Between 1968 and 2024: A Historical Perspective

The lessons of 1968 are reflected in the political battles of 2024, and socialists must be ready to make the most of them.

By Judith Chavarria

1968 was a year of movement.

That year—from Czechoslovakia to China, France to Pakistan, Mexico to Chicago—radical students, sections of the middle class, and masses of workers clashed with the postwar order. Interconnected struggles by these forces in opposition to war, for reforms on campuses, and for increased freedom of expression challenged ruling elites in both Western democracies and Eastern Stalinist regimes. Through these struggles participants developed an awareness that it was possible and necessary to smash up the continuum of history; that society, even in a moment of relative economic stability, was stagnating. 

In the United States, this upsurge took the form of a “New Left” which was defined by ruptures with the “Old Left”—including its partyist organizational forms and association with the ‘official’ communism of the Soviet Union. It emerged from and responded to a multifaceted crisis engendered by US imperialism and the Cold War. The Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were catalysts for the 1960s student upsurge which encompassed the New Left. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, freedom rides, and early resistance to the political repression of the Cold War contributed to increasing radicalization, reaching its climax amidst the Vietnam War protests. These events, alongside confrontations such as the May 24 general strike in France, made it feel like revolution might once again be on the horizon.

A generation of young students ran headlong into the violent reality of our country, their illusions in American democracy were beaten out of them by the batons of the Chicago police and by the bullets of National Guardsmen at Kent State.

But revolution was not to be. As this height of mass struggle was rolled back, a lasting alternative failed to materialize. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had served as the main rallying ground for the New Left and the student movement, fell apart. And in the wake of its collapse, the left failed to build a fighting, multi-tendency socialist party which could nurture and sustain the energy of mass movements through defeat until the next struggle.

The power of the late 1960s did not vanish in a weekend. For a while, the movement actually continued to engage wider layers in mass struggle. In May of 1970, millions of US university and high school students joined student strikes against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the shooting at Kent State. But over time many of the leading political elements spiraled into sectarian irrelevance. Middle class activists scattered to the wind as the working-class backbone of the movement was broken by Reagan’s neoliberal onslaught. The broader layers which had been energized were co-opted once again into the disorientating folds of the Democratic Party.

The political mobilizations of 1968 magnified a deeper underlying crisis of Western capitalism, as the American ‘Golden Age’ of super profits was eroded by new competition in Europe and East Asia. The ruling class responded to this double crisis with a dramatic pivot, discarding the corporate-liberal synthesis of the post-war years for neoliberalism. The capitalists of today face another inflection point, with a new double crisis of economic and political challenges to the Western imperialist system, leading them to pivot away from long-held pillars of neoliberalism. The question facing us all is what comes next.

Yet the revolutionary tasks which were posed then are still the tasks of today. Socialists have been recovering from this failure for a long time. Although there were notable movements like the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and the demonstrations against the War in Iraq, it took an entire half-century before the economic crisis of 2008 sparked movements which are once again approaching the fervor and potential of 1968. Fifty years later, another antiwar movement is mobilizing new layers the world over against the genocide in Palestine, and growing inter-imperialist conflict threatens to only further escalate global tensions. 

Just as the lessons of the Civil Rights movement informed the antiwar movement, mass uprisings for racial justice over the last few years have contributed to the antiwar movement of today. But approaching 1968 levels of mass mobilization is one thing; winning this time is another. Determining what is living and dead in the New Left is a necessary step to going further than they could. Concrete strategic decisions around party-building and the sustainability of movements are for us to answer. These historical reflections are a reason to pose a decades old question: What does it mean to go beyond the legacy of the New Left?

Reflections and Refractions

On January 30, 1968, a mass attack by Vietnamese communist forces, which came to be known as the Tet Offensive, caught the US completely off guard. A combined force of North Vietnamese People’s Army conventional units and Viet Cong insurgents numbering more than 80,000 attacked over 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam. The attack shocked Americans and showed a military vulnerability that had seemed previously unthinkable. In terms of this vulnerability, it is hard not to draw comparisons with the armed incursion into southern Israel by the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2024. As with the US in Vietnam, the IDF has responded with an intense bombing campaign and devastating military occupation.

