Andrei Kuznetsov
5th August 2010, 16:27
had to post this... I thought it really gets into the question of youth subcultures and the place they have in future revolutionary movements.
Youth Culture & Reefer: Subversive Lessons for Future Breaks (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/08/04/revolution-youth-culture-and-reefer-60s-lessons-for-future-breaks/)
http://www.kasamaproject.org/
“If we (as a new revolutionary movement) are not prepared to ‘get it’ when some new wave of alienation breaks, and if we are not prepared to see the positive factors within cultural explosions (and their intimate connection with political possibilities), and if we are not prepared to fuse our communist insights with such new radical social divergence emerging within growing pockets of new generations — then everything else we do now is a waste of time.”
by Mike Ely
Dave Palmer kicked off this discussion (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/07/30/the-worst-essay-weve-seen-in-ages-on-zizek/#comment-26683) by saying:
“I didn’t live in the 1960s, but it seems to me very tragic that Abbie Hoffman and people like him promoted the idea that drug use was somehow revolutionary. (To his credit, Hoffman discouraged the use of heroin and methamphetamine — but on the other hand, he also claimed that cocaine wasn’t addictive). Abbie Hoffman seemed to truly believe that the 1960s youth culture, including (and maybe even especially) the aspects revolving around drugs, presented a radical challenge to capitalist society. In fact, the 1960s youth culture was easily co-opted by capitalist society, and continues to be sold today. Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that the widespread use of marijuana and other drugs may have seriously reduced the revolutionary potential of US radicals in that time period.”
I think it is hard for post-60s generations to “capture” for themselves the social meaning and impact of various 60s cultural forms.
In themselves, long hair, worn clothes, smoking pot, public dancing, new forms of music (especially Black music and its descendants), traveling instead of careers, experiments with communal living, erosion of traditional sexual mores, saying fuck in public, the sense of getting back in touch with the natural …. they don’t all look sharply subversive , or that obviously connected with a revolutionary overthrow of an existing empire.
But that is (in part) because they had a huge impact on the subsequent culture, and so (now) don’t look that shocking. You can’t recapture the shock of the new two decades later. It always just looks old. But we live history going forward — and we have to anticipate that there will be new, shocking and highly attractive ruptures (that in their initial content often don’t seem literally revolutionary).
It is hard to re-capture today how threatening the Temptations could be. Or the idea of young white girls listening to Little Richard.
But coming out of the 1950s, all of those things were a huge part of the sudden de-legitimization of the cultural norms that had been (very tightly) imposed and enforced in the 1950s (one of the most clamped down periods in U.S. history). It was a generational fuck you that spread like wildfire, and was part of windows and doors being suddenly thrown open. And all of these things were SHOCKING.
And (then and now) it wasn’t just the authorities, or conservative parents that didn’t like it. It was also the orthodox and dogmatic on the left (who had fidelity to their own fidelity, and had their minds stuck in the culture and norms of the 1930s). There were parts of the left that “didn’t get it” — and thought all this upheaval and innovation was a distraction (from their timid and unimaginative “political” routines).
If we (as a new revolutionary movement) are not prepared to ‘get it’ when some new wave of alienation breaks, and if we are not prepared to see the positive factors within cultural explosions (and their intimate connection with political possibilities), and prepared to fuse our larger communist insights and drive to a new radical social divergence emerging deep within the people (and especially the youth) — then everything else we do now is a waste of time.
This is not a call for “tailing” the new — it is a call for preparing our minds even “see” it.
The Authorities Could Smell the Subversion and Danger
In school millions of us were lined up, and principals came down the rows with rulers to measure the length of our hair (forbidden to touch the collars, or fall into the face etc.) In millions of families, parents would yell, “Turn off that screeching.” (And in the more reactionary families, there would be shouting about “jungle music.”) The defiance represented by dress and hair gave us a sense of a community of youth — we could recognize and find each other, we could outrage the conservatives, we could express stubborn non-compliance. It was part of something brewing, and it was a cultural form that the polarization took.
