This is the year of red anniversaries: the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, the 100th anniversary of the German Revolution, and finally the 50th anniversary of the worldwide upsurge of 1968. For this issue, Insurgent Notes has asked a dozen comrades from Europe and the United States who “lived” “1968” as conscious political activists the question: How present or absent was the thought of Karl
Marx in that year (see our invitation)?

We hardly mean, at the current dangerous juncture, to fall into a purely “backward looking” stance, and we have hardly forgotten the need to make the revolution. But history and memory are part of the revolutionary movement, perhaps never so much as today with the current hype about the new phase of “digital capitalism,” a worthy ideological successor to the now-forgotten “new economy” of the 1990s, and undoubtedly condemned to a similar “sell-by” date. As one black comrade put it long ago “The revolution will not be televised,” and it will not be online either.

There are many theories of “why 1968?” and we will let our contributors speak for themselves. Most prominently and immediately was the murderous American war in Vietnam; intimately related, the continued dramatic impact of civil rights struggles as well as the radicalization of the black movement in the United States. There was the radicalization of the student movement under the impact of all the preceding, and a sexual revolution in full swing, setting the stage for the emergence of radical feminism by 1969. Aside from these phenomena, obvious to all at the time, there was the end of the post–World War II capitalist boom, of which few of us were then aware, or made central to our interventions. There was the rising, less generally noticed wave of wildcat strikes in us industry, which would continue until the 1973–75 “oil crisis” and the deepest recession, to date, since the war. All of these events came together in a visceral sense that there was no going back to (in Yeats’s phrase) the “file clerk sense of reality.”

Never since he wrote them in the glow of the French Revolution did Wordsworth’s words ring truer: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

For us and all our contributors, there was an irreversible aspect to “1968” and the years that followed; nothing could ever be as it was before, neither socially nor in individual life choices. Something had “gotten out of the bottle” that could never be put back in, and never was. Our apocalyptic sense of the near future may have been overwrought, but everyone we asked to contribute “stayed the course” in their respective ways. Our two Italian comrades have provided accounts of the “long 1968” in that country, lasting a full decade, significantly longer than in most other places. Another Italian comrade once remarked on those years: “It may have been a festival, but what a festival!”

Some of us have seen the footage of the return to work at the Wonder factory in Paris in June 1968, where a young woman is telling some gathered union bureaucrats that, unlike most of her fellow workers, she could never go back to that “shithole,” and in fact she disappeared shortly thereafter, never to be seen again.

We at Insurgent Notes offer this issue both to our “’68” age cohort and, more importantly, to younger comrades, hoping we can convey some of the electricity of 1968 and what followed, in that (in the words of clr James) “turning point of history where history did not turn.”

We should note that none of the contributors, other than the editors, have seen each other’s submissions. We’d like to hear their reactions to what their fellow contributors have written and urge them to submit comments or new articles. Similarly, we are confident that we have only scratched the surface and that there are many others whose experiences and perspectives on the events of 1968 (especially from outside Europe and the United States) would enrich the discussion, so we invite others to contribute articles and comments as well. And finally, we are quite aware that nostalgia for 1968 can preclude serious discussions about the ultimate significance of the events and ideas of that moment for revolutionary politics today so we also want to invite younger activists and thinkers to weigh in with articles and comments. In either the case of those active in ’68 or those who have become active since, we’d also be especially interested in anarchist perspectives on the issues involved. We’d be delighted if we could turn this initial symposium into a sustained conversation about what revolutionary politics should look like—in tumultuous times and beyond.

Being raised by conservative, Republican parents in an all-white conservative Republican suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, it took some time to get to Marxism. There were no red diapers let alone flags for miles and miles! But I was raised with a basic sense of fairness and my encounters with the events and activism of the 1960s were contradictory to my upbringing. Ultimately my activism touched off a search for meaning to resolve the contradictions I felt. Essentially practice/activism due to moral outrage opened me to theory/philosophy and Marxism.

On October 18, 1968, I was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, teaching my urban planning graduate students economics. Suddenly one of my students who was not in class at the time burst into the classroom and shouted at me. He was sweating and red in the face.

“If you think we don’t have fascism in this country, go down to the business college and see what is happening there!”

Class was about over so we all decided to go and have a look. I had been having an ongoing debate with this student about what fascism was and wasn’t. The area around the business college reeked of tear gas and I saw gas-masked police beating students with nightclubs. Later at an emergency faculty meeting we were shown films of the action during which students were attempting to prevent Dow Chemical from interviewing business college graduates. The police were shockingly vicious. But what was more shocking was that while half of us (there were about 2,000 faculty present) sat in stony-faced silence watching our students being beaten by the police, the other half of the faculty was applauding the police! At some point the students surrounded the auditorium and locked us in. We were forced to stay in the auditorium for several hours until the police could drive them away and open the doors. During that time there was much shouting and fistfights between faculty members. The student-led actions against Dow were later memorialized in David Maraniss’s book, They Marched into Sunlight.

By 1968, I was already an activist against the war in Viet Nam and for the aims of the various civil rights movements of the time. My antiwar work stemmed from personal outrage about the secrecy and lies concerning us military involvement in Southeast Asia with the resulting needless death and destruction. I had no position on the anti-communism that drove us government activities, but I didn’t believe the government’s ultimate explanation that allowing Viet Nam to fall to “the communists” would result in a communist takeover of the region and ultimately the world.

Reflecting on an encounter I had in Thailand in 1963 led me to the realization that the United States had been involved in covert operations in the region since at least the early 1960s and had consistently lied about that fact or hid the truth. When I was a graduate student at Syracuse University, I had a student internship in India for a year between 1962 and 1963. On my way home some of us traveled through Southeast Asia. We stopped, among other places, in Thailand. In the Bangkok airport I spotted several us fighter jets on the runway as we landed. In fact our plane almost collided with one of them. This set off some indistinct alarm bells in my mind but I shrugged it off. Then I made my way to northern Thailand with a guide. In a small village an old man said through an interpreter:

“Are you an American?”

“Yes.”

“Then I want to shake your hand.”

“OK,” I said as we shook hands. “Why do you want to shake the hand of an American?”

“As thanks for killing our communists,” he replied.

I was stunned but it took a year or two to understand what this meant. I had originally planned to visit Viet Nam as we made our way home. But we decided not to stop there because Buddhist monks were burning themselves in the streets. In Calcutta (Kolcata) where I had been stationed, Indian students I knew said that these self-immolations were, in part, protesting the fact that the cia was waging a war against a leftist insurgency. I began to think more about these conversations after my experiences in Thailand. When I returned home, I saw Lyndon Johnson deliver a speech at Syracuse University announcing that one of our ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. I told my friends about what the Indian students were saying about Viet Nam and what I saw in Thailand. I told them that the Gulf of Tonkin story was bullshit. That was the start of a long involvement of opposition to the war.

While living in Calcutta the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was exploding. I remember seeing the now-famous photos of dogs attacking black people in the United States in the left-wing Indian press. And as a result, I spent many hours with Indian and us students talking about race discrimination in the United States as well as caste, religious and ethnic discrimination in India. One of my fellow grad students back in Syracuse was the vice chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality and I later joined him in demonstrations for open housing in Syracuse and also picketed the office of Patrick Moynihan, who was a professor at Syracuse then, after the release of his victim-blaming pamphlet with Nathan Glazer, The Negro Family.

Fast forward to Madison in October 1968 and the Dow demonstration: I didn’t think it was the time to have an intellectual debate with my students over the nature of fascism. But it was time to try to understand what was going on around us. Both my students and I were clear on what we were against but clueless on what we were for. Marx was not in the equation. And I was only vaguely aware of the various political currents in Students for a Democratic Society (sds) to which a number of my students belonged. There were teach-ins on the Viet Nam war that offered important historical insights but little theoretical/philosophical context other than the anti-communism of the time. I was aware of the divide in the black civil rights movement between Dr. King and Malcolm X, and the rise of the Black Panthers and especially the Chicago leader Fred Hampton. But again there was little context.

In 1968 the National Guard had been mobilized to come to Madison a number of times to put down student-led rebellions. Many Wisconsin students had been involved in the battle with police during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Since the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive and the us government responded with further escalation of the war, there were anti-war uprisings not only in Madison and across the United States but around the world. King’s assassination in April had touched off a massive protest in Madison. And a year later, in December 1969, the police murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, which set off another major demonstration in Madison. Madison had become a war zone itself as students regularly battled police and National Guard soldiers in the streets.

In response the Wisconsin State Legislature held hearings about student unrest. Some elected officials were putting out the line that all the trouble was being caused by New York Jews and they subpoenaed a few of them. I went to one of the hearings and watched in amusement as one of these students waved a book in the red face of his accuser.

“Have you read this?”

“No.”

“Then I have nothing to say to you. We’ll talk after you’ve read it.” He then walked out of the hearing.

The book was Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. I went to a bookstore and picked up a copy. It was my first look (except for an undergraduate reading of The Communist Manifesto) at any sort of Marxism and I began to look into the Frankfurt School with which Marcuse was identified. I realized then that I knew nothing of Marxism in general.

Because of my activism, my job at the University of Wisconsin was in jeopardy so my wife and I and our two-year-old son packed up and moved to Iowa City where I had secured another faculty position at the University of Iowa. Shortly after I left Madison, a local group bombed the Army Math Research Center on the campus. The building was destroyed and a graduate student was killed. The suspects were unknown to me. Many activists had been operating in so-called “affinity groups” to promote various forms of disruption. The “New Year’s Eve Gang,” as the bombers called themselves, was one of these. There was little evidence of any theoretical core behind the bombing or other forms of militant disruption, some of which I participated in. It was pure resistance by a lot of anonymous players.

The University of Iowa campus at this point was also highly active. While at the University Computer Center one day, soon after I arrived, I found some papers left in a copy room. They were copies of a budget for the Computer Center and I put them in my briefcase. I discovered that more than half the budget came from the Department of Defense for a project at the Rock Island Arsenal. They were helping sharpen calculations for artillery trajectories being used in Viet Nam. I published an article about it in the student newspaper. The students’ spontaneous response was to try to storm the Computer Center and it took almost the entire campus and city police force to keep them out. Fortunately I had come to the university with tenure! But this put me in touch with a wide range of campus radicals.

A number of these students and a few faculty members had been connected with sds. Maoism was a major theoretical thread and there were study groups reading the works of Mao. But at this point there was still no Marx. The Maoists were mainly affiliated with Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Union. They couldn’t seem to get beyond “power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” I flirted with Maoism for a short time. What brought that to a halt, as a recall, was a sober discussion in a study group one evening of a pamphlet called “How Mao Tse Tung Thought Fixed the Peanut Machine.” (Workers located the “primary contradiction” in the broken machine.) That did it for me! No more Maoism with these people.

I finally settled for a time with an organization of faculty and graduate students called New University Conference (nuc). It was founded at the University of Chicago in 1968. It considered itself “multi tendency.” One of the leaders on the Iowa campus was an anarchist sociology professor. It was my first experience with anarchism in practice. But I never really learned what anarchism was about. There was no study of anarchist theory. We were primarily an action group who wrote and distributed critiques of textbooks being used in a number of undergraduate survey courses. Our critique attacked the race, gender and class bias being promoted. We also started a food cooperative and a cooperative daycare center, and debated the possibility that alternative institutions could serve as a path toward a new society. We held community meetings to discuss city plans for an urban renewal project that would destroy affordable housing and at those meetings we showed films and had speakers about national liberation struggles in Africa.

One of the nuc members was a professor of intellectual history who considered himself a Marxist. He wanted us to read Marx and organized a study group to read the first volume of Capital. My education in economics stood in sharp contrast to Marx’s critique of capitalism. And Marx’s critique of political economy challenged much of what I was teaching at the time. This beginning of my studies of Marxism made me realize for the first time that what I was fighting against was ultimately capitalism. This was in 1972. With all of my activism of the past eight years, it was a reading of Capital and subsequent readings of Marx and other theorists that began to help me make sense of what was going on around me. It was practice that led me to theory that, in turn, informed my future practice.

Later that year, Sojourner Truth Organization (sto) organized a study group in Des Moines, Iowa, that I attended. It introduced me to dialectical philosophy and had us reading more of Marx. The following year I moved to Chicago and worked for a time in the National Office of the New American Movement (nam) another “multi tendency” socialist organization that had a strong orientation toward social democracy. I went on to join first sto and later News and Letters. Both had a strong orientation to theory and philosophy. My move to Chicago occurred a full decade after my year in Calcutta, India, and my travels in Southeast Asia. My political education was really just beginning.

The many thousands of American students and young people who not only engaged in various parts of “The Movement” from the middle 1960s–70s but also read books on Marxism, rarely found themselves in “study classes” conducted by Marxist organizations of any kind. It would be more accurate to say that they created their own self-studies, by themselves or with friends, or even that they found their closest study in college classes taught by self-defined radicals, often enough Marxists or those sympathetic to Marxist ideas.

This is not quite as remarkable and unprecedented as one may think. “Marxism” in any intellectual sense did not sink in deeply among the activist Left of, say, 1870 to 1960. Most of the actual proletarian Left, in the United States, consisted of first generation European immigrants, until at least the middle 1930s, and afterward to 1950 or so, of an uncertain mix, often second generation Reds. For immigrants, the socialist or communist (or Wobbly) newspaper was the source of knowledge, and didacticism did not go deep. “Marxism” as a generalized vision of working class destiny proved sufficient, with a few pamphlets naturally including The Communist Manifesto.

Study classes flourished among socialists before 1920, but theory was mostly abjured, for history, iconoclastic studies of business and such. Communists tried hard to inject a theoretical grasp, but succeeded only with working class autodidacts (these existed in each ethnic group and played an important role, but sophistication in Marxist theories was rarely a focus), and a similarly small portion of “American” working and (more often) lower middle class types. The same would be true of African Americans. Small movements, Trotskyist movements, could be fierce in their learning and discussion of fine points, but remained few in numbers. Their collective compulsion for study and argument indeed seemed to be a factor in their small size.

By 1965, we have a middle class radicalism for which personal working class destiny is a stretch, if also definitely part of the basics of what the young Marxist would wish to believe. By that time and more so a few years later, radical bookstores with abundant used volumes sprung up around many campuses, in student areas, also university bookstores with left-sympathetic clerks served the same purposes: offering a larger variety of Marxists texts than ever before available, at pretty low paperback prices.

Young people, more often male than female and more often Jewish than gentile, at least in demographic terms, dug in, often learning between campus or community demonstrations. The first substantial Rosa Luxemburg anthology appeared in 1970 (it was a “Radical America Book” under the mr imprint) and this may be a good indication.

The Kerr Company and International Publishers published copies of The Communist Manifesto by the tens of thousands, mostly on assignment of college instructors. Small Marxist groups offered inexpensive pamphlets, their own versions of classics mostly not of the “theoretical” variety but sometimes rooted in factional disputes, and so on. These could be described as the salad days of the printed Marxist word, better in variety and style than even in the 1930s–40s, when the Left, at least the cp-oriented Left, had widely read magazines and active bookstores of its own.

It is intriguing that a large handful of older sds members, including myself and Carl Davidson, came into a political world of the later 1950s or early 1960s without political resources and read the Weekly People of the Socialist Labor Party. It was literate (edited by a former cab driver and repeated candidate for president), and suitable for someone “interested” in socialist ideas, if not for someone who sought real political activity beyond leafleting. Perhaps, I sometimes think, the student syndicalism of sds had an origin or relation to the semi-syndicalist, pre-1920 Wobbly sentiment still buried in later De Leonism. The generation only a few years younger would know nothing of this, but would find Fanon, Du Bois, James’s Black Jacobins and other books readily available, along with the memoir of Malcolm X and much else at hand. A visiting lecturer, Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn among others, would inspire a reading of their newer or older books.

All this bears only, it seems, a distant relation with the Maoist and Trotskyist worlds. But perhaps I am wrong. The reality that I perceived (or thought that I perceived) even a half decade later was that interest in Marxism became far more cerebral, mainly around the campus, and the audience far more limited. It was great, for instance, to have scholarship on radical phenomenology (during the brief leftward swing of Telos magazine) but this was not for everyone, to say the least. And it was over by the later 1970s.

We should not forget important exceptions: Madison, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Burlington, and a dozen other places where avowed radicals and even Marxists remained prominent, sometimes as elected city officials, just as often leaders of unions or even local labor federations. It was a little surprising to learn, by the 1990s, that Santa Cruz (“the other Madison”) had a city manager who also taught the basic Marxism course at the university! In such spots, where aging Old Left old-timers sometimes also retired, Marxism found new life in global support movements but also in lively discussions. How far did these penetrate the mysteries of Marxist theory? Not as far as in Greater New York—that would be the safest generalization.

In many ways, I was very lucky from the point of view of studying Marx before 1968. I was an activist in sds from 1964–68, and sds’s turn to make sense of the escalation of the Vietnam War after February 1965 in terms of imperialism, led me and others to the deeper study of capitalism. As I started to organize sds chapters in Michigan, including the mobilization of students to attend the march on Washington in April 1965, I came under the influence of a janitor (!!) at Michigan State, where I was an undergraduate. Roy Barr was ten years older than me and, in retrospect, he was clearly trying to groom me as a Marxist activist. Because of him, I read Capital, volume 1, twelve hours a day for several weeks in 1966, long before I read Marx’s early writings. This was one of the greatest intellectual experiences of my life.

I was also lucky, even before I met Roy Barr, to have had a professor who had written a biography of Vito Marcantonio, the American legislator and leftist activist, and who taught the history of the American left in the twentieth century, which led me to read many things, including the volumes of Theodore Draper on the Communist Party. So I was increasingly focused on Marxism and the left by 1966.

At the same time, Roy Barr had me reading Lenin in order to understand the need for a particular kind of political organization. I did not read Trotsky or Stalin until later, but I did read Mao, because China was obviously looking for influence in the West, and, unprompted, they sent me the four volumes of Mao’s selected works in 1965 or 1966. Although the effect of all of these political events and of this reading was to make me a revolutionary, it was my turn to Leninism in 1965, and even a very brief turn to Maoism in 1968, that I now believe was a mistake. Unfortunately, the sds organizations I played a role in came under the influence of pl, which gave a bad name to everything they claimed to stand for.

Stimulated by the proposal from IN to think about Marx in 1968, it has only occurred to me now that I never thought to figure out what Roy’s political affiliation was or whether he belonged to a political organization himself. He was a scathing critic of the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party. I don’t think he ever mentioned Trotsky. He seemed unaffiliated, but I now wonder whether that was true. By the time I got to Berkeley in 1967, I was a committed Marxist-Leninist, though I was a student in classics and comparative literature. Though I regretted not being at Berkeley in 1964 for the Free Speech Movement, I became an sds activist again and went through many demonstrations, including the struggles over racism embodied in the Black Panther Party and the campaign to free Huey Newton. I changed my field to political science, where it was the influence of the political theorists, especially John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, that led me to read the Bottomore selections from the early Marx, and then to teach these same works as a teaching assistant for another theorist, Hanna Pitkin. For a while in 1968, I planned to drop out of grad school to work full time as an organizer in a working-class setting. I was dissuaded from doing this at the time by the dean of the graduate division, but I continued to struggle to figure out what kind of activism I should undertake. Then, for a few months, I had the illusion that the Cultural Revolution was actually about building “socialist man,” a vision I found true to Marx. My only excuse for this foolishness was that I must have wanted to believe the propaganda and only later found out the reality.

Then my luck shifted again. I went to France as a student in September 1968, where under the influence of the tremendous anti-Leninist fervor of the student movement there, I gave up my Leninism forever, though had nothing to replace it. I suppose I became a “critical critic” for a while, only in 1969 to watch sds self-destruct in Chicago, which caused me to become quite depressed, which it took me more than a year to overcome.

The Insurgent Notes editors ask, “Where Was Marx in 1968?” and suggest that Marxism was largely absent, at least in the United States. As a guide to action that was mostly true, but in fact a lot could be said about how the events of that year—mass working-class struggles across the globe—stimulated the development of Marxism within the growing radical movement even in the United States. But that is a huge undertaking. I will instead take the opportunity to comment briefly on one topic: the anti-Marxist influence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital.

I came into the radical and socialist left in the late 1960s, when Monopoly Capital was all the rage in the us New Left. Baran, Sweezy and their Monthly Review tendency deserved recognition for emphasizing the importance of imperialism in sustaining capitalism for a century or more. But their overall theoretical and political influence was harmful.

Those of us trying to grasp Marxism back then and to apply it to the explosive world we were living in—in the United States, the Black struggle and the country’s imperialist assaults on Vietnam, Cuba etc.—were up against slews of Baran–Sweezy fans who learned from their bible that

1. the law of value, and therefore Marxist political economy, was useless for understanding the imperialist world and
2. that the working class in the imperialist countries was useless for challenging capitalism.

The main alternative analysis was the book Marx and Keynes by Paul Mattick, but that was terribly difficult to read and never became popular.

Rejecting the working class

B&S’s rejection of the “first-world” working class soon came into conflict with the worldwide and world-shaking struggles of 1968, as the post-war boom drew to an end. French workers seized factories and almost overthrew Charles de Gaulle’s government. The international upsurge (ranging from Europe to China and Mexico) included the United States, with the proletarian-based ghetto uprisings. This was a refutation of theory by reality. But damage had been done.

B&S wrote:

Industrial workers are a diminishing minority of the American working class, and their organized cores in the basic industries have to a large extent become integrated into the system as consumers and ideologically conditioned members of the society. They are not, as the industrial workers were in Marx’s day, the system’s special victims, though they suffer from its elementality and irrationality along with all other classes and strata—more than some, less than others.1

That industrial workers were then (and are now) a shrinking section of the us working class is undeniable. But Baran and Sweezy had no conception that the working class (not just industrial workers) would ever come under the pressure of capitalism’s relentless austerity drive, a fact certainly related to their rejection of Marx’s laws of motion. Instead, they read into the working class a diagnosis of apathy, disorientation, boredom, aimlessness and depression—a catalog of middle-class anxieties.

Even though Baran–Sweezy are not responsible for all the turns their followers took, their outlook helped mislead much of a whole generation of radicals into rejecting any anti-capitalist potential of the us working class. Some variants of third-worldism contended that workers in the global North were in collusion with the imperialist capitalists and were themselves exploiters of the South; this current had no interest in promoting the political independence of the working class or even in supporting its struggles against capital. A few years later when radicalism faded, many of them jumped onto the career ladder of the trade-union bureaucracy and the bourgeois (and imperialist!) Democratic Party—where they served amicably alongside social democrats whom they had despised and battled back in the day.

Rejecting Marxist theory

On the theory side, subsequently Sweezy often insisted that he and Baran had not rejected the law of value as the basis for their analysis. You would not know that from the book: the term “value” does not appear there, except for a brief explanation of why they abandoned surplus value. That was not just an oversight. For Marx, value is the starting point of the analysis of capitalism, and price relations are derivative of value. Baran–Sweezy, in contrast, said that “market relations are essentially price relations,” and therefore “the study of monopoly capitalism, like that of competitive capitalism, must begin with the workings of the price mechanism” rather than value.2 The authors also acknowledged that their method “has resulted in almost total neglect of a subject which occupies a central place in Marx’s study of capitalism: the labor process.”3 That was an extraordinary admission for people who claim to be developing Marxism, for it is in “the labor process” that value and surplus value are generated.

Baran and Sweezy never made clear whether or not “surplus” meant surplus value in Marx’s sense. And if it did not mean surplus value, it is not clear where it comes from or whether it has any connection to class struggle. Years later, in correspondence published posthumously, it turned out that Sweezy had not been sure whether “surplus” meant surplus value, while Baran insisted they were different. Leaving this question unresolved, and the disagreement unacknowledged, was dishonest and further helped lead thousands of readers to the conviction that Marxist theory was obsolete.

