The 60s and US Political Decline
Swab the decks ! Swab the decks!
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Funnily enough, a couple weeks ago, I youtubed the Gorrilaz Glastonbury show from 2010, a fine set of music it is, and on the side came a link entitled “Murray Bookchin on the Ecology Movement (1978).” I had never heard of Bookchin. It’s a worth listening to talk by one of those handful of people of the 20th century who were spot on about some of the issues of technology, politics, and the environment, but have since been completely forgotten.
Unhelpfully, Bookchin came from both an old and new left perspective, so some of the vocabulary, most especially his use of words like “anarchy” and “socialism” are of little use. It’s clear he was gravely damaged by Marx, but to his credit transcended it in helpful ways, which in my experience precious few are ever able to do. Most, heavily influenced by the Old Moor's thinking, never get beyond it, or even worse, became shrieking reactionaries, for example the Neocons and any number of late 20th and early 21st century American warmongers.
A long time ago, I read a lot of Marx. He had great understanding of developing industrial capitalism, some of it still valuable today. His Hegelian deterministic history is pure twaddle, his revolutionary theory poppycock. What was done in his name across the 20th century should have consigned him to the dustbin of history, but in certain silly circles, where earnest youth try to find some understanding to America’s reality TV, internet defined, political desert, Marx has enjoyed a certain renaissance.
You’d like to blame bumbling old men who managed to hide in dark, musty halls of academia or the backwoods of Vermont for this resurrection. They have some culpability, but more importantly by the second half of the 20th century, political thinking completely atrophied, becoming trapped between a destructive dichotomy of psuedo-Marxian orthodoxy and America’s industrial corporate order. When the Soviet Union dissolved thirty years ago, I thought, “Great, maybe we'll see some new political thinking arise.” Instead, there was a doubling down on American political stagnation, Gorbachev labeled this America’s “winner complex.”
There’s various reasons for this atrophy, but in part, the great deterioration of American democratic politics was led by many who held the 60s up as some sort of political pinnacle instead of the beginning of a nadir from which we we've yet to ascend. I define the 1960s as the politics that sprung from the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement itself should legitimately be considered a pinnacle of American democracy, where after two centuries, the descendants of slavery became enfranchised in the system of self-government that ironically had originally codified their enslavement.
Anytime the bottom of a society moves, everything above it shakes. From the Civil Rights Movement and just as importantly from America’s post-war, historically unprecedented, industrial prosperity, emerged the great bourgeois Cultural Revolution, which ruefully came to dominate much of the next half-century of American politics. From inception, there were two great problems. The first was a searching for how any individual was oppressed, thus of course a necessity to define who was doing the oppressing. This politics rose directly from the Civil Rights Movement, where in contrast, these questions were quite easy to answer. Even more importantly, for Civil Rights the solution of gaining enfranchisement into a concrete political system that had excluded them was even clearer. Cultural issues, all cultural issues are a lot trickier, even more so when the leadership of such politics were overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of historically impressive economic privilege. To claim various mantles of oppression was in any number of ways always a stretch.
Secondly, unlike the Civil Rights Movement seeking enfranchisement in a very concrete, constitutionally structured political system, the privilege of the cultural movement allowed them to either largely ignore that system or disparage it as part of their historical oppression, leading largely through simple neglect to a decadence, a degeneration of democracy in America that reaches new lows even today.
In this regards, there’s a second long interview Bookchin gave in the early 90s about the 1960s that is worth listening, especially for all today who think Marx has political relevance. Bookchin is most astute explaining how the introduction of Marxist notions in the 1960s helped make the various aspects of the movement not just ineffectual, but plain ridiculous. Most enlightening, in Bookchin’s long deposition on the influence of Marxist thinking and actions on much of 60s' politics, there is not one mention of any election strategies to any office, that is of strategies to influence and direct the very system the Civil Rights Movement had just struggled to become part.
This is essential to understand for innumerable reasons. Most significantly, as the newly enfranchised Americans of the Civil Rights Movement would soon learn, the two century structure system of self-government itself was failing. It's greatest cause the ever increasing centralization of political power in DC, a process of centralization antithetical to what Bookchin correctly notes was “the extremely revolutionary nature of the American revolution.”
Instead, what came out of 1960s was a romantic glorification of protest politics. A badly romantic notion that demonstrating was somehow democracy, instead of any understanding demonstrations were overwhelmingly public displays of powerlessness, not democracy. In the end, protest politics proved both ineffectual in the short term and a politically destructive energy waste in the long term. If you need examples, what might be deemed the crown jewel of 60s' protest politics, the anti-war movement, has led to today, as I write, a completely unaccountable executive sending army troops into the streets of Los Angeles.
It would be unfair, worse it would be wrong, to claim the 60s were solely or even largely responsible for the political cesspool we find ourselves in today, but little of it helped. At the time, it was clear for all who cared to closely and smartly look, the entire political system, not just its constitutional structure was deteriorating. Today, to those struggling for any sort of political thought to confront our political decadence, and there’s far too few, it must be recognized the 60s, just like Marx, offer little guidance, both best consigned to the dustbin of history.
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