/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2340994
#doubt

no revolutions took place in the late 60s or the 70s, 80s or 90s

>>2340924
It wasn't a revolution as socialists in the 1920s expected to happen. But I like Eric Hosbawm writing about the enormous generation gap between the young people then and their parents, which grew extremely wide because of rapid technological change compared to the differences between generations in the past. Some of the cultural aspects of this were also shaped or became dominant in "developed market economies" which had socialized these people differently, and they had increased spending power. It was a generation that really was detached from their past.

>The essential antinomianism of the new youth culture came out most clearly at the moments when it found intellectual expression, as in the instantly famous posters of the Paris May days of 1968: 'It is forbidden to forbid', and the American pop radical Jerry Rubin's maxim that one should never trust anyone who had not done time (in jail) (Wiener, 1984, p. 204). Contrary to first appearances, these were not political statements in the traditional sense - even in the narrow sense of aiming to abolish repressive laws. This was not their object. They were public announcements of private feelings and desires. As a slogan of May 1968 put it: 'I take my desires for reality, for I believe in the reality of my desires' (Katsiaficas, 1987, p. 101). Even when such desires came together in public manifestations, groups and movements; even in what looked like, and sometimes had the effect of, mass rebellion, subjectivity was at their core. 'The personal is political' became an important slogan of the new feminism, perhaps the most lasting result of the years of radicalization. It meant more than simply that political commitment had personal motivations and satisfactions, and that the criterion of political success was how it affected people. In some mouths it simply meant 'I shall call anything that worries me, political', as in the title of a 1970s book, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (Orbach, 1978).

>The May 1968 slogan 'When I think of revolution I want to make love' would have puzzled not only Lenin, but also Ruth Fischer, the militant young Viennese communist whose championship of sexual promiscuity Lenin attacked (Zetkin, 1968, pp. 28ff). Yet, conversely, even for the typically politically conscious neo-Marxist-Leninist radical of the 1960s and 1970s, Brecht's Comintern agent who, like the commercial traveller 'made love with other things on his mind' ('Der Liebe pflegte ichachtlos' - Brecht, 1976, II, p. 722) would have been incomprehensible. For them the important thing was surely not what revolutionaries hoped to achieve by their actions, but what they did and how they felt while doing it. Making love and making revolution could not be clearly separated.

>Personal liberation and social liberation thus went hand in hand; the most obvious ways of shattering the bonds of state, parental and neighbours' power, law and convention, being sex and drugs. The former, in all its manifold forms, did not have to be discovered. What the melancholy conservative poet meant by the line 'Sexual intercourse began in 1963' (Larkin, 1988, p. 167) was not that this activity was uncommon before the 1960s or even that he had not practised it, but that it changed its public character with - his examples -the Lady Chatterley trial and 'the Beatles' first LP'. Where an activity had formerly been prohibited, such gestures against older ways were easy. Where it had previously been tolerated, officially or unofficially, as for instance lesbian relationships had, the fact that it was a gesture had to be specially established. A public commitment to the hitherto prohibited or unconventional ('coming out') therefore became important. Drugs, on the other hand, except for alcohol and tobacco, had hitherto been confined to small subcultures of high, low and marginal society, and did not benefit from permissive legislation. They spread not only as a gesture of rebellion, for the sensations they made possible could be sufficient attraction. Nevertheless, drug use was by legal definition an outlaw activity, and the very fact that the drug most popular among the Western young, marihuana, was probably more harmless than alcohol or tobacco, made smoking it (typically, a social activity) not merely an act of defiance but of superiority over those who banned it. On the wilder shores of the American 1960s, where rock fans and student radicals met, the line between getting stoned and building barricades often seemed hazy.

[…]

>What is even more significant is that this rejection was not in the name of some other pattern of ordering society, though the new libertarianism was given ideological justification by those who felt it needed such labels,* but in the name of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire. It assumed a world of self-regarding individualism pushed to its limits. Paradoxically the rebels against the conventions and restrictions shared the assumptions on which mass consumer society was built, or at least the psychological motivations which those who sold consumers goods and services found most effective in selling them.

How retarded do you have to be to compare the revolutionary wave of the early 20th century (even if most of them didn't get to a DotP) to a bunch of fucking college students?

>>2340924
>closest that the West came to revolution
You really think 1968 was closer than 1919?
Yeah gonna say this is a b8 thread

>>2341213
The only country that was close to revolution and had an actual revolution in 1919 was Germany. A single nation isn’t the West. The West includes the rest of Western Europe and Great Britain and the US. The west as a whole was the closest to a Western revolution in 1968.

2nd sexual revolution soon

>>2340924
don't forget the cultural revolution in china

hippies were failures, they were all like "lets have sex and smoke weed mannnnnnnnn" and thought that would lead to revolution. Student activists just annoyed actual workers.
by the time we got to the 70s/80s all the old liberals voted regan and johnny rotten (who is now pro trump lel) was shouting "NOOOOOOOOOOO FUTURE"

>>2341381
Sure, if you mean simultaneous revolution across the entire imperial core. 1919 still was a more consequential inflexion point for the revolutionary transformation of the core.
>>2341526
The imprisoned nations and internal subalterns orgs like the BPP were much more effective. Unfortunately, not as effective as the FBI.

>What was it about 1968 that made it such a revolutionary year in the West?
It wasn't revolutionary.
>What was the historical materialist context
The capitalist superstructure didn't align with the economic base. Youngsters wanted a more liberalized culture that would fit the already liberalized economy. In short, the whole "movement" was just about pushing culture to fit the already established realities of the economy.
>how was it coopted and liberalized in the 70s and 80s?
It wasn't coopted. It was always already a fake. That the "movement" took an ideological facade inspired by Mao's cultural revolution and Western anarchism is of no consequence. People do stupid shit all the time with false consciousness.

>>2341088
>'It is forbidden to forbid'
>'I take my desires for reality, for I believe in the reality of my desires'
>'The personal is political'
>'When I think of revolution I want to make love'
Literal pomo marketing slogans, lmao.