I was born in Oxford in 1967 – during the fabled ‘Summer of Love’! My parents were (and remain) ‘Hippies’ – but a Hippy is not necessarily what the Bourgeois media defined them to be! Enemy within? – definitely! Only an enemy within? – definitely not! Hippies were many things – including Marxist-Leninists and Maoists! Many opposed the Vietnam War and supported Ho Chi Minh! You can watch the British public ‘attacking’ the US Embassy in London during the late 1960s in protest to the Vietnam War! Many Hippies tried a new approach very similar to that advocated by the Italian Socialist – Antonio Gramsci! If everybody simply chose not to be ‘capitalist’ here and now – then the ‘capitalist’ system would collapse straightaway due to having no active participants! The Revolution in this case would be one of ‘non-participation’ – but herein lies the problem. Marx and Engels did consider this approach but thought its success was unlikely due to its Anarchist tendency. Workers would probably be divided on how this process would unfold and inevitably end-up betraying one another and fighting for leverage and self-interests, etc! The collective aspect of Scientific Socialism would not be followed and there would be no effective unified action!
And yet Marx admitted it could be effective if things did spontaneously move in the correct direction! Hippies could have been the vanguard of an entirely new chapter in Marxist-Leninist Thought – if only they had, as a group, identified with ‘Marxist-Leninism’ – rather than a vague (drug-induced) opposition to predatory capitalism and hard work! Socialism cannot be built by a population of artificially induced (and inward-looking) Hippies who have no interest in the material world or the operation of its physical processes! The workers must seize the means of production and use those means for their own benefit! Simply disengaging from the process and stating the ‘means of production’ are a Bourgeois myth (Cannabis Socialism) does not change anything in the outer world – and leaves the ideological battlefield firmly in the hands of the class enemies! Hippies could have changed the Western world – but they had their (once in a lifetime) chance and resolutely failed! Many Hippies today are staunch supporters of the Bourgeois Establishment they once rejected and look back at the 1960s as being some type of self-indulgent mistake!
The Beatles were beaten up during their 1966 tour of the Catholic dominated Philippines by order of the Vatican – due to their out-spoken opposition to the Vietnam War and US aggression in the region (the Americans had established a Catholic Dictatorship in the Puppet State of South Vietnam)! During their tour of Japan just previous to arriving in the Land of Marcos tyranny and brutality – The Beatles had been threatened by US-supported ultra-nationalists! These Japanese Imperialists had murdered millions throughout Asia during the 1930s and 1940s – but the Americans had quickly rehabilitated these racist thugs following the 1949 Socialist Revolution in China! Japanese (fascist) racism was different to Catholic theology – but it achieved exactly the same anti-Socialist ends! Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the Catholic thugs singled-out Brian Epstein (the Manager of The Beatles) – for particularly intense (physical) beatings due to him being Jewish! Indeed, this abuse caused an illness that Brian Epstein would eventually die from during 1967 – just a year later! The usually passive George Harrison was beaten so badly that he said afterwards that if he possessed a nuclear bomb – he would unhesitatingly drop it on the Philippines!
In many ways this story of The Beatles exemplifies the era (and contradictions) inherent in the 1960s! There were definitely Revolutionary (dialectical) forces in operation not just in the West – but throughout the world! Paul McCartney would pen a song entitled ‘Back in the USSR’ (about a Cold War Soviet spy returning from service in the US – where he understood just how ‘bad’ life is for the average person living under capitalism) and John Lennon would write a song entitled ‘Revolution’ – and record at least 18 versions of it within which he ‘might’ or ‘might not’ support a violent ‘Revolution’ depending upon how he felt on the day! The anti-Chinese Yoko Ono would influence John Lennon ‘away’ from his support for Chairman Mao – and lead to his odd comments in one of the takes! Like all hideously wealthy people the world over (who can ‘pay’ to solve systemic problems in their immediate environment) – John Lennon often adopted the fallacious argument of the ‘idealist’ whereby simply changing inner thought forms is considered enough to change outer material reality! Of course, it can be argued that as he got older his understanding matured and he moved more toward a conventional ‘Socialist’ perspective – probably as his relationship with Yoko Ono faltered and they transitioned nearer to divorce. The May Pang interlude was probably far more indicative of his maturing attitudes than most people would like to admit. Whatever the case, when he was murdered in 1980 – he and Yoko Ono were near to a permanent break – but when John Lennon died, Yoko Ono more or less inherited ALL his Beatles Estate despite only being present right near the end (primarily during 1969) and considered responsible for the ‘split’!
THE SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 