1960s student protests - revolution or distraction?

I am enjoying writing in this blog. It is satisfying, even if no one reads it yet. But it is slow, and I haven't even touched on some of the themes I hope will become central to my purpose in writing this blog. I haven't even written anything to explain the title of the blog. But since no one reads this blog anyway, I don't think anyone is complaining.😂

Instead I spent a lot of time on two topics that I think will be themes in my writings here - history, and the idea of Christianity under siege by cultural and institutional forces. I spent some time trying to understand for myself why the study and teaching of history is so different today from what what it was in the mid-1900s - more specifically, why certain pro-Christian and pro-Western approaches to history have been banished to obscurity in academia. (see here and here) I called this the "History Coup." That term seems quaint now that I have some understanding of the broad and cataclysmic sweep of the societal forces that make up this coup. But, surprisingly, a deliberate suppression of historical analysis plays a very significant part in this movement (basically Critical Theory and Postmodernism), so I will keep using the term to bring attention to this aspect.

It turns out that the story I told was an odd story because it had no climax: Neo-Marxist "Critical Theory" spread through academia until reaching a critical mass around the 1960s and now these ideas hold a dominant position within the social sciences. Here is what I wrote in "Making sure we don't learn the lessons of history":

it mostly boils down to this:

Many of the students taught by the School became teachers and professors themselves in the US and Europe. Who, in turn, taught another generation of teachers and professors. And so on.

That sounds kind of anti-climactic. 

But maybe I completely missed the climax? Reading more since then, it began to look like the student protests of the 1960s were the climax and I had made a big mistake in omitting this point from the original story. After all, student protests resulted in changes to the curriculum boards in universities around the country, even around the world, and led to changes in university leadership in many leading universities. The famous rallying cry of the Stanford protests: "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go!" says it all, right?

 In a retrospective, Collin Barker describes in some detail the background leading to the student uprisings, and the global scale of the ensuing student conflicts. Initially it began through Civil Rights protests for equality for African Americans, no doubt a virtuous cause. But another factor was Marxist recognition that the working class in the West were too contented to serve as the needed "revolutionary proletariat," but that intellectuals as a class were the best hope. And the very recently swollen ranks of discontented and unsettled university students, especially in the social sciences (where there is less surety of a career after college than in, say, engineering) made a tasty target for Marxist revolutionary recruiters. With this extra energy, the Civil Rights protests shifted seamlessly to protests against the War in Vietnam, which was going badly, and finally to a wide and continually shifting amalgam of social issues, including the role in society of the university. Various demands were made and universities tended to acquiesce to the demands. These waves of protests in the 1960s often turned violet and many could be characterized as riots. Barker reports that "In the academic year 1968-9 70 per cent of private universities and 43 per cent of public universities reported ‘severe student unrest’, often involving battles with the police." Clearly these protests were not isolated, but had a systemic impact on the university system.

I found an article in the Atlantic from 1969 by Nathan Glazer that looks back on the student protests of the 1960s (from an unsympathetic point of view):

We have witnessed in the past four or five years one of the greatest and most rapid intellectual victories in history. In the press addressed to the young (whether that press is elite or mass or agitational) a single view of the society and what is needed to change it is presented. Violence is extolled in the New York Review of Books, which began with only literary ambitions; Tom Hayden, who urges his audiences to kill policemen, is treated as a hero by Esquire; Eldridge Cleaver merits an adulatory Playboy interview;

However, if the students have been radicalized by the media and, as Glazer states, "by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others," then what we are seeing is not simply the work of a few years, but the result of a decades-long under-the-radar effort to put sympathetic radicals into key positions of influence. Only when the critical mass has been achieved and the timing is right do the radicals show their cards. At that point "the change which it seeks to bring about is not effected gradually," as Horkheimer put it in the 1937 essay that first defined Critical Theory.

