A talk given in London, 1965. The below piece is extracted from the 1966 Solidarity pamphlet of the same name,

The theme of the discussion today is 'the crisis of modern society'. I would like to start by evoking what appears to be a fantastic paradox concerning modern industrial society and the way people live and act in it. It is the contradiction between the apparent omnipotence of humanity over its physical environment (the fact that technique is becoming more and more powerful, that physical conditions are increasingly controlled, that we are able to extract more and more energy from matter) and, on the other hand, the tremendous chaos and sense of impotence concerning the proper affairs of society, the human affairs, the way social systems work, and so on.

This is not to say that from the point of view of what one might call the 'internal environment' of society there have not been changes, in some sense even big, progressive changes. So called prosperity is more general than it was (though one ought to see more precisely what this prosperity consists of). There is a spreading of culture. There is an expanding society. There is better health and so on. But here we meet a second paradox. It is that this society which produces so much — and where the population has, to some extent, a share in this expansion of wealth — that this society which has apparently created less cruel living conditions for most of the people who live in it, does not present an image of greater satisfaction, of greater happiness for a greater number of people. People are dissatisfied, people are grumbling, people are protesting, constant conflicts exist. Even if dissatisfaction takes on different forms, this richer and more prosperous society possibly contains more tensions within it than most other societies we have known in history.

These paradoxes offer a first way of defining the crisis of modern society. But this is a superficial way of looking at the phenomena which confront us. If we go a bit deeper, we'll see that the crisis manifests itself at all levels of social life.

Let's start from an aspect which traditional Marxists consider just part of the 'superstructure' of society, as a derived and secondary phenomenon, but which we consider to be very important, i.e. the crisis of social and human values.

No society can exist without a set of values which are recognized in practice and adhered to by the quasi-totality of its members. The problem here is not to know if these values are right or wrong — or whether they conceal real mechanisms whereby some people succeed in exploiting others. For the cohesion, for the working of all the societies we have known — even of societies divided into classes — such a set of values has proved necessary. They are what constantly orients the actions and motives of people and makes them cohere into a social whole. This function cannot be ensured just by violence or coercion, nor even just by the penal law, which says 'you ought not to do this, otherwise you go to prison'. There must be something more. After all the law only states what is prohibited. It cannot provide positive motives, a positive orientation enabling people to fill the content of social life.

Now we all know (it has been said for a long time but this does not diminish the importance of the phenomenon) that such a set of values, such a system of accepted goals and common beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong, what ought to be done or not done (irrespective of what the penal law says) hardly exists any more in today's society.

There was a problem in all societies, in all historical phases, about the place of man in the world and about the meaning of life in society and of life in general. Every period of history attempted to give an answer to these questions. The problem here is not whether these answers were right or wrong but the mere fact that an answer was forthcoming gave a cohesion, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning to the people living in these periods. But today there is no clear answer. We know very well that religious values are out, for all purposes practically finished. What used to be called moral values (inasmuch as they can be distinguished from religious values) are also practically finished. Are there really any accepted moral standards left in today's society ?

At the level of officiality, of the powers that be, of the press, etc, there is just an official hypocrisy which almost explicitly recognizes itself as sheer hypocrisy, and does not even take its own standards seriously. And in society at large there is an extremely widespread cynicism, constantly fed by the examples provided by social life (scandals and so on). The general idea is that you can do anything and that nothing is wrong, provided you can get away with it, provided that you are not caught.

What in Western Europe had appeared for some time to be a sort of universal value welding society together, namely the idea of the nation, of national power, of national grandeur, is no longer an accepted value. What was after all its real basis — or the pretence of a real basis — has disappeared. In the past it was often a mystification when great nations pretended that they were playing important roles in world affairs. But today no nation can claim this except for America and Russia. And even for them this 'leading role in world affairs' is clearly seen as being just an entanglement in the impasse of nuclear power.

Could knowledge or art provide values for society today ? First of all let us not forget that knowledge or art are important or have meaning, at least today, for only very limited strata of the population. More generally, in history, wherever art has played a role in social life, it has never been as an end in itself. It has been as part of a community which was expressing its life in this art. This was the case in the Elizabethan period. It was the case in the Renaissance. It was the case in Ancient Greece. The Greeks or the people during the Renaissance did not live for art, but they put great value into their art because they recognized themselves and their problems in it. Their whole life had a meaning which was expressed in its highest form in this artistic creation.

