Of course I wasn't saying that they desired this in the name of capital accumulation - that would be completely absurd. What I said was that their discourse of liberation proved to be in perfect keeping with the move away from Welfare State institutions and towards systems of home care among other things. I'll go into this slightly more below, but I don't think that this mentality simply overlapped with the emergent mentality of low-State involvement/emphasis on personal "responsibility", I think it was part and parcel of it. (Again I'd appeal to the theories of Boltanski and Chiapello, a summary of which can be found here: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2036) Especially:
"Boltanski and Chiapello’s basic premise is that key developments in modern society and politics rest on the dialectic between capitalism and its “critique.” Capitalism keeps going, and typically overcomes the crises it generates, by responding to “critique,” stealing the thunder of its critics by answering some of their challenges while diverting attention from other grievances that are either left unremedied or exacerbated.
Furthermore, this process has everything to do with “the spirit of capitalism,” the notion B&C borrow directly from the German sociologist Max Weber to mean that the system cannot operate without a suitable mental orientation or subjective motivation held by many if not most of the people who inhabit its world.
Ideology matters, though the authors insist that ideology is never “mere ideology.” It’s not just a mask or delusion that shields the reality of capitalist oppression, crisis, or decay from view. It’s more a way of life, carried out in beliefs and behavior that justify the normal run of things; it gets people, more or less, to play along and to judge as legitimate those standard practices and inequities that mark the capitalism of a particular epoch."
But a summary of their major work also sums up this line of thought; obviously I'm claiming that this went deeper than work-practices:
"This major new work examines the structure of capitalism and how it has been reorganized since the 1960s. Via an unprecedented examination of management texts the authors find that employers are using the language of 1968 counterculture to drive through new work practices and more successful and subtle forms of exploitation. They argue that from the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a network-based form of organization that was founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace—a 'freedom' that came at the cost of material and psychological security. In a work that is already a paradigm-shifting classic, Boltanski and Chiapello show how the new spirit triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the Left's critique of the alienation of everyday life. This epoch-defining work is as important and as sweeping in scope as Ernest Mandel's *Late Capitalism* and Hardt and Negri's *Empire*."
The 60s generation - sorry to anyone on here that was part of it - were arrogant in their assertion of a crass individualism that was willing to attack any institutional formation which they perceived as oppressive without considering the consequences of this action.
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> The Left certainly has a frought history with its embrace of modernization
> but I think this has to be seen as contradictory rather than something we'd
> use to kinda moralistically critique folks working in other times and
> places.
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To really see what went on in this sphere you have to dive into the anti-psychiatry literature of the 50s and 60s. The ideas propagated therein completely undermined the basis of what was admittedly a rather barbaric institution - the Rosenhan experiment for example, proved to be a particularly forceful critique ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment). However, those that undertook these criticisms were not able to establish any alternative. Instead of trying to change these institutions from within they attacked them as best they could from without and hence helped de-legitimise them.
The effects of this for both psychiatry and for the psychology of how people see themselves was disastrous. For a comprehensive and very entertaining study of this I'd refer (once again, I've pointed to this so many times now, but relevance is relevance) to the first episode of Adam Curtis' documentary "The Trap". Curtis focuses on RD Laing but tell me these don't sound exactly like Foucault's theories:
"A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate strategems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s."
Here's a summary: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)#1._.22Fuck_You_Buddy.22_.2811_March_2007.29 )
And a link: (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085)