I was sitting in my Sci-fi and Urban Dystopia course today milling over last nights reading, an excerpt from Robert A. Heinlin’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is about a penal colony on the moon who revolt against the rule from earth (story sound familiar?). The colonists on the moon carry out this revolt using cell structures and guerilla tactics. At the heart of it all is the anarchist philosophy that is voiced through the character Bernard de la Paz. He positions that the state, society, and government essentially have no existence. One of the most important philosophies that is given in the novel relates on the level of the individual, saying,
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them intolerable, I tolerate them;
if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
Although on the surface these positions seem nihilistic, they are, at the core, deeply anarchistic. Naturally, because I was taught to react and think about what I read, I started to ponder the idea of anarchy and uprising. What does it take for a group of people to change the environment they live in when the task seems to be monumental in size or just damned impossible? I then started to think about the students in the 60’s and 70’s and all that ensued during that time. And, having just written a post on the 80’s, I thought it’d be fitting to regress to the times that came before. I’ll admit the 60’s and 70’s were messy, or so they seemed anyways. But they were glorious. For a ‘young’ person (in my case, very young) that didn’t experience the time period first hand, but can only live off of the myth and media of what had happened during these tumultuous times, there is definitely a glamorized image of brazen student protests and flowering cultural revolution. It seemed as if life couldn’t get any more real and neither could the causes that were fought for. Here on US soil, there were students fighting the draft and the Vietnam War. We had feminism was in its hey-day along with sexual liberation. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the forefront of the civil rights movement. People weren’t afraid to experiment and be utterly free in mind and body. Abroad, you had France and the student riots of May ’68 that eventually led to the downfall of an entire government entity. You had Watts, Berkeley in the 60’s, the killings at Kent State, The Chicano movement, the New Left. This time period was marked by an infectious call to activism; a distinct call to uproot the current hegemony was sent out and heard.
For someone my age, those involved in the 60’s are those who raised me. Yet what interests me most is that I look around at my university and the universities of my friends. I've visited Berkeley, a place notorious for its activism in the 60s, and the finest institutions of higher learning, and everything is so utterly QUIET. I currently go to UC Irvine, an institution that truly lives up to it's timid biology major stereotype. You know what the number one major in our universities is? BUSINESS ADMINSTRATION. Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that it is a sensible major and that many people are ‘cut’ out to do this, blah blah blah. But to me, the pieces don’t fit. How does a generation raised by cultural revolutionaries become so complacent with the events that are transpiring around them? Have we all become completely self-centered and driven by economy?
Let’s do what many people fail to do on a daily basis. Look around us. Our situation today is this. We are at war in Iraq. Many parallel this war with the one in Vietnam, except the only difference here is that the biggest protests we get about the war in Iraq can pretty much fit on our neighborhood corner coupled with a few honks from people driving by. We are also in the midst of the most important and groundbreaking presidential elections this country has ever seen. A black man and a white woman are the top candidates for the democratic nomination. And while we may not be experiencing the same sort of cultural revolutions of the 60s, we are engaged in a different sort of cultural revolution. It’s the height of an information revolution. People have never been more exposed and readily accessible to such a vast amount of information. On top of that, more kids are in college today getting a higher education. As different as our situation may be, when it comes down to it, is it really that different?
When I think about the possible contexts that our ‘revolutionary’ mothers and father’s were brought up in, it is almost astounding. Assuming that the majority of these movements happened among twenty-somethings, it is then safe to assume that they were brought up by men and women brought up in the 40’s. And if you think about it, during this time, the first batch of women were JUST joining the workforce. You had extreme patriotism and a cohesion among the American people during the country’s time of need. Families seemed to be, for the most part, high-functioning in society and strictly a nuclear family. It was this high-structure, high-values sort of family that birthed the generation of the 60’s love child. So with that in mind, it is interesting to see that the more revolutionary generation has seemingly begotten a more conservative one.
