Between Marx and Coca-Cola

Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980

Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780857456854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études des enfants en sociologie

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."

Part I

Politics and Culture in the “Golden Age”

Chapter 1

Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties

Arthur Marwick

By the 1950s West European countries were beginning to enjoy some of the fruits of the affluence that had previously characterised only the United States, as recognized by the French historian Jean Fourastié with respect to the thirty glorious years between 1946 and 1975 or again by Eric Hobsbawm who describes “the golden age” between 1945 and 1973.¹ It took time for affluence to translate into the cultural transformations described in this book, and then only because affluence converged with other crucial demographic, technological, ideological and institutional factors. The most important of the demographic factors was the working through of the 1940s “baby boom,” which resulted in unprecedentedly high proportions of young people in all countries by the early sixties. Thanks to continuing economic growth these young people had equally unprecedented security and self-confidence. As other factors, which I shall discuss in detail in the course of the chapter, took effect, a universal youth culture began to take shape.

In the 1950s, prior to this convergence, Western societies, afflicted by the miasma of Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation, were profoundly convention-bound and conformist. The triumph of the Allies over the forces of Nazi brutality and obscurantism by the end of the Second World War, a triumph in which workers, peasants, women, resistance movements and partisans, colonial peoples and ordinary citizens participated, had held out the promise of a greatly changed postwar world; some reforms were implemented, which, particularly in the sphere of education, would eventually have significant results, but in the severe conditions of reconstruction, austerity and international tension, many of the hopes for change were frustrated. West European societies were preoccupied with their own problems; while American personnel and American customs might have been familiar (particularly in West Germany), as, of course, were American films and American popular music, American society itself might as well have been a million miles away, both its rampant consumerism and its family and school rituals, affecting adolescents in particular.² However, all Western societies did, in one way or another, share certain highly conservative characteristics, such as: rigid social codes and class distinctions; the subordination of women to men and children to parents; racism—standing out all the more starkly in America as a result of the few brave and isolated challenges to segregation taking place in the fifties, just perceptible on mainland Britain (where the non-white population was still tiny) in what was known as “the colour bar” imposed in employment, housing and leisure facilities, blatant in Northern Ireland where the indigenous Irish Catholics were treated as second-class citizens, and very apparent in the behaviour of the French towards the North Africans in their midst; repression, guilt and furtiveness in sexual attitudes and behavior, constantly overshadowed by the fear of pregnancy; unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law, and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem, all of this approaching hysterical dimensions in the United States during the McCarthyite era; a pronounced paternalism in the running of such “top-down” facilities for young people as youth clubs and youth hostels (one has only to reflect on the connotations of the German word, Herbergsvater), young people themselves being generally conformist and apolitical; a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes, strongly marked among young people and the prescribed and separate roles of young males and young females; dull and cliché-ridden popular culture, most notably in American popular music with its boring big bands and banal ballads, epitomised in the song, “Love and Marriage, Go together like a Horse and Carriage” (continental European countries were more successful than Britain in preserving indigenous traditions in popular music); a very haphazard distribution of the amenities of modern society, with only a few families in Western Europe with refrigerators or television sets, many without electricity, inside bathrooms, or even running water.³

By the mid 1970s transformations had taken place in all of these areas. Most tangibly, modern domestic conveniences and consumer goods were being enjoyed in the remoter rural areas of Western Europe, as well as in the big cities. The 1960s had been a decade of rising living standards and enhanced lifestyles, involving a much-remarked-upon growth in “consumerism”—a word widely and loosely used, less often defined; I use it to signify a condition in which relatively high levels of income throughout society make possible a high level of consumption of goods of all types, which go beyond basic necessities and include “modern conveniences,” “consumer goods” and “domestic luxuries,” and where, indeed, preoccupation with such consumption becomes a characteristic feature of society.” But the decade had also been one of political protest and violent confrontation, in which the main proponents were young people, particularly students; the events of 1968 had seemed to carry the threat of the overthrowal of established society and could be read as testimony to the politicization of a whole student generation. One of the most significant phenomena was the way in which students and other young people who were generally uninterested in politics and certainly resistant to radical and Marxist ideas became swept up in protest movements as they perceived the authorities, and particularly the police, as acting with illegitimate force (often trying to provoke the police into “demonstrating the illegitimacy of the capitalist system” as a deliberate tactic of certain student radicals).⁴ It must always be borne in mind that many students who demonstrated were concerned mainly with grievances against the university authorities, against the police, etc., rather than with overt political causes.

