The First Great Global Uprising
In May 1968, the Situationist-inspired Paris riots set off “a chain reaction of refusal” against consumer capitalism. First students, then workers, then professors, nurses, doctors, bus drivers and a piecemeal league of artists, anarchists and Enragés took to the streets, erected barricades, fought with police, occupied offices, factories, dockyards, railway depots, theaters and university campuses, sang songs, issued manifestos, sprayed slogans like live without dead time and down with the spectacular-commodity culture all over their city and challenged the established order of their time in the most visceral way. The breadth of the dissent was remarkable. “Art students demanded the realization of art; music students called for ‘wild and ephemeral music’; footballers kicked out managers with the slogan ‘football to the football players’; gravediggers occupied cemeteries; doctors, nurses, and the interns at a psychiatric hospital organized in solidarity with the inmates.” For a few weeks, millions of people who had worked their whole lives in offices and factories broke from their daily routines and … lived.
It was “the largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history,” and it spread rapidly, first around Paris and France and then around the world. At the height of the uprising in Paris’s Latin Quarter, 50,000 people marched in Bonn, and 3,000 took to the streets in Rome. Three days later, students revolted at the University of Milan. The next day, students staged a sit-in at the University of Miami. Then skirmishes erupted in Madrid, Berkeley, New York City, Frankfurt and Santiago. The wave reached London, Vancouver, Dakar, Munich, Vienna and Buenos Aires, then Tokyo, Osaka, Zurich, Rio, Bangkok, Düsseldorf, Mexico City, Saigon, La Paz, Chicago, Venice, Montreal and Auckland. For a few heady weeks a tantalizing question hung in the air: What if the whole world turned into the Latin Quarter? Could this be the beginning of the first global revolution?
Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam
Part: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10
Right-click to download the full audio version of "A Brief History of Revolution"
20 comments on the article “The First Great Global Uprising”
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Elliott
I've heard of lecturers and i've got friends that agree that this is the last time western culture really gave a shit about anything. After this, television and technology took over to offer a much easier outcome. It resulted in mass escapism and now i'm not sure if people can truly overcome it and try to live like that again. The question 'What If?' is important but im struggling to see 'How?' in a world full of distractions. As well as this, there is the struggle of the message being anti the medium it uses, but if we didn't do anything at all it would be worse.
Elliott
I've heard of lecturers and i've got friends that agree that this is the last time western culture really gave a shit about anything. After this, television and technology took over to offer a much easier outcome. It resulted in mass escapism and now i'm not sure if people can truly overcome it and try to live like that again. The question 'What If?' is important but im struggling to see 'How?' in a world full of distractions. As well as this, there is the struggle of the message being anti the medium it uses, but if we didn't do anything at all it would be worse.
Anonymous
In 2008 Paris burned for 10 days while the poor of Paris took over the inner city and fought bloody battles with the police.
Desperation is the igniting factor, not general discontent.
Anonymous
In 2008 Paris burned for 10 days while the poor of Paris took over the inner city and fought bloody battles with the police.
Desperation is the igniting factor, not general discontent.
Anonymous
somewhat in response to Elliott,
it is often sited that the 60's radicalism was a final moment of genuinely progressive effort. what always comes to mind for me, like the unspoken variable in all our lives, is that the world population was half the size then than it is today...and i don't often see people refer to this when dealing with political issues...but what could be more political than an overwhelming doubling of population? what could be more destabilizing to meaning, than 3 extra billion souls hungry for glory? at the same time as a rapid escalation of inter-connectivity.
it is easy to say people are apathetic...but i'm not sure this is anything more than a descriptive, rather than judgmental assessment. people are apathetic, yes, but perhaps there are genuine existential reasons for being so. not that i am apathetic, i am wildly optimistic, but that is simply an aspect of my nature, i can no more take credit for that, than i can for my poor complexion.
as i've said before, we will need something larger than an individual to unite a human force of 6.5 billion people, a force never before seen on the earth, and one that is sharing its consciousness in unprecedented ways. perhaps it will arise out of our communication network...who knows, but it will have to be miraculous...that is what i've concluded, that we have reached that point where a miracle is needed. and putting up barricades in the street certainly won't be it.
Anonymous
somewhat in response to Elliott,
it is often sited that the 60's radicalism was a final moment of genuinely progressive effort. what always comes to mind for me, like the unspoken variable in all our lives, is that the world population was half the size then than it is today...and i don't often see people refer to this when dealing with political issues...but what could be more political than an overwhelming doubling of population? what could be more destabilizing to meaning, than 3 extra billion souls hungry for glory? at the same time as a rapid escalation of inter-connectivity.
it is easy to say people are apathetic...but i'm not sure this is anything more than a descriptive, rather than judgmental assessment. people are apathetic, yes, but perhaps there are genuine existential reasons for being so. not that i am apathetic, i am wildly optimistic, but that is simply an aspect of my nature, i can no more take credit for that, than i can for my poor complexion.
as i've said before, we will need something larger than an individual to unite a human force of 6.5 billion people, a force never before seen on the earth, and one that is sharing its consciousness in unprecedented ways. perhaps it will arise out of our communication network...who knows, but it will have to be miraculous...that is what i've concluded, that we have reached that point where a miracle is needed. and putting up barricades in the street certainly won't be it.
s3
Read and learn about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernais and you will understand why nothing on this site or any other will make a change.
The final piece of the puzzle was solved. Homo sapien is now a blob of flesh consumed by the ego. People will never rise to the next level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs if they are trapped in the indulgences of the ego.
s3
Read and learn about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernais and you will understand why nothing on this site or any other will make a change.
The final piece of the puzzle was solved. Homo sapien is now a blob of flesh consumed by the ego. People will never rise to the next level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs if they are trapped in the indulgences of the ego.
Ken Vallario
do you acknowledge the possibility of divine or cosmic intervention?
for, what is the spiritual, if not the most powerful potential energy in our experience....
have we not been saved countless times from the indulgences of ego, by singular magical acts of discovery or insight?
Ken Vallario
do you acknowledge the possibility of divine or cosmic intervention?
for, what is the spiritual, if not the most powerful potential energy in our experience....
have we not been saved countless times from the indulgences of ego, by singular magical acts of discovery or insight?
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