Media 68

R	SEXUAL REVOLUTION The novelty of the student movement in the developed West was not that of proposing to practice freedom of sex. Sexual liberation was in the West a long drawn-out process that went on for at least the whole of our century, linked to other main tendencies: industrialization, female work, urbanization, the disappearance of the extended family. All phenomena that underwent a strong acceleration in the post-war period. These basic structural tendencies were replaced by a new custom that greatly precedes the 1968 movement: a freer attitude towards sexuality is theorized and practised by French existentialism, to be joined later by British anti-psychiatry (the book Reason and violence by Laing and Cooper is dedicated to Sartre), not to mention the mass diffusion of new models, from transgressive London of the early '60s to the United States: it was not by chance that Elvis Presley was called "Elvis the Pelvis" because of his way of singing. Sexual liberation was therefore a much vaster and lengthier process that the movement of 1968. What characterized the movements of 1968 was the fact of considering sexual freedom as a "political gesture". The theoretical basis was a double one. On the one hand the analyses and studies of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s and '30s and his attempt to introduce a sexual policy for young people (Sexpol) in the German Communist movement. On the other the antiauthoritarian trend of the Frankfurt School that culminated in Eros and civilization of Herbert Marcuse, which linked sexual repression with the formation of that authoritarian, gregarious and dogmatic personality that constitutes the general basis of fascisms and of every violent form of dominion. For the 1968 movements in the West, sexuality was a decisive side of the new political liberty to be conquered and constructed. Otherwise a term such as "struggle for sexual freedom" would be impossible to understand. It was for this reason also that the full and free possession of this dimension had to be extended to all subjects under the guardianship of institutions, such as children (the experience of the antiauthoritarian kindergartens, above all in Germany) or the mentally ill (the fight against mental hospitals and their regulations). Free sexuality thus becomes a decisive component of the "non-alienated" subject, of the "new man", not foreseen by majority tradition of the workers movement or abandoned along the way. It was a crucial element of the new ideology of the movement, a "public" ground on which to break and oppose the dominant taboos and norms. It was necessary to reveal the "political" meaning of the most intense and private human relations, make them the centre, to be exhibited and demonstrated even with provocative and transgressive intent, of their own unshakeable alterity to society and the "system". "Naturalness", opposed to the social hypocrisies and dehumanizing devices of the productive society, half "full" of communication between people, instrument of collective identity: this was the sexual conscience, completely public, of the movements of 1968. Of all this the mass media of the time grasped only the colourful aspect and completely upset the sense of phenomenon, deducing from the centrality of sexual freedom the pretext type aspect of political will that was being established among the young people. It was the exact opposite to what was actually happening.	REPRESSION On the contrary to what we often seem to hear, the 1968 movement was not received with any delicacy. Rather the protests often led to responses that were out of all proportion. It was only the mass character of the protests and the fact that for the first time different and heterogeneous social classes took part in them, as against those, workers and farm-workers who had animated the violent post-war street protests, that put some limit on the use of repressive methods. The years of protest thus saw an embittering of the legislation regarding public order and, if there was some softening, this was addressed only to the regulations regarding morals, as well as causing a slight extension of political rights. The embittering of the legislation on public order is a tendency that, having grown excessively in the 1970s, above all in Germany and Italy, never suffered a decisive inversion, not even after the decline of the violent social insurrections. But the movements of 1968 also involved countries governed by dictatorial regimes, such as Spain and Greece, authoritarian regimes, like Mexico, Brazil and Poland. Here the repression was hard and bloody: massacres, mass arrests, heavy prison sentences, torture, persecutions that went on for years, restriction of political and civil rights, militarization of public life. But even in the countries with democratic governments the politics of repression did not stop before anything. In the United States a real war of annihilation was waged against the black ghettos in revolt and the Black Panther Party, but the repression against the students and the youth movement was also ferocious: from the savage beatings of Chicago to the use of firearms (the deaths of Kent at the beginning of the '70s). All over Europe the reaction against the student demonstrations and the occupation of the universities was very hard: arrests, trials, heavy sentences, beatings, intimidation, thousands of wounded, quite a number of dead. There was massive use of infiltration and provocation, to channel towards the movements the effect of order and hate of the social body (the "strategy of tension" in Italy), Fascist and Neo-Fascist formations were used and indirectly favoured (in France, Italy, Germany and Great Britain) to frighten the student movements or drag them into a spiral of band war. The media, except for some more or less convinced exceptions, attacked and denigrated the movements in every way and in some cases, as in Federal Germany, they tried to create a real atmosphere of lynching around the student protest. Therefore the attention of the institutions was minimal and the acknowledgement of the interlocutor was denied. Everywhere the protesters found themselves before new riot squads, emergency legislation (in 1968 in Germany the notorious Notstandsgesetze are passed), unbending magistracies. However, far from discouraging the movement, the repression greatly contributed to encouraging it, establishing an upwards spiral of repression and protest. The demonstrations "against repression" became an almost daily event to be in their turn repressed. Moreover, the reaction of the state and the behaviour of the police and of the magistracy seemed to confirm the diagnosis of the protesters on the basically violent nature of the "system", and helped to spread it in public opinion. It was only where the repression reached maximum intensity, as in the street massacre of the three cultures in Mexico, with the tanks in the streets in Prague or in Rio de Janeiro, or with the anti-student and anti-Jewish pogrom of Warsaw, did it manage to sweep away the movement and or to interrupt, for a long time, its continuity.
