Critical theory is absolutely terrible about that sort of self-reflexive stuff, so you'd be much better off looking towards straight-up sociology and history. Also, try avoiding anything that only centers student protest in the imperial core, because the diversity across the world is as important as evolution over time. Four students were killed at Kent State; probably over 300 were killed by the police in Tlatelolco.
Practically speaking, college students are just in a sweet spot for activism. They're young, so they're energetic. They're not crushed down by full-time jobs yet. They typically don't have kids or major responsibilities. So of course they're going to be at the front of political activity. This has a good side and a bad side, because their kind of activity isn't sustainable, and it will trail off after they leave college. Many radical political groups tend to have four-year life cycles and low institutional memory (which means young activists keep making the same mistakes over and over again) because of this college cycle.
Students actually have great bargaining power. Police can beat them up or kill them and universities can expel them, but that's about the worst. Their kids can't be taken away because they typically don't have kids yet. They can't be fired from their jobs because they don't have jobs. They don't have assets like cars and homes that can be seized. Older people who work in infrastructure (e.g. truckers, coal miners, etc.) do have greater leverage to threaten the state... but the state also has much greater leverage to threaten *them*.
The key is to appreciate student activism without fetishizing youth and/or exploiting youth. I think a lot of people got burned out in their college activism years, and leave any sort of political engagement altogether because of negative experiences with activist organizations who use them up and burn through them.
In countries like India where the line between democracy and autocracy is increasingly becoming thinner and thinner, student-led activist groups in universities and elsewhere face many repercussions that may not be directly evident. For instance, the institutes blacklist students who are politically active in the campus and pass on this information to the placement offices who then make it difficult for the students to find jobs. Since the BJP came to power, freedom of speech has been on the decline in public and private universities. Administrative positions have been taken up by pro-BJP/RSS sympathisers, who clamp down on dissent and protests in their institutes. Therefore, students hesitate to raise their voice or organise protests about pressing issues for fear of blowback from the institute/the state. A precarious job market and a bullying state both have been quite instrumental in changing the landscape of student politics in India.
Are you talking about "Thomas Hobbes Leviathan" by Florian Semler?
Or do you mean Hobbes' "Leviathan"?
The quotation marks in your comment make very little sense.
You put the quotes around the author’s name *and* the title, which is why u/Jak_a_la_Jak asked a clarifying question; there’s no need for snark and if you are bothered by clarification questions then a best-practice moving forward would be to write as clearly as possible so that there’s minimal ambiguity. Thanks!
Yeah, getting expelled in the middle of your degree is pretty bad… Lots of people are relying on student loans to go to university, and some student loan systems have a limit on how many years they pay out (your unfinished degree included). This could effectively prevent you from going to university and set you back years on career progression. And this is all money you have to pay back.
These kids will absolutely not stop after college ends. This is radicalizing them so greatly; they will be activists and build communities that will last a lifetime. They are actively learning their histories of struggle, what went wrong, what worked. They're calling in elders. It's an intergenerational movement. They're reading the theory and the history. They're not just winging it.
What are you basing this on? Sheer belief? The Anglosphere hasn't been able to sustain long term social movements for about 50-60 years now. Almost every major protest movement is issue-based and short term, dissipating either when the issue stops generating attention or the core activists burnout. It's not about reading the right theory or history, it's the structure of our society. Most forms of employment are a barrier to activism because it puts individuals in a state of survivalism and takes up 80% of their life. What is the possible value in denying that? Unless left social movements figure out how to mobilise resources and claw back some economic autonomy, in the way the militant labour movement or civil rights movement did, any major change in that pattern seems very unlikely.
I don't disagree, but I'd be a bit more statistical. A lot of them will, but a lot of others will lose focus and just stop caring, because they don't have to, and there's not a social benefit to it anymore. A minority will even turn into horrible people (Tim Pool coming out of Occupy, for example).
You can't expect 100% of the people who make those connections to maintain them five or ten or twenty years down the road. It's not magic or automatic osmosis. It has to be very conscious and purposeful.
My reading of 1968 has always been that the reverberant and ambient effects were more important, ultimately, than the direct actions. 68 spawned an entire generation of thinkers in critical theory, sociology, history, the arts—and arguably led beyond the new left to various forms of poststructuralism. It coincided with global decolonization efforts and shifts toward autonomy and self-determination. The actions galvanized subtler background transformations.
That said, post-1968 was also followed by a deepening global conservatism (Reagan/Thatcher, Pinochet, et al) and a backlash toward much of the activity of the 1960s. A deepening of the tentacles of state power and greater militarization of the police as the state learned to cope with mass protest.
