The last fifty years has witnessed a tragic and paradoxical cultural shift: from the Old — the emergence of a powerful movement encompassing the vastness of cultural, political and social innovation — to the New — a digression to the very base of a conservative conformity the old attempted to destroy.
What we perceive today as Culture, and the way we respond to this as individuals, has changed dramatically since the 1960s. What was once an emerging Culture - a powerful collective response to archaic and oppressive institutions - has today become a series of bathetic products void of meaning, which represent nothing but the expression of capitalism’s drive for profit.
Ultimately there is perhaps a plethora of reasons for this deterioration of modern culture, but the one that resonates most tragically with me is the departure of radicalism from the youth scene. At the beginning of the 60s young people, and more importantly students, made up the catalyst of social, cultural, and political innovation, and they did so, emerging as the new generation; bursting out of the 1950s and its post-war apocalyptic nightmare. The youth of the sixties, sick and tired of the patriarchal, preconceived morality espoused by their parents, realised instead that they truly did have a world to win - youth, students, kids, broke out of their Christian ways, and began forging a vision of a new world; often with violence, but usually with music, art, drugs and love. The Vietnam war gave young people the basis for opposition to the ‘establishment’, and from it an egression of movements which challenged every core value and cultural appreciation in western society: the way we listened to music, wrote books, had sex, and organised our time.
The most prominent moments of this cultural radicalism came at events like Woodstock, which exemplified the collective belief that culture represented something new. The hippie scene in San Francisco and the creation of thousands of communes (an expression of all these different political and philosophical ideas) were a convergence between youth and radicalism.
For me, as an anarchist, the most profound example of the culmination of this radicalism were the 1968 Paris riots, in which students at the Sorbonne, angered at the closure of the Nanterre University convened to organise a series of strikes. This small action of solidarity between students quickly became a national event of ten million striking workers; battles in the streets, between the police and the students, typified the defiance of youth globally.
Since that moment, the emergence of a society of the spectacle, observed by Debord, has become our perceived reality; a world of objects taking form as the definitive concept governing our world. The experimental innovations of the 60s have failed, and consequently culture now refuses to create anything new, pushing to the peripheries any sense of radical expression. Cultural industries no longer feel it beneficial to endorse anything that appears too extreme, relying on a formula that embraces triteness as a cultural remedy. Culture was radical when youth was radical; now, in the age of the Playstation, culture represents nothing more than our desires to be momentarily entertained.
Of course it’s not all doom and gloom. Student and radical art movements do still exist, and youth will always be ultimately revolutionary. The problem, I think, is our disillusionment in what defines us, and what better defines us than the culture to which we connect ourselves? Youth needs to understand it has the ability to innovate again; to challenge the world by wresting control from the trite peddlers of everything we love about our lives: music, literature, film, art and time. ‘Let us create!’ should be our motto.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw an explosion of radical hope burst into the very core of a generation, and it is wholly conceivable that this will, at some point happen again. In any case, and until that time we can all agree that the 1960s and 1970s were a special moment; an ultimate spectacle that, regardless of its failures, gave us an understanding and perhaps even a confidence, hidden as it may seem, to really understand our radical position in a society and history intent on destroying the very essence of our creativity.