoolchilden since the 1930s, it is a magisterial spoof of English history, of the production of historical knowledge and historical convention, and the practice of teaching about the past. Entries are short, epigrammatic and very funny:
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Enclosures: At the same time was the Agricultural Revelation which was caused by the invention of turnips and the discovery that Trespassers could be prosecuted. This was a good thing, too (1931: 94).
At the end of each chapter are test questions:

1. Sketch vaguely with some reference to the facts the South Sea Bubble 2. Write not more than two lines on Napoleon Buonaparte 3. Ruminate fiercely on Lord Cardigan (1931: 116)
As the authors put it, the object of this history is to console the reader. No other history does this. History is not what you thought it is. It is what you can remember (1931: vii). 1066 and all that was intended to debunk the view that history was one damn thing after another, to challenge the idea that historical narrative is a taken-for-granted compendium of the facts. So my invocation of and all that in this second sense is to alert us to the complexities of historical reception and meanings of historical events. Ideas, practices and events of momentous import are always fought over and contested but there is the ever-present danger that they become, as Beatrice Webb once said of Adam Smiths ideas, the gospel of the employer (she actually said: by what silent revolution of events could the scientific expression against class tyranny and oppression of the many by the few be changed into the Employers Gospel of the 19th century cited in Rothchild, 1992: 88). The 1960s in particular tend to travel poorly. By what silent revolution, then, could they be transformed into the neoliberal gospel of the 1980s, into Marwicks aperu that, from its very inception, 1968 was proto-capitalist, imbued with the entrepreneurial, profit-making ethic (1998: 13), or into Mazowers judgement in Dark continent that 1968 created a fragmented and bitterly dogmatic Left, tempted by violence and unwilling to comprehend the scale of capitalisms triumph (1998: 319)? The death narrative achieves its final victory by positing what Carl Boggs (1995) calls a total break as popular struggles purportedly came to an explosive and sudden halt between 1968 and 1970. Perhaps this revisionism explains a particular form of sixties silencing and forgetting. It is as if 1968 is the buried child, to use the title of a Sam Sheppard play and another sixties man, the product of an excess, of a capacious libido best forgotten. Which leads necessarily to the question: why disinter the body of 1968 now? Why should I be interested in exhuming the child of the sixties myself, 30 odd years on, during an era in which, to quote Perry Andersons recent and forbiddingly bleak assessment of the current political conjuncture, American capitalism has resoundingly reasserted its primacy in all fields and virtually the entire horizon of the 60s generation has been wiped away (2000: 10)? Revolutionary figures Che, Fanon, Mao seem as remote, if I may return to 1066 and all that, as Ethelred the Unready. Well, one reason is an accident of history. When I was asked to give this lecture three years ago (1998) we were in the midst of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of 1968. I thought then and now that these treatments were by and large trivial. Endless fluff on French former Maoists, now well heeled capitalists, comparing cars at the Opus caf during the soixante-huitards anniversary; or the return of so-called Prada-Meinhoff radical chic fashion; or former activists like Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Health, braying that 68 was the last great exercise in style (Newsweek, 1 June 1998: 45). In keeping with this tradition of trivialization, Hollywood now has on offer its own celluloid analysis of Abbie Hoffman and the sixties in the appalling film by Robert Greenwald entitled Steal
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this movie. Recent history has not been kind to the 1960s. The industrial boom of sixties books has continued unabated. On this side of the Atlantic one thinks of Todd Gitlins The sixties (1987) and The twilight of common dreams (1995), Paul Bermans A tale of two Utopias (1996), Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazins America divided (2000) and Richard Avedons big picture book The sixties (1999). In Europe, Arthur Marwick (1998), Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman (1987), Heinz Bude (1995), and Luisa Passerini (1996) have all weighed in with their own tomes. Sixties as memoir and nostalgia is not an exclusively Euro-American preoccupation either. There are already a clutch of new books published in Mexico on 1968 prompting the local critic Hector Aguilar Camin to proclaim: Im sick of the inventions of 68 (Newsweek, 28 September 1998: 34). What characterizes this prodigious output is a curious combination of defeat and deviancy. On the one side (the left) stands a failed political project and on the other (the right) stand the excess, decay and depravity of a successful cultural revolution. The sixties hold a special place for the neoconservatives not only because it drove them to the right (indeed the sixties launched the New Right) but also because it marked the loss of civility and the gradual slouch toward Gomorrah as Judge Robert Bork described the period (cited in Kimball, 2000: 14). It was a delirium of the postwar generation, a pathology of youth and immaturity:
Out of this ragtag and bobtail culture, sanctioned by their friendly neighborhood psychiatrist, blessed by the stage army of defrocked priests, defended by jurists weary of the law, and cheered on by aging intellectuals and poets longing for lost puberty, they went on to the ultimate four letter obscenity: the bomb (home made) (Lasky, 1988: 3).
Across the Atlantic, Roger Scruton (1998: 49) also deploys the language of infantilism and childishness too: the sixties were a sort of arrested development, a refusal to pass over into adulthood in which jerks and junkies . . . enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame. Among former New Left activists like David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh and Peter Collier who fled the movement the animus is palpable (Farber, 1988). Collier talks of an oedipal revolt on a grand scale; a no-fault acting out . . . we were political Katzenjammer kids whose mischief turned homicidal somewhere along the way (cited in Staples, 2000: 10). In some Parisian intellectual circles there is a neo-Toquevillian reading of the sixties echoed by David Brooks in Bobos in paradise in his claim that the countercultural sixties and the achieving 80s [have combined] into one social ethos (2000: 34). The one realm, he says, where the language of sixties radicalism remains is business: Bohemia is the culture of the ruling class (bobos) reconciling the bourgeois love of order with the Bohemian love of emancipation. Gertude Himmelfarbs One nation, two cultures (1999) and Roger Kimballs The long march (2000) are simply the latest salvos in this sixties boomlet. Roger Kimballs angry and bitter ideological rant traces a successful cultural revolution back to the excesses and moral depravity of the Beats. To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, says Kimball (2000: 274), we live in that moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties. Like Communism, the 1960s was, he says, born wrong. In Himmelfarbs account the hegemonic counterculture became dominant by defining deviancy up, that is to say, liberating people from the stabilizing, moralizing and socializing bourgeois values: [T]he cultural revolution denigrated those virtues work, thrift, temperance, self-discipline that are conducive to economic improvement and social