Further on in the theory, Baran–Sweezy argued that the problem with capitalism in its monopoly stage was not that profits were too low but that the “surplus” was too high and needed to be “absorbed.” Marx’s tendency for the rate of profit to fall was replaced by their “tendency of surplus to rise.”4

Since the Monthly Review tendency is primarily noted for its stance against imperialism, it is interesting to see how they handled the imperialist drive for super-exploitative foreign investment. In Monopoly Capital Baran–Sweezy ran into a difficulty:

One can only conclude that foreign investment, far from being an outlet for domestically generated surplus, is a most efficient device for transferring surplus generated abroad to the investing country. Under these circumstances, it is of course obvious that foreign investment aggravates rather than helps to solve the surplus absorption problem.5

This is an astonishing statement. The second half of the first sentence above is of course true: lots of surplus value, and presumably “surplus” as well, flows from South to North. No surprise: foreign investment in the South is often a highly profitable outlet for surplus value, given imperialism’s ability to super-exploit the workers and drain the resources of the poorer countries.

But think about the dilemma that B&S faced which, according to their theory, should amount to an existential contradiction for the capitalist-imperialist system. If foreign investment aggravates what the authors said is the central problem for capitalism in its monopoly stage, why on earth do the capitalists do it? Can’t the ruling class see what’s “of course obvious,” that their scheme of draining the poorer countries of surplus is counterproductive, that it only aggravates the absorption problem and makes capitalism’s basic economic dilemma worse? If Baran and Sweezy were right, the entire imperialist capitalist class was blind to the fact that their insatiable greed for profit is overfilling the trough they pig out from and exacerbating their problem of excess surplus.

Compare B&S with Marx. B&S observed that the problem they see capitalism as facing, excess surplus absorption, is not helped by foreign investment. For Marx, the problem for capital is not an excess but a shortage of surplus value, in the long run brought about by the falling rate of profit tendency. So the aggravation of the problem is a contradiction in B&S’s theory but not in Marx’s.

From the B&S angle, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the imperialists were to come to their senses and let the third-world countries keep their surplus? And while they are in a contrite and generous mood, why not also lay out some of their surplus to offer workers in the home countries good wages as well? That would bring relief and comfort to all, exploiters and exploited alike. That was, as it happens, more or less the Keynesian answer that was also popular in the 1960s.

Sweezy himself came up with such a proposal even before the Baran–Sweezy book was written.

Would it not, for example, be in the objective interests of the American capitalist class as a whole…to institute a vastly increased program of financial and technical assistance to underdeveloped countries? Would not such a program help to dispose of the always threatening domestic surplus and at the same time strengthen capitalism internationally in its struggle with the rival socialist order?6

Sweezy went on to say that “the answer to these questions seems obvious,” and attributed the failure of the ruling class to carry out so obvious a program to capitalist greed: “the deeply ingrained capitalist abhorrence of giving anything away without receiving in return an immediately related and measurable quid pro quo.”

To conclude, the “obvious” fact that foreign investment exacerbates the surplus absorption problem forces one of two conclusions: the capitalists are blind to what’s obvious and as a result have been undermining their own system for over a century—or the theory that sees absorption as the chief problem is wrong.

The classical Marxist analysts of imperialism—Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin and others—despite their different theories, all regarded capitalism as driven by its laws of motion to extend its sway to the whole world, thereby devastating the conquered continents and threatening world war. Baran and Sweezy replaced Marxism with a superficial construction that credited imperialism’s super-exploitation and horrendous wars to a “greed” that was “obviously” self-destructive and for that reason ought to have been able to be reformed out of existence.

If Marx was absent in 1968, Baran and Sweezy bear much of the responsibility. The only positive side is that the attempt to junk Marxism only proves that Marxism is more necessary than ever.

Walter Daum lives in New York City.

• 1Monopoly Capital, p. 363.
• 2Ibid., p. 53.
• 3Ibid., p. 8.
• 4Ibid., p. 72.
• 5Ibid., pp. 107–108.
• 6“Has Capitalism Changed?,” in the book Has Capitalism Changed; An International Symposium on the Nature of Contemporary Capitalism (1961), ed. Shigeto Tsuru.

Berkeley (California) was probably a unique political-cultural milieu in the United States in the 1960s, both before and after 1968. It was part of the larger political-cultural scene of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945 onward. The Bay Area at the time was a relative backwater in the United States, compared to the East coast. The area had, however, seen one of the biggest general strikes of the 1930s, when the Communist Party-influenced ilwu (International Longshore Workers Union) helped bring San Francisco to a halt in 1934, including mass street battles with the police. As late as the 1970s, prior to the serious beginnings of gentrification, San Francisco was still something of a “labor town” where capitalists and politicians had to tread softly. In 1945, the poet Kenneth Rexroth and others had laid the foundations of the later San Francisco Renaissance with a gathering of poets and radicals that reached into the 1960s, when it was challenged and overwhelmed by the hippie counterculture. In 1951, the anarchist poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in San Francisco’s North Beach area, had founded City Lights Bookstore, a center for books and poetry available in few other places (and still in existence).

Across the Bay from San Francisco, Berkeley was a somewhat different but related cultural-political scene. One of the differences was, of course, the main campus of the University of California system, which by the 1960s had over 20,000 students. uc Berkeley had famously purged its own radical professors during the McCarthy era (late 1940s/early 1950s), a kind of liberal housecleaning intended to keep at bay right-wing witch hunt forces such as huac (House of Un-American Activities Committee, a Congressional investigative body) by doing their dirty work for them. In 1960, there were major riots against huac in San Francisco, in which Berkeley radicals participated, effectively ending huac as a force.

Berkeley was a city (population 100,000) where Communists, ex-Communists and other radicals from the 1930s and 1940s could to some extent “lay low” during the period of McCarthyite reaction. The city saw the (1948) origins of Pacifica radio, in which many such types found a home during the 1950s emergence of fm broadcasting, featuring not only jazz and classical music but also poetry and serious news programs not available elsewhere. Cody’s Bookstore, another iconic scene, was started in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s occupied a large building on Telegraph Avenue, south of the campus, where it remained for decades, one of the best bookstores in the United States.

By the early 1960s, Berkeley and San Francisco were increasingly swept up in the emerging black civil rights movement. By 1964, there were mass demonstrations in both San Francisco and Oakland against racial discrimination in hiring, and some Berkeley students went to the Deep South in the summer of 1964 to help with voter registration of black people. When they returned, they brought with them the outlook and organizing methods learned in the South, for movements both on-and off-campus. This led directly to the origins of the Free Speech Movement in fall 1964, in which 800 Berkeley students ultimately occupied the administration building, demanding the right to have political tables on campus, including for organizing off-campus. They won. Their arrests became a national and international flashpoint. Sproul Plaza, the main campus area for tabling and leafleting, became something like a major Athenian agora in which two dozen political and cultural tendencies vied for influence.

Both interesting and significant was the fact that, amidst such ferment, Students for a Democratic Society (sds), the main national group of radical students, never gained a foothold in Berkeley, in contrast to many other us campuses which lacked such a varied political and cultural scene.

The national elections of 1964 were a major turning point. The “great liberal” Democrat and “peace candidate,” Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmingly defeated a right-wing, war-mongering Republican, Barry Goldwater, in an election in which both the civil rights movement and the then-emerging Vietnam War were major issues. Within a few months of his landslide victory, Johnson escalated the bombing of North Vietnam, an unsurpassable education by events for the 1960s generation then coming of age. Shortly thereafter, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic to put down a radical uprising there, warning of possible “Communist influence” from the nearby Cuban Revolution, which was then consolidating itself and was (seemingly) oriented to exporting revolution throughout Latin America and beyond. New Deal Democratic Party liberalism never recovered from these and other developments.

I became a student at uc Berkeley in the spring of 1966, above all to maintain a student draft deferment, as the American troop presence in Vietnam reached 500,000. I was bored by the classes and dreamed of expatriating to Paris. There were daily political rallies on the main campus plaza, overwhelmingly left-wing and antiwar. I was antiwar but mistrustful of the Maoist, Trotskyist and vaguely Third Worldist groups that partly set the tone. The Chinese “Cultural Revolution” was then in ascendance, which many Berkeley students and ex-students rather naively assumed was a counterpart of the cultural revolution then taking shape in the Bay Area, centered in the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” of the burgeoning hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

In 1966, uc Berkeley offered no courses in Marx and Marxism per se, though that was mainly beside the point because, especially to hostile outsiders, led by newly elected California governor Ronald Reagan, much of the “Berkeley” experience at that time seemed a 24/7 immersion in Marxism. A number of the speakers haranguing the noontime crowds on Sproul Plaza were from self-styled Marxist groups, such as the often spellbinding Peter Camejo (Socialist Workers Party) or the recovering left-liberal Bob Avakian, also a great demagogue, and not yet the jefe maximo of what became today’s Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp). The junior philosophy professor Richard Lichtman, with a humorless rapid-fire but competent delivery, began offering courses on Hegel and Marx around this time. Two of the highly talented theorists of the political science department, John Scharr and Sheldon Wolin, taught Marx and Lenin in their classes. Professors of German and Russia history (Gerald Feldman, Martin Malia, Carl Schorske) were not sympathetic to Marxism per se, but could hardly avoid dealing with it. In 1969, after Lichtman was denied tenure, the philosophy department brought in the eminent Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski to teach Marx, though by the time he arrived he had already turned away from the Marxist humanism for which he had become famous in Eastern Europe. The opening lecture of his undergraduate Marxism class was packed with student militants, but Kolakowski’s talk on the origins of the dialectic in the neo-Platonic thinkers of late antiquity, above all Plotinus, quickly cleared out the room. I stayed; it was a great course on a history of which I was, to put it mildly, unaware, of the philosophical expressions of the great medieval and Renaissance-era millenarian uprisings.

It was actually an offhand comment by a maverick anthropology professor named Ernest Becker that inspired me to read, over the summer of 1967, the three volumes of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, which (in the slang of the day and since) “blew my mind.” I was not specifically taken with Trotsky’s politics, aside from the obvious anti-Stalinism, nor Deutscher’s spin of them, but by the sweep of his life as an activist, writer and speaker. I was already receiving English translations from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, and other “ultra-left” writings such as Ida Mett’s pamphlet on Kronstadt, from S ou B’s fraternal group in Britain, Solidarity. I set out looking for a group with some variant of these politics, and a friend pointed me to the (then) Independent Socialist Clubs (isc), which called for the working-class overthrow of every government in the world. I had found “my people.”

Perhaps the most accomplished Marxist on campus at that time was actually Hal Draper, who by then worked in the acquisitions department of the library (as a result of which Berkeley had an outstanding collection of working-class and socialist history). Draper had emerged as a firebrand speaker at mass rallies during the Free Speech Movement, earning respect as the “one person over 30” (in the trope of that time) who could be trusted. Draper was the grey eminence of the isc (later renamed International Socialists (is). He also gave public talks for the group, and wrote a widely read pamphlet “The Two Souls of Socialism,” contrasting Marx and Engels (socialism from below) with an array of (in Draper’s view) then popular “socialism from above” figures ranging from Fidel Castro to Mao to Herbert Marcuse. Because of Marcuse’s World War II work for the oss (Organization of Strategic Services), the predecessor to the cia, the ultra-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party (with a negligible presence in Berkeley) ran a campaign against him called “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop?”

These campus goings-on could hardly be understood separately from the larger mobilizations and events of these years: the mass antiwar march in San Francisco of spring 1967 of perhaps 100,000 people, the fall 1967 Stop the Draft Week demos at the army induction center in downtown Oakland involving thousands, or the (less successful) attempts to halt the troop trains in western Berkeley. Nor could they be separated from the (above mentioned) hippie counterculture developing across the bay in San Francisco. Fall 1967 also saw the giant March on Washington, dc, during which the poet Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon with Buddhist chants.

In early spring 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, though it was militarily defeated, ripped away the last vestiges of the us claim that it was “winning the war,” which no one in Berkeley had taken seriously for years previously. The Orwellian statement by a us officer that “We had to destroy the village to save it” summed up the outrages being committed there to “defend democracy,” supposedly embodied by the corrupt militarist clique then ruling South Vietnam.

The 1960s radical black movement was present in Berkeley above all through the Black Panther Party (bpp), which had been founded in Oakland in 1966 and quickly gained national notoriety for armed public demonstrations (entirely legal under the Second Amendment of the us Constitution, but which terrified the “establishment,” which never imagined the constitution extending to black people). bpp founder Huey P. Newton was in jail from fall 1967 until 1970, but other talented leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver (whatever his other problems) and Bobby Seale spoke at Sproul Plaza and elsewhere on the campus. I remember Cleaver in 1968 telling a meeting to “get down” with the thought of “Big Daddy Karl Marx.”

A mass registration campaign throughout California in 1967 succeeded in getting the newly-founded antiwar Peace and Freedom Party (pfp) on the statewide ballot with over 100,000 signatures, a development carefully monitored in the White House itself, as a sign of the disintegrating Democratic Party. The 1968 pfp convention came close to nominating Cleaver for president of the United States. Shortly thereafter, however, he and other Panthers were involved in a shootout with police, and Cleaver had to flee the United States, first to Algeria and then to France, where he was granted asylum by Giscard d’Estaing. (The pfp ultimately nominated Dr. Benjamin Spock, of liberal child-rearing fame.)

My own real education in Marxist politics was provided by older members of the isc and the internal education meetings we had on China, where we read books like Harold Isaacs’s classic The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, and on the Russian Revolution. As a result of this education, combined of course with involvement in the unfolding of the broader left movement, I was, age 21, able to hold my own in study groups in the county jail in December 1968, against older speakers from the Stalinist plp, and others. The hippies who had been arrested with us looked on in awe at such “head trip” debates, and one of them later said: “That isc really educates its members.” Which it did! (I remember a new arrival from Cornell taking me aside and saying: “In Ithaca, you just had to be against racism and imperialism. Here in Berkeley, people want to know where you stand on Norman O. Brown’s theory of polymorphous perversity vs. Freud’s genital organization before they’ll even talk to you.”

Berkeley was occupied five times in 1968–1969 by the National Guard and by the Alameda County sheriffs. Twice in summer 1968 there were confrontations on Telegraph Avenue, just off the campus; in fall 1968, 80 people (myself included) occupied the philosophy department building, and were arrested; in February and March 1969, there were violent confrontations over the demand for a “Third World Studies” program for black, brown and Asian students, and finally in May 1969 there were even larger confrontations over the mass appropriation of (off-campus) university land for what became “People’s Park,” during which the police shot and killed one guy throwing rocks from a rooftop. When asked at a press conference why the sheriffs had fired buckshot at the crowds, Alameda County sheriff commander Frank Madigan replied laconically “We ran out of birdshot.”

Such, then, were the local, national and international contexts for my encounter with Marx in Berkeley, 1968.

This is, in its earliest moments, a Brooklyn story—more precisely a story of growing up Catholic in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1950s. I grew up in Sunset Park, a neighborhood made somewhat famous by Hubert Selby’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. It is also a story of education—in high school and college, still grounded in thoroughly Catholic environments but ones that were less homogeneous and had many more cross currents of interpretations (perhaps in large measure due to the continuing impact of the Vatican ii Council initiated by Pope John xxiii). At the end, in and just after 1968, it becomes a story of my efforts to work through four realities:

1. my continued involvement in liberal political projects;
2. my growing awareness of, and peripheral involvement in, erupting radical movements against the Vietnam war and other aspects of American society;
3. my readings of provocative critical theoretical texts and, finally,
4. my encounter with and eventual response to an emerging and quite dominant politics that I’d describe as a combination of the Popular Front and “soft Stalinism” and other forms of what might be considered traditional Marxism at the time.

Marx and Marxism were episodically present in the later periods but my engagement with them was not nearly as deep as it needed to be. Although I had the benefit of seriously reading Marx’s early writings and the work of Herbert Marcuse, the Marx and Marxism that were on offer in the world of political practice were, more often than not, caricatures. What was needed in 1968 and beyond was not simply more Marx but a different Marx. At the end, I’ll sketch out some ideas of what a different Marx might have been and what difference it might have made.

Sunset Park in the 1950s was so Catholic that, for all practical purposes, the local Catholic grammar schools were the public schools. When I attended Saint Michael’s School, its total enrollment exceeded 2,000 and individual class sizes approached sixty. The parish defined much of my existence by marking important milestones such as First Communion and Confirmation—both preceded by somewhat intense instruction in the Baltimore Catechism, consisting of codified questions and answers that provided what was considered to be age-appropriate instruction in the fundamentals of the Catholic faith. Prior to the sacramental celebrations, we were subject to an examination by a priest who asked one or more of the questions. We were expected to provide the verbatim answer from the Catechism. As I recall, I don’t think that anyone ever failed.

I became an altar boy and was credibly proficient in the responses required in the pre-Vatican ii era of Latin masses and was quite accomplished at performing the various tasks assigned to the altar boys as assistants to the priest in the celebration of the Eucharistic sacrament—the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. As an altar boy, I also had grandiose pretensions about the priesthood to come and saw my performances on the altar and in the larger church as rehearsals of a sort.

Separate and apart from its place as the center of religious activity, the parish was also a formidable institution. It had a large physical plant, including a magnificent church that was pristinely maintained. The parish’s operation required a good deal of money—especially, since throughout my grammar school years (until eighth grade), enrollment in the school was tuition-free. The parish was engaged in nonstop money raising—including two or three collections during Sunday masses, weekly Bingo games, and an annual ten-day bazaar—effectively taxes from the parishioners. The entire operation was ruled over by a very imposing Monsignor, named Nolan—someone who I never recall being able to speak to. Truth be told, the parish had many of the characteristics of a small state and there was virtually no room for heresy or treason.

Sunset Park was a neighborhood of small tenement apartment buildings and a good number of two or three family homes. It lay side by side with one of the ends of the long stretch of the city’s industrial belt that stretched along the harbor and East River from Sunset Park through Red Hook, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and on into Long Island City in Queens. Of course, I didn’t know that then. I knew that there were a lot of factories nearby—but knew almost nothing about what happened inside them. I knew a bit about the jobs that people, mostly but not only men, in the neighborhood had.

My father worked as a mechanic for the subways at the Coney Island shops and a good number of his relatives and friends also worked for the Transit Authority. Another man in our eight-family building worked for the telephone company; the father of one friend worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (a workplace whose closing was significant enough that it registered on my childhood brain as an important event). At the end of each day, I saw people trudge out of the block-away subway station, with tabloid newspapers rolled up into a small packet size, and light up their cigarettes.

What I knew a lot about was school, playing and reading. Doing really good at school was my mother’s prime directive for her children and she worked at it. The best illustration that I remember happened in sixth grade. In Geography, we had to learn the products of the different American states. We were handed out mimeographed sheets, saturated with what smelled like glue, which listed the products state-by-state. For my mother, it was not enough that we knew all of the products of each state but we had to be able to name them in the order they were listed on the sheets. It worked; we did. I also had the great good fortune of living on a block with dozens of kids—kids who were out on the streets all of the time. In the summer, it was possible to play from nine in the morning until after nine at night—and I did. Most of the games were segregated by sex, but not all and “ringolevio” (which could go on for hours into the night) was open to all comers. And reading—talk about luck! I grew up across the street from a Carnegie library—part of the Brooklyn Public Library. I read all the time—mostly not such great stuff but it got me hooked. I can still remember my mother losing her patience after I had ignored numerous calls for me to come. She refused to believe that I hadn’t heard her but she was wrong—I was lost in a different world.

I also came early to work. In addition to his subway job and his all but permanent second jobs in places as varied as office buildings, banks and bakeries, my father was the super of our apartment building and earned $25 a month that was deducted from the rent. Starting at the age of ten or eleven, my job was to sweep and wash the floors in the hallways and stairs once a week. I also helped in shoveling the coal into the furnace’s core and shoveling out the ashes from the bottom of the furnace and depositing them in steel ashcans. When the furnace was roaring, the heat was intense and you had to shovel fast. Once the ash cans were full, they had to be hauled out of the basement to the front of the building to be picked up by the garbage collectors. I don’t think that I was ever strong enough to carry them even up the few steps from the cellar to the street level. I should mention that the cellar was something to behold—it was mostly a place where you didn’t want to go. When the coal company made a delivery, it seemed like a mountain of coal had been deposited and it was impressive in its way. The delivery also made it easier to reach for the coal to shovel into the furnace because there was so much close to hand. As the supply dwindled, the distance to get to the coal increased and the harder the work became.

When I was a bit older (my guess is at the beginning of high school), I went with my father on Friday nights or Saturday mornings (when I didn’t have homework) to help out on his second jobs. I remember cleaning an enormous office in an industrial-style building on 34th Street on the west side of Manhattan and a bank in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. For me, the cleaning consisted mostly of emptying and cleaning trashcans and cigarette trays (this, after all, was way before smoking was prohibited in workplaces), taking junk off the desks and collecting a supply of pads and pencils to share with my sisters.

I also remember going into a neighborhood bakery (it was called Cushman’s), where my father worked as a counterman, very early on dark Saturday mornings and taking newly baked pastries from delivery trays and putting them into display cases before the store opened. These opportunities to “help” my father are among the most treasured experiences of my life. Many years later, I tried to explain all that to my father but I don’t think that I succeeded very well.

In the evenings during the summer months, I sold late night/early morning editions of the Daily News and Daily Mirror, mostly a racing sheet, to patrons of the numerous bars around the neighborhood after buying them at wholesale prices from the guy driving the delivery truck. The money came mostly from the tips because the cover price of the paper was still in pennies. The trick was to get to a bar before any of the other kids selling papers so that that you would be greeted by grateful, friendly and not quite sober drinkers. It was worth it for me.

I also delivered copies of the diocesan weekly newspaper (more about that below); sold soda to people at the above-mentioned Bingo games on Sunday nights; and, when I was a bit older, climbed ladders to paint roof cornices and window frames on houses around the neighborhood for a small-time contractor.

Looking back, it seems clear that my childhood and adolescent understandings of class had little directly to do with opposition to another class but instead were grounded in complex bonds among people who found themselves more or less in the same place—geographically, economically and socially. Most of the values were implicit ones—acquired through the experiences of everyday life.

I wound up not going to the diocesan high school that prepared students for entry into the priesthood—as I recall, mostly because my father thought that it was too early for me to make that kind of commitment. The decision was a disappointing one for my mother who, like many of her friends in the neighborhood, wished for few things more fondly than an ordained son. Her hopes in that regard were grounded in a religious faith that suffused every aspect of her life. Since I was the only boy in the family of four children, her dreams were not to be. Thinking back on it now, I realize that such aspirations were only those of a handful since, even in the days when vocations to the priesthood were plentiful, only a small minority of Catholic families shared them. My hunch now is that most mothers didn’t want their sons to be priests but that perhaps those who wanted priests got them one way or another. It’s kind of weird to imagine that becoming a communist was the fulfillment of a vocation but it may well be true.

Opposition to Communism was taken for granted (as it probably should have been). Patrick Scanlan, the editor of the diocesan newspaper, the Tablet, consistently embraced very conservative and traditional views. He was a supporter of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. In October 1951, the government of Spain presented him with the Cross of Isabella the Catholic. In the early 1960s, Operation Abolition, a documentary film produced by the House Un-American Activities Committee, was shown to a large crowd in the school’s auditorium—I was part of the crowd. The film focused on an incident in May of 1960 when the committee convened in San Francisco’s City Hall. College students protested inside and outside the building. After clashes with the police, a few dozen students were arrested. The filmmakers used local tv news footage to charge that the protesters were Communists or instigated by Communist agents. The students had been “duped” by groups whose ultimate goal was to destroy the committee. In just a few years, millions of people had seen the movie and presumably were convinced. Unfortunately, I can’t remember my reaction.

The high school I attended was called Saint Augustine’s—operated under the authority of the Christian Brothers. Although admission to the school was by exam, the admission policy ensured that boys from a wide range of different parishes around Brooklyn got to go. I was a diligent student and earned good grades. At the beginning of 11th grade (1963), a new teacher, Jim Gallagher, joined the faculty and I had him for English. After he entered the classroom for the first time, he put down his books, asked us to stand, made the sign of the cross and asked us to pray for the four little girls who had been murdered in the Birmingham church bombing. I had never heard anything like it. I and a handful of others became close to him and were introduced into what I at first thought was a daring radicalism but, in retrospect, was a bit of a daring liberalism—in the context of a deep-seated conservatism in church and school. In any case, the friendship helped me a great deal. In the spring of 1965, I published my first essay in the school’s literary journal, for which Jim was the faculty advisor. It was a review essay on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

When I was deciding where to go to college, my mother told me that I couldn’t go to Brooklyn College (part of the City University of New York) because I’d become a Communist. (I am certain that she could not have imagined any difference between the word with a “C” or a “c.”) She didn’t have cause and effect right but her predictive abilities were remarkable. I went to Manhattan College, another Christian Brothers’ institution, in the Bronx, and became a small “c” communist.

