i968revolution

Contents

A new breaking point - 40 years on 3How Tet turned the war in Vietnam 9The Prague Spring - beginning of the end for Stalinism 13Timeline 22Revolution in France: betrayed but not defeated 24Learning from history 30Martin Luther King’s unfinished business 34The German student revolt 36

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A new breaking point - 40 years on

When Bob Dylan penned The Times They Are A Changin’, released in 1964, the great songwriter and musician caught the mood of a mass movement in America led by Martin Luther King that was challenging the old order.

By 1968, this upsurge reached Europe, where it produced a year of revolutionary confrontation. As Dylan sang:

There’s a battle outside ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin’.

Cynics and sceptics like to suggest that 1968 “failed” because, in the end, the order was not, as Dylan sang, rapidly fadin’ but withstood the assault and survives to this day. They therefore view 1968 nostalgically – as something great but ultimately pointless – before getting back to dinner-party talk about property prices and the education of their children.

But this not only misses out the substantial achievements and experiences that resulted from the struggles of this period, but also – crucially – ignores the complex socio-economic processes that conditioned the global explosion of 1968. Why are these important? Well, unresolved contradictions have developed to a new breaking point in 2008. They foreshadow revolutionary movements and events that have the potential to finish the business left over from 40 years ago. By the end of 1968, a number of irreversible processes had established themselves, and these would continue to reverberate and generate change long afterwards:

America’s apparent military invincibility was exposed as a myth. The Vietnamese national liberation movement – which had already defeated the French in 1954 – demonstrated with its Tet offensive in January 1968 that the American forces could be defeatedsimultaneously, the once mighty dollar had plunged into crisis. This confirmed that the notion of a permanent boom for capitalism was nonsense, and that the entrenched contradictions of the system continued to operatestudents and workers in France showed in the May/June events that it was still entirely possible to launch a revolutionary uprising in a major capitalist country despite appearances that everyone had been “bought off ”the betrayal of that revolution by the French Communist Party (PCF), together with

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the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia three months later, dealt mortal blows to Stalinism internationally. The Stalinist bureaucracy would never recover from these eventsthe idea of extra-parliamentary actions as the route to change had established itself in the United States through Martin Luther King’s movement and the militant Black Panthers as well as the student movement in Europe.

The May/June events especially seemed to come out of the blue. There were no indications that the mass of the French working class would suddenly go on strike and occupy their factories, offices and shops. Social and economic conditions in France had been under severe stress, however, which helps to explain what took place. The government under president General de Gaulle insisted on maintaining a strong franc, even though much of the economy was uncompetitive in international terms. This required a series of public spending and social security cuts, as well as plans to rationalise heavy, older industries like coal. The universities were also targeted, with the regime determined to bring them into line with the needs of modern capitalism and reduce the number of students. De Gaulle acted to defend French capitalism in the context of a growing crisis in the relationship between the United States and France, over the dollar and NATO. The dollar was the lynchpin of the international monetary system created at Bretton Woods at the end of World War II. The US then committed itself to backing the dollar with gold to maintain its value and fixed exchange rates with other currencies. Bretton Woods also established tight restrictions on the movement of capital between countries.

A number of factors had combined to undermine Bretton Woods, which had been set in place along the lines suggested by the economist John Maynard Keynes as a way of avoiding a return to the slump of the 1930s. American capitalism was compelled to export capital in order to take the pressure off rates of profit within the US. During the 1960s, American enterprises had found their way into the heart of the French economy, especially in new industries. A Eurodollar market appeared, which opened the dollar up to speculation, further weakening the currency’s stability.

At the same time, the war in Vietnam led to a massive expenditure of dollars – essentially through running the printing press at top speed – to the point where it was clear that there was not enough gold in Fort Knox to sustain the Bretton Woods promise. A political crisis had emerged in America itself because of sustained opposition to the war and the high level of casualties sustained by troops.

The dollar crisis came to a head following the January-March 1968 Tet offensive, when Vietnamese liberation fighters inflicted heavy casualties on US forces throughout South Vietnam. In March 1968, gold was allowed to “float” against major currencies, which was the beginning of the end of Bretton Woods. Later that month, president Johnson announced that he would not be running for a second term.

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Many years later, it emerged that Harold Wilson's Labour government came close to launching a financial coup d’état at the height of the 1968 financial crisis. According to Cabinet papers released in 1999, the plan would have meant “a drastic and permanent abandonment of the sterling system as it has been known”. Large international companies trading in sterling would have been unable to use their balances without a certificate from the government, and UK citizens working abroad would have had their sterling bank accounts frozen indefinitely. Only the previous year, Labour had devalued the pound and carried through a swingeing package of cuts.

It was in this international economic and political context that the French government dealt brutally with student protests against government policies that began in Nanterre in March. The protests spread to the Sorbonne and on May 7, a march of about 30,000 students took place up the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. In the days that followed, the students were savagely beaten by the thugs of the CRS, the riot squads created by de Gaulle. Students appealed to the workers for support and the PCF, which was fearful of losing its grip on trade unionists, sanctioned a one-day strike by the Confédération Générale de Travail (CGT) – which it led and controlled – for May 13. Over a million workers and students took part in one of the biggest marches that Paris had ever seen.

But instead of returning to work, workers in many areas began spontaneously to occupy their plants, and within days up to 10 million were involved in an indefinite general strike. The French state was suddenly paralysed and it was even reported that de Gaulle had fled the country. The police were nowhere to be seen. In other words, the possibility of a revolutionary overthrow of the French state was entirely within the grasp of the masses. Step forward the PCF.

The PCF had maintained its grip on leading sections of the working class, despite its decline in post-war years. Thoroughly Stalinist in outlook, the PCF had absolutely no intention of challenging for power. The PCF accepted the capitalist parliamentary state, showing its loyalty by backing the Popular Front government of 1936 which took office in order to maintain stability during a traumatic political and economic crisis. Now the PCF wanted to show it could be a loyal government party. In any case, the Soviet bureaucracy saw de Gaulle as a useful counterweight against American power and a potential ally in its peaceful co-existence with imperialism.

Instead of generalising the strike movement into a struggle for power, the PCF instead called for negotiations with the employers and government on the economic demands of the workers. The PCF restricted its political campaign to calls for a general election.

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Some militants tried to develop the movement. In the Sud-Aviation plant in Nantes, they issued a leaflet on June 3 which included the following:

Let us continue the strike until our demands are fully met! All together, we have shaken the bosses and their state! All together, we shall snatch victory Long live the general strike until complete victory.

But the momentum had disappeared, dissipated by sectoral negotiations, and strikers drifted back to work. At the end of May, de Gaulle called elections for June, which he would easily win. Student activists were left isolated and at the mercy of the state. A number of left-wing groups were banned. The betrayal of the revolution in France was undoubtedly in the thinking of the Stalinist bureaucrats in Moscow when in August they launched the invasion of Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring.

The collapse of Bretton Woods finally took place in August 1971, when Nixon severed the link between the dollar and gold on a permanent basis. What followed was economic recession,

massive inflation and renewed class struggles that lasted, in Britain at least, until the end of the miners’ strike in 1986. During that same period, the process of corporate-driven globalisation got underway, which has since transformed the world economy, the financial system as well as political parties, states and the labour movement.

Yet today, many people can and do make the same mistake as some did in the 1960s, declaring that workers and students have gone “soft” as a result of the long, credit/debt financed consumer boom. To these same casual observers, it seems as if the political and economic system of globalised capitalism is beyond challenge. Some point to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to support their argument that “socialism” is simply not a practical or viable alternative.

This standpoint entirely ignores how the contradictions of global capitalism are expressing themselves today in a variety of ways, containing the prospects of a social explosion far deeper and more widespread than took place in 1968. To get back to Dylan, the times they are a changin’. The dollar crisis of 1968 is but a mere blip compared to the profound global financial and economic crisis of 2008. The entire banking system is at risk of breakdown, with financier-philanthropist George Soros warning: “I consider this

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the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime, a ‘superbubble’ that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting.”

