"What is one to make of this extraordinary students revolt? Is it as some observers here believe, an historic cataclysm, heralding social changes so profound that we are only now beginning to catch a glimpse of them?"
(The Age, Melbourne, May 30th, 1968.)
If only a few months ago it scarcely seemed possible for revolutionary students to lift the issue of student power beyond the political fringe, the effect of the new struggles in France has been to make this achievement itself appear trivial. In the context of such an upheaval, student power appeared as a mere form of expression of a deeper striving; a searching -- led by students, but shared by others -- which reached down beneath the first principles of all contemporary social structures to seek their total re-organization.
It is only by attention to this deeper chord that one can begin to understand either the elemental character of the French uprising, or the contagious effects whereby whole strata in a mass response to the student actions, began to bypass their established leaders. In a broader setting, it helps us to focus on the common elements which bind the revolt in France to movements of intellectuals in the USSR as well as the USA, in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as well as in Italy, Britain or Australia.
In all of these countries students and intellectuals have begun to set a new course. But a number of circumstances have obscured this. Their relatively small numbers, their person-centred and 'unrealistic' demands, the traditional political roles of students and intellectuals by way of their attachment to other groupings -- all these have contributed to a conventional view that questioning of the social order by students, intellectuals and intellectually trained groups is no more than a temporarily sharpened expression of restlessness they have shown at other times.
The events in France have put an end to this complacency. With the students acting as a catalyst, ideas which somewhat remote debate -- about the integrity of the person, about the facade of democracy, or the remoteness of the individual from the levers of power -- suddenly became integral with a social movement. It was as if the classical struggle of the classes had joined a deeper and more general revolution, in which the latent structure of the intellectual culture itself was penetrating, disintegrating and absorbing the structures of conventional society.
Of course, for many people propositions of this sort cannot arise. It is still a little unusual to regard the intellectual culture as having an independent structure capable of giving rise to an independent view of the world, a qualitatively distinct mode of personal formation, and historically novel forms of social action; there is still prevalent a tendency to view it as a monumental repository of ideas which people pick up and use from time to time, or even occasionally (by some mysterious process of spontaneous combustion), add too.
By contrast it is my presupposition here that once attention is drawn to the point, the previously hidden shape of a socialist society can be clearly seen to be carried within the basic structure of the intellectual culture. This structure is a universalized social matrix of co-operative and autonomous persons: * it is however, overlaid by alienating ideologies, based in bureaucratic and class structures. Through them the members and creations of the intellectual culture are tied into the service of the material and parochial ends of national and class power structures.
By the nature of their position, students are the first grouping within the sphere of the intellectual culture as a whole to give spontaneous expression to its tendency to become a socialist 'culture for itself'. Even in France, of course, only a small minority independently attained any form of conscious expression of their own cultural situation. As in other countries, it appears that students of politics, sociology and philosophy, who by the nature of their studies 'can most readily come to see the social process 'as a whole', were amongst the first to take revolutionary positions. Significantly they found a response among other students who at first had 'seen' their interests as confined to reform and modernization of the universities within the existing social structure. But in a relatively short space of time the latent situation of all students and intellectuals began to move into conscious focus. The movement as a whole passed over into a revolutionary stance; it began to irradiate, to beckon the working class into action around its own overlapping aims, even in the face of the divisive conservatism of trade union and party political bureaucracies.
These realignments are occurring in a situation where the established modes of integration of the intellectual culture with the larger society are in dissolution. Socially as their previous setting withers beneath them, the intellectuals and the intellectually trained are expanding out from their submergence in the old middle class. Functionally their decisive roles are shifting out of the superstructure. Having become key figures in the development and application of the new technology the analytical and detached style of the intellectuals (aspects, in part, of their alienation) has penetrated every phase of society. And hence, totally alienated 'in a world they have begun to make themselves' a spontaneously authentic expression (an anarchic marxism) of the existential situation of the intellectuals first breaks through at the point where the major convergence of forces presses against a counter movement to impose the official conception of the intellectual culture.