S	ANTI-STATISM (see A) SELF-MANAGEMENT Self-management was among the movements of the end of the '60s and for the whole of the subsequent decade one of the most popular passwords and, at the same time, a widespread practice in the organization of protest situations, a pressing and generalized request for participation "from below". Every collective moment: study courses and seminars, situations of militant workplaces of artistic and cultural production, nursery schools, in short any type of social space or activity, was to be "self-managed", that is to say, sheltered from all heteronomy and dependency. It had to be the members themselves of the collective who established, through an assembly, its rules and its ways of functioning. This implied a definite contrast to the norms imposed by the dominant political and productive organization, with its established hierarchies, but also a similarly definite refusal of every form of state planning and of delegation to other centralized powers, whether this referred to a party, a stable directive group expressed by the movement or an excessively binding coordination. The Universities and the schools were the first places where the practice of self-management was experimented. It was then extended to situations of workers protesting (occupied factories), popular neighbourhoods and occupation of houses (the neighbourhood committees), to numerous situations in the services sector (health, social assistance, etc.), in various forms and with variable intensity, in the different European countries. But Self-management was also a macro-social model that was decidedly delimited as much towards the impersonal power of the market economy, the "pseudo-objective" constriction of the capitalistic laws, as towards the statist authoritarianism of planning. In this it referred as well as to the tradition of council democracy, to a current of "self-management socialism" that aimed at the direct control of the workers over their own specific productive activities, to the non-nationalized socialization of the means of production, to a production directed by social utility and not by profit. This current generated different variations, from the most radical to the most moderate, from the most complete refusal of capitalist order to the compromise with its compatibility, from the egalitarian communes to the social-democratic politics of co-management. The Yugoslavian experiment lay half-way between these two extremes, as an heretic variation in the socialist field, although the decisional and organizational autonomy of the social and productive situations, advocated in the theory, clashed in reality with powerful limits, social imbalances, employment problems and authoritarian structures. So much so that the Yugoslavian model, considered moderate and arbitrational, was not at all loved by the radical movements in the West; these were much more influenced by the extreme characters of the Chinese communes. In the East, the idea of Self-management, interpreted above all as independence of the productive realities from the inefficient licence of centralized planning, had instead a certain course in the fight against the excessive power of the bureaucratic state within the framework of a system that it was desired to keep socialist. The idea and practice of Self-management, especially as a form of organization of protest situations, as an attempt to make productive activities destined by the owners for liquidation survive by taking them over and self-managing them (it is sufficient to recall the case of the French watch factory Lip in the early 1970s), or as a form of association of citizens involved in the defence of a territory or of a social space, will then survive with ups and downs to our time. We remember the experience of the Buergerinitiativen in Germany, or that of the Social Centres in Italy. CRITICISM OF REAL SOCIALISM 1968 was the year of the "New trend" and the year of the invasion of Prague. The tanks of the Warsaw Pact put an end to an attempt at economic reform and political liberalization that was pacific and desired and carried out by a Communist party that not only chooses to remain fully within the framework of the socialist system, but does not even intend to question the cohesion of the Eastern block. This event leads in the East and in the West to a crucial question: can "real Socialism" be reformed? Did the de-Stalinization of 1956 really open the possibility to transformation or are the stagnant and authoritarian characteristics of the system second nature to something even more basic than the Stalinist deformation and its survival? In the twelve years that elapse from the twentieth congress and the disorders and heartache that followed (first among these the bloody insurrection of Hungary), in the Eastern countries critical currents and innovative trends develop, starting with restless Poland, in the form of intellectual opposition, that is often still of a Marxist stamp; or else there is reformist search for a new model of economic development, or one that is in any case an alternative to that of capitalism (consider the group of Lange, Bobrowski, Kalecki). The break with the Stalinist model and the reflection of his historical rise and fall, join together in critical positions that attack not only the past of real socialism, but even its present, so entering a collision course with its leaders. An extensive left-wing intellectual dissidence develops in the German Democratic Republic, from the philosophers Ernst Bloch and Wolfgang Harich (who in 1956 organize a famous conference entitled "The problem of freedom in the light of scientific Socialism"), to the physicist Robert Havemann, to the singer-songwriter (who will also be the bard of the student protest in Western Germany) Wolf Biermann, and many others. All of them, more or less radically, attack the licence of the bureaucratic structures and the suffocation of social dialectics, turning to the critical instruments of Marxism. In Czechoslovakia, a country left out of the riots of 1956 and in very slow de-Stalinization, everything precipitates in the feverish months of the "Spring", the ambitions of which for pacific democratization, autonomy of the businesses and the progressive introduction of market elements, seem, for the time being, to indicate to the entire Eastern block a moderate path and therefore one that can be travelled. In the field of Western Marxism, the criticism of real Socialism