Clearly, the central tragedy of 1960s radicalism was its inability to transcend these ironies of mass culture. As members of a society of bureaucratically controlled consumption, telegenic spectacles of opposition, resistance, critique, or negativity projected from abroad in the mass media provided most of the revolutionary forms and goals of the New Left. With the eclipse of blue-collar industrial work by white-collar service work in the 1950s, and the effective domestication of proletarian union power in the 1940s, the strategy and tactics of America’s Old left were defined as obsolete by 1960s radicals. Instead the spectacles of media culture projected new models of action: Gandhi’s humiliation of British rule, Ho’s defeat of French and American military force, Nasser’s appeals for Pan-Arab/Pan-African unity, Che’s call for Third World uprisings, Nkrumah’s model of African revolution, and the new Islamic awakening across the Eastern Hemisphere. To transform America, many among the New Left mindlessly mimicked these anticolonial models of struggle, debating endlessly whether or not committed radicals should fight in the mountains, out in the countryside, or from within the ghetto. One need only remember those endless debates during the 1960s, late at night, in one, two, many dorm rooms, over the relative strengths and weaknesses of Gandhi’s satyagraha, Maoist peasant war, or Che’s focoismo in mobilizing “the people” of Oregon, Illinois, Alabama, or Vermont. In these spectacular images of rebellion, 1960s radicals found the illusions needed to conceal from themselves the corporate limitations on the content of their struggles, while keeping their enthusiasm on the high plane of great historical tragedy. Thus, America’s counterculture, which had produced rebels without a cause in the 1950s, generated revolutionaries without a base in the 1960s and 1970s.
Timothy W. Luke