Year 1956

Year 1956

DE-STALINIZATION AND THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS

Popular unrest threatened to destabilize the postfascist international order. The East German Uprising of 17 June 1953 grew from protests of East Berlin construction workers against higher production norms, raising po- litical demands for free elections. Military repression was swift, but both the SPD and the Allies in West Berlin observed restraint, closing the border against possible solidarity.³ A general Eastern European strike wave devel- oped after Stalins death, with over a hundred factories affected in Czech- oslovakia, including the Skoda arms complex in Pilsen, where troops were sent. Strikes spread through Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, reaching the USSR itself in July, in the camps of the Vorkuta mining complex in Siberia, following earlier risings in 1948 and 1950. Eastern European industrial unrest prompted economic liberalization and loosening of repression. In Hungary, Rakosi was partially disavowed and replaced as prime minister by the reform Communist Imre Nagy. The prisons were massively cleared out.

Then, at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, Krush- chev denounced Stalin. The Congress began with the familiar fanfares and speeches, but anticipation was in the air. Vittorio Vidali, a delegate from Trieste and transnational citizen of Communism, with spells in Italy, Ger- many, the United States, France, the USSR, Spain, and Mexico since 1917, exchanged news of disappeared comrades in the corridors: Every day the tone is more shrill, the accusations more specific.⁴ Appalling stories, ban- ished to the Communist unconscious, returned:

At dinner Germanetto informed me that a certain Bocchino from Tri- este wanted to meet me. He has served 17 years in jail; now he has been rehabilitated . . . and Russified. There are other rehabilitated Italians with him; nearly all of them have spent half of their lives in concentration camps. They came here to work as specialists, techni-

cians. One fine day they were arrested, accused of sabotage and sent

to prison. Probably to avoid torture or death, they confessed to crimes they had not committed, and so they ended up in Siberia. It happened to many people. When I asked about Edmondo Peluso, or Signora Monservigi (whose son died at Stalingrad), or Parodis wife, about Go- relli, Ghezzi, etc., I received no answer. Robotti, too, was in jail for more than a year, but he signed nothing and so they had to release him; but he went through hell; he is made of steel. The same thing happened to Gottardi, but he confessed to what he had not done. They asked Robotti to confess that Togliatti was a spy!⁵

Detailed revelations were delivered by Khrushchev at midnight on 25

February in closed session, with foreign Communists excluded. Detailing the cult of personality and Stalins megalomania, the secret speech fo- cused on the gross arbitrariness of Stalins power, Soviet ill-preparedness for war, and the dictatorial violations of socialist legality in the terror of the 1930s. Though Stalins behavior in the 1920s was attacked, his pol- iciessocialism in one country, Bolshevization of the Comintern, central planning, industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and of course democratic centralism and the one-party statewere not.⁶

Communism was cast into disarray. Senior nongoverning Communists were informed, and knowledge quickly circulated. Leading Communists killed in 194852, like Rajk in Hungary and Kostov in Bulgaria, were rehabilitated. Stalinist leaderships kept the lid closed, but events in Poland and Hungary moved too fast. Gomulkas successor as Polish general sec- retary since 1948, Boleslaw Bierut, died just after the Twentieth Congress, and Edward Ochab now took the Khrushchev route, releasing political prisoners and encouraging open debate. Intellectuals urged freedom of ex- pression; industrial militants moved toward workers councils; and events exploded into a workers uprising in Poznan on 28 June 1956. A crisis meeting of Polish and Soviet leaders brought Gomulka back to power on

1920 October. He initiated economic reform, cultural liberalization, and compromise with the Catholic Church. In return, Khrushchev removed the hardline Polish minister of defense, Marshall Konstantin Rokossovski, who had been ready to march on Warsaw. Crucially, Gomulka observed the lines of the postwar Eastern European settlement: the single-party state, the centrally planned economy, and Soviet military rule.⁷

Hungarian events were more extreme with different results. While Ra- kosi had surrendered the Premiership to Nagy in July 1953, he continued blocking reforms and forced Nagys dismissal in March 1955. But civil society was starting to stir, with writers, students, Catholics, and eventually workers forming associations, galvanized by attacks on Stalin and stories of returning prisoners. The Peto fi Circle, a student discussion club, called for honoring the purge victims. Rajks widow Julia denounced Rakosi at a Peto fi meeting on antifascist Resistance and prewar illegal work in June

