The natural reaction of old lefties to the new movement was: ‘These people have not yet learned how to achieve their political objectives.’ That is presumably why, referring to the French title of my book Primitive Rebels, then recently published in Paris,6 Alain Touraine, who had every sympathy with the 1968 rebels, wrote on the fly-leaf of my copy of his book ‘Here are the Primitives of a new Rebellion’. For the purpose of my book had indeed been to do historic justice to social struggles – banditry, millennial sects, pre-industrial city rioters – that had been overlooked or even dismissed just because they tried to come to grips with the problems of the poor in a new capitalist society with historically obsolete or inadequate equipment. But supposing the ‘new primitives’ were not pursuing our ends at all, but quite different ones? Because it was so clearly and passionately on the side of the eternal losers I wrote about, my own book, available in English since 1959, had given me more street credibility among the Anglophone ‘new lefts’ than Party members usually enjoyed. Nevertheless, I was astonished and a little baffled to be told by a colleague from the University of California, Berkeley, the epicentre of the US student eruption, that the more intellectual young rebels there read the book with great enthusiasm because they identified themselves and their movement with my rebels.
Having both taught in the USA at the peak of the anti-Vietnam movement in 1967 and watched the Paris events in 1968, I wrote an equally uncomprehending article on ‘Revolution and Sex’ in 1969. If there was any correlation between the two, I pointed out, it was negative: rulers kept slaves and the poor quiet by encouraging sexual freedom among them and, I might have added, remembering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, drugs. As a historian I knew that all revolutions have their free-for-all libertarian aspect, but ‘taken by themselves cultural revolt and cultural dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces’. ‘The more prominent such things are’ – as obviously in the USA – ‘the more confident can we be that the big things are not happening’.7 But what if the ‘big things’ were to be not the overthrow of capitalism, or even of some oppressive or corrupt political regimes, but precisely the destruction of traditional patterns of relations between people and personal behaviour within existing society? What if we were just wrong in seeing the rebels of the 1960s as another phase or variant of the left? In that case it was not a botched attempt at one kind of revolution, but the effective ratification of another: the one that abolished traditional politics, and in the end the politics of the traditional left, by the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Looking back after thirty-odd years it is easy to see that I misunderstood the historic significance of the 1960s.
One reason for this was that I had been immersed since 1955 in the small and mostly nocturnal universe of jazz musicians. The world I lived in after hours in the second half of the fifties had already seemed to anticipate much of the spirit of the 1960s. This was an error. It was quite different. If there is anything that symbolizes the 1960s it is rock music, which began its world conquest in the second half of the 1950s and immediately opened a profound gap between the pre- and post-1955 generations.
It was impossible not to be aware of this gap, as when my wife and I, in Berkeley and San Francisco for a few days at the height of the ‘flower-power’ year of 1967, visited a former au pair of Andy and Julia in Haight-Ashbury, where she was then discovering herself. It was obviously marvellous for the girl, usually as level-headed a Netherlander as you could hope for, and fun to watch, but how could it be our scene? We were taken to the Fillmore, the giant ballroom throbbing with strobe lights and excessive amplification. I cannot even remember what Bay Area groups we heard – the only act that made any sense to me that night was one of the Motown girl groups – was it the Marvelettes or the Supremes? – which swung in the familiar way of black r&b. Perhaps this is not surprising. To enjoy that year in San Francisco one really had to be permanently high on something, preferably acid, and we were not. Indeed, by virtue of our age, we were a textbook illustration of the phrase ‘If you can remember anything of the 1960s, you were not part of them.’
Nor could the jazz world, with the rarest exceptions, understand rock. It reacted to rock music with the same sort of contempt as it had traditionally reacted to the Mickey Mouse music of the old pit and commercial bands. Perhaps even with greater contempt, since the men who played the most boring of barmitzvah gigs were at least professionals. Conversely, within a few years rock almost killed jazz. The generational gap between those for whom the Rolling Stones were gods and those for whom they were just a creditable imitation of black blues-singing was virtually unbridgeable, even when both sides might from time to time find themselves in agreement on some talent. (As it happens I rather admired the Beatles and recognized the fragments of genius in Bob Dylan, a potential major poet too idle or self-absorbed to keep the muse’s attention for more than two or three lines at a time.) Whatever the appearances, my generation would remain strangers in the 1960s.
And this despite the fact that for a few years in the 1960s the language, culture and lifestyle of the new rock generations became politicized. They spoke dialects recognizable as deriving from the old language of the revolutionary left, though not, of course, of orthodox Moscow communism, discredited both by the record of the Stalin era and the political moderation of the Communist Parties. Anyone who reads the best book on the 1960s written in Britain, Promise of a Dream, by my friend and former student Sheila Rowbotham, will realize that for some years it really was almost impossible for someone of her generation (born 1943) to distinguish between what was personal and what was political. It was ‘the left-wing Alexis Korner’ – I remember him, dark and quiet in Bayswater – who inspired ‘the clear-cut throbbing sexuality of the blues bands’8 such as the Rolling Stones, whose Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ after a dramatic Vietnam Solidarity demonstration in 1968 and published it in the flamboyant Pakistani Trotskyite Tariq Ali’s new radical paper, The Black Dwarf (‘PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. WE WILL FIGHT. WE SHALL WIN’). Pink Floyd, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’, Che Guevara, Middle Earth and acid belonged together. Not that the line was totally erased. A subsequent holder of a Cambridge economics chair proposed that principled socialist men should protest publicly against the spread of Soho strip clubs, e.g. by stripping outside them. (‘The New Left Review men had told him he was being ‘‘puritanical and old-fashioned in his attitude to socialism’’.’) Wearers of ‘the sombre ‘‘struggle gear’’, increasingly worn … on the left’ shook their heads over an equally devoted militant who came to an occupation of the London School of Economics ‘in an olive-green bell-bottomed trouser suit, bought in my September spending spree’.9 Most of this passed the older left by, even though the young British radicals – perhaps thanks to my generation of red historians – were probably more deeply impregnated with history, especially labour history, than any other. We knew most of the chief activists as fellow-protesters, pupils or friends. I did not bother to read the Black Dwarf, although I was asked to write an article for it and naturally did so. People like me were mobilized by the young for such things as Vietnam teach-ins – I was put up against the spectacularly ill-chosen Henry Cabot Lodge, former American Big Brother in Saigon in the Oxford Union teach-in of 1965 organized by Tariq Ali. Fortunately in my own college I did not face the bruising experience of a student occupation, a considerable strain on intergenerational relations, although I was invited to address a crowd of occupying forces in the Cambridge Old Schools by one of their leaders, the son of old friends. I think my suggestion that even the history of eras lost in the mists of antiquity such as the nineteenth century could be ‘relevant’ – the buzzword of the moment – disappointed them.