“Cultural Revolutions” examines the politicization of culture around 1968. From Surrealist and Situationist attempts to redefine art as a utopian-socialist enterprise, to the public scandals created by subversive avant-gardes like the Dutch Provos, to the development of popular culture into a new field of youth radicalism centered on rock‘n’roll and new styles of dress and behavior, the chapter shows that the new politics of the 1960s were inseparable from cultural innovations. This synergistic relationship frequently involved attempts to remake the self by reshaping the face of daily life, a goal central both to new aesthetic forms like the Happening and the growth of nonconformist subcultures and countercultures aimed at erasing the distinction between the personal and the political. The creation of local underground “scenes” in which much of the political-cultural work of the 1960s was accomplished was a key expression of this tendency, while the prominence of alternative media practices in and around those scenes highlights the importance around 1968 of efforts to create alternative sources of knowledge outside the mainstream.

This chapter plots the rebellion(s) of the “long 1960s” across three “zones” of Europe in order to understand how Europe’s 1968 manifested under different political regimes. Exploring how border-crossing connections functioned around 1968, it emphasizes the importance of transnational exchanges alongside acts of the globalizing imagination in which activists joined metaphorical hands across borders, blocs, and continents. Emphasizing the eclecticism of 1960s radicalism, the chapter traces efforts to identify the revolutionary subject—the “who?” of the revolution—and the search for radical source material to answer the question of “how?” Highlighting the importance of key principles such as anti-authoritarianism and self-organization, it emphasizes the “total” vision of 1960s radicals. Motivated by the belief that all spheres of social existence could or should be political, they attempted to put that principle into practice, leading to the “proliferation of the political” that gave 1968 its all-embracing character.

“The Search for Social Power” considers the development of radical movements after the crisis year of 1968, showing how revolutionary tactics were adjusted even as new concerns and actors came to the fore. Exploring how activists responded to the danger of “recuperation”—the act by which consumer capitalism packaged rebellion and sold it back to its constituents—the chapter examines the rise of political undergrounds determined to live authentically even while searching for new avenues in the political struggle. While numerous small new communist parties emerged demanding a return to Marxist-Leninist basics alongside small cells dedicated to armed struggle, new movements such as second wave feminism emerged to challenge the usually male-dominated politics of militant struggle in favor of attempts to reshape the experience of daily life. In every case, the post-1968 moment was shaped by the attempt to achieve “social power,” that is, to find workable strategies for producing real change in the world.

This chapter examines the key political events of 1960s Europe, focusing on how different local conditions shaped the possibilities of activism. Beginning with a consideration of student radicalisms in Poland and West Germany, it moves on to events in France and Czechoslovakia. Whereas the French May saw a temporary but powerful alliance between students and workers, the Prague Spring was crushed by a Soviet invasion. Yugoslavia, too, saw attempts to regenerate socialism along the lines of workers’ democracy, but in a context where “self-management” was official (but unrealized) state doctrine. Hungary continued to suffer under the effects of its own aborted attempt to steer toward industrial democracy. In Italy, student and industrial militancy reached a pitch equaled nowhere else in Europe. Right-wing dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and Portugal repressed but failed to fully subjugate emancipatory movements of students and workers. Portugal saw a massive and sustained antiauthoritarian explosion that placed it at the forefront of European revolutionary movements. Activists pursued a “politics of truth” that challenged official lies and put forward emancipatory counternarratives.

To think about sixties Europe is to do more than consider Europe as a geographic space and the 1960s as a time period. It is to reflect on fundamental unresolved problems of modernity. In a moment when the processes of cultural and economic globalization are more advanced than at any time in human history, a particular vision of free market capitalism appearing under the sign of “neoliberalism” seems so solid as to represent a form of common sense. “Yet, since the financial collapse of 2008, and especially with the economic disruption caused by the global pandemic of 2020, the capitalist order looks a lot less certain than it used to. The political consequences of that uncertainty have thrown politics open in a way they have not been for decades.”

A particularly disquieting feature of the present moment is the way in which radical right-wing movements in Europe and America have made themselves beneficiaries of the widespread anger about neoliberal globalization. The liberal establishment, in both in Europe and America, has been shocked by widespread resistance to the political-economic consensus it has done so much to put in place. On the right, paradoxically, the reaction to the crisis of capitalism focuses its anger on various perceived challenges to white identity (e.g. immigration), positioning itself as a defensive bulwark against a radical left whose threat is more symbolic than real.

“Cold Wars and Hot” situates the 1960s in Europe in the twin contexts of Third World decolonization struggles and the global Cold War, tracing its roots in the anti-fascist struggles of the postwar period and the anti-Stalinist rebellions of the 1950s. The latter, in Hungary and Poland especially, sought not a return to capitalism but a path forward to socialist workers’ democracy that, even if stillborn in the East, placed key items on the agenda for the European 1960s. Even in the face of the post-1945 persistence of fascist structures and ideas, meanwhile, key moments in European revolutionary history—above all the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s—continued to reverberate in the radical imagination of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an examination of the emergence of an anti-Stalinist New Left, in Great Britain and elsewhere, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s laid the indispensable foundation for the student and countercultural rebellions of later in the decade.

“[A]fter more than forty years of counterrevolutionary history,” proclaimed the journal Internationale Situationniste in late 1969, “the revolution is being reborn everywhere, striking terror into the hearts of the masters of the East as well as those of the West, attacking them both in their differences and in their deep affinity.”1