The move by Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations, which would have helped consolidate the pro-Western imperialist bloc in the Middle East, pushed Iranian-backed Hamas to strike. Imperialism increases bi-polarity, and bi-polarity increases pressure, as pressure leads to resistance, and resistance to reaction. The forces unleashed by imperialism finally return home, as defeats then have an impact on domestic politics. These are dynamics present in both Gaza and Vietnam. While the Vietnam War and the genocide in Gaza are not reducible to each other, they share political affinities which are worth examining in greater detail.

The Vietnam War was unpopular by 1968, with a majority of Americans saying it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam. Deaths rose dramatically that year, with 246 US forces killed at the start of the Tet Offensive, the deadliest day for US troops of the whole war. The wartime costs weighed heavily on the American economy as well, with inflation rising from 1 percent annual growth in 1964 when the US entered Vietnam, to 4.7 percent by 1969. 

Despite the fact that the war was losing support, the student movement against the Vietnam War was also very unpopular at the time, with a majority of Americans saying that they approved of the way Chicago police violently handled antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention. There existed a tension between nationally and internationally minded sections of society—the former seeking an end to the civil unrest and the latter taking part in it—and this reflected the fact that the overarching social effects of the Cold War still lingered.

What seemed at first glance like a burning revolt was also an attempt to pull the fire alarm, though many Americans didn’t accept it as such.

By comparison, the US Palestine solidarity movement is less directly connected to the war—it was American soldiers in Vietnam, not just American funds. Opposition to the Israeli occupation is based on seeing its abject violence unfold in real time, not on any economic incentive. For now, this is producing less friction for the bureaucratic state to withstand.

The US was neither winning nor losing the Vietnam War in militaristic terms, but the war imposed a high cost in blood and dollars. As public disapproval of the war increased, student protests brought the political cost home. This forced politicians to speak of peace even as they prolonged the war. Once the US decided to withdraw, it eventually led to the victory of the North Vietnamese forces. The student protests were critical, because withdrawal was not militarily necessary, but it would have meant little without armed resistance making successful escalation impossible. Today, there must be a similar dual pressure—politically and militarily—on Israel and the US for a free Palestine. Ending US military aid for Israel would immediately compromise the fighting power of the IDF, creating necessary openings for the Palestinian resistance.

Students are often the first section of society to move into struggle, but their institutional power is largely symbolic. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1910, “Throughout their entire history – in its best, most heroic moments just as in periods of utter moral decay – the students of Europe have been merely the sensitive barometer of the bourgeois classes.” They need to get broader layers of society involved, especially the labor movement. But the labor movement is not monolithic. During the Cold War, the leaders of the AFL-CIO were junior partners in Western imperialism and opposed the antiwar movement in the 1960s even while it grew in support amongst the rank-and-file membership. UAW President Walter Wutherford broke with the AFL-CIO over its support for the war, but opposition to the war from the labor establishment was rare.

Today, a growing minority of the labor movement, including major national unions like the UAW, are supporting the antiwar movement’s call for a ceasefire. Unions across the country are passing ceasefire resolutions at a local level, University of California academic workers went on a political strike in solidarity with protesters, and seven major unions recently called on Joe Biden to halt military aid to Israel. These are all vital steps in expanding the movement and developing its ability to strike critical blows against US imperialism. However, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s recent speech at the Republican National Convention gave political cover from the labor movement to the right wing, and many unions have thrown support behind the Democratic Party. Clearly, union support for imperialism and right-wing politics is a tension that has yet to be overcome since the Vietnam antiwar movement. With union density having significantly decreased since 1968, there is also a need to expand the labor movement, consolidate gains, and build militancy. In the class-struggle, we are having to work against crises of organization, consciousness, and leadership.

These crises are reflected in the difficulty of building a robust socialist movement. Thousands of Black people in the US considered themselves revolutionaries by the end of the 1960s, and forces like the Black Panther Party were able to channel their desires for a world beyond capitalism and police brutality. Revolutionary circles at universities, such as the Independent Socialist Club at Berkeley, were important for establishing small but active Marxist cores. Revolutionary ideas were stronger in the movements of the 1960s than in the current period.

