Originally published in Soundings
By Phil Cohen
June 2018
There
is an old saw about the so-called swinging sixties: if you can remember
it you weren’t there. This has the rather interesting corollary that
if you were’nt there, if you have to consult the archive or rely on
second hand accounts rather than your own experience, then you are more
likely to grasp the events in more detail, depth and accuracy than
someone whose hippocampus and neural pathways have been irreversibly
damaged by taking too much acid while ‘on the scene’ .
We are
living in a culture whose collective memory is no longer primarily
conveyed through to face to face story telling , but is stored,
retrieved and disseminated through the prosthetic devices of digital
technology and social media. Whatever we remember or don’t about 1968,
whether we were there and actively involved or not, our sense of this
conjuncture and what it represented, is massively mediated in a way
that makes it difficult to re-capture, let alone re-kindle the immediacy
of the intellectual and cultural ferment, the heady, contagious
excitement of those days . This is especially the case in these dark
and dismal, not to say cynical times, when the optimism of the will so
much in evidence in 1968 is now so easily made to appear as hopelessly
naïve youthful idealism which foundered against the brutal realpolitik
of capitalism’s onwards march towards globalisation. Especially on the
Left, pessimism of the intellect continues to thrive , a depressive
position split off from and counter-posed to the often manic enthusiasm
of those political activists who continue to believe that entrenched
structures of power and inequality will somehow magically dissolve when
confronted with the assertion of their ‘counter-hegemonic’ demands .
From
where we are now it is much easier to imagine the future in dystopic
terms, than to conjure up the spirit so famously evoked in Wordsworth’s
panegyric to the events of 1789:
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
Interestingly,
Wordsworth highlights the re-enchantment of the world that is brought
about in the revolutionary conjuncture, only to frame it with his
pre((cautionary title : The French revolution as it appeared to
Enthusiasts at its Commencement, already foreshadowing the advent of
Robespierre and the Jacobin Terror. If contemporary political memory
conspicuously lacks this kind of mythopoeic sentiment it is because it
is always and already immersed in a frenetic (and often narcissistic)
capture of transient moments in and against the meagre, stale,
forbidding ways of neo-liberalism. At the same time ,courtesy of our
digital devices, everyday memory work has increasingly become
repetition work, oscillating between moments of rapt epiphany and
inertial foreclosure , at once the transcendence and immanence of the
mundane affordances delivered to our doors of perception via Instagram
and Facebook.
Nevertheless there has been no shortage of
memoirs written by participants in 1968, supplemented by an avalanche
of commentary in this 50th anniversary year. Why should something which
pales into insignificance compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall or
the AIDS crisis, global warming or the 2008 recession, continue to
exercise such fascination?
Before we can pinpoint the exact
sources of this interest we have to recognise that ‘1968’ functions in
two dimensions of discourse at once. It is a metonym that has come to
stand for a whole gamut of actions and attitudes which directly or
implicitly set out to disrupt the post war settlement between capital
and labour and the cosy consensual political culture based upon it.
Just as importantly ‘1968’ is a powerful metaphor of radical cultural
and political change initiated by a younger generation who rise up
against the old order they have inherited from their parents, in the
name of some principle of hope for a better future that is
incommensurate with the status quo.
The paradox of ‘1968’ is
that its legacy has survived as a metaphorical statement of intent to
overthrow an ancien regime, while the events themselves actually mark
the end, or at least the supercession, of that revolutionary narrative
in which this project has been embedded in Europe since 1789. Equally
the transformative values and attitudes associated with the social
movements that came into such spectacular existence in this period now
appear to be either prefigurative or outmoded, but, for that very
reason continue to provide a focus point for debate on the Left .
There
are some more local reasons for the present 68 notalgiafest. 1968 did
not start in 1968, or even in 1965 but in 1945, in the sense that its
genealogy lies in the long aftermath of the second world war and its
austerity regimes through the 1950’s and early 60’ and then their
sudden collapse. And that evokes identification with today’s
‘Generation rent’ who must hope against hope that the end of austerity
politics is in sight.
