A guy who was staying at Chacra de Cielo, the organic farm we stayed at in El Bolson showed us his copy of the book The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture can't be Jammed. He assured us that the book "cant be bought in the States" as if the NWO Lizard People Illuminati (see here) were trying to suppress it, but actually what the book proposes is quite apposite to all that conspiracy stuff. In fact, what the authors suggest is that there is no Conspiracy (capital C), and never was. There is no "system" and no "spectacle".
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter are young Canadian academics who have been though the modern activist scene and come out with some bad tastes and original ideas. For them, the main flaw in modern revolutionary thought began when it's focus changed from "helping the common man" to "freeing the common man from his mental slavery". This change of ideals became even more convoluted, they suggest, when it then became "before you can free others' minds, you first must free your own." This shift is relatively new development, and didn't really take hold until the 60's.
According to the book, this was the decade that the whole democratic progressive activist movement was really subverted by people who confused hedonism for revolution, sexiness for political clout, fashion for progress. While real strides were being made on a grass roots political level for human and civil rights, posers who were more concerned with looking the part and getting laid were claiming their great victory. Then, they write "...(contrary to rumor) the hippies did not sell out. Hippie ideology and yuppie ideology are one and the same. There simply never was any tension between the countercultural ideas that informed the '60s rebellion and the ideological requirements of the capitalist system."
They go on to say that the "counterculture" is a hoax that's been played out ever since. Sure, the "revolution" wised up and turned it's back on the hippies, but because none us of us, punks and anarchists etc., ever questioned the fundamental "us vs. them" paradigm we haven't moved forward. We are still suckers for the sexy image of the martyred revolutionary, and we still think of ourselves as fighting against a "system" that is somehow "brainwashing" everyone into being complacent. Sure punks hate hippies, but how far have we really come from Pink Floyd's "Break down the wall!" to Youth of Today's "Break Down the Walls!"?
The book's main target is the new "counterculture"- Naomi Klein, Micheal Moore, the "culture-jamming" trend spearheaded by Adbusters magazine and the antiglobalisation protest movement. Each of these are approached directly, but the theme is that they are all based on a single fallacy- that everyone is brainwashed by "the spectacle" and all it will take is some creative publicity stunt to wake them up.
Once you start thinking about things in these terms, it's hard to stop. Yesterday, as usual, the anarchists and socialists and commies were having a huge rally around the 9 de Julio and Plaza de Mayo, pounding drums, yelling slogans, waving banners. Genevieve was walking home near all this when a young "revolutionary" took a fat stack of flyers that he was supposed to be distributing and threw them up behind him. Unfortunately he was standing in a crowd of people and Genevieve was standing right behind him and caught the whole stack in her face. Then he walked off without apologizing. When she got home and described the carelessness and cluelessness of this kid and his stupid Rasta hat, I thought about The Rebel Sell.
The idea of this undoubtedly middle class suburban kid, littering the world with pamphlets which he may not even understand, and hurting someone in the process makes my blood boil. Is his self-righteous revolutionary ejaculation more important than another person walking down the street without getting literally hit in the face with his adopted ideology? Maybe it's because she was obviously "brainwashed by the system" and needed to be woken up out of her complacency. This must have been obvious to him because she was just walking by and not on the other side banging a gong and waving a red flag. But, of course, if everyone was over on the other side of the street, there wouldn't be anything to get worked up about anymore. If everyone was on the other side, that's the side that wouldn't seem as appealing to little revolutionaries anymore.
Just the fact this young firebrand would wear a Rasta hat (and lets make the safe bet he had Che patch on his person somewhere) shows that he has no problem with advertising an ideology that he couldn't possibly fully understand. Let us remember that liking Bob Marley and being a fire-and-brimstone Battyman-hating Rasta are NOT the same thing, and that thinking the Zapatistas look cool in their anarcho-ninja outfits is not the same as understanding Mao.
As you can tell, I thought The Rebel Sell was inspired and thought provoking, but I also found it somewhat infuriating. The tone is consistently arrogant and often didactic on subjects that scholars have been discussing for years. In the first chapter alone they blast through Frued, Marx, the hippies, situationism, punk, hip hop, workers struggle, autosugestion in advertising, even the movies American Beauty and Pleasantville.
All this slapdash coverage laced with snide commentary is bound to stumble, and it often does spectacularly. About the role of alcohol as a state sponsored stupefacient they say that the government "has fought against alcohol again and again" citing prohibition, and that "the claims made about LSD in the sixties are the same made about absinthe in the 20s". What prohibition, a social movement of the early twentieth century, or absinthe, a NARCOTIC (not just a form of alcohol) has to do with modern alcohol consumption I have no idea. And on the idea of Marihuana as a mind-expanding substance they simply say that no pothead could help with any revolution because "anyone who has ever spoken with a stoned person knows they are they most boring people in the world to talk with." Funny? Yes. But incredibly dismissive. I guess Terrence McKenna wasted his whole life work looking into this and we should just move on?
Another problem with the book is that it is so clearly aware of it's itended audience that it often seems insular. I understand that Heath and Potter are trying to reach the same college-age readers that lapped up No Logo and Adbusters, but they shouldn't exclude others. For example, they patiently take you though the theories of Frued and how they are regarded today, then turn around and drop references to "The infamous rave scene in the Matrix 2" totally unexplained. Sorry guys, but not all of us consider The Matrix trilogy to be a great cultural milestone (i.e. we're not all baked Canadians).
Overall the book is quite hilarious and quite worth reading. The best are it's respective trashings of American Beauty (it's the pot smoking counterculture vs. the sexually repressed gun toting facists all over again!), Easy Rider (self-indulgent white potheads liken themselves to black civil rights activists by being martyred in the deep south!), and Alanis Morrisette (she sings "thank you, India" as if the whole subcontinent will wave back and say "You're welcome, Alanis!"). These are worth the price of admission alone. I just hope those Evil American Imperialists will let this WMD over the border from the land of freedom and liberty to the North... (order here).