Glazer described the protests against the universities as a "tactic" in the larger Marxist goal of tearing down Western society:

to the student radicals, it [the student protest movement] was immediately subordinated to the larger social criticism—educational reform was valuable if it meant the universities could be moved toward becoming a training ground for revolutionaries, or if it meant that revolutionaries would achieve greater power within it, or if it meant that the university could be used so as to produce "radicalizing confrontations" with "reactionary" forces.

From this, it would seem that the student protests were a fulfillment of the work initiated by Horkheimer, and set in stone in academia the changes initiated by his Frankfurt School, transforming universities into a "training ground for revolutionaries." Radical students were put onto the boards over curricula, and changes were made to meet student demand.

However, on further contemplation, it is not entirely clear what exactly was gained by the protest movement. Apparently there already existed a critical mass of Marxist or neo-Marxist sympathizers in key positions of influence in the university and in media. Beyond the Civil Rights demonstrations, were the noisy and chaotic university protests necessary? Did they accomplish through noisiness anything for the critical or revolutionary cause that had not already been won quietly over two generations? I am not convinced. In fact, it could be argued the quietly-radical elites unwisely showed their cards too early. The noisy protests by students and other radicals introduced chaos and riots before the true revolutionary moment, leading to a backlash. For example, Ronald Reagan started his first successful campaign for governor by rallying against the student protests. The conservative movement was galvanized against the radicalized chaos of the 1960s, many non-radical liberals were disturbed by the violent tactics of the radicals, and the 1970s ended up being a time of rising conservativism. Of course with the election of Reagan as president in 1980 the conservative movement enjoyed a decades long period of ascendency after being a political non-factor just before the 1960s. Its hard to know what a counter-factual history would have looked like without the 1960s radical protest movement, but it is possible that the reaction set the radical anti-Christian / anti-Capitalist agenda back 30 years, at least in the public sphere. However, I suspect the Critical Theory / neo-Marxist dominance of the academic social sciences was largely unaffected by the popular and political reaction - and maybe the protests did actually serve to further radicalize the universities.

During a time of student protests in Germany in 1969, two of the most important Critical Theory scholars of the Frankfurt School engaged in a very revealing dialogue about the student protests. Theodore Adorno was one of the originators of the Critical Theory movement from the 1930s, while Herbert Marcuse was a more recent Critical Theory innovator who used oppressed demographics like racial minorities, women, and homosexuals as a "critical" wedge to divide and tear down Western Christian, capitalist society. This movement is sometimes called the "New Left." Today's political left still owes much of its value system to Marcuse. Many university students were radicalized through his direct or indirect influence. As I mentioned in my original post, Adorno did not support the student uprisings. Remember, Critical Theory for him was about patiently gaining neo-Marxist influence in key positions of power over time until the Revolutionary Moment. Adorno is clear in his letters that he believed 1969 is not the Revolutionary Moment, that little would be gained by a student protest, and that the chaos would lead to reactionary backlash. Marcuse, while acknowledging that it was not the Revolutionary Moment, wanted to indulge the students' appetite for protests, and may have felt more than a little pride at the movement he created, and he thought there might be something to be gained by premature "praxis", meaning putting the theory into practice. In the end, I think Adorno was right that the student protests were more distraction than climax, and it would have benefitted the movement more to keep their eyes on the prize and maintain discipline. 

Below are key selections from the back and forth. For context, Krahl was one of Adorno's own graduate students. He was the leader of a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist group engaging in protests at the university.

Adorno:

Things have been terrible again here. A SDS group led by Krahl occupied a room in the Institute and refused to leave, despite three requests. We had to call the police, who then arrested all those who they found in the room; the situation is dreadful in itself, but Friedeburg, Habermas and I were there, as it happened, and were able to guard against the use of physical force. Now there is a whole lot of lamentation, even though Krahl only organized the whole stunt in order to get taken into custody, and thereby hold together the disintegrating Frankfurt SDS group—which he has indeed achieved in the meantime. The propaganda is presenting things entirely back to front, as if it were we who grasped at repressive measures, and not the students who yelled at us that we should shut our traps and say nothing about what happened. This is just to put you in the picture, in case rumours and rather colourful accounts should filter through to you.