1956:Murderers should not be criticizedthey should be punished. I shall never rest until those who have ruined the country, corrupted the Party, destroyed thousands and driven millions into despair receive just punish- ment. Comrades, help me in this struggle! The Circles last meeting before suspension occurred on 27 June, the day before the Poznan Uprising. A huge overflow crowd heard calls for press freedom, Nagys reinstatement, and changes in the system.⁸

On 18 July, the USSR replaced Rakosi with another Stalinist, Erno Gero , balanced by two returned victims, Janos Kadar and Gyo rgy Maro- san. An alternative leadership crystallized on 6 October during Gero s ab- sence in Moscow, when Rajk and three others were reinterred in the Ker- epesi National Cemetery on a hugely emotional occasion. New voices were demanding reformthe Writers Union, the Central Council of Trade Unions, the reactivated Peto fi Circle, and a new student association. On

2223 October, as demonstrations spiraled out of hand, inspired partly by Gomulkas appointment in Poland, Gero handed over to Nagy and Kadar as premier and general secretary. Budapest lurched into turmoil, as fascists and freebooters joined democrats and reformers on the streets. On 30 Oc- tober, Nagy restored the multiparty system, backed by a four-party coali- tion of Communists, Smallholders, Social Democrats, and National Peas- ants, with Christian Democrats forming in the wings. On 1 November, he withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. On 4 November, the Red Army occupied Budapest and all the major cities.⁹

Here, a second international crisis supervened: Israel had invaded Egypt on 29 October in collusion with Britain and France. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypts nationalist leader since 1954, had nationalized the Suez Canal on

26 July 1956, challenging Western authority in a formerly colonial terri- tory. The Israeli invasion was the pretext for an Anglo-French ultimatum calling on both sides to withdraw, so that British and French troops could

protect the Canal. Against U.S. warnings, Britain and France began bombing Egypt on 30 October, invading a week later. On 6 November, the freshly reelected U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, imposed a ceasefire on the British and French.

Perversely, these dramatic disruptions confirmed the lasting stability of the 1945 settlement, with each side tacitly conceding the others freedom of actionthe USSRs in Eastern Europe, the Wests in the colonial and postcolonial world. But this very coincidence of police actions finally shat- tered the Cold Wars disciplines, leaving a new oppositional space beyond the Communist and social democratic battlelines. If Soviet behavior disas- trously compromised Communisms remaining credibility, the equivoca- tions of right-wing Socialist and Labour leaderships over the Suez invasion renewed a nonCommunist antiimperialist critique. As the British Left dem- onstrated for a Suez ceasefire on 4 November, the Red Army was entering Budapest, and this painful symmetry inspired a new Left to emerge.

THE CRISIS OF COMMUNISM

Khrushchevs revelations tore Communist loyalties open. The secret speech elicited agonized self-criticisms, personally and collectively, with great di- visiveness and calls for reform. Then, at the height of this soul-searching, the Hungarian invasion suggested that nothing had changed after all. As Communists stared at the freshly exposed Soviet reality, first in the wake of the Twentieth Congress and then through the smoke of Budapest, facing not only the record of repression, but the public lies and massive self-deceptions that Moscow loyalties had entailed, conformities cracked.¹⁰

The resulting debates surpassed anything since the mid-1920s, when Bolsh- evization sacrificed internal democracy to revolutionary elan.

This was Communisms big trauma: in two years, the PCI lost four hundred thousand members and the CPGB dropped from 33,095 members to 24,900. In some smaller CPs, like the Austrian, West German, and Por- tuguese, Moscow loyalists merely bunkered down.¹¹ Some nongoverning parties developed greater autonomy, usually after losing members, often via splits. This applied to Scandinavia, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, and the Low Countries. Finally, in the larger Icelandic, Italian, and French CPs, 1956 worked with the grain of existing history. If the Icelandic Peoples Alliance avoided the vagaries of international Communism alto- gether, the PCI used 1956 to enhance its autonomy, while the PCF flaunted its Moscow orthodoxy. If Thorez minimized destalinization out of in- grained pro-Soviet loyalism, Togliatti pursued an explicitly independent course.¹²

But whatever the independence from Moscow, internal centralism re- mained. The CPGBs Commission on Inner-Party Democracy recommended against reform: once the dissidents had left, they became renegades and the party circled its wagons.¹³ The PCF dissent broke on the rock of Sta- linist discipline. Even in the PCI, the least Stalinist of CPs, whose support for pluralism and civil liberties was boosted by 1956, Togliatti adhered to the partys centralism. At the PCIs Eighth Congress in December 1956, dissenters were easily defeated. Some prominent individuals left, but the partys structure perdured.

