From the article:
Bourgeois history has primarily retained from ’68 the spectacle of the student-led revolts in the heart of Paris: the barricades in the Latin Quarter, the occupation of the Sorbonne, the libertarian sloganeering, and so forth. A significant segment of the intelligentsia, particularly anarchist, Maoist, Trotskyist, libertarian socialist, and Marxian currents, wrote in support of these revolts and often joined them in the streets and the various occupations. Marxist-Leninist intellectuals generally questioned the strategic clarity of the unorganized petty-bourgeois and anticommunist politics of many of the more vocal students, which they criticized for being gauchistes and beholden to the illusory belief in a revolutionary situation.5 At the same time, many of these intellectuals also recognized the youth uprising as an important catalyst for a new phase of class struggle, and they stalwartly supported the mobilization of workers.
These different segments of the intelligentsia, as we shall see, were not those that rose to global prominence as major contributors to the phenomenon known as French theory.6 On the contrary, those marketed as the ’68 thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others—were disconnected from and often dismissive of the historic workers’ mobilization. They were also hostile to, or at least highly skeptical of, the student movement. In both senses, they were anti-’68 thinkers, or at a minimum, theorists who were highly suspicious of the demonstrations. Their promotion by the global theory industry, which has marketed them as the radical theorists of ’68, has largely obliterated this historical fact.
More from the article:
Although gauchiste can be literally translated as “leftist,” in this context it means “ultraleftist.” Gauchisme or ultraleftism, as Simon explains, “is at once the absence of a program and the adventurist assessment of forces, the rejection of a strategy and a tactic founded on the careful assessment of class forces. This character trait is typically petty bourgeois.” Simon, “Mai–Juin 1968,” 9. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.
I love it when people confirm my beliefs that they're charlatans with nothing useful to say, because I'm sure as hell not going to learn French and philosophy so I can try to evaluate their stuff in their own language.
Im a philosophy noob but i think deconstruction is a good way to analyse art. What is the problem with derrida?
A lot of people think he's full of shit and the difficulty people have understanding him is because there's nothing to understand, just a lot of poorly defined terms and overwrought language masquerading as philosophy.
I'm the only one I know that subscribes to Science & Society (another Marxist journal).
But yes, I also regularly read MR.
Damn!
You know about International Critical Thought?!
Hexbear gets better and better, imho. Nobody outside of a large Discord server I frequent knows about them.
I don't know some journals by name, but some of the Russian ones on the NEP and Bukharin that I've found out through Google Scholar (and then used places like Sci-Hub) are pretty good.
Wow, these links look great! Thank you so much! And yes, I can post more "theory" on Hexbear 'cause I see that it's mostly shitposting (not that there aren't stuff besides that!). Let me see what I have...
And one of my favorite parts from the article:
Moreover, the intellectuals who had indeed participated in the preparation of the movement and committed themselves directly to it have largely been marginalized or banished from the global phenomenon of French theory. Rather than discursive radicality, they did something, which often took the form of supporting the student movement. It is of the utmost importance to note, in this regard, that there is of course a marked distinction between different forms of political engagement. Many of the intellectuals who concretely backed the students embraced what Domenico Losurdo referred to as populism: the celebration of “the masses” and opposition to any form of power, including that of communist parties or socialist states. This is a profound political problem that plagued many of those in the Trotskyist, Maoist, libertarian socialist, and anarchist movements. Losurdo summed it up in the following terms, explicitly referencing the culture of ’68: “In absolutizing the contradiction between masses and power, and condemning power as such, populism proves incapable of drawing a line of demarcation between revolution and counter-revolution.”72 This populist embrace of insurgency tends to fetishize spontaneous contestation in general at the expense of developing a coherent socialist strategy for building real working-class power through parties and eventually the seizure of the state. In the case of France, Clouscard cited in particular those purportedly radical—but ultimately antirevolutionary—intellectuals who followed Herbert Marcuse in assuming that the working class had sold out and was no longer a potential revolutionary force. This discourse confers “to the libertarian consumer of the new middle layers a narcissistic ‘revolutionary’ status.”73 As Clouscard lucidly explained: “This inversion thus consists in attributing to the producer (proletariat) the negative aspect of the new society, and in attributing to the libertarian consumer the revolutionary positive aspect!”74
To be fair, many activists and organizers from the 60s/70s era are still here and fighting. It's not that ubiquotous and I would even say they're partly behind the recent revival in radicalism and Marxism today.
