The season of celebration of the tumultuous events of 1968 continues in London tomorrow. A World to Win’s new publication 1968 Revolution, analysing the worldwide impact and lessons of those times will be on sale there for the first time.
The momentum of 1968 continued for some years, especially in US. It reached a high point in 1970 with the only national student strike in US history, precipitated by the May 4 Kent State college massacre carried out by the Ohio State National Guard. On May 9, more than over 150,000 protesters, mostly students, converged on Washington to protest against the killing of unarmed students.
President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and others were kept in the White House protected by armed military guards with machine guns. The White House was surrounded and protected by a cordon of bumper-to-bumper buses. Nixon was pushed to the point of physical and emotional collapse and withdrew plans for the invasion of Cambodia. The tide of public opinion shifted against the war in Vietnam.
Key facts from research regarding the historical impact of these events show that:
* nearly 5,000,000 American students joined the national student strike
* approximately 175,000 faculty members joined the protests
* over 35,000 national guardsmen were called into action in 16 states
* highways, expressways, city streets and railroad tracks were barricaded across America
* on May 16, 1970, Business Week magazine warned: "This is a dangerous situation. It threatens the whole economic & social structure of the nation."
* 100 art museums and galleries closed in solidarity with the student strike
* over 500 US GI's deserted each day in May, 1970
* after the Kent massacre, entire companies of US troops in Vietnam refused orders to invade Cambodia
* in solidarity with the US students, numerous US soldiers wore black armbands and refused to fight any longer in Vietnam
* on Armed Forces Day, May 16, 1970, there were marches, rallies and rock festivals at 22 US military bases involving 43 different anti-war veterans' groups
* Congress passed the War Powers Act preventing the President from invading a country without the approval of Congress
* in May, 1970, Nixon began his "enemies list" & started the paranoid campaigns that led to his eventual impeachment and resignation
* Nixon and the Pentagon were forced to de-escalate the war, remove US troops and negotiate peace in Southeast Asia
* the voting age was soon reduced from 21 to 18 in America for the first time.
Whilst these events document the dramatic potential for change contained in mass action, capitalist rule remained intact. Four decades of globalisation have increased the tension that burst in 1968 to an unbearable intensity. In 2008, billions in every country throughout the world experience the effects of climate change, illegal wars for resources and markets, a widening gulf between rich and poor, unsustainable levels of credit and debt, a global financial and economic crisis, and increasingly authoritarian rule.
With a rapidly increasing number of people ready to challenge the status quo, and Stalinism no longer able to stifle the building of an independent movement that can inspire and lead the challenge for power, the potential for a revolutionary change is within reach.
Gerry Gold
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label 1968. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1968. Show all posts
Friday, May 09, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The German student revolt
Forty years ago today, students demonstrated in Berlin following the attempted assassination of their revolutionary leader, Rudi Dutschke. After narrowly surviving the attack, he and his family later took refuge in Britain, only to be expelled by the Heath government as “undesirable aliens” in 1971.
He died eight years later, aged 39, from the after effects of his injuries, but not before linking up with anti-Stalinist campaigners in Eastern Europe and anti-nuclear protesters in Germany. Dutschke had been born in former East Germany and fled to the West just one day before the infamous Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961. He became the most notable leader of the West German student movement, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) which organised mass demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam.
Josef Bachman, the man who shot him, had been provoked by the Bild tabloid newspaper which had urged readers to “eliminate the trouble makers”. The powerful Springer press, which owned Bild, was seen by many students as the main enemy, influenced as they were by Frankfurt School philosophers such as Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno and their theories of cultural criticism.
In an interview conducted a few months before he was shot, it is clear why Dutschke was seen as an enemy of the West German state. Dutschke believed that the 1968 movement was the heir of the 1918 revolution that had swept Germany 50 years earlier, when the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia the year before inspired the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Dutschke also published articles making clear his support for the October Revolution in Russia and its leaders, including Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek. He condemned the governing parties for not bringing about unification with East Germany. In particular, he denounced the parliamentary system in West Germany for having disenfranchised the population.
He believed the SDS movement should not only be extra-parliamentary but against parliament, because there was in fact no dialogue between politicians and the electorate. His aim at this time was the creation of organisations which would be “different from the existing parties who manipulate people’s interests”. Politicians should be subject to recall. He believed that humans beings were not simply “blind objects of fate” but that they could make history, but that they had to make it consciously”. Dutschke saw Germany as part of an international system, in which “one part of the world exploited the other part”.
In 1967, Dutschke had begun to shift towards an urban guerrilla outlook, in which the SDS would become a “sabotage and civil disobedience group” to protect people against state terror. Others, though not Dutschke, founded the Red Army Faction, which went on to carry out political assassinations in West Germany. Inevitably, neither the “long road through the institutions” of the SDS nor the individual terror of the Red Army Faction could dislodge the German capitalist state.
Dutschke went down a different political path, joining others to help found the German Green Party which many years later would become part of the political establishment he opposed. Whatever Dutschke’s political weaknesses, he was a courageous opponent of the system and deserves to be remembered, not only in Germany but also in the UK. His political trajectory was an expression of the crisis in post-war Germany, as a new generation sought to come to terms with the history their parents had made. And, of course, he was completely right about the need to go outside and beyond the existing parliamentary bourgeois state.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
He died eight years later, aged 39, from the after effects of his injuries, but not before linking up with anti-Stalinist campaigners in Eastern Europe and anti-nuclear protesters in Germany. Dutschke had been born in former East Germany and fled to the West just one day before the infamous Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961. He became the most notable leader of the West German student movement, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) which organised mass demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam.
Josef Bachman, the man who shot him, had been provoked by the Bild tabloid newspaper which had urged readers to “eliminate the trouble makers”. The powerful Springer press, which owned Bild, was seen by many students as the main enemy, influenced as they were by Frankfurt School philosophers such as Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno and their theories of cultural criticism.
In an interview conducted a few months before he was shot, it is clear why Dutschke was seen as an enemy of the West German state. Dutschke believed that the 1968 movement was the heir of the 1918 revolution that had swept Germany 50 years earlier, when the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia the year before inspired the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Dutschke also published articles making clear his support for the October Revolution in Russia and its leaders, including Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek. He condemned the governing parties for not bringing about unification with East Germany. In particular, he denounced the parliamentary system in West Germany for having disenfranchised the population.
He believed the SDS movement should not only be extra-parliamentary but against parliament, because there was in fact no dialogue between politicians and the electorate. His aim at this time was the creation of organisations which would be “different from the existing parties who manipulate people’s interests”. Politicians should be subject to recall. He believed that humans beings were not simply “blind objects of fate” but that they could make history, but that they had to make it consciously”. Dutschke saw Germany as part of an international system, in which “one part of the world exploited the other part”.
In 1967, Dutschke had begun to shift towards an urban guerrilla outlook, in which the SDS would become a “sabotage and civil disobedience group” to protect people against state terror. Others, though not Dutschke, founded the Red Army Faction, which went on to carry out political assassinations in West Germany. Inevitably, neither the “long road through the institutions” of the SDS nor the individual terror of the Red Army Faction could dislodge the German capitalist state.
Dutschke went down a different political path, joining others to help found the German Green Party which many years later would become part of the political establishment he opposed. Whatever Dutschke’s political weaknesses, he was a courageous opponent of the system and deserves to be remembered, not only in Germany but also in the UK. His political trajectory was an expression of the crisis in post-war Germany, as a new generation sought to come to terms with the history their parents had made. And, of course, he was completely right about the need to go outside and beyond the existing parliamentary bourgeois state.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
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