Revolutions have always been manifested in huge cultural ruptures like that — and the specific details of the rebel fashion are not (inherently or obviously) radical, their radicalism lies in the expression of discontinuity.
I’m talking about the roundheads’ haircut of the English Civil War and their personal severity that so sharply broke with foppish longhair and dissolution of the feudal culture, or the closecropped hair and black leathers of the Bolsheviks, or the cutting of the topknots in China with the unbinding of women’s feet. (And it isn’t just clothes or hair, but revolutionary movements also have mood and psychology: the Puritans were severe, the Bolsheviks cultivated a “get it done, kick some ass, storm the heights” ruthlessness, other movements have a relentless modernity about them, the enlightenment’s rationalism expressed itself in countless cultural ways, and so on.)
Sometimes the counterculture precedes the explicit politics — it is an alienated current creating a space for even starting to think about political ideas. Example: Die Wandervogel in Imperial Germany, a back to nature movement that got out into the woods, and currents within it grew to be an attractive pole for ant-fascist youth. There was/is nothing inherently subversive about hiking in the woods — but in the Weimar context, after the disillusionment of defeat in WW1, it had meaning and the Nazis fought to ban it after 1933 (and also coopt its Germanic romanticism).
Every revolution has its “counterculture” that mocks, shocks and defies the old culture. It isn’t invented-the-promoted by the revolutionaries, but emerges organically from the culture as disaffection and rebellion spreads among the people. It is one of the forms that disaffection and rebellion spread. And such cultural movements are then shaped, championed and refined by leading cultural figures.
As part of that, revolutions develop “weird” new fashions. In France the most radical class was called “sans cullottes” because of their trousers. In other revolutions, there were “the shirtless ones.” In Peru, police tried to profile bus riders for Shining Path supporters because their “look” was so distinctive (clean cut, Indian features, short hair in women, no make up, pants-not-dresses, sneakers, etc.)
And, once again, there is nothing inherently revolutionary about this or that cultural fashion (both long AND short hair have been revolutionary fashions) — it is something that emerges from the moment and from the cultural context. And this is a place where Badiou’s sense of the unpredictability and uniqueness of The Event and its Truth Process is worth learning from.
There were obviously some parts of the 60s cultural changes that can be understood in their radicalism (the changing of sexual norms, the active attempt to end segregation of Black people, the cross-national musical and social experiences, etc.)
But I have to say that the New Communist Movement greatly underappreciated these cultural aspects. And the workerism (inherited from the old Communist Movement) led some communist currents to reject (and even despise) the radical youth culture (and cut their hair, and straighten up, and insist on living in one-man-one-woman nuclear families).
My first encounter with the RU/RCP happened in an East Coast revolutionary post-SDS political commune we had created in a small industrial town — and one of the first things the RU visitor said was “In the Revolutionary Union, we don’t live in communes like this, we live in one family arrangements.” And he was straight (short hair, straight shortsleeved shirt etc.) and that was part of the political message — of severing this new communist movement from the existing radical youth culture. It was done in the name of “the workers,” but (as I have written before) after we straightened up, and got married and “went to the workers” we found that the most advanced workers ( Black and white and Latino) often identified with the defiance of the youth culture, and wore their hair long, and toked up after hours.
The Uniqueness of the Moment — and Its Passing
You can’t repeat or recapture those moments — a future revolutionary wave in the U.S. obviously won’t recapitulate “hippie” mores (which now just seem old when you meet “old hippies” and pony-tailed Viet Vets).
But in the context (both of a break with 50s society and in the context of a rising set of radical mass movements) those cultural expressions were shocking and radical, and very much part of what made a new revolutionary movement possible — and they were also part of what made it so much more revolutionary than previous attempts at revolution in the U.S.
“Turning your high school onto pot” obviously doesn’t have the meaning today that it had forty years ago — politically, culturally. Then high schools often divided between the “heads” and the “jocks” — and the heads were generally antiwar and antiracist and eager to get out of town to explore the radical youth communities of East Village or the Bay Area. And the jocks were….. well, you know what they were.
