Being Young 1n a Postindustrial Society
Kohák, Erazim V.
WHATEVER IS HAPPENING ON CAMPus, it is not a revolution in any recognizable sense. A revolution must have an independent socioeconomic base, and the "youth revolution" conspicuously lacks...
...T T V HE SUCCESS of the new revolutionaryutopian synthesis on campus is due not to any ability to solve the problems of the young but rather to its ability to rationalize them...
...The translation is not always this extreme, and there are still a great many students struggling to retain their hold on reality, but the direction of the revolutionaryutopian ideology is unmistakable and powerful because it makes problems appear amenable to the strategy available to the young—dropping out and turning on...
...But while the revolutionary utopianism does accurately reflect the experience of the young, it does nothing to change it...
...The reason is not simply the inevitable discrepancy between expectations of affluence and objective reality...
...An ideology simply reflecting the conditions of production is not enough...
...A student's personal identity is first of all that of a student—and if this is ERAZIM V. KOHAK experienced as trivial or insignificant, no amount of marginal activity can replace the self-esteem lost through deprecation of the primary role...
...But it is not at all clear that its aristocratic opposite, the spontaneous activity "liberated" from all external motives, is the alternative...
...A modern utopia need not be a utopia for drudges, but it does have to be a utopia of producers rather than of conspicuous consumers...
...In a sense, the utopian/aristocratic approach is much more congenial to the experience of the young in postindustrial society...
...Their common denominator is distress rather than demand, loneliness rather than confidence...
...Campus revolutionaries tend to find such a catalyst in the Sombartian principle of power struggle which Lenin singled out as the key to his interpretation of Marxism...
...Its strategy is to make virtue out of necessity by stressing the inherent nobility of work and desirability of the compensations it offers...
...In the objectivist utopia, complexity of technological relations is resolved through strict accounting...
...Academic effort is real enough and its effects far-reaching, but its connection with need is seldom acted out...
...The place of the young in a society that accepts the affluent model as normative is significantly different from that in a society of scarcity...
...Nothing in the nature of postindustrial production demands such a society...
...The result is the paradoxical situation of effort invested so that one part of the society would not have to roll up car windows by hand while another part remains deprived of essential services...
...The problem is that the society has no real role for its young...
...The heroic model failed disastrously even in much less developed Eastern Europe...
...For purposes of social analysis and construction, a different historical conception is more helpful...
...Only with the loss of confidence—brought about by the failure of basic policies and signalized by the death of a President—did the inherent tensions actually erupt...
...Have, not do...
...A person stripped of all the accouterments of personal identity—of skills, interests, obligations— may well be permanently alienated simply because he has lost the ability to function in any social context...
...Its proponents do not constitute a class, definable in terms of a specific mode of production and capable of offering an alternative mode of meeting men's physical and social needs...
...The problem, after all, is not that the young refuse to accept the role of pampered, useless children: that was always the positive moment in their mutiny...
...The cash nexus may have been a symbol of alienation, but it was also one of its compensating factors...
...We need to suspend the fierce imagery of campus rhetoriticians and their constructionsite opponents...
...Freedom is not empty when it is won through ability to meet necessity through effort—when it is based on democratic work...
...Finally, the isolation of the academic community from daily demands, required for academic work, may help to create a very distinctly affluent perspective...
...It is an amorphous, discontinuous series of outbursts, which attach themselves to anything from fads in dress and music to radical activism...
...His production is not pointless activity, his product not soulless commodity...
...On campus, this heroic approach has produced mock-heroics...
...On campus, obligations appear and often are conventional, and the effort required to meet them appears arbitrary...
...Within a socialist structure, a technologically advanced society can be a classless society of wage earners rather than a society polarized between owners and the owned...
...It has an inflationary effect on the economy as well as on skill levels demanded of the labor force...
...The structure of society is not a passive reflection of productive relations, but rather a product of the dialectical interaction of economic and ideological factors...
...As interpreted on campus, Marcuse shares the Madison Avenue conviction that the effortless utopia is possible and desirable, and that our failure is the failure to realize it...
