This picture from 1973 is pure ego, but it kinda symbolizes one of the major problems of the 1960’s counterculture that has most recently surfaced in the comments on Monday’s post Flip To Reality. The shameful truth is that, somewhere around 1975, we freaks made the classic revolutionary misstep and allowed not only the means of production, but even those of distribution, to slip back into the hands of totalitarian corporate management. And that is the root cause, as Roldo notes, “for outlaw/Underground artists finding so few gigs.”
If, as he says “economic crucifixion does seem the current method-of-choice” it has a lengthy and decidedly sorry history. Between approximately 1966 and 1975, give or take, the counterculture did it’s damnedest to run it’s own mom and pop store, walking a hard-to-follow line between cooption, prosecution, and hip capitalism. We printed our own propaganda, we dyed our own ties, we smuggled our own dope, and where the squares gathered, we sold retail. Jobs for hippies were generated so they didn’t need to join the Manson Family.
By the mid-seventies, however, a serious combination of weariness and greed had set in. I was as much to blame as anyone. On the music side of things, The Deviants had packaged and distributed the first album PTOOFF! ourselves, but later we’d look for a deal with a major label because it made life easier. IT, Nasty Tales and the other print publications with which I’d was involved had been independently organized from paste-up to newsstand. After years, however, of police raids, poverty, and preparing for one bullshit trial after another, the idea of writing for a corporate music tabloid like the NME seemed damned attractive. Of course, NME was owned by the IPC mediaglomerate, but I rationalized that there weren’t too many content clashes with management, and punk was on the horizon, and I getting to promote the shit out of the Ramones, the Pistols, and The Clash, and also make records of my own. How bad could it be? But something very crucial was in the process of being lost. What remained of the counterculture was hard wired to global total media – Every Boredom Entertained – and only survived if handled accordingly. South Park. The revolution will be animated.
Thus when Matt and others commented on the need for a broad, ground-up revision of our ideas, it felt like a return to ideas long lost. A whole lot of mom & pop micro-economies functioning on a local level. “We can choose to be active Americans in our local communities who build our direct economies rather than join the entrenched top-down Republican-Democrat-Corporate collusion (no matter who their symbolic savior/figurehead is at any given moment).” This may actually be the path out of totalitarian capitalism.
The secret word is Comintern
Nigel Cross provided the pic.
