“Forces of Chaos and Anarchy”: Revolution and Restoration at the End of the 1960s (1968-71)

While the counterculture had been countered by autumn 1968, it hadn’t been crushed: while the Fordist order had reasserted control, it had been seen to flounder. Despite the conventional ‘death of the 60s’ narrative, the period from late 1968 to mid-1971 contains a striking number of countercultural highs: the 1968 Olympics’ Black Power salutes, the Woodstock festival, the trial of the Chicago Seven, the feminist disruption of 1970’s Miss World and the glory of ghetto soul. Sheila Rowbotham recalls that, “caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion, it felt as if we were being carried to the edge of the known world”.² Yet we hear rather more about this period’s countercultural lows, what Simon Reynolds and Joy Press call “the tenor of desolation and fatalism [in] the aftermath of the 60s”:³ the Manson murders; the violence at the 1969 Altamont festival; a Black Panther declaring women’s role in the revolution “prone”; the deaths of Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin – and the breakup of the Beatles. Once the standard-bearers of 60s optimism, the Beatles’ valedictory statement was a defeatist dirge, a recommendation in such “times of trouble” to simply ‘Let it Be’ (Highest Chart Position: 2; US 1). Todd Gitlin recalls that “the riptide of the Revolution went out with the same force it had surged in… activists cooled, beaten and disappointed in the measure they were once hopeful”.⁴

These contradictory impulses reveal this period’s polarities after the relative cohesion and stability of the high 60s. 1968 was the apex of Fordism, the peak of post-war incomes and the apotheosis of Western economic growth.⁵ It was also when Fordism began to falter, real wages became a warzone and growth began to shrink. The Fordist consensus was increasingly contested not just in its actions – by the counterculture in the bloodiest period of the Vietnam War; by renewed working-class militancy – but in its essence: by capital cutting costs to compete globally; by a resurgent anti-Fordist conservatism. Hall recites the right-wing refrains of this restoration as “law and order, the need for social discipline and authority in the face of a conspiracy by the enemies of the state, the onset of social anarchy, the ‘enemy within’, the dilution of stock by alien black elements”.⁶ Conservatives were alarmed by Black Panther militarism and countercultural militancy – and particularly by their potential to combine,⁷ with Panther Huey Newton declaring, “only by eliminating capitalism and substituting it [with] socialism will… all black people achieve freedom”.⁸

Yet the right positioning itself as the representative of “property, family, religion, order” is, Marx argues, always a populist ruse to discredit anyone to their left as “the enemies of society”. As such, murderous hippie cultist Charles Manson was the right’s best nightmare. The ruse worked: Richard Nixon and Edward Heath’s election victories in 1968 and 1970 effected a conservative restoration by interpellating a ‘silent majority’ in opposition to what Nixon called the “coastal elites”, conflating metropolitan liberal culture and counterculture. Soon Nixon would wage a ‘war on drugs’, whose symbolic priority-shift from his predecessor’s ‘war on poverty’ pitted respectable straight society against a supposedly anarchic alternative society.

Jefferson Airplane’s claim that “we are forces of chaos and anarchy” on winter 1968’s ‘We Can Be Together’ (Volunteers, US 13) satirises such conservative attitudes: “We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent.” The rump counterculture’s increasingly revolutionary outlook was caught by Lindsey Anderson’s If (1968) and Thunderclap Newman’s stunning 1969 ‘Something in the Air’ (1). Lest anyone imagine “the revolution’s here” is metaphorical, the song spells out how it’ll be achieved: “Hand out the arms and ammo/We’re going to blast our way through here”. This paralleled the attitude of the Panthers, Yippies and Weather Underground – who, declaring war on the American government, bombed the Capitol Building in 1971 – and Britain’s Angry Brigade. Yet given the crackdown exemplified by 1968’s events in Chicago, the counterculture’s calcification was clearly a response to the increasingly authoritarian countermeasures of the state. As Marx remarked, “To defend oneself with a stick when attacked with a sword” is, to the establishment, chaos and anarchy. Mainstream media presented popular protest as civil disorder, and the ‘new journalism’ did the same, with added pretension. Tom Wolfe conflated revolution with counter-revolution in his ‘Me Decade’ essay, while Joan Didion claimed the counterculture to be “devoid of any logic save that of the dreamwork”, and that hippie “disorder was its own point”.⁹ This has become a consensus on the late 60s: Reynolds invokes “the sixties sagging into decadence”;¹⁰ Michael Bracewell laments “the significant role of violence in an epoch too frequently misrepresented by the truism ‘Love and Peace’”.¹¹ Yet there’s no distinction in these accounts between what was done by or done to the counterculture. Indeed, Jeremi Suri uses “violence” only to describe the actions of protestors, never those of the state, while also calling the hippies’ favourite philosopher, Herbert Marcuse an “international advertiser for romantic ideas of liberation through sex and violence”.

The state may be struck from the historical record, but it struck contemporary skulls and ribcages with tangible force. California Governor Ronald Reagan declared, “If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with – no more appeasement”, and crushed the hippie occupation of Berkeley’s People’s Park in May 1969 (one dead) and the Isla Vista ‘riot’ in January 1970 (one dead), while an FBI raid on the Black Panthers’ HQ resulted in the “justifiable homicide” of Fred Hampton. Then the death toll stepped up. Nixon sent the National Guard against war protesters at Kent State University in May 1970 (four dead), at Jackson State days later (two dead), while police attacked the fall 1971 Attica prison protest (43 dead). Less bloodily, but equally bloody mindedly, the state also deployed black ops (the FBI’s COINTELPRO exposed in 1971) and the judiciary (the British state vs. Oz magazine; the US state vs. war protestors) to counter the counterculture, and used the legislature to tame trade unions, with Wilson’s 1969 ‘In Place of Strife’ only withdrawn under pressure. Capturing this authoritarian atmosphere, R. Dean Taylor’s 1970 ‘Indiana Wants Me’ (2; US 5) fearfully observes: “Out there the law’s a comin’… Red lights are flashin’ around me,” as bullets fly. Which were the forces of chaos and anarchy?