...Even when affluence is quite objective—or perhaps especially when that is the case—the place of the young in society becomes precarious...
...But the basic need is to make the students' professional work significant...
...But an ad hoc explanation deals with causes rather than conditions—for understanding conditions, a generic catalytic principle is needed...
...Neither indulgence nor repression is relevant...
...Any youth movement must stress the special problems and assets of the young—their lack of a firm place in society, their spontaneity, enthusiasm, and idealism...
...IV T T HOUGH CREATING an explosive situation, alienation itself does not bring about the explosion...
...The impact of campus mutiny on national policy has been significant, but largely indirect...
...Neither does ideology alone...
...and avoid problems the young normally do not face, such as assuring daily sustenance, public safety, or long-range planning...
...The scholarship presented in courses deserves to be thorough, and the standards demanded high...
...The inherent danger of socialism, however, is that in establishing a social machinery for economic direction it creates a concentration of power—the coercive power of the state and the power of focused economy —far beyond anything capitalism dreamed of and makes men far more dependent than free...
...Socialist recognition of social rights and democratic recognition of individual responsibility make another conception possible: democratic work as the self-expression of a free man in a just society...
...Its logic is simple: since in an affluent society production is justified by replacement of effort rather than meeting of needs, Madison Avenue holds out the vision of effortlessness as the way to fulfillment...
...11 W W HAT PRECISELY is the youth "revolution...
...The affluent society makes a youth "revolution" not only possible but virtually necessary...
...It must degrade those qualities the young do not ordinarily possess, such as skill, persistence, competence...
...The dichotomy of drudgery and leisure leaves out the uniquely human alternative, necessary work, freely undertaken for good and sufficient reason...
...Seeing everything, in R. Roland's words, "from the viewpoint of an army commander" obscures both the complexity of social problems and possibilities of solution...
...As at the time of the analogous failure of isolationism and laissez-faire in the early thirties, America is reexamining its basic commitment, foreign and domestic, and the young serve as the leading edge of frustration...
...Any concern with needs is degrading, and as the ideal of the drudges is a society in which all men labor and none is exempt, the ideal of the drones is a society in which all are aristocrats and no man labors...
...It is not simply a matter of specific setbacks like the Bay of Pigs fiasco or the bloody stalemate in Vietnam, or the discovery of poverty and discrimination at home...
...They deserve our support...
...But it can also reflect the added productive capacity represented by a team of horses in a village where the family cow pulls the plow by day and gives milk at night...
...What is needed is an ideology that could play the role of a catalyst between ideals and the realities of the postindustrial age...
...Any concrete social action will necessarily disappoint them...
...First of all, they establish the lesson of Karl Marx: there is a definite connection between technology and ideology, between the modes and means of production and the modes and means of social existence...
...It might be more efficient to have a state agency build low-cost hous ing than to organize a tenants' cooperative through which to channel funds, but the rebelling young are beginning to recognize that the efficiency is self-defeating...
...Closing down the University might not improve the quality of education just as "offing the pigs" might not contribute to a more humane and equitable assurance of public safety, but it will render social problems insoluable— and so force the society to transcend them...
...In this crude version, this self-destructive aristocratic utopia is persuasive because it reflects rather than challenges the position of man as consumer in an industrially mature society...
...It is the problem of humans in a society in which significant roles appear to be reserved for machines...
...It can lead only to greater and greater frustration, sharper and sharper confrontation—and ultimately to repression, whether by reaction or revolution, since even "the revolution" could not meet its own demands...
...Youth movements invariably tinge their idealism with a sense of bitter disillusion: brought up on the ideals of their society, the young tend to be shocked by its realities, whether capitalist, Communist, or socialist...
...According to Marcuse, the realm of necessity has become superfluous: technology is at least in principle capable of replacing all necessary activity...
...Effort loses objective significance not simply because postindustrial society can produce more than it needs, but because it is unable to use its productive capacity to improve the quality of life...
...His emphasis on an aesthetic perspective of man and world, his insistence on speaking of surplus repression, all hint in this direction...
...BEING YOUNG IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY The social strategy of such "Leninism" is to transform problems to be solved into struggles to be won and enemies to be destroyed...
