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

[John W.]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

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.


Yes.  And the factory workers, after calling hippies "faggots" in the 1960s
for their long hair, started wearing their hair long themselves sometime in
the 1970s.  And watched passively, dumbly, as private sector union
membership declined, factories were shuttered, and their jobs moved
offshore.



> 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.


Let us not forget Robert Crumb and Zap Comix.  :-)



> 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."


Yes and no.  The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties were
the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement.  Where those class
struggles?  Only in part, I submit.



>  (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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