Media 68

A	ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM Antiauthoritarianism was a flag of the student movement of every country, but it was in Germany that the subject became a really central one, because it was grafted onto the cultural inheritance of the Frankfurt School. Since the 1930s the Institute for Social Research of Frankfurt on Maine had in fact concentrated its interest on authoritarianism. Already 1936 had seen the publishing of the monumental research study entitled Studies on authority and the family, edited by Max Horkheimer and his collaborators; this was followed, in 1950, by another huge research work on the field, published in the United States: The authoritarian personality, in which Adorno collaborated. The criticism of authoritarian society advanced by the student movement refers to the analyses of the Frankfurt scholars: these analyses show how, once the age of the liberal bourgeoisie is over, society tends to transform itself into one that is fully integrated (what Horkheimer will call the “organized world”), that leaves no room either for autonomy of the individual or real political opposition. Developing on this cultural background, and being at the same time a revolt that was also generational, the '68 movement finds one of its underlying themes in the struggle against authoritarianism, and against the institutions that are founded on a principle of authority; from the family to the army, from the school to business. Authoritarian is the family that reproduces roles that are already defined and stigmatizes every type of behaviour that deviates from these roles; authoritarian is the school that transmits a model of social discipline and education to be subservient. Authoritarian by definition are all the repressive institutions: the police, army, magistracy, the Church. The criticism of all established authority, like many of the ideas of the '68 movement, is a mental attitude that contains different, perhaps contradictory, aspects: indisputable demands and aporiae that it would be hard to solve. On the one hand the '68 movement deals the final blow to all the old-fashioned notions that were only waiting to be thrown out, in a healthy process of modernization of behaviour that had already begun before 1968 (with Rock and Roll, with the “wasted youth”, with the rebellious language of music) and which would have continued afterwards (especially with the change of the role of women in society). The '68 movement finally puts the authoritarianism of the patriarchal family in a definite crisis and with it the social figures in which it was still expressed: the soldier, the judge, the policeman, who are in fact amply mocked and derided (and in fact forced to redefine themselves). But at the same time, the antiauthoritarian revolt tends to trigger off an endless trend, a sort of bad process that is never-ending. Where do we find the frontier between sensible authority (if there is such a thing) and reprehensible authoritarianism? The more antiauthoritarian criticism is driven forward and radicalized, the more difficult it becomes to determine a moment of social organization that is not subjected to this accusation. Even someone who wishes to declare an assembly open or closed, form a presidency, teach a lesson, sins against authoritarianism. Authoritarian is handed-down culture and is even a book, being an object in which codified knowledge, that students must passively take in, is condensed. Antiauthoritarianism is, therefore, one of the most emblematic and problematic questions of the '68 movement, which movements will soon leave behind them as they evolve towards more traditional forms of organization. ANTI-PSYCHIATRY Before becoming one of the cultural poles to which the movement of 1968 refers, antipsychiatry was a current of thought that developed during the 1960s through criticism of psychoanalysis and official psychiatry. Its more or less remote cultural background is found in the rediscovery of currents and authors that academic psychiatry had allowed to be forgotten: first of all, the existential and phenomenological analysis of Minkowski and Binswanger, which had developed starting from some of the most important philosophical experiences of the twentieth century: the phenomenology of Husserl, the existentialism of Jaspers, the analytics of Existence outlined by Martin Heideggeer in his first philosophical masterpiece, Being and time. As a movement of ideas, antipsychiatry develops from the beginning like an archipelago that is widespread at international level, and very differentiated within itself. In Great Britain, its most famous exponents are Ronald Laing (the author of The divided I) and David Cooper (to whom we owe another book that was very successful, Death of the family); in the United States Szasz; while in Italy the criticism of the psychiatric institutions finds its most important spokesperson in Franco Basaglia, who edited a book that came out in 1968 with enormous success, L'istituzione negata – Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico (The institution denied – Report from a psychiatric hospital). . The various antipsychiatric tendencies contest first of all the current forms of treatment of the mentally ill, to arrive at a radical criticism of the concept of mental illness. In spite of what has been written many times over by its numerous denigrators, antipsychiatry does not deny the existence of mental illness, or better it does not deny there are individual situations of unease and psychological sufferance, nor that there are types of behaviour that, measured according to the usual metre, appear completely irrational, incomprehensible and therefore “crazy”. What completely changes, however, is the position that the psychiatric operator takes with regard to this unease. To begin with, antipsychiatry refuses compulsive therapies and above all the segregation of a mental hospital, that has no therapeutic value but only the function of excluding, from society's sight, those elements in which a disease that has much more extensive roots is catalyzed, or erupts. But above all, in the perspective of