Over 30 years of credit-driven globalisation is now unravelling in an uncontrollable way, which we explain in more detail in A House of Cards – from fantasy finance to global crash. Attempts by governments and central banks to control the crisis will come to naught because the sums involved dwarf their resources while the financial system has a logic all of its own.

The social and political impact of the deepening crisis is certain to be profound, especially in Britain. Here, as in the US, economic growth was largely founded on a consumption boom financed by house price inflation and easy credit. First the Tories and then New Labour encouraged this as part of the deregulation/globalisation process. These special conditions helped create an alienated sense of rampant individualism and a me-first outlook which has tended to overwhelm traditions of collective thinking and action. The credit-led boom reached its limits when people were no longer able to service their mounting debts. As reality reasserts itself, the conditions for revolutionary social change will also reappear.

The present political system cannot deliver the changes that are required through regulation, taxation or new laws. It has, after all, facilitated the takeover by the transnational corporations and handed vast powers to unelected bodies like the World Trade Organisation and the European Commission. Governments like New Labour and even states themselves have become voluntary warders patrolling the global economy on behalf of the corporations. They have promoted deregulation and privatisation, imposing competition in the public sector and undermining workplace rights. Britain and the United States have launched disastrous and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have declared that only market “solutions” are acceptable in the face of mounting climate chaos that itself is the result of ruthless expansion for profit.

To break the deadlock, we need to move on in history, both economically and politically. The capitalist period that stretches back little more than 200 years has outlived its usefulness and purpose. The same holds true for the parliamentary political system. The market state’s priorities are the endless and futile “war on terror” and the upholding of the economic and political status quo.

A rapidly increasing number of people are dissatisfied with the status quo and are eager for change. They are represented in a diverse array of campaigns and initiatives, consumer action groups, climate camps, antiwar and anti-poverty campaigns. Tens of thousands of trade unionists have opposed privatisation and the worsening of their conditions in the name of “competition” and “market forces”. Transition Initiatives are forming in many towns and cities, villages and localities to anticipate and work out solutions to the issues arising from the twin problems of the imminent reduction of oil production as it reaches its peak, and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to limit global warming.

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We put forward the following principles as a way to act globally by starting locally:

ownership of production facilities of the major corporations and of land and water through a variety of forms of co-ownershipdemocratic control and self-management of economic and financial resources, including public services productive capacity shifted towards satisfying need rather than generating profitecologically sustainable production and distributionencouraging and supporting small-scale enterprises, creative workers and farmers to work sustainablyfavouring local production for local needs.

A World to Win believes that in order to achieve our goals we must challenge the political and moral support for capitalism as the organising premise of society. There are no solutions to the planetary crisis through protest, pressure, regulation or the feeble and powerless parliamentary political system. To create the conditions for sustainable change, nothing short of a revolutionary transformation of the state system that maintains capitalism in power is needed. In place of the existing discredited, undemocratic, unaccountable political system, we have to develop new decentralised, networked forms of democratic government to work out equitable solutions for all. In Britain, a new constitutional settlement would guarantee new social, economic and political rights in place of the right to exploitation established by capitalism.

Naturally, we live under entirely changed political and social conditions compared with 1968. Stalinism is no longer the great force for counter-revolution it once was, while reformism in the shape of Labour has been transformed by globalisation into an outright capitalist party. Let us shed no tears about these events because they “free up” the situation in ways not experienced for almost a century.

Together with the crisis of the legitimacy of the parliamentary system of rule, these changes constitute the ingredients for revolutionary upheaval that, as in France, can take place unexpectedly. A sudden wave of strikes, like the ones that erupted in Britain in April 2008, or mass protests, can emerge seemingly out of nowhere.

As in 1968, their outcome will entirely depend on the leadership that is present at the time and what perspective it can offer. We must, for example, learn from the experiences of the anti-Iraq war movement, where the momentum was frittered away in futile attempts to force the New Labour government to change course. The building of an independent revolutionary movement that can inspire and lead the challenge for power itself remains the most crucial lesson from 1968.

Paul Feldman, 1 May 2008

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How Tet turned the war in Vietnam

The Tet offensive – which takes its name from the Vietnamese new year – was launched on January 30, 1968 by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its allies in the National Liberation Front (NLF). Although its military objectives did not

succeed, the offensive’s boldness and breadth and – above all – surprise, caused a political earthquake in Washington and is now seen as the turning point in the Vietnam war.

It became clear that the United States could not win the war in Vietnam, which was aimed at propping up a client government in South Vietnam. Within months, as casualties mounted from a variety of military actions, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek the nomination of his party for a second term. By the end of the year, peace talks were being arranged.

Finally, in May 1975, the Americans were forced to leave Saigon – the capital of the south – in an embarrassing hurry as the NVA and NLF swept through the country. The pictures of embassy staff struggling to get on the last helicopter out of Saigon were flashed all round the world.

France had colonised Vietnam in the 19th century, but were driven out by the Japanese during World War II. At the end of the war, France tried to reimpose colonial power in Vietnam with disastrous consequences. In 1954, the Viet Minh communist revolutionary forces laid siege to the supposedly impregnable French encampment at Dien Bien Phu. Again, the element of surprise proved decisive. No one had expected the Vietnamese forces to bring artillery through dense jungle on bicycles and then bombard the French positions until they surrendered.

The battle occurred between March and May 1954, and culminated in a massive French defeat that effectively ended the war. It was an historic moment in terms of national liberation struggles against colonial powers. Martin Windrow, the military historian, says that the battle was “the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organised and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle”. A peace treaty divided the country into two, which became the basis for a civil war in which the Americans first intervened with ground troops in 1965.

Looking back, it seems that the US had sufficient intelligence to prepare for the Tet offensive but ignored the signals altogether. They could not bring themselves to believe that the NVA and NLF was capable of a series of nationwide, co-ordinated attacks. This was a fundamental error, borne out of imperial arrogance, from which they never recovered. For example, on January 5. American officials in Saigon released to reporters the contents of an NLF soldier’s notebook that had fallen into the hands of US

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intelligence two months before. The key passage read:

The central headquarters has ordered the entire army and people of South Vietnam to implement general offensive and general uprising in order to achieve a decisive victory. . . Use very strong military attacks in coordination with the uprisings of the local population to take over towns and cities. Troops should flood the lowlands. They should move toward liberating the capital city [Saigon], take power and try to rally enemy brigades and regiments to our side one by one. Propaganda should be broadly disseminated among the population in general, and leaflets should be used to reach enemy officers and enlisted personnel.

On January 30, in the middle of the Tet new year holiday, North Vietnamese regular army troops and NLF fighters struck in a coordinated attack on 36 of South Vietnam’s 44 provincial capitals, and 70 other towns in the country. The North Vietnamese also unleashed a ferocious attack on the US base at Khe Sanh that lasted two months. They stormed the coastal city of Hue, which took US Marines a month to retake. The most sensational blow was an attack on the US embassy in Saigon. While the attack was quickly repelled, film of the assault soon found its way into every American living room.

Three women with a field gun by artist Quang Tho

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Steven F. Hayward, in his book, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Liberal Order, 1964-1980, concludes:

The Tet offensive proved to be the turning point of the war, delivering a fatal blow to political support for the war in the United States. Even though Tet was a disappointing defeat for North Vietnam in strictly military terms, it exposed the bankruptcy of US war policy and aims in Vietnam, and prepared the way for America’s eventual humiliation. The most surprising aspect of the Tet offensive was that it was not really a surprise at all. Yet the episode shows how even a superior force can be taken by surprise both militarily and politically when it lacks the initiative in war. Since the North Vietnamese had the initiative instead of the US, it was possible for their elaborate campaign of deception to succeed in maintaining the element of surprise, even though the US discovered numerous details of the attack to come.

