Late in the year 2000 I attended some Green Party meetings in Milwaukee, at a time when there was quite a bit of momentum remaining from Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. I was struck by the number of young people in attendance, students from UWM, the MATC technical college, and some city high schools. These young people seemed to have a very progressive worldview concerning the issues of globalization, an attitude of anti-consumerism, a consciousness about avoiding sweatshop-produced products and engaging in fair trade.
It occurred to me that this new youth movement was in some way a sort of echo of an earlier one from the late 1960s–the counterculture, the hippies, the back-to-land movement, various labels that were applied to the youth subculture that resulted when millions of Baby Boomers came of age at the same time and began to exert their influence on the USA.
But the counterculture was only one among many rivers of social change that were converging at around the same time. There was also the emerging peace movement attempting to put an end to the US involvement in Vietnam. And there was a civil rights movement raging, which had begun by 1965 to take an increasingly insurrectionary, violent, unpredictable course which threatened the whole social order which those in power had established. As these three rivers of social change ran together, you had what is somewhat amorphously seen as “the 60s.” An additionl stream of social change was the impact of rising national liberation and revolutionary movements in the “third world” — movements against neocolonialism, the new form of colonialism in which countries were still fully under control by US and European powers, yet had nominally independent governments. These movements would play a larger part in the 1970s.
The US by the late 1960s was at the pinnacle of its days as a producer nation. There was full-scale industrial production to fuel the war on Vietnam. US oil production was nearing its all-time peak, reached in 1970. Food production was hitting new highs as the policy of the post-Henry Wallace US Department of Agriculture played out: farmers should “get big, or get out” as Earl Butz later summarized as US policy toward farmers.
(You could probably argue that globalization began with trade in food, going all the way back to the British empire moving tea, coffee, sugar and other food commodities all around the globe, quite profitably to the British corporations. Oh, and as Jim in the UK points out, also opium. Lots of opium run by the British drug cartel.
(The US corporate sector was quick to realize that secure access to certain foods would be an important part of its emerging consumer society. Even as US domestic staple food and fiber production kept ramping up, decade after decade, there were commodities such as fruits and vegetables, sugar, coffee, cocoa and so on that could be locked-up for US consumption. Thus, the USA intervened early and often in affairs in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. US meddling in Nicaragua began in the early 1850s, and the adventures of William Walker in that country assured an enduring US footprint in Nicaragua that continues to this day, even under the leftist Ortega presidency. Part III deals with cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmers downpressed.)
Yet this pinnacle of US power as a producer left the younger generation cold. And it left the black and Latino workers out in the cold, not to participate in the best-paying segment of labor. This situation set the stage for the separate, but rarely intersecting, paths of the youth counter-culture and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. They began to intersect during the years of peace protests aimed at ending the Vietnam war, however.
Youth counter-culture took on an anti-consumerist, simple-life living, back-to-land worldview as tens of thousands of mostly white Baby Boom youth attempted to cut the cord binding them to “straight life” (before that took on a different meaning). They attempted to “drop out” as the term was used. It was a time of great experimentation with forms of social organization, as co-operatives, community farms, Ashrams, “communes” and a range of other, usually loose, organizations tried to take root out in the country. There was also a large urban component to this social experimentation, as a survey of the Minneapolis-St. Paul co-operatives scene would have revealed circa 1970.
Many of these social experiments were aimed at reconnecting with the land, in order to provide a livelihood for the young folks moving out to these small towns and rural townships. However, youth would soon find out that the powers that managed the ever-expanding global economy did not really want a lot of young people reconnecting with the land and becoming producers with some degree of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
To impose a consumer society, it was necessary for big capital–whether industrial capital, retail and distribution capital, or finance capital at its highest level–to continue breaking the connection of independent producers with their means of production–be it land, or small artisan shops, or artisan food processing, or anything else that would threaten the oligopoly that now reached into every aspect of modern life.
Nowhere was this assault on autonomy and self-sufficiency felt more harshly than in the black and Latino working-class communities. Black small farmers and sharecroppers in the south never enjoyed what you’d call prosperity. Always living on the edge with the threat of violence and a kind of down-home fascist repression in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, black workers and farmers in the south needed relief from oppression. And the coming of World War II in a way provided this relief.