This does not mean the left cannot grow. While students in 1968 were responding critically to both anticommunism from the US and ‘official’ communism from the USSR, the latter is now dead and gone. The left today is having to reconstruct itself as if from the beginning. There are opportunities to internalize lessons through today’s struggles and within different organizations such as YDSA. While SDS was larger, it was not openly socialist like YDSA is, and its political clarity around long term goals was more tenuous. Students aren’t the decisive mechanism of change in society—to avoid the mistakes which SDS made, YDSA must also look beyond them to encompass the diverse youth who are not in higher education. This means connecting on campus battles to the battles taking place outside of them, while centering lifelong participation in the socialist movement through DSA.

Ultimately, what our nascent socialist movement needs to grow is for these efforts to become truly engaged in high politics—a struggle which moves through the whole of society in opposition to the capitalist state, channeling energies in a revolutionary direction. An organized movement for socialism which utilizes electoral positions at all levels as bully pulpits for mass movements is absent today. The Italian Communist Party managed to grow in parliament from the upheavals of 1968, while the French left became enveloped in a crisis that led to victory for the supporters of President Charles de Gaulle. In the US, there were left electoral attempts over the course of the 60s and 70s, such as by Harvey Milk, but not a cohered socialist project to ground those attempts on. This is something we are still able to change in our strategy today. 

The increasing polarization of society and advancements of the left throughout the 60s also gave the right-wing new opportunities to grow. Resistance is consistently met with reaction, which is then supported by far-right attempts to cohere a mass base and break the left. Former Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace led a Dixiecrat revolt against the Democratic Party with his third-party campaign, winning five southern states and almost 10 million votes to Nixon and Humphrey’s 31 million each. Likewise, the far-right has grown its base of support internationally this year, especially in European elections. The far-right is rapidly developing in Ireland, and the UK is beginning to experience anti-immigrant pogroms. The emergence of the Nouveau Front Populaire in France has shone one light in the dark, but the international left is currently fighting a series of defensive battles it cannot afford to lose.

Right now, the fates of socialism and Palestinian liberation are deeply intertwined—we are tasked with fighting for each through the other. But to do this, the left must find a way to build the political cohesion and independence of the working-class as a whole.

Fear and Loathing at the DNC

Through much of 1968, antiwar organizers sought a political alternative to challenge Lyndon Baynes Johnson (LBJ) for the Democratic Party nomination and oppose the war. While most Democratic politicians declined to challenge the party establishment, sitting Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with Joseph McCarthy, the former senator from Wisconsin who led the Second Red Scare) decided to run. As a political figure, McCarthy was comparable to Don Quixote, running endless losing campaigns in the years to come. Yet thousands of volunteers flooded into New Hampshire to support his campaign in the March primary, getting him 42% of the vote. Though he did not win, it was enough to spook the incumbent LBJ into not running again. 

This is when Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of John F. Kennedy and Attorney General under his presidential term, stepped into the presidential race. RFK was a contradictory figure, staking his career on a generalized ‘New Politics’ that was built from his proximity and loyalty to the existing political order. His experience as a staffer to Joseph McCarthy during the Cold War gave way to a mythologized liberal idealism; he took on the establishment after previously having coordinated attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Suddenly there were two anti-war candidates running for the nomination. While both Kennedy and McCarthy won individual states in the primaries, the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was racking up delegates through the Democratic Party machine, which controlled a majority of the delegates. The assassination of RFK at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, allegedly by Palestinian activist Sirhan Sirhan, helped break the antiwar movement’s organized pressure on the election. The political bosses and conservative union leaders then helped Humphrey get the nomination. This only intensified the political unrest which had previously broken out after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., pushing the whole country to an intense breaking point.