Another reason is that historical
generations, demographic cohorts formed around a significant event or
singular conjuncture, are imagined communities which create their own
invented traditions, their own shared memoryscapes, their own vectors of
meaning centring on once- upon- a- time prospects or predicaments.
There is a correspondingly strong investment in creating occasions of
commemoration as a way re-uniting the faithful and making a
pre-emptive bid for posterity.
A further reason, which I have
already alluded to, is that ‘1968’ has become the site of fiercely
contested readings of the Left’s own recent history and future
trajectory. In one, mainly Marxist, reading it is a cautionary tale. It
marks a historical turning point in which the project of political
emancipation founded on the industrial working class auto-destructs;
the onward march of labour is permanently halted well this side of the
New Jerusalem while capitalism goes cultural as well as global, and
becomes hip. The so-called ‘Youth Revolution’ creates a platform for
disseminating the hedonistic pleasure principles of consumerism and
makes possessive individualism – doing your own thing – sexy,
addictive and above all cool. In this optic, recreational sex, drugs
and rock’n’roll may not exactly be the devil’s work, but they promote
the dispositions of creative self-invention, underpinned by a whole
culture of narcissism that post- Fordism, and the just- in-time
production of the self requires. Playing it cool becomes the motto of a
whole ‘post ’generation: post modernist, post Marxist, post feminist,
post political. From this standpoint the ‘counter culture’ is well
named, for it is precisely about the merchandising of pseudo-radical
life styles, getting your highs from what you can buy or sell across
the counter in a way which lends itself to constant recycling and
retro-chic.
Another reading, which comes mainly from the
libertarian Left, sees 1960’s counterculture as a great disseminator of a
popular anti-authoritarian politics, a generational revolt against
the patriarchal structures of the family and the bureaucratic
structures of state and corporate culture, and as such embarked on the
quest for new and more directly democratic forms of collective
self-organisation, based on a moral economy of mutual aid. It is also
about an aesthetic revolt against the dead weight of elite bourgeois
literary and artistic canons and cultural tastes. A rejection then of
party politics, whether mainstream or vanguardist, in the name of a
cultural avant-gardism embedded in everyday life. This version of the
counter culture is celebrated as an incubator of new counter-hegemonic
visions, associated variously with feminism, gay liberation,
anti-racism, the environmentalist movement, community activism and
do-it-yourself urbanism. It prefigures the anti-globalisation and
anti-capitalist movements of more recent years as well as radical
identity politics.
Every interpretation of the counterculture
tends to privilege some aspects over others as symptomatic. Culturalist
interpretations emphasise the global impact on music, fashion and other
creative industries. Clothes, posters, record covers and other
ephemeral artefacts provide a readymade archive for curating such a
viewpoint, often drawn from the personal collections of the alternative
glitterati. In contrast, political commentators focus on the student and
anti-war movements and their often tense and tenuous relationship to
traditional Left and labour organisations .
Some of the more
sophisticated analyses recognise that alternative life styles could have
both progressive and reactionary aspects, could challenge the
patriarchal bio-politics of deferred gratification and be part of
what Marcuse called the apparatus of repressive desublimation.
However, most of the personal accounts produced about this period
emphasise the positive, liberatory aspects, whether they concentrate on
the cultural or the political side of things.
Now clearly what
we refer to rather glibly as the ‘60’s counterculture’ is a complicated
affair: it is made up of many different strands and is not homogeneous
either ideologically or sociologically.The ‘alternative society’ in
Britain mirrored the stratifications of so-called straight society. It
had its aristocracy, some of them the rebellious offspring of actual
aristocrats or plutocrats, but mostly wealthy rock musicians and
entrepreneurs who bankrolled its projects. It had its professional
middle class who ran its organisations, like BIT, Release and the
underground press. And then it had its foot soldiers, the young people
who flocked to its psychedelic colours and lived on the economic and
margins.
Although the student movement is of central
importance, especially in the USA , where it was closely linked to the
anti-war movement ( many students were, after all, potential
draftees), and although art colleges were at the forefront of
cultural and aesthetic experimentation, the university and the
creative industries were not the only site of ferment. The squatting
movement and what was happening in youth subcultures and on the streets
created their own platform of ideas and practices. One of my aims in
engaging with the current ‘1968’ debate has been to rescue the street
commune movement in which I was involved from the vast condescension
of the official historians of the Left whose own formation and sense
of posterity is confined to the role of the Dissenting Academy.