For example, Black Alliance for Peace are headed by radicals from the 60s/70s/80s era.
I find it morbidly fascinating, how some of the seemingly more academically-educated Marxists in the Western left turned to shit.
I.E. Read also Lyndon Larouche and his "National Caucus of Labor Committies", a cult if you will, and the developing of the magazine "Living Marxism" into "Spiked", another right-wing British rag for reading. Even without hindsight, folks, there were clear red signs on pseudo-leftism in the west, if you will.
I've always found that there is a particular irony within the Marcuse analysis of 'workers selling out', because Lenin also comes to the same conclusion, albeit he recognized that that 'selling out' nature comes from the derivation of 'super-profits' of imperialism. It is from there that we come into complex class terms such as 'labor aristocracy' and the complex class character of the imperial core proletariat, who are both coddled on a world stage, but still exploited by strict Marxist definitions, but to varying degrees.
However, that doesn't mean that Lenin rejects the Marxist analysis that the proletariat are only class with the revolutionary potential to 'remake society and redefine the relationship to the means of production'. Which is true! Artists, students, beggars and intellectuals can all adopt aesthetics of revolution and bang the gong of 'change' but they cannot redefine the relationship to the means of production because they are not directly involved with the mass replication of the material culture nor the long-term production processing of capital. Can they potentially form a sort of vanguard? Of course. But are they the revolutionary class? No, they cannot be.
It's almost like he didn't actually process any Lenin, Engels or Marx and really shows the liberalism and idealism within his theory, instead picking and choosing what he believed to be the 'most radical' based off of his own personal academic experiences.
Uh, actually, the American proletariat can indeed by the most revolutionary class, given how poorly they treated, which is only better than a peasant in India.
Perhaps, but the average level of purchasing power is still too high. Even the working poor in America can afford luxury electronics and most escapist media is oriented towards their desires. We'll see what happens when they get to retirement age and realize that they have nothing close to what their parents had, and they can't just consume their sorrows away. Drugs probably. We are still the world's premier consumers, and it's important not to forget that.
The purchasing power vis a vis other countries does not matter, especially in terms of quality of life, and Americans by and large are dirt-poor.
"luxury electronics"
So do a lot of people in India.
These are just Republican talking points repackaged in leftist jargon.
Look you can believe whatever you want. I am simply going off of the observations that I, as a multi-decade long member of the working class, see that cause lumpen behavior. You can dismiss them if you want but don't accuse me of being reactionary.
I've been to India a couple of times, and this is simply not true. The purchasing power of your average poor American is still much higher than the majority of people in India and American's quality of life is better simply because there are less people competing for more space. This country is absolutely massive, I'm not saying that there are not lots of very poor Americans living is squalor, there are! But their physical concentrations and numbers are, right now, small enough to render them politically inert. At this point in time, you can still, at the sacrifice of your body, pick up a welding job in the Midwest in your teens for 21 dollars an hour, or work in retail for 18. It's not enough to retire or raise children or live alone, but it is still enough to buy what you want on the global market. However, this is a rapidly deteriorating situation.
Once our relationship with China and the real manufacturing hubs starts to change, that will not be the same case, and that time is approaching as the elite class, who are completely financially isolated from any consequences of their actions at this point because of their relationship to super-profits, try to contest for geo-political control. This country will not survive if we are not the world's premier trading partner, as consumption is the only thing we have left. The question is if it will be enough, or if we get into the strange modern situation where we are at war but still fully trading with each other (like the current situation with Ukriane and Russia).
These are not 'Republican talking points'. Republican talking points are that (white) god-fearing Americans are culturally and genetically prone to individuality and freedom, that they love hard and honest work, and that communists are lazy beggars who have never done an honest day's labor in their life and just want hand-outs. None of which I am saying. Hell, you could say that my points are closer to neo-liberal talking points, but I am saying that they are a bad thing.