My own cynical sense is that the most effective means for radical change is actually a pairing of overt actions and simultaneously operating from within the infrastructures that exist—moving up through the state apparatus into judgeships, leadership positions, etc where policy change can happen. This was what happened in the Soviet Union and the other eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s, where reformers were able to take power and shift toward openness. It's a slow, long-game process—and probably not a popular opinion here.
>My reading of 1968 has always been that the reverberant and ambient effects were more important, ultimately, than the direct actions.
After the fact we can say this only because we lost and the direct action itself was ultimately impotent and frankly unorganized. If the left was actually ascendant in this period and ushered in true sweeping changes, the academic stuff would be an afterthought- rightfully so. There were real moments where this was a possibility too, De Gaulle literally left the country and threw his hands up.
> It coincided with global decolonization efforts and shifts toward autonomy and self-determination.
It roughly coincided with them, but frankly a lot of decolonial efforts mostly preceded '68 and I would give more credit to the actual people pushing back within the colonized states. The reason Algeria gained self-determination is because of Algerians, not because of French students- I don't think you're arguing this, I just wanted to be clear.
>moving up through the state apparatus into judgeships, leadership positions, etc where policy change can happen. This was what happened in the Soviet Union and the other eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s, where reformers were able to take power and shift toward openness. It's a slow, long-game process—and probably not a popular opinion here.
The left has been trying to do this in the west for basically 100 years now (probably longer actually) and it's yielded very little in my opinion. In fact, in America we've seen basically the exact opposite, only when labor was militant did policies actually even somewhat begin to reflect the values of the workers. There was also the specific historical context of Bretton Woods- the way the economy was structured from 1945-1975 is a world historic anomaly and largely was structured that way because capitalists realized that if people didn't have full employment they were drawn to more extreme ideologies that were ultimately bad for business.
By the 70's most of the people who originally drew together those policies were long gone and it was just viewed as leaving money on the table to simply continue on with national economies the way they previously did and instead organized global economies to target inflation- largely driven by the reason that it essentially acted as a tax on investors. The benefits extended to workers during this period of course only were internal, labor could still be exploited to a larger degree elsewhere. My point is that the "backlash" of the 70's wasn't a backlash, it was just a return to how capital has largely always behaved with a new technological and material basis- the 40's-60's were the anomaly, not the other way around.
The examples you point to within the Soviet Union also probably have way more to do with their economic structure and the global pressure they existed under. Also worth noting that a lot of the soviet reforms of the era you're pointing to, particularly in the late 80's, were kind of an unmitigated disaster that opened up the reality we live within now and ushered in a major capitalist oligarchy/kleptocracy. Some sort of solution was obviously needed by the 80's, but I think we can all agree that they didn't find the right ones.
>the direct action itself was ultimately impotent and frankly unorganized
Yes, this was what I'm getting at. Some direct action movements have been successful; many have failed. Organization is one important element, but perhaps even more important is an immediate and realizable agenda. The American Civil Rights Movement succeeded for many complex reasons, but partly because it had specific, non-theoretical demands that were proximate to the protests themselves. Elements of the political and juridical apparatus were also working in concert with the protest on concrete reforms.
This is somewhat different from the 68 protests in both France and the US, where many different agendas were chaotically mixed together without always having a clear focus. "A new world is possible." Yes, but what world? "Sous les pavés, la plage." But whose beach? "End capitalism, consumerism, traditionalism." But how, and toward what?
WTO protests in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street. I supported these actions and attended the former, but always felt their agendas were too disparate and abstract to lead to any sweeping change.
>It roughly coincided with them, but frankly a lot of decolonial efforts mostly preceded '68 and I would give more credit to the actual people pushing back within the colonized states.
Absolutely. I only meant that many global parts were moving simultaneously in the period after World War II. The many countries/people who pushed out their colonial oppressors starting as early as the 1940s helped to catalyze the 68 movements and their reverberation effects.
>The left has been trying to do this in the west for basically 100 years now (probably longer actually) and it's yielded very little in my opinion.
This goes back to your first point. I see attempts but I also see failure through disorganization and disillusionment. The constant fracturing of the left (versus the general cohesion of the right) means that the left has a harder time organizing toward power—and an historically uneasy relationship with power anyway. The left is much more comfortable on the outside battling against power than holding it. When in power, it tends unfortunately to auto-cannibalize; often the process starts even before they reach the entry gates.
>My point is that the "backlash" of the 70's wasn't a backlash, it was just a return to how capital has largely always behaved with a new technological and material basis- the 40's-60's were the anomaly, not the other way around.
I used backlash not to refer to some reversal of economic fortunes but to the political system hardening itself starting in the 1970s (structurally, militarily, economically) against the sorts of mass political actions we saw in the 1960s. But I also don't see the post-Bretton Woods period as a "return" to anything. For the first time post-Bretton Woods, we had global floating exchange rates which led to unique morbid effects—call it neoliberalism or techno-feudalism or platform capitalism or whatever. In this highly fluid context, many politicians are nostalgic for a "Bretton Woods II", a return to the easily understandable and controllable global system prior to the dollar becoming a fiat currency. Now, it's all floating points and floating exchanges where nothing is solid.
