http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3751/the_ambiguous_legacy_of_68/
Forty years ago, what was revolutionized the world or capitalism?
June 20, 2008
By Slavoj Zizek
In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graffiti messages on the city's
walls was "Structures do not walk on the streets!" In other words,
the massive student and workers demonstrations of '68 could not be
explained in the terms of structuralism, as determined by the
structural changes in society, as in Saussurean structuralism. French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's response was that this, precisely, is
what happened in '68: structures did descend onto the streets. The
visible explosive events on the streets were, ultimately, the result
of a structural imbalance.
There are good reasons for Lacan's skeptical view. As French scholars
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999's The New Spirit of
Capitalism, from the '70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.
Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the
production process which, named after auto maker Henry Ford,
enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command and
developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for
employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we
get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in
teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public
welfare, or worrying about ecology.
In this way, capitalism usurped the left's rhetoric of worker
self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a
capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic
and administrative.
The anti-capitalist protests of the '60s supplemented the traditional
critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique:
alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption,
inauthenticity of a mass society in which we "wear masks" and suffer
sexual and other oppressions.
The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical
rhetoric of '68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt
against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism
and "really existing" socialism. This new libertarian spirit is
epitomized by dressed-down "cool" capitalists such as Microsoft's
Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
What survived of the sexual liberation of the '60s was the tolerant
hedonism readily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. Today,
sexual enjoyment is not only permitted, it is ordained individuals
feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The drive to radical
forms of enjoyment (through sexual experiments and drugs or other
trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when "the
spirit of '68" had exhausted its political potential.
At this critical point in the mid-'70s, we witnessed a direct, brutal
push-toward-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: first, the
search for extreme forms of sexual enjoyment; second, the turn toward
the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism); and, finally,
the rise of leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany,
Red Brigades in Italy, etc.).
Leftist political terror operated under the belief that, in an epoch
in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological
sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative. Only
a resort to the raw Real of direct violence could awaken them.
What these three options share is the withdrawal from concrete
socio-political engagement, and we feel the consequences of this
withdrawal from engagement today.
Autumn 2005's suburb riots in France saw thousands of cars burning
and a major outburst of public violence. But what struck the eye was
the absence of any positive utopian vision among protesters. If May
'68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was an
outburst with no pretense to vision.
Here's proof of the common aphorism that we live in a
post-ideological era: The protesters in the Paris suburbs made no
particular demands. There was only an insistence on recognition,
based on a vague, non-articulated resentment.
The fact that there was no program in the burning of Paris suburbs
tells us that we inhabit a universe in which, though it celebrates
itself as a society of choice, the only option available to the
enforced democratic consensus is the explosion of (self-)destructive violence.
Recall here Lacan's challenge to the protesting students in '68: "As
revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one."
And we did get one in the guise of the post-modern "permissive"
master whose domination is all the stronger for being less visible.
While many undoubtedly positive changes accompanied this passage
such as new freedoms and access to positions of power for women one
should nonetheless raise hard questions: Was this passage from one
"spirit of capitalism" to another really all that happened in '68?
Was all the drunken enthusiasm of freedom just a means to replacing
one form of domination with another?
Things are not so simple. While '68 was gloriously appropriated by
the dominant culture as an explosion of sexual freedom and
anti-hierarchic creativity, France's Nicholas Sarkozy said in his
2007 presidential campaign that his great task is to make France
finally get over '68.
So, what we have is "their" and "our" May '68. In today's ideological
memory, "our" basic idea of the May demonstrations the link between
students' protests and workers' strikes is forgotten.
If we look at our predicament with the eyes of '68, we should
remember that, at its core, '68 was a rejection of the
liberal-capitalist system, a "NO" to the totality of it.
It is easy to make fun of political economist Francis Fukuyama's
notion of the "end of history," of his claim that, in liberal
capitalism, we found the best possible social system. But today, the
majority is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as
the finally found formula for the best of all possible worlds, all
that is left to do is render it more just, tolerant, etc.
When Marco Cicala, an Italian journalist, recently used the word
"capitalism" in an article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, his
editor asked him if the use of this term was necessary and could he
not replace it with a synonym like "economy"?
What better proof of capitalism's triumph in the last three decades
than the disappearance of the very term "capitalism"? So, again, the
only true question today is: Do we endorse this naturalization of
capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain contradictions
strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?
There are (at least) four such antagonisms: the looming threat of
ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property
rights for so-called "intellectual property"; the socio-ethical
implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in
biogenetics); and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, in the
form of new walls and slums.
The first three antagonisms concern the domains of what political
theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call "commons" the shared
substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act
that should be resisted with violent means, if necessary (violence
against private property, that is).
The commons of external nature are threatened by pollution and
exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the
commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity)
are threatened by technological interference; and the commons of
culture the socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily
language, our means of communication and education, but also the
shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.
are privatized for profit. (If Bill Gates were to be allowed a
monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a
private individual would have owned the software texture of our basic
network of communication.)
We are gradually becoming aware of the destructive potential, up to
the self-annihilation of humanity itself, that could be unleashed if
the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run.
Economist Nicholas Stern rightly characterized the climate crisis as
"the greatest market failure in human history."
There is an increasing awareness that we need global environmental
citizenship, a political space to address climate change as a matter
of common concern of all humanity.
One should give weight to the terms "global citizenship" and "common
concern." Doesn't this desire to establish a global political
organization and engagement that will neutralize and channel market
forces mean that we are in need of a properly communist perspective?
The need to protect the "commons" justifies the resuscitation of the
notion of Communism: It enables us to see the ongoing "enclosure" of
our commons as a process of proletarization of those who are thereby
excluded from their own substance.
It is, however, only the antagonism between the Included and the
Excluded that properly justifies the term Communism. In slums around
the world, we are witnessing the fast growth of a population outside
state control, living in conditions outside the law, in terrible need
of minimal forms of self-organization. Although marginalized
laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants make up this
population, they are not simply a redundant surplus: They are
incorporated into the global economy, many working as informal wage
workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or
social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the
inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with
cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local
agriculture.) These new slum dwellers are not an unfortunate
accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.
Whoever lives in the favelas or shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, or in Shanghai, China, is not essentially different from
someone who lives in the banlieues or outskirts of Paris or the
ghettos of Chicago.
If the principal task of the 19th century's emancipatory politics was
to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the
working class, and if the task of the 20th century was to politically
awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal
task of the 21st century is to politicize organize and discipline
the "destructured masses" of slum-dwellers.
If we ignore this problem of the Excluded, all other antagonisms lose
their subversive edge.
Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual
property turns into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetics becomes an
ethical issue. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks enjoy
favor among liberals even though they engage in anti-union
activities; they just sell products with a progressive spin.
You buy coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value.
You drive a hybrid vehicle.
You buy from companies that provide good benefits for their customers
(according to corporation's standards).
In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the
Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates
is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases, and
NewCorp's Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing
hundreds of millions through his media empire.
In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have "nothing to
lose but their chains," we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The
risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects
deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance,
our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.
These triple threats to our being make all of us potential
proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to
act preventively.
The true legacy of '68 is best encapsulated in the formula Soyons
realistes, demandons l'impossible! (Let's be realists, demand the impossible.)
Today's utopia is the belief that the existing global system can
reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to
envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but
appear as impossible.
--
Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher
at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen,
Germany. He is the author of, among many other books, The Fragile
Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
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