As I suppose many older people do, I was thinking about the most important parts of my life, not only personally, but socially: how did the social forces around me affect me and made me think what I think.
There is little doubt that for most of my generation in the West and the East the Cultural Revolutions of the 1960s-70 were a crucial event. (I have to exclude the Third World from this generalization since I do not know enough about how the Western Cultural Revolution affected ideology and the mores there).
May and June this year were the 55th anniversary of Les événements de mai. Last week was the 55th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia that also saw the birth of the modern dissident movement in the USSR when eight persons unfurled a banner on the Red Square condemning the invasion.
The Revolution caught me in the formative years of high school. All events that happen at that age, even when not revolutionary, have an impact on people’s later lives. So much more if they are revolutionary. We were lucky that the events that affected us were revolutionary mostly in the cultural sense. At the same time China went through the Cultural Revolution, but it was an altogether different series of events, more serious, more ideological, and far bloodier. But no less significant was the Western Cultural Revolution.
What did it accomplish? It reduced social distance between the rich and the poor, a huge achievement; it liberated sex and improved women’s social position in a way that led to the current acceptance of gender equality and all sexual preferences among the liberal elites; it ensured equal or similar civic rights for the Black population in the United States; it changed dramatically vestimentary habits, simplified them, and thus added to the apparent social levelling by making it more difficult to recognize social status from one’s dress.
The revolution was similar in the West and in the Communist East, but it produced very different effects. In the West, politically, it diminished class polarization and class antagonism. I lived through the Revolution in Belgium where I went to high school. There was no doubt in my mind when I arrived there that Belgium was a class-stratified society where only rich parents’ boys could date rich parents’ girls. The rules were clear. The Revolution, incrementally, eroded them however: by the mid-1970s, this was no longer true. It produced a deep social change which, I think, has persisted.
In the East, where class differences were less or were obliterated by the political revolution of the late 1940s, the new Revolution opened the vistas of freedom. It hinted that a different, much freer and diverse world existed close by and that it was possible—not a Utopia. It stimulated resistance to the authorities, and the feeling of freedom—both things that were anathema to the communist regimes that valued conformism and obedience.
Revolution’s effects were long-term and were seen well among the generation that came to power twenty years later. It may seem strange to unify in the same sentence Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, but they do illustrate well what I have in mind. Clinton was the product of breaking class barriers to advancement while Gorbachev was a product of the Ideas of 1968: socialism with the human face. That belief affected Gorbachev in his student years as we know from Zdenĕk Mlynař’s memoirs and Gorbachev’s own “confessions”.
One of the complicating features of the Revolution was that it was leftist not only in the social ways that I described, but also because it brought from oblivion the Young Marx (whose early works, by coincidence, were first published then, more than 100 years after he wrote them), and thus the belief in democratic socialism.
The challenge to the ossified pseudo-Marxist regimes in the East came from the left. And even better—thinking of the Young Marx—from the very founder of the political system the authorities claimed to represent. It was not a coincidence that almost all leaders of the Revolution in Eastern Europe came from the Communist Youth movement: the entire Praxis group in Yugoslavia, students of Lukacs in Hungary, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik, Leszek Kolakowski (coming from the hard Stalinist left) in Poland, Ota Šik and Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia.
The Revolution was similar to the Reformation: it refreshed and re-affirmed the original ideological beliefs, and thus highlighted the gap between them and reality. Later the leaders will, with the rest of the society, move towards the right: either in nationalist or classical liberal directions. But that was only possible because the first opposition came from the left, and was thus ideologically more valid than had it come from the discredited right. My point is that in 1968, East European regimes were well equipped to deal with the challenges from the right; but they were ill-equipped to deal with challenges from the left and with the seemingly apolitical challenges of long hair, loud music and bell bottom trousers.
In the West, however, after breaking up some of social barriers and thus establishing apparent equality, the Revolution ended up, in many ways, like the Revolutions of 1848. In the latter case, formal political equality was proclaimed; in the case of the Revolutions of 1968, formal social equality was proclaimed. But in both cases economic gaps became wider. Moreover, the post-1968 economic gaps were suddenly regarded as more justifiable than before when the revolutionaries argued that they were due to class differences. Now as the Revolution unfolded the gaps reflected differences in ability and effort—in short, in merit. This is where the two iconic figures of the revolutionary generation and the turn to neoliberalism come: Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. It was the left that validated the traditional positions of the right, made them seem common-sensical and thus more firmly entrenched.
The left-wing attack on the regimes in the West soon morphed into the validation of the positions of the right, now even reinforced because shorn of its usual, and hard to justify, class support. The seemingly anti-capitalist Revolution of 1968, made the world safe for capitalism. Joschka Fischer became foreign minister of Germany and oversaw the first deployment of German military might since the end of the Second World War; Bob Dylan received the Medal of Freedom; Mick Jagger was knighted. To more vividly appreciate the change, note that Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps the only significant political figure in the West who continued to hold the 1968-like beliefs, came to be seen in the 2020s like a relic from a distant past.