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mobility; . . . and the Great Society . . . drew [minorities and the poor], into a closed society of chronic dependency (1999: 19). This double-movement eviscerated the culture of the 1950s Himmelfarbs model of moral and ethical rectitude for everything from sex to religion to absolute standards of truth and relegated it to a dissident inferiority. Quite why on earth anyone would seek to restore the culture and sentiments of 1950s Kansas or Florida is entirely bewildering. But I digress. But even those who identify in some way with left, while recognizing that the 1960s incubated something healthy and politically worthy (feminism, sexual tolerance, environmentalism, civil rights), are also quite disillusioned and sad. Marshall Berman (1974: 36), in his stunning Faustian account of the sixties, sees the street activism as a mirror image of the hotshot stock operators on Wall Street: high risk, extravagant and built on flimsy foundations. Michael Kazin in The populist persuasion (he was a 68er himself) says the 1960s radicals tore off the ideological blinders worn by past friends of the people and donned some thick ones of their own, that the movement discredited the old order without laying the political foundation of a new one (1995: 218). Isserman and Kazins final verdict resonates with many of the former denizens of the New Left: the 68ers were flawed but earnest idealists (2000: 12). Even Regis Debray (1978), the revolutionary theorist of the Left Bank, the architect of foco guerilla theory and liberated zones, and someone who might be expected to cast a nostalgic glance toward the soixante-huitards, now claims that 1968 stabilized class relations; it was, to use his language, a giant servo-mechanism that accomplished the opposite of what [it] intended (1978: 51). Deluded Maoism produced, in short, the free market. And for those liberals like Arthur Marwick who can see something good in just about anything, the solution is to forget politics, or at least organized politics, altogether and see the sixties like Himmelfarb and Kimball as a cultural revolution but as a redemptive one, echoing Philip Larkins great poem Annus Mirabilis:
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty three (Which was rather late for me) Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles first LP
But here too the sixties came up short. Emancipatory rhetoric succumbed to a preoccupation with every nuance of the private psyche, a culture and politics of consumption, most especially of an encounter culture of consumption of narcissistic contemplation, personal selfhood and the stroking of the victim role (Burner, 1995: 22223). The contraflow is no more than a trickle. There are those renegades like Bill Reading, author of The university in ruins (1997), who emphasize (rightly) the positive repercussions of the sixties for the university (see Antipode, 2000); there is the occasional lost soul like Chalmers Johnson, former cold warrior and Vietnam warmonger who, in his new book Blowback (2000), has apparently discovered the downside of American imperial power and now wishes in fact that he had stood with the anti-war protest movement during the sixties. But in general the historical canvas is black and foreboding, and the assessment bleak and pessimistic. A diagnosis of failure is, of course, perfectly understandable because 1968 proved to be a sort of climacteric. Within a few years the bubble of revolutionary rhetoric had burst. All the signs were reversed, says Perry Anderson in The origins of postmodernity,
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all the political dreams of the sixties were snuffed out (1998: 91). The May revolt was absorbed without trace as political identities splintered, the Czech spring and socialist reformism were smashed, the luster of the guerilla movements tarnished, and the flashes of labor unrest in Europe dimmed by the late 1970s. Soon enough the vitality of the students movements had either soured or drifted into violence and terror signaled by the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction, Front Line and the Red Brigades. It is to be expected that the guerillas fared no better (Daniels, 1989) despite the continued roar of revolutionary overthrowal during the 1970s in Nicaragua, Iran and elsewhere. Che Guevara, the iconic sixties revolutionary, has been the subject of three massive and, for the most part, unflattering studies (Anderson, 1997; Castaeda, 1997; Taibo, 1997), and now appears as a fanatic, consumed by overwhelming hatreds, whose words, says Alma Guillermoprieto, are foolish and empty now (1997: 104). Even Jorge Castaeda (1993) in Utopia unarmed, who has a sympathetic ear for the sixties rhetoric, draws attention to the abject failure of the left in Latin America in the wake of the 1960s, a stunning catalogue of defeat in which Communist ideas were congenitally alien (1993: 25) to the region, in which liberation movements lacked internal democracy, and oppositional politics were crippled by clandestiny. Whether the voices emanate from London or Paris or New York or Mexico City, the death narrative reigns supreme. A final nail in the historical coffin of the sixties is hammered home by Sunil Khilani (1993) who sees the events of 1968 in France as a gesture of pure nothingness, made by and for intellectuals, concluding, in exuberant hyperbole, that it would not be unjust to see 1968 as an interpretation in search of an event (1993: 122). The year 1968 was, in sum, nothing at all. As befits someone who is concerned to show how the revolution was exorcised by poststructuralism, 1968 was a free-floating signifier in search of content. It was a sort of grand fiesta of bullshit. It is this nihilistic and trivial fate that I seek to contest. So I want, then, to examine the events of 1968 from a particular vantage point which is both geographical and historical: what was its geography, and what is its historical legacy? In exploring these questions I want to pick up on the notion that 1968 was a harbinger, a great rehearsal: The explosions of 1968 and their aftermath can be interpreted as symptom of the fact that the system is approaching its historical asymptote. The year 1968, with its successes and failures, was thus a prelude, better a rehearsal, of things to come (Arrighi et al., 1989: 11011, see also Singer, 1970). The year 1968 almost looks as though it had been designed, noted Eric Hobsbawm in his tenth anniversary remarks, to serve as some sort of signpost (1978: 130, emphasis added). If 1968 was indeed a rehearsal or a signpost of things to come, what exactly was it a rehearsal for, what was it signaling? Was the student unrest anything more than the mere reflection of a postwar generation coming of age? To what extent did it prepare the ground for the anti-state neoliberalism of the 1980s, or postmodern political disengagement (Callinicos, 1989)? Did this rebelliousness achieve anything more, as Donald Sassoon suggests in his magisterial history of socialism, than the weakening of the traditional left without leading to any alternative (1996: 406)? Or do we conclude, with Paul Berman (1996: 19), that the insurrection in middle class customs was a prelude for liberal democracys finest hour?
Suddenly it was obvious that the authentic political revolution of our era was now, not then . . . The radical exhilarations of circa 1968; the awkward modulation from revolutionary leftism to liberal democracy on the part of rebellious-minded people around the world; the outbreak of a new and different revolutionary exhilaration
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in 1989; finally the unresolvable debate about world history and the idea of progress; these have been the four main stations in the political journey of the generation that came of age in the student rebellions of [1968].