Talking to Nuovi argomenti in June 1956, Togliatti stepped out of the self-referential Communist public sphere, however, and rebuked Khru- shchev for confining criticism to Stalins person rather than the system itself. He advanced the notion of polycentrism: there are countries in which the road to socialism is being pursued without the Communist Party being in the lead. . . . The whole system is becoming polycentric, and even in the Communist movement we cannot speak of a single guide, but of progress which is achieved by following roads which are often diverse.¹⁴ These were oblique references not only to China and Yugoslavia but also to Italy itself

and the Peoples Democracies, invoking the national roads philosophy of 194347. Togliatti reiterated these views many times after 1956, cul- minating in his Yalta Testament of September 1964, just before he died. A new diversity characterized the international conferences of CPs in Moscow in November 1957 and December 1960, which denied the USSR the blan- ket loyalism it had earlier presumed. In April 1956, Cominform was dis- solved, and the PCI blocked Soviet initiatives for any new international organization.¹⁵ Instead, regional conferences of Western European CPs met in Brussels in 1965 and Vienna in 1966. The PCI reopened relations with the Yugoslav League of Communists and began meeting regularly with the PCF.

Thus the crisis of Communism in 1956 provided crucial pointers for the future. On the one hand, the revival of grassroots democracy was extraor- dinarily moving and courageous. The main Hungarian resistance to the Red Army had come from workers councils, which reappeared in Europe for the first time since 191723. Resistance committees in 194345 had been a partial revival, as were the French factory occupations in summer 1936 and the anarcho-syndicalist collectives in Spain. But Hungarian events re- vived the conciliar form, mainly after the Nagy governments fall. Industrial towns, the main coalfields, and the Budapest district of Red Csepel re- sisted the Red Army during 411 November, forming the Central Workers Council (CWC) of Greater Budapest, with three permanent officials and seven commissions. It negotiated with the Kadar government; handled re- lations with the Soviet military; coordinated a citywide strike; and prepared a National Council in a conference of 21 November. But in December, the authorities regained the initiative. They began picking the councils off, out- lawing the CWC. But the councils remained an impressive display of grass- roots democracy, based in the working class, mobilizing the best of rank- and-file Communism. They established a precedent for future episodes of working-class democracy.¹⁶

On the other hand, the Nagy government provided vital precedents for Communist reform. The Hungarian revolution was much disputed, with anti-Communists upholding its democratic authenticity and pro-Soviet apologists attacking its counterrevolutionary dangers, as former fascists, Horthy supporters, and Western agents came out of the ground. Hungarys leaving the Warsaw Pact also threatened to drive a Western wedge into the Soviet sphere. But the Nagy government stood for Communist reform, based on Nagys own ministerial record from 194549 and his manifesto on the eve of the Twentieth Congress, On Communism. Nagy invoked Lenins NEP as a better model of socialist construction than Stalinist five- year plans, with slower industrialization, priority for consumer goods, and an end to collectivization. Nagys socialist-humanist credo and language of the national road was close not only to the reform Communism of the

1968 Prague Spring but also to the Eurocommunism of the mid-1970s and the unrealized antifascism of 1945. These perspectives characterized the

clandestinely published Hungaricus pamphlets in December 1956February

1957, calling for new roads, different from Stalinist terror-communism or the social democratic trends fawning upon capitalism, in effect a pre- mature Eurocommunism.

WEST OF SUEZ

The Suez Crisis was a watershed of international relations, marking both USprimacy over Britain and France and a disastrous defeat for the old imperialist powers, whose inability to block colonial liberation was now exposed. Resistance to decolonization continued, but mainly where Euro- pean settlers hijacked colonial rulein Algeria, the Belgian Congo, Por- tuguese Africa, and British southern Africa. Otherwise, Suez drew a thick line between two moments of decolonization: before 1956, when colonial independence came mainly through bloody wars of liberation, and after Suez, when negotiated independence took over.¹⁸ In Cyprus, the Commu- nist sympathies of the nationalist movement under Archbishop Makarios made this shift to negotiation especially dramatic. British Colonial Office spokesmen had declared that Cyprus would never be independent, exiling Makarios to the Seychelles in early 1956; in March 1957 he was released, leading to independence in three years.¹⁹