The offensive was masterminded by General Vo Nguyen Giap, hero of Dien Bien Phu. According to Hayward, the North Vietnamese thought their military position was weakening, and would continue to deteriorate without some dramatic act. This calculation was largely correct, he believes. But a major political miscalculation was in thinking that the offensive would set off a spontaneous uprising of the South Vietnamese population. This never happened and is a major reason why the NVA and NLF were

GIs under fire in Vietnam

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unable to hold on to their initial military gains. The great deception which the US fell for was at Khe Sanh, a massive military base in the northern province of South Vietnam. With Dien Bien Phu in their minds, the American generals decided that this would be the main objective of any new offensive. More than 40,000 NVA regulars massed near the base at the end of 1967, lending credibility to this belief. But their aim was to draw US forces towards the base and away from the cities. It worked. Over half of US combat forces were detailed for the northern provinces, away from the cities.

A pre-arranged ceasefire for Tet began at 6pm January 29; South Vietnamese president Thieu left town for a vacation at the coast, and nearly half of South Vietnam’s army went on leave. The North Vietnamese attack began just a few hours later, shortly after midnight. Out of a total attack force of 84,000 troops, nearly 50,000 NVA and NLF forces were killed in Tet. The US suffered 1,100 dead; the South Vietnamese lost 2,300.

Hayward says that Tet did provoke an uprising, not in South Vietnam but among US elites, including the inner circle around President Johnson:

Because of the prior political and public relations handling of the war at home, Tet demolished the illusion of control and progress. Despite the battlefield outcome, a number of shocking vignettes from Tet had a powerful impact on American opinion and became etched in the American mind. Gallup Poll data suggest that between early February and the middle of March a fifth of people who had regarded themselves as ‘hawks’ changed their minds and became ‘doves’.

The media seized on the fact that Johnson’s administration had no clear strategy or timeline for ending the war, a foretaste of what would take place in Iraq after the 2003 invasion and occupation. Newsweek declared: “The Tet offensive… has exposed the utter inadequacy of the Administration’s war policy… Those who opposed the war can now find new reasons to justify their criticism.”

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The Prague Spring - beginning of the end for Stalinism

One of the first crucial events of the year 1968 would have passed unnoticed by most people. Alexander Dubček replaced Antonín Novotný as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on January 5. Another day, another

grey bureaucrat plodding around the cogs of another monolithic East European party machine, is how it appeared. The leadership re-shuffle took place under the auspices of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, notable for his re-imposition of Stalinist repression and responsible for years of utter stagnation after the Khrushchev Thaw. The advent of a new leader hardly seemed to herald something truly exciting. But, as with the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, it was an event which soon led to enormous and irreversible changes inside the Soviet bloc and around the world.

What became known as the Prague Spring was to combine economic reform with a cultural and political movement, in which the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism played a significant role. For most of its leaders, as well as the Czech masses, 1968 was an attempt to retrieve the principles of socialist democracy from the dead hand of Stalinism. The Czech movement revealed the force of the growing political revolution against Stalinism, first seen in the heroic 1956 uprising in Hungary. Though it ended with tanks on the streets, blood and bitter disappointment, it brought about irreversible changes in a year that changed world history.

At the end of World War II, after the Red Army and partisans liberated the country from Nazi occupation, a coalition government took power under the bourgeois politician Edvald Beněs, who had headed the government-in-exile in London during the war. The government, with Communist Party (KSČ) ministers in key posts, began to nationalise heavy industry and banking. A programme of land reform also started. But the government also carried through ethnic cleansing of Czechs of German and Hungarian origins, accused collectively of collaborating with the Nazis. They were forced out of the country and their property seized.

When elections took place in 1946, the Communist Party won 38% of the vote nationally and its leader, Moscow-trained Klement Gottwald, became prime minister in another coalition government. Gottwald and his party favoured participation in America’s Marshall Plan, which channelled investment into war-torn Europe. But Stalin would have none of this independence from Moscow and in 1947 instructed Gottwald to reject Marshall aid and instead prepare to oust other parties from the government. So

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in 1948, backed by a general strike, the KSČ staged a political coup d’etat. Beněs resigned as president and the country from then developed into a one-party, bureaucratic and repressive Stalinist state.

The enthusiasm of the trade unions was eroded by the imposition of “shock workers” in factories to stimulate unrealistic productivity norms, while wages were held down. Consumer goods were neglected in favour of producing machinery and other heavy industrial goods, which themselves found their way to the Soviet Union under trade “agreements”. The country’s secret police apparatus hounded and arrested dissidents and notorious show trials were staged in the early 1950s.

But a new generation began to take up the struggle for political change in the 1960s and the momentum against Stalinism built up, especially in cultural circles. As early as June 1967, Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera, Jan Procházka, Antonín Jaroslav Liehm, Pavel Kohout and Ivan Klíma had strongly prepared the way by criticising the regime at the Czechoslovak Writers Union 4th congress in Prague. Then, in February 1968, the new Communist Party (KSČ) leadership approved an enlargement of its economic reform programme to combat the deepening recession. In the mid-1960s, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania had begun to adapt their economies to the demands of international capitalist competition. The only result had been to intensify the social crisis and the economic impasse in each country. In March, rallies held in Prague and elsewhere in the country demanding an end to censorship led to the resignation of Novotný who had lingered on as president.

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By April, the heady events, which came to be known as the Prague Spring, were well underway. Dubček launched an Action Programme, which included freedom of the press, speech and movement. There were to be more consumer goods and possibly a multi-party government. The powers of the secret police were to be restricted and Czechoslovakia was to be federalised into two equal nations. The chinks in the Stalinist apparatus rapidly allowed new parties and political clubs into being as pressure grew for immediate change. At a meeting of the Communist Party leadership, Dubček made his famous call for “socialism with a human face” and a new central committee was to be elected. The Action Programme referred to a “unique experiment in democratic communism” in which the KSČ would have to compete with other parties in elections and there would be a 10-year political reform. It proposed technical skills and participation in the “scientific-technical revolution” as solutions to the economic crisis. On April 19, the National Assembly promised political rehabilitations and freedom of the press, assembly and religion. At the May 1 celebrations, President Ludvík Svoboda honoured some of those who were executed in the notorious show trials of 1952, in which Rudolf Slansky and ten other KSČ leaders were framed up, tortured and executed. L’Aveu (The Confession), a 1970 film starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, was based on these events.

A talented economist, Ota Šik, who had endured the Mauthausen concentration camp, led economic reforms of the day. He told students at a Prague rally in May that Czechoslovakia could inspire workers in the Western capitalist countries by creating a “model of socialist society that will become really attractive for the working peoples of all capitalist countries, and that will have a tremendous impact on the development of the left-wing movement in Western countries”. Šik’s proposal for working people’s councils was taken up in Czech factories on an experimental basis in June.

Today’s Radio Prague website gives a flavour of the heady revolutionary atmosphere: “Within six months, Czechoslovakia underwent a change many people had never thought possible. Several organisations, including some banned by the communists in the 1950s, were revived, including the gymnastic association Sokol and the scouts. New magazines were founded, TV started broadcasting debates with politicians, and people were allowed to travel again.”

“The people listened”, as Radio Prague puts it, “and it wasn’t long before jazz music, rock clubs, pop culture, miniskirts and other symbols of Western imperialism [sic] were to be spotted all over the place, but most especially in Prague. Bohumil Hrabal, Josef Koudelka, Ivan Klíma, Josef Skoverecky, Milan Kundera, Arnošt Lustig, Miloš Forman, Jeri Menzl and many other writers and artists were all living and working at this time. Culture thrived, and the Czechs are especially well known for the films they produced at this time. They also invented a precursor to the modern-day music video, which they called ‘television songs’, and experimented with multimedia, and Laterna Magika and other forms of Black Light Theatre date from this time.”