...The place and image of being young in postindustrial society is far more relevant for understanding the youth "revolution" than the oppositon of "revolution" and "reaction...
...Marcuse's estimate of the possibilities of technology may or may not be accurate...
...This reading of Marxism provides us with the methodological tool for understanding phenomena like the youth "revolution...
...The factory worker's experience is differ ERAZIM V. KOHAK ent...
...Perhaps the most striking testimony to the effectiveness of Madison Avenue is that parents who have "liberated" their children from virtually every opportunity to assume responsibility and whose children are "still" restless, frequently share the conviction that their children need even more freedom from responsibility, more done for them...
...Nothing is allowed to appear "free...
...It not only expresses but also reinforces human alienation in a machine world...
...There would be something radically wrong if, for some ten years after ceasing to be children, the young continued to accept without protest the role of pampered chil dren...
...If the wage functioned objec tively, as an instrument for control of labor and distribution, its subjective significance was no less important: the wage packet func tioned as a link between effort and effect, translating labor into needed goods...
...There the lesson of Marcuse has become virtually indistinguishable from the lesson of Madison Avenue: effort is degrading and objectively unnecessary, demanded only by old-fashioned administrators and equally old-fashioned superegos...
...The shift in campus strategy makes the point clearly...
...These processes have in fact broken down— but the question is precisely where and how...
...but it requires the time and leisure of a student, and in the past students have constituted a miniscule proportion of the young...
...In particular, the mutiny of the young is not an extension of a struggle between Soviet and/or Chinese "socialist" power and American "capitalist" power...
...The young have a right to a significant role in society, not only for their own sake but for the sake of society as well...
...Today, some 50 percent of young Americans go on to some form of higher training, only entering the labor force between 18 and 26...
...Not the fact but the form of the youth revolt raises a question about conditions rather than causes—the place of the young in a postindustrial society...
...Putting it quite crudely, a subsistence farmer literally eats what he grows: his toil and aching muscles have an immediate personal significance in the feel of a full stomach...
...Theo retically, an adequate wage could compen sate for technological alienation...
...The young share a common sense of being in the society but not of it, thereby reflecting quite accurately their relation to the economy...
...Work is vain, dedication and drama alone avail...
...Rather, making study significant means taking students seriously, showing them the same respect scholars show their colleagues...
...There are problems to be solved rather than unequivocal "struggles" between good and evil...
...In part, to be sure, the reasons are historical —the economic prerequisities for a campus revolt existed in the '50s, but America's confidence in the ability of its leadership to cope with the problems of the time did much to prevent an explosion...
...Freedom from drudgery, impossible in any case, is presented as decadent, and experienced as unnecessary: the drones make the decisions and bear the responsibility...
...To a great extent, the complexity of postindustrial production eliminates economic justification both for the class of drudges and the class of idlers...
...Unlike his counterpart in the 1820s, a romantic rebel today can "drop out" almost completely for extended periods of time while still enjoying much of the affluence, security, and mobility of an advanced society...
...Utilizing the skills of graduates in social service rather than surplus production is their counterpart...
...Yet affluence is a state of mind as much as a level of consumption...
...But there is also something radically wrong with a social model which offers them this role...
...In the postindustrial age, a quasi-magical relation of push-button and instant product replaces effort as the basic, experienced link between man and his world...
...The world becomes familiar as men handle it, work in it and with it, and as they incorporate it in an overall world view...
...The basic problem of rationalizing postindustrial production has disappeared behind a revolutionaryutopian smoke screen...
...Given the high degree of skill demanded by modem production, the young have little opportunity for significant participation in the work of the society...
...Nothing in the nature of postindustrial production guarantees this: quite the contrary, it is entirely possible for most parents and the society as a whole to deprive the young of all participation...
...Being a revolutionary, if we are to trust CohnBendit, is a great way to live...
...But even were it technologically feasible, Marcuse's vision would remain problematic...
...The empirical people are to a large extent middle America—as a revolutionary mass they exist primarily in campus imagination...
...It is also the problem of women, displaced by technology from traditional roles but barred by old habits of thought and work from assuming new ones...