Unfortunately, decolonization owed little to the Left as such. Paternalist favoring of colonial development notwithstanding, Labour disregarded the rights of colonial peoples to self-determination. The French Left also emerged with little honor: it was a Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, who presided over Suez; and neither the PCF nor the SFIO managed a principled anticolonial politics over Algeria. In Western Europe no less than the East, 1956 demanded a reckoning with existing Left politicswith the depressing experiences of both actual existing socialism and actual existing social democracy. ²⁰

The main story of the early 1950s was one of closureof stepping down from the big expectations accompanying the end of war, of giving up the sense of agency in a changeable present, of forgetting what the victory over fascism could bring, of shedding the optimists skin, the sense of history still being made. The postwar settlement brought large and lasting change, and capitalisms slow but dependable recovery in the West was about to deliver a different kind of plenty, a prosperous future of consumer largesse. But as Europe emerged from austerity after the war, it was the the Cold Wars conservatism that delivered the main truth.²¹

The dual crisis of 1956 broke through the climate of fear and suspicion which prevailed during the 1950s, when the Cold War dominated the political horizon, positioning everyone and polarizing every topic by its remorseless binary logic. For Stuart Hall, a student at Oxford in the early

1950s, freshly arrived from Jamaica, the converging tragedies of Hungary

and Suez dramatized the lack of appeal of both the Lefts primary traditions, Communism and mainstream social democracy. These two events unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems which dominated political life at that timeWestern imperialism and Stalinism. The year 1956 symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age. It pointed the way forward to a new or third political space, where a New Left could form.

FUTURE IMPERFECT

in febr uary 1983, the British Labour Party lost a disastrous by-election in Ber- mondsey, a South London docklands district held continuously by the party since 1918. In a microcosm of the difficulties befalling urban Labour parties in the late twentieth century, deindustrialization and demographic change had removed the labor movements social un- derpinnings, leaving behind an entrenched party oligarchy in the Southwark Borough Council linked to a union machine. In an in- creasingly familiar patterm, younger activists moved into the local party, selecting its new secretary, Peter Tatchell, in 1982 to succeed the retiring MP Bob Mellish. The contrast was stark: Mellish, the right-wing associate offor- mer Prime Minister James Callaghan, in bed with the union power brokers ofthe Borough Council and the sworn enemy ofchange; Tatchell, a 30-year-old former sociology stu- dent in public employment, an Australian with no local roots, and equivocally on the left. Tatchell was also gay.

Under pressure from Mellish and the party right, Michael Foot, the new elected Labour leader, publicly disavowed Tatchell as Ber- mondseys parliamentary candidate, citing an article Tatchell had written in London Labour Briefing and accusing him ofmembership in Militant, a Trotskyist caucus inside the party. The local Labour Party refused to back down, and Tatchell fought the bye-election amid vi-

ciously homophobic attacks from the press, from a Real Bermondsey La- bour candidate, and from his Liberal-SDP Alliance opponent, who won the seat.¹ But Tatchell had no links to Militant. A grassroots socialist, he typified a generation ofpost-1968 activists who graduated from the student movement into forms of community-based politics and during the course of the 1970s saved local Labour Party branches from decay. In the offend- ing article in London Labour Briefing, he had called merely for broad ex- traparliamentary mobilization by and for the unemployed in a Siege of Parliament to restore the radical and defiant spirit ofLabours early days. He was a pacifist. He supported gay and lesbian rights. He was in tune with Ken Livingstones recently elected left-wing administration at the Greater London Council (GLC).²

The Bermondsey by-election revealed the collision ofLeft cultures. It was a dramatic case ofthe so-called loony Left syndrome. Throughout the 1980s, Conservatives and the press pilloried Labour politicians in local government for supporting antiracism, feminism, and lesbian-gay rights. Labours national leadership reacted cravenly by disavowing the policies. Faced with the new political agendas, it recurred to the safest political ground, presenting a respectable, moderate, trade-unionist, male- dominated working-class account ofitself, through which the post-1968 ideas were denied.³ The Rights demonizing ofthese New Left causes scared the Old Left leaders so effectively that the issues were simply excised from the agenda. In a later by-election in Greenwich in February 1987 and like- wise in the runup to a general election, the Labour candidate Deidre Wood, a former GLC member, faced the same vilification with no official Labour support and lost again to the SDP. As the Labour leader aide Patricia Hew- itt commented: The loony Labour left is taking its toll; the gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear among the pensioners.⁴

These conflicts recurred across Western Europe. On one side were left- wing generations shaped by the legacies ofthe Second World War and the postwar settlement, complacent from the climactic prosperity of the 1960s and increasingly intolerant ofdissent, settling into their anticipated future as natural parties ofgovernment. On the other side were the generations of 1968 and beyond, whose sense of the future was very different. Partic- ipatory politics and direct democracy; feminism, gender difference, and the politics ofsexuality; issues ofpeace and ecology; racism and the politics of immigration; community control and small-scale democracy; music, coun- terculture, and the politics ofpleasure; consciousness raising and the poli- tics ofthe personalthese were the issues that inspired younger generations ofthe Left during the 1970s and 1980s. For the generations of1945, such preoccupations were simply not intelligible. The resulting clash fundamen- tally shifted the Lefts overall ground.

