The Origins of Student Radicalism: a Study of the Sixties

1 THE ORIGINS OF STUDENT RADICALISM: A STUDY OF THE SIXTIES Ken Mansell (1991) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Youth Culture Student Radicalism Youth Subcultures/Student subcultures SECTION ONE - SOURCES OF CULTURAL RADICALISM 1. Criticism and “New Criticism” 2. Student Subcultures Jazz Folk music SECTION TWO - A CASE STUDY: THE REVIVAL OF STUDENT POLITICS - MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY 1. The Transformation of the Subculture 2. “Student Action” 3. The Transformation of Political Style SECTION THREE - GENERATIONAL POLITICS 1. The Origins of a Political Style 2. The Origins of a Generational Political Consciousness a) “The Bomb” - an assault on a generation b) The emergence of youth politics - conscription 3. Vietnam - and the Elaboration of a Style SECTION FOUR - VIETNAM AND THE ONGOING RADICALISATION OF STUDENTS The Case of Monash University The Case of Melbourne University SECTION FIVE - THE CULTURAL ( INTELLECTUAL AND MUSICAL) SOURCES OF THE “GENERATIONAL SPLIT” IN RADICAL POLITICS: FROM “ALIENATION” TO “COUNTER- CULTURE” 1. Alienation 2. Mass Society 3. Music SECTION SIX - VIETNAM: 1966 AND AFTER CONCLUSIONS BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 INTRODUCTION This essay is a study of the emergence of political and cultural radicalism in the sixties, specifically those forms of dissent and rebellion which were expressed by a particular generation of student (and therefore ‘middle-class’) youth in Melbourne. My purpose has been to account for the origins of the new forms of student radicalism and to assess the particular impact of the Vietnam War as a factor contributing to the radicalisation. The radicalisation process witnessed and experienced in Australia was not separate from the process of growing dissent that occurred internationally in the sixties and that in some countries was strong enough to shake the ruling order of society. Still by far the best sociological studies of sixties radicalism in Australia, partly because they so rigorously interrogate the very notion itself, are two articles (by Richard Gordon and Warren Osmond ) that appeared in the 1970 publication “The Australian New Left”.1 There has been a surprising paucity of analysis since that effort, which may reflect the decline and fragmentation of the same sixties movements but which is hardly warranted from the point of view of their historical importance. Most of the recent work has a tendency to focus on the later, more radical, sixties years (1966-72). This study below will offer a counter-balance in order to assess the impact of ‘Vietnam’ but also on the grounds that the radicalism of the sixties originated in the distinctive earlier years (1961- 5). Youth Culture. Without attempting to suggest that there may be a single cause, it is important to seek an explanation for the sixties. The most common explanation offered for the radicalisation is the notion of the development of a youth culture, and a corresponding generational consciousness. Almost without exception, those authors who have dealt specifically with the cultural/political radicalism of the sixties emphasise the generational character of the rebellion––a “self-consciously alienated”2 reaction against the way of life of ‘the oldies’. Various factors, emerging in the fifties and becoming increasingly apparent over the following decade, have been suggested to explain the strong generational identification of youth. Two stand out––a decline in the sense of belonging to a ‘class’ was both a cause and effect of this identification;3 the increasingly prolonged period of adolescence experienced by the youth of the post-war ‘baby-boom’ generation encouraged a specific and independent ‘youth culture’.4 Not only was the 1 Richard Gordon and Warren Osmond, “An Overview of the Australian New Left” and Warren Osmond, “Toward Self-Awareness”, in Richard Gordon (ed.), The Australian New Left, Melbourne, Heinemann, 1970. 2 Peter Cochrane, “The War at Home” in G. Pemberton (ed.), Vietnam Remembered, Weldon Publishing, 1990, pp. 169-70. 3 Stephen Alomes, “Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties”, Arena No. 62 (1983), pp. 32-3, 34. See the discussion in Hebdige (p. 74) of the development of youth culture (and its ‘marginal discourses’) as part of the process of polarization and fragmentation of working-class community. Dick Hebdige, Subculture - The Meaning of Style, London, Methuen, 1980. 