Abstract
This chapter problematizes the notion of a single ‘disobedient generation’ as an explanatory concept applied to the 1960s student rebellions. Autobiographical accounts by activists reveal considerable heterogeneity of experience and reflection. There were social movements both to the left and to the right which this concept tends to mask. It is suggested that the idea of a ‘disobedient generation’ functions as a myth. The politics of the student rebellions in the USA and the UK are analysed, and as part of the narrative three different reactions are identified: neoconservative, liberal, and neoliberal (ChiVirLa). The long-term neoliberal ‘stealth revolution’ is identified as an on-going continuation of economic thought of the 1960s provoked by the bubble of student radicalization, and its consequences (marketization as a means of control) are to be seen in the universities today.
68 ‘a été une fausse revolution qui a fait peur comme une vraie
(Pierre Bourdieu, cited in Audier 2009: 247)
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- 1.
Rather than a simple review of the book The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties by Sica and Turner, I draw on a large range of autobiographies of activists and counter-activists to look at the claims that the sixties were uniquely important. One study even attempts the Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, by Luisa Passerini, a very strange work; Tariq Ali’s account (1987) is also sub-titled ‘An autobiography of the Sixties.’
- 2.
In his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time, Althusser admits he did think revolution was possible but the precise moment of opportunity was fleeting and could ‘only last a few hours.’ It was the Communist Party that actually ‘organised the defeat’ (1993: 230–231, emphasis by Althusser).
- 3.
During the second Anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London in 1968, I saw, as the march preceded down The Strand, a group of policemen talking. I stood next to them and they were discussing ‘the great unwashed’ before them.
- 4.
Although I was born in 1943 and thus I am just outside the generation as defined by Sica et al., I was a late arrival at university in 1965–68 (Leicester) and 1968–71 (LSE). I was involved in radical politics at both universities. The character of the anti-student radicals interested me from the start—from the Law Professor at Leicester, Prof. Jan Grodecki, who blocked the student occupation of the Library (the students wanted it open all night) thinking the students were on a Nazi mission to burn books, to anti-student radical supervisors for my doctoral work at the LSE (Professors David Martin and Donald McCrae) for whom the student rebellion was a form of conformity to an aberrant norm. But James Buchanan and Nicos Devletoglou whose book I read at the time and who regarded old traditional university as ripe for neoliberal transformation I regarded as completely eccentric and with no future.
- 5.
In this chapter I use Mirowski’s 13-point identification of neoliberalism as a guide to conceptualization (Mirowski 2013: 53–67).
- 6.
See Bryant and Jary 1997: 5.
- 7.
Lewis S. Feuer, who taught sociology at Berkeley, developed a critique of Marx based on the idea that generations were more significant than class. In his 1969 introduction to his selection of writings by Marx and Engels, he noted Marx’s reaction to Bakunin’s appeal of anarchism to Russian students.
When Bakunin in 1869 had looked forward to a social revolution led by a phalanx of forty thousand revolutionary student youth at the head of the peasants, Engels commented apprehensively: “How awful for the world […] that there are 40,000 revolutionary students in Russia without a proletariat or even a peasantry behind them […]. If there is anything which might ruin the Western European movement, then it would have been this import of 40,000 more or less educated, ambitious, hungry Russian nihilists: all of them officer candidates without an army” […]. This phenomenon of generational conflict […] fell outside the purview of Marx’s historical materialism. The sons, often from noble families, acted with pure idealism; it was their custom to destroy themselves to prove that their assassinations were deeds of unalloyed altruism. This heightened ethical consciousness, and gravitation to suicide, took one into the innermost core of the human psyche (Feuer 1969: 24).
- 8.
This is a constant theme in journalism on the subject of generations. Tiffanie Darke writes ‘Rave, fuelled as it was partly, but not wholly by the dance drug ecstasy, equipped Generation X to rewrite the rulebook for society […]. So where is Generation X now? All we hear about is millennials, those pesky digital natives with their lumberjack shirts and artisan coffee habits […]. Or baby boomers, with their big fat final-salary pensions who have decades of Saga holidays ahead’ (2017: 8). The problem of Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict is dealt with at length in Jennie Bristow’s recent study. Her parents both graduated from the LSE in 1969, and she writes as a member of Generation X about the baby boomers as a ‘social problem’ (2015). Serge Guérin and Pierre-Henri Tavoillot ask whether La Guerre des Générations aura-t-elle Lieu? (2017): their answer is that it is much better to think of the family and schools and universities as institutions of intergenerational solidarity; indeed, this should be ratified in a formal social pact (2017: 227–238).
- 9.
Habermas points out that these sociologists did not predict the student protest movement. And the neoliberal economists, though claiming to be the only predictive social science, did not either.
- 10.
This observation seemed to be confirmed by the impression of others: ‘Throughout the 1950s, magazines and newspapers berated the young as members of a “silent generation”—politically apathetic, intellectually passive, caring less for social causes, than for economic security, preoccupied with their private lives’ (R.H. Pells 1985, cited by Furedi 1992: 192, who added that ‘there was even concern about the lack of political engagement on the campuses’).
- 11.
