Shifts in Dissent

Based on broad class coalitions, various welfare-state regimes were established across western Europe. The fortunes of social democratic parties rose well into the 1970s. In a movement known as Eurocommunism, several Communist parties in the West broke from the Soviet line by embracing liberal democracy and expanding their base beyond the working class. But these reformist parties soon began their terminal decline amid neoliberal globalization. Also in that decade, the impressive growth that once characterized the command economies of the East stagnated.

As deindustrialization and rising unemployment hit the West during the 1980s, social democratic and Eurocommunist parties remained prominent in some places, such as Sweden and Italy. But the mass parties of the past were gone, having been hollowed out into electoral campaign vehicles that made austere compromises or simply enriched their own corrupt leadership. Membership in left-wing parties and unions steadily declined. In the Eastern Bloc, after popular uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s, politics became strictly controlled by the state and the official unions.

As the socioeconomic and political terrains across Europe changed, so too did popular forms of struggle and dissent. Häberlen’s book begins with youth subcultures that emerged in divided Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. “Lifestyle revolutionaries” such as the greaser Halbstarken and the hippie-like Gammler launched a generational revolt against elders whose conservative worldview was defined by experiences of economic depression, world war, and genocide. Many of the young rebels had parents and grandparents who denied their Nazi pasts. In light of the rehabilitation of former fascists and collaborators, critics spoke of an authoritarian restoration in western Europe. The new regimes of the Eastern Bloc were officially anti-fascist, but their celebration of mass resistance to Nazi tyranny tended to obscure the complex history of collaboration. Thus, the countercultural revolt of the early postwar decades was implicitly political: it struck at fascist remnants in the fabric of everyday life.

The political rebellion became explicit in France, Italy, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere amid the dramatic uprisings that occurred around 1968. Militants taking to the streets revived interwar traditions of revolutionary Marxism and called for solidarity with Third World anti-colonial struggles. They occupied university campuses in Paris, demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Amsterdam and West Berlin, and demanded democratic socialism in Prague.

They often joined forces with young industrial workers who wanted more autonomy in the workplace. In northern Italy, such workers were inspired by operaismo, or the strategy of forming independent committees that “challenged the authority of the unions to represent workers” and made demands for workers’ control over production. Under the slogan “We want everything” (Vogliamo tutto), militants revolted against work as such, creatively reimagining life and leisure. In France, the student uprising evolved into a general strike in May 1968. That strike together with the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy represented the last structural challenge to the democratic capitalist state in Europe and also perhaps the last time that the counterculture and militant labor allied together in an anti-systemic opposition.

To varying degrees, the uprisings of the late 1960s expressed disillusionment with the old Socialist and Communist left: those party and union organizations had raised hopes for a radically democratic society, but they were unable to deliver more than welfare capitalism in the West or state socialism in the East. At first, such disillusionment was expressed by a militant minority, while social democracy enjoyed some of its greatest electoral successes. But as the 1970s drew to a close, disillusionment spread and prompted an exodus even from the reformist left parties.

The apparent failure of mass movements and reformist politics led some far-left militants to take more drastic action, including terrorism. Häberlen compares two classic examples, the Italian Red Brigades (BR) and the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). Rather than fight on the existing social and political terrain, both small groups tried to build their own revolutionary counter-state. In their increasing reliance on armed force and authoritarian leadership, they actually “began to mirror the state, its language and institutions they hated so much.”

Neither the BR nor the RAF could sustain any broad base of support among the working class or critical intelligentsia. Their campaigns of assaulting politicians, armed robberies, hijackings, kidnappings, and murders (including the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978) did not obviously relate to ordinary people’s struggles in the workplace or everyday life. Violence against people was harder to justify than property destruction, which had been the previous mode of street militancy.

Perhaps due to their small size and sectarian origins, far-left terrorists turned away from concrete struggles toward a fight against “what they simply called ‘the system’ and its representatives.” It was their violent abstraction of social struggle from everyday life that eroded sympathy for them among most European leftists. In any case, by the 1980s, leftist activism in Europe became almost uniformly nonviolent. And unlike earlier moments in postwar history, it became mostly disconnected from party politics and the labor movement.