...Technological complexity makes Ayn Rand's simplification impossible in principle...
...everything must be paid for individually...
...As long as it is based on dependence on others, whether slaves or robots, it is alienation...
...The youth "revolution" today can be a mass phenomenon because there is a mass of the young that has the objective pre requisities for engaging in it...
...Social issues have become accessible to campus concern through a translation from the terms of the external world into the terms of emotions, attitudes, and feelings...
...In the "socialist" countries of Eastern Europe, comprehensive medical and social care, embracing everything from job security to free vacation tours, creates symptoms of affluence in spite of rather low standards of consumption...
...It is a mood of concern and acute alienation, and the upheaval in which it results, while capable of affecting national policy and causing temporary disruption of academic processes, can be represented as a "revolution" only rhetorically, either to justify or provoke repressive measures...
...Both are profoundly conservative: both see affluence as the villain and the solution as a reversion to a simpler age...
...While social action is necessary to make individual action effective, it is not sufficient—it is the individual action, what Marx called "socially useful labor," which gives men confidence in their identity and a sense of social participation, and can transform campus mutineers into a positive social force...
...A strategy that seeks not to make effort sig ERAZIM V. KOHAK nificant but to eliminate it is much more appealing, especially if linked to a vision of spontaneous activity as the genuinely human pursuit...
...Effort appears pointless, goods become soulless commodity...
...Those causes are real, urgent—and familiar enough...
...Campus rebels, while aware of the limitations of capitalist economy, have been blissfully ignorant of this tendency of socialism...
...In the experience of the drone, work is unnecessary, for his physical and social needs are met by drudges...
...In terms of the campus, this justifies the entire range of student participation in academic administration and services, as well as off-campus involvement...
...But for good or bad, neither its puritan nor proletarian version is viable in an affluent society...
...With a few exceptions like the "frontlash" project, the overt content of the youth BEING YOUNG IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY revolt has tended to create an isolated subculture of youthful imagination rather than significant alternatives for the public world...
...In the America of Eisenhower and Kennedy it was effectively compensated by the faith that though the forces may be anonymous they are effective and benign...
...This is a generic feature of technological complexity...
...Even on campus, there is increasing evidence of a sorting out process which separates the desperate from the concerned...
...There are signs that Americans are becoming aware of the continuity between responsibility and self-respect...
...Read in revolutionary-utopian terms, social issues and personal problems may become at once comprehensible and insoluble...
...As goods become widely available and payment effectively invisible in a tangle of delayed payment and paper accounting, the significance of effort diminishes...
...Only old habits, psychological and institutional, stand in the way...
...It creates social and environmental problems not only morally bad but also economically damaging...
...None of this, to be sure, speaks directly to the problems raised by student rebels...
...today it is a problem for national and racial minorities whose traditional forms of effort are not sufficiently sophisticated to produce an effect in a postindustrial society...
...Alienation is finally the result of a sense of the ineffectiveness of effort and anonymity of effect: the gnawing suspicion that what a man does has no relation to what he hopes for or enjoys, and, conversely, that the things he enjoys and hopes for are a fortuitous product of anonymous forces...
...Its appeal is understandable enough: struggle, especially the rather indefinite "revolutionary" struggle, is a form of activity that places a premium on the assets of youth...
...Modem pro BEING YOUNG IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY duction requires a social structure capable of coordinating national productive effort, channelling investment into areas of need, and preventing major dislocation of the economy by irresponsible decisions...
...Within such a matrix, any effort is in principle significant as contributing to total capacity— the secret of Adam Smith's invisible hand...
...There is little visible link between the effort he exerts and its effect on his immedi ate social world...
...The second alternative articulates the experience of the drones, making a virtue out of privilege...
...It is by no means an automatic development, but it is a possible and a promising one...
...The puritan version did not even have an opportunity to fail...
...From this perspective, work is polarized between the abstractions of drudgery and play, and the young—some of them— see play as their birthright...
...And for entirely understandable reasons, the young have often shared a sense of mission to redeem their society with their spontaneity and dedication, coupled with a conviction that this cannot be done by hum-drum means...