antipsychiatry, mental disease, rather than being segregated, must be interpreted: it is a way in which the individual responds to conditionings or contradictory expectations that his environment of social relations, starting obviously with the family, raises in his regard. The deviant is the weak link on which the tensions deriving from pathogenic situations are unloaded. It is not the suffering individual who is ill, but the context that generates his “illness”. In Italy, starting from this trend, there was an extraordinary cultural and political impact from the experiment started by Franco Basaglia in the psychiatric hospital of Gorizia: doors open, demolition of gratings and nets, abandonment of the physical constriction of the ill, community administration of the institution. Starting from this experience, the denouncement of the useless sadism of the mental hospital will be strengthened, through a long battle that will in the end lead, in Italy, as elsewhere, to the closure of mental hospitals and the difficult construction of new structures of assistance and care for mental disease. Basaglia's was an experience that immediately got involved in a relationship, not without its misunderstandings and contradictions, with the students' movement. Contradictions that, after all, the actual antipsychiatric approach had itself, and of which it was well aware: “Our situation – wrote the authors in the second edition of the Institution denied – has to be a contradictory one: the institution is completely denied and managed, illness is placed between brackets and cared for, the therapeutic act is refused and implemented”. ASSEMBLY Consistent with the refusal, that was more or less radical depending on the moments and circumstances, of forms and instruments of delegated democracy, the student movements made of the Assembly the main seat of every decision and, at the same time, the preferred place for the formation of consensus. The Assembly was never conceived as an instrument of government, because it did in fact mean to cancel the gap between governors and governed, but as the seat of a collective statement inserted in the tumultuous flow of the protest deadlines. Precarious majorities and minorities were formed and disbanded in response to the series of events and the even emotional reaction of the participants. Nonetheless, the movement claims “all the power” for the assembly which becomes permanent and can give itself, at most, organs of pure direction of the debate. In fact, what governs the procedure and the results of assembly meetings that would be otherwise ungovernable, are often agreements defined in other occasions among the different currents of the movement or among its exponents of greatest prestige, without, moreover, any institutional representation, and always exposed to the risk of refusal and failure. Although subject to every sort of abuse and prohibitive for the more timid and uncertain positions, the Assembly did however represent a public sphere that was independent of every institutional arrangement, a context of widespread and intense participation, a highly communicative instrument. With respect to the exterior, to the counter-parties of the movement, to the institutional organs and the consolidated hierarchies, the Assembly was a real counter-power in action, a threatening presence that interrupted the space and time of the established order in the universities, the schools, the factories and the neighbourhoods. It was not by chance that the movement furiously opposed its every regulation, it never accepted forms for it that were legally granted and defined. The spaces and times conquered for the Assembly were considered non-negotiable war booty. This space and this time will then be populated by improvised actors, by exhibitions of every kind and taste, by a surreal sceneggiata and an unending and complacent political oratorio, as far as the parody of classic parliamentary astuteness. The Assembly will be, finally, a great forge of obsessive stereotypes, but also, often, of dazzling linguistic inventions.	ANTI-IMPERIALISM The movements of 1968 were decidedly internationalistic and anti-imperialistic, but in a way that did not fully coincide with the traditional “proletarian internationalism” of the world communist movement and this not just because it refused to recognize the Soviet Union's leadership of the planetary emancipation. There is no doubt that the internationalism of 1968 was essentially addressed against the United States, their allies and their interests in the multinational companies, and that it willingly took its reference from the work of Lenin and his famous Imperialism, supreme phase of capitalism. However the young generations of the end of the '60s had developed a political-anthropological interest for the cultures of “others”, considered not just as an oppressed mass to be liberated, but also as bearers of values and experiences necessary for undermining the middle-class rules of the developed West. This diversity sometimes assumed the guise, as in the case of China or Cuba, of an “authentic” communism as opposed to the bureaucratized, cynic and authoritarian version of the USSR and of the Warsaw pact countries; other times that of the eastern or communist tradition philosophies left at the margins of capitalistic modernization. In any case cultures of “others”, of which it was asked to indicate something different to, something better than, the myths, rites and goods of the opulent society. This formulation would later lead to the development of a line that was critical towards progressive ideology and the myths of development, partly inherited by the green movements of the last twenty years. For example, of Vietnam, it was not just the defence without compromise of the principle of self-determination and the inclination towards socialism that fascinated, but also that home-made and peasant talent of war, those traps of liane and thorns, that poor and ingenious creativity and above all that dense, very solid, network of relations and community solidarity that surrounded on all sides and seduced not only the men, but the very culture of the