Tony Judt regards the counterculture as bringing this counter-revolution upon itself: “the narcissism of student movements, New Left ideologues and the popular culture of the 60s generation invited a conservative backlash”.¹² Nina Simone’s 1968 ‘Backlash Blues’ (’Nuff Said, 11) captures this reaction as a specifically “white backlash”. Segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace and British Conservative Enoch Powell played on fears of the racial ‘other’ among sections of the working class that hadn’t benefited from Fordist mobility, and on the paranoia of the petit bourgeoisie who had, shifting the direction of political discourse in the wake of 1968’s Civil Rights (US) and Race Relations (Britain) Acts. Carl Freedman argues that Nixon’s ‘law and order’ campaign motif “was the dominant code phrase… for hatred and fear of blacks”,¹³ and with the issue also underlying Heath’s 1970 campaign (and 1971 Immigration Act), race served as a repository for a broader ressentiment about the 60s’ upending of hierarchies and habits of mind.

While popular culture reflected this resentment in reactionary, working-class Alf Garnett (Till Death Do Us Part) and his American analogue Archie Bunker (All in the Family), this tendency also testified to something progressive: the cultural power of the working class, underwritten by political power. West Virginian miners shut down the state in 1969,¹⁴ a wildcat postal strike caused Nixon to call in the National Guard in 1970, while in 1971 dockworkers on Britain’s Clyde staged a counterculture-inspired ‘work-in’ which forced the government to reverse planned closures. This class power was audible in music: Glen Campbell’s jazzy country songs infiltrated AM radio with accounts of ordinary working men, like his 1968 ‘Wichita Lineman’ (7; US 3), who’s proud of working for “the county”, or the soldier in 1969’s subtly anti-war ‘Galveston’ (14; US 4). Nicky Thomas’s 1970 reggae hit, ‘Love of the Common People’ (7) posits pride against poverty when there’s “a dream to cling to”. Lennon donated to the dockworkers, while his late-1970 ‘Working Class Hero’ raged, “You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see” (Plastic Ono Band, 8; US 6). McCartney’s first post-Beatles single, 1971’s ‘Another Day’ (2; US 5), was derided by critics – and Lennon – for the one thing that made it notable: the depiction of a female office-worker’s everyday life. Everything, for Jethro Tull’s “common working man”, is ‘Up to Me’ (Aqualung, 4: US 7). Even Benny Hill’s 1971 novelty ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’ (1) depicts ordinary working people as mythic heroes embroiled in an eternal struggle.¹⁵

For all this era’s reactionary cultural currents and the restoration’s authoritarian actions, therefore, radical right-wing ideas couldn’t gain political or popular traction at this point. While Heath experimented with Powellite laissez-faire economics – with letting it be – he abandoned the approach amidst rising unemployment and public resistance and returned to interventionist Fordism. Even Nixon asserted “we’re all Keynesians now,” and for all his right-wing rhetoric, largely pursued socially liberal policies. Moreover, while we often hear about the level of public support for Powell’s racist 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, it’s less remarked that mixed-race Britons the Equals scored a huge hit with ‘Baby Come Back’ (1) the very same year, while their 1970 ‘Black Skin, Blue Eyed Boys’ (9) could confidently declare, “The world will be half-breed”.

For all the corporate consolidation occurring in this period, countercultural concepts still held sufficient sway to be co-opted rather than coldcocked, from 1969’s psychedelic bubblegum – Tommy Roe’s ‘Dizzy’ (1; US 1); the Archies’ ‘Sugar Sugar’ (1; US 1) – to Men’s Wear magazine’s “cool conservative” look,¹⁶ to Coke’s 1971 hilltop hippies’ television advert. This was the period of the corporations’ ‘house hippie’, and if the cynicism could be transparent – “If you won’t listen to your parents, the Man or the Establishment… why should you listen to us?”¹⁷ – the creative space this created for countercultural production benefited both musicians and fans. Despite the Bunkers and Garnetts, television was a progressive redoubt: with American networks ditching game shows, laugh-track comedy and small-town dramas, the trippy, multicultural Sesame Street (1969–) was emblematic of the era, while Britain’s Play for Today (1970–84) represented popular modernism at its most progressive. The ‘New Hollywood’ combined countercultural attitudes – Catch 22 (1970), Zabriskie Point (1970) – and psychedelic techniques – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film whose huge commercial success sparked this cinematic golden age, Easy Rider (1969), captured the period’s polarities: enduring countercultural utopianism violently countered by reactionary forces.

Just as the political settlement broke apart after 1968, so did popular music fragment and fracture. Nik Cohn calls this period’s music “a return to sanity, to responsibility”,¹⁸ but this is simply a pop variant on Suri’s claim that “citizens… longed to return to something they identified as ‘normal’ in a world undergoing dizzying change” – an acceptance of conservative concerns as consensus. Such critical bubblegum occludes the contestation that now defined pop and politics. David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ - with CSNY - places his desire to let his “freak flag fly” in direct relation to state surveillance, as it “increases my paranoia” (Déjà Vu, 5; US 1). Mungo Jerry’s skiffly 1970 ‘In the Summertime’ (1; US 3) confronts this conflict amicably, assuring conservatives, “We’re no threat, people, we’re not dirty, we’re not mean”, voicing the solidaristic countercultural credo, “We love everybody”, while adding, defiantly, “but we do as we please”.