Playing with Politics

Everything is permitted but nothing is possible.

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As with anyone who writes regularly, ideas for essays strike me in different ways, at different times. Sometimes, I see coverage of a contemporary event or issue in the media, and think to myself “yes, I might be able to shed some light on that.” More often though, some piece of serendipity will start a train of thought in my head, and I’ll engage a little sub-routine to search around my memory for other bits and pieces, and come up with a coherent argument for a week to two in the future.

And so it was this time. I was listening to a podcast about philosophy called Le Précepteur—roughly “the private tutor”— which is massively popular in France, with over a million Youtube subscribers as well as those who follow the podcasts. Charles Robin discusses his subject with exemplary clarity, and if you can speak reasonable French it’s easy to follow, especially with the transcript. But what was striking was his choice of subject that week: the French philosopher Michel Clouscard, who died in 2009. Clouscard is hardly a household name, even in France: Frédéric Worms’s massive book on 20th Century French philosophy doesn’t even mention him. He spent his career working at an unfashionable provincial university and his books sold poorly. In part, this was because he was outside the warring mainstreams of French philosophy, and especially its more mediatised elements, from the late 1960s onwards.

Clouscard was an orthodox Marxist, a supporter of the Communist Party, but never a member. He was not, therefore, part of the exciting, glamorous, high-profile world of Maoists and Trotskyists who dominated left-wing intellectual life in the late 1960s, he did not subsequently recant and become a neoconservative, he did not abandon Marxism for structuralism and deconstruction, and he did not join the attempt to marry Marxism with Freud, Lacan, Deluze and others. Unlike other orthodox Marxists he did not retreat into navel-gazing scholastic textual analysis like Althusser, nor take up any and every fashionable overseas cause like Sartre.

Clouscard’s method has been well described, I think, as “applied Marxism,” which is to say that he was interested in the light that Marxist ideas could throw on the lives and experiences of ordinary people, not in Vietnam or Nicaragua, but in the towns and cities of France. He was particularly interested in the rise of the consumer society, and its use as a political control mechanism. Needless to say, the post-1968 Left, in France as elsewhere, did not share this concern for the lives and interests of ordinary people, for whom it felt at best indifference, and at worst contempt, and that stranded thinkers like Clouscard somewhat out on a limb.

But don’t worry, this isn’t an exegesis of Clouscard’s work: I haven’t read all of it anyway. Rather, I want to take a couple of his ideas which I think were and are very valuable, as well as being well ahead of their time, and which I think help to explain rather neatly the mess that our societies and our political systems are in today. However, it’s important to begin by stressing that a good part of Clouscard’s originality comes from the fact that he was a fierce critic of May 1968, and of the student radicals of the era in general. Now in any country this would be problematic, but in France, where the “events” of 1968 are a large part of what remains of the National Myth, it’s quite close to blasphemy. The entire media, intellectual and academic class in France looks to 1968 as the Church looks to the birth of Jesus, and to speak out against any of its dogma, or to make a criticism of the events themselves and what followed, gets you banned from TV and radio, and your books unpublished or withdrawn. And note that this isn’t simply a Left-Right thing. There were always critics of 1968, and there still are, notably from the traditional Catholic Right, but billionaires are just as likely to call for you to be strung up as temporary lecturers in gendered sociology. Indeed, leftist critics of 1968 like Clouscard have probably suffered more than others.

So what’s going on? Clouscard put his finger on it very quickly after the “events” in a book published in 1972 called Néo-fascisme et ideologie de désire which is still in print: I have a copy looking at me now. (The title would take several paragraphs to explain: ignore it.) In it, Clouscard coined the phrase Libéral-libertaire to describe the post-1968 ideology, and that’s where I want to start. Libéral is used here in the English sense of “free” markets, competition, deregulation etc. which was a trend already starting in that era, but one which Clouscard noticed before most other commentators. Libertaire is perhaps unfortunate as a term, because it has right-wing individualist overtones in many countries, but what Clouscard means here is “freedom of personal behaviour,” outside the economic sphere. Thus, he suggests, individuals are at least notionally “free” to behave as they wish in their personal lives, even though they are increasingly controlled economically by consumerism and advertising, by the extinction of artisans and small tradesmen, by ever more ferocious competition and the rise of larger and larger corporations.