The universities become the point of fracture for many reasons: because some element still persists of the relative autonomy granted them in times when they served other needs; because within them students are drawn into a common situation in large numbers, because once there they experience the bureaucratic degeneration of the university; because as yet they have not moved within the suffocating counter-structures of bureaucratic employment. And preceding this there is the diffuse state of disorientation, the crisis of identity, which tends to beset the student in common with other people whose societies (in all of their social relations) have been set in movement by the basic revolution in the sphere of production.
I am suggesting then that the French events signified the emergence of a qualitatively new level in social development. A general revolution of thought and being (wherein social consciousness is directly conditioned by the social matrix of the intellectual culture) is beginning to fan out through the key structures of the advanced industrial societies.
As intellectual technique has penetrated production and administration, a question is put: will the intellectual culture absorb industrial society or will it be itself absorbed and instrumentalized within the terms of industrial systems. This is an issue which, although it cuts beneath the differences of technologically advanced societies, nevertheless takes on an explosive power in capitalist states simply because, as it moves within the power relations of the classes, it adds impetus and totality to their struggle.
II
Of course, it can be said that the incredible detonating effect of the French students was entirely specific to the situation in Gaullist France. lt could be argued that an effort to modernize the economy and extend the national influence has involved a crash programme to expand the 'output' of archaic universities and a financing of this, as well as related projects, by an unremitting pressure on the living standards of the working class. No doubt these aspects were important but to concentrate on them is to ignore the similarity of the Sorbonne uprising to the revolt at Berkeley, to the student actions in West Germany, Italy and -- in a lower key -- in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Furthermore it ignores the way in which students, and then workers went beyond or bypassed demands for economic reform or betterment of conditions and accented socialism, participatory democracy and the worth of the individual person. In social composition, mode of development and in depth there seems little doubt that a social revolutionary movement of a new type took shape in France. In commenting on the irrelevance of material issues to the basis of the uprising the New Statesman is not inconsistent with the preceding interpretation when it comments:
"The comforting bourgeois analysis, that the students merely detonated the crisis and now drop into the background while the workers argue out their pay-claims with the government, is seen to be wholly misleading. The students object not just to university conditions but to the social immorality of a society in which they are expected to provide the elites. The workers indeed want better material conditions, but in the context of a wholesale reorganisation of the economic system. They know what the students feel, because they have the same urges themselves." (31/5/68)
Apart from distilled comment of this order, both observers and participants recognized -- as in the stirring of all great revolutionary processes -- that established society had suddenly lost its credibility. Often, because developments had a spontaneous and unformed character, their significance was apprehended rather than understood. But on all sides the direction of the movement was clear. Without exception figures of power recognized that the institutions of industrial society (whether bureaucratic socialist or -- nominally -- pluralist democrat) had been challenged. In capitalist countries France, Britain and certainly in Australia too) there has been an immediate bending to the spontaneous form of expression of demands -- a solution is sought in the revival and extension of forms of participatory democracy. As Mr. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, British Minister of Technology, put it in direct response to events in France: "Beyond parliamentary democracy as we know it, we shall have to find a new popular democracy." (The Observer, 26/5/68)
This, of course, will not be enough. People are not simply asking for new forms of political interchange but for a new content to existence. And in structural terms it is in the universities and through the students -- where the powers of the old society come into the most open and clearly defined conflict with the emergence of the new -- that the issue is most clearly defined. Robert Stephens was perhaps expressing something of the view that the student upsurge had to do with the whole level of society rather than with one or another party political outlook when he commented:
"The fact that the initiative came from the universities was not so much because of the traditional role of students as political militants or the particular political views of French students at this time. It was the result rather of the students' grasp of the revolutionary role of education itself in modern society and the belief that this role cannot be properly fulfilled without changes in the structure not only of the educational system but also of the State." (The Observer, 26/5/68)
Stephens believes "that one of the tactical aims of the student leaders may have been to break down the class and political barriers between students and workers", but turning to the underlying thrust of the uprising he goes on as follows:
"But behind these pre-occupations lies the deeper thought: This is an attempt to break down the whole concept of the separation of learning and work, to replace the idea of education as a 'preparation' or 'qualification' by the concept of a perpetual renewal and interchange between education and the working world. Linked with this concept is the idea that knowledge is now the greatest means of production of all and is not to be guarded as the secret of the few."