...In Marx, the realm of freedom makes the realm of necessity meaningful: man works in order to enjoy freedom from need...
...The "affluent young" on state college campuses are, objectively, anything but affluent...
...First, what is the impact of technological change on the experience of being young...
...There is much talk of duty, little of freedom...
...A catalytic ideology would need to take it into account, and counter it with a consistent, radical demand for democracy...
...A catalytic principle is needed to explain why particular forms emerge at a particular time and place...
...Moral incentives," paradoxically dear •to materialist theoreticians, proved at best partly effective, and only in situations in which the theoretical struggle had a practical counterpart...
...When Adam Smith's invisible hand ceases to function with the overcoming of social scarcity, a capitalist society has no way of replacing it...
...Similarly, the complex issues of the place of women in society became the question of "sexism," and even urgent questions of public safety at home and abroad have turned into emotional issues of being "for peace," for "love," "against oppression," or hating "racist, sexist, imperialist pig America...
...Revolution is the praxis of utopia: since problems have to be surpassed rather than solved, "revolutionary" symbolic acts are appropriate...
...For purposes of social analysis it might be more accurate to describe it as a sort of mutiny—a bewildered, explosive refusal to continue functioning within a system that has become increasingly alien and alienating...
...We need rather to ask about the relation of ideology and technology in concrete human experience...
...As an analytic tool, however, the Leninist emphasis, more familiar in the West as the "cold-war perspective," is viciously counterproductive...
...In the Third World version, effort becomes radically social and heroic, either by substituting guerrilla warfare for productive activity or by making productive activity heroic...
...WHATEVER IS HAPPENING ON CAMPus, it is not a revolution in any recognizable sense...
...In the thirties, the "people" of campus rhetoric had a definite empirical counterpart—union workers, dust-bowl farmers, depressed urban middle class...
...The issues are real, but the campus "radicalizes" ERAZIM V. KOHAK them—makes them subjective, highly general, and charged with the emotions of personal problems...
...Continued reinvestment in surplus production is economically as well as socially undesirable...
...A revolution must have an independent socioeconomic base, and the "youth revolution" conspicuously lacks that...
...The academic intelligentsia—especially the students—experiences the effect of technological alienation most acutely...
...Expecting a faculty to teach and paying it for teaching, and expecting students to study and rewarding them for it, are prime requisites...
...This is a bit more sur prising...
...Prerequisites for a catalytic ideology do exist today...
...Campus ideologies today reflect this matrix far more than the realities of a postindustrial society...
...Certainly the young—and for the matter humans qua human—find the postindustrial society alien: bewildering, incomprehensible, threatenting...
...Not only do a great many of the young consider having to exert effort the chief source of their alienation, but a great many adults, including educators, see the solution to youth protest in making things easier, in doing for the young more and more of what they can do for themselves...
...In turn, the realm of necessity makes the realm of freedom possible: the achievements of work win man leisure...
...But the anarchist/authoritarian temper of the campus mutiny suggests that posttechnological production does not create the psychological conditions for democracy...
...Here a conscious attack is needed...
...But there is everything to make a meaningful participation possible...
...Economic dependence, however, is a necessary but not a sufficient explanatory principle...
...Analogous economic development is compatible with more than one form of social organization and behavior...
...Marcuse's recent loss of popularity on campus may well be due to his misgivings about this bowdlerized version of his ideas...
...The first priority of socialism must be to safeguard rights of free critique, free press, vigorous dissent, individual responsibility and initiative...
...A catalytic ideology would have to be capable of providing social roles both objectively significant and experienced as such...
...But while there are clear parallels between the failure of isolationism and laissez-faire in the thirties and the present failure of anti-Communism and Keynesianism, there are basic differences as well, and these need to be explained in terms of changing conditions rather than recurrent causes...
...This version of the utopian ideology fits rather neatly with the campus version of the ideology of heroic effort...
...Technology alone does not guarantee smooth social functioning or cause social crises...
...The quixotic nature of the campus mutiny, however, may well be due to the fact that the ideological alternatives available to the campus are still geared to the realities of the age of scarcity in which total need vastly exceeded total productive capacity...
