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PARTISAN REVIEW
"nuclear issue" drew attention to "the irrationality of advanced technocratic
systems committed to rational social engineering." The new left's "grassroots
counter-institutions ... challenge the bureaucratic structures of official society"
and "endow common people with an awakening sense of their own identity."
Caute recalls some perhaps forgotten events of the year, such as a
two-week Havana Cultural Congress in January 1968 which attracted some
four hundred intellectuals from
latin
America, Europe, and the United States.
He brings forth the documents of the
East Village Other,
the Free School of
New York, and Liberation News Service; recounts the major speakers and
events of student protests in Spain, France, Britain, and West Germany;
contrasts the earnest yearning for democracy and civil liberties in Eastern
Europe with the countercultural assaults on one-dimensional society in the
West. There are short chapters on American draft resistance and black
power, the Democratic convention in Chicago, May '68 in Paris, the turmoil
in the West German, British, and Spanish universities, radical theater, the
Prague Spring, the beginnings offeminism. Yet at the end of the year, the
"distinctive challenge of 1968 to the State, the political system and corporate
capitalism was defeated." Culture had undergone change, but it too became
incorporated:
Many wires got crossed, with hip tycoons everywhere. We may ex–
pect a professedly gay heavyweight champion of the world . Rock
music still hypnotizes the young and 'top of the charts' is top of the
world. Capitalist culture became more eclectic: the ideal TV talk show
confronts Miss America with a militant feminist and then has the for–
mer reveal she's a 'feminist,' too. So that's all right. This constant cul–
tural neutering of dissent, the eclecticism which treats all ideas as
short-lived merchandise, has reinforced the triumph of the profit
motive and the idolization of market forces in the era of Reagan and
Thatcher.
The spirit ofMarcuse lives on in Caute's account. The society without
opposition made dissent into fun and profit. But there is just too much in this
book, treated too superficially. It is an informative travelogue.
David Farber's
Chicago
68
3
is a book about the "public feelings" of the
forces contending in the streets during the Chicago Democratic Convention:
countercultural Yippies, 'serious' political leftists in the National Coordinating
Committee working to end the war in Vietnam, or the Mobilization (Mobe), as
it was known, on one side, facing Mayor Daley and the Chicago police on the
other. Farber writes that the conflict was "fueled by the completely different
5
Chicago
68. By David Farber. The University of Chicago Press. $19.95.
