In 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley staged a sit-in at Sproul Hall to protest campus restrictions on political activism. Shouting through his bullhorn, Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement, likened modern society to an unhearing, unfeeling, oiled machine that needed to be stopped.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Four years later, students the world over had seemingly made good on Savio’s words. In Italy, the occupation of the University of Turin in 1967 ignited a widespread student take-over of campuses in Florence, Pisa, Venice, Milan, Naples, Padua, and Bologna. By March 1968, the spreading disruptions had paralyzed the entire system of higher education in Italy. Tens of thousands of students went on strike; the universities were besieged or occupied; and professors faced locked rooms or empty lecture halls.

In 1968 in France, student protests began at Nanterre and soon spread to occupations throughout the French university system. The same year, German students occupied the Free University in Berlin and barricaded the entrances to campuses in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Göttingen and Aachen while high school and university students in Mexico occupied their school buildings under the slogan “We don’t want the Olympic Games, we want a revolution!”

In the United States, the 1968 occupation of Columbia University by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was, within two years, replicated across the country as over 4 million students — joined by 350,000 faculty in over 800 universities — went on strike, taking over university buildings and burning down army recruitment offices. Between May 1 and June 30, 1970, nearly a third of all US universities witnessed “incidents which resulted in the disruption of the normal functioning of the school.”

Initially centered on campuses, students soon took their tactics outside the university to disrupt “business as usual” within society at large. In the United States, students blocked railroad tracks and city streets, and held sit-ins on America’s highways to engage stalled drivers in debates about the state of the nation — though how well this last tactic worked is open to some debate. Anti-war demonstrators chanting “Hell no, we won’t go!” occupied the Pentagon steps, blockaded draft-induction centers and obstructed draftees in attempts to arrest the movement of American bodies to fight the war in Vietnam. In May 1971, 35,000 anti-war protesters occupied West Potomac Park in Washington and announced that “because the government had not stopped the Vietnam War, they would stop the government.”

In 1966, student groups in West Berlin had blocked traffic by engaging passersby in long discussions. Two years later the German New Left was building street barricades and overturning the Springer publication’s delivery trucks in order to physically arrest the distribution of false reports of their activities. In 1968 in France, the government crackdown on the universities led to the construction of barricades in the streets of Paris and the spread of the occupations to factories that paralyzed the country for the better part of May and June. All told, between 1968 and 1970 alone, tens of millions of students and workers across the Atlantic, en masse and spontaneously, shut down thousands of universities and factories, and took effective control of their places of study and work.

Neither Marx nor Coca-Cola

Almost immediately, the non-violent disruptions of the New Left attracted intense criticism. The leftist militant Pierre Goldman claimed that New Left students were “satisfying their desire for history using ludic and masturbatory forms.” Left-wing critics excoriated the student protests: “For a number of weeks, [the rebels] were the masters, not of French society, nor even its university systems, but of its walls.” To many of an older generation, the imagination had seized power in 1968 — but it was only an imaginary power. “Because they no longer wished society to be a spectacle” critics damningly continued, “they mistook a spectacle for society.”

Even the sympathetic Sartre remarked that “a regime is not brought down by 100,000 unarmed students, no matter how courageous.” This understanding of the New Left as engaged in a war between an all-powerful military state and powerless students adrift in a purely symbolic and performative realm has been a near constant refrain over the past half century.

Student protesters in Paris, May ’68.

The ghost of Lenin drools over these and countless similar comments that judge 1968 by its potential to appropriate political or economic power. Like Lenin, they view the New Left through the eyes of the state, as something that did or did not pose a threat to its existence. From this vantage point, as Kristin Ross writes in May ’68 and its Afterlives, “people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power.” Such views cannot help but see 1968 as the failed, symbolic and masturbatory reenactment of what workers had attempted before. Or what British journalist David Caute described as the “playground stuff” of middle-class kids “enacting their nursery rebellions.”

By the 1980s, critics from the old left were joined by other commentators. These newcomers — including the aging participants of 1968 itself — described the New Left as a “generational” or “cultural” revolt; as the birth of an era of personal expression that was soon recuperated in the service of consumer capital; and, most recently, as enabling the communications “revolution” epitomized by the internet. In their celebration of youth pressing up against staid barriers and embrace of unfettered personal creativity, each of these newer interpretations simultaneously elevated individuals and individualism while disavowing the collective political essence of 1968. While the old left claimed that “nothing happened” in 1968, these more recent interpretations assert its teleological connection to what we have become today.

