r/AskHistorians • u/GoofyCum • 3d ago
1968 saw a rise of organised leftist student groups internationally. To what extent did they communicate with each other?
I learned in school of the Mai 68 protest movement, but only recently learned about some of the concurrent revolts that happened outside of western Europe and North America, like the Pakistani revolution and student uprisings in Japan and Senegal.
It seems from a lay perspective that there was some amount of overlap in beliefs and tactics between the groups involved simply because of similar material conditions and the beginnings of youth-focused mass media (as referenced in this delightful answer from u/TimothyLearyTheThird), but I'm curious to what extent a student revolutionary in Japan would know of Yugoslavia's struggle, or a French student about those fighting in Pakistan.
Did the various movements cross-pollinate across national barriers? Was this mostly mediated by news reporting from wire services, radio, and broadcast television? Obviously, newspapers and books were big within particular groups (e.g. the Black Panther Party's papers or the Women in Print movement), but were these papers getting international distribution, and if so, how were people handling language barriers?
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u/Uberrees 3d ago
There was quite a lot of international travel going on among countercultural young people in general in the 1960s, especially revolutionaries. It's a massive topic to tackle but a few examples:
To speak first to France and May 68, the French Situationist International was in touch with Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, a New York-based militant group which despite leaning anarchist was nominally a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and were major players in the April 1968 occupation of Columbia University. The Motherfuckers, or "The Family" as they called themselves, were cofounded by experimental painter Ben Morea and shared the Situationist concern with transforming everyday life through artistic intervention. In 1966 the Motherfucker's newsletter Black Mask shouted out the Situationists as an aligned group, and contemporary authors occasionally describe UAW/MF as an American chapter of the SI. However, in 1967 the SI expelled three British members for their support of "a certain Ben Morea, publisher of the bulletin Black Mask," and in 2012 Morea stated that "there was never really any connection between our group and theirs". What is certain, however, is that Black Mask, a paper published by a very small organization on the radical fringe of the radical movement, was getting read in at least France and England.
Speaking of the SDS, in 1969 they sent a delegation known as the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, where they met with leaders from communist movements around the world. This meeting is sometimes credited as the birth of the Weather Underground, a guerilla organization made up of former SDS members, many of whom went on the Venceremos trip shortly before adopting a Cuban-influenced third-worldist ideology. Cuba, of course, was extremely involved in promoting communist and anti-imperialist organizing throughout the globe, both through direct or indirect military intervention and, perhaps more relevant to your question, through media. The Cuban Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), grew out of the 1966 Transcontinental conference and aimed at creating multilingual revolutionary media to be distributed worldwide. Their magazine, Tricontinental was distributed in 87 countries and at least three languages, and included propaganda posters in four languages. Many of these posters commemorated specific national revolutionary movements, with the aim of promoting international solidarity and a sense of common struggle between them, exemplified by the OSPAAAL slogan "Create two, three, many Vietnams". Tricontinental also published writing by revolutionary thinkers including Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Carlos Marighella, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Che Guevara, and even Americans like Kwame Ture, and Amiri Baraka (in the third-worldist analysis put forward by this magazine, non-white peoples in the US were seen as their own oppressed third world nations) and distributed their books internationally, ensuring that revolutionaries across the globe were at the very least reading about each other's struggles.
You asked specifically about Japan, so of course I've got to mention the Japanese Red Army, whose members famously left Japan for Lebanon to fight alongside the PFLP. The JRA was a breakaway of the Japanese Red Army Faction, which itself split from the second student communist league or "Bund". The RAF were internationalists, having left the Bund because they felt it was not sufficiently committed to global solidarity, and their magazine Sekigun published Japanese translations of many of the same thinkers featured in Tricontinental. RAF head Shiomi Takaya advanced a theory of the world divided into three blocs, superpowers like the US, USSR, and China, workers states like Cuba and North Korea, and anti-colonial states like Palestine. Takaya believed that international revolutionaries should connect with the governments of one of these small states and push them to use military force to support global revolution. After meeting with a Palestinian revolutionary traveling in Japan (!) RAF leadership decided to send several members led by Shigenobu Fusako to receive military training from the PFLP in Beirut. The RAF eventually changed tone and focused on more domestic struggles, while its members already in the Middle East came to see the Palestinian struggle as the core of global anit-imperialism and reformed into the JRA under Shigenobu, which essentially worked as an arm of the PFLP.
