Permanent Revolutionary Radical Posturing

Marxism 2010 continues in London and ideologues without a clue are nothing new. Last year the pathetic "anti-capitalist" G 20 protests achieved nothing, apart from expressing inchoate anger at the "system": a justified response to the financial collapse brought about by New Labour adding up to nothing but a designer protest.

At the time I wrote this,

Richard Rogers in the Guardian has written in -The Revolution Will be Taught

After the madness of the central London crowds of thousands and clashes with riot police, a small number of scholars and demonstrators met at the University of East London campus Wednesday afternoon to hold an alternative G20 summit, the dream of G20 meltdown organiser Chris Knight.

Organiser Chris Knight, still costumed as a dead banker from the rallies at the Bank of England earlier in the day, professed that he felt this summit was already superior to the bankers' summit Thursday because although not many had gathered, those that did did so to discuss an alternative, whereas those meeting tomorrow were not, and "as we've seen today the whole of London has no confidence in them".

This smacks of utter desperation.

The pretence this was an 'alternative summit' was futile and flawed and would fail to mobilise people and thus end in total failure.

A significant number of protesters only care about their 'counter cultural credentials': being seen to be radically transgressive and against 'the system' no less than the lifestyle revolutionaries of 1968.

They will make a smooth transition into corporate market structures later on. For radical gestures, street theatre, choreography, coining slogans and so on are 'transferable skills' that can be absorbed by corporate capitalism.

Knight's own stand was pitiful: it meant to radicalise and he had the position of professor from which to try and do so. Unfortunately, it was East London and he is grey, old and has bad teeth. Not sexy. Not handsome. Not Tariq Ali. Not Vanessa Redgrave. A failure even in kitsch terms.

Like many 68ers such people are fit for the contemptible dustbin of history into which those whom the 68ers rebelled against were flung. It's difficult to complain about that when radical movements have lauded youth over experience.

Ultimately, Professor Knights defiance is a defiance against his own death, which will happen a lot sooner than the deaths of the campus rebels he feels will carry the cause forward when many of them simply won't because they are fake.

The protest in pretending to be a dead banker will do nothing to nothing to offset that he is an irrelevant idiot.

The point about radical mythologies, in this case 1968, is that they can still act as a spur to change the world now even if the past 'radical moment' no longer in retrospect seems to be as promising or as liberating as once it did.

That does not seem like a rejection of the idea that students can act as a liberating vanguard force in society by pushing for social change when such an idea is very much flawed-more so today than in 1968.

For let's face it; what do those of 18 to 21 really know of life beyond often scouring texts for trendy theories that they do not often fully understand and cling on to in order to provide ego security.

Politics becomes a form of salvationist creed that can make sense of the senseless drift of life in meaningless consumer society,that is supposed to give direction and purpose whilst rejecting doubt, uncertainty, and scepticism.

So whilst every institution in Britain is repudiated and called into question, the aim is to suspend all that when it comes to lauding some 'systemic alternative' which can just anything that promises the work of destruction.

The destruction of Western civilisation in its entirety as nothing but a hypocritical mask concealing the fact that our liberal democracy is based reducing people to economic animals and appropriating Arab oil. Much of which is true.

Yet now that high culture has been junked and merely intelligent people without wisdom brought up on a diet of consumerism and media induced spectacles, the feeling in some will be inchoate rage: everything is a sham. Let's get acting then.

The irony is that the 1968 generation participated in the work of destruction of a society in which communal ties and bonds meant something were relentlessly eradicated by this mediocre generation of politicos and activists.

At this moment in our history that has led and will continue as many in this generation to have no real sense in which anything can go beyond the tired out antinomian postures of ultimate revolution for "self-autonomy" .

It will not matter how this is done; economic sabotage, blowing up TV transmission networks, Islamist terror-only violence will derail the gormless apathy of the masses that prevents them from rejecting their consumerist daydreams.

Nothing can change unless the situation in which most people in too comfortable Western nations like Britain is radically changed-if that means anarchy, bricking the bankers windows, smashing up cars, etc it will happen.

So there is a certain continuity between 1968 and the radical groups agitating for change on a global basis now in 2009-Professor Knights comments are very similar to sentiments expressed by students in 1968.

In the post-war liberal Britain of 1968 the sense of alienation led in the direction of supporting anti-capitalism, 'the system' and any radical force capable of defeating US Imperialism ( Mao, the NLF, Ho Chi Minh etc etc ).

In 2009 many on the anti-imperialist left were not "anti-war" but "anti-imperialist war"-they tend to see Hizbollah or Hamas as liberating forces that will carry out first and foremost the work of destroying Israel and Western power in the Middle East, the prime site for imperialism today.

Not south-east Asia or Latin America as it was back in 1968. This in itself has divided the left today between those student radicals who later went on to support 'liberal interventionism' ( many in New Labour like Charles Clarke, Mandelson , et al )and those who stuck to the supposed purity of the creed of 1968.

The present brewing up of discontent amongst students incited to action by professional pedants like Chris Knight might not lead, however, in a particularly tolerant direction.

For in the 1930s in Germany it led to most students supporting Nazism and burning books. Many 'Old Left ' academics and thinkers were very wary of the hysterical and intolerant dogmatism of some radical students.

One post-studenty style radical named Huq opined in response to the G 20 protesters,

Straitened economic circumstances are breeding palpable anger across the board – witness the attack on Sir Fred Goodwin's house this week. Forget the mythologised moment of 1968: higher education has the potential to be a flashpoint during this recession.

As a prediction, that's about right. But it does not portend towards a new enlightened generation, who will necessarily change the world for the better, not least in the light of the very dumbed down standards and 'instrumentalised knowledge' in the 'polyversities'.

Economic privation, the absence of security and the futility of being deluded that their degrees are anything more important than 'a diploma in origami' ( JG Ballard ), might push lots of half educated people into nihilistic anger.

I have predicted since New Labour came to power, the inevitable economic slump it's debt fuelled fake consumer boom will lead, in an atomised society, to the rise of ethnic tensions, Islamist militancy and enfevered pedants of Respect calling for 'direct action'.

After 1968, the failure of the 'mythologised moment' led a minority of student radicals to actually join or be sympathetic with the RAF or the Baader Meinhof Gang.

The failure of the 'Anti-War' movement and to prevent Iraq, the lack of any real political alternative with two parliamentary parties offering the same neoliberal dogmas and the rise of campus Islamism is an even more potentially "revolutionary moment"

And this time it is not going to be very pretty at all.