The Red Flag: A History of Communism (83 page)

Moreover, as the elision of the university and the ‘factory’ illustrated, a critique of gender and ethnic discrimination, along with paternalism, could soon evolve into a more generalized attack on what was perceived by some as the ‘military-welfare state’ of the post-war era. To their critics it seemed that Western states, though not as regimented as their Soviet-style counterparts, demanded an intolerable degree of social discipline. Factories were governed by the ‘Fordist’ production line, and corporations had become huge, hierarchical and alienating. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, when many feared Stalinist subversion and accepted the imperative need to rebuild swiftly shattered economies and societies, such discipline had seemed defensible. But as in the Soviet bloc, once the threat of real war retreated, the young were less willing to submit to these constraints for which the compensations of welfare and consumer goods seemed insufficient. As Barbara Garson, the editor of the FSM newsletter, wrote: ‘Many people were beginning to say: “I want to do something with my life. I don’t want to be a sharply chiseled tool to be used for corporate profit.”’
¹⁰

In crucial respects, therefore, the Western student movements differed from their Russian and Chinese forebears: they were suspicious of the very technology, machinery and organizational modernity that their predecessors had so admired. Indeed they were challenging a fundamental element of the Promethean project, as was perhaps not surprising, given the fact that they did not perceive their societies as ‘backward’ and were uninterested in international competition. In some ways the protests of the mid-1960s, with their attacks on ‘imperialistic’ and ‘militaristic’ fathers by rebellious sons and daughters, were closer to the convention-ridiculing Dadaists of World War I than to Chernyshevskii and Lu Xun. The European Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s acknowledged that debt. Convinced that deep down Western men and women were ‘alienated’ by philistine consumer society, they believed that provocation and ‘spectacle’ would shock them out of their numbed complacency.
¹¹
The main theorist of the ‘Situationist International’, Guy Debord, insisted that ‘proletarian revolutions’ had to be ‘festivals’ based on ‘play’ and the indulging of ‘untrammelled desire’.
¹²
Debord’s book,
The Society of the Spectacle
, published at the end of 1967, became one of the gospels of Western student revolutionaries.

But as had happened during World War I an essentially aesthetic frustration at bourgeois philistinism evolved into a more political Romanticism, bearing powerful Marxist influences. Indeed, it brought the return of the Lukács–Frankfurt School brand of Marxism to prominence. Herbert Marcuse, a pre-war Frankfurt School luminary who had left Germany for the United States in 1934, was to emerge as philosopher-in-chief of the 1968 student revolt. His
One-Dimensional Man
, published in 1964, was an extreme restatement of the Romantic Marxist worldview, albeit one now exotically blended with Freud. Marcuse argued that modern capitalism was imbued with a technocratic rationality that had fused the ‘Welfare state and the Warfare state’ to produce a ‘society of total mobilization’. Consumerism and hierarchical institutions like corporations, the military and political parties had established a ‘mechanics of conformity’, people were alienated and autonomy was suppressed whilst the genuinely pleasurable, creative and erotic aspects of life had been outlawed.
¹³
In Marcuse’s rejection of the Modernist Marxism of planning and rationality, one sees a revival of Fourier’s phalansteries and the Romantic ‘Young Marx’. And given his rejection of the Marxist synthesis of modernity and revolution, it is
hardly surprising that Marcuse condemned Soviet Communism as vociferously as he did capitalism. For him both industrial capitalism and Communism were heirs of Nazism – ‘totalitarian’ orders, ruled by soulless technocratic elites.

Marcuse’s deep mistrust of technology and science, and his view of Nazism, industrial capitalism and Soviet Communism as all symptomatic of a ‘totalitarian’ syndrome, permeated the Romantic left politics and culture of the 1960s. Domineering fathers, Nazis and atom bombs were vividly yoked in the soon cultic poetry of the American Sylvia Plath. And 1960s technophobia haunted the powerful films of Stanley Kubrick. The figure of Dr Strangelove in his 1964 satirical film of that name encapsulated many of Marcuse’s themes – a bomb-obsessed German-born scientist and adviser to the American president, whose mechanical arm kept rising in an involuntary Nazi salute.
¹⁴
In
2001: A Space Odyssey
, first shown in 1968, technological progress is shown as a sinister force that leads to violence, most famously in the form of the murderous Cyclopean computer HAL.
¹⁵
Mario Savio’s most famous speech at the Berkeley rallies was full of this Romantic rhetoric:

Marcuse was, however, merely the most prominent of the ‘New Left’ thinkers – an eclectic group, amongst whom we can count the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, the British historian E. P. Thompson and the Greek-born Trotskyist intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis. In adopting the label ‘New Left’, they consciously defined themselves against an ‘old’ left, both Social Democratic and Soviet Communist. Their objections to the old left were numerous; they disliked its obsession with party organization and hierarchy, championing instead free discussion and participatory democracy. But at its root the conflict between old and new left turned on conceptions of equality and power: for 1960s thinkers economic equality alone (a core value of the old left) was simply not enough. More important was a change in authority relations, a cultural revolution and an end to all forms of hierarchy. As Gregory Calvert, a president of the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) explained, ‘revolutionary mass movements are not built out of a
desire for the acquisition of material goods… Revolutionary movements are freedom struggles born out of the perception of the contradictions between human potentiality and oppressive actuality.’
¹⁷