In the UK: Trevor Fisk, the President of the NUS reported that ‘Of 23 instances’ of student action in 1968, the casus belli that sparked off the trouble varied widely. Five centred around student demands for representation on college governing bodies—Aston, Leicester, Keele, and Birmingham Universities, and Regent Street Polytechnic. Another eight were concerned with a variety of essentially campus issues, ranging from the suitability of the Director and subsequent disciplinary action (LSE), examination reform (Hull), the use of student buildings (Bristol), the activities of campus police (Leeds), academic dissatisfaction and strained communications (Hornsey and Guildford Schools of Art), library facilities (Manchester College of Commerce) to inadequate transport facilities between annexes (Birmingham College of Education). The other ten were universities where visiting students were subjected to violence or stimulated violent demonstrations (Oxford, Sussex, Cambridge, Essex, Leeds, East Anglia, Kent, and Bradford). ‘Of the thirteen instances involving campus issues, ten led to sit-ins and three to physical occupation of college property’ (Fisk 1969: 423).
- 12.
The Report discusses a third issue: policing and the effects of excessive force (34–35).
- 13.
Frank’s companion Nancy, Rowbotham remembers as having ‘a most impressive tattoo—a butterfly on her buttock. She showed it to me with pride […]. Before Nancy’s butterfly, my own efforts at not being a nice girl paled into insignificance’ (2000: 86).
- 14.
This account is quite different from the one given by Tariq Ali who was chairing the meeting (1987: 178–179). This simple discrepancy between accounts is a simple warning that every eye-witness interpretation should be given independent verification.
- 15.
I did attend this conference. It was almost entirely taken up with voting on motions, more and more surreal, for a Manifesto.
- 16.
Tony Judt wrote in his autobiography ‘By any serious measure, nothing at all happened […]. At the time I thought Aron unfairly dismissive […]. Today I would be disposed to share his contempt, but back then it seemed a bit excessive’ (2010: 111).
- 17.
Issue 53 of NLR is also interesting in that together with material on a special feature on university as red bases, it also has an early article on the Chinese Cultural Revolution (by Bill Jenner). What is interesting is the paucity of information but the number of political lessons drawn from it. It emphasized the role of youth, mobilized by Mao against the establishment that had begun to take the capitalist road.
- 18.
It is interesting that Caroline Hoefferle did not investigate the police records, the National Archives at Kew, as David Fowler pointed out in his review of her study of the British student movement (English Historical Review (2014) 129: 1548–1549).
- 19.
The New Left Review, which began in 1960, divided in 1962 when Perry Anderson took over as editor. E. P. Thompson left the board, while Anderson led the journal towards new European Marxist thought, both Trotskyist and Althusserian, as it radicalized. The debate between Anderson and Thompson was summed up in Anderson’s Arguments within English Marxism (1980). The student milieu at Leicester University in the late 1960s was dominated by Anderson’s influence in a journal called Sublation 1966–67, via the presence of Anthony Barnett, which introduced Althusserian theory into the debates.
- 20.
The acronym for Chicago, Virginia, UCLA neoliberal groupings (see Peck 2010: 102).
- 21.
For example, Wendy Brown notes recently:
It is remarkable how quickly all strata in public universities—staff, faculty, administrators, students—have grown accustomed to the saturation of university life by neoliberal rationality, metrics, and principles of governance […]. Also on the horizon are new “enterprise zones” encircling public universities, where businesses large and small will make direct use of university goods, including research, technology, consultants, and cheap university labor. Not only does this vision pose a striking contrast with the classic university-town ambiance of cafés, bookshops, pubs, and thrift stores, it literalizes as it spatializes the domination of the university by the needs and purposes of capital and spatializes as well the merging of business, state and academe. (Brown 2015: 198)
- 22.
The bind implanted by neoliberal thinking is well summarized by Colin Crouch: the Buchanan approach he says
represents nearly all state activity as the self-seeking and self-aggrandizement of political figures and officials. For this school, a proposal to develop a public service should not be seen as having anything to do with the substance of the service in question, but as politicians and officials expanding their scope for patronage. From this they drew similar conclusions to their friends at Chicago: keep as much as possible in the market, away from the public sector […] we need to register the dilemma in which the combined Chicago/Virginia approach leaves us in relation to issues like distribution, pollution and environmental damage. We are told that these are not matters for firms, as their duty is to maximize shareholders’ profits; if we want action on them, we will have to turn to politics. But when we arrive at the door of politics we find Chicago/Virginia people waiting there to warn us never to turn to politics for anything, as governments are at best incompetent and at worst corruptly self-seeking. (Crouch 2011: 62–63)
- 23.
Curiously one of Milton Friedman’s doctoral students of 1957, Andre Gunder Frank, was in Chile advising Allende. He had resolutely rejected neoliberal economics arguing that economic backwardness was a result of imperialist styles of economic domination and that neoliberalism could only be applied in a country like Chile by violence and terror. He wrote a blistering open letter to Milton Friedman denouncing the complicity of neoliberal economics with the illegal seizure of power by Pinochet.
- 24.
This is one of Benedict Anderson’s last essays: he had been expelled from Indonesia after reporting the installation of the dictatorship and banned from the country until 1998.
- 25.
A report in The Guardian, November 16, 2016 by Aditya Chakraborty and Sally Weale noted that 68.1% of teaching staff at Warwick were on temporary or ‘atypical’ contracts.
- 26.
Henry Giroux has written of the ‘awakening’ in recent years of new international student protests against some of the extreme measures and effects of neoliberalism, its attack on democracy, its ‘intellectual violence,’ its ‘war on youth.’ His report focuses particularly on ‘the Quebec Student Protest Movement’ (2014: 155–180), and he argues the London demonstrations of March 2011 should be considered as symptomatic of a new period of discontent and protestation.
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Gane, M. (2018). The ‘68 Disobedient Generation’ and the Rise of ChiVirLa. In: Castro, J., Fowler, B., Gomes, L. (eds) Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71519-3_16
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