Another important episode needs to be inserted here. I’ve spoken above about my father working multiple jobs on top of his regular work with the city’s Transit Authority. He needed to do so because his earnings as a transit worker were simply not enough to keep our bodies and souls together. In 1966, that began to change. On New Year’s Day, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union greeted the new mayor, John Lindsay, with a strike that shut down the city’s subways and buses. Millions of people had to dream up fantastic alternatives to getting to work or staying there. Mike Quill, the President of Local 100, scandalized all of the city’s rulers and editorial writers by refusing to be cowed. He went to jail. He told a judge to drop dead. Quill died two weeks after the strike ended. So far as I know, Quill was not in the Communist Party in 1966; hell, almost no one was in the Communist Party in 1966. But his political views still reflected the very powerful pull of cp sensibilities. Read, for example, an “editorial” by Quill first published in the TWU Express and then re-published in the March 1966 issue of Ramparts. I assume that my father knew and understood some of what all this meant but he never spoke about it.

The strike lasted almost two weeks. And, lo and behold, in the next few years, transit workers started making a good deal more money and my father could stop working extra jobs. In later years, my parents got to travel to Ireland, Rome, and visited the friends in California who had introduced them to each other in 1946.

Towards the end of his employment with the ta (at the end of the ’70s), my father used his seniority to get a job working with the South Brooklyn Railway that ran through the streets of the industrial section of Sunset Park. The railway had been taken over by the city in a desperate attempt to keep the handful of plants still operating in town. His job, such as it was, consisted of measuring cars to make sure that they were not too tall to pass through one of the overpasses. He usually only had to do it once a day but he had an assistant. So he spent his time reading the newspapers and watching tv news and talk shows in a small hut next to the tracks. He was able to walk home most days to have lunch with my mother. It was his retirement before retirement—not so bad a change for someone who had worked sixty hours a week for almost thirty years.

At Manhattan, I was enrolled in a “great books” course of study. I took four or five required courses (in history, philosophy, literature, theology and art) every semester for four years.1 We began with the “cradle of civilization” in the Middle East (and read Gordon Childe—although I didn’t know that he was a Marxist or better probably didn’t know what difference it made), read through ancient Greece rather thoroughly and Rome less so, spent a good deal of time in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, raced through the modern era (although we did read Kant, Hegel and Marx) and barely got to the contemporary finish line—at least as that was imagined fifty years ago. Eventually, I became an English major. At the time, “English” literature did not include Americans so I only studied works written by English and Irish authors. It was the heyday of the “new criticism” and I learned how to read literary texts closely and carefully but not contextually. In spite of its shortcomings, it provided me with tools that I could use for other larger purposes when it came to reading other kinds of texts. For ten years after college, I don’t believe that I read a single work of literature; instead, I read history, economics, philosophy and political theory, and the newspapers.

Not surprisingly, since we read his works in a philosophy course, the Marx we read was mostly texts from the early philosophic manuscripts. We relied on the Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat edited collection titled Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. That was very fortunate for me—my subsequent recollections of Marx were always of him as a great humanist. I remember being fascinated by his argument that private property was the consequence of the division of labor into manual and intellectual—in other words, private property was not some eternal reality within which human beings had to live life as best they could but was, instead, a result of human activity and, therefore, might be subject to change. As far as Marx’s economic writings, I think the readings we did resulted in us having little more than an assortment of catchphrases—“the labor theory of value” interpreted by one of my friends as meaning the same thing as “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”—and vulgar versions of Marx’s presumed argument that socialism was inevitable.

I became a radical, in thought at least, once I read Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and felt that he had read my mind in formation. No one else I had read before had captured the ways in which personal dissatisfactions were grounded in deep social structures. By the time I got to Marcuse, I was ready intellectually and emotionally—prepared by all of the accumulated experiences of Catholicism, class and about-to-be communism. I should mention that Bill McCormick, the Marxist professor with whom I read Marcuse, closed the course (on critical social thought) by saying, “I still think I prefer the old man”—meaning Marx. I had not read enough of Marx to know what I thought. But, at a more substantial level, I became “political” because of the swirl of events in which my life was enveloped—even when I didn’t understand all that much of those events.

My political activity lagged behind my thinking. I was active in “liberal” politics from the mid-60s almost to the end of them. I campaigned for John Lindsay for Mayor in 1965 (the same mayor that Quill would challenge with his strike in 1966) when he ran against the Democratic machine and distributed leaflets in support of his proposed Police Civilian Review Board later on in 1966. I participated in anti-war protests on campus and elsewhere, and went to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke out against the war for the first time in April 1967 at Riverside Church. In the spring of 1967, I was elected as a delegate to the National Student Association (NSA) and attended its national conference in College Park, Maryland, later that year in the midst of shocking revelations that the organization had cooperated with and received funding from the cia. The agenda for the conference as well as the organization of the main contending forces seemed to be securely in the hands of student leaders from elite state universities and my presence mattered not at all. Subsequently, I became a bit involved in the National Federation of Catholic College Students—an organization inspired by the early currents of liberation theology—even though I was no longer Catholic in any meaningful way. What I retained from years of instruction and intensive participation in the sacraments was an instinctive impulse towards universal brotherhood.

In late 1967 or early 1968, I led a small campus teach-in on the topic of Tom Hayden’s Rebellion in Newark and argued that what many insisted was simply lawless rioting was instead justifiable rebellion. In February of 1968, I traveled to New Hampshire to campaign for Eugene McCarthy and then, when Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race after Lyndon Johnson’s sudden withdrawal, switched to support him. I believe there are some college newspaper columns I wrote in the college’s archives that can document the reasons for my conversion. In any case, they’re not very important fifty years later. In the fall, I attended a talk by Michael Harrington who would argue, not so surprisingly, that the left should/must support Hubert Humphrey and not “waste” its votes for the illusory Peace and Freedom Party. I was torn.

I also supported the movement for community control of schools in New York City that had emerged after the city government and the school system’s leadership failed to respond to a series of mass protests and school walkouts in the mid-60s that had demanded an end to segregation. The beginning implementation of a community control plan was met by strikes called by the United Federation of Teachers (uft) in the fall of 1968 that, in turn, led to organized strike-breaking by community control supporters. I was still in college and could not teach but I did organize events on campus in support.

While Manhattan had a small number of self-identified radicals, it never had an sds chapter. Campus-level activity was often focused on the removal of long-standing practices of censorship of the student newspaper and regulation of student behavior in the dorms. Our radicalism was mostly quite removed from events on the national level. As a result, I was spared the experiences of having to deal with Progressive Labor or the various revolutionary youth movements. But I missed things that I should have known about. For example, I honestly don’t know what I remember from 1968 about the May events in France. I do know that I read first-hand accounts several years later and was transfixed. All that’s to say is that we’re not always at the train station when the train we should be on arrives and we probably wouldn’t know that we missed it.

In the year after college, I attended some talks at the Alternate University on the west side of Manhattan and went to one of the first Socialist Scholars’ Conferences at Town Hall.

All in all, I’d say that my politics were a bit of a mess. I had been affected by the sway of anti-imperialism—for some quite understandable reasons: the ongoing murderous assault against the peoples of South East Asia reported every night on the evening news.

It was not so far a leap to a kind of soft-Stalinism—advanced by people like if Stone, with his revisionist history of the Korean War, and David Horowitz, the author of Free World Colossus (which enjoyed a kind of instant classic status). He is now a prominent conservative scold. Horowitz also authored a series of essays on Marxism, ostensibly from a Trotskyist perspective forged in years of working with Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, that are included in The Fate of Mida$ and Other Essays. I’d describe his views as scrambled-egg Marxism with the eggshells included. Here’s an excerpt from an essay titled “Marxism and its Place in Economic Science”:

The starting point of an answer to these questions [referring to questions about the relevance of Marxism to global revolutionaries and the irrelevance of modern economics to them] lies in the recognition that Marxism and orthodox economics represent two complementary scientific paradigms. The Marxist paradigm is expressly constructed to analyze a system based on private capital and wage-labor. It is macroeconomic and dynamic in character. It advances the notion that the central pivot of the present system is a relationship that is at the same time social and economic: namely, the institution of private property in the means of production. The orthodox paradigm, on the other hand, is basically static and oriented toward micro-economics. Above all, it abstracts from the specific differentializing characteristics of capitalism to universalize its concepts and applications.

The orthodox model is extremely useful as a framework for dealing with certain technical problems, such as the problem of optimalization and the analysis of market behavior both at the micro-economic and macro-economic levels.

Lord, please save us from Marxism like this! Unfortunately, the Lord was not responding in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

Soft-Stalinism emphasized how the Russians were supporting the Vietnamese; how much the Russians had suffered in WWII; how the battle of Stalingrad against the Nazis was the last line of the defense of civilization, how the primary responsibility for the Cold War lay with the United States, and how a planned economy had allowed the Soviet Union to avoid the effects of the Great Depression. And then you add a bit about how heroic the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were in the fight against fascism in Spain (leaving out all mention of the ways in which the Soviet Union murdered the Spanish Revolution) and an assumption that the Rosenbergs had been framed.2

Accompanying this new defense of Stalinism was a discovery of the grand progressive character of the New Deal and the Communist Party’s role during the Popular Front. The Wagner Act and Social Security came to be seen as grand victories of a working class on the move. Since probably no one in the new left had ever thought about the Wagner Act or Social Security before, the new interest in matters related to working-class well-being might have had its place. But the understandings were all one-sided. By way of example, there was no understanding of the role of New Deal housing policies in promoting redlining; no appreciation for the similarities between New Deal and fascist state planning. All things considered, the renewed appreciation for the New Deal and the Popular Front led to a more or less taken-for-granted notion that socialism was a reformed capitalism—a society more equal and more solicitous of human needs but not fundamentally a different kind of human community. At the same time, this notion was accompanied by a growing conviction that any explicit articulations of radical views would not be met favorably by ordinary workers, especially ordinary white workers—which, in turn, led to a hesitation in confronting workplace practices that advantaged white workers.

What you wind up with is a politics grounded in a sympathetic understanding of Communist Popular Front politics as depicted in the 1973 Robert Redford–Barbara Streisand movie The Way We Were.

This assemblage of notions, combined with appreciation for the folk songs of people like Pete Seeger and the “progressive” politics of the handful of unions still led by cp-influenced folks, produced a new left (no pun intended) common sense that saturated the emerging left scene outside the campuses in New York City. My understanding of Marx was simply not good enough to enable me to move beyond a somewhat ill-defined sense that something was fundamentally not Marxist about it.

At one point in what I believe to have been my very brief interest in soft-Stalinism, I said something to my father about Russia that he understandably enough interpreted as an apology for tyranny. He responded: “How come, if it’s so bad here and so good over there, no one here wants to go there and just about everyone there wants to come here?” Good question with no good answer!

In 1970, I started driving a taxi. I did so because I needed a job and a friend had already started doing so. Six months later, I found myself in the midst of a strike called by perhaps the most incompetent trade union in America, Local 3036 of the Taxi Drivers and Allied Workers Union. At the end of the strike, taxi drivers found themselves the recipients of an enormous increase in taxi fares (which drove riders away) and a reduction in starting pay for new drivers and a new tax on all rides to cover benefits. At a general union meeting a few months later, all hell broke loose and the union leaders were driven from the meeting hall. Out of the crash of thrown chairs, an insurgent group was born—the Taxi Rank & File Coalition. I joined soon afterwards. Some of the members of the coalition, myself included, have established a website that collects many of its printed materials and some reflections.

The website provides a pretty good picture of what we tried to do but there is one aspect of our experiences that bears directly on the topic at hand that deserves emphasis. Over the course of six or seven years, a parade of members of various vanguardist and sectarian groups made attempts to influence what we were doing. They included the Communist Party (one of whose members famously described us as “taxi rank and infantile”), the Workers’ League (an obscure Trotskyist sect), the Labor Committee (before its descent into monomaniacal madness), Progressive Labor, the Revolutionary Union and the International Socialists (is). I left the is for last because its members played a very different kind of role within the coalition. They were cooperative in executing tasks even when they had disagreed with the decisions that led to them. One of the characteristics of the coalition that endured for most of the years of its existence was a willingness to sustain a multi-tendency group that, nonetheless, encouraged vigorous discussion and debate—within a commitment to common group action. Early on, members of the is reached out to me and encouraged me to attend various workshops where they presented their overall political perspectives in the hope that I might consider joining—they were always reasonable but they were never quite convincing enough for me to join—even enlightened Trotskyism was still Trotskyism.

As I look back at the post-’68 period, what seems evident is that the turn to the working class, by a good number of ex–student radicals, as the potential driver of revolution was not accompanied by an equally serious turn to the work needed to understand exactly what capitalism was, where it was heading and what a genuine alternative to it might be—more specifically, a turn to Marx. When the coalition initiated internal study groups, the readings of Marx were almost entirely limited to relatively short texts—in many ways, not so surprising since we were all working and often engaging in twenty plus hours of coalition activities every week. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the engagement with Marx was quite limited for many genuine radicals. On the other hand, and this is a really important “other hand,” those who chose years of day-to-day involvement in radical politics over only an engagement in abstruse theoretical speculations in this period deserve much more attention and credit than they have thus far received.

What was missing as the ’60s ended was a substantial and self-conscious trend that rejected Leninism-Stalinism-Trotskyism-Maoism as well as Social Democracy—opposed to all of the miseries of supposed socialism in the Soviet Union and its copycats in places like eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Cuba, and to supposed reformed capitalism in various European countries.

This raises an important point: it was not enough to reject vanguardism (the notion that the working class needed an external group to enable it to move beyond trade unionist consciousness or some variant of such a thing); it was also necessary to reject sectarianism as a principle of political organization. Most of the anti-vanguardists remained committed to a notion that they should say what they thought as precisely as possible and make every effort to distinguish themselves from others who had more or less different points of view. They seldom thought about the desirability/possibility of developing organizational forms that could allow individuals who agreed on a lot, but not all, to act together effectively. In that regard, they displayed little knowledge or understanding of the role that Marx had played in the First International—about which more below.

Keep in mind that, at the same time, the Monthly Review folks were quite hegemonic in advancing their Marxism for modern times and the Maoist Guardian newspaper was arguably the most influential voice of supposed revolutionary politics. But it was not completely dreary—this was also a time when Radical America, Liberation, New Left Review, Race and Class, the first New Politics, as well as perhaps hundreds of local radical newspapers, supported by a remarkable national news service (Liberation News Service), provided some balance and alternative interpretations. In the halls of the universities, there was a serious turn to Marx—a turn all but completely divorced from practical radical politics. The results of the serious engagement of scholars with Marx were profoundly limited by their reluctance to think or act on the basis of radical politics.3

By the end of my taxi-driving career (1978), I still did not have an adequate understanding of Marx and it would take me some years before I think that I acquired it. My best guess is that there was more available than I was aware of and that I “read” Marx in ways that proved to be inadequate to understanding. Perhaps the worst aspect of the dilemma was that reading Marx for me was, far too often, a solitary activity and not one that was embedded in active social relations. That changed quite a bit when I met members of the Sojourner Truth Organization.

Conclusion

I’ll conclude with a few thoughts about a different Marx reading. Let me make clear that I’m not at all interested in the frequently recurring fashionable idea that Marx needs to be improved on. Instead, I’m talking about the potential of a sustained engagement with the rich complexity of Marx’s writings and life’s work. I offer the following suggestions. I believe that all of them could have been undertaken in 1968 with the textual resources available at that time and, indeed, there were small currents within Marxism that were doing what I’m advocating—they were simply not the Marxists that mattered.

I am not suggesting that different readings of Marx would have allowed us to avoid the evaporation of the upsurges of 1968 but I do think that they would have allowed us to build a political project that would have been far better prepared to fight against the sustained capitalist offensive that was launched in the early 1970s and to avoid some of the worst political dead-ends that have dominated far too much of radical and revolutionary politics in the years since.

Marx as a critic of those revolutionaries who wished to seize state power on behalf of others; specifically, Marx as against Bolshevism and its heirs

The interpretive screens provided by the Bolsheviks and their various Bolshevik-inspired offshoots, even those who present themselves as critics of Stalinism and Maoism—the Trotskyists—only distorted Marx.4 The endless invocation of Marx as an authority for the justification of what were simply dreadful exercises in the brutal implementation of capitalist accumulation in different national contexts placed Marx’s contribution to human emancipation in mortal danger. It’s of course not possible to challenge them within their own terms of reference (in no small part, because they lied about matters small and large), but it is possible to challenge them by returning to Marx’s own writings. In “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’ ” published in 1844, Marx wrote about the difference between a political revolution and a social revolution:

But the community from which the workers are isolated is a community of quite different reality and scope than the political community. The community from which his own labor separates him is life itself, physical and spiritual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature. Human nature is the true community of men. Just as the disasterous [sic] isolation from this nature is disproportionately more far-reaching, unbearable, terrible and contradictory than the isolation from the political community, so too the transcending of this isolation and even a partial reaction, a rebellion against it, is so much greater, just as the man is greater than the citizen and human life than political life. Hence, however limited an industrial revolt may be, it contains within itself a universal soul: and however universal a political revolt may be, its colossal form conceals a narrow split.

The “Prussian” brings his essay to a close worthy of it with the following sentence:

A social revolution without a political soul (i.e., without a central insight organizing it from the point of view of the totality) is impossible.

We have seen: a social revolution possesses a total point of view because—even if it is confined to only one factory district—it represents a protest by man against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the point of view of the particular, real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting, is the true community of man, human nature. In contrast, the political soul of revolution consists in the tendency of the classes with no political power to put an end to their isolation from the state and from power. Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstract totality which exists only through its separation from real life and which is unthinkable in the absence of an organized antithesis between the universal idea and the individual existence of man. In accordance with the limited and contradictory nature of the political soul a revolution inspired by it organizes a dominant group within society at the cost of society [emphasis added].

Marx as being open to the possibility of non-proletarian revolutionary forces emerging in, if not leading, the fight against capital

As has been noted often enough, the Civil Rights movement in the United States had given rise to and been an integral part of the large student and anti-war movements and, in turn, the emergence of women’s liberation and gay liberation movements. In other words, something quite significant had occurred because of the impulse of the black freedom movement. Few thought to theorize those developments from a Marxist perspective. An exception was Facing Reality, the clr James led group. In 1964, the group published an extraordinary pamphlet titled Negro Americans Take the Lead.5 The pamphlet puts forward any number of important claims. I will cite only three now. First, it argues that movements find the leaders they need:

The leadership of these struggles [referring to examples such as the voter registration drives in the Southern states, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1964 Harlem rebellion] has been particularly American in character and may indicate the road that the masses of the world will follow in the pregnant period that is before us. Men have always been able to find leaders especially when united, disciplined, organized by some basic conception or social relations [emphasis added].

The highlighted words of course are an echo of the words that Marx used to describe the preparation of the proletariat for its future tasks by the process of production. Here, the Facing Reality folks extend the idea to suggest that preparation for future tasks can take place elsewhere throughout the totality of capitalist society.

Second, Marxism had thus far not been especially helpful. The pamphlet repeats what Facing Reality had first written in 1957:

Marxism has few triumphs and many unpardonable blunders to its account on the Negro question in the United States. This does not include the calculated deceptions of the Communist Party which have nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with the Kremlin line. But altogether apart from this the record is one which should induce in the Marxist an attitude of respect for the Negro people and their political ideas, seasoned with a strong dose of humility. Great changes in American society, the greatest of which has been the organization of the C.I.O., have been the motive force creating new attitudes to race relations among whites and Negroes alike. But it is the Negroes who have broken all precedents in the way they have used the opportunities thus created.

Third, the Negro struggles point the way forward:

The American Negroes did not wait for the Vanguard Party to organize a corps of trained revolutionaries, including Negroes, to achieve their emancipation. They have gone their own way, and in intellectual matters (for example, the study of Negro History) as well as in practical, they have in the past twenty-five years created a body of political achievement, both in striking at discrimination and influencing American civilization as a whole, which makes them one of the authentic outposts of the new society [emphasis added] [also repeated from 1957].

I believe that this can be read as one of the starting points of autonomous Marxism.

Marx as a revolutionist opposed to sectarianism

In his introduction to the collection of documents from the First International, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, Marcello Musto commented about Marx’s role in the organization as follows:

Contrary to later fantasies that pictured Marx as the founder of the International, he was not even among the organisers of that meeting at St. Martin’s Hall. He sat “in a non-speaking capacity on the platform,” he recalled in a letter to his friend Engels. Yet he immediately grasped the potential in the event and worked hard to ensure that the new organization successfully carried out its mission. Thanks to the prestige attached to his name, at least in restricted circles, he was appointed to the 34-member standing committee, where he soon gained sufficient trust to be given the task of writing the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Statutes of the International. In these fundamental texts, as in many others that followed, Marx drew on the best ideas of the various components of the International, while at the same time eliminating corporatist inclinations and sectarian tones. He firmly linked economic and political struggle to each other, and made international thinking and international action an irreversible choice [emphasis added].

One aspect of his effectiveness was his ability to draw upon the findings of his theoretical investigations to arrive at valuable political insights and to communicate them to others. In the version of Value, Price and Profit that Marx delivered in two speeches to the International’s General Council in June of 1865, he said:

These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation [emphasis added]. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement [emphasis added].

At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market [emphasis added]. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”

Marx as a great writer and Capital as a great literary text

In 1968 and even now, Capital continues to be read “straight”—as if it were intended to be a social science textbook. Every claim that Marx puts forward is assumed to be a statement of what he thinks—even when, in footnotes or subsequent paragraphs, he makes clear to an attentive reader that he believes nothing of the sort. Some remarkable Marx readers have taught us to do otherwise—Nicole Pepperell, for example, has concluded that “they’ve got it all wrong” and Keston Sutherland has argued that “they missed the point.”

In numerous articles and in her unpublished dissertation, Pepperell has provided numerous insights into the ways in which Marx’s complex thinking becomes manifest in volume 1 of Capital. In a recent essay, “ ‘To Dream of a Wildness Distant from Ourselves’: Capitalism, Colonialism and the Robinsonade,” Pepperell provides a powerful overview of one of the plots of Capital:

Robinson Crusoe also features centrally in Karl Marx’s analysis of the fetish character of the commodity, in the opening chapter of the first volume of Capital (hereafter, just Capital). Marx suggests that he uses Crusoe chiefly due to his popularity amongst political economists. Still the example figures in Marx’s account—as it does in Rousseau’s—as a model of “simple and transparent” economic relations.

To be sure, Marx’s tone is strikingly different from Rousseau’s: needling and sarcastic, poking fun of Crusoe’s religious exertions, and drawing attention to the fact that—isolated though he may be—Crusoe has by no means removed himself from the influence of society. Instead, Crusoe carries over to his isolated island the social conventions of his nation—in Marx’s words: “having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books.” These social conventions, as Marx enumerates them, include a highly-developed set of categories for keeping track of objects of utility, processes of production, property rights, and average labour costs.

Marx suggests that such categories would not have arisen spontaneously on Crusoe’s island: they express, in some sense, Crusoe’s own distilled experience of British society. Yet in Crusoe’s ledger, as expressions of his own personal expenditure of labour and of the utility he personally gains from this expenditure, there is nothing mysterious about the categories as such. This clarity, however, does not arise from some essential, pre-social simplicity. Crusoe may be alone, but he is entirely socialised before he comes to be isolated. If his activities present a simplified and clear version of economic and social life, it is the economic and social life of a specific historical period, rather than economic or social life in general. It is this very social and historical specificity, indeed, that makes Crusoe useful for Marx’s critique of political economy.

