New Left, Local Control, and Fascism

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counterculture can today claim for itself the privilege of the decadent Romantics degenerated further into a cult
historical backwardness which the utopians in America of irrationality, unleashing its full fury in the barbarism
already in the 1820's and 1830's had the privilege of of the twentieth century. Today we can study the
claiming for themselves, cultural prototype of this phenomenon in the Rock cult.
However, there is a more sinister aspect to the However, before proceeding with this matter, it is
situation. There is currently facing us a different kind of necessary to take a scenic side tour without which the
austerity from the one self-imposed by the lunatics who phenomenon that we are discussing cannot be fully
are living out some wild historical fantasy. That is the understood. In order to understand why the cult of
austerity facing the working class as a result of the irrationality appears to be an appropriate response, we
current world monetary crisis. While Dylan whines must first understand what other ideology exists in our
about the pleasure of a log cabin, his soul-brother in the society that has completely discredited rationality. It is
ecology movement is begging for restricted consump- necessary to understand how the possibility of any
tion and curbing of technological growth as an answer certainty of human knowledge was discredited by the
to the ecology crisis which, if taken seriously, would currently hegemonic academic school of thought of
pollute and starve us all out of existence. Similarly, in scientific empiricism.
the recent spectacle of "Earth Week," people jubilantly
welcomed a return to a more archaic mode of The essential predicament facing man with regard to
transportation as they "walked for health" rather than knowledge about the world is that different "facts"
demanding the immediate construction of cheap mass regarded in and of themselves appear to be contratransportation
to supplant automobiles and to be paid dictory when compared with each other. To overcome
for by taxing the speculative income of capitalists who their hysteria in the face of this problem of human
are the cause of the problem. The Nazis, who were not knowledge and its consequent loss of power for the
without a certain ironical talent of their own, took the individual confronting it, the scientific empiricists deideology
that dominated their society the way a return clared "meaningless" any attempt to compare one set
to nature dominates ours, namely the German mystique of facts with any other set of facts which threatened to
surrounding work, and showed what its logical outcome expose this inherent contradiction which existed as long
would be under capitalism in a state of crisis: over the as "facts" were presumed to have an existence in
entrance to one of their concentration camps they themselves. Throwing out this fundamental problem
placed the motto "Arbeit macht Frei" ("Work crucial not only for an abstract understanding of the
Makes Us Free"). In the coming depression the Bob limits of human knowledge but for the basis of an
Dylan cult will afford us the opportunity of creating a understanding of human identity, i.e. man's control
"happening" appropriate to our own historical situa- over his world, the scientific empiricists acclaimed
tion, as we gather thousands of unemployed workers to themselves as the "modest" philosophers, a euphehear
him sing their favorite song, the one with the mism for what anyone else would have identified as a
refrain: "And never more will you toil." simple-minded solution for a difficult problem. While
most of society suffered a historical reality that was
What Marx said about the revolution of the nine- desperately in need of not only an explanation but of
teenth century applies even more urgently to our own explanation that would lead to a qualitative change in
time: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century the condition of human existence, the so-called rational
cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the people threw up their hands in "modest" despair at
future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped having any solution to this "metaphysical" problem
off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolu- that was an eminently material reality for most other
tions required recollections of past world history in people, and "modestly" set about inquiring into some
order to drug themselves concerning their own content, limited domain of what they thought were verifiable
In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of "facts." The only problem was that those "facts"
the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their didn't really exist in themselves, as Hegel could have
dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here pointed out to them, but rather represented a judgment
the content goes beyond the phrase." abstracted from a process whose probability for truth
decreased in proportion to its severance from that
In 1821 Shelley wrote "In Defense of Poetry" as a process taken as a whole. These were the very polite
rebuttal to a critic who advanced the point of view that barbarians in business suits who systematically set
"a poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized about destroying the basis of real knowledge, an opporcommunity,"
the future dimensions of which he prob- tunity uniquely afforded them by their almost total
ably didn't realize at the time. Shelley, however, was social isolation.
quick to understand the significance of such a statement
for the future of poetry and man, and in his
"Defense..." reasserted the poet as a force of light and In the period following World War II, the same
as such one of the "unacknowledged legislators of the period that produced the school of mathematical ecoworld."
By the end of the nineteenth century the nomics, a type of composition emerged out of the ruins
alienated sensuality and concomitant incoherence of of music codified by Arnold Schoenberg and passed on