1968 | ukwatch.net

1968: Tariq Ali Looks Back

Ellie Keen — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:23:22 +0000

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Guest: Tariq Ali, acclaimed British Pakistani historian, activist and commentator. He is one of the editors of the New Left Review and the author of a dozen books, including Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. His forthcoming book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the latest part of our series “1968: Forty Years Later.” For a discussion on the legacy of 1968, I’m joined by the political activist, novelist and historian, Tariq Ali. Back in the 1960s, with the Vietnam War at its height, Tariq Ali earned a national reputation through debates with figures like Henry Kissinger and then-British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. He protested against the Vietnam War, led the now-infamous march on the American embassy in London in 1968, and edited the revolutionary paper Black Dwarf, where he became friends with numerous influential figures, such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Forty years later, Tariq Ali continues his lifelong struggle against US foreign policy across the globe. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, as well as five novels and scripts for both stage and screen. He is currently one of the editors of New Left Review. His memoir is titled Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties.

Tariq Ali, welcome to Democracy Now!

TARIQ ALI: Good to be with you.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There’s so many things that happened in 1968, and obviously you’ve had time to reflect on all of them. Talk to us first about what was going on in England at the time and your involvement in the social movements that developed at that time.

TARIQ ALI: What we had in Britain in the ’60s, late ’60s, was a Labour government, which had been elected. This Labour government, despite all its promises, had decided to carry on backing US foreign policy, and the war in Vietnam was at its height. And the government, to our anger, decided to support the war in Vietnam. So there was a wave of anger amongst Labour supporters, who said this is not on. And w then set up the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, though it has to be said, Juan, in retrospect, that that Labour government resisted heavy US pressure to send troops to Vietnam. They backed it verbally, but neither Britain nor any other Western European state sent troops to Vietnam, unlike Iraq. So even though they backed it, it was very different. And the United States embassy—

JUAN GONZALEZ: The only troops, I think, that were sent by other countries were South Korea, Australia, some of the—

TARIQ ALI: South Korea and Australia, always there. But no European country sent troops to fight in Vietnam. Very interesting when you think back on that. It was the height of the Cold War. You would have thought they would, but they didn’t.

And so, a big movement grew, demanding dissociation from the war in Vietnam and for Britain to withdraw political support. And this became a very large movement and backed by virtually every serious political figure in Britain at the time, apart from the government. We had lots of Labour members of Parliament who were opposed to the war, rock singers coming on demonstrations, Mick Jagger writing “Street Fighting Man,” numerous other people involved in it. And the fact that this was Britain’s closest ally in Europe made it a problem.

And I remember Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Democrat peace candidate, saying publicly, “What is our country coming to, when our embassy in the friendliest country we have in the world is permanently under siege?" That cheered us up enormously, because it meant that we were having an impact.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the protest at the US embassy that you were involved in?

TARIQ ALI: Well, you know, this was after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese had taken the US embassy in Saigon for a token period. They had all been killed. I guess you could call it a suicide attack, using today’s language.

And so, we thought, what can we do to show solidarity with the Vietnamese? Can’t we just capture the embassy for a short time and run the Vietnamese flag up and then withdraw? And in October ’67, we got very close to doing that. And we were surprised, as well, and so were the people in the embassy. So we thought, in March ’68, we would do that. But this time, everyone was prepared, and the police, mounted police, charged us and prevented us from reaching the embassy, so there was a big clash. And then Mick Jagger said, “Well, you know, it’s obvious what we have now got to do. We’ve got to have our own cavalry. So why don’t we train people to fight on horseback against the mounted police?” But we thought that we’d give this one a miss.

So that was the big clashes outside Grosvenor Square, which stunned the country, actually, because they weren’t prepared for that. But it showed the depth of feeling. And then, a few months later, France exploded in May-June, with ten million workers on strike, which just shifted the whole political locus or focus of the struggle to something completely different, that something which had begun as an antiwar movement was now becoming a deeper social movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the French convulsion, of course, didn’t actually start in Paris, as you mention in an article you recently did at the Guardian. It started at a smaller university outside of Paris, and it started in March, right? Could you tell—

TARIQ ALI: It started on March the—

JUAN GONZALEZ: —for a lot of our younger listeners and viewers, some of that history of that amazing movement, how a few students ended up leading a movement that paralyzed the nation?

TARIQ ALI: It’s quite astonishing when you think back on it. On March the 22nd in a campus in Nanterre outside Paris, students came out to protest against the restrictions, against bad housing conditions, and the government overreacted, beat them up. They set up the March the 22nd Committee, which called demonstrations in the heart of the Latin Quarter, and that quarter exploded on the night of May the 10th.