Very briefly in these concluding comments, I want to suggest that Marx intends Capital as a sustained critique of the epistemologies of ignorance manifested in political economic theory. Capital opens in the space of the Robinsonade—and, as I noted above, the text even flags this as its starting point through an explicit early reference to Robinson Crusoe. In its opening chapters, Capital remains largely within the social contractarian space favoured by political economy—discussing free exchange of the products of labour by their autonomous producers, which Marx sarcastically describes as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man…the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” By the end, however, the text stands squarely in the realm of the oppressive application of the hard power of the state—levelled simultaneously through the regulation of marginal populations in the core and genocidal campaigns in the colonial periphery.

In between these depictions of capitalism lies Marx’s analysis of the vast epistemology of ignorance that informs and is perpetuated by political economy. For Marx, political economy actively produces and foregrounds knowledge of all dimensions of capitalism that can be readily identified with the realm of personal autonomy and with power legitimately wielded only through the informed consent of all social actors. At the same time, it aggressively manufactures and encourages the spread of a fundamental ignorance of the other, equally central, dimensions of capitalist production. Hard power dimensions of the reproduction of capital on a global scale are thus treated as unfortunate exceptions to the enlightened norm, pushed to the margins of political discourse, or simply denied outright.

By starting within the Robinsonade of political economy, Marx intends to explode political economy from within. Piling up counter-example after exception after contradiction, he aims to show the aggressive ignorance required to sustain the naïve vision of capitalism as a system fundamentally and essentially grounded on personal freedom. Along the way, he makes regular use of the imagery of Enlightenment—only to debase it with terms drawn from anthropological analyses of purportedly primitive and savage societies. It is not an accident that Marx’s own term of choice for political economy’s distinctive epistemology of ignorance is the “fetish”—an anthropological term for a material object onto which “primitive” religions arbitrarily confer mystical value.

At first, the suggestion of ignorance is only hinted from the margins of Marx’s text. Footnotes offer sarcastic and sceptical asides, or suggest counter-intuitive comparisons between European economic practices and the strange customs of purportedly uncivilized peoples. Before long, monstrous and phantasmagoric imagery begins to intrude into the main text—metaphoric and hallucinatory images drawn from folklore—vampires and werewolves and shape shifters of all sorts haunting the depiction of industrial production. By the end, this phantasmagoria gives way to a cold and sober portrayal of the concrete actions of capitalist industry, documented in plain text by the representatives of the capitalist state bureaucracy—no less monstrous for all that it now prosecutes its case in factual prose.

Relentlessly, Marx’s text progressively demonstrates how the major vector for the contemporary production of barbarism lies, not in some savage margin, but right in the heart of the industrial core.

And yet, the overall structure of Marx’s text remains poorly understood. The nature of its object—a system of knowledge that actively produces ignorance—has proven remarkably resilient in taming and redirecting the force of Marx’s work. The Robinsonade that is the object of Marx’s critique is also, and at the same time, one of our most familiar and widely-shared frameworks for making sense of our economic and social institutions. Thinking against this grain—escaping from this conceptual rut—is difficult, and the contradictory and often oppressive application of Marx’s work attests to the challenge of using even critical resources in the service of emancipation.

.…

The problems posed by his text replicate those posed by the analysis of capitalist production itself—a process which contains something that could be described as “social metabolism,” a process for which the expenditure of specifically human labour-power is essential, and essential in ways that plausibly imply to social actors that this necessity is driven by nature, rather than by contingent social practices. In attempting to demonstrate the social validity of partial and one-sided analyses of capitalist production—analyses that fixate on only small portions of a complex social phenomenon—Marx generates a number of opportunities for readers to stumble across his re-presentations of the partial and one-sided views of political economy, mistaking those views for Marx’s own, rather than understanding them as perspectives specifically put forward to be criticised in the course of a more complex analysis of capitalist production and the wealth of capitalist societies [emphasis added]6

Sutherland has forcefully argued that that much of the difficulty involved in reading Capital springs from a conviction that it should be read as a work of pure theory and that the essential task is to get the theory right. He believes that such an approach fails to appreciate the distinctive literary purposes informing Marx’s writing. He cites Marx’s comment in the preface to the second German edition that, “No one can feel the literary shortcomings in Capital more strongly than I myself.” He insists that Marx’s concern with style was inseparable from his larger political goals—including a determination to not let the bourgeoisie or its apologizers off the hook. In his view, theory can always be made into something rather innocuous but vicious satire cannot. Sutherland makes an interesting argument about what might be considered a central moment of volume 1—the theory of commodity fetishism. He argues that it’s not especially a theory at all (although it certainly has theoretical merits). He begins by pointing out another translation error—the phrase should better be translated as the “fetishistic character of commodities” rather than the “fetishism of commodities.” The distinction is reinforced by Sutherland’s extended commentary on Marx’s use and abuse of the concept of fetishism. The first person to use the word was Charles deBrosses, an eighteenth-century aristocratic ethnographer who used it to celebrate European civilization in comparison to the benighted world of superstitious primitives all over the world. Marx, of course, wanted nothing to do with celebrating bourgeois civilization and took special delight in exposing the superstitious dimensions of political economy. For Sutherland, the theorists who miss the satire miss Marx: “Each time this theory is extracted, the impurities of style and satire are washed away with the ‘caustic’ of pure theoretical paraphrase.” In this sense, then, interpreting Marx may not be reading Marx.

How to read Marx by reading Marx

We spent way too much time reading interpretations of Marx. None of us was well prepared to read Marx—he produced a body of work that defies categorization or simplification. But, most of us will have had some preparation, either through life experience or education, to do so. But we can only learn to read Marx by reading him—by working hard at it, although almost certainly not as hard as he worked at writing his texts. The more you read him, just like the more you read Shakespeare, the better you can get at it. You learn to wait for a sentence that undoes or undermines claims made in preceding sentences. By way of an oft-cited example:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be [emphasis added].7

The later (italicized) sentences need to be seen as posing a sharp contrast to the earlier ones and they affect the overall meaning of the paragraph. Iring Fetscher argued that: “An architect in capitalist society, for instance, is—as Marx makes perfectly clear—not capable (or rarely capable) of producing according to his own plan because his plan is decisively conditioned by the people who pay him and by their necessity to conform to the economic system under which they live. The ‘subject’ that is acting ‘through’ him is ‘capital,’ the epitome of a given capitalist society.”8 Marx’s clarity is only available to those who are sufficiently attentive.

Marx, at his heart, as a fighter for human emancipation

In his earliest writings, Marx had shown his colors. The recently released movie, The Young Karl Marx, begins with scenes of German peasants gathering wood in a forest and being set upon by vicious enforcers of the rules of private property. The film quickly moves on to the debates within the circles of the Rheinische Zeitung regarding the rashness of Marx’s criticism of Prussian censorship. Rosa Luxemburg commented on the same events:

Mehring is quite right in saying that Marx was no longer prepared to adopt the Hegelian standpoint for the last article about the purely economic question of the division of peasant land he planned for the Rheinische Zeitung, but did not write. In fact he had already been let down by this standpoint in the practical questions he had addressed earlier. Certainly, it was the cutting weapon of the Hegelian dialectic that he deployed so brilliantly in his critical demolition of the proceedings of the Rheinland provincial assembly concerning the freedom of the press and for the pilfering of wood. But it was only the dialectics, the method of thought, that was of service to him; as for the viewpoint itself, it seems to us that Marx already here, as he stood up for the freedom of the press and the right of poor peasants to gather wood freely in the forest, rather imposed his own point of view on the Hegelian philosophy of law and the state, than derived his point of view from it. It was first and foremost, as Mehring himself said, the deep and true sympathy that Marx felt for the ‘politically and socially deprived masses,’ it was ‘the heart’ that drove him already in his idealist stage into the struggle and determined the side that he took in it [emphasis added].9

We didn’t need Marxist catechisms in 1968; we don’t need them now. They do not provide a way into Marx; they provide a way out.

• 1There is a quite accurate and perceptive account of the liberal arts curriculum at Manhattan at the time—albeit from quite different political perspective from mine.
• 2I didn’t read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia until years later.
• 3At the risk of being charged with partisanship (because of my connections with the group), I’d highlight the example of the Sojourner Truth Organization as a real alternative to the various practical and theoretical dead-ends. See, for example, the Insurgent Notes Symposium on Truth and Revolution.
• 4See “Trotsky Reconsidered” in an earlier issue of Insurgent Notes.
• 5The pamphlet is available for purchase from Amazon. The core argument recapitulated the remarkably prescient views of clr James in his 1948 report, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” at the 13th convention of the Socialist Workers Party.
• 6Nicole Pepperell, “ ‘To Dream of a Wildness Distant from Ourselves’: Capitalism, Colonialism and the Robinsonade,” (2017). Unpublished draft. This excerpt has been edited to remove page references and footnotes from the original text.
• 7Capital, volume I, chapter 7, section 1.
• 8Iring Fetscher, “Karl Marx on Human Nature,” Social Research, vol. 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 443–467.
• 9As cited in Paul Zarembka, “Marxist Political Economy without Hegel: Contrasting Marx and Luxemburg to Plekhanov and Lenin,” draft for inclusion in In Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michal Kalecki: Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik, Jan Toporowski, Ewa Karwowski and Ricardo Bellafiore, eds.

This little article is a personal testimony and does not pretend to describe the attitude of a whole generation towards Marx in the late 1960s. Nevertheless I will try to point to some general tendencies at work before May ’68 in France.

Marx seen through Liberation Theologians and Althusserism

I discovered The Communist Manifesto in my stepfather’s bookshelf but he did not specifically advise me to read it. I was 16 years old in 1966 when I read it for the first time. I was active in the antiracist movement (the mrap, cp-controlled) and in the antiwar movement controlled by the Maoists (cvb, Comités Vietnam de base, which only distributed South Vietnamese nlf and North Vietnamese Stalinist propaganda). The leaders of this Maoist group studied at the super-elitist Ecole Normale Supérieure, where the Stalinist philosopher Louis Althusser was teaching. They had been active in the Communist Party student organization (uec) from which they were expelled in 1965 to form the ujc-ml in 1966. Several of them became (and are still) preeminent Left intellectuals (Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Bernard Pudal, Michelle Zancharini-Fournel, Robert Linhart, Gerard Noiriel, etc.).

Politically I was a Third-Worldist Catholic, influenced by Frères du monde (“Brothers of the World”), a journal founded by Franciscans who became more and more influenced by Marxism and Liberation Theology. I read Yves Congar’s (a Dominican) and Jean-Yves Calvez’s (a Jesuit) articles and also Témoignage Chrétien (a left-wing Christian weekly founded in 1941 by a Resistance movement during the Second World War and which was very active against French colonialism). I also read La Pensée de Karl Marx, published in 1956 and written by Jean-Yves Calvez, a book which was translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and had a longstanding influence on the South American Left.

As I have no specific memory today of the content of this book I looked for critiques written at the time and it was praised in academic journals as “the best and most sophisticated study ever written in French about Marx”! So I was almost tempted to read it again, 52 years later!

Anyway, Liberation Theology was not my only introduction to Marx as I had a philosophy teacher during my last high school year who was probably a cp member. He convinced me and some other students to read Althussser’s For Marx (published in French in 1965). He also pushed us to read a book written by a Marxist sociologist Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God, a fascinating analysis of the seventeenth-century Christian scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, analysis which I successfully used to pass my baccalauréat (final high school exam) in June 1968.

Compulsory Marx readings

So when I was contacted in January 1967 by a Trotskyist “workerist”1 group called Voix Ouvrière (today Lutte Ouvrière, or Union Communiste), they were appalled by my readings and strongly advised me to read Marx himself instead of reading books about his ideas and methodology.

So I was obliged to read Marx and Engels, as it was a precondition to get accepted in the organization. It took me three years to become a member with full rights (I was also supposed to recruit at least one worker to the group—which I did not succeed to do), so, during this time, I read 19 Marx and Engels’s books or booklets which were compulsory readings (I don’t quote here other authors as it’s not the subject of this inquiry).

To become a sympathizer (I was accepted in a “sympathizers’ circle” in September 1968) I started to read:

• The Condition of the Working Class In England
• Theses On Feuerbach
• The German
  Ideology
• The Principles of Communism
• Wage Labour and Capital
• The Class Struggle in France
• The Peasant War in Germany
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
• Value, Price, and Profit
• Capital, volume 1
• The Civil War in France
• The Housing Question
• Critique of the Gotha Program
• Anti-Dühring
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
• The Dialectics of Nature
• Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
• Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and
• Critique of the Erfurt Program

As we had one or two weeks to read each of these texts, it took me probably one year, or one year and a half, to read them all, as it was intertwined with novels, history books and theoretical books by Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky and Luxemburg. This list shows that:

• we were not obliged to read Capital, volumes 2 and 3, nor the Grundrisse (translated for the first time in 1972), nor the Unpublished Chapter 6 of Capital (translated in 1971);
• a good part of these books were either written by Engels, a thinker not very much appreciated by many French unorthodox Marxists at the time or they were historical writings rather easy to read.

So this personal information is slightly different from what you write in your presentation about us left groups which “seldom asked their members or prospects to actually engage with Marx’s own writings,” but I would partly agree with your second statement: “In almost no cases, were people encouraged to ‘read’ those texts in ways that might illuminate anything other than the ‘lessons’ they presumably taught.”

Nevertheless, being in contact with far-left and anarchist militants for half a century I don’t know of any group or “group-journal” or “group–non-group” which has an open-minded attitude and pushes its members or sympathizers to call into question their basic political and philosophical positions… And I am not sure Marxism, especially if you consider it as a “science” or a “scientific method,” pushes you automatically towards a non-doctrinarian attitude.

As I publish a journal (Ni patrie ni frontières) which translates and publishes (or republishes) opposing views on specific themes from anarchist, Marxist, Trotskyist, left-communist authors, I am well aware that most groups hate to be criticized and deal very badly with internal or external debates.

What general “lessons” can be drawn from my personal experience between 1966 and 1968 in France?

First, there was a significant number of Marxist (generally cp members and sympathizers) teachers in high schools and universities, as testified by the positions of left-wing teachers’ trade unions in 1968. My high school was no exception, as can be shown by the testimonies of many comrades who were born in the early 1950s: high school history and philosophy teachers were often left-oriented in these days. As regards universities, this was often the case in the history, sociology, philosophy and economics departments before May 1968 and it expanded for at least 10 years. Marxism (generally structuralist, Stalinist, Leninist or Third Worldist forms of Marxism) was quite influential and as the French university democratized itself after 1968 (the process had started before) it influenced tens of thousands of students.

As regards left-wing Christians, they were quite active at that time (including in the factories, as the “worker-priest” movement started in 1942)2 and many became atheists or agnostics. Their commitment did not stop in the 1970s because many of them were still active in the no-global movement in the 1990s and even today you can find them in the struggles supporting “illegal” workers.

How was the working class perceived in the Marxist far left, Trotskyist and Maoist press before May 68?

As I was in a “workerist” group, obviously all our attention was centered on workers’ strikes and reports about local working conditions but that did not mean we were more able than others to foresee the May ’68 mass student movement, youth revolt and “general strike.”3 Meeting a friend of a rival organization (the jcr, half-Guevarist, half-Trotskyist but
linked to the Frank/Mandel Fourth International), I remember that I proudly proclaimed: “There won’t be a general strike in France before at least ten years.” My arrogance (I obviously labeled my friend and his group as hopeless “petty bourgeois”) was linked to my very bad capacity of political prediction and lack of experience but also to the strong pessimism of my group which thought that, as the cadres of the future Leninist party were not numerous enough, the
working class could not win any significant struggle. Actually Voix Ouvrière published at the very beginning of May in its monthly journal (Lutte de classe, Class struggle) an article which was named “Le rôle de la violence hors de l’histoire” (“The role of violence disconnected from history”). This text basically said that student revolts had never led anywhere and certainly not led to any general strike. It criticized the far left groups which wanted to imitate the example of the Japanese Zengakuren and the German student sds who confronted the cops and got international fame:

The perhaps confused but alive feeling of one’s exploitation, of the injustice one daily undergoes, exists in every worker. There is no need for any “provocations” to reveal him an “alienated” condition (although he obviously does not use that word). Aspects of his daily life and of his status as a wage-earner are more than enough to show him his reality. But it is not this permanent feeling that can explain either the reactions, or the lack of reaction, of the working class. Because, to react, it is not enough to feel oppressed, it is also necessary either to think that one has nothing more to lose—which is rarely the case—or to have the hope, even the smallest, that something can still be changed. This hope, or lack of hope, has played a central role in the history of the labor movement for 100 years, and determined its ups and downs…. French workers understand that the strikers of the Saviem [truck factory], who are fighting for their demands, clash with the police who come to rescue their boss; they understand that these workers retaliate and fight. German workers might also understand that German students attack the Springer conglomerate if the reasons were explained to them. But this would require, in the current context, that the revolutionary students not only worry about setting fire to the bourgeois press, but also to create a workers’ press in order to develop this work of explanation and propaganda. This would probably mean a complete reorientation of the work of the revolutionaries who are currently in the sds…. French workers would certainly not understand that French students—even if they claim to support the working class—trigger fights for the simple purpose of imitating German students. And in this case, those who would take responsibility for such actions would not only fail to achieve their goal—if their goal is indeed the proletarian revolution and the constitution of a revolutionary workers’ party. By indulging in incomprehensible “provocations,” far left groups and militants may cut themselves from the working class. Today, as yesterday, the essential problem remains the connection of this extreme left with the only class that can give it its size and its historical role: the proletariat.

Voix Ouvrière was strongly anti-Marcusian (although few of Marcuse’s books were translated in French at the time). It tried to lecture the other Trotskyist groups so they would reorient their propaganda from the student milieu to the factories and popular districts, if they wanted to avoid being overwhelmed by “petty bourgeois” ideologies like Third Worldism or the “students-as-a-substitute vanguard” theory.

So reading Marx, and spending a lot of time leafleting factory bulletins in front of factories and selling our weekly newspaper in working-class districts did not really help us, as members of a group dedicated to reading Marx and which included a few dozens of industrial workers, to understand what was going on in the months preceding May ’68.

Does it mean reading Marx was not useful? Certainly not! But we lacked subtlety and flexibility, qualities which were (unfortunately) more present, for example, at the head of the Christian reformist trade union, the cfdt. One of their leaders (Albert Detraz) was specially commissioned by his fellow top bureaucrats to understand what was going on before May ’68. The union bureaucrats did not understand why there were several spontaneous militant strikes in 1967 and early 1968 and why the strikers refused the support of the cfdt or even of the cgt (the strongest union at the time, it was dominated by cp cadres). Detraz was more in favor of “workers control” than of “self management” but he successfully carried out his mission for the union bureaucracy. He was sent to tour several factories in the provinces, to discuss with the workers and try to draw some lessons from their hostility to classic trade union activities. And the cfdt was able to use the “self management” concept as soon as May 16 in its propaganda and make it sound “radical.” It attracted many militant young workers (as well as leftist militants who were happy to find a friendlier milieu than in the Stalinist cgt) to build the union in the months and years following May ’68.

As Jacques Wajnsztejn wrote in his recent book about May ’68 in Lyon, at that time no activist in France made workers’ inquiries to study the class composition and understand what changes were occurring in French society. The cp intellectuals were very much interested in the new waged petty bourgeoisie (teachers, technicians, foremen, executives and engineers), which were slowly replacing its traditional social basis (the qualified workers of the mines, harbors, steel and auto industry). The Trotskyists were split among those who thought that the working class composition had not changed at all (and anyway never allowed their working class comrades to think collectively and define a strategy based on their professional and political experience) and those who thought the sleepy working class should be awakened by a vigorous anti-imperialist student movement.

As regards the Maoists, at least before May 1968, they did not have a specific conception of how to revive the workers’ movement and the unions. Both wings of the Maoist movement, the hard Mao-Stalinists and those who will become the Mao-spontaneists, were still dreaming to revive the “good old days” of Stalinist-dominated unions. They had no idea about the role of a workers’ bureaucracy and its function under private and state capitalism. The front page of the ujc-ml newspaper even proclaimed “Vive la cgt!” just before May ’68. They did not elaborate any specific critique of capitalist hierarchy and its growing sophistication and manipulation of the workforce.

It’s only after 1968 that one current of the Maoist movement (the “Gauche prolétarienne,” the Proletarian Left, coming from the ujc-ml) started to put forward strong anti-hierarchical slogans and actions (like nominally denouncing foremen and security guards in their leaflets, throwing a bucket of paint at them at the gate of the factories, or beating them up).

They attempted to reach the youngest and most revolted layers of the working class, be they Franco-French or recent migrants, but their strategy was not built on any concrete analysis. It was rather based on the desire to make the revolution at once and fill a new “blank page” of history, according to their fantasies concerning the so-called “Cultural Revolution.”

Fifty years have passed and the attitude of the far left has not qualitatively changed as regards the lack of a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” Maoist groups have (hopefully!) disappeared; the three main Trotskyist groups4 are still playing around; the anarchist movement is probably a little bit stronger than half a century ago (although very much divided between trade unionist, individualist and insurrectionist tendencies), but I don’t know of any militant group whose working-class members have tried to see whether Marx’s concepts are still useful to understand, for example, the multiple divisions along sex, ethnic and national lines as well religious beliefs, and how the class could be sufficiently reunited to destroy the state and capital today.

The far left and the anarchists have mainly recruited among state employees and new waged petty bourgeois (teachers, executives, members of the cultural industry and social services), but their roots among the non-qualified manual workers, specially among migrant workers (and their children and grandchildren who have French nationality) are still very weak not to say nonexistent. Marxism is of no use to a good part of the radical left (including the various anarchist groups who tend to use “Marxist economics” or concepts to fill the void of their ideology) because they are mesmerized by postmodernism and identity politics.

The usefulness of Marx’s concepts to understand our world needs still to be proven in our daily practice today.

Yves Coleman lives in Paris.

• 1

  “Workerist” 50 years ago as today was an insult or at least a deprecating judgment. I will always take it as a compliment, especially in our present world where anti–working class postmodern, multiculturalist, left-identitarian and decolonial “theories” dominate.

• 2Condemned by the Pope Pie XII in 1954, they were once more supported by the Catholic Church in 1966 by Pope Paul VI. They were 800 in 1976 and are still 500 today.
• 3I put these two words between quotation marks, because the scale and importance of this strike has been, and is still, much exaggerated (See, for example, my article about 2006 student movement or the collection of articles What’s new in France for the Left?, although it does not deal in detail with May ’68). May ’68 was not a wildcat general strike: the trade unions did not call for a general strike and they bureaucratically organized the occupations of most factories; the mass of the workers occupied neither their places of work nor their neighborhoods; and the young workers went to the universities, or to the local action committees or to the demonstrations, to have some fun fighting the cops.
• 4See the debate in 2007 with Loren Goldner and other comrades: “Left Communism and Trotskyism” on Break Their Haughty Power website, and an updated version (but only my contribution) in French in 2012.

I was 22 years old in May 1968 and I was a history student. I had been defending revolutionary ideas for nearly six years. In 1962, I considered myself an anarchist. Having grown up in a family of high school teachers who were anti-clerical, pacifist and anti-colonial militants, I had always thought of myself as politicized, in the sense that I was revolted by all injustices, large and small, around the world or right in front of me. The Algerian War was the biggest injustice of all. I wondered why it had lasted so long, and why the anti-war movement in France was so weak.

I began to be seriously acquainted with Marx’s ideas at the high school in Elbeuf, a working-class city near Rouen. My philosophy teacher was a non-dogmatic Marxist who supported the struggle of the Algerian people while introducing me to Wilhelm Reich as well as to the pre-Socratics. Many young people of my generation, having the opportunity to attend high school, often discovered Marx through a philosophy teacher.

