Every contribution to our symposium can be accessed directly by clicking on the name of the individual author below. You can also discuss issues raised by the symposium, and by our latest issue, on?First Drafts, Prospect's editorial blog.
Bryan Appleyard,Arthur Aughey,Cheryll Barron,Peter Bazalgette,Vernon Bogdanor,Rudi Bogni,Joe Boyd,Samuel Brittan,Lesley Chamberlain,Stephen Chan,Robert Cooper,Emma Crichton-Miller,René Cuperus,William Davies,Meghnad Desai,Anthony Dworkin,Geoff Dyer,David Edgerton,Duncan Fallowell,Timothy Garton Ash,Anthony Giddens,Robert Gore-Langton,David G Green,Johann Hari,David Herman,Michael Ignatieff,Pico Iyer,Josef Joffe,Alan Johnson,Eric Kaufmann,Tim King,Denis MacShane,Jean McCrindle,Edward Mortimer,Onora O'Neill,PJ O'Rourke,Paul Ormerod,Mark Pagel,Ray Pahl,Jonathan Power,Gideon Rachman,Jonathan Rée,Bridget Rosewell,Bob Rowthorn,Jacques Rupnik,Dominic Sandbrook,Roger Scruton,Jean Seaton,Anne-Marie Slaughter,Erik Tarloff,Tzvetan Todorov,Emily Young,Slavoj Zizek.
On Ostpolitik
by Robert Cooper
The students rampaged against the stuffiness of the 1950s. In France, Italy, Germany and Japan, they closed universities. (At Oxford we took ours to court—and won). People who should have known better promoted theories of the "structural violence" of capitalism. Later, some of their followers tried real violence.
These events did not change much and did not matter much. What did matter was the Soviet Union's suppression of the Prague spring. This was real structural violence: the division of Europe could be maintained only through force. Fortunately, no one was daft enough to contemplate a military response. The answer was to tackle the origin of the problem. This was what, from 1969, Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr's Ostpolitik did. By reassuring the Soviets that West Germany was not intent on revenge or on changing the status quo, it brought the stability and confidence that permits change, and that eventually ended the division of Germany.
Change comes through politics, not sit-ins. In America, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement mobilised support, but Lyndon Johnson's legislation made the changes which, with the slow passage of time, have brought Barack Obama within reach of the White House. In Europe, change came 20 years after, but it was Bahr's concept of common security that Gorbachev brought with him to summits with Reagan.
Robert Cooper is a diplomat
On academia
by Anne-Marie Slaughter
In the US, the best legacy of the 1960s is the realisation on the part of elite universities that they had an obligation towards their entire society, rather than just the moneyed elites who had traditionally built their buildings and funded their professorships. The result, 40 years on, is Ivy League institutions that work hard to find the most diverse group of students both in the US and increasingly throughout the world, and to fund their education and living expenses as fully as possible. The worst legacy of the 1960s in the US is the identification of the term "liberal" with counterculture mores—long hair, free sex, permissiveness in every domain of life—rather than the solidarity with the less fortunate that should be the bedrock of every great society.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs at Princeton University
The heaven of '68
by Denis MacShane
Before 1968 all was grey, conservative, male and old. After 1968, it got a lot better. I was 20 in 1968, and I cannot think of a better year in the last 200 to have been 20 in. The 1968 generation gave up economics for sociology. Capitalism won as most 1968ers morphed into Richard Bransons with greater or lesser success, and 1968 produced no enduring reformist politics. But to be young in 1968 was very heaven, and today's Blimpish attacks prove just what a great moment in history it was.
Denis MacShane is Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham
Murder and faith
by Michael Ignatieff
The best of '68 was the faith in politics. The worst were the assassinations: Martin Luther King dying on that balcony in Memphis, Robert Kennedy dying on the floor of the hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. But hope never dies, and this year, in the US at least, there's a rebirth of faith in politics.
Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian politician
The capitalist "truth" of the '68 revolt
Reflections on 1968 following the Festival of Philosophy marking the 40th anniversary of 1968 at Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica
by Slavoj Zizek
One of the best-known graffiti on the Paris walls of '68 was: "Structures do not walk on the streets!" This was the idea that one cannot explain the large student and workers' demonstrations of '68 in terms of structuralism. Jacques Lacan's answer was that on the contrary, this is precisely what did happen in 1968: structures DID descend on to the streets. The visible explosive events were ultimately the result of a structural imbalance—in Lacan's terms, of the passage from the master's discourse to the university discourse.
