Post-1968 Western radicalism abandoned belief in domestic socialist revolution

Evidence

The ambiguity of the period covered in this book _the persistence, up to the 1970s, of the socialist offensive in many of the directly imperialized formations; the receding of revolutionary horizons in Western Europe; the many disrorrions of the Comecon countries; the sheer power and productivity of advanced capital; but also the highly visible brutality of imperialist warwas that the radicalism which arose in the United States in 1968 or thereabouts did not, except in some small pockets, believe in the desirability of socialism in tts own country or in any realistic possibility of a revolutionary movement in the West, while its counterparts among the Parisian intelligentsia seemed to believe more in Surrealism than in socialism and quickly settled into poststructuralisms and New Philosophies which were directly hostile to Marxism and to the idea of any historical role for the working class. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Sets the historical precondition for why discourse-based theory (and with it strategically essentialist identities) displaced class politics in the metropole, which is the materialist backdrop Ahmad builds toward. — connects to: Radical theory shifted from socialist revolution to Third-Worldist nationalism as national bourgeoisies consolidated — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 272; Global anti-capitalist revolution retreated by the mid-1970s — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 271; Sixties radical thought was still committed to totalized utopian master narratives — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 669 (+1 more)