But the politics of comfort was superseded by that of social standing. Everyone suddenly found himself'exP.osed to the scrutiny of his neighbors, compared with the ldentikit portrait of the ideal American consumer: a model of civic-mindedness whose gestures, quirks and attitudes toward life were henceforth broadcast without reprieve by the radio, the press, television and the cinema, and buried under commercial messages. Its political counterpart is the McCarthy period, a time of blacklisting, of anti-American witch hunts, of artists and intellectuals on trial-the same artists and intellectuals who were again designated in 1 975 by the Trilateral Commission as a threat to democracy by their ability to constitute demobilized and irredeemable margins.
I n fact, American-style (social) security implies the population's cultural underdevelopment. lt'is remarkable to see modern democratic States bragging about their silent majorities. In its way, the silence of the American people has become just as oppressive as that of the Russian people; social standing has become a step toward the invention of the proletarian policeman.
The hierarchy of high speeds of penetration and assault made and unmade the specter of the proletarian as if in a lap-dissolvethat mutation that begins with the all-too clear social distribution commanded by the Convention, then continues with the cloudier look of Marx and Engels, who are unable to see the mythic figure of the Worker, even in the rich deposit of industrial proletarianization that is England in the nineteenth century. Engels cannot find his specimen, his neanderthal of historical evolution . . . 3 Only in June 1 848 will the image finally take shape, in the streets of Paris, on a theatre of civil War "as populated as that of the Battle of Leipzig," where thirty to forty thousand men are thrown into combat.
The End of the Proletariat
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