grew basically along two guiding principles: the first, that can be traced to the hypothesis formulated by Deutscher in 1956, assumed by such intellectuals as Jean Paul Sartre and by Communist parties, like the Italian one, justified the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime with the conditions of backwardness and international encirclement of the Soviet revolution. However the situation of abolishment of private ownership of the means of production, would have produced a healthy "socialist structure" that, sooner or later, would have led to a change in the democratic sense of the political superstructure. The second, which was led by Charles Bettelheim and Bernard Chavance, held that the abolition of private ownership of capital would have generated a capitalistic monopoly of state which was entirely coherent with the authoritarian single party regime. This interpretation meant that in the revolutionary process described by Marx the abolition of private ownership of the means of production was a necessary but not sufficient element, its end being the repossession of work and the extinction of the state. Therefore it was hoped that there would be a resumption of the class struggle in the Socialist countries, that would be capable of uniting the new figures of dispossessed. And the cultural Revolution in China seemed to move in this direction. It was this second line of interpretation (very marginally so among the opponents of the East) that had greatest luck in the new left that arose from the movement of 1968. This last did not nourish much sympathy for the Soviet model, accused of "treachery", "revisionism", "authoritarianism", and it had also radically opposed it, especially in its strong anarchical and non Communist components (in France, the situationist International carried out a ruthless criticism against Soviet Socialism and its cultural restoration), but, generally, in spite of the jolts of Prague and Warsaw the 1968 movements did not consider the "Socialist camp" as a fertile ground for the development of protests. It was not from there that significant drives for social transformation were expected. And, even if the wave of protest had attacked both camps, the caesura remained. SOCIALISM WITH A HUMAN FACE "Socialism with a human face" was the fortunate slogan in which the hopes and dreams of the spring of Prague and its popular leader Alexander Dubcek were expressed before the public opinion of the whole world. The slogan certainly could not have been liked by the Soviets because it implied, without any doubt, a judgement and condemnation without appeal of the errors and horrors of the Socialism that existed up to then, which was basically accused of being inhuman. Behind Socialism with a human face there was therefore a sentence on Stalinism and its crimes which had already been announced by Kruschev in his report to the twentieth congress of the Soviet party in 1956 but which had not been translated into a real process of reform and democratization of the countries with a socialist economy. Socialism with a human face had therefore the ambition of resuming the discussion interrupted on the renewal of socialism, the only key that could permit, according to Dubcek, the reopening in Western Europe also of a more advanced front of struggle: a renewed Socialism would have contributed to weakening, in the West, anti-Communist prejudice, and therefore to opening new possibilities for the western Communist parties that were capable of grasping them. The decisive point for the reform of Socialism was defined, by the theoreticians of the new course, in the question of democracy; but with it the spectre of necessary reforms did not come to an end by any means. First of all the abolition of censorship was requested, as was the possibility of openly debating ideas and the right for all citizens to have their own say in the renewal taking place. It was desired that the authoritarian and Stalinist methods that had so profoundly characterized the history of "real Socialism" should be ended. It was not the economic basis that was under discussion, but on this ground too a transformation appeared necessary. This transformation would have to redefine the relations between plan and market, bearing in mind also a model that then appeared very interesting, that of the Yugoslavian self-government. There was also new attention to the necessities of increasing scientific research, and of increasing the role of the technical-scientific intelligentsia, which felt mortified and frustrated in the contribution that it believed it could give to Socialist development. The search for a Socialism with a human face was interrupted by the tracks of the armoured tanks of the Warsaw Pact; it was however the most significant of the attempts at self-reform of East European Socialism. We do not know what fruits it might have brought, if it had not been extirpated even before it had taken root. SEXUAL REVOLUTION (see R) STUDENT POWER Student power is the first (and one of the most shared on the international scene) of the passwords of the university students movement. But it is also a motto that marks a period and that indicates a problem: student power is the password of the first stage of the movement, the stage that concentrates on the protest within the university institution, and it is therefore the slogan that will be surpassed and questioned when, too small for the general revolutionary charge of the movement, the universities and schools will be in fact the basis from which the movement will start to bring its general attack to the system. The demand for student power which, to give two examples, resounds as much in the halls of the Palazzo Campana in Turin as in the building of the London School of Economics, is almost the reverse of that criticism of academic authority which is, almost everywhere, the triggering element of the revolt of the universities. The students refuse to be the passive subjects of a formation on which they have no voice of their own, and the fundamental scope of which is that of reproducing subordination, obedience, and renouncing of their critical capacity. They criticise the university as a mechanism of social integration the function of which is to reproduce mass loyalty with regard to the powers and systems of dominating ideas. Student power is therefore, in the first place, the demand to control and self-govern their own university career, the contents of their