I, personally, feel that I was raised in a more 40’s style home, with Christian morals and values, an expectation to go to college, get a job and become a well-behaved member of society. I did about half of those. I went to college, became an artist and instead of getting a job, I got romanticism and ideals instead. I must admit that I have become inwardly frustrated with the premature cynicism that seems to have pervaded throughout our generation. I feel like I’m surrounded by the attitude of “one person can’t possibly make a difference.” I, on the other hand (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this), refuse to accept the notion that we go to college only to settle with a job that we will work in for 20-30 years only to not have a life during this time and in the meantime, procreate, etcetera. It’s like accepting a barely higher form of parole. Yes I acknowledge that my views may sound completely and utterly leftist/extreme/biased/skeptical, but is there really any denying that this indifference has unfolded among us? Irrespective of that, it still makes for good discussion. I’ll admit, the tactics that were used during the 60’s are antiquated and times have changed. Methods must change. But when it comes down to it, I’m just really tired of people being happy with their forms of protest and activism starting and ending with a facebook group or chain email. Today, we don’t get Kent State riots or sit-ins, Instead we get incidents like that of Columbine and Virginia Tech. We don’t get petitions and rallies. Instead we get polite emails and fleeting web support groups. The heat and passion of the 60’s seems like it stays in such a distant place that I wish were here today. We have traded a deep sense of responsibility in exchange for unadulterated nihilism.
//
For someone my age, those involved in the 60’s are those who raised me. Yet what interests me most is that I look around at my university and the universities of my friends. I've visited Berkeley, a place notorious for its activism in the 60s, and the finest institutions of higher learning, and everything is so utterly QUIET. I currently go to UC Irvine, an institution that truly lives up to it's timid biology major stereotype. You know what the number one major in our universities is? BUSINESS ADMINSTRATION. Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that it is a sensible major and that many people are ‘cut’ out to do this, blah blah blah. But to me, the pieces don’t fit. How does a generation raised by cultural revolutionaries become so complacent with the events that are transpiring around them? Have we all become completely self-centered and driven by economy?
Let’s do what many people fail to do on a daily basis. Look around us. Our situation today is this. We are at war in Iraq. Many parallel this war with the one in Vietnam, except the only difference here is that the biggest protests we get about the war in Iraq can pretty much fit on our neighborhood corner coupled with a few honks from people driving by. We are also in the midst of the most important and groundbreaking presidential elections this country has ever seen. A black man and a white woman are the top candidates for the democratic nomination. And while we may not be experiencing the same sort of cultural revolutions of the 60s, we are engaged in a different sort of cultural revolution. It’s the height of an information revolution. People have never been more exposed and readily accessible to such a vast amount of information. On top of that, more kids are in college today getting a higher education. As different as our situation may be, when it comes down to it, is it really that different?
When I think about the possible contexts that our ‘revolutionary’ mothers and father’s were brought up in, it is almost astounding. Assuming that the majority of these movements happened among twenty-somethings, it is then safe to assume that they were brought up by men and women brought up in the 40’s. And if you think about it, during this time, the first batch of women were JUST joining the workforce. You had extreme patriotism and a cohesion among the American people during the country’s time of need. Families seemed to be, for the most part, high-functioning in society and strictly a nuclear family. It was this high-structure, high-values sort of family that birthed the generation of the 60’s love child. So with that in mind, it is interesting to see that the more revolutionary generation has seemingly begotten a more conservative one.
I, personally, feel that I was raised in a more 40’s style home, with Christian morals and values, an expectation to go to college, get a job and become a well-behaved member of society. I did about half of those. I went to college, became an artist and instead of getting a job, I got romanticism and ideals instead. I must admit that I have become inwardly frustrated with the premature cynicism that seems to have pervaded throughout our generation. I feel like I’m surrounded by the attitude of “one person can’t possibly make a difference.” I, on the other hand (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this), refuse to accept the notion that we go to college only to settle with a job that we will work in for 20-30 years only to not have a life during this time and in the meantime, procreate, etcetera. It’s like accepting a barely higher form of parole. Yes I acknowledge that my views may sound completely and utterly leftist/extreme/biased/skeptical, but is there really any denying that this indifference has unfolded among us? Irrespective of that, it still makes for good discussion. I’ll admit, the tactics that were used during the 60’s are antiquated and times have changed. Methods must change. But when it comes down to it, I’m just really tired of people being happy with their forms of protest and activism starting and ending with a facebook group or chain email. Today, we don’t get Kent State riots or sit-ins, Instead we get incidents like that of Columbine and Virginia Tech. We don’t get petitions and rallies. Instead we get polite emails and fleeting web support groups. The heat and passion of the 60’s seems like it stays in such a distant place that I wish were here today. We have traded a deep sense of responsibility in exchange for unadulterated nihilism.
//
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4 comments:
Fun stuff Mich. What's next the 20's? No,but in all honesty, I must admit that our youth (especially the students) do lack that oomph of activism it once had. But would I want it to reoccur? Um,nah, probably not, it'd be boring, banal. That was the 60's ideology, not ours. We have our ideals - as fifty cent would put it: "get rich or die trying." What else is there to live for??
