Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution

by George Katsiaficas, Carlos Muñoz (Foreword), Kathleen Cleaver (Preface)

This book brings to life social movements of the 1960s, a period of world-historical struggles. With discussions of more than fifty countries, Katsiaficas articulates an understanding that is neither bounded by national and continental divides nor focused on “Great Men and Women.” Millions of people went into the streets, and their aspirations were remarkably similar. From the Prague revolt against Soviet communism to the French May uprising, the Vietnam Tet offensive, African anticolonial insurgencies, the civil rights movement, and campus eruptions in Latin America, Yugoslavia, the United States, and beyond, this book portrays the movements of the 1960s as intuitively tied together. Student movements challenged authorities in almost every country, giving the insurgency a global character, and contemporary feminist, Latino, and gay liberation movements all came to life. A focus on the French general strike of May 1968 and the U.S. movement’s high point in 1970—from the May campus strike to the revolt in the military, workers’ wildcat strikes, the national women’s strike, the Chicano Moratorium, and the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Convention in September—reveals the revolutionary aspirations of the insurgencies in the core of the world system. Despite the apparent failure of the movements of 1968, their profound influence on politics, culture, and social movements continues to be felt today. As globally synchronized uprisings occur with increasing frequency in the twenty-first century, the lessons of 1968 provide useful insights for future struggles.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

352 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2018

About the author

George Katsiaficas is currently living in Gwangju, South Korea.
A visiting professor of sociology at Chonnam National University, he is finishing research on East Asian uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s.

A Fulbright Fellow, student of Herbert Marcuse, and long-time activist, he is the author of The Imagination of the
New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. His book, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, was co-winner of the APSA's 1998 Michael Harrington book award. Among his edited volumes are Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (with Kathleen Cleaver) and Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views of the War. He wrote Introduction to Critical Sociology with R.G. Kirkpatrick.

Reviews

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great overview of 1968 from an international standpoint. I liked that it distinguished the New Left from previous leftist manifestations, that it had an international scope, and that it looked at the years surrounding 1968 as well, to give more of an impression of how the events in France, the US, and the Czech Republic ignited events elsewhere and how focusing on only those three places gives a very limited picture.
Katsiaficas delves into many aspects of the uprisings in the US and France that are ignored by other books, such as the relationship between student uprisings and worker strikes, and the total revolt of most of the armed forces towards the end of the Vietnam War. I also did not know anything about the Revolutionary Constitutional Convention of the Black Panther Party that was convened in 1970. It was nice that this book went beyond the year 1968 and put everything into context within the timeline of the era. I thought this book went well with "1968: the Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution," which was an excellent overview of culture and politics in America at the time. I learned a lot and thought the author did a very good job of thoroughly analyzing these movements and including their positive and negative aspects and repercussions.
I think this period of history is pushed to the sidelines in schools and there are a lot of misconceptions about that period of history. Mostly the sixties and seventies are lumped together and in school we learn about the civil rights movement but not the Black Panther Party, campus occupations, or (in any period of history) workers' strikes. Books like this one are important for filling in those gaps in our historical knowledge and for analyzing past movements and instances where things could have gone differently. Also, the brutal violent repression of movements in the US is swept under the rug, other than the Kent State murders, and it's hard to reconcile the real history with what little we learn in school.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in world history, movements, or American history.

[Scott Neigh]

A revised and updated version (published in 2018) of Katsiaficas' classic book (originally published in 1987) on the uprisings of 1968, notable as the first attempt to understand the peak years of the New Left in a truly global context. There are definitely some quirky elements to this book. I'm not convinced, for instance, that his framing of the circulation of struggle as what he calls "the eros effect" (drawing on the thought of his mentor, Herbert Marcuse) is particularly useful – it seems to kind of mystify things, if you ask me. I'm also not sure what I think of the elevated place that he gives to the Black Panther-led Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention in 1970 in his account of the US movement. And as couldn't help but be true, the global sweep of the book captures some dynamics and some places better than others. Nonetheless, this is a crucially important book. It effectively conveys something important about how struggles move, how they interconnect, how they feed into each other. It conveys something important about the feeling of those years as well, and the sheer density of action and intensity of revolutionary ferment. Yes, it is uneven and (by design) broad rather than deep, but in that breadth it captures something real and important about the history that it's covering. I read it for a very specific purpose, but it's something I've been meaning to read for years anyway, and I'm glad I did.

[Jacques · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting overview, i think that the coverage of protests in the eastern bloc was a bit disingenuous but well researched

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book but I think Katsiaficas missed the mark on a few things