Paul Anderson, review of 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt by Ronald Fraser (Chatto, £14.95), Tribune, 29 January 1988
In 1968 I was an eight-year-old schoolboy in a provincial town. I watched television news pictures of rioting in Paris, which scared me, but otherwise the political turmoil of the year passed me by – at the time at least.
Twenty years on, however, 1968 seems politically one of the most important years of my life. I was introduced to Left political ideas by secondhand paperback editions of books produced in the wake of the 1968 explosion. My first experience of organised Left politics was in a far-Left group that would hardly have existed but for 1968. At university, my friends and I read the Situationists and attempted (completely unsuccessfully) to convince our fellow students to act like their predecessors a decade earlier. More recently, I have worked for magazines and newspapers that would be rather short of contributors and readers were it not for the 1968 generation.
Of course, not everyone of my age and class now involved in left politics has a similar history, and, of those that have, few now consider that the way forward is to ape the radicals of 1968. Nevertheless, the influence of 1968 on the political culture of everyone who has grown up since is undeniable, and it has not been entirely for the worst.
True, some of the ideas it encouraged have hardly helped the left - the illusions that students could transform society on their own, that street-fighting could topple "the system", that "the real struggle" was in the Third World, that "bourgeois freedoms" were just a capitalist con-trick, or that the state and the traditional social democratic left were simply enemies of progress. 1968 led to a surge of Leninist vanguardism, often idiotically Third Worldist, the extreme of which was the terrorism of the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraction; even the non-vanguardist versions of "that revolution stuff' look pretty silly from the vantage point of 1988.
But other elements of the political culture of 1968 have been wholly beneficial. The radical democratic demand for self-management articulated by the student movements has reverberated through the left ever since; so too has the idea that sexuality and gender are political (though here 1968 was really just the beginning). Much of 1968's Third Worldism Was not knee-jerk; and the effect of 1968 in reinvigorating left intellectual life is still visible on the bookshop shelves (just). Without 1968 there would have been no West German Greens, no women's movement, no gay movement, and fewer good films and magazines.
Ronald Fraser has compiled a fascinating oral history of 1968, drawing on interviews with more than 200 participants in the late sixties student movements of France, America, Italy, Britain and Northern Ireland. The interviews were conducted in 1984 and 1985 by Fraser and a team of eight researchers.
Fraser laces together the anecdotes and analyses to form a set of superb racy journalistic accounts of the histories of the various movements. For the most part he avoids coming to definite conclusions about history's "lessons", if indeed it has any, simply allowing the interviewees to express their (current) thoughts.
Inevitably, the result reflects the fact that most of the interviewees are one-time student activists whose subsequent fate has been to become left intellectuals: there's rather more celebration than critique, and too little from the now-disillusioned. And although the book's scope is rightly limited to the student movements, I would have liked more on the working-class movements, particularly in France and Italy, that accompanied or followed them.
But it would be wrong to carp. Fraser's is an excellent piece of work, quite as good as his oral history of the Spanish civil war, Blood of Spain. There are real human beings talking here, bringing events to life. Somebody needs to do the same for the left since 1968. Continuous le combat, ce n'est qu'un debut!, or words to that effect.