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Censorship was officially abolished on June 26 and re-habilitation of political prisoners was set to begin. The very next day, the 2,000 Word Manifesto, written by Ludvík Vaculík, was published in the literary weekly Literarni Noviny, and in the dailies Prace and Zemedelske Noviny. The Manifesto reflected the pressure of the Czech masses, going far beyond the Party’s Action Programme.

The political leadership, including Dubček, rejected it.

Not surpisingly, because Vaculík’s Manifesto targeted “the apparatus”. It said that leaders and members of the Communist Party bore “the greatest responsibility of all” for the exercise of “unchecked power … the decline of our economy, for crimes committed against the innocent, and for the introduction of censorship to prevent anyone from writing about these things”. While some officials were “redressing old wrongs, rectifying mistakes, handing back powers of decision-making to rank-and-file party members and members of the public, and establishing limits on the authority and size of the bureaucracy”, others, the Manifesto noted, “have been resistant to change”.(Manifesto is at http://library.thinkquest.org/C001155/documents/doc26.htm)

In a statement published in its autumn 1968 journal, the leading world Trotskyist tendency, the International Committee of the Fourth International, saw the Manifesto as “the expression of the political revolution on its way … a stage that the masses and vanguard should overcome through the struggle for the construction of a revolutionary party on the basis of the programme of the Fourth International”.

The race was on for the Stalinist leaders in the Moscow and the Warsaw Pact countries, and those who opposed Dubček within the KSČ, to rein back a movement which was rapidly spiralling out of control. The revolutionary upsurge of the Czech working class, intellectuals and youth was now creating the possibility of a successful overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy and a socialist democratisation of power. Behind the political euphoria, sinister forces were on the move. In July, Soviet-led troop movements began on the Czech border as representatives of the Communist Parties of the USSR, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria met in Warsaw and sent what was, in effect, an ultimatum to the new Czech leaders.

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Under the shadow of an impending invasion, the hugely popular Dubček addressed the nation on television, saying. “The presidium [of the Communist Party] has said that we will keep following the direction that we started pursuing in January of this year. The Party is supported by the trust of our people. The people will not allow any return of pre-January times. Our journey will not be easy. What we need is to work quietly and in solidarity on the common task. We need to rectify errors and deformations, while getting away from the narrow group of people who bear responsibility for them.”

On August 3, a Warsaw Pact meeting of representatives from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia met in Bratislava, southern Slovakia, and signed a declaration that was the death-knell of the Prague Spring. Hiding behind the jargon of “Marxism-Leninism” and “proletarian internationalism”, Stalinist leaders agreed to oppose what they termed “anti-socialist forces”, thus endorsing the “Brezhnev doctrine”, which legitimised military intervention. After the conference, Soviet troops left Czech territory, while remaining on its borders, whilst the KSČ prepared its September 9 party congress. It appeared that a compromise between Moscow and the Czech leadership had been reached just at the peak of the crisis. This was far from the case.

In high political drama, still under the threat of military intervention, the KSČ leadership was divided between those who supported Dubček - Oldřich Černík, and

© Vldimir Lammer, Wenceslas Square, Prague, 1968

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František Kriegel and the pro-Stalinists Vasil Biľak, Drahomír Kolder, and Oldřich Švestka, who went on to prepare a coup1. The last three, along with Alois Indra and Kapek, sent a handwritten letter to the Soviet authorities asking them to save the Czech republic, “from the imminent danger of counter-revolution” – in other words, inviting Moscow to launch a military invasion. The existence of this letter was denied, but in the early 1990s the Russian government gave the new Czech president Vaclev Havel a copy of the letter. While the Soviets were considering waiting until August 26, the date of the Slovak Party Congress, Indra, Kolder and Bil’ak, anxious to defeat the Dubček wing, asked for the troops to move in six days earlier – on August 20. As an advance warning of the invasion reached the Praesidium, two key members of the conspiracy switched sides to support Dubček.

On the night of August 20-21, troops and 2,000 tanks from five Warsaw Pact countries – the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and East Germany invaded. Estimates of troop numbers vary from 200,000 to half a million. On the morning of August 21, the four reformers in the KSČ leadership, including of course Dubček, were arrested in the party headquarters by Soviet airborne troops and were soon flown to Moscow. Over the next few days, they were made to fear for their lives and compelled to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol, which agreed to the presence of Soviet troops. Of the four, only František Kriegel refused.

Crowds of workers and students confronted Soviet troops in Wenceslas Square and Old Town square in the heart of Prague and at the National Museum. There were many acts of non-violent resistance as Czechs and Slovaks argued with the Warsaw Pact soldiers. There was a symbolic one-hour general strike. Assistance, including food and water, was denied the invaders while graffiti, signs and placards denounced them and suspected collaborators. During the attack, between 72 and 100 Czechs and Slovaks were killed and around 700 wounded, although other estimates put the figure much higher at around 1,000 deaths. Under arrest, Dubček had called on people not to resist. The 14th Congress of the KSČ was eventually held in secret in a factory, under the protection of the working class. The party thereby broke its links with Moscow. The Czech masses needed the support of workers elsewhere in Europe to end the Soviet occupation and to defeat Stalinism itself. Only such a movement could have forced the release of Dubček, who was placed in solitary confinement and worn out physically and mentally, as the Kremlin’s mouthpiece, Pravda, called for “The liquidation of 40,000 nerve centres of counter-revolution”. Despite the occupation – or perhaps because of it – the pro-Stalinists were unable to form a government with any legitimacy to rule. It took eight months for

1 http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/cite/czechoslovak1968.htm (Armed Conflict Events Data) “The KSČ Presidium met during the night of August 20-21; it rejected the option of armed resistance but condemned the invasion. Two-thirds of the KSČ Central Committee opposed the Soviet intervention. A KSČ party congress, convened secretly on August 22, passed a resolution affirming its loyalty to Dubček’s Action Program and denouncing the Soviet aggression. President Svoboda repeatedly resisted Soviet pressure to form a new government under Indra.”

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the Stalinists to regain their hold on power. Reactions worldwide were mixed. In the German Democratic Republic, as well as in

Red Square, Moscow, there were courageous but isolated protests, which were quickly suppressed. Although the U.S. and other Western countries condemned the invasion, it was clear that President Lyndon Johnson had no intention of pursuing the issue. Informed of the imminent attack by the Soviet ambassador to the U.S, Johnson simply thanked the ambassador for the notification and asked him to move ahead with an invitation to visit the USSR, according to Walt Rostow, a national security advisor present at the White House meeting. Huge rifts opened up in the Communist Parties of Europe. Reversing their general support for Soviet intervention against the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Italian, Romanian, Finnish, Italian, British, Spanish and French parties opposed the invasion whilst the Portuguese party leader, Alvaro Cunhal, and some factions in the Greek Communist party joined with Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh in condemning the Czech political revolution.

The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration from Czechoslovakia as people feared for their lives. Some 70,000 fled immediately with the total eventually reaching 300,000, out of a total population of 14,000,000. On 19 January 1969, a student called Jan Palach set himself alight in the centre of Prague as a protest against the clampdown. By April 1969, Gustáv Husák had replaced Dubček after disturbances following the Czechoslovak hockey team’s victory over a Soviet team in Stockholm. Dubček was expelled from the party and for the next 20 years lived under constant police surveillance, working as a forestry official in the Slovak city of Bratislava.

The next two decades were marked by the Husák regime’s repression of party members as he sought to keep political change at bay. Reporting from Prague in 1988, New York Times journalist Mark Uhlig estimated that half a million Czech Communists were purged from the KSČ after the invasion. Many leaders of the Prague Spring took refuge abroad, “Others”, wrote Uhlig, “who remained in the country have found themselves living as outcasts, forced to accept jobs as drivers, night watchmen and warehouse clerks.”

