Youth in revolt: the battle against neoliberal authoritarianism

Abstract

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. --Martin Luther King, Jr. The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States (US), one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on both the social contract and crucial social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by Theodor Adorno (1998: 191-204), titled 'Education after Auschwitz', in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialisation of death. Adorno's essay, first published in 1967, asserts that the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz had barely penetrated the consciousness of people's minds, such that the conditions that made it possible continued, as he put it, 'largely unchanged'. Mindful that the societal pressures that produced the Holocaust had far from receded in post-war Germany, and that under such circumstances this act of barbarism could easily be repeated in the future, Adorno argued that 'the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds' must be made visible (ibid: 192). For Adorno, the need for a general public to come to grips with the challenges arising from the reality of Auschwitz was both a political question and a crucial educational consideration. Realising that education before and after Auschwitz in Germany was separated by an unbridgeable chasm, he wanted to invoke the promise of education through the moral and political imperative of never allowing the genocide witnessed at Auschwitz to be repeated. For such a goal to become meaningful and realisable, Adorno contended that education had to be addressed as both an emancipatory promise and a democratic project. He urged educators to teach students how to be critical so they could learn to resist those ideologies, needs, social relations and discourses that lead back to a politics where authority is simply obeyed and the totally administered society reproduces itself through a mixture of state force and orchestrated consensus. Education, Adorno keenly understood, is at the centre of any viable notion of democratic politics, and such education, he asserts further, takes place in a variety of spheres both within and outside of schools. Freedom means being able to think critically and act courageously, even when confronted with the limits of one's knowledge. Without such thinking, critical debate and dialogue degenerate into slogans, while politics, disassociated from the search for justice, becomes a power grab or simply hackneyed. Adorno's warning about the residues of authoritarianism still alive after Auschwitz has been repeated in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) and Achille Mbembe (2003), who argue respectively that the fundamental spaces in which humans live their lives are now shaped through the mechanisms of modes of sovereignty that exercise structural violence, view populations as disposable, and view politics as an extension of war. What is partly evident in the Occupy Wall Street movement is not just a cry of collective indignation over economic and social injustices that pose a threat to humankind, but a critical expression of how young people and others can use new technologies, social formations and forms of civil disobedience, to reactivate both the collective imagination and develop a new language for addressing the interrelated modes of domination that have been poisoning democratic politics since the 1970s. …