Before going any further, my notion of the cultural revolution of the long 1960s, the “long 1960s” running from roughly 1958 to roughly 1974, deserves elucidation and examination, as does the concept of a single, transnational youth culture: how far it was independent of the rest of society; how influential in determining the basic character of the “Cultural Revolution”; how far, if at all, subject to a basic tension between, say, consumerism and politicization. The final section of the chapter, prior to a brief conclusion, will look in more detail at relationships between young people and their elders, broadly arguing that, while there were instances of bitter confrontation, it is wrong to think in terms of a “conflict of generations.”

Too little attention is still given to the legislative enactments that were in fact among the culminating achievements of the cultural revolution. First in importance are the measures giving young people the vote at the age of eighteen, coming in 1974 in France and Italy, 1972 in West Germany and the United States, and 1968 in the United Kingdom; these scarcely betoken bitter hostility between the older generation and the younger, or a total disjunction between “youth culture” and the rest of society. It was during these same years in the early 1970s that crucial decisions were made with respect to the rights of women. In October and November 1972 the celebrated abortion trials took place at Bobigny on the outskirts of Paris, resulting in the de facto acquittal of the women concerned, in the cessation of all such prosecutions, and in the Abortion Law Reform of early 1975.⁵ The American Supreme Court ruling that made it clear that it was possible for abortions to be carried out legally was announced on 22 January 1973. In Italy, on 12 May 1974 a different referendum was passed when, to the surprise even of Socialist leader Pietro Nenni,⁶ 59.1 percent of Italian voters defied the Catholic Church to endorse the Divorce Law enacted in November 1969. Permissive attitudes and behavior throughout society, though not necessarily permissive legislation by governments, continued and expanded throughout the later 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and on into the twenty-first century. It seems to me apposite to perceive the cultural revolution itself as coming to an end around 1974, as it does to perceive it as having its beginnings in the late 1950s, when the phenomenon of the “affluent teenager” began to be noted, when the world view of “the beats” began to spread, when young people began to form music groups of their own to play skiffle and rock, when Mary Quant first began designing clothes specifically for the student-age group, when Herbert Marcuse and others integrated Marxist revolt with Freudian rejection of sexual repression, when postwar educational reforms were beginning to produce greater numbers of young people open to intellectual and cultural influences, when liberals recovered their faith in tolerance, democratic rights, and due process, and when a reaction began to develop against the stifling and authoritarian conventions and taboos of the earlier 1950s.⁷ Technological developments relating to travel and communications, the creation and diffusion of popular music, and the production of consumer goods were approaching critical mass. After the privations of the war and postwar periods, and as the postwar welfare reforms took effect, the process whereby young people were becoming sexually mature at an ever earlier age was again accelerating. As recovery gave way to affluence and some aspects of the Cold War faded, there was a revival of wartime aspirations; in some circles, among young and old, the spirit of protest was ignited over the threatened deployment of nuclear weapons and over neo colonialism in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia. Great historical transformations are not confined neatly to years or decades. It is a minor weakness in the excellent Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften⁸ that it sticks so rigidly to the decade of the 1960s, ignoring, in particular, the important developments of the early 1970s. And it should be noted that while, for reasons given, it is appropriate to perceive the transformations as actually beginning in the late 1950s, the year 1980 does not form a distinctive terminal point, the revolutionary changes that culminated in the early 1970s simply continuing steadily throughout the later 1970s and on towards the twenty-first century.

