Hippies, Situationists, and Ravers: What's Next?

Can Fun Be An Effective Means Of Resistance & Recruitment?
What can we do to
csub.edu/~mault/subcultures.pdf
(worth a read, it's short)

Other urls found in this thread:

vimeo.com/29589320
youtube.com/watch?v=ZovX27v41rM
youtube.com/watch?v=k4mrkP3xgdc
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao-Spontex
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

nah, they're shit

Okay

Hippies were good and necessary to get rid of the kind of almost-universal rigid conformity and moralism of the 50s
It's something that muslim societies need right now, because they're stuck in similar small-town religious mentalities (almost more 30s-like)
Also the South Park "I hate conservatives but I REALLY fucking hate hippies/liberals" mindset is cancer, there's nothing wrong with hippies, leave them alone

I think that's partly why Holla Forums got so big at all. It's fun to shitpost, and to delude yourself into thinking that you're some underground hacker part of an elite club; although their's is necessarily exclusive, whereas the hippies and beatniks weren't.

The lack of fun on the left is pretty often noted too. How many times have you heard that the left can't take a joke anymore?

Bump

The left needs to go back to embracing drugs tbh.

I bet none of them read Das Kapital.

Absolutely. Holla Forumsacks nearly all the time were never allowed to participate in the fun they claim to despise. No one invited them to parties, they never had friends to take DMT with, no one was willing to try weird sexual stuff them. Not saying this to ridicule them, but there is very much a bit of sour grapes going on here. If a political movement gave them an opportunity to do all that fun without judgement, I think they'd at least consider.

I had an in depth talk with this kekistani guy on irc. He told me that he opposes sexual freedom because this supposed freedom for him is the freedom to choose a sex doll or his hand. Got me thinking

Unironically, supporting sex and drugs is what would even attract /r9k/. It's a successful recruitment tool.

Holla Forums and the alt right are a popular precisely because they allow young males express their identity crises and anger at society. Holla Forums's lack of theoretical sophistication is an asset, fascism is all about gut feelings. theory gets in the way of gut feelings. On one side you have your identity, on the other, the enemy that wants to destroy you. the majority of the left has been mired in guilt loathing and self righteous snark, it is ultimately powerless, mostly attracts joyless smug shitheads, ie. 'woke' white male allies who seem to get a near sexual pleasure from lecturing their 'fellow white people'.

under late capitalism, identity crisis becomes universal. The hyperaccelerated panopticon world of social media-a world in which everyone watches everybody else and everyone knows they are being watched- liquidates identity, reducing it to hashtags and ingroup shibbolets. the way people perceive themselves and the world has shifted radically in the last 10 years. Everyone is now profoundly and irrevocably involved with everybody else. You just want the voices in your head to shut up. It becomes impossible to maintain the pretense of individualism. The subject of late capitalism is a hollow shell that lashes out at any perceived threats to its identity.

nostalgia can be a successful recruitment tool for the left as well, Walter Benjamin wrote quite a bit about this. notice how the alt right uses vaporwave and 80s kitsch in their propaganda material. we all feel a sense of loss or perhaps betrayal linked with the past and with our childhoods. the unfulfilled promises of the past pile on. the world of late capitalism feels empty and hollowed out. Superhero movies, porn, and 'woke' award shows all evoke the same shapeless sense of dread. everything is simultaneously de politicised and hyper politicised. where did things go so wrong?

That's not success that's just them being at least 5 years behind the curve of people making actual music and not knowing the warm love that is seapunk

Quality post user

The left never did embrace drugs.

They did, for a while. In America.

Luring people in with the promise of sex, love, and drugs, and music, is honestly going to win us a fuck ton of support in an age of complete alienation.

It's why it's looked down upon and mocked the most by the media as the typical leftist, but it's actually one of the most powerful ways of uniting the alienated.

Just say sex and people will side with you. Embrace what the right criticizes the left for, whatever fornication and scary spooky leftist debauchery there is.

