The Explosion of Deferred Dreams by Mat Callahan

Author:Mat Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

1968 and Beyond: Culture, Counterculture, and Revolution

How do we remember 1968? Is it the Tet Offensive, when the National Liberation Front launched a coordinated assault across the length and breadth of southern Vietnam, leading ultimately to the defeat of the United States? Is it the assassinations of first Martin Luther King and then Robert Kennedy, dashing all hope of nonviolent political change? Is it the violent confrontation in Chicago between police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention—where, as the demonstrators loudly and rightly proclaimed, “The whole world is watching”? Do we remember Prague Spring—the rising of young Czechs demanding radical reform, only to be met by Soviet tanks? Is it the May events in Paris, where massive student protests led to even more massive strikes of French workers, nearly toppling the government? Perhaps it’s the Mexican Olympics: Tommy Smith and John Carlos raising clenched fists in defiance of the U.S., for whom they’d ostensibly won their medals, or the giant protests of Mexican students and workers, brutally suppressed only days before the Olympics began.

Or is it all these events and many more that we remember simply as 1968, the year of a worldwide and world-historic revolution? Many books titled simply 1968 suggest that people will make the connection and draw the conclusions. As world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote: “There have only been two world revolutions. One took place in 1848, the second took place in 1968. Both were historic failures. Both transformed the world. The fact that both were unplanned, and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous, explains both facts—the fact that they failed, and the fact that they transformed the world.”

If 1848 marks the rising of the dispossessed—the wretched of the earth—to throw off the yoke of ancient despotisms, then 1968 marks the explosion of deferred dreams. If 1848 recalls the specter of communism haunting Europe, of fallen monarchs, rising proletarians, romantic poets and enslaved nations yearning for freedom in the “springtime of peoples,” then 1968 recalls the outraged response of the young to the broken promises of liberal democracy on the one hand and of social-democracy and Soviet communism on the other. This was not only impatience but disbelief in the claims made on both sides of the Iron Curtain that, in the wake of World War II, dreams of peace and freedom, of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would at long last be realized. Two decades had passed and the rulers, communist and capitalist alike, had failed to deliver. If that were not enough, the United States (with the acquiescence of the Soviets) was suppressing liberation movements in the former colonies of Europe. A great wave of revolution was sweeping the “Third World” from China to Vietnam, from Algeria to Cuba. These revolutions (and others less successful) were made, moreover, against the advice of the Soviet leadership bent on maintaining the status quo agreed to with the United States at Yalta. But 1968 went one step further: Prague Spring on the one hand and the Great

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