Western Communist parties continued to distance themselves from Moscow, a process driven by Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian CP, who initiated the Euro-communist movement. He forged his “compromesso storico”, a historic compromise – in fact a rapprochement – with the Christian Democrats. In 1977, the leaders of the Italian, Spanish and French parties met in Madrid and mapped out their alternative path, a reconciliation with their own ruling classes rather than a reaffirmation of socialist principles. The “Euros” contrasted with the “Tankies”, who were unreconstructed Stalinists who supported military intervention and old-style dogmas.

Thirty years after the Prague Spring, in August 1998, former Soviet President Gorbachev told a Slovak newspaper Narodna Obroda that he “found the courage and the strength to start fundamental changes” in the 1980s under the influence of the

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Prague Spring. “The brave reforms of Alexander Dubček were an attempt to get rid of totalitarianism and connect socialism with democracy. Even though they ended in tragedy, at the cost of human life, they were not made in vain,” he said. In fact, Dubček and Mikhail Gorbachev were both educated at Moscow State University in the 1950s and in Zdeněk Mlynář, had a close mutual friend and political associate. The August invasion was the last full-scale military action that the Soviet Union would undertake against one of its satellite states. In East Germany in 1989, when a political crisis unfolded, the Soviet government, now with Gorbachev as the secretary of the Communist Party, signalled they would not send troops to prevent the mass protests and exodus to the West which led to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in December. In the same month, the Warsaw Pact leaders jointly signed a statement condemning the military suppression of the Prague Spring.

The force of the Prague Spring cracked wide open the seemingly all-powerful Stalinist monolith, which some on the left had claimed would last for centuries. The iron grip of the bureaucracy could never be restored. The flowering of political ideas and culture in Prague inspired movements round the world in the years to come, including a brief period of popular democracy in China, the Beijing Spring of 1977-1978, when it became possible to criticise the government as the Democracy Wall movement emerged. It continues to have a wide cultural resonance in the music, literature, theatre and poetry of 1968 and the years that followed in the writing of Milan Kundera and filmmakers like Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, Jan Němec, Jiří Menzel and Jan Švankmajer. Capitalist states have now arisen on the ashes of Stalinism and Czechoslovakia has been divided into two countries in a manoeuvre played out by reactionary nationalists. But the new states are rapidly being stretched to their limits by the extreme tensions posed by today’s economic and financial crisis. The revolutionary potential of the Czech and Slovak people is certain to be rekindled in the spirit of 1968.

Corinna Lotz

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Join A World to WinBuilding support for A World to Win is vital if we are to inspire people to make the kind of revolutionary change outlined in this pamphlet. AWTW campaigns for a transfer of political and economic power to the working majority in society and for the reorganisation of the economy along co-operative, not-for-profit, self-management lines. We strive to create a networked, non-hierarchical, interactive organisation. AWTW emphasises the importance of theoretical training and education as a guide to action.You can apply to join by sending an email to info@aworldtowin.net, filling in the form at www.aworldtowin.net, texting/phoning 07871 745258 or by post to AWTW, PO Box 942, London, SW1V 2AR.

Rights and Revolutions

18 October 2008Waterloo Action Centre

You are invited to a one-day event being organised by A World to Win on October 18 as part of its Revolution 1968 celebrations. The historic struggle for rights in Britain will be presented through music, drama, poetry, films and political debate. Key moments will include events such as Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Revolution, Chartism, the General Strike and the miners’ strikes against the Tories.

The event will examine the legitimacy and authority of the existing parliamentary capitalist state, especially in the light of the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’. We will then discuss alternative models of democratic rule.

Confirmed speakers include Bill Bowring, lawyer and human rights activist and professor of law at Birkbeck University and John McDonnell MP, chair of the Labour Representation Committee.

www.aworldtowin.net

22

Timeline 19685 The US Justice Department indicts Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Coffin of Yale

and three others for conspiring to violate draft law5 Alexander Dubcek is elected leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia6 The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album goes to number 18 Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson endorses the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign for working an

additional half hour each day without pay17 US president Lyndon B. Johnson calls for the non-conversion of the dollar19 At a White House conference on crime, singer and actress Eartha Kitt denounces the Vietnam War

directly to President Lyndon Johnson21 An American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashes at North Star Bay, Greenland,

killing one crew member and scattering radioactive material23 North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying30 Tet offensive begins as North Vietnamese and NLF forces launch a series of surprise attacks across

South Vietnam. They attack more than 100 cities and assault the US embassy in Saigon

1 Saigon’s police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes an NLF fighter with a pistol shot to the head in a scene captured on camera

8 At South Carolina State, three black students are killed in a confrontation with highway patrolmen in Orangeburg, during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley

13 The US sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam18 Some 10,000 people in West Berlin demonstrate against US in Vietnam War26 Thirty-two African nations agree to boycott the Mexico Olympics because of the presence of S Africa

4 Martin Luther King announces plans for Poor People’s Campaign8 First student protests in Poland’s political crisis15 The US mint halts the practice of buying and selling gold16 My Lai massacre in Vietnam. American troops kill hundreds of civilians17 Over 100,0000 demonstrate in London’s Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War. More than 90

injured and 200 demonstrators arrested18 The Congress of the United States repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency22 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and 7 other students occupy administrative offices of the University of Nanterre 27 Soviet space pioneer Yuri Gagarin is killed in a training flight crash28 A riot erupts in Memphis during a protest in support of striking cleaners led by Martin Luther King31 US President Lyndon B. Johnson announces he will not seek re-election

4 Martin Luther King. is shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots erupt in major American cities for several days afterward

11 Joseph Bachmann tries to assassinate Rudi Dutschke, leader of a left-wing student movement in Germany. Students attack Springer Press HQ in Berlin

19 Secretary of the National Assembly in Czechoslovakia promises rehabilitation of political prisoners and freedom of the press, assembly and religion

23 Student protesters at Columbia University take over buildings and shut down the university

January

February

March

April

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3 First battle between students and police at Sorbonne, University of Paris7 March of 50,000 students to the Arc de Triomphe10 Night of the Barricades in Paris. Hundreds injured and arrested13 Demonstration of one million workers and students in Paris14 Occupation of factories begins at Sud-Aviation, Nantes27 Second week of strike action, with 10 million workers involved29 De Gaulle “disappears” as 500,000 demonstrate in Paris

3 First returns to work take place3 Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots and wounds Andy Warhol as he enters his studio5 US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los

Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day13 Several left-wing organisations banned in France17 The UK imposes sanctions against Rhodesia19 50,000 in Washington to support the Poor People’s Campaign23 Elections in France lead to major successes for Gaullists27 Czechoslovak parliament abolishes censorship and provides for rehabilitation of political prisoners

17 The Arab Socialist Baath Party stages a bloodless coup in Iraq and gains control as the Revolution Command Council

11 USSR announces new military manoeuvres along the Czechoslovak border13 An assassination attempt is made against Col. Papadopoulos, the right-wing military

leader in Greece20 Prague Spring ends as 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia25 Seven dissidents protest in Red Square against the invasion28 Beatles release Revolution

27 France vetoes the UK entry into the Common Market

2 A student demonstration ends in a bloodbath in Tlatelolco, Mexico City. Soldiers kill 300 students prior to the start of the summer Olympics

5 A civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, which included several Stormont and British MPs, is attacked by the Royal Ulster Constabulary

16 In Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-Americans athletes, raise their arms in a black power salute after winning medals

3 300,000 march against Greek fascist junta as ex-premier Papandreou is buried5 Richard M. Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey to become US president

22 Mao Zedong advocates educated youth in urban China to be re-educated in the country

24 US spacecraft Apollo 8 enters orbit around the Moon

a year that shook the world

May

June

July

August

SeptemberOctober

November

December

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Revolution in France: betrayed but not defeated

This analysis was originally published in the immediate aftermath of the May/June events in the journal Fourth International, August 1968 edition

THE GREAT STRIKE movement of May and June 1968 which brought the French working class within sight of power has enormous political significance and requires careful analysis and study. All the problems raised by the revolution

in advanced capitalist countries were suddenly presented in living form. By their action in downing tools together and occupying their places of work ten million workers demonstrated their strength and shook the bourgeois state to its foundations. For the space of two weeks France stood on the brink of a revolution which, given leadership, could have carried the working class to power with little bloodshed. The paralysis of the economy was complete; the state power was in eclipse and the bourgeoisie was stricken with panic and confusion. What many had believed to be impossible, a revolutionary situation in an advanced country, was now plainly in existence. At one point bourgeois rule depended upon nothing more than a few tens of thousands of riot police and an uncertain army largely composed of conscript soldiers who would be asked to fire on their fathers and brothers.