It’s therefore entirely possible for the ruling class to have their cake and eat somebody else’s. In the past, as Clouscard pointed out several times, the upper middle classes tended to be sober and responsible in their personal behaviour, just as in business. Hard work and thrift, living within your means, marriage and family were all regarded as fundamental. It’s for this reason that much of the commercial upper middle-class was attracted to Protestantism, or the more ascetic versions of Catholicism, and developed a social conscience that encouraged them to do Good Deeds.

Clouscard was writing at a time when the PCF followed the Moscow line rigidly (the ultra-orthodox George Marchais had just begun his long reign as Secretary-General) and so his vocabulary can seem curious today. Clouscard, following Marxist traditions, talked of “Capitalism” as though it was a living entity, rather than a contested label given to an economic system, and “Capital” as though it had some kind of independent agency. But it’s not hard to see what he was really talking about. For all that the “events” of 1968 now seem romantic and quaint, at the time they were taken very seriously by governments. In France, De Gaulle was afraid that the precarious unity of the country would crack, and wanted to send the Army in. No, said his Prime Minister Georges Pompidou: we can’t use the Army against tomorrow’s ruling class. And that was the point. In no country did the “young rebels” really attempt to overthrow the political system, let alone the economic one. They were indeed the next ruling class, and their complaints were largely about their treatment by their actual and symbolic parents.

All over Europe, student rebellions were accompanied by political and industrial militancy. In France, some ten million people took part in industrial action: by far the biggest movement in French history. Yet the students were entirely uninterested in political or economic reform, except for slogans, and never made common cause with the workers: had they done so, they could have brought the Republic down, which was not, of course, what they wanted. All over Europe, these were the sons and daughters of the existing ruling class, looking to modify the internal management of that class, to which, of course, the University administrators and government Ministers also belonged. But rather than a traditional ruling class that was sober and disciplined, the students demanded a ruling class that would still be in control, but where life would be more fun, and everybody would do like, whatever they wanted in their private lives, while systems of authority ranging from government to education to the Church to the trades unions, the Communist Party and and even the universities at which they studied, were slated for destruction.

The actual demands of the students as reflected in the media, in speeches and in the famous graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, essentially reflected the nihilist, fantasist, adolescent mood of the times, itself mostly a consequence of the Situationist International. Few of the more specific demands were ever realised: burning down the Sorbonne seemed a less attractive idea when you were a lecturer there than it had been ten years later. But among the most common themes was that there was no real distinction between fantasy and reality, and that of the two, fantasy was to be preferred (“take your desires for reality!”) But if the students rapidly formed a significant part of the very consumer society they affected to despise, and went into politics, the media, education and other establishment jobs, they nonetheless did succeed in modifying norms of personal behaviour in the direction of the hedonistic model of the instant gratification of desire, often citing Wilhelm Reich or some other fashionable intellectual figure of the day in support. (It’s interesting that the origins of 1968 are usually taken to be the occupation of the University of Nanterre the year before, demanding the “free movement” (libre circulation) of male students into female accommodation. Sometimes shadows are cast forward.)

One of the main motives behind the demands was the age-old one of shocking parents and the bourgeoisie, and this was certainly achieved. But when the generation of 1968 (roughly, anyone born between 1945 and 1955) began to move into positions of influence, and abandoned any superficial interest they may have had in radical political change, they still preserved the radicality of their individualist social objectives. (It is debated whether “it is forbidden to forbid” was an actual slogan of the time or not, but it nicely encapsulates the mood.) One of the slogans of 1968 was “let’s invent new sexual perversions!” and this led directly to the powerful movement in the 1970s to decriminalise pedophilia, a movement which most of the leading young intellectuals of the day supported, and remains influential even now. (I was reading a new biography of the poet W H Auden recently, and was struck by the non-judgemental tone in which the author described Auden’s pedophilic affairs with young pupils in the schools he taught at.)

