Gabriel Rockhill, “The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback“, Monthly Review, June 2023 (open access)

Like any major social and political movement, the events referred to as those of May 1968 have multiple different aspects and internal contradictions. They cannot be easily summed up in terms of a single significance, and they were themselves the site of class struggles, with various groups vying for power, pushing and pulling in different directions. This is as true of the past as it is of the present, in the sense that the battle over historical meaning continues long after the event itself has passed.

A dialectical approach to ’68 begins with the recognition of the infinite complexity of the events, while also concretely abstracting from them in order to establish a heuristic framework that makes sense of some of their fundamental traits. This frame can be situated at a greater or lesser level of abstraction, allowing for a multiscalar analysis, meaning one that can either cast the event at its most macro level, or hone in on microdevelopments. For such an analysis to function, of course, it requires a coherent relationship between the different scales, so that they can be nested within one another.