Two months later, the campaign erupted with massive clashes. And, you know, the French have this magical capacity to erect barricades. Historically, from the eighteenth century onwards, they’ve been very good at doing barricades. It’s almost genetic now. And so, they put up the barricades in May, and the country was on the—completely divided.

The students were then joined by workers. There were factory strikes. And soon, by the beginning of June, you had ten million workers on strike, many of them occupying their factories and wanting to run society. And you had Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French philosopher, congratulating the students and workers and saying, “You have put imagination on the seat of power.” So that French upheaval transformed the mode all over Europe, without any doubt, and people were scared.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how did the students build that kind of alliance with the labor movement? And how did it spread beyond just the students to the labor movement?

TARIQ ALI: I think when workers saw students fighting on the barricades, the effect of that was exemplary. It’s just like the students had seen the Vietnamese fighting in Saigon; that had got them going. So the Latin Quarter in the heart of Paris was, when it was under student control, was renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. And when workers saw students fighting on the barricades, they said, “Hey, hang on a minute. You know, these namby-pamby kids are taking on the state. We suffer much more than they do.” And slowly, delegations of young workers started coming from the car factories, from other factors, and joining students. Very funny story, when building workers suddenly came and said, “Hang on. We can show you how to build better barricades,” and immediately barricades went up. So this exemplary effect then went into the factories, and the trade union leaders, which were communist, all of them, were completely thrown by this and couldn’t control the workers at all, and the workers occupied.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the impact of that movement on the social conditions of the people in France, because obviously Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero, was the president at the time, and the impact on the government and what kinds of reforms emerged from there?

TARIQ ALI: Well, the government panicked. Charles de Gaulle, in a very rare outburst of anger, because normally he was very lofty, but when he found out what was going on in his country, he said, “Chie-en-lit”—it’s “[expletive] in the bed.” And the students then put up a poster with de Gaulle, saying, “No, you are the chienlit,” which went all over the streets of Paris. But de Gaulle panicked. During the general strike in France, he panicked.

He went secretly to address French troops stationed in Baden-Baden in Germany and said to them, “If Paris falls, will you help me to retake it?” And the army—the general said, “We will, provided you release the generals who were involved in the Algerian coup,” total sort of right-wing generals. And de Gaulle made the deal. Never came to that, thank God, because there would have been massive bloodshed. So it didn’t come to that, but that’s how scared they were.

And you had French journalists traveling Europe and being asked, “Do you think the disease will spread? How serious is it?” because the entire rulers of Western Europe became very nervous.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And again, what kind of impact was there on French society, in terms of the conditions of workers and students following that?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, the impact was that they won massive reforms. You know, the government which came after de Gaulle, Pompidou, actually made a lot of concessions in levels of wages, working conditions, the conditions inside universities. So, in order to prevent revolution, they acceded to a great deal of the workers’ demands. In some factories, trade union bureaucrats would go to the factory and say to the workers, “Guys, we’ve won a 25 percent wage increase,” and they’d say, “Screw it.” “And what do you want?” “We want the factory.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what most people don’t realize, I think, is that, the past forty years, the ruling classes of France have been trying to take back all of the reforms that were achieved in that short period of time back then, and the French working class has always been considered the most pampered by capitalists of Europe, in terms of their general conditions.

TARIQ ALI: They are. And the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, came to power saying, “My victory shows the death of May ’68 and that legacy in France, and I will destroy it forever.” Well, exactly the opposite is happening. His ratings, a year after he was elected, are now rock-bottom. He’s a disliked president, even more unpopular than Chirac. Even as we speak, there are public-sector strikes taking place in France.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to move on to Czechoslovakia, also 1968. Certainly, what was happening in France had an impact as well on what happened in Czechoslovakia and in the confrontations with the Soviet Union.

TARIQ ALI: You know, Juan, I always felt that in some ways what happened in Czechoslovakia offered a great deal of hope, because here you had a reformist faction inside the Czech Communist Party trying to make Czechoslovakia a socialist democracy. Dubcek, the leader of the reform communists, said, “We want socialism with a human face.”

And that socialism with a human face had already led to the most amazing discussions in the Czech press and Czech television, which became the freest in Europe, even though it was state-owned. Journalists took control, and the newspapers and television were transformed. Political prisoners could confront their jailers on prime-time television and say, “Why did you torture us? Why did you say this?” So the whole country was politicized.

