>
>
> People keep saying this, and it isn't true. 1917 surprised MARXISTS,
> because it did not correspond to their a priori schemata. It did not
> surprise the Tsarist government or secret police, which had been terrified
> of revolution since, oh, the Decembrists. 1917 took place 12 years after
> another revolution, a decade-plus period of time that saw civil unrest in
> the Russian Empire that killed _thousands of people_, and after a giant war.
> Oh, and after decades of agitation and assassination by various
> revolutionary groups. Yup, no way anybody could see that coming.
>
>
Granted I wasn't alive at the time but if we really are "doing history
backwards" I think I can make this point. "The 60s" or whatever its called
seems to me to have been coming for at least 20 years and no one really
recognised it as part of a broader historical current except maybe Adorno
and a few others. Culture was undergoing, for better or for worse, a major
change throughout this period.
I always liked an example Zizek gave of this - albeit in a different context - he points to a scene in "The Maltese Falcon" and a scene in "Vertigo"; in the former it was when the two protagonists are talking in an apartment and then it cuts to an air-traffic tower for about five second, then back to them. In Vertigo its the scene where Scotty saves the woman from drowning, brings her back to his apartment and strips her down while she's unconscious, the camera pans across what should be her underwear, but due to censorship it doesn't show underwear. Zizek's point was that there was really no need for censorship here because the films both clearly inform the viewer of "what just happened". Everyone knows what is implied here but the film refuses to fully articulate it.
My point is that in the period leading up to the great cultural shift known as the "60s" these changes were probably already latent within society even though society manifestly refused them. But, and this is important, just like in Tsarist Russia: if society was making a sustained effort to refuse them (i.e. through outward censorship) then logically it had to first acknowledge them which means that there was a recognition of their existence.
This is perhaps an important lesson for thinking about social change. Although the outward struggle, or whatever, usually manifests itself relatively contingently the mindset is already usually deeply ingrained in society. At a day-to-day level people are probably thinking these things almost continuously.
Today, in my opinion at least, there is something to this as well. An awful lot of people have who were only 30 years ago members of the working-class. When the so-called boom came along they were, for various reasons, convinced that they had joined the privileged ranks (hehehe) of the lower middle-class. My favourite example of this, which was not only one of the first steps in this direction, but seems highly pertinent today, was the movement under the British Thatcher government to get working-class people to buy their council houses - houses that today are being repossessed. A lot of people are - and this is the key to social change - going to experience a sort of cognitive dissonance. All their attempts to join the "highbrows" by working harder, by keeping company shares, by doing up their houses which they considered a nest egg, by keeping up with the Jones' by buying new cars among other things; all these things will come crashing down around them. I'm not saying that they'll overthrow the state, but I'd imagine in the next decade that the demands of voters among other things will undergo a drastic change.