A Radical Vision

RADICALS view American society as being dominated by a relatively small group of people--an elite, more or less tightly co-ordinated, that benefits considerably from the present system. Under this upper crust lies a vast semi-oppressed white lumpenproletariat and a clearly oppressed black proletariat.

Such an analysis of the situation leads a radical to the conclusion that his tactics should be to politicize the masses so they recognize that their class-interest is being thwarted by a tiny minority.

So the Progressive Labor type cuts his hair, puts on a T-shirt, and goes to work in a factory so he can talk to the workers and educate them about their true plight. The fallacy of such an approach lies in the assumption that the process of converting someone else to one's own beliefs is a purely intellectual one. It is wrong to suppose that all one has to do is to present the worker with facts and figures and expect him to be "educated" into understanding that his real enemy is the capitalist establishment. It is a myth that a lifetime of cultural and social indoctrination can be nullified by any cool and rational expose.

The amazing ease with which George Wallace has managed to divert the attentions of the working-class from real inequities to imagined and irrelevant ones demonstrates the power of values that have been long instilled. When the working class man frets about his "high" taxes, he does not pause to worry about the loopholes by which the rich escape paying anything like a fair share because he is preoccupied instead with the thought that his money is being given out in some fraction to welfare recipients. He is more suspectible to the latter viewpoint because all his life he has been taught to believe that a man should work for himself to amass as much wealth as he can in ceaseless competition with everybody else.

The radicals have correctly identified their constituency--the people who are attracted today to Wallace--but they have no way of reaching these people. This disjunction has crippled the American social movement.

Moreover, even if the Left miraculously managed to stimulate the working class to full class-consciousness and succeeded in pulling off a social revolution to supplant the old elites with a workers socialist state, there is no assurance that a solution would have been effected.

From our meager knowledge of socialist states in practice (quite apart from what Marxist theory predicts) and the dismal history of the Soviet Union in particular, it is likely that another stultifying bureaucracy and an intolerant, repressive system would emerge in this country. The problem of alienation from a society that is based on the dehumanizing principle of competition between humans will not automatically disappear in a state which places the worker's interests before those of other classes. In the Soviet Union in fact other classes have sprung up and this development is inevitable as long as there has been no fundamental change in the prevailing value-system. The task before us is not to create a new kind of state but a new kind of person.

AND THE only place to start is with yourself. The principles of the good society aimed at creating what Fidel Castro calls the "communist consciousness" have already been glimpsed by many people. This has been the great spiritual contribution of the hippies to the American political thrust of today. Unselfishness, generosity, no hangups about one's personal possessions--this is the faith on which the improvement of future human societies depends. Along with these go the quintessentially hippie virtues of individual self-creativity and confident self-expression, a reverence for beauty, a gentleness and openness in one's dealings with others, an unwillingness to submit to rigid schedules.

These are the prerequisites of humane political effort. Without such underlying convictions all political actions become irrelevant. The cultural manifestations of our generation, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, as much as its social manifestations, long hair and flagrant dress for example, are bound in an inextricable whole out of which emerge also our political beliefs. It is not only futile to cut your hair to further your political interests--it is meaningless and absurd, a betrayal.

It was easy to fight against the war in Vietnam as it was to support civil-rights in the South. From now on issues will rarely be presented that are so clear-cut. The struggle now is to attempt the massive restructuring of a complex and highly industralized society. This will inevitably be a desperately slow process and we may as well resign ourselves to patience helped by a deepening of commitment.

The answer is to build a counter-community of people who share the same life-style (the style is so important) based on political and social service. The old dichotomy between full-time political revolutionaries and those who need to be politicized must be broken down. In the counter-community embodying the spiritual beliefs of the "communist consciousness," everyone is a political being as well as a performer of a socio-cultural function, whether it be film-making or teaching or law.

The concrete imperatives that such an analysis implies for all of us as college students soon to be unleashed on the world derive from a single central principle: One should not set out to make as much money as possible. This means that each person must learn to set an objective limit on his future needs, and not get trapped in the cycle of continually increasing wants, the second car, the country home, etc.

BY RECONCILING oneself to a certain low level of comfort one is freed from the urge to participate in the system. The only thing that keeps a person grinding away at an unfulfilling 9-to-5 job, dressed neatly in suit and tie, hair cut short to acceptable levels, is the lure of personal advancement with its accompanying psychic and material benefits.

There are then certain honorable professions open to one, honorable in the sense that they fit in with the ideology of uncompetitive co-operation, unfettered individuality and the desire to fulfill a definite socio-political function.

One of these is teaching in an urban public school. Another is to work in the non-establishment media, underground newspapers, small theater, radical film, both documentary and artistic. Perhaps most momentous, community television stations could be established in the suburbs as well as the urban areas. (Television is going to be the most potent tool of social change in the near future and it offers the best possibilities for the talented hippie-radical to achieve any dent in society. Physicists could be television engineers and artists could put the meat on the skeleton of radical theory.)

Lawyers and doctors too are needed but they must be community doctors and lawyers and their social function demands that they work for low salaries.

Out of this partnership of committed people only will we be able to build the counter-community that lives by its own value-system with its own way of life and customs, dope, rock & roll, etc. If the community is to grow, it can grow only by example--by being around to attract more people to its fold and in this way to inculcate its radical beliefs as much as its radical structures into outside society.

The present state of the American proletariat is such that one cannot hope for many more adult recruits. But their children in the high schools have been exposed however superficially to the strains of the hippie culture and will not grow up the same. They will be the nourishment of any radical movement of the future.