occupation. The resistance of this cultural and political “other” offered a formidable principle of legitimization and a hope of success for the resistance of every “other” persecuted person in the citadels of the developed world. It was for this reason too that Vietnam was at the centre of the internationalism of 1968. Never as in that situation, had a war that was waged and a solidarity movement, that was world-wide, acted as one and with such a factual result. The protest movements considered themselves, and rightly so, as a “continuation of the Vietnamese war with other means”. And the American intervention in Indochina became the prototype of every policy of power and suppression. The horrors of the Vietnamese war, the ferocious regimes kept alive in Latin America, questioned the political quality of the western post-war democracies and their actual civil tradition. For the young generations of the developed world, the violence unleashed against the peoples of the Third World was the tangible proof of just how limited and qualified was the freedom that was promised to them, how apparent was the plurality of the choices allowed and how hypocritical was the good conscience of the post-war period. In its most extreme versions, the “Third-World-ism” of the 1960s and '70s placed its trust exclusively in the freedom struggles of the peoples of the Third World to defeat the injustices inherent in the capitalistic model of development, believing the working class of the developed world to be “integrated” in the “system” and, consequently, the beneficiary, even if in the lowest degree, of the exploitation of the poor countries by the rich countries. Therefore, insensitive to the moral scandal implicit in the means used for safeguarding the interests of the West in the rest of the world. According to this line of interpretation, it was in the exploited countries of the Third World that had nothing to loose, from Vietnam to Latin America, where arms were taken up, it was there that the “high points” of the class struggle were located. The young revolutionaries of the metropolises had the task of working beside the aggressors, of acting behind the lines together with the “Third World interior”, like the black Americans and the others excluded from the affluent society. In 1968 the memory of the season of independence and the trauma of the war of Algeria was still vivid. The colonial war was still going on in the Portuguese possessions in Africa. The “two, three, hundred Vietnams” forecasted by Guevara, seemed an incontrovertible reality. The economic and geo-political interests of the West put up a resistance with no holds barred to the emancipation movements in the post-colonial world. The sad involution that the nationalisms of the Third World would have sustained, due also to this resistance, was still in the shade. And it did not undermine the hope that from the revolution of the poor countries a prospect of general freedom could have arisen. The disappointment was enormous, so much so as to tarnish even the unquestionable reasons for that season of struggles. ANTI-STATISM That of 1968 was basically an antistatist movement. There is no request in it for more State and less private. The nationalization of means of production and programmed economy had long lost any appeal. If anything research was addressed towards other forms of socialization and collective administration. The proportions and balances between public and private that occupied the debate between institutional political forces and with which the reformism of the 1960s tested its strength, fell far outside the horizon of the movements. Public and private powers appeared as complementary and united elements of the one “system”, not in the least undermined by internal contradictions, and therefore every political strategem aimed at acting on these contradictions appeared superfluous. The State appeared to the eyes of the movements, in the East as much as in the West, in Europe as in the USA, essentially as a repressive mechanism, as a guarantor of the state of things existing: police and magistracy, academic powers and bureaucratic powers, censorship and control. As the bearer of an old ideology, oppressive and steeped in violence. The school that was attacked by the protest was the public school, in its public function of factory of State consent and cultural standardization. Very few longed for the replacement of the middle class state (the famous “committee of business of the middle class”) with a socialist state. In this, the protest movements both on this side and the other of the iron curtain, in spite of suspicions and misunderstandings, had a strong common element and referred to the same ius resistentiae against a sclerotic and irremovable hierarchy. In the East, the State then rose with all its discredited rhetoric as the sole obstacle to the exercise of essential individual liberties and collective rights, masked behind a mound of lies. The antistatism of the 1968 movements that was very active also on the symbolic level, together with the sad spectacle offered by real socialism, will contribute to shaking in the public opinion of the western left their faith in the superior rationality of the State. The movements of 1968 had basically asked the State to move aside, to withdraw from areas destined for self-management, to resign in the person of this or that rector, of this or that police commissioner, of this or that minister, to free the arrested, to repeal laws. Practically no request in the positive sense, except for some sporadic claim of redistribution of resources. Liberties were more pressing than guarantees, “safety” and “safeguarding” did not form part of the list of needs most felt, and, if anything, the risks of oppressing them were felt. The French May then produced, for a few days, one of the greatest performances of the “extinction” of the State ever remembered. The '68 movements certainly had their own perception of counter-power, but this never imitated in a minor form the structures of state power, as, on the contrary, parties and trade unions, and even utopian movements of the past had done.
