The events of 1968 actually launched anti-communism and a new consumer capitalism

Evidence

The real trends remained so unclear for so many years that the Events of 1968, when they burst upon the French scene, were widely viewed as the inaugural gesture of a new generation of radical, even revolutionary, intellectuals and militants, and neither as the process that propelled the worst kind of anti-communism to an hegemonic position among the Parisian avant-garde nor as the last rites for an antiquated form of capitalism which was soon to be replaced by a more efficient, more consumptionist form. In the course of the decade following 1968, Paris was at length normalized. Many of the more strident members of the generation of ‘68, from Kristeva to Glucksmann, then passed into the ultra-Right of the ‘New Philosophers’, and the voices that came to dominate French intellectual life – Derrida and Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari – quite comfortably announced ‘the death of the subject’, ‘the end of the social’, and so on. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 96

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses the standard narrative of 1968 as a radical dawn, arguing it was sowed the seed of the ultra-Right ‘New Philosophers’ and the post-ideological declarations of French theory.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this holds — that poststructuralism’s ‘death of the subject’ was a symptom of the Right’s victory rather than a radical gesture?
• XREF: connects to: May 1968 paradoxically advanced the narcissistic individualism its actors opposed — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 534; May 1968 actually began the implosion of the social — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 251; American capitalism secretly adopted Soviet centralized planning principles in the 1960s. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 158 (+2 more)

Related

• May 1968 actually began the implosion of the social (similarity 0.84)
• May 1968 paradoxically advanced the narcissistic individualism its actors opposed (similarity 0.83)
• The 1968 generation’s disillusionment followed the events’ modernizing logic (similarity 0.82)
• Post-1968 literary theory abandoned solidarity with labor movements (similarity 0.78)