The hippies and the socialists hated each other. Never forget that hippies were the precursors to the Silicon Valley tech bros and tended to recreate the systemic oppression they rebelled against within their communes. But they were less anticapitalist, so they became the “safe” form of rebellion that we now associate with the 60’s and 70’s. I’d argue that the punk aesthetic has become a pretty well-commodified form of rebellion too. Literally the main villain from Trolls 2 whose dad is voiced by Ozzy Osbourne wears all punk shit.
The peak of the Young Republicans on college campuses was during the Vietnam war.
The hippies are vastly overrepresented in movies and TV. Maybe 10-20% of the youth culture at the time could ostensibly be called hippy in any sense. About as many hippies in the 1960's as there were ravers in the 1990's.
Anything from the white counterculture was called hippies by the press. poets, SDS, Yippies, Psychadelics users, Buddhists, rock and roll fans, folk fans, all of it.
Abbie Hoffman gave a speech about how "Hippies" didn't mean anything, but implied a lot of things and was more a rhetorical bludgeon than a reflection of reality.
What we think of now as "hippies" is a consumer identity built out of the rubble of the 60s and 70s to sell crystals and pyramid schemes to traumatized trust fund kids
Yippies were the OG leftist troll army. The world needs more socialist theater kids.
The hippies and socialists were the same thing lol. The idea of a concrete hippie identity is a new thing. Back in the 60s participating in the new left would get you called a hippie just as much as dropping acid at Woodstock would.
The new left had critiques of lots of things: the commodification of youth culture, the pacifism of the religious movements, the use of the word hippie as a rhetorical bludgeon similar to "antifa," all sorts of stuff. But they didn't have beef with hippies because "hippies" as a consumer identity built around psych rock, drugs, crystals and cults didn't really exist yet.
Hippies yesterday gave us plague rats today. Hippies yesterday gave us recycling away climate change to the third world today. Hippies yesterday gave us a neutered 1960s left and hellworld today. Disney adults for plants who want to feel good without challenging any actual privilege or doing actual analysis of the world.
man what if everything in the forest was an animist cartoon caricature that wants to teach me moral lessons. i bet native americans learned all sorts of lessons. maybe if i just dress up like my favourite native american character i can talk to the cartoon flowers about curing cancer.
I feel like we on the left don't spend enough time shitting on subcultures that aren't left enough.
I don't think many hippies exist any more as part of an actual social phenomenon. Anyone who intentionally adopts the dress and mannerisms is pining after decades past.
I think we just have a strong urge to disavow ourselves from an aesthetic we see as misfired, hypocritical, and corrupted to the right, which is fair, but the real story is more complicated. If you wanna claim they all went Q go for it, but I need more than anecdotes to believe they didn't just split in a ton of directions.
pining after decades past.
Hence why they are so prone to reactionary shit.
Uh, punks are the same for the most part. Nothing has really changed in punk since 1988
'Hardcore punk' can mean a wide variety of things. I'd say once the camo pants and mosh metal stuff came in hardcore became a pretty different thing than punk
I was thinking Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, maybe second incarnation of the misfits, etc. Idk the dates though, tbf.
The Yippies were called hippies when they were active lol. Distinguishing the political counterculture from the less explicitly political counterculture is a new thing.
It needs an accordion though, the most proletarian instrument because you can play bella ciao on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsOTRkv5n1w
That album is almost a decade old. I don't really keep up with it now so it might be dead, but it had a good run in the 2010s.
Lotta punks are people who just want to break glass ime. Bottom line, everyone had bad parents
Every punk person I've met was cool as fuck, but I've never been able to get into the music :(
IMO punk is less about the music and more about the experience. Pre-Apocalypse times I used to love getting faced and brawling with 50 strangers on a packed dance floor while running in a circle. The music was a cherry on top.
there's still plenty of dirty homeless hippie kids that are cool.
Oh god so much. For every actual radical leftist there are dozens more that became small business tyrants and tech bros, they were big early anti-vaxx evangelists, the environmentalist aspects have been completely absorbed and coopted and much of what's left is people with zero materialist analysis stumbling into eco-fascism. There have been many issues their communes harboring abusers and generally being attractive environments for predators given the whole "free love" era of the 60s and 70s. The most radical hippies weren't even ever organized and just did adventurist shit.
I grew up around hippies so this is anecdotal but also definitely stuff I've had conversations about with other leftists that grew up in similar communities.
I think this is part of where the whole "you get more conservative as you grow older" idea comes from the older assholes. They had some level of leftistish ideas as youth around "free love" and "let's do drugs" and "end war" but then later adapted themselves into the libertarian small business tyrants and other shitheads that they are today. Because the hippie movement was more about rebellion and personal satisfaction than communal benefits.
They had some level of leftistish ideas as youth around “free love” and “let’s do drugs” and “end war” but then later adapted themselves into the libertarian small business tyrants and other shitheads that they are today.
I think a perfect contemporary illustration of this is how easilly modern Q-type conspiratorial thinking got to the Star Seeds / New Age types through things like Save the Children. You get all these (correct) ideas about high-profile sexual abusers and traffickers, and the correlation between wealth/power and depravity; "solved" through liberal-style protests and the posting wars.
I always consider hippies more akin to libertarians than Communists - that is, a focus on their own benefit. Make myself comfortable with no social or future planning.
Hippie "activism" is what leads to movements like Occupy, and Extinction Rebellion. No planning, no goals, just performative
Yeah the whole "mindfulness" and "power of positive thinking" bullshit has just become a bunch of self-help grifters, pseudo-spiritual grifters and basically the new age equivalent of faith healers, and all of it is a product of having the privilege to indulge in that shit while having zero materialist analysis of the societal ills they once were ostensibly trying to overcome
Occupy was like one activist group's project to get class back into the discourse. They never expected it to get picked up by so many places so quickly. There was no way it could have been planned lol. Its lack of planning wasn't the result of a hippy cultural deficiency
My dad is a good example of this. He was quite the hippie back in the day and smoked weed and lived in communes and visited hippie camps and was into eastern mysticism. Today he is a catholic conservative who believes Muslims are doing white genocide, black people are stupid and violent and China is about to enslave us all.
My dad was a hippie in he 80s,did everything you mentioned but now he’s a leftist.
You said what I took a whole paragraph to convey in 5 words. Bravo.
I don’t even know what a “hippie,” is in this day and age tbh. Too broad of a category.
Yeah, besides of the ones who just take it as aesthetics, I have mer good and bad people in the bunch, tho the bad ones were shockingly bad. Richer hippies tend to be worse, tho not a too strong R^2
man it would really suck if there was a generation of people who mistook their own individualist narcissistic self-aggrandizement for a radical movement against the dominant order *logs onto twitter*
for anyone hung up on the "hippies aren't leftist" thing, give this book a read. i read it back in community college and really loved it; hope it holds up
colorado kid goes to college, sees people talking about racial justice and the vietnam war, joins SDS and becomes a primary fixture is the student movement of the 60s to end vietnam and redefine the relationship between universities and students. it's been a while since i read it, but i remember there being intraleft fighting with another more explicitly dogmatically marxist org. these libs thought the capitalists would willingly give up power because it's the right thing to do.
