The Red Flag: A History of Communism (84 page)

The Johnson administration was stunned. The Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, remembered that ‘there was, for a brief time, something approaching paralysis, and a sense of events spiraling out of control of the nation’s leaders’.
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The elite split, with the military demanding more troops whilst Clifford and others called for disengagement. More importantly, the markets began to lose faith in Washington’s ability to finance the war, and in March the dollar came under serious strain as investors fled. The old Bretton Woods system that fixed the dollar to gold was under threat.

Johnson was forced into a partial retreat. The war continued, but on 31 March he announced that the escalation was over: bombing was to be limited, military demands for a massive build-up of troops were rejected, and peace talks offered. Meanwhile, he was compelled to accept that the Bretton Woods system, and with it the economic hegemony the United States had enjoyed since 1945, was unsustainable. As the dollar cracked, so did the legitimacy of American global power, both at home and abroad. The spring and summer of 1968 saw the high point of protests throughout the world as the enemies of American power scented weakness. In the United States, the assassination of Martin Luther King in March sparked off riots in 126 cities, whilst in August student protests at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention brought police repression.

Outside the United States, in its Western sphere of influence, the Vietnam War and ‘American imperialism’ (along with more mundane university governance grievances) became the major targets of student demonstrations. Students fought with police from Rome to Tokyo, from Paris to West Berlin. But the rebellions also took on specific national colourings. In countries with a fascist past – Germany and Italy – students demanded that the guilt of the older generation, which they believed had been suppressed, be exposed. In southern Europe workers played a central role in the revolts.
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Elsewhere, the rhetoric of civil rights merged with Radical Marxism to fuel nationalistic protests. In Belgium, students protested against the dominance of the French language in Flemish
universities. In Northern Ireland, a broad alliance of liberal Republicans, Catholics and Marxists challenged the Protestant ascendancy, drawing on the example of American civil rights. It became more radical as violence increased, and in 1969 Republican Marxists took over the Ulster civil rights movement, casting it as a struggle against imperialism.

Everywhere, though, whatever the local specificities, a Romantic, participatory Marxism was the inspiration – one that set itself firmly against Soviet Marxism (especially coming so soon on the heels of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia). Che Guevara was now joined by Ho Chi Minh in a new pantheon of leftist heroes – Ho’s distinction being principally his defiance of the USA; people knew little of his politics. Stalin, however, had definitely been excluded.

The immediate consequence of the 1968 rebellions and the North Vietnamese offensive was the humbling of various Western governments and politicians. Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek another presidential term; the Belgian government fell in February; and in France a general strike seriously undermined President De Gaulle, and forced Prime Minister Pompidou to agree to a massive 35 per cent increase in the minimum wage. But the longer-term repercussions of this series of rebellions were more profound. They signalled the unwillingness of the West’s youth to fight for control of the global South, whilst also triggering a wage explosion that undermined the economic order established at Bretton Woods. The
soixante-huitards
had then, in effect, signalled the beginning of the end of the post-World War II order.
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Nowhere, however, did the movements of 1968 achieve lasting power. In large part this was the result of the diversity of their objectives. Students, concerned with democratizing everyday life, and workers, often more concerned with economic demands, found it especially difficult to forge long-lasting alliances. The New Left’s inherent suspicion of conventional ‘bureaucratic’ politics made it difficult to achieve lasting goals. Shunning party organization, they failed to develop coherent programmes or sustain political victories.

In the short term, the convulsions of 1968 contributed to the electoral victories of the right. Elections in France brought a landslide victory for De Gaulle, and the conservative Republican Richard Nixon won the United States presidency, promising to counter the ‘revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country’.
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The West had experienced a revolutionary crisis akin to the failed revolutions of
1789–1815, 1848 and 1918–19; and like them it too was followed by a pronounced swing to the right. Yet it was some time before order was to be restored.

On the radical left, the defeats of the summer of 1968 led to a reassessment of the revolutionary project. Some of the rebels now decided that the New Left was too democratic in these violent times, and more Radical, far-left Marxist parties emerged, mainly Maoist and Trotskyist.
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Their precise character varied from place to place. Some, like the Maoist
Gauche Prolétarienne
(Proletarian Left) – whose sympathizers included much of the cream of the French intelligentsia, including Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher Michel Foucault and the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard – were relatively decentralized.
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Daniel Singer, a participant in the Parisian
évènements
of 1968, described the appeal of the Maoists:

More commonly, however, Maoists valued organization and discipline, even more so than Trotskyists. This Radical Marxist obsession with ideological coherence and unity led to endless splits and disputes – so well lampooned in the biblical satire
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
(1979), in the absurd rivalry between the Judean People’s Front, the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean Popular People’s Front and the oneman Popular Front of Judea.
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Yet whilst tiny groupuscules proliferated, the far left was surprisingly popular in some countries. Almost 100,000 activists were involved in Italy, and in Germany polls showed that 30 per cent of secondary and university students sympathized with Communist ideologies – largely of the New Left or far-left variety.
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The same conviction that New Leftist participatory democracy had failed inspired the transition to a more radicalized politics of conspiracy and terrorism. If the Vietnamese had won victories through a disciplined Marxist-Leninist party and military force, surely that was the right
strategy in the West as well? Such was the thinking of the terrorist Weathermen, the group named after a line in a Bob Dylan song (‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’) that broke from the SDS in 1969. SDS member Cathy Wilkerson remembered the reasoning behind this decision to build a Marxist-Leninist party, for ‘popular democracy must be a luxury that we would have to forgo until the world became a more peaceful place’.
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Members now trained themselves in martial arts and subjected themselves to Maoist self-criticism sessions. The ‘Americong’, as they called themselves, sought to ‘bring the war home’ with violent protests and bombings.

