A small minority of erstwhile student radicals, intoxicated by their own adaptation of Marxist dialectics, set about ‘revealing’ the ‘true face’ of repressive tolerance in Western democracies. If the parliamentary regime of capitalist interests were pushed hard enough, they reasoned, it would shed the cloak of legality and show its true face. Confronted with the truth about its oppressors, the proletariat—hitherto ‘alienated’ from its own interest and victim of ‘false consciousness’ about its situation—would take up its proper place on the barricades of class warfare.
