By Ross Gandy
January, 2011

Immanuel Wallerstein has been writing articles claiming that the 1960s-1970s were a turning point in world history.**  Were they? Those of us who come from that generation would be well advised to think about what happened in those two decades and why.  And many progressive people who are now arriving would also like to know the meaning of the “fabulous sixties.”

I’m seventy-six years old, I lived through the history.  What follows I do from memory.

During the 1960s there was a rising tide of protest against existing social conditions from youth, students, intellectuals, young academics and working people all over the world.  The height of the protest movements were the years 1968-1972: the May student uprising of 1968 in France, the “Long May” of the 1970s in Italy, the urban guerrillas of the Red Army Fraction terrorizing Germany from 1970 on, the marxist workers’ commissions in the factories of Franco’s Spain, Chinese youth loose in the Cultural Revolution, students rioting across Europe from Yugoslavia to England, the paralysis of Mexico City by universities ending in the Tlatelolco massacre, guerrilla wars in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the peaking of the anti-war movement in the USA while women and gays came out of the closet, the continuation of Black Liberation, the counter-culture penetrating the media, the vogue of marxism in dozens of versions.

By the end of the 1970s this radicalization of students and intellectuals was waning, and soon we were in the long night of 1980-2010.  What caused this radicalization and what happened to it?

There were several historical tendencies woven together that matured in the 1960s and caused the unrest lasting into the 1970s.

After the Second World War the world was in ruins and in the Cold War years of the 1950s times were bad in almost all countries: misery, tightening of the belt, reconstruction.  Most nations were traditional societies, even in Europe.  In the West the Cold War fed conservative religion as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. In Catholic Italy the Christian Democrats reigned and it was against the law to get a divorce!  In Germany 90-year-old Adenaur ruled through his Catholic Party. In Paris, Sartre and Saint Genet were hardly representative of the sea of traditional peasants who often voted for  the DemoChristians. In fascist Spain, Franco enforced traditional religion with the secret police.  In the United States the lid was on: the universities taught orthodoxy in politics and literature, college women majored in home economics, Kierkegaard boomed among the intellectuals, at the end of every movie the cowboy kissed his horse and in 1960 the popular governor of New York was rejected at the Congress of the Republican Party as a possible candidate for the presidency because—he was divorced.  In Hickville, Podunk, Dogpatch, Main Street, Peoria, Houston no one would vote for a godless man like that! Yes, in the 1950s the coffin was clapped tight.  Critical thought was underground: 500,000 people read the Little Magazines; Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had small publics; gays and Beats hid in closets popping peyote pods under blue lights. I lapped up Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.

In the 1960s the counter-cultural tendency in the “West” surfaced with a whoosh—a reaction against the blandness of the Cold War generation.  In the USA as late as 1960 eighty percent of college women still said their aim in life was a home and babies but in 1965 Betty Friedan trashed the Feminine Mystique and by 1970 eighty percent were saying they wanted a career.  The underground Beatniks of the 1950s became in the 1960s a mass movement: acid gulping, pot smoking Hippies tuned in, turned on and dropped out.  Students read The Power Elite and sneered at the fairy tales told by their political science profs. On soap operas appeared scenes of love making as Hollywood came out of its own closet and slammed the door. The media threw out censorship of sex and chased the fundamentalists off stage.  The “marital and procreative imperative” institutionalized in the dominant Calvinist culture since the sixteenth century was beaten down as the hedonist ethic took over. Sex is for fun: free love, homosexual eros, polymorphos forms of sex, Henry Miller in the bookstores.

In 1956 the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott kicked off the Black Liberation Movement. The struggle of Afroamericans to ride in the front of the bus, to enter restaurants and theaters, to attend better schools, even to go the bathroom got support from white students in universities as far apart as Princeton and Berkeley.  The students’ Freedom Rides into the South to join civil rights actions showed them the fate of underclasses in the United States.  In 1962 the Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society at Ann Arbor launched a populist movement in the universities for the reform of Amerika.  In 1964 it picked up speed in Berkeley as students raising money on campus for the civil rights movement met administrative repression and discovered that they weren´t free either.  The Free Speech Movement exploded as Mario Savio screamed at the crowds, “Lay your bods on the wheels and the gears and stop the machine!”  From coast to coast the university students obeyed him.  They poured into the streets and the plazas to protest against the war on Vietnam that they were being drafted into.  In 1967 Martin Luther King came out against the Asian war, and many activists began to roar for Black Power.  The drum beats of the Anti-War Movement rose to a crescendo in 1970 as a million people marched on Washington roaring OUT NOW.  Nixon withdrew his troops in 1973, the war ended for U.S. youth, and the Movement began to weaken.  The State hammered down its organizations but in many towns Afroamericans ran for mayor while government bureaucracies hired black university graduates.  Repression and co-optation stripped the Movement of leaders.

