In 1957, a small group of European artists and writers formed a group called the Situationist International. The movement combined the artistic traditions of dada and surrealism with anarchism and Marxism. Unlike traditional Marxists, the situationists did not focus on the workplace. Instead, they developed a broad critique of everyday life, protesting the stifling of art, creativity, and imagination in contemporary society. They denounced the "tyranny" of consumer culture, which constantly invented new needs and desires to fuel consumption. Capitalism, they said, had "colonized" everyday life. The situationists' ideas and especially their unorthodox, surrealist style, became influential during the events of May 1968 in France. All around Paris students painted situationist slogans such as those printed here.
The social movements of 1968 cut across Cold War boundaries, attacking Western consumerism as well as Soviet authoritarianism. A group of students and situationists sent a telegram (second excerpt) to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in May 1968.
Situationist Anticapitalism, 1968
OCCUPY THE FACTORIES
POWER TO THE WORKERS COUNCILS
ABOLISH CLASS SOCIETY
DOWN WITH THE SPECTACLE-COMMODITY SOCIETY
ABOLISH ALIENATION
ABOLISH THE UNIVERSITY
HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST
DEATH TO THE COPS
FREE ALSO THE 4 GUYS CONVICTED FOR LOOTING DURING THE 6 MAY RIOT
—Occupation committee of the Autonomous and Popular Sorbonne University
Situationist Anticommunist Slogans, 1968
17 MAY 1968 / To the Politburo of the Communist party of the USSR the Kremlin Moscow / Shake in your shoes bureaucrats. The international power of the workers councils will soon wipe you out. Humanity won't be happy till the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist. Long live the struggle of the Kronstadt sailors and of the Makhnovshchina against Trotsky and
Lenin. Long live the 1956 Councilist Insurrection of Budapest • Down with the state • Long live revolutionary Marxism. Occupation committee of the Autonomous and Popular Sorbonne
Sources: "Slogans to Be Spread Now by Every Means," in Situationist International Anthology ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: 1981), pp. 334-45.
Questions for Analysis
1. Are there any common themes in these sets of slogans?
2. Why has 1968 often been called "the year of the barricades"?
The flowering of protest as another “springtime of peoples.” Others saw it as a long nightmare.
PRAGUE
The student movement in the United States and Western Europe also took inspiration from one of the most signifi-
Revolt of 1956 (see Chapter 27): the “Prague spring” of 1968. The events began with the emergence of a liberal communist government in Czechoslovakia, led by the Slovak Alexander Dubciek (DOOB-chehk). Dubciek had outma-neuvered the more traditional, authoritarian party leaders. He advocated “socialism with a human face”; he encouraged debate within the party, academic and artistic freedom, and cant challenges to Soviet authority since the Hungarian less censorship. As was often the case, party members were
ANTIGOVERNMENT PROTESTS IN MEXICO CITY, 1968. On October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police opened fire on student protesters and arrested over one thousand people.
Divided between proponents of reform and those fearful that reform would unleash revolution. The reformers, however, also gained support from outside the party, from student organizations, the press, and networks of dissidents. As in Western Europe and the United States, the protest movement overflowed into traditional party politics.
In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had fallen in 1964, and the reins of Soviet power passed to Leonid Brezhnev as secretary of the Communist party. Brezhnev was more conservative than Khrushchev, less inclined to bargain with the West, and prone to defensive actions to safeguard the Soviet sphere of influence. Initially, the Soviets tolerated Dubciek as a political eccentric. The events of 1968 raised their fears. Most Eastern European communist leaders denounced Czech reformism, but student demonstrations of support broke out in Poland and Yugoslavia, calling for an end to one-party rule, less censorship, and reform of the judicial system. In addition, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and Nicolae Ceausescu (chow-SHEHS-koo) of Romania— two of the more stubbornly independent communists in Eastern Europe—visited Dubcek. To Soviet eyes, these activities looked as if they were directed against the Warsaw Pact and Soviet security; they also saw American intervention in Vietnam as evidence of heightened anticommunist activities around the world. When Dubcek attempted to democratize the Communist party and did not attend a meeting of members of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets sent tanks and troops into Prague in August 1968. Again, the world watched as streams of Czech refugees left the country and a repressive government, picked by Soviet security forces, took charge. DubCek and his allies were subjected to imprisonment or “internal exile.” Twenty percent of the members of the Czech Communist party were expelled in a series of purges. After the destruction of the Prague spring, Soviet diplomats consolidated their position according to the new Brezhnev Doctrine. The doctrine stated that no socialist state could adopt policies endangering the interests of international socialism and that the Soviet Union could intervene in the domestic affairs of any Soviet bloc nation if communist rule was threatened. In other words, the repressive rules applied to Hungary in 1956 would not change.