This was part of the wider search throughout the western world for “transgressive” behaviour patterns. One, curiously, was the 1970s fascination with the criminal as the ultimate “outsider,” the elite transgressor of society’s rules in the front line of the war against property. (This view remains influential among sociologists who have not themselves been victims of robbery.) More serious, perhaps, was the reframing of the confinement and treatment of mental patients as a form of “oppression” and a denial of their “choice.” The British psychiatrist R D Laing was known for the equanimity with which he greeted the suicides of some of his patients. This attitude led directly to the closure of mental hospitals throughout the West, and to the suffering, homeless and sometimes violent figures in the streets of western cities. But hey, it’s their choice.

The Church and organised religion were also targets of that generation, especially in countries where they were still strong, such as France and Italy. Church attendance dropped precipitously from the late 1960s, as the new middle classes attended less and less. But something had to take its place, and the new generation that had so thoroughly internalised the consumer society they had affected to despise looked around, as consumers do, for something more attractive, less serious and just more fun, than the dreary and culpabilising religion of their parents with its Thou Shalt Not. At its most harmless, this led to the adoption of New Age thinking, books by Californians purporting to explain Zen, and of course the commercialisation of the ’68 belief that what really counts is fantasy, not reality, into profitable scams such as The Secret. (To be fair, it did also lead to some more serious studies and the spread of some genuinely useful ideas.)

But applied to religion, the transgressive urge led, with dreary predictability, to a fascination with the Occult, the worship of devils and an unhealthy interest in the mythical iconography of the Third Reich. Popular culture moved in a matter of a year or two from peace, love, Atlantis and UFOs to something much darker, as Gary Lachmann has documented. It hit popular music, as I recall, around 1971: walking past a friend’s door in our student Residence I heard thundering guitars and drums and somebody screaming lyrics along the lines of:

All day long I sit and scream

And bang my head against the wall.

This was Black Sabbath and their kind, and the start of a rather unpleasant flirtation with half-understood demonology and the “Magick”of the great fraud Alesteir Crowley, whose slogan, “Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law,” could have been, and probably was, written on a wall in 1968.

Finally, nothing was more despised by the rebels of 1968 than the bourgeois family: that repressive, crypto-fascist apparatus whose only redeeming virtue was that your parents paid for your education. The destruction of the family was a priority, and it has to be said it has met with much success.

Up to the 1960s, marriage was recognised as an unequal bargain. Women received security and a pre-emptive claim on the assets and earnings of their husbands. Men could only look forward to the end of their independence, and perhaps twenty-five years of supporting a wife and family. That’s why so much popular (and even elite) culture up until that point was concerned with women trying to find husbands and men trying to avoid being found. (Think of the efforts Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster has to expend to stop one of his aunts marrying him off.) The masculine ideal, reflected in figures from Sherlock Holmes to Richard Hannay to Bulldog Drummond to The Saint to Philip Marlowe to James Bond was the independent bachelor, going through serial conquests, perhaps, but never being tied down. To many of the young male rebels of 1968, this must have seemed a utopian state of affairs, and one to be urgently pursued in place of the traditional male rituals of “growing up” and “taking responsibility” for a family. (How the proto-feminist movement was ever deluded into sharing such notions remains a mystery.) The steady undermining of marriage as a norm has inevitably left a legacy of one-parent families generally headed by women, as men pushed off elsewhere. This, of course, was entirely foreseeable.