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
Take the idea of “dropping out” — the sudden disinterest in a career and in assimilation in the corporate structure, and the desire to (instead) experiment and just hang out…. this was a rather potent way that delegitimzation of the existing society rippled out among a new generation (and rippled out to older people who felt trapped by the 1950s corporate America).
Dropping out was a tremendously powerful ethos. And when I speak on college campuses today, I’m always amazed by how (now) students are so “nose to the grindstone” in their overall perspective and how “partying” is so often now episodic release-by-binging without undermining the overall assumptions of career, success, money, grades, etc.
There is nothing inherently positive about marijuana or the then-popular hallucinogens. But (again in a specific historic context) it assumed a particular importance and status. In many parts of the country, especially outside of a few more advanced centers, being an early pothead and being an early radical were merged, i.e. they emerged together. It was often the same circles doing the experimenting with pot and with antiwar/antiracist politics.
And that’s the way you have to understand Abby. He wasn’t so much “promoting drugs” (though obviously he was), but he was arguing that the new communities of youth and youth culture should actively work to politicize themselves even more — to see themselves as a oppressed by the society and the empire, and should more and more integrate radical activism (and revolutionary goals) into the assumptions of the culture and the communities. (I.e. imagining a revolutionary struggle by a ‘Woodstock Nation” — it wasn’t my politics, but it was the very popular and very radical politics of the Yippies.)
I am not a big believer in the current analysis (about the ease of cooptation of cultural divergences etc.) which are used to dismiss the youth culture of the 1960s.
I’m on the opposite pole: the further we get from those days of radical youth culture, the more I appreciate and miss it. Today the “alternative culture” and various subcultures (goth, emo, steam punk, japanese trends, etc.) are so drained of rebellious meaning and bite by comparison.
Really, the 60s movements were not “easily coopted” — but were ultimately politically defused and defeated.
Waves of upsurges objectively rise and fall. The 60s rose and fell because they were not able to go farther — and actually destroy U.S. imperialism. And in the absence of that, the rise and fall is inevitable. And people will “go back” to the established order in large numbers. And various elements of the radical wave will “be coopted.” And after that fall, you can’t really blame the movements for the fall (i.e. if they had somehow just been a little different they would not have been just a wave.)
Dave wrote:
Just as one example, I wonder to what extent the generally poor strategy and tactics of groups like the Weather Underground were attributable to drug use — and whether the people involved would have pursued more effective methods if they hadn’t been using drugs.
There were a few micromoments where Dave Palmers speculation may have played a role: I.e. Weatherman (in my experience) did start to heavily use amphetamines in the summer of 1969 — as their fantasies of immanent revolution got more intense.
And that may have played a (minor, secondary) role in helping to deepen their disorientation as Days of Rage (November 1969) approached.
But really — the fact that their collectives took acid together (and not just their collectives) may seem odd now. But I don’t think it was drugs that produced the political veering — it was mainly that all kinds of leading people (in SDS, the Panthers, and hundred other political centers) were facing major problems they didn’t know how to solve. (And that includes the leading Weather people who were, frankly, at their wits end after 1970.)
And for some of the frustrated lead players of the 60s, there was a turn to more dangerous drugs (and even drug dealing) as the movement died (for example: this was true for a number of Panther leaders and for Abby). But I view that as the problems of defeat, that emerged after the upsurge and the great disillusionment that defeat caused– but it was not something inevitable or something caused mainly by the illusions of the movement at its prime. The forms of despair emerged organically out of the culture of the upsurge (of course, how could it not?) — but things did not “go to defeat” mainly because of the flaws of the movement.\
Overall point: New arising subversive movements and moods inevitably adopt forms that are shocking and dissonant — and if you are not prepared, you will (out of raw conservatism) fail to understand what they represent, and fail to see their potential. They don’t start by flying the red flag, but by creating spaces, and declaring a divergence with cultural markers. And it would be pathetic to keep revolutionary hopes alive during difficult times, and then fail to “get it” when a new generation experimented with a new and angry strut.
