POWER AND PROTEST IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY:
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS
People Power Week
5: The ‘60s youth and counter-culture movements.
Links:
Imagining
Other Home Page
Notes
on the Youth/Counter-culture movement
1. “New
Social Movements” in the ‘60s – introduction/background:
- how
new, and how similar to each other?
- power
to the grassroots
- anti-convention
- new
demands and new forms of organisation
- cultural
change – new meanings
- anti-authority,
and for autonomy
2. The post-war scene:
-
teenagers and consumerism
-
consensus politics (the ‘end of ideology’?) – Butskellism
-
power of the state – Keynesianism; and of corporations - technostructure
- the
consensus questioned – conflict in reality? Northern Ireland, ex-colonies, New
Left, corrupt bureaucracies, cold war, consumer culture
-
questioning rationality itself: power to the imagination.
3. The variety of movements,
and common features:
-
civil rights, Vietnam, Socialism/New Left, Hippies and Beatniks, sexual
revolution, women’s liberation, students and "May '68" [next week]
- in
common: emphasis on ‘culture’, opposition to hierarchy, middle class?, the end
of ‘deference’
4. Youth
and the Counter-culture:
- ‘peace and love’
a reaction against ‘cold rationality’ that had brought WWII genocide, and
drawing on other protest movements
- new values, and influence
of Buddhism etc, drugs, flower-power, love-ins, teach-ins
- writers exemplifying
the movement: Gary Snyder: personal liberation as feeling rather than theory;
William Blake (1757 – 1827): not repressing our emotions; Allen Ginsberg: love;
Norman Mailer: the ‘white negro’, existentialism.
5. The meaning(s) of ‘autonomy
6. A new meaning of ‘politics’.
7. Discussion: Thatcherism as the heir to the sixties? Life-style
politics a dead end? Anti-globalisation, Occupy (‘space for alternatives’), Avaaz
and online activism (‘clicktivism’), Indignados, Podemos, a million masks
etc....
William Blake:
“Everything that
lives is holy” … “The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but the hours
of wisdom no clock can measure.” … “Jesus was all virtue, and acted from
impulse, not from rules”
“… the Loom of
Locke whose Woof rages dire
Wash’d by the
Water-Wheels of Newton; black the cloth
In heavy wreathes
folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I
view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by
compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel
in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.”
Allen Ginsberg:
“The weight of the
world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of
dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we
carry
is love….”
Norman Mailer:
“Probably, we will
never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the
atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.
For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of
history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that… we
might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in
which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death
would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked” …
“It is on this bleak
scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist – the
hipster, the man who knows… that the only life-giving answer is to accept the
terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from
society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the self…”