What came to be known as the “Second Great Migration” of African-Americans northward into the industrial cities where war production was gearing up, took place between ca. 1940 and ca. 1970. Black workers had two paths to choose as the War began: enlist in the armed forces, or go to work in a factory doing industrial production for the War. Both of these paths contributed to the civil rights movement that began after the war’s end.
In the factories of the north, and the industrial cities where they were located, blacks had to contend with the need for at least minimal worker unity, whether it took the form of joining a union or not crossing picket lines during a strike, or in rare cases, rising to some position of leadership and authority in a union. This was a world apart from living in fear of an unprovoked racist attack in a small town in the deep south.
Nelson Peery described the process he and tens of thousands of other blacks inducted into the military underwent during World War II as “the journey of the African-American soldier from second-class citizen to first-class soldier.” Upon returning to one’s hometown after this transformation, not many young blacks wished to return to “second-class citizenship.” You can view Peery’s account of the role of the black veteran in the emergence of the civil rights movement on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S33j7YdrCOc&feature=related
This perspective shows the role of the rank-and-file worker, soldier, or citizen in social change. As with all movements, attention is often absorbed by a few prominent people and the story of the movement is written into history as the achievements of these individuals, rather than the grass roots movement that they rode into the history books upon.
Similarly, the history of the counter-culture is often absorbed by a few pages on the likes of Timothy Leary, or Steven Gaskin and “The Farm” or perhaps Ken Kesey or even an Abbie Hoffman. The lives of the millions of others involved in these social movements are of no consequence as the story is later told. This approach to history accommodates the needs of a consumerist society, where the average person is just a sort of spectator to the latest social trend or American Idol craze, and perhaps harbors secret aspirations to get up on that stage and show what they can do, and pray for a launch into stardom. Since one’s life as a producer of average, everyday stuff of life is so devalued, this escape route to consumerist stardom beckons to millions.
For the black and Latino worker, the life of the counter-culture held little appeal. One black worker on a factory floor once told me over a couple of sandwiches, sitting next to a milling machine, “why would brothers want to drop out into that hippie lifestyle of voluntary poverty, when we haven’t even had the chance to experience what that other life is like?”
Likewise, for the Chicano farmworker out in the California Central Valley, life in the “country” was not so appealing, as it usually meant back-breaking, unsafe work, poisoning by ag chemicals, lousy wages, no job security, and if you were here illegally, the likelihood of being rounded up by La Migra and shipped back over the border.
There were chances for idealistic young whites from middle-class backgrounds to provide support and solidarity work to the civil rights movements: help with the farm products boycotts launched by the United Farmworkers in the 1970s (again, “Cesar Chavez’s movement”), or traveling to the south to assist with civil rights work, voter registration, and other avenues of support. Sometimes, people went back and forth between roles: activist to counter-culture farmer, or vice-versa.
Certain points in time were pivotal. I would argue that spring, 1970 was one of these for many people involved in these parallel paths of social change. There were the killings of students at Kent State; there was increasing participation of blacks, Latinos, and American Indians in the anti-war protests that were growing increasingly large and vocal. One peace march I attended in St. Paul in spring, 1970 included a Black Panthers member, Dennis Banks from American Indian Movement, student leaders, senior citizen leaders, feminists and a host of others. There was the first Earth Day, which attempted to provide a nationwide stage for the emerging environmental movement to challenge the entire consumerist basis of what America was becoming. There was a nationwide student strike that spring, when students attempted to shut down their campuses in order to have a massive nationwide “teach-in” about ending the war, about social justice, about a lot of things gone wrong.
As the 1970s unfolded, what many people didn’t realize was that the ground underneath their feet was shifting and the foundations were being undermined. The great “guns and butter” economy of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” where war could mix with consumer abundance, poverty could be fought like another war, and justice for all at last achieved, all was about to begin to deteriorate.
Next Part III: cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmers down.
Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, United Electrical Workers, self-published, 1955.
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Prager, 1975.
Steven Gaskin, Monday Night Class, revised ed., Book Publishing Company of TN.
Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 2nd edition, South End Press, 1998.
Nelson Peery, Black Radical. New Press, 2007.
Nelson Peery, Black Fire. New Press, 1995.