In 1963, just one year after Algerian independence, I participated in a camp near Skikda along with more than 200 French young people from the whole left and far-left spectrum, ranging from the uec, the student organization of the pcf, by way of the psu and different Trotskyist groups, to Socialisme ou Barbarie. The camp was a virtually permanent forum where passionate discussions ranged from Algeria’s chances of becoming a socialist state or having a worker and peasant government (I had no illusions about this) to the “right interpretation” of Marx’s analyses. I remember a sharp collective discussion, of which I understood nothing, on the new book of Kostas Axelos, Marx, penseur de la technique. What I on the other hand understood quite well, talking with young Algerian peasants or fishermen my age, who were mainly illiterate but very lucid, was that they had no confidence in Ben Bella and the fln people in power. They gave me concrete examples of their corruption. These youths, who had fought for independence in the countryside, dreamed only of leaving for France and finding work. I became friends there with a guy studying in Lyon who had been a militant with Socialisme ou Barbarie and then with Pouvoir Ouvrier. I had already evolved from anarchism to libertarian Marxism from reading Daniel Guerin’s book Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire. My friend introduced me to issues of the Situationist International, Louis Janover’s journal Front Noir, and to the bulletins of ico (Informations Correspondances Ouvrières). A Parisian militant from Voix Ouvrière had also persuaded my father to subscribe to their Trotskyist journal, without ever actually meeting me. I was very interested in all these publications, but the analyses of Socialisme ou Barbarie seemed to me the richest and most convincing. Although I was reading very widely to keep up with all these analyses, and having begun the reading of Marx, Lenin, Lukacs, Korsch, Ernst Bloch and Debord, I had the permanent impression of catching up, and not being at the level to this constantly evolving revolutionary movement, itself in constant evolution. That led to a break of one year with my friend; I had written him to tell him not to waste his time with me because I no longer was able to understand everything he was explaining to me.

While waiting to find my way forward, I was an activist with the Fédération anarchiste, which ultimately disappointed me for its lack of interest in ideas, including the major anarchist thinkers, whom I had conscientiously studied on my own. No one in our group in Rouen cared about communicating their thought to workers. Being an anarchist struck me as a comfortable posture, not as a way of trying to change the world. Furthermore, Proudhon’s Philosophie de la misère had bored me, and seemed quite obscure, whereas, to my great surprise, Marx’s reply, Misère de la philosophie, seemed to me clear and convincing. Hanns-Erich Kaminski’s biography of Bakunin had also cooled my enthusiasm for this major figure of anarchism.

In 1964, I briefly joined the Union des Etudiants Communistes (uec), to see how it functioned from within. We were under the vigilant guidance of a pcf militant. I briefly encountered the very predigested and metaphysical character of Marxism in its Stalinist version, as theorized in the prewar period by Georges Politzer and then for the later period by Garaudy, Cogniot and Kanapa. That Marxism, and the electoralism of the pcf (“the peaceful road to socialism”) provoked hilarity and the hidden indignation of my comrades, who were with me in the last year of high school and at the uec, and who would, soon after, join the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (jcr) of Alain Krivine, or the Maoist ujc (M-L).

In one youth hostel (then known as a hotbed of left-wing ideas), I had met, among others, a Trotskyist militant of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (the Pierre Franck tendency) who was trying to win over young people. He didn’t convince me, but increased my interest in Trotsky, about whom Isaac Deutscher’s biography had just appeared. Deutscher’s three volumes impassioned me, as did Victor Serge’s Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire.

Never losing sight, through all this, of Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B), I had ordered the complete set of the issues of that journal, because I wanted to work with that group after first consolidating my knowledge of their analyses. I soon received a package with their available back issues, but accompanied by a note explaining that the group had ceased to exist. The author of the note had foreseen the end of S ou B, which came about in summer 1965. I was disappointed. In a debate with Pierre Franck of the Fourth International, who had been invited to Rouen by the youth group of the psu, I had given an animated defense of S ou B’s analysis of relations of production in the ussr. Where could I go now, to defend real revolutionary ideas?

At that moment, I got back in touch with the friend I had met in Algeria. I saw him again in Paris in April 1965, with another militant who was even more politically developed. He had known Castoriadis personally and up close, and he criticized him for having turned his back on Marx and even on the working class. Both he and my friend had later been active in Pouvoir Ouvrier (po). But, in their view, neither po nor ico offered any perspective. As for me, having had the experience of the Fédération anarchiste, I was not myself drawn to any Marxist group that was too passive, and too attentiste, producing “drawing room” analyses or being satisfied with publishing material on exploitation and workers’ struggles, without actively and methodically seeking to win workers to revolutionary ideas. The “state capitalist” analyses had deeply and lastingly shaped me, but their relevance seemed less obvious if they led to a distant and contemplative attitude toward class struggle, as the new orientation of Castoriadis and his circle seemed to do.

My two friends proposed that we become active in a “bureaucratically deformed” Trotskyist group, but one giving us a way to be active within the working class. They convinced me, along with a small group of young Parisian intellectuals coming out of po, known as “Edouard’s gang,” to join the group Voix Ouvrière (vo). That organization had a reputation for seriousness, and intervened in a certain number of major factories. Not only were their militants unafraid to physically confront the Stalinists to defend their ideas among workers, but they made a major point of a very comprehensive theoretical education for members, which included reading many novels. That appealed to me deeply, and all the more because vo rejected every so-called socialist regime on the planet, including Cuba’s.

With my companion Hélène, we also were able to meet and appreciate the older vo militants coming from the Barta group, who had been active during the Second World War and who had played a decisive role in the strike at Renault-Billancourt in 1947. It was thus that, with great enthusiasm, we set about building a vo section in Rouen, with the help of a 25-year-old Parisian militant who regularly came to see us.

The success of Marxism before May 68

In the years following the Algerian War, all the young people who had joined a self-styled revolutionary organization (including those active with the uec or the jc) called themselves Marxists and saw the proletariat as the potentially emancipatory class. We were all, in one way or another, workerist Marxists. The anarchists, such as those in Maurice Joyeux’s Monde Libertaire, and who rejected Marx en bloc, could get nowhere in those years. Everyone felt the need to have some serious theoretical baggage in order not to come across as an idiot in the numerous debates and discussions between groups and tendencies. All the works of Marx and Engels were published and widely available from the cp’s Editions Sociales. All the authors who were, or called themselves Marxists, attracted attention and provoked discussions. Some young people in the uec felt obligated to read Ernest Mandel’s Traité d’économie marxiste, which appeared in 1962, a “must” read, if only to critique it. Whether one was, at the time, for or against the best-known writings of Lenin, no one could ignore them. I remember a raucous discussion in Le Mans in 1966 with some young workers from the jc who were attempting to justify the electoralist strategy of the pcf and the “peaceful road to socialism,” and who referred to one of Lenin’s 1917 texts where he explained it was possible to take power without recourse to violence. As a militant already in vo, I knew this text much better than they did, and the very specific context in which Lenin wrote it. But, naturally, no argument could get them to budge. This anecdote is revealing. Being in the pcf and having a thin veneer of Marxism and Leninism allowed these young Stalinist workers to feel very sure of themselves in all circumstances.

To the left of the pcf, workerist Marxism found its concrete justification in experiences not that far in the past, such as the creation of workers’ councils in the Hungarian insurrection of 1956, the Belgian general strike of winter 1960–61, and the miners’ strike in France in 1963. For anyone who had studied these events and had read widely in the history of the international workers’ movement since its origins in English Chartism, the major strikes which erupted in France in 1967, at the Rhodiaceta plant near Grenoble, in the Saint-Nazaire shipyards, or at the Saviem plant in Caen in January 1968, reinforced the idea that in spite of the overlay of reformist and above all Stalinist organizations, the working class still had a revolutionary potential. They were also strong arguments against the Third Worldist groups and intellectuals for whom there was nothing more to be expected from the “bourgeoisified” working class of the imperialist countries.

The Hegemony of the pcf in the Working Class

The region where we set out to build a vo group was very industrial, with a strong pcf presence in all the major factories. The Stalinists were in power in several local governments around Rouen. They had influence in secondary education and at the university.

When we organized our first public meetings in 1967, more than 70 local leaders and active members of the pcf came to prevent it from taking place. Among them were longshoremen to push us aside, and university professors who came to people for some distraction. The confrontation was violent and we were the ones who expelled them, with the decisive help of Parisian comrades who came as reinforcements. Some weeks later, the thugs of the pcf returned in force to prevent a meeting of the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (jcr) in honor of Che Guevara, who had just been murdered. We had organized a joint defense group to prevent them from getting into the room. On that occasion, the confrontation had been more verbal than violent.

When we sold our newspaper door to door in the working-class apartment buildings, and attempted to talk to workers at their homes, one of us started from the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom, in order to be able to react together to any ugly incident with a pcf member, if we heard shouts. Seen in retrospect, it might seem incomprehensible that the Marxist far left did not have more success with the working class in May ’68. We need to take account of the obstacle constituted by the pcf, which impressed people with its strength and influence, well beyond its ranks. The pcf took all necessary measures (including, of course, calumny and violent interventions) not to be criticized and challenged on its left. They quite simply did not want us to exist. The working class was its preserve.

In France, to my knowledge, the only (Trotskyist) groups that dared leaflet in front of factories in their own name were the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (oci, the Lambertists) and Voix Ouvrière. These two organizations had, moreover, collaborated for a while in publishing joint factory bulletins at the beginning of the 1960s. On the eve of May 1968, vo had a presence at some sixty companies, including roughly forty factories. If one adds the slightly more serious presence of the oci, some “industrialized” Maoist students, a handful of anarcho-syndicalists and the rare councilist militant, we can see that, in France as a whole, the presence of revolutionaries within the proletariat was extremely small. This weakness discouraged no one, but it should be taken into account in any assessment of what far-left groups could have done, or didn’t do, in May–June 1968.

From never having met and appreciated revolutionary militants, workers could rarely object to the Stalinists that the far-leftists were anything but “rich kids,” “provocateurs,” and irresponsible loud-mouths “playing the game of the bourgeoisie.”

Since we had succeeded in Rouen, as in other cities in the provinces, in winning over a small number of workers, white-collar people and hospital employees, despite our youth and our limited experience, we had proof that it was possible to spread revolutionary ideas directly, that is, not by engaging in entrism in the pcf (as did the pci of Pierre Franck) not getting student comrades hired in the factories (as the Maoists enthused by the “Cultural Revolution” were doing) nor, finally, by waiting until workers were spontaneously interested one day in revolutionary ideas or took over a program prepared for them (the position of the Bordigists).

Educating ourselves with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg

While having an important activity on the ground, putting up posters with the week’s editorial, by spreading public sales and contacts with wage workers, high school students, especially at meetings to support the Vietnamese people, we continued as best we could our formation and that of comrades close to us, in the form of readings and exposés.

We had comrades and contacts read Wage Labor and Capital, Wages, Prices and Profit, and the edition of Capital abridged by Otto Rühle and prefaced by Trotsky (Marxism and Our Epoch). Some hardy comrades in vo read the version of Capital as condensed by Julien Borschardt, which was 500 pages long. This was not negligible. On my own, I had begun, starting in 1964, to read volume 1 in the translation by Maximilien Rubel, published by Pléiade. As an appendix, there was Marx’s Workers Inquiry of 1880, which had impressed me by its detailed focus on the working and living conditions of workers. That underpinned the validity of our focus in vo being attentive, as we were, to all the aspects of exploitation recounted to us by the workers, with whom we put out our shop-floor bulletins. We were thus able to vigorously denounce, sometimes with humor, the different aspects of exploitation in a company. It was on that basis, where the cgt did not dare venture, that we aroused the interest of the readers of our bulletins, and often their sympathy.

However, it was the political writings of Marx and Engels, and the biographies by Riazanov, Nilolaïevski and Maenchen-Helfen which were the solid basis of our “Marxism.”

All the Trotskyist groups made much of the pamphlets of Lenin and especially of What Is To Be Done?, each group having its own reading to justify their practice. I remember jcr militants mocking our factory bulletins, while we criticized them for remaining in the student milieu and for not making much effort to connect with rank-and-file workers. Only trade-union militants were in their good graces, having shown a “class consciousness” higher than that of other workers.

In the galaxy of Marxist militants and thinkers, aside from Lenin and Trotsky, whose available works we read, Rosa Luxemburg had an important place. We had read and had comrades read Paul Fröhlich’s biography of her, published by Maspéro, as well as Social Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions, as well as her text from prison The Russian Revolution. But before 1968, few texts by her or on her were available in French.

Building a Party for the Self-Emancipation of the Workers

Although at the time we had no doubts on the necessity of building a Bolshevik-type party, we belonged to a Marxist organization which gave greater importance than others to autonomous organs created, or to be created in the future, by the workers. We did not imagine that our factory comrades might play a leading role in a strike outside the framework of a strike committee elected by a general assembly, even if they succeeded, which was very rare, in having a trade-union office. A strike led by a trade union automatically deprived the strikers of any possibility of controlling their strike and showing any kind of initiative. I note in passing that this orientation was maintained by Lutte Ouvriere into the 1980s, and then was progressively abandoned, as lo’s factory militants acceded to trade-union responsibilities in the cgt.

In our thinking, anything that could emerge in the working class outside the control of the trade-union apparatuses (above all of the cgt) was welcome, and an indication that the emancipation of the workers would be the task of the workers themselves. The desire to build a party, as an instrument helping and making possible this emancipation, did not seem to us contradictory, because that seemed positively illustrated by the initial success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and, in the negative, by the failures of the German Revolution of 1918 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

May ’68, a promising first attempt

My head was thus filled with the many examples of revolutionary struggles from the past, and of course the impressive struggles then underway, in Vietnam, the United States, and in student agitation from around the world.

Since vo turned all its efforts toward the factories, and did not seek to play a role in the student movement, I was especially excited by the outbreak of the strike and occupation at Renault-Cléon, set in motion by young workers. It was the second factory to strike after the one at Sud-Aviation in Nantes.

A surprising sentiment emerged among many workers after the confrontations in the Latin Quarter: not only were they angered by the violence of the crs; they had sympathy and a certain admiration for those students who had fought on the barricades and challenged established power. This sentiment went against the grain of the negative image of the student movement which the pcf and the cgt tried to impose on people’s thinking. This current of sympathy opened a breach for the surge of those first workers who struck and occupied their factories.

It was logical that the spontaneous initiatives took place in the provinces, where the hold of the cgt was weaker than in the Paris region.

But the cgt rapidly understood the dangers of contamination of the combative ideas of the students for those workers wanting to enter the struggle. That is why the cgt rapidly generalized the strike, in order to maintain its control over the working class. A lucid right-wing journalist used a very evocative image: “The cgt is spurring on its mount, the better to control it.” At first, then, the cgt appeared to be reinforcing and developing the movement. At the Cléon plant, the strike and occupation was animated for several days. But once the cgt decided to free the ceo and the managers, workers began to be disappointed, and returned home. On the contrary, in different factories where the young workers wanted to participate in the movement, they went to the campus or to the Circus Arena, which had been occupied by the students. There, I was able to have very intense discussions with young workers. Some of them took our big piles of leaflets and went off to distribute them even before we asked them to.

There is no question that a certain current of young workers wanted to go farther. Behind the factory gates of the Renault-Cléon factory, at the end of the movement, I witnessed a scene as poignant as that of the rebellious woman worker at Wonder who did not want to go back into the “prison.” A young worker I had won over was shouting at a group of bureaucrats and courageously going toe-to-toe with them. After the resumption of work, he left the factory.

There were undoubtedly young strikers who were terribly disappointed that the movement was stopped in its tracks. For them, it was something like the dawn of a new life, and thus a dream that was broken. The cgt told them to be reasonable and that a major victory had been won, which was absolutely not the case. And those of us in vo were proposing that they patiently build a revolutionary workers’ party in their factory. Certain workers were motivated to do so, until roughly 1978. They were at the head of the numerous bitter strikes which broke out until that date. Other workers dropped everything and we never saw them again. In the first leaflets we wrote to distribute at Renault-Cléon, one young worker from the factory wanted us to say things more radically than I was proposing.

For all that, because of our formation in vo and from the historical example we had studied, we never thought that we were at the dawn of a revolutionary situation or some kind of 1905. Even if the cgt’s call to end the strike often encountered strong resistance, we had to admit that there was no strong and durable will to go farther. Opportunities for building a revolutionary party seemed to have opened up for us, but the working class, nonetheless, had not expressed any aspirations to overthrow the existing powers and change society.

May–June ’68 thus appeared to me as a promising first attempt, which would be followed by even more important movements, which was not the case. It only undermined the influence of the Stalinist movement, which was important, so that revolutionary ideas could penetrate more widely in the working class, so that more important margins of autonomy existed for the workers in all the important strikes which took place in France over the next fifteen years. Today, it seems to me that May ’68 could not have produced more of an emancipatory breakthrough than it did. I remember it as a moment of happiness, during which everything alienating and loathsome in capitalist society was shut down for several weeks.

The Return of Marx, but not of the Proletariat

The last importance experience of struggle in which I participated as a Trotskyist militant was the movement of November–December 1995, when the railway workers took the lead and, in Rouen, maintained democratic control of the strike, which had pulled out other sectors of workers.

After my expulsion from lo in March 1997, and my break with the Voix des Travailleurs tendency at the end of 1999, I maintained ties and even friendships with several workers, which allowed me to follow the most important mobilizations closely. But at the same time, the Trotskyist movement seemed to me more than ever to have exhausted its living substance, and to have become unacceptable in its internal functioning, a prisoner of its electoral routine, and incapable of analyzing the transformations affecting the proletariat from the 1990s onward.

In fact, the decline of the Trotskyist organizations shadowed the decline of the pcf. lo seemed to come off better for several years, but finally ossified, turned in on itself, and put more energy into its electoral campaigns than into the initiatives of the workers. More than ever, it had become a perpetually self-satisfied organization, claiming to be the sole revolutionary one. It rid itself of militants who were asking troubling questions that might disturb the little squirrel wheel of its traditional activities and its minimalist, repetitive propaganda. I would summarize lo’s posture like this: “Let us always repeat the same thing, while waiting until the level of working-class consciousness rises and allows us to play the role of enlightened experts.” This elitist position, one condescending to workers, avoids the facts that the traditional far-left organizations do not want to confront.

One of the most important facts is that, compared to the situation of 1968 and into the mid-1970s, the power and resources of the proletariat have been weakened. Millions of people are partially or fully unemployed; precariousness, flexibility, exhaustion, and harassment on the job have reached impressive and demoralizing levels for those affected, holding back the possibility of larger struggles. Overcoming such obstacles means at minimum admitting that they exist, and reformulating analyses and political intervention that take them into account.

The critical study of Marx, deepening the understanding of past and recent revolutions, of movements such as May ’68, and the qualitative transformations of capitalist social relations, are of no use to organizations like lo and the npa. For the past twenty years, an interest in these crucial questions, and especially for the writings of Marx, is found more often among young researchers in the social sciences or among militants who have broken with the far-left organizations, and who write for online journals or websites.

For myself, I have gone back to studying the proletariat’s place in society, the role of parties and structures and democratic experiences from another critical angle, reading authors such as Jean-Marie Vincent (Un autre Marx and Critique du travail), Oskar Negt (L’espace public oppositionnel), Günther Anders (L’obsolescence de l’homme) or John Holloway (Crack Capitalism).

On another level, the interest that May ’68 can have for us today is in giving vitality and a new content to internationalism. And this of course will happen through the international and fraternal confrontation of different points of view.

Reasons of age prevented me from actively participating in the social explosion of ’68. At the time I was only an adolescent, more interested in kids’ games and in the onset of emotional turbulence than attracted by the electric atmosphere around me. Further, I grew up in a small town which historically had been dominated by the temporal power of the Church, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, the consequences of which were still in evidence in the 1960s. I vaguely perceived that things were rapidly changing, without being able to make much sense of the news on tv. There had been the assassination of President Kennedy and then, in ’68, of his brother Robert, and of Martin Luther King. I had been struck earlier by the enormous demonstrations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, while Italian media maintained the silence of the tomb on the Vietnam War and on the big us demonstrations opposing it. For me, 1969 was the year of man’s first trip to the moon. Images of the French mobilizations in ’68 also seemed to come from another world. My arrival in high school, and the student strikes there, were not enough of a push to get me involved in the movement, which by then had come to my town. My participation was completely passive and I saw the strikes as a good opportunity to skip classes.

Nonetheless, the passing years and my growing hostility to everything representing authority pushed me further toward what was happening around me and around the world, and especially to understand why. Thus, during the summer vacation, after my third year of high school, I borrowed some books from some of the more active students and began to read randomly. I was unable to understand the first texts they recommended, especially Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, and they depressed me. Then I got ahold of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and I was totally swept away reading it. More and more, what was happening around me, and the real structure of our society, seemed understandable. Above all, I saw a clear need to take part in the movement which, four years after ’68, was still very strong in Italy. Thus, when school reopened, I began to participate more seriously in student struggles, but although I tried to keep up to date reading the daily newspapers of the far left at that time, I felt completely inadequate to make a significant contribution. I looked to the older students in the last year of high school as the natural leaders, because of their experience and their knowledge.

I was put off because my technical school, which had 1,500 students, only participated with limited delegations in unitary demonstrations with other schools. Most of the students, exactly like me in previous years, went on strike mainly to have a day’s vacation from classes. So, one morning during a strike, as I was getting more and more fed up with the way things were going, I approached one of the students guiding the procession, hoping to get more decisive and solid answers. Since I was very impatient, and was obviously bothering him, he at a certain point handed me the megaphone and told me to try to get other students to participate in the march. After being briefly taken aback by this unforeseen development, I began to aggressively harangue the crowd, addressing the more active students, convincing them to organize monitors, to block the sidewalks and to take over the head of the march, calling on the others to follow them. On that day, for the first time, 90 percent of the students from my school participated, and when we linked up with marches from other schools, our contingent, to everyone’s surprise, was the biggest. This event, caused more by impatience and common sense than by any real political experience, turned me suddenly into one of the more visible leaders, not only of my school, but of the whole student movement in the town. I had gotten into this situation out of a certain discomfort rather than from any enthusiasm, because I felt completely unprepared for this kind of role. But it turned out to be a positive challenge, because I, always a very lazy reader, began to devour books and journals to overcome my obvious lack of political education. Further, I began to participate in different kinds of meetings organized by collectives and political groups, which at that time were sprouting like mushrooms, to get a better idea of the positions of the different political tendencies. But from all this, my confusion only increased, rather than diminished. Everyone claimed to base their outlook on the theoretical fathers of communism, and to be their most faithful adherents, but every group pointed to a different path to follow. Although I was living in a small city in southern Italy, all the most representative political tendencies of that time were present. Moreover, the university students, who returned periodically from the big cities where they were studying, brought with them the latest twists and turns in the national political debate and, above all, communicated to us the effervescent climate they were experiencing.

Nonetheless, I had chosen my camp and, like so many others, once I had overcome generic juvenile rebellion, my political commitment was thereafter based, above all, on a conviction of the need to overcome a society divided into antagonistic classes and to put an end to social relations based on profits and capitalist exploitation. Not that the reasons for my rebellion had disappeared, but all those aspects, from authoritarianism to the patriarchal family, seemed rather to be consequences of the dominant social relations characteristic of capitalism. Or more precisely, as became clearer to me later on, they were old forms of oppression, revitalized and brought up to date by bourgeois domination to reinforce control over all other social classes. At any rate, while I still saw the need to continue fighting against these secondary manifestations of capitalist oppression, I was henceforth convinced that, without a basic struggle attacking the roots of the dominant social relations, it would not be possible to definitively overcome them. This is a conviction that, still today, remains the main motivation for my choice to be a militant.

The main problem to confront was understanding the real conditions, and who could be the key force for the radical change to which the whole young generation involved in the struggles of ’68 aspired. I think that this problem, above all, was the decisive one in the discussions and political actions of an entire generation of militants. This was the big problem, to which people came up with such diverse solutions, and which determined the subsequent successes of so many militants’ choices.

Let us attempt to trace out the main outlines of how this question was posed in Italy in ’68 and later years.

