The Sixties by Jenny Diski

Author:Jenny Diski [Diski, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312427214
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2009-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

There were other versions of changing the world. For readers of Marcuse, even such as Tariq Ali, for example:

. . . the long march did not mean “boring from within” but gaining experience of production, education, computers, mass media, the organisation of production, while simultaneously preserving one’s own political consciousness. The aim of the long march was to build counter-institutions.9

This was a serious preparation for a new order, but I think there were very few young people prepared to forgo the more demonstrative, emotionally satisfying forms of revolution, or engage seriously if covertly with the “straight” world in the way “boring from within” (in both senses) required. There were endless meetings, of course, if you had signed up to the VSC (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign), IMG (International Marxist Group), IS (International Socialists) or WRP (Workers’ Revolutionary Party); you could keep to agendas, take minutes, debate and make points of order, and feel you were part of the righteous few who were in possession of the true way. In this sense, too, I was not political. I continued to see and abhor what was wrong, but I wasn’t convinced by any of the true and mutually exclusive solutions on offer. Other people’s certainty always made me uncertain. I failed to join anything and merely continued my long-standing inclination for non-engagement. I told myself that smoking dope, dropping acid, shooting up Methedrine and reading about other ways of being was a form of resistance against the unsatisfactory world. I settled for outlaw-hood. Or escape, as others, more politically committed, would reasonably have said. It suited my temperament, and the interdisciplinary arguments and fractional infighting in the meetings I did attend—I made small efforts from time to time—seemed far too much like microcosmic versions of what went on in the real world that we all so much disliked. I had the airy idealism of M. Poupin, Henry James’s refugee from the Paris Commune in The Princess Casamassima:

He was a Republican of the old-fashioned sort . . . humanitary and idealistic, infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in the land of his exile . . . he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks and cover the globe with boulevards . . . where the human family would sit in groups at little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee . . . and listening to the music of the spheres.10

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