Timothy Scott Brown - Part 1: Lecture

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“Is Revolution Still Possible? The Crisis of Capitalism and the Meaning of 1968” Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:30 p.m., Sheldon Museum of Art

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[00:00:00.000]And now, on to our speaker. Professor Timothy Scott Brown
[00:00:03.744]is a professor of history at Northeastern University.
[00:00:07.375]He received his BA, MA and PhD from Berkeley.
[00:00:11.593]His work focuses on 20th century German and transatlantic
[00:00:16.047]political and cultural history, radical mass movements,
[00:00:19.627]popular music and youth subcultures, the revolt of 1968,
[00:00:23.902]and environmental politics.
[00:00:26.025]His work over the last decade has been at the forefront,
[00:00:28.836]in my opinion, of arguing for a shift from a national
[00:00:32.144]to a transnational and thus truly global approach to how we study 1968,
[00:00:37.758]as reflected in the titles of his major publications.
[00:00:41.425]For example, he's the author of
[00:00:43.115]"West Germany in the Global 60s: the Anti-authoritarian Revolt, 1962 to 1978"
[00:00:50.262]which is out with Cambridge University Press, 2013 and that's the book that
[00:00:56.060]you can pick up out in the Sheldon's foyer there, and I'm sure that Tim
[00:01:01.793]would be happy to sign it also, if you wanted an autograph. He is
[00:01:05.170]also the author of a forthcoming book called "60s Europe," also with Cambridge.
[00:01:12.154]In addition, he's also the author of an earlier book called "Weimar Radicals"–
[00:01:17.134]'Weimar' is sort of Germany in the 1920s –
[00:01:20.162]"–Nazis and Communists Between Authenticity and Performance"
[00:01:23.913]which is out with Berghahn Books, 2009.
[00:01:27.090]Timothy Brown has also edited "The Global 60s in Sound & Vision:
[00:01:31.278]Media, Counterculture & Revolt," out with Palgrave, and
[00:01:34.868]"Between the Avant-garde and the Everyday:
[00:01:37.205]Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present"
[00:01:41.171]so even the titles alone suggest a
[00:01:43.400]strong throughline in his work around the question of revolutions
[00:01:47.763]in various parts around the globe.
[00:01:49.990]Professor Brown's essays have appeared
[00:01:52.220]in top journals such as: the American Historical Review;
[00:01:54.991]the Journal of Social History; German Studies Review;
[00:01:57.930]The Sixties: A Journal of History; Politics, and Culture; and
[00:02:00.985]Contemporary European History, as well as
[00:02:03.211]a number of highly visible edited volumes.
[00:02:06.324]Professor Brown has also received a number of prestigious awards and honors
[00:02:10.658]including the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship,
[00:02:14.314]not one but two Fulbright fellowships,
[00:02:16.999]and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin.
[00:02:22.455]As he is working on finishing his Sixties Europe book, he's also already
[00:02:26.116]at work on a new project entitled
[00:02:28.307]"The Greening of Cold War Germany: Environmentalism and Social Movements
[00:02:32.849]Across the Wall and Beyond, 1968 to 1989."
[00:02:38.327]and astonishingly, he does all of this high-calibre scholarly work
[00:02:42.766]while continuing to pursue his love of music as a member of "Hard Left,"
[00:02:46.376]even though he doesn't want me to play this right now – I really want to
[00:02:49.971]play a song right now.... [ audience laughs ]
[00:02:52.396]a hard-mod punk band which was born out of a
[00:02:56.486]desire to explore leftist political ideas
[00:02:59.306]and marry them to rabble-rousing
[00:03:01.116]music worthy of the worldwide struggle
[00:03:03.177]against capital, as their Bandcamp website states.
[00:03:08.046]I am a fan of the band, so I've listened to their records. It's quite good.
[00:03:14.626]On our way from Omaha to Lincoln yesterday evening after a quick beer,
[00:03:19.006]I confess that I became even more impressed with Tim
[00:03:22.078]if not even a little bit envious, when he casually pointed out that in 1997,
[00:03:28.087]the band that he played with at the time had opened in London
[00:03:31.197]for the great Scottish masters of so-called post rock, Mogwai –
[00:03:34.496]in my opinion, the best band in the last twenty years.
[00:03:38.926]So, you know, kudos. [ laughs ]
[00:03:43.047]So, before my introduction turns into a fanboy chat
[00:03:45.539]about great contemporary rock music,
[00:03:47.269]let's stop right here and welcome Timothy Scott Brown, whose lecture
[00:03:50.747]is entitled "Is Revolution Still Possible? The Crisis of Capitalism and the
[00:03:55.783]Meaning of 1968."
[00:03:58.003][ Applause ]
[00:04:07.698]Thank you. Can you hear me okay?
[00:04:10.378]Thanks Marco for that very kind and slightly embarrassing introduction
[00:04:16.048]I was delighted to receive this kind invitation from Marco and Roland
[00:04:23.278]and the rest of the organizing committee to give the opening lecture of this year's
[00:04:27.558]Humanities on the Edge lecture series and given the work that I've done,
[00:04:33.188]I found the theme of "Post-Revolutionary Futures" particularly alluring.
[00:04:38.278]I was very happy to accept.
[00:04:41.012]I've called my talk "Is Revolution Still Possible?"
[00:04:44.598]and promised to talk about the student rebellion of 1968 and also
[00:04:49.898]I promised I would also talk about 1917. That was not advertised,
[00:04:54.683]in case I nerved to back out of it, but I have no reason to back out of it
[00:04:58.689]because it's actually very important, I think, if we're going to
[00:05:02.889]consider the question of whether we live in a post-revolutionary future
[00:05:06.599]or in the face of post-revolutionary futures, we need to understand
[00:05:10.568]something about the revolutionary past.
[00:05:13.599]Of course the Bolshevik Revolution, led by women and others
[00:05:16.869]to overthrow tsarism, was second only to the French Revolution of 1789
[00:05:21.859]as the most important of these past revolutions.