...Traditionally, those sectors of the population which have most closely approximated such "liberation"—the children of the aristocracy, the children of the superrich, and now the children of the afflu BEING YOUNG IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY ent—have constituted the most frustrated, decadent, and alienated sector of society...
...It has always been the problem of the children of the aristocracy...
...And, finally, how would our image of man and society have to change to be capable of rationalizing new productive relations, and how would those relations have to be ordered to safeguard the values represented by that image...
...They may be enthusiastic— but in economic terms they constitute seasonal unskilled labor...
...Making study significant does not mean making it "relevant" in a fashionable sense of the word by restricting it to the narrow horizons of students' immediate experience...
...Rather, it reflects a dialectic of ideology and technology...
...Postindustrial productive relations create conditions for democracy as a life-style and not only a political system...
...The first alternative is represented by puritan and proletarian ideologies, by Ayn Rand's objectivism of but a few years ago and the present cult of Third World revolutionism...
...In spite of the appeal of the revolutionary-utopian strategy, the great es cape was not and is not what the great majority of students seek to achieve...
...Hence the response is the "Great Refusal"—chemical or political—to destroy the system which makes demands without, presumably, disrupting the flow of benefits from a self-operating technology, and the "new sensibility" which will replace inner need for effort with instant self-realiza tion...
...The problem of man as producer, absent in the Madison Avenue utopia, is very much present in the rather more sophisticated version presented by neo-Marxists like Herbert Marcuse...
...One alternative articulates the situation of the drudges for whom work is drudgery but inevitable...
...It is self-destructive because the consumer is also the producer, and the habits of effortlessness and dependence may be virtues in the consumer but are vices in the producer...
...In the famous passage in Kapital Marx distinguishes the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, and his reference to a short work day suggests that what he had in mind was economically necessary activity and free-time activity respectively...
...The same is true of community clinics and college dormitories...
...Effort is never anonymous or social...
...It invokes a "struggle" that is theoretic and abstract, though the work it demands is all too immediate and concrete...
...Such strategy may keep students amused, but it gives them little sense of the importance of their work—or of themselves as engaged in it...
...III T T HESE OBSERVATIONS leave the question of fact unanswered but they do suggest an answer to the question of method...
...Marx's hopes for the redeeming role of the proletariat were based on the fact that the proletariat wins its freedom by meeting its own needs through its own labor, not by dependence on others, and so need not itself become an exploiting class...
...Marcuse himself may well be trying to say something very similar—that work becomes meaningful when it serves a purpose rather than an external demand...
...The in dustrial age dealt with it in part through the wage system...
...Within such a matrix, society is inevitably polarized between drones and drudges—those whose needs are met and those whose needs, because of inadequate total capacity, must remain unmet...
...The crucial factor is their interrelation: a society can function smoothly if its productive processes can meet its physical needs—and if its images of man and society are capable of rationalizing those processes...
...The technological-scientific revolution has changed the role of the young by creating a need for extended training periods while at the same time obsuring the relation between training and practice, effort and effect...
...To be sure, there have always been young ERAZIM V. KOHAK men who enjoyed this privilege, but in the past they have been relatively few...
...The only truly "radical" approach is to reject the problems and solutions alike, to withdraw from the world of effort into the world of sensibility...
...Income differences tend to be quantitative, differences of earned income...
...They did not anticipate the secondary effect: that human life will be deprived of the token tasks through which man builds a sense of self-confident identity, relates effort and effect, and gains the habits of work demanded by creative effort: in short, that man, no longer forced to manipulate his world, will lose the ability to conceptualize it...
...In the postindustrial age the dissociation of effort and effect increases sharply while the compensating mechanisms become obscured and obsolete...
...Necessity can become meaningful rather than oppressive when man appropriates it as a means of freedom: when it is simply met by the efforts of others, it remains degrading...
...Yet the demand for "immediate abolition of racism, sexism, imperialism, and pollution" will necessarily be frustrated...
