Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 11, Part Two. Feminism Didn't Bring On socialism.

        Feminism Didn't Bring On Socialism. Part Two by Dave Jaffe.




         As mentioned, Jackie, a 1960's activist thought that the rise of feminism would lead to socialism. That of course, didn't happen. In fact the rise of new movements in the world in the 1960's and 1970's, triggered a massive backlash. So that to-day things are far more conservative in some ways than they were forty years ago.
      So how did this happen? Very simply really. "How do you move a donkey?" people used to say. "Just use the carrot and the stick." This is what the business class and its allies did. The stick they brandished was government--backed force. In the year 1968 protests movements and near insurrections erupted all across the globe. Yet they were nearly all crushed.
      In early 1968 a massive attack in Vietnam by National Liberation Front troops and their North Vietnamese allies was launched against the American troops in South Vietnam. Yet the attack was beaten back by massive American force. The U.S. and its allies killed about 100,000 Vietnamese and the terrible war in Vietnam just went on and on. Back in the U.S. assassins murdered Martin Luther King Junior ands then Robert Kennedy. With the death of these two men all hopes of progressive change in the U.S. just vanished. Thousands of African Americans rioted when King was shot dead.. Police forces and military guards shot and killed over 170 African Americans. The political hopes for people of colour and the poor in general were crushed.
      The assassinations in the U.S. didn't stop there. Police forces in the late 1960's and early 1970's shot and killed members of revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers. Still in 1968 revolts spread far outside U.S. borders.
     In that year, French students and many workers occupied schools and factories defying the French government of President Charles de Gaulle.de Gaulle unleashed his police forces against the rebels and then called an election, where he won a massive electoral victory. "It is forbidden to forbid," French students wrote on walls in Paris. Yet their protests couldn't forbid or stop another De Gaulle victory at the polls.
   The mood of rebellion spread  to the other side of the Iron Curtain. In communist-ruled Czechoslavakia, communist leader Alexander Dubcek tried to create what his supporters called "Socialism, with a human face." Yet the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies made short shrift of these hopes. Their armies rolled into Czechoslavakia and crushed Dubcek and swept away his government.
    In Mexico, just before the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City thousands of young people took to the streets to demand changes from the long ruling government of  the Party of Institutionalized Revolution or the PRI. The PRI rulers brushed off these youthful rebels. Government armed forces killed hundreds of youthful protestors in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City just before the opening of the Games. That was the end of the protests in Mexico - at least for a while.
      The brutal face of force and repression rolled on. Police forces gassed and beat protestors in the streets of Chicago in the summer of 1968. The protestors had come to this big American city to protest the Vietnam war outside the Democratic convention held in Chicago.
     The use of brute force didn't end in the 1960's. In the spring of 1970 American forces invaded Cambodia and tens of thousands of anti-war protestors shut down dozens of American college and university campuses. Troops shot and killed protestors at Kent state in Ohio and Jackson State. The protests faded away but the terrible now Indochinese war just went on and on.
      Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proclaimed a war Measures Act in the fall of 1970 after the revolutionary front de Liberation de Quebec kidnapped  a British diplomat and a prominent French-Canadian politician. "just watch me," Trudeau told reporter Tim Ralfe, who asked the Prime Minster how far he was going to go to crush the F.L.Q.
      Hundreds of Quebecois were rounded up and jailed. Most were released after the so-called 'October Crisis ended. Still, Trudeau had crushed the F.L.Q. and it too vanished into history.