Bermans account is, I think, at once too easily fooled by the powers of hindsight, and too inattentive to the labyrinthine reverberations, and the long-term accommodations and disruptions of revolutionary change (Wallerstein, 1990). What such accounts studiously ignore is a sense of what was built, what German New leftist Rudi Dutschke, echoing Gramsci, called the long march through the institutions (cited in Gitlin, 1987: 422). The year 1968 bequeathed a working against the established institutions while working within them (Marcuse, 1972: 55), a project to build counterinstitutions and liberated zones as Dutschke put it in his electrifying address to the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin in 1968, and it is to the politics (and not to culture narrowly construed) of this long march that one must necessarily turn to grasp the complex meanings of the political repertory that was to follow the great rehearsal. How might the geography of 1968 be written? I want to approach the question in terms of three geographical moments, and then turn to legacies that each generated. III Moment 1: global insurrection, transnational politics
The insurrections of 1968 proved to be a global phenomenon; there was hardly any region of the world, noted Hobsbawm, which was not marked by the spectacular and dramatic events of 1968 (1978: 131). According to a survey in Le Monde over 70 countries had major student actions during that year (Figure 1). Between October 1967 and July 1968 there were over 2000 incidents worldwide of student protest alone (Anderson, 1980; Katsiaficas, 1987); if one were to add the related worker actions and other nonstudent demonstrations each country in the world would, on average, have had over 25 incidents over the nine-month period. But 1968 was global in another regard, namely, the committed internationalism of the movements which were indisputably multicultural in orientation and transnational in aspiration. The Parisian communards were internationalist through and through. Parisian enrag Daniel CohnBendit was after all a German Jew; the Situationists certainly neither knew nor encouraged any national identitification; and whatever one may say of the New Left it was never parochial in outlook. Cross-border networks, transnational alliances and the global traffic in ideas activists were often reading the same foundational texts by Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong drew London, Mexico, Prague, Paris and Delhi into a revolutionary maelstrom. The year 1968 provides a vivid illustration of what Keck and Sikkink (1998) call activism beyond borders. The American womens movement inspired European counterparts; festivals and protest brought students together across borders; the Polish Commandos were afforded a heroic status by many among the New Left. It is revealing that none other than Vaclav Havel was at Columbia in the heady days of the 1968 occupation! Crossborder traffic in ideas 1968 was without precedent as regards its participants reading and writing books (Hobsbawm, 1977) was matched by a footloose revolutionary vanguard, in tandem generating something like a radical diaspora unprecedented in the twentieth century. The Vietnam war functioned as a tremendous galvanizing force in the 1960s, a sort of global catalyst, and this provides 1968 with its third source of global inflection. Gran
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Figure 1 Major student disruptions, 196869 Source: Adapted from Kidron and Segal, 1981
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Therborn, writing in the New Left Review, noted that the dialectic of the war has transferred the ideology of the guerillas into the culture of the metropolis (1968: 4). He might well have pointed to how opposition to the war stimulated student movements in, for example, Belgium, Thailand and Sweden, and they in turn with the assistance of the mass media (the whole world is watching), helped make the events resolutely global. And lest we forget, the affairs of 1968 unfolded at a crucial juncture in the cold war which had the effect of linking national and world affairs in radically new ways. As a result of the strategic reverberations within the global geopolitical system, fundamental shifts on the local, national or global level resonated with and grew out of each other (Fink et al., 1998: 2). The centrality of colonial wars in two of the most important crucibles of sixties radicalism, France and the USA, raises a fourth sense of sixties globalism, what Jameson (1988: 180) calls politicocultural models and the resistance to wars aimed precisely at stemming the new revolutionary forces in the Third World. Third worldism, for better or worse, put on offer the heroic guerrilla (the year of the heroic guerilla as Fidel Castro dubbed it in his 1968 New Year speech), a mobile and transnational figure if ever there was one. For revolutionary theorist Regis Debray (1967), the guerilla foco (operation) was so mobile as to be beyond geography narrowly construed, occupying the space between town and country, operating as it were in the wilderness of the Sierra Mestra. Cuba, China, Vietnam and the postcolonial African states provided the model of radical practice for the New Left and in this way 1968 helped shatter the Eurocentric idea that the advanced proletariat of the West [brings] socialism as a gift to the backward masses of the periphery (Amin, 1974: 603). The third world was formative for not only the sixties New Left but also for those of the October tradition and, as Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 437) again reminds us, to the entire radical community who needed something more than social security and rising real wages as the pillars of the New Jerusalem. So often it was to the peripheral other Ho, Mao, Fidel that the 1968ers turned for their reference points, their heroes and their hopes.1 Third worldism corroborated not only a sense of revolutionary internationalism, but also confirmed that there were models of revolution and liberation outside, and beyond, both the Communist and Social Democratic traditions. Finally, the 1960s were inextricably part of a long boom that simultaneously transformed and coupled the world in fundamentally new ways. The sixties, says Jameson (1988: 186), is the period when capital is in full dynamic and innovative expansion. When Eric Hobsbawm in The age of extremes characterizes the period as the most rapid and dramatic revolution in human affairs to which history has record (1994: 286), he is of course referring to the extension of capitalist industrialization to large portions of the globe. New clusters of capitalism merged in Latin America, northeast Asia and elsewhere; indeed the defining attributes of the original industrialization in northwest Europe proletarianization, urbanization, commodification now became a global experience (Callinicos, 1999: 258). A common ancestry in industrial modernity instantiated the common cause (the language is deployed by Fink et al., 1998: 3), from which the well-spring of oppositional energies issued forth. Opposition to racial, patriarchal and economic exploitation, deepening the concept of freedom, enlarging the base of radicalism and revolution, the extension of the democratic process, and an emphasis on direct action; these were the defining expressions of a global New Left (Katsiaficas,1987: 2327). Freedom, justice and self-determination a complete disaffec-
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tion with the system, with a program of human relations, as Tourraine (1970) observed resonated deeply between East and West, North and South. IV Moment 2: the geopolitics of anti-systemic movements
If 1968 must be grasped in global terms it is equally clear that the uneven development of the world system also conditioned the composition and character of its diverse movements. I want to start with the now dated notion of three worlds the first world of advanced capitalisms, the second world of actually existing socialisms, and the third world of what in the 1960s was dubbed underdevelopment and to suggest that there are three corresponding geopolitical moments to 1968 (Figure 1). Arrighi et al. (1989) see these moments as global oppositional, what they call anti-systemic movements which stand as counterpoints to a broadly construed Old Left (symbolized by the European, Russian and Mexican revolutions of 1848, 1917 and 1906). What emerged in the 1960s, in their view, might be read as a sublation of 1917, in the same way that 1848 was a revolution against the counter-revolution of 1815 (itself a sublation of 1789). In their historical schema, the global New Left accused the Old Left of bureaucratic sins: of weakness, of corruption, connivance, neglect and arrogance (1989: 102). These anti-systemic movements, while sharing a fear of state authoritarianism, of bureaucratic structures and of establishment powers, assumed a particular, color drawing upon the geopolitical palate of three distinctive political economies: social democratic consumer capitalism, party Communism, and postcolonial nationalism.2 This trio of geopolitical articulations of 1968, each containing a complex history of oppositional politics long predating the explosive events of the late sixties, might be glossed as follows. The first is an Eastern moment represented by the Prague Spring. These movements are anti-party or anti-bureaucratic standing against the political closure, party corruption and hyper-statism of the Communist system. This is in fact the history of all socialist states in the period, but the efforts to de-Stalinize can be traced clearly to the 1950s and 1960s experiments in self-management and decentralization in Yugoslavia, to the Great Cultural Revolution in China and to socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia. Beginning with the Novotny mini-liberalization of 1962, the Czech movement envisaged a socialism that was democratic, pluralist, stable and efficient, a model whose significance stretched well beyond its borders. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, unleashed in 1965 and reaching its mad zenith in 1968, is less obviously an anti-systemic struggle. We now know it was in large measure a manufactured mobilization from above that ultimately degenerated into chaos, terror and further party consolidation. But Wang (1999) has shown, nevertheless, that at its inception Lin Biao and Maos efforts to overcome the sclerosis of state socialism were radically anti-bureaucratic. So-called New Trends movements bloomed albeit briefly during the period 196668, even if their aspirations were ultimately subverted and crushed. That a search for new ways in the socialist bloc should lead to the Soviet invasion of Prague on the one side, and to the consolidation of the party state and the Tiananmen massacres on the other, should not, however, belittle the anti-bureaucratic, anti-systemic and popular democratic impulses of those who sought to reform from within. The second movement is a western moment, represented by the New Left and the
