HUMANISM AND REVOLT
From France to Czechoslovakia, from Germany to Poland, from Spain to Italy, from the United States to the Soviet Union, the second half of the sixties was defined by the challenges of redefining oppositional politics, with varying degrees of participation and representation in efforts to assert the awakening of society as a response to a perceived crisis of the state. The fundamental difference among these movements was their attitude toward utopia, with crucial consequences for the reconceptualization of the political in all these countries. Some were anti-ideological, others were against established structures of authority, but all were variants of an activism advocating the new societal differentiations developed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The circumstances of bipolarism imposed, nevertheless, a significant difference in rationale: in the West, the logic of 1968 was of politically emancipating spaces previously exempt from public scrutiny; in the East, it was about humanizing Leninism, breaking its ideologically driven monopolistic grip on society.59 Or, to invoke Milan Kundera, the Parisian May was “an explosion of revolutionary lyricism,” while the Prague Spring was “an explosion of post-revolutionary skepticism.”60
In the Soviet bloc, the crushing of the Prague Spring, the March events in Poland, and the turmoil in Yugoslavia brought about the “death of revisionism” (as Adam Michnik put it). In the West, the inability to articulate a coherent vision of an alternative order and the incapacity to sustain revolutionary action generated a departure from what Arthur Marwick called the “Great Marxisant Fallacy.”61 Tony Judt accurately notes that despite its claims of novelty and radical change, the sixties were still very much dominated by one grand master narrative “offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself.”62 The movement of 1968 was a blessing in disguise because through its failures it revitalized liberalism. Agnes Heller perceptively summarized the essential impact of these momentous events: they strengthened the center.63 For the first time in the twentieth century, the hegemony of radical thought among European intellectuals was in retreat.
The year 1968, in the Soviet bloc, signaled the retreat from revisionism and the inception of the dissident movement, a large-scale, cross-regional “goodbye to Marx.” With historical hindsight, one can also identify it as the threshold for the gradual decomposition of the Communist regimes. The system had lost its initial totalizing drive; stagnation and immobility were its main characteristics. The increasingly routinized mechanization of ideology laid open the cracks in the system's edifice for easier exploitation by the opposition (e.g., “new evolutionism” or the Charter '77 movement). The Prague Spring of January through August, the Polish March student upheaval, the April student protests in Belgrade (and the later Croatian Spring of 1970–71, an all-out contestation of this country on national bases), and the Soviet intellectuals' reaction to the Sinyavski-Daniel trial all represented a fundamental challenge to the Stalinist foundations of the Soviet bloc.64 The failure of these movements left an enduring disenchantment with state socialism and the loss of any hope of reforming these regimes. In other words, “it underscored the political and moral sterility … of the attempt to marry the Soviet project to freedom without a return to private property and capitalism.”65 Moreover, as one of Gorbachev's future advisors remarked, one side effect of the Soviet Union's reassertion of hegemony was that the Western Communist parties “without confessing it, came to understand the irrelevance of the Communist movement either for the majority of the countries where it was formally present or, even more important, for the Soviet Union itself.”66 The reaffirmation of the status quo and the systemic stagnation in the Soviet bloc signaled an irreversible “disenchantment with the (Communist) world.” Despite the fact that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, “the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.”67
The West, on the other hand, experienced an upsurge of “romantic anticapitalism,” a rebirth of radicalism fed by the reenchantment with utopia. In the context of the shock produced by the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the identity crisis of the former colonial powers, 1968 “began [for the New Left] with the scent of victory in the air” (in the words of Jeffrey Herf), for, as Paul Auster reminisced, “the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.”68 The second half of the 1960s marked both a return to Marx and a rejection of the existing practices of democracy (with the notable exception of Spain and Portugal, where, between 1966 and 1968, civil unrest targeted the right-wing dictatorships of Salazar and Franco). The influence of the New Left, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Latin American guerilleros, and the decolonization movements combined, in a amorphous blend, with the generational clash, an institutional crisis (the occupation of the Sorbonne, the nearly two-year-long paralysis of Italian universities), and a wave of recession (signaled by workers' strikes and autogestion projects). This mix produced what some authors later called les années 1968. The sixty-eighters claimed to have developed a critique of the ideological bases of the West in the context of the Cold War (also against older self-representations of the Left) and a spontaneous “direct action” against the “hidden oppression” of the liberal-capitalist establishment. The “anti-politics” of 1968 were, to a certain extent, a topsy-turvy expression of the attempt to reconcile theory with praxis (Theoriewut). The extreme radicalization of certain sectors within the student movement and the cultivation of violence as a cathartic instrument led to a divorce between left-wing post-Marxist thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, and those whom they suspected of “Red Fascist” inclinations. In France, Raymond Aron proposed a scathing critique of the new search for redemptive revolutionary paradigms.
Ultimately, 1968 effected, both in the West and the East, an anti-ideological reaction that was the premise of “the project of a global civil society.” Or, as Tony Judt put it, “a 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.”69 The 1968 movement was indeed one of the world-historical events of our age, la brèche, the cleavage that set up a course of events that seem to have yet to run their course.70 Charles Maier eminently summarized the transformation: “1968 closed an epoch as surely as it opened one.”71 To paraphrase Paul Berman, the imaginary panoramas deployed across the world by the rebellious youth of the West gradually gave way to the new realities of reformed democratic societies.72 In the East, decade-long futile attempts to find ways of reforming Communism from within were replaced by an emphasis on human dignity and the inviolability of human rights.73 As Communist regimes declined under the burden of their own ineffectiveness and the elites lost their sense of historical predestination, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for the reconstitution of the public sphere. The upheavals of the late sixties and their aftermath had a formative effect on the Soviet intelligentsia, and particularly on the new cohort of experts, the so called mezhdunarodniki, “those policy analysts, journalists, scholars, and others mainly concerned with foreign affairs.”74 According to Fyodor Burlatsky, “Analyzing [East European] reforms … we concluded that many of them could be … adopted in our country. We studied the rapid integration of Western Europe, deeply envious of the Common Market and its contrast with the slow, bureaucratic functioning of CEMA [Council for Economic Mutual Assistance]. We thought about acquiring … modern technology and joining in the greatest achievements of world culture. In other words, we dreamed of reforming Russia.”75 In other words, if for some revisionist intellectuals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the conclusion of the events of 1968 led them toward liberal opposition, for others, especially in the Moscow center, the lesson was a different one. Those who would later lay the foundation of the perestroika reforms came to believe that “reforms were possible, but only under an enlightened leader that many ‘awaited as if for the coming of the Messiah.’” Robert English accurately commented on this position: “Their naïveté—if only leaders had the will, then reforms would ‘work without a hitch’—would be a severe handicap to a later leader's search for ‘socialism with a human face.’”76