"but don't accuse me of being reactionary"
I never did but I know that talking-points like this one are common and it just gives people an excuse to not organize or do any bit of activism.
It would not matter if the purchasing power is better as it means little to quality of life for an American. Go to where I live. Poverty. Go to prison. Poverty. Go to the homeless in the city. Poverty.
Republican talking-points are that the poor are not poor and that they own an iPhone or a computer and therefore have it easy.
I am not saying that we shouldn't be organizing, I'm just saying we shouldn't expect our activism alone to turn the situation around.
Again, there is poverty, but it is too spread out and completly disorganized. There is no peasant or proletariat community that are the traditional building block for communist or anarchist movements. The closest thing we can get is ethnic minority communities, and that could be enough to create an effective political bloc. But that will not be the case forever.
They don't make life 'easy', but they do make life 'tolerable'. I can't even remember how many times I have had discussions with people about activism or politics and just receive blank stares, but as soon as I bring up video games or tv shows their faces light up and are engaged. These are people who are right next to the poverty line despite working 40+ hours. If they get to a point where they can no longer afford those things, then maybe they will engage in politics. Maybe not. The point is to have the organizations and capacity to facilitate their understanding and redirect them away from reactionary tendencies.
These aren't the days where the whole town comes out to support the strike, only to be put down by the national guard.
Good read.
Framing the mostly liberal intellectuals of '68 as leftist also has the handy function that the chuds can condemn them as the left, so that they can take even more right wing positions. (iirc CSU politician Alexander Dobrindt called for a "conservative revolution", which has some pretty ugly Weimar Era connotations and the '68 movement is usually condemned by chuds in the rare occasions it gets brought up.
Also some people with leftist worldviews and no theoretical knowledge might be encouraged to look up their theoretical work and get bogged down in philosophy of the 60s.
Nah, I live in Germany.
I wasn't criticizing the article, but the libs with cultural hegemony
Yeah my favourite monthly review piece has to be the one Samir Amin did about a year before he died, it's a great summary of his work.
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/revolution-from-north-to-south/
Yes, the left wing in France, or what is seen as the left in terms of the intellectuals mentioned in the article that the author has disdain for, regressed since 68. France since then has acted as an auxiliary force for US hegemony with it's project in Africa.
De Gaulle broke with these paleo-colonial and pro-American illusions simultaneously. He conceived then the triple ambitious project of modernizing the French economy, of leading a process of decolonisation making it possible to substitute a flexible neo-colonialism for henceforth outmoded old formulas and of compensating for weaknesses intrinsic to any average country like France by European integration.
Within this latter perspective De Gaulle conceived an Europe capable of being autonomous with respect to the United States not only on the economic and financial plain, but also at the political and even, in the long term, military level, just like he conceived, also in the long run, the association of the USSR with the European construction ("Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals").
But Gaullism did not outlive its founder and, since 1968, the French political forces, both the traditional right as well as the socialist left gradually returned to their former attitudes. Their vision of European construction narrowed down to the dimension of the "Common Market", between France and Federal Germany (so much so that when the German unification was realised, people were somewhat surprised and anxious in Paris...) and with the pressing invitation to Great Britain to join EEC (forgetting that England would be the Trojan horse of the Americans in Europe).
Naturally, this slide implied the abandonment of any French Arab policy worthy of name, i.e. any policy going beyond the simple defence of immediate mercantile interests. On political level, France behaved objectively in the Arab world as in sub-Saharan Africa, as an auxiliary complementary force of the strategy of American hegemony.
- Samir Amin, The US imperialism and the Middle East. Link
This was shared in a few places and on a discord server and I remembered seeing it linked here so I came back to read the comments. Fascinating article, and very interesting conversations here, I think I might subscribe to MR if I can spare the cash.
It would be good, though Science & Society could also use the help.
I checked it out and saw quite a lot of really interesting stuff that they published, so I'm subscribing to them as well. It's fucking expensive internationally, but I think it's worth it, it looks like it's a quality publication. I'm going to try my best to share them around and make the 80$ worth it lmao.