One of the characteristics of the Italian ’68 was the diffusion of a myriad of political organizations, some of which had existed earlier, though they were completely turned upside down by the waves of struggles in those years. The explosion of the years ’68–69 did not quickly ebb away, as happened in other European countries, but rather was consolidated in the formation of various political groups which were joined by the most active and sensitive elements in the movement. In this way, the spontaneity and generic anti-authoritarian rebellion characterizing the first phase was partially lost, but this at the same time gave a relative continuity to the movement itself, though in a competition which often led to standoffs between the various organizations. Among the most active elements in the movement, there was a diffuse consciousness that the issues raised in the struggles of ’68 implied a confrontation on a whole other level with the existing powers and institutions, if they were to be resolved. Moreover, the most radical part of the movement was made up primarily of students, whereas the working class and the world of labor in general, while involved in those years in a level of action and struggles quite as deep as those of the students, remained in its overwhelming majority within the ranks of the reformist parties and the institutionalized trade unions. In particular the cgil, the union linked to the Communist Party, adopted a very elastic strategy to deal with the radicalism expressed by the workers. When dealing with individual factory struggles, which were often quite intense, the cgil did not counter-pose itself to them, but often supported them, while attempting to progressively rein them in. Even the establishment of Factory Councils, elected by all workers and not merely those who were union members, which were also an important step forward relative to the old forms of trade-union representation, went in the same direction. Relative to the spontaneity and “assemblyism” which characterized the first phases of the movement of factory struggles, the formation of the councils was precisely an attempt to channel and discipline these energies, in order to better control them. Moreover, the very radicalism of the workers’ struggles and the workers’ aggressive role wound up winning important results for the great mass of proletarians, both in terms of wages and working conditions, as well as in the welfare state and workers’ rights.

One of the triggers for the general struggle of workers in ’68 had been precisely the government’s attempt to cut pensions. These gains, which reached their climax in ’75 with the agreements on the “sliding scale” (scala mobile, the automatic adjustment to equalize wages with inflation, which was then very high), reinforced for the majority of workers the illusion that henceforth there would be an era of continuous and progressive improvement of working and living conditions from which there would be no turning back. There was widespread belief in a consolidation and extension of these gains, including winning political control by the workers’ own party to take over the government, but not that it was necessary to radically change the dominant social relations. This explains why the various revolutionary tendencies in Italy, during and after ’68, despite their significant mass following, never really took root in the working class. Some of the most combative workers joined those organizations, and had the trust of the people where they worked, but this was almost always limited to factory committees or, at the most, within the unions, without leading to large-scale adhesion to the organizations and programs of these factory vanguards. The tendencies of the revolutionary left generally explained this phenomenon by the influence of the reformist organizations on the masses of workers, which by their political weight and their bureaucratic-ideological apparatuses were able to contain the revolutionary breakout of which the proletariat was presumed capable. But this was only part of the reality, which concealed a self-consoling logic and, at bottom, a relative condescension towards the workers themselves, who were seen as a mass of people who could be maneuvered at will. In fact, it was certainly true that the reformist organizations were doing everything possible to channel the radical impulses of workers’ struggles into institutional paths, in order to keep them within the logic of preserving the capitalist system, however improved, but it was also true that the workers did not aspire to overcome the dominant relations of production. Even when some of them were inclined to socialism or communism, what they had in mind was capitalism with a human face, one more just and more egalitarian. They mainly imagined a society where most property was in the hands of the state. All in all, their model was the ussr, perhaps a bit improved, because by then it was obvious that, especially in terms of consumption, the workers of the so-called socialist countries were not better off than those in the west. But a society in which wage labor, the market and exchange based on value were abolished was completely beyond their horizons. And this was not because no one had been able to explain all this well, or to propagate such ideas with the necessary efficacy and clarity, or to translate such a perspective into a credible program of political objectives. For the Italian proletariat, which had recently suffered the consequences of a destructive war on its own doorstep, which had known the poverty and hunger of the first years of the postwar period, the economic boom of the 1960s was a tremendous step forward in terms of the levels and quality of consumption, of access to social services, and even for job prospects. It was of course true that many proletarians had to emigrate from the south to the north of Italy, or even to other countries, to find work, but this had never before been possible and such workers had previously survived in the poverty of their own places of origin. All in all, the 1960s saw the spread of a relative well being, even if it were bought at the price of harsh exploitation. The phase of development underway in the imperialist metropolises, and the favorable balance of forces in the labor market, gave workers greater contractual power in limiting their own exploitation, but at the same time produced a sense of inclusion and of belonging to the existing society in which they could demand more consideration, but certainly not subvert it from top to bottom. Further, in a society divided into classes like our own, there has never been a revolutionary turnover during a relative expansion of the dominant relations of production and the relative improvement in the living and working conditions of the oppressed.

Nonetheless, the powerful actions of the factory workers, which lasted into the mid-1970s and beyond, was the real motor underpinning the extension of ’68 in Italy. The student upsurge could never have lasted as long without this diffuse and continuous movement of struggles shaking the factories. Its effects reverberated on other sectors of the proletariat and on other social strata as well. Those years in fact saw the development of powerful struggles over housing, especially in the large cities, which were concretized in the occupations of free living spaces, or in the demand for laws on equal rents, calculated according to income and not by the laws of ground rent. In the Italian south, movements of the unemployed arose, especially in Naples, expressing a radical combativity never seen before in these social sectors. In healthcare, in schools and in public transportation, there were important cycles of struggles, not merely over wages and working conditions, but posing directly the form and quality of the services provided to all citizens, and above all to proletarians. The feminist movement also benefitted from this general effervescent climate. In fact, women who had in recent years had had better access to productive labor, were the protagonists of factory struggles and naturally found the strength to raise demands about their own gender condition and double oppression. The effects, in terms of results, were not lacking. In a clerical country such as Italy, where the power, including political power, of the Catholic Church was decisive, during a four-year period laws were passed that finally legalized divorce, in ’74, and then granted the right to abortion in ’78. The church itself was shaken by pushes for renewal and social activism, both by some priests and by some believers and their organizations. There was the phenomenon of worker priests, who chose to share the conditions of the most exploited people in society, or to go spread the gospels in the most rundown peripheries of the large cities. Many Catholic organizations transformed their own social missions, to defend the rights of workers and the poor, going beyond their previous charitable and pietistic character from earlier decades. To a certain extent, there was even a political tendency of Catholics for Socialism, whose members were active in the ranks of the radical New Left organizations.

In the army of that period, which was still based on mandatory conscription, and which was thus the authoritarian institution par excellence, the arrival of so many young people who had been involved in workers’ and student struggles introduced the phenomenon of generalized subversion there as well. Struggle organizations were created, leading to highly significant outbreaks of mass insubordination. With the support of outside activists, there was an attempt to give continuity to organizations in the conscript army, including through the printing and spread of a clandestine rebel press specifically aimed at the military. But frequent turnover and heavy repression made everything more difficult. Personally, during my period as a draftee, I participated in at least three strikes in the mess hall and was involved in three support committees in the city where I was stationed. Even categories such as doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers and magistrates were caught up in this climate of renewal, giving rise to professional organizations for the defense of those most oppressed by existing social relations, and beginning to criticize from within these institutions that embodied domination and class oppression. Finally, though this was not a secondary phenomenon, this climate also affected intellectuals and artists, bringing about a temporary change in culture at every level. There was an exceptional increase in research and elaboration in every field; from the adoption of themes from Marxism and communism, to anthropological and sociological studies, to law and urban studies, to prisons and mental institutions, every aspect of social life and institutions was involved in radical critique. But perhaps the most vital and meaningful effects took place in the areas of moral values, customs and interpersonal relations. Here as well, the church was an enormous obstacle and Italy was clearly arriving late in these areas, relative to other countries. A bigoted, patriarchal and moralistic ideology still dominated, which claimed to dictate what was permitted and what not, giving rules for behavior to be rigidly applied. 1968 and the following years were a real revolution in the way people dressed, in the rejection of every kind of formal comportment, in the questioning of hierarchy in the family, in sexuality and in emotions.

In this climate of general effervescence, the various revolutionary political parties born of the impact of ’68 believed that it was enough to push the mobilizations even further, giving organization to the movement, and thus weaken the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie to the point of imploding its power and opening the way to socialist transformation. But the Italian ruling classes, though often divided among themselves, reacted with real shrewdness to the situation, in the shared perspective of throttling the movement or at least dismantling its subversive abilities. On one hand, they played the card of massacres, with the bombs set off in Milan in ’69, then in Brescia and on the Italicus train in ’74, while they prepared for a coup. This strategy was unleashed by important parts of the state apparatus and by men of the state institutions, with the support of activists from the extreme fascists, who were also used for continuous thuggish aggressions against activists and public mobilizations. On the other hand, on the institutional level, the bourgeoisie opened the doors of the government to the moderate left, in particular to the Socialist Party, by pushing through some reforms, of which the most significant was the Statute of Working People, in order to convince the majority of the proletariat that by the parliamentary and electoral road it was possible to obtain progressive improvements without having to go into the streets. In fact, this strategy of collaboration by one section of the bourgeoisie involved the Communist Party itself, which was seeking to benefit from the movement on the electoral level to increase its negotiating power, but at the same time projecting an image as a responsible and democratic force, one capable of managing the interests of Italian capitalism more effectively, and of guaranteeing control of the streets.

Confronted with this dynamic, the organizations of the radical New Left split. Some supported the idea of adopting the Chilean model, which had brought Allende to power by forging a government of the left-wing forces together with the support of the revolutionary parties and with street mobilizations as the basis for a further revolutionary breakthrough. Others denounced the vague and dangerous nature of this electoralist project, pointing not only to the failures of the Chilean experiment leading to Pinochet’s coup, but also that in the event of success, the solid support of the Communist Party would produce a government preserving the bourgeois order and definitively disciplining the movement, preparing the way for even more reactionary strategies.

The culmination of this discussion resulted from the political elections of 1976, when the Communist Party reached the peak of its influence while still remaining the second party in terms of votes, whereas Democrazia Proletaria, which was something of a cartel of various left-wing tendencies, came in with a miserable 1.5 percent of the votes. This led to a government of “national unity” because, in fact, if the Communist Party did not participate directly in the government, it still made up part of the majority. Disappointment ran very deep in the rank and file of the organizations of the radical left. Lotta Continua, which was one of the strongest parties of the New Left, decided to dissolve itself immediately after the elections, in light of the failure of its own strategy, but the other political formations, which had also supported the electoral project, saw important losses of members, some of whom withdrew from active politics, while others evolved to much more radical positions. In particular, the tendency of Autonomia Operaia, which was not really a political party but a vaguely defined radical political grouping around the positions of Italian workerism (operaismo, one of the precursors and protagonists of ’68, giving rise to Potere Operaio), dissolved in ’73. The other tendency strengthened by the disappointments in the electoral road, and by some exemplary military actions carried out in those years, was the Red Brigades. The further radicalization of some political milieus fed into the explosion of mobilizations in ’77, a relatively spontaneous movement, with different expressions in the various cities where it developed. What tied together this last cycle of struggles was the refusal of work and the right to live a decent life, satisfying collective and individual needs, outside of and against any capitalist logic. The other characteristic element was very intense, and sometimes military, confrontations with the repressive apparatuses of the state. But in reality, even if new waves of young people were involved in this movement, it was mainly made up of recycled political militants who saw and presented themselves as a social subject, without any unitary defined political project. The militarization of confrontations thus strengthened the appeal of the Red Brigades, as well as of the other armed groups which had emerged in interim period, and who were definitely better equipped to take on this level of activity. But all this made it possible for the bourgeoisie to unleash much more repressive actions, even more forcefully after the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. The latter were practically annihilated in a series of military confrontations, and by the renunciations of some of those arrested, but above all because the social and political conditions for long-term urban guerrilla warfare were lacking in an imperialist country such as Italy. The milieu around Autonomia Operaia was in turn hard hit by the repressive action of the state referred to as the “inquiry of April 7, 1979” (in fact, a nine-year campaign against Autonomia, lasting until 1988, during the “years of lead” that began after the Moro kidnapping). The most visible figures from Autonomia were accused of plotting against the state and of being the real leaders of the Red Brigades, and thus threatened with the most severe sentences. Those who managed to avoid this crackdown escaped abroad, but in fact the Autonomia milieu never recovered from the harsh blows of this repression. But even in this case, the state did not react with repression alone, but also in the same years undertook certain measures to expand youth employment, especially Law 285, which led to the hiring of hundreds of thousands of young people for public works, and also for socially useful jobs, undermining broad swaths of support for the radical left.

With the struggles of ’77 and the repression that followed, one can say that the social ferment begun in Italy in ’68 had exhausted itself.

In my own case, after being involved for several years in the political project leading to the formation of Democrazia Proletaria, based on very radical positions, together with other comrades, we decided to build a new political organization which would continue to actively participate in proletarian struggles. At the same time, I was in a position to begin a critical reflection, not merely on the experience of ’68, but also to draw up a balance sheet on the various political and theoretical tendencies of Italian and of international communism.

For me, the most significant experience of the social, political and cultural movement emerging from the struggles culminating in ’68 and, even more so in ’69 (the working-class “hot autumn”!) was essentially permeated with the methodology learned in my decisive encounter with the newspaper Lotta Comunista, its developed Marxist approach and my subsequent involvement with, and then commitment to, that group, which was active, if not hegemonic, in both worker struggles and student agitation. That organization, moreover, both in Turin and elsewhere in the industrial triangle in northern Italy, was absolutely not a major force in the student agitation characteristic of those years. The group was a small minority and, I should add, it established itself in Turin relatively late, as compared to other cities such as Genova and Milan. Practically speaking, my contacts with the group Lotta Comunista were, at least for me, and especially at first, somewhat by chance, through reading the newspaper, which a young militant from Savona distributed in Turin, as did other activists in the cities of the “industrial triangle,” as well as in student demos and in the university canteens. All of this took place against the backdrop of the French May and similar oppositional movements in the rest of Europe. To these were added, in Italy itself, and especially in Turin, the period of university “occupations” at the Palazzo Campana, already in 1967. In the LC newspaper, the references to Marx and to Lenin, as well as to the history of the organized workers’ movement, were explicit and rigorous. In a context in which the theoretical and cultural triad was centered on the three main sources (known in slang as the “three MAs, Mao, Marcuse and Marx”), not to mention Freud, Jung and Reich, as well as the feminist dimension of “women’s liberation” and the questioning of the traditional family and its “authoritarian” and patriarchal practices, I and others wound up concentrating on the “bearded philosopher of Trier.”

I came from a “backward” social situation, by comparison with the industrial and avant-garde scene in Turin, but there had nonetheless been a rather complex experience of student agitation in the Torremaggiore high school in Foggia province, against the local fascist riffraff of rich kids, and I sympathized with the demands of the agricultural workers, for which my hometown was a famous center and of which I was proud. Torremaggiore was, in fact, and still is famous as the birthplace of (the Piemontese and Pugliese!) Nicola (Fernando) Sacco, the friend and comrade of another Piemontese, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two anarchist immigrants in the United States sentenced to the electric chair in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1920s, during a ferocious campaign against the “reds,” and especially Italians, the “wops,” the undocumented people of that time, and of whom I myself am a distant offspring. It was, into the postwar period, a center of agricultural workers who carried out land occupations, during which two workers, Lavacca and Lamedica, were killed by the police. I commuted to that high school from Turin (where my family had moved, and where I spent school vacations), and every year I returned to Torremaggiore to study, after a rough experience of one year of immigration, made unbearable because of the racism against southern Italians that pervaded Turin and the high school of the Turin aristocracy where I unfortunately enrolled. That was in 1961–62, the year of the “invasion of southerners” and of the centennial of Italy’s paradoxical and ironic “unification”; it was also a year of the culmination of renewed worker struggles, sharper in Turin than in other parts of Europe. This was a Turin which, following its enlargement by waves of migrants, was at the time inclined to certain forms of racism, ethnocentrism and chauvinism against the southern “terroni,” who were increasingly concentrated in the dilapidated ghetto areas of the historical center and in peripheral ghettos.

The Turinese and Piedmontese insulted us with jeers such as “go back where you came from,” “soap eaters,” and “Mau Mau.” In the previous year, 1960, large worker demonstrations, with several people killed, in Genoa and then in Reggio Emilia, had provoked the fall of the Tambroni government, which was supported by the fascists of the Movimento Sociale. Turin’s population, already in the post–World War I period, had been swollen by the waves of these migrant flows, which peaked precisely in the years of the so-called “economic boom,” when urban expansion transformed this “working-class city” into a “metropolis” living the myth of “affluence.”

In the preceding decade, in 1951, during the postwar period of reconstruction of hardship and poverty, Turinese immigration was still coming from the north, and particularly from the Veneto (Polesine, Ferrara and especially the Po basin after the 1951 flood) as well as from the surrounding countryside and mountains, Turin’s population numbered 719,300, but in 1961, when my family arrived there, it had reached 1,025,822 and, ten years later, 1,167,968. In twenty years the city had grown by 62 percent, in a daily flow of people symbolized by the “sun train,” which ran in 23 hours from Sicily to Turin, bringing primarily people from Puglia, Calabria, Lucca, Sicily and Sardinia. According to the census of 1971, Turin had 77,589 Sicilians, 106,413 Puglians, 44,723 Calabrians, 35,449 Campanans and 22,813 Luccans. Turin was thus becoming a “southern city as big as Palermo.” Numerous wall posters trumpeted terrible (to me, as a “terrone”) and frightening announcements such as “We don’t rent to southerners,” or “No entrance for dogs, street vendors and southerners,” which have been collected in the impressive study of Goffredo Fofi, about whom more later.

I had, age 16, directly witnessed the “events” of the Piazza Statuto. (This was in July 1962, after the assault on the headquarters of the uil trade union and confrontations with paving stones of the “May ’68” type, and with police in small trucks chasing workers and clubbing them on the steps of the Court of Appeals, across from where I lived with my family.) I knew nothing, and it seemed like scenes from a war. Thus began the long series of housing occupations on the Via Verdi, across from the liberal arts building, followed by various other locations, which extended into the 1970s, all told a decade of migrant inflows of labor power bound for the monoculture of fiat and elsewhere. Because history, in such situations, changes only its form but never the substance, there began the battle of parties and sects and churches, contending in the periodic political and administrative elections, with promises of favors of various kinds.

Following my definitive return from Puglia to Turin, as the city became the capital of the automobile industry and of fiat, I began studying philosophy, while also working in the market of the Porta Palazzo and selling caps at soccer matches. Shortly thereafter, the occupations of the Palazzo Campana began, and I participated, in mid ’68, at the Palazzo Nuovo, in the sociology courses and seminars of Prof. Luciano Gallino, an intelligent and far-sighted industrial and labor sociologist, who was already active at the company of Adriano Olivetti in Ivrea. There, the Sociology Institute included researchers and scholars who had previously collaborated on the journal Quaderni Rossi, such as Liliana Lanzardo and Vittorio Rieser. There was also a whiff of the cultural fashion for the Frankfurt School, whereas Marxism had little presence in the academic world. There were study groups self-managed by the students. The Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), based on the operaismo of Mario Tronti, Tony Negri and others into the 1970s, took up themes and methodologies central to the development of the Italian working-class movement; in the six issues of the journal appearing from 1961 to 1965, the analysis was theoretically buttressed by a reading of Marx (Rainero Panzieri, the founder, who died at 43 in 1964, was a translator of Marx). The collaborators produced reports and were involved in organizations, such as the first one by Danilo Montaldi, Report on the Immigrants (1960); Workers’ Inquiries continued with Southern Immigration to Turin, organized by Goffredo Fofi in 1964, which already had a central importance for the whole cycle of struggles of 1962, with the confrontations on the Piazza Statuto, which continued over the following decade, in the midst of the restructuring of capitalism; after the fall of 1980, there were the “61 layoffs” at fiat, the march of the so-called 40,000 white-collar workers against a five-week blue-collar strike that shut the factory, and the 23,000 laid-off workers, again from fiat. When, with a group of comrades in various cities, we left Lotta Comunista, we went back to that method of political work from 1968, with the journal Inchiesta Operaia (Workers’ Inquiry), which we also saw as a way to organize the class, and then with the Bollettino delle lotte operaie e proletarie (Bulletin of Worker and Proletarian Struggles). But this is already another story.

Turning back to the mid-1960s, the latter were fat years for collectors of ground rent, a cyclical process in situations of rapid development of markets for commodities and labor power, a period of big deals set against the backdrop of a housing shortage. I saw Turin swelling up like an overflowing river. We lived in dumps, offered at apparently slightly lower rents, also because they were often owned by religious bodies, such as the Mauritian Order, and entire family units were crammed in like pigeons; it was a life of decay, where we moved among a thousand unbearable odors with heads lowered, so as not to hit them on the beams of the skylights, along with the typical terrors of “clandestinity” and the threat of expulsion.

I was only a socialist in terms of ideas, but not yet organized. The head of the Italian Socialist Party was Lelio Basso (who had sympathies for Rosa Luxemburg) and there were other people slightly out of place there, such as the Luxemburgist Riccardo Lombari, the so-called Italian Lenin. I found the pro-Russian attitude of the pci to be strange, and it came to symbolize for me the most opportunistic Stalinism and nationalism enforced through the union. Already in high school I was a passionate Gramscian on the cultural level; I followed various journals such as Astrolabio, and finally, in its last days, Quaderni Rossi, whose founder, Rainero Panzieri, was also a socialist sui generis. But as soon as I understood the electoralist horse-trading in which all the institutionalized socialist formations were involved, at the same time that the student movement was exploding and the movement of university occupations was taking off, I threw over all those basically parliamentary politics, which, thereafter, appeared to me as merely one variant of the repressive apparatus of capital and the state. The only possible political activity for me became revolutionary militancy against the system.

I briefly became an observer, without real involvement, in informal spontaneist groups of various persuasions, and especially in an “experimental” non-violent group in Turin influenced by Aldo Capitini, a Perugia philosopher known as the Italian Gandhi, also the chief editor of the journal Azione Nonviolenta, whom I knew personally, and for whom I wrote several notes on the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and on the “Prague Spring,” which culminated in Jan Palach’s self-immolation in January 1969, protesting censorship. I came to understand the power balance and the relationship between nato and the Warsaw Pact, and the bipolar equilibrium of Yalta.

I was also curious about the social battles of another non-violent reformer, Danilo Dolci, when these movements were attracting many members, especially in April 1968, when the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated. Even the Catholic priest don Lorenzo Milani was expressing unease about inequality, which culminated in the questioning of all authority and privilege (“rich kids”), and who founded the Barbiana School with proletarian students, who then collectively wrote a book Letter to a Professor (May 1967), which became a model and guide for the whole phase of student opposition to class-based selection in schools. This sympathy for “opposition,” which presented itself as “global” even in the Catholic world, was due to the fact that many young people, myself included, while being convinced atheists, did not disdain sympathies for certain forms of sociability coming from movements within the church, which in Italy have always had a social component that is unabashedly working-class and hostile to ecclesiastic hierarchies.

Don Milani had written another disruptive and important text L’obbedienza non è più una virtù (1965) (Obedience Is No Longer a Virtue), with obvious anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical and anti-fascist content; it counter-posed “doubt, disobey, resist” to the fascist conceptual triad “believe, obey, fight.” In addition to Don Milani, there was also the case of Don Zeno Saltini, the founder of the Community of Nomadelfia. His sympathies extended to certain armed forms of “non-violence” such as that of the Latin American priest Camillo Torres.

However, and always with a theoretical and practical openness to social revolution, at a moment when, both on the Italian domestic scene of workers’ struggles and on the level of international relations, emotions and superficiality characterized movement and street mobilization politics, and the multiple proliferation of the so-called extremism of the little leftist groups, whether spontaneist such as Lotta Continua, or in Maoist, anarchist or Guevarist theorizations, I felt the need to understand things I felt were larger than myself, and to read about the phenomena which followed one another at a dizzying rate, from the war in Vietnam to the Sino-Soviet artillery exchanges on the Ussuri River, to the Latin American guerrillas, the struggles of the ex-colonial countries, the explosion of struggles of black people in America and their complex evolution from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, the case of Rudi Dutschke and the German sds, and above all the Prague Spring, and more to come. In that context of contrasts and different stances between those who supported the anti-colonial movements, those who limited themselves to an anti-American attitude, and those who went so far as to identify certain forms of nationalist struggle with socialism, I was very taken with the vast and profound geopolitical vision of Lotta Comunista’s statement on The General Outlines of Italian Capitalism, which was distinguished by its economic analysis and its very serious and austere style, when set against the fiery but empty writing of those years. The Gramscianism I had already developed in high school was deepened, and I worked on the north-south disjuncture in Italy, and on the agrarian and southern questions, in order to understand the functioning of capitalist production.