The political effects of the Revolution East and West were at first different, but over the long-term, almost identical. In the East, as we have seen, the attack on the regime was from the left and that made the regimes clumsy in their response. But socialism with the human face, or any kind of socialism for that matter, was gradually discarded, and in an evolution that mimicked that in the West the end-point was declared to be what Václav Klaus called “capitalism without adjectives”. Liberals, united with strong forces of nationalism that grew independently in the meantime and were rather unimportant in 1968, brought communist regimes down. (I am not denying thereby the importance of American readiness to wage war on Communism in every quarter of the globe; when I say that the regimes were brought down from within, I have in mind the fact that ideologically, by 1989, Communist regimes had very little to offer to their populations.)
The Revolution–with the important exception of nationalism that I mentioned— fashioned the world in which many of us lived until the Financial Crisis of 2008, or covid in 2019, or the war in Ukraine in 2022—whichever of the three possible markers dividing the eras one wishes to take. But in any case, it is plain that we live in a different ideological world today.
I didn't live 1968, but my area of research requires me to have at least some undergraduate level of understanding of that era (i.e. the Cold War).
My opinion is that 1968 may be one of the biggest dark holes of History of the 20th Century. There are so many disparate, polar opposite documented opinions on it that making a comprehensive general history of that event is extremely difficult. Besides, there is no centralized, authoritative archive or single source that one historian can rely on to at least build a skeleton of a general history.
The only certainty that we can have on 1968 is that it was a very traumatic, cataclysmic; a watershed event in the history of the First World and the Socialist World (except China). It definitely marked the end of an era and the start of another one. But we don't know what were they exactly.
There must be a single, underlining event -- probably of economic nature -- that caused it to happen practically at the same year, in such vast and diverse territory of the human world. Data points that 1969 was the year capitalism in the USA was at its apex in the sense that it was the last year all the main indicators of capitalist welfare were rising at the same time (that is, the tide was rising all boats). But I don't remember if that was the case in the socialist world (that may be). The problem with this argument is that we know the world's economy started to go bad with the oil crisis of 1974, that is, six years after 1968. Maybe 1974 was brewing since then?
Another glaring feature of 1968 was the fratricide of the Left side of the political spectrum, which started infighting to mutual destruction that year, paving the way for the reunification and later rise of the Right side of the political spectrum. The USA is the easiest case to explain: the Old Left, led by the AFL-CIO itself, supported the continuation of the Vietnam War until the very end; the result of this was the rise of the New Left, which is the Left we have in the USA to this day. It is possible that this disaster is the main reason the American people hate unions.
In the socialist world, it seems that socialism degenerated into some kind of humanist socialism, preached by the likes of Gorbachev. What's striking about Gorbachev is that, since day 1, it was clear he was a complete loser in terms of economic results. Except that Stravopol experiment, which he himself admitted was just due to it being a test, which meant the USSR redirected the resources so it could be successful by design, Gorbachev's career was littered by absolute lack of results. There was absolutely no evidence his “humanist socialism” could work, and his career ascension was meteoric either way. Even more astonishingly, with every failure of his ideology, he doubled down on his critique of the Soviet system -- he blamed absolutely everyone but himself (indeed, he blamed the Russian people for the failure of his Perestroika at the very end of the USSR). This process of imbecilization (intellectual decline) must be a case to be studied by future historians, and it certainly started with the generation who graduated in Moscow circa 1968.
Let's talk about the “other”: the Third World. Well, seeing they essentially started to suffer a series of military coups and liberal (right-wing) dictatorships -- not to talk about Vietnam, which had millions dead in a brutal war of annihilation -- all I can say is that it was the peoples of the Third World who footed the bill for 1968.
Last but not least, we must talk about the only one truly unaffected great part of the world: China. Here we can only talk in exclusion: coincidence or not, all the parts of the globe were tied by destiny by 1968. Every one of them went to shit after 1991 in hindsight (at the time, the USA definitely thought it had become a 1,000-year Empire). China, it seems, escaped the curse of 1968.
P.S.: I don't think 1968 was a revolution or a series of revolutions. I think “reformation” is the more appropriate term. But, as a historian, I must respect the terms chosen by the people who were contemporary, who lived the event. If for them it was a revolution, a revolution it is from a historical point of view.
I think 1968 is not as much much about revolution, as about the usual generational change. Do you think that without the events of 1968 there would be no described developments in social or cultural institutions?
In my opinion, it was something inevitable since the post-WW2 generation had been raised in completely different sociocultural conditions and perspectives, which coplitelty differed with these of their fathers. In this case the 1968 was just one of possible manifeststions of this long duree proccess.