And then, fearful that this particular disease might spread to Russia and Eastern Europe—and there was every chance it might have—the Russians sent in the tanks. And the response of NATO was not so critical, if you look at what—

JUAN GONZALEZ: And they sent in the tanks around—in what month again?

TARIQ ALI: August.

JUAN GONZALEZ: August.

TARIQ ALI: It was the 21st of August, 1968. The Russians and the Warsaw Pact powers sent in the tanks to crush the Czech experiment. And by doing so, they didn’t know it, but they signed their own death warrant, because, interestingly enough, people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize Russian novelist who wrote the famous books on the gulag, he was asked, “When did you lose faith totally in your own country and its capacity to reform from within?” and Solzhenitsyn said, “21st of August, 1968. When they stopped the Czechs from doing what they wanted and transforming the system, then I knew it was the end, and I lost all faith in this regime.” Interesting.

But the response of the West was very mild, because they were not happy with the socialism with a human face either. But if the Czechs had won, who knows? The history of Europe might have been very different, because you never had a socialist government which was also democratic. And here, there was a possibility that the two could come together, and that would have given a very different shape to the world in Europe and elsewhere.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re talking to Tariq Ali, the political activist, novelist and historian. His memoir is called Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. We’ll be back with him in a minute. Stay with us.

[break]

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re talking to Tariq Ali, the political activist, novelist and historian. His memoir is called Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. He has a big article in the Guardian of London called “Where Has All the Rage Gone?” about 1968. We’ve been talking about England, France, Czechoslovakia, where the fermenting in Europe in 1968, but it wasn’t just in Europe or in North America. There were widespread movements, amazing movements, in other parts of the third world at the same time. And those have gotten far less attention in many of the retrospectives about what’s been going on.

TARIQ ALI: I know. It’s really awful, that, actually. It shows the sort of nostalgia side of it. People only want to remember what they remembered at the time. But I think the two big events in the third world, one was the Mexican students’ uprising at the—it was Olympics year, don’t forget. And the Mexican students fought for democracy in their own country against an oppressive semi-one-party state regime. And the Mexican authorities decided to massacre them. There was a gigantic massacre by the Mexican regime. You know, hundreds of students were killed, thousands were wounded. And at the same time, the Olympics were about to take place. No one at that time in the West said, “Let’s boycott the Olympics,” by the way.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. And in terms of some of the issues that they were raising at the time in Mexico?

TARIQ ALI: The issues they were raising were social justice, democracy, democratic rights, an end to an authoritarian, corrupt one-party state government. That is what the Mexican students were demanding, and they were mown down. And the most striking image that came out of the Olympics was the two black US athletes who had won the gold—the runners who had won the gold and silver medals, when they went to the podium. I mean, it was a moment of real pride and internationalism that, in solidarity with the students, they had their medals, and they stood with their heads hanging down and raised their fists to give the clenched fist salute, a very moving event which was seen all over the third world as a sign of solidarity with that world by Afro-American athletes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, in Mexico itself, the achieving justice or rectifying what happened back then is still a political battle that’s ongoing in a series of Mexican governments since then.

TARIQ ALI: It has been ongoing, and it’s still ongoing, because in the last Mexican elections, as anyone who followed them closely knows, Juan, they tricked—they tricked the electorate once again. They rigged the elections, not as massively as they used to do in the past, but sufficiently to deny López Obrador the presidency. The Obrador campaign, election campaign, in Mexico mobilized more people than any other campaign they’d done, literally a million people in the Zócolo, in the heart of Mexico City. And then they say he didn’t—and this was the case in most parts of the country. Everyone thought he was going to win. But suddenly, at the last moment, they rigged the elections, and all the people who accuse Chavez in Venezuela of all sorts of crimes and send hundreds of observers to watch every move were not present when the pro-Western government in Mexico was rigging the elections against López Obrador.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Then, of course, the events in your own homeland, which are perhaps the least covered or remembered of all the major upheavals of 1968.

TARIQ ALI: You know, people sometimes get surprised when they ask me, “Well, we know about ’68, but we lost everywhere. We fought, and we lost.” And I say, hang on a minute. There’s one country where they fought for three months, the students in Pakistan, against a military dictatorship. And the struggle began on November the 7th, 1968, went on ’til March the 10th, 1969.

And if you look at the chronology of that struggle, Juan, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Workers join, white-collar workers join, lawyers join, women join, judges come out on the streets, prostitutes get organized and come out. It became a massive social struggle. And every day, the number of people getting killed gets bigger and bigger and bigger. We still don’t have accurate figures of how many people the police and army shot dead in Pakistan.