Between
1968 and 1970 the London Street Commune organised a series of mass
squats of young people in Central and Inner London . It was made up of a
rich mix of student drop outs, beats, hippies, Hells Angels, teenage
runaways , street poets and musicians, rent boys,drug dealers, and a
wild variety of people who defied easy sociological classifications but
in their various ways subscribed to a few basic tenets of an alternative
society and found semi-legit ways of eking out a living on the street .
In Hardt and Negri’s terms they could be considered to constitute a
‘multitude’ occupying the niches of a tourist and luxury economy in
and around the West End.
The street communes hit the world
headlines in 1969 when we occupied a large mansion at 144 Piccadilly,
which , it was rumoured ,had once belonged to the Royal Family. The
Marxist Left and the Tory Right joined forces to dismiss us a lumpen
rabble. When we turned up at a conference of the Revolutionary
Socialist Student Federation (RSSF) in the Roundhouse, to canvass their
support for our campaign against police harassment, in particular the
sus and obstruction laws which were used to target the Black
community as well as ‘long hairs’ ,we were dismissed us a mob of
junkies and physically ejected amidst cries of ‘What do you
produce,syringes?’
Ironically we got better treatment from a
group of High Tory Ladies whom we met in Piccadilly Circus when we were
staging a sit in at the Pronto Bar, a coffee shop we used as a hangout
and which had barred anyone with long hair. We handed out leaflets
showing a bedraggled beat being refused service under the disarming
slogan’ Every Englishman’s Right to have a Cup of Tea’. The ladies took
one look at the guy behind the counter, who happened to be a Pakistani,
and decided that they had to support ancient native rights against
these ‘aliens in our midst’ and , brandishing their copies of the Daily
Mail promptly joined the sit in, much to our embarrassed
astonishment.
Traditionally the Marxist Left has only
considered the street as a place where barricades can be erected , and
where marches and demonstrations can be organised. It has regarded
people whose livelihoods or lifestyles actually depend on the street and
its hidden economy, as a threat , at best a colourful backdrop to
their actions, at worst a source of scab labour. The libertarian Left
in contrast has tended to romanticise the street as a site of authentic
encounter, of social and cultural experimentation, direct action
,popular riot and spontaneous assembly, even a proletarian public
realm. The Situationists famously celebrated the alliance of black
and white street gangs in Chicago and Detroit during and after the riots
as the emergence of a new revolutionary force. One of their slogans at
the time was ‘ For a street gang with an analysis’.
Most of
the young people who joined the squats were initially quite apolitical –
they just wanted to be left alone to get on with their alternative
life style without being continually harassed by the police. But as the
movement developed and encountered the full power of the State and
the Corporate Media, many of them became radicalised.
The key
Street Commune slogan was ‘WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL ‘ which we
sprayed on buildings all over central London. It was a performative
statement of intent, which, somewhat disingenuously, evoked the
fragility of purely symbolic action. No amount of graffito on the walls
of the Bank of England or Canary Wharf will ever bring that fortress
of finance capital tumbling down.
The chant nicely captures
the spirit of generational revolt , with its barely disguised oedipal
thematics that characterised the mood of the time. In There have been
echoes of this in some of discourse around ’generation rent’ ,
The
street commune agenda could be summed up in its one sentence
manifesto :‘From the streets to the streets through the institutions
which keep us off the streets’. The statement drew heavily on ideas
circulating with the Libertarian Left at this time . Thus , the
institutions in question were:
The family – the nucleated
bourgeois /patriarchal family which either drove its members mad or
turned them into monsters. The commune was to become an alternative
family.
The school – compulsory schooling was part of the
ideological state apparatus , and was largely about teaching work
discipline to future wage slaves .
The factory and the office , prime sites of capitalist exploitation and bureaucratic control
The corporate media and the church : where the public mind was made up and dominant values inculcated.