Both fundamentally misconstrue what many activists were attempting to do. Lost in these critiques is the collective, global, anti-imperialist, emancipatory politics of 1968. Civil rights and black power activists; students in Paris, Mexico City, Berlin, Berkeley, and New York; and feminists self-identifying as Third World women articulated an anti-imperialist politics that expanded the existing economic understanding of oppression to include foreign policy, domestic social relations and individual consciousness. The anti-imperialism of 1968 and the New Left provides some important lessons for the politics of liberation today.

A Politics of Anti-Imperialism

The year 1956 was key to the emergence of the New Left. Within the span of a few months beginning in late September, the British and French invaded Egypt to reassert Western control over the Suez Canal, the French social-democratic government pursued a brutal crackdown against Algerian freedom fighters in the Battle of Algiers, and the Red Army’s tanks rolled into Hungary.

These interventions were a wake-up call for many on the left, exposing the imperial violence of both the USSR and the West. A decade earlier, Frankfurt School theoreticians Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer claimed in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that “the fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant.” They argued that the scientific and managerial administration of society, rather than guaranteeing human liberation, had led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Now it seemed that wherever the left looked, the myths of technocratic and rational progress promoted by their own societies shattered against the harsh reality of Soviet tanks, napalm and very real threat of global thermonuclear Armageddon.

The 1960s brought these horrors into sharper relief. America’s war in Vietnam, a failed intervention into Cuba, the normalization of French torture in Algeria, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the West’s military and political support for repressive regimes in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East all underscored the imperial oppression occurring along a newly imagined North/South Axis.

However, unlike the complacency of the European and American left, the Third World was fighting back. In Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam, ordinary men and women had taken up arms to disrupt and remove imperial regimes from their countries. These Third World liberation struggles, particularly the resistance of the Vietnamese people to foreign domination, catalyzed the birth of the New Left throughout the Atlantic world. From its beginning, the New Left was internationalist to its core, drawing inspiration, tactics and subjectivities from the writings and struggles of Third World revolutionaries.

Vietnam War protesters in 1967.

The guiding principle of this New Left subjectivity was anti-imperialism. They saw the world governed by an imperial authority, a global, unfeeling, unhearing machine which mobilized bodies and created desires to simultaneously buy its products and carry out its genocidal policies. SDS member Tom Hayden stated as much regarding the 1968 occupations of Columbia University, “the Columbia Students were taking an internationalist and revolutionary view of themselves in opposition to imperialism.” They aimed “to stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve human ends.”

Though expressed in many different forms, the New Left shared the feeling that the existing organization of human beings — how they related to one another, the ways they spoke, what they saw and desired — was a mechanism of social control. For New Left activists, these more subtle mechanisms worked hand-in-hand with explicit state and economic oppression to colonize the lives and minds of humans in “post-industrial” society. As Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense put it: “People are colonized, oppressed and exploited on all levels. Intellectually, politically, economically, emotionally, sexually and spiritually, we are oppressed, exploited, colonized.”

The broader critique of imperialism is crucial to understanding the politics of the New Left. For the New Left, the social order was not simply in the wrong hands — something that could be reformed or seized — but itself suspect. Anti-imperialism, in this sense, meant neither the modification nor the seizure of power but rather, and more profoundly, the destruction or devolution of it. As Italian student activist and later cultural historian Luisa Passerini observed in Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, “we realized that, notwithstanding its fascination, the idea of an assault on the Winter Palace was archaic.”

The New Left, whether attacking a racist or patriarchal system, the Vietnam War or the university’s complicity in it, intended their political action to either withdraw from or completely irrupt the oppressive movement of the world around them. According to a Berkeley student leaflet, “we are not intent on petitioning leaders to take action on our behalf. We are no longer interested in protesting someone else’s politics. Reconstitution is about making our own politics.” The popular slogan of the French student revolt echoed this sentiment: “We won’t ask/We won’t demand/We will take and occupy.”

