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From International Socialism, No.45, November/December 1970, pp.30-31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Making of a Counter Culture
Theodore Roszack
Faber
Theodore Roszack has managed to transcend his own intellectual alienation. In Chapter One he is a sociologist; in Chapter Three a psychologist; in Chapter Two an armchair Dionysian; in Chapter Five an Appolonian guru. He begins the book in the role of positivist, he ends a rank idealist. What are we to make of a man who weaves the heady mantle of shamanism out of such strange fibres as reductionism and psychological determinism? Who advocates intuitive and non-rational approaches to knowledge yet leads us to this position through the tortuous logic of Freud, Marcuse and Norman O. Brown? The Making of a Counter Culture is a mess of contradictions: all positions are possible to Roszack, none are coherent or tenable.
1967 is a crucial year in the history of contemporary bohemianism. For it is at that point of time, the upper middle class dropouts (who I have termed elsewhere the Middle Underground), together with powerful allies from the world of pop music, became the major ideologies of the bohemian tradition. The older Beats did not disappear, they merely submerged for a while, out of the cognisance of the media, unable to compete with the pastiche image of pretty clothes, free love and bountiful optimism, that made up the hippie. Pivotal to the philosophy of the Middle Underground was the notion that advanced industrial countries in the West had reached a point where material scarcity was only maintained by the advertisers, it was a ‘hype’, an infinite regress of ‘false’ needs. This perspective on society derived directly from the middle class backgrounds from which they originated, a world untroubled by scarcity and unaware of poverty. What was necessary, they argued, was merely to tell people the truth about reality, to ‘turn them on’ to the possibilities that lay before them. No organised opposition to this endeavour was envisaged apart from a few people who were ‘evil’ and suffered from the double affliction of being ‘uptight’ and emanating ‘bad vibrations’. The catalysts of change were three-fold: love, drugs and rock ’n’ roll music. Conflicts within the culture occurred over whether technology was an evil per se, or the basis of liberation; whether collective action would be necessary to back up the individual revolution; whether alternative economic forms were necessary or whether a ‘turned on’ IBM, BBC and Ford’s was all that was necessary.
Roszack’s portrait of hippiedom stems from this period – the major part of the book derives from articles written in The Nation in early 1968. He creates an ideal type of the new bohemian which contains a common error of such analysis. Namely, it is a one-sided accentuation, stressing all that agrees with his views, and omitting all evidence to the contrary as the emphemeral product of youthful immaturity. Moreover, in the process he irons out (to his advantage) all of the major conflicts within the culture. Lastly, this culture is placed in a social vacuum, there are no conflicts of interest within the bohemia, no dialogue with their peers on the Left, no systematic discussion of likely conflicts with the outside ‘straight’ world. Thus we have a caricature of 1967 which suits Roszack’s analysis. The counter-culture is seen as anti-technological, its members sharing the author’s idealisation of the primitive, culminating in his description of neolithic man as living ‘a decently comfortable life in a wise symbiotic relationship with their environment’. Technology is in itself anti-humanitarian, no matter what goals it is used to achieve, or whose control it is under. The culture is individualistic seeking individual salvation and despising political action. It sees its economic base as agricultural; its major aim being to dismantle industry. Its experimentation with drugs he interprets as an immature lapse, music is hardly mentioned, hedonism is introspective and intellectualised. There is a consensus within bohemia, and Left-wing ideologies are heartily trounced upon. I wish to argue that although all these traits existed in 1967 they were only one small part of the underground, moreover, that the tendencies over the last three years has been in precisely the opposite direction to the counter-culture that Roszack envisaged. This is because these ideas were proved faulty, in that they provided unacceptable solutions and inadequate explanations of subsequent events. Roszack’s version of 1967, and the more complicated reality of Flower Power itself were both transformed by virtue of their patent inability to provide palatable answers.
The 1967 hippie sought to ‘turn on’ the world; to his astonishment the world did not seek to be ‘turned on’. Instead a vicious backlash met his offerings of love, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He discovered that it was not necessary to steal from people or beat them, in order to elicit their hostility. Hedonism unrelated to productivity, pleasure not covered by the credit card of work, expressive identities pursued outside of the confines of workaday reality: all of these hit at the moral plexus of the system. For what price self-restraint in marriage, deferred gratification at work, sobriety and conformity in dress and behaviour, if the shiftless boy across the road disdains all these yet appears to enjoy all the rewards? The ‘individual revolution’ then could not be sustained by love alone, and no amount of transcendental meditation stopped the bastards knocking on your door at six in the morning to see if you might be employing illicit means to enjoy yourself. But the Middle Underground were in for even a greater shock. For they found themselves surrounded by a lower underground who had no money but were only too willing to take the philosophy of sharing property and food seriously. They tended to overstay their welcome at flats, they were ‘uncool’ about drugs and, worse, they tended to get involved in political action such as the Piccadilly squat which, to quote one prominent member of the Middle Underground, ‘gave youth a bad image’. Haight-Ashbury was not destroyed by lower class predators as the liberal apologists of hippiedom maintain, it was torn apart by its own theoretical inadequacy, when the lower bohemia took the message of the Middle Underground at its face value. For the vision of affluence on which the Utopia was based was grounded in the regular handouts from Daddy, it was as much beyond material scarcity as the waiting room of a liberal National Assistance Office. In the end the coalition of 1967 broke up, Roszack’s united counter-culture was at each other’s throats. A few found jobs with CBS (where ‘all the revolutionaries are’ as their slogan says) and managed to imagine they were infiltrating the system. A tiny minority saw in this the message that capitalism can buy up anything and retreated to the hills, muttering about ‘bad vibrations’, and shuffling their Tarot, waiting for it all to collapse. These are all that remain of Roszack’s men. The majority became more political, communicated more with the Left, did not despise technology – for it is difficult to disdain washing machines and cars if you are part of culture whose major artifacts consist of the electric guitar, the stereogram and video-tape. Above all it began to see the virtue of collective action and the very real forces which opposed its aims. As a writer in a recent International Times put it:
‘Getting stoned, drunk or laid is maybe the aim of revolution, but it is not the sole means to achieve it. If it was Ladbroke Grove would be a free state ... Basically we are being ruled by a bunch of fat rich honkeys who are going to do nothing that will benefit us unless we really force them to, and forcing honkeys to do what they don’t want is commonly called revolution.’
Roszack’s book is both outdated and confusing. His call for political quietism in the last chapter, is particularly inappropriate. The Left has much to learn from the underground, for only they are seeking to undermine the monolith of blinkered reality which faces modern industrial man. But the underground must learn politics, for without change all its experiments will not only be futile but meaningless.
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