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Title: The Youth Culture
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1970
Language: en
Topics: culture, youth, hippies
Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2022 from https://radicalarchives.org/2015/08/26/murray-bookchin-in-praise-of-hippie-youth-culture-and-life-style-1970/
Notes: Published in Hip Culture: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential; Yippie, Third World, Feminist, Marxist, High School Student, Anarchist (New York: Times Change Press, 1970), 54, 55, 58–59, 60.

Murray Bookchin

The Youth Culture

We must break away from the traditional Marxian outlook, with its

limited interpretation of the class struggle, of the motive forces for

revolution, and of the revolutionary process, to understand the

revolutionary implications of the Youth Culture. …

Nourished by the relative abundance produced by a new, potentially

revolutionary technology, young people began to develop a post-scarcity

outlook—however confused, rudimentary, and intuitive its forms—that has

been slowly eroding the ages-old psychic complicity between oppressor

and oppressed—a complicity that had made hierarchy, domination,

patriarchy, renunciation, and guilt a condition of the human spirit, not

only the institutional and psychological instruments of class-rule and

the state. It is difficult to convey what a historic breach this

emerging Youth Culture produced in the social desert that was once

America. …

The explosion of the Youth Culture shattered this decade-long edifice

and its mythology [i.e., the social conformity of the 1950s—RA] to their

very foundations and, almost alone, is responsible for the massive

alienation that permeates American youth today. For the first time in

the history of this country, every verity not only of bourgeois society

but of hierarchical society as a whole is now in question. Mere critique

of the kind so endearing to the orthodox Marxists might have produced

nothing more than a sense of cynical engagement, so similar to

Salinger’s young hero in “Catcher in the Rye.” But the Youth Culture

went further—into the realm of positive, utopian alternatives. In its

demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic

experience, and a balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures,

however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society, freed of

the trammels of hierarchy and domination, a society that would transcend

the historic splits between town and country, individual and society,

and mind and body. Drawing from early rock-and-roll music, from the beat

movement, the civil rights struggles, the peace movement, and even from

the naturalism of neo-Taoist and neo-Buddhist cults (however unsavory

they may be to the “Left”), the Youth Culture has pieced together a

life-style that is aimed at the internal system of domination that

hierarchical society so viciously uses to bring the individual into

partnership with his/her own enslavement. …

The Youth Culture has spread from the Haight-Eastside axis into the most

remote towns of the United States, areas that no radical movement in the

past could have hoped to colonize, disrupting all the time-honored ties,

institutions, and values of these communities. Owing to its increasing

influence on working class youth, the culture has now begun to rework

the labor reserves of bourgeois society itself—the reservoirs from which

it recruits its industrial proletariat and soldiers—until recently,

perhaps the most intractable element to radical ideas and values.