In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graf­fi­ti mes­sages on the city’s walls was ​“Struc­tures do not walk on the streets!” In oth­er words, the mas­sive stu­dent and work­ers demon­stra­tions of ​‘68 could not be explained in the terms of struc­tural­ism, as deter­mined by the struc­tur­al changes in soci­ety, as in Saus­sure­an struc­tural­ism. French psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan’s response was that this, pre­cise­ly, is what hap­pened in ​‘68: struc­tures did descend onto the streets. The vis­i­ble explo­sive events on the streets were, ulti­mate­ly, the result of a struc­tur­al imbalance.

There are good rea­sons for Lacan’s skep­ti­cal view. As French schol­ars Luc Boltan­s­ki and Eve Chi­a­pel­lo not­ed in 1999’s The New Spir­it of Cap­i­tal­ism, from the ​’70s onward, a new form of cap­i­tal­ism emerged.

Cap­i­tal­ism aban­doned the hier­ar­chi­cal Fordist struc­ture of the pro­duc­tion process – which, named after auto mak­er Hen­ry Ford, enforced a hier­ar­chi­cal and cen­tral­ized chain of com­mand – and devel­oped a net­work-based form of orga­ni­za­tion that account­ed for employ­ee ini­tia­tive and auton­o­my in the work­place. As a result, we get net­works with a mul­ti­tude of par­tic­i­pants, orga­niz­ing work in teams or by projects, intent on cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and pub­lic wel­fare, or wor­ry­ing about ecology.

In this way, cap­i­tal­ism usurped the left’s rhetoric of work­er self-man­age­ment, turn­ing it from an anti-cap­i­tal­ist slo­gan to a cap­i­tal­ist one. It was Social­ism that was con­ser­v­a­tive, hier­ar­chic and administrative.

The anti-cap­i­tal­ist protests of the ​’60s sup­ple­ment­ed the tra­di­tion­al cri­tique of socioe­co­nom­ic exploita­tion with a new cul­tur­al cri­tique: alien­ation of every­day life, com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of con­sump­tion, inau­then­tic­i­ty of a mass soci­ety in which we ​“wear masks” and suf­fer sex­u­al and oth­er oppressions.

The new cap­i­tal­ism tri­umphant­ly appro­pri­at­ed this anti-hier­ar­chi­cal rhetoric of ​‘68, pre­sent­ing itself as a suc­cess­ful lib­er­tar­i­an revolt against the oppres­sive social orga­ni­za­tions of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism and ​“real­ly exist­ing” social­ism. This new lib­er­tar­i­an spir­it is epit­o­mized by dressed-down ​“cool” cap­i­tal­ists such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

What sur­vived of the sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion of the ​’60s was the tol­er­ant hedo­nism read­i­ly incor­po­rat­ed into our hege­mon­ic ide­ol­o­gy. Today, sex­u­al enjoy­ment is not only per­mit­ted, it is ordained – indi­vid­u­als feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The dri­ve to rad­i­cal forms of enjoy­ment (through sex­u­al exper­i­ments and drugs or oth­er trance-induc­ing means) arose at a pre­cise polit­i­cal moment: when ​“the spir­it of ​‘68” had exhaust­ed its polit­i­cal potential.

At this crit­i­cal point in the mid-’70s, we wit­nessed a direct, bru­tal push-toward-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: first, the search for extreme forms of sex­u­al enjoy­ment; sec­ond, the turn toward the Real of an inner expe­ri­ence (Ori­en­tal mys­ti­cism); and, final­ly, the rise of left­ist polit­i­cal ter­ror­ism (Red Army Fac­tion in Ger­many, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.).

Left­ist polit­i­cal ter­ror oper­at­ed under the belief that, in an epoch in which the mass­es are total­ly immersed in cap­i­tal­ist ide­o­log­i­cal sleep, the stan­dard cri­tique of ide­ol­o­gy is no longer oper­a­tive. Only a resort to the raw Real of direct vio­lence could awak­en them.

What these three options share is the with­draw­al from con­crete socio-polit­i­cal engage­ment, and we feel the con­se­quences of this with­draw­al from engage­ment today.

Autumn 2005’s sub­urb riots in France saw thou­sands of cars burn­ing and a major out­burst of pub­lic vio­lence. But what struck the eye was the absence of any pos­i­tive utopi­an vision among pro­test­ers. If May ​‘68 was a revolt with a utopi­an vision, the 2005 revolt was an out­burst with no pre­tense to vision.

Here’s proof of the com­mon apho­rism that we live in a post-ide­o­log­i­cal era: The pro­test­ers in the Paris sub­urbs made no par­tic­u­lar demands. There was only an insis­tence on recog­ni­tion, based on a vague, non-artic­u­lat­ed resentment.

The fact that there was no pro­gram in the burn­ing of Paris sub­urbs tells us that we inhab­it a uni­verse in which, though it cel­e­brates itself as a soci­ety of choice, the only option avail­able to the enforced demo­c­ra­t­ic con­sen­sus is the explo­sion of (self-)destructive violence.

Recall here Lacan’s chal­lenge to the protest­ing stu­dents in ​‘68: ​“As rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, you are hys­ter­ics who demand a new mas­ter. You will get one.”

And we did get one – in the guise of the post-mod­ern ​“per­mis­sive” mas­ter whose dom­i­na­tion is all the stronger for being less visible.

While many undoubt­ed­ly pos­i­tive changes accom­pa­nied this pas­sage – such as new free­doms and access to posi­tions of pow­er for women – one should nonethe­less raise hard ques­tions: Was this pas­sage from one ​“spir­it of cap­i­tal­ism” to anoth­er real­ly all that hap­pened in ​‘68? Was all the drunk­en enthu­si­asm of free­dom just a means to replac­ing one form of dom­i­na­tion with another?

Things are not so sim­ple. While ​‘68 was glo­ri­ous­ly appro­pri­at­ed by the dom­i­nant cul­ture as an explo­sion of sex­u­al free­dom and anti-hier­ar­chic cre­ativ­i­ty, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy said in his 2007 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign that his great task is to make France final­ly get over ​‘68.

So, what we have is ​“their” and ​“our” May ​‘68. In today’s ide­o­log­i­cal mem­o­ry, ​“our” basic idea of the May demon­stra­tions – the link between stu­dents’ protests and work­ers’ strikes – is forgotten.

If we look at our predica­ment with the eyes of ​‘68, we should remem­ber that, at its core, ​‘68 was a rejec­tion of the lib­er­al-cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, a ​“NO” to the total­i­ty of it.

It is easy to make fun of polit­i­cal econ­o­mist Fran­cis Fukuyama’s notion of the ​“end of his­to­ry,” of his claim that, in lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism, we found the best pos­si­ble social sys­tem. But today, the major­i­ty is Fukuya­maist. Lib­er­al-demo­c­ra­t­ic cap­i­tal­ism is accept­ed as the final­ly found for­mu­la for the best of all pos­si­ble worlds, all that is left to do is ren­der it more just, tol­er­ant, etc.

When Mar­co Cicala, an Ital­ian jour­nal­ist, recent­ly used the word ​“cap­i­tal­ism” in an arti­cle for the Ital­ian dai­ly La Repub­bli­ca, his edi­tor asked him if the use of this term was nec­es­sary and could he not replace it with a syn­onym like ​“econ­o­my”?

If the principle task of the last century was to awaken the rural population of Asia and Africa, the task of the 21st century is to politicize the destructured masses of slum-dwellers.