In what did this passage consist? Boltanski and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism examines it in detail, and especially à propos France. In a Weberian mode, the book distinguishes three successive "spirits" of capitalism: the first, entrepreneurial, spirit of capitalism lasted until the great depression of the 1930s; the second took as its ideal not the entrepreneur but the salaried director of the large firm. From the 1970s onwards, a new figure of the "spirit of capitalism" emerged: capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organisation founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of the hierarchical chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organising work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction. In this way, capitalism is transformed into an egalitarian project: by way of accentuating auto-poetic interaction and spontaneous self-organisation, it even usurped the far left's rhetoric of workers' self-management and turned it from an anti-capitalist to a capitalist slogan.
An entire ideologico-historical narrative is thereby constructed, in which socialism appears as conservative, hierarchic and administrative, so that the lesson of '68 is "goodbye Mr Socialism," and the true revolution is that of the digital capitalism. This is the truth of the '68 revolt. The anti-capitalist protests of the 1960s supplemented the standard critique of socioeconomic exploitation with the topics of cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we "wear masks" and suffer sexual and other oppressions. The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organisations of corporate capitalism as well as "really existing" socialism—this new libertarian spirit is epitomised by dressed-down "cool" capitalists such as Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry ice cream.
The wager of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri is that this new spirit is already in itself communist: like Marx, they celebrate the revolutionary potential of capitalism; like Marx, they locate the contradiction within capitalism, in the gap between this potential and the form of the capital (the private-property appropriation of the surplus). In short, they rehabilitate the old Marxist notion of the tension between productive forces and the relations of production: capitalism already generates the "germs of the future new form of life," so that, in a revolutionary explosion, this new should just be liberated from the old social form. No wonder Negri has come to praise the "postmodern" digital capitalism, claiming that it is already communist and that it will need just a little push, a formal gesture, to openly become one. The basic strategy of today's capital is to cover up its superfluity by way of finding a new way to subsume again the free productive multitude.
The irony is that Negri is referring here to the process which the ideologists of today's "postmodern" capitalism themselves celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production. Negri is here effectively faithful to Marx; what he tries to prove is that Marx was right, that the rise of "general intellect" is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making the exactly opposite claim: it is the Marxist theory (and practice) itself which remains within the constraints of the hierarchical centralised state-control logic, and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new informational revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, the supreme irony of history is that the disintegration of communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of force of production and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its endeavour to overcome capitalism. What effectively ruined the communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the "informational revolution": they tried to steer this revolution as yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is thus that what Negri celebrates as the unique chance for overcoming capitalism, the ideologists of "informational revolution" celebrate as the rise of the new "frictionless" capitalism.
Was the passage to another spirit of capitalism really all that happened in the '68 events? Recall Lacan's challenge to the students: "As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one." Even if he was right, was '68 a single event or an ambiguous one in which different political tendencies struggled for hegemony? While '68 was gloriously appropriated by the hegemonic ideology as an explosion of sexual freedom and anti-hierarchic creativity, Nicolas Sarkozy said in his electoral campaign that his great task was to make France finally get over '68. So there is "their" and "our" Mai '68—in today's ideological memory, "our" basic idea of the May demonstrations, the link between students' protests and workers' strikes, is forgotten.
What survived of the sexual liberation of the 1960s was the tolerant hedonism easily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant's "Du kannst, denn du sollst!" (You can, because you must!)—it relies on a "You must, because you can!" That is to say, the superego aspect of today's "non-repressive" hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l'acte, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy); and, finally, the turn towards the real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement.
And, finally, the big question: if, as Alain Badiou claims, May '68 was the end of an epoch, signalling (together with the Chinese cultural revolution) the final exhaustion of the great revolutionary-political series which started with the October revolution, where do we stand today? Are we who still count on a radical alternative to the hegemonic parliamentary-democratic capitalism content to withdraw and act from different "sites of resistance," or can we still imagine a more radical political intervention?
This is the true legacy of '68: the core of '68 was a rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, a NO to the totality of it, best encapsulated in the formula Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible! The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly "realist" is to think what, within the co-ordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and writer. This piece is extracted from an article that appeared in "La Repubblica"
Joyful anarchy
by Joe Boyd
The most important thing about the legacy of the 1960s is that reactionaries splutter with rage when they talk about it. We must have been doing something right!
For the better or for the worse? To me, the terrible legacy of the 1960s lies not in the joyful anarchy of it, but in the violent resistance of the old order. The murders of the Kennedys, of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in America were reflected in pale but nonetheless unpleasant fashion in Britain by drug busts, attacks on freedom of the airwaves and censorship of the media. Trevor Griffiths wrote a wonderful play five years after May '68 called The Party. Laurence Olivier played a caged lion of a Trotskyite union leader watching the events in France unfold on television in a fashionably liberal South Kensington flat. From this tight little island we witnessed the violence across both ponds and, as Griffiths pointed out, couldn't really muster anything so threatening to the establishment.
