Tags / 9 quotes from 1 source
#revolution
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Poverty had become psychological
By the middle of the decade so many young people were dropping out that it looked as though “youth” was becoming a social class in its own right, one about to inherit the revolutionary dynamism Marx had ascribed to the industrial proletariat. For between the two world wars…
Politics as psychopolitics
LOOKING BACK ON THAT time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set ’60s and ’70s radicalism…
Feminists dealt capitalism the body blow
Rather than the terrorists, it was the early feminists who dealt capitalism the body blow. Their work offered the first critique of Western society as a whole and provided the first tools with which revolutionaries could begin to revolutionize themselves—to question their very…
Never really trusting LSD
Basically, I never trusted LSD; and despite all the song and dance about psychedelics at the time, I suspect that a large number of my peers didn’t either. Amazing eye-opener LSD might be, but it seemed too volatile, too violent to be workable. Had we known of the research…
The backlash after failed revolts
Perhaps revolts that fail always create this murderous backlash. Ringleaders are either dead or thoroughly discredited; and the rest, however sick at heart, have little option but to try to pick up the pieces and lead some semblance of normal life, to curl up with a lover and a…
Self-remembering and the thrill of direct action
To say I had briefly “woken up” would express perfectly what had happened. And as I read more of Ouspensky’s book, I realized I had known this strange state before. Falling in love had taken me there; so had Third World travel; so had political activism when it involved crime…
Revolution needs psychotherapy at its heart
Whatever the truth, one of the ideas I kept coming back to was that any future revolutionary movement, however you conceived it, must have some kind of psychotherapy at its heart: some basic analysis of the ego. This struck me as being just as important, if not far more so…
Toynbee's two proletariats
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon declared famously that Rome was destroyed by Christianity and the barbarians; and Toynbee’s analysis could be seen as an extended commentary on the thesis. For him, as for Gibbon, the untold millions of people enslaved by the…
Being in the world but not of it
Toynbee’s analyses of the various forms such resistance takes are too complex to do more than touch upon here—initially workers tend to be conservative and merely want to return to an earlier, less dehumanized stage of society; only as such Utopianism proves impossible do they…