Freudo-Marxian Deconstruction – Part 3

Fromm’s Bastards

Where was all of this leading? In place of the redundant class conflict, what emerged during the 1960s was the conflict of multiple identities, starting with Blacks and with privileged youth alienated from their ‘authoritarian’ parents. These ‘rebels’ were following the scenario prepared decades previously. Well-funded studies legitimised doctrines that permeated society from the academy.

Fromm saw the tumult at his university, Columbia, in 1968 as the birth of the revolution for which he and his colleagues had prepared since their days in Weimar Germany. Speaking at Columbia¹ as an honoured guest to the ‘counter-commencement ceremony’ that had been organised as a protest against the university Administration by the Students for a Restructured University,² Fromm stated that the student protest was ‘a revolution of life’ ‘in a society of zombies’, and that ‘anyone who does not lose his mind does not have a mind to lose’.³

It had been Columbia University where the Frankfurt Institute exiles had gained their initial academic employment. Among the most important contributions by this cabal at Columbia was the five-year, two volume study initiated by Fromm in Germany on the family as the incubator of authoritarian attitudes, and edited by Horkheimer, entitled Studien über Autorität und Familie. One of the contributors was Herbert Marcuse, who would become the primary ideologue of the New Left.

Rebellion against parents was healthy and would usher Fromm’s utopia of ‘spontaneity in love and work’. Youngsters, aligned with Blacks, were the wave of the future, and would redeem the inherent racism and ‘white privilege’ of their parents.

Could it be that Fromm was projecting his own dysfunctional parental relationships? As mentioned previously, there was much about the New Left that was merely a temper tantrum against parents. In France, this took a murderous form when celebrated neo-Marxian philosopher Louis Althusser killed his wife/mother-figure, suffering a total psychotic collapse, which was after all precisely the formulae being articulated in the USA by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the Weather Underground about killing one’s parents.

Fromm’s family background fits a stereotypical pattern, and is appropriate for one of the fathers of the New Left.⁴ In 1912 Fromm’s father Naphtali employed Oswald Sussman in his wine business. Sussman lived in the Fromm household, introduced Erich to the writings of Marx and Engels, and became Erich’s father figure. Erich said of Sussman that he was the first adult to take a real interest in him as an individual.⁵ Of his father Erich stated that he was ‘very neurotic’ and ‘obsessive’. Erich stated he ‘suffered under the influence of a pathologically anxious father who overwhelmed me with his anxiety, at the same time not giving me any guidelines and having no positive influence on my education’.⁶ The Fromm marriage was not happy, and Erich described his father as distant and his mother as overprotective.⁷

In 1923 Fromm opened a psychiatric clinic with Freudian analyst Frieda Reichmann to treat specifically Jewish patients by making them aware of their Jewish tradition and identity.⁸ Fromm had been raised in an Orthodox household and had immersed himself in Talmudic studies as a youth. It is notable that while he was zealous in his mission to detach individuals from tradition, this did not apply to Jewish individuals, whose anxieties could be treated by a reattachment to their heritage.

Herbert Marcuse

It was Herbert Marcuse, another Critical Theorist brought to the USA courtesy of Rockefeller and the State Department, who defined the ‘New Left’ in 1967 and called for the necessity of student organisations to unite across the world. This they had been doing under the leadership of the National Student Association, with CIA sponsorship, as part of a Cold-War agenda to thwart Soviet influence among youth.⁹ Marcuse’s own early career in the USA was as part of the Cold War apparatus.

Marcuse saw the 1960s as the time to create a strategy of tension across the world. The New Left was ‘neo-Marxist’ rather than ‘Marxist’, and was influenced by Maoism, Third World revolutionary movements, and ‘neo-anarchism’.¹⁰ Marcuse defined the Left in something other than the old class terms, and here the notion of ‘identity politics’ emerges: ‘The New Left itself cannot be defined in terms of class, consisting as it does of intellectuals, of groups from the civil rights movement, and of youth groups, especially the most radical elements of youth, including those who at first glance do not appear political at all, namely the hippies, to whom I shall return later’.¹¹

Marcuse stated that the revolution would not be made by the proletariat, who were being co-opted by the System, but by disaffected and alienated elements. Ironically, it was the ‘youth revolt’ and other ‘alienated elements’ who were co-opted by the System, while it was precisely the proletariat that had not shown itself amenable to Establishment manipulation, remaining among the most conservative elements of society.¹²

Marcuse stated that the primary elements in this youth mobilisation were both the ghetto underprivileged whose deprivation cannot be met by the Establishment, and the privileged, who through their education and resources can analyse the situation better than any white-hick pleb. This elite have a high state of consciousness that can escape ‘social control’. Here again, the contrary is the case: this educated class were precisely most susceptible to indoctrination by the Establishment’s education system, whose social science programmes, run by those such as Fromm and Marcuse, were lavishly funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as the means of causing a leftward paradigm shift in society.¹³ During 1952–54 this grant-making had come under Congressional scrutiny. The research director of the investigation, Norman Dodd, reported to the Congressional committee that the Foundations since the 1930s had brought a revolution to the education system:

[G]rants had been made by Foundations (chiefly by Carnegie and Rockefeller) which were used to further this purpose by:

Directing education in the United States toward international view-point and discrediting the traditions to which, it [formerly) had been dedicated.