And then, whilst the political engagement of most of that generation was superficial at best, it did exist, but in a very restricted fashion, and usually related to things happening overseas. The Vietnam War, of course, was the great cause (perhaps “pretext” would be fairer) of the time, and a way of mobilising large numbers of young people, not just in the United States, which would have been logical, but in Europe, whose countries had no real involvement. But that criticism misses the point: “demos,” as we used to call them, were fun. Marching, singing, throwing stones at the police, maybe dodging water-cannons, was exciting, it was politics as play. When looking at examples of political action, it’s always helpful to consider what could have been done instead, and of course here the answer was obvious: it wasn’t as if problems nearer home were lacking, but they were less interesting and less glamorous, and could involve difficult judgements and require some knowledge. It was the triumph of fantasy over reality again. The vast majority of the protesters would not have wanted to live in post-1975 Vietnam—any more than their grandchildren would want to live in a fundamentalist Islamic state controlled by Hamas—but that was never the point. In 1968 and afterwards it was all about drama and excitement.

It was a fair criticism of the post-1968 demonstrators and polemicists to say that they cared more for the peasants in Vietnam than they did for the peasants in their own countries, who were already being forced off the land by the agricultural industry. (And yes, let’s acknowledge here that some of that generation, in a number of countries, did engage seriously with problems nearer home.) For most of them, therefore, political activism was about countries far away of which little was known, and which could thus be reconstructed along fantasy lines. And in due course, their own children constructed a Fantasy Bosnia and a Fantasy Rwanda, just as their grandchildren construct a Fantasy Ukraine.

We’ll stop there for the moment, and I will come back to the implementation of fantasies in politics in a second, but I just want to draw the obvious conclusion for the change in the nature of the ruling class from which, remember, the vast majority of the “rebels” came. (People like me from the grubbier fringes of the lower middle class were only just starting to be allowed in.) What they realised was that it was quite possible to junk the whole respectable, boring traditional middle-class ethic of business, whilst still holding on to the levers of control. Business, and even politics, could be transgressive and yet still retain its power. Indeed, embracing the counter-culture could be good business: I remember the advertising slogan from the early 1970s: The Revolutionaries Are on CBS. You could let people grow their hair, wear whatever they liked, live in communes and (within reason) take drugs, so long as they continued to consume your products.

Thus, it was possible to define a political “third way” (Clouscard actually used this term in 1972), in which radical gains in apparent personal freedom could be combined with increased control by larger and larger concentrations of private economic power. This was the beginning of the redefinition of ordinary people from citizens with rights, to consumers with choices, whether real or imaginary. As Clouscard says, if life is about “having fun” through the acquisition of consumer goods and the exertion of your right to do whatever the hell you want, then serious political questions to do with the nature of power and wealth can simply be bypassed.

For what it's worth, I don’t see this as a conspiracy, still less the deliberate operations of the Beast Capital, but rather the logical outcome of a widely-shared egoistic and superficial way of looking at the world, based on the gratification of immediate desires, and a rejection of the prudent, long-term thinking of the elder generation. As the “generation of 1968” (widely defined) acceded to political power, it took its egoism and its superficiality with it. in France this was in the early 1980s, in the US in the early 1990s, in the UK a little later, and we began to see the Libéral-libertaire project developing quite naturally, from the way that the social ideology of the ruling class had developed: a turn to the Right economically, mixed with some vaguely socially-progressive gestures, reflecting the actual spirit of 1968. And now of course this is the elder generation, in charge of the western world.

But these were the children of the ruling class, and the obvious question was how they were going to succeed as the next ruling class, of which Pompidou spoke. A ruling class can only survive if it can control entry into its ranks. This does not mean preventing entry, since that leads to atrophy and sometimes to events like 1789. Rather, it means ensuring that very able people from the lower orders are recruited, but only limited numbers. More widely, it means ensuring that benefits theoretically available to everyone cannot in practice be exercised by more than a minority. Here, we come to Clouscard’s second coinage: Tout est permis mais rien n’est possible. Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible. This slightly gnomic formula has been interpreted in different ways, but the essence of it is the difference between abstract, theoretical rights, and the ability to exercise those rights in practice. This isn’t a new idea of course: Spinoza argued long ago that you could not have “rights” without the power to exercise them, and the Marxist tradition in which Clouscard was working was always scornful of “bourgeois rights,” which only the wealthy could exercise.