Youth Culture & Reefer: Subversive Lessons for Future Breaks (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/08/04/revolution-youth-culture-and-reefer-60s-lessons-for-future-breaks/)
http://www.kasamaproject.org/
“If we (as a new revolutionary movement) are not prepared to ‘get it’ when some new wave of alienation breaks, and if we are not prepared to see the positive factors within cultural explosions (and their intimate connection with political possibilities), and if we are not prepared to fuse our communist insights with such new radical social divergence emerging within growing pockets of new generations — then everything else we do now is a waste of time.”
by Mike Ely
Dave Palmer kicked off this discussion (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/07/30/the-worst-essay-weve-seen-in-ages-on-zizek/#comment-26683) by saying:
“I didn’t live in the 1960s, but it seems to me very tragic that Abbie Hoffman and people like him promoted the idea that drug use was somehow revolutionary. (To his credit, Hoffman discouraged the use of heroin and methamphetamine — but on the other hand, he also claimed that cocaine wasn’t addictive). Abbie Hoffman seemed to truly believe that the 1960s youth culture, including (and maybe even especially) the aspects revolving around drugs, presented a radical challenge to capitalist society. In fact, the 1960s youth culture was easily co-opted by capitalist society, and continues to be sold today. Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that the widespread use of marijuana and other drugs may have seriously reduced the revolutionary potential of US radicals in that time period.”
I think it is hard for post-60s generations to “capture” for themselves the social meaning and impact of various 60s cultural forms.
In themselves, long hair, worn clothes, smoking pot, public dancing, new forms of music (especially Black music and its descendants), traveling instead of careers, experiments with communal living, erosion of traditional sexual mores, saying fuck in public, the sense of getting back in touch with the natural …. they don’t all look sharply subversive , or that obviously connected with a revolutionary overthrow of an existing empire.
But that is (in part) because they had a huge impact on the subsequent culture, and so (now) don’t look that shocking. You can’t recapture the shock of the new two decades later. It always just looks old. But we live history going forward — and we have to anticipate that there will be new, shocking and highly attractive ruptures (that in their initial content often don’t seem literally revolutionary).
It is hard to re-capture today how threatening the Temptations could be. Or the idea of young white girls listening to Little Richard.
But coming out of the 1950s, all of those things were a huge part of the sudden de-legitimization of the cultural norms that had been (very tightly) imposed and enforced in the 1950s (one of the most clamped down periods in U.S. history). It was a generational fuck you that spread like wildfire, and was part of windows and doors being suddenly thrown open. And all of these things were SHOCKING.
And (then and now) it wasn’t just the authorities, or conservative parents that didn’t like it. It was also the orthodox and dogmatic on the left (who had fidelity to their own fidelity, and had their minds stuck in the culture and norms of the 1930s). There were parts of the left that “didn’t get it” — and thought all this upheaval and innovation was a distraction (from their timid and unimaginative “political” routines).
If we (as a new revolutionary movement) are not prepared to ‘get it’ when some new wave of alienation breaks, and if we are not prepared to see the positive factors within cultural explosions (and their intimate connection with political possibilities), and prepared to fuse our larger communist insights and drive to a new radical social divergence emerging deep within the people (and especially the youth) — then everything else we do now is a waste of time.
This is not a call for “tailing” the new — it is a call for preparing our minds even “see” it.
The Authorities Could Smell the Subversion and Danger
In school millions of us were lined up, and principals came down the rows with rulers to measure the length of our hair (forbidden to touch the collars, or fall into the face etc.) In millions of families, parents would yell, “Turn off that screeching.” (And in the more reactionary families, there would be shouting about “jungle music.”) The defiance represented by dress and hair gave us a sense of a community of youth — we could recognize and find each other, we could outrage the conservatives, we could express stubborn non-compliance. It was part of something brewing, and it was a cultural form that the polarization took.
