One of my main memory of the 60s was going to an SDS meeting where a lot of privileged, college bound white kids planned to go into the factories over the summer to organize the workers. I remember thinking that the workers were going to feel pretty offended by a bunch of kids coming in and teaching them what they should think and what they should do next. I was not inspired or encouraged.
I am not saying your picture of the sixties was wrong; but it was a partial picture, and Graeber is describing another part, equally important in the long-term development of radical movements.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- Shag, this is a lengthy post it will take me a couple days to read at my present clumpy rate. This will respond to one short passage in isolation. You write:
"Graeber explains that 60s activism "emerged from a kind of social bottleneck. The welfare state ideal of the time had been to defuse class tensions by offering a specter of perpetual social<< mobility..."
Yup. That's one of the things we chattered about at the time: the phrase was "Revolution of Rising Expectations." We (whites) assumed it was important in the Black Movement (especially perhaps in the riots). Whether it was or not is debatable.
But those rising expectations had a number of different expressions and
meanings at different times, different places. And Graeber might be falling
inti a really crude economic determinism. (I read Mattick at the time but
can't remember my response to him.) Among college students (who were just
one part, not necessarily the main part of the totality of Movement) the
kick-off wasd that college had become fun, it kept triggering hopes for
knowledge, for understanding, that it couldn't really satisfy. And they had
FREE TIME. It is hard now to realize how much margin of time there was in
collge life for both faculty and students. And they had some margin; many of
them worked few if any hours outside college. Time to sit around and bull
shit. And that bull shit didn't always lead to more bull shit; it led, for
example, to the Freedom Rides and the dangers of opposing the horrors of Jim
Crow in the South. In the past Jim Crow, from the liberal northern white
perspective had been a bad thing. In our leisure and bull shitting time Jim
Crow became a living horror that had to be destsroyedl We had to start
building support for that struggle. And for some that meant going South to
work with SNCC in Mississippi, and they came back transformed. (Do not
believe any account of the '60s that does not several times feature that
phrase, "The horror." This is a commonplace. Peasants who are beaten and
half starved are less apt to becom animal-rights fanatics than comfortable
people, relatively safe from the constant threat or reality of pain. Then
here and there over the land thee was a person like the late Beulah Thornton
Kennedy. (I can't describe her, but perhaps the words I spoke to her the day
before she died will give some sense of her impact: "It has been a privilege
to know you and an honor to be your friend." Anyhow, Beulah, active in the
local NAACP, thought there was needed an informal group, not tied by the
formalities of NAACP. They were mostly church people at first (Unitarian,
Methodist, Prresbyterian. Several of them went South as mentioned above.
About that time my wife came home from Unitarian Church and mentioned that
there was this group that met every Monday night in the basement of the
Union Baptist Church. I had just finished my dissertation, had some free
time, went down there in the summer of '64. That hour or two every Monday
night around a table in that dingy basement were some of the most exciting
hours of my life, then and since. I think it was the next summer that two
SNCC workers from Mississippi vistited. The friend whose house they stayed
at had an observation later: The first two days they were tense, jumpy, but
gradually became calm and rested. Then the day before they returned to
Jackson, they began to get nervous and jumpy again. Jan noted something
similar a couple years later when she drove two Panthers down to Bloomington
from Chicago - how nervous & jumpy they were, especially at the sight of a
police car, until, well beyond the boundary of Cook County they began to
relax. (This is not going to be very coherent, but I think a reader can
reorganize it in her own mind. The '60s themselves were not wholly coherent.
:-> Anyhow, one of those SNCC workers, a junior college student, told how he
got into SNCC. He had been hearing about it and went up to a conference in
Memphis, Tenn. He like it and asked to join. They said, O.K., Go back and
organize Jackson. (Graeber's later reference to "organizers" is ahisotrical
and kind of silly.) He went back, puzzled a bit and wrote a leaflet on
something (the transit lines?), and SNCC was born in Jackson¸the site of the
Jackson State Massacre the same week as Kent. I've backed off from the term
"organizer," but do any of our objections have any relevance to this?
Now all of this can correctly be placed under the labels of rising expectations, the frustrations of rising hope not really satisfied. But if you reduce that to economic terms (rather than merely recording the necessary economic preconditions), you have missed the '60s. And I've just been dealing with one very tiny corner of an immense and reale and reall unprecedented cascade of movements, of big and little struggles.
And something more important in many ways than the actual struggles or their particular goals. And it was this something else that eventually scared the corporate elite & their intellectual gunfighters out of their panties. The discovery inside these struggles of something very old and very new, which we can only give the blank-check label of democrqcy: Democracy in Action. Perhaps our (my) best taste of that in B/N was a battle not reallaps our (my) best taste of that in B/N was a battle not reall part of any of the main movements, carried out by mostly non-movement academic hacks, and eventually ending in mostly defeat. We had an ass of a department chairman. One professor started a rebellion against him; it grew; lots of people signed a request to the Administration to investigate him. The investigation happened and at the end of the year the Assholes in Administration decided to allow him a one-year lame duck continuation as cvhair and then he would be replaced. Meanwhile such excitement, such vigorous conversations among 30+ faculty members who in many ways did not have all that in common. And that comaderie, that solidarity, led to electing an entierely anti-Chair new APT Committee for the next year, I being one of the four elected. O.K., the issue here is utterly trivial, the 'spirit' and ealan and new relations among the faculty nottrivial: And here is the Point: This was happening all over the U.S. in the various movements. They were discovering the energy released by the discovery of democracy, of collective effort. You can't even begin to touch on this in any view of the '60s which begins with the large "economic" changes which probably enabled the '60s but had nothing fucking to do with the content of the '60s.
Carrol
P.S. That local group without which I prbaably wouldn't be on lbo-talk today, called US on the suggestion of a SNCC visiter, was made up almost entierely of men and women over 30. We had one student member. He had served 6 years in the peacetime Marines before coming back to school. He was also the founder of SDS at ISU.
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