The Red Flag: A History of Communism (82 page)

There was, then, no necessary contradiction between Communism and modern popular culture, but Communist parties still reacted to it in a ‘prehistoric’ way. Khrushchev and his generation had dragged Communism into the space and nuclear age. But modernity had moved on, and the ageing Communist leaders looked increasingly ‘prehistoric’, just as their politics seemed conservative.

‘I like rightists.’ Thus did the
ne plus ultra
of Communist radicalism, Mao Zedong, address the notorious anti-Communist, American President Richard Nixon, during their summit in Beijing on 21 February 1972. Equally implausibly, Nixon, not known for his interest in theory, claimed a desire to discuss ‘philosophic problems [
sic
]’ with Mao.
⁹¹
A mere two years earlier, few would have predicted this extraordinary rapprochement between the most radical force in the Communist world and the ‘jittery chieftain of US imperialism’, as the Chinese press had dubbed Nixon.

Just over three months later, on 29 May, Nixon met the other Communist bloc leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in the distinctly unrevolutionary surroundings of the Kremlin’s St Catherine Hall, an architectural orgy of gilt and crystal. They had come together to sign a range of treaties, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and a document outlining new foundations for US–Soviet relations.

Brezhnev’s willingness to make peace was no surprise, given his character and the changes in Soviet thinking since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also, the détente of 1972 achieved much of what Stalin had hoped for in 1945. The world was formally carved up into spheres of superpower influence. Now that East and West were more equal – at least in military and geopolitical terms – Brezhnev had succeeded in securing the recognition of the Communist empire in Eastern Europe which the Americans had denied for so long.

Mao’s reincarnation as a peacemaker is, of course, more unexpected. But both Communist leaders were facing similar difficulties, weakened as they were by the revolutionary explosions of the late 1960s and strategically vulnerable. As Brezhnev was trying to stabilize his bloc after the Prague Spring of 1968, Mao was still restoring order after his own Cultural Revolution, whilst anxious about military threats from the USSR and India. He therefore had good reasons to turn to the ‘right’.

It was Nixon, however, who had most reason to compromise. For after its apparent success in suppressing revolutions in the Third World in the mid-1960s, American power was shaken by resistance in Vietnam. As in 1945 – and indeed 1919 – statesmen negotiating in grand residences and palatial halls could not impose their will on the turbulent South. And even more worryingly for Washington, it found that its opponents in the Third World had attracted sympathizers closer to home – on its own university campuses and in its inner cities. In 1968, from Washington to Istanbul, from Paris to Mexico City, politicians anxiously looked on as a new generation of revolutionaries took to the streets.

In March 1968 a charity fashion show was held in Addis Ababa University’s Ras Makonnen Hall in an atmosphere of high tension.
¹
It was organized by Linda Thistle, an American Peace Corps volunteer who ran extracurricular activities at the girls’ hostel, and followed a show the previous year when a Californian firm had donated modish creations from ‘Salon Exquisite’ and ‘La Merveilleuse’ – including the fashionable miniskirt. The 1967 show had generated critical articles in the Ethiopian student press; miniskirts were especially controversial. Whilst some of the arguments were nationalistic or Africanist – fashion shows were ‘un-Ethiopian’, an ‘opium that has contaminated Europe’ – denunciations also carried a distinctively Marxist tone. Indeed, such rhetoric had become pervasive in student circles at the time. ‘The fashion show is nothing but [an]… agency for neo-colonialism… an instrument for the creation of [a] favourable market for [Western] luxury goods,’ one article thundered.
²
Thistle responded to the criticism by excluding mini-skirts and transforming the event into the first African fashion show on the continent, featuring only ‘African fabrics’. But the radical students were not to be so easily appeased. Some argued that no fashion show, however nationalistic, could be justified in such a poor country. But questions of gender, and power relations between the male and female students, were also at issue. The men saw the event as evidence that Ethiopian women, seduced by Western mores and decadent lifestyles, were neglecting the more serious business of political discussion and activism. As one, Wellelign Makonnen, explained, ‘Our sisters’ heads have been washed with western soap… American philosophy of life leads nowhere.’
³

The dispute eventually erupted into a small but violent demonstration. About fifty angry male students gathered outside the hall, abused and slapped the women, jostled foreign visitors, threw rotten eggs at some of the guests, and dragged others from their cars. Soon the police were summoned, violence escalated and the police arrested a number of radical students, including the editor of the student journal,
Struggle
. Meanwhile the University authorities – with the American University Vice-President at the forefront – decided to close the institute. Marxism and anti-Americanism had been a palpable sentiment amongst Ethiopian students for some time. Americans were associated with the increasingly unpopular regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, and a couple of months before the fashion show, the US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had been prevented from speaking to students by a rowdy anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
⁴
But the events at the Ras Makonnen Hall signalled the final breach between the student movement and the Selassie regime; many of the students involved would go on to play a central role in the Ethiopian revolution of 1974.

