After '68: The Left and Twenty-First Century Political Projects

Abstract

In broad terms '1968' still stands as a signifier of social and political radicalism. Workers' mass action and students' protests signal an age of powerful labour and politicised youth; the impassioned commitments of 'engaged intellectual' and citizen alike show a synergy between the life of the mind and activism; fierce philosophical debates illustrate the vitality of ideas; and the expansive critical vision and hope reaching throughout the social reveal an unrestrained radical imagination. In short, the very tumultuousness of the period expresses a political urgency and commitment seemingly profoundly distanced from contemporary apathy. But as with all representations, these sets of associations are as fictional as they are factual and the tendency to inflate and romanticise the meaning of '1968' is as obvious as its undoubted significance. Nonetheless, even beyond its disputed symbolic status as a moment of exemplary radicalism, '1968' is often--even if only implicitly--taken as marking an intellectual-political watershed. Dominique Lecourt, for example, argues that the French 'master thinkers' and political culture of the 1960s have been replaced by a pedestrian intellectual 'mediocracy' that is media-driven and acquiescent to a neo-liberal agenda, resulting in prosaic social analysis and abdication of politics. (1) This is broadly mirrored within wider Euro-American perspectives on the activist-intellectual vocation: arguably academics have retreated into the university as an insular domain, which is disengaged from practical social and political involvement; (2) and the work of intellectuals has moved from the legislative sphere towards a more abstracted interpretive function. (3) And although vital expressions of popular radicalism can be found within various forms such as anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist movements and protests, they are often seen as confined to mounting a reactive rearguard action against the hegemonic neo-liberal agenda. Perhaps most importantly, the contention that the utopian spirit able to imagine a progressive alternative beyond present constraints has been all but extinguished suggests that we are consigned to a sterile futurity of limited possibility. (4) The conditions of our present 'historical bloc' as a moment of extreme difficulty for progressive politics seemingly confirm the validity of such despondency. From one side the consolidation of the New Right and its neo-Conservative progeny has pushed re-distributive social agendas onto the defensive. And from another side, the 'sacralization of difference' (5) has served to reify, inflate, and isolate a series of identity-based claims to recognition that has appeared to erode much of the collective ethos central to forging and maintaining broad political coalitions. As such 'the market' qua 'the social' and 'identity' qua 'the individual' or 'group' would seem to confirm a liberal-democratic 'end of history'. A pressing question for the dissident, the uneasy, and the unconvinced alike is: 'What forms of politics are possible in times like these?' Swift reflection on this question is not particularly reassuring however. Many of the radical and oppositional political projects of recent and present times can be readily classified as based in proscriptions--anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and so on. This begs a crucial question of the possibilities of positive political prescription. As Paul Gilroy asks of anti-racism, how does the elusive question of what we are positively committed to 'connect with the necessary moment of negativity that defines our political hopes?' (6) Perhaps more importantly, we may also ask what happens when we become mired in the 'necessary moment of negativity' to the extent that it becomes a political habitus in and of itself instead of a transitory stage en route to imagining, articulating, and pursuing political hopes? We may instead wonder 'What forms of politics might be possible in times like these? …