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

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Sat Aug 22 22:21:15 CDT 2009


John W. wrote:
> ...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.

You omit the major movement that unites the two you mention, the anti-war movement.

Class struggle is rarely perspicuous -- i.e., it's usually expressed through 
other conflicts. But it perhaps emerges more clearly over time:

    "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and people 
are at last compelled to face with sober senses, their real conditions of life, 
and their relations with their kind" (from the aforementioned tract).

Slavoj Zizek notes "a fundamental difference between the goals of feminist, 
anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles on the one hand, and class struggle on the 
other. In the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference 
(the peaceful coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), but the goal of 
class struggle is precisely the opposite: to aggravate class difference into 
class antagonism. To set up a series of equivalences between race, gender and 
class is to obscure the peculiar logic of class struggle, which aims at 
overcoming, subduing, even annihilating the other – if not its physical being, 
then at least its socio-political role and function. In the one case, we have a 
horizontal logic involving mutual recognition among different identities; in the 
other, we have the logic of struggle with an antagonist."  ("Over the Rainbow" 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/zize01_.html> -- the article repays the difficult 
of getting through it...)

The goal is reconciliation on the basis of justice for races, genders, etc.  But 
reconciliation is impossible between exploiter and exploited without their 
giving up their roles.  --CGE


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


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