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just a little more than a 20th century interpretation of Marxist essays on alienated labor,” said Peter Urban, manager of the Dils, a Los Angeles punk band “into class war” (their first single was “I Hate the Rich,” the principal result of which was a tune by the rival Vom, “I Hate the Dils”). “It’s a little of that,” said McLaren, “but it is very, very strong. The good thing about it was all those slogans you can take up without being party to a movement. Being in a movement often stifles creative thinking and certainly, from the point of view of a young kid, the ability to announce yourself . . . That’s the greatest thing, that it allows you to do that. There is a certain aggression and arrogance in there that’s exciting . . .” Old hat, said Urban, ignoring the interesting conclusions McLaren was drawing, and ignoring too the sticker on the cover of the book, which carried a quote from a review by John Berger: “one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of the ’60s.” “Lost Prophets,” Berger’s review was titled; had the rest of it been somehow squeezed onto the sticker, it could have taken the conversation even farther afield, or closer to home.
    The conversation was appearing in the May 1978 issue of
Slash,
an L.A. punk magazine; the number, a note on the contents page read, was “dedicated to the handful of
enragés
(French for maniacs, fanatics, crazies) who, ten years ago, tried to change life.” The dedication was illustrated with “une jeunesse que l’avenir inquiète trop souvent” (a youth disturbed too often by the future), a once-famous poster by the May ’68 art-student collective Atelier populaire: it showed a young woman with her head covered in surgical gauze and a safety pin jamming her lips closed. After ten years, with May ’68 all but forgotten in the United States, this was true archaeology. It was an odd return to strange times, when apparently trivial disruptions on a university campus in the Paris suburbs had begun a chain reaction of refusal—when first students, then factory workers, then clerks, professors, nurses, doctors, athletes, bus drivers, and artists refused work, took to the streets, threw up barricades, and fought off the police, or turned back upon their workplaces, occupied them, fought off their unions, and transformed their workplaces into laboratories of debate and critique, when the walls of Paris bled with unusual slogans—when ten million peoplebrought a signal version of modern society to a standstill. “In the confusion and tumult of the May revolt,” Bernard E. Brown wrote in
Protest in Paris,
his unique academic account of May ’68, “the slogans and shouts of the students were considered expressions of mass spontaneity and individual ingenuity. Only afterward was it evident that these slogans”—
     
    REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL AFTER GOD, ART IS DEAD DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON’T DIE OF STARVATION HAS BEEN PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY DON’T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE NEVER WORK CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU BE CRUEL THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME, INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHSUNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!
    —“were fragments of a consistent and seductive ideology that had virtually all appeared in situationist tracts and publications . . . Mainly through their agency there welled up in the May Revolt an immense force of