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new anti-authoritarian or new social movements represented by Berkeley, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. New Left traces are evident in the 1950s and especially in the debates over the Hungarian invasion and de-Stalinization. By the 1960s, however, these earlier efforts to rethink the Communist project and the rigidities of the Octoberist tradition had met up with an altogether different constituency disaffected with the mass Utopias of any ilk (Buck-Morss, 2000). Anti-war impulses figured centrally also, but so did individual liberation, sexual tolerance, civil rights, an expanded sense of freedom, opposition to cultural imperialism and consumerism and a deep sensitivity to nonclass forms of exploitation. Here too national diversity was marked; the Trotskyist, Maoist and anarcho-syndicalist groupuscules in Europe, with their critique of orthodox Communist Party practice and praise of auto-gestion, had no direct parallel in the USA, Brazil or Japan. A new politics of recognition (Fraser, 1995) provided a central plank from which these anti-authoritarian movements were pitted against the professional politics of a stale social democratic consensus and of a crass consumer culture. Like their east European counterparts, they shared a hostility to ideological dogmatism (on both right and left), to cultural uniformity and to bureaucratic authority. And the third is a Southern moment, or perhaps more properly Fanonite postcolonial movements. Here the object of critique is the nationalism and institutionalized elite politics (the corrupt national bourgeoisie as Franz Fanon, would see it) of the first generation of independent third-world states. The origins of such opposition also predate the sixties and can be traced to the postwar insurgents and guerillas in Latin America and, indeed, to some of the anti-colonial movements in Africa, and Asia. By the 1960s the nationalist wardrobe looked worn and threadbare. A broad swath of Latin American and African regimes had descended rapidly into military dictatorship, and the first generation of political elites whether Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt or Nkrumah in Ghana were quick to abandon any serious commitment to popular democracy. From this conjuncture emerged a veritable pot pourri of guerilla impulses there were at least 30 major guerilla wars during the 1950s and 1960s! student-led democratic movements, worker and union struggles, and a nascent culturalism seen in the rise of the Muslim brotherhoods and aggressive ethnic communalism for whom corrupt state apparatuses, and a questionable record of nation-building, provided the fuel for their political aspirations. Whatever their obvious ideological and tactical differences, Maoist militants in Peru, middle-class students in Mexico City, Naxalite organizers in India and Muslim reformists in Cairo all shared a radical disaffection from the postcolonial state and the decrepit political cronyism of peripheral capitalism. V Moment 3: local articulations
Sixty-eight was unequivocally global and regional yet it was necessarily, and irreducibly, local too. A number of commentators have noted national differences but the fact remains that in an array of locations from Prague to Peking, from Cairo to Cape Town, from Berkeley to Berlin each movement possessed a distinctive local identity within the circumference of a global wave of New Left protest. Articulation, a term I have taken from Stuart Hall (1996) which refers to the simultaneous rendering of an identity (youth, student, hippie) and linking that identity to a political project (Maoism, self-management, participatory democracy), lends itself well to the geo-
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graphical interpolation of multiple 1968s. Precisely how geography and articulation produced particular identifications has been almost wholly ignored by geographers, a lapse that is made all the more curious by the obvious geographical inspiration of key actors (psycho-geography for the Situationists, the wilderness for foco guerillas) and practices (the Parisian barricades or Chinese long march). This is not the place to attempt to catalogue how particular 1968s were interpolated in particular settings an incomprehensibly massive task in any case. But I can at least sketch something of the variety and the geographical specificity of such local articulations (see Dirlik, 1998) while retaining a sensitivity to the three geographies the three moments described previously. 1 Japan
The 1968 student actions grew from shimin (citizen) movements of the 1960s (Kurihara, 1998; Sasaki-Uemura, 1998). So-called Anpo movements were precipitates of the renewal of the USAJapan Security Treaty which granted to the USA the right to intervene in the event of domestic unrest. A combination of cold-war politics and the dubious legitimacy of US hegemony in the region produced a violent internal struggle between ruling conservative and opposition parties which in turn stimulated a whole raft of new social movements. Anpo simultaneously met up with four other sixties actions: the anti-Vietnam war movement (Beheiren), environmentalism (dating back to the Minamata poisoning), farmers struggles (most notably in relation to the Narita airport) and the communist and Trotskyist student movements which grew up around the famous Uno Kozo school of Japanese Marxism. 2 India
The year 1968 was ushered in by a riot in Connaught Place in Delhi, part of a growing student mobilization during the 1960s whose highwater marks were 1966 and 1970. Much of this activity was explicitly seen as an attack on comprador capitalists and on a deeply institutionalized and bureaucratic Congress Party pursuing its staid Nehruvian socialist path. If Mao and cultural questions figured prominently in these movements, they were nonetheless diverse enough to include anti-English instruction in Rajasthan, and anti-Hindi attacks by Tamil students in Mysore. While the Indian movements were national in scope they were especially active in Bengal around an increasingly fragmented Communist movement. Yet in the Indian case it was peasant insurgents that were to prove decisive, giving rise to the Naxalite guerilla movement (aided by Maoist militants from Calcutta) which drew inspiration from the nineteenthcentury Indian jacqueries, from the 1940s rural insurgencies and from the political successes of Marxist parties in Kerala during the 1960s (Nossiter, 1982; Samanta, 1984). 3 Egypt
February 1968 saw major student demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria after a long period of student quiescence. Student militancy was detonated by Middle East
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geopolitics and more precisely the devastating Egyptian defeat by Israeli forces in 1967. Furthermore, there was deep disaffection with Nasserite nationalism what the students called the intelligence and military state precipitated by, among other things, the failed land reform, endemic corruption and by economic recession. Later in the year the movement was reactivated by the attempt to democratize the university but the tensions were left unresolved, only to re-emerge later in the 1970s (Dirlik, 1998). 4 Ethiopia
A March 1968 fashion show at University College Addis Ababa triggered an outburst of violence against female students and the first serious discussions of western cultural imperialism. A student movement that had hitherto addressed questions of academic freedom now turned its attentions to the cultural dimensions of colonialism. By 1968 Africanity had become the dominant idiom in which Marxist ideas (notably through the Crocodile Club founded in 1964) confronted the feudal relics of Emperor Haile Selassies regime. China and Cuba proved to be the key reference points whereas the Soviet model was studiously ignored. Transnational organizational links to Ethiopian students organizations in Europe and North America proved to be a distinctive feature of the Ethiopian protests. 5 Britain
The British New Left, which had its origins in the 1950s in the fallout from the Hungarian invasion and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, encompassed three major political trends: dissident communism based on nineteenth-century native radical traditions, independent socialism, and theoretical Marxism of a continental European persuasion (Chun, 1996; Kenney, 1994; Elliot, 1998). Each contributed to different strands within the New Left (socialist humanism, Marxist culturalism, workers control), and intersected with a number of ideas of peculiar British inflection and origin (for example, R.D. Laings psychoanalysis and Hegelian existentialism). The Vietnam war engaged a youthful anti-imperialist movement but the student movement was shallow and in many respects unimportant. The May Day manifesto of 1968 (Williams, 1968), drafted by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and others associated with the New Left Review, has a very different tenor from comparable manifestos written in Paris (The Amnesty of blinded eyes) or the USA (the Port Huron statement). 6 China
In large part outside the global traffic of 1968, China experienced a disastrously violent and internally generated insurgency. Ironically, the Cultural Revolution acquired a political cach, and was exported to Europe, North America, Africa, south Asia and elsewhere. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (196676) was a fabricated revolution from above, designed to cleanse opposition from within the party that ultimately got out of hand. What began as an invocation of the oriental commune and self-reliance devolved into factionalism and internecine warfare between the Red
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Guards, students, workers and party members across the country. In the name of egalitarianism and mass mobilization from below, a staggering 17 million Red Guard youth the children of Mao went down to the countryside between 1967 and 1978. One could continue almost indefinitely but that is not the point. There were many 1968s. Yet there is nothing in their site-specificity which might give reason to doubt what Fink et al. (1998: 12, emphasis added) call 1968 as a coherent historical phenomenon . . . which explain[s] the simultaneity of the crises that erupted throughout the world. VI The Long March and the politics of the possible
Lets categorically refuse the ideology of PROFIT and PROGRESS or other pseudo-forces of the same type. Progress will be what we want it to be. Lets refuse the trap of luxury and necessity the stereotyped needs imposed separately upon all, to make each . . . in the name of the natural laws of the economy . . . (We are on the way, LAmnistie des yeaux creves, Paris, May 1968). A subject matter, moreover, whose features ran so far beyond the conceptual power of ordinary politics that it required a wild leap of the imagination to see that it was precisely politics that was being put in question (Oglesby, 1969: 6).