But the British are good at subtlety. There may have been no violent revolution, but homosexuality was legalised, the lord chamberlain's office abolished, Radio 1 initiated, the concepts of civil, human and women's rights, protection of the environment and relaxation of the futile war on drugs all marched forward during that decade or as a result of initiatives begun in it. Look through the bins for CD box sets. How many are of 1960s artists compared to other decades? How many current groups take their inspiration from that era?
Of course there are caveats. The gravest one being the idea that self-expression is of value regardless of who is doing the expressing. But the 1960s had an enormous advantage: optimism—we still believed in the future! So many great things are possible with that sort of energy. We were deluded, of course. We thought the earth could survive the raising of all mankind to the level of material security we enjoyed in the west. But delusion is often an essential ingredient in creativity. And I am happy to thank the courageous rebels of Paris, San Francisco, Mexico City, London and all over the world whose defiance of propriety, police and politicians gave us so much of what we enjoy today.
Joe Boyd is a music producer. He will talk about the legacy of the 1960s on 9th May in the Purcell Room of the South Bank Centre.
What really did change
by Bryan Appleyard
For an innocent but ill-tempered lad in the suburban northwest, 1968 was news from a distant country. Even Paris seemed distant to me then and Daniel Cohn-Bendit—Danny le Rouge—was just one more gesticulating foreigner. I did have more immediate news of what was happening in London. A schoolfriend had been down there and stared into cellars where people with weird things in their hair were eating alarmingly exotic food. What was in their hair, I wondered, and what was this food?
I found out the following year. My 1968 was 1969, and it lasted until about 1974 when, again later than everybody else, I noticed the whole project had gone horribly wrong. "Look out for the bad acid," we used to warn each other as they did at Woodstock, but we took it anyway. As Danny the dealer so wisely says in Withnail and I, "We blew it, man." We blew it because my 1968, like the real one, consisted of two antagonistic movements that, for a very brief moment, appeared to be one.
The first was political, ranging from blood on the streets and capitalists hanging from the street lamps to mildly socialist plots to occupy campus buildings. I didn't get either of these, though the blood on the streets option at least sounded like fun. I could see, however, that it had unpleasant implications. When not plotting to steal the Rubens from the chapel at my college—King's, Cambridge—using baseball bats to club the porters senseless, I knew perfectly well that another, as Tariq Ali put it, "Leninist moment" was not a good idea since the last one had cost 200m lives. The socialist herbivores, meanwhile, just seemed to be having a miserable time of it, sitting in meetings and pretending to be real politicians. Charles Clarke was doing a lot of that at King's. Years later, we agreed we hadn't liked each other at all. In fairness, he did become a real politician.
I, you see, came from the aesthete/lotus-eating side of soixante-huitardism. This movement didn't really want to overthrow stuff; we just wanted to eject anything that got in the way of our super-refined delectations. We had rejoiced when Dylan went electric and, in my case, when Lou Reed sang "Thank your god that I just don't care." There was an ideological spread here also—from Incredible String Band, folky, hippie-dippie get back to the gardenism to spaced-out, Warholist nihilism. To the dispassionate observer, this distinction would have meant nothing since we all just sat around in rooms.
What we had in common with the politicos and what, briefly, united us was the absolute conviction that nothing would ever be the same again. We had stepped over a historical fault line that divided us—surely forever—from the strictures of our parents and teachers.
Exactly why we thought this is not clear. Perhaps it is simply the timeless conviction of youth. But, having watched my daughter's generation grow up, I don't think so. They seem intensely conservative. Nearer to the heart of the matter must be the fact that we were the first truly postwar generation. The stoicism and dutifulness that got our parents through the second world war and the years of austerity were lost on us. What had it all been for, we wondered? Living under the threat of vaporisation by a Soviet ICBM four minutes after the first siren didn't seem much of an advance in human welfare.
What we were really doing was trying to escape from the 20th century. The whole thing had been the most appalling screw-up. Either there was a conspiracy—the "system," the "establishment"—deploying exotic tools to crush the spirit of the people, or there had been a gigantic failure of the imagination that had somehow convinced people that eternal war was mankind's fate rather than the much more pleasant activity of sitting around in rooms with like-minded freaks.
So soixante-huitards agreed that nothing would ever be the same again. But that was it. We failed to agree utterly on how to react to this momentous discovery. I suppose the yippies tried to unite the two postures with their programme of politically targeted lotus eating. And I guess, in moments of lucidity, the politicos and the aesthetes could take the view that they were two sides of the same coin—the first trying to make a world in which the idle aspirations of the second could be more generally indulged. But this was threadbare stuff and, soon enough, it all fell apart.
