1968 – 2024: What do we need to learn?
1968 – 2024: What do we need to learn?
“I follow the example of Karl Marx, who also despised this property nonsense“
Every society has turning points – events, situations that have a greater impact than others and bring about change.
The Federal Republic of Germany has experienced quite a few despite its short history; especially in the post-war decades.
The FRG becomes a NATO member (1953), a wall is being built in Berlin (1961), former Nazi Kiesinger becomes Chancellor (1966), and the Federal Republic begins to participate again in wars.
The post-war children, who increasingly had to confront the atrocities committed by their parents, grew tired of witnessing the remilitarization of post-Nazi Germany and sought alternative explanations that could fill the shaken trust in their family authority and the state.
It turned out that not only the parents had been Nazis, but also many of the ruling class, including the Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger.
At the top of the bourgeois Germany, which no longer wanted to be Nazi, stood Kiesinger, a member of the NSDAP, who not only collaborated but was also a pioneer of the Nazification of the Catholic Askania Student Association.
The bourgeois German state of the 1960s fell back into old patterns for disillusioned students, a development that, along with the remilitarization of Germany and the déjà-vu-like emergency laws (which, by the way, are still in force), marked a turning point for many students.
The Vietnam War was seen by many as a situation that exposed the structural causes of imperialist war – Ho Chi Minh quickly became a symbol of resistance against this system, which began to revert to old patterns both internally and externally (war is, of course, necessary for the survival of this system, always and everywhere).
68er movement was fundamentally a rebellion against the structures that had enabled the Holocaust and World War II.
The resistance against these structures divided the movements into genuinely class-struggle oriented, materialist groups and postmodern, often idealistic groups.
The influence of postmodern thinking on the “Anti-Authoritarian” spectrum alienated large parts of the student body from the revolutionary subject, the working class, and early on negated the actual productive effect of protest.
After the end of the general student movement, large parts of the anti-authoritarian spectrum institutionalized and became part of the very rule they hated (see “The Greens”).
Later, pioneers of the genuinely Marxist part of the movement formed in numerous “K-Groups” (small, mostly Maoist splinter groups) or experimented with armed struggle in the imperialist center (RZ, RAF, Autonomous), but were eventually also suppressed by the state apparatus.
The failure of the movement
Looking back, the student unrest of 1968 was despite the postmodern alienation from Marxism, the only partly progressive mass movement in German history.
The failure of the mass movement, or rather its lack of development into a revolutionary situation, can be attributed to two main contradictions:
“The 68 revolt was not a revolutionary movement with a unified program, it was primarily an anti-movement that questioned the existing conditions in nearly every conceivable way. It opposed ‘imperialist capitalism’ just as much as ‘real socialism’ or Stalinism… There was no utopia filled with a programmatic vision; the critique of the status quo aimed to unleash something better.”
The lack of internal leadership within the student body and ideological disagreements over the goals of the movement led early on to splits, often into postmodern reformists (Fischer, Dutschke, Krahl), who subordinated themselves to bourgeois institutions, and “Radicals,” mostly Marxist-Leninists (e.g., Meinhof), who increasingly engaged in (counterproductive) urban guerrilla warfare and/or (also often counterproductive) K-Groups.
The missing content from the reformists led to the idea that they could continue the extraparliamentary protest through parliamentary means – they could have known from materialist analysis that the bourgeois state apparatus is built on structures that are fundamentally unchangeable internally – as the way it ultimately functioned, the Greens, demonstrates.
“The social-liberal coalition succeeded in largely absorbing the ‘dissatisfaction’ that had manifested through the student movement and extra-parliamentary protests, (by) postponing the relevance of a communist alternative for many (students) with its reform promises, thereby diffusing the anti-capitalist protest’s sharpness”
The second, even more decisive contradiction was between students and workers.
Unlike in, for example, France, where a connection between students and workers was successfully established and culminated in mass strikes (May 1968, Paris) that paralyzed France for days, the German student movement lacked this connection to the revolutionary subject – the working class.
The reasons for this are manifold: state repression against students, propaganda by the mass media (which mainly reached the working population), postmodern confusion, and the absence of a historical necessity for societal upheaval.
But it is clear: the 68 movement in Germany ultimately failed most notably because it did not reach the revolutionary subject, which intensified the contradiction between the question “What do the workers want?” and “What are we doing?,” the most important question for any revolutionary development.
The postmodern ideas, which led to absurdities like calls for impunity for pedophilic acts (since one was against all structures, including sexual ones), inevitably distanced the movement from the working society, which obviously didn’t have time to read thousands of pages of Adorno and Foucault just to understand why these often absurd postmodern claims might somehow contribute to their liberation.
This contradiction is naturally closely linked to internal disagreements within the movement, which prevented a unified understanding of the true goals of the revolutionaries (precisely because these goals did not exist).