...At a time in life when a young person most acutely experiences the need for a socially significant role to establish his personal identity, a society patterned on the affluent model consigns him to the role of an object of indulgence...
...Even if Marx's scheme of necessity and freedom were economically invalid—which is far from evident—it would still retain its social and psychological validity...
...It reflects relative freedom from ordinary economic cares and preoccupations: in terms of the most elementary immediate experience, it is the mentality of the man who can ask himself, what shall I do today?—and does not receive an immediate, unequivocal answer in terms of daily need...
...But the misgivings come too late: utopian ideology has inseparably associated all effort with the problems it seeks to resolve...
...It was an expression of concern...
...Engels suggests it in his letter to Bloch in 1894 when he writes that his and Marx's preoccupation with economics and revolution was an understandable but unfortunate oversimplification...
...Even in America, the affluent society is at best 20 years old and remains a class phenomenon...
...Nor is an ideology that simply reaffirms a perennial ideal...
...It has to be democratic both in outline and detail, striving to achieve maximum participation—giving each man an opportunity to function as a member of a community rather than as its beneficiary or victim...
...Today, "the people" is largely a mystified concept...
...Young intellectuals are the segment of the population most completely deprived of—or liberated from—the need and opportunity of handling the world, of linking matter and meaning through effort...
...The growing disillusion of the majority of students with the heroics of their over-thirty ideological mentors, their growing involvement in social, political, and academic processes and their evident concern with the realities rather than the psychodrama of social change hold out hope for a democratic alternative to violence and repression...
...Marcuse in effect radicalizes Marx in a rather interesting way...
...Given a consistent commitment on the part of all who deal with the young to provide opportunities for participation and assumption of responsibility and an equally consistent resistance to the clamor of the frightened for fewer demands and greater "freedom," it is a development that can effectively compensate for the technological displacement of the young...
...His is alienated labor: effort dissociated from effect...
...Second, what are the ideological tools in terms of which the young seek to appropriate that change...
...Rather, basic conceptions which have guided American public policy since the thirties have proved inadequate in the complex world of the sixties...
...Marcuse is right in seeing work performed under alien, arbitrary constraint as senseless drudgery...
...If they can win the freedom to accept responsibility and show a willingness to accept being young not as a privilege or an onus, but as a valid, responsible way of participating in social existence, the youth revolution will become unnecessary...
...To describe the impact of the scientifictechnological revolution as "alienation" is accurate but not very helpful...
...The appeal of the proletarian/puritan approach lies largely in its recognition of the need to make effort significant—and of the uses of adversity in achieving this...
...Nor do the young have a set of structural proposals that they could put into effect if they were to seize power—or, for that matter, an organization capable of seizing it...
...BEING YOUNG IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY The explosion came when the basic concepts of the Eisenhower era, anti-Communism and Keynesianism, the struggle against totalitarianism abroad and scarcity at home proved inapplicable to new problems...
...A postindustrial society requires a socialist social structure to make effort objectively meaningful...
...Effort becomes meaningful not by becoming unnecessary, but by becoming purposeful and effective...
...Effective in mobilizing energies for battle, it is unable to use them except to do battle: Leninist regimes, having won power, are notoriously incapable of building free, just societies—instead, they are borne into the fratricidal process Stalin described as "intensification of class struggle following the Revolution...
...In addition to the common traits of adolescence, present-day youth movements share a common perspective of posttechnological affluence...
...A great part of the confusion may be due to the fact that it isn't anything precisely...
...Any effort to resolve them perpetuates them because it perpetuates the age of effort rather than ushering in the age of spontaneity...
...Social crises reflect a discrepancy between technology and ideology, while social progress is a process of mutual adjustment rather than of forcible imposition of one factor on the other...
...The split between effort and effect, the two poles of personal identity, becomes endemic...
...The odds are against it: the construction, servicing, and control of an economic system so sophisticated that it could meet all productive and distributive needs is likely to demand more rather than less skill, discipline, and dependability on the part of labor...
...Thus the very real problem of minorities in an increasingly homogeneous society has become the problem of "racism" rather than civil rights, the solution an equivalent of dropping out and turning on—black separatism and black consciousness...
