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Number 2- April1998 Workers ACTION
Summer of love - ten years on - Review Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and
Acid House Richard Price The story of the left's relationship with popular culture has been sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical, but never easy. In some ways this relationship has had an uncomfortable parallel to the reaction of bourgeois society itself to successive waves of youth revolt, and it has often come up with similar knee-jerk responses. It is something of a cliché that capitalism first denounces radical departures in culture, only to adopt, adapt and domesticate them in its own interests. The left, too, has frequently responded with horror as youth rebellions took place without its seal of approval, only to adapt to them uncritically. In the early sixties, Gerry Healy's SLL tried to build a 'mass' youth movement through none too political discos, aimed at 'uniting' mods and rockers. In the seventies, early punk swastika chic persuaded much of the left that here was a potentially fascist movement. Yet within a year or two, the Anti-Nazi League was tailending punk and giving credence to the idea that rock could defeat racism. More recently, the RCP created a temporary niche market among style-warrior design students. Just as capitalism has seen the various phases of youth culture as out of its control and dysfunctional to the serious business of making money, the left has tended to view youth culture as a 'diversion' from the task of making revolution. Militant's attempts to organise a socialist echo of the 'just say no' to drugs campaign have only served to highlight how remote it is from this generation. At the same time, the left has also eyed popular culture greedily as a source of potential recruits. Insofar as the left has attempted to relate to popular culture at all, it has usually been to pinch a few ideas to brighten up tired, out-of-date publications. Should Marxists study popular culture, and if so, why? Certainly, there is no point in devoting the relatively limited space of the left press to debates on the merits of speed garage versus big beats. But it is worth spending a little time thinking about why today the left is more isolated from popular culture and youth than it has been for decades. As we approach the tenth anniversary of acid house's 'summer of love', that in turn requires some serious thought about what has happened in the past decade, and Matthew Collin's Altered State at least gives us some of the raw material to do so. Socialists do not seem to have noticed, or at least written very much about it, but we are dealing with a unique cultural phenomenon. Whereas all previous youth cultures - rock and roll, Beatlemania, mods, psychedelia, glam rock, punk and new romantics to name but a few - had a life cycle of about three years, the juggernaut of dance and ecstasy culture has rolled on unstoppably. Instead of giving way to rival forms, it has drawn them into its orbit, creating new sub-genres of dance influenced by soul, hip-hop, rock, world music and jazz. But this is far from simply a question of musical hegemony. Imagery and sounds from clubbing have permeated everything from mainstream television, advertising and fashion to literature and film. Even the most respectable broadsheets carry reviews and articles to keep the corporate clubber informed, while politicians conduct a 'war on drugs' which police chiefs admit is already lost. According to one estimate by economists in 1993, the British dance scene was worth £1.8 billion per year - a turnover comparable to that of the book or newspaper industries. Yet despite the transition from illegal raves to legit clubs diversifying into fashion, magazines and record labels, dance music has never entirely shaken off its illegal roots, with the most obvious reason being its intimate relationship to ecstasy - the drug of choice for up to half a million, predominantly young, clubbers every week. Reports of the 'death' of house music every couple of years since 1990 have been premature to say the least. Matthew Collin's widely acclaimed book is above all a social history of youth culture during the last decade, concentrating particularly on the years 1988-92. Often perceptive and funny, sometimes enthralling, it sets out to explain the roots of the rave scene, as well as its longevity. Tracing the eclectic sources of house music in American black gay disco, soul, sixties psychedelia and German electronic music, Collin argues it is this adaptability combined with an explosion in recreational drug use which explains its persistence: '. . . Ecstasy culture's prevailing ethos is inclusive. It has an open-access formula: rather than a defined ideology, it offers a series of possibilities that people can use to define their own identity, possibilities that can be adapted to each individual's background, social status and belief system. It is endlessly malleable, pragmatic to new meaning.' (p.4) But if ecstasy culture can mean all things to all people - and to those who control the clubs-drugs axis it simply means big bucks - for many of the participants, it is the collective feeling of togetherness, solidarity and love which is valued above all. This surely cannot be solely explained by the chemical properties of MDMA. Naive and saccharine emotions, perhaps, but in the context of the 1990s, scarcely reactionary ones. Although the timing of the arrival of ecstasy in significant quantities in 1988 was