Graffito in a University of Lyon classroom. Image, George Garrigues, Wikimedia Commons, 3.0
As to be expected, the 50th anniversary of May 68 has generated a mass of comments and stories that highlight the familiar events that provide a broad political and cultural context for what was going on at the time. However, one really important aspect has been curiously neglected. It concerns the intellectual and radical legacy of these events and, as I shall argue, it is this legacy which abides though it is now more than ever threatened.
Of course, most of the accounts have stressed both the range and global character of the radical movements and struggles opposing the existing relations of power that foregrounded May 68. Indeed, many commentaries have underlined the fact the atmosphere sustaining radical change during the 1960s was made up of a whole cluster of events, particularly, the Civil Rights and anti-racist movement, the anti-war protests about Vietnam, the beginning of second wave feminism, and the emergence of a counterculture. And we all remember that 1968 was the year that saw the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and the disturbances that followed in cities across the USA, the Tet offensive that ended American Cold War intervention in Vietnam, the Prague Spring against Russian domination, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City in October that stands as yet another sign of the violent suppression of left-leaning radicalism, and the Black Power salute at the Olympics Games in October that stood as a symbol of the continuing struggles against racism.