In the 1960s one half of the United States population was under twenty-five.  As the Soviet Union wound down its side of the Cold War in 1964, the youth of the 1960s did not understand why in the USA there were a million soldiers and a zillion bases scattered around the world; the war on Vietnam seemed absurd: they had not lived through the 1950s balance of terror and anti-communist hysteria.  In the 1950s Khrushchev had beaten his shoe on the podium of the United Nations and roared, “We will bury you!”  Khrushchev believed, Suslov believed, Kaganovich believed: the Soviet economy was growing three times as fast as the USA’s. But in the 1964 coup Brezhnev and his bureaucrats took over and they only believed in their limousines and dachas, their luxury restaurants, and the state brothels scattered around the black sea.  So they gagged their ideologists and begged the West for a truce on the red telephone at a time when for the youth of Amerika Uncle Sam was changing from a kindly old gentlemen with a white beard into an imperialist monster. As the Vietnam War heated up from 1965 to 1973 European youth also saw him that way.

I grew up in a nation with an industrial Northeast corner facing a gigantic hinterland of farms and  towns.  During my early years the transition from agricultural society to industrialism accelerated with rapid urbanization: in 1960 there were seven million farmers but by 1970 only three million.  The transition to the knowledge society was also beginning: in 1960 there were three million university students and by 1970 seven million!  Half of high school graduates were going on to more education, if only in technical training or in community colleges, while the universities became hotbeds of discussion and debate.  In Europe this knowledge explosion shocked the classical education of the universities with students demanding science instead of Plato.  La nouvelle classe ouvrière was enraged by education designed for an old leisured aristocracy when these new technocrats were facing work without being trained for it.  As one of them told me, “You read Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley in the world language, we read Plato and Aristotle in Greek.”  The summer of their discontent arrived in 1968.

In the 1960s Spain, France and Italy were going through rapid industrialization with peasants pouring into the factories, railways and mines.  Marx and Engels never tired of pointing out that this phase of industrialization radicalizes a proletariat: “the herding together of an uprooted population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women; demoralization of the working class, suddenly flung into new conditions, from the country into the town, from stable conditions of existence into recurrent economic crises.”

In changing Spain, Santiago Carrillo´s revolutionary communists tunneled up as an opposition to Franco; in modernizing France  the Party waved the hammer and sickle as Althusser became all the rage in the Ecole Normale Supérieure while a revolutionary situation emerged in May of 1968 with red flags flying over the factories; in northern Italy the Communists threatened capitalism through the electoral process and by general strikes, and in  political cafés intellectuals debated Gramsci’s philosophy.  In Italy the “Long May” was a march through the institutions that would have delighted that cryptic philosopher.

In Germany and England the transition to the knowledge society shook the universities; the Frankfurt School and Eric Hobsbawm became must reading; for students marxism was red meat and strong beer.  Marxism has always been difficult and obscure for people in the USA, but in 1969 Students for a Democratic Society abandoned its populist pitch for maoist social myths.

At the beginning of the 1960s the revolutionary Cuban people seemed to rouse the Latin American masses against United States imperialism, the revolutionary Algerian people emerged to lead
the Africans against colonialism, and the revolutionary Vietnamese people headed up the Asian struggle for liberation.  The “Third World” appeared to be encircling the ruling classes of
the metropoles in order to do them in—maoism
radiated across the planet.

For many radical thinkers the Marxist-leninist parties that proliferated throughout the world were better motors of history than the classical proletariats.  In China, Mao had a million people in the Communist Party before he took power in 1949, and another million in the Red Army: his revolution was led by this emerging elite.  There were two million communists in Italy, two hundred thousand in little Chile.  Could the Party, rallying workers and peasants, be the social force for making peoples’ revolutions around the world?

Masses, classes and parties were not the only historical actors.  In the USA Herbert Marcuse decided that radicalized students and academics, intellectuals and literati, and the millions of young professionals generated by the knowledge explosion
were a new revolutionary force.  In France, Serge Mallet called them la nouvelle classe ouvrière and expected them to transform European society.

Left activists of the reformist stripe thought that social democratic movements based on the industrial unions were bringing about a more just society in Sweden and Germany–models for the future!  The redistribution of the social product through pensions, doctors, schools, wages and the dole might soften the class struggle and level upward toward more equality.

From 1960 to 1980 waves of hope swept over left intellectual communities in the West as the colonial revolution lumbered forward behind its “natural ally”, the Soviet Union.  The USSR had generated a social myth: planning and collectivism would solve the world’s problems and usher in more equalitarian societies. And in Northern Europe social democracy ruled several economies on a level of material prosperity unequaled in world history.

We see then: during the 1960s and 1970s the mobilization of students, intellectuals, young academics, budding technocrats and working people around the world was the result of maturing and interweaving tendencies:  countercultural revolt, antiwar resistance, soviet accomodation, knowledge explosion, rapid industrialization and colonial revolution.  The trends came together and reached critical mass in 1968-1972.  But these historical tendencies slowly cooled off and in the 1980s disappeared.