They fear it because it is indeed, popular.

take inspiration from the juggalos

vimeo.com/29589320

Well yeah, but they were liberals, not leftists.

There's nothing stopping us from luring the desperate into theory by what made hippies popular. In fact most hippies were well read in theory.

That's why the US Government fucking hated them, they didn't squash communist sympathies or support for the Vietnam War.

We need to bring sex, drugs, and rock n roll back into leftism. Because no matter what a Holla Forumsyp says, it makes a crowd. And a crowd can be turned.

the 60s weren't all they are cracked up to be. the better world that seemed so close at hand failed to materialise. the euphoria of rock'n'roll, lsd and may 68 gave way to the disappointment of the 70s. change is a hell of a drug. many people became addicts or ended up in cults. The sexual revolution wasn't necessarily good for women, either, that's were radfems come from. In a way we are still living through the fallout of the 60s. The views of Wilhelm Reich and the hippie free love advocates seem downright naive by modern standards. sex is not inherently liberating, but just another biological function, as exploitable as hunger or thirst. capitalism will leave nothing untouched. The way we understand sexuality has changed a lot since the 60s. they didn't have internet porn for one, this may sound trivial, but think about formative sexual experiences and their impact on later development.

btw Chris Marker's a grin without a cat is a great documentary on the left of the 1960s. everyone should watch it.

Ravers and Hippies sat around and did sex and drugs.
Situationists sat around and did sex and drugs, and theoretical work as well as took part in elaborate and intentional subversive propaganda (and walked aimlessly in the city).
Tfw no situationist friends.

hippies were a waste of revolutionary potential that developed self-destructive patterns and stupid tinfoil cults. they were cointelpro dustbin

I want to go to free parties with my /lefty/friends

That much I agree with, the far left should be more libertine. We inherited an extremely puritanical stance from Bolsheviks. The real problem would be stopping the movement from decaying into hedonism, lifestylism etc. That would no doubt be one of Porky's strategies of attack.

I don't think I've seen a single far leftist advocate for decriminalization of all drugs except maybe Zizek.

That's because, altho their social positions were metaphorically revolutionary, their methods weren't literally so, in no small part because America was neither ripe for revolution nor allowed for so much as an adventurist insurrection. I do agree with you on everything.

going to give my drugs a hug, brb

no, we danced and did drugs

chairman Mao's status an antiauthoritarian counterculture youth icon among western students was definitely one of the weirdest parts of the 60s. Nobody really knew what was going on in China, the whole country was a no go zone and the cultural revolution did seem like a spontaneous libertarian anti party uprising from the outside, and it part it was one, but for Mao it was just an astroturf bureaucratic powergrab that got out of control.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZovX27v41rM

youtube.com/watch?v=k4mrkP3xgdc

Really weird times
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao-Spontex

How can we turn Holla Forums into a successful subculture?

It already is successful, just not well known.
The best possible thing we can do is read, discuss, organize, support. Otherwise we'll get watered down into succdems. If we want a more cohesive community, having more get-together documentary/film streams would help, certainly helped 4/co/ back in the day, where it felt like everybody knew each other despite being user.

Speakin of situationist fun, when is lefty tv gonna stream Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
One of the funniest leftist films out there, if you ask me.

This. The Left needs to learn how to have fun again. As of now it's mostly composed of angry, moralistic scolds. The major appeal of idpol to most people is a 2 second feeling of power as you publicly humiliate someone while looking like you're a good person. Although, to be fair, it might just be a generational think, because the alt-right seems just as joyless and self-serious as any SJW I've ever seen.

Killing bourgeois faggots is the most fun of all, still people won't join. Fun as a vague term is a shit motivator.

I think of the reasons Occupy ever got so big in the first place, ineffective and hijacked as it was, was because standing up as a group and interrupting the system is precisely fun.

As for idpol and id/pol/, they just get off on the power trips and groupthink; they sell each other out the moment they can.

Situationists were council communists.

Absolutely.