B
C	CULTURAL INDUSTRY In the critical analysis of the society that develops from the student movements, a concept that occupies a key-role is that of “cultural industry”. In the society of late capitalism, in fact, social conflict and antagonism have calmed down and been rendered inoffensive by the presence of a pervasive apparatus of manipulation of consciences, which takes advantage of all the modern means of mass communication. The political battle against manipulation of information by the media in the service of the authorities is an aspect that united the student movements of various countries. The conflict between the movement and the media reaches its climax in the mobilization of the German students against the newspaper of the editor Springer, but in Italy too significant episodes are registered in this area: for example the protest of the Milanese students which goes as far as an attempt to stop the publication of Corriere della sera. The concept of cultural industry, of which extensive use was made in 1968, had already been elaborated many years before. The social criticism of cultural industry can be found, in fact, for the first time in a systematic manner in a book published in 1947, the Dialectics of enlightenment, which can perhaps be considered the masterpiece of the two teachers of the School of Frankfurt, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. In dedicating a chapter of their philosophical work to cultural industry, the authors insist on the necessity of using just this concept, while rejecting that more common and widespread of “mass culture”. On the contrary to what occurs in the concept of mass culture, in fact, in that of cultural industry it is clear that what is spoken about is not at all a spontaneous phenomenon. Rather the opposite is true: that which in the late capitalist society appears as mass culture is in reality the planned product of an impressive industrial apparatus which, with the instruments available to it (radio, television, popular and information newspapers, consumer cinema, music, various forms of entertainment) sustains and spreads in an all the more effective as much as more implicit way the models of life and consumption that best harmonize with the current arrangement of powers. In all its forms, therefore, the cultural industry is ideology or, to be more precise, apology of the state of existing things; but on the contrary to traditional ideologies, it is ideology in the form of goods. In a society characterized by the quantitative growth of free time, the subjects fill this empty time by acquiring the shining goods that the cultural industry offers them. More than communicating specific ideological contents, the products of the cultural industry however transmit a message that, even when implicit, is very precise: we live in the best of worlds possible, and the most rational thing that we can do is not to ask ourselves too many questions and to try to adapt ourselves to it. CRITICISM OF THE FAMILY (see F) CRITICISM OF THE PROFESSIONS (see P) FORMS OF COMMUNICATION Cyclostiles, wall newspapers, graffiti, posters. These were the main instruments to which the 1968 movements entrusted their possibilities of growing and, above all, of influencing the surrounding social and political area. Especially by addressing the other antagonists, “proletarians” and proletarianized”. A cyclostile, now a thing of the past almost everywhere, was a poor but quite effective instrument: there was a matrix on which the text was printed with a typewriter (and on which elementary outline drawings were inscribed with a stylus). Fixed on the printing roll, the matrix was able to produce thousands of copies on standard size paper, ready for hand distribution. As regards lay-out and graphics, these were almost always rather Spartan or simple: it was taken for granted, in these cases, that the content was more important than the form and the language used was often full of rhetoric, exclamation points and emphasis. Long nights were spent feeding the machine which, with its rhythmic noise takes a sheet, passes it, unloads it on the other side, becomes music. The flyers, straight from the press, departed immediately for their destinations: material for instant consumption, for urgent mobilization, for widespread counter-information, that would contrast that of the communication means “of the regime”. The wall newspapers had a different function. They took even their name (dazebao) from the Chinese experience of a collective work: a wall poster or a series of texts attached to the same wall (of a road or a school). The dazebao differs from the classic poster in the sense that quite often it is born from below and contains elements of criticism towards the summit and of denouncement of specific situations. It could be a protest of a silent base with regard to authority, but also of the leaders of the movement. It was the way to take the floor in public of those who usually were not allowed to do so. By definition and practice, the dazebao is a work in the making and is interactive. It often excites replies, on the same wall and on the same pieces of paper; it is the continuation of the assembly with other