Training individuals and servicing agencies to render advice to the Executive branch of the Federal Government.

Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition.

Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.

Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature.¹⁴

Columbia University was one of a half-dozen institutions favoured by the Foundations in making grants, and it was here that the Rockefeller Foundation had ensconced the Critical Theorists. As the annual reports of the Ford Foundation show during the late 1960s and early 70s the result of the New Left riots on the campuses was to accelerate the Leftward reforms in the education system that had been part of the Foundation agenda.

Marcuse explained the crucial role of Western minority ethnicities and Third World peoples as the ‘new proletariat’:

In the United States the underprivileged are constituted in particular by national and racial minorities, which of course are mainly unorganized politically and often antagonistic among themselves (for example there are considerable conflicts in the large cities between blacks and Puerto Ricans). They are mostly groups that do not occupy a decisive place in the productive process and for this reason cannot be considered potentially revolutionary forces from the viewpoint of Marxian theory – at least not without allies. But in the global framework the underprivileged who must bear the entire weight of the system really are the mass basis of the national liberation struggle against neo-colonialism in the third world and against colonialism in the United States. Here, too, there is no effective association between national and racial minorities in the metropoles of capitalist society and the masses in the neo-colonial world who are already engaged in struggle against this society. These masses can perhaps now be considered the new proletariat and as such they are today a real danger for the world system of capitalism. To what extent the working class in Europe can still or again be counted among these groups of underprivileged is a problem that we must discuss separately; I cannot do so in the framework of what I have to say here today, but I should like to point out a fundamental distinction. What we can say of the American working class is that in their great majority the workers are integrated into the system and do not want a radical transformation, we probably cannot or not yet say that of the European working class.¹⁵

Added to this was ‘sexual-moral rebellion’, referring to the ‘fusion of political rebellion and sexual-moral rebellion which is an important factor in the opposition in America’.¹⁶ This too had been well prepared by Alfred Kinsey’s ‘sexology’, also lavishly funded by the same sources, with the Rockefeller Foundation stating:

In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published his first research findings on human sexuality. Entitled, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the work was widely read by academic and popular audiences, and inspired both praise and condemnation. Ultimately, the work transformed American society by challenging American perceptions and attitudes toward sex.¹⁷

After being brought to the USA with his comrades from the Frankfurt Institute, Marcuse served first in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) then in the Eastern European Section of the State Department. That is to say, like many anti-Stalinist Leftists, Marcuse served as a Cold Warrior for the USA. Over the decades, Marcuse enjoyed celebrity status as a leading U.S. philosopher. Rioting students in Rome carried the slogan ‘Marx, Mao and Marcuse’, while to the contrary the USSR’s Pravda journalist, Yuri Zhukov, denounced him as a ‘false prophet’. There was nothing Soviet-inspired about the New Left, FBI efforts to find a link notwithstanding; its origins lay to the contrary in the U.S. project to create a Liberal-left Internationale that could both counter the USSR’s appeal among youth and intelligentsia, and offer American Liberalism as the ideology for the post-colonial emerging states. Organisations such as the CIA- and Foundation-sponsored African-American Institute, Peace Corps and USAID, provided the ideology and training for the re-colonisation of Africa in the name of ‘de-colonisation’ and ‘liberation’.

The White working class had become passé as agents for change, and would henceforth increasingly be denounced by the New Left as beneficiaries of ‘white privilege’. Marcuse states that while the working class might still be ‘radicalised’, this could go the other way – towards the ‘Right’ and ‘Fascism’. This is the very deep suspicion harboured by the liberal intelligentsia for the working class, such as that expressed presently towards the Yellow Vests in France by Danny Cohn-Bendit.¹⁸