The
prison and the mental hospital- these furnished the model for the
repressive nature of all the other institutions. The family, the school,
the workplace , the mass media, the church, all so many equivalent
ways of imprisoning minds and bodies, so many strategies to discipline
and punish or, alternatively, to seduce or haunt , so with the
phantoms of their own manufactured desires.
The long march of
liberation through the institutions was supposed to either replace
them entirely with alternatives viz Free schools, the Anti-University,
the Laingian asylum, the Ashram or dissolve sclerotic forms of power
into joyful assemblies, co-operative forms of collective self
organisation.
In the street commune milieu these ideas were
not so much debated as enacted. For example the notion of ‘liberation’,
borrowed from the lexicon of the revolutionary Left, was transformed
into a rationale for stealing things we needed but could not afford
from West End shops : food, clothes, sleeping bags. So’ liberating’
some milk from a supermarket was OK , but stealing luxury goods to
resell them was not , and anyone who nicked stuff off a fellow squatter
was immediately barred from our company. In this way the values of a
moral economy of mutual aid were sustained, however tenuously.
So
much for the theory. In reality hanging out on the street was often
cold, boring and ran the risk of being arbitrarily arrested and beaten
up by the police. So Street Communards spent a lot of time figuring
out how to get off the street and into places of relative safety, if
not peace and quiet. We occupied large empty and abandoned public
buildings, a school, a nurses hostel, a hotel , a children’s home. And
we organised a form of communal living where young people also had
some privacy. Decisions were made collectively in public meetings
often lasting hours . Should we ban the press from the building? Should
we accept everyone who arrived at our doors, or vet them to ensure that
violent anti social nutters were kept out.
Should there be a
curfew after midnight so people could get some sleep or was this
amount to creeping authoritarianism . So far so familiar, but what
was unusual was that the people doing this were not political
activists or students, were mostly not middle class, and were widely
regarded as failures, drop outs or delinquents. Certainly very few
had any experience of being listened to or being treated as if their
young lives mattered.
So what about the legacy ?
Some of
the street communards went on to become community activists , especially
around housing and environmental issues, some became involved in
counter cultural activities of various kinds. Some resumed previous life
trajectories , as factory workers, drug dealers, buskers ,odd jobbers
and the like.
The law was changed to close a loop hole in civil
property law , and to criminalise any illegal entry into a building,
making squatting a much more dangerous business. More positively the
street communes helped transform the squatting movement into a form of
do- it- yourself urbanism , often linked it to wider environmental and
planning issues.
At a deeper level this way of thinking about
the street and the institution as alternative centres of popular power
aimed to make an exemplary break from the ossified politics of both the
social democratic and vanguard party. It privileged direct action over
representative democracy, and the urban commons over municipal
socialism. The right to the city , to lay claim to its material and
cultural resources , housing and public amenity was to became an
integral part of the Libertarian Left’s programme But in retrospect
it is also possible to see that the street communes, like so many
other initiatives influenced by social anarchism, were symptomatic of
a more general failure on the Left to engage the key urban question
around which a more embedded social movement might have mobilised :-
the de-industrialisation of the working class city, and the consequent
destruction or gentrification of the inner city labourhood.
As
soon as we shift the time frame forward, a set of rather different
questions opens up, to do with the role which the archive plays is
disseminating political memoryscapes The question was raised concretely
for me when I was approached by the MayDay Rooms, an archive devoted
to documenting the history of the counter culture and radical politics
in Britain since the 1960’s. They wanted me to deposit my collection
of material related to the Street Communes, posters, leaflets,
photographs, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera. Rather than treat
these materials as relics, as ritual objects of commemoration, it
seemed more to the point to regard them as agents provocateurs in an
emergent network of possible interpretations, clues as to what their
still-to-be-figured-out significance might be.
The inevitable
narrative re-framing that takes place in the act of consigning
materials to an archive ensures that whatever future posterity is
achieved for them cannot be reduced to or approximate the significance
they may have for their donor . The raw remains of the past may indeed
be chaotic and condemned to insignificance, but we should not delude
ourselves into thinking that, by retrieving them for the archive , by
cooking them into a palatable dish for contemporary consumption, they
can be returned to some aboriginal meaning. The question is how does
the archive contextualise the material consigned to it, whether by
placing a deliberate interpretative frame around it, or simply by its
presence there?