The objective of the handfuls of cadres of Lotta Comunista was, at that time, to select militant student movement activists for future working-class struggles, including the struggles “predicted” by what they called “Marxist science,” and verified by the powerful immigration which had already produced the struggles of the Piazza Statuto in the early ’60s, and which I, barely 16, had seen in the police clubbings there (see above).

My meetings with the activists of Lotta Comunista, and with some more knowledgeable comrades, as well as individually with still others, became more intense. There were meetings, as well as group participations in social struggles, debates with other political groups, discussions on the positions of the newspaper, consultations shifting from one comrade to another as the problems posed became complicated, and finally meetings with their leader Arrigo Cervetto, whom obviously no one knew by name. Cervetto, moreover, was never seen or touted publicly, unlike so many leaders of that time. He was actually a shy person, and did not like visibility, or any myth of himself, or the spectacular posturing of so many small-time politicians today, to the point that, on top of the hundreds and hundreds of very useful articles he wrote, and the dozens and dozens of public lectures, seminars and party schools, any reconstruction of his political trajectory must include the memories of those who had the occasion, and in my case the pleasure, of knowing and dialoging with him, as someone who, in this way, seriously developed the role of political educator in a way that no one after him has managed.

Our first meetings also continued in trattorias in Genoa and sometimes touched on topics of my own interests, which I had studied at the university with the sociologist Luciano Gallino, on capitalist development of agriculture, on the relationship of city and country, the capitalist development of the relationship between the Italian North and South, “unequal development” and not “underdevelopment” as was touted in the famous journal Monthly Review and by a raft of scholars who were defined as “underdevelopmentists.” With Cervetto, we learned not to confuse socialism with state capitalism, at a time when political fashion was deeply influenced by Maoists, Castroists and Guevarists. Together we read and studied Bruno Rizzi and then Tony Cliff. The “southern question” was at that time a political platform, with roots going back to the Italian Risorgimento, and which influenced the various theories then under discussion, from Gramsci (Writings on the Mezzogiorno and the Prison Notebooks) to Rosario Romeo (Risorgimento e capitalismo) to Gerschenkron on the “advantages” of “economic backwardness” both for Italy and for Russia. In the academy at this time, until a few years later, no one mentioned Bordiga. In contrast to the activists of the student movement and the little left groups, we were distinguished by the fact that we passed around, and had at home, texts by Marx and Engels, something rare for all the other groups.

I came to understand the idealist limits (from Gentile and Sorel) of Gramsci. I had to read various pages of Marx as a framework to weigh the positions of different political groupings, especially on their interpretations of the dialectic and on the relationship between structure and superstructure. At that time, Cervetto was useful for a generation of militants who were coming to know materialism and Marxism, and I was in awe of the clarity with which he showed his knowledge of the arguments and readings on which was I then laboring. Pedagogically, he let people talk, and gradually he opened up my horizons on Trotsky’s theses on “combined and uneven development” (I then discovered on my own that Trotsky in turn had taken these theses from Parvus).

Cervetto proposed that I make an intervention at a conference in the student center of Genoa on unequal development in capitalism, with a particular focus on agriculture and on the Puglia region I knew well, using a Leninist framework, different from the under-developmentalist theses and the “neo-capitalism” then in fashion. We studied these phenomena in light of the theory which Cervetto defined as “unitary imperialism,” which included Italy’s “laggard” imperialism. To fight against imperialism, it was necessary to take up Karl Liebknecht’s slogan against his own imperialism, “the enemy is at home.” It goes without saying that at the congress, I presented a typewritten report annotated by Cervetto himself. I think the point of such conferences, beyond their specific content, was to train cadres in public speaking, and it was an interesting experience for me, from which I learned, for example, not to read a text but to speak off the cuff. From then on, I used the texts solely as outlines.

All in all, what made for the force of the cadres recruited in that generation was the care and rigor in the theoretical formation of militants, as professional revolutionaries on the Bolshevik model. I should specify that the term “professional” was intended neither in the social or bureaucratic sense, but in the sense of a direction for one’s own life, of revolutionary militancy as a life choice and not as a place for inconclusive chatter. There were not, in fact, hierarchies or leaders, but only tasks to be carried out, for which, in every aspect of the organizational work, there were not “leaders” but “comrades with responsibilities,” which became a praxis of dialectical responsibility to a center made up of the provincial committee, and all committees in turn answered to a national committee.

Cervetto used to distinguish this form of centralism (which he called “dialectical” instead of “democratic,” as in the mainstream Marxist tradition) from the bureaucratic centralism of the opportunist and Stalinist groups, and also from the formal centralism of A. Bordiga, known as “organic” centralism. In reality, after a careful study of the democratic centralism of the Bolshevik Party, we have to admit that there were substantial differences between Bolshevik centralism and Cervetto’s. The latter conceived of a stricter discipline; posts were not elected but chosen centrally, and whereas the Bolshevik Party accepted internal fractions and majority votes, Lotta Comunista was decidedly hostile to fractions and did not make choices by voting.

I am not talking about what that organization has become, in which almost twenty years later I no longer recognize myself. In the 1970s, study, in particular, was undertaken in the workers’ circles. I myself oversaw numerous seminars and study groups, as well as relations with workers and students. We not only studied the works of Marx and Engels (Dialectics of Nature, Origins of the Family, Anti-Dühring) but also the history of the workers’ movement, German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, but even Clausewitz! Over time, this activity progressively degenerated into a kind of Marxist scholasticism, with “courses in Marxism” of dubious quality, similar to the catechism of the church, sometimes even presented like education courses for teachers. But I was already out of there…

The development over time of Lotta Comunista went through different phases, from as early as ’68 onward, but in substance it went in two directions; on one hand in the factories, and on the other hand in its broader outreach, without disdaining, in the early period, interventions in the crisis of class-based school selection, from which the “68ist” (“sessantottino”) movement unfolded. In the factories, especially in those of higher capital and labor power concentration such as fiat, themselves enlarged by the development of the assembly line and the coming of the “mass worker” (operaio massa), the struggles were continuous from the early ’60s onward, compounded by the general climate of social, student and youth contestation in which demands for higher wages tended to supersede differences in individual treatment and merit increases for workers, and were thus not based on percentages but on equal pay for all. There were demands about the quality of work and job safety, through the reduction of time of exposure to risk, and thus for the reduction of the work week to 40 hours with the same pay (the main slogan was “higher wages, less work”) and thus the demand for more free time and also a limit on overtime. There also exploded the problem of the conditions of the many “worker/students” and “student/workers,” with demands for easier and cheaper access to studies and exams (our slogan for working-class kids was “free schools for workers’ children,” “free books and transportation for workers’ children”). There was an explosion of a new role for workplace assemblies in the factories and while on the clock.

Over time the old union representatives from the period of the skilled working class (and of the worker aristocracy) were pushed aside and the new democracy of delegates and factory councils was affirmed. National contracts by category were replaced by workplace negotiations taking account of specific local situations. The activity of militants was not only distributing newspapers and leaflets outside workplaces, but where there was a militant or sympathizer on the inside, attempts were made to develop “Leninist factory nuclei” with various agitational newspapers, together with propaganda (such as Il Filo Rosso dell’ENEL, etc.), and the distribution of the national paper. Outside workplaces, workers’ circles were developed in different parts of town. Naturally the more workers’ circles there were, the more functions they could carry out. With the passing of time and the ebb of workers’ struggles, in fact, the better attended circles with more people and better results nonetheless underwent a “strategic retreat,” aimed at “concentrating” forces, closing down the small and medium-size circles to make way for other ones as the occasion arose, as militants became ready to take on responsibility and the roles they were assigned.

Beginning in the 1980s, the workers’ circles were expanded to other European countries where the task was essentially spreading Marxism and our publications in other European languages. Publishing activity expanded and developed, creating the series Panta Rei, and other initiatives. The great publishing achievement emerging from Lotta Communista remains its rescue of the Italian edition of the translation of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels (and Lenin) which had been started and then dropped by Editori Riuniti, the cp publishing house. Today, in fact, 200 years after Marx’s birth, Edizione Lotta Comunista is producing, in fifty volumes, the Complete Works of Marx and Engels (of which eleven are previously unpublished material), filling a void left by Editori Riuniti, which had suspended their publication. La Stampa, the Turin newspaper which is the mouthpiece of fiat, and which the workers in the 1960s called “the liars” and “the bosses’ voice,” has been reviewing this initiative to publish the works of Marx and Engels, with a flattering comment: “a publishing house far from the clamor of the media, animated by a single unitary passion as well as a philological acuity unexpected in a group of revolutionaries. The publisher takes its name from a movement which is the sole survivor among so many groups of the extra-parliamentary left of the 1960s, which has since that time expressed a fidelity to Marx and Lenin, and hostility to Stalinism, and with no sympathies for Castroism and Maoism.”

In 1968, the “golden years” of capital came to an end. Those years, which had allowed conservative forces to talk of the death of Marx, ended with the crisis of the latter’s mode of production of material goods (crisis of Fordism) and their political economy (crisis of Keynesianism) but mainly because of social struggle: the counterculture in the United States, the French May, the hot autumn in Italy, wildcat strikes against the unions in almost all countries, new demands, struggles aimed not only at taking power but at total individual and social liberation…1 It was the beginning of a new kind of revolution, fundamentally ideological, the result of the appearance, in those “golden years” of a new class structure, no longer merely bourgeois and proletarian but also of the managerial techno-bureaucracy in an alliance with the monopolistic bourgeoisie, pitted against the rebels (new social movements: feminist, ecologist, anti-militarist), not to mention the struggles of the masses of the impoverished countries2 with Vietnam in the lead.

It was an ideological revolution which unquestionably affected the dominant revolutionary ideology, Marxism, and here begins my contribution, which I will divide into two large sections: an account of the situation in Spain, and then the rebirth of

Marxism, and why we can say: “Long live Marx!”

Spain in 1968

The new revolution was not only ideological, but also practical, and was reflected in concrete political organizations:

The hierarchical Communist Parties continued to be the major force, but a force that was divided, on one hand, in the orthodox core (the Spanish Communist Party, or pce) which was evolving toward a conservative and techno-bureaucratic Euro-communism, after taking its distances from Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, an evolution which was concretized in Spain in the politics of national reconciliation, in other words in the “social pact” (the same pact with which Keynes had re-launched capitalism), a pact between the different social forces (including progressive business elements) on two common bases: anti-Francoism and rationality, i.e., democracy and technological progress.

This evolution, and the expulsions of Fernando Claudin and Jorge Semprún, produced different heterodox splits, giving rise to Trotskyist and Maoist parties. Of the Trotskyists, the Revolutionary Trotskyist League (Liga Comunista Revolucionaria, lcr) was founded in 1971 by members of the Catalan group Comunismo. It was the Spanish section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, one of the fractions into which the Trotskyist Fourth International was divided. The lcr was born with a perspective of refusing class collaboration and putting an end to capitalism, and argued for a model of territorial organization based on a federation of republics, recognizing the right of self-determination for each of them.

Nationalism was clearly present in Euskadi (the Basque provinces) with eta, and in Catalonia, though the latter was not exactly Marxist but, rather, conservative (CiU). In 1972, a group called Liga Comunista (lc) split from the lcr, but would rejoin the lcr in 1978. The lc in 1973 fused with a split from eta, after the latter’s vi Assembly, and was thus called eta–vi. In fact the majority of the members of that organization, as revolutionary communists, decided to abandon terrorism as a form of struggle, and to unite with politically similar groups in the rest of Spain. With this union the lcr acquired a base in the Basque country and in Navarra, where it previously had very little presence, using the name lcr–eta (vi).

With the death of General Franco, and because of the difficulties in explaining the reference to eta outside the Basque country, the lcr dropped its previous name and was called, in the rest of Spain, only lcr; in the Basque country it constituted itself in autonomous form with the name Liga Komunista Iraultzailea (lki). There also existed, within Trotskyism, a very small group called the Partido Obrero Revolucionario Español (pore, Spanish Revolutionary Workers’ Party), a clear expression of Trotskyist orthodoxy.

As for Maoism, the first split in the pce was the Organización Comunista de España–Bandera Roja (Red Flag) (oce–br) an extreme left party, active in the last years of Franco, and during the transition to democracy. It emerged in Barcelona in 1970, out of a 1968 split from the pce in Catalonia, the el Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (psuc). In 1977, it signed onto the “Register of Political Associations.” It argued for a democratic and federal republic as a transition to socialism, and denounced the post-Franco political reform. After suffering multiple splits, it rejoined the psuc–pce in 1989, and disappeared formally in 1994. All in all, the most important group was the Partido Comunista Internacionalista (pci); it had many internal debates, including violent ones, which led to its explosion, though fragments remained active, such as Lluita Internacionalista (li), not to mention the Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota, with a confused perspective for armed struggle.

The years 1960–1968 were the heyday of the Workers Commissions (Comisiones Obreras): worker struggles became generalized, mainly in the negotiations for collective bargaining, and the comisiones are still with us. This process went through three phases:

1. comisiones as the self-organization of the working class, with branches in the majority of firms. These were nuclei of workers which were the sparkplug of struggles, which rebuilt the workers’ movement destroyed by Francoism, and did so in close contact, despite being underground, with the rest of the workers in a given factory. Their power arose, if not from legalization, at least from tolerance, by forcing specific factories to negotiate with the commission, thereby recognizing it, at least implicitly.
2. The comisiones managed to establish themselves on a nationwide basis and, further (as economic development took off), were winning concrete demands, which resulted in the dominance of the purely trade-union line, pushed by the pce, winning out over the self-organizing current, defended by Catholic groups and new revolutionary militants. The pce placed its energies in the organizational apparatus (local, regional and national coordination), and with the bureaucracy under its control, was able to push through its line.
3. The comisiones were thus converted into merely one more trade union, controlled by the pce, even though it retained the original name, in continuity with the historical prestige it had achieved.

Together with this, the Frente de Liberación Popular (flp), the “felipes” (known in Catalonia as the foc and in the Basque provinces as the esba), had begun with a Guevarist orientation but finally, and above all in Catalonia, was rivaling the pce for hegemony in the working-class movement; it even managed to counter-pose, to workers’ commissions in the factories, neighborhood commissions, which inspired tenant associations, still very active today, and commissions of working-class youth. The “felipes” slipped into crisis in 1969, in part under the influence of May 1968, which stirred the discovery of Trotskyism into the mix of Guevarism and Catholicism.

Out of of the flp as well as from religious organizations—Hermandad Obrera de Acción Catolica (the hoac), and the Worker Youth of Catalonia (Juventudes Obreras de Catalunya, the joc)—taking advantage of their legal status, there emerged a Catholic revolutionary movement, playing a crucial role in the workers’ movement.3

Out of these groups there emerged the cadre formation circles (Circulos de formación de cadres), which relinked with the first phase of the workers commissions, elaborating the concept of class organization, the direct organization of workers, which for some rendered “worker” parties totally unnecessary, incorporating as they did an anarchist ideology. We should also note the divisions within Christian Democracy, which, however, had influence only in intellectual milieus, with the exception of the prestigious journal Cuadernos para el Dialogo, founded in 1963.

Communism based on workers’ councils4 was expressed in various organizations:

Acción Comunista (ac), Unión Comunista de Liberación, Organization of the Communist Left (oic), Grupos Comunistas Revolucionarios (gcr) and Germania Socialista. Among these groups there was an attempt at fusion, which also included the historic poum (present only in exile), but this fusion really took place only with the ucl, the gcr and Germania Socialista (the three weakest groups). In spite of this weakness, I think that the ucl introduced two important elements: the concept of transitional vanguard, for the sole period in which the class organization is not yet strong enough, to then disappear afterwards as vanguard, and the idea of unifying Marxism and anarchism, the overcoming of the division inherited from the First International, which was the origin of the working class’s difficulty in allying with other oppositional elements.

It may appear strange that I say little about the Socialists of the psoe (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), the only group which succeeded in governing and which still exists as such. But in these early years it was of little importance, with strength only in the exile groups; in fact, the small group of Tierno Galvan was more important. After Felipe Gonzalez came to power, basically with the support of the German Social Democrats, the psoe became more and more social democratic and totally abandoned Marxism.

There was little support for the masses of the Third World, even though the latter were showing their power; I have already mentioned Vietnam, and we must also add Guevarism and the peasantry (China). In fact, the anti-Franco struggle and the workers’ councils absorbed all energies. Shortly thereafter, the ngos, principally those in solidarity with Latin American revolutions, picked up many militants in what was the final phase of practically all of these organizations.

Now, given this background, we can move on to the analysis of Marxist perspectives.

The Renaissance of Marxism

Marx did not die but was rather reborn, transformed; we were in the period of the new reading of Marx, of the brilliant influence of the re-reading of Marx by authors such as Althusser and Poulantzas (a conceptual revisiting), of Marcuse, Reich (the role of personal liberation) and others.5 It was an authentic re-birth which made it possible to begin overcoming the two original vices of Marxism:

1. Economism, which emerged from political economy (a progressive science), and which was characterized by the struggle against scarcity. Three main errors flowed from this: the identification material basis = economic basis, the mystification of the dynamic of the productive forces, and the reduction of classes to economic reality.
2. Mechanism, expressing a full-blown rationalism, and the mystification of the ideas of science and progress. It erroneously saw history as predetermined, and always progressive, the myth of the future rational society, and thus the possibility of foreseeing the future.

And this arose in spite of what already had been said by Engels: “According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is, in the last instance, the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever affirmed any more than this; therefore, if someone twists this into an assertion that the economic element is the sole determining one, they transform it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase.”6

The supercession of these errors was realized in two visions: one structuralist, the other historicist.

On economism:

1. For structuralism, the distinction between different aspects of reality, overcoming the view of economic base/superstructure and determining/determined; the distinction between the mode of production of material goods as an abstract concept defining the form of production and appropriation of the surplus, and which is the central concept (here I will call it, for more clarity, the “mode of exploitation”).
2. Historicism: a modification of the concept of “material basis”: the economic dimension changes historically, and is the production and reproduction of real life. In history, there have existed three material bases: the biological (the patriarchal communist mode of exploitation, the political (the mode of tributary exploitation) and the economic (capitalist mode of exploitation).

In this perspective, all the basic economic concepts are no longer economic:

• the productive forces have to also include knowledge;
• the relations of production are the production of social relations;
• we have to talk not merely of the mode of production of material goods but also of the mode of exploitation in the sense indicated above;
• it is not sufficient to consider the ownership of the means of production but also their possession, i.e., the power of decision on the daily activity of the firm as the basis of the managerial techno-bureaucracy);7
• the surplus is not only capitalist surplus value, but also varies according to the material base;
• social classes vary and we have to distinguish between classes in themselves: the objective interests of distinct professional groups, and classes for themselves: when these interests are concretized in social forces defending those interests.

On mechanism:

History is not the succession of modes of production, but rather a social formation resulting, unforeseeably, from class struggle. The basic concepts are not the social base but rather a social formation, which is greater than relations of production, greater than class structure, and greater than a mode of exploitation.

Marx proclaimed: “I am not a Marxist.” He was right, given the distortions of his thought by his disciples; obviously it cannot be based on any human being, without turning that person into God (which is what happened); rather, a new science was created, historical materialism, not based on any specific assertion, but rather on Marx’s great discovery: history is the result and the creator of class struggle.

I think I can end here, having laid out what Sorel tells us:

Let us return to Marx, that is my motto, and I believe it is the right path. Marxism is very far from being the doctrine and method of Marx; in the hands of disciples lacking historical knowledge and an adequate critical philosophy, Marxism has been turned into a caricature.8

• 1John Holloway, Changing the World Without Taking Power.
• 2R. García-Durán, Saber, sociedad tecnológica y clases (Hacer, 2000).
• 3Antonio Sala y Eduardo Durán, Crítica de la izquierda autoritaria en Cataluña (Ruedo Ibérico, 1975).
• 4Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (1941–42).
• 5Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man; Wilhelm Reich: Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis; Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital; Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes in the Capitalist State.
• 6Friedrich Engels, Carta a J. Bloch, in Friedrich Engels, Obras Escogidas (Cartago, 1957).
• 7Charles Bettelheim, Calcul économique et formes de propriété (Broché, 1971).
• 8George Sorel, Lettres a Benedetto Croce (La critique sociale, no. 1, March 1931).

The events of May 1968 in Paris and around the world reverberated in Britain, in its industrial relations, in the wider culture and on the left.

Rodney Kay-Kreizman was arrested on the Vietnam demonstration at Grosvenor Square, March 17, 1968, “a pitched battle with the police”:

I went to help a young woman, who was being set upon by three policemen, and rugby-tackled one of them. She got away, but I was arrested. The next morning, I was up before the beak, who gave me three months suspended.

Rodney had joined a group of socialists in Nottingham—“in 1956 [after the invasion of Hungary] everyone was moving out of the Communist Party just as I was moving towards it.” “Ken Coates, a sociology lecturer at the University, an ex-miner, Pat Jordan and John Daniels, an education lecturer.”

“Along with Tony Topham, who was a lecturer in Hull, they set up the Institute for Workers Control,” says Rodney:

We were nominally in the Labour Party, but it was really a group of its own, linked to the Fourth International. We had a magazine, The Week, which offered “News Analysis for Socialists.”

The Week was the focal point of a group that had supporters in “the East Midlands, in Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and Rotherham.” Some of Rodney’s connections were friends first, and “we met on demos on Market Square” in Nottingham. “As an ex-serviceman I was against Suez.”

The Communist Party was “on the wrong side of everything. They wanted peace in Vietnam and we wanted a victory to the Viet Cong. They would have had two Vietnams, and two Koreas.”

After the Second World War, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s police was “all about peace”: They had Peace rallies and Peace Conferences—and they wanted peace in the workplace as well. They were always for a “fair settlement”—but we wanted workers’ rights, and workers’ control. We favoured an independent shop steward’s movement. We took up issues like health and safety because we wanted them under the control of the workers.

“That was our vision: workers’ control. Their vision”—the Communist Party’s—“was Government control of big industry, big nationalised monopolies, like in the Soviet Union.”

“There was a lot going on in 1968—it was a time of hope and optimism and people doing things for themselves. I haven’t changed my views, but I think I am out of my time now. We’ve had the Labour Party shit on us all the time. The whole society has moved to the right. Trade unions are at their lowest ebb ever.”

“The reason Corbyn is being attacked so viciously now is because they are afraid of the optimism of the 1960s—because they have no answers, they have no answers to the problems of robots taking jobs, and to mass poverty.”

Susan Caffrey was protesting in Red Lion Square, too. She was a student at the North West Poly in London. “We were all going.” Back then “there was the idea that we would take the streets—like they had in Paris. It was very exciting.” There were meetings about the Vietnam war going on at colleges all over London, and Susan can remember hearing Robin Blackburn (later editor of the New Left Review) and Tariq Ali speaking at the London School of Economics (lse). Later, on the radio, “Tariq Ali said that they would paint the leaves red in Grosvenor Square, but it was too early, and the leaves had not come out.”

In 1968 Patrick Hughes was “teaching at Leeds College of Art which had already been revolutionised,” pioneering the experimental approach others copied. “The revolution in art schools happened because of Harry Thubron.” Under him the college decided “to get with it. To bring performance art, painting, sculpture all together.” Thubron asked “why have we got a painting and a sculpture department?” They should be together—“like Kurt Schwitters.” At Leeds they “wanted to be ‘modern’ but not just in a formalistic way.”