But Clouscard was writing about a consumer society, where “rights” meant much more than political rights. Thus, international travel is much easier and objectively cheaper than it was when he was writing, but it is still confined to a minority of the population in most countries. (Last year, one third of French families could not afford a holiday of any kind.) Under the Schengen scheme, I can get on a train in Paris and travel direct to Venice without showing a passport: fine if I have the necessary funds. And in principle, nationals of one EU state can settle and work in another, provided, of course they have the right kind of job with the right kind of salary. If you are an international lawyer from the Netherlands speaking several languages, you could get a job in a University in Germany. And the barriers aren’t only financial: how many supermarket cashiers could get a similar job in a country with a different language? (Indeed, our Dutch lawyer’s University toilets are probably cleaned by desperate Eastern European workers trafficked West.) So much for the right of free movement, which for ordinary people means the right to be moved.

Indeed, “free movement” is an excellent example of Clouscard’s formulation, and indeed of the his wider argument. It isn’t just a question of the post-68 ruling class distracting ordinary people from the concentrations of power and money they had achieved, it’s also that their priorities are their own, and take no account of what ordinary people need. Our Dutch lawyer has a chance to experience a new social and professional environment, visit interesting places, try skiing, improve his German, and bring up his family in a multilingual environment. The Romanians who empty the dustbins outside his apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning are brought in minivans across Europe by criminal syndicates, paid starvation wages without social security, and live four to a room in cheap hotels. If you asked the general population of Europe to choose between the guarantee of a well-paying job on one hand, and the”right” to work anywhere in Europe on the other, it’s not hard to see what choice most would make.

The ERASMUS scheme and similar projects allow students from all over Europe to spend time at foreign universities. It’s a great idea in theory, but there is a small catch, of course: your parents need to have the money, and you need to be able to adapt and survive in a foreign environment, which generally means being fluent in at least one other language: not many children from the poorer areas of cities can qualify, therefore, and this further depresses their chances of a decent life, when the elites of their own countries recruit disproportionately from those with wider, multinational backgrounds, and indeed when elites increasingly work in and for each other’s countries. Everything is permitted in terms of social and economic mobility, therefore, but nothing is possible for ordinary people.

Even at the most mundane social justice level, the same logic applies. The decriminalisation of homosexuality, then starting to be implemented, was not a priority in 1968, but its “transgressive” nature became part of the post-1968 agenda, and was more and more insisted upon as the years passed, and it became increasingly difficult to be more “transgressive” than the next lobby. But because of the frivolous, play-acting approach to politics that the generation had grown up with, mundane legalisation was not enough. Rather, there was a constant series of “happenings” and “fun” episodes like Gay Pride marches, because that was what politics was about, in the end. On the other hand, giving homosexual marriages legal status, which happened in a number of countries over the last decade or so, was from the start an elite project. Its essential practical purpose was to secure property succession, in countries where the interest in property passes directly to the immediate family, in the case of death, not to your partner of the time. So now homosexual couples can buy houses together, except that, as with heterosexual couples, it’s permitted but it’s seldom actually possible, because you have to have the money.

All this slows down and regulates changes in the composition of the western ruling class, and prevents too many commoners like me scrambling abroad too quickly. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of education, long recognised as the fundamental key to social mobility. Now in principle, educational opportunities have never been greater. Unprecedented number of young people go to university, which is a good thing, isn’t it?