And yet, almost as rapidly as the crisis broke and the question of workers’ power was posed, the ruling class resumed its poise; de Gaulle re-asserted his command, the strikes were brought to an end and elections confirmed the Gaullist victory by a substantial majority. The change in the situation was so rapid and so complete that the question of how near France actually was to revolution in May will undoubtedly become a perennial subject of historical controversy. In retrospect many of those who, at the height of the battle in May, foresaw a defeat for the bourgeoisie have already revised their opinion and now claim that the issue was never in doubt. True, for a final historical judgement, many of the necessary elements are lacking. In particular it will be a long time before we know what was going on in the inner councils of the Gaullist government. Did it, before de Gaulle’s broadcast of May 30, at some point decide that the game was up, as stories that the Ministries were burning confidential papers seem to suggest? What was the relationship between the government and the leadership of the CGT and the Communist Party and was a guarantee actually given (or even required) from the Soviet Ambassador that there was no intention of turning France into a ‘People’s Democracy’? In the event of a workers’ revolution would the army leaders have plunged the country into civil war?

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In fact we do not have to answer these questions in order to be able to raise, and in part answer, the more immediate and vital ones raised by these events.

In the first place the lie has been given to the myth that the working class in the advanced countries has become an inert and demoralized force. In France the workers flexed their muscles and displayed their power. It is true that the signal was given by the students, but the situation did not have revolutionary implications until the workers occupied the factories and began to make their own demands. It is true, also, that in form these demands were mainly of an economic nature; but, by their extent, their manner of presentation and the context in which they were made they also represented a direct challenge to the ruling class and its state.

More important still was the fact that the level of this challenge was directly related to the ability of the Communist and reformist parties and the trade union bureaucracies to control the strike movement and confine it to what were called ‘professional’ demands. After the massive demonstrations of May 13, in which the workers expressed their solidarity with the students in struggle against the Gaullist regime, the ‘left’ parties and unions, and especially the Stalinists, hoped that these energies could be channelled back into the usual humdrum forms and that the situation would be restored to normal. It was the action of the workers at Sud-Aviation and the Renault plants in occupying their factories which set in train the mass strikes which the CGT and the other unions had neither prepared for, called nor desired.

It was as though all the locks which the bureaucracies had placed on the combativity of the workers for many years were suddenly blown off. Following the example of the students, the young workers in particular demanded action to protect wage packets which were shrinking under the pressure of rising prices and against intolerable working conditions and lack of a real future. Plants which had not had strikes for three decades came out solidly, sections of workers reputedly the most docile and least class-conscious in department stores, offices and banks demanded to join the strike. All over the country universities, schools and public buildings were occupied. Over many the red flag was substituted for the tricolour. The gates were locked, pickets and strike committees were

Journal of the International Committee of the Fourth International

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set up. All the major plants, except in a few backward areas, from government arsenals to the big motor works, were in the hands of their workers. Electricity and other services only functioned by permission of the workers.

Yet a general strike was never called by the CGT or any other trade union body. L’Humanité never issued such a call nor, in its front page headlines, did it ever provide slogans or a lead for the strikers. The Communist Party, and its members in the leadership of the CGT, struggled might and main to limit the scope of the strike to the basic economic demands which, however heavy for the capitalists to meet, still accepted the framework of bourgeois property relations.

There was no national direction of the strike and it was everywhere the policy of the CP to prevent a link-up between the strike committees in the separate enterprises. The CGT negotiated with the government, as did the other national confederations (CFTD, Force Ouvriere, CGC), and as soon as possible went back to the enterprises with the terms which had been provisionally agreed upon. Thus a key role was played by the refusal of the Renault workers to accept the model agreement brought back from his meeting with the government by Georges Seguy, the general secretary of the CGT on May 27. This ensured that the strike would continue and that more then ever, in the next few crucial days, the question of power would be posed.

At this point it is clear that the Communist Party set itself solidly against any movement to take power. This is borne out by the tone of the statement of the Central Committee dated May 27. In substance this declared opposition to those who claimed that the situation was ‘revolutionary’; called on followers of the CP not to join in the student demonstration called for that day; and stated its aim to be ‘a government of democratic union’ with the Left Federation – at that time in almost complete eclipse – the dissolution of the National Assembly and the holding of new elections.

That was on May 27 when the disarray of the government and the demoralization of the bourgeoisie were still apparent. On May 30, in a radio broadcast, de Gaulle signalled the turn of the tide for the bourgeoisie, echoing the call of the Communist Party for dissolution of the National Assembly and new elections and promising stern measures. Immense relief of the bourgeoisie and a massive Gaullist procession in Paris. Reaction of the CP: relief and satisfaction (the Party had apparently wanted elections all along!).

In the following days and weeks the Stalinist bureaucracy fought day and night to settle

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the strikes and hand back the factories to their lawful owners. At the same time it settled down to the electoral campaign, carefully distinguishing itself from the ‘revolutionaries’ of May. The Communist Party was, as Waldeck-Rochet put it, ‘a revolutionary party in the best sense of the term’, that is to say, a party which ensured that a revolution did not take place.

Then and since Stalinist propagandists, and those who cover up for them, have been working hard to prove that the situation in France in May was not revolutionary and to discredit all those who claim it was. For all the conditions to be present for a revolutionary situation there has of course to be a revolutionary party able to heighten the consciousness of the working class and lead it to power. As the principal political party of the working class, and as the leader of the largest trade union confederation, Stalinism did everything it could to confine the strikes to material objectives consistent with the preservation of capitalism and to prevent the working class from turning them into a struggle for power. It first slandered the students, even when they had become the principal victims of the police repression, and then did everything possible to isolate the students and the youth from the striking workers. Wherever possible it controlled the strike committees to prevent them from becoming instruments of power. The Stalinists had no intention of leading the working class in revolution and made sure that no one else should. After carrying out this policy; which opened the way for the resumption of control of the situation by de Gaulle at the head of a shaken but newly self-confident bourgeoisie, it had the audacity to claim that there had been a revolutionary situation.

In this the Communist Party stood four square with the Soviet bureaucracy which feared nothing more than the opening of the European Revolution, for which a successful revolution in France would have been the prelude. It was clear all along that the CP would therefore place a brake on the movement while taking care to retain its control over the working class. Thus the need to discredit the students, to denounce the ‘leftists’, to confine the aims of the strikes to questions of wages and hours and to bring them to an end as soon as possible; thus the slogan of a ‘popular government’ and the acceptance of elections which it knew would be certain to have the form of a referendum for de Gaulle.

The Communist Party has had great difficulty this time in concealing its betrayal from the workers and from its own militants. The drop in the electoral vote of the Communist Party indicates this very clearly. Many workers opposed the return to work to the very end; even more went back reluctantly on the instructions of their leaders with the knowledge that they had not won the power that was in their grasp. Opposition in the ranks of the party has never been so widespread; a renewed ferment has begun amongst the intellectuals but this time it is accompanied to a much greater extent than before by criticism by worker members. Some sections of the party have been further astonished by the failure of the CP and the CGT to protest against the banning of the left-wing organizations and the hounding of their militants.