Marcuse’s seminal One-Dimensional Man was published in 1964, and became what The New York Times called ‘the foremost literary symbol of the New Left’. It is a critique of the repressive character of industrial society. Yet among the grantees acknowledged by Marcuse are the seemingly omnipresent Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation had also subsidised Marcuse’s Reason & Revolution in 1960. In 1959 Marcuse was awarded a scholarship by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Program in Legal & Political Philosophy (LAPP), with the recommendation by Herbert Deane, Columbia University, acting as Consultant to the Foundation for LAPP, stating that Marcuse was ‘probably the most distinguished among the mature men now actively engaged in political philosophy’.¹⁹

Globalisation

In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse sought to extend the dialectical conflict to include ‘the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions’,²⁰ the latter finding political voice in Germany with the Socialist Patients’ Collective, where the insane and their psychiatrists could join in common socialist struggle against a society whose normalcy was the real sickness. Addressing the issues of the Cold War, Marcuse advocates peaceful economic competition between the USA and the Soviet bloc, ‘on a global scale and through global institutions’. Marcuse explains:

This pacification would mean the emergence of a genuine world economy—the demise of the nation state, the national interest, national business together with their international alliances. And this is precisely the possibility against which the present world is mobilized.

The fateful interdependence of the only two ‘sovereign’ social systems in the contemporary world is expressive of the fact that the conflict between progress and politics, between man and his masters has become total. When capitalism meets the challenge of communism, it meets its own capabilities: spectacular development of all productive forces after the subordination of the private interests in profitability which arrest such development. When communism meets the challenge of capitalism, it too meets its own capabilities: spectacular comforts, liberties, and alleviation of the burden of life. Both systems have these capabilities distorted beyond recognition and, in both cases, the reason is in the last analysis the same – the struggle against a form of life which would dissolve the basis for domination.²¹

Here we might understand precisely why Rockefeller and other oligarchic individuals or foundations were interested in Marcuse et al., and sponsored both the Frankfurt Institute’s relocation to the USA, and the publication of their studies. While in the preceding passages Marcuse seems to be critiquing ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’, what he is calling for is a synthesis leading to a ‘genuine world economy’ ‘through global institutions’. It should not be misunderstood that Marcuse’s call for the ‘demise of national business’ by such a dialectic is antithetical to the aims of those who employed or sponsored him. What he is proposing is precisely the agenda of global capitalism. What oligarchs such as the Rockefeller dynasty require are fundamental changes in capitalism, and they have long backed supposed ‘radicals’ in the pursuit of this objective.

It is ironic that Marcuse, and indeed the Left in general, in demanding an international socialist order, are entirely encumbered in their thinking by the Late Western Zeitgeist – as indeed was Marx, in proposing what amounts to globalisation, by whatever ideology it is called. How would this universalism function without the obliteration of the ‘primary ties’ that, while having been destroyed in the Western world, are still alive in other parts of the world, whether in Iran or the Amazonian rain forest? This would necessitate technological and cultural colonisation beyond the comprehension of the old imperialism. We have already seen the triumph of the Late Western economic model in China and even in Vietnam, both of which had served as role models to the New Left. However much Fromm and Marcuse called it ‘socialism’, it remains the bastardous offspring of the Late Western Zeitgeist.

In this regard, after Marcuse states much about the dehumanising impact of technology, not altogether disagreeable from a Rightist viewpoint and betraying vestiges of his old teacher Heidegger, it transpires that it is not the overthrow – the ‘Great Refusal’ as he calls his ‘rebellion’ – of techno-industrial domination that he urges. Rather, the new order ‘depends on the continued existence of the technical base itself’.

I have stressed that this does not mean the revival of ‘values,’ spiritual or other, which are to supplement the scientific and technological transformation of man and nature. On the contrary, the historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks-the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization. Moreover, the new ends might assert themselves even in the construction of scientific hypotheses-in pure scientific theory. From the quantification of secondary qualities, science would proceed to the quantification of values.²²

To emphasise the soulless character of his doctrine Marcuse furnishes a footnote assuring readers that such questions remain solely technical and cannot be considered as ‘ethical and sometimes religious’.²³ It aspires to be the hubristic mastery over nature, the transformation of ‘values into needs’ and of ‘final causes into technical possibilities’. The earthly paradise is finally reached, a paradise which becomes ‘the free development of needs on the basis of satisfaction’, the ultimate condition of Man being ‘Pacified existence’.²⁴ Yet Marcuse warns against making a ‘fetish’ of technology, but relies on a ‘collective effort’ of ‘free individuals’. Should these contradictions seem to lack coherence, they can be rationalised through ‘dialectics’.²⁵

Tyranny Means ‘Freedom’

It has been heard before from Marxist theorists: the withering away of the state and the unfolding of ‘true Communism’ after the transition phase of Socialism, where the laws of social production will usher in a utopia of total freedom. Marcuse’s utopia of ‘pacified existence’, however, has its own transitional phase that, like the path to Communism via Socialism, requires repression. This is more than implicit in what Marcuse states. In his 1965 essay, ‘Repressive Tolerance’, Marcuse condemned the toleration of ideas and actions that are in opposition to his ideology:

The active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity, I call this non-partisan tolerance ‘abstract’ or ‘pure’ inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides – but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination….

However, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.²⁶

By demonising others Marcuse enables the Left to declare in the interests of ‘peace and humanity’ that the repression of opposition is necessary. Hence, when today we see liberals and Leftists committing acts of violence against opponents in the name of ‘peace and freedom’, they are being perfectly consistent according to their dialectic. One can more than suspect that what Marcuse is proposing is a dictatorship of technocrats who eliminate any threats to ‘freedom and happiness’ in the manner by which Robespierre and his committee upheld ‘public safety’ in the name of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man & the Citizen’. In his 1968 addendum, Marcuse elaborates on how this technocratic ‘elite’ would operate, citing John Stuart Mill: ‘ In any case, John Stuart Mill, not exactly an enemy of liberal and representative government, was not so allergic to the political leadership of the intelligentsia as the contemporary guardians of semi-democracy are. Mill believed that “individual mental superiority” justifies “reckoning one person’s opinion as equivalent to more than one”’.²⁷ But then Marcuse assures readers that this would not be necessary if ‘democracy’ is established through revolution. Perhaps he is being dialectical in giving contrary views out each side of his mouth? This revolution would be made by ‘minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant’, against the ‘majority’, for the sake of the latter’s true happiness.²⁸

Marcuse considers that an objective criterion can be established to determine what should be tolerated and what should be repressed:

Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to ‘the people’ for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.²⁹

Again, it would be necessary for a body of guardians to define ‘what is right and wrong, good and bad’, and only then would ‘the people’ be asked for their ‘democratic deliberation’, without the encumbrance of contrary opinions, which would be suppressed on the grounds that such opinions are deemed self-evidently ‘stupid’. At the time the most vocal custodians of the ‘party of peace and happiness’ were such ‘sensible’ types as the Yippies, Hippies and Weathermen, many achieving a superior enlightenment with the aid of LSD and pot.

Marcuse updated his essay in 1968, at the time of the New Left riots, stating that extremism is justified in the most tolerant democracies, because the opinions of the majority are not legitimately formed. Hence only the New Left is the custodian of what is right: ‘this means that the majority is no longer justified in claiming the democratic title of the best guardian of the common interest’.³⁰ Repression would be used against whatever is deemed ‘Right’:

Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressor. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled.³¹

Marcuse’s definition of the ‘Right’ is that of the straw-man argument.

When Julius Evola’s book Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) was republished in 1969, receiving notice amidst the ‘student revolt’, he was at times called the ‘Marcuse of the Right’. Evola pointed out that unlike the Left his was a ‘truly radical “no”’ to the ‘system’, as he examined the roots of modern existence in ways that the Left could not. ‘Neither Marcuse nor any of the “protestors” have done the same: for they have neither the ability nor courage to do so’. ‘In particular, I think that the “sociology” of Marcuse should be completely rejected: it only tends towards a sort of gross form of Freudianism… likewise, the ideal society Marcuse envisages once all this “dissent” has led to the end of the so-called “system” is as squalid and insipid as can be’.³²

New Conceptions of Family Bonding

Marcuse saw revolutionary potential in the Hippies. They were the fulfilment of Fromm’s ‘creative spontaneity’ and ‘love’ of humanity who could reach the revolutionary nirvana at an accelerated pace via LSD. They were what can be achieved when family bonds are deconstructed, and new bonds formed.

New Left spokesman Jerry Rubin, head of the Yippies, reminisced about a ‘psychic therapy session’ in which participants sought liberation from ‘childhood deprivation’ – pure Fromm, taking on matricidal proportions:

I started shouting at my mother for the specific messages she gave me. ‘Thanks, mommy. You white-skinned, no-good sexless asshole cap-toothed cancerous venom of a snake who destroyed me from birth…. I have your self-righteous right-wrong should-should not programming… with that stupid JUDGE inside me that I got from you. I don’t see people as they are, but as they fit my standards, my self-righteous beliefs…. Oh, it is so liberating for me to tell the truth. MOMMY I AM GLAD THAT YOU DIED. IF YOU HAD NOT DIED OF CANCER, I WOULD HAVE HAD TO KILL YOU… You taught me to compete and compare, to fear and outdo. I became a ferocious achievement-oriented, compulsive obsessive live-in-my-head asshole… Well, fuck you Mommy, fuck you in the ass with a red hot poker.³³

Rubin ended up as a Wall Street stock broker, and died a martyr during his final act of rebellion – jaywalking. His closest colleague, Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman, whose enduring parental influence was an ‘overbearing father’, similarly pitched his political appeal to destroying the ‘parent culture’, and killing one’s parents. Hoffman committed suicide because he could not endure a life off centre-stage; he was a has-been and failed in his effort to become a stand-up comic,³⁴ whereas once he had been in the world’s spot-light as chief clown of the New Left.