But finally, when railway workers began to disrupt the railways, taking out the railway lines from the track, and the demand was very simple: end of dictatorship, and democratic free elections in the country. These were the two central demands. But the military dictator of the time, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, backed by Washington and London, was standing firm, ’til he realized he couldn’t carry on. And in March, he was toppled. And I remember—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Why was he so backed by Washington and London?

TARIQ ALI: Well, because Washington, in Pakistan, have always preferred to rule via the military than through civilian politicians. They don’t trust the civilian politicians too much. So all the three key dictators Pakistan have had had been backed by Washington. And in fact, Ayub was put into power by Washington in October ’58. So after ten years, the students—he was removed. It was an insurrection, and he had to go.

And I was in the country at the time, and the mood was just exhilarating, euphoria, you know, people celebrating on the streets, hugging each other, distributing sweets. And religion played no part in the struggle at all. It was a totally secular struggle. And the three big demands of the movement, social demands of the movement, were food, clothes and shelter for all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also talk about the enormous development of a feminist movement at that time, which most people, when you’re dealing with the Muslim world, would not even envision that. But as far back as ’68, there was a strong feminist movement there.

TARIQ ALI: There was a strong women’s organizations in both parts of Pakistan, as it was then. And one of the most moving things was when a student was killed in the western part of the country, in the eastern part of the country, which later became Bangladesh, women would just pour out onto the streets, very few with their heads covered, but barefooted in mourning and in solidarity with what was happening to students in West Pakistan.

But the feminist movement, you know, it’s often forgotten: why was it called the women’s “liberation” movement? The word “liberation” came from Vietnam. The National Liberation Front of Vietnam was fighting for its freedom; we should fight for our freedom. Gay liberation movement, women’s liberation movement, black liberation movement were inspired by all those struggles.

And I guess, of what survives from that, in terms of the legacy, the biggest gains were probably made on that front, social and sexual front. Women’s rights were won, the right of women to have abortions, the ending of illegalizing abortions, homosexuality, which was totally crushed. People now forget, because so much has changed on that front, that in countries like Britain, in the late ’50s and ’60s, early ‘60s, it was illegal to be gay. Illegal. You were arrested if you were found out. I have many friends who were locked up. Now, young people can hardly believe that. So the ’68 movement was a political, social, and movement for sexual liberation, which shouldn’t be forgotten. A lot of the rights being enjoyed by women and gay people today come from that movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, as you say, religion played no part in that movement, and yet now religion plays such a huge part in the daily life and the political life of Pakistan today. What was the transformation that has occurred?

TARIQ ALI: You know, I challenge that, actually. I think what—the last general elections in Pakistan, the religious parties were virtually wiped out electorally. It is true that there is much more religiosity on Pakistan, but there is in virtually all parts of the world, including this country. But in terms of the religious parties actually dominating Pakistan, this is not true, or the notion that Pakistan is on the eve of a Jihadi takeover and the Jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger.

I’ve just written a long a book on Pakistan, which will be published in September, in which I actually challenge all these mythologies and ask why are they being created and what is the function of it. The bulk of the country isn’t attracted to either Jihadi or religious politics. These are a tiny, tiny minority in Pakistan. The real problems of people in that country are food, clothing, shelter, education. And no political party or the military are interested in solving them. The surprise is, for me, that more people don’t move towards religion. But they don’t.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So where has the rage gone, as you’ve asked in your article? And why there is so little of that kind of rage that erupted in a short period in the late ’60s and early ’70s?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I think it was a different period. That was an epoch of wars, of revolutions. Don’t forget, a lot of revolutions had taken place. I mean, the Cuban revolution had happened in 1959. So the mood was very different, whereas what we are witnessing now is essentially the attempts to revive a movement after massive defeats.

So the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003 were gigantic, much larger than anything that happened in the ’60s, both the United States and in Europe. Gigantic. But it was a spasm. It happened, and then it disappeared. And it was as if millions of ordinary citizens were coming out to tell their politicians, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying. Don’t force us into this war.” But once the war happened and Iraq was occupied, through demoralization, depression, a sense of powerlessness, they retreated. Whereas in ’68 the movement grew slowly and built up to a peak, here the movement peaked to try and stop a war, and then it disappeared.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention the massive protest in 2002, 2003. We also had, in this country, massive protests just a year or two ago of unprecedented protest of immigrants in the country—

TARIQ ALI: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —over attempts to recruit much more draconian laws against immigrants. Yet, again, that movement too rose and then dissipated, and there hasn’t been any significant continuity. Could it be that part of the problem is that there’s been much less emphasis on the need for strong radical and revolutionary organizations to move from one massive uprising to another to be able to provide some kind of accumulated strength to the progressive movement?