The two dogmas in art were “social realism,” which was “realism with all four feet on the ground” in Eugene Ionescu’s words. The other “monolithic vision of art was abstract expressionism,” that “art was like music, all about tones and affect.” The radicals at Leeds “just wanted more variety than social realism and abstraction.” They wanted “imagination and creativity…and humour, as Tony Earnshaw [a lecturer and artist at nearby Bradford College] would say.”

Among those in the Leeds Art School were Robin Page and George Brecht who were with the “Fluxus” group; their works were called performances or happenings. Yoko Ono, who would marry John Lennon, was allied to Fluxus, too. In one performance Robin Page kicked his guitar down the street and the audience followed after him. In another, in 1967, called “Protest March,” 200 students demonstrated, with no collective demand, but each with his own banner or cause—and I was on it too. My mother’s placard read “Kick Against the Pricks!” and mine said “Hands off King Kong.”

Harry Thubron went on to teach at Goldsmiths where his approach nurtured artists like Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Leeds College of Art inspired the revolutionaries at Hornsey, who occupied their college.

Hughes is sceptical about the “zeitgeist” of 1968. “I don’t believe in spirits.” Most of the country was still living in the 1940s. Shortly after the riots in Paris, Hughes visited his friend there, George Brecht. The students had ripped up the small pavé (paving stones) to use as missiles against the police. When he got to the door of Brecht’s Paris apartment, it was open but walking in he was surprised to see Brecht throw a pavé straight at him. Instinctively he grabbed it. “It squeaked.” “It was made of rubber, with a little whistle valve so that it squeaked when you squeezed it, like a child’s doll.” “I was impressed at how quickly the practical jokers had détourned the May events.” Inventiveness and creativity “were always there, under the surface, waiting to break through.” You could see the same playful use of language and imagery in the work of Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century, or in Lilliput (the 1940s magazine) or the Beano (children’s comic), he said.

Mick Owens was fourteen in 1968 and living on a council estate in Birkenhead. His older brother was in a band—the Globetrotters—a part of the Merseybeat sound. “He worked night at Cammell Laird [shipbuilders]—well mostly sleeping off excitements of that evening.” Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks came out that year, which we listened to, but probably more the Small Faces.” “We were into Motown and thought of ourselves as “mods.” “In 1968 we listened to the Beatles White Album, and the track ‘Revolution Number Nine’ was all experimental, by [the Fluxus artist] Yoko Ono and John Lennon, with different recorded tape loops played over one another.” “Like an action painting,” said Lennon in an interview. Even on a council estate in Birkenhead you were a part of what was going on, Owens explains. On the other hand, “the idea that 1968 was a thing never occurred to us.”

Social historian Lucy Robinson explains that for the Labour governments of the 1960s there was a “move away from class and production towards issues of identity and fairness,” that were evident in the liberalisation of laws on divorce and the semi-legalisation of homosexuality.1
The growing importance of the politics of consumption, with a greater emphasis on youth and pop culture chimed with the post-war boom, and with a New Left.

Meanwhile, in Derry, in British-occupied Northern Ireland, events were more on the cusp of all-out conflict. Tommy McKearney remembers “a civil rights march approached the Craigavon Bridge and was halted by an ruc cordon”:

Initially, taking the advice of veteran trade union leader and Communist Party activist Betty Sinclair, the marchers sat down in the street and started to sing. After a few minutes, a young student activist stood up and began counting the police. She estimated that the sedentary marchers had numerical superiority and could overwhelm the police ranks and push their way into the city if the crowd charged forward.

As McKearney says,

After a few minutes, they burst through the ruc ranks and poured into the city. Leadership of the radical street protest in Northern Ireland had passed from the generation guided by Betty Sinclair to a new generation of activists inspired by Bernadette Devlin, the young woman who had called the advance.2

The following year Bernadette Devlin was elected to the House of Commons, at the age of 21 as the “Unity” candidate of Irish Republicans and Socialists. Soon after, Bernadette Devlin spoke at the North West Poly in London and Susan Caffrey remembers being blown away: “she was nothing like the MPs of the time.”

The events of May 1968 centred on Paris, but they resonated strongly in Britain, too. In his memoirs Alan Thornett remembers the chair of the Joint Shop Stewards Committee at the Cowley car plant opening the meeting by proclaiming “a spectre is haunting Europe.”3

The real force behind these sentiments was the slow disintegration of the post-war, corporatist settlement between organised labour, industry and the government—the so-called “tripartite system.” In wartime industry and labour had been drawn into collaboration, elements of which survived after the war. Full-time union officials, local convenors and general secretaries were all involved in cooperating with management. This was the “fair deal” that the Communist Party was promoting. But over time these practices and institutions were inadequate to both the ambitions of the workers on the one hand, and the employers’ “modernisation” plans on the other. Younger shop stewards who had not been socialised into the arrangement were much more confident about taking “unofficial” strike action.

The “New Left” was well placed to take advantage of the collapse of the old tripartite order—it was created out of the protests at the Stalinist compromises. The group around The Week joined up with Tariq Ali to become the International Marxist Group, and in Ireland, the student campaign People’s Democracy were talking to them, too. Some of those student leaders at the lse joined up with the New Left Review that Perry Anderson and ep Thompson had helped to create.

The New Left Review’s “Partisan Café”

The other left-wing group that rode the wave of Labour Party and trade union activism were the International Socialists. Their leaders traveled light intellectually, leaving a lot of Marxist theoretical baggage behind: Lenin’s theory of imperialism was out of date, they said, and the arms economy could offset the long-anticipated economic collapse indefinitely. Such iconoclasm helped them to attract talented young students like Paul Foot, the Hitchens brothers, Peter and Christopher, Irene Bruegel (who did fine work analysing labour markets and women’s position in them) and the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre.

For the next decade it looked as if the revolutionaries might overthrow the system.

Days lost to strike action rose to 24 million in 1972. According to the government white paper, “In Place of Strife,” “95 per cent of all strikes in Britain were unofficial and were responsible for three quarters of working days lost through strikes.”4
The conflict in Northern Ireland went straight into fourth gear when the Unionist authorities lost control and called in the British Army. Some senior establishment figures talked about the need for a military takeover.

The powers-that-be were thrashing around, without any sure idea of how to keep order. Militant workers kept on striking. But crucially the revolutionary forces lacked the will to step in and take control. The International Socialists’ leader Tony Cliff summarised in 1975 that:

We are entering a long period of instability. International capitalism will be rent by economic, social and political crises. Big class battles are ahead of us. Their outcome will decide the future of humanity for a long time to come.5

Cliff’s plan of waiting for objective forces to drive people to revolt was a recipe for defeat. This was the essential flaw of the International Socialists—their fear of “substituting” themselves for the class made them reluctant to fight for political leadership. Instead, they left politics to the Labour Party.

The New Left Review had done well relating to the new mood, even setting up New Left Clubs. But it shied away from the goal of overthrowing the state, preferring instead a reform of what it assessed to be an “incomplete bourgeois revolution” (this was known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis, after its authors Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson). Revolution in faraway places featured in its articles, but it was more cautious about social change in Britain.

Leo O’Neill, who had been in People’s Democracy in Newry, Northern Ireland, told me that the whole organisation there was debating the drafts of Michael Farrell’s analysis of the situation there. But when it was finally published as The Orange State, good as it was, it was clearly not the key to the Irish revolution (I guess that what they really needed was a critique of the shortcomings of Irish Republicanism, as a guide, rather than a critique of the Orange State, which most people they were talking to had a good idea of anyway). The only real challenge to British rule was coming from the Irish Republican Army, whose limitations were hidden by the intensity of the conflict.

The Communist Party in Britain recovered after the shock of 1968, and it even grew on the back of the workplace militancy of the 1970s. The two wings of the party were those organised around the older union convenors, and the others, who called themselves “Gramscians” and indeed saw themselves somehow as heirs to the évènements in Paris.

Far from collapsing, the Communist Party learned to relate to the new mood. Meanwhile the ruling classes recovered their composure and fought for their preferred outcome to the collapse of the post-war compromise. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had its answer to the shortcomings of corporatism, and their inner confidence won them the election in 1979—appealing first and foremost to middle-class fears of social disorder. The Thatcher government’s root and branch reforms had a formal similarity to those the New Left was arguing for. Both were seeking to overthrow the post-war corporatist order, but her government was doing it from the right. As Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson were railing against Britain’s “gentlemanly capitalism,” Margaret Thatcher was taking on the “Grandees of the Conservative Party” and the “Union Barons.”

The Conservative governments “resolved” the problems of British capitalism by forcing through a thoroughgoing reform of industry, not by modernising production, but by breaking up working-class institutions, and social solidarity. It was her Conservative revolution that ended up shattering the post-war compromise, and fatally wounding those who championed it: the old Labour Party and the Communist Party. The International Socialists got to be a lot more dogmatic, for reasons of internal coherence, losing much of the élan of their earlier years.

The New Left had suggested an alternative resolution to the barriers faced by British society in 1968, one that emphasized creativity and freedom, and even workers’ control. In that they made a great contribution to the decades that followed. But practically speaking they failed to realise that alternative. They were much better at diagnosing the problems of the day than they were at crafting solutions. When the governing classes were at a loss for what to do, the revolutionaries of ’68 were—surprisingly—too cautious, or perhaps too virtuous, to step into the breach.

Many have made the point that the rebels of ’68 provoked a greater reaction against them than they gathered support. In Britain, even though the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1969, the Conservative Party (under Edward Heath) won the election in 1970. All the same, the influence of the activists of 1968 was profound. British political leaders like Gordon Brown, Charles Clarke, and Tony Blair were all students of the New Left. So, too, were Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and David Puttnam were products of ’68, too. Looked at another way, the influence of the ’68 generation was generally more effective in the criticism of the old arrangements than it was in the formulation of the new. When the French ’68ers became “postmodernists” and “deconstructionists” they were making a virtue of that political approach. English academics were frightened of those difficult theories, but they did over time learn from the French the dubious lesson that “the age of grand narratives” was over.

Looking at the state of the nation fifty years on, the obvious signs of reorganisation come from the 1980s. It was then that collective bargaining made way for individualised labour contracts; and it was then that many nationalised industries and public services were privatised. But look further, and you can see the influence of ’68 in the growth of identity politics and the shift towards a consumer culture. But most of all, the legacy is that critique is a stronger force than construction; since 1968, the driving force of social organisation has been the dismantling of the old institutions, without creating new ones.

James Heartfield lives in London.

• 1Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain (2007), p. 36.
• 2The Provisional IRA (2011), p. 37.
• 3From Militancy to Marxism (1987), p. 129.
• 4Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1964–70 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984), p. 562.
• 5Crisis: Social Contract or Socialism (1975).

The year of 1968 signifies not only the climax of the global student movement. That year also witnessed a series of dramatic political events around the world. 1968 is associated with the Tet Offensive of the Vietcong and the My Lai massacre committed by the us Army on the Vietnamese battlefield. 1968 is also irreversibly associated with the assassination of Martin Luther King, the charismatic leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the usa, and with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, bringing the reform politics of the “Prague Spring” to a sudden end. And in the same year the barricades in Paris’s Quartier Latin set off a general strike in France lasting several weeks and bringing the political regime of President de Gaulle to the brink of collapse.

For the student movement in Germany, centered particularly in the university cities of Berlin and Frankfurt, the killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg by a police officer during a protest rally against the visit of Shah Reza Palewi of Iran in 1967 and the assassination attempt by a jobless right-winger on Rudi Dutschke, one of the most prominent leaders of the German student movement, in April 1968 set off high-intensity protests by the students, temporarily led by the Socialist German Student Association (sds). The sds originated as a student organization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany; the loss of political control over the sds culminated in its expulsion by the spd in 1961 and the withdrawal of any financial and organizational support. Thus set free from party control, the sds eventually became more and more antiauthoritarian and politically radical. Beginning in 1965, the members took a growing interest in Marxist analysis; the sds organized training courses in Marxist theory and in the history of Marxist analysis of politics. An enormous output of legal and illegal reprints of historical Marxist thinkers from Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg to Karl Korsch, Ernst Bloch and György Lukacs were indicative of this tendency. As an aside, Angela Davis, long-term member of the us Communist Party, spent a couple of years at Frankfurt University and joined the sds at that time, keeping, however, a low profile during her stay.

Thus, it is fair to say that Marx played an important role for some parts of the student movement of 1968 in its attempt to understand the current societal state of affairs, and in devising the right political strategy for political revolt. The student movement in Frankfurt am Main and elsewhere consisted, however, not only of Marxists: there were the hippies and flower people as well as diverse groups fighting for changes in the legal system, education or gender relations.

The biggest “success” of the student movement in Frankfurt was the occupation of the main building of the “J.H.W. Goethe Universität” in 1968 and its renaming as “Karl-Marx Universität.” The Frankfurt version of the assault on the Bastille was the capture of the university rectorate, where the conquerors posed on the windowsills in the rector’s gown and sampled the fine French cognac from the office sideboard. This carnivalesque act would not have justified the change of the university’ s name. For about two months an “active strike” was proclaimed and implemented with seminars devoted to the analysis of the current societal state of affairs. This strike was supported and critically accompanied by renowned professors such as Jürgen Habermas. This reciprocal conditional sympathy ended when the sds occupied the Institute of Social Research under the directorship of Adorno and Habermas, who called the police for help. The strike ended after massive police action. The aim of the “active strike” was to introduce current societal topics of urgent relevance into the university. Not all members of the university were convinced of this change of the curriculum. My task during this strike was to disrupt the seminar of an elderly professor of philosophy, a renowned expert on Hegel’s theory of consciousness. When I entered his seminar and declared it over, he indignantly reproached me: “How dare you destroy my fine web of thoughts?” Having started to know already then how intricate indeed the Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophies are, I could not avoid feeling some sympathy for this professor, but had to tell him to continue weaving somewhere else.

This is how a university building came to be named for Marx. But what was his role as an intellectual “spiritus rector” for the political analysis and strategy of 1968? Insofar as the student movement was driven by intellectual analysis, it wanted to understand such different political events as the us invasion of Vietnam, the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, the resistance movements in Central Europe against Soviet domination, the Maoist “Long March” in China, the uprising of landless farmers in South America in the wake of the Cuban revolution of 1959 and—last but not least—the worldwide student movements of the sixties themselves. The Frankfurt Marxists tried to find the right theoretical concepts to understand what was labeled “late capitalism” in the advanced industrial nations, the predominance of agriculture in most African and Asian countries, and the Stalinist and post-Stalinist attempts at industrial modernization in the Soviet Union. The students partially rejected the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose disciples, as the intellectual leaders of the Frankfurt sds, had been for almost half a decade at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (under the direction of Horkheimer and Adorno, and later of Habermas, whom, by the way, Horkheimer deeply distrusted for his alleged Marxist furor).

The Marxist intellectuals of the sds faced enormous problems reconciling diverse and seemingly contradictory social phenomena within one theoretical framework, such as:

1. the ongoing persistence of capitalist economies in the “West” (despite recurrent accumulation crises throughout the twentieth century, as prophesied by Karl Marx);
2. the acceptance of modern capitalism by organized labor (due to the recognition of labor unions within the process of industrial relations, which ensured the workers a certain share of the added value of production—a phenomenon which did not conform to Marx’s prediction that the cyclical ups and downs of the accumulation process would degrade living conditions such that the workers would feel compelled to overthrow capitalism);
3. Mao’s national liberation movement in China aimed at a socialism on an agricultural basis—which deviated starkly from the Marxian concept of revolution in industrialized countries);
4. it appeared, however, as if radical bourgeois elites in the cities of Latin America were capable of radical revolution, following the overthrow of the us-supported Batista regime in Cuba by guerrillas led by Fidel Castro (a scenario which only vaguely reminded Marxists of the Paris Commune in 1871);
5. anti-colonial struggles in Central Africa which seemed to stop the strategy of Western capitalist exploitation by securing the potential surplus reserves for the people of the Third World.

In view of the lingering shadows of National Socialism and the contemporary forms of late capitalism, the task for Marxists was tremendous. The question was: what kind of Marxism was still viable in view of the Leninist and Stalinist deformations in the Soviet Union and its dilution through Social Democracy in the European countries? In addition, György Lukacs had argued that the German idealist philosophy of Hegel had directly led to National Socialism (Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, 1954). This could be read as a warning against returning to the idealist traces in the young Marx (Marx, The Paris Manuscripts) and a safeguard against any possible Leninist reading of the mature Marx of Das Kapital, both texts having become popular among the Frankfurt Marxists of 1968.

So, the task of a revitalized Marxism for the “68ers” was, first, analyzing the form of current capitalist production relations; second, identifying the dominant global class relations; and third, ascribing the student movement a role within the seemingly global revolutionary struggles.

Certainly, the sds activists had some theoretical resources at hand for that task. Since 1967, the sds tried to organize training in Marxist theory and history. In Frankfurt as well as in Berlin, some academics offered seminars and lecture courses in Marxism, prominently represented by Jürgen Habermas and Oskar Negt. Was this enough to accomplish a task which none of the older Marxists of the time, such as Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy or Ernest Mandel, had been able to manage?

What was the overall Marxist concept with which the sds wanted to capture the diverse features of the current societal state of affairs and find the right political strategy to overcome the dominant political conditions? One has to say: there was none. Marxism in the minds of the student radicals became a multi-faceted collection of partial concepts. The disassembled topics of any comprehensive political analysis were the authoritarian state, the “dormant” working class, and the revolutionary (?) uprisings in China, Africa and South America. Thus, the Frankfurt School thesis of the authoritarian state as henchman of big capital served to explain the Emergency Legislation of 1968, but did not help in illuminating the critical potential of recurrent economic crises for the re-awakening of the proletariat. Not fully compatible with this thesis was Marcuse’s critique of mass culture and its fusion with consumerism (“repressive desublimation”) in his book One Dimensional Man, which was meant to explain the eclipse of the capitalist regime of exploitation in the awareness of large parts of the population and, particularly, of the working class. Even less compatible with Marxist theorizing was the meaning of the Maoist “Long March,” of African anti-colonialist struggles, and of the revolts of agrarian workers and uprisings in the cities (“Tupamaros,” etc.) in South America. In trying to adapt Marx’s theory of capitalism to the era of imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg had argued in her work The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism, 1913), that by extending the reach beyond the industrialized North to the whole world, modern capitalism had become imperialist and turned formerly pre-capitalist living conditions in Africa, Asia and Latin America into capitalist production relations, and had transformed the global poor into a world proletariat. Franz Fanon’s polemical pamphlet (The Wretched of the Earth) seemed to prove Luxemburg right. The diverse uprisings of the sixties could be interpreted as the revolutions of the new world proletariat. Hence, for some time, the Marxist reasoning gained some support; the emergence of (anti-colonial) struggles for independence in Africa and Mao’s Long March in China, as well as the peasant revolts against the latifundia economy in South America could be subsumed under the general term of a revolution against imperialism, even though this “Third World Proletariat” consisted of landless farmers and migrant peasant workers instead of industrial workers. But none of these movements acted like working-class revolutionaries, as the Maoist civil war against the Chinese Republic under the Kuomintang and the bloody wars of the Diadochi during the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa showed.1 Similarly, the turn toward the narcotics business by former resistance movements such as the farc in Columbia, or the build-up of a family dictatorship by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, seemed to prove the point that there is no direct way from urban guerrilla struggles to a liberated society.

And what about the role of the worldwide student movements in a potential revolutionary struggle? It was after all Herbert Marcuse who—in a speech in Berlin in 1967—attributed revolutionary potential to the students who, in his view, could escape the bewitchment of repressive desublimation in the industrial countries. (A caustic professor of sociology and former Habermas assistant in Frankfurt later offered a different explanation for the radicalism of the students. The students could afford to be radical because their parents were the first postwar generation which would pass down substantial inheritances, allowing their children to live a carefree life. To him, not even students could escape the fate of repressive desublimation.)

The student struggle against the authoritarian state culminated in the protest against the State Emergency Laws of the German government (Nostandsgesetzgebung). Ironically, the German government had conceived them as a decisive step toward the removal of the remaining rights of the occupation forces; for the student opposition, they were an attempt at repeating the Enabling Act of 1933 (see the 1968 “Römerberg Speech,” by Hans-Jürgen Krahl, then a member of the federal executive board of sds); nonetheless, the struggle against the enabling state did not really promise quick success, because labor unions only hesitantly joined the protests. But how to combine the student struggles in the metropoles with, for instance, the guerrilla struggles in the Latin American cities and forests? Che Guevara’s execution by an officer of the Bolivian army in October 1967 in Bolivia was indicative of the fading hopes for combining the struggles in the cities of the industrialized West with those in the less developed areas of the world.

Apart from the problems of solving current political problems, trouble also came from within the sds. It might have seemed a minor irritant for the exclusively male leaders of the sds when the “Weiberrat” (Bitch Council), founded by the female members of the sds, blamed them for male chauvinism, treating women as mere auxiliaries. In November 1968, the Weiberrat published a flyer with the heading “Befreit die bürgerlichen Eminenzen von ihren Schwänzen” (“Liberate the bourgeois eminences from their cocks”), showing the cocks of the sds-leadership hacked off and pinned on some plank with their names below. This aroused some public attention, but did not provoke sds leaders enough to resign from their positions and reunite with their hacked-off cocks. The resistance from within was not the only coffin nail for the politics of the sds and the student movement. Its defect remained that it could not interpret the political role of students in Europe and North America, and give these movements a relevant role in modern anti-capitalist struggles.

It came as no surprise that the diverging strategies of the students in the metropoles and of the “proletariat” of the Third World did not coincide. Political dividing lines emerged:

1. depending on the relation of the students to the “Third World” uprisings, some factions of the student movement became Maoists;
2. others saw the students as a vanguard of the struggle against late capitalism and opted for terrorism, such as the Red Army Faction of Baader and Meinhof (raf),
3. the Spontaneists with Dany Cohn-Bendit, sharing the same view of uniting students and workers with Lotta Continua in Italy, wanted to change lifestyles and spread this change among workers (“Revolutionary Struggle”);
4. and finally, those who wanted to revitalize the communist tradition of the Weimar Republic started to build communist groups such as the kbw (Communist League of West Germany), the kp-ml (German Communist Party–Marxists-Leninists) or kpd-ao (German Communist Party–Reconstruction Organization). The student movement in Frankfurt thus split into diverging splinter groups during the years following 1968 and, not surprisingly, lost its broad appeal to the general public.

The splintering of the student movement into diverse groups and “parties” was the beginning of the end of the student movement in Frankfurt. In March 1970, the sds declared the dissolution of the organization, reflecting the de facto end of the student movement. The movement had produced few tangible results, if any. Nevertheless, it instigated a change in the political and interactional culture, even though the movements and political events in the rest of the world each followed their own course which—to the chagrin of the Marxist and non-Marxist participants in the student movement—did not advance the collapse of late capitalism one small step.

P.S.: On a personal note, I might end my short review of Marx in Frankfurt 1968 by reporting an encounter with Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the undisputed ingenious leader of the sds and Adorno’s no. 1 doctoral candidate, sometime in 1968 in the “Club Voltaire,” a bar—run by leftist Social Democrats—where the student activists would wind up their days of permanent activism with endless talk and more drinks. Krahl, who as a gay person with a history of membership in a right-wing youth organization, lived a borderline life filled with excesses of all sorts, including theorizing (always “taking a walk on the wild side,” Lou Reed). During his fourth or fifth “double-double” corn schnapps, he reproached me for not putting my life on the line like a true revolutionary; his diagnosis was: “You are just a petit bourgeois.” Krahl died shortly after in a car crash, while I continued a significantly less spectacular life, doing the unrewarding job of throwing a post-factum glance on the vanities, ambitions and mixed blessings of the student movement in Frankfurt’s 1968.

• 1I am thinking primarily of the struggles between Kasavubu and Lumumba and the ensuing civil war in the Congo after the retreat of the Belgian colonial power in the early sixties. Other examples are the Obote regime in Uganda (since independence in 1962), toppled about 10 years later by a military coup of Idi Amin, followed by a 20-year civil war; and the independence wars in Angola between mpla and unita since the early sixties and intensified after the end of the Portuguese colonial rule in 1974. Needless to say, none of these civil wars took place without clandestine interventions by Western and Eastern powers.