...The Leninist linear reading cannot explain it: neither internal nor international issues fit the pattern of worldwide struggle ranking the "good guys" against "bad guys...
...The con cern of the unions with wages—or of the individual worker with what Karl Marx, liv ing on an unearned income, perceived as "soulless commodity," was not an expres sion of the greed and materialism of the un enlightened proletariat...
...Men appropriate their world through the double process of conceptualization and manipulation...
...Thus the mutiny of the young against purposive effort is legitimate, not only because effort has been misdirected but because it is gratuitous...
...The displacement of the young that produces it is not simply the result of a technology that makes effort unnecessary, but also of an obsolete ideology that regards it as heroic —and onerous...
...Ideological appropriation of physical reality is the catalyst—struggle is incidental to it...
...Student slogans about participation grope in this direction...
...This is the democratic alternative...
...Thus the harvest becomes the "battle for the grain," manufacture becomes a "struggle to fulfill the plan...
...For in the '60s the problem was no longer simply one of "stopping Communism" but rather of creating a viable democratic alternative, no longer one of raising the GNP but rather of distributing affluence...
...it is always individual, tied to individual needs...
...The mutiny of the young need not end in irrelevance and repression...
...The campus upheavals have created a violent, destructive fringe, but the campus mood as a whole is not that...
...From this perspective the proper pursuit of man is not work but pure, spontaneous self-expression...
...This is but one sense in which revolution and counterrevolution become equivalents...
...Reliance on spontaneity is notoriously more compatible with beachcombing than with sophisticated technology...
...For this reason, social conditions that shaped the campus upheavals might well prove more significant than the immediate causes sparking this or that explosion...
...The revolutionary-utopian ideology has given the young a superficial sense of instant significance, but the cost is damnably high...
...Those problems are cosmic ones, stated in intensely personal terms...
...Students are not alone in experiencing it: it is the problem of the least as well as the most privileged...
...A capitalist economy is inevitably bound to reinvest for profit, creating an inflation of unneeded goods, but it lacks the mechanisms to channel its surplus capacity to meet the need for a distribution of affluence—public health, education, housing...
...The objective problem can be solved because it is not simply a matter of technology but of its ideological appropriation as well...
...In a very crude version, this is the alternative offered by Madison Avenue...
...The positive traits of campus upheaval are common to youth movements of all ages...
...But that has not been his impact on campus...
...It will also succeed...
...It is not surprising that the young seek to establish their distinct identity either by dropping out or by adopting the mockheroic role of the rebel...
...What is needed is the democratic opportunity to do, to accept responsibility and participate in the work of the society, from shared family responsibilities to opportunities for dealing with political and social problems...
...In this sense, affluence can reflect, as in America and Western Europe, the condition of a society whose total productive capacity exceeds its total needs...
...At the same time technological sophistication eliminates many of the marginal tasks that had traditionally provided a bridge between play and work, and where it does not, it makes them appear onerous and insignificant...
...In the age of scarcity, liberals assumed that once the goods of daily life become available with minimum effort, human life would be freed from drudgery, and human energy would flow into "creative" tasks...
...An affluent society provides for its young a far greater degree of autonomy from many pressing daily occupations, not only objectively but also because it expects far less from the young in terms of cooperation in securing food, shelter, and even an atmosphere of cooperation within the family unit...
...This approach has had a remarkable impact on America...
...The policy emerging from recent confrontations —roughly, to push off the young into even more luxurious academic sandlots while stationing armed guards around them—is counterproductive...
...Human life is in principle capable of becoming entirely a realm of spontaneous, unnecessary activity...
...For some years after ceasing to be children they are effectively excluded from assuming adult social roles...
...Rather, it tends to create habits of dependence, irresponsibility, and anonymity, directly contrary to habits required for a democratic life-style...
...Perhaps the most significant difference is that while in the thirties the revolting young were very much part of a wide upsurge in the whole society, today they are strangely isolated in a world of their own...
...A basic prob lem for any society beyond subsistence level is one of providing compensatory mecha nisms for technological alienation...
...American foreign and domestic policies are passing through a fundamental crisis...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
