ABSTRACT
If the notion of the avant-garde seems slightly outdated in the context of contemporary art, it appears downright unthinkable in the context of politics, not least as a model for a political community. The idea of a small cadre of people determined to advance history and lead the masses to some imagined utopia comes off as completely anachronistic today. Already in the mid-1970s it was clear that the dream of the modern revolutionary break with capitalist society was not going to materialise, and that neoliberal globalisation was using the cultural revolution of the late 1960s to introduce a new phase of capitalist accumulation. It is difficult to find more materialist accounts of the trajectory of the avant-garde. But one such analysis was made by the Italian workerist, architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri who, in Progetto e utopia from 1973, argued that the avant-garde had been unable to transcend the structures that determined it.