For the first time in a century, the parliamentary party ofsocialism linked to trade unions lost its hegemony over the democratic project ofthe Left. Aside from the litany of particular issues just mentioned, the last third

ofthe twentieth century saw a resurgence ofinterest in locally focused direct action to the point where extraparliamentary agitations frequently supplanted the parliamentary sphere as the main center ofleft-wing energy. Concurrently, the infrastructures of capitalist industry, urban class forma- tion, and autonomous city governent previously sustaining the class- oriented parties ofsocialism also began to break up. In a surrounding eco- nomic context after 1973 of recession, massive unemployment, and ravaged welfare states, that old socialist and Communist Left experienced profound disorientation.

In the midst ofthese changes, the Soviet Union entered a dramatic pe- riod ofupheaval and reform, which ended with its dissolution in 1991. Along the way, and after a succession of earlier crises, the governing Com- munisms ofEastern Europe collapsed, bringing the region into the pan- European system ofdemocratic states via the Revolutions of1989. In con- junction with the longer-run changes mentioned earlier, these events signaled the end ofa long era. The politics ofdemocracy were clearly open- ing out.

on 2 january, Fidel Castro, Cubas char- ismatic leader, declared 1968 the Year of the Heroic Guerilla in memory of Ernesto Che Guevara, killed in Bolivia the previous Octo- ber.¹ An international Cultural Congress in Havana, with four hundred intellectuals from the Americas and Europe, then focused inter- national enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolu- tion.² Meanwhile East Asia captured atten- tion, from Chinas Cultural Revolution

(196569) to student tumults against the USS Enterprise in Japan and the seizure of the in- telligence vessel USS Pueblo in North Korea. On 30 January, the National Liberation Front, or Vietcong, launched the Tet Offen- sive against major cities in South Vietnam, pitching U.S. policy there into crisis. By the time U.S. and South Vietnamese troops reoc- cupied Hue, their credibility was in shreds. European radicalism in 1968 was nothing if not internationalist, inspired by non- Western revolutionary movements or anger at the counterrevolutionary United States. Stu- dents passed easily across borders, from one theater of radicalism to another. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundations International War Crimes Tribunal promoted this process, cen- tering its efforts on the Vietnam War.³ The world had shrunk, practically through travel and communications and culturally through taste and style. Television was key. Events in Saigonor Paris, Prague, and Chicago could be shared simultaneously in student bars and common rooms in London, Stock- holm, Rome, Amsterdam, or West Berlin:

for the first time, the world, or at least the world in which student ideologists

lived, was genuinely global. The same books appeared . . . in the student bookshops in Buenos Aires, Rome and Hamburg. . . . The same tourists of revolution crossed oceans and continents from Paris to Havana to Sao Paulo to Bolivia. The first generation of humanity to take rapid and cheap global air travel and telecommunications for granted, the students of the late 1960s, had no difficulty in recognizing what happened at the Sorbonne, in Berkeley, in Prague, as part of the same event in the same global village.⁴

LEAVING NORMAL

On 5 January, Antonin Novotny, Czechoslovakias Stalinist President, was replaced as the KSC first secretary by a reluctant reformer, Alexander Dub- cek.⁵ By March 1968, the KSC had liberalized the press, abolished cultural censorship, and recognized academic freedom. It rehabilitated Purge vic- tims. Its Action Program of 10 April focused political hopes in what became known as the Prague Spring. Concurrently, student protests precipitated crises in Poland and Yugoslavia, climaxing in March and June. Students clashed with police, spreading demands for civil freedoms across Poland. Warsaw Polytechnic University was occupied as students demanded a Cze- choslovak process of reform.⁶