Revolutions have always been manifested in huge cultural ruptures like that — and the specific details of the rebel fashion are not (inherently or obviously) radical, their radicalism lies in the expression of discontinuity.
I’m talking about the roundheads’ haircut of the English Civil War and their personal severity that so sharply broke with foppish longhair and dissolution of the feudal culture, or the closecropped hair and black leathers of the Bolsheviks, or the cutting of the topknots in China with the unbinding of women’s feet. (And it isn’t just clothes or hair, but revolutionary movements also have mood and psychology: the Puritans were severe, the Bolsheviks cultivated a “get it done, kick some ass, storm the heights” ruthlessness, other movements have a relentless modernity about them, the enlightenment’s rationalism expressed itself in countless cultural ways, and so on.)
Sometimes the counterculture precedes the explicit politics — it is an alienated current creating a space for even starting to think about political ideas. Example: Die Wandervogel in Imperial Germany, a back to nature movement that got out into the woods, and currents within it grew to be an attractive pole for ant-fascist youth. There was/is nothing inherently subversive about hiking in the woods — but in the Weimar context, after the disillusionment of defeat in WW1, it had meaning and the Nazis fought to ban it after 1933 (and also coopt its Germanic romanticism).
Every revolution has its “counterculture” that mocks, shocks and defies the old culture. It isn’t invented-the-promoted by the revolutionaries, but emerges organically from the culture as disaffection and rebellion spreads among the people. It is one of the forms that disaffection and rebellion spread. And such cultural movements are then shaped, championed and refined by leading cultural figures.
As part of that, revolutions develop “weird” new fashions. In France the most radical class was called “sans cullottes” because of their trousers. In other revolutions, there were “the shirtless ones.” In Peru, police tried to profile bus riders for Shining Path supporters because their “look” was so distinctive (clean cut, Indian features, short hair in women, no make up, pants-not-dresses, sneakers, etc.)
And, once again, there is nothing inherently revolutionary about this or that cultural fashion (both long AND short hair have been revolutionary fashions) — it is something that emerges from the moment and from the cultural context. And this is a place where Badiou’s sense of the unpredictability and uniqueness of The Event and its Truth Process is worth learning from.
There were obviously some parts of the 60s cultural changes that can be understood in their radicalism (the changing of sexual norms, the active attempt to end segregation of Black people, the cross-national musical and social experiences, etc.)
But I have to say that the New Communist Movement greatly underappreciated these cultural aspects. And the workerism (inherited from the old Communist Movement) led some communist currents to reject (and even despise) the radical youth culture (and cut their hair, and straighten up, and insist on living in one-man-one-woman nuclear families).
My first encounter with the RU/RCP happened in an East Coast revolutionary post-SDS political commune we had created in a small industrial town — and one of the first things the RU visitor said was “In the Revolutionary Union, we don’t live in communes like this, we live in one family arrangements.” And he was straight (short hair, straight shortsleeved shirt etc.) and that was part of the political message — of severing this new communist movement from the existing radical youth culture. It was done in the name of “the workers,” but (as I have written before) after we straightened up, and got married and “went to the workers” we found that the most advanced workers ( Black and white and Latino) often identified with the defiance of the youth culture, and wore their hair long, and toked up after hours.
The Uniqueness of the Moment — and Its Passing
You can’t repeat or recapture those moments — a future revolutionary wave in the U.S. obviously won’t recapitulate “hippie” mores (which now just seem old when you meet “old hippies” and pony-tailed Viet Vets).
But in the context (both of a break with 50s society and in the context of a rising set of radical mass movements) those cultural expressions were shocking and radical, and very much part of what made a new revolutionary movement possible — and they were also part of what made it so much more revolutionary than previous attempts at revolution in the U.S.
“Turning your high school onto pot” obviously doesn’t have the meaning today that it had forty years ago — politically, culturally. Then high schools often divided between the “heads” and the “jocks” — and the heads were generally antiwar and antiracist and eager to get out of town to explore the radical youth communities of East Village or the Bay Area. And the jocks were….. well, you know what they were.
