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Chomsky and the '68ers From accounts of this particular October weekend in 1967 emerges a compelling portrait of Chomsky the activist. The hallowed events of 1968 were not of monumental consequence to people such as Chomsky, precisely because he, like many others, had been at the center of similar events the year before. Moreover, he had been fascinated by politics all his life, and politically active throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. He had, in fact, great reservations about the form that the 1968 student uprisings ultimately took.

Adorno: Dialectics at a Standstill

Chomsky (like others on the left, notably Theodor Adorno) questioned the objectives of the student activists. He even publicly criticized the Columbia University strike at a public forum in 1968: There, and in meetings afterwards, I was very harshly criticized for that by student leaders and their adult supporters; and I paid virtually no attention to what was going on in Paris as you can see from what I wrote ­ rightly, I think. sds [Students for a Democratic Society] had by then "self-destructed"; its leaders were running around saying that the war is a "liberal issue" and they have to get on with revolution. I kept my connections with serious activists and organizations, which were expanding rapidly, though they are beyond the view of most historians and those who bother to write memoirs, most of them (not [Mike] Albert, Dellinger, and others who are rarely mentioned). (31 Mar. 1995) The events of the late 1960s are, however, fondly recalled by nostalgic leftists, and the mainstream historical record is filled with evocations of the period. Certainly, some of the advancements made at this time were of great significance, and it looked, for a brief moment, as though the student-worker links that had begun to form could advance the cause of radical social change. Students and workers had found a common cause, and had taken to the streets of Paris in the spring of 1968; students throughout Europe and America were becoming vocal in their disillusionment with the institutions that they claimed stifled the individual. Workers had been fighting for control over their own labor conditions throughout the century, but now, suddenly, it seemed possible that cohesion and mutual support could be achieved among a number of disenchanted groups. Ken Coates quotes one of the many posters that appeared in Paris during the uprising: I participate. Thou participatest. He participates. We participate. You participate. They profit. (Quality 5) Also in 1968, Bertrand Russell spoke at Nottingham University in England on the occasion of the Sixth National Conference on Workers' Control. He talked about the relationship between contemporary events and earlier socialist ideals: I welcome the growing importance of the workers' control movement because its demands go to the heart of what I have always understood socialism to mean. The Prime Minister and his friends have developed a quite new definition of socialism, which includes the penalising of the poorest, capitulating to bankers, attacking the social services, banning the coloured and applauding naked imperialism. When a government makes opportunism the hallmark of its every action, it is the duty of all socialists to cry "halt" and to help create an alternative based on socialist principles. (qtd. in Coates, et al., 9 ­ 10)

The Black Panthers Simone de Beauvoir Martin Luther King (sound clips) Malcolm X on the Internet 'The Quality of Life and Workers' Control' Ken Coates, 1972

The workers', peace, civil-rights, Black Power, and women's-liberation movements all looked forward to making important gains. In England, Ken Coates was writing incendiary pamphlets on workers' control and Raymond Williams was offering another take on social history. In Germany, colleagues and workers, members and associates of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Lowenthal, and Marcuse, all of whom had spent time in the United States during or following World War II) were still publishing powerful Marx-inspired works on psychological, sociological, legal, and aesthetic issues. In France, Simone de Beauvoir was claiming for women a more dominant place in society. In the United States, Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King seemed to offer proof that change within particular disenfranchised sectors of society, and in society as a whole, was not only essential, but also possible (although Malcolm X and King tended more towards liberal reform than radical change). Activists recognized that there were common obstacles. In his 1973 pamphlet The Quality of Life and Workers' Control Coates states: When Malcolm X and his friends began to preach "Black is beautiful," and the movement for Black Power started rolling, the first and key element in the upsurge of the black population was a new self-recognition. Black people had to recognize themselves, but they also had to learn to like what they recognized. In the same way, the movement for Women's Liberation has to begin with an attack on all the complex attitudes held by women which contribute to their subordination. And with working people, things are not fundamentally different. Whilst workers take for granted their right to political suffrage, they are prevented, by attitudes which pervade their whole upbringing, from conceiving industrial suffrage as natural or just. (10 ­ 11) Noam Chomsky was one particularly articulate voice among many, a single note in a growing chorus. Carol Chomsky also became politically active at this time, but entirely on her own terms. Noam writes: "in the sixties, she took part in anti-war activities as she chose, and in her own way; not as part of my activities. Thus when she took the children to a demonstration in Concord of women and children in about 1966 or so (where they were attacked with tin cans, abuse, etc.), that was her initiative, not mine. Same with other things. We have both always felt, strongly, that one should not simply assume that X's wife is automatically interested in and participant in what X happens to be doing" (14 Aug. 1995). Though he was courted by activists and students who valued his advice on finding appropriate venues and strategies for expressing their urgent concerns, Chomsky was not an American Che Guevara who would take up arms and lead his band towards self-government on horseback. And he was not a Mao or a Lenin who promised to show faithful followers the way to a workers' paradise ­ and to exact from the unfaithful the price of dissent. He was a scientist who had rational ideas that had made him famous in his field, and a social conscience that gave him the courage and the confidence to recognize that rationality could also be employed to a greater social end: encouraging people to think for, and believe in, themselves.