Students were on the move in Western Europe too. In Spains universities they demanded educational reform, physically battled the state, and pressed for democracy with militant workers and illegal opposition groups. Faculty and administrators were suspended or resigned, police occupied buildings, and universities were closed.⁷ Italian students occupied universities in Trento, Milan, and Turin, then Rome and Naples, until 26 universities were struck and higher education was immobilized. When students in Rome tried to occupy the faculty of architecture on 1 March, police brutality was an- swered in kind: It was the first time we hadnt retreated in front of the police. . . . It gave us a sense of strength, of doing what we hadnt been able to do before. We were profoundly convinced that we were right to be doing it. We ripped up the wooden park benches and used the planks as clubs.⁸

This violent confrontation, the Battle of Valle Giulia, became the

1968 norm. In West Germany, violence had already erupted during protests against the Shah of Irans visit to West Berlin in June 1967, anger spilling over into other universities. In Britain, a sit-in at the London School of Economics (LSE) during March 1967 sparked the same pattern, with fur- ther flare-ups at universities in Leicester, Essex, Bristol, Aston, Hull, Brad- ford, Leeds, and Hornsey College of Art. Two London Vietnam demon- strations in October 1967 and March 1968 captured the rising propensity for violence: one was an orderly march of 10,000, but the other drew

30,000 who battled police at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.⁹

Paris had the same combustible ingredients as in Italy and West Ger- manyhugely expanding student numbers, hopelessly inadequate facilities, alienating environments, uncomprehending administrationsbut it took time to draw the spark. Protest began at the new university of Nanterre, built on an air force depot in northwest Paris, in a brutalist construction of glass and steel cubes, set down where industrial wasteland meets the ready-built slum housing of the Spanish and Algerian immigrant work- ers.¹⁰ In November 1967, Nanterre was paralyzed by a student strike, and campus surveillance by plainclothes police ratcheted up the tensions. Daniel Cohn-Bendit emerged as the audacious and charismatic agitator of Nan- terres discontents.¹¹

On March 22, six Nanterre activists were arrested after Vietnam rallies, and students occupied the chancellors offices in response. The 22 March Movement was born, forging a common front beyond the Lefts sectarian divisionswithout formal leaders, without common theoretical positions

. . . divided by their different political beliefs but united by a common will to act, and a pact that all decisions would be taken by general assem- blies.¹² Hostilities spiraled: classes were suspended while police cordoned off the campus; sociology students boycotted exams; the university closed three days later. Authorities disciplined the leaders, summoning Cohn- Bendit and seven others to a hearing in the Sorbonne on 6 May. Parisian Maoists (with helmets, clubs, catapults and ball-bearings) arrived after an ultra-Right threat to exterminate the leftist vermin, and Nanterre closed indefinitely.¹³ A manifesto of the 22 March Movement was endorsed by 1,500 students: outright rejection of the capitalist-technocratic univer- sity, of the division of labor, and of so-called neutral knowledgesupple- mented by a call for solidarity with the working class.¹⁴

By May, the signs had multiplied. Other French campuses were affected, and students sometimes connected with workersat the Saviem works in Caen, the Dassault factory in Bordeaux, and Sud Aviation in Nantes. Unrest reached the schools, with a teachers strike and High School Student Action Committees forming on 26 February. Student anger at the Vietnam War was shaped by an International Congress hosted by the Socialist German Students (SDS) in West Berlin in February. An attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April produced immediate international solidarity, with Cohn-Bendit coordinating French protests for the 22 March Movement, joined by the Maoist Union des Jeunesses Communistes, marxistes-leninistes (UJC-ml) and the Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Re- volutionnaire (JCR). French radicalization joined a general European tu- mult, with student risings in Spain, Italy, and Poland, widespread demonstrations in West Germany and Britain, and further militancy in Bel- gium, Sweden, and elsewhere, all in a framework linking Vietnam to stu- dent issues and revolutionary critiques of capitalism.

Student movements discarded conventional politics in favor of direct action and the streets. Student radicals ignored parliaments and elected

representatives, behaving in passionate and unruly ways and looking for agency and meaning beyond the confines of the system. Their actions were embedded in broader generational rebellion, as world events magni- fied images of change. Tensions heightened following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Nigerian Civil War (196770), confrontations of state and stu- dents in Algeria, and the war in Southeast Asia. United States events shattered the Cold Wars domestic stabilities: Democrats divided over Viet- nam as President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from reelection; black rad- icalization accelerated after the urban riots of summer 1967, with the grow- ing militancy of the Black Panthers, black nationalism, and the civil rights movements conversion into the Poor Peoples Campaign. The transconti- nental rioting after Martin Luther Kings assassination on 4 April blazed across Europes television screens.