TARIQ ALI: Well. I think that is a part of the problem, is that there is no political organization, radical or otherwise, which can actually take these movements forward, except in Latin America, Juan, where country after country, you have giant social movements in Latin America. And then the result in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador and now in Paraguay, of all places, is victories for people attached to these movements. So, Latin America, I argue, is one of the few places where there is hope. But in the rest of the world, movements rise and fall.

I mean, we could say, in a way, that an unusual development in Western politics is the size of audiences which Barack Obama is getting. He has energized youth in a way that they weren’t energized before. And it’s foolish and sectarian to say, but it’s the Democrats. Yeah, it is, but that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that a young generation has become attracted to politics again. The question is, will it remain so if the Democrats win? But it’s an interesting phenomenon.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Or—but then the issue is, are they attached to normal Democratic party politics, or are they attached to some kind of a real—a potential social movement? That’s the big issue is, in terms of the presidential race.

TARIQ ALI: Well, it’s—you know, the strength of this campaign for Obama has been that people think he is offering something different, that this will mark a break. And, of course, on one level, his race, it will mark a phenomenal break if he’s elected. But whether it will on other things, of course, remains to be seen. If he wins, my advice to everyone here is to be at the celebrations in Washington with banners saying "Pull out of Iraq now,” is to make it a big antiwar moment, because since he’s used his opposition to the war in Iraq in this campaign, one shouldn’t stay aloof from this movement, but find ways of intervening in it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in Europe today and in Britain, what are the expectations of these presidential elections?

TARIQ ALI: In Europe, well, it varies from place to place. I mean, I think, for instance, in Italy, which has just had a big victory of the right, they will find it awkward, because it’s a very racist government now in Italy. Juan, I don’t know whether people here follow it, but 68 percent of Italians want all the gypsies, the traveling people, expelled from the country, forgetting that they too were victims of the Third Reich and were wiped out in the Second World War. So if America elects a black president, I think a lot of Italian right-wingers will be slightly disconcerted, saying “Oh, but these are the sort of people we are trying to get rid of from our country.”

In Britain, they are prepared to go along with anyone Washington elects, both political parties, New Labour and Conservative. So they are not bothered. Their position will be support the White House, whoever’s there. If Obama changes some things, they’ll go along with that. They are not going to fight.

But Europe, of course, is watching this quite keenly, because in Germany, for instance, and other places, you have politicians who have been incredibly upset by the Iraq business and now Afghanistan, where they see no hope at all. So they are hoping that there will be a change of regime, which will pull out and allow the Western world to breathe again without occupying countries. But, you know, that may be a hope which might not be fulfilled, but we’ll see.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Tariq Ali. You’re going to be speaking tomorrow night, May 30th, at 7:30 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in a public forum on “The New Imperialism: Old Problems and New Challenges.” Thanks again for being with us.

TARIQ ALI: Thank you very much.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Tariq Ali, political activist, novelist and historian. An Autobiography of the Sixties is his book. He’s speaking tomorrow at the Baruch Performing Arts Center here in New York.

Where has all the rage gone?

JamieSW — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:07:53 +0000

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

If the Vietnamese were defeating the world’s most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation.

In February 1968, the Vietnamese communists launched their famous Tet offensive, attacking US troops in every major South Vietnamese city. The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof. It was undoubtedly a suicide mission, but incredibly courageous. The impact was immediate. For the first time a majority of US citizens realised that the war was unwinnable. The poorer among them brought Vietnam home that same summer in a revolt against poverty and discrimination as black ghettoes exploded in every major US city, with returned black GIs playing a prominent part.

The single spark set the world alight. In March 1968, students at Nanterre University in France came out on to the streets and the 22 March Movement was born, with two Daniels (Cohn-Bendit and Bensaid, Nanterre students then, and both still involved in green or leftist politics) challenging the French lion: Charles de Gaulle, the aloof, monarchical president of the Fifth Republic who, in a puerile outburst, would later describe as chie-en-lit – “shit in the bed” – the events in France that came close to toppling him. The students began by demanding university reforms and moved on to revolution.

That same month in London, a demonstration against the Vietnam war marched to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. It turned violent. Like the Vietnamese, we wanted to occupy the embassy, but mounted police were deployed to protect the citadel. Clashes occurred and the US senator Eugene McCarthy watching the images demanded an end to a war that had led, among other things, to “our embassy in Europe’s friendliest capital” being constantly besieged. Compared with the ferment elsewhere, Britain was a sideshow (”...in sleepy London Town there’s just no place for a street fighting man,” Mick Jagger sang later that year): university occupations and riots in Grosvenor Square did not pose any real threat to the Labour government, which backed the US but refused to send troops to Vietnam.

