The global revolt of the 1960s offered hope for liberation from capitalism, a hope that was not fulfilled. To succeed this time, we must address four questions:

• What caused the crisis?
• How was the system stabilized?
• What factors are leading to another global revolt?
• How can we win this time?

What Caused the Crisis?

Capitalism is a dynamic system based on a competition for capital that can never be won decisively. Whoever gains the top position is immediately challenged by others striving to surpass them. The result is perpetual social and economic instability. As Marx observed,

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and Man is compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The 1960s revolt erupted in response to a post-war shift in the global imperial order that opened new possibilities for organizing society.

The decline of European empires triggered a wave of national liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Former colonies won their independence, and military dictatorships were overthrown. Two additional factors shaped the crisis: a post-war race to industrialize and the globalization of capital.

The push to industrialize drew millions of rural people into cities, swelling the ranks of the working class and challenging previous methods of social control.

The globalization of capital linked the economies of all major nations, turning every national crisis into an international one.

The U.S. War in Vietnam

The United States emerged from WWII as the dominant global power. The war in Vietnam (1955-1975) marked the beginning of its decline.

By 1967, almost half a million U.S. troops were stationed in Vietnam. By 1968, the war was costing $27 billion a year with no victory in sight. The rising government deficit caused a surge of inflation that triggered workers’ demands for more pay.

The U.S. could not meet workers’ demands, modernize industry, and also secure a global empire. So it chose to suppress workers’ demands and silence anti-war sentiment. Students were among the first to rebel.

The Student Revolt

Before the war, higher education was reserved for the elite. The post-war expansion of industry demanded a more inclusive education system.

More scientists and engineers were needed to raise productivity, more professionals were needed to manage expanding state institutions, and more intellectuals were needed to impose capitalist ideas on a more educated working class.

To meet this challenge, colleges and universities admitted middle-class students and even a few from the working class. Some nations enrolled more students than the education system could manage, causing conditions on campus to deteriorate.

Increasingly, the lofty ideals taught in universities conflicted with the reality of class inequality, racist violence, and imperial oppression. Students began to protest a system that made no sense.

In California, thousands of students occupied their university. When police tried to arrest them, thousands more came out in support. In the 1968-69 student year, 70 percent of private universities and 43 percent of public ones reported “severe student unrest.”

Student revolts also erupted in Germany, England, Italy, Poland, France, and Spain. In Greece, a student occupation developed into a mass uprising that toppled the military dictatorship.

The Anti-Racist Rebellion

In the United States, the student rebellion emboldened the anti-racist movement.

In 1900 almost all Black Americans lived in Southern states. The expansion of industry drew Black people from Southern plantations to take jobs in Northern cities. By 1970, almost half the Black population lived in Northern states.

To pacify the demand for Black civil rights, politicians offered anti-racist reforms such as school desegregation and voting-rights laws. This was more show than substance. Authorities refused to enforce these laws and attacked those who tried to enforce them.

Police assaulted peaceful anti-racist demonstrators with dogs, water hoses, clubs, and guns. Black churches were bombed. The FBI infiltrated protest organizations, spreading misinformation, provoking conflict, and discrediting leading activists.

The main tactic of the civil-rights movement was non-violence. Taking the moral high-ground suited a movement for equal rights and social acceptance. Impatient with the lack of progress, activists formed the Black Panther Party and organized armed patrols to defend Black neighborhoods against police violence.

The Anti-War Movement

The anti-racist movement fed the anti-war movement.

Three-hundred thousand Black Americans facing racist oppression at home were conscripted to fight a racist war in Vietnam. They formed just 12 percent of the U.S. population, yet suffered 24 percent of the deaths in what Martin Luther King condemned as the White man’s war.

World boxing champion Muhammad Ali rejected the war as an exercise in genocide and refused to serve in the U.S. Army. He said,

I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights.