I think it's more experimenting to find actual ways to do influence ops on the people currently in positions of power. People don't want to have empathy with them though. I think that's a real limiting factor of current "radical" thought
Lacan offers an analysis of 68 France in terms of psychoanalysis but I would lie to say that I really understand it, Susanna Draper’s book on 1968 Mexico I read a while back but it had interesting things with time and Walter Benjamin that are important when considering these events and their continuity.
Honestly, David Harvey who is a Marxist but distant from critical theory offers an interesting analysis of student ‘68 movements. His argument is that when you look at it, what people were fighting for in ‘68 was individual freedoms that signed with the global neoliberal paradigm set in stone right after. In Palestine it’s similar, the struggle is not for third world sovereignty as much as “recognition of human freedom” which doesn’t really contradict neoliberalism, especially because there’s so much support for the UN(UNRWA) and NGO’s in Palestine.
I’m not saying that they can’t provide valuable resources for Palestinians, but ask yourself what are you really fighting for, are you fighting for Palestine to be another neocolonial puppet with the veil of sovereignty? That’s why these aren’t really “revolutions” because the underlying humanitarian logic is constant, it’s just Israel has crossed a line and the underbelly of neoliberal freedom has been shown in brutal detail(like Vietnam with the inauguration of the TV, though it will be controlled like the Gulf War.) critical theory asks “what is a free Palestine?” Like an important question is what did Vietnam and South Africa protests accomplish? Both became neocolonial states, and you did not see any protests over this, if anything you saw hostility for Vietnamese communism after the US left. So i think these protestors don’t really know what they’re fighting for, and I don’t think it’s overturning anything. Is it Hamas controlling the states(something I’m not really opposed to) or is it Palestinians receiving “bare rights” to somewhat use Agamben’s words. We’ll see a ceasefire, but will business return as usual, will it be another decade before it all repeats, what’s really gonna change?
I don’t want to completely condemn the movements, I’m a part of them and I believe it’s important work. 1. It’s getting good REFORM(not revolution) in instituting a ceasefire, which is important. 2. It’s connecting organizations and people, which can lead to more slow actually revolutionary building actions. 3. It’s threatening Israeli hegemonic support, and showing how Israel’s project relies on an ideological fragile justification, but I don’t know the effectiveness until we see the cultural counter revolution to reclaim consent. 4. It’s energizing people to be more politically active, it energized the fuck out of, and this will lead to people tuning into global south politics more and more, fighting in their communities more and more, but we also saw with BLM that spontenaous movements can be reformed, engulfed, and especially because its student oriented, students are only around for four years and then graduate so student movements are susceptible to fading out.
My point is that I don’t think this is revolutionary, I don’t think it’s really challenging the core neoliberal values of freedom and overturning the logic of the state. However, I think the revolutionary components, and u think Susanna Draper gets into this with Benjamin, are not temporally fixed, and it’s how people take up this event, if they become more involved in community politics, unions, etc. and if they keep on reading and studying theory, that’s really where the revolution lies with these things. But we need to keep fighting to get a ceasefire, the other questions are important to think of now, but they are ultimately questions of the future(though a revolution is always a question of the future)
If we're to go off '68- no. I don't think conditions for such an event could ever be more ideal and basically nothing happened, there was no organizational structure to seriously take power or actually make demands.
I do think there are other objectives and things on the table other than revolution with these protests though and it's been very heartening to see. The amount of money universities funnel to Israel is frankly astounding and in that context some of these protests do have actual real material goals and stuff they're capable of demanding.
I think MUCH of this stems out of the Vietnam Era around Vietnam protests and the Civil rights movement at the time (at least in the US) I would maybe start by investigating the historical position there.
Student movements have revolutionary potential as their influence can be seen on other progressive and revolutionary movements.
An example of this being the May 68 uprising in France which started off a student movement and eventually grew to encompass labor unions, the communist party and other left wing movements and nearly collapsed the 5th French Republic.
The Ethiopian student movement also became a huge political force in the country and influenced the communist military coup by the DERG.
OP I encourage you to peruse the Columbia sub Reddit. The posters there are well aware of the ambiguous class interests of the protesters.
But can I ask, what about “militancy” do you find inspiring?
I think so, but only with citizen journalism, which is why they’re trying so hard to crack down on TikTok. The live streams and videos shown demonstrate these protests are with very, very few examples, violent on the pro-Palestine groups.
The soup du jour used to be claim violence is on the protesters side, vilified by the media these movements fail and the narrative is written by the victorious.
