1968, as Herbert Marcuse put it, was the year of the Great Refusal—a “public moment,” to echo French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, when the social contract was challenged. Allen Ginsberg chanted “Om” amidst the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Beatles released The White Album. Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world, was denied a license to fight because he opposed the war in Vietnam. The Women’s Liberation Party protested the Miss America pageant, affirming that women are people, not livestock. Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Bob Marley made reggae music in Jamaica, and the whole world danced. At the Olympics in Mexico City, just months after the massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco, the fastest men alive bowed their heads and raised their arms and joined their fingers into fists of black power and workers’ struggle.
Rebels could read the writing on the walls. The graffiti of Paris took the imagination to unprecedented heights against the imperialist Leviathan: “soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible” (“be realistic, demand the impossible”). Turning the world upside down required turning the police command, “Up against the wall, mother fucker,” back on the police themselves. Below it all was an infrastructure wrought of rubber, iron, chrome, coal, oil. On them was built the Keynesian model of economic development and the Fordist model of work. The speed-up on the auto assembly line killed workers and stuffed gas-guzzling vehicles onto the asphalted highways.
Looking back on 1968, I see two big themes in conflict—thanatocracy versus the commons. My reflections are part reminiscence and part commentary on two revolutionaries of the time, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and American writer Grace Lee Boggs.
In 1968 I was a graduate student in history, and I helped occupy one of the five buildings occupied at Columbia University in April. The first one, Hamilton Hall, was named after Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and the key figure responsible for the capitalist transition from the slavery of the Caribbean sugar plantation to the slavery of the U.S. cotton plantation. It was with poetic justice that Hamilton Hall was occupied by the descendants of slaves, the Students’ Afro-American Society. The Students for a Democratic Society took the next building (Low) and then another (Math). A fourth building (Avery) was taken by architecture students, and a fifth—Fayerweather—was taken by graduate students in the arts and sciences, including those of us in history.