1968 AND ALL THAT

What a difference a year makes: if 1967 was the year of flower power, psychedelia, San Francisco and the Summer of Love, then 1968 brought a rude awakening. It was the year that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, that Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination and anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed with police at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was the year of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and of the short-lived Prague Spring that was crushed when the soviet tanks rolled in. Kate Millet wrote Sexual Politics and Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute at the Mexican Olympics. Also in Mexico the police fired on political protesters, killing some 200 of them, while in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, Madrid, London and elsewhere students took to the streets.

In a speech to the nation on New Year's Eve 1967, President Charles de Gaulle was able to say complacently, 'I greet the year 1968 with serenity', adding with the purblind confidence of all politicians too long in power, 'It is impossible to see how France today could be paralysed by crisis as she has been in the past'. How wrong he was. Only three months later, on March 22, at Nanterre University, a small group of students - no more than 25 - protesting at conditions there, found themselves confronted by riot police. From there the protest snowballed as students became radicalised and their interests merged with a wider anti-war sentiment. The momentum then shifted to Paris when the de facto student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was summoned before a disciplinary board at the Sorbonne on May 6. The rest, as they say, is history.

Most commentators agree that there were two factors that helped the protest to spread: the first was the quantity and quality of the posters, banners and slogans that were produced anonymously by staff and students in the lithographic department of the École des Beaux Arts under the aegis of the hastily formed Atelier Populaire. Highly influential, some of the posters have become classics, notably La Lutte Continue (the struggle continues). The other factor was television. The same medium which had been used to beam images of the Vietnam War directly into our homes, now also showed images of anti-war protests across the world almost as they happened: the new video technology made it possible for footage of events, often unedited, to be broadcast on the same day.

Forty years on, and we are in the midst of another unpopular, morally unjustifiable war, but while Harold Wilson's Labour government refused to be dragged in to the Vietnam War, Tony Blair joined the 'coalition of the willing' despite the biggest anti-war protest march this country has ever seen. The sense of frustration and disenfranchisement resulting from that fateful decision is still palpable, but once again, politicians too long in power seem oblivious. The similarities between 1968 and now are pointed up by Martha Rosler's decision in 2004 to make a second series of 'Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful' collages, this time referencing the Iraq war, but using digital technology (see AM314).

Governments have learned some lessons from the Vietnam War, however. An almost total news blackout was imposed during the Falklands War, while only embedded reporters have privileged access to - strictly controlled - information about the Iraq war. Meanwhile, under the pretext of the so-called 'war on terror', legislation against legitimate political protest has become ever more draconian, culminating in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) introduced in 2007. Mark Wallinger famously challenged the scope of the act in his installation, State Britain, at Tate Britain (see AM303 and 304). The work, an appropriation of the anti-war banners set up by lone protester Brian Haw, and seized by the police under the terms of the act, won Wallinger the Turner Prize which, in turn, ensured that both his work, and Haw's vigil outside Parliament, reached a wider audience not only through the medium of television, but now through the internet.

And what of student protest? What would it take for students to take to the barricades today? It is possible to sentimentalise the past, and to overlook the fact that 'les soixante-huitards' were mostly privileged middle-class students, the so-called postwar baby-boomer generation. The fact remains, however, that not only did they draw attention to real abuses within the education system, but they also became the catalyst for a wider popular protest that led to a general strike. Today, however, thanks to the abolition of the grant system and the introduction of loans in 1997, students in the new corporatised universities are weighed down with debt - £15,000 on average - even before they leave college. And now there is talk of raising top-up fees to as much as £10,000.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Graham Crowley points to the fact that in a recent National Student Satisfaction Survey, six of the ten institutions that scored lowest in terms of satisfaction 'are or were art schools' (see Letters). Students at the London College of Communication, a constituent of the University of the Arts, have had enough and have officially registered their dissatisfaction by demanding the return of their fees in protest at staff shortages and the lack of organisation. As Crowley points out, staff, for their part, are over-burdened by bureaucracy, rising student numbers, low pay and low self-esteem.

Vice chancellors, meanwhile, are all focused on competing in the lucrative global market for full fee-paying foreign students, claiming that to attract students from abroad new money should be spent not on staff but on corporate-style branding and infrastructure, by which they mean gleaming new buildings (though this didn't stop them from awarding themselves a pay rise of 8%, taking their average salary up to £177,844). The students who demanded their fees back from the LCC were demanding more staff time, not new buildings. The examples of St Martins School of Art in the 60s, or Goldsmiths in the 80s, should serve as reminders that it is not buildings that make for a dynamic teaching environment but people.

To borrow a slogan from 1968, perhaps it is time to remind ourselves to 'Be realistic - demand the impossible!'

This editorial was originally published in April 2008/ Issue 316, p12.