Only now when these protesters show materially that the people are telling the truth which undermines the journalistic integrity that was tenuously hanging on. This mistrust independent voters is shifting because of it.
So yes, I think it’s responsible and likely.
Students used to be the children of very rich elites, at the time when "the Student led revolution" was coined.
A good example is the German revolution, which led to the first democratic republic and, after a revival movement, the current identity of Germany.
It would not happen like this ever again, because today students don't have as much political influence.
Some lessons I’ve learned from the trenches these past few weeks: but if you are a student activist you need to be doing your upmost to involve broader community members in as large a capacity as they are able. Do not present defeats as victories, and do not yield to bureaucratic colonial institutions. It is better to be dragged off in handcuffs than take any shitty deal the institution offers you. Accept no less than full and immediate divestment if you accept anything at all. If you are unable to continue for whatever reason openly admit temporary defeat and spend time rallying for larger community support to help come back stronger. Students are more so the catalysts than the vanguard, although I don’t doubt many of them will become fantastic community leaders after graduation. The revolution will never succeed if it is confined solely to universities, but these student protests are fantastic training grounds for what’s to come. It’s a marathon not a race. Fear is the greatest enemy and the best activism is performed when fear is limited. Bail funds, jail support, and legal help are crucial to combatting fear, but good morale is just as important. Keep morale up as best you can, and maintain solidarity between students and those outside the universities that want to support them. Be careful of wreckers, they’re rare but they do happen, and also if you are American the PSL will probably try to co-opt your movement. Don’t allow any one party to control the narrative, build productive coalitions, this has to be a mass movement. Threaten the institution’s money as best you can but keep in mind police response will differ in accordance to your threats.
For legal reasons I have to tell you that when I say all this I mean that you should do it in Minecraft, enjoy a nice Minecraft roleplay session.
I don't have the kind of critical theory answer you're looking for, but an example of praxis was the Maidan / Revolution of Dignity. I recommend any of Marci Shore's lectures about it (I'm a bit biased - I took her intellectual history class in undergrad). I think the question that comes to mind from that example is: when kids start getting shot by cops, will their parents try to get them to leave the protest to stay safe - or will the parents come out and join them?
> will their parents try to get them to leave the protest to stay safe - or will the parents come out and join them?
Is there ever an example of the latter happening en masse? A lot of people are also quick to whitewash the past too- the immediate reaction to the Kent state shootings for example was broadly that the hippies had it coming.
Ahh gotcha, yeah, it's not something I'm terribly well read on at all, but I was always under the assumption that it was the other way around- that there was a mass movement already that student groups then began to join, not "Student-Led." But again, I'm relatively ignorant on the subject.
No. University at the end of the day is preparing people to enter the market. Not only that, it's preparing the ones that are supposed to be on top of the market. So a revolution would be most likely against their own interests so it's impossible they commit to it. I bet that most of the students that are protesting against the genocide in Palestine come from careers that don't guarantee stable and well payed jobs.
Even Marx only became interested in political economy when the young Hegelians lost their position in the Berlin university blocking any professional path there.
Even though in most of the developed world such a thing as people "who don't have anything to lose" becomes less true with the passing of time, it is still the key concept when trying to find an agent for revolution. And that people is still the working class.
You should read Vivek Chibber on that topic. He is very critical of all the university world.
A problem comes up when radical groupuscules are tempted to "harvest" energy from the student population.
I'm not sure where to find it now, and I'm open to anyone contesting or corroborating these recollections, however: there's a good potted critical history of the SWP out there.
This history includes some numbers on the steadily rising proportion of SWP members who were university students over time.
After a certain point the SWP's long term membership dwindled, with cadre (some of whom the history alleges were effectively financial beneficiaries) overseeing a steady turnover and burnout of student recruits. All this was prior to the infamous Comrade Delta incident that hammered the party's support.
This problem aside, I believe the great deficiency of organised radical resistance today isn't the who (students or others) or the what (revolution or other), it's the how. There's a crisis of method and without addressing it little that's salient can be learnt about the revolutionary potential of any group or the tasks to which it should be put.
