What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.

Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.

Such remarkable social stability would never have been achieved had the anarchistic behaviour of competing capitalists been the only motor of distribution. The largely unregulated capitalism described by Marx and other nineteenth-century thinkers was an utter failure. It was marked by constant economic crises, with terrible political effects: global wars, authoritarian regimes and massive unemployment. The triumph of capitalism, les trentes glorieuses, was, in reality, the triumph of regulated capitalism: the countries under such a regime enjoyed democracy, peace and unparalleled prosperity.

Socialists and feminists did not simply denounce the duplicity and incompleteness of the liberal revolution - the citizenry whose power it sought to enhance excluded the propertyless worker and the female, both equally disenfranchised. They also sough to reveal the uneven distribution of power in civil society. It was at this point that the two traditions, the socialist and the feminist, diverged: socialists - of the post-utopian variety - concentrated their attacks on socio-economic inequality and its political repercussions; feminists focused on the systematic gender inequality which pervaded all sphere, from family life to the most elemental interpersonal associations, including the relationship between men and women.

Anti-capitalism was in fact the most obviously ideological basis of the student movement but its most salient feature was the assumption that politics could be based on semi-permanent mobilisation. When the German ‘Extra-Parliamentary Opposition’ or APO (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition) advocated direct democracy, democratic councils, rule by the assembly of students (or workers in factories), rather than by delegates, it made demands which ran counter to the fundamental principles of Western representative democracy, and hence against those of all the political parties of the Left throughout Europe. It seemed clear to these parties that the historical models from which one could draw analogies with the forms of direct democracy advocated by the students - the Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets, the Italian occupation of the factories in the 1920s - belonged to a rejected insurrectionary past, probably unrepeatable and certainly unsustainable.

The overt commitment to popular rule and the democracy of Western societies somehow clashed with the obvious fact that most people felt they had very little real power over their environment. The basis of the Western conception of democracy remained the electoral process, defined as the designation of representatives. Examined from a different perspective, this, however, could be seen as a process whereby citizens were required to divest themselves of the main powers of decision-making in favour of representatives who would exercise them on the citizens’ behalf. To be able to choose the powerful is better than having them imposed by fiat; but it is not the same as having power oneself.

It is in the interplay of this twin-faceted phenomenon - an anti-establishment culture with an elitist and avant-garde profile, resting on popular foundations - that the student movement developed. It should not be thought, however, that student activism ever ‘dominated’ the universities, or that student activists were ever in the majority, or that Marxism become the uncontested ideology of the student movement. The single most important strand of the activists’ ideology was a strong anti-authoritarianism. This was accompanied by a dislike of rules and bureaucracy, a suspicion of representative and delegated authority, and a strong sympathy for the oppressed, especially those oppressed by racial discrimination. Apart from such description enunciations, it is difficult to provide an adequate analysis of the phenomenon of student and youth protest.

Socialist parties were thus in an impasse. They aspired to redistribute power away from the impersonal forces of the market towards ordinary people. They sought to help the poor, establish economic and social justice, expand opportunities for those who could not obtain them through the market. Little of this could be done without accepting economic growth - in other words, capitalism growth - as the overarching priority. The constraints of democratic electoral politics compelled them to do so.

Socialist revisionism remained firmly committed to politics in the narrow sense and ignored culture. It did not open new horizons. Perhaps this is inevitable under the conditions of democratic politics, where competition for votes acts as an obstacle to political innovation.