Features » August 1, 2008

In Defense of the ‘60s (cont’d)

In May 1968, a columnist for Le Nouvel Observateur wrote of Paris:

It was the strike, not the student revolt, that truly paralyzed the country for three long weeks. The paradox is that these two movements never encountered each other. The students marching toward the factories to “meet the workers” found the doors closed. The unions didn’t want them: the workers found the students disorganized and irresponsible.

The New Left tried to put all claims together and in context, but in the end failed. The system was too strong, was able to deliver the goods to meet ever-increasing, artificially created needs and consumerist desires, and provided enough satisfaction to thwart the emergence of even deeper demands. The reforms that were achieved were limited not by the weakness of the students and the protesters of the ’60s, but by the strength of the system that they critically engaged.

By 1968, the advances that a technologically oriented industrial society had opened up were, in a technical sense, revolutionary. They created a possibility of a world without want, a world in which necessary uncreative labor was reduced to a bare minimum, in which restraints on liberty and blocks to fraternity were no longer required for growth, in which there was no need to repress love that might interfere with economically more desirable motivations – a world in which, in a manner of speaking, utopias were no longer utopian but were technically feasible.

Realizing this, as many of the protests of ‘68 did, put the possibility of meeting new claims – such as for the achievement of happiness – on the historical agenda, and on the global stage.

For the first time in history, the possibility of achieving the full goals of the 18th century revolution existed, and the students and protesters of ‘68 were the first to raise it in the arena of political and social action.

However, the formulation of these new demands ignored one simple thing: the system – which had delivered the goods to many of the students and their supporters, enabling them to formulate these newly realizable aspirations – had not delivered the goods in like manner to everyone.

Many workers, the unemployed and poorly paid, members of ethnic or racial minorities, and many women were excluded from the benefits of the new abundance, as were huge numbers in the Third World. Their struggles were for the minimal level of equality that would let them participate in the acquisition of the goods being delivered to others. Žižek, writing in In These Times, calls them the Excluded, differentiating them from the Included, such as the students and many of those on the New Left.

As a consequence, a conflict appeared between the demands of the ‘68 protesters and the large number of those whose demands could be seen as a prerequisite for pursuing the claims of the new sensibility. In other words, a disconnect occurred between the needs of the Included and the needs of the Excluded.

That disconnect was little addressed in theory, and it perhaps prevented the ferment of the ’60s from achieving either side’s goals.

But there were glimmers of a realization of the problem: in the calls of the civil rights movement not only for full participation in the existing system but also for reform of that system as in the calls of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the end of his life:

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life’s highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished. That is where we are now. (Speech to the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Frogmore, May 1967.)

When Žižek stresses the importance of “the destructured masses” and attention to “the Excluded,” but criticizes the French suburban riots of 2005 as “an outburst with no pretense to vision,” he is right. But the lesson that needs to be drawn is to forge the link between the resistant members of the Included – the students and intellectuals of ‘68 and their successors today – and the Excluded – the exploited workers of the majority of the world, including the French suburban rioters in 2005 and of African Americans and Latinos of the United States. But the unification of the two is not easy in practice.

We have seen a perverse reflection of the failure to unite the sources of protest in the current election campaign. In caricature, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) primary campaign drew on the demand for sorority, and Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) on that for racial equality. Both campaigns dealt, with various levels of directness, with the exploitation of workers.

But Obama also draws on another sensibility – that greed is dehumanizing, that broader changes in human relations and conduct are needed, that there is something missing in everyday life that goes beyond a mere paycheck and a middle-class standard of living. Perhaps calling it a real chance at the pursuit of happiness is too rhetorical, but that is what it harkens back to.

Clinton tried to convince voters that this was elitist, of interest only to the Included, and she tried to convince those who endure exploitation – whose daily lives are insecure, whose needs and anxieties are day-to-day, who may in fact really be bitter, the Excluded – that Obama and his greater vision come at the expense of neglecting their immediate crises.

Former White House adviser Karl Rove saw the difference in similar, if cruder, terms. He wrote in the May 16 Wall Street Journal: “The primary has created a deep fissure in Democratic ranks: blue collar, less affluent, less educated voters versus the white-wine crowd of academics and upscale professionals (along with blacks and young people).”

In diluted form, this is precisely the problem that 1968 raised for the first time in efforts for major social change in the United States: on the one hand, the connection between the immediate needs of those still struggling for the basics, and, on the other hand, the hopes for a fuller, richer life that others, largely better positioned, want to pursue.

The two together constitute a call to implement the “inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that the Declaration of Independence claimed more than 200 years ago, that the idealistic protesters of 1968 were after, and that Obama must succeed in unifying if he is to advance the change he is talking about.

It is a set of goals still well worth fighting for. And we should honor the activists of 1968 for their contributions to it, not dismissively denigrate them.