1968 was a year of the Revolution in France, May 1968 had a disruptive effect on society. But the revolution failed. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello wrote in their book “The new spirit of capitalism” that the revolutionary critique was split into two groups: the workers on the one hand, who mostly supported a kind of social critique, focused on social securities, fair wages, and stable living standards, and the student on the other hand, who supported an artistic critique, focused on flexibility, self-fulfillment at the working place and flat hierarchies. Capitalism in the aftermath of 68 co-opted the artistic critique: organizing the working conditions became more flexible and implemented creative forms of working, identifying with the brand or the enterprise became more important and therefore, the self-fulfillment.
“Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try and change it they just experienced it. […] Radicals across America turned to art and music as means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people’s heads and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action.” (Hypernormalisation: Minute 8)
What Curtis describes in his movie HyperNormalisation (2016) is very similar to the artistic critique, he is describing the hope that change comes through the individual first. If we isolate the underlying focus on the individual, we definitely can see something in common with neoliberalism in which “private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation” (Harvey: 64). Disruption starting within the individual is something that neoliberalism and some versions of the counterculture share. In one version it’s the disruption of the capitalistic system and in the other, it’s the disruption bringing the whole system forward.
But why and how was this critique co-opted? David Harvey already mentioned something very important:
“But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation” (Harvey:44).
One could argue that some ideas of the counterculture found their way into the capitalistic production: The “workers” at Google and Facebook are trying out new forms of relationships or LSD-micro-dosing. But obviously, they are forming a new liberal middle class or even an elite. The key workers, the cleaning workers, the securities in Google and Facebook are other people. And this topic wasn’t implemented, this would be a contemporary social critique: to raise the awareness of class differences, the lack of financial and social securities. On the surface, for the upper-middle class, the working conditions changed, but in general the divergence between the rich and the poor became bigger (Harvey: 25) and competition for jobs became harder.
To change this could be a starting point for today’s social critique: to change the financial and material vertical differences.
Resources:
Curtis, Adam: HyperNormalisation. BBC, 2016.
Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Boltanski, Luc/ Chiapello, Eve: The new Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, 2005.
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