accidental, its impact was not. Acid House exploded among a generation of alienated, largely working class, youth. With the defeat of the miners in 1985, Britain had seen no large-scale popular movement for three years, as the Tories had defeated one after another section of workers. Until then, much of eighties-style youth culture had mirrored ascendant Thatcherism in its celebration of money and its tribal exclusivity. A generation was growing up which had never witnessed the organised power of the working class, but which was excluded from the late-eighties Thatcherite boom. Ecstasy offered an escape, but one very different from crying into the bottom of a pint glass. Illegal raves in warehouses and fields offered a transcendent empathy with hundreds and thousands of other youth ranged against existing society. This goes at least some way to explaining how such an apparently non-political movement could also take on such an anti-establishment stance. For their part, the Tories reacted hysterically, setting up special police units throughout the country to target promoters and ravers, and finally passed the draconian Criminal Justice Act in 1994, which among other things, targeted music with 'repetitive beats'. At the time, many of us on the left contented ourselves with the idea that the act was really aimed at the organised working class, and indeed many of its provisions - supported by the then Labour opposition - can be used against workers in struggle. But in doing so, we tended to underestimate just how worried the Tories were by the explosion of raves in the late eighties, not to mention their paranoid hatred for new age travellers. In fact, environmental protests, along with the anti-poll tax campaign, have been by far the largest movements involving youth in the nineties, and the Tories' fears were not so misplaced. One angle relatively unexplored by Altered State is the relationship between the anti-poll tax movement, which culminated in the massive demonstration and riot in Trafalgar Square on March 31, 1990, and the huge mobilisations of ravers in the previous two years. It's probably hard to draw any direct causal connection, but both were symptomatic of an enormous alienation on the part of hundreds of thousands of young people outside the traditional labour movement. The campaign against the poll tax certainly drew on many of the imaginative methods early rave promoters and organisers used to keep the police on the hop. Both owed much to the spontaneous organising skills of their previously unorganised supporters; both fell away due to the lack of any coherent political ideas as to what to do next. This was in part a product of the distance between the left and the emerging youth culture. The only 'political' leadership on offer to insurgent youth came from the green anarchists, eco-warriors, assorted post-hippies and travellers around the free festival confrontations in 1992. But in many ways, although the massive police operation closed down illegal raves and festivals, the ravers came out on top. The government and the police were forced to come to terms with the new situation. Clubs were given licences, drug possession increasingly met with nothing more than a caution, and instead of driving the scene underground, the powers that be sought to bring it on board 'Cool Britannia' as part of the leisure industry. Collin writes affectionately but not uncritically about his subject. He does not underplay the gangsterism which moved in on raves from 1989, in turf wars over drugs and venues. Nor does he overdo the multi-cultural 'peace and love' ethic of club culture, seeing jungle as a specific black response to feelings of exclusion from predominantly white clubs. (That being said, overt racism is largely unacceptable in most clubs today, which counts as something of a step forward, as does an environment in which women feel more able to go out alone or in groups than in previous periods.) There are some down sides to the book. Some of the political judgements are shallow, the analysis of the years 1992-97 is skimpy, as if the author either got bored or wanted to get into print quick, and the overuse of the word 'narrative' gets irritating. But the extensive research based on interviews with many of the key players is impressive. All of which brings us back to the original point of departure: has the youth culture of the last decade any significance, or has it all been a 'diversion'? If it wants to relate to youth at all, the left will have to drop its traditional puritanism on the one hand, without tailending developments uncritically either. The naive hopes for a better world in the summer of '88 are long gone, replaced by a deep-going distrust of established politics. Widespread recreational drug use is a fact, but it is not the cause of the low level of struggle, so much as an effect of it. Not surprising in a world which seems post-everything - post-communist, post-causes and post-politics. Film, television, ballet and opera are also 'diversions' from the task of organising strikes and demonstrations, as is the left's own drug of choice, alcohol. Yet nobody in their right mind has assigned them a primary role in undermining the class struggle. The absence of many picket lines at 3.00am on a Sunday morning tends to underline this point. Socialists should stop trying to lecture youth, and instead attempt to find points of contact in the many campaigns and issues which much of the 'chemical generation' supports. They could do worse than start by reading this book. |