III
In elaboration of our previous argument as to the effects produced when the achievements of the intellectual culture penetrate the industrial and institutional processes of society at large we may say that:
(1) There has been created a new situation in which the intellectually trained people and students can begin to relate their own lives to the frequently obscured but basic relations of the intellectual culture. They begin to stand up as 'a culture for themselves'.
(2) Simultaneously a situation has arisen in which the parochial and conformist power structures of the old level of society struggle to contain the disintegrative (to them) pressure which qualitatively new modes of social life bring to bear on the material basis and forms of their power.
(3) In particular, and because of their strategic role, this becomes a struggle to control the universities (to secure them as sources of human capital, to undercut their autonomy, to 'produce' intellectually trained rather than intellectual persons). This in effect is the key to a larger struggle, in which the issue is whether the intellectual culture will attain 'self consciousness' and through its strategic location (enabling the remaking of production, shortening the working day, freeing man from necessity), begin to remake society in its own terms, or whether it will itself be absorbed to the ends and means of the industrial system.
(4) It would seem that the positive outcome of this struggle would depend (in any short run) on the possibilities of forming bridges of co-operation between the newer (intellectually trained and student) and older levels of employed people or, in another mode of expression of the same issue, between the expanding intellectual culture and the industrial working class.
This last point brings us to the central political issue which the events in France have raised. In effect we are saying that they underline the existence now of two distinct yet interlocked bases for a socialist movement within the advanced capitalist states. Hence they confront us with both the possibilities and the problems of the convergent action of the groupings involved.
In this context it is logical to concentrate on the changes wrought by the impact of the achievements of the intellectual culture. These changes are the main source of the new features to be considered. For present purposes we can reduce them to two questions: first, the theoretical statement of the structural interlocking of two revolutions; secondly, the changed situation of the industrial working class and in fact of all of the employed strata as a result of all of the social relations being set in motion by the revolution of technique.
With regard to the first question a useful point of departure is to attempt an interpretative construction of the students' aspirations. At present this has to be a composition drawn from fragmentary sources, here these are articulated from the standpoint of a group of people at present doubly alienated -- cut off from full access to self consciousness within the terms of their own formative culture and potentially alienated within their future work relations as well.
In essence then it seems that the students are asking for a mode of individual life in society which is inconceivable within any capitalist mode o£ social organisation and at present unattainable within socialist forms. They are saying, in effect, that they want a society based on the principle of the individual human identity -- one where each person is able to make himself in free association with others: without constriction by the parochial conformities of class, sect and nation, without the bureaucratic power centres of mass society and without the grand mystiques (of national power, of growth rate, o£ personal affluence and prestige), which by binding us to abstractions separate us from each other.
We have suggested elsewhere (Arena No. 15, 'Features of the Intellectually Trained') that intellectual skills and the values associated with them are personally central for intellectually trained people. For them, to be treated, as a means (a thing), leads to a more immediately total alienation than is l experienced by other employed people. Such a person is radically cut off from self determination within the social relations which brought him into being' and this first alienation (as an intellectually trained means by contrast with an intellectual) is the condition for the further alienation within the relations of wage labour and capital.
The structure of interlocked revolutions reflected in this two-dimensional alienation of the intellectually trained person can be a source of an innovating vision on the one hand and a catalytic role on the other. Hence the students in France from their ties to a universalist culture could sense the shape of a new society. However vaguely, they could feel the imprint of that different world which had formed them and could begin to reach out to a society built in its image. This striving (its anarchist stress on the free individual, or on participatory democracy is the near spontaneous expression of an intellectual culture 'for others' stirring towards development 'for itself') in no way contradicts the latent tendencies of the industrial working class. From an alignment towards the employed role, the student or the intellectually trained person can expect to throw a deeper illumination on the condition of all employed people. To repeat: his dual situation allows the same person to at once glimpse the future on one dimension (through his tie to the intellectual culture) and on the other (through his actual or intended employment), to relate this future to the particular condition in society of both intellectually trained and other workers. This, in essence, is the source of the detonating effect** achieved by the French students and, although more indirectly, it is a major source, too, of the less developed, but nonetheless remarkable upsurge around Senator McCarthy in the USA.
