Comradeship // Freechat

Radical leftism without class analysis gives you hippies

So the problem with thinking about "hippies" is that we've kinda been handed a shitload of people with otherwise nothing in common except a penchant for psychedelic drugs and a few hairstyles. There are probably more ways to do this, but I'm going to separate "Hippies" into 3 categories:

Youth Movement: The boomers understood that they were a generation bigger than any other and that they could affect some real tangible change in the world if they put their minds to it. They got burned out or otherwise found their place in flatland around 1972. Ideologically they had some sound footing, and even got some big wins (lowering the voting age to 18, abolishing the draft, title IX) but they grew up and the new kids just didn't feel the same way.

New Communalists: An even bigger mixed bag. The New Communalists were eager to explore new ways of building communities and living together. Noble enough intentions, and it even led to some really cool stuff like the way we're interacting over the internet right now. However, one of the new ways of building community they got really into was psychedelic drugs, and this is how we get into all the horrible things that people did in the name of "free love."

And then there were The Freaks: They were libertarians before libertarianism had a foothold in American conservatism. They were in it for the sex, the drugs, and the music. They also often got confused for Youth Movement types because they were hairy, they were smelly, they smoked pot, and they were broadly critical of the US Government.

"Hippies" is term that really only helped the Nixon administration crack down on their political opponents with draconian anti-drug laws.

Edit: Come to think of it, there were probably a fair bunch of radical leftists among the Freaks, but again, who was actually listening to their politics? Besides, radical leftists and libertarians used to be able to find common ground in their exclusion from, and subsequent disillusionment with, American politics.

The hippie movement at its core is escapist. Hippies recognize that capitalism is evil, but they choose to not really do anything about it and instead simply avoid it and live a hedonistic lifestyle.

It should be recognized that some hippies did good things (protests, organizing).

But most of them ended up forming the core of what the Americans now call "progressive liberal", becoming just another support mechanism for capitalism.

Theoryless ultras, they did some good, but also thought they could fight the world‘s problems with a CIA supplied drug (LSD).

Failed to commit, particularly to left politics, and we all paid for it.

Raised by Australian hippies, they were all just as hardworking as the next person, just they worked on growing crops and landcare.

As they grew older, a lot dropped their ideology and cashed in on the Boomer property boom, but I am not convinced anyone else could have said no to that.

They are people like any other, except they smoke more weed and treat nature with a bit more respect.

8/10 would childhood again.

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

as far as i know, brazil didn't have hippies. some white shamanic movements appeared after redemocratization, but they are mostly composed of petty bourgeois, they are mostly reactionary since it has no political content, just middle class common sense privatization good big bad state, just groups of people with money to spending on drugs and beach parties.

like a caricature of usian hippies.

i didn't read much about usian hippies, only that they did great songs.

Not sure how hippies live in other countries, but the hippies here usually don't have a house, have nomadic lifestyles and usually sell their arts and crafts. The fact that they live vulnerable lives could place them as lumpenproletariat, though the fact that they produce things to sell and sell it themselves, could place them as a petty-bourgeois. The hippie ideas you describe, "free love", "non-violence" is perfectly in line with a petty-bourgeois mentality too.

Are you me? Lol

Also wanted to add in one more thing: Child Poverty was quite the issue in Height-Ashbury (the epicenter of the Hippie movement) because so many teens and adolescents wanted to run away from their strict, born-in-the-20s/30s parents and do drugs and fuck, obviously that didn’t work well often times, the world is a scary place no matter where you are, and people get taken advantage of, especially when the thing binding your “group” together is sex and drugs. I saw the Woodstock documentary and it was something else seeing so many parents with signs apologizing to their children and asking them to come back. Heartbreaking stuff

"Back in the 60's, we saved the planet! I drove a Prius and had sex with an underage girl while high on acid. I fought the empire, I had long hair and went to Woodstock."