What about knowledge ? Again in the strict sense, it is limited today to a small minority. And there is a tremendous crisis developing in science. This has followed the increasing division within particular spheres of knowledge, the increasing specialization, the fact that a scientist today is necessarily someone who knows more and more about less and less. At least among scientists who take a broad view there is a deep feeling of crisis in relation to what even yesterday was considered to be the solid basis of factual knowledge. Newton thought he was discovering eternal truth, that he was reading a page out of the eternal book of nature or of God's creation. Today no scientist believes that in discovering a 'law' he is discovering an eternal truth. He only knows that he will perhaps be the object of three lines in a history of physics or of chemistry where it will be said 'attempts to explain the peculiarities of this experiment by W. in 1965, provided some hopes that led to theory X. This however was later superseded by the construction of theories Y and Z.'

Scientists themselves, like Oppenheimer for instance, are dramatically aware of yet another aspect of the crisis. It is that with this specialization they have not only isolated themselves from the whole of society but that they have also isolated themselves from each other. There is no longer any scientific community with a common language. As soon as you go beyond the limits of a speciality, people cannot really communicate, because there is so little common ground.

What is happening, in these circumstances ? What values today does society propose to its citizens ? The only value which survives is consumption. The acquisition of more and more, of newer and newer things is supposed completely to fill people's lives, to orient their efforts, to make them stick to work, etc. I won't dwell much on all this, which you all know very well. I'll only stress how much all this — even as a mystification — is only a partial and unsatisfactory answer. Already today people cannot fill their lives just by working to earn more money, in order to buy a more modern TV set and so on and so forth. This is felt more and more, The profound reason for this feeling is of course that in its content this consumption does not express organic human needs. It is more and more manipulated, so that purchases can become an outlet for the ever-growing mass production of consumer goods. This whole pattern of existence almost by definition becomes absurd. The value which having newer and more things can possess is caught up in a process of perpetual self-refutation. It has no end. The only point is to have something more, something newer. People become aware of what in the USA is now called the 'rat race'. You just try to earn more so that you can consume more than the neighbours. You somehow value yourself more than the neighbours because you have a higher consumption standard, and so on.

Now let us try to see how the crisis manifests itself in the sphere of people's economic activity. We can start first of all by examining what has happened to work.

Since the beginning of capitalism the permanent tendency has been to destroy work as a meaningful activity. What previously might have been the relation of say the peasant to his land, or of the artisan to the object he was making, has been progressively destroyed with the industrial revolution, with the division of labour, with the chaining of people to extremely partial aspects of the production process. Together with this has developed the constant and ever growing attempt by capitalist firms, and now by the managerial bureaucracy, to intervene more and more deeply into the labour process. They seek to direct it from the outside, not only to direct the final results of the work, the ends and the methods of production, but even precisely to define the gestures of the workers through time study, through motion study, etc. This has been established practice now, in Western industry, for over half a century. The meaning of work has not only been destroyed so to speak from the objective side. Nobody any longer produces a thing, an object. People just produce components, the precise destination of which is often unknown to them. The meaning of work has also been destroyed on the subjective side, in the sense that even when producing a bit, at least in the system as it exists, you are not supposed to have a say as to how to produce this particular bit.

Now this development, this destruction of the meaning of work (which is a necessary concomitant of the whole system) has very important effects. It manifests itself as a subjective alienation of the worker from the work process, through the fact that the worker feels both like an outsider and at the same time like a manipulated person. It also manifests itself socially, one could almost say objectively, because, despite all, modem production requires the active participation of men both as individuals and as groups.

The real subject of modern production is less and less the individual worker. It is the group, the team of workers. Now at this level you again have the same phenomenon. The existing management of production does not want to accept the fact that the real unit of the work is more and more a team, a collectivity, because the resistance of a group to imposed rules of work and to attempts to destroy the meaning of work is greater. It is much easier to manipulate people at the individual level. A contradiction is engendered.

The crisis of modern work is not only expressed as misery on the part of the worker, but as an objective impasse of the production process. Modern production requires the active participation of men both as individuals and as groups. Yet the methods which are necessarily established by the system as it functions today, seek to destroy this very participation at the same time as they require it. The manifestations of this phenomenon are both an immense waste in production and also a permanent conflict in industry, between people who merely carry out instructions and those who direct them.

Now let us pass to another sphere : the sphere of politics. Everybody is familiar with the crisis of politics. It has been talked about for a long time, under, the term 'apathy'. What is apathy and what are its roots ?

After a certain historical development both the State and various other institutions (like local government) became increasingly bureaucratized, like everything else in modem society, Political organizations — not only the bourgeois, conservative political organizations, but the political organizations created by the working class to struggle against the ruling class and their State — and even the trade unions were involved in this process. Irrespective of its other aspects, this bureaucratization meant that people were excluded from running their own affairs.

