Rich Finks

July 10, 2011 8:53 PM

Mark Ames delves into the FBI documentation on surveillance of the Yippies and dredges up the anti-capitalist core of 60's radicalism.
posted by clarknova (28 comments total)

Related conversation over on the anarchism subreddit.
posted by elektrotechnicus at 8:59 PM on July 10, 2011

The 60′s radicals were nothing at all like the version we get today, which portrays the hippies and revolutionaries as a bunch of spaced-out New Age nudists who just want to be left alone to screw, get high and dance without being bothered by “The Man.”

That’s the current retarded/sanitized “Burning Man” revision of 1960′s radicalism.

Quoted for truth.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:15 PM on July 10, 2011 [5 favorites]

See also: retarded/sanitized versions of The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, The Great Depression . . .
posted by jason's_planet at 9:29 PM on July 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

In my more paranoid moments I just assume the gutting of public education is another policy to re shape history and keep a populace uninformed and disconnected from their history.
posted by The Whelk at 9:39 PM on July 10, 2011 [9 favorites]

Ah, it's just like reading Pynchon's Vineland all over again.
posted by ztdavis at 9:42 PM on July 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

I just assume the gutting of public education is another policy to re shape history and keep a populace uninformed and disconnected from their history

That's crazy. Instead, they just come up with "frameworks" and "core curriculum standards" that guarantee the sanitized stupid version is taught and that there's no time left for any truth.
posted by Dr.Enormous at 9:49 PM on July 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Ames makes it clear that the libertarians were not considered a threat to the established order despite the fact that the A-word made its appearance in its literature now and then.

However, Ames seems to both portray the Yippies as juvenile clowns AND a serious threat to the capitalist system at the same time. I'm a little confused. Ames seems to generally believe that Rubin et al. had no ideological grounding in history at all. But, because they seemed to generally threaten capitalism, they were automatically considered as seriously dangerous as was someone like Emma Goldman. Is this what he is saying? But he doesn't believe it, does he?

Ames' conflating of the Panthers, like Mark Hampton, murdered in his sleep, with the drug-addled branch of the Sixties left makes no sense at all. He makes David Horowitz sound like a scholar.

OK, the Yippies were against what they thought was capitalism, and mixed it all up with sex and drugs and adolescent rebellion. Is he saying they were actually dangerous? I don't get the purpose of this FPP, aside from the airing of a few more muddled FOIA FBI documents.
posted by kozad at 9:51 PM on July 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm with kozad. This is possibly the worst article I've ever seen on Exile(d) and I've seen some real stinkers. All I can reckon is that the author thinks he's being infuriatingly clever and outrageously iconoclastic.

The subtext reads like he's trying to inspire outrage about this outrage and lead the reader to the conclusion of "wait, weren't the yippies actually kind of right? look at where the free market and unbridled capitalism have gotten us!", but that may well be my personal subtext.

But whether or not it's a troll or meta-troll, it's about as accurate as a hand grenade.

The bits about who was and wasn't infiltrated are interesting, but whatever pro-capitalist pseudo-libertarian framing in the article is annoying and it clouds the interesting parts.
posted by loquacious at 10:11 PM on July 10, 2011 [3 favorites]

"However, Ames seems to both portray the Yippies as juvenile clowns AND a serious threat to the capitalist system at the same time."

I think he's saying that the Yippies were ineffectual, but could have formed the nucleus of a stronger left-wing movement in later years, much as libertarians have provided the right-wing establishment with ideological inspiration through a multiplicity of institutes and think tanks. So one reason the political spectrum in America has moved to the right may be because so many of the people who might otherwise be leaders and inspirations for today's Left were busted by the FBI in the 70's and early 80's, and never recovered.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:48 PM on July 10, 2011 [6 favorites]

loquacious: "pro-capitalist pseudo-libertarian framing in the article"

did we even read the same article?

What’s so galling is that, in the libertarians’ revisionist history of themselves, they constantly describe themselves as “radicals”–as in “radicals for capitalism” or “anarcho-capitalists.” For three decades now, they’ve been pumping American history full of free-market mind-smog.
...
The real radicals were destroyed by the State: imprisoned, scattered, harassed, surveilled, ruined, even shot to death in their beds, like Fred Hampton. That becomes clear in those FBI files. Today, there’s no Left to speak of. Today, libertarianism is not only the only “choice” that the state allows us to make, but worse, libertarianism’s popularity is growing to record levels (thanks to the billionaire Koch brothers’ investment).

posted by idiopath at 10:53 PM on July 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

man that article was a complete mess. it reads like the author wrote it in chunks over the course of a couple of weeks, and every time he picked up where he left off he didn't go back and read what he had already written. sort of made sense, but pretty much didn't.
posted by facetious at 11:12 PM on July 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

did we even read the same article?

