Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Abstract:The emergence of a new type of consumer society was catalysed rather than impeded by the tumultuous events of the late 1960s. The rebels of 1968 contributed considerably to the breaking down of conservative obstacles to consumption, to the opening up of new markets, and to the creation of a new type of consumer. At its heart, '1968' was an intra-bourgeois confrontation pursued by an innovative minority. The many instances of personal transformation from protagonists of protest to pillars of the establishment can be interpreted in the context of communicative and consumerist modernisation. The protesters' performative hedonism proved highly compatible with consumer culture. Protest culture, on the one hand, sought the publicity of consumer society as a spatial and moral sphere for its activities. The response of the 'system' to the protests, on the other hand, was surprisingly flexible, and resulted in the further development of capitalism and consumer society in the late 20 th century.In 1848, a text which was to make a name for itself announced a revolution:All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.
2Here Marx and Engels describe a process of socio-cultural transformation which has continued uninterrupted to the present day: the revolutionisation of social relationships by a capitalist market logic and commercialisation from which no area of life is spared.This concept of revolution has so far hardly been used to interpret the protest culture of the late 1960s. Both the literature produced by the movement's renegades and conservative analyses have highlighted its revolutionary intentions and anti-capitalist thrust. The waves of research that have emerged in the past decade have begun to revise this view significantly.However, an important aspect has not been at the cutting edge of research: that hindrances to consumption in the form of traditional allegiances to authorities were discarded like reac-1 For a more extended discussion, see our earlier: '"1968" als Katalysator der Konsumgesellschaft. Performative Regelverstöße, kommerzielle Adaptionen und ihre gegenseitige Durchdringung',
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