In France, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was at the peak of his influence. Contrary to Stalinist apologists, he argued that there was no reason to prepare for happiness tomorrow at the price of injustice, oppression or misery today. What was required was improvement now.

By May, the Nanterre students’ uprising had spread to Paris and to the trade unions. We were preparing the first issue of The Black Dwarf as the French capital erupted on May 10. Jean-Jacques Lebel, our teargassed Paris correspondent, was ringing in reports every few hours. He told us: “A well-known French football commentator is sent to the Latin Quarter to cover the night’s events and reported, ‘Now the CRS [riot police] are charging, they’re storming the barricade – oh my God! There’s a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise – the CRS are retreating. Now they’re regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things from their windows at the CRS – oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of apartments…’ The producer interrupts: ‘This can’t be true, the CRS don’t do things like that!’

“ ‘I’m telling you what I’m seeing…’ His voice goes dead. They have cut him off.”

The police failed to take back the Latin Quarter, now renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. Three days later a million people occupied the streets of Paris, demanding an end to the rottenness of the state and plastering the walls with slogans: “Defend The Collective Imagination”, “Beneath The Cobble- stones The Beach”, “Commodities Are The Opium Of The People, Revolution Is The Ecstasy Of History”.

Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Black Dwarf: “What France proves is when someone demonstrates that people are not powerless, they may begin to act again.”

I had been planning to head for Paris – it was something we had been discussing at the paper – but then I received a late-night phone call. A posh voice said, “You don’t know who I am, but do not leave the country till your five years here are up. They won’t let you back.” In those days, citizenship for Commonwealth citizens was automatic after five years. I would not complete my five years until October 1968. Already Labour cabinet ministers had been discussing in public whether or not I could be deported. Friendly lawyers confirmed I should not leave the country. Clive Goodwin, the publisher of our mag, vetoed the trip and went off himself.

I went a year later to help Alain Krivine, one of the leaders of the May 1968 revolt, in his presidential campaign, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. As we touched down at Orly airport, returning from a rally in Toulouse, the French police surrounded the plane. “Hope it’s you, not me,” muttered Krivine. It was. I was served an order banning me from France which stayed in force until François Mitterand’s election many years later.

The revolution did not happen, but France was shaken by the events. De Gaulle, with a sense of history, considered a coup d‘état: in early June, he flew from a military base to Baden-Baden, where French troops were stationed, to ask whether they would support him if Paris fell to the revolutionaries. They agreed but demanded rehabilitation for the ultra-right generals whom De Gaulle had fired because they opposed pulling out of Algeria. The deal was done. Yet De Gaulle slapped down his interior minister for suggesting that Sartre be arrested: “You cannot imprison Voltaire,” he ruled.

The French example did spread, worrying bureaucrats in Moscow as much as the ruling elites in the west. An unruly and undisciplined people had to be brought to heel. Robert Escarpit, a Le Monde correspondent, wrote on July 23 1968: “A Frenchman travelling abroad feels himself treated a bit like a convalescent from a pernicious fever. And how did the rash of barricades break out? What was the temperature at five o’clock in the evening of May 29? Is the Gaullist medicine really getting to the roots of the disease? Are there dangers of a relapse?... But there is one question that is hardly ever asked, perhaps because they are afraid to hear the answer. But at heart everyone would like to know, hopefully or fearfully, whether the sickness is infectious.”

It was infectious. In Prague, communist reformers – many of them heroes of the anti-fascist resistance during the second world war – had that spring already proclaimed “socialism with a human face”. The aim of Alexander Dubcek and his supporters was to democratise political life in Czechoslovakia. It was the first step towards a socialist democracy and was seen as such in Moscow and Washington. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement.

In every west European capital there were protests. The tabloid press in Britain was constantly attacking leftists as “agents of Moscow” and was genuinely taken aback when we marched to the Soviet embassy, denouncing the invasion in strong language and burning effigies of the bloated Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Alexander Solzhenitsyn later remarked that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the last straw for him. Now he realised that the system could never be reformed from within but would have to be overthrown. He was not alone. The Moscow bureaucrats had sealed their own fate.

In Mexico, students took over their universities, demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule. The army was sent in to occupy the universities and did so for many months, making it the best-educated army in the world. On October 2 – with the eyes of the world on Mexico City 10 days before the Olympic games were due to begin there – thousands of students poured on to the streets to demonstrate. A massacre began at sunset. Troops opened fire on the crowd listening to speeches in one of the city’s main squares – dozens were killed and hundreds more injured.