studies, the methods of learning, the ways of functioning of the university institution as a whole, the bodies that govern it. In this first sense also, however, student power is not a joint management or reformist claim, but rather aims at the construction of another university: occupations, counter-courses, university criticism, self-governed university. Practices in which knowledge becomes the result of a process of collective self-education aimed at the construction of a critical knowledge that interrupts the integrative function of the university and rather makes it the propulsive base for a general attack on the system. Student power is also, by virtue of the implications of its first and strictest meaning, the assertion of a power of the students not only inside the university, but more generally in society. As David Aldestein, one of the leaders of the protest at the London School of Economics, wrote, students must establish themselves as a power in society capable of influencing the choices of government and public opinion. Student power, therefore, is a password starting from which unstable dynamics are generated: because the university is the integrated ring of a more complex social system, to transform it in the sense of student counter-power is not, in the end, either possible or useful: the students end up understanding themselves as the avant garde of a more general revolutionary process, the password is no longer student power but workers power.	AGAINST THE NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE Objectivity is the category that is radically questioned by the movements through a very strong and original extension of the Marxist criticism of ideology. Nothing is neutral according to the 1968 movement, in the sense that everything is branded with the mark of class that it bears. Therefore there is no such thing as neutral mankind, but exploiters and the exploited, governors and the governed, those who have power and those who don't. Neither language nor scientific knowledge is neutral. Indeed, whoever speaks of neutrality, according to the movements of 1968, is carrying out the most dangerous work of mystification because he is suggesting that there are areas free of conflict, where servant and master do not clash because they have common values, ideas that are alright for everyone, shared knowledge. This alleged communion, says the '68 movement, is the form through which the dominant sphere proclaims as universal their own interests, stating that they are valid for everyone and exempt from class conflict. Thus the 1968 movement becomes unacceptable for the established order not when it criticizes the inefficiency or some authoritarian aspects of the scholastic institution, but precisely when it questions the "universal" nature of knowledge and, by so doing, delegitimizes everything, the culture of the right as much as the historical culture of the left. The university movement will try to demolish the apparent neutrality of culture, especially in the counter-courses, administrated directly by the students in the occupied faculties. The theme of counter-culture becomes a burning issue because the refusal of codified tradition, even Marxist tradition, forces complete revisions, not only in the method of teaching, but also in the bases of culture. In this sense a particularly demanding area is that of the scientific subjects which were always considered objective even by leftist thought, because they are based, scientifically to be precise, on a principle of reality and on objective laws. Here two lines of thinking are schematically outlined. For one part knowledge is neutral while its use is not. Indeed, it is sustained that it is precisely capitalism that mortifies and bends good science to inhuman uses (military and exploitation). In particular in the case of the war in Vietnam, which uses an extensive deployment of science and technology, it was clear to everyone that the so-called "international of scientists" had no progressive function, as had been sustained by the left for years, but on the contrary that it carried out a support role to American aggression. Another line of thought, that was more fruitful, began to wonder about the very foundations of knowledge and of the social machine that produces science. Linked to this also was a revision of the Marxist orthodoxy that had begun to make progress from the early years of the '60s with the reinterpretation of the Manuscripts of '44 and of the Grundrisse. The non-neutrality of science is acknowledged not only in the solutions that it offers to particular problems, but in the process that is at the source, that of the formulation of the problems to be solved. It is here that factors foreign to science enter into play; these factors derive from the powers and from the hierarchies of society as a whole and are therefore marked by class conflict. The element of passage from the needs of capital to the contents of science is determined in the structure of the system of research (funding, possibility of career, circulation of ideas and publications). It is realized during those years that science is increasingly a productive force, not just because it is often used for direct productive ends, but also because a social pressure is exercised on it: in the choice of the sectors to be developed and of the investments to be made, in the formation of the scales of values of research, in the different levels of prestige attributed to one or other branch of science. In the best cases, the occupied science faculties, where often the teachers and researchers themselves participated in the movement, produced meaningful elaborations both with regard to the sociology of science, and of an epistemological type, which left a permanent mark in modern thinking. In particular, it was precisely from those off-the-cuff reflections that dignity and development were restored to a sector traditionally considered minor, such as that of the history of science, which is both the internal history of the subjects, and external history, that regards society and its transformation processes. THE SOCIAL FIGURE OF THE STUDENT "Why study? Why is it that I can study and the majority of people can't? What use is this type of study? To whom is it of any use?". Worded in various ways and languages, these were the questions which, in the United States as in France, in Italy as in Germany, ran deep in the assemblies and in the heads of the individual