Convergence of strata however, cannot be an unimpeded development. The interlocking of revolutions means that (seen from the standpoint of industrial capitalism) the new and older strata have dual modes of existence and separate modes of consciousness which tie back to these roots. Thus the intellectually trained are more directly concerned with the life of the person and given to associative or looseknit forms of organisation, they tend to gain direction from the self activity of participants rather than by reference to leadership structures and to bypass rather than to join the established parties and forms of political activity. In the short run the sharp contrast of these 'individualist' modes and goals with the differently emphasized aims and solidarist forms of the working class makes co-operation difficult -- the differences of form obscure the underlying common ground simply because (in the context of scientific technological revolution) the two strata are looking to the future while set in two different stages in the history of capitalism and the development of culture.
Simply to look at the root features of different models -- an old and a newer one -- of the life of given strata is however only one aspect of the complexity involved. Hence we will now turn briefly to the second question we raised earlier in this section.
Through the intellectual culture and through the agency of the intellectually trained the whole of the institutional framework is being transformed. As the thought/being revolution moves within the framework of capitalism a re-orientation of the occupational categories occurs; they are reconstructed in alignment to the requirements of intellectual technique. In production the effect is expressed (leaving aside changes of scale and internal organisation) in an increased surplus which, being corporately (or privately) appropriated is, in part, distributed as the rewards of 'affluent strata'. Occupational reconstruction is therefore motivated through a mass illusion of individual betterment; one experiences one's own 'achievement'. The fact that whole strata are in motion in a wholesale process of modernization and change can only be grasped in the abstract and so frequently it is not grasped at all.
The reconstruction of the occupational structure, and of the 'stratificatory' and material environment in general affects every institution. In family, church or in the state, established norms are challenged, communal relations begin to change -- the whole ensemble of social relations passes into a phase of disintegration and renewal. Reaching over this break-up of old social forms the new level of technologically extended social relationships (the media) 'integrate' the population to the fetish goals of the industrial system in terms of nationally generalized goals of conformist consumption and aspiration. In politics, just as in consumption, influences towards a new conformity operate on the basis of manipulative selling of policies, the diversities of left and right are acceptable, as long as they move within the consensus requirements of the new industrial social organism.
It is inherent in the technologies which underlie the new relationships that they should be highly assymetrical in the sense that one speaks but many listen and unidirectional in the sense that no-one answers back. However, since they act at a distance and cannot allow reactions to be directly checked they must hold the attention by persuasion rather than by coercion.
In structural terms then, the impact of intellectual technique shatters the old class and institutional framework. It sets men 'free' within their particular relations and consumption 'choices'. But then, within the new level of technologically extended relations, it builds in the steering principle of commodity fetishism. In his 'free' existence man aborts himself in the service of the industrial organism, while from time to time he 'approves' this process within the increasingly meaningless husks of representative democracy.
Outside this apparently closed circle there is only one set of relations which can provide a vantage point from which new industrial states can be interpreted. And it is, of course, from the intellectual culture that the critique has come. If it is expressed with a special vigour in capitalist states this is because only they are subject to the 'two revolutions' setting. Viewed from a static or structural aspect this setting can help to explain detonating effects. These, when viewed in an historical perspective can be expected to increase, not only because the roles and mass of strata are shifting to accent the intellectual groupings but also because as the conditions of 'modernization' shatter traditional society, people who have lost their familiar moorings J and have not been 'reintegrated' with the standards of neo-corporatism' gravitate towards the new political movements of the left.
IV
The international significance of the French events lies in the fact that one could see prefigured in them a new stage in the development of society. A successful generalization of the key relationships can therefore suggest the lines of strategic orientation which should guide efforts to develop the consciousness and co-operation of the more significant groupings represented. It is beyond my purpose here to go far into this area but it may be useful if in conclusion, we look quickly at the bearing of this discussion on propositions relating to education which have already been set out in Arena.