Ali was sentenced to five-years in federal penitentiary, stripped of his boxing title, and fined $10,000. The attack on Ali was intended to dampen anti-war sentiment, but it had the opposite effect. Civil-rights leader Julian Bond wrote,

Ali’s statement reverberated through the whole society. You could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war before began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.

At the time of Ali’s conviction, U.S. forces were killing a thousand Vietnamese civilians every week, a hundred U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month.

The War Comes Home

By 1965, mass anti-war demonstrations were shaking every U.S. city. At the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, 12,000 police and 6,000 National Guards viciously attacked peaceful demonstrators.

Huge tear-gas canisters burst in the center of the gathering. Street-cleaning trucks advanced spraying more gas. Police attacked in lines of 20 or 30. They chased people into the park, ran them down, and beat them up. Demonstrators, reporters, hotel workers, doctors, all began staggering into the hotel lobby, blood streaming from face and head wounds. Senator George McGovern described the scene as a ‘bloodbath’ and said he’d seen nothing like it since the films of Nazi Germany.

People were shocked. The methods being used against the protest movement were no different from those used by Russia to impose authoritarian rule on Czechoslovakia. According to one writer, “Young people went to Chicago as pacifists and left as revolutionaries.”

The morale of U.S. troops in Vietnam plummeted. By 1970, thirty-five percent of the armed forces were smoking cannabis and a hundred-thousand were using heroin. Officers who forced reluctant soldiers into battle had fragmentation bombs tossed under their bunks or bullets directed at their backs. In 1971, a U.S. Colonel reported,

The morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Workers Rebel

Workers entered the battle. In France, ten million workers mounted the biggest general strike in history. In Italy, workers occupied their factories. In Britain, coal miners used flying pickets to close the mines until there was no coal to feed the factories and the lights went out, forcing the government to surrender.

Buoyed by the social rebellion, public-sector workers unionized. They went on to win parental leave and anti-discrimination clauses in their union contracts, setting standards for governments to follow.

As workers pushed up general living standards, income inequality fell to its lowest point in the 20th century.

The crisis of the 1960s spilled into the following decade with the Quebec General Strike of 1972, the fall of dictatorships in Greece and Portugal in 1974, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the 1979 revolution in Iran, and the end of dictatorship in Poland in 1980-1981.

How Was the System Stabilized?

To hold onto power, beleaguered ruling classes used a combination of reform, repression, and outright fraud.

Most nations offered progressive reforms. In 1964, U.S. President Johnson launched public support programs including Head Start, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid. The Civil Rights Act made racist discrimination illegal, and the Voting Rights Act made it easier for Black people to vote. The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed in 1970. In 1972, the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. In 1973, women won the legal right to abortion. These reforms bought time for the ruling class and encouraged the belief that capitalism could deliver real improvements. It was an illusion.

The same year President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to secure the Black vote, he launched the racist War on Crime which, combined with President Nixon’s later War on Drugs, massively expanded the prison system to criminalize Black Americans and strip them of the right to vote. U.S. prisoners can be used as slave labor, so mass incarceration marked a return to mass slavery. Nixon’s former assistant later confessed,

We had two enemies: the anti-war Left and Black people. We couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and heavily criminalizing both, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guards fired on peaceful student demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four. Eleven days later, police shot and killed 2 student demonstrators at Jackson State University. In 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.

Leaders of U.S. liberation movements were imprisoned, forced into exile, or murdered. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and Fred Hampton was assassinated in 1969. Hampton was a leader in the Black Panther Party and founder of the Rainbow Coalition that brought together Black Panthers, Young Patriots (poor Southern Whites), Young Lords (Hispanics), and major Chicago street gangs to challenge their collective oppression.

International Terror

At the international level, the United States conspired to destroy anti-colonial and national-liberation movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. To name just a few:

In 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew the democratically elected President of Guatemala and installed a military dictatorship that terrorized the population for decades.

In 1961, Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Congolese National Movement and first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo was abducted, tortured, and executed following a military coup supported by Belgium, the United States, and powerful mining corporations.