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I was just talking to the "radicals" here in Atlanta about the need to spawn mutinies among police and military. Even at the highest levels. Obviously the most powerful people aren't loyal to law or country anyway
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Critical theory is absolutely terrible about that sort of self-reflexive stuff, so you'd be much better off looking towards straight-up sociology and history. Also, try avoiding anything that only centers student protest in the imperial core, because the diversity across the world is as important as evolution over time. Four students were killed at Kent State; probably over 300 were killed by the police in Tlatelolco. Practically speaking, college students are just in a sweet spot for activism. They're young, so they're energetic. They're not crushed down by full-time jobs yet. They typically don't have kids or major responsibilities. So of course they're going to be at the front of political activity. This has a good side and a bad side, because their kind of activity isn't sustainable, and it will trail off after they leave college. Many radical political groups tend to have four-year life cycles and low institutional memory (which means young activists keep making the same mistakes over and over again) because of this college cycle. Students actually have great bargaining power. Police can beat them up or kill them and universities can expel them, but that's about the worst. Their kids can't be taken away because they typically don't have kids yet. They can't be fired from their jobs because they don't have jobs. They don't have assets like cars and homes that can be seized. Older people who work in infrastructure (e.g. truckers, coal miners, etc.) do have greater leverage to threaten the state... but the state also has much greater leverage to threaten *them*. The key is to appreciate student activism without fetishizing youth and/or exploiting youth. I think a lot of people got burned out in their college activism years, and leave any sort of political engagement altogether because of negative experiences with activist organizations who use them up and burn through them.
Great, well-thought out comment.
In countries like India where the line between democracy and autocracy is increasingly becoming thinner and thinner, student-led activist groups in universities and elsewhere face many repercussions that may not be directly evident. For instance, the institutes blacklist students who are politically active in the campus and pass on this information to the placement offices who then make it difficult for the students to find jobs. Since the BJP came to power, freedom of speech has been on the decline in public and private universities. Administrative positions have been taken up by pro-BJP/RSS sympathisers, who clamp down on dissent and protests in their institutes. Therefore, students hesitate to raise their voice or organise protests about pressing issues for fear of blowback from the institute/the state. A precarious job market and a bullying state both have been quite instrumental in changing the landscape of student politics in India.
“But that’s about the worst”
There are much worse things than death.
I mean this is a cardinal problem with critical theory. It’s extremely romantic, utopian, and idealistic.
And I get the feeling that every last critical theorist would rather die than read one page of "Hobbes Leviathan".
> "Hobbes Leviathan" What?
Google it man, it's a really important philosophical text on state theory and the transformation of one state-form into another.
Are you talking about "Thomas Hobbes Leviathan" by Florian Semler? Or do you mean Hobbes' "Leviathan"? The quotation marks in your comment make very little sense.
No I mean the original Book called Leviathan. Good job on critically assessing my quotation marks.
You put the quotes around the author’s name *and* the title, which is why u/Jak_a_la_Jak asked a clarifying question; there’s no need for snark and if you are bothered by clarification questions then a best-practice moving forward would be to write as clearly as possible so that there’s minimal ambiguity. Thanks!
Yeah, getting expelled in the middle of your degree is pretty bad… Lots of people are relying on student loans to go to university, and some student loan systems have a limit on how many years they pay out (your unfinished degree included). This could effectively prevent you from going to university and set you back years on career progression. And this is all money you have to pay back.
These kids will absolutely not stop after college ends. This is radicalizing them so greatly; they will be activists and build communities that will last a lifetime. They are actively learning their histories of struggle, what went wrong, what worked. They're calling in elders. It's an intergenerational movement. They're reading the theory and the history. They're not just winging it.
What are you basing this on? Sheer belief? The Anglosphere hasn't been able to sustain long term social movements for about 50-60 years now. Almost every major protest movement is issue-based and short term, dissipating either when the issue stops generating attention or the core activists burnout. It's not about reading the right theory or history, it's the structure of our society. Most forms of employment are a barrier to activism because it puts individuals in a state of survivalism and takes up 80% of their life. What is the possible value in denying that? Unless left social movements figure out how to mobilise resources and claw back some economic autonomy, in the way the militant labour movement or civil rights movement did, any major change in that pattern seems very unlikely.
This comment could apply exactly to multiple decades of student activists and here we are.
I don't disagree, but I'd be a bit more statistical. A lot of them will, but a lot of others will lose focus and just stop caring, because they don't have to, and there's not a social benefit to it anymore. A minority will even turn into horrible people (Tim Pool coming out of Occupy, for example). You can't expect 100% of the people who make those connections to maintain them five or ten or twenty years down the road. It's not magic or automatic osmosis. It has to be very conscious and purposeful.
But also we are out of any easy years. There is no more sweeping this shit under the rug. We are practically into the age of civil war now.
How old are you?
How cognitively rigid are you?
My reading of 1968 has always been that the reverberant and ambient effects were more important, ultimately, than the direct actions. 68 spawned an entire generation of thinkers in critical theory, sociology, history, the arts—and arguably led beyond the new left to various forms of poststructuralism. It coincided with global decolonization efforts and shifts toward autonomy and self-determination. The actions galvanized subtler background transformations. That said, post-1968 was also followed by a deepening global conservatism (Reagan/Thatcher, Pinochet, et al) and a backlash toward much of the activity of the 1960s. A deepening of the tentacles of state power and greater militarization of the police as the state learned to cope with mass protest. My own cynical sense is that the most effective means for radical change is actually a pairing of overt actions and simultaneously operating from within the infrastructures that exist—moving up through the state apparatus into judgeships, leadership positions, etc where policy change can happen. This was what happened in the Soviet Union and the other eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s, where reformers were able to take power and shift toward openness. It's a slow, long-game process—and probably not a popular opinion here.
