revolt? who is rebelling?
at any rate, this reminds me of something I read in Graeber, which I'd never heard and I'm surprised it's has never come up here.
Contrary to claims that 60s activists were rebelling in the context of a healthy economy, Mattick argues that it was more along the lines of dashed dreams. In fact, what they were irritated with was much more like what OWS folks are irritated by today. They were raised with expectations about the American Dream but by the time it was their turn, it went to shit.
Graeber explains that 60s activism "emerged from a kind of social bottleneck. The welfare state ideal of the time had been to defuse class tensions by offering a specter of perpetual social mobility... After the war, there was a very conscious effort on the part of the government to pump resources into the higher education system, which began to expand exponentially, along with the number of working-class children attending university. The problem, of course, i s that such growth curves invariably hit their limits, and...when they do the result are typically explosive. By the 1960s, this was starting to happen. Millions of students were left without any realistic prospect of finding jobs that bore any relation to their real expectations or capacities - a normal prospect in industrial societies, actually, but suddenly hugely exacerbated. These where the students who first became involved in SDS; people who, as Mattick emphasizes, like their equivalents in the global South, always saw themselves as a kind of breakaway fragment of the administrative elite. This was, he suggest, crucial to understanding the limits of the New Left - that activists invariably saw themselves as "organizers," social workers:
<mattick> What united all factions of the left was the conception of their relationship to actual or fantasized communities as organizers -- after the example of trade unionists and social workers - rather than as "fellow students" or workers with a particular understanding of a situation shared with others, and ideas of what to do about it. Despite the disagreement over the primary target for organizing-- unemployed, blue-collar workers, white collar workers, dropout youth -- in each case the "community" was sen as a potential "constituency"... The radicals saw themselves as professional revolutionaries, a force so to speak outside of society, organizing those inside on their own behalf. Thus, the activists played the part reserved in liberal theory for the state, a point not to be neglected in the attempt to understand the drift of the New Left from an orientation of liberal governmental reform to Leninist-Stalinist concepts of socialism." </mattick>
The contradictions of this situation eventually became apparent as the decade wore on. The crisis was sparked first in groups like SNCC, when demands for civil rights began to give way to calls for black Power. The radicals in SNCC, who were eventually to found the Black Panthers, called on whites to stop doing alliance work and return to their own communities, particularly, in order to organize white communities against racism. SDS activists always greeted such calls with great ambivalence in part because they were never quite clear on what their own communities were supposed to be.
... The crisis initiated by Black Power ultimately led in two very different directions. Again, at the cost of gross simplification: once their allies in the civil rights movement had abandoned them, white activists were effectively left with two options. They could either try to build countercultural instituti9ons of their own, or they could focus on allying with communities or revolutionary groups in struggle overseas ...
<> Zizek, digestible for once: <> <> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie <> <> How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has <> nothing to do with Microsoft producing good software at lower prices <> than its competitors, or ‘exploiting’ its workers more successfully <> (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). <> Millions of people still buy Microsoft software because Microsoft has <> imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically <> monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the <> ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its <> forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised <> part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the <> rent that followed. <> <> The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was <> something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism <> (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at <> the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role <> of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social <> co-operation – increases in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth <> accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its <> production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the <> self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the <> profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated <> through the privatisation of knowledge. <> <> [ ] <> <> <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
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