The cool hippies were murdered, the only ones that survived were harmless libs or people going through a rebellious phase. Most of them try to make a political statement out of the normal teenage urge to fuck, play music, and do drugs. If these values were adopted by a right-wing group, a not insignificant portion of hippies would be putting minorities into camps instead of hugging trees.

I was born in 2006 so I don't know much about them

hippies are an annoying side effect of the american "new left" of the 60s. a revival of leftism, sure, but not one that was too effective or theory-based at all. the entire thing was kinda centered around the vietnam war, which was a fantastic mobilizer for the years that it was happening, but once the united states was defeated in vietnam and pulled out and the war ended, all the hippies stopped caring and settled down while they gave birth to one of the most wretched groups, the yuppies. the hippies were basically like the first iteration of the "calls themself a leftist but still buys some CIA propaganda" type you see all too often nowadays. america was bad, sure, but the soviet union was JUST as bad. lets just have world peace and everyone in harmony, man. there were of course active radical marxist-leninists, and not to mention the incredible black panther party, but i think they were kinda overshadowed in general by the "new left" hippies who were so high on CIA LSD that they didn't really do much in the country aside from protest the war that was already on its way out thanks to the brave soldiers of the NVA.

nowadays, you can find hippies living in million-dollar homes in cities that were once cool and radical and are now just havens for the rich (think san francisco), living out all the ideals that they "rebelled against" in the 60s and posting 5G covid conspiracy theories online.

Idk, born in 2006 and goth, I don't know about other subcultures that much.

Putting them in their historical context might help. The 60s were a time of social upheaval in the US, with the BPP (and its sibling the White Panther Party), anti-war movement, AIM, Young Lords and a lot of trade unions and other groups all stacked on one side against the KKK, CIA, COINTELPRO, HCUA, Indian Termination and both parties, as well as the general climate of a possible world ending war anytime now, including the Turkish Missile Crisis. There were also coups happening all over the US international holdings as part of the red scare, though I'm not sure if Yankees ever heard about those.

This also manifested in the music of the time, with disco, rap, hip-hop and jazz flourishing, as well as some genres that didn't survive as well like punk, folk and psychedelic rock. The time of both Dead Kennedy's and Yoko Ono's participation in The Beatles.

It was also the time of what's called the "sexual revolution," caused partly by the sudden increase in the access to contraception such as latex condoms and birth control pills, in which both men and women (but specially women) could now date and have sexual relationships outside of marriage with less of the biological constraint of pregnancy, while pushing back at the US's weird social views on sexuality.

So putting those into that historical perspective, I see the "Hippies" as a particularly white, "libertarian" and idealist "movement," surrounded by much stronger and more motivated forces. There were lots of people that might be called that who actually stood up for something, for example the riot at the 1968 DNC, but as usual the ones we get to hear the most about in the media are the overly arrogant pacifist drug addicts. There are better lines one can draw the other user pointed out about the Yippies, but I'm just reinforcing how very important it is to demystify this very turbulent and fascinating period of Yankee history.

Often the propaganda is so deeply rooted that you might as well just throw out your entire understanding of history and start over. And in the case of the "Hippies," they serve as the "pathetic and degenerate" side of the eternal fascist equations of "all-powerful and destructive but also pathetic and degenerate," while the non-white groups served as the other side. Meanwhile both got regularly infiltrated by informants and wreckers, making sure to single out and eliminate all effective leaders that got a hold, like Seale, Hampton, Peltier, and to a lesser extent Hayden.

There was also a lot of overlap and (dare I say it) contraditcion between all of those aforementioned groups. Some "Hippies" destroyed military research facilities with arson and explosives (Sterling Hall), BPP members generally were also part of the broader anti-war movement, AIM is often forgotten despite being the most dedicated fighters in all of these causes. I'm no US specialist, so if you are a Statesian, I'd really recommend you doing your own deeper research on those times as I think they're possibly the closest the US got to an actual revolution.