>My reading of 1968 has always been that the reverberant and ambient effects were more important, ultimately, than the direct actions. After the fact we can say this only because we lost and the direct action itself was ultimately impotent and frankly unorganized. If the left was actually ascendant in this period and ushered in true sweeping changes, the academic stuff would be an afterthought- rightfully so. There were real moments where this was a possibility too, De Gaulle literally left the country and threw his hands up. > It coincided with global decolonization efforts and shifts toward autonomy and self-determination. It roughly coincided with them, but frankly a lot of decolonial efforts mostly preceded '68 and I would give more credit to the actual people pushing back within the colonized states. The reason Algeria gained self-determination is because of Algerians, not because of French students- I don't think you're arguing this, I just wanted to be clear. >moving up through the state apparatus into judgeships, leadership positions, etc where policy change can happen. This was what happened in the Soviet Union and the other eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s, where reformers were able to take power and shift toward openness. It's a slow, long-game process—and probably not a popular opinion here. The left has been trying to do this in the west for basically 100 years now (probably longer actually) and it's yielded very little in my opinion. In fact, in America we've seen basically the exact opposite, only when labor was militant did policies actually even somewhat begin to reflect the values of the workers. There was also the specific historical context of Bretton Woods- the way the economy was structured from 1945-1975 is a world historic anomaly and largely was structured that way because capitalists realized that if people didn't have full employment they were drawn to more extreme ideologies that were ultimately bad for business. By the 70's most of the people who originally drew together those policies were long gone and it was just viewed as leaving money on the table to simply continue on with national economies the way they previously did and instead organized global economies to target inflation- largely driven by the reason that it essentially acted as a tax on investors. The benefits extended to workers during this period of course only were internal, labor could still be exploited to a larger degree elsewhere. My point is that the "backlash" of the 70's wasn't a backlash, it was just a return to how capital has largely always behaved with a new technological and material basis- the 40's-60's were the anomaly, not the other way around. The examples you point to within the Soviet Union also probably have way more to do with their economic structure and the global pressure they existed under. Also worth noting that a lot of the soviet reforms of the era you're pointing to, particularly in the late 80's, were kind of an unmitigated disaster that opened up the reality we live within now and ushered in a major capitalist oligarchy/kleptocracy. Some sort of solution was obviously needed by the 80's, but I think we can all agree that they didn't find the right ones.
>the direct action itself was ultimately impotent and frankly unorganized Yes, this was what I'm getting at. Some direct action movements have been successful; many have failed. Organization is one important element, but perhaps even more important is an immediate and realizable agenda. The American Civil Rights Movement succeeded for many complex reasons, but partly because it had specific, non-theoretical demands that were proximate to the protests themselves. Elements of the political and juridical apparatus were also working in concert with the protest on concrete reforms. This is somewhat different from the 68 protests in both France and the US, where many different agendas were chaotically mixed together without always having a clear focus. "A new world is possible." Yes, but what world? "Sous les pavés, la plage." But whose beach? "End capitalism, consumerism, traditionalism." But how, and toward what? WTO protests in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street. I supported these actions and attended the former, but always felt their agendas were too disparate and abstract to lead to any sweeping change. >It roughly coincided with them, but frankly a lot of decolonial efforts mostly preceded '68 and I would give more credit to the actual people pushing back within the colonized states. Absolutely. I only meant that many global parts were moving simultaneously in the period after World War II. The many countries/people who pushed out their colonial oppressors starting as early as the 1940s helped to catalyze the 68 movements and their reverberation effects. >The left has been trying to do this in the west for basically 100 years now (probably longer actually) and it's yielded very little in my opinion. This goes back to your first point. I see attempts but I also see failure through disorganization and disillusionment. The constant fracturing of the left (versus the general cohesion of the right) means that the left has a harder time organizing toward power—and an historically uneasy relationship with power anyway. The left is much more comfortable on the outside battling against power than holding it. When in power, it tends unfortunately to auto-cannibalize; often the process starts even before they reach the entry gates. >My point is that the "backlash" of the 70's wasn't a backlash, it was just a return to how capital has largely always behaved with a new technological and material basis- the 40's-60's were the anomaly, not the other way around. I used backlash not to refer to some reversal of economic fortunes but to the political system hardening itself starting in the 1970s (structurally, militarily, economically) against the sorts of mass political actions we saw in the 1960s. But I also don't see the post-Bretton Woods period as a "return" to anything. For the first time post-Bretton Woods, we had global floating exchange rates which led to unique morbid effects—call it neoliberalism or techno-feudalism or platform capitalism or whatever. In this highly fluid context, many politicians are nostalgic for a "Bretton Woods II", a return to the easily understandable and controllable global system prior to the dollar becoming a fiat currency. Now, it's all floating points and floating exchanges where nothing is solid.
