During 1968, in France, Italy, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and all over the world, there were immense uprisings against the status quo. This fall, we will study this watershed period (1968-1974) considering the achievements and failures of the Left in the 1960s. How ready was the Left to face the imposition of neoliberalism, one aspect of capital’s response to these uprisings?
During 1968, in France, Italy, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and all over the world, there were immense uprisings against the status quo. This fall, we will study this watershed period (1968-1974) considering the achievements and failures of the Left in the 1960s. How ready was the Left to face the imposition of neoliberalism, one aspect of capital’s response to these uprisings?
Published on the 50th anniversary of those days in the spring of 68, “May Made Me” presents the legacy of the uprising: how those explosive experiences changed the individuals who participated and their lives as lived since then.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, —from Ginsberg’s Howl
“May ’68 seemed to portend the beginning of a revolutionary period in Europe, but it didn’t. Even so, in France and in so much of the world, it remains a marker, a moment when it was forbidden to forbid, when it seemed the imagination was about to seize power.”