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Although the elections were run by the Gaullists on a ‘red scare’ platform and with a lot of anti-Communist talk there can be little doubt that the government, and particularly de Gaulle himself, are well aware of the services which the CP rendered in May and June. This was understood during the events by many reporters and commentators of both the French bourgeois and the foreign press. For the first time, in many papers, the conclusion, new and astonishing to the writers themselves, that the Communist Party was a great institution making for the preservation of the bourgeois social order, in other words,’was a counter-revolutionary force, as Trotsky pointed out over three decades ago, became a commonplace. As Victor Fay summed it up in Le Monde Diplomatique for July:

‘By putting a brake on the popular upsurge the leaders of the Communist Party and the CGT upset the vanguard of the working class and cut themselves off from the revolutionary students. At no moment during the crisis did the CP and the CGT push the workers towards direct action; they followed rather than led this action. At no time did they issue a call for a general strike nor recommend the occupation of the factories by the workers. At no time did they consider the situation as revolutionary. Monsieur Seguy, general secretary of the CGT declared on June 13: “The question of knowing whether the hour for the insurrection had struck was never at any time posed before the Bureau of the Confederation or the Administrative Commission, which are composed, as is well known, of serious and responsible militants who do not have the reputation of taking their desires for reality”.’

Whether Seguy is speaking the truth or not is scarcely important. What can be assumed from the whole behaviour of the CP is that its leaders well knew that a revolutionary situation did exist. Their main concern was to prevent the working class pushing towards a seizure of power – a task which they successfully carried out, but only by dint of immense efforts. After the event they were able to explain that there never had been a revolutionary situation, in order to cover up their tracks and their actual role in preventing it from maturing.

Once again, then, as in 1936, as in 1945, as in 1953 and 1958 the Communist Party imposed a strait-jacket on the working class and helped to preserve the bourgeois social order.

The bitterness and hostility of the attacks launched by the CP on the student movement and upon the left-wing groups were required in order to prevent the latter from becoming a pole of attraction and an alternative leadership.

What was the possibility of such an alternative arising? As far as the student movement was concerned, and those groups who concentrated their main efforts in the Sorbonne after its liberation from police control on May 13, it can be said that it evaded in practice such a task. Instead the energies of the students were dispersed in interminable discussions, sallies to the barricades and occasional sorties to the factory gates.

Only the supporters of the International Committee, the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, the youth movement Révoltes and the student movement, the

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Fédération des Etudiants Révolutionnaires put forward consistently a Marxist policy. Themselves taken by surprise by the rapidity with which the storm broke, fighting with small numbers in a most difficult situation these organisations acquired a valuable capital of experience in struggle from which the whole international movement can draw. Undoubtedly their intervention in a number of decisive instances, including the first occupation at Sud-Aviation, had an important bearing on the course of events. Links were developed with important sections of the youth and the working class. In the universities the FER put forward a basically correct line against the advocates of ‘student power’ and the ‘critical university’ – that is to say against the mainstream of student feeling – with great consistency and courage in the face of slander and misrepresentation.

In the end the smallness of the vanguard enabled the treachery of the Stalinists and the reformists to prevail. The alternative leadership, while it made its presence felt, was not able to take command of the class. Now, along with other left groups, the OCI, Révoltes and the FER have been banned: but their struggle continues. Inside the CGT and the CP there is a growing volume of questions and criticism. The workers were not defeated, and they know it; but the class-conscious elements also know that they could have gained much more – that power was within their grasp. In these conditions, with the crisis of French capitalism aggravated by the events of May and June, the opportunities for intervention, even under conditions of illegality, become very great. The struggle continues and in the coming period the Trotskyists will come forward to lead the final victorious struggle of the French working class.

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Learning from history

Corinna Lotz reflects on the life of Pierre Lambert, a leader in the French workers’ movement, who died in Paris in January 2008

Forty years ago, the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front launched what became known as the Tet offensive against the United States forces occupying their country. The NLF’s attacks on the capital Saigon and

former capital Hué by a people’s army taking on the world’s most powerful military might sparked off a year of revolutionary events around the world.

A few months later, Czech Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček ushered in a reform programme, which led to the “Prague Spring” in which unarmed youth faced Soviet troops on the streets of Prague. In France, conflicts between students, workers and the police sparked a general strike in May-June, which led to the occupation of most of the country’s factories.

That year, countless young people were inspired by the amazing sacrifice of the Vietnamese people. Then, just across the channel, the mass demonstrations in Paris enabled us to envisage for the first time the real possibility of workers, students and ordinary people overturning the capitalist state machine and bringing into being a new era of history.

Today, as a global economic slump looms and world leaders stand helpless, we move into a new and unknown period of history, in which mass upheavals of many kinds will certainly take place. This new crisis is the background to the passing of Pierre Lambert, whose death was announced on January 16 by the Parti des Travailleurs (Workers Party). He was part of a generation of leaders who reached political maturity in the 1930s and 1940s – the years of global slump, revolutions in Spain and China – and world war.

The early years of Lambert’s life demonstrate the courage, determination and resourcefulness of revolutionaries who opposed Stalinism when it was a truly dangerous and difficult act of defiance – before, during and just after World War II. There were other people like him in various countries who held fast to the achievements and principles of the Russian Revolution of 1917 despite its degeneration under the Stalinist leaders who eventually took control.

Lambert was born Pierre Boussel in Paris in 1920 into a Jewish family which had emigrated from Russia, fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms at the turn of the century. At the age of 14, he joined the Communist Party of France only to be expelled a year later for opposing the pact between France and the Soviet Union.

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The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s oppo-sition to Stalin inspired Lambert. Trotsky had been forced out of Soviet Union by Stalin and into exile in 1929, making a two-year sojourn in France between 1933 and 1935, before being forced to leave. His presence had strengthened the left opposition in the French Communist Party, including a strong tendency within artistic movements like Surrealism.

Lambert joined the left socialist party led by Marceau Pivert but was expelled in 1939 along with other pro-Trotsky militants. In February 1940 he was arrested by the police due to his “anti-war defeatism” and sentenced to three years in prison. However, when France capitulated to the Nazis, he managed to escape and return to Paris under the occupation.

In December 1943, he joined the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste (POI) which organised clandestine trade unions. It was the only political party to seek fraternisation with German troops against the Vichy government and the Nazi occupiers. A number of German and French Trotskyists paid for their courage with their lives. Some became victims of the Gestapo. Others were taken to concentration camps. Still others in the POI joined the maqui resistance forces.

Between 1943 and 1944 Lambert helped to unite French Trotskyists in the Parti Communist Internationaliste (PCI), which now became the French section of the Fourth International, which had been created in 1938 in place of the discredited Third International by then under Stalinist control. The PCI’s opposition to the wartime alliances between Stalin, Britain and France and the agreement between the French Stalinists and General De Gaulle earned it attacks by the French Communist Party, which denounced them as “hitléro-trotskyist”. Despite this, the Trotskyists became a growing force, especially in the Paris industrial suburbs.

The end of the war brought a deep crisis in the Fourth International. Michel (Raptis) Pablo and his supporters saw capitalism and Stalinism as enduring indefinitely. The American Socialist Workers Party under James P. Cannon opposed this outlook and fought to uphold revolutionary perspectives. Under Pablo’s leadership, the French section was ordered to join the Communist Party.

Those such as Lambert, who opposed this capitulation to Stalinism, were promptly

There are signs of improvement

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expelled. In 1953 Lambert’s group, which came to be called the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), joined with the British, New Zealand and Swiss sections to break from Pabloism and support the American Socialist Workers Party’s restatement of revolutionary Trotskyist principles – the Open Letter of 16 November 1953. In an historic move, the five organisations formed the International Committee of the Fourth International and British leader Gerry Healy was appointed secretary.

As leader of the French section, Lambert took part in the Third Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which was held in London in April 1966. But the May-June events of 1968 were to take Lambert and the OCI by surprise. They limited themselves to trade union demands for a co-ordinated strike committee but refused to demand that the French Communist Party and Socialist Party take over from De Gaulle, placing the question of state power at the heart of things. When the French state was able to regain control, it banned many left-wing organisations, including the OCI.