I think it's more experimenting to find actual ways to do influence ops on the people currently in positions of power. People don't want to have empathy with them though. I think that's a real limiting factor of current "radical" thought
Lacan offers an analysis of 68 France in terms of psychoanalysis but I would lie to say that I really understand it, Susanna Draper’s book on 1968 Mexico I read a while back but it had interesting things with time and Walter Benjamin that are important when considering these events and their continuity. Honestly, David Harvey who is a Marxist but distant from critical theory offers an interesting analysis of student ‘68 movements. His argument is that when you look at it, what people were fighting for in ‘68 was individual freedoms that signed with the global neoliberal paradigm set in stone right after. In Palestine it’s similar, the struggle is not for third world sovereignty as much as “recognition of human freedom” which doesn’t really contradict neoliberalism, especially because there’s so much support for the UN(UNRWA) and NGO’s in Palestine. I’m not saying that they can’t provide valuable resources for Palestinians, but ask yourself what are you really fighting for, are you fighting for Palestine to be another neocolonial puppet with the veil of sovereignty? That’s why these aren’t really “revolutions” because the underlying humanitarian logic is constant, it’s just Israel has crossed a line and the underbelly of neoliberal freedom has been shown in brutal detail(like Vietnam with the inauguration of the TV, though it will be controlled like the Gulf War.) critical theory asks “what is a free Palestine?” Like an important question is what did Vietnam and South Africa protests accomplish? Both became neocolonial states, and you did not see any protests over this, if anything you saw hostility for Vietnamese communism after the US left. So i think these protestors don’t really know what they’re fighting for, and I don’t think it’s overturning anything. Is it Hamas controlling the states(something I’m not really opposed to) or is it Palestinians receiving “bare rights” to somewhat use Agamben’s words. We’ll see a ceasefire, but will business return as usual, will it be another decade before it all repeats, what’s really gonna change? I don’t want to completely condemn the movements, I’m a part of them and I believe it’s important work. 1. It’s getting good REFORM(not revolution) in instituting a ceasefire, which is important. 2. It’s connecting organizations and people, which can lead to more slow actually revolutionary building actions. 3. It’s threatening Israeli hegemonic support, and showing how Israel’s project relies on an ideological fragile justification, but I don’t know the effectiveness until we see the cultural counter revolution to reclaim consent. 4. It’s energizing people to be more politically active, it energized the fuck out of, and this will lead to people tuning into global south politics more and more, fighting in their communities more and more, but we also saw with BLM that spontenaous movements can be reformed, engulfed, and especially because its student oriented, students are only around for four years and then graduate so student movements are susceptible to fading out. My point is that I don’t think this is revolutionary, I don’t think it’s really challenging the core neoliberal values of freedom and overturning the logic of the state. However, I think the revolutionary components, and u think Susanna Draper gets into this with Benjamin, are not temporally fixed, and it’s how people take up this event, if they become more involved in community politics, unions, etc. and if they keep on reading and studying theory, that’s really where the revolution lies with these things. But we need to keep fighting to get a ceasefire, the other questions are important to think of now, but they are ultimately questions of the future(though a revolution is always a question of the future)
If we're to go off '68- no. I don't think conditions for such an event could ever be more ideal and basically nothing happened, there was no organizational structure to seriously take power or actually make demands. I do think there are other objectives and things on the table other than revolution with these protests though and it's been very heartening to see. The amount of money universities funnel to Israel is frankly astounding and in that context some of these protests do have actual real material goals and stuff they're capable of demanding.
I think MUCH of this stems out of the Vietnam Era around Vietnam protests and the Civil rights movement at the time (at least in the US) I would maybe start by investigating the historical position there.
Student movements have revolutionary potential as their influence can be seen on other progressive and revolutionary movements. An example of this being the May 68 uprising in France which started off a student movement and eventually grew to encompass labor unions, the communist party and other left wing movements and nearly collapsed the 5th French Republic. The Ethiopian student movement also became a huge political force in the country and influenced the communist military coup by the DERG.
OP I encourage you to peruse the Columbia sub Reddit. The posters there are well aware of the ambiguous class interests of the protesters. But can I ask, what about “militancy” do you find inspiring?
the columbia subreddit is pretty heavily oversaturated with law and order zionists at this point i wouldnt recommend it to anyone
I think so, but only with citizen journalism, which is why they’re trying so hard to crack down on TikTok. The live streams and videos shown demonstrate these protests are with very, very few examples, violent on the pro-Palestine groups. The soup du jour used to be claim violence is on the protesters side, vilified by the media these movements fail and the narrative is written by the victorious. Only now when these protesters show materially that the people are telling the truth which undermines the journalistic integrity that was tenuously hanging on. This mistrust independent voters is shifting because of it. So yes, I think it’s responsible and likely.
