Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [146]
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.
We did not understand how deeply even the unquestionably political ultra-left, the armed revolutionaries and neo-terrorists who emerged from the 1960s, were influenced by, indeed were part of, the ‘counterculture’. The Weathermen in the USA took their name from a song by Bob Dylan. The Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, lived in the German version of a counter-culture of outsiders by choice and behaviour.
My age group did not understand that the student generations of the West in the 1960s believed, as we had once done, though in a manner far less easy to specify as ‘politics