Protest Music

The book recounts a gradual transition of leftist activism from the economic and political terrains to the cultural terrain. For example, a major theme of the book is the role of music in the making of protest culture. Protest music took various forms from rock to hip hop. Sonic subversion encouraged collective rebelliousness, Häberlen claims: “The very sound of rebellious music could be disruptive and threatening. It encouraged certain styles of dancing, dressing, piercing ears and noses, or dyeing and styling hair, that authorities have at times felt undermined the moral order.”

In the case of the Rolling Stones, for example, it was the form of their music — its driving rhythm, its gritty distortion, its sexual swagger — rather than its lyrical content that incited conflict with the authorities. In West Germany, Ton Steine Scherben was “the first political rock band to sing in German, with a distinct Berlin slang,” and its music inspired people to take to the streets in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Czechoslovakia, the banning and arrest of the experimental band Plastic People of the Universe inspired critical intellectuals to produce the important dissident text Charter 77.

The most extreme musical rebellion was punk. Häberlen explains that “Punk was a radical negation. Its sound was fast, aggressive and disturbing. Vocals were yelled rather than sung, and there was no need for musical virtuosity. . . . Punk rejected consumer society and hippie culture, as well as ideals of femininity and masculinity, not to mention conventional party politics. It painted the world in bleak terms without a sense of hope for the future.” In the UK, the popularity of the punk band Sex Pistols reflected “the bleak reality of mass unemployment” in the dawning age of Thatcherism. Likewise, hip hop music among Turkish migrants fighting against racism in Germany or Muslims in the French banlieues reflected the bleak reality of police violence and economic misery at the margins of urban renewal in the 1980s and ’90s. Unfortunately, the book does not discuss the culture industry: all these sonic undergrounds were eventually commodified, transforming their original ethos of active participation into passive consumption.

Sooner or later, almost every example of postwar protest and counterculture was co-opted by existing institutions. As leftist activism focused increasingly on the cultural terrain, this process of co-optation accelerated. The sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have tried to explain this assimilation of aesthetic or cultural resistance by new configurations of capitalism. In their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), they explored “how the opposition that capitalism had to face at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s induced a transformation in its operation and mechanisms — either through a direct response to critique aiming to appease it by acknowledging its validity; or by attempts at circumvention and transformation, in order to elude it without having answered it.”

In the West, the results of that neutralization of critique were obvious: while the paradigmatic social movement of the decade 1968–78 was still marked by labor militancy, class struggle, and use of coercive force, the social movement of the decade 1985–95 “expresses itself almost exclusively in the form of humanitarian aid” and obliterates most “references to social class . . . and especially the working class.”

A similar shift occurred in central and eastern Europe, if on a different timeline. The collapse of authoritarian state-socialist regimes around 1990 proved that protest by citizens’ movements (Bürgerbewegungen) could achieve spectacular results. However, the agony of post-communist transition betrayed the original aspirations of those movements. The case of East Germany is telling. A semantic shift occurred during the brief period between the start of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig in September 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall that November: at first, the slogans revolved around participatory democracy and a humane socialist alternative (“We are the people”), but then they transformed into calls for German national reunification regardless of socioeconomic system (“We are one people”).

When reunification did occur in October 1990, the former East Germany was simply absorbed into the West German state without any new constitutional convention: the real promise of democratic participation was replaced by a false promise of consumer abundance. Former state-owned assets were sold off to private investors at deep discounts, and despite the “solidarity surcharge” introduced into the tax schedule in 1991, the East German people were never formally compensated. Such dispossession of former communist populations was widespread and constitutes one of the most brazen original accumulations of capital in recent history. Needless to say, this was not the economic result that protesters expected from the peaceful revolutions of 1989.

The cultural turn in leftist theory and practice since the 1970s has been criticized by Marxists like Vivek Chibber, who view it as a betrayal of materialist class struggle. But it is worth considering why leftists came to focus on culture to the exclusion of economic and political struggle. Häberlen’s book identifies several factors that overdetermined this cultural turn: disillusionment with the parties and unions of the old left, declining economic growth, deindustrialization, and indeed the provincialization of Europe due to decolonization and the Cold War. This was less a story about new leftists who came from educated middle-class backgrounds and selfishly preferred cultural issues, and more a historical result of changing objective conditions: the political means of mobilization and the industrial base that had once sustained the old left were simply eroded.