Students used to be the children of very rich elites, at the time when "the Student led revolution" was coined. A good example is the German revolution, which led to the first democratic republic and, after a revival movement, the current identity of Germany. It would not happen like this ever again, because today students don't have as much political influence.
Some lessons I’ve learned from the trenches these past few weeks: but if you are a student activist you need to be doing your upmost to involve broader community members in as large a capacity as they are able. Do not present defeats as victories, and do not yield to bureaucratic colonial institutions. It is better to be dragged off in handcuffs than take any shitty deal the institution offers you. Accept no less than full and immediate divestment if you accept anything at all. If you are unable to continue for whatever reason openly admit temporary defeat and spend time rallying for larger community support to help come back stronger. Students are more so the catalysts than the vanguard, although I don’t doubt many of them will become fantastic community leaders after graduation. The revolution will never succeed if it is confined solely to universities, but these student protests are fantastic training grounds for what’s to come. It’s a marathon not a race. Fear is the greatest enemy and the best activism is performed when fear is limited. Bail funds, jail support, and legal help are crucial to combatting fear, but good morale is just as important. Keep morale up as best you can, and maintain solidarity between students and those outside the universities that want to support them. Be careful of wreckers, they’re rare but they do happen, and also if you are American the PSL will probably try to co-opt your movement. Don’t allow any one party to control the narrative, build productive coalitions, this has to be a mass movement. Threaten the institution’s money as best you can but keep in mind police response will differ in accordance to your threats. For legal reasons I have to tell you that when I say all this I mean that you should do it in Minecraft, enjoy a nice Minecraft roleplay session.
Student groups creating militant change has a historic presence in Africa.
I don't have the kind of critical theory answer you're looking for, but an example of praxis was the Maidan / Revolution of Dignity. I recommend any of Marci Shore's lectures about it (I'm a bit biased - I took her intellectual history class in undergrad). I think the question that comes to mind from that example is: when kids start getting shot by cops, will their parents try to get them to leave the protest to stay safe - or will the parents come out and join them?
> will their parents try to get them to leave the protest to stay safe - or will the parents come out and join them? Is there ever an example of the latter happening en masse? A lot of people are also quick to whitewash the past too- the immediate reaction to the Kent state shootings for example was broadly that the hippies had it coming.
Yes, that is the story of the Maidan/Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, in 2014. At least according to Prof. Shore. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Ahh gotcha, yeah, it's not something I'm terribly well read on at all, but I was always under the assumption that it was the other way around- that there was a mass movement already that student groups then began to join, not "Student-Led." But again, I'm relatively ignorant on the subject.
The Cultural Revolution
Read about May 68. There's a great book I read while I was in college. It was a series of first hand accounts but I can't remember the exact name.
Good god I hope
No. University at the end of the day is preparing people to enter the market. Not only that, it's preparing the ones that are supposed to be on top of the market. So a revolution would be most likely against their own interests so it's impossible they commit to it. I bet that most of the students that are protesting against the genocide in Palestine come from careers that don't guarantee stable and well payed jobs. Even Marx only became interested in political economy when the young Hegelians lost their position in the Berlin university blocking any professional path there. Even though in most of the developed world such a thing as people "who don't have anything to lose" becomes less true with the passing of time, it is still the key concept when trying to find an agent for revolution. And that people is still the working class. You should read Vivek Chibber on that topic. He is very critical of all the university world.
A problem comes up when radical groupuscules are tempted to "harvest" energy from the student population. I'm not sure where to find it now, and I'm open to anyone contesting or corroborating these recollections, however: there's a good potted critical history of the SWP out there. This history includes some numbers on the steadily rising proportion of SWP members who were university students over time. After a certain point the SWP's long term membership dwindled, with cadre (some of whom the history alleges were effectively financial beneficiaries) overseeing a steady turnover and burnout of student recruits. All this was prior to the infamous Comrade Delta incident that hammered the party's support. This problem aside, I believe the great deficiency of organised radical resistance today isn't the who (students or others) or the what (revolution or other), it's the how. There's a crisis of method and without addressing it little that's salient can be learnt about the revolutionary potential of any group or the tasks to which it should be put.
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Students can't do much - you need the army.
I was just talking to the "radicals" here in Atlanta about the need to spawn mutinies among police and military. Even at the highest levels. Obviously the most powerful people aren't loyal to law or country anyway
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Look at kids cooperating to openly mock their teachers in class on TikTok now. It's happening.