In May 1968, I was on a train from Lausanne to London when it stopped at a railroad station in Paris. The air was heavy with tear gas -- even on the train, you could smell it. I had heard before leaving Switzerland that something big was happening in Paris and I thought about getting off to find out what it was but I had to to be in London and the Englishman with whom I shared a compartment was extraordinarily well stocked with food and wine and generously inclined to share both, so I stayed on the train.
I have regretted it ever since. As I ate and drank my way to the Channel, one of the 20th century's pivotal moments was playing out behind me in the streets of Paris -- "les evenements de mai," the student riots that would change the course of politics and culture in the West, giving them a lurch to the left that still influences public thought and policy.
That was 40 years ago this month and in France they are still fighting about 1968. Veterans of the "movement," as French leftists call the riots, lament the fact that in many places, including France, the right is in power, and where the left rules it is a pale and milquetoast left compared to the robust radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
There is fresh red meat on the right, however. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has referred to the legacy of 1968 as something that "must be liquidated" because it has created a continuing crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity" even as he scorns the contemporary left as white-wine socialists.
Which is basically what we find most places on the left today, whether it be in France or Canada. Instead of Danny the Red and Red Rudi throwing cobblestones at police officers, today's leftists are more likely to fit Orwell's definition of a socialist: "The typical socialist is... a prim little man with a white collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting." For something stronger, you'll have to go somewhere like Cuba, where Stalin is still in style, because you won't find it in Manitoba, for example, despite the fact that it has a "social democratic" government -- polite parlour parlance for "socialist."
So, since it's 40 years later and just two days past May Day -- traditionally when the Socialist International comes out to play -- it might be useful to check on the health of the "movement."
For the most part, it doesn't look very good for the left, although South America seems to be bucking the trend. Otherwise, it is fainting, dying, failing just about everywhere and where it is successful it usually is either because it carries a gun, as in China or Cuba, or because it pretends to be something other than what it really is -- social democracy in Manitoba, the "Third Way" in Britain.
In fact, no one hardly even uses the word socialist anymore, it is in such ill repute. The few remaining Communist countries remain proudly socialist, but that's not socialism as the West understands the left. It is a euphemism in a different direction, something darker and more terrible, but even in these dark places, conservative tendencies are creeping in. China, for example, has been moving towards a free market economy even as it remains rigidly Stalinist in its political system.
In the socialist paradise of Cuba, hard as it is to believe, the winds of change are started to blow, lightly and fitfully, but there is at least a hint of a breeze now that Fidel Castro has passed the reins of government to his brother Raul: Cubans are now allowed to own cellphones and computers, thus creating the possibility that they might have access to sources of information other than the government.
The Communists in Havana will certainly try to curtail that access, just as the Communists in Beijing try to control cellphone and computer use, and Cubans may find that all that this means is that there is now a brand new way to get yourself thrown in jail. But whenever the tools of freedom are available, people will try to use them. People want information, they hunger for the truth and, as experience in every socialist paradise has shown, they will take astonishing risks to get it. Cuban jails are full of such people.
Up here in North America's other socialist utopia, the Doer government has been playing games with access to information through a cap on the amount of money political parties can spend on advertising. The cap had been $50,000 a year but this week Mr. Doer raised it to $75,000 outside an election year.
A higher cap on communication is still a cap, however, and leaves the government -- in this case the NDP -- with an extraordinary advantage in getting its message across to voters. It also offers the extraordinary spectacle in a democracy of a government telling opposition political parties how often and for how long they can talk to the people. It does, as the NDP says, mirror a federal law passed by the Liberals that uses the same muzzle on the opposition, but bad law is bad law no matter how often it is emulated.
And this is bad law. It is the kind of thing that Raul Castro might have wanted to copy, except that in Cuba they take this process to its logical conclusion and simply ban opposition parties altogether. The spirit of 1968 is still heavy in the air in Havana. There's a wisp of it Winnipeg, too.
tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca
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