[00:05:26.469]And we might say, sort of to begin,
[00:05:28.429]that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the uprisings of 1968
[00:05:35.059]represent different conceptions of revolution; and I like to think of the
[00:05:40.219]history of revolutionary movements in terms of revolutionary dilemmas -
[00:05:46.890]what I call "revolutionary dilemmas" –
[00:05:48.999]that is, the questions that have to be answered in every revolutionary epoch.
[00:05:55.776]This focus allows us to examine the fractures and revolutionary projects
[00:06:02.630]to examine the competing tendencies, key questions, and debates,
[00:06:07.320]and it seems that many of these key questions and debates keep returning and
[00:06:11.920]appear in all revolutions. So what are some of these, historically?
[00:06:17.070]One of the most important is the question of who is the revolutionary subject.
[00:06:22.080]The "revolutionary subject," that is, the
[00:06:28.662]revolutionary subject is the person or a class that makes the revolution.
[00:06:32.110]And one of the questions connected with this is the question of whether
[00:06:35.709]a revolution has a class basis, and if it does what is that class?
[00:06:39.979]Is there a revolutionary class?
[00:06:43.301]Another question: can a small group of determined militants make a revolution
[00:06:47.700]on behalf of that class? Or is a revolution carried out in some manner
[00:06:52.480]by the masses themselves? And if so, how?
[00:06:56.331]Is there a role for a revolutionary party - a vanguard party like the Bolsheviks?
[00:07:01.823]Can elections be involved in a revolutionary process?
[00:07:06.561]What is the role of violence? Is self-defense permitted?
[00:07:11.241]What about offensive violence?
[00:07:14.061]These sorts of conflicts have deep historical roots.
[00:07:17.600]Now, in some cases they can be reduced to a conflict between
[00:07:20.921]socialism and communism on one side and anarchism on the other side,
[00:07:26.588]and this is a conflict that stretches back to the nineteenth century
[00:07:29.556]into disagreements between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin in the
[00:07:33.914]First International. Mikahil Bakunin is the famous Russian anarchist.
[00:07:38.631]This debate was also mirrored in the Russian Revolution
[00:07:42.832]in conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian anarchist movement
[00:07:49.112]led by Nestor Makhno, and also in the well-known Kronstadt uprising.
[00:07:57.442]And this was the moment in which in 1921, in the midst of the civil war
[00:08:02.628]that broke out after the revolution, the revolutionary sailors
[00:08:07.272]in the Baltic Sea naval base Kronstadt revolted against the Bolsheviks.
[00:08:11.872]They revolted against the Bolsheviks from the left. They revolted against
[00:08:16.413]the Red Terror that the Bolsheviks had instituted in the course of the civil war,
[00:08:21.693]against forced requisitioning, against strikebreaking,
[00:08:25.643]against the workers in Petrograd and also the Bolshevik's efforts to
[00:08:33.692]stop trade between the cities and the countryside –
[00:08:38.443]because many of the sailors and soldiers were themselves peasants, and so
[00:08:44.543]there were a bunch of things that they weren't happy about.
[00:08:47.333]Anarchism was also very strong in Spain in the Spanish Revolution of 1936
[00:08:52.313]And here we have very strong anarchist training in the CNT,
[00:08:58.064]which was connected with an affinity group called the FAI,
[00:09:01.465]so if we see pictures from that era, you can see "CNT FAI" on armbands.
[00:09:05.593]And the Spanish Civil War sees a conflict between the
[00:09:09.854]Communist Party that's backed by the Soviet Union,
[00:09:12.985]the Spanish anarchists, and also the Socialist Party in Spain,
[00:09:17.182]There's voluminous literature on these "behind-the-lines" struggles:
[00:09:20.153]George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is the most well-known of these.
[00:09:27.374]So after 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution, there's three broad tendencies
[00:09:32.915]we could say, to keep it simple.
[00:09:34.724]There's social democracy, which continues to exist in a form since
[00:09:39.304]the 19th century; there's communism and there's anarchism.
[00:09:44.980]After 1917, social democratic parties in Europe have to decide whether
[00:09:48.554]they're going to try to form Bolshevik-style parties,
[00:09:51.387]communist parties, or whether they're going to stay
[00:09:54.105]social democratic parties.
[00:09:56.263]Social democracy had already decided on sort of an evolutionary approach
[00:10:02.144]to the revolution, so to decide that you were going to form a communist party
[00:10:06.145]meant that you were going to try to speed up the wheels of history
[00:10:09.597]and do something like the Bolsheviks did to Russia.
[00:10:12.114]So the result of this is that social democratic parties split
[00:10:16.537]and the social democratic parties remained social democrats,
[00:10:19.872]and then there were these new communist parties.
[00:10:26.659]In this conflict between anarchism and communism we can think of
[00:10:33.294]in terms of a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach.
[00:10:37.495]The Bolsheviks believe in a top-down, centralized approach, and the
[00:10:41.205]anarchists believe – like the CNT FAI in Spain – that the way to make the
[00:10:45.805]revolution is to organize workers at the level of the shop floor
[00:10:49.286]and delegate their authority upward rather than having their authority
[00:10:53.655]imposed from the top down by a revolutionary party.
[00:10:57.656]Now, in the post-1945 period these conflicts and dilemmas are renewed.
[00:11:03.837]Still the question of parties and state power, but now we have new actors
[00:11:10.008]on the scene, beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s
[00:11:14.129]which are artistic avant-garde groups, also youth in general
[00:11:19.508]– the creation of the teenager in the 1940s and 50s and youth culture –
[00:11:25.052]this is a new phenomenon and raises new revolutionary questions.
[00:11:29.009]For example, you know, was rock and roll a revolutionary force?
[00:11:33.148]Was the sexual revolution a revolution?
[00:11:36.664]What role has identity played? What about class?
[00:11:41.918]And so again in the uprisings that break out in the United States
[00:11:47.128]and in Europe and both sides of the Iron Curtain, there's a new question
[00:11:51.208]about who the revolutionary subject is.