means, the coagulation in writings of spontaneous discussion. Its occasional character means, unfortunately, that there are few testimonies of the dazebao of 1968, even less than of the flyers. The graffiti had on the other hand a role of communication and expression directed above all towards the exterior, towards the public at large. They are spontaneous writings and drawings that the more or less organized movements and groups leave on the exposed surfaces of public buildings. The phenomenon appeared in all its impressiveness, including visual impressiveness, during the days of May in Paris where the students, especially those of the École des Beaux Arts, produced a huge number of wall writings that practically invaded the entire Latin Quarter and some thousands of posters with texts and images, carried out with the technique of silkscreen printing. For the alternative political movements it was essential to have a way of occupying an exposed public space: a monument, the internal and external walls of a university or a factory, the actual palaces of power. The scope was two-fold: on the one hand it was a way of getting one's own point of view and one's own news (counter-information) to the public, on the other it was important to also signal visually one's physical presence on the territory. In the subsequent years, among the possible techniques, one will take over due to its easiness and rapidity: the can of spray paint. It is a form of communication from below that has been made their own by the young and the alternative groups of the whole world and which has given rise to new graphic ideas that have become the common patrimony of everyone, even of advertising. At the same time, it has generated a long and infinite technological guerrilla warfare between the owners of surfaces, who wish them free and “clean” and the anonymous spontaneous authors of urban graffiti.	THE COMMUNE AND THE COMMUNES The model of the Commune is amongst the most widespread sources of inspiration of the movements at the end of the 1960s: with different accents and arrangements in almost all the countries that were engulfed by the wave of 1968. It comes onto the scene in a double capacity. On the one hand as the model of fighting self-government and direct democracy that is so much in contrast both to the liberal tradition of parliamentarism and to the power of state bureaucracy and of the specific party of “real socialism”, following the more or less idealized historical model of the Commune of Paris of 1871. It is in this capacity that the password of the Commune resounds from the Shanghai of the Cultural Revolution to Paris of the joli mai, and in a general sense inspires the movement of the Chinese communes as an answer, decentralized and governed from below, at least in theory, to the centralistic and authoritarian model of Soviet inspiration. Mao himself will speak of the “Commune of Paris of the 1960s”. The trend of anarchic tradition, that spreads throughout the movements of 1968, also contributes to the success of the ideas of Commune as an overall ideal form of social organization. On the other hand, above all for the young people of the West on both sides of the Atlantic, the communes assume the meaning of a form of socialization and organization of collective daily life, in contrast to the middle-class family and the productive discipline of capitalism, with all the competitiveness that characterizes it. In the thousands of communes that sprung up in different countries from the second half of the 1960s to the first years of the '70s, the experience of the American hippy communes and of other groups, even of a religious nature, of alternative circles linked by artistic and cultural interests, is joined to that of the political collectives, that arose from the most diverse situations of protest. In the United States, above all in California and New England, and in Northern Europe, above all in Germany and the Netherlands, vacant houses, sometimes whole neighbourhoods, are occupied, abandoned pieces of land are colonized by colourful communities. Thousands of young people choose to live their personal lives in communities which are more or less structured, more or less ideologized. The commune thus becomes the space, par excellence, in which to develop more egalitarian social relationships and a project of personal life that is richer in meaning and relations, removed from the norms, conventions, hierarchies and antagonisms of the bourgeois society. On the contrary to the family, which is considered the “transmission belt” of these norms, the commune would offer the possibility of “authentic” and transparent relations and affections, because freely chosen and revocable at any time. This is joined, moreover, to the utopian idea that wishes to show, here and now, the concrete possibility of establishing free and sound relations. In this sense the commune appears as an example and embryo of the new society. But it is not just a season of innocent enthusiasms. Often the “Communards” will be well aware of the hazarded and experimental characters of their attempt, which will also be subjected to a bitter critical scrutiny and object of endless discussions. This will lead, around the middle of the 1970s, to the burnout of the phenomenon, at least as a widespread initiative and one linked to a political project. CRITICISM OF WORK (see W) CRITICISM OF REAL SOCIALISM (see S)