Yeah, and it's muddled. Sorry, the pro-capitalist pseudo-libertarian is too strong and I'll retract it, but there's some curious or simply fuzzy framing or opinion going on in the article.
posted by loquacious at 11:18 PM on July 10, 2011

I dunno, I thought the guiding opinion of the article was pretty clear:

This is just another reason why libertarianism is so goddamn offensive. They’ve even managed to turn “radical” into a harmless, meaningless, anti-radical brand—they’ve sucked out everything that was dangerous, and replaced it with its every opposite, the most shameless pro-capitalist, pro-bootlicking ideology imaginable. All they kept from the hippies was the very worst, most imbecilic, self-absorbed, childish nonsense that you can find in that Jerry Rubin manifesto: the whining about teachers, the whining about wanting to smoke pot and grow out his hair.

I don't think Ames' view of the Yippies is incoherent, just ambivalent--yes, they were juvenile clowns, but they were also a genuine anti-capitalist movement (even if their understanding of capitalism wasn't especially sophisticated). The anti-capitalism was what made them threatening, or at least what made the FBI treat them as a threat, but their major legacy is juvenile clownishness, precisely because the anti-anti-capitalist crackdown was so effective. As a result, when we think of 60's radicalism we don't think of anti-capitalism, we think of long hair and weed...which makes it easy for libertarians and other pro-capitalist bootlickers to project a "radical" image.

As I read it, the basic thrust of the article was: capitalism is so terrible that any anti-capitalism, even if it's masterminded by a yutz like Jerry Rubin, is better than no anti-capitalism at all. (I think this is also the point of the Black Panthers comparison: the Panthers were group of serious anti-capitalist revolutionaries who are now mostly remembered for their iconography--clenched fists, Afros, etc.)
posted by DaDaDaDave at 11:42 PM on July 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

Mark Ames has a bizarre hard-on for supposed conspiracies or unlikely combinations of seemingly disconnected historical events involving libertarian groups or individuals, and has at least since he worked so hard on that hatchet job against a guy that stood up in some small way to the TSA. He's more concerned with saying something, anything to keep the focus on his perceived enemies than saying something of substance.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:16 AM on July 11, 2011

I am constantly amazed at the level of hate and disdain there is for hippie culture by the gen-x'ers and millenials.
posted by crunchland at 4:44 AM on July 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think it's more disdain for baby-boomers in general, crunchland. As a Gen-Xer, I've seen their incredible self absorption and heard their claims of how they somehow changed the world. Looking at how jacked-up our world truly is, I often think that they should have either left it alone or done a much better job. Watching film of these people who supposedly changed the world getting stoned and fucking in the mud makes their claims a little hard to swallow. Especially since so many of them now embrace with a bear hug the the very capitalism that they supposedly stood against, and now require unlimited access to guns to protect their McMansions, BMWs, right to be a Tea party member and most especially their social security checks.

I know that's quite a bit of hyperbole, but who the fuck are these people?
posted by double block and bleed at 5:29 AM on July 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

However, Ames seems to both portray the Yippies as juvenile clowns AND a serious threat to the capitalist system at the same time. I'm a little confused. Ames seems to generally believe that Rubin et al. had no ideological grounding in history at all. But, because they seemed to generally threaten capitalism, they were automatically considered as seriously dangerous as was someone like Emma Goldman. Is this what he is saying? But he doesn't believe it, does he?

Comparison: someone like Rush Limbaugh claims to be just doing his schtick for the LOLs. He enjoys needling "the libs". Now, let's assume for the moment he is telling the truth when he says this: he's just a clown, reducing everything to absurdity and just having a laugh. He means to be harmless, just a class clown, poking people's assumptions. HOWEVER, the people who listen to him aren't necessarily in on the joke. They think he is being serious, and they start acting and voting on what they hear as the truth.

So where these people are just poking fun at the establishment and telling everyone to loosen up, their acolytes might take them far more seriously than they take themselves and stir up some trouble.
posted by gjc at 6:16 AM on July 11, 2011

As a Gen-Xer, I've seen their incredible self absorption and heard their claims of how they somehow changed the world.

This is all truly the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. It was a totally different world back then, and lots of young people tried to change the status quo. Were they naive? Absolutely. But they tried. The posers went on to do the same stupid shit everybody else did.