From the outer fringes of the politicos came homebrewed terrorism and, from the further reaches of the aesthetes, came drug-addled wrecks and Hare Krishna. The rest of us just started to construct lives that more or less reflected the inclinations of '68. Clarke went into mainstream politics; I went into—sort of—mainstream writing. Would it have been any different if '68 had never happened?
To answer that question in the negative is to say that nothing special happened. There were some unusually showy adolescent high-jinks, and then business continued as usual. This view is supported by the condition of the baby boomers now. In their late fifties and sixties, they have become just another older generation complacently gripping the levers of power and resisting the advance of the young. It is noticeable that in American the phrase "the greatest generation" is now used to refer to the one that came of age only to find themselves fighting Germany and Japan. In other words, the boomers have embraced as an ideal the stoicism and dutifulness they once so contemptuously rejected.
In this sense, soixante-huitardism may be seen as a symptom of affluence. We could be radically idle or idly radical at little risk to ourselves and our future prospects because we were rich and getting richer. The career-building mainstream would be waiting to embrace us whether or not we tore up the cobblestones or listened to 20-minute Jerry Garcia guitar solos.
Yet I am not fully convinced by this interpretation. Something did happen. The attempt to escape from the horrors of the 20th century was legitimate. To be told of two recent world wars and then of the possibility of being reduced to a Hiroshima-like shadow on the pavement because of some macho face-off between Washington and Moscow was just too much. We had a nervous breakdown which we now call 1968.
Of course, it couldn't work in the ways either the hippies or politicos intended. But the simple statement that nothing would ever be the same again was, in the context of the second half of that bloody century, an event in itself. In our sit-ins and in our rooms, we showed, for a moment, what Auden called "an affirming flame." Nothing like it has happened since.
Bryan Appleyard is a writer and columnist for the Sunday Times
Protests and the pill
by Josef Joffe
I had my May '68 in the fall of '64, when I occupied the city hall of Chester, Pennsylvania, with some 50 fellow students—for reasons long forgotten. Of course, the college dispatched its lawyers to spring us from jail the next day. In April '69, we jeered the furiously helpless police from behind the safety of Harvard's iron gates—the children of privilege vs the sons of lower-class Boston. It was a lot of play-politics, fortified by rock and grass, until the mayhem at Kent State in 1970. But the real revolution was a silent one: the irresistible spread of the pill, which has changed the world more profoundly than any invention since James Watt's steam engine.
Josef Joffe is editor-publisher of Die Zeit
Fatal for bureaucracy
by William Davies
'68 dealt a fatal blow to the legitimacy of bureaucracy as a form of social organisation. The private sector has spent the decades since producing various illusions—brand values, teamwork, funky CEOs—to disguise its reliance on bureaucratic structures. The public sector has been, depending on your perspective, either too slow or too honest to keep up.
William Davies is working on a PhD in the sociology and cultural studies departments at Goldsmiths College, London
Tolerance and Trotskyites
by Meghnad Desai
Good legacy—inauguration of a climate of tolerance of hippies, feminists and gays and a decline of habitual obedience of authority in all its forms. Bad legacy—57 varieties of Trotskyism.
Meghnad Desai is a development economist
California, California
by Geoff Dyer
The most important legacy of the 1960s is San Francisco, and northern California generally. After the blissful, acid-crazed party went all wrong in the late 1960s, the city got over its hangover, cleaned up and went on to achieve a wonderful synthesis of freedom, hedonism and responsibility. It's been at the forefront of everything, from gay marriage, to the smoking ban, to food (let's hear it for the heirloom tomato!) to environmental responsibility to the development of alternative lifestyles and the less tangible realms of spiritual enrichment. To travel there from England is to have a glimpse of what life is like several rungs up the evolutionary ladder.
Geoff Dyer is an author
Counter-revolutions
by David Edgerton
"1968" represents a wave of revolutionary actions across of the world. It was followed by a wave of counter-revolutionary repression of immense savagery. In the Americas, in Africa and in Asia, millions were killed and modernised torture became standard practice.
David Edgerton is a historian of technology
Western challenges
by David Herman
1968 offered the most humane challenge to the worst features of postwar conservatism: racism, homophobia, misogyny, Stalinism and repressing the memory of fascism and Nazism. But the '68ers were too west-centric. They played to the media. They exaggerated the importance of a brief moment in culture, which affected a few (sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll). And they underestimated the importance of economics, which is why the right won the economic arguments of the 1970s and 1980s.
David Herman is a television producer and writer
Read part three of our four-part symposium here