Up through the 1970s in western Europe, leftists could still conceive of cultural struggle as organically related to politics and economics. These terrains overlapped in a totality of social contestation. To illustrate this totality, the book discusses critical theories of everyday life that had a strong influence on postwar protest and counterculture. As formulated by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre or the Belgian activist Raoul Vaneigem, such theories interpreted culture as the general sphere of capitalist social reproduction. Vaneigem believed that class struggle must combine workers’ material demands with broader cultural demands.

In his book The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), he claimed that “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life . . . has a corpse in his mouth.” The Italian theorist Mario Tronti likewise believed that the cultural terrain of everyday life should not be viewed as a neutral space, but rather as a “social factory” that needs to be organized. And the French philosopher Louis Althusser, famous for his structural Marxism, considered universities the bourgeoisie’s “true fortress of class influence” and thus a legitimate arena for class struggle.

Urban Activism

Through the example of housing struggles since the 1970s, however, Häberlen tracks a crucial change that has occurred in this revolution of everyday life. The book relates how renters in Rome once resisted the power of landlords by undertaking a “self-reduction” (autoriduzione) of rents. This was a militant act of collective autonomy that struck a blow against the order of private property. Likewise in Berlin after reunification in the early 1990s, artists occupied vacant lots such as the Tacheles building, living collectively and improvising a utopian architecture in contrast to the grey “deserts of concrete.”

Such rent strikes and squats inevitably led to confrontations with the police. There are some continuities with anti-gentrification campaigns today, such as the Berlin referendum campaign to nationalize housing (passed by the electorate, left unenacted by the German capital region’s Senate). But Häberlen observes a major difference: the “massive rent strikes and squatting movements that led to violent riots are a thing of the past. Nowadays, urban activists call for the state to intervene in the market, for example by imposing rent caps or buying up property for council housing, and they tend to operate within the law.”

One reason why urban activism has become less confrontational is that the urban landscape has changed considerably over the past thirty years: “The derelict buildings that offered the space for the improvised lifestyle of squatters are gone” — e.g., Tacheles was sold to real estate developers — “and cities are no longer the wild space for anarchic experimentation that their inhabitants once found in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Berlin.” Another reason is that the capitalist state has virtually monopolized the political terrain, through the “repressive tolerance” of protests or channeling their demands into appeals for state intervention. The economic terrain also has been eroded, or depoliticized, through decades of labor compromise and technocratic governance.

This closure of the political and economic terrains to popular contestation is a hallmark of neoliberalism. It helps account for why “leftist activism in general has become less militant” since the 1970s. Pushed back onto the cultural terrain of values, identities, and lifestyles, the Left has understandably focused more on individual self-expression and less on overt political struggle. Sometimes such cultural struggles for recognition did yield concrete results, such as the women’s and gay liberation movements, which succeeded in legalizing abortion rights and winning a remarkable degree of sexual freedom within a matter of decades. By contrast, the ideas and practices of myriad countercultures have either been lost to history or co-opted by neoliberal capitalism in ways that have made life worse: privatization of public services, casualization of work, entrepreneurship of the self, wellness cults, and so on.

Until the 1970s, leftist activism thrived within a diverse organizational ecology, as the theorist Rodrigo Nunes has put it: anarchic new lefts arose in opposition to hierarchical parties and unions, and such “horizontal” and “vertical” forms of organization coexisted in a tense but mutually beneficial relationship. With the decline of mass parties and militant unions, however, that ecology broke down.

The ephemeral protests and countercultures that remained were deprived of the biodiversity that once animated the Left in general. In this situation of the past fifty years, activism has largely been reduced to tactics of resistance on the cultural terrain. Occasionally, radical visions of social transformation do reappear, such as in the 2011 uprisings against wealth inequality or in the climate movement, but they are fleeting. They seem all the dimmer now, when the far right is on the march.

Häberlen concludes with an appeal to young people throughout the Global North: “Dare to try something, whether it’s by taking to the streets and demanding political change, fighting sexism and racism, or by building a better world, here and now, in your personal relations, living in a commune, or supporting those fleeing from war and violence. Have the courage to try and fail, to reflect, with the help of history — and then try again.”

There is nothing wrong with this appeal. However, it does echo the same historical transformation of protest culture that the book narrates: from diverse struggles to seize power and organize for lasting social change, we have arrived at resistance and ethical appeals. Ironically, neoliberal globalization may have returned social struggle in the developed world back to its proto-industrial condition in the early nineteenth century: radically idealistic, but disarmed and disunited.