NEW LEFT–COUNTERCULTURE

NEW LEFT–COUNTERCULTURE

ANNOTATING:
|...| Fred Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2008
|...| Steve Rushton Masters of Reality, 2011

I wrote: "Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2008) distinguishes two political trends that emerged in the United States during the 1960s. These can be broadly categorized as the ‘new left’ and the ‘counterculture’. The new left emerged from the civil rights and anti-war movements. This group understood the world as driven by the material realities of class, race and labour. The second group, the counterculture, emerged from a heady blend of beatnik literature and cybernetics, which understood individuals and systems (including ecological systems) as comprising networks which exchanged information with others. In this scheme the media could be understood as a media-ecology, the evolution of which could be redirected. The experimenters with LSD understood the drug as a technology of the self, as a form of software that could re-programme a group or individual. The underlying philosophy of the network was also a major inspiration for 700,000 individuals to set up a series of communities throughout the United States between 1967 and 1971."

Note: Ken Kesey’s second Novel Sometimes a Great Notion was a tribute to rugged individualism, it had a strike-breaker as the hero and union men as the bad guys – an indication that the Counterculture of the 1960s had a very different political DNA to the New Left. The new left and the counterculture

New left =

Ideology (implicit):
Class critique
Critique of technology
Critique of capitalism
Critique of industrial, military, state complex

Action:
Non-violent protest
Civil disobedience

Policy:
Anti- Viet Nam war
Pro civil rights
Extend social democracy

Counterculture =

Ideology (reflexive):
Libertarian
Individualism
Suspicion of state structures
Positive toward technological change

Action:
Affirm pleasure
Affirm personal experience
Refuse to legitimate authority
Set up autonomous systems

Ethos (implicit):
Self-sufficient
Pragmatic