As a commie who lived in Williamsburg when it was still cool . . . .I feel entitled to repost this response here.
The superstructure of the hipster era saw all towns become Brooklyn, as gentrification and twee commodities invaded the space of all non-Boomer adults.
Now, this is course is a reflection of the underlying material reality, where the proletariat is increasingly being concentrated in knowledge cities, while the petit bourgeois have been left to their pool dealerships in the exurbs. And as we know, superstructure follows base to reinforce it (we do know this, right)?
In this case, the Brooklyn superstructure serves to deepen the divide of the proletariat and petite-bourgeois, enabling the large bourgeois tech titans to continue to privatize all space as the culture war continues.
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I’ve been reading “The Portable Beat Reader” because I’m unfamiliar with the Beat generation authors and this broad survey (with biographical details) is a great overview.
The Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Boroughs, Snyder, Dylan, et al) were the direct predecessors to the hippies. It is fascinating to see how similar the struggles and concerns of the Beats (and later, beatniks) were compared with today. And they, likewise, were seeing close comparisons to the 1920s and the Lost Generation of writers.
But equally fascinating is seeing how they failed. Kerouac could see the problems in America, but only had his own very limited viewpoint to understand it. He saw it as a personal, spiritual problem, and saw travel as the solution to it. There’s a lot of good intent and theory lost in car-brained, hyper-atomized praxis that ultimately didnt have the power to change society. Instead, their work was coopted by the hippies, who transformed a diverse and scattered proliterian movement into a poverty aesthetic and identity.
It’s also insane to try and untangle the mess of other concerns. They were all largely patriarchal and misogynistic. Homosexuality and queerness were part of it but not integrated and not championed by the straight writers. There was a lot of gross youth fetishization too, from idolizing overly young girls to just straight up pedo stuff. (Boroughs writes about wanting to “buy a boy” in South America.)
If anything, all this should teach leftists that aesthetics and identity are not routes to revolution but distractions from it that are easily coopted by capital. Without addressing practical and material concerns, it’s all just snake-oil and platitudes.
Because they were tied to the hippies and gays, people don’t seem to realize that Kerouac was a conservative.
And hippies in a large way. In The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (also featuring Cassidy) they describe how Kesey basically equates left-wing political movements as Mussolini and helps castrate the American Left.