D	DIRECT DEMOCRACY The most important and generalized characteristic of 1968 was the passage of the political dimension from its institutional and historically established seats to a plurality, in constant growth, of social subjects and collective realities, marked by an overall politicization of the areas of existence. A process of this type could not but develop on the basis of a general direct participation in the decisions and initiatives of the movement, in its moments of discussion and elaboration. Every idea of delegation and representation was, as a result, overthrown by it. Delegates and representatives, whether they were members of national parliaments, of student parliaments, or of trade union bodies, were considered, more or less bitterly, hostile counter parties, a separate body, agents of a general mechanism of dispossession of the subjects. The classic Marxist criticism of formal democracy was generally received as a basic theoretical instrument for “unmasking” the deceptions of representation. Delegated democracy, from the schools, to the universities, to the general idea of a new political organization of society, is countered by the idea of a “direct democracy” which, moreover, had the task of radically distancing itself from the statist and bureaucratic model of the regimes of the East. Each authorization is delivery of one's own political will into others' and treacherous hands. Every mandate that cannot be revoked is a sacrifice to authoritarianism and negation of popular sovereign power. If we add then that this authorization is manipulated , at the time of voting, by the force of the media and by the strong powers that control them, it is clear that both the state, and the parties or trade unions that model themselves on a modern state, in fact deny the basic sovereignty from which they claim to draw their legitimacy. Against all this the movement tries to copy the forms of organization that the revolutionary movements give themselves in their initial phase, or in the more tumultuous and shared moments of the conflict: the Soviet of 1917, the workers' councils of the German revolution of 1919, the fighting organizations of the red guards, the anarchical formations in the war of Spain. Theoretical enlightenment is sought in the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch or Pannekoek. But the idea of direct democracy remains in any case much more soundly tied to the practical experience of the struggles, in the universities first and in the factories afterwards, and of the systems of relation and communication that traverse them, than to a fully formulated theoretical-political model. The stabilization of defined political forms does not form part of the horizon of the movement, at least for most of 1968.	DIALECTICS OF LIBERATION Dialectics of Liberation is the title of an extraordinary and very crowded meeting that was held in London from 15th to 30th July 1967. Its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it managed to be a sort of meeting point between the many critical, differentiated and decidedly plural cultures, which were however all, in this particular end of the 1960s, wondering precisely about liberation. Herbert Marcuse, with his criticism of one-dimensional society and repressive tolerance, was at it, as were Paul Sweezy, the theorist of monopolistic capital, the leader of Black Power, Stokely Carmichael, the Masters of antipsychiatry from London, Ronald Laing and David Cooper, who had shown the pathogenic nature of current social and family relations. And again the poet Allen Ginsberg, the scientist and anthropologist, Gregorty Bateson, the dialectics philosopher Lucien Goldmann. A very particular and ambitious attempt thus developed to bring together many protest cultures that, even while speaking in different languages, converge at least in denouncing “liberal” capitalism as an oppressive and totalitarian system (in its true and hidden reality); and they also came together in their criticism of the no less authoritarian Soviet system. “All men are in chains” – stated the programmatic poster of the convention. Even if the forms of slavery in which they are ensnared are diverse: these are not just explicit oppression, poverty and hunger; slavery is also what the inhabitants of the rich West experience, alienated as they are in the race to possess, for useless goods, for social prestige and power. The plurality of the forms of oppression, which however support one another and form a “system” can only be countered by the powerful convergence of a similarly articulated plurality of “dialectics of liberation”. What in fact characterizes the cultures that nourish the 1968 movement is precisely a new awareness of this point: there will be no political liberation, no collective liberation, even if individuals will not be able to free themselves from all forms of subjection, of non-freedom, all the more insidious the more they have been entered by the individuals themselves.