To return, then, to the question of rehearsal, how might 1968 be understood as a global prelude amidst its local diversity? I want to take seriously Jean-Paul Sartres assertion that 1968 demanded the enlargement of the field of the possible (cited in Feenberg, 1998: 25). It unleashed a polemical and practical struggle a wild leap of imagination as Oglesby put it around the very constitution of the political. The purpose of the sixties, says French historian of 1968, Herve Hamon, was to change life in the social arena, to distrust belonging to the State including the deadly closures that inevitably issue from professional politics (1998: 11). The year 1968 addressed issues studiously ignored by the dominant political tradition the limits of reason, the meanings of personal emancipation, and the unconscious origins of the desire of domination, participatory democracy and self-management. It unleashed, said Jrgen Habermas, a process of fundamental liberalization (cited in Leggewie, 1998: 292). Insofar as the public sphere was compelled to take account of private lives to enlarge the space of the political the 1960s were in some senses deeply individualist and libertarian (why dont we do it in the road), and it is to be expected that the populist elements within these discourses were articulated in quite disparate forms of political projection. Rebecca Klatchs new book A generation divided (1999) shows precisely that these libertarian currents produced in the USA the birth of a New Left and a New Right with similar sorts of trajectories. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were both born in 1960, each harbored a hostility to the Vietnam war and to the state, and both disintegrated in similar ways in 1969. A desire to control ones own life contained a radical individualism susceptible, when circumstances changed, to a neoconservative subversion by the likes of Mrs Thatcher or Mr Reagan. Robin Blackburn lamented in his reflections on Britain: instead of controlling your own place of work it became a questioning of owning your own house (cited in Fraser, 1988: 364). And yet in their inclusiveness, the 1968 movements were a cri de coeur against the
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world system in which Old Left and Old Right had both failed. They provided an incubus for new sorts of activism across the political spectrum in which suspicion of authority, individual freedom, decentralization and anti-statism were all constitutive of doing politics differently. This was as true for ornery students in North America, who suffused their anti-capitalism with a critique of a suffocating parliamentary politics, as it was for their eastern European comrades who wished to reform socialism and push the frontiers of human and political rights. Lin Chuns (1996) synopsis of the British New Left in the 1960s rightly noted a fresh surge of emancipatory and democratic Utopianism. If the sixties inspired, to use Daniel Cohn-Bendits turn of phrase, a radical democratic tradition (cited in Fraser, 1988: 361), it immediately needs to be said that there was no single form of political practice corresponding to such a tradition. What distinguished the movements were their multiple and hybrid forms a striking illustration of what Hardt and Negri call the multitude against empire (2000: 394). To simplify matters vastly I propose to emphasize three important anti-capitalist expressions within this radical democratic opening: the Marxist (seen, for example, in the Maoist and Trotskyist Parisian groupuscules, some of the British New Left organizations and postcolonial guerilla movements); the social democratic (for example, Charter 77, many of the socialist dissidents, the reformist student movements such as SDS and some democracy-orientated third-world anti-nationalist movements); and the anarchist (the Situationists, the Diggers, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers). Specific political questions feminism, the environment, race, disarmament cut across these broad movements making for enormously complex political hybrids, crossovers and interconnections. Furthermore they differed, often dramatically, in their style of politics the anti-disciplinary politics (no leadership, no platform, no organizations) of say the Diggers versus the vanguardism of some of the extreme left groupuscules and in their organizational forms and tactics. Conflicts between them, needless to say, could be ferocious (memorably between the Diggers and the mainstream of SDS), and often degenerated into excessive fragmentation and dispersal during the seventies. Yet they all took seriously the idea of a sense of democratic incompletion, a call for a popular radicalism so to say. Its emancipatory impulses were expressed through forms of direct action, through anti-disciplinary politics (Stephens, 1998), through new social movements and in the creation of new community organizations and civic institutions. Guy Debord, who had little sympathy either for third worldism or many of the New Left homilies, famously noted that the problem is not that people live more or less poorly; but that they live in a way that is always beyond their control (cited Jappe, 1999: 158). And it seems to me that in seeking to extend control, the movements took up, sometimes in defeat and sometimes by default, Dutschkes metaphorical call to march through the institutions: to question cultural hegemony, to repeal the repressive and authoritarian practices of dominant institutions, and to render political those domains that were conventionally seen to be beyond politics. The point, said the Situationists, was to live instead of devising a lingering death (Situationists, 1970: 90). And it is to the new political practices, to the new organizations created (as much as old institutions they attempted to reform), and to the enlarged role of civil society that the sixties legacy can be made to speak. Hilary Wainwright puts all this nicely into perspective: 1968 led us to see that power comes through building organizations at the base rather than restricting our political paths to the established institutions . . . These
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sorts of transformations need new forms of political power (cited in Fraser, 1988: 364). We now take this complex mix of civic, popular-participatory and extra-parliamentary politics for granted but perhaps we should not. The sixties were central to this way of doing politics and as such they did not so much stop in defeat in 1968 as disappear underground, working on and through institutions, networks and new organization, building in their polyp-like activity a veritable reef of oppositional practice. Wini Brienes (1982), for example, has charted the affinities between the sixties activists and all manner of 1970s and 1980s community organizing in the USA, but the genealogy holds for Latin America where military rule forced militants and former revolutionaries into squatter movements, indigenous peoples struggles, and rural activism (Castaeda, 1993), as much as for the western European autonomen movements that sprung up in the 1970s (and indeed which still flourish) in Italy, Germany and Belgium (Katsiaficas, 1997). Neither should we be surprised that the road from personal liberation to community organizing and direct action, the long march from self-determination to associative and deliberative democracy (Cohen and Rogers, 1995; Hirst, 1997), took the social and cultural sphere as politics. From his perch at Nanterre, Alain Tourraine saw clearly that the consensus around capitalist growth and Keynesian welfarism had witnessed the progressive disappearance of the separation between state and civil society (cited in Hobsbawm, 1977: 243). The vast expansion of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) one expression of voluntary self-government if not participatory democracy is indisputably one part of the sixties extra-parliamentary legacy. The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies estimates for a sample of only 22 countries that NGOs generated $1.1 trillion in revenue, employed 19 million workers and recruited 10 million volunteers (Ryan, 1999). In contrast to Putnams (2000) claim that social capital has collapsed over the last three decades, a deepening of associational and civic life is one of the hallmarks of the post1968 generation. In 1960 each country had, on average, citizens participating in 122 NGOs; by 1990 the number had lept to over 500. Significantly, two-thirds of the NGOs in western Europe have been founded since 1970. There are now in excess of 2 million NGOs in the USA, three-quarters of which have been established since 1968. In eastern Europe, 100 000 nonprofits appeared between 1989 and 1995; Kenya authorizes almost 250 new NGOs each year. Among international NGOs the growth and proliferation are no less explosive. In 1909 there were 176; currently there are over 29 000, virtually 90% of which have been established since the 1960s (The Economist, 22 January 2000: 2526). For someone like Melucci the emergence of such transnationally networked organizations, a sort of global civil society, marks a rupture, a shift from the new social movements of the 1970s to an overarching system of closely interdependent transnational relations (1996: 224) and new forms of governance and partial government. As if to drive home the point, the Rand Arroyo Center, in a recent study sponsored by the US Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, published a report entitled The Zapatista social netwar in Mexico, documenting the grave dangers of an electronic horizontal network of social mobilization which confound fundamental beliefs in virtue of their epistemological approach to politics (cited in Morris-Suzuki, 2000: 63)! It is wildly optimistic to see the vast and differentiated universe of NGOs as unambiguously anti-capitalist, as unalloyed exemplars of radical and popular movements as such (Morris-Suzuki, 2000). Some of the emancipatory zeal has been harnessed by the NGO community but the very existence of dubious hybrid entities such as BONGOs
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(business-organized NGOs) or GRINGOs (government-run NGOs), for instance, exemplifies the extent to which the porous boundary between state and civil society can substitute market-orientated individualism for the radical autonomy of community empowerment. The fact that the World Bank funds NGOs does not alter the fact, nevertheless, that contemporary debates over associationalism, publicizing civil society, pluralizing of the state and voluntary self-governing can be read as the legitimate heir to the 68ers ideological commitment to a participatory democracy and to an enlarged field of the possible (see Arato and Cohen, 1992; Hirst, 1997; Habermas, 1999). VII Three roads from Paris
In the present situation . . . the systems integrative models of mass consumption and the search for social advancement . . . represent in reality the modern form of oppression, which is no longer materialized exclusively in the state. The instrument of capitalist power thus no longer resides so much in the latter as in the submission . . . to models of consumer society and to all the differentiated forms of authority that ensure its functioning (Parisian leaflet, 1968).