This opposition to ‘economistic’ Marxism was closely connected with disillusionment with the industrial working class, which (at least in northern Europe and the United States) the radicals believed had been bought off by the ‘warfare–welfare state’. The new revolutionaries would be an alliance of groups who suffered from legal, political or racial discrimination in a world dominated by an imperialistic United States – an alliance of students, African-Americans, Third World revolutionaries, women and homosexuals. As Wright Mills wrote in his ‘Letter to the New Left’ of 1960:

By the early 1960s the parallels between African-American civil rights at home and American anti-Communism abroad seemed obvious to some intellectuals and activists. But it was only with the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that the comparison became a commonplace. With the doubling of military conscription, students were inevitably radicalized. Although deferments were possible, avoiding the draft was often difficult. Protests began in the universities in 1965, and radical academics began to cancel normal lectures and organize ‘teach-ins’, based on the Mississippi Freedom Schools – day-long seminars on the war. One Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) member remembered how powerful the New Left conception of an alliance between students, blacks and Vietnamese had become:

A radical anti-imperialist language became increasingly dominant within the SDS. As another SDS activist and future terrorist, Cathy Wilkerson,
recalled, it was at this time that Vietnam and a perception of persistent economic inequality led her from liberal democracy to the revolutionary belief that ‘we could sweep out the old government ourselves’, and ‘any “sweeping out” would not be accomplished without a fight, given the violent nature of our government’.
²⁰
By 1967, the SDS leadership – though not always the rank-and-file – was turning to revolutionary Marxism, because, as Carl Oglesby explained, ‘there was – and is – no other coherent, integrative, and explicit philosophy of revolution’.
²¹

A similar radicalization was occurring in the civil-rights movement. The Vietnam conflict was the cause of a double resentment, as resources were funnelled away from social programmes and into the war, whilst a far higher proportion of blacks than whites found themselves conscripted. Martin Luther King’s non-violent strategy which had worked so well in the South did not resonate with the radical youths of the Northern cities where violent riots erupted in the summer of 1967.
²²
A new generation of Black Power politicians drew freely from the rhetoric of guerrilla Communists, and in particular the violent Third Worldism of the Martinique-born revolutionary, Franz Fanon. Speaking in London in 1967, one of Black Power’s most charismatic spokesmen, Stokely Carmichael, quoted Fanon and Che Guevara in a paean of praise to political violence, adding:

The rebellion also spread to America’s ‘empire by invitation’ in Western Europe. Anger at events in Vietnam was central to all student protests there, particularly once TV screens began to fill with images of airborne, mechanized violence. Opposition to the war grew rapidly in those states where the government supported the conflict, as in Britain. One British student remembered: ‘There was the bombing and the relentlessness of the bombing… I think people now probably don’t understand that, but it was just terrible. Everything that was progress was being used to destroy… My feelings were so strong that I feared the sense of my own violence.’
²⁴
Europe’s elites began to question their support for the United
States. France’s De Gaulle refused to contribute to NATO operations, and the British declared that financial difficulties would force them to reduce their troop commitment in Europe.

The United States, of course, never experienced a Marxist revolution, but 1968 brought a taste of it. At home and abroad waves of rebellion, partly inspired by ethnic nationalism, partly by various very different forms of Marxism, were threatening the American
imperium
. President Johnson, faced with ‘guerrillas’ in both urban America and Vietnam, was determined to continue welfare at home and warfare abroad. But as in so many empires in the past, a combination of domestic unrest, defeat abroad and financial profligacy provoked a crisis.

The (partial) defeat came in Vietnam, and was of huge symbolic importance. Johnson, convinced that its fall would undermine American credibility and embolden Moscow and Beijing throughout the world, had decided to send American troops into Vietnam in 1965. And he had a point: Vietnam was central to the Cold War conflicts, and America’s successful halting of the North Vietnamese advance in 1954 had indeed blunted Moscow’s and Beijing’s resolve in the Third World for some time. However, as critics argued, by ‘Americanizing’ the conflict, Johnson had dangerously raised the stakes. Undersecretary of State George Ball’s prediction that a military failure would have far worse consequences for American credibility than a peaceful compromise, proved prescient.
²⁵
Though initially pessimistic about the Vietnamese Communists’ prospects, Moscow and Beijing were determined to counter American military support with their own, and poured money and weapons into the conflict. The result was stalemate. Meanwhile, American bombing and destruction of forests with chemical defoliants only pushed more South Vietnamese into the arms of the Viet Cong.

In January 1968, in what became known as the ‘Tet Offensive’ after the Vietnamese term for New Year, 67,000 Viet Cong troops attacked the major cities in the South. It was, in effect, a mass suicide mission, and though it was eventually beaten back, the accompanying media images of Communist fighters attacking and occupying the United States embassy in Saigon were deeply humiliating for Washington, and encouraged radicals everywhere. As one West Berlin student remembered: