Branding the Revolution: Hair Redux

Abstract

The anti-capitalist revolution known as 1968 set in motion a social, political, and economic reaction that would culminate 20 years later in the victory of neoliberalism. The students and workers around the world who mounted the barricades succeeded temporarily in effecting certain progressive initiatives, such as the largest general strike in French history, the Prague Spring, and, in the USA, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist protests that shut down universities and prompted the withdrawal of the country from Vietnam. But reaction was determined and powerful. By the beginning of the 1980s a particularly ruthless form of capitalism had been reinstituted, administered in the political arena by “operatives” such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and economically by the structural readjustment programs mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Although neoliberalism violently rejected 1968’s anti-capitalist agenda, philosophers, theorists, and sociologists such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello emphasize that the revolution of 1968 had quite distinct political, cultural, economic, and personal dimensions and that neoliberalism ironically ended up exploiting the last of these: 1968’s individualist and hedonist ethos. The neoliberal social and economic order, in other words, pilfered a revolutionary libertarianism formulated by anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, feminists, and many others, and used it to critique and rebuff Fordist and hierarchical modes of production in favor of a “new spirit” that “denounced the mechanization of the world […] and stressed the intolerable character of the modes of oppression which, without necessarily deriving directly from historical capitalism, had been exploited by capitalist mechanisms for organizing work” (Boltanski and Chiapello 201).