Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Map
- Introduction: The Culture and Politics of Space
- 1 The Culture Wars and the Sixties
- 2 Go West!
- 3 Free Space, Free Speech
- 4 SDS Goes West
- 5 Genesis of a Counterculture
- 6 The Contradictions of Cultural Radicalism
- 7 Liberated Territory
- 8 Revolutionary Dreams, Provincial Politics
- 9 Soulful Socialism and Felicitous Space
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - Soulful Socialism and Felicitous Space
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Map
- Introduction: The Culture and Politics of Space
- 1 The Culture Wars and the Sixties
- 2 Go West!
- 3 Free Space, Free Speech
- 4 SDS Goes West
- 5 Genesis of a Counterculture
- 6 The Contradictions of Cultural Radicalism
- 7 Liberated Territory
- 8 Revolutionary Dreams, Provincial Politics
- 9 Soulful Socialism and Felicitous Space
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
By the late 1960s, countercultural ideas greatly influenced sections of the New Left, as the Berkeley Liberation Program testifies. ‘Free territories’, ‘liberated zones’ were conceived of as political and cultural entities but, increasingly, it was the cultural dimension which gave them form and substance. Cultural radicalism had fed into political dissent from early in the decade but, in the first instance, hippies and political radicals mostly kept a safe distance from each other except when brought together at the rock dances. Towards the end of 1966, this was beginning to change in the Bay Area. And despite the rapid decline of Haight-Ashbury in the following years, the experiment with ‘youth ghettos’, free spaces or counter-spaces defined culturally as well as geographically, lived on in the minds of some radicals. The Berkeley south campus community, in particular, was seen to embody the values of a new society, to point in the direction of profound social transformation. New ways of living, influenced more and more by counter-cultural perspectives, supposedly prefigured the good society. No one reflected this type of thinking more than Tom Hayden. One of the Movement's leading figures, he was swept along by Berkeley radicalism in 1969 and 1970. He quickly succumbed to provincialist revolutionary mythology and projected half-baked goals of liberation which were fashioned out of hippie experience as much as New Left ideals. Sixties radicalism was running out of steam and so were many of its prominent theorists and activists.
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- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014