In 1982 the Republicans seized the White House.  Uh, oh!  Waves of reaction foamed across the world to sink hopes of change from the downtrodden classes.  The 1980s saw the collapse of the colonial revolution, its rollback in Africa and Latin America by the imperialists’ underlings. The soviet social myth vanished in Gorbachov’s perestroika.  In 1989 history rolled on beyond Marxism-Leninism, and its Parties dwindled into sects.  The “new working class” turned into a bunch of yuppies.  The developed nations’ industrial proletariats shrank in postindustrial society.  Social democrats saw their old working class base weakening, the industrial unions withering, permanent employment disappearing, the surplus product diminishing, the rich hiding in tax havens, the aging populations too large to be pensioned off, the marginalized becoming too many to feed.  The historical forces of social change dissolved in the rising tide of neoliberal reaction and globalization.

The result?  Youth dropped out of politics; left
politicians turned into manipulative chameleons; and desperate masses converted to religious fanaticism.  The liquors of irrationalism and pessimism, of disillusionment and despair dripped into the political cafés and the philosophy seminars: intellectuals once more cried in their tequila, wrung their hands
and decided that “modernism” was a mistake.  They threw the philosophical shirt of modernism onto the pile of unfashionables and donned the irrationalism of yesteryear.  They became “postmodernists.”  This is the jargon word intellectuals use to describe those who have lost faith in progress.

The postmodernists turned their backs on the social scientists as a pack of failures who can predict nothing and proclaimed that History is a chaotic process with no foreseeable direction: civilization hurtles into the darkness of an unknowable future.

Their rejection of a scientific analysis of society has not fared well. 

In the 1990s John Bellamy Foster and the marxist school of thought at Monthly Review predicted that in the opening decade of the twenty-first century the world economy of neoliberalism would go to pieces.

In the 1990s the philosopher-economist George Soros predicted the disintegration of the world financial system in the opening decade.  In his The Crisis of Global Capitalism he said it would happen because of the deregulation of the international economy.

In the 1990s Lester Brown and his social scientists in the Earth Policy Institute predicted that climate collapse would arrive in the first decade of the twentieth-first century.

All of these predictions were fulfilled right on schedule.

In the World North market society drives economic growth toward ecological catastrophe; in the World South population growth drives society toward famine and ruin.

The North grows richer and the South poorer. The North’s transnational corporations exploit the working people of the South through the profit suck,
scanty wages, unequal exchange, the debt trap, austerity programs, patent rip offs, theft of biodiversity, capital flight north.

But there is another face to growing inequality: inside northern societies wealth is concentrating in ever fewer hands, while the majority in most southern countries finds its economic condition also worsening.

My crystal ball is filled with swirling forms,
but I can make out the dim shapes of coming political philosophies.  I see a revival of nationalism, a shift away from electoral democracy toward authoritarian forms of government, a
concentration of power in executive branches to bring market society under control and to curb population growth.  There will be regional economic integration, customs unions, scrapping of the IMF, the WTO and the UN that Uncle Sam has dancing on his strings.  There will be an end to United States blustering as coalitions of rival powers offset Washington’s imperialism.  Russia, India, China, Iran and Brazil have had enough!

Protest movements are popping up: community projects, Green sit-ins, producers’ cooperatives, literacy campaigns, health projects, reforestation drives, defense of minorities, Base Christian Communities, Indian struggles, human rights activists, peasant communes, feminist class actions, student outbursts, organizing by marginalized peoples, angry intellectuals shooting at professorial pundits with barbed truths.

Immanuel Wallerstein interprets the 1960s-1970s explosion as a turning point in world history.  Was it?

The U.S. New Left did not stop the war on Vietnam, although the way we ripped the social fabric of Amerika apart was a necessary condition for Washington to throw in the towel. The Vietnamese won the war.

What about the underclasses suffering from exploitation? In dealing with the Social Question the New Left never really amounted to much.  In the 1980s the remnants of the U.S. New Left watched the Reaganites dismantle the welfare state that the Old Left had extracted from the ruling class by a muscular struggle forty years before. Some of the new women executives and coopted managerial blacks even participated in the counterreform.

In Europe the New Left soon faded away or joined reformist political formations. In the 1970s in France when maoists and trotskyists finally gave up and entered the compromising Communist Party, older observers considered this an act of maturity.

The scientific and technical revolution began in 1959 with the discovery of the helix that kicked off biotechnology and the invention of the chip that launched informatica.  By the 1990s after thirty years of  scientific and technical revolution the digital age of neoliberalism arrived and its deregulated market society pushed the laboring people back down into the cellars of the economy with the new class division between the knows and the know-nots.

Karl Marx loved literature and history and hated economics.  He called it Scheisse—one of his favorite words—“shit”.  He complained about having to spend years studying die oekonomische Scheisse.  In December 2008 the bowels of the neoliberal world economy began a fart that in 2009 turned into a roar that in 2010 covered the academic economists in their own Scheisse.  Is the collapse of the economy a turning point in world history?

Yes, it is the beginning of a swerve.   History is spinning out of the neoliberals’control.

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** The commentary of Immanuel Wallerstein can be found at http://fbc.binghamton.edu/cmpg.htm