Beneath the Pavements, the Beach’ – or the Whirlpool?
▻http://longreads.tni.org/state-of-power-2018/lessons-1968
The political legacies of generational changes usually take the form of a circulation of elites a renewal of the personnel, the young coming to the rescue of the exhausted old. But once in a while, when it is the institutions that are exhausted or have become dysfunctional for the majority of the population, generational change can produce competing cultures – sometimes leading to competing strategies – for modernization of an institutional or even a whole political and economic system. These are circumstances in which the old institutions have lost credibility with a whole generation, who draw, in different ways, on the cultural innovations of the era to fashion their own alternatives.
By the late 1960s, the institutions of US-dominated but nation-state-based finance was beginning to crack. In workplaces across Europe, employers faced increasingly uncontainable pressures due to policies of full employment and with them enhanced bargaining power and a collective, self-confident workforce that was already restless with the Fordist deal of total obedience in exchange for high wages.
This began to affect profits and consequently to lead employers to build up political pressure for wage restraint and laws to curb the power of organized labour. In the UK, it was a Labour government that tried to implement these policies in 1967, in the face of strong resistance. At the same time the expansion of higher education had led to growing demands for expanded services, more diversity and greater power for students and teachers.
The demand for increased wages or investment clashed directly with the government imperatives to curb public spending, beyond the military. But these movements challenged not just constraints on public spending or the levels of profit, but went much deeper too.