What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?

Abstract

Seattle used to be just a city. Since December 1999, it has become shorthand for grassroots protest against the injustices of global capitalism. This is hardly the first time a place-name has come to symbolize a watershed in opposition movements. There were a host of such markers in the huge wave of U.S. protests against racism and the Vietnam War during and after 1968: “Chicago” (referring to the 1968 Democratic Convention where police beat demonstrators as they chanted “the whole world is watching”); “San Francisco State” (where a 1968–69 strike led by students of color made the first major breakthrough in the fight for Ethnic Studies); and “Cambodia” and “Kent State” (referring to Richard Nixon’s ill-fated 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of four white students by the Ohio National Guard). For the rebellious youth of the late 1960s, those locations-turned-emblems did not just register as external events. They spurred personal transformations that led thousands to adopt a revolutionary anticapitalist outlook. Radicalization ran both broad and deep. In 1968 more college students (20 percent) identified with Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara than with any of the candidates for the U.S. presidency.1 A 1971 New York Times survey indicated that four out of ten students— nearly 3 million people—thought that a revolution was needed in the United States.2 Radical sentiment ran even stronger in the African American community and by the early 1970s had penetrated deeply into the Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian American,