In 1965, the U.S. supported a military coup that overthrew the elected government of Indonesia and went on to massacre half a million people.

In 1973, a U.S.-backed military coup toppled the democratically elected government of Chile, killed the President, tore up the Constitution, and proceeded to murder, disappear, and torture more than 40,000 people.

The Crisis Deepens

In 1973, the world economy plunged into recession. To restore profitability, every nation raced to modernize their economy. In capitalist terms, raising productivity means making workers produce more while paying them less. The problem was how to prevent the inevitable mass protests from developing into revolutionary movements.

The ruling class couldn’t simply outlaw demonstrations and unions. The fascist government in Spain had criminalized both and that had backfired big-time.

In 1962, 400,000 Spanish workers defied State repression and went on strike. They had no formal unions so they elected Workers Commissions to organize their actions. As the rebellion grew, Workers Commissions began collaborating at the local and then the national level to challenge the fascist regime.

So the ruling class used fraud. They appealed for national unity and invited leaders of Left-reform groups to work with government and business to calm the crisis.

Eager for a seat at the table, opposition leaders jumped at the opportunity. They insisted they could replace oppressive governments by electing progressive ones. They could not. Over the following decades, the electoral system delivered neoliberal regimes that cut wages, slashed social programs, and reversed every hard-won reform.

Union Collaboration

The ruling class also appealed to the union establishment. They offered union officials the legal power to bargain with employers on condition they control their members. Fear of losing that control made union officials politically cautious. They could not command workers to end strikes without losing credibility, so they would rush to the front of every strike in order to restrain it.

In France, when university students marched in solidarity to worker-occupied factories, rows of union officials physically blocked them from entering the buildings and mingling with the strikers.

In Italy, when workers organized power on the shop floor, union officials found ways to transfer decision-making into their own hands, away from the workplace.

In the United States, top executives in the AFL-CIO helped the government suppress strikes, overthrow democratically-elected governments, and prop up anti-union dictators. In 1999, the U.S. Secretary of State told a meeting of government labor advisors,

When you undertook your lives as labor leaders…becoming a part of the U.S. Government may have not have been something that you intended…but I do think it has been a very important partnership. I think that is the best way to describe it.

Why did workers go along with these setbacks, defeats, and betrayals?

During the 1970s recession, employers downsized, automated, and axed hundreds of thousands of jobs. Those who kept their jobs feared losing them.

When unions failed to mount an effective fightback, employers escalated their attacks. Over the following decades, living standards fell and inequality rose. Emboldened by the lack of organized resistance, the ruling class moved to reverse the gains of the past 100 years.

To crush workers’ spirits, government, the mass media, reform parties, and union officials warn that the only solutions to the crisis are capitalist solutions, and any serious fightback will only cause more job loss. They insist that workers have no option but to tighten their belts and accept concession contracts to keep the economy afloat and their employers in business.

Workers can resist such arguments only if they think there is a real alternative to capitalism. The Left were too confused to offer that alternative.

Failure of the Left

The anti-communist Cold War campaign had purged socialists from the union movement and buried the revolutionary history of the working class. This created a cascade of problems.

There was no clear goal. Many on the Left saw China, Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia), and Vietnam as socialist. This section of the Left collapsed after China backed the genocide in Kampuchea, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea, and China invaded Vietnam.

They did not organize effectively. Some favored leaderless spontaneity. Others imposed strict discipline. Some engaged in mindless hyper-activity. Others pushed for violent confrontation.

The Left were not equipped to navigate the complexity of class war. They reacted to events instead of strategizing. While the movement was rising, it seemed unstoppable. However, there is no war in which one side moves relentlessly forward to victory. There are inevitable setbacks that demand tactical retreat and reassessment.

There was confusion over how to fight oppression. The Black Panthers were torn between the need to lessen the impact of oppression and the need to end the system that generates oppression.

There was a failure to recognize that most people in oppressed groups are working class. Instead of building working-class unity against all forms of oppression, sections of the Left organized oppressed peoples separately from workers and from each other. The result was a collapse into reformism, with different groups competing over whose cause mattered more.