Whilst generalisation is always hazardous, it’s fair to say that going to university—in my day, an adventure, a privilege and a stepping-stone—is now an obligatory expense and commitment to stop yourself falling out of even the scruffiest fringes of the privileged class. Together with the inequities of opportunity, the sheer cost of tuition in many countries, and the unofficial but very real differences among universities in status and prestige, this produces a situation not that fundamentally different from the past, when privileged routes through universities to top jobs and social positions were openly acknowledged, instead of being disguised under the same “permitted but not possible” logic. In France, the Grandes Écoles, more prestigious and harder to access than Universities, historically functioned as a filter controlling access to the top layers of society. After the Second World War, successive governments managed to widen to scope of recruitment considerably, to include many more students from ordinary backgrounds. That was progressively reversed as the post-1968 generation came to power, all the time congratulating themselves on the superficial “diversity” of the student body, because it included middle-class children with different coloured skins.

There were changes in schools, however, as the post-1968 generation moved into the control of the education system. Even if few politicians in any country still actually wished to burn schools down, the idea of education as oppression, of learning forced upon unwilling children to prepare them ideologically for their place in society, remained powerful. Indeed, the idea that education is a Bad Thing, or at least a questionable one, is barely hidden in the beliefs and conversation of many people with progressive views even today. This shows itself in the literal fun and games that western politicians and their advisers have had with education since the 1990s, reorganising it into aesthetically and politically pleasing patterns. After all, wasn’t one of the 1968 slogans “all teachers are students, all students are teachers”? The idea that teachers and students engage in a process of “mutual learning,” no matter how lunatic it may seem, is now embedded in the educational policies of many countries, in place of the idea of the transmission of knowledge, and with predictably awful results.

But that’s only a game. The education of Our Children, on the other hand, takes place in elite public, or more often private, establishments, where strict discipline and traditional educational measures are used, and access to elite higher education is thereby assured. In France, by a particularly painful irony, the children of the post-1968 ruling class, and anyone else who can afford to, educate their children in private schools run by the Catholic Church.

The essentially ludic, ego-focused approach of the post-68 generation is shown in its conviction that much of life is really a game and a joke, or should be. One major change was the progressive transformation of the business world from one of dour application and grey conformity to a place of fun and games, especially if you happened to be an entrepreneur or senior manager. Richard Branson was perhaps the first sighting of this tendency, although it should be said that he was actually a decent businessman (I frequented the Megastore for decades, and Virgin Atlantic was a very good airline in the days when I flew with them a lot) but then he hadn’t actually been to university, though he was of the ’68 generation. Steve Jobs, hated and reviled by grey-suited executives and tech journalists alike, was another early sighting, and he did succeed in founding an outstanding company. But recent transgressive businessmen have failed to produce anything of value, or really anything at all, save Ponzi schemes and bankruptcies, for all that the cultivation of an alternative, edgy, transgressive business image now seems compulsory. Watching the antics of Mr Musk and his cohorts, I reflected that his generation is now in the process of destroying capitalism and government more thoroughly than the generation of 1968 could ever have imagined, as he jets off to Mars in his starship.

And of course this is true of politics as well, as I’ve suggested several times, notably here and here. Politics in most countries these days is about its practitioners Having Fun. Remember the slogan of 1968: beneath the paving stones, the beach. Yes, life is a beach, and so we should enjoy the opportunities it gives us to play roles—President, Prime Minister—without getting too deeply into the kind of boring practicalities that the parents of the 1968 generation were always there to take care of. Some cases—Boris Johnson comes to mind—are too parodically flagrant to ignore, but for most politicians of today, the greater seriousness of much politics in the past is a distant memory, if indeed they are aware of it at all.

Finally, it’s in this context, I think, that we should understand the war in Ukraine. For European politicians, at least, it’s fun it’s exciting, it’s a chance to relive the glory days of their parents and grandparents. Mr Starmer gets the chance to play-act at being Winston Churchill. The leaders of the West are the students of 1968, throwing stones at the police and dodging the horses and the water cannon. Instead of societies run by their parents, they are taking aim at the Russia of Vladimir Putin a stern parent figure if ever there was one. And if they destroy a lot of things along the way, well, remember that one of the most popular slogans of 1968 was taken from Bakunin: the urge to destroy is a creative urge.