Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
New Left, New Communalists: Disruptive or Establishment? (New Communalists…
New Left, New Communalists: Disruptive or Establishment?
New Communalists
Turner describes the New Communalists as "those who actually estabished [...] communes and those who saw the transformation of consciousness as the basis for the reformation of American social structure." (Turner 33)
Retreated in communities of hillsides and wooden lots, detached from 1960s American urban capitalism. (Turner 33)
Community in San Francisco moved away from mthe cultural style of middle-class cold war America to seek a new nation build on egalitarian communities.
Communities based on religion, politics or sexual orientation
The New Communalists did not outright reject the cold war world in which they were born but also took up its technological developments.
They they embraced the "collaborative social practices, the celebration of technology and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research." (Turner 33)
Unlike the New Left, the New Communalists had a profound distrust in every form of politics.
"Most retained a deep distrust not only of traditional politicians, but of any and all formal chains of command." (Turner 36)
For the New Communalists The mind was the key so social change, not politics
A new culture needed a new consciousness, one that rejected authority in favour of "bureaucratically leveled communities, harmonious collaborations in which each citizen was "honest" and "together" with every other." (Turner 37)
However, as the mind had to undergo a change, the New Communalists related to the orderly world of cybernetic thought. "If the mind was the fist site of social change, then information woul dhave to become a key part of a countercultural politics." (Turner 38)
This way the New Communalists opened door to mainstream cybernetic culture and in this aspect were not as disruptive as was thought, Turner argues.
New Left
Political movement of the 60s that resisted the "highly bureaucratizes society whose structures virtually required individuals to become psychologically fragmented and thus capable of atrocious behaviour." (Turner 34)
Which to them led to racism and the nuclear tension of wiping out humanity. These critiques and fears led them to have a distrust in the "closed world" in which they grew up: the bureaucratic society impeded their freedom to develop and find meaning in life.
Even though they ended up with a relatively communitarian organisation, the New Left's resistance was acted out within the traditional confines of American politics.
-
"The New Left retained an allegiance to mainstream political tactics and an anipathy to the psychedelic mysticism common to the countercultre. The New Left may have sought to build a new world, but it did so using the traditional techniques of agonistic politics." (Turner 35)
New Left dreamed how "an effective democracy facilitated individual participation and individual independence" (Turner 35)
They also tried to carry this out this democratic communitarian approach. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was run on communitarian beliefs. They were convinced that they should not only "destroy the power which had created the loveless anti-ciommuity of mainstream America, but actively seek to create a new community within its own ranks" (Tuenre 35).
RED = Disruptive (that is: did not or did not fully act within the boundaries of established 1960s American society or sought to seek radical new ways of organizing society)
BLUE = Establishment (that is: aspects of the movements that were related or embedded within the boundaries of established 1960s American society)
In order to identify how the paradox of platform capitalism (disruptively make the world a better place through new forms of control), it is relevant to determine on which points the movements that preceded the Silicon Valey companies were already operating in established political and cultural confines or whether they were truly disruptive. This graph tries to identify both these aspects of the New Left and New Communalists movements.