[00:11:55.289]In this talk, I'll show a couple of posters that were made by the
[00:12:01.588]so-called "atelier populaire." In May 1968 students of the art school
[00:12:07.619]produced a bunch revolutionary posters that are very well known and this one is
[00:12:13.456]"Beauty is in the street," and it really depicts an image that never would have
[00:12:20.388]appeared in the propaganda of the interwar period, which is a beautiful
[00:12:23.879]young woman who was also a revolutionary militant
[00:12:26.809]who's taking part in street fighting. And so it captures a little bit of these
[00:12:30.300]new concerns about beauty, sexuality, youth culture, and the connection
[00:12:37.791]of those things to revolution.
[00:12:41.654]So we have the term 1968, and this afternoon we were able to talk about
[00:12:44.959]terminology a little bit I won't go oo into depth about that but usually
[00:12:50.406]for Americans the date 1968 conjures visions of social unrest centered on a
[00:12:57.613]series of big events that took place in the year 1968. These were
[00:13:01.362]the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy;
[00:13:06.315]the Tet Offensive in which the Viet Cong shocked American Forces in Vietnam
[00:13:10.423]and also the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
[00:13:16.649]If we're going to understand the term 1968 a little more capaciously to refer not
[00:13:22.097]just to the year 1968, but to a broader complex of events, we would include
[00:13:28.313]for America the founding of Students for a Democratic Society,
[00:13:33.758]which was the most important student radical organization in the United States
[00:13:37.924]which produced in 1962 their founding document, the Port Huron Statement.
[00:13:44.839]In the Port Huron Statement they called for a resurgence of
[00:13:49.001]participatory democracy and
[00:13:52.995]called for attempts to solve problems like the Cold War arms race
[00:13:56.713]and continued racial injustice in America.
[00:14:00.611]There is also the emergence over this longer span of more militant groups like
[00:14:05.145]the Black Panthers, Marxist-Leninist groups like Progressive Labor,
[00:14:10.697]the Weathermen, a terrorist group, and also additionally the women's movement
[00:14:15.407]and the gay rights movement and so on.
[00:14:18.046]Now, in Europe 1968 is associated with May '68 in Paris, and also to a lesser
[00:14:24.116]extent with the so-called Prague Spring. You will recall that the Prague Spring
[00:14:28.082]was when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia tried to institute
[00:14:31.637]"a socialism with a human face" and then this was crushed by the Soviets who
[00:14:36.670]didn't want socialism to have a human face, as it were.
[00:14:42.236]So scholars had identified 1968 in all the countries of Europe
[00:14:47.670]including those in Eastern Europe,
[00:14:49.477]and increasingly now scholars are also working on the third world
[00:14:53.017]as it was called at the time – "the global south" as we usually refer
[00:14:56.536]to it now. So we've had to open up the timeline more and more because 1968
[00:15:02.299]is not the key date in many places.
[00:15:04.238]In some countries key events take place in the 1970s or they take place earlier.
[00:15:10.007]We've also talked in terms of a "Global 1968," "the Long 1960s"... there's
[00:15:17.058]different terminology that's sort of been invented to capture this in a
[00:15:21.677]little more detail to get away from the idea that everything happened in 1968
[00:15:25.518]which it did not.
[00:15:28.625]So how did 1968 differ from earlier moments of radical rupture,
[00:15:33.568]from earlier revolutions?
[00:15:35.788]We need to make an important distinction first here,
[00:15:38.688]between the so-called old left and the new left.
[00:15:41.718]We usually use the term "new left" to describe the new movements
[00:15:45.017]that become prominent in the 1960s. And so if there's a "new left"
[00:15:49.208]there has to also be an "old left." So what is the "old left?"
[00:15:52.261]Well, the "old left" is basically a term that pertains to the classical workers'
[00:15:56.727]movements of the period before 1945 – the interwar period –
[00:16:01.939]and going back into the 19th century.
[00:16:04.748]The distinction between the old left and the new left is that the old left
[00:16:10.075]functions in a classically Marxist mode. It's focused on factory workers –
[00:16:16.918]the industrial proletariat. It's focused especially on male factory workers,
[00:16:21.675]whereas the new left is driven by youth and by students in particular.
[00:16:28.319]They differ also in their social location because the old left is centered
[00:16:32.906]in factories, in some ways, also in the street, obviously; and
[00:16:38.079]the new left is centered in the universities and also in the street.
[00:16:42.690]They have different analytic lenses and they have different concerns.
[00:16:47.629]So whereas the old left concerned itself with the class struggle
[00:16:51.560]in the classical Marxist sense, and the need for those who were forced
[00:16:55.748]to sell their labor power to survive –
[00:16:58.851]the proletariat – to seize the means of production.
[00:17:03.079]The new left is based on new actors and new assumptions.
[00:17:07.693]So what are some of those? Well, first of all,
[00:17:11.673]a first assumption of the new left is that 1917 failed – that the
[00:17:17.241]Russian Revolution failed. [ aside ] I will qualify this, Marco.
[00:17:21.530]That is, that the state begun by Lenin and continued by Stalin
[00:17:25.299]was, by the 1960s, no longer revolutionary in any meaningful sense of the word.
[00:17:31.066]Now Trotskyists, the followers of Leon Trotsky,
[00:17:33.951]could quibble that it was not their man who had sold out the revolution –
[00:17:37.591]that was Stalin. But either way the Soviet Union was no longer the place
[00:17:42.471]to which one looked as an example.
[00:17:45.931]and this was of course not the position of the communist parties in countries
[00:17:50.531]like Spain - er, sorry, France and Italy
[00:17:54.050]the old-guard communist parties who were still in the Bolshevik tradition.
[00:17:58.501]And this presaged a key conflict in 1968
[00:18:03.181]between these communist parties and the student movements.
[00:18:06.621]You would think at first glance the communist parties in France and Italy,
[00:18:09.807]for example, would back the rebellion of the young rebels who were revitalized
[00:18:14.290]by aspects of the Marxist tradition, but this was not the case.
[00:18:18.015]This conflict was especially noticeable in France,
[00:18:22.501]where the French Communist Party shunned the student movement,
[00:18:26.312]leading one of that movement's key leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
[00:18:29.875]to write a critique of Bolshevism both historical and contemporary which
[00:18:34.820]basically condemned Bolshevism as a counter-revolutionary movement that
[00:18:39.462]seized power and instituted a one-party dictatorship and therefore buried
[00:18:45.052]revolution rather than protected it. And so, in his book he talks again about
[00:18:51.972]the Kronstadt rebellion, which is one of the classic historical incidents
[00:18:57.592]that's used to make the case that the Bolsheviks are counter-revolutionary
[00:19:01.068]rather than a revolutionary movement.
[00:19:04.303]And this claim was important in other countries as well, as in West Germany
[00:19:10.043]which is the country that I work on the most.
[00:19:13.272]You can see here an announcement of a special conference on Kronstadt
[00:19:20.182]in the radical journal Agit 883, and it says "Smash the state,"
[00:19:27.086]"All the power to the proletariat,"
[00:19:30.594]"Alle macht den räten — all power to the councils,"
[00:19:35.023]which in the soviet context would be the soviets,
[00:19:38.779]"Against capitalism" and "Against Bolshevism."
[00:19:41.824]And, you know, anarchism rather than Bolshevism.
[00:19:44.134]So, the 60s are a moment of strong resurgence of interest in anarchism
[00:19:49.593]and this whole thing around the Kronstadt revolt was important for them.
[00:19:54.158]Now, the official New Left with a capital "N"and a capital "L"
[00:19:59.999]was launchedin England especially over the question of the crimes of Stalinism.
[00:20:06.656]Stalin had died in 1953 and you probably remember that in 1956
[00:20:11.320]in his secret speech, which wasn't secret, Khrushchev revealed the crimes
[00:20:15.174]of Stalinism and admitted that Stalin murdered millions of people
[00:20:18.349]and had done all these things.
[00:20:21.342]The same year, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and smash the sort of
[00:20:26.889]budding democracy movement there.
[00:20:30.179]So the New Left is a response of British intellectuals, many of whom broke with
[00:20:34.802]communist parties because of this and tried to find a new way to make Marxism
[00:20:41.150]relevant for a new generation.
[00:20:43.540]And this idea that's really crystallized in '56 is reinforced in 1968
[00:20:49.480]because 1968 is the year that the Soviets invade, or the Warsaw Pact
[00:20:53.669]countries invade Czechoslovakia and crush the Prague Spring.
[00:20:57.148]Now there was a move in 1968 to recover Bolshevism as a meaningful tradition
[00:21:03.960]and we'll come back to this, but this relates to a basic fact of 1968 –
[00:21:10.221]a claim that I frequently make – that there is no "one 1968."
[00:21:15.249]1968 is a matter of multiple revolutions, sometimes complementary
[00:21:20.689]and sometimes competing.
[00:21:23.659]So a second key assumption about the new left was that
[00:21:27.333]the proletariat, the working class, was no longer revolutionary,
[00:21:33.450]though obviously some workers were more radical than others.
[00:21:36.651]In France, for example, the student radicalism of May 1968 took place
[00:21:41.389]against the backdrop of a massive general strike that saw millions of
[00:21:45.371]workers out on strike temporarily shaking the French state to its foundations.
[00:21:52.121]Workers were extremely militant in Italy, as well.
[00:21:55.030]In West Germany, not so much, for historical reasons.
[00:21:59.192]But whatever the situation in individual countries, it was generally the case that
[00:22:03.701]workers no longer belonged to a punitively unitary class that was
[00:22:08.792]being so immiserated as to make revolution inevitable.
[00:22:17.172]Karl Marx had posited the idea of a proletariat, that is, this class that's
[00:22:23.542]created by industrialization, that was impoverished and immiserated by
[00:22:28.662]industrialization, and had to sell its labor power to survive.
[00:22:32.779]But by the 1950s and 1960s, workers were not uniformly confined to shabby tenements
[00:22:38.502]and deprived of basic necessities as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s.
[00:22:43.743]This was a period, as the British historian Arthur Marwick has pointed out
[00:22:48.091]in which amenities such as washing machines, automobiles and television sets
[00:22:52.662]became widely available and the prospects of working-class life markedly improved.
[00:22:58.622]It goes without saying that rising prosperity
[00:23:01.222]did not take workers out of the conditions of exploitation;
[00:23:05.063]they were still forced to sell their labor power,
[00:23:07.163]while the owners of capital pocketed the profit from their labor.
[00:23:10.831]But the relative satisfaction of working classes presented radicals with a problem.
[00:23:16.355]Who would make the revolution if the exploited classes
[00:23:19.183]were no longer interested in the revolution?
[00:23:22.572]This image, which is either the image or a similar image to the one that's on the
[00:23:28.882]French theorist Guy Debord's book, The Society of the Spectacle.
[00:23:34.095]It was used on the cover of that book to suggest the situationist analysis of
[00:23:38.646]the situation that I just described,
[00:23:41.031]Because Dubord posited the idea of
[00:23:46.333]modern society that the commodity that Marx had talked about
[00:23:49.465]had reached its ultimate state in the kind of society of the spectacle
[00:23:55.124]in which people were completely removed from the realities of their life
[00:23:58.612]and just live inside kind of a shop window, as it were.
[00:24:08.503]For radical who were convinced that relative prosperity did
[00:24:12.275]not obviate the need for revolution,
[00:24:15.443]especially in view of the socially oppressive conditions
[00:24:18.164]that accompanied this prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s,
[00:24:22.534]It was time of repressive social mores
[00:24:25.784]and expectations of conformity to Cold War categories,
[00:24:29.835]fierce anti-communism, somewhat...
[00:24:32.374]These groups that still wanted revolution had to focus on groups that might still
[00:24:39.022]have an interest in upsetting the status quo. In other words,
[00:24:42.019]"The factory workers don't want to rebel,"
[00:24:45.305]– and again that's an oversimplification, but widely true –
[00:24:50.045]"We have to look to new groups." So who are the new groups?