So what precisely were these “revolutionary developments”? First, it is essential to be clear on the fact that the cultural revolution was in no sense a revolution on the Marxist model, and indeed that there was never any possibility of such a revolution taking place. This consideration influences my conclusions about the long term significance of “politicization.” One can admire those young people who were determined to involve themselves in the major issues of the day and who demonstrated on behalf of what they believed to be right, but one has to recognize that they were completely mistaken in their faith that their actions would bring about the overthrow of “bourgeois” society—the great events of 1967/69 really had remarkably little in the way of long term consequences, and it is well worth noting that the senior Bonn diplomat, Ulrich Sahm, commented that while the student demonstrations did worry him, he considered the student movement “marginal” and of no danger to the existing political order.⁹ What actually did take place in the “long sixties” was something far more important, a revolution that transformed the lives of ordinary people, one that can most clearly be explicated by identifying seven distinct, but constantly interacting phenomena. The unprecedented influence exercised by young people, partly through a tiny minority of them becoming icons of the age, mainly through the spending power of the overwhelming majority in a new market entirely devised with them in mind, and through their being, in part at least, arbiters of taste in that market, was important, but we do have to understand that other phenomena developed largely independently of young people and that indeed these phenomena themselves operated as contextual influences on youth culture.

First in importance was the great profusion of new movements, new ideas, new social concerns and new forms of social participation, the passion for experimentation, for pushing matters to extremes, and for, of course, challenging established ways of doing things, exemplified by experimental drama, art, poetry and music groups, New Left, civil rights, anti war and environmental-protection movements, the philosophical pronouncements of the structuralists and post structuralists, the situationists and of Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary, in which excess was succeeded by still further excess. Closely associated with all of this were outbursts of entrepreneurialism, individualism, hedonism, doing you own thing, as seen in the founding of clubs, boutiques, pornographic magazines, etc., the development of uninhibited fashions (short skirts, long hair, for example) which defied convention and gloried in the natural attributes of the (youthful) human body. Second, and related to all of these, was an upheaval in personal and family relationships and in public and private morals, subverting the authority of men over women and parents over children, and entailing a general sexual liberation, involving “permissive” attitudes and behavior, and a refreshing frankness, openness, and indeed honesty in sexual matters.

And so, thirdly, we come back to the rise of the unprecedented influence of young people, most clearly expressed in the formation of a potent youth culture. Inextricably bound in with the forces of commercialism, this youth culture had a steadily increasing impact on the rest of society, dictating taste in fashion, music, and popular culture generally. The central component was pop/rock music, which became a kind of universal language, its performers being young in comparison with the crooners and band leaders of the 1950s, and the audiences mainly (though far from exclusively) being very young. “Youth,” in any case, was not monolithic: in respect to some developments one is talking of teenagers, with respect to others it may be a question of everyone under the age of thirty or so. Such was the growing prestige of youth and appeal of the youthful lifestyle that it became possible to remain “youthful” at more advanced ages than would ever have been thought proper in previous generations. While the origins of youth culture lay in America, the distinctive character it took on owed much to developments in the United Kingdom. Late in 1960 Mary Quant and her aristocratic partner, Alexander Plunkett-Green took their new youthful fashions to America. Responses ranged from astonishment that the staid English could produce anything like this, to a glimmering recognition that this new English fashion was poised for universal conquest. Life (5 December 1960), in a feature entitled “British Couple’s Kooky Styles,” remarked on the shortness of the skirts (in fact they went up to just below the knee. Quant did not introduce miniskirts to the world until 1964). Women’s Wear Daily was more percipient: “These Britishers have a massive onslaught of talent, charm and mint-new ideas.” Anticipating the way in which Mary Quant fashions would soon be a vital part of American youth culture, the American teenage magazine Seventeen prepared a special Mary Quant spring promotion.¹⁰ For nearly forty years now everybody has known everything there is to know about the Liverpool group, The Beatles (consisting of three working-class lads, and lower-middle-class John Lennon). However, a special insight into the appeal of the group, and of their kind of music—in this case to a young adult—is contained in a letter, written (on 3 January 1964) by a Cambridge academic re...