Features » August 1, 2008
In Defense of the ‘60s
The pursuit of happiness is a dream for all generations
By Peter Marcuse
On May 6, 1968, students battled police in the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris.
For the first time in history, the possibility of achieving the goals of the 18th century revolution existed, and the protesters of '68 were the first to raise it in the arena of political and social action
The protests of 1968 — symbolically, the occupation of the Columbia University buildings, the student uprisings in Paris and the street protests in Berlin — are now in danger of being denigrated as the actions of spoiled, confused, if not neurotic, students and rebellious youth who were “finding” themselves in making trivial demands of their uncomprehending and benevolent societies.
An April 23 op-ed by Paul Auster in the New York Times calls 1968 “the year of the crazies.” Another op-ed, by Jean-Claude Guillebaud, on May 24, calls the protesters “useful idiots,” and the current attention on them a “frenzy of nostalgia.”
In the process, the serious changes brought about by the events of ‘68, the substance of the protests, the reasons for the discontent, and the desire for change, are either ignored or superciliously dismissed as childish daydreams.
Even Slavoj Žižek, in the July issue of In These Times, quotes with approval French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s comment about the students of ‘68: “As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”
That that much was, in fact, achieved is beyond doubt.
The Columbia protests stopped both military research at the university and the construction of a gym in a park that was seen by Harlem and its black residents as an insult by a rich, dominant institution.
Internationally, the ‘68 protests changed the character of post-war politics, helped end the Vietnam War, and legitimized concerns about peace, welfare and democracy beyond the prevailing mainstream consensus.
Underlying the student protests was a deep dissatisfaction with things as they were: the acceptance of violence, the discrimination, the consumerism, the competitive pursuit of wealth and power, the false virility, the hypocritical sexual mores, the environmental degradation, the commercialization of art and imagination, the production of one-dimensional people. The desire for love as a central component of life — love both in its erotic and in its humane sense, brotherly and sisterly love among all people — was a powerful motivating force.
But the nature of the dissatisfactions and the aspirations behind them deserve a closer examination.
Surprisingly, those aspirations for a just and humane society are not far from those on which the United States and the French revolutions were based more than two centuries ago: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and “liberty, equality, fraternity.” These claims have run through the history of the modern world, and have been the sources of major protests against the three great social evils of exploitation, domination and discrimination.
In the American Revolution, “life” meant the satisfaction of material needs. That’s what motivated the Boston of Sam Adams and what roused, in the spirit of equality, the colonial farmer.
“Liberty” in the United States meant freedom from domination from abroad, and in France meant freedom from an entrenched feudal system.
“Fraternity” — later “sorority,” or better yet, “solidarity” — spoke to relations between people, not simply formal justice but also human relations. It was this claim of fraternity, coupled with a belief in equality, that lay behind the slave rebellions, the Civil War and later the civil rights movement, in which the exploitation and domination that racism supported were necessarily also targets of the struggle.
“The pursuit of happiness,” however, added something different. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is Thomas Jefferson’s modification of philosopher John Locke’s phrase “life, liberty and property” — a solidly liberal and now conventional formulation.
It is stretching a point to think that in writing “the pursuit of happiness,” Jefferson might have had in mind the claims of the ’60s protesters. But while the connection may be more logical than historical, it is nonetheless symbolically provocative.
The ’60s did add a new ingredient to the conventional liberal demands of the earlier centuries — claims made possible by technological promises of plenty and prosperity that were based on a system in which exploitation, domination and racism were concealed but nevertheless central.
The ‘68 movement targeted the one-dimensionality that was the result of a system in which profit was derived from never-ending competition and never-ending growth.
The protesters thought there was hope for revolutionary change because this system contains the means for its own undoing: It produces technologies that enable the fulfillment of authentic human needs to an extent never before possible — and without the necessity of manufacturing inauthentic needs for material consumption to keep the system going.
With this new awareness, new demands were expressed in action. (Historically, those aspirations were not new; the Lawrence textile strikers in Massachusetts put “Bread and Roses” on their placards in 1912.) These new claims took seriously the “pursuit of happiness” both as a social goal and as a personal one. They were the foundations of the ’60s protests.
The earlier claims were included: the right to equality in opposition to discrimination was successfully addressed with broad civil rights legislation and political reform. The acceptance of more widespread democratic participation in politics extended liberty. And opposition to domination ended the Vietnam War under the claim for justice and liberty.
Separately, these were each major reforms. They came together as anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The students occupying Columbia University buildings — protesting a university gym preempting a public park, accepting the leadership of African-American youth, and opposing the use of university resources for research into technologies of death — symbolized the earlier and the new sensibility.
The students were deeply disturbed at the difficulties of providing an adequate material life, in the face of the reality of increasing inequality in the distribution of goods and services. But they added to that a demand to expand the possibilities for the pursuit of happiness, both as individuals and collectively, although the claim was often rather inchoate, and expressed more theoretically and philosophically than politically.
So, no political revolutions resulted from the actions of the demonstrators in the streets of Berlin, New York and Paris — or in Detroit, Los Angeles and Montgomery. Major reforms, yes, but the idealistic aspirations were abortive.
They responded to the one-dimensionality of the world around them, and linked their dissatisfaction to the antiwar and civil rights movements, but not politically to the third source of protest — exploitation.
Symptomatic of this was the attitude of the police in the Columbia buildings occupation. They treated the students as elitist brats enjoying the luxuries of an expensive education that a working policeman could never aspire to. The common nexus that connected the students’ aspirations for freedom and happiness to the limits on material opportunities of exploited workers did not come together.
In France, workers were directly engaged, but the bulk of the trade union leadership withheld support from the broader aspirations, refusing to see connections where doing so would have interfered with more pragmatic considerations.
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