It almost goes without saying that Kevin's response here is worse than useless.
You may want to check the recent posts on the nettime list (if you're not already on it) that point toward what for me is the crucial question: can 'net-organizing' (for lack of a better term) lead to substantive, long-term social change?
The 'original post' is here and there is a good response that it looks like hasn't been added to the archive yet, so I've pasted it below:
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Snafu, this is a brilliant post on the Grillo demonstrations, excellent and clear, particularly this:
>> what left-wing analysts seem to miss altogether is that the power of this grassroots movement does not reside in the expression of a particular political tendency, but, as Walter Benjamin used to say, in its "organizing function" i.e. in its ability to turn consumers into producers and “readers or spectators into collaborators.” (1978: 233) Obviously, this organizing function is not detached from the content, so to speak, of Grillo's message: only by portraying the establishment as a monolithic block, can the subjectivity of vast numbers of former "spectators" be mobilized and set in motion. <<
What you're getting at, it seems to me, is the way the old Gramscian idea of mobilizing people against a "power bloc" takes on a new life through the organizing techniques and appropriation possibilities of the Internet. That's a major lesson for radical-democratic politics, which seemed to be making it through the ambient haze in the days of the anti-globo movement, back when net-organizing was new. Since then it has declined and not only gone untheorized, but above all, largely unpracticed. Still it's an amazing possibility and it's great how you show all sides of it, including the center-left worries that their newspapers may decline if subsidies are cut, which is of course a real possibility. And the absence of decent newspapers is becoming a real problem everywhere... because newspapers, too, are necessary for the Left to exist politically.
I gotta add something here though:
>> In the end, the difference between Colbert and Grillo boils down to a very basic difference between U.S. and Italian capitalism: while American capitalism valorizes anything that is moneymaking, so that Colbert has his own TV show simply because he is popular, Grillo is banned from the mainstream media because the Italian bourgeoisie have historically resorted to authoritarian measures as a means of enforcing an otherwise uncertain political leadership.<<
Yeah, but another corollary difference is the sheer existence of the piazza in Turin where the people gathered on April 25. What the Italians call "scendere in piazza" has no real translation in American English anymore: because there is no common sensation of "taking it to the streets," except maybe in post-hippie anarcho-punk San Francisco. Colbert is a man with an audience glued to their screens, not a man with an unpredictable crowd of political revelers collaborating on a change in the way that society relates to itself here and now. Whether this possibility of "taking it to the streets" could be reinvented in America is maybe up to the Latinos, since the great immigrant demos of a few years ago were the closest thing that the US has recently seen to an embodied mass movement. Yet it is disturbing the way the previous Seattle movement was nipped in the bud -- a big attempt to retake the streets was really repressed, in the most brutal possible manner.
As to the question of whether new forms of electronically mediated social change are possible -- well, I won't repeat anything about past disappointments, but let's just say your analysis of Grillo's success is something the European and Latin American Left should pay attention to. Is something like that possible in the USA? Maybe, but no one has done it. Despite an impressive flowering of radical essayists, comedians, documentaries and Internet media, the US system of social control has worked almost perfectly across this whole nightmare period since 9-11. If anyone sees the cracks in the wall please let us know!
best, BH
###
(Neither of these were written by me, but maybe they will point in a useful direction in terms of thinking about contemporary challenges to political struggle.)
six
Six, you may have a point. My response was worse than useless. I mean, the mere fact that I quoted pop artist Fifty Cent may have alluded to this sentiment of irony... But hey, not everyone reads with two eyes or listens with two years... I can see how you could misinterpret this post... or could I?
Indeed, I could always insert someone else's irrelevant blog here [insert blog here].
And then
juxtapose it with a irrelevant blog in succession [insert blog here].
[Insert qualifier here, 'I didn't write either of these blogs - I just copy and paste shit']
And hey, would you look at that another "worse than useless" response. But this time, only longer...
The point is this: the original post was a thoughtful exploration of something I care about. I felt it deserved a reasonably thoughtful response. The fact that I felt somebody else had already written something appropriate to the topic is, I would argue, more or less immaterial. What do you propose? Irony and sarcasm don't solve the problems of global food riots, climate destabilization, continuing socialization of risk and privatization of gain by the transnational financial elite, the continuing failure of leftist politics in the US and elsewhere, both to challenge empire effectively and to articulate coherent alternatives, the litany goes on, and you've heard it all before anyway. ...I'm sure you're a clever cat, and I'm not saying that snark doesn't have its place. But caustically mocking the bourgeoisie, while entertaining, isn't enough anymore.
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