The fate of trade unions is now more or less left to appointed officials, to people elected for long periods. These people act in such a way that the rank and file are prevented from expressing their views. They are prevented from having any genuine activity within the union. The rank and file serve as a sort of support, paying fees and obeying orders. From time to time they are even given orders to strike. But they aren't supposed to have a real say in all this. By a natural reaction the rank and file estranges itself from the organization, be it the trade union or the Party.

I don't know how far this has already gone in Britain, but on the Continent we are familiar with trade union branch meetings where the two or three appointed officials turn up and perhaps half a dozen other persons, out of 200 people who were supposed to be there, Now, of course, when this happens a sort of vicious circle is set up. The bureaucracy argues : 'You see ! We call upon people to come along and discuss their affairs. They don't ! Somebody has to take over to solve all these problems" So we do it. We do it for them, not for our own sake.' This is partly propaganda and self-justification by the bureaucracy but it is also partly true, What is not usually seen is that this vicious circle always started at some specific point where the wish and tendency of people actively to participate, to take over their own affairs, was opposed and finally destroyed by the will of the bureaucracy, using all the means at its disposal. The same thing happens in the purely political organizations. These are bureaucratized. They keep people away from active participation in the decisions which govern their lives.

There is a growing consciousness in the population at large that politics today is just a manipulation of people, a manipulation of society to serve specific interests. The phrase 'they are all the same gang' (which you often hear 'apathetic' or 'non-political' people use) expresses first of all an objective truth. It also expresses, as a first approximation, a very correct attitude. It has been perceived, after all, that those who compete to rule society are all part of the same gang. Today the differences between governing parties, in how they govern, are less and less than they were in the past.

What is the end result ? Parties (and, in the case of the USA, presidents) cannot claim support on the basis of ideas or of programmes. Presidents or parties are now sold to the population, like various brands of toothpaste. An 'image' of Kennedy, or of Johnson, or of Harod Wilson is created. Public relations experts ask themselves 'Isn't Wilson coming over as too much of an egghead ? Shouldn't he say something or other to correct this impression ? What should he do to get support from that 5% sector of the electorate who really likes his opponent because he is rather stupid and who don't want a Prime Minister who is too clever ? Shouldn't Wilson try to say something stupid next time ?'

In the end politics becomes practically undistinguishable from any other form of advertising or sale of products. In this respect the products are immaterial, though they matter in other respects.

I will not dwell on the fact that all this does not just create a subjective crisis. It isn't just that we resent the fact that society is run this way. All this has objective repercussions. In an Italian town, during the Renaissance, a tyrant might have succeeded in keeping the population cowed. But a modern society, with its established rules and deep-going institutions, cannot be managed on this basis, even from the point of view of the rulers themselves. It cannot be run with the total abstention of the population from any intervention or any control in politics, for there is then no control by the reality on the politicians. They run amok and the result is, for instance, Suez. Here again the crisis impinges upon the workings of society itself.

Let us try to sum up. All that we have discussed impinges upon the two basic concepts, the two polar categories which create society : the personality of man and the structure of the social fabric and its cohesion.

At the personal level the crisis manifests itself as a sort of radical crisis in the meaning of life and of human motives. It is no accident that modem art and literature are more and more, if I may use the expression, 'full of the void'. In the social attitudes of people, the crisis shows itself in the destruction and disappearance of responsibility. There is a tremendous crisis of socialization. There is the phenomenon which we call privatization : people are so to speak withdrawing into themselves. There is practically no community life, ties become extremely disrupted and so on. As a reaction to this there are new phenomena, for instance youth gangs, which express the need for positive socialization. But socialization in the more general sense, that is the feeling that what is going on at large is, after all, our own affair, that we do have to do something about it, that we ought to be responsible, all this, is deeply disrupted. This disruption contributes to a vicious circle. It increases apathy and multiplies its effects.

Now there is another very important side to all these phenomena of crisis. The time left does not allow me to do more than mention it. When we talk of crisis, we should understand that it is not a physical calamity which has fallen upon contemporary society. If there is a crisis, it is because people do not submit passively to the present organization of society but react and struggle against it, in a great many ways. And, equally important, this reaction, this struggle of the people contains the seeds of the new. It inevitably produces new forms of life and of social relations…

So we see that the crisis of modern society is not without issue. It contains the seeds of something new, which is emerging even now. But the new will not come about automatically. Its emergence will be assisted by the actions of people in society, by their permanent resistance and struggle and by their often unconscious activity. But the new will not complete itself, will not be able to establish itself as a new social system, as a new pattern of social life, unless at some stage it becomes a conscious activity, a conscious action of the mass of the people. For us, to initiate this conscious action and to help it develop, whenever it may manifest itself, is the real new meaning to be given to the words 'revolutionary politics'.