Fromm’s vision of new bonds on the ruins of the traditional was brought to perfection with the formation of an entity of mainly Hippie runaways called ‘The Family’, established in 1968 at Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. This was the national centre of Hippiedom, and the centre of this was the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Center, where Hippies could get abortions, treatment for STDs, and as much LSD as they wanted, courtesy of the CIA. This new conception of ‘The Family’ was started by Charles Manson, hitherto a petty recidivist criminal, who suddenly emerged from the Haight-Ashbury clinic as the messianic leader of a Hippie cult, expounding a rudimentary doctrine analogous to Fromm’s. Through his own upbringing, or lack thereof, Manson had ‘a special kind of hatred for women as mothers’.³⁵ Greg Jakobson was especially admired by The Family as ‘angelic’ because he had grown up an orphan and was regarded as having come into the world ‘without parents’.³⁶ Tex Watson recalled that the inhibitions of what the New Left were condemning as the ‘parental culture’ were obliterated through orgies directed by Manson, with the aid of LSD and Manson’s musical compositions. (Bill Ayres, the Weathermen leader, recalls the similar use of orgies as a revolutionary act to obliterate traditional morals.)³⁷ Like cults generally, members of the Manson Family were prohibited from contacting their own families. Manson gave his followers new names in order to completely break them free³⁸ from ‘primary ties’. As Manson’s followers became increasingly under his spell, he stated that they were being freed from the ‘straight world’, where people were programmed like computers. We might recall how Fromm commended the dissident students at Columbia University for their breaking free of a zombified society, by up-ending traditional perceptions of normality.

In August 1969 The Family embarked on the famous Tate-LaBianca murders. The Manson Family members who remained free, toting guns and knives, called for ‘revolution’, and the New Left took them seriously. In 1969 at a ‘war council’ of the Weather Underground led by Bernadine Dohrn, today an esteemed academic, she introduced a three-fingered salute to the Weathermen in honour of the fork that was said to have been used to repeatedly stab the pregnant Sharon Tate. Dohrn declared: ‘Offing those pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!’ Weathermen at the ‘war council’ shouted that ‘all white babies are pigs’, (hence the opfing of Tate’s foetus was no more aberrant than the multitudinous legal abortions that are part of the new ‘normal’ in breaking the ‘primary tie’ of motherhood).

The adulation was widespread. Jerry Rubin and fellow New Left leader Phil Ochs visited Manson in jail. Manson told them how inspired he had been by the court-room antics of the iconic ‘Chicago Seven’. New Left journal Tuesday’s Child featured a crucified Manson on its cover during his trial, and proclaimed him ‘man of the year’.³⁹

The Manson murders are often claimed to have ended the Hippie epoch by exposing the psychotic underside. Haight-Ashbury became a centre not of ‘peace and love’, but of homicides, disease, aborted foetuses and a mass of drugged up imbeciles wallowing in their own excrement. Was it really a failure in terms of shifting the USA, and hence the rest of the Western world, leftward? The riots from Chicago to Prague, drugs, Manson murders, and student strikes, served as a warning of what was to come if changes were not wrought to society. The social sciences of Fromm, Marcuse, Adorno, and Alfred Kinsey, lavishly funded by Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and others, provided the academic rationalisation, assuring the ‘majority’, looking in askance, that the troubles could be handled if reforms were instituted. What a generation previously would have been regarded as insane and self-destructive, now seemed moderate in comparison to Manson, Weathermen, The Days of Rage, Yippies and Hippies, and calls to ‘bring the war home’. Martin Luther King and the NAACP became the mainstream answer to ghetto riots and Black Panthers; the Peace Corps superseded the SDS, and what was once regarded as ‘revolutionary’ and nihilistic is today seen as ‘centrist’ and even ‘conservative’.

The ’68 Generation, as ‘useful idiots’, enabled the Establishment to proceed with its restructuring of society in ways that seemed moderate by comparison to its own excesses and violence. So far from having been made redundant, that era ushered a pervasive revolution whose ideology persists as a battering ram against whatever vestiges of tradition remain, whether in the West or the remotest corners of the world, in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘love of humanity’.⁴⁰

References