The good times suddenly crashed in the 1970s. Craig Calhoun reminds us that the sequence of another political transition did not start from the resurgent Right. Rather, it was the youthful New Left that first challenged Cold War compromises by demanding still better times minus the official hypocrisies and sclerotic bureaucratism. True, contemporary establishments everywhere—West, East, and South—were showing many signs of bureaucratic pathology and despotism disguised with hypocrisy. Importantly, however, those detested establishments by the 1970s represented later stages of the various political regimes originating in the modernizing, socially reformist, anticolonial, or revolutionary takeovers of the earlier heroic epoch. For all the loudly proclaimed ideological differences, the wartime generation of states held in common their reliance on what the Americans called the triad of Big Government, Big Unions, and Big Business, or their functional equivalents in the Soviet industrial ministries and national republics. All these political and economic structures drew their power and legitimacy from the mass provision of modern education, housing, health and welfare services; typically lifelong industrial employment; and, not least of all, comfortable middle-class careers in the bureaucratic, military, and professional hierarchies.
Certainly many powerless social groups and peoples in different countries felt excluded from this bureaucratically organized prosperity. Typically, these were the racial, religious, immigrant, and gender minorities in the developed countries; the non-Russians and subproletarians in the Soviet republics; and the masses of recent rural arrivals in the sprawling shantytowns of the Third World. But such marginalized groups could rarely raise a political voice. Things would change, however, in the 1960s with the arrival of energetic student activists and dissidents in the intelligentsia spreading organizational techniques along with the ideologies and singable slogans of rebellion against “the System.”
The antisystemic movements of the New Left gained traction wherever they could tap (often without fully realizing it) into latent social tensions generated by conjunctures of many factors: industrial recessions, demographic transitions, the changing social geography of urban neighborhoods, repressed ethnic memories, even the sectarian religious fervors or the regional elite factionalisms previously marginalized by modernistic planners of new towns, industries, and states. Profoundly changing the historical pattern of revolutions, these anti-authority rebellions were diffuse, nonviolent in their preferred tactics, and centered on the demands for greater autonomy from bureaucratic regimentation and recognition for the many and greatly varied status groups that were now called identity politics. This meant a departure from the Marxian categories of economic classes as the basis of social struggle. What gave a semblance of common purpose to the disparate protests of the sixties was the universal presence of bureaucratic establishments, oftentimes presided over by the paternalistic and patronizing Big Bosses. For a short while, such situations were conducive to the sharply polarized confrontations of “us against them” performed in public spaces and on spectacularly massive scales. Recall the events of 1968 in the West, the tremendous anti-Shah marches in Iran during 1978–1979, the 1980 strikes in Poland and the 1989 rallies across the whole Soviet bloc, or, for that matter, the 2011 uprising against the Big Boss in Egypt.
The participants, commentators, and sympathetic researchers of these exuberant events focused overwhelmingly on the contentious side where all the energy and hope could be found. Contemporary analyses from the insurgent side typically ignored or took for granted what the embattled rulers were doing or actually not doing. In the majority of instances, bureaucratic establishments seemed oddly reluctant to unleash an all-out terroristic repression. This should seem quite startling because both “capitalist pigs” and “communist apparatchiks” certainly possessed the means and personnel for launching massive violence against unruly civilians in the manner of the interwar totalitarian decades. Grim exceptions still abounded in the stormy aftermath of 1968. We must not forget the brief throwbacks to European fascism that continued in Spain, Greece, and Turkey; Latin American dictatorships; the apartheid-era South Africa; coups and “emergencies” in Arab countries; and internal violence in the East Asian states of both communist and anticommunist persuasion, like Maoist China and South Korea under military rule. The immediate reasons for unleashing state terror in response to student-led activism were local and peculiar to each instance. Yet repression commonly occurred across the outlier world regions and semi-peripheral countries where states were inherently weaker and often newly established.
This contrast in the state reactions to protest points toward an important theory. In the West and in the Soviet bloc—but not in Latin America, Middle East, or East Asia—the political establishments by the 1970s had indeed become thoroughly bureaucratic. Their institutions and ruling personnel were forged in the enormous wartime mobilizations of the twentieth century and disciplined by the precarious balance of the Cold War. Their senior members still collectively remembered the run-away affair with fascist paramilitaries during the interwar period in Europe, or Stalinist purges, or the racial and labor conflict violence recurrently flaring up in twentieth-century America. Perhaps it was the overwhelmingly peaceful and civic tactics of New Left, in contrast to the revolutionary militias of Old Left, that denied the state security organs clear targets for violent confrontation. Perhaps the bureaucrats and politicians ensconced in highly institutionalized environments developed cautious dispositions that were conductive to avoidance of overt conflicts. Instead such “post-Machiavellian” rulers reckoned on the default bureaucratic tactic of muddling through. And this suggests an important and even hopeful insight. Leaping ahead, we should say that studying the conditions for violent action and its avoidance in modern bureaucratic states must be a priority for social science in the anticipation of bigger crises and possible revolutions.
In the seventies and eighties, establishmentarian politics of muddling through and evasion delivered a fix that has lasted until yesterday. The New Left movements flared up and burned out as fast as fireworks. But the damage was considerable, especially when viewed in the longer-run perspective. The discredited and momentarily disoriented rulers began shedding their erstwhile commitments to industrial modernization, full employment, and welfare. In the West political systems had enough strength and resources to do this in a controlled manner, all the while calling it a new age of postindustrialism, flexibility, and globalization. In the Soviet bloc the process got out of hand, causing panic in the political and industrial elites. The result was state fragmentation and colossal pillage. The dissident New Left had its Pyrrhic victory in the extinction of communism. But, unlike the Old Left which was an organized (more precisely, a bureaucratically organized) force, the insurgent energies of this new generation failed to translate into institutions and policies adequate to the tasks of seizing the power that was dropped on the floor. Moreover, the ensuing deindustrialization, and severe budget cuts in higher education, cultural institutions, and general welfare rapidly undid the bases of popular confidence and thus the bases of support for this new generation of antisystemic insurgents.