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Book Review: "1968: A Student Generation in Revolt" by Ronald Fraser and others (Chatto & Windus, #14.95) The upheavals of the latter half of the Sixties have had a curious record of publication. An initial cycle of books and pamphlets, starting with the rush of "specials" after the significant events (notably the May-June events in France), purported to explain what had happened or merely recorded the images, but shed little light. More considered books (notably Alfred Willener's "The Action-Image of Society: On Cultural Politicization" (1970)) used techniques ranging from the statistical, through discussion, to description of the cultural background, aiming to situate and socialize the energy which had flared so suddenly and brightly. Entering the Seventies, the glare largely dissipated, whether in comparison to the widening wave of contestation affecting Western societies in the first half of that decade, or in a growing disillusionment with the aims and methods of the movement. The events of 1968 lived on mainly in the memories of the libertarian left, as the Situationists' finest hour. The tenth anniversary of the events produced little in the way of commemorative material: a brief article here, a reprinted pamphlet there. The situation on the twentieth anniversary could hardly be more different. Distance, in time and possibility, magnified the fascination. Christmas 1987 brought the first pre-emptive strikes. The New Statesman must have bemused its residual Fabian readers (not to mention sensible Kinnockites) with the "I Love You!!! Oh, Say It With Cobblestones!!!" colour supplement. Britain's one-time revolutionary enfant terrible, Tariq Ali, reminisced about celebrities and airport lounges. However, if Sixty-Eight nostalgia there must be, Ronald Fraser is the best person to produce it. Fraser is probably Britain's best known oral historian, committed to a method described thus in the book under review: "Through protagonists' memories, we sught to recreate not only those events but, more importantly, their meaning to those who took part in them, the lived experience." His "Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War, 1936-39" (1979) was a notably successful project of this kind. By interweaving narratives by participants of all political groups, he achieved a text which gave substance to movements relegated to the footnotes of more orthodox histories. The better historians of these years had differentiated the movements on the Left (Republican, Anarchist, Trotskyist, Communist). Blood of Spain made the reader aware, perhaps for the first time, of the justifications which Carlists and Falangists perceived in their beliefs and actions, and their subsequent resentment at the imposition of Francoist orthodoxy. More recently, Fraser's "In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnerfield, 1933-1945" (1984) was an autobiographical enquiry into his r?le as child of the manor, providing a fascinating narrative on the interface between psyche and class. Again, the oral historical approach assisted in his elucidation of the actual facts and social relations between family and servants on the estate. So Fraser was well-placed to lead an international team seeking to apply such techniques to testimony of participants in "the movement", with the intention of clarifying the confusion of events. What, then, is the fascination of 1968? Was it a blast against social stasis which nearly brought the walls tumbling down? An explosion of unchannellable energy? The return of human-scale relations repressed since the 1920s (such as feminism and ecology)? An implosion of politics and culture? A speech of the speechless? A mad, medieval festival? The background is that of a society where conflict on social goals had been both made manifest in the Berlin Wall and subsumed within the West in the drive for growth and prosperity. This was truly the age of the car - the symbol of consumer prosperity, but also of ongoing automation of production processes. So, while the struggles in the car plants prefigured the labour shakeout to come, material prosperity and full employment appeared to have been realised. Management of society would be a matter of all sides pulling together. As Willener put it: "(In) a Europe that had found a new equilibrium, one found images of society relatively well established and logically-distributed over a whole population?" Young people occupied a peculiar new place in this society. On the one hand, they had a higher disposible income than others (and more, relatively, than ever before or since). The formation of a youth culture market feeding on this money was also their accession to a new form of citizenship, at an age when they were otherwise being treated as mere apprentices. "Consumerism made possible new types of relationships and awoke people's fantasies and desires to break with old ways of life" (Laura Derossi, p64) Identity and community grew from shared interest in a particular set of commodities, and from a corresponding disdain for those choosing a "straight" set of commodities. By the end of the decade, such commodity identity would be all, the movement nothing. But the young felt equal to their citizenship - and were often appalled when they saw the gulf between what the system promised and what it delivered. The war babies became aware of "unfairness", whether in Alabama or Saigon, and when they began protesting against these injustices, the brittleness of social power immediately became obvious (as did that of their heads). Internationally, the obscenity of the Vietnam War and its tacit support by other Western governments delegitimised their authority in turn in the eyes of their own young. The book concentrates on those movement in which students played a major r?le, but only in the Western democracies. The escalating movements in the USA, West Germany, France and Germany are therefore covered in great detail, but missing are accounts by participants in the movements in Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Poland and Yugoslavia. This is a pity, as these would have broadened the perspective on, for example, the influence of international youth culture in spreading an attitude of "We want the world and we want it NOW!" That said, the chapter on the Northern Ireland student movement provides the most haunting material. Here was a politico-religious backwater sheltered from consumer pop culture. But TV film of the American Civil Rights movement caused a ripple which became a tidal wave: "Within the institutionalized discrimination of the state, we saw ourselves basically as black." (Bernadette McAliskey, p207). The Civil Rights Association (and then Peoples' Democracy) rapidly reached a point where they threatened (or were perceived to threaten) the very foundations of the legal authority. Dogmas being so central to the regional government's very rationale, a wrong-footed British government, although hardly sympathetic to Stormont, could apply little pressure on it. The book records how badly it all went wrong after the Free Derry and Free Belfast episodes. "PD lost what it had once had - a solid movement of people who took action, and a well-attended discussion forum for the development of ideas. For a brief period, we were the leaders of the struggle and then we lost it in as many months?" (McAliskey, p214). Community self-defence was supplanted by the specialists, as the IRA, previously just as wrong-footed as the government, returned from the dead to establish hegemony over opposition. The result remains with us today, and nowhere is an emancipatory perspective visible. Those interviewed for the book were deeply involved in the movements of their respective countries, but with allegiances as diverse as Selma marchers and pro-Situationists. Their current situations are equally divergent: some languish in jails (like ex-Weatherman David Gilbert), others in parliaments (like Dieter Kunzelmann: Situationist turned Green Bundestag MP) - and many more on campuses. Most, however, still consider themselves to be "on the Left" In the end, seeking the source for the continuing fascination of 1968, Fraser agrees with Willener, that its central meaning lies in anti-authoritarianism. That anti-authoritarianism was common to most aspects of contestation, but was equally denied by the fervour with which so many people yoked themselves to just another authority. Political grouplets sprang up, each with its own hierarchy and sacred texts. Gangsterism was a short step away: Some hardly needed actual state repression to take on a clandestine r?le, fetishising an "armed struggle" which often debilitated any real movement. Authoritarian groups played with a realpolitik at least as unprincipled as that of Henry Kissinger. To a large extent, the movements of 1968 provided a rationalizing impulse to societies whose technical over-rationalization had debilitated them of any internal corrective mechanisms. The Vietnam War, the prime example of rampaging technology, was ended; counter-bureaucratic forces were established in many areas of life. "?(Like) many a subversive movement, this one ended up contributing in some respects to the modernization of the existing system, becoming integrated in it." (Elsa Gili, p324) But for those who lived through it, the lesson is that a possible break with the existing state of things remains ever-present: "Having lived through it, I can't ever say 'It will never happen?'" (Dany Cohn-Bendit, p7). From Edinburgh Review