Fintan O’Toole: The marching, charging feet of 1968

In April and May 1968 the Rolling Stones were in the Olympic studios in west London recording a pulsating new track. The music had previously been attached to a different song, but Mick Jagger had come up with new lyrics after he was in the crowd at a demonstration against the Vietnam War that was charged by the police: “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy / ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy.”

In 1995, asked why the band was still playing Street Fightin' Man on stage, Jagger shrugged. "I don't know whether we should really play it . . . I'm not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don't really like it that much."

The marching, charging feet of 1968 had by then long since walked away from the promise of revolution.

Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of turbulence, of violence, of drama, of horror, of assassination, of hope. But what it proved in the end not to be was a year of progressive change. The left won all the battles of imagery, of propaganda, of style. But the right won almost all the battles for power. Fifty years on, the events of 1968 remain deeply influential – but not always in ways that the young radicals who drove them would have recognised or celebrated.

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The mood of revolt that spilled out on to the streets in 1968 was brewed in a stew of often contradictory impulses. There was frustration on both sides of what was still called the Iron Curtain with the way the cold war had locked the world into binary antagonisms.

The Soviet Union held much of eastern and central Europe in its grip. The United States exercised a hegemony that was apparently much softer but whose capacity for brutality was evident in the increasingly brutal war in Vietnam and the unfinished business of the black liberation struggle at home. There was, in Germany and Italy, a belated coming to grips with the guilt of the second World War and the Holocaust. In Asia and Africa, there were the increasingly frayed hopes of a postcolonial transition to freedom. In Latin America, repressive regimes were seeking to contain the demands of an emerging middle class for democracy and of a repressed peasantry for justice.

Sexual attitudes

Yet some of the energies that were unleashed were more ambivalent. There was a flowering of youth culture on the back of postwar economic prosperity, a revolt into style that manifested itself in music, dress, sexual attitudes, drug consumption and a general belief that the younger generation was purer, more imaginative and more real than its passively consumerist predecessor.

This revolt was tremendously creative. But it was also a reaction against the great achievements of postwar western social democracy, a kind of boredom with liberal values and collective institutions. Many of the students who took to the streets to rail against oppression had enjoyed free education all their lives and were studying with the aid of generous government grants and subsidies. In the decade preceding the riots that brought Paris to a standstill in May 1968, the French student population had nearly trebled, from about 175,000 to more than 500,000 – there was a huge student movement precisely because the regime it despised had opened up third-level education.

Yet, for all the contradictions, the most remarkable thing about the protest movements of 1968 is that they were genuinely global. The sparks may have been western – the Prague Spring, in Czechoslovakia, in January, the student protests in Rome in February, rolling on to the violent reaction in April in Berlin to the attempted murder of the student leader Rudi Dutschke, the protests at Columbia University, in New York, the same month, and the Paris events in May – but there were also big student revolts in Poland, in Senegal, in Egypt, in Ethiopia, in Mexico, in Japan. Maoist peasant uprisings took off in India. And in many cases these movements were intensely aware of each other: in Northern Ireland, the civil-rights marchers sang the anthem of the black liberation movement in the US, We Shall Overcome.

The great hope of 1968, indeed, was that a spontaneous movement could change not just one country but the world. Its first act was the election of the reformer Alexander Dubcek as leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on January 5th, an internal coup that ignited hopes both for democratic reform in the Soviet bloc and for the emergence of a liberal form of communism that would rescue the socialist cause from the disgrace of Stalinism. And, on the other side, the gathering storm of protest against the Vietnam War challenged the image of the US as the great upholder of freedom and justice.

The orgy of rape, torture and murder at the village of My Lai by a company of the US 23rd Infantry Division on March 16th was by no means unique, and it did not become public knowledge until 1969. But the moral cover for the war was already very thin by the time the Tet offensive, launched by the north Vietnamese at the end of January, destroyed the illusion that American victory was inevitable.

In one sense, the anti-Vietnam War protests had a stunning political success: on March 31st, Lyndon Johnson shocked the world by announcing, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your president.” It was Johnson, otherwise one of the great progressive presidents of US history, who had scaled up the war and who had in turn been broken by it.

Civil rights

His fall seemed to open the way for a man who had come, rather surprisingly, to carry the torch for a different United States. Robert Kennedy had previously seemed a rather dour figure. But his opposition to the war and passionate support for civil rights lit a fire within him, and his bid to succeed Johnson embraced the left in ways that went far beyond the vaguer liberalism of his murdered brother.

Kennedy was himself following Martin Luther King. Having achieved great legal and legislative victories, King had already turned the civil-rights movement towards the question of economic inequality: his Poor People’s Campaign sought to bring black and white together to demand urgent action on poverty. He was concentrating early in 1968 on supporting the sanitation workers of Memphis in a strike over unsafe conditions and bad wages.

With Kennedy’s new-found charisma, King’s moral stature and Dubcek’s courage, it seemed possible in those early months of 1968 that radical change was coming on both sides of the cold-war divide. It was this large-scale hope that turned local protests into utopian movements. The student uprising in France started with demands that male and female students be allowed to visit one another’s dormitories; it became a demand for a general revolution.

New world

The stew of elements that went into this revolutionary fervour – from sex to Vietnam, from hatred of Stalinism to boredom with social democracy, from anti-colonial sentiment to post-Holocaust shame – was its great strength. It allowed for a moment in which everything seemed to cohere in a demand for a new world. But it was also its great weakness:the movement was not in fact coherent enough to withstand murder, repression and counter-revolution.

King, the greatest leader the left had thrown up in the 20th century, was murdered in Memphis on April 4th. Robert Kennedy was murdered on June 4th, when he had just won the California primary and become the clear favourite for the Democratic nomination. At the party’s convention in Chicago in August, the last of the dominant Irish city bosses, Richard Daley, unleashed his police against the anti-war protesters and beat them off the streets. The televised police riot in Chicago had popular support: a national poll conducted shortly afterwards showed 57 per cent agreeing that the police had not used excessive force.

The 1968 movements were beaten back everywhere, either literally or electorally. The Gaullists, who had held only a two-seat majority in the previous French assembly, won a landslide in snap elections called in June. The Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks in August. On October 2nd, 10 days before the opening of the Olympic Games in Mexico, the army moved to crush the student movement. Hundreds of students were killed in the Tlatelolco Plaza massacre. Thousands more were beaten and jailed, and some of them disappeared for good.

Black Power salute

Those Olympics may be remembered as the ones in which Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists in a Black Power salute during a medal ceremony, but Tlatelolco was in fact a more accurate image of where power was really going in 1968. In November, the victor, Richard Nixon, and the white segregationist George Wallace between them won 57 per cent of the vote in the US presidential election.

The counter-revolution of 1968 went on to gather force until it came into its own with the victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980.

The would-be revolution, meanwhile, largely failed to take power because it could not reconcile itself with social democracy and electoral politics. Its energies did not merely dissipate, however; they flowed off into separate channels: ecological awareness, gay rights, feminism, even New Age escapism. In the aftershocks, the left altered consciousness but the right completed the assault on social democracy with much more thoroughness and brutality.