David Burner's Making Peace With the 60s

The second counter-proposition, in its scholarly form, belongs almost entirely to American historians of the United States. It is the position that the things that happened in the sixties--there is full recognition that distinctive things did happen--on the whole had harmful effects on the societies in which they happened. The polemical form we have already met in the words I quoted from Margaret Thatcher. The more scholarly version, in its application to the United States, is well expressed in the title Allen J. Matusow chose for his general history of America in the period, The Unraveling of American Society, a theme not dissimilar to that expressed in the title of an earlier book by W. L. O'Neik, Coming Apart; recent versions of the `unraveling' thesis are John M. Blum's Years of Discord and David Burner's Making Peace With the 60s. In Destructive Generation, former radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz maintained that sixties developments turned American society `into a collection of splinter groups'. All of these historians were deeply sympathetic to the liberal reform policies of President J. F. Kennedy and his advisers, as they were to the entire civil rights movement. They were profoundly shocked by the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, and then by the assassinations in 1968 of Martin Luther King and of Robert Kennedy. They deplored the way in which social welfare programmes were curtailed as a result of the colossal expenditure on the Vietnam war; even more they regretted the bitter divisions in American society provoked by that war, the often violent demonstrations, and the still more violent repressions by the police. They were shocked, again, by the split in the civil rights movement after 1964, with blacks moving towards violence and separatism; shocked too by the destructive and murderous rioting in the black ghettos in the major cities. They had put faith in the liberal instincts of the Democratic party, then found that party in utter turmoil by 1968, before its defeat by Richard Nixon and the Republicans. Havoc, largely involving white students and white police, was wreaked in 1968 and 1969; attacks by the secret terrorist organization, the Weathermen, continued into 1970, which was also the year in which white student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University. Horrific events, indeed. But they were not, in my view, indications of new fractures in American society; they were indications rather that fractures which had long existed and had been too long ignored were now being brought out into the open. The Vietnam War was a tragedy and a crime; but by 1973-4 the anti-war cause had achieved a wonderful victory. Despite the advent to power of Nixon and the Republicans, welfare programmes did continue, and in some cases were actually improved. American socially did not `unravel': forms of discrimination continued, but blacks did win basic civil rights, and some prospered as never before.

It will be a major theme of this book that it is a mistake to concentrate on politics and changes of government: the social and cultural movements I am concerned with continued largely irrespective of the political complexions of governments. If we look outside America, it is true that racial discrimination got worse in both Britain and France from about 1968 onwards. It is also indisputably true that in 1969-70 a new era of terrorism and violence, `the years of the bullet', began in Italy. We are not studying a `golden age'--there are no golden ages--and many appalling events took place in the sixties. We may well throw up our hands in horror, but we must also make long-term assessments. Italy survived its crisis, as America did not `come apart': on the other hand, it will be argued in this book, the true gains of the sixties proved enduring.

We now come to the most fraught field of contention when it comes to the scholarly analysis of the sixties, as well as the popular mythology. This counter-proposition is inextricably bound up with the arguments and debates which actually took place in the sixties, since most of the activists and protesters at the time themselves believed in it. At its heart lies what I shall call the Great Marxisant Fallacy: the belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society. (I say `Marxisant' because I am speaking of a broad metaphysical view about history and about how society works, derived from Marxism, but forming the basis for the structuralism, post-structuralism, and theories of ideology and language developed in the sixties.) In reality the society we live in has evolved through complex historical processes, very different from the Marxist nonsense about `the bourgeoisie' overthrowing the feudal aristocracy. It contains genuinely democratic elements as well as gross inequalities and abuses of power; the only thing we can do is to work as systematically and rationally as possible to reform that society. In the eyes of the upholders of the Great Marxisant Fallacy, of course, that opinion condemns me as a dupe of bourgeois ideology. Practically all the activists, student protesters, hippies, yippies, Situationists, advocates of psychedelic liberation, participants in be-ins and rock festivals, proponents of free love, members of the underground, and advocates of Black Power, women's liberation, and gay liberation believed that by engaging in struggles, giving witness, or simply doing their own thing they were contributing to the final collapse of bad bourgeois society. To say that is not to withold admiration from the activism and the idealism, nor to deny the many positive achievements of the protesters; but it is to recognize that their ultimate objectives were based on a fundamental fallacy. There was never any possibility of a revolution; there was never any possibility of a `counter-culture' replacing `bourgeois' culture. Modern society is highly complex with respect to the distribution of power, authority, and influence. Just as it was not formed by the simple overthrow of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie, so, in its contemporary form, it does not consist simply of a bourgeois ruling class and a proletariat. Contemporary societies, as I shall stress throughout this book, are certainly class societies--using `class' as the ordinary people we shall be studying (as distinct from the ideologists and activists) used the term when, say, they talked of `upper-class education', `upper-middle-class professions', `lower-middle-class leisure activities', or `working-class housing', and not in the loaded Marxist way with its assumptions of class conflict and class ideologies.