The antiwar movement surrounded the Democratic National Convention in Chicago like a wildfire. As Black Panthers, Yippies, and future Weathermen took to the streets in protest, the Democratic Party tried to repress them by any means necessary. Chicago police brutalized the protestors in full view of news cameras for days on end, and as this violence continued, they began to cry out, “The whole world is watching.” The antiwar movement posed itself in stark, irreconcilable conflict with the political establishment which sought to maintain the war effort. What seemed at first glance like a burning revolt was also an attempt to pull the fire alarm, though many Americans didn’t accept it as such.

Through these struggles participants developed an awareness that it was possible and necessary to smash up the continuum of history; that society, even in a moment of relative economic stability, was stagnating. 

Presently, the severe police repression of student encampments for Palestine across the country—under the purview of another Democratic president—has radicalized thousands of people and, like the protests at the 1968 DNC, the world was again watching. 

Not unlike LBJ, the incumbent Joe Biden became unpopular enough, due in part to his support for a deeply contentious war, that he could not remain in the election. Yet the hope for a genuine alternative is less concrete than it was in 1968. Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to take Biden’s place on the ballot without any intention of significantly changing his political course. The ruling class is attempting to stabilize a historically dangerous election through her. Due in part to the war’s lack of material consequences domestically, with it not translating into an economic downturn yet, the Palestine solidarity movement has not been able to produce a serious antiwar challenger. None of this year’s third-party candidates have been able to inspire the working-class. Another Kennedy is running, but his campaign has proven to be little more than a farce. These are difficult conditions from which to organize, and this has to be acknowledged to formulate a sober response. 

Affirming the power of mass struggle to impact events also requires recognizing the potential of unintended consequences. Richard Nixon, helped by the chaos of Chicago, won the presidency in 1968. Although, in the long term, the drama of 1968 helped to build an even larger anti-war movement through sustained pressure, in the short-term Nixon’s election meant a massive expansion of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The same risks are facing us today. The radicalization of American society is matched by a sense of desperation as the Republican challenger, Donald Trump, stands to gain. This points to the danger of a powerful protest movement without a viable positive outlet for change—it hurts the center but can help the right wing. 

The DNC is once again being held in Chicago. Thousands of people are mobilizing for protests, and socialists should join them. On the ground, we can help organize demonstrations which recognize the absence of a credible alternative to both parties while proactively struggling to build one. DSA can be a leading part of this, but success will take a long-term understanding of our goals. The long view of history was missing in the DNC protests of 1968, and this is what eventually allowed the New Left to be co-opted and dismantled. These consequences weren’t immediately apparent following the DNC, but they were actualized over time. Without the organization and historical foresight needed to understand what was happening, doing something about it became more difficult. But we can’t afford to have our efforts in the present be dismantled over the course of decades; we need our political horizons to expand over time. 

We still lack institutions of the left, and this crisis of organization must be confronted without illusions. It is a party-building program which prepares us to build the political independence of the working-class, while patiently bringing together movements against oppression under a common banner. The situation will not produce ready-made solutions, and so the left must attempt to look beyond the next few months. We also cannot settle historical accounts cheaply—it requires direct confrontation with past failures.

Unfinished Revolutions

Protests in the US were one small part of a global revolutionary upsurge in 1968. It was a year when regular people seemed capable of toppling governments.

Without a healthy and vibrant Marxist core, the New Left was unable to build on solid foundations. Even with the strength of the Civil Rights movement behind them and struggles such as the 1970 student strike and the Stonewall riots yet to come, it is a bitter truth that the energy of 1968 developed into a powerful anti-war movement and a wider cultural rebellion, but not a lasting and effective political alternative. It extended only as far as it could be accommodated by capitalism. Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Eight who stood trial for involvement in the 1968 DNC protests, eventually became a capitalist himself. Eugene McCarthy went on to support Ronald Reagan for president. The participants of mass organizations like SDS, with a deeply optimistic conception of popular democracy, failed to navigate the limitations of that inheritance as a bright future died down. None of the alternatives which emerged in the 1960s found a way to break through.

