Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
The world-wide economic recession of 1973–4 checked post-scarcity utopianism; the vast majority of rebellious youth put away their beads and tried to make it once again in straight society. They reverted to type. Only a few persevered with the commune movement.
Whereas Kropotkin’s symbol was said to be the industrious and co-operative ant, van Duyn chose the peacock butterfly. Its normal mode of existence is based on love and co-operation, but it can also frighten its predator by spreading its wings and revealing menacing eyes.
At the same time, while modern technology has ended natural alienation (the struggle for survival against nature), social alienation in the form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has continued. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing. The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what could be. ‘Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation’, Vaneigem asks, ‘entails the risk of dying of boredom?’
Unlike the classic anarchist thinkers, who as heirs of the Enlightenment looked to reason and science to bring about progress, the gurus of the counter-culture rejected the ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ which had been so debased by the dominant culture in its attempts to justify war, poverty and injustice. The pendulum swung in the other direction, towards a reinvigorated spirituality, towards subjectivity, feelings, sensations, play, mysticism, and magic.
The anarchism of the New Left was different from its pre-war antecedents in that it was predominantly pacifist and largely existed outside strictly anarchist organizations. Crucially, it also saw feminism as a central issue. Where the main support for the old anarchist movement came from peasants and artisans, the new anarchists were principally disaffected middle-class intellectuals, especially teachers, social workers and students. As a result, there was a new emphasis on the importance of environment, culture and lifestyle.