We noted earlier that "the universities are both the bridge into and at the basis of the new society" (Arena, No. 13, p. 5). It is of critical importance to both the intellectuals and the industrial workers that present policies, which seek to co-ordinate these institutions to the ends of class based and bureaucratic power structures, should be reversed.
In Australia for instance, policies of 'human capital' formation (Martin Report, page 15) of reduced autonomy and of restricted and class biassed entry need to be confronted by the political parties and organizations based on the working class as a whole. But this can scarcely occur unless university staff members and students themselves begin to grasp the inherently socialist and equalitarian principles at the root of the intellectual culture.
This process is made difficult by structural and ideological forms, based in parochial power groups, which overlay and obscure the basic pattern of the intellectual culture. University Councils laden with businessmen, faculty and departmental chains of command, administrative bureaucracy, the material and career structure of incentives derived from the wider society, mystical and 'great man' conceptions of the source of ideas are just a few of the conditions which help to hold 'self consciousness' at the level of a culture for others. But it is apparent that student protest movements are often supported (as at Berkeley) by many staff members. Their inclination is towards personal and institutional autonomy and as this latency is consciously grasped the basis is laid for a further insight into a line of the convergence of interests of workers and intellectual people. Specifically: if universities and related institutions are to perform a genuine bridging role for these people entering the new level of society, then they must greatly increase in numbers. But unless in doing so they retain their autonomy they simply become bridges into a new form of bondage. Hence theoretically one can state a line of convergence wherein increased numbers of universities with increased autonomy meet the basic needs of both workers and intellectuals. This, of course, is merely a guiding principle but so far, as it can be given, a practical expression, it begins to cement a relationship in which working class interests and those of the intellectual culture have become mutually supportive. And, of course, this would not be confined to education. Just because of the new strategic role of the institutions of higher learning any tendency for them to deny 'human capital' to the industrial bureaucracies and to begin to provide not merely trained but critical and cultured people is to call into question capitalist social relations as a whole. Yet what could b" more reasonable than a minimum educational programme of the type suggested?
There are many such lines of convergence. Because we are entering a new level of society, few of them as yet have practical embodiment in the consciously directed policies of social groups. Therefore they appear as 'theoretical' and remote just as the chances of detonation, the bypassing of ossified structures, or the spontaneous movement to forms of participatory control appeared before the French events. But unless such guiding principles are followed, the effect of technological changes, steered to serve narrow interests, will be to generate a substantial sector of unemployed, even unwanted, people who (as U.S. development suggests) can only hope to re-enter society by arming themselves and smashing an immoral social order.
Politically the effect of minimum programmes of convergence is to draw together the two sources of socialist change, to begin to find points of co-operation between the superficially antithetical autonomous and solidaristic modes of relationship between the person and his social base. And this is to bring the two revolutions into phase; to set a strategic bearing on a society founded on the socialist structural principles of universality, co-operation and autonomy; it is to begin to buttress this objective with the mass weight of all working people; finally it is to move towards its achievement through participatory and democratic forms wherein basically pacific institutions of dual power begin to constitute the shadow structure of a new social order.
G.S.
* In a later issue of Arena this question will be taken up in some detail. In passing it is interesting to note that the intellectual culture was the first social system to construct its basic internal relations in terms of technological extension. The means whereby it does, do tend to liberate the individual, rather than bind him in conformity to alien interests. In the intellectual culture the basic means whereby the universally extended network is achieved is the book. In direct contrast to the single active source/many passive listeners, assymetry of the mass forms of technologically extended social relations, we have here a manifold of overlapping networks all activated by and: anchored on individuals. Each intellectual 'listener' chooses his own 'speakers' and synthesises them as the active process of his self development. Because the networks differ the persons differ and yet the 'free development of each is the condition for the free development of all'.
** This widely used phrase aptly describes the way in which the action of one grouping stimulates action in others, but it can be positively misleading if used to suggest that while intellectuals lead, others merely follow.
(Originally published in Arena 16, 1968)