For naïve students to militant groups on both sides of the Atlantic, politics became less about making claims for inclusion or reform and increasingly about a total repudiation of the socio-political system. As the Yippies provocatively claimed, “we are not protesting ‘issues’; we are protesting Western civilization. We are not hassling over shit so that we can go back to ‘normal’ lives: our ‘normal’ lives are fucked up!” Or, in the words of Stokely Carmichael: “When you talk of Black Power you talk about bringing the country to its knees… of smashing everything Western civilization has created.”

Anti-imperialism opposed the encroachment of social control into the national, institutional, communal and individual domains of human existence. Instead it asserted the autonomy of these spheres, shaping efforts to stop the global war machine, arrest police intrusion into black neighborhoods, and redefine the social roles, perceptions and language of everyday life. Though the New Left used various terms for the imperial mechanisms of social control — “the machine,” “the establishment,” “the regime,” “the man” — the most common term was the police.

The police described its literal manifestation as well as the wider sense of modern society’s prescription and surveillance of the desires, horizons, occupational roles, and experiential universe of its members. Police and policing became central concepts in the New Left’s understanding of subjugation, a multi-layered target for the anti-imperialist politics they undertook to liberate their lives.

Disrupting Authority in Everyday Life

Professors, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

New Left activists across the Atlantic questioned the hierarchy and authoritarianism of liberal capitalist societies and disrupted the mechanisms of policing. As students formed a major contingent of the New Left, education was an early target. The student occupations connected the educational system within the universities to the university’s role within society. They disrupted examinations, the “control centers” of education that conditioned students to accept arbitrary authority and hierarchy within the classroom and acquiesce to it within society at large.

Students also challenged what they were being taught. They asserted that higher education had lost its critical function, becoming instead a site where future leaders were inculcated in the principles and rules of the social order. “University education has been reduced to the acquisition of technocratic skills…vocational training for the market researchers, personnel managers and investment planners of the future,” claimed Robin Blackburn in A Brief Guide to Bourgeois Ideology.

Students sought to disrupt this integrative function of education, to blockade the reproduction of society in its existing form. “We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as your police dogs,” wrote one student on the walls of Nanterre. As Alain Touraine, the French sociologist who witnessed firsthand the Nanterre insurrection, claimed, the 1968 student uprisings were about “transforming the relationship between the young person and society. He was being taught to enter society; he wished to learn how to change it.”

The student occupations and strikes that resulted in blockaded or empty classrooms were accompanied by efforts to revamp the higher educational system. Counter-curricula, alternative education courses and “critical” or “free universities” were often launched during or shortly following student strikes and occupations. First proposed and put into practice by the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, by 1969, the Free University of Berkeley (FUB) offered 119 courses with such titles as the “Dialectics of Alienation” and “Revolutionary Thought and Action.” By 1970 there were 300-500 Free or Critical universities in the US with an estimated 100,000 students having taken one or more of their courses.

During the occupation of the University of Trento in northern Italy, insurgent students published a counter-curriculum challenging both the form and content of education administered by the university. A year later, the same groups circulated “The Manifesto for a Negative University,” a blueprint to radically reshape the university from an instrument of class domination to one of liberation. By 1968, Free Universities had been established in England, West Germany, France, Canada and the Netherlands. Throughout these counter-institutions, academic vocabulary was stripped of its “false neutrality” and radically moralized. As one French student wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne: “When examined, answer with questions.”

The hierarchical and authoritarian nature of education reflected the society that had created it. The larger problem for the New Left was the colonization of everyday life. First and foremost, there was the literal presence of the police, encountered by the white New Left in the form of the national guard or riot squad, and by Blacks daily as the street cop in their communities. In this context, decolonization meant confronting the authority the police wielded over human lives. “Liberate the Sorbonne from police occupation!” became a key demand of the French student uprising in 1968, one soon to be replicated across universities in Europe.

In the United States, decolonization was the explicit intent for the 1966 formation of the Black Panther Party, whose armed patrols shadowed law-enforcement officers, disrupting their attempts to racially police the “Black colony.” Significantly, their projects of neighborhood decolonization embraced the full gamut of anti-imperialist politics, from confronting the reign of predatory slum lords — a project also taken up by the Latino Young Lords of Chicago and New York — to burning draft cards, refusing to “fight and kill other people of color who…are being victimized by the white racist government of America.”