Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties
By Sheila Rowbotham
Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000
262 pp, $40.00 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"Dreams have gone out of fashion" and the dreams of the 1960s generation, veterans from a tumultuous decade when multitudes of people dreamt and acted on dreams of liberation and joy, are routinely dismissed by conservatives as "ridiculous, sinister, impossibly utopian or immature". So writes the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, a socialist — sometimes hippie — surfer on the sixties' waves of change, in her new book which defends the political validity of that decade.
Desperately seeking escape from the intellectual bondage of Methodist boarding school as the 1960s opened, Rowbotham continued her quest for meaning at Oxford University. "Non-conformist but non-Communist", she remained stubbornly seated for the Internationale at a French Communist Party rally as much as she did for the British national anthem at the Leeds flicks, but as the '60s political temperature rose, the politicisation of her rebellion increased.
Leaving behind the self-absorbed world of beatnik Bohemia and the mildewed corridors of diplomatic history, she found activism through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and she discovered Marx.
However, Rowbotham shunned Marxist parties, opting instead for the British Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists. At the time, it was under siege by most of the Trotskyist groups, burrowing away into the party with the "entrist" strategy as their ticket to reaching a working class still firmly wedded to Labour.
Rowbotham "endured the solemn rituals of sectarian combat" between Militant, the IMG (International Marxist Group), the SLL (Socialist Labour League) and the other labels of the divided house of Trotskyism.
When it became obvious that the Labour government, elected in 1964, was not about to deliver respite for the working class, challenge the murderous US war in Vietnam — let alone introduce socialism into England — the pent-up demand for change burst forth into an explosion of political struggles, industrial disputes, social movements and alternative lifestyles.
Rowbotham plunged into the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippie counter-culture, the AgitProp street theatre, the "non-sectarian" socialist Black Dwarf newspaper, and, for a while, the International Socialists.
Rowbotham was present at the graduation from slogan to reality of the concept of a worker-student alliance, and she was in at the ground floor of campaigns for international solidarity, for democratic student control of education, and for an emerging women's liberation movement which often had to battle sexism in the radical movements and parties as well as in capitalist society.
Frenetic activity was the order of the day for Rowbotham in 1968 and 1969, when the momentum peaked, carrying social and political radicalism deep into the pores of society. Revolutionary theorems, for so long guarded in small groups and little-read pamphlets, suddenly connected with people in real movement and booked a date with history.
The 1960s flood receded, however, as capitalism, despite some significant wounds, recovered and Rowbotham, like many radicals, was caught in the backwash. Leaving socialist activism behind, she immersed herself in feminism, which in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was to display much of the same spirit and defiance of the '60s.
Rowbotham excels at conveying what it was like to be involved in a rapid political growth spurt. Her personal anecdotes, in turn fervent, reflective and funny, will spark recognition amongst '60s activists about their own journey from political adolescence to maturity, from wandering through the shopping mall of radical ideologies, sampling this and that, to a coherent approach to political tactics, strategy and theory guided, at least in part, by a principled and open Marxism.
There will be many an amused smile at Rowbotham's entertainingly honest anecdotes of the follies of sectarianism, the occasional over-zealousness of the new Marxist convert, and the angst of political disagreements with friends and lovers.
Less amusing is Rowbotham's persistent antagonism to revolutionary Marxist parties. The growth of the revolutionary left, in both size and influence, was a feature of the 1960s every bit as much as the university occupations, the music and the hippies. Although briefly a member of the IS, Rowbotham was always dogged by scepticism. "Too anarchist to be a Marxist, too Marxist to be an anarchist", she never accepted the democratic discipline of the revolutionary party, preferring "networks and movements" to the "danger of merging individuality into the collectivity".
Rowbotham's picture of the British left parties is a dark one of feuding "vanguards" imparting "correct" knowledge into the masses while keeping their membership under authoritarian control. This, like all caricatures, makes a mountain out of a molehill.
Many of the beleaguered Trotskyist sects of the 1960s had an inflated sense of their own historical importance, held stubbornly to their version of Trotskyist orthodoxy and could be less than fully democratic. These distortions borne from marginality combine with Rowbotham's anarchist aversion to parties and leadership in general to produce a crude caricature of Leninism. Her political prejudices remain unbreached by the authentic meaning of "democratic centralism" (freedom of discussion and unity of action) and unfazed by the fact that differing levels of consciousness in the working class create the need for revolutionaries to organise in a party to raise the anti-capitalist level of consciousness and the political effectiveness of struggles and campaigns.
Anti-Leninist flavouring aside, Rowbotham mixes her ingredients well and the '60s rise to their appetising best, highlighting in particular the liberatory stirrings of women who so often make only limited entrances into conventional accounts of the decade, and then mostly as "legs in miniskirts". Rowbotham's book leaves a real taste of the dreams of workers and students in that radical period, and their partial realisation, dreams which were the capitalists' worst nightmare and which still haunt them today.