E	EGALITARIANISM The theme of equality exploded in the students' movement, from one end of the planet to the other, in an original form that goes well beyond a simple egalitarian quantitative goal. It had attacked an essential fact of the modern world, the hierarchy of roles. This hierarchy, with the consequent rigid division of work, had been contested in the school, in the family and in every social relationship. The hierarchy was questioned explicitly on the basis of the equal rights of the human person, over and above all the conditionings of forced relations between persons and between classes. It was itself considered the very substance of inequality, but also the point of arrival of a process that determines it: a process that reproduces differences and subordinations in work, school, civil life. The movements therefore attacked inequality not just in its final effects, but also in its particular roots. Egalitarianism that appeared as an acknowledgement of common social needs, already in itself contained those characteristics that pass over any directly negotiable end. It was an ideal thrust that was able to promote the formation of a collective subject and therefore pertaining to the constitution of its identity. In this anti-hierarchical context, that does not spare the social and political roles defined by the system of delegation and representation in the democratic-parliamentary tradition of the West, the egalitarian drive had a disruptive character even in those societies that claimed to be organized according to egalitarian principles. In China, and more marginally in some countries of Eastern Europe, the egalitarian movement revolted, even violently so, against those powers (of state, of party) that denied, when stating their prerogatives and guaranteeing their reproduction, that equality to which they referred and from which they made their legitimacy descend. It was to this trend that the “bombarding of the general headquarters” of the cultural revolution of China and the radicalism of the Commune of Shanghai belonged. How much these movements were influenced by the political struggle between ruling groups does not change much in the substance of the drive that animated them: the common interest of subjects involved in a fight against the authority of dominating powers that had become independent from the concrete reality of the social context, establishing themselves in separate bodies. It would not be possible to explain otherwise the attraction exercised by the Red Guard, product of a history and a custom that were so different, on the young protesters of the West. For the latter, except for some components that were more or less extensive and more or less lasting, the radical egalitarian demand in fact represented more an instrument of protest against the hierarchies than a principle of good government and discipline of the diversities. The egalitarian movement in the factories (populated with new subjects foreign to the historical traditions of the workers' movement) was also closely linked to an idea of protest and permanent unrest. This was true especially in Italy where it involved both the relation between capital and work and relations between workers and the area of trade union democracy. The productive organization was refused functional divisions, an independent subjectivity was established against business consistencies (salary and health as “independent variables”), salary inequalities and factory hierarchies were attacked, the highest level of direct democracy in the representation of workers' interests was claimed. Egalitarianism passed during those years from being the ideal arrangement of a future society to a type of protest incarnated in the conflicts of the present.
F	CRITICISM OF THE FAMILY It represses, it forms personalities suited to authoritarian orders, it educates to hypocrisy, it transmits fears: the middle class family is accused by the corrosive criticism of the students. Their analysis, born from the discussion of the committees that are formed in the universities, and encouraged on the one hand by the sociological analyses of the School of Frankfurt (Horkheimer, Adorno, the great collective work of 1936 which was entitled Studies on authority and the family); and on the other hand by the elaborations of the antipsychiatrists Cooper, Laing, Esterson, who, from the beginning of the 1960s, work on schizophrenia and delve into the pathological relations that tie family members to one another (what will make this extraordinary cultural and redeeming experience popular and usable by everyone will be Ken Loach's beautiful film Family life). In the analysis of David Cooper (who in 1971 will publish a very successful book, The death of the family, on this subject), the family is first and foremost, in all societies based on exploitation, an instrument of ideological conditioning; going deeper, the family is a sort of paradigm the key-figures of which, the "father" and the "mother", loved or hated, return to structure the relations in the most diverse types of social institutions: the Church, business, the school, the party, and so on. Thus that of the family is a situation that pre-structures our whole social experience, encapsulating it at the same time in a series of taboos and false certainties that amputate, of the individual, precisely the most profoundly and intensely vital parts: "the death of doubt and the death of the body – writes Cooper – have their origin in the gregarious needs that have developed within the family". The family is therefore in this perspective the original place of alienation: "passive submission to the invasion of others", which in its turn generates in the subjects "paranoiac" reactions in which a form of response to this devastating invasion is developed. Family education basically initiates the individual, through its rituals and apparent certainties, towards a result of social submission to which he sacrifices his spontaneous creative experiences, his potential of free development, of invention, of imagination and of dream. It is also on the basis of reflections such as these that the experiences of anti-authoritarian education are born around the 1968 movements: from the Kinderlaeden of West Berlin to the anti-authoritarian nursery schools of Milan, forms of socialization are sought that do not sacrifice the creative potential of the child, that are not aimed at the creation of good and disciplined subjects. A search that is not in its turn without its contradictions: ideology, psychoanalysis, libertarian opportunities are mixed in the heads of the educators of 1968, who are dealing with a task that is too onerous for a generation that is still involved in the difficult challenge of defining its own identity.	