students in the movement. And these are also the roots of those same protests. The answers that were given were quite different, and they all tried to redefine the role and social figure of the student. In some wordings he was understood as a revolutionary figure in the strict sense, perhaps destined to replace, in that historical period, the workers and in general the proletarians. All the more reason, because the traditional workers' movement would have introduced the values and consistency of the system. Therefore the students were not only the "revolutionary class" but the only one possible. This discussion was intertwined with that on the new processes of proletarianization, in particular of the new technical and intellectual sectors. It is also bifurcated: in the positions that followed the most orthodox Marxist analyses, it was a real transfer into the lines and next to the already existing proletariat, that of the factory. To put it simply, capitalism was changing into its instruments other social sectors also, such as the intellectual ones, which previously had enjoyed a partial, even if perhaps apparent, immunity. The same new productive processes activated in the cultural industry took on again the characteristics of subordination and dispossession which were previously typical of the work of the factory worker: lines of command, hierarchies, alienation, division and division into compartments of work, extraction of added value. However, not everyone thought in these terms, or at least not everyone proposed a close identification between students and new proletarians. For others, the students were if anything a sort of "social category" that was transversal to the classes and not a class unto itself. Theirs appeared yes as an "anticapitalist struggle", but it was never candidated to replace the workers' protest. Nor to be the trigger of the revolution. This analysis intertwined, almost everywhere, with that of the role of the school and of higher education: "place of production of the skilled work force", it was said. Therefore, if not proletarian in the strict sense, the student certainly emerged as a subordinate social figure, and this from a double point of view: both for the place that awaited him in the world of work (junior technician or agent and propagandist of social consensus), and because of his being even now "in misery", given the basic mechanisms on which the university is established. These are based on the capitalistic division of intellectual work, on the fragmentation of knowledge and its sterilization into separate compartments; it is then transmitted only from above, through essentially authoritarian formulae. Present, but completely minority, were the positions that, wishing to be orthodox Marxist, continued to classify the students as middle class, indeed "lower middle class", the possible antagonist role of whom could only be found through a radical change of conscience and a parallel "betrayal" of their own class to "take the side" of the only possible revolutionary subject, the industrial proletarian. In this case the students were seen just as aspirant but frustrated bourgeois, victims of a system that was not able to maintain its promises of social promotion and status. SOCIETY OF SHOW-BUSINESS The fortunate and, over time, also abused saying "society of show-business" is, originally, the title of a book that the most important of the situationist intellectuals, Guy Debord, publishes in November 1967, just on the eve of the explosion of the 1968 movement. Debord had founded, in 1957, the International Situationist and, from 1958 to 1969, published the magazine "Internationale Situationiste". The organization dissolved in 1972, after suffering various scisms. The society of show-business is an extraordinary forerunning book: in fact, at the time when it was published, the transformation of politics and of all social and cultural life into a spectacular phantasmagoria had still not reached the dimensions that it was to know in the Eighties and Nineties. Paraphrasing Marx, who described modern society as an immense collection of goods, Debord wrote in his essay: "Capitalism in its ultimate form appears as an immense accumulation of shows, in which all that was directly experienced has moved away in a performance". But in what sense does show-business become, in Debord's analysis, the central phenomenon that characterizes the society of late-capitalism? "Show-business � writes Debord � cannot be understood as an abuse of the visual world, produced by the techniques of massive diffusion of images [�]. Show-business understood as a whole, is at the same time, the result and project of the world of existing production. It is not a supplement of the real world, its overlapping decoration. It is the heart of the unreality of real society". Show-business, basically, far from being a specific phenomenon, is found rather at the centre of the way of capitalist production. In fact, it is not a question of just a particular product, of that special type of good that is produced by the cultural industry. Show-business, in late-capitalism, involves the entire social production inasmuch as it is increasingly woven into the communication processes: linguistic, imagination, knowledge, cultural skills. Show-business has therefore a double nature: on the one hand it is a specific product that flanks all the others, but at the same time it represents (in the most literal sense of the word) the quintessence of the way of production as a whole. Show-business is, as Debord says, "the general exposition of the rationality of the system". In the show-business good, whose use value is linguistic-cultural, the communicative value of the late-capitalist production as a whole seems to be reflected. Twenty years after The society of show-business, in the Commentaries published in May 1988, Debord continued his reflection by focusing what according to him was the nature of the next phase, which he defined as the phase of "integrated show-business". "The ultimate meaning of integrated show-business � he wrote � is that it has become integrated in the reality to the extent that it was spoken about: and that it reconstructs it just as it is spoken about, so that it is no longer in front of it like something foreign. When the spectacular was concentrated, the majority of peripheral society escaped it: when it was widespread, a small part escaped from it; today no more. Show-business has mixed with every reality, permeating it. As was to be expected in theory, the practical experience of the relentless achievement of mercantile reason shows, rapidly and without exception, that the becoming- world of falsification was also a becoming-falsification of the world". In the meantime, with Deford dead, the criticism of the society of show-business, like that of culture-show-business and politics-show-business, can be found on everyone's lips, rendered inoffensive and deprived of its subversive force. On the other hand, post-modern thinking has in some way upset the pessimistic diagnosis of the situationist intellectual, weaving the disenchanted eulogy of a derealized world, reduced to image and phantasmagory. SCHOOL OF FRANKFURT (see F) WORKERS AND STUDENTS (see W) STRUGGLES FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION (see L)
