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

[John W.]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 10:21 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

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.


That's because I don't see it as a "lasting" contribution.  As I said in the
previous post, we will have war as long as there is any significant number
of humans on the planet.  And as you're always lamenting, where is an
anti-war movement of today to rival even that of the Viet Nam era?



> 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


So what are you saying, Carl?  Are you agreeing with me that the civil
rights movement and the women's movement were only in part class struggles,
because they were struggles of reconciliation and subverted the class
struggle to the extent that reconciliation was achieved?




> 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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