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
Take the idea of “dropping out” — the sudden disinterest in a career and in assimilation in the corporate structure, and the desire to (instead) experiment and just hang out…. this was a rather potent way that delegitimzation of the existing society rippled out among a new generation (and rippled out to older people who felt trapped by the 1950s corporate America).
Dropping out was a tremendously powerful ethos. And when I speak on college campuses today, I’m always amazed by how (now) students are so “nose to the grindstone” in their overall perspective and how “partying” is so often now episodic release-by-binging without undermining the overall assumptions of career, success, money, grades, etc.
There is nothing inherently positive about marijuana or the then-popular hallucinogens. But (again in a specific historic context) it assumed a particular importance and status. In many parts of the country, especially outside of a few more advanced centers, being an early pothead and being an early radical were merged, i.e. they emerged together. It was often the same circles doing the experimenting with pot and with antiwar/antiracist politics.
And that’s the way you have to understand Abby. He wasn’t so much “promoting drugs” (though obviously he was), but he was arguing that the new communities of youth and youth culture should actively work to politicize themselves even more — to see themselves as a oppressed by the society and the empire, and should more and more integrate radical activism (and revolutionary goals) into the assumptions of the culture and the communities. (I.e. imagining a revolutionary struggle by a ‘Woodstock Nation” — it wasn’t my politics, but it was the very popular and very radical politics of the Yippies.)
I am not a big believer in the current analysis (about the ease of cooptation of cultural divergences etc.) which are used to dismiss the youth culture of the 1960s.
I’m on the opposite pole: the further we get from those days of radical youth culture, the more I appreciate and miss it. Today the “alternative culture” and various subcultures (goth, emo, steam punk, japanese trends, etc.) are so drained of rebellious meaning and bite by comparison.
Really, the 60s movements were not “easily coopted” — but were ultimately politically defused and defeated.
Waves of upsurges objectively rise and fall. The 60s rose and fell because they were not able to go farther — and actually destroy U.S. imperialism. And in the absence of that, the rise and fall is inevitable. And people will “go back” to the established order in large numbers. And various elements of the radical wave will “be coopted.” And after that fall, you can’t really blame the movements for the fall (i.e. if they had somehow just been a little different they would not have been just a wave.)
Dave wrote:
Just as one example, I wonder to what extent the generally poor strategy and tactics of groups like the Weather Underground were attributable to drug use — and whether the people involved would have pursued more effective methods if they hadn’t been using drugs.
There were a few micromoments where Dave Palmers speculation may have played a role: I.e. Weatherman (in my experience) did start to heavily use amphetamines in the summer of 1969 — as their fantasies of immanent revolution got more intense.
And that may have played a (minor, secondary) role in helping to deepen their disorientation as Days of Rage (November 1969) approached.
But really — the fact that their collectives took acid together (and not just their collectives) may seem odd now. But I don’t think it was drugs that produced the political veering — it was mainly that all kinds of leading people (in SDS, the Panthers, and hundred other political centers) were facing major problems they didn’t know how to solve. (And that includes the leading Weather people who were, frankly, at their wits end after 1970.)
And for some of the frustrated lead players of the 60s, there was a turn to more dangerous drugs (and even drug dealing) as the movement died (for example: this was true for a number of Panther leaders and for Abby). But I view that as the problems of defeat, that emerged after the upsurge and the great disillusionment that defeat caused– but it was not something inevitable or something caused mainly by the illusions of the movement at its prime. The forms of despair emerged organically out of the culture of the upsurge (of course, how could it not?) — but things did not “go to defeat” mainly because of the flaws of the movement.\
Overall point: New arising subversive movements and moods inevitably adopt forms that are shocking and dissonant — and if you are not prepared, you will (out of raw conservatism) fail to understand what they represent, and fail to see their potential. They don’t start by flying the red flag, but by creating spaces, and declaring a divergence with cultural markers. And it would be pathetic to keep revolutionary hopes alive during difficult times, and then fail to “get it” when a new generation experimented with a new and angry strut.