[00:24:53.213]Well, the new groups would be students, because this is a time of
[00:24:56.696]rapid expansion of universities and access to higher education.
[00:25:00.305]It could be artists, especially radical artists working in the European tradition
[00:25:05.608]of avant-garde, artists who were involved in politics;
[00:25:08.695]it could be youth subcultures, and it could be so-called marginal groups
[00:25:14.294]and the German-American theorist Herbert Marcuse was very influential
[00:25:19.043]for the student movement and he posited the idea of the marginal group made up
[00:25:23.854]of people like juvenile delinquents, bohemian non-conformists like the Beats,
[00:25:28.806]and people like that who could in some way represent a revolutionary force.
[00:25:34.276]Part of the idea was that the intrusion of youth subcultures and people
[00:25:41.455]who wouldn't conform to bourgeois values represented a revolutionary
[00:25:46.435]stirring of the pot and the British underground newspaper International Times
[00:25:53.238]published an article by their Berlin correspondent in which this picture
[00:25:56.685]appeared - which captures something of the perception of the youth subcultures
[00:26:01.536]and the so-called Beat wave of the 1960s
[00:26:06.045]when rock'n'roll seemed to be, in a way,
[00:26:09.827]a social force that was threatening to the status quo.
[00:26:15.308]So the thinking went that these marginal groups –
[00:26:18.437]students, artists, subcultures – were groups that either
[00:26:22.584](a) possess the critical analysis to see past this glowing window of
[00:26:29.077]consumer capitalism to the alienation that it concealed, or
[00:26:33.245](b) they were so marginalized as to not be able to take part in it,
[00:26:37.839]and so desperate as to have no allegiance to it.
[00:26:40.648]This also included for Marcuse the national liberation struggles of
[00:26:44.347]the third world, the guerillas in Vietnam and elsewhere, who were
[00:26:47.967]directly fighting capitalism in the form of fighting imperialism with weapons.
[00:26:55.349]So 1968 in the New Left is driven by new
[00:26:58.742]actors, but it also has new concerns and new methods.
[00:27:03.167]It was an uprising of youth, and intelligencia, also sometimes workers.
[00:27:08.908]It was against the Cold War. It was in favor of decolonization
[00:27:12.978]and self-determination for formerly colonized people.
[00:27:16.088]It was in favor of participatory democracy; that is, not just democracy
[00:27:21.059]as voting in elections, but democracy as making decisions about your own life
[00:27:26.598]in cooperation with other people around you.
[00:27:29.779]It was bottom-up, not top-down, and this pertains to
[00:27:32.677]participatory democracy as well as to questions of organization.
[00:27:37.248]And it connected the dots. I would say, the single most important thing about
[00:27:40.838]1968 is that it connects the dots.
[00:27:43.771]You've all heard the phrase, uh, sometimes meant as criticism of a
[00:27:50.242]movement being a "single-issue movement,"
[00:27:53.853]well, the 60s are not single-issue movement, and not a set of
[00:27:57.691]single-issue movements. The movements of 1968 are
[00:28:00.380]multi-issue movements that insist that every type of oppression is linked to
[00:28:06.082]every other type of oppression, and they all have to be fought together.
[00:28:10.381][ silence ]
[00:28:26.547]So I've described 1968 in terms of a convergence followed by a divergence.
[00:28:33.431]So the convergence is, in the 1950s and early 1960s – in West Germany,
[00:28:39.810]for example, which is the country that I've done the most work on –
[00:28:43.320]there's a bunch of people who are opposed to the Cold War,
[00:28:45.952]who are opposed to German rearmament, or opposed to nuclear weapons
[00:28:49.682]on German soil; people in the peace movements; trade unions; Christian clergy;
[00:28:55.791]they come together in the early 1960s with people who were radical
[00:29:00.486]avant-garde artists, student radicals, and the German SDS, the Socialist German
[00:29:07.116]Students League; and they become a broad
[00:29:11.838]movement that has kind of revolutionary expectations
[00:29:16.527]and this is referred to in Germany as an extra-parliamentary opposition
[00:29:20.507]because the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, goes into government
[00:29:24.427]with conservatives in the mid-1960s,
[00:29:26.957]and so radicals feel that they no longer have representation in Parliament
[00:29:30.608]so they form the extra-parliamentary opposition.
[00:29:34.098]After 1968, some of their main goals don't work out. I'll talk about those
[00:29:39.649]in a moment. And these groups all diverge, and they diverge into some
[00:29:43.126]new forms like the women's movement, the back to the land movement,
[00:29:48.509]and you know, the countercultural movement of hippies
[00:29:50.588]very much from the American model.
[00:29:52.698]They diverge into terror groups. They diverge into groups that try
[00:29:56.698]to found new little communist parties – the so-called K-Gruppen in West Germany -
[00:30:02.526]to try to go back to the workers and make the revolution that
[00:30:05.556]should have been intended all along, and so and so forth.
[00:30:09.486]The flavor of that moment, the rise of K-Gruppen, comes across in this image
[00:30:15.945]of one of their demonstrations and you can see they've got pictures of Mao, who is
[00:30:20.618]extremely important for them and also Lenin, and you can even see Stalin.
[00:30:27.947]So there's an attempt to go back to revolutionary basics
[00:30:33.168]and these groups are influential for a while but they're also marginalized
[00:30:36.953]because they're dogmatic sectarian groups.
[00:30:41.826]Also, in this case, you can see they're blended with countercultural style as well
[00:30:46.807]because this is early 1970s at this point.
[00:30:50.667]So the question we have here, in the wake of this convergence and divergence is
[00:30:56.337]what are we to make of a revolution or radical moment in which
[00:31:01.009]no one actually seizes power?
[00:31:05.378]What's important about '68, first,
[00:31:08.167]is this democratic renewal that I talked about before
[00:31:11.704]and also there's a focus on consciousness and on information and what I call
[00:31:17.878]politics of knowledge.