T	REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE In 1965 the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, the sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. and the more famous Herbert Marcuse, all three members of the academic community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a volume that, re-echoing in a rather irreverent way the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, they entitled A Critique of Pure Tolerance. The book became a flag for the students of 1968, who found in it one of the most acute criticisms of western liberal democracy, from the point of view that, however, it did not nourish any tenderness towards western "realized socialism". The book targeted the defence of Western liberty aiming precisely at the apparently most exemplary, indisputable and positive concept: that of tolerance, the subject of the great battles of Voltaire, the most noble idea in the arsenal of the enlightenment concepts. By focusing on the question of tolerance today, Marcuse proposed a curt reversal of dominant platitudes, which he questioned bitterly: the "pure", abstract and indiscriminate tolerance of late-capitalist society � he said � is in reality intolerant, because it closes every space to the serious discussion of every thought that is heterodox or subversive. And, viceversa, true tolerance, understood as an instrument that promotes human rationality and freedom, can exist today only by being transformed into decisive intolerance: intolerance towards the movements and even the ideas that take the side of repression, racism, of all more or less brutal forms of enslavement and of inequality. "If democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future heads began their campaign � Marcuse writes -, mankind would have had the chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a world war". And, on the other hand, "when tolerance serves mainly for protecting and preserving a repressive society, when it serves for neutralizing the opposition and rendering men immune to different and better forms of life, then tolerance has been corrupted". In modern society, tolerance is corrupted, first of all because there is a lack of the premises on the basis of which it constitutes a value: free and equal discussion of all opinions serve to discover the best ones if the discussion is rational, conducted with independence of thought, free from manipulation, indoctrination and prejudice. But precisely these are the conditions that do not exist in the late-capitalist society. Rather here what dominates is the neutralization of all the opinions on a market of ideas that are apparently open but which are really hermetically closed to any thought that is not assimilable to the order of current things. The only reasonable answer to this situation, says Marcuse, is a "systematic withdrawal of tolerance": the first step for giving a shock to the omnipervasive "false conscience", that is in fact the most solid support of a pseudo-liberal and pseudo-tolerant society.
U	UTOPIA "Be realistic, ask for the impossible". Few slogans can better explain than this, coined during the French May, the utopian charge of the 1968 movement. The 1968 movement was utopian in the sense that, on the contrary to the movements that preceded it and that will follow it, it moves in the perspective of an absolutely radical transformation, of which perhaps it perceives the impossibility (as in the previously mentioned slogan), feeling it however as a challenge, as a bet, as a fact that enthusiasm and passion can and must alter. The 1968 movement does not know either the reformism that is satisfied with small, but realistic steps, or the desperation into which protest transforms when it realizes that it is up against a wall. As a generative moment, as a beginning that sees an open horizon before it, the movement does not repel criticism of utopia, but rather makes it a reason for pride. This view is expressed in some way also by Herbert Marcuse who, in his The end of utopia, starts from just this problem. Marcuse writes that generally speaking the projects of a new society that are considered not achievable are defamed as utopian, inasmuch as the subjective and objective factors would put an insurmountable limit on their implementation. Utopian were, for example, the communist projects during the French revolution. It is the very development of capitalism, of technical-scientific progress, of the wealthy society and of automation that renders the accusation of utopia obsolete today. "Today all the material and intellectual forces to create a free society exist", Marcuse maintains, and the fact that they are not used means nothing more than that it is society itself, blinded in some way, that opposes a deaf resistance to the actual possibility of its liberation. The movement of 1968, however, is not satisfied with dreaming of utopia, or of fighting for it, but tries to put it into practice. From the awareness that society can only be changed by changing ourselves, attempts are born to construct forms of life that are already, here and now, ways of practising alternative social relationships: it is the experience of the anti-authoritarian kindergartens, of that of the communes, practised by the Berlin students and the hippies of America. The '68 movement is utopian because it does not want to just make a revolution, but to go so far as changing life. And it will indeed change it, even in the deepest sense, because it will trigger so many changes, so many fragments of liberation that are very different however from those expected and desired.