Actually, the allowance and freedom of fun is a completely serious issue for me. Like, here it's expensive/shitty to go out and dance… and we're not a top-tier town. In top tier towns you can dance at vastly better/bigger clubs for free almost any night, and here they add covers as attendance goes down and cause it to go down even further.

My town at least half way hates fun. The people who put up apartments in particular. They put 'em up right on top of the red light district and try to force out more red lighters to push the values up. People will come and move in and probably feel super cool for living in what was the 'edgy' part of town before their building came up.

Some people just don't really understand fun, too. You know, you might do lotsa weed, but you're super neurotic and really worried about going on years-abandoned open property that's dilapidated and unmonitored because what if somebody catches you.

What I'd do is I'd put a place here and run it 24/7. Dancing all the time. To join, you just accept a volunteer position there and do the work associated with it while you're there. Not going to close for some cunts can satisfy their desire for a false sense of security.

We're merely in the embryonic stage.
Our true birth and growth hinges on whether we'll be able to become autonomous of Holla Forums or not.

I say it's about time.

provide people with a sense of belonging

We still need more theory/read-along/study threads before we can do that. Jumping the gun will be disastrous.

bump

Raving is definitely not a good recruitment tool. It's full of really shit rich kids who are retarded and don't give a shit about politics except "ayy weed lmao."

It's a huge community so there's obviously a diverse group of people in there. But there's a whole lot of the above.

There was an article about the original rave scene a couple months back that I'll post if I find it. The actual history of Raving was a way for kids, of really all classes before it became bougie as shit, to get together and subvert societal constraints.

Yeah, judging what I see at pictures from EDC it's nothing like that now, especially in the states.

tldr
subcultures get commodified as soon they are identified as such

Electronic music festivals are not raves. Try illegal parties instead.

Agreed. There will probably never be a new *proper* youth culture again because capitalism has supplanted all that is thinkable with it's dull pragmatism. culture is predictable and pre-packaged when there's no alternative to point to. Anyone interested in that idea should read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. It's short and pretty accessible .

look to the juggalos

This is stupid fucking shit OP. Bourgeois decadence.

“Oh yeah, you know how to really stick it to the capitalists? Dancing and shit.”

Good luck with your lifestylist spectacle, hope you’re able to put a dent in the vast network of capitalist domination backed up by state violence. While you’re at it, why don’t you join up with the C.I.A. orchestrated, chemical warfare-distributing “hippies” and their “revolution happens by getting really high and thinking about the universe” shit.

1. Dancing is stupid, nobody have any fun! It's not helpful!
2. ????
3. Revolution

The idea is about how fun and positing alternative lifestyles and social networks has proven effective for recruitment and sustainability. for a movement. Look at the what the Jazz and Folk scenes did for the civil rights movement and what Jazz and funk did for the Black Panthers; cultural aspects, including Fun, are damn important to any movement.

Fucking obviously I don't think that's enough by itself. And fuck off, you clearly don't know anything about the original hippie movement before it got co-opted by the hit parade.

yes fun is necessary but not in the form of subcultures. instead of calling it fun i will go for the idea of liberated play (from the situationists)

We need to have more fun. Most people nowadays need some form of entertainment to be apart of something. How do you think Holla Forums got so big? They have memes and the like; so people went with it. Because the memes were (not really) funny, and they helped alive feelings of alienation under capitalism.

Yeah that's going to work but, if you ignore everything else you're not going to get much more subversion

We should stream and dawn of the dead.
Shit would be fun.

think of it like this: did junkie "leftists" (AKA red liberals) achieve anything?

We need more film/documentary threads in general. Good film analysis is always fun and insightful imo

I'll take the initiative if someone could tell me what streaming site to use.
I've never done it before.

There's already a leftytv stream, although I forget the link. We should make a thread tonight

Yes.

Alright, so who has the link then?

Unless you want to start your own new stream. I made a new /lefty/ film list here if you'd like to stream any on your own:
IIRC the leftystream is one of those Youtube-chat ones, so a lot of the movies (save for some, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", Society of the Spectacle'', and some others are on Youtube) can't be done.