[00:31:20.729]The Frankfurt School intellectuals like Adorno and Horkheimer
[00:31:26.532]and also Marcuse had worried about what they called the "culture industry"
[00:31:31.559]which was the way in which capital shapes the ability of people
[00:31:34.818]to even think about their situation.
[00:31:37.879]And Marcuse had also introduced the term "the consciousness industry"
[00:31:41.658]which makes the point even more strongly.
[00:31:44.471]And the students in 1968 protested precisely against this -
[00:31:50.726]the operation of this cultural consciousness industry
[00:31:56.109]and they argued that it prevented revolution because it prevented
[00:31:58.978]people from knowing their true situation.
[00:32:01.878]So one of the things they protested against was the Springer press
[00:32:06.838]in West Germany, which is kind of like the West Germany Rupert Murdoch
[00:32:10.018]I guess you could say.
[00:32:11.988]And you can see in this image, that outside the student organization here,
[00:32:18.558]you see the student depicted as this biker barbarian
[00:32:24.269]and the citizen wants to know if he can go to the fußball now
[00:32:28.979]- if he can go to the soccer game now
[00:32:31.909]or are they still rioting there as well.
[00:32:34.809]This is at a time when the students are wearing ties, right. It's the mid-sixties;
[00:32:39.910]they don't look like this in any way.
[00:32:42.259]So this is just one small example of what the students claimed
[00:32:45.091]was an anti-democratic system of using mendacious images that were lies
[00:32:51.270]basically to marginalize student movement and separate them from the population.
[00:32:57.179]And there's a wonderful image from May '68 from the Atelier Populaire
[00:33:03.359]which says "The radio lies." This claim
[00:33:08.400]is made in connection specifically with the way the May '68 revolts
[00:33:14.190]are being treated on the radio but it's also a metaphor for a
[00:33:19.041]broader critique of the media and the media's role in capitalism, and
[00:33:24.800]I would say what they diagnosed then is much worse today than it was 40 years ago.
[00:33:31.570]I think that's clear.
[00:33:34.462]We have a problem, however, because now we talk about the role of social media
[00:33:40.880]like for example in the Arab Spring or the use of the Facebook, you know,
[00:33:44.841]to spread subversive memes or whatever, but we don't really have any clear
[00:33:48.710]evidence that our improved communications, i.e. the internet,
[00:33:52.500]are giving rise to some sort of aufklärung or enlightenment
[00:33:56.341]in the sense that the student movement would have wished.
[00:34:00.621]The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse had posited
[00:34:04.891]the idea of repressive tolerance. This is very important, for,
[00:34:08.021]in other words that capitalism didn't have to openly repress people
[00:34:11.821]but they would permit them to say anything they wanted
[00:34:14.632]and then it wouldn't matter.
[00:34:17.282]One wonders if his idea of epressive tolerance in some ways
[00:34:21.663]is expressive of this situation.
[00:34:24.920]But, I will say that in the 60s, and this is Rainer Langhans, of the
[00:34:30.301]infamous Kommune 1 in West Berlin - that's the "first commune" who were
[00:34:34.091]the sort of people who started radical situations, inspired subversive practices
[00:34:42.210]that helped create a counterculture and was prevented somewhat.
[00:34:45.603]What he's doing in the picture is he's using a rotor print machine to produce
[00:34:49.493]subversive literature for Kommune 1. In part, they were doing bootleg
[00:34:55.481]publishing of all kinds of works that had not been previously available
[00:34:59.051]like the Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich,
[00:35:03.540]and all kinds of books of the Frankfurt School and all the revolutionary
[00:35:07.372]writings of the past that have been suppressed under the Nazis
[00:35:10.541]twenty years previously. These people reprint them and sell them
[00:35:14.102]or make them otherwise available. And they also produce their own literature
[00:35:20.004]dealing with their psychological theories and so on and so forth.
[00:35:23.693]And I would say that this activity is a characteristic activity of 1968 -
[00:35:30.121]the creation of knowledge from below, the alternative press -
[00:35:34.602]and it's also true of all revolutionary movements.
[00:35:37.152]There's a huge outpouring of written material
[00:35:40.829]in historical revolutionary movements in 1848, 1917, and obviously in 1789 as well.
[00:35:48.086][ silence ]
[00:35:57.216]So, the theorist Fredric Jameson once wrote, quote,
[00:36:04.664]"Someone once said that it is easier to
[00:36:08.114]imagine end of the world than to
[00:36:10.354]imagine the end of capitalism."
[00:36:13.881]Marco referred to this idea earlier.
[00:36:16.929]It was alwasy central to Marxist thought
[00:36:19.929]that real existing conditions would produce their own solutions.
[00:36:24.443]After all, Marx believed capitalism
[00:36:27.695]would have to spread through the entire world,
[00:36:30.387]destroying old ways of life and revolutionising human existence.
[00:36:35.891]Marx believed that capitalism was a revolutionary force and it was only
[00:36:39.367]after capitalism had enacted its revolution that the proletariat
[00:36:42.875]would be able to enact its revolution.
[00:36:45.817]Now, the Bolsheviks and others decided that they needed
[00:36:48.697]to speed up this process and no one expected the Russian revolution
[00:36:52.076]to take place in backwoods Russia - overwhelmingly peasant population.
[00:36:57.646]People thought if a revolution of the marxist model occurred in Europe,
[00:37:02.516]that it would occur in Germany -
[00:37:04.656]an advanced country with an organized industrial proletariat.
[00:37:08.617]But this is not what happened.
[00:37:11.228]Marx believed that capitalism would have to do to what I would say
[00:37:15.557]capitalism is doing now - spreading throughout the entire world and
[00:37:19.007]upsetting traditional ways of life - before it would reach the point
[00:37:22.420]at which the proletarian revolution would be possible.
