What was it about 1968 that made it such a revolutionary year in the West? What was the historical materialist context which made it so revolutionary and made it the closest that the West came to revolution and how was it coopted and liberalized in the 70s and 80s?
>>2340924It wasn't a revolution as socialists in the 1920s expected to happen. But I like Eric Hosbawm writing about the enormous generation gap between the young people then and their parents, which grew extremely wide because of rapid technological change compared to the differences between generations in the past. Some of the cultural aspects of this were also shaped or became dominant in "developed market economies" which had socialized these people differently, and they had increased spending power. It was a generation that really was detached from their past.
>The essential antinomianism of the new youth culture came out most clearly at the moments when it found intellectual expression, as in the instantly famous posters of the Paris May days of 1968: 'It is forbidden to forbid', and the American pop radical Jerry Rubin's maxim that one should never trust anyone who had not done time (in jail) (Wiener, 1984, p. 204). Contrary to first appearances, these were not political statements in the traditional sense - even in the narrow sense of aiming to abolish repressive laws. This was not their object. They were public announcements of private feelings and desires. As a slogan of May 1968 put it: 'I take my desires for reality, for I believe in the reality of my desires' (Katsiaficas, 1987, p. 101). Even when such desires came together in public manifestations, groups and movements; even in what looked like, and sometimes had the effect of, mass rebellion, subjectivity was at their core. 'The personal is political' became an important slogan of the new feminism, perhaps the most lasting result of the years of radicalization. It meant more than simply that political commitment had personal motivations and satisfactions, and that the criterion of political success was how it affected people. In some mouths it simply meant 'I shall call anything that worries me, political', as in the title of a 1970s book, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (Orbach, 1978).
>The May 1968 slogan 'When I think of revolution I want to make love' would have puzzled not only Lenin, but also Ruth Fischer, the militant young Viennese communist whose championship of sexual promiscuity Lenin attacked (Zetkin, 1968, pp. 28ff). Yet, conversely, even for the typically politically conscious neo-Marxist-Leninist radical of the 1960s and 1970s, Brecht's Comintern agent who, like the commercial traveller 'made love with other things on his mind' ('Der Liebe pflegte ichachtlos' - Brecht, 1976, II, p. 722) would have been incomprehensible. For them the important thing was surely not what revolutionaries hoped to achieve by their actions, but what they did and how they felt while doing it. Making love and making revolution could not be clearly separated.
>Personal liberation and social liberation thus went hand in hand; the most obvious ways of shattering the bonds of state, parental and neighbours' power, law and convention, being sex and drugs. The former, in all its manifold forms, did not have to be discovered. What the melancholy conservative poet meant by the line 'Sexual intercourse began in 1963' (Larkin, 1988, p. 167) was not that this activity was uncommon before the 1960s or even that he had not practised it, but that it changed its public character with - his examples -the Lady Chatterley trial and 'the Beatles' first LP'. Where an activity had formerly been prohibited, such gestures against older ways were easy. Where it had previously been tolerated, officially or unofficially, as for instance lesbian relationships had, the fact that it was a gesture had to be specially established. A public commitment to the hitherto prohibited or unconventional ('coming out') therefore became important. Drugs, on the other hand, except for alcohol and tobacco, had hitherto been confined to small subcultures of high, low and marginal society, and did not benefit from permissive legislation. They spread not only as a gesture of rebellion, for the sensations they made possible could be sufficient attraction. Nevertheless, drug use was by legal definition an outlaw activity, and the very fact that the drug most popular among the Western young, marihuana, was probably more harmless than alcohol or tobacco, made smoking it (typically, a social activity) not merely an act of defiance but of superiority over those who banned it. On the wilder shores of the American 1960s, where rock fans and student radicals met, the line between getting stoned and building barricades often seemed hazy.[…]
>What is even more significant is that this rejection was not in the name of some other pattern of ordering society, though the new libertarianism was given ideological justification by those who felt it needed such labels,* but in the name of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire. It assumed a world of self-regarding individualism pushed to its limits. Paradoxically the rebels against the conventions and restrictions shared the assumptions on which mass consumer society was built, or at least the psychological motivations which those who sold consumers goods and services found most effective in selling them. >>2340924>closest that the West came to revolutionYou really think 1968 was closer than 1919?
Yeah gonna say this is a b8 thread
>>2341381Sure, if you mean simultaneous revolution across the entire imperial core. 1919 still was a more consequential inflexion point for the revolutionary transformation of the core.
>>2341526The imprisoned nations and internal subalterns orgs like the BPP were much more effective. Unfortunately, not as effective as the FBI.
>>2340924Neoliberalism. There's a lot of whining about the hippies being traitors and fakes but the reality is that the state struck really fucking hard with austerity everywhere. Also there was the fall of the Soviet Union. Also the state flooding the streets with hard drugs. In general, communists greatly underestimate the amount of active class war taking place against Americans. Sometimes communists note a few things like the propaganda or the repression against Black people. But a lot of people don't grasp the scale of domestic Gladio stuff. Cambridge analytica was in bed with the state and they've done shit like this before. The skinhead movement wasn't just an attempt to crush non-white people, these Neo-Nazi groups are an active attempt by the state to crush white trash (typically marginalized groups such as in Appalachia). Also the feminist movement made a Faustian bargain with the state and was neutralized with the whole nonprofit industrial complex. The whole Satanist Neo-Nazi stuff is a psyop designed to target disaffected young youth. I mean I'm pretty sure Andrew Tate is an asset. You can go crazy assuming everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes people are just stupid or dicks. But rich men will make a few anonymous donations here and there.
Like I'm pretty sure the whole incel movement is a psyop broken off from the Seige culture stuff which is connected to Michael Aquino and military intelligence. Something like that anyhow.
Anyone have any good reading (whether long or short) on the crisis of world capitalism from the 60s-70s that would have encouraged the bourgeois to strip down their social democratic institutions and strike back with repression and psyops like
>>2341544 explains?
>>2341544if everyone thought like this we'd actually get somewhere
we are literal soldiers brother, this is a class war that's been waging for hundreds of years.
>>2341860German RAF and their Italian similars had nothing to do with actual proles of these countries
A bunch of over-energetic young people causing havoc through random terrorist acts, if anything, only alienated the working masses.
>>2341881Prague was even more petit porks chomping out than France
Prague 'Spring' had even less relevance to socialism that porky France
>>2342673I know a guy who was born in the late 1930s who doesn't wear jeans. Always slacks.
This is also Hosbawm. From "The Age of Extremes."
>>2341878There is a part of truth in that, but it's also a lie and a psyop. The students went to the factories and tried to ally with the workers. There were huge strikes in Paris and Lyon but the PCF and CGT cucked out and told workers to go back to work, and signed the Grenelle accords. Many activist groups criticized Cohn-Bendit as an opportunist who diluted the revolutionary potential of the situation. It was a chaotic time and many students wanted to create workers' councils in factories, but the official communist party were cucks who didn't support them and wanted capitalism to go on as usual, like the usual opportunist bureaucrats they are.
Read Jacques Wajnsztejn, he wrote a really good book about the 1968 situation in France and Italy (the 1969 Turin strike at the Fiat factory was the biggest of Europe at the time), and that's not even talking about what was also happening in Prague, Germany, Belgrade, Pakistan and Japan.
It was a serious but failed revolution like 1919 and it gave rise to neoliberalism just like 1919 gave rise to Nazi Germany.
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