We are between histories, traditions, struggles, and conflicts. The New Left’s formulations were often set against the political and organizational practices of the Old Left, but each has something to give us. The Old Left, with decades of written theoretical material being reflected in the practice of the October Revolution, established a Marxist current which must be carried forward. The New Left, which looked to find a way out of the choke point of Stalinism’s eventual collapse, radically expanded its own fields of inquiry and critique to include every aspect of society (i.e. racism, sexism, queer life, consumerism, universities, abortion, medical institutions, and more). Our task is to productively merge them, to heal old wounds and account for new ones. This is an important part of coming up with effective tactics and strategies, properly implementing and expanding them, and contextualizing the political struggles unfolding right in front of us.

Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote about the period, 

We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

We are trying to stop the waves from breaking and rolling back again. Overcoming the limitations of 1968 can only be a result of what we do in the present, on the basis of internalizing the lessons of the past; this is one of the functions of a socialist party. In its absence we are caught in a negative dialectic—a tension between our lack of a historical memory and the fragmented effort to gather one—that we cannot afford to shy away from.

For socialists there are hard lessons to learn. Even when we mean well, our movements can fall into self-defeating marginalization. Opportunities for a radical upsurge were squandered. But we shouldn’t write off 1968 so quickly. Against the pressure of a corrupt political establishment, the imperialist system, the concentrated intervention of intelligence agencies, and violent police repression, a mass movement against the war in Vietnam was built. A generation of young students ran headlong into the violent reality of our country, their illusions in American democracy were beaten out of them by the batons of the Chicago police and by the bullets of National Guardsmen at Kent State. Against all odds, they managed to transform the consciousness of millions.

We can learn the lessons of their decade. Mass protests alone cannot achieve a lasting political alternative, and every instrument of political repression will be used to prevent them from posing a challenge to the capitalist state. To counter this repression, the working-class requires a democratic organ in the form of a socialist party. This party can help direct the political dissent of increasingly radical sections of people, while finding ways to grow those sections. An important mechanism for achieving this is fighting for protest democracy, giving participants the chance to decide on slogans, concrete demands, and goals together. Democracy is a process capable of changing desires, and this should be reflected in every battle we partake in to counteract marginalization. Alongside this, the diversity of the working-class must be matched by the breadth of our analysis and political engagement. Every attack facing the working and oppressed people is of immediate concern to socialists. The explanatory power of a Marxist program is crucial for turning this concern into a practical struggle against capitalism, and its absence can be fatal to even the largest of movements.

There are concrete steps DSA can take to begin acting on these lessons:

1. Amidst the DNC protests, DSA members should ensure they form an organized contingent with a distinct socialist message. YDSA is taking the lead here, bringing together members to march alongside SJP. These marches should be taken further with coordinated pamphleting, media interviews and recruitment on the ground.
2. While the DNC has the potential to be an important flashpoint, the struggle will continue once it’s over. Joining Palestine solidarity rallies across the country, while agitating for and going beyond a ceasefire, is necessary for DSA to become a leading part of the movement. This requires a comprehensive, positive vision for how to achieve our goals.
3. Chapters should be supported in running ambitious campaigns on popular demands which present DSA as a distinct alternative to both capitalist parties. The recently announced Workers Deserve More program can be the basis for tabling, canvassing and even town halls where DSA members can present what we’re fighting for and what we’re building a party on.
4. A propaganda campaign would allow us to thoughtfully differentiate our program from Kamala Harris. We could begin with efforts such as interviewing people in the south about the struggle for their rights, from bodily autonomy to labor. A member-run Communications Committee would help facilitate this. Our publications such as Democratic Left should also be expanded with diverse historical material.
5. Internally, we require a clear democratic process for developing a strategy we can act on. This can begin with member forums from national bodies, discussion sessions on the presidential election, and model resolutions for a party-like structure which chapters can adopt. The socialist organization we are building is a tool, we must use it.

With every country that experienced some form of radical upsurge, a heterogeneous tapestry was created. Those moments of collective solidarity which are woven into them reveal the possibilities which remain open to us even now. We don’t just need to repeat 1968; our task, this time, is to finish the revolution they started.

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Cover photo: “KÖLN 1968! Protest. Pop. Provokation-8839” by Raimond Spekking is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.