As for the Yippies being juvenile clowns - that was their schtick. Jerry Rubin (who, indeed, turned out to be an incredible putz) and Abbie Hoffman intentionally embraced an absurd theater approach.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's easy to shit on a party that happened more than 40 years ago because you have all the data of the ensuing decades. But there was so much more hope and belief back then that we could really change the world. Just because it didn't work doesn't mean it wasn't right.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 6:29 AM on July 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

I think it's more disdain for baby-boomers in general, crunchland. As a Gen-Xer ...

Sorry, but if you think the conflict between generations is anywhere near one of the most significant in our society, then ........ well shit, I don't know what to say other than I disagree.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:47 AM on July 11, 2011

some of the confusion comes from "libertarian" being used as a term the anarchists used to describe themselves starting in the 1930's and later being used to describe right-wing hyper-individualist antinomians. Same word, two totally different meanings at two different points in history. The rest of the article is full of the same literal-minded failure to realize that not everything committed to words is objective timeless truth.

Humor fail.
posted by warbaby at 6:55 AM on July 11, 2011

If you follow the stranger shades of lightly paranoid thought ( which if you're reading The Exiled, you do) you might now there is a real theory that the cultural landscape in the 80s was deliberately pushed to mock and revile any element of radicalism that reamined and present the whole thing as a doomed failure for losers.
posted by The Whelk at 6:56 AM on July 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I don't see much evidence in Ames' analysis to see an actual threat posed to "the ideology of capitalism" by the Yippies. Quite a lot of evidence for hilarious degrees of paranoia within the FBI, so, yeah, thanks for confirming what we already knew about Hoover's Bureau, I guess.

It may be because I am not myself anti-capitalist (for these values of it, anyway), but I didn't come away from the article with any sense that 60s and 70s era radicals really need much rehabilitation. They had some interesting ideas and quite a few remarkably stupid ideas, and idealism not particularly tempered by reasoned analysis of how to actually apply levers to change society. They wanted the world to be different, but they didn't want to go to the effort of actually fighting to change it, and as a mainly middle-class movement they could always fall back on living a fairly comfortable existence inside the society they decried. Which most of them did, in the end.

Generally speaking, the most effective fighters are always the ones for whom such a retreat is unacceptable - which is why so much more was achieved between 1919 and 1964 by the black civil rights and union groups - these were people who actually had something to lose by giving up the fight, not only would failure mean a return to the status quo, it would mean the status quo getting worse for them.

He does have a point about the way "radical" has been drained of all actual content in present political discourse, though.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:10 AM on July 11, 2011

So, what the fuck are we gonna do?
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 9:10 AM on July 11, 2011

They wanted the world to be different, but they didn't want to go to the effort of actually fighting to change it

It's worth noting that a bunch of '60s radicals, middle-class white kids and Yippies included, did go to the effort of fighting, literally, in an attempt to change the world.

Also, sneers at "middle-class" radicals should be tempered by the knowledge that the American proletariat in the 60's could be pretty lumpen.

Also also, any argument that implies that "Baby Boomers," "Gen-Xers" and "millennials" are monolithic groups that can be safely generalized about is a dumb argument.
posted by DaDaDaDave at 10:22 AM on July 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Only a small fraction of the Baby Boomers were hippies. A larger contingent supported the antiwar movement and the feminist movement. And then there were many many more Baby Boomers who would drive by in their cars yelling "Fucking Hippie!" at any long-haired pedestrian, or, more politely, join the Young Republicans for Freedom. There was a big cultural divide. The hippies did not generally grow up to own McMansions and become stock brokers, contrary to popular belief. It was the anti-hippie group who grew up to be Rush, George W, and all those other power brokers. The cultural divide remains, although the waters are more muddied now, the issues more complex and multitudinous. But it is not a conflict between generations, although younger generations will always tend to dislike the older generations (in Western cultures, anyway).
posted by kozad at 11:02 AM on July 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

I am constantly amazed at the level of hate and disdain there is for hippie culture by the gen-x'ers and millenials.
posted by crunchland at 12:44 PM on July 11

As a member of the punk generation, I am not.
posted by Decani at 12:02 PM on July 11, 2011

As a member of the punk generation, I am not.

Really? I thought you could take it or leave it each time.
posted by benito.strauss at 1:08 PM on July 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

This thread is a good chance to trot out "Chicago '68" an excellent look at the Yippies and the DNC in Chicago that year by David Farber.
posted by IvoShandor at 2:19 PM on July 11, 2011