The dialectics of liberation

During the decadal reconsiderations of the 1960s—and this volume is one such effort on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary—it has been common to consider the period’s relationship to current politics: the relatively depoliticized climate of the tenth and thirtieth anniversaries occasioned certain types of reflections, the sprouts of possibility glimpsed in the twentieth anniversary suggested others. I propose here to consider liberation, a central aspect of political discourse in the 1960s, and its fate in the recent upsurge of the political—here I refer to the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s but primarily to the post-2008 confluence marked by the Occupy movements, the “square” and “spring” movements, and various anti-austerity agitations. A useful temporality of the sixties can take inspiration from GDR historian Jürgen Kuczynski, who, late in life, speculated that the events of 1989 signified not the end of socialism but a point in what might one day prove to be a longer transition to a different society, and that setbacks, reversals, and dead ends are to be expected over the long durée of systemic change. ¹ It is of course possible that the end of the global sixties—and I take that expansive view of the 1960s as the global explosion of world-making lasting from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, including decolonization and national liberation struggles, anti-capitalist and anti-systemic revolt, and counterculture in the overdeveloped world, and new political energies in the socialist world, from the Cultural Revolution to the Prague Spring—represented the end of one political sequence, and that we are in transition now to another. ² Whether that is the case, or whether the sixties transformations are still in the process of establishing themselves, it might be of some benefit to do a brief comparative analysis of oppositional political movements in the two periods.