A couple of weeks before, in New York, a young Berkeley graduate, Dona Fowler, read out a petition with sixty-six signatures, which championed the miniskirt and threatened to picket department stores with banners demanding ‘Down with the Maxi!’ But whilst Thistle’s and Fowler’s generation was just as angry about Vietnam and ‘American imperialism’ as its Ethiopian peers (and were indeed just as fond of Marxist sloganeering), their immediate concerns and overall vision of politics could not have been more different. For Fowler and her sisterly protestors, miniskirts symbolized personal and gender liberation, a rejection of the disciplined and masculine culture they believed had prevailed in the United States since World War II. But for Wellelign Makonnen, these garments flaunted a decadent attitude that was holding Ethiopia back; rigorous discipline, not frivolous liberation, was precisely what was needed. Both groups of youth voiced Marxist slogans, but those of the Ethiopians, which harked back to the militant Radical Marxism of late 1920s Russia, contrasted rather sharply with the more democratic, Romantic Marxism of the Americans.

The year 1968 saw the explosion of a whole range of long-established resentments heralding a high tide of revolutions throughout the world. Never before nor again would Marxist language be so fashionable and commonplace, as activists in the global South joined those in the West
to struggle against ‘imperialism’, ‘racism’ and ‘paternalism’. The number of Marxist regimes proliferated and the map of world Communism was at its reddest. And yet beneath the apparent unity, Communism had never been so diverse and disunited. The decade or so after 1968 saw it emerge in all its varieties. It was as if the whole history of the movement had been condensed into one febrile decade: from a late 1920s-style Stalinism in Africa, to a Cultural Revolution Maoism in Cambodia; from the Popular Front Communism of Allende’s Chile, to the Marxist Romanticism of the
soixante-huitards
; from an almost Social Democratic Eurocommunism, to Nicaragua’s Guevara-inspired guerrilla struggle.

But the sense of Romantic liberation and democracy beckoned by 1968 proved fleeting. Though the defeat of American power in Vietnam had emboldened a vast range of radical political and social forces, the United States and its allies soon rallied. And as Communist movements and regimes became entangled in great power rivalry and Cold War competition, the politics of protest meetings, discussion groups and love-ins gave way to those of guns, bombs and grenades. Khrushchev’s Third World ‘zone of peace’ had become a bloody battlefield.

In the summer of 1964 about a thousand American students from Northern universities – most of them white – travelled to the Southern state of Mississippi as part of a campaign by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to fight against the racial segregation that prevailed there. During the ‘Mississippi Summer’, the students lived in communes – or ‘Freedom Houses’ – or with local black families, registered voters and taught in ‘Freedom Schools’.
⁵
Much of this earnest activity recalled the ‘Going to the People’ movement of idealistic young Russians in 1874. But unlike the Russian agrarian socialists, these American students were joining an already well-established grass-roots movement and their relations with the local African-Americans were good. Nevertheless, like their Russian forebears, they had to contend with repression. Ten days after they arrived, three students were beaten to death by segregationists (assisted by the local police) and many more were victimized.
⁶

The Mississippi Summer was a radicalizing experience for all involved; and it was with anger, therefore, that a group of returning Berkeley students discovered they had been banned by the university authorities from land which they had previously used to set up stalls and distribute political leaflets. When the police turned up to enforce the ban, one student, Mario Savio, led a ‘sit-in’ around the police car – a technique used in Southern civil rights demonstrations. Attempts by Berkeley to punish Savio provoked the newly formed ‘Free Speech Movement’ (FSM) to organize massive sit-ins and demonstrations involving an estimated 10,500 of the university’s 27,000 students. These remarkable events became a model for student protests that was swiftly exported, making Berkeley, in a sense, the epicentre of the series of rebellions (or even ‘revolutions’) which swept across America, Europe and beyond and which we call ‘1968’.

The Berkeley student movement, like its Russian and Chinese predecessors, was an attack on both legally sanctioned inequality – in this case ethnic – and on paternalistic power structures, and in particular the university authorities. Savio explicitly linked civil rights and university politics in a speech of 1965:

Savio’s language is strikingly radical, but before the 1964 demonstration he was not known as an especially politicized person. As an Italian-American – one of the ethnic groups that had been so successfully mobilized in the anti-Communist crusade – Savio was a beneficiary of the welfare state of Truman and Eisenhower. He was also attending a university (or ‘multiversity’ as it proclaimed itself) committed both to technological research – some of it for the military effort – and to social mobility, at least for white Americans. Berkeley was therefore typical of many universities, especially in the Western world, which had rapidly expanded and now counted amongst their students many people from rather modest families with no previous history of higher education. And like the first-generation students in 1860s Russia, they did not always appreciate the rather hierarchical and sometimes alienating
educational culture they encountered. As one student recalled, ‘We really did speak of Berkeley as a factory. Classes were immense, and you didn’t feel that you could get near professors because they were this presence way up in front of the lectern.’
⁸

In recent years it has become common to see the student rebellions of the 1960s as naïve and self-indulgent, but whatever our opinion of their objectives, we should not underestimate their historical significance. For like their Romantic student predecessors, they registered a fundamental shift in worldview. Western students of the 1960s and 1970s were taking a stand against all ‘fathers’, whether at home, in the university or in the state. Within the essentially fraternal communities fostered by student life, young people were questioning traditional hierarchies and authority, challenging prevailing attitudes to women and gay people, and even experimenting with new forms of domestic life in hippie communes.
⁹
At the same time the feminist and homosexual rights movements challenged traditional patriarchal attitudes. At the centre of their vision, therefore, lay a participatory form of democracy. Much of this iconoclasm was the consequence of a long-term change in the position of young people since the 1950s. With higher incomes and the autonomy of higher education, the young seemed more independent and assertive than in the past.