[lbo-talk] NONSENSE RE THE '60S - was A Note on an old slogan

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Feb 22 08:04:44 PST 2011


"It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists." Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class

This points in several directions; here I'm interested in its relevance to the early stages of the 1960s -- Say 1954 to 1963. The NAACP was the initiating force in this period, and its demands were well within American orthodoxy: they demanded simple justice, and the violent response to those demands in the South revealed to the whole nation what Blacks had always known. This generated strong revulsion -- moral outrage-- among a number of northerners (including, I think, the wife of the Governor of Massachusetts -- though that may have been later). Some of these northerners (including but not limited to students) joined in the Freedom Rides of 1961. Participation in collective action worked its quite common miracles, and the whites returned to their campuses determined to build solidarity with the just, the morally righteous struggle in the South. A fuse had been lit.

It was moral outrage in the first place, and not just in young people, that powered the early struggles of the '60s. Specific political issues were confronted. And from the beginning the media tried to trivialize this by locating it in a generation rather than in political issues. Savio's hauling in of a "generation" was simply a surrender to the lies in the mass media.

Carrol



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