"It's odd how that Beloit list, and some of the punditry it inspired, seems to assume that you have to have had personal experience of a historical event to know anything about it." Doug
-------------
Just some notes, reflections spawned from the idea that you have to have had personal experience of an historical event to know anything about it. No, of course not... and yet.
There is always a difference between what is written as history and what occurred. It is probably impossible to write an accurate account, whether you've seen it, felt it, lived, or not.
It is very difficult to capture or characterize events, just at it is very difficult to describe a person, that is, give them the unique combination of qualities that are their make up. And all that assumes you are trying to be truthful, accurate, and fair minded.
So then, being part of a historical sequence produces a form of knowledge that is not necessarily written about or well characterized.
Here is an example that I can't quite nail down.
At some point around 1962-6 there started to be, at least in my mind, a feeling of deep comraderie among just about anybody my age and roughly in my position---student, broke, not sure what to really do with my life, already alienated from parents, roots, the past, the general direction of society. Some edgy thing was in the air---that's what it felt like. The constant threat of the war, the draft, the endless civil rights fights with the government, demos---and arguments with parents and friends over all this.
After a couple of years in LA at CSUN, I went to Iowa City UI and met students in a similar scene/mood. We made trips to Chicago, New York, Philly... home towns of my friends then, and of course met more. It was everywhere, pretty much at the same stage of awareness and development. Politics, drugs, sex, life, music, film, the arts...
We had all read certain books. Books would become popular and go through a student community like a fad. Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, Brothers K, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Man's Fate, everything of Camus---also endless tracks on this or that, Domhoff's first version of Who Rules America, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Genealogy of Morals, bits and pieces of Marx, psychology, Freud, Horney, anthro, Children of Sanchez, The Savage Mind, Labyrinth of Solitude... parts of Heidegger and Sartre... These were books we read outside of classes. Most were not in our classes at all. Education seemed to take place outside the lecture hall, but reflect back to a lecture hall somewhere else, some utopian wonderland.
We could talk for hours and hours on these books, or the jazz coming out playing in the background or Bach or Dillon, or old time blues, getting loaded, drinking cheap red wine, going out for midnight snacks... and of course trying to get through school at the same time.
When we were weaving all this culture together, it was as if it all spoke to us in a magic voice.
This student culture, was taken, borrowed, infiltrated, mixed with others---the ones that writers, artists, musicians, theater people lived---along with student radicals and older politicos. That's where I wanted to be, that's what I wanted to be, living in whatever it was. And it was considered criminal! Drugs, sex, commies, queers, agitators, weirdos, all that was true enough---except it wasn't criminal and it wasn't weird.
Now I would say, these experiences and events were a re-enactment of the class conflict between the bourgeoisie and its critical intelligencia, the avant garde----very similar in some ways to the build up for the 1848 revolutions that swept up Europe---all suppressed only to blossom again in the 1870s...then again and again building up to 1917 and beyond.
If you go back over some these 19thC events you just barely sense, there was broad based and international awareness there, not unlike the kind of mass awareness that I thought I sensed in the 60s.
When I read Marx now, I think of him as one of these beatnik radical type characters, living hand to mouth, run out of Germany for his radical essays, landing in among the writers, politicos, artists, bohemians of the age and getting thrown out of Paris for similar writings, and then back again with start of the 1848 revolution.... etc, etc. Taking refuge again in London, going to the museum library...
Freedom of speech, freedom to argue, act, organize... freedom to think and live. All these elements are mixed together in my mind as political awareness, that harks back to my own student days, and the art and politics of 19thC revolving around Marx and others...
Here is an excerpt from Engels 1869 account:
``Expelled once again, this time by the Belgian government under the influence of the panic caused by the February revolution, Marx returned to Paris at the invitation of the French provisional government. The tidal wave of the revolution pushed all scientific pursuits into the background; what mattered now was to become involved in the movement. After having worked during those first turbulent days against the absurd notions of the agitators, who wanted to organise German workers from France as volunteers to fight for a republic in Germany, Marx went to Cologne with his friends and founded there the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which appeared until June 1849 and which people on the Rhine still remember well today. The freedom of the press of 1848 was probably nowhere so successfully exploited as it was at that time, in the midst of a Prussian fortress, by that newspaper. After the government had tried in vain to silence the newspaper by persecuting it through the courts Marx was twice brought before the assizes for an offence against the press laws and for inciting people to refuse to pay their taxes, and was acquitted on both occasions it had to close at the time of the May revolts of 1849 when Marx was expelled on the pretext that he was no longer a Prussian subject, similar pretexts being used to expel the other editors. Marx had therefore to return to Paris, from where he was once again expelled and from where, in the summer of 1849, [about August 26 1849] he went to his present domicile in London.
