Why this conference on 1968?
Why this week of activities?
It is, of course, the 40th anniversary of the uprisings of that year. Let us explain why we conceived of this particular day of discussions, focusing on 1968 as a world revolutionary moment, and the week of activities surrounding it.
1968 was an explosion—at Columbia University, in Paris, in Prague, in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in the Italian October. The explosion was as much of a surprise to the participants as to those against whom it was directed. It was very powerful, and the most surprised of all were the old left movements.
1968 was a protest—a simultaneous crie de coeur against both the Cold War consensus and against the old left strategy of taking state power before changing the world.
1968 was a world revolution— as with 1848, it was a revolutionary world event that at once failed and transformed the world.
1968 is alive and well—the revolution is a process, and one that altered the balance of power in favor of those oppressed and forgotten. Since 1968, and especially after the US was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, the capabilities of either the West or East to police the South have become limited. Well beneath the institutional noise of the political economy and inter-state relations, the power of the dominant and powerful was diminished. Pre-1968 power relations between capital and labor have never been restored, and Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Brazil, Iran, and South Korea were all turned into loci of labor unrest. In addition to the unruliness of labor, the power of States over civil society has diminished. Prague Spring and the Chinese cultural revolution have one fundamental thing in common: they were both assaults on the “dictatorships of the officials,” and states everywhere witnessed a struggle for greater grassroots democracy and economic decentralization.
1968 is dead and buried—the revolution was an indisputable historical failure, as it has not improved the material welfare of the oppressed and the forgotten. The New Left, the multiple maoisms, feminists, greens and many other identity-based movements had a brilliant, short impact in various countries, but failed to acquire the dramatic centrality, either nationally or internationally, that the old left movements achieved after the war. Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s were a time of powerful cultural and political backlash against everything that 1968 stood for, a time of a worldwide neoliberal offensive of the so-called “Washington consensus,” with the ideal of “globalization” replacing the one of developementalism.
1968 was a prelude—a failed world-scale revolution that was a great rehearsal. A rehearsal for what? We hope, for today. Beginning with the middle of the 1990’s the seemingly complete cultural and ideological dominance of neoliberalism met an unexpected challenge in a loosely organized coalition of world movements. The neoliberal consensus was shattered. The new movement, emerging from Chiapas, Seattle and Porto Alegre, strategically determined to change the world without taking power, has mobilized a global antiwar protest, unmatched in previous world history. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and WTO have been discredited, especially so in the Global South. The critical utopia of the new world movement, of the “Porto Alegre camp,” and of “The Other Campaign,” has reawakened the emancipatory energies of the world struggle of 1968. This counter-hegemonic movement, rooted in the Global South, with its simultaneous demands for global justice and for global cognitive justice, cannot, we feel, be understood in traditional, hegemonic or counter-hegemonic terms. It can also not be understood without the background of the anti-systemic struggles of 1968. We live in a time of confrontation, in a time of transition. Whether the ultimate outcome of this confrontation will be a more or less egalitarian and democratic world order is, of course, entirely uncertain. The question of whether the world can be reconstructed in the ways in which people hoped in 1968 depends on how we act, collectively and individually, today, and in the years and decades to come.
This contradictory, ambivalent, and, very often, paradoxical legacy of 1968, seen as a global emancipatory process rather then a ritually celebrated date in the calendar of rebellions, is the topic of the conference and the underlying theme for the week of events.