In the 1970s and the 1980s, it was not just class which was being challenged but the idea that all political differences could be located on a Right-Left spectrum. The time for such dichotomies - it was claimed - was over. New issues, beyond both Left and Right, were advanced by young ‘post-materialist’ cohorts, who took it for granted that Western societies had achieved material wealth and well-being. A new individualism, or new ‘subjectivity’ was said to challenge the ‘old’ parties across the board…The point, however, is that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are always being redefined, often in response to social and political change.

In the field of ideas the crisis of socialism was even more obvious. The view that the capitalist market was a highly wasteful mechanism for allocating resources, and that collective means of providing services were better than private, became unfashionable - even on the Left. The Left lost ground to those they derided in the past as the apologists of capitalism, the worshippers of the market, the high priests of the Invisible Hand. Old ideas were resurrected: serving one’s own interests somehow helped everyone to prosper. The state should let people get on with their lives, limiting its role to the provision of a few ground rules - as Hayek had suggested thirty years previously. Socialists looked like an army which, though once powerful, was now everywhere in retreat, demoralised, anxious to regroup around a few ideas which it sought, unconvincingly, to defend, while accepting that much of what it had supported in the past should be discarded.

Any increase in unemployment, particularly when coupled with a reduction of social protection, is tantamount to an effective decrease in personal freedom. The importance of having an occupation which provides a reasonable income is directly commensurate with the magnitude of private consumption. In a society of this kind - that is to say, in a capitalist society - effective freedom is, in the final analysis, largely the freedom of the individual consumer. Where the consumer is ‘sovereign’, those who have no gainful occupation and no personal fortune are de facto disenfranchised. Conversely, those who are rich are freer; they can do more. It is the possession of money which transforms many formal rights into real, effective rights. No amount of liberal rhetoric, no shrill protestation of concern for the rights of the individual, can possibly disguise the fact that where the market rules, those without money effectively lose thier membership of the consumer society. As they sink into the demoralising morass of poverty, they are not only disempowered from obtaining so-called luxuries (the term which designates the necessities of the rich), and those commodities which make life comfortable and pleasant, but they are also effectively denied ‘access’ goods, such as culture and education. Eventually, they are condemned to a life dominated by an obsessive preoccupation with the cash nexus, by the endless worry of making ends meet, by the anger of being unwanted, unemployable, unacceptable, by the frustration of having become a human surplus which cannot be absorbed - a human mass whose only economic raison d’etre is to keep those who are in employment pliant and disciplined and their wages lower than they would be otherwise.

Though it failed to offer a credible political alternative, the student movement expressed a global and radical critique of society and its institutions which could not be so easily dismissed. Such a critique had, of course, previously been expressed by individual theorists, writers and artists. What was new in the 1960s was that this was voiced, more or less spontaneously, by a mass movement.

Its cultural underpinnings were virtually ignored by the traditional Left, partly because socialist parties had little understanding of cultural politics, partly because it involved concepts which were outside the socialist tradition. What was this cultural substructure? Social theorists have described it as ‘post-materialist’, an expression which suggests the search for the politics appropriate to an an age of abundance. Socialist and capitalist politics, in spite of their differences, shared a common terrain: if resources were scarce, the question was how to distribute them. For post-materialists this assumption did not hold. In an era of abundance, politics must, inevitably, acquire a different form.

Politicians of the Left (and the Right) could fairly retort that the assumption that a post-scarcity age had been reached could only be entertained by privileged students, temporarily removed from the world of gainful employment, detached from its competitive ethos and unencumbered by family responsibilities. The real electorate had mortgages or rent to pay, children to feed and clothe, jobs to obtain or preserve. The student radicals arrogantly or childishly ignored these fundamental truths. They were right, however, when they held that human dignity should not be satisfied merely with the riches available on the shelves of supermarkets and department stores; they were wrong when they believed themselves to be the first to hold these views.

The radicalism of students everywhere took the form of a deep hostility towards the parties of the Left; some of the values it exhibited were distant from, or quite external to, the traditional values of socialism. For example, the new youth culture expressed a profound individualism, epitomised by the phrase ‘doing my own thing’, and a pre-occuption with the self which were quite alien to the more regimented traditions of social democracy. When youth culture - through the student Left - embraced a political-collective approach of the ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ variety, it tended to identify as ‘youth’ or ‘students’ the group to be united, rather than the working class. When the young radicals sought a privileged role for the working class, they believed that ‘youth’ would assume a leadership role, or, at least, that of the spark which started the prairie fire (to use one of Mao’s expressions). When civil rights issues were embraced - such as the struggled against racial discrimination or against excessive police powers - they were always approached from a libertarian standpoint, which intersected, but never merged, with that of the organised Left.

No political party of any major weight developed out of the organisational structures devised by the student activists. No established party suffered unduly, or prospered particularly, as a consequence of the movement. All attempts to construct a more or less revolutionary party in opposition to the traditional socialist or communist organisations utterly failed, and all efforts to capture these organisations and subvert them were successfully repelled. Yet some of the long-term influence of the 1960s on politics manifested itself in unlikely quarters in the 1980s and 1990d: some of the individual and anti-state rhetoric of the period was captured by a reconstructed conservatism with its emphasis on ‘getting the state of the backs of the people’ - a far more 1960s’ slogan than anything subsequently invented by parties of the Left. To some extent, May 1968 was the first step towards the dissolution of the Jacobin language of revolutionary politics which had for so long prevailed in France.

What baffled and still baffles scholars is that, under the cover of a great similarity in behaviour, style, fashion and action, the trend displayed a complex array of contradictory values. Hard-core young Stalinists or Trotskyists went around with long hair and in tight jeans. Maoists enjoyed listening to the Rolling Stones’ ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. Defence of individualism and distaste for bureaucracy went hand in hand with staunch advocacy of state or collective action against racism and poverty. Avowed libertarians urged withdrawing free speech from supporters of far-right groups. In the name of liberalism, student radicals defended the autonomy of the universities against the encroachment of capitalism, and condemned any funding from private enterprise or government departments connected to the police and the armed forces. At the same time, they criticised the liberal, elitist and allegedly ‘irrelevant’ nature of much academic research, demanded that the universities should no longer be ivory towers and a preserve for the few, and should instead serve society and the people.

Although intrinsically linked to the industrial working class, socialism attracted all those who wanted to change the world and who refused to accept distress as the fated condition of human beings. This moral appeal was its strongest point. On this terrain, liberalism, in its pure individualistic form, stripped of its social content, was never a match for socialism.