The biggest mistake was to write off the working class as too affluent or too White to be a revolutionary force.

It is true that workers are slow to rebel. The system is structured to prevent workers self-organizing, and union bureaucracies discourage worker initiatives. So, when workers did rise en masse, the Left were unprepared to offer a way forward.

A corresponding mistake was seeing students as a revolutionary force. Students are free to meet and mobilize, so student movements can rise rapidly. But with nowhere to go, they just as rapidly decline. Students can win concessions but lack the economic power to seriously challenge the system.

Finally, the Left had no strategy to challenge conservative union bureaucrats and reform-party compromise.

Because of these failures, workers could see no way forward and retreated from open struggle. Demoralization set in, and Right-wing forces began to grow.

If the only solutions being offered are capitalist ones, if there are no social solutions and it’s everyone out for themselves, then racism and even fascism begin to make sense.

The Coming Global Revolt

While the capitalist system recovered from the social crisis of the 60s, it did not resolve the underlying economic crisis. That crisis continues to deepen, laying the ground for the next global revolt.

Capitalism is based on the Golden Rule: whoever has the most gold makes the rules. There are only two ways to accumulate capital, extract it domestically or import it. The challenge is which to prioritize.

Nations that focus on extracting capital can be robbed by stronger powers. Those that import capital from weaker nations need military force to back their claims. As Thomas Friedman wrote,

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

However, an empire that prioritizes military spending over raising domestic capital will eventually suffer economic decline.

Japan was forbidden to rearm after WWII, so it invested in new technology to become a manufacturing powerhouse. In contrast, the U.S. built the world’s most powerful military.

Modern war machines are expensive. A nation that cannot produce enough capital to pay its military bill must borrow from other nations. Today, the United States is the world’s biggest debtor nation, owing 18 percent more than the total yearly value of the goods and services it produces. Ironically, Japan holds the bulk of U.S. debt.

Compared with the U.S., China spends a much smaller portion of its wealth on the military and far more on boosting domestic productivity.

By 2014, China’s economy began to surpass that of the United States. Now China’s economy is 30 percent larger. China’s manufacturing sector is bigger than that of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain put together. In 5 years, China is expected to account for 45 percent of all global manufacturing, a level of dominance seen only twice before, by the United Kingdom at the start of the Industrial Revolution and by the United States after World War II.

Unable to compete with China economically, the United States is gutting domestic social programs in order to spend even more on its military.

Liberal democracies cannot survive the extreme inequality that militarism demands. They must become increasingly authoritarian to suppress the inevitable mass rebellion.

How Can We Win This Time?

The fatal mistake of the 1960s revolt was not connecting the social movements against oppression with the power of the working class to end all oppression. Repeating that mistake will lead to another major defeat and a deeper descent into capitalist barbarism.

Do not discount the power of the working class!

The working class today are numerically larger and more powerful than ever. One worker can shut down an entire automated factory simply by turning off the electricity.

Workers are also more connected. When capital globalized, it created a global working class. As Apple’s website confirms,

Thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions are part of our supply chain, contributing their skills, talents, and efforts to help build, deliver, repair, and recycle our products.

The COVID pandemic showed how breaking any link on the international chain of production can affect the entire chain. Globalization gives workers the economic power to redirect the entire global economy, to produce for need not greed.

The ruling class know and fear the power of the working class. All their laws and institutions are designed to block workers from acting in their own interests. They use racism, sexism, and nationalism to divide workers and undermine class solidarity.

The capitalist class can manage worker rebellions. They cannot prevail against an international working class that are socially connected, conscious of their economic power, and self-organized to end capitalist rule.

The key lessons of the 1960s are these: root all struggles in the working class; organize across social divisions and national borders; and reject compromise with capitalism. That is how we can win our liberation and build a cooperative world that provides for all.

*I borrowed much of the historical material from Chris Harman’s excellent book, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (1988)