Spectacle, spaces and political change: 1968 and now.
| Author | Campsie, Alex |
| Position | PEOPLE AND MOVEMENTS |
We are fifty years on from 1968. The moment seems right, therefore, to think about the relationship between disruptive protests, politics, and social change more broadly, in 1968 and now. This was a moment when the politics of the spectacular, the reclamation of space, and a general sense of disruption came to the fore.
1968 was swiftly mythologised as a moment of disruptive change, though in fact we should think of a 'long 1968' spanning several years. One historian has written of the 'euphoric anti-authoritarian thrust of 1966-1972'. (1) This moment is remembered as a spectacle of pure liberation. This year's 50th anniversary will be marked by all the familiar images. But 1968 was also produced and reproduced as a spectacle too: images of militancy in Mexico City, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Bolivia and Belfast drew on and referred to one another for collective, reciprocal force. Lawrence Black has argued that the late 1960s saw a broader shift towards a 'post-material' politics, marking the point where the instrumental appeal to distinct class interests gave way to the spiritual, the humanist and the self, enabling claims to be made about universal revolt. (2) These symbolic tools were used in revolutionary upheaval in Britain too. In Grosvenor Square, thousands marched against the Vietnam War, occupying the square, with placards and banners 'bringing a sense of theatre' to the anti-militaristic message. (3)
Such techniques were not always successful: hundreds of police dispersed the Grosvenor Square marchers with brutal force. Belief in the utility of symbolic protest was not always shared on the Left either. During the occupation of the London School of Economics in October 1968--as the police chained the gates of the university shut--students and intellectuals associated with the New Left Review journal urged what they saw as their quiescent classmates to join them in storming a nearby sea cadets' hall in order to procure rifles to ward off the police, and to offer non-revolutionaries what they had elsewhere called a 'moral summons' to the socialist cause. (4)
Martin Shaw, a member of the Trotskyist group International Socialists (IS) and an LSE student at the time, ridiculed the suggestion that symbolic acts would somehow shock anyone into revolt as 'curious wishful thinking'. (5) He argued that the only way to truly build social change was to reach out to working-class communities and actively 'build links' here--or else the student movement would doom itself to self-conscious 'isolation and defeat'. (6)
Shaw himself was part of a group of LSE students who had joined strikes in Fleet Street and at Ford's Dagenham plant. Eschewing the politics of symbolism, the workerist tradition of the British Left instead preferred direct action and class-based organisation. IS and others called for the Left to link up with the increasingly militant shop stewards' movement. As radical class and factory-based politics exploded into view in the late 1960s, groups like Big Flame participated in factory occupations with workers (in this case at the Fisher-Bendix plant in Kirkby). (7) As Jimmy Reid commented of the Upper Clydeside Shipbuilders 'work-in' in 1972--where the workers took over the ship-yards and demonstrated that they were still economically viable and need not be shut down --this colonisation of space had practical and symbolic merit, demonstrating that economics' did not 'control men', but that rather 'men can and must control economics'. (8)
Notably though, there was also a latent scepticism from within 'the working class' towards external groups coming from outside to co-opt the struggle. In first-hand testimonies from Tyneside, workers expressed defiance towards activists or sociologists from elsewhere, and were as likely to make sense of social difference through either stories of individual escape or the invocation of place-based solidarity as they were class consciousness. (9)
The community organising movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s also illustrated...
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