- Spring 2018
- Out Now
- Issue 29
1968

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Between us we can change this rotten society. Now, put on your coat and make for the nearest cinema. Look at their deadly love-making on the screen. Isn’t it better in real life? Make up your mind to learn to love. Then, during the interval, when the first advertisements come on, pick up your tomatoes or, if you prefer, your eggs, and chuck them. Then get out into the street, and peel off all the latest government proclamations until underneath you discover the message of the days of May and June.
Stay awhile in the street. Look at the passers-by and remind yourself: the last word has not yet been said. Then act. Act with others, not for them. Make the revolution here and now. It is your own. C’est pour toi que tu fais la révolution.
Front Matters
The alarm clock rings: first humiliation of the day.
The Soapbox
Letters + The Internet Speaks
Friends & Foes
The Tragedy of Bayard Rustin
How one of the greatest American socialists ended up on the wrong side of history.
Struggle Session
The Second Emancipation
Until his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr led an unheralded struggle for economic justice.

March on Washington, DC, 1963
Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress
Means of Deduction
Imagine: there was a war and no one turned up!
Vulgar Empiricist
A Poor Man’s Fight
As the Vietnam War dragged on, soldiers took matters into their own hands.
Transitions
A Quarter Century of Terror
Uneven & Combined
Bomb Anything That Moves
More than triple the bombs dropped in World War II devastated Southeast Asia

How Beautiful It Was

View of the demonstrations in Toulouse, June 11–12, 1968.
Municipal Archives of the city of Toulouse
For a few brief weeks in France, not just a government but an entire system was called into question.
Reading Materiel
Down with journalists and those who cater to them.
Canon Fodder
When Ramparts Reigned
How Ramparts went from Catholic literary magazine to the vanguard of the New Left.
Canon Fodder
Discovering Shanghai in Paris
Mao’s Little Red Book united student radicals with Third World guerrillas.
Field Notes
COINTELPRO

Half the Way With Mao Zedong

How Students for a Democratic Society went from building a mass movement to embracing the politics of self-destruction.
Why We Fought

During the 1968 Soviet invasion, Czechoslovaks carry their national flag past a burning Soviet tank in Prague.
Luciana Castellina on the real ’68.
Cultural Capital
Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.
Red Channels
Year of the Zombie
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead showed a new society devouring the old.
Beyond a Boundary
Before the World Arrived
Just ten days before the 1968 Olympics, hundreds of protesters lay dead in a Mexico City square.
Ways of Seeing
Life Without Buildings
In the late sixties, radical architects expressed their scorn in satirical utopias, where the world’s landmarks and landscapes are eaten up by the power of capital.

Illustration by Christoph Kleinstück
When the Old World Unraveled

Illustration by Emily Haasch
Before 1968, we felt confident in everything. Afterwards, we knew everything had to change.
The Tumbrel
Barricades shut down the street but open the way.
Girondins
Joschka Fischer’s Long March
How the Green Party wunderkind transformed German capitalism, and with it, himself.
Thermidor
George Wallace’s ’68
For every American won over to radicalism in 1968, there was another captured by George Wallace’s right-wing populism.
Versailles
Traitors to Their Class
Rich people today mostly post Instagram photos of themselves. They used to sometimes do left-wing politics too.

Illustration by Ayumi Takahashi
Leftovers
Forests came before man, the desert comes afterwards.
The Dustbin
Dear Comrade, Follow the Feds
How the FBI broke into the revolution business.
Proletoccult
Your Quarterly Horoscope
Means & Ends
Socialism in Our Time
We reach hundreds of thousands — we need socialist media that reaches hundreds of millions.

Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula.
Albert Barr / NASA