Mention of the term `counter-culture' brings me to one of the most important aspects of the whole muddied field of controversy we are now tramping our way through. One of the most basic problems in the production and consumption of history is that many of the most important words we have to use are actually used in different ways, that is to say, have different meanings. `Culture' is one of the classic instances. Often the word is used as a collective noun embracing opera, painting, poetry, and so on, broadly what is dealt with in the arts, entertainments, and books pages of our posher newspapers. Sometimes `popular culture' is also spoken of, referring to films, popular music, romantic, crime, and other less ambitious fiction, and, perhaps, spectating at football matches. Sometimes in this book I use `culture' in that way--there is no space for elaborate reformulations. But when we come to terms like `counter-culture', `culture' is being used in a wider sense to mean `the network or totality of attitudes, values and practices of a particular group of human beings'. This definition is far from solving all of our problems, because much uncertainty remains as to the size of the `group of human beings' which would be appropriate. One might speak of American culture, or of aristocratic culture, or of youth culture, or, perhaps, of Western culture, signifying `the Western way of life'--all the attitudes and values and practices springing from the traditions of ancient Athens, modified by Christian religion, by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, by the French Revolution, by Romanticism, by overseas conquests and colonialism, by the upheavals of the twentieth century. A single `culture', obviously, may be very big, or it may be quite small, depending upon the context in which the concept is being used. For myself, I intend throughout this book (though such is the slippery nature of language that it is always difficult to achieve total obedience even to self-imposed rules) to use the word `subculture' where I want to drive home the point that the `network' I am speaking of is, in the last analysis, a part of a larger network, or culture. Thus I speak of `youth subculture', because I do not believe that there was a `youth culture' which ever became completely independent of, or alternative to, the larger culture involving parents, educational institutions, commercial companies, technology, and the mass media. Indeed, it is one of the absolutely fundamental contentions of this book that the essence of what happened in the sixties is that large numbers of new subcultures, were created, which then expanded and interacted with each other, thus creating the pullulating flux which characterizes the era. I shall return to that, but meantime let us stick with the concept of `counter-culture'.

The term does originate within the period (1958-74) itself: those indulging in the various practices and activities I have already listed began to feel themselves to constitute a counter-culture. It was introduced to a limited audience by a young American academic, Theodore Roszak, in an article, `Youth and the Great Refusal' published in The Nation on 25 March 1968:

The counter culture is the embryonic cultural base of New Left politics, the effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic.

The term went into wide usage when Roszak put together a number of previously published essays as a book and called the book The Making of a Counter Culture. Readers of the over-written and elaborately rhetorical introduction which Roszak wrote specially for this potential (and actual) bestseller perhaps did not notice how muted his claims actually were on behalf of his counter-culture: he surmised that it might over the next four generations `transform this disoriented civilization of ours into something a human being can identify as home'. His counter-culture consisted of `a strict minority of the young and a handful of their adult mentors': it was opposed to `technocratic society', and drew its ideas from `the psychology of alienation, oriental mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and communitarian experiments'. In the same year another young professional, Charles Reich, in an even more speculative and less precise work, The Greening of America, suggesting that adoption of the new lifestyles and new ways of thinking would completely transform the world. These books give us insights into concerns of the time about the spoliation caused by the unrestrained application of technology and into some of the euphoric responses; they cannot be taken as embodying authoritative historical assessments. For myself, I accept that the term `counter-culture' was and is widely used, and that most people have a firm sense of what it signifies: my position is that it is a convenient term, valuable if it is deployed in the manner of everyday usage but dangerous if it is taken to imply any Marxisant assumptions about the dialectic, the overthrow of bourgeois society, the triumph of the alternative society. (The theory of the dialectic, I should explain, poses a sharp conflict between existing (bourgeois) culture and an oppositional culture, this conflict resulting in a new stage in human development, a new culture or society--there is no more evidence for the existence of `the dialectic' than there is for the existence of `the Holy Ghost'.)

It is, then, perfectly legitimate to use the term `counter-culture' to refer to the many and varied activities and values which contrasted with, or were critical of, the conventional values and modes of established society: the contrast, in slightly hackneyed common usage, is between `counter-culture' and `mainstream culture'. These are terms I shall occasionally use in this book, though my preference is for using the adjective, `counter-cultural', rather than the substantive, `counter-culture'. The crucial point is that there was no unified, integrated counter-culture totally and consistently in opposition to mainstream culture. When I demonstrate the many commercial transactions between those who probably saw themselves as mainly belonging to counter-culture, and those who indisputably belonged to money-making mainstream culture, I am not condemning or mocking the former. We can none of us escape from the larger culture to which we belong--and, in any case, there is nothing inherently objectionable about commercial transactions. Pointing out that hippies and drop-outs, while in some ways making the most complete break from mainstream society, did absolutely nothing to further the reform, let alone the supercession, of that society is not to condemn or mock them either, but merely to point out that what is called the counter-culture was in reality made up of a large number of very varied subcultures. Sometimes commentators, particularly those writing on American society, make a distinction between the counter-culture and `the Movement' or `the New Left': there is no rigid distinction, but in speaking of counter-culture the emphasis is on dress, general values, lifestyles, leisure activities, while in speaking of the Movement or the New Left the preoccupation is entirely with those who were genuinely politically active and took part in protests and demonstrations. The British `New Left', a more restricted grouping of non-dogmatic Marxists, appeared in the fifties; in France and Italy the term `New Left' is applied to the non-Communist radical groups consolidating in the later sixties, above all the `student movement'. These are convenient labels and it is sensible to make use of them, provided always that they are not made to carry a greater load of assumptions and implications than they can bear, and that their deployment is not made a substitute for fully substantiated explanations.