Even so, these extremists were very small in number, especially in America. Marxist terrorists, though, had more impact elsewhere. In Northern Ireland, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) split from the Marxist Republicans and launched an armed struggle for a united Ireland; in France the
Gauche Prolétarienne
also formed an armed wing. But the most fertile ground for terrorism lay in West Germany and Italy, where they used the argument that the authorities were profoundly compromised by the Nazi or Fascist pasts.
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In both countries the terrorists were drawn largely from the educated middle class and included a high proportion of women. The most prominent German group was the Red Army Faction (RAF), commonly called the ‘Baader–Meinhof Gang’ after the charismatic, aggressive and violence-loving Andreas Baader and the well-known left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof. Meinhof, who came from an anti-Nazi family, had originally joined the illegal East-German-aligned German Communist Party (KPD) in 1958, believing that it best embodied the anti-fascist tradition, before eventually embracing the New Left.
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The real or supposed persistence of fascism in contemporary Germany was not, however, the most inflammatory issue; it was the question of German official attitudes to American-supported regimes in the Third World – though when a student demonstrator was killed during a visit by the Shah of Iran in 1967 the themes converged. From 1970 the group began their campaign of urban terrorism, which continued until the gang’s arrest in 1972. Yet even from within prison the RAF’s leaders managed to recruit and orchestrate a new group of terrorists. Though their numbers were tiny, the terrorists elicited a notable degree of public support, with a quarter of West Germans under the age of thirty expressing broad sympathy in 1971, and 14 per cent actively willing to help.
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Italy’s terrorist groups were more numerous and larger and had deeper roots in society. Like the German terrorists, they believed that they were continuing the wartime struggle against a quasi-fascist state, and in the case of Italy they could appeal to the tradition of the wartime Resistance. It was widely believed that authoritarian groups within the Italian state favoured the use of violent tactics against radical students and workers, and that bombings in Milan in 1969 had been organized by neo-fascist groups in collaboration with the police and the CIA to justify a crackdown. For one terrorist, the bombings ‘marked a decisive turning point for me as it closed the circle (which until then had still seemed open) between the institutions, the state and the right’.
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However, industrial unrest also gave the Italian extreme left their opportunity. Worker unrest formed a much greater part of ‘1968’ in southern Europe than in the North or the United States. Italy saw some of the most radical worker unrest with a strike wave that lasted for two years. Wage demands were important, but so too were more radical, egalitarian demands for self-management. Young workers followed students in demanding participatory democracy, and serious concessions were extracted from employers, including the election of factory councils. The ‘Red Brigades’ – the most prominent of all terrorist groups – emerged from radicals involved in the rash of strikes that hit urban North Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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And though from the mid-1970s repression forced the Red Brigades to become more clandestine, they also became more violent – and more effective in disrupting the state.

Italy was undergoing an economic downturn, but it was not alone in suffering serious industrial unrest. The 1968 disturbances in France were so effective because workers joined with students in a general strike that lasted over a fortnight. The diminished authority of governments after 1968 emboldened workers throughout Europe and the United States, but there were other reasons for their assertiveness. Full employment in some countries and post-1968 inflation gave them power, and also a new radical generation of workers was growing to maturity. Business had invested in new European plants in the 1940s and 1950s, taking advantage of cheap migrant labour, whether from southern Europe in the case of the north-west, or from the countryside within the nation in the case of southern Europe itself. As is so often the case, however, second-generation migrants proved less willing to put up with the hardships
their parents had endured. Countries – like Italy – that relied on their own citizens rather than foreign immigrants were especially affected by worker radicalism, because internal migrants linked industrial disputes with broader demands for equality and recognition.
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The Vietnam crisis, then, released and radicalized a cascade of preexisting grievances amongst students, ethnic minorities and workers. But whilst Marxist-Leninist rhetoric became fashionable, the rebels were, in reality, rejecting the orthodox, pro-Soviet Marxism of modernity and political pragmatism. Nineteen sixty-eight – both the student and worker rebellions in the West, and the Prague Spring in the East – was a major challenge to all orthodox Communist parties fearful of being outflanked by a new radical left. For a time the French party condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but under Soviet pressure it soon accepted the Husák ‘normalization’. It also refused to accept that France was experiencing a genuine revolutionary situation, and Waldeck Rochet accused the students of being ‘typical petty-bourgeois radicals’.
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The domestic rebellions, and the Prague Spring after them, led to serious splits within the party, though it retained its 21.5 per cent of the vote in the 1969 elections. The Italian party, in contrast, remained critical of the Soviets (even though it refused to split with them), and succeeded in appealing to some of the more radical student and working-class left. But ultimately the radical left was not tamed, and the Communists were forced to confront them later in the decade.