V	VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE Violence and repression constantly marked the social and political conflicts of the post-war period in Europe and not only in the countries subjected to dictatorship. But it was at the end of the 1960s, and especially in 1968, that political and social violence was discovered, discussed and experienced at mass level, even in sections of society that had up to then been sheltered from it and among young people who had not lived the experience of the war. Violence and force that implied not a state of war, but a condition of peace were discovered and denounced: discriminations, persecutions, injustices, exploitation, repression of every protest that was even vaguely threatening. This violence was generally acknowledged as "class violence", exercised not only and not so much by the repressive organizations of the states, as by the dominant social relations, by the inequalities and by the defence without scruple of privilege. To this was added the open violence, in distant countries, to defend the interests of the west. Before this internal and international violence of the "system", the movements claimed a sort of natural right, of modern ius resistentiae. You could stay in the game without yielding, without implicitly accepting injustices and abuse. For the protest movements "lawfulness" did not civilly guarantee the space of the conflict, but was shamelessly sided, in the service of an unacceptable social order that did not contemplate alternatives or variations. Consequently the movements claimed for themselves the practice of "unlawfulness", that is to say the systematic infraction of norms provided by the system and clash with its defenders. The "unlawfulness" of the mass was not considered simply as a tactical choice aimed at the pursuit of this or that objective, but a condition of existence of the movement itself, of its visibility and its voice. The law is the legal arrangement of power, unlawfulness is the emergence of needs denied which are acknowledged and speak. The occupations of the universities and factories violated the established order in the form of substitution, they made power disappear from the places in which it was physically installed, but they did not extinguish it and neither did they go so far as to damage it. Repression did not delay and violence ceased to be implicit and latent. The movements reacted, even achieving ephemeral victories on the field, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Chicago. For the students, in Europe as much as in the United States, passive resistance was no longer sufficient. Which were the reasonable limits of "unlawfulness" and the legitimate space for the exercise of violence was a question that was debated at length, as much on the ethical level as on the tactical one of the sustainable "clash level", but generally the 1968 movement did not exclude in principle recurring to violence, and ended up by assuming it in its common sense. Rather it sought a difficult balance between the practice of unlawfulness and the clash with the institutions. Certainly, especially in the Anglo-Saxon area, the legacies of the pacifist movements of the post-war period survived, and the non-violent mass struggle was supported and practised, for example among the black Americans, by important organizations, such as that of Martin Luther King. But with the worsening of the 1968 protest these members were partly overcome by the more radical movements that theorized and practised armed self-defence and the violent clash with the powers of the state, such as the Black Panther Party. Finally, various sectors of the movement considered themselves directly involved in a war of a planetary nature that had Vietnam as its epicentre. And they made their own the task of striking behind the lines of the enemy American imperialism with bomb attacks and other acts of sabotage. Here the choice of violence, brought into the dimension of total war, was no longer subject to any limitation and was able to withdraw from every context. This is the path that will lead to the formation and short existence of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany.
W	CRITICISM OF WORK With the student and workers' protests of the end of the 1960s the criticism of work reached a widespread articulation: as criticism of the social division of work and of the hierarchies that resulted from this, as criticism of alienation and as radical criticism of salaried tout court work, of its form of merchandise. In the student movements the Marxist idea of alienation was welcomed with enthusiasm and immediately extended to study and to the expert professional roles; the idea in the general sense being of an action that is separated from the needs and from the will of the subjects, to develop according to its own and foreign laws, those of commodities and of the accumulation of profits. To enter the production machine meant to act against oneself, one's needs and those of one's brother. The same fate was shared by the criticism of the social division of work (which in just those years reached the maximum of strictness and fragmentation) that reduced and crushed all the faculties and the potential of the subject to the repetitive and devastating execution of a single productive function. The refusal of this "one-dimensionality", of this cancellation of the person and of the hierarchized social fragmentation that resulted from it was one of the main trends that ran through the movements, in search of a rearrangement of the subjects that would mix in an egalitarian manner the requirements necessary for social reproduction, perhaps even taking inspiration from the China of the red guards. The overcoming of the division between intellectual and manual work was, as a result, one of the most widespread passwords in the student movements. Of course there was no lack either of workers' fringes and politicized techniques that picked on the organization of work, demanding to impose their control over the production cycle and to regain possession, on the basis of their collective knowledge, of the ways and objectives of production, taking them away from the discretion of the owner. An attitude that will later be used for gain, distorting it and subjecting it to the rules of competitiveness, by Toyotism. But the most radical position was that of the "refusal of work" that aimed at an immediate and immanent negation of salaried work. By repelling the idea of a capacity of emancipation inherent in work itself and of it having any ethical value (the old ethics of work interiorized by the workers' movement), it aimed at removing from it, with every means, time and energy, of questioning the actual system of salaried work and its units of measure with the idea of an income that was no longer related to productivity. Hence the non circumscribed and "revolutionary" character that was attributed to the salary claim. The request for "more money" separate from "more productivity" would have questioned the commodity character of human working capacity. In the only possible way: by inflating its cost, creating a constant "excess". But the "refusal of work" was not just a theoretical position, articulated through the favouring of certain protest objectives, but rather a spontaneous movement that was expressed in the behaviour and subcultures of the young people, with their desperate attempt to escape a grey worker's fate, and in other forms of individual and collective exodus, that were more or less ideologized, by the production society. Even the permeation of politics in 1968, its arrogant invasion of every environment and every