In London at that time was assembled the entire fine fleur [flower] of the refugees from all the nations of the continent. Revolutionary committees of every kind were formed, combinations, provisional governments in partibus infidelium, [literally: in parts inhabited by infidels. The words are added to the title of Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian countries; here it means in exile] there were quarrels and wrangles of every kind, and the gentlemen concerned no doubt now look back on that period as the most unsuccessful of their lives. Marx remained aloof from all of those intrigues. For a while he continued to produce his Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the form of a monthly review (Hamburg, 1850), later he withdrew into the British Museum and worked through the immense and as yet for the most part unexamined library there for all that it contained on political economy. At the same time he was a regular contributor to the New York Tribune, acting, until the outbreak of the American Civil War, so to speak, as the editor for European politics of this, the leading Anglo-American newspaper.
The coup d'etat of December 2 induced him to write a pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York, 1852, which is just now being reprinted (Meissner, Hamburg), and will make no small contribution to an understanding of the untenable position into which that same Bonaparte has just got himself. The hero of the coup d'état is presented here as he really is, stripped of the glory with which his momentary success surrounded him. The philistine who considers his Napoleon III to be the greatest man of the century and is unable now to exaplin to himself how this miraculous genius suddenly comes to be making bloomer after bloomer and one political error after the other that same philistine can consult the aforementioned work of Marx for his edification.''
Now isn't that just grand? What a great life, wonderful. Living in the swirl of events sweeping an age into the vast currents of history.
Maybe the reflection is that you do need to have experienced at least some moment of history in order to understand history at all. You can't just read history otherwise it disappears, you forget it. History exists as something like a living thing. It almost is a geist, like a novel or poem that only exists as a voice when you are imagining and reading it.
I know it sounds creepy, but moments are geists of a sort, and every once in while, it is shared as a collective experience, and the moment becomes like Hegel's Weltgeist, because it is shared across a whole physically disconnect mass of people at the moment.
But leave Hegel here. I don't go for the great hero theory, the leader thing, because these experiences and their momenta are too complex and too out of scale to ever be embodied as a single person or even a small group. This is why it was impossible to mount a direct suppression of various 60s events by arresting the so-called leadership. Leaders in my view don't lead. They make significant contributions to and borrow from something much larger than themselves. And you absolutely can not freeze these fluid forms and moments into a state structure---that's the deepest problem of revolution. Instead, you have to creat systems that allow for these moments to live, change, flow---or something like that. A big risk for opportunities from counter-revolution, reactions and so forth.
I've been interested in all the great positive throws of these moments, but in the last few years, I started to read and think and try to figure out the profoundly darker elements that also seem to arise in these events---the sources of counter-revolution, the reactions, and reactionaries who found themselves trapped, moved against their will by events, and not liberated by them---at least simply indifferent to them.
Obviously the whole rightwing of the US is filled with these people, many of them my near-contemporaries. I wonder now where they were hiding back then, these bystanders who thought we were despicable. They have spent the last thirty years trying to erase whatever it was that happened.
In my brighter moments I think, you fools, you have erased nothing, and since you have spent your lives trying to destroy whatever positive additions we tried to make and perhaps failed, you have wasted your lives---that is destroyed yourselves. Sure you have managed to make millions miserable and killed thousands, for what?
Iraq will be your monument and what a devastating place it is, so far beyond victory or glory, that it will mock you forever. One of the historic origins of human civilization turned into chaos and rubble, a desert of misery, suffering and death. That's your contribution to the great project of civilization.
Yesterday afternoon when Lauren S. drove into my work stall, I was reading this thread (Feeling old...or something). I already knew she was part of whatever I had been once upon a time, carrying the torch so to speak. I almost knew in advance she would be able to answer silly history jeopardy questions. So I made up a few from the list I had just read and sure enough she did know. We laughed over this while the list was debating the virtues of these questions. I had to coach some of the answers out of her. Weimar for example. She knew it was about Hitler, but she was unsure of the sequence. I just said, ``before'', and she finished it, ``oh, yeah, that's right, he overthrew Weimar...''
She didn't make me feel old at all. She turned it around and started quizzing me about biology---her major. She didn't know that was one of my interests, but I stumbled on the Gram positive, Gram negative question, bacteria classifications---something. She filled in, ``think lab tests...Chuck, lab tests...''. ``Oh, yeah, staining something.''
Lauren's funniness, liveliness was hope, where today and yesterdays blend... in days of mad romance and love. Then youth was mine, free and joyous, flaming life was mine...
CG