[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'd say corporate capitalism managed to co-opt the counter-culture over the 
course of a generation, roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, with the 
crucial change coming about half-way through, with the rise of neo-liberalism. 
(David Harvey's book with that title is the best general account I know.)

Serious discussion of revolution as an historical phenomenon rather quickly 
became ads for "Revolutionary Jeans!," etc.

But it's certainly true that the uncomfortable questions and challenges to the 
assumptions of American society that go under the collective name of "the 
sixties" had an unsettling effect.  That's why the sixties and its "excesses" 
are generally excoriated by bien-pensant liberals and conservatives alike.  (For 
a not unimportant example, see the condemnation of the sixties in "The Audacity 
of Hope.")

American society suppressed but didn't answer the sixties' questions, because 
they were questions about human flourishing, which is necessarily retarded to a 
greater or lesser degree by the exploitation necessary to capitalism.

Nevertheless American society is a good bit more civilized today than it was in 
the 1960s, largely as a result of those questions.  (As an example of the poets' 
-- in this case TV writers -- getting there first, see these questions posed 
however obscurely in the current series "Mad Men.")

I think you could argue that all real revolutionary movements need to invent new 
media of communication, from the early Christian movement's invention of the 
codex on.

The new media of the 1960s were the underground newspaper and alternative radio, 
now both sadly in almost complete decay.  They've gone the way of an independent 
labor press (and radio) of an earlier American generation.  They've been 
supplanted by this box I'm typing on; it and parallel IT will probably soon 
destroy hard-copy newspapers, no bad thing.

But where's the social revolution that should go with new media?  Maybe we'll be 
surprised.

You agree with the Old Man who wrote (when he was a young man), "The history of 
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."  (His tract 
etc. are worth re-reading.)  When you comin' back, red writer?  --CGE


John W. wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> "... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign sometime in the 
>> Nineties, finished off by identity politics and general self-satisfaction..."
>> --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
>> 
>> Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its coverage by
>> the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex Cockburn has this
>> about right.
> 
> 
> I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too long for my
> limited attention span.  But I submit that in the so-called "counter-culture"
> essentially BECAME the culture.  In some ways our generation, that of the
> 60s, was absorbed into the existing culture; in certain ways it profoundly
> changed the culture; and in yet other ways the culture recoiled in horror and
> moved in the opposite direction. But isn't that simply the way of the world?
> Thesis ---> antithesis ---> synthesis , for good or ill?
> 
> What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture.  The closest thing I've
> seen to that in this country is the development of the independent media
> movement starting in the late 1990s.  Last I looked, the U-C Independent
> Media Center was still very much alive and well.  But of course the new
> counter-culture needs to affect more than just the media, important as that
> is.
> 
> I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate the planet
> and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be war.  I dare to
> imagine that American culture could change to allow for universal health care
> if the political and public will was there.   We could inject a bit of
> "socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without demonstrable ill
> effects.  But human nature does not change, and war will be with us always.
> 
> J.W.
> 
> 
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