Ranting to /dev/null

More from Nation of Rebels

Here's another selection from Nation of Rebels (with apologies and thanks to Drs. Heath and Potter, should either of them show up). This one is from the 2nd chapter, "Freud Goes to California". It's an extended discussion of the latent Freudianism that underlies all countercultural thinking, and the authors end up arguing that it is Hobbes, not Freud, that has the better part of the argument as to the nature of humanity and civilization.

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It should be clear by now just how modest the Marxian critique of society was when compared to the countercultural critique. Fundmentally, what bothered Marx about capitalism was simply that the people who did all the work were desperately poor while the wealthy sat around and contributed nothing. He was concerned, in other words, about exploitation. This exploitation was produced, he thought, by the system of private property. It could therefore be corrected simply by eliminating, or rather reforming, these specific institutions. So the communist movement had fairly clear political objectives - to abolish private property and establish common ownership of the means of production.

The countercultural critique, on the other hand, is so vast and all-encompassing that it is difficult to imagine what could possibly count as "fixing things". What limits our freedom, according to this view, is not some specific set of institutions, but rather the existence of institutions in general. This is why the entire culture must be rejected [and also has a lot to do with why so many people are okay with religon but opposed to most organized forms of the same]. The '60s icon Abbie Hoffman contemptuously dismissed "political revolution" on the grounds that politics merely "breeds organizers". Cultural revolution, on the other hand, "creates outlaws". This certainly makes cultural revolution sound more exciting. But we must keep in mind that the goal of all of this is not to provide entertainment for intellectuals, it is to effect some kind of an improvement in society. Being an outlaw is in many ways parasitic upon the existence of an organized society. What if everyone became an outlaw? What does a society with no institutions, no rules, and no regulations look like?

Countercultural theorists have traditionally been quite evasive when it comes to answering this question. The standard dodge was to say that there is "no blueprint for a free society" or that because freeing ourselves from the culture requires completely transforming our consciousness, we are unable to predict what the future society will look like. Michel Foucault was the master of such evasions. Another option was simply to romanticize rebellion and resistance for its own sake. Resistance to mainstream society was often seen as theraputic for the individual, and promoted on those grounds. The goal of improving conditions in society at large, or of promoting social justice, receded from view. In this way, the concern for social justice became redirected and absorbed into an increasingly narcissistic preoccupation with personal spiritual growth and well-being.

Yet there are some countercultural theorists who managed to keep their eye on the ball and who made an honest effort to explain what an emancipated society would look like. Marcuse is the most important of these. He realized that the core obstacle to the development of a coherent countercultural project lay in Freud's instinct theory. As long as the id was divided between positive and negative instincts (love and death, Eros and Thanatos), then there would be no way to avoid Freud's pessimistic conclusion. There would be no avoiding the repression that one finds in civilization, simply because the only way out would be a return to violent barbarism. Genuine emancipation would be possible only if one could find a way to give Eros the upper hand in the battle for control of the id.

Naturally, anyone influenced by a particular type of vague Christian spiritualism could easily be led to believe that the powers of love were great enough to conquer all. Certainly, if love could rule the id and drive out aggressive and destructive urges, then there would be no reason for superego repression, anth thus no reason for social control of any form. We should be free to "let love rule". Yet Marcuse was wise enough to realize that Christians had been working the "love your neighbor" angle for two thousand years without much success at creating a utopian society [in no small part because that isn't the point, I might add]. And, so people soon learned, you can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints.

What Marcuse proposed instead was an influential hybrid of Marx and Freud. He argued that the level of instinctual renunciation required throughout the history of civilization is due not to the inherent strength of the destructive impulses of the id, and thus the requirement that they be kept under control, so much as to the burdens placed upon us by the prevailing conditions of material scarcity. In other words, it is the "curse of Adam" - the requirement that man must provide for himself by the sweat of his brow - that makes our society so repressive. With increased automation and factory production, however, we are at the point of lifting this curse. Under "post scarcity" conditions [how naive!], machines will do all the work and people will be left free to laugh, play, love, and create.

Thus Marcuse succeeded in hooking the critique of counterculture into the same type of political analysis that had motivated traditional Marxism. Marx himself, after all, believed that capitalism would lay the groundwork for a future communist society by eliminating scarcity, leaving the worker free "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner". In Marcuse's vision, not only would this eliminate class conflict, it would also eliminate the repressive superego. Work would become like artistic production, unleashing the creativity of each individual. Society would no longer have to compel individuals to conform to the "one-dimensional" model of human life, and all of the rules and regulations that dominate our daily life would melt away.

In the Marxian analysis, what prevents the emergence of this utopia is the class interests of the capitalists. Although capitalism was initially a force for innovation and change, eventually the class relations became "fetters" on the development of prudctive technology. After all, once the factories are fully automated, what grounds could there be for keeping them in private hands? What does the capitalist contribute? He isn't even producing any jobs. So why not nationalize the factories and let the people enjoy the benefits they produce?

