Someone says something about how the true inheritance of ‘68 is today’s branching bush of corporate endorsed reformism and its praxis of activist product placing: the popular front of every ally making their own contribution. The idealist supposition of the world’s inherent malleability, and its active responsiveness, calls forth the idealised figure of an unchanging changer: ‘history is what we are making here today’ as an expediency for brazening out the latest crisis at the minimal wage rate labour cost.
The post-68 value repertoire of doing something, participating, committing, involvement, being the change, and the behavioural predisposition to make a difference, does correlate with and converge upon the événements and its sequelae as they diverge into abstractions and away from the struggle for wage increases - behold, Baudrillard’s ‘immortal’ victory of canonical appearances, the clenching fist, the taken knee as these cohere collectively into a totalising agency, over the ‘slowly exterminated’ autonomous contingencies thrown up as direct experience of class war as tethered to work-derived life.
Even so, the real consequence of ‘68 is the manifestation of the discourse of radical politics within the apparatus of social reproduction, and the transfer of the site of revolutionary theory from direct experience of factory work to the content of academic study - precisely the transfer of the direct but passive knowledge of social exitlessness belonging to millions of individuals, the veritable ground of disenchantment, to the magical reforms thrown out as niche divergences within post-grad research.
Of course, the post-68 workers movement was not defeated by wrongheaded academics (how would that work?) but by the capital investment in their obscure debates, the variant possibilist conjectures and hypotheses generated by such academics whose departments were transformed into the R&D laboratories for everything still on the table once wage de-immiseration had been taken off it. After the ‘68 floodgates opened, any emancipatory social transformation became feasible as long as it countered the spiral of strike driven wage inflation.
The institutionalised licensing of revolutionaries within the cultural and educational spheres shifted the academy onto a permanent war footing and transformed it into the interface between the Real, that is the crisis of valorisation embodied by exponentially expanding industrial militancy, and the ideologically feasible whilst at the same time converting revolutionary ideas into a managerial discourse of futurity, and the creation of a new subset of managers whose class allegiance to the apparatus would always eclipse manifest course content - it is fated that privilege theory will never extend far enough to expose the income streams directed towards the NGO/reform sector, and thus subject to critique the function of privilege theory within that sector.
Class consciousness was not overcome by whatever the forebears of intersectionality and CRT were, as the post-left assert, but by the capital invested in such theories, and by the market exploitation of the ideological subject formations derived from them. Whether identity theory is bad or wrong is completely irrelevant. Much of it is true and strikes home, but that is not the point - whether a theory is an appropriate object for ‘critique’ is not the question - content is almost always irrelevant, it’s just the selling point for the generic form. The only relevant question is how a product, whatever its content, was capitalised - for the reason that actualisation by capitalisation is the expression of the only significant social relation.
The final defeat of class consciousness by ideology was possible because the investment in social change as a mechanism for social stability assumed a corresponding transformation in the nature of consciousness itself - where class consciousness is always reactive and passive, where every worker knows implicitly and therefore does not act, the revolutionary ideology developed by the American academy, and now circulated as the imperial discourse of the American state, retains its fundamentally bourgeois characteristics, it is active and organised.
Where proletarian class consciousness is entropic, bourgeois revolutionary theory is negentropic. Whilst the proletariat was caught mid-metamorphosis as it struggled to slough off the identity of the historical workers’ movement and its representation by trade union mediation, it became prey to the ideologies of niche identities generated out of the atavistic symbolisms of race and gender.
The escape of identity theory’s delta variant from the academy into human resource departments is sufficient proof of the problematic, and instrumentalising, character of critique as the established form for revolutionary thought. Critique has served adequately as the basis for modifying the programming of institutions in the endless movement towards equal employment opportunities and therefore, by implication, has also operated as a significant theoretical component in the use of equal opportunities as a managerial weapon for dismantling collective bargaining. The problematic of critique in the media age is that it degrades perfectly in line with Boolean organisational procedures - critique is a wildfire of the internet and may be directed at a constant rate against the universalisation of class consciousness.
Critique was always a function of bourgeois subjectivity, and whilst it could align with the interest of the proletariat both on the grounds of the moving contradiction and the irrationality of production for exchange, as well as in accord with the ideal of a rationally designed world managed directly, equally it could also align with productive forces against the proletariat - or rather, critique is the immanent consciousness of productive forces as it moves to abolish labour.
The historical purpose of critique was to convert experience into categories, and turn passive common knowledge into active transformative intervention - at the level of the revolutionary group this transformation seems plausible but wherever it is institutionalised it has the catastrophic effect of petrifying of lived autonomy. Capital is already material critique of conditions and critique itself only traces, because it is bound to it, the abstracting movement of capital through the experienced world.
The transformation of proletarian consciousness of the impassability of the world into petit bourgeois enthusiasm for getting things done realises the most basic productive manoeuvre: capital must supplant experience. The self-evident contradiction of a Marxist professor - one who openly makes a living from his revolutionary opinions - is exemplar of this tendency. There have always been professors with radical sensibilities, but after 68, their relation to the institution, and thus to set course content, has radically shifted.
The post-68 profusion in radical political positions maps directly onto the institutional imperative to produce original research work which in turn feeds into the ideological apparatus - this circumstance will remain both irrelevant and in equilibrium until conditions change and a fragment of theory secures sufficient capital to environmentalise itself as occurred in 2020 when a swarm of emancipations escaped out along the world’s trade routes.
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