field, its claim to primacy, contrasted in some way with work. The "being involved in politics" that "employed" tens of thousands of young people was exactly that "being involved" that could not be traced back to the commodity nature of work and its units of measure. And, for this reason, by breaking away from every "professional" idea of politics, it was proposed immediately as a model of liberation. INTEGRATION OF THE WORKING CLASS (see I)	WORKERS AND STUDENTS The exit from the universities and schools towards the social and towards the factory took place in a nearly spontaneous and almost forced manner, even if many were the factors that produced it, not all of them coherent between one another. On the one hand the student leaders soon realized that the movement risked being suffocated in the occupation-evacuation-new occupation dialectics. They were well aware that they had to maintain their own specific nature and their own "mass base", but also that that experience could finish due to simple exhaustion. Therefore the choice of projecting themselves towards the external also corresponded with a need for social support and alliances. The factory and the neighbourhoods were the natural ground for finding them. On the other hand, some elaborations had gone beyond the scholastic question and that of university reform. Theoretical analyses tended to see the student as part of the production, both in the version of "proletarization", and in that of the work force being prepared. Thus even the problems of the university could not be solved just within its walls. It was not simply a question of starting up a policy of alliances between different social groups, but rather of working for a more advanced "class rearrangement". In fact, if students, workers and technicians were also productive forces subject to the dynamics of control and dispossession of capital, if basically they were the same thing, then it was reasonable to embody this condition of equality in a theory and in a practice that reunited that which up to then had remained artificially divided. Finally, on the side of those who considered , in theory or in fact, the students as a revolutionary force, the tendency to exercise this role in society as a whole was inevitable. In this version the students appeared as the most conscious and radical avant gardes and their historical task had to be that of propagating the social fire to other sectors also. All the more so if it was believed that the historical organizations of the workers' movement, parties and trade unions had in some way "betrayed" or in any case caged the workers' antagonism in a reformist practice and theory that no longer challenged the balances of power of society. In this version it was a question above all of "unveiling" the role of class collaboration of the historical organizations of the workers' movement and of indicating the right line, even coming directly to the heart of the platforms of union demands. Whatever the motivations, therefore, for the student avant garde, their going towards the gates of the factories was a natural step, which was embodied in various ways: from the establishment of mixed student workers collectives with aims mainly of analysis and confrontation with their different but similar subaltern position, to the somewhat innocent distribution of leaflets in front of the entrances to request solidarity, to convoke joint demonstrations or on themes of general political importance. The fruits of this joint work would be seen, especially in Italy, starting from the Autumn and then for the whole of 1969. But it should be said that, over and above the joint demonstrations, the organized relationship with the working class basically regarded limited sectors both of one and of the other. It weighed equally and in a significant manner in the matters of Italian trade-unionism: it produced important analyses even of a theoretical nature, but it was inevitably limited to the most political protagonists of those movements. And precisely the lack of the "mass encounter" produced as the only possible choice, the birth of the "political groups", in the form if not of a party, certainly avant gardes open to everything, with their own separate elaboration and their own organizational structures different from those of the movement and of the assemblies.
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Y	YOUNG PEOPLE For the entire period of the 1950s, starting with the United States and Great Britain, but the rest of the developed countries were soon to follow, a new field of problems was being constructed: adolescence, with at its centre a new disturbing, conflictual object-subject: the teen-ager. The traces of this emersion are clearly recorded in the themes and language of mass culture. For the first time, young people become themselves a vehicle for the self-reflection of an entire society on itself. The privileged pole capable of condensing all the anxieties removed, the sensation of instability masked by the conformist optimism of the decade. Up to then, in fact, the problem of youth, definitely present since the middle of last century, had been mostly kept within the framework of the "social question". The most current interpretation of the new phenomenon was, at the end of the 1950s, the increase in economic well-being and free time, the expansion of entry into the world of work, the discovery of a new formidable consumption area by the cultural industry. In Europe, above all in the German Federal Republic, we must add a deep fracture between the generation of the war and that which followed, accompanied, in its most responsible fringes, by a radical refusal. After the middle of the 1960s, starting with the USA, the revolt of the young people would move from the wars of position in the family, from the neighbourhood haunts, from the identifying signs of style and body, to the university halls, the marches, the sit-ins, the battles for civil rights, but with different tonalities from the old radical commitment, extending to include the entire area of culture: creativity, behaviour, the ways of gathering. In Europe, the emergence of a restless universe of youth in revolt appeared first among the British working class young people with the subculture of the mods, young people in flight from the restricted greyness of the working class fate, through soul music, amphetamines, clothes and hairstyles. But while the political and counter-cultural hippie movement showed that it was able to propose an overall radical and utopian antagonism, spread throughout the whole area of social and cultural relations, the urban subcultures, more marked by their class origins, remained an attempt at direct and immediate resistance against an oppression experienced in their daily lives, even while extending their influence to the taste, style and way of life of the decade. A strong echo of all this reached continental Europe long before 1968, where however the establishment of a young antagonist subject, one that was visible and of the masses, more closely coincided with the hour of politics and of the protest movement. This last preserved in its beginnings a strong youth subjectivity, in Germany where fathers were universally suspect, but also in France and Italy, which will however be gradually less as the interpretation of the conflict is affirmed in terms of "class struggle", excluding in this way every self-representation of the movement in terms of strictly generational conflict. Even if, in the forms of aggregation and communication, the sign of the youth revolt will never be completely cancelled.
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