And then in November 1968 Pakistan erupted. Students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US (sound familiar?). They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes, and other social layers, and despite the severe repression (hundreds were killed), the struggle increased in intensity and, the following year, toppled Field Marshal Ayub Khan.

When I arrived in February 1969, the mood of the country was joyous. Speaking at rallies all over the country with the poet Habib Jalib, we encountered a very different atmosphere from that in Europe. Here power did not seem so remote. The victory over Ayub Khan led to the first general election in the country’s history. The Bengali nationalists in east Pakistan won a majority that the elite and key politicians refused to accept. Civil war led to Indian military intervention and that ended the old Pakistan. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.

The glorious decade (1965-75), of which the year 1968 was only the high point, consisted of three concurrent narratives. Politics dominated, but there were two others that left a deeper imprint – sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below. We had cause to be grateful for the latter. We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited The Black Dwarf in 1968-69. One day a guy in overalls walked into our Soho office and counted out 25 grubby £5 notes, thanked us for producing the paper and left. He would do this every fortnight. Finally, I asked who he was and if there was a particular reason for his generosity. It turned out he had a stall on Portobello Road and, as to why he wanted to help, it was simple. “Capitalism is so non-groovy, man.” It’s only too groovy now and far more vicious.

In some ways, the 60s were a reaction to the 50s, and the intensity of the cold war. In the US, the McCarthyite witch-hunts had created havoc in the 50s, but now blacklisted writers could work again; in Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were released, the gulags were closed down and the crimes of Stalin were denounced by Khruschev as eastern Europe trembled with excitement and hopes of rapid reform. They hoped in vain.

The spirit of renewal infected the realm of culture as well: Solzhenitsyn’s first novel was serialised in the official literary magazine, Novy Mir, and a new cinema took over most of Europe. In Spain and Portugal, ruled at the time by Nato’s favourite fascists, Franco and Salazar, censorship persisted, but in Britain DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written in 1928, was published for the first time in 1960. The book, in its complete form, sold two million copies.

Following Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work in The Second Sex (1949), Juliet Mitchell fired off a new salvo in December 1966. Her lengthy essay, Women: The Longest Revolution, appeared in the New Left Review and became an immediate point of reference, summarising the problems faced by women: “In advanced industrial society, women’s work is only marginal to the total economy… women are offered a universe of their own: the family. Like woman herself, the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation… Both can be exalted paradoxically, as ideals. The ‘true’ woman and ‘true’ family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair.”

In September 1968, US feminists disrupted the Miss World competition in Atlantic City, warning shots in a women’s liberation movement that would change women’s lives by demanding recognition, independence and an equal voice in a male-dominated world. The cover of the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf dedicated the year to women. Inside, we published Sheila Rowbotham’s spirited feminist call to arms. (As I write this, Professor Rowbotham, now a distinguished scholar, has her job under threat from the ghastly, grey accountants who run Manchester University. We are now in an epoch of production-line universities with celebrities paid fortunes to teach eight hours a week and genuine scholars dumped in the bin.)

And, yes, there was also the pleasure principle. That the 60s were hedonistic is indisputable, but they were different from the corporatised version of today. At the time they marked a break with the hypocritical puritanism of the 40s and 50s, when censors prohibited married couples being shown on screen sharing a bed and pyjamas were compulsory. Radical upheavals challenge all social restrictions. It was always thus.

In the prefigurative London of the 18th century, sexual experiments required the cover of break-away churches such as the Moravians and surreal Swedenborgians (for whom “love for the holy” was best expressed in the “projection of semen”): both preached the virtues of combining religious and sexual ecstasy. Sexual orgies were a regular feature of Moravian ritual, according to which penetration was akin to entering the wounds in Christ’s side. William Blake and his circle were heavily involved in all of this and some of his paintings depicting this world were censored at the time. I hope this does not come as too much of a shock to my old friend Tony Benn and others who sing Jerusalem without realising the hidden meaning of:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear!

Homosexuality in Britain was decriminalised only in 1967. Gay liberation movements erupted with activists demanding an end to all homophobic legislation and Gay Pride marches were launched, inspired by the Afro-American struggles for equal rights and black pride. All the movements learned from each other. The advances of the civil rights, women’s and gay movements, now taken for granted, had to be fought for on the streets against enemies who were fighting the “war on horror”.

