How the Counterculture created the Reagan Revolution

[Eric the Green]

(07-29-2020, 04:51 PM)Einzige Wrote: You can say what you like, but the Curtis documentary goes into pretty close detail about how marketing agencies learned to sell products to the new "values and lifestyle" consumers, and how those people voted in high numbers for Ronald Reagan

The documentary is wrong, then. In 1980, the boomers were the least likely to vote for Reagan among the generations.

Marketing agencies will do their thing, as they always had before, and people buy stuff, as they always had before, but that does not change what the counter-culture and sixties movements were about, and still are about. It was not solely about the "pleasure principle," it was fundamentally about changing our consciousness in our relation to ourselves, our environment and to people. 

According to Theodore Roszak, seen in the videos I posted above, author of The Making of a Counter-Culture, the difference from Marxism is the same difference between us. The counter-culture sought a greater experience of spirituality in a non-authoritarian and personal/interpersonal/universal sense. You deny this experience simply because you don't have an experience of it, and are concerned only about material survival. Survival for what? Only if guided by higher values of some kind, and direct experience of relationship with all Being, can a society ever be just and productive of peace and prosperity.

A society only concerned with economics and class struggle creates an economy and society that does not respect people or the Earth, and creates a society of death because it denies life. Marxism as usually practiced keeps the industrial lifestyle and its productive methods intact, and only proposes that a supposed idealistic paternalistic elite take it over. Marxism turns us into mechanistic cogs, whatever Marx may have understood about alienation. He may have understood this, but his philosophy only perpetuates it. And no Marxist society so-called has ever created wealth or prosperity for its people. People are rendered equally poor. 

And no Marxist society will ever be purely Marxist by your definition. It will decline into the pseudo-marxist forms that you criticize. That's because people and societies aren't perfect, and greedy and ambitious folks are always around to corrupt things.

A higher synthesis is needed. Individual rights and participatory democracy, and even smaller and truly free and well-regulated enterprise and entrepreneurship, must be included from the preceding revolution. And it must be updated to the next revolution with recognition of spirit and life and full recognition that we are embedded in ecology with rights for all kinds of people.

If you believe Marx proposes doing away with labour, surplus capital and the state right away through organic change, then I don't think the hippies were much different in their ideal society. But if you propose "worker councils," that needs to be fleshed out, and this doesn't sound like an abolition of labour, because the people are still called "workers" in that designation.

There's no doubt about the power of commercial capitalism to co-opt everything it can. There was nothing new about this commercial culture; it pre-existed the counter-culture by decades. The hippie society, whatever its merit and its flaws, could not survive fully intact in a commercial materialist society. It was an experiment which released new attitudes and ideals into society, but the USA society remained commercial and materialist anyway. Predominant powers tend to persist. That was not the fault of the counter-culture itself, which stood in opposition to this commercial culture as best it could. The love-lifestyle experiment did not create Reaganomics, but neither was it a strong enough method or movement to supercede and rein in the commercial capitalism that Reaganomics promotes, perpetuates and enables. I hope, though, that certain long-term trends began and will rise again now and then. 

Changing commercial capitalism will take more than denouncing and insulting the counter-culture. It will take a strong alliance of all concerned folks. It will take people-power, democracy and activism as well as changing lifestyles and inner discovery. Simply pronouncing what a pure and perfect Marxism is, and hoping it will appear as if by magic, will not work. There is no such pure society, and describing alone does not bring things into reality. Nor does any violent method.