If 1968 did indeed produce a long march through the institutions in which community organizations and voluntary self-government did redefine what was political, then the question of rehearsal can be broached from a different angle. Not from the vantage of the forward march of neoliberal hegemony or cultural revolution, but rather from the high-ground of democracy itself. In this way we might say 1968 was a rehearsal for three events each of which, despite the geographical notation implied by my notation, must be understood to stand in for particular forms of political practice within a radical democratic tradition. Each harkens back to a particular road from Paris: Marxist, social democratic and anarchist. 1 1994 Chiapas
Subcommandante Marcos himself was not a sixties man (he was 11 years old in 1968) but this is not the connection I wish to suggest. Rather I want to identify a number of other pathways from 1968. First of all, Chiapas was unthinkable outside of the democratic processes unfurled by the slaughter of Mexican students in Tlateloco Square. In his massive biography of Mexico, Enrique Krauzes notes that 1968 was both the high point of authoritarian power and the beginning of its collapse (1999: 736). Secondly, the genesis of the Chiapas rebellion must be traced to the maelstrom of the 1960s, throwing together the church, Indian movements and left activism. The long fuse of the Zapatista Front was ignited by Bishop Ruiz and the Catechist Apostles movement (liberated by the Medellin episcopal assembly of 1968), by Maoist insurgents in Monterrey and Chihuahua (established in the late 1960s) who helped form SLOP (with Ruiz) and Union de Uniones/Asociacion Rural de Interes Colectivo (ARIC), and of course by the burgeoning of Indian movements brought together in the 1974 Indian conference. The winding trail from the Armed Forces of National Liberation to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation can, and must, be traced to the late sixties even if, as Krause (1999a; 1999b) rightly shows, it was the period between 1983 and 1989 when the Diocese, the Zapatistas (EZLN), SLOP and ARIC worked together that proved to be the revolutionary crucible in which the events of 1994 matured and ultimately
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combusted. And not least, Chiapas is surely unthinkable outside the world market that NAFTA anointed on 1 January 1994 which has its own sixties reference. The year 1968 was in this sense a sort of apogee, marking the end of the golden age of capitalist growth, and the slide into crisis and recession of the 1970s. The dark times of capitalist crisis had returned. The devaluation of the pound in 1967 and the subsequent run on the dollar revealed the limits of President Johnsons guns and butter policy and shattered growth liberalisms ascendancy. Overaccumulation, the growing deficits associated with the Vietnam war and the abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971 led the USA to destroy postwar international arrangements, laying the groundwork for the rise of what is now called the IMFTreasury complex and a regulatory environment which conferred unprecedented freedoms for transnational capital. Global neoliberalism was not born in 1968 but was nourished by it. 2 1999 Seattle
This is not the place to review the police riot in Seattle, the politics of the destruction of Starbucks or the nefarious activities of the TeamsterTurtle alliance, the Ruckus Society or Direct Action Network (see Wainwright et al., 2000). What matters is the obvious fact that the Third Ministerial Conference of World Trade Organization of 29 November4 December 1999 served as a catalyst for an exceptionally well organized NGO movement, transnational in composition, often virtual in political practice and exceptionally effective at taking questions of governance (who governs the world regulatory agencies and for whom?) into the public sphere. Whether the conference would have produced consensus even without the popular demonstrations is perhaps of less significance than The Economists observation that: The battle of Seattle is only the latest and most visible in a string of recent NGO victories (11 December 1999: 20). It was this gesture to the Earth Summit and the multilateral agreement on investment which prompted a tremulous Dean of the Yale School of Management to describe the international NGO community dubbed the NGO swarm as no longer the ragtag protesters of the sixties but a powerful new force, sending nuanced messages sensitive to the anxieties of communities around the world (Business Week, 8 November 1999: 24). Aided and abetted by the new technologies, the Seattle activists returned to the street as part of transnational networks and alliances and, in echoing the spirit and carnivalesque street practices of 1968, placed global institutional democracy firmly on the agenda.3 The political repertoires were, transnationalism notwithstanding, right out of the 1968 handbook (Finnegan, 2000; Smith, 2000). Barbara Epstein (2000) has argued that Seattle differed from the sixties in its focus on global corporations (rather than the state), and in the political pluralism across interest groups. But this contrast is misplaced, I think, and Epstein severs the obvious connections between Seattle and the 68ers rejection of corporate liberalism, their demand to democratize institutions including the state (the WTO is after all a multilateral institution), and their commitment to the tense community of doing street politics. Virtual organizing, transnational networking and the centrality of powerful regulatory agencies should not alter the fact that Seattle (and subsequently the Washington, DC, anti-IMF protest) was Berkeley gone global a multitude against Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
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1989 Berlin
Any account of the revolutions of 1989 would be radically incomplete without reference to the structural weaknesses of the socialist economy, the brittleness of the neotraditional party system, the debilitating consequences of growing integration into the global financial system, the severity of the ecological crisis, the Gorbachev factor and distortions of the military build-up and the cold war itself. To see the fall of the Berlin Wall written into the graffiti of the Latin Quarter requires perhaps a flight of fancy rather than clairvoyance. But the contiguities between Prague and Paris, between Berlin and Berkeley are tangible and compelling. The Czechs were always delighted to point out, said Garton-Ash (1990: 151), that 89 is 68 turned upside down. The year 1968 witnessed its own anti-communist moments in Warsaw, in Prague, in East Berlin, even in Moscow. There had been such fractures in the Soviet edifice before (Hungary in 1956), but the reformist and democratic impulses of 1968 were the same sensibilities to emerge in central Europe three decades later. Secondly, the New Left whether the Situationists or the SDS libertarians had no truck with old style socialism, with the old gray mares of Stalinism, as Tom Nairn called them (Quattrocchi and Nairn, 1998: 106). The French Communist Party, to take the obvious example, had shown itself in 1968 to be congenitally incapable of seizing the revolutionary moment. The writing was indeed on the wall. And not least, as Garton-Ash (1999) and many others have shown, Berlin in 1989 cannot be grasped outside the culture of dissent traceable to the sixties and early seventies. Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and the figures of Ferenc Fehrer, George Konrad and Adam Michnik were not simply exemplars of what Tismaneanu (1999: 4), with a tip of the hat to the sixties, calls critical public intellectuals, but they also stood at the ground zero of 1968 itself. For my generation, said Michnik, the road to freedom began in 1968 (cited in Jacoby, 1999: 11); even Gorbachev described himself as one of the men of the sixties! The dissidents Havel, Kuron and others were sixtyeighters talked of parallel polis, parallel public sphere and dissident subculture deploying the same vocabulary as Parisian and Berkeley radicals. In dress, appearance, in their internationalist links with other political communities in and outside Europe, they were New Left in temper (Tamas, 1999: 183). In this sense Paul Berman is partly right when he says that in regard to Communisms ultimate collapse, Paris was the first to fall (1996: 287). And Prague too. Much could be said about these momentous events but I wish to return to the notion of rehearsal and to the three iterations of popular radicalism. First, the intricate paths and common threads linking the late sixties to Chiapas, Berlin and Seattle are substantive in several senses: they are personal (in the figure of someone like Havel), organizational (for example, the transmutation of the ARNL to the ZANL), political (the enduring concern with radical democracy and critical publics) and ideological (the spirit of 68). And secondly, at risk of sliding into a rigid and unmerited typology of historical pathways from the past to the present, I want to propose each event as the product of a particular 1968: Seattle as an heir to the anarchist movements and their anti-disciplinary politics; Berlin as an offspring of the social democratic, new social (dissident) movements; and Chiapas as unfolding through the Marxist long march from guerilladom to the politics of recognition. None of these paths can accommodate the internal diversity of the events themselves. My purpose is rather to unload the deadweight of the sixties as
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monolith, and to seek to restore to the times, and to the moment of 1968 in particular, a heterogeneity capable of bequeathing multiple legacies around a common vision and a common cause (Macedo, 1997). These three momentous events are not exhaustive or definitive of the long march (they are obviously archetypes). The nonviolent direct action movements in the USA of the 1970s and 1980s (Epstein, 1991), the new rural radicalism in Latin America (NACLA, 2000), the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil (Petras, 1997), or the burgeoning indigenous peoples struggles to which Barney Nietschmann devoted his energies are equally relevant. Neither do I want to infer that 1968 harbors no other important legacies. What was to become a worldwide womens movement took off in the sixties in the USA at the very moment that SDS lost its coherence and vision. Ruth Rosens book The world split open (1999) charts its exhilarating rise from Atlantic City to the first Womens Conference in 1975 and the UN Decade of Women. Whatever one makes of its Malthusian overtones, the UN Population Conference held in Cairo in 1994 can only be read as a signal victory for the feminist position on reproductive rights, namely, as part of a more encompassing platform including health, employment, education and civil liberties. Furthermore, the sixties crisis and what Richard Jolly (cited in Arndt, 1987: 108) of the United Nations Development Program called the growing questioning of Western consumerurbanindustrial models is indisputably key to an understanding of the shift in development thinking from growth theory to redistribution with growthbasic needs programs during the 1970s. Gross national product is no longer the Holy Grail of development. Indeed the critique of growth determinism has now become an orthodoxy itself, enshrined in Nobel Laureate Amartya Sens Development as freedom (1999), but its conditions of possibility, so to say, were forged in the sixties. All this, and much more, is indisputably part of the wave of social transformation that broke on the shores of Paris and elsewhere in 1968. But the great rehearsal of 1968 articulated, more powerfully than anything else, the democratic question and the centrality to it of the nonparty tradition of radical politics. The sixties willed to us a revived sense of self-government and participatory democracy, both nationally and globally. None of this is to suggest that the community of civic groups or the thickening of civil society through NGO activism is an unalloyed good good living, warm and whole, as Michel Foucault once put it (1988: 168). Civil society produces its own incivility in the name of community, association and identity. Nor is it my intention to roll the legacies of 1968 into the grand narrative of liberal democratic triumphalism and the End of History. To do so would return us to Paul Bermans (1996) absurd notion that the sixty-eighters have all slowly come around to see the blinding light of liberal democracy at its moment of triumph. In practice the picture is more complex and sanguine. Perry Anderson put it this way: Democracy is indeed more widespread than ever. But it is also thinner as if the more universally available it becomes, the less active meaning it retains (1998: 77). So how might the rehearsal of 1968 bequeath a different sort of democratic theatre? VIII Real Utopias
Far from bring defeated, the revolutions of the twentieth century have each pushed forward and transformed the terms of class conflict, posing the conditions of a new subjectivity, an insurgent multitude against imperial power (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 394).
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When asked by Henry Kissinger for his assessment of the French Revolution, ChouEn Lai famously responded that it was too soon to tell. Surely this is no less the case for the events of 1968, surrounded as they are in the mists of nostalgia, defeat, injury and extreme partisanship. We are still burdened by misunderstandings, says Herve Hamon (1998: 2). Perhaps. But is May 1968 as he says simply an end in which the demonstrators have eliminated that which they thought they were reviving (1998: 2)? In eliminating their Utopian visions, the sixties in this account paved the way for postmodernism, and the postsixties disengagement with politics as such. Alex Callinicos (1989: 102) dismisses the sixties for precisely this reason:
The political odyssey of the 1968 generation is . . . crucial to the widespread acceptance of the idea of a postmodern epoch in the 1980s. This was the decade when those radicalized in the 1960s . . . began to enter middle age. Usually they did so with all hope of revolution gone . . . [they] became members of the new middle class . . . when the overconsumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism offered this class rising living standards . . . This conjuncture . . . provides the context for . . . postmodernism.