By 1971, the OCI, now the largest section in the International with a youth movement numbering thousands, organised a mass rally in Essen, a major industrial town in West Germany. I was part of a delegation from the British Young Socialists who travelled to the youth rally in Essen that year. At a crowded and tense meeting before the main rally took place, the OCI delegates joined with all kinds of unknown organisations to vote down an amendment proposed by the Young Socialists which insisted that revolutionary youth had

to take on the task of developing Marxist theory, without which “there can be no revolutionary party”. Simply following the Transitional Programme set out by Trotsky in 1939 was worse than useless. Marxist theory had to be constantly developed, and not be made into a set of empty, dogmatic phrases.

The Essen rally itself was massive, with workers arriving in droves from factories in France. But the numbers were illusory, giving an appearance of strength when in fact there was no revolutionary leadership on offer. The OCI’s opposition to the Young Socialists’ amendment was a fundamental split with

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revolutionary politics, marking Lambert’s break with the International Committee after 18 years of collaboration.

Within a few years of Essen, the OCI was caught red-handed conspiring with ex-members of the British section to discredit the newly-formed Workers Revolutionary Party. The OCI leadership over the next decades was marked by dogmatic adherence to the Programme of the Fourth International whilst in practice making unprincipled compromises with the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) in Bolivia and other Latin American organisations as well as the reformist Socialist Party of France. Long-standing members of the OCI, such as Lionel Jospin, joined the Socialist Party and became supporters of Francois Mitterand. Jospin became prime minister in 1997, carrying out public spending cuts which opened the door to a right-wing government.

Lambert had long ago completely abandoned even the semblance of revolutionary politics, calling for a vote for German SPD leader Gerhard Schroeder in three elections. Lambert’s new organisation, the Parti Travailliste (PT) founded in 1991, supported Luiz Lula in the Brazilian elections of 2002 and even in 2006, when Lula switched from left populism to Blairite subservience to the global corporations.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Lambert’s weekly newspaper, Informations Ouvrières. In commemoration of Lambert’s long history it published a special edition, including a chronology of his life and work. A reminiscence by PT Secretary Daniel Gluckstein refers to the events of May-June 1968, but not the possibility that the Gaullist state could have been overthrown at that time. There is no mention of the OCI’s split with the International Committee in 1971. Seemingly oblivious to the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies during the 1990s, Lambert “re-proclaimed” the Fourth International in 1993.

Pierre Lambert’s funeral took place in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris on January 25. It was attended by a large crowd who marked the occasion by singing the Internationale. The cemetery has a special place in French working class history because it was here that 147 Communards were executed at the end of the Paris Commune of 1870.

Like the Commune, the history of those like Lambert who took part in the Trotskyist movement holds many crucial lessons for us today. Mass movements often arise when people least believe they are coming. Being prepared for such change is absolutely vital for a revolutionary transformation to succeed. Preparation has to focus on the constant development of our theories and analysis. That provides the basis for the confidence to place the struggle for state power at the centre of our perspective. Anything less is certain to lead to unprincipled compromises with labour bureaucracies and/or the capitalist state, which Lambert’s eventual political degeneration shows.

Pierre Boussel Lambert: born Paris 9 June 1920, died Paris 16 January 2008

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Martin Luther King’s unfinished business

Martin Luther King, who was assassinated 40 years ago today in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike of low-paid municipal workers, is more often than not characterised as leader of the civil rights movement in the

United States and a man driven solely by religion. But King was much, much more than that and by the end of his life was advocating change of a revolutionary character, challenging the power of American capitalism.

In August 1963, under Kennedy’s presidency, King led a multi-racial rally of 250,000 in Washington demanding economic justice. It was the largest gathering in the capital’s history, and where King held the crowd spellbound with his inspiring, momentous “I have a dream” speech about how “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.

King rebuked the country’s leaders for breaking the promises contained in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to guarantee the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad cheque, a cheque which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds,’” he said. Moreover, in a distinct rebuff to America’s black separatist movement, King urged unity, declaring: “Many of our white brothers as evidenced by their presence here today have come to realise that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and they have come to realise that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We can not walk alone.”

From 1965, King started to attack America’s war in Vietnam. Exactly a year before his death, he delivered “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”. He insisted that the US was in Vietnam “to occupy it as an American colony” and denounced the government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. King also said that people around the world would look with indignation and see “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries”. In private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In a speech in front of his staff in November 1966, King told them:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with

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capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organised the “Poor People’s Campaign” to address issues of economic justice. He criss-crossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in non-violent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection”. King cited systematic flaws of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism, and that “reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced”.

His family have never supported the official version of the assassination, which has James Earl Ray as the lone gunman. Ray was an escaped convict who later retracted his confession. He had neither the motive, money or mobility to have killed King by himself. Jesse Jackson, who was with King on April 4, 1968, says: “Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.”

A report published today by the Service Employees International Union explores the economic implications of King’s movement and message. “Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty”, concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralysed outside the gates of the city”.

First published as an AWTW blog, 4 April 2008

Martin Luther King at the Washington rally in 1963

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The German student revolt

Forty years ago today, students demonstrated in Berlin following the attempted assassination of their revolutionary leader, Rudi Dutschke. After narrowly surviving the attack, he and his family later took refuge in Britain, only to be

expelled by the Heath government as “undesirable aliens” in 1971. He died eight years later, aged 39, from the after-effects of his injuries, but not before

linking up with anti-Stalinist campaigners in Eastern Europe and anti-nuclear protesters in Germany. Dutschke had been born in former East Germany and fled to the West just one day before the infamous Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961. He became the most notable leader of the West German student movement, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) which organised mass demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam.

Josef Bachman, the man who shot him, had been provoked by the Bild tabloid newspaper which had urged readers to “eliminate the trouble makers”. The powerful Springer press, which owned Bild, was seen by many students as the main enemy, influenced as they were by Frankfurt School philosophers such as Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno and their theories of cultural criticism.

In an interview conducted a few months before he was shot, it is clear why Dutschke was seen as an enemy of the West German state. Dutschke believed that the 1968 movement was the heir of the 1918 revolution that had swept Germany 50 years earlier, when the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia the year before inspired the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Dutschke also published articles making clear his support for the October Revolution in Russia and its leaders, including Trotsky, Bukharin and

Radek. He condemned the governing parties for not bringing about unification with East Germany. In particular, he denounced the parliamentary system in West Germany for having disenfranchised the population.

He believed the SDS movement should not only be extra-parliamentary but against parliament, because there was in fact no dialogue between politicians and the electorate. His aim at this time was the creation of organisations which would be “different from the existing parties who manipulate people’s interests”. Politicians should be subject to recall. He believed that human Ru

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beings were not simply “blind objects of fate” but that they could make history, but that they had to make it consciously. Dutschke saw Germany as part of an international system, in which “one part of the world exploited the other part”.

In 1967, Dutschke had begun to shift towards an urban guerrilla outlook, in which the SDS would become a “sabotage and civil disobedience group” to protect people against state terror. Others, though not Dutschke, founded the Red Army Faction, which went on to carry out political assassinations in West Germany. Inevitably, neither the “long road through the institutions” of the SDS nor the individual terror of the Red Army Faction could dislodge the German capitalist state.

Dutschke went down a different political path, joining others to help found the German Green Party which many years later would become part of the political establishment he opposed. Whatever Dutschke’s political weaknesses, he was a courageous opponent of the system and deserves to be remembered, not only in Germany but also in the UK. His political trajectory was an expression of the crisis in post-war Germany, as a new generation sought to come to terms with the history their parents had made. And, of course, he was completely right about the need to go outside and beyond the existing parliamentary bourgeois state.

First published as an AWTW blog, 15 April 2008

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