In this way, the Freudian critique of society was wedded to the Marxian analysis of class. Marx was concerned primarily with the exploitation of the working class; Freud was concerned with repression in the entire population. Out of the synthesis of the two, a new concept was born: oppression. An oppressed group is like a class, in that it exists in an asymetrical power relationship with other groups in society. But it is unlike a class in that the power relationship is exercised not through an anonymous institutional mechanism (such as a system of property rights), but rather through a form of psychological domination. Members of oppressed groups are repressed, in other words, by virtue of their membership in a dominated group. Who are the oppressed? Primarily women, blacks, and homosexuals.

The "politics of oppression" bears some resemblance to the "politics of exploitation". The difference, hwever, is that it considers the roots of the injustice to be psychological, not social. Thus, the first imperative is not to change specific institutions, but rather to transform the consciousness of the oppressed. (Hence the enormous popularity of "consciousness-raising" groups in the early feminist movement [a popularity which endures in countercultural groups of all stripes]). Politics begins to resemble a twelve-step program. The old-fashioned concern with wealth and poverty is now characterized as "superficial". Roszak, for example, argues that with the development of the counterculture, "revolution will be primarily theraputic in character and not merely institutional". What an extraordinary phrase: merely institutional!

This sort of talk was widespread. Charles Reich, in The Greening of America, writes, "The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa. The machinery turns out what it pleases and forces people to buy. But if the culture changes, the machine has no choice but to comply." No one found it exceptional at all when the Beatles, in "Revolution," claimed that instead of changing the "constitution" or any other such "institution", it would be better to "free your mind instead".

One can see here an implicit picture of how society works, with a relationship of hierarchical dependence between social institutions, the cultura, and finally, individual psychology. The latter two are thought to determine the first. So if you want to change the economy, you need to change the culture, and if you want to change the culture, fundamentally you have to change people's consciousness. This led to two fateful conclusions. First, it suggested that cultural politics was more fundamental than the traditional politics of distributive justice. And act of nonconformity was thought to have important political consequences, even if it appeared to have nothing to do with anything that would be considered "political" or "economic" in the traditional sense of the term. Second, and even more unhelpful, was the suggestion that changing one's own consciousness was more important than changing the culture (much less the political or economic system). Nowadays, this preoccupation with individual consciousness usually takes the form of self-help. But in the '60s, the primary consequences was a massive diversion of utopian energies into the drug culture. It seems hard to believe now, but people at the time actually thought that widespread use of marijuana and LSD would solve all of society's problems: that it could affect geopolitics, eliminate war, cure poverty, and create a world of "peace, love, and understanding". Many of Timothy Leary's experiments were aimed at "expanding consciousness" by undoing the effects of socialization, scrambling the "imprints" that individuals received when they were young. Yet it wasn't just self-styled gurus like Leary who bought into these idease. Even a critical observer like Roszak was tempted by the following argument: "The 'psychedelic revolution' then comes down to the simple syllogism: change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world; the use of dope ex opera operato changes the prevailing mode of consciousness; therefore, universalize the use of dope and you change the world."

The idea that taking drugs might be revolutionary was of course reinforced by the existence of punitive drug laws. Countercultural revolutionaries saw an obvious logic to it all. Alcohol, which dulls and subdues the senses, is perfectly legal. It's like soma, used to placate the working classes. As long as daddy gets his scotch after work, he can tolerate another day in his suburban hell. But marijuana and LSD< rather than dulling the senses, help to free the mind. Thus they cannot be tolerated by "the system". These drugs encourage noncomformity, and therefore pose too great a threat to the established order. That's why The Man sends round the fuzz to bust your stash. Or, later, it's why Ronald Reagan felt the need to declare a "war on drugs". [no one appears to have considered the idea that mainstream culture opposes drug use because stoners are annoying]

And, of course, when repression fails there is always co-optation. Thus, pharmaceutical companies get in on the cat, selling sanitized versions of the same drugs but without the subversive, mind-expanding properties. So you get poppers and bennies, and soon you're in the Valley of the Dolls, another "treacherous parody of freedom and fulfillment". (To this day, people continue to describe the transformation of the United States into a "Prozac nation" as though it were a perversion or co-optation of the counterculture, as opposed to the logical extension of it.)

Underlying the countercultural analysis of the drug laws there was, of coruse, a preposterous interpretation of the effects of all these substances, alcohol included. The idea that marijuana liberates the mind is something that only someone who is stoned could believe. Anyone who isn't knows that marijuana users are about the most boring people on earth to talk to. Furthermore, the idea that alcohol is somehow less subversive than narcotics or psychedelics reveals a woeful ignorance of the history of alcohol. The claims that were made about LSD in the '60s are almost identical to the ones made for absinthe in the second half of the 19th century. It is precisely because of its disruptive, antisocial effects that major efforts were made to ban alcohol, particularly in the United States during Prohibition. Yet during this time, no progressive group was foolish enough to think that alcohol represented a positive force in society, or that it was good for people. Communists and anarchists didn't go around encouraging alcoholism among workers. They could see that creating a more just society would require more, not less, cooperative effort on the part of the broader public. And alcohol certainly didn't encourage that. The hippies, unfortunately, had to learn this the hard way.

Posted by ryan at April 16, 2005 03:17 PM | TrackBack