4 See Stephen Alomes, op. cit, p. 33; Stephen Alomes, A Nation At Last, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1988, pp. 185, 189; Donald Horne, Time of Hope, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1980, p. 49;Julie 3 sixties’ teenage cohort proportionately large, far greater numbers of young people were staying on at school, or attending university.5 It has been suggested that these conditions allowed the emergence of a “youth market”6 but also the space for questions of meaning and identity to arise.7 The concept of a “youth market” was first put forward in 1980 by Donald Horne, an author who himself played a decisive historical role in the sixties. In Horne, the context for this concept was the development of a “permissive”, “self-indulgent” society made possible by affluence (“the era of assured and optimistic economic faith”), and the extension of consumerism, both conditions transforming middle-class values away from traditional puritanism.8 Peter Cochrane has employed the same basic economic framework––the notion of an indulgent “permissive consumerism” stemming from the “marketplace” of a capitalism that had “itself signalled that the time for deviation was approaching.”9 According to both Horne and Cochrane, permissive consumerism, as an ideology, encouraged a belief in the right to self-fulfillment.10 The critique of the mass society which developed at the same time started from the awareness that self- fulfillment could not be achieved through consumer goods.11 Thus, for Cochrane, “it was capitalism (that was) laying the foundations for the discontent of the Vietnam era”.12 And affluent post-war Australia was also making room for ‘romanticism’.13 It is thus, for these authors, basic economic causes that produced the ‘youth culture’ and, in turn, questioning, dissent and radicalism. For York, the Vietnam protest movement too ‘emerged’ from the ‘youth culture’.14 According to Cochrane, the permissive ideology of the ‘youth culture’ created by the market of consumer capitalism15 contained “no simple and direct lines” into radical activity or political Ockenden, Anti- War Movement and the Student Revolt at Monash: an examination of Contending Ideologies 1967-70 (BA Hons. Thesis), Monash University, 1985, pp. 6-7. 5 Cochrane, op. cit, p. 169; Horne, op. cit, p. 41; Barry York, Student Revolt Latrobe University 1967-73 (MA Thesis, Sydney University, 1984 ), pp. 9, 25; Sol Encel, “Education and Politics”, Outlook, No. 1 (February ) 1965. 6 Horne, op. cit, p. 41; Ockenden, op. cit, p. 7. 7 Cochrane, op. cit, p. 169. On the Left, what was initially seen by some as the negative, exploitative ‘cult of the teenager’ had, by 1966, become a positive phenomenon associated with the “aware generation”. W.E. Gollan, ‘Society and the Juvenile Delinquent’, Orbit, Vol 3, No. 3 (December 1963); Editorial, Target, Vol. 5. No. 1, 1966. 8 Horne, op. cit, pp. 3, 13, 73, 84. Horne refers at one point to “the spirit of permissiveness” (p. 26 ). 9 Cochrane, op. cit, p. 167. 10 Horne, op. cit, demonstrates that this idea extended to the belief in the right to (consume) sex - the subject of his first chapter. 11 For the development of moods of romanticism among the ‘affluent alienated’, see Alomes, op. cit, pp. 37-9. See also Horne, op. cit, pp. 43, 73. 12 Cochrane, op. cit, p. 168. Alomes also employs the notion of ‘consumer capitalism’ in his basic framework. See Alomes, op. cit, p. 28. 13 Cochrane, op. cit, p. 166. 14 Barry York, Power to the Young, in V. Burgmann and J. Lee (eds), Staining the Wattle, Penguin, 1988, pp. 228, 233. 15 For the pivotal role of the transistor radio for teenagers, see Barry York, Student Revolt Latrobe University 1967-73, Canberra, Nicholas Press, 1989, p. 26. York, Power to the Young, op. cit, p. 233. 4 activism and could just as easily lead into sensualism.16 He admits difficulty in explaining why some took the political path rather than the hedonistic road, and suggests biographical method, or psychology, might be necessary.17 Perhaps, however, there is a flaw in Cochrane’s historical method. Certainly the idea that some took the ‘search for self-fulfilment’ ‘beyond the market-place’ into political action explains very little.18 Student Radicalism Cochrane asserts that student rebels “came out of a distinctive youth culture”.19 This culture was not unified but consisted of various subcultures (rockers, sharpies, surfers etc) all alienated from the parent culture. Yet Cochrane’s chapter does not contain one reference to the specific characteristics of the student subculture. Consequently, this subculture is effectively reduced to, or collapsed into, the generalised ‘youth culture’ concept. Precisely because student subculture was characteristically ‘literary’ and its music (initially jazz, folk ) an expression of the rejection of mass consumerism, student subculture ( at least in the early sixties ) bears a certain antagonism towards ‘youth culture’ and certainly cannot be reduced to it. And being ‘cultural’ (i.e. created rather than consumed, commodified) it gives rise to a cultural radicalism whose origins are not in the economy but relatively autonomous in relation to the economy ( understood as ‘a market’ ). For instance, the mood of romanticism, so strongly present

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