Chris Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After

THE FIRE LAST TIME:
1968 AND AFTER

Chris Harman

Third edition

Chris Harman

Third edition

The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After

by Chris Harman

First published 1988

Second edition published 1998

Third edition published 2018

Bookmarks Publications

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London WC1B 3QE

Cover design and typesetting

by Peter Robinson

Printed by Short Run Press

ISBN 978-1-910885-79-6 (pbk)

978-1-910885-80-2 (Kindle)

978-1-910885-81-9 (ePub)

978-1-910885-82-6 (PDF)

To those who stayed with revolutionary politics while the going was good and have found it now convenient to get out, good riddance. To those comrades who are taking a rest, in pain, or disagreement, or from exhaustion, well see you again. To those who have stayed, a salutewe aint seen nothing yet. Like the reggae singer says, Were going to mash down Babylon, one of these days, and well have May in our hearts when we do.

David Widgery, Ten Years for Pandora, Socialist Review, May 1978.

CHRIS HARMAN was one of those who stayed the course. Long after 1968, he continued to produce books, essays and newspaper articles, to speak at meetings, to hundreds of activists or to handfuls, to build and to attend protests, and to promote socialist ideas. Of the mass of works he produced, The Fire Last Time was, in some ways, the most personal.

The book itself describes the extraordinary turn that history took in 1968. The Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese National Liberation Army, which humiliated the worlds most powerful military machine, the death of Martin Luther King as anti-racist struggle raged in the US, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, above all, the biggest ever general strike in France in May 1968these episodes helped to set politics on a new path.

Unsurprisingly, one of the main messages contained in this book is that out of apparent apathy revolt can arrive, often surprising many of those on the left. Chris would later describe the apathy prior to 1968 as double edged, writing that it expressed alienation from established politics and a lack of confidence in any alternative, but also deep bitterness. This kind of apathy could explode into its opposite.

However, The Fire Last Time is not simply a chronicle of these explosions. For Chris, 1968 was just the beginning of a broader cycle of struggle. Furthermore, while the student radicals of Berkeley in the US or the Sorbonne in France are often seen in popular culture as the key figures in the rebellion of 1968, Chris traces the wider development of working class militancy in that year and through the period that followed. This includes the rising tide of industrial struggle in Britain in the early 1970s, powerful enough to sweep away a Tory government, along with the fall of the Greek and Portuguese dictatorships, and the end of Francoism in Spain.

The movements that sprang from 1968, whether directed against authoritarian dictatorships or liberal democracies in the West or against Stalinist tyranny in the East, deserve to be celebrated. Yet one of Chriss central arguments is that celebration of such movements is not enough. This book discusses not just the high points reached by these various struggles, but also how they were ultimately contained. One of the problems for the radicals in this period was that, while reacting against the sterile Stalinist politics that dominated left-wing thought, they could fall prey to what Chris would occasionally refer to as the worship of spontaneity.

It is true that political organisations that rejected revolutionary change in favour of the gradual reform of capitalism, which included the Communist Parties in the West as well as traditional social democratic parties, were caught off guard by the upsurge of protest. However, this situation would not last and by the mid-1970s a concerted effort was under way to regain the initiative and to tame workers struggles. These efforts were reinforced by a deepening economic crisis, which demoralised workers and sapped the strength of the movements. In these conditions, revolutionary organisations were simply too small to overcome the hold of reformism and to create the space for an alternative. The result was a crisis for the revolutionary left and, eventually, a rightward shift in society.

This book, then, was directed towards the goal of ensuring that the next time such a cycle of struggle erupts, the revolutionary left will have learnt the lessons of 1968 and its aftermath, and that it will be stronger and better implanted in the working class.

One could read this book with only a faint awareness of Chriss own role in the struggle, for he too was a protagonist in the drama as it unfolded.

When he speaks of the period in the run-up to 1968 in the chapters The long calm and Slow train coming, one can almost imagine Chris as a newly radicalised socialist school student jibing at the conformity of life in Watford in 1959. By the early 1960s, he had begun studying at Leeds University, where he joined the Socialist Review Group, founded by Tony Cliff, which would later become the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers Party. He would remain a member of these organisations for the rest of his days.

From Leeds he moved to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he studied for a PhD, never completed, under Ralph Miliband. It was at LSE, one of the storm centres of student radicalism in 1968, that he became a socialist leader of real stature. Here he participated in the LSE sit-in of 1967 against the racist regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which organised two huge demonstrations in 1968.

In this book Chris is characteristically modest about his own role. He presents a quote from David Widgery describing a student meeting in 1968. But Chris omits to mention, except in a buried footnote, that the student radical described speaking there is Chris himself! The original passage reads:

We have to be absolutely clear about this, said Chris Harman from the platform of the LSE Old Theatre, as he always said when starting a speech. A groan went round the theatre and Harman brandished his moped crash helmet. We must be quite clear whats happening. 1968 is a year of international revolution no less than 1793, 1830, 1848, 1917 and 1936. We are experiencing the re-birth of the international Marxist movement after over 30 years of defeat and hibernation. The audience of prematurely hard-bitten student lefties gathered to inaugurate the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation looked impressed. Harman, although fairly widely disliked, was also widely respected as a Marxist intransigent. When he started evoking the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Barcelona uprising, he meant it. Militants were to be seen conferring about what did actually happen in 1830.

But for Chris and the few hundred members of the International Socialists drawn to the organisation, student radicalism was not sufficient. In 1970 he reflected on a new outburst of student radicalism, capturing both its vitality and its limits:

There is a good deal of life yet in the present student upsurge. It can annoy the authorities a deal more, as well as bring many more of its

Chris did not simply play a major role in building the student movement of the 1960s, he was also crucial to reorienting many of the young radicals, directing them towards the growing workers movement as the force that had the power to transform society. Sabby Sagall, one of those recruited at the LSE, recalls: