As a very young (23) reporter, I was assigned to cover and interpret the events of 1968 as they touched Britain. It was assumed, I suppose, that since I had recently been a student I was best placed to make sense of a phenomenon that baffled the older generation, and particularly liberals and leftists. "What do the students really want?" editors asked. To which the only honest answer was that they wanted to tear everything down and start again, preferably with a new model of humankind. This wasn't a conventional uprising with demands for more food, more elections or more time off. The students weren't concerned with the means of pro duction only, but also, as one of their gurus, Ernst Bloch, put it, with "the power of love and of light".
In the eyes of the '68ers, state socialism in the east and representative democracy in the west had both failed. Both were corrupt, authoritarian, militarised and bureaucratic. Liberal intellectuals - all professors were "cretins", observed On the Poverty of Student Life, a key text for the French and German students - and revolutionary socialists were equally guilty of hypocrisy and betrayal. Only six years earlier, the world had faced nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis. When leaders of the world's most powerful nations could calmly contemplate the annihilation of civilisation, it didn't seem unreasonable to propose the destruction of everything that had led to this prospect.
The '68ers acknowledged that western democracy seemed preferable to the eastern alternative. But it was, they argued, a cruel illusion.
Workers in the west were seduced by what another guru, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called "repressive tolerance". Freedom of speech, Marcuse wrote, "was granted even to the radical enemies of society, provided they did not make the transition from word to deed, from speech to action". Free election of masters had not abolished the masters or the slaves and, if there was greater material equality, it hid continuing inequalities of power and control, which were enhanced by technology. Nor had mass prosperity abolished alienation. Work was still controlled by impersonal, inhumane forces, its routines and purposes determined from above.
Moreover, capitalism had extended control beyond the workplace into private life and even into humanity's soul. It was transforming reality. The workers' passivity was guaranteed by what Guy Debord, a leading light in the situationist movement, termed "the society of the spectacle", a mighty machine based on advertising, fashion, film, television and the press. "Waves of enthusiasm for particular products," observed Debord, "are propagated by all the communications media. A film sparks a fashion craze; a magazine publicises night spots which in turn spin off different lines of products." Faddish gadgets proliferated so that absurdity itself became a commodity.
"The spectacle," Debord argued, "is the leading product of present-day society . . . The real world is replaced by a selection of images . . . projected above it." For example, the pop ulace was besotted by stars, "spectacular representations of living human beings". By identifying with these "superficial objects", the workers compensated "for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live".
Students were being trained as the technicians and manipulators for this flawed society. They, wrote the authors of On the Poverty, would be the "future petty functionaries", the market researchers, media planners, journalists, PRs and personnel officers. As Alexander Cockburn argued in Student Power (the best introduction to what drove the British student movement), they were learning "techniques of domination", which they had first to practise on themselves without being allowed "to rumble the whole game". Mass higher education was another cunning ploy in the capitalist project; what students learned was "profoundly degraded" from the old high-bourgeois culture. "The modern economic system," declared On the Poverty, "requires a mass production of uneducated students who have been rendered incapable of thinking."
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