Aging sixties radicals, realizing that the revolutionary moment had passed, cut off their ponytails, disposed of their Ho posters and made for Wall Street. The fact that Jerry Rubin did indeed land up on The Street is for Callinicos and his like a stunning confirmation that the counterculture was co-opted. Revolution was, after all, good for consumer capitalism. As Julie Stephens (1998: 94) put it, the link between commodification and the failure of sixties radicalism is written large in the death of the sixties narrative. And yet this is a deeply suspicious death trip. It vastly exaggerates the powers of co-optation, presumes a stunning duplicity on the part of the activists themselves, it radically misreads the abilities of the Diggers or the Situationsists to see through the veil of the market and not least rushes to judge the marketability of the sixties as an abandonment, as a cop-out, as middle-aged dejection. There is no need for an air-headed nostalgia either as Sheila Rowbothoms (2000) new memoir pointedly points out. But I have stressed the idea of 1968 as a revival and a return, highlighting the radical incompletion of democracy; an acknowledgement that democracy, to quote Norberto Bobbio (1987: 57), has stopped short of the two great blocs of descending and hierarchical power . . . big business and public administration. As long as these blocks hold out against the pressures exerted from below, the democratic transition cannot be said to be complete. This language would not have surprised the enrags in Paris or the militants in Prague or Sao Paulo. It marks something more than Oedipal selfindulgence, or indeed of culture as politics. Ideas of self-government, of participatory democracy, of self-management, even if not fully explored in 1968 and after, speak directly to ways of doing politics differently, of making democracy work better (Couto, 1999). None of this should be read as an unqualified hymnal to 1968. It was a sort of tragedy, as Marshall Berman (1974) says, born of militant activism; it did prefigure in some ways the slide into encounter culture and political fragmentation; and the period laprs Mai was in some regards a shift from paranoia to poststructural hysteria, as Starr puts it (1995: 183). But I have tried to reclaim what I think has been lost, even in the brilliance of Marshall Bermans Faustian account of the period, namely, the political struggle to unite two logics of different provenance, one Marxist, the other libertarian. From this struggle the enlargement of the field of the possible emerged a number of sixties innovations. It is a measure of the conservatism of our era and the capacity to silence
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the past that such innovations are now seen to be so retrograde as to be almost an embarassment to articulate in public: the Situationists and their worker councils, anarchist auto-gestion, the Italian syndicalists and the autonomen movements, the Dutch Provos and their Kropotkinist libertarian communes, the grassroots self-government of the Mexican student strike council, and the oriental commune of the New Trends of Thought in the Cultural Revolution. But they are of a piece, in my view, with the idea of deliberative democracy as an alternative to neoliberal constitutionalism and civic republicanism (Bohman and Rehg, 1997). Deliberative democracy focuses on the deliberative deficit in democratic institutions (Gutman, 1999), that is to say, the process of justifying actual decisions to those who are bound by them. Its focus is the artifactual aspects of associations in which members fix the basic terms of social co-operation including authoritative collective decision-making, distribution of resources and so on. Running through this deliberative process is a concern with governance outside markets and hierarchies and with questions of popular sovereignty, civic consciousness, distributional equity, political equality and state competence (Cohen and Rogers, 1995). Much could said about these debates over real Utopias though curiously geographers have had little to say about them. At any rate, deliberative democracy, in its examination of self-government and association, carries the echo of 1968. And these deliberations are practical experiments. The autonomen movements in Europe are certainly part of this radical tradition, as indeed are some of the projects described by Dick Couto in Making democracy work better (1999) in Appalachia. My own preference, in keeping perhaps with the third worldism of 1968, is to turn to what Sartre in describing sixty-eight called something which came from the outside. In particular I want to close with a mention of two real Utopias, deliberative democratic experiments of the sort that Unger (1998: 5) calls democratic experimentalism: the participatory budgeting in urban Brazil associated with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Abers, 1998; Santos, 1998), and the Peoples Campaign for Decentralized Planning in Kerala, India, attached to the Left Democratic Front (Isaac, 1999). Each of these experiments opens up the development process (urban budgeting, and ward-level development projects) by establishing new forms of decentralized institutional and political frameworks (tinkering, as Unger calls it). Both are examples of participatory democracy, or to return to Unger (1998), of three sources of empowerment: the institutional reconstruction of government, the organization of the economy and systems of rights. At the heart of both participatory budgeting and decentralized planning is the dialectic of institutional and social change that is both liberatory and transformative. Democratic governance, whatever its institutional character, helps to redeem the events of 1968 and to locate it in the great sweep of history in which spaces of hope are constantly sought and created (Harvey, 2000). So the spirit of 1968 lives on, in part through the rehearsals which are now part of a long-running repertory. The outcome and meanings of the sixties are not treasures to be unearthed with an exultant Aha! but as Gitlin notes sand paintings, something provisional, both created and revised in historical time (1987: 433). The year 1968 provided a dystopian definition of revolution and a revived sense of radical democracy through voluntary self-governing associations, and reanimated the idea of deliberative democracy. In reconstituting politics, 1968 was an exemplary case of what Edward Said calls the unstoppable predilection for alternatives (1983: 247). Of course, I write these words at a moment when, if I can quote Hobsbawm (2000) one last time, Pope John Paul
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II is the only figure of authority to criticize capitalism to have listeners in any number. And any sense of self-government in my own village of San Francisco is dwarfed by twenty-something billionaires, palm-pilot capitalists, IPO gurus and the reckless pursuit of money and consumerism that might make even Updikes superman wince. Yet I take heart from the fact that even in Paris, the ground zero of radical defeat, none other than Pierre Bourdieu has emerged as a resonant voice of anti-capitalism and a radical critic of untrammeled globalization. I come here, he said during his speech to striking French workers in 1995, to defend a civilization, to construct a social order not governed solely by the pursuit of self-interest and individual profit. (Bourdieu, 1998: 105). A sixty-eighter pur et dur. Yes, the matters to which 1968 spoke cannot be removed like tonsils or a bad tooth. They have been anaesthetized and in a way hidden from consciousness says Gianni Statera, but nothing excludes the possibility that they will suddenly flare up again (1975: 272). We are still here, said Alice, and we sing still. Acknowledgements This essay was originally delivered as the Progress in Human Geography lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Convention in Pittsburgh on 17 April 2000. I have deliberately retained the spoken and performative qualities of the original presentation precisely to capture the spirit in which it was written. I am grateful to Peter Dicken for extending the invitation to me and to Sharad Chari for research provided. Allan Pred, Gunnar Olsson, Mary Beth Pudup, Jim Glassman, Kent Mathewson, Susie Friedberg, John Pickles, Derek Gregory, Ulf Strohmayer, Neil Smith and David Harvey shared with me their own reflections on the 1960s and all that. The year 1968 never fails to elicit strong opinion. David Harvey was of the view that I had ventured too far into the dangerous territory called nostalgia. After reading the last chapter of his new book Spaces of hope (2000), I can see that I am in good company. Notes
1. Todd Gitlin (1987), in his memoir of the US sixties, dwells upon the student interchanges with Cuba, the chic appeal of the guerilla for political praxis and, of course, the centrality of the liberation struggles in southeast Asia, all of which acted as a political glue holding together a disparate set of political interests and visions. A northsouth axis of solidarity actually displaced to a certain extent Paris or Prague (an eastwest axis), says Gitlin, because the latter was neither sufficiently exotic nor charged with white-skin advanced-nation guilt . . . Vietnam and Cuba confirmed that we had been right all along to feel displaced at home. And not only because the Third World revolutionaries seemed . . . more civilized than the napalming would-be civilizers (1987: 281). 2. Immanuel Wallerstein (1990) has described these movements as anti-bureaucratic, anti-authoritarian and anti-western (a term which seems to me not to capture what was at stake in the movements). 3. In that tradition, see Decadent Action (underbelley.emon.co.uk/decadent/docs/ sickcont.htm), and the Surrealist Movement of the United States (Beasley@mcs.com).
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Progress in Human Geography http://phg.sagepub.

1968 and all that...

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Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 157188

The Progress in Human Geography lecture

1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

Eulogy for a sixty-eighter

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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At the end of each chapter are test questions:

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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1968 and all that . . .

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