[00:37:27.457]He also predicted that this would cause widespread misery
[00:37:32.346]and, now, as brutal conditions of work that used to exist in the West
[00:37:38.357]are exported to the Global South, this becomes a prophecy in a way
[00:37:45.535]and in their place of origin we are left with, in many cases, unemployment,
[00:37:51.458]the so-called opioid crisis in the United States, and so on and so forth.
[00:37:57.708]There's been a lot of scholarship recently about capitalism and
[00:38:03.125]the crisis of capitalism, which is why I included that phrase in title of my talk.
[00:38:08.230]And - Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore recently pointed out that
[00:38:13.218]the period during which the student movements of the 60s took place -
[00:38:18.010]the period that came sort of at the end of the New Deal period -
[00:38:22.508]was really only this blip on the historical radar.
[00:38:28.959]And this also is a period of liberalism at home, which is
[00:38:32.589]conjoined with massive violence in Vietnam and elsewhere
[00:38:37.008]on the part of the same liberal administrations, right?
[00:38:39.685]Their argument is that this period of "kind and gentle" capitalism
[00:38:44.068]of the 1950s and 1960s that begins to end at the beginning of the 1970s
[00:38:49.599]is in fact a blip on the historical radar.
[00:38:54.070]So if there was a Gilded Age, you know, we use the phrase "the golden age"
[00:38:58.239]of maximum exploitation
[00:39:01.159]and the decades leading up to the turn of the last century
[00:39:05.160]and if we are now in what the centrist liberal commentator Paul Krugman calls
[00:39:10.129]a "New Gilded Age," doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination
[00:39:14.988]to realize that capitalism is always at least striving to be a golden age;
[00:39:21.749]an age of maximum exploitation with no checks on the right or the ability
[00:39:26.089]of a certain class to extract profit from another.
[00:39:30.980]German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck pointed out recently in his book
[00:39:37.392]"How Will Capitalism End?" that even the link between capitalism and democracy
[00:39:42.100]that we take for granted is very tenuous at best.
[00:39:46.580]and of course we know that capitalism and authoritarianism exist very well in
[00:39:52.040]in Russia, in China, and in Latin American dictatorships
[00:39:55.461]over the past several decades.
[00:39:58.120]Streeck argues that this association between capitalism and democracy
[00:40:02.851]is only really powerful in the interwar period between 1919 and 1933.
[00:40:09.522][ silence ]
[00:40:12.522]So if it were the case, as some might suggest, that we're now seeing the
[00:40:16.172]rise of a hollowed-out sham democracy as a façade for corporate rule,
[00:40:22.361]protected by a heavily militarized police force,
[00:40:25.680]then it makes us think about the old common term
[00:40:29.371]definition that fascism has: "The open terroristic dictatorship of the most
[00:40:34.883]reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital."
[00:40:41.611]Now, you know, that definition has received a lot of criticism because it's
[00:40:46.389]kind of a vulgar Marxist interpretation of the link between capitalism and fascism.
[00:40:55.245]Nevertheless, one's mind, under certain circumstances, can be called to - uh -
[00:41:02.202]to return to it.
[00:41:08.132]So with the Old Left, we had a situation of mass poverty -
[00:41:12.805]think back to the industrial revolution -
[00:41:15.156]the Manchester that Engles saw and that Marx wrote about -
[00:41:22.051]this social question that was produced by the industrial revolution.
[00:41:25.573]And with the New Left, we have a post-materialist turn,
[00:41:29.623]made possible by rising prosperity - you've probably all heard the term
[00:41:33.013]"Post-materialism" to denote this period in which people, like student radicals
[00:41:37.817]in the 60s, embrace new concerns because they know that
[00:41:41.453]they will have a job; they can go off to the Peace Corps or whatever.
[00:41:44.951]Very than how students feel nowadays I think.
[00:41:49.063]If we think about this, if we have this Old Left and this New Left that is
[00:41:53.974]post-materialist, which produces a cultural revolution which succeeds
[00:41:58.614]at that, but fails to produce a political revolution,
[00:42:03.158]what do we have now in a "post-post-materialist" society in which
[00:42:08.044]ever greater wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands?
[00:42:13.039]Occupy Wall Street, a while back, put class back on the agenda
[00:42:19.973]with its idea of a 99% facing a super-rich 1%.
[00:42:26.132]Occupy has been criticized for its tactics, and one criticism has been that
[00:42:30.943]if you can't occupy a place in the face of state power -
[00:42:35.914]if you can't not be expelled from Zuccotti Park, etc. etc. -
[00:42:39.573]then you haven't actually occupied anything.
[00:42:42.524]But they did put this issue of class back on the agenda.
[00:42:46.914]and they also put on the agenda, or they at least called attention to the fact that
[00:42:51.363]protest is no longer enough for the left but rather that organization is key
[00:42:57.255]which is something that they were accused of lacking.
[00:43:01.704]Identity has been used as a weapon against class in recent history
[00:43:10.474]and in truth, you know, the two are not in opposition.
[00:43:13.162]We saw this problem in the recent electoral campaign with the myth
[00:43:16.874]of the so-called "Bernie Bro," and this is really nothing less
[00:43:21.422]than an attempt to use identity politics to smear anyone who's attempting
[00:43:26.456]to assert a class perspective.
[00:43:28.915]And it goes against the facts of the matter because Bernie Sanders
[00:43:32.495]had many, many supporters among minorities and women.
[00:43:38.135]I've been charged, as you know, by the organizers with the task of
[00:43:41.492]considering what, in these revolutionary traditions that I've discussed,
[00:43:45.485]is still relevant for today.
[00:43:47.755]And, I guess I don't agree with the organizers if, in positing the idea of a
[00:43:52.716]post-revolutionary future, they mean to suggest that revolution is no longer
[00:43:56.682]possible - although don't ask me when it will come or what form it will take.
[00:44:01.303]But I think about Naomi Klein's recent book about the climate crisis
[00:44:07.456]in which she suggested that climate change could
[00:44:10.811]force a reckoning with capitalism that all the revolutionary moments
[00:44:15.506]of the past were unable to accomplish.