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004, when I was in the US on a lecture tour that coincided with Bush’s re-election campaign, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam.” The sound engineer in the hall, a Mexican-American, whispered proudly in my ear that his son, a 25- year-old marine, had just returned from a tour of duty in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, the scene of horrific massacres by US soldiers, and may show up at the meeting. He didn’t, but joined us later with a couple of civilian friends. He could see the room was packed with antiwar, anti-Bush activists.

The young, crewcut marine, G, recounted tales of duty and valour. I asked why he had joined the marine corps. “There was no choice for people like me. If I’d stayed here, I’d have been killed on the streets or ended up in the penitentiary serving life. The marine corps saved my life. They trained me, looked after me and changed me completely. If I died in Iraq, at least it would be the enemy that killed me. In Fallujah, all I could think of was how to make sure that the men under my command were kept safe. That’s all. Most of the kids demonstrating for peace have no problems here. They go to college, they demonstrate and soon they forget it all as they move into well-paid jobs. It’s not so easy for people like me. I think there should be a draft. Why should poor kids be the only ones out there? Out of all the marines I work with, perhaps four or five percent are gung-ho flag-wavers. The rest of us are doing a job, we do it well and hope we get out without being KIA [killed in action] or wounded.”

Later, G sat on a sofa between two older men – both former combatants. On his left was Will Williams, 60, born in Mississipi, who had enlisted in the army aged 17. He was sure that, had he not left Mississippi, the Klu Klux Klan or some other racist gang would have killed him. He, too, told me that the military “saved my life”. Following a stint in Germany, he was sent to Vietnam. Wounded in action, he received a Purple Heart and two bronze stars; he also began to change following a rebellion by black troops at Camranh Bay protesting racism within the US army.

Following a difficult period readjusting, Williams read deeply in politics and history. Feeling that the country was being lied to again, he and Dot, his companion of over 43 years, joined the movement opposing the war in Iraq, bringing their Gospel choir voices to rallies and demonstrations.

On G’s right was Clarence Kailin, 90 years old that summer and one of the few remaining survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He, too, has been active in the movement against the war in Iraq. “Our trip was made in considerable secrecy – even from our families. I was a truck driver, then an infantry man and for a short time a stretcher-bearer. I saw the brutality of war up close. Of the five Wisconsinites who came to Spain with me, two were killed… later, there was Vietnam and this time kids from here died on the wrong side. Now we have Iraq. It’s really bad, but I still believe there is an innate goodness in people, which is why so many can break with unworthy pasts.”

In 2006, after another tour of duty, G could no longer accept any justification for the war. He was admiring of Cindy Sheehan and the Military Families Against the War, the most consistently active and effective antiwar group in the US.

A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that “History is the lies we agree on”. Afterwards there was little agreement on anything. The debate on 1968 was recently revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year’s presidential elections was the final nail in the ’68 coffin. The philosopher Alain Badiou’s tart response was to compare the new president of the republic to the Bourbons of 1815 and Marshal Pétain during the war. They, too, had talked about nails and coffins.

“May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all,” Sarkozy declared. “The heirs of May ’68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics.”

He even blamed the legacy of May ’68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May ’68 attack on ethical standards helped to “weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses”. So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the “free market”, a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.

The struggle against the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. In 2003 people came out again in Europe and America, in even larger numbers, to try to stop the Iraq war. The pre-emptive strike failed. The movement lacked the stamina and the resonance of its predecessors. Within 48 hours it had virtually disappeared, highlighting the changed times.

Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries – utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe – wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.

“You’re like fish that only see the bait, never the line,” we would mock in return. For we believed – and still do – that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others – the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few; and that socialism without democracy could never work. Above all, we believed in freedom of speech.

Much of this seems utopian now and some, for whom 1968 wasn’t radical enough at the time, have embraced the present and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.

The collapse of “communism” in 1989 created the basis for a new social agreement, the Washington Consensus, whereby deregulation and the entry of private capital into hitherto hallowed domains of public provision would become the norm everywhere, making traditional social democracy redundant and threatening the democratic process itself.

Some, who once dreamed of a better future, have simply given up. Others espouse a bitter maxim: unless you relearn you won’t earn. The French intelligentsia, which had from the Enlightenment onwards made Paris the political workshop of the world, today leads the way with retreats on every front. Renegades occupy posts in every west European government defending exploitation, wars, state terror and neocolonial occupations; others now retired from the academy specialise in producing reactionary dross on the blogosphere, displaying the same zeal with which they once excoriated factional rivals on the far left. This, too, is nothing new. Shelley’s rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism, expressed it well:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.