SCHOOL OF FRANKFURT Among the various trends of critical thinking that nourished the movement of the students of 1968, that from which the movement drew some of its most characterizing ideas was undoubtedly the so-called Frankfurt School. In 1968 the masters of the Frankfurt School of thought (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) were still alive and active; Adorno would die the following year, in August 1969. Although in 1968 these great scholars assumed very different positions (on the one extreme the cautious conservatism of Horkheimer, on the other the almost youthful revolutionism of Marcuse) the road that they had followed together was long and meaningful. The Institute for Social Research had by now in 1968 a long history behind it. Inaugurated in Frankfurt in 1924, the Institute was born (thanks to the sponsor patron Feliz Weil) as a centre for research on Marxism and on the workers movement, and it had developed in particular its analyses of social theory starting from 1930 when Horkheimer had taken over its direction. Three years later Hitler took power in Germany. For the Institute this was the beginning of a long period of exile, which would bring Horkheimer and his collaborators first to Paris and subsequently to the United States where, at the end of the 1930s, the Institiute found hospitality at the Colombia University of New York. It was precisely this experience of totalitarianism that was the decisive question on which the philosophical-sociological research prepared by the School of Frankfurt concentrated between the 1930s and 1950s. The profound roots of authoritarianism and of submission to totalitarian dominion were investigated in a huge collective work published in 1936. The Studies on authority and the family saw the collaboration of among others Marcuse, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (who subsequently would have separated from the others because of his Freudian “revisionism”) and the scholar of oriental despotism Karl August Wittfogel. In 1942 another scholar linked to the Institute, Frank Neumann, published one of the most profound analyses of Nazi Germany, which he called Behemoth, from the name of a mythical monster mentioned in the Bible and taken by Hobbes as a symbol of disorder and chaos. In 1950, the monumental research study on Authoritarian personality was published in New York. This was the fruit of the collaboration between a philosopher like Adorno and United States scholars of much more empirical formation. In it the psychological roots of the type of personalities inclined to prejudice, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism were investigated with above all Freudian instruments. The philosophical centre of all this work of research is found expressed, in all its radicalism, in the book, written by Adorno and Horkheimer during their American exile, entitled Dialectics of enlightenment. This does in fact study the process by which the enlightened rationalism of the West was able to generate in its bosom the monstrous barbarism of Nazism. During the post-war period, while Marcuse remained in the United States, becoming a privileged interlocutor of the youth movement, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to the Old Continent. During the 1960s the former will retire to the quiet of Montagnola, in Switzerland, while Adorno, in the Institute of Frankfurt, will clash with the student protest, in a conflict that will also have its unpleasant episodes. Marcuse, on the other hand, will criticize his former companions, in the name of their old common ideals. Among the paradoxes of 1968 is also that by which the students of the movement, who above all in Germany had been formed on the texts of Adorno and Horkheimer, will find themselves clashing with precisely the masters from whom they had learnt most.
G	GUERRILLA WARFARE The guerrilla insurrections of the Third World, following closely on the season of independence, were for the most radical public opinion a sort of modern incarnation of the bellum iustum. It was the violent rebellion of the weakest against the strongest, but no longer as simple desperation and protest, but rather as identity and project, capable of shaking incalculably greater powers. It does not defeat the enemy militarily, on the open field, in the fight between armies, but attacks the enemy from every side, undermines his certainties, wears down his prestige and image, makes partial and sudden tensions explode striking him on the field of political identity and compatibility. The first theorization of this violence is the foco guerrigliero of the Cubans, which intends in fact to act on the imbalance between military power and political weakness. In the guerrilla experience, armed violence and politics, proselytism and fighting action appear indissolubly entwined in the very subjectivity of the guerrilla. The latter appears, with a good dose of ideation, a more complete and conscious person than the soldier who follows orders and carries out, so to say, a specialized function. In the image of the guerrilla, devotion to the cause is accompanied by a completely personal sense of justice and by a subjective participation in a general process of transformation of society. All this contributes to constructing that romantic aura that surrounds the figure of the guerrilla and which strongly influenced the young generations at the end of the 1960s. The reference to the partisans of the anti-fascist resistance in the Second World War was still very strong, even if, on the contrary to these, the post-war guerrillas seemed to have to do everything alone, count on their own efforts, walk on their own two feet (even if in the bipolar world inherited from Yalta it was not quite like that). In the guerrilla movements of the Third World the conditionings and geopolitical play of the super-powers weighed heavily and were rendered very visible in the political and state arrangements and in the social tragedies that derived from many of those experiences of struggle. Guerrilla warfare appeared therefore a violent form of protest within everyone's reach, that could be administered from below, egalitarian, not separated from the social tissue of reference, able to constantly strike immensely stronger repressive powers and, for this reason, the protest movements in the Western countries adopted them and believed that they were adopting their model. Street guerrilla warfare, urban guerrilla warfare, that was how the conflicts in the squares between demonstrators and police forces were usually defined . But it was not just a question of form of protest. Segments of movements (some of which will give life to the armed groups of the 1970s, essentially the Raf in Federal Germany) wished to be considered, in a society that they believed was entirely and relentlessly integrated into the capitalist system, as guerrilla patrols of the liberation struggle of the Third World destined to act in the metropolises, behind enemy lines.
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