What were the effects of 1968? De Gaulle’s government recovered. The Republican Richard M. Nixon won the U. S. election of 1968. From 1972 to 1975, the United States withdrew from Vietnam; in the wake of that war came a refugee crisis and a new series of horrific regional conflicts. In Prague, Warsaw Pact tanks put down the uprising, and in the Brezhnev Doctrine the Soviet regime reasserted its right to control its satellites. Serious Cold War confrontations rippled along Czechoslovakia’s western border as refugees fled west, and in the Korean peninsula after North Korea’s seizure of an eavesdropping ship from the U. S. Navy. Over the long term, however, the protesters’ and dissidents’ demands proved more difficult to contain. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, dissent was defeated but not eliminated. The crushing of the Czech rebellion proved thoroughly disillusioning, and in important respects the events of 1968 prefigured the collapse of Soviet control in 1989. In Western Europe and the United States, the student movement subsided but its issues and the kinds of politics that it pioneered proved more enduring. Feminism (or, more accurately, “second wave” feminism) really came into its own after 1968, its numbers expanded by women a generation younger than Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. They had been in student political organizations in the 1960s and their impatience with traditional political parties and, often, their male student allies, sent them into separate groups, where they championed equality in sexual relationships and in the family. In a phrase that captured some of the changes of the 1950s and 1960s, they insisted that “the personal is political.” As one English woman said, “We wanted to redefine the meaning of politics to include an analysis of our daily lives,” which meant sexuality, health, child care, cultural
A RUSSIAN TANK ATTACKED DURING THE PRAGUE SPRING, 1968. The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20-21, 1968 put an end to Alexander Dubceck's experiment in creating "Socialism with a human face.”
Images of women, and so on. The antiwar movement took up the issue of nuclear weapons—a particularly volatile issue in Europe. Finally, the environmental movement took hold—concerned not only with pollution and the world’s dwindling resources but also with mushrooming urbanization and the kind of unrestrained economic growth that had given rise to the 1960s. Over the long term, in both Europe and the United States, voters’ loyalties to traditional political parties became less reliable and smaller parties multiplied; in this way, new social movements eventually became part of a very different political landscape.
ECONOMIC STAGNATION: THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
Economic as well as social problems plagued Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, but these problems had begun earlier. By the middle of the 1960s, for example, the West German growth rate had slowed. Demand for manufactured goods fell, and in 1966 the country suffered its first postwar recession. Volkswagen, the symbol of the German miracle, introduced a shortened workweek; almost 700,000 West Germans were thrown out of work altogether. In France, a persistent housing shortage increased the cost of living. Though new industries continued to prosper, the basic industries—coal, steel, and railways—began to run up deficits. Unemployment was rising in tandem with prices. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s pledge to revive Britain’s economy by introducing new technology foundered on crises in the foreign-exchange value of the pound, which were compounded by continued low levels of growth. The Common Market—expanded in 1973 to include Britain, Ireland, and Denmark, and again in the early 1980s to admit Greece, Spain, and Portugal—struggled to overcome problems stemming from the conflict between the domestic economic regulations characteristic of many European states and the free-market policies that prevailed within what would become the European Economic Community (EEC) countries.
World History