There is also an epistemological trap in trying
to establish an autobiographic pact with an archive . In summoning up
and reflecting on images and texts from the past which have a direct
personal reference, it is all too easy to view them in the distorting
mirror of self-regard.
The temptation is even greater when the
remembered events evoke principles of hope that have become tenuous
or unsustainable in a subsequent political conjuncture. It is not
difficult today for Sixties radicals like myself to feel that things
have gone backwards, that everything we fought for and sometimes
achieved is in danger of being swept away and there will soon be
nothing left to mark the impact they once had, except what is
archived. Hence the frantic attempts at revivalism, both in Britain and
the USA. To at last create a legacy from which there is no turning
back!
The power of the archive to exorcise the demons of the
past and to forge putative links with the present is intrinsic to
such projects. But it is a tricky operation. We have recently seen it
at work in the retro-chic radicalism prevalent in some of the 50th
anniversary events organised around ‘May 68’, providing a platform for
many an erstwhile revolutionary to misrecognise today’s ‘Generation
Rent’ as the true inheritors of their own values and ideals.
Projective
– and retrospective – political identifications often skip a
generation; it is always easier to be generous towards one’s
grandparents achievements in and against adversity, while blaming
one’s parents for the unfair advantage which circumstances have
bestowed on them, and which they have been unable to pass on as
opportunities for their children.
Yet we need to be careful
about imputing to the archive a capacity to transmit collective memory
which it may usurp, but which exists independently of it. Any
significant event, whether archived or not, casts a long shadow over
those who have lived through it. For example, the scenes witnessed at
144, many of them undocumented, left an indelible impression on many
former street communards and have continued to shape the way they
think about politics, culture and society. In the words of one of them,
a factory worker and trade unionist who dropped out and went on the
road and eventually became a housing and community activist: ‘It was not
a question of going with or against the tide of history: for a brief
moment we were the tide’.
It is clearly important to document
the quality of such experiences and the forms of solidarity associated
with them. At the same time we have to acknowledge that activist
cultures tend to iterate on a single polemical note, and lend themselves
to tunnel visions. The real task for any Living Archive of the Left is
not to resurrect the past, to re-animate the corpse of 1968 and all
that, nor to neatly pigeon hole events and movements according to
some a priori schema but rather to capture their singularity, their
divergence from the historical context in which they were embedded, to
restore to them their futurity, even their counter-factuality, which is
also their potential to reconfigure the present.
Such
questions about the role of the archive are very much part of a
present-tense debate about whether or not the Left has a future. Has
the Left the capacity to reclaim its political imagination of the
future from recuperation and perversion by corporate capitalism and
its imagineers? Can its memoryscapes be more and other than an
involuntary response to the ruin of those dreams of a better world
historically bound up with communism and the labour movement? Is it
possible to enunciate realistic principles of hope which articulate
popular demands for social justice without falling back into
pragmatic opportunism or Utopian fantasies ?
If the answer is
no, then we only have a permanent nostalgia-fest to look forward to, a
prolonged mourning for a world of hopefulness we have lost. We arrive
at a negative historicism in which 1968 serves as a benchmark against
which all subsequent events and movements are judged and found
wanting. What kind of legacy is that to pass on to future generations?
The
critical futurology I am calling for, whose revisionism of the past
a Living Left Archive might support, may be the only honest way to
remain faithful to the zeitgeist of 1968. To return to the Wordsworth
poem with which I began:
We are called upon to exercise our skill
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,he place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
***
Phil Cohen played a key role in the London counter culture scene of the 1960s. As “Dr John” he was the public face of the London street commune movement and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly in July 1969. He subsequently became an urban ethnographer, and for the past forty years he has been involved with working-class communities in East London documenting the impact of structural and demographic change on their livelihoods, lifestyles, and life stories. Currently he is research director of Livingmaps, a network of activists, artists, and academics developing a creative and critical approach to social mapping. He is also a professor emeritus at the University of East London and a research fellow of the Young Foundation. He is the author of the book: Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance.
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