Marcuse:

You know me well enough to know that I reject the unmediated translation of theory into praxis just as emphatically as you do. But I do believe that there are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis—situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself. We cannot abolish from the world the fact that these students are influenced by us (and certainly not least by you)—I am proud of that and am willing to come to terms with patricide, even though it hurts sometimes. And the means that they use in order to translate theory into activity?? We know (and they know) that the situation is not a revolutionary one, not even a pre-revolutionary one. But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in.

Adorno:

I know that we are quite close on the question of the relation between theory and practice, although we really do need to discuss this relationship thoroughly some time (I am just working on theses that deal with this matter). I would also concede to you that there are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow.

The strongest point that you make is the idea that the situation could be so terrible that one would have to attempt to break out of it, even if one recognizes the objective impossibility. I take that argument seriously. But I think that it is mistaken. ... To put it bluntly: I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts, because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra. If that really is your reaction, then you should not only protest against the horror of napalm bombs but also against the unspeakable Chinese-style tortures that the Vietcong carry out permanently. If you do not take that on board too, then the protest against the Americans takes on an ideological character.

Marcuse:

Of course, I never voiced the nonsensical opinion that the student movement is itself revolutionary. But it is the strongest, perhaps the only, catalyst for the internal collapse of the system of domination today. The student movement in the United States has indeed intervened effectively as just such a catalyst: in the development of political consciousness, in the agitation in the ghettos, in the radical alienation from the system of layers who were formerly integrated, and, most importantly, in the mobilization of further circles of the populace against American imperialism (I really can see no reason to be allergic to the use of this concept). All that may not amount to very much, but there is no revolutionary situation in the most advanced industrialized countries, and the degree of integration simply delimits new, very unorthodox forms of radical opposition.

Adorno here sounds positively reasonable. I have to point out that Marcuse refers to the Christian, capitalist West as "the system of domination," and openly calls for its "internal collapse." He refers to the high "degree of integration," in the US - which means prosperity, thriving middle class, and lack of an oppressed working class. Because of this integration, he refers to the need for "unorthodox forms of radical opposition" - by which he means that students form a key part of the revolutionary entity, alongside the aforementioned racial minorities, women, and homosexuals (as opposed to the "orthodox" Marxist view of revolutionary agitation based on class divisions.

Postscript 1: The 1960s protests remind me a lot of the recent pandemic era BLM protest movement, though the 1960s protests were on a larger scale and over a larger time frame. There is clearly something of a critical mass of support for the Critical Theory cause today (mostly in its Critical Race Theory variant) not just in academia, education, and the media, but now in the public sphere and business, even if most don't understand the true nature or objectives of the movement. I have to ask myself - is this the Revolutionary Moment? Or did we witness a premature attempt at praxis that will result in a backlash? (The Right is increasingly starting to recognize and push back on the Critical Race Theory assumptions.) Or, since the 2020 protests paled in comparison with the scope of the 1960s protests, maybe the 2020 protests were not enough to galvanize a resistance movement and the quiet under-the-radar radicalization of society will continue apace until the true Revolutionary Moment.

Postscript 2: I have enjoyed reading up on Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, and I have come to appreciate the genius of their methods even though I am appalled at their ultimate goals. I was studying the flu virus in graduate school in 2009 during the beginning of the Swine Flu Pandemic, before it became clear that as a pandemic that one was a dud. Viruses are fascinating self-replicating information spreading machines. I remember reading papers and following intently the increasing numbers of infections, early reports of high death rates, and early work to uncover the mystery of its origins. At one lab meeting I commented to my advisor that I couldn't help feeling excited about the pandemic, and that I needed to periodically remind myself that I am on the side of the people, not the virus. That's a little bit like how I feel now studying with great interest how neo-Marxist ideas from critical theory have spread like an ingenious and fascinating self-replicating virus through our society.