[00:44:18.776]Would such reckoning be a revolutionary one or would it be an evolutionary one?
[00:44:22.786]I don't really have an answer to the question that Marco raised about
[00:44:26.678]thinking outside the boundaries of the present. I mean,
[00:44:30.345]I think a little bit about Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist
[00:44:34.385]who was imprisoned under Mussolini, and his influential idea of the hegemony -
[00:44:39.716]that is, the process by which the ruling class
[00:44:43.016]is able to do precisely what Marco was talking about, which is
[00:44:46.326]to make it impossible to think outside the bounds of the current situation.
[00:44:51.736]And this is in fact something that's done by the creation of "common sense."
[00:44:57.398]In Gramsci's italian, "common sense" is created that dictates that, for example,
[00:45:02.968]revolution could not be possible. Right?
[00:45:06.997]I just wanted to say that, well, first of all, just since I put this image up
[00:45:10.967]I'll say something quick about it.
[00:45:14.206]This is in 1968 in West Berlin and it says "State of Emergency,"
[00:45:20.953]and it has 1848 which is of course the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848,
[00:45:26.548]it has 1968 and it also has 1933. The reason in the German context
[00:45:31.267]that it has 1933 is because that's the year that the Nazis come to power
[00:45:34.763]and declare a state of emergency.
[00:45:37.022]So there is the the dialectical relationship between the threat from
[00:45:41.002]fascism and the birth and inversions of left-wing movements which
[00:45:46.557]we don't really have time to get into today.
[00:45:51.718]Marco, in his preliminary conversation, made reference to an essay of Toulouse
[00:45:59.318]in which he suggested that May '68 did not take place.
[00:46:06.059]And he meant this in the sense that 1968 did not fail - indeed could not fail
[00:46:11.579]because it was not a set of empirical events as much as a temporary
[00:46:15.509]eruption of a potential, inherent in
[00:46:18.480]modern society, that returns again and again.
[00:46:24.680]What is this potential?
[00:46:28.204]I would say it's sudden recognition, driven mostly but not entirely
[00:46:33.447]by the young, that they have problems that can't be named, that they share
[00:46:38.559]these problems with others, and that they can struggle together to solve
[00:46:42.350]these problems on the basis of solidarity, comradeship, and truthfulness.
[00:46:48.641]'68 and moments like it is when the ghost of social revolution past reappears.
[00:46:54.984]People see each other in the street, maybe even talk;
[00:46:58.791]it's when the printing presses start up, manned by young people
[00:47:02.229]and some older people who suddenly realize they have something urgent to say.
[00:47:06.290]It's when, for a moment at least, nobody really believes the "can't"
[00:47:11.360]that normally governs social relations. It's sort of when a window opens up,
[00:47:16.469]in which everyone is suddenly paying attention.
[00:47:19.169]And in that moment, the possibility of utopia suddenly appears.
[00:47:23.609]It's kind of captured nicely in this image from the Atelier Populaire
[00:47:28.770]which says, of course, "Return to normal..."
[00:47:31.759]and the normal is being sheep, right?
[00:47:35.459]It's interesting because they saw the moment they were living through
[00:47:39.874]as this moment of some sort of utopian outbreak that wasn't normal
[00:47:46.150]and of course, we discussed earlier today about how that moment can never last.
[00:47:50.450]It always has to fade back into the normal
[00:47:52.702]but I mean, look at '68 at one of these historical moments in which
[00:47:56.499]there is something that's not normal that happens, that then can be
[00:48:00.409]returned to, and that not-normal thing
[00:48:03.362]is sort of what I just described.
[00:48:05.781]So I've been looking at the meaning of 1968 precisely here.
[00:48:10.141]1968 was against the Cold War. It was against the arms race.
[00:48:13.803]It was against the madness of the mutually assured destruction doctrine,
[00:48:18.911]according to which all powers who could have conflict would be destroyed.
[00:48:23.180]It was against imperialism. It sought to recover lost revolutionary traditions
[00:48:28.112]and invent new ones. It made missteps. It was incomplete. It couldn't always
[00:48:33.851]figure out what was valuable in the old revolutionary traditions.
[00:48:37.802]It couldn't bridge the gap between a political movement to change society
[00:48:42.421]and a countercultural movement to drop out of society.
[00:48:46.251]They became unduly enamored with third-world liberation movements that were
[00:48:50.461]themselves not particularly democratic. It was uncritical about things like Maoism
[00:48:55.732]and there's no surprise that the former '68ers were most embarassed and most
[00:49:00.352]trying to distance themselves when their previous actions were denounced.
[00:49:04.903]The anarchists aren't trying to distance themselves from being anarchists.
[00:49:08.143]Just saying. [ laughter ]
[00:49:12.161]It struggled to accommodate the voices of women, gays and minorities.
[00:49:18.101]But 1968 was opening; it sought to name the problems, to connect the dots,
[00:49:23.532]and to struggle collectively for solutions.
[00:49:26.759]It was a moment when a bunch of separate streams
[00:49:29.602]became, for a little while, a raging torrent.
[00:49:34.422]There's a famous story in which the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai
[00:49:38.013]was asked in 1972 what he made of the French Revolution
[00:49:43.293]and Zhou said "Too early to tell."
[00:49:46.686][ laughter]
[00:49:48.014]This is such a good story, and I wanted to have it in my book
[00:49:51.015]but I realized it's actually apocryphal because apparently
[00:49:54.333]there was a mistranslation and Zhou was talking about 1968
[00:49:58.574]and it was too early to tell what the meaning of 1968 was.
[00:50:02.835]But I think this wonderful quote works both ways because it is,
[00:50:06.293]in some ways, sadly still too early to tell
[00:50:09.594]what the outcome of the French Revolution is, but it's definitely,
[00:50:14.003]as a historian, too early to tell what 1968 means.
[00:50:18.484]But I've made a little bit of a foray into that for you today so
[00:50:24.025]I hope that was interesting.
[00:50:26.834][Applause]

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Timothy Scott Brown - Part 1: Lecture

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