Post-social-democratic student movements must build themselves from nothing without prior leftist infrastructure

Evidence

Like Ireland, the UK has been at the forefront of what I have called “capitalist realism” — the view that, since capitalism is the only game in town, all we can do is find a way of accommodating ourselves to it. … 68 came at the end of the “cultural revolution” of the Sixties — a series of challenges to the monolithic Marxist meta-narrative (its claim that everything could be reduced to class conflict). 68 presupposed both a credible leftist political project (from which it could deviate) and a social democratic context (which provided the conditions for its exorbitant demands). But both of these have definitively disappeared. They are a distant memory even for the parents of many of the teenagers who took part in the recent UK protests. The current movement has had to build itself up almost from nothing, in a situation where the revolutionary left has no infrastructure and the moderate left has long since acquiesced to capitalist realism; and, perhaps most astonishingly, it has been constructed by those who had previously been the most obvious victims of capitalist realism — the young. … 68 was about a short-lived alliance between workers and students, but many of today’s students are already workers, forced to do part-time — and often fulltime — jobs in order to support their studies. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1557

Categorization

• SEED: An essay comparing the structural preconditions of 1968 versus post-2008 student revolt — what movements can arise when no credible leftist project or social democratic baseline exists.
• DEEPTHINKING: Fisher’s contrast between a movement critique that presupposes a prior leftist project and one that must invent itself entirely is a genuinely paradigm-organizing frame for understanding generational political action.
• XREF: connects to: 2010s leftists faced demobilized civil society instead of mass parties — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 17

Broader Connections

• 2010s leftists faced demobilized civil society instead of mass parties #corroborates (0.78) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 17