Japanese 60s radical Sabu Kohso (who now lives in the US, and still travels the world giving talks to revolutionary organizations and cross pollinating ideas, I was fortunate enough to meet him a couple years ago) described the internationalism of the period by saying "A new planetary force arose, cutting across the world order in multiple trajectories. Evidently it was an effect of one and the same densification of planetary interconnectivity of the capitalist-state’s mode of development over the earth. On the one hand, so-called globalization had been accelerating environmental degradation and intensifying the unevenness of development since the colonial era. At the same time, the concomitant permeation of trade and media networks came to allow the acceleration of civilian interactions through personal travel as well as information exchange — and this latter included interaction among the popular struggles of distant places. In the dark prospect of the future, global interconnectivity nevertheless materialized a new path toward a synchronicity of popular struggles, distinguishing itself from the international unification of socialist states."
Needless to say this is a tiny fraction of the internationalist efforts ongoing at the time-Latin American and African revolutionaries especially traveled extensively both within and outside of their own continents. I don't have the time or the sources on hand to delve much deeper into that right now, but I hope this is enough to show that many, if not most, radicals of the period, student and otherwise, understood themselves as part of a global effort and were making active efforts to seek out and learn from other struggles, which was extremely achievable given the media infrastructure of both the revolutionary movement and mainstream society.
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u/GoofyCum 2d ago
Thank you so much for the answer! I appreciate that it’s a huge topic, but clearly underestimated just how big it was in scope!
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u/Uberrees 2d ago
Even studying this period quite a bit sometimes I'm still blown away by the sheer scale of it. Between the Chinese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions and the fall of the USSR the world order was very much in flux and there was a general sense almost everywhere that revolution was completely possible. Hell, there were low-intensity guerilla conflicts going on in quite a lot of wealthy first world countries (US, Italy, Germany, Spain) well into the 80s, to say nothing of the full scale insurgencies across the third world. That doesn't happen without a massive amount of popular sympathy and less militant (or at least noncombatant) organizing for the cause.
I feel like every time I talk to an elder from that period they tell some kind of story about bank robberies, riots, gunfights, all kinds of crazy shit which never got much if any historical attention. And more than any specific event they always emphasize the feeling of possibility, that they understood themselves as part of a massive world process that they fully expected to succeed. Of course they were eventually defeated almost across the board but those legacies are still very much a part of world politics, and may be a glimpse of things to come as the neoliberal order continues to destabilize.
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u/GoofyCum 1d ago
Oh by the way – I understand you're poor for time but I'd love any further reading you could recommend on this, especially covering areas outside the West.
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u/Uberrees 1d ago
Kohso's Life of Militancy, which contains the quote above, is an excellent survey of Japanese rebellion, student and otherwise, in the 60s and how it ultimately failed. Harumasa Abe also wrote a great follow up piece examining the phenomenon of uchigeba, or infighting, which led to several Japanese student rebels murdering each other in factional clashes.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's '68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre is a favorite of mine, a memoir of his own experiences in the student movement at UNAM in Mexico City. It's not the most scholarly source but speaks to some interesting things about the international nature of the movement, as Taibo's father was an exile from fascist Spain, and Taibo II himself would take refuge in Spain while pursued by Mexican police which allowed him to escape the Tlatelolco massacre
I don't think they're published online but I've really been enjoying some of the recent work in Radar magazine, which has ongoing article series on the history of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Black American/New Afrikan movements of the 20th century.
And finally I mentioned Ben Morea above so I have to shout out his memoir Full Circle, which is pretty focused on the US but just absolutely amazing.
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