Revolutionary Politics: Ten Years After 1968

Abstract

Describing the last tortured decade of Trotsky's life, his biographer Isaac Deutscher (paraphrasing Marx) wrote: "This was a time when. . . 'the idea pressed towards reality', but as reality did not tend towards the idea, a gulf was set between them, a gulf narrower yet deeper than ever." 1968 was a year when at least reality began to "tend towards the idea again." The explosions which shook world politics that year are ten years old. They have already become history, but their effects still remain. The French general strike, the Tet offensive of the Vietnamese communists and the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring demonstrated the validity of the central tenets of the revolutionary marxist programme. Revolutions were possible in the West. The working class remained the only agency of social change in the advanced capitalist countries. Prague demonstrated, even more clearly than Hungary in 1956 and East Berlin in 1953, that the spectre of the Soviet bureaucracy could not be exorcised by reforms from within. The battlefields of Vietnam demonstrated that the road to social liberation did not lie through the blind alleys of peaceful co-existence.