“Human sacrifices are made every day to this idol of the idiots: the car power,” read the 1965 statement from countercultural Dutch anarchists and performance artists who called themselves the Provotariaat.
Long before Ulez, the 15-minute cities and Just Stop Oil, the Provos (nothing to do with Irish republicanism, it hardly needs to be said) were trying to end what one called “the asphalt terror of the motorized masses.” mentioned.
The Provos argued that the center of Amsterdam should be closed to cars and that an armada of white-painted bicycles should flood the city. The bicycles would be unlocked to enable the “first free public transport”.
The initiative was clearly not suitable for the Amsterdam police. They argued that “the bicycles were not locked and therefore gave rise to theft” and removed them.
These and more events served, in that ugly verb, to problematize authority and consumer society, Joachim C Häberlen argues in this amiable and comprehensive history of countercultural European agitators, including the feminists of Greenham Common, the enragés of Paris ’68, the Prague Plastic People of the Universe, and, my favorites, the Polish dwarf fetishizing Orange Alternative.
Karl Marx was old-fashioned, many of these groups thought: not religion was the opiate of the masses, but consumer capitalism in general and the cult of the car in particular. “The asphyxiation of carbon monoxide is its incense,” the provotariat argued.
The traditional heroes of Marxism, the proletariat, were indeed no longer suitable for revolutionary purposes, argued Herbert Marcuse, doyen of the New Left in his 1964 bestseller. One-dimensional person. Subaltern groups—people of color, women, homosexuals, hippies, and anyone who longs to live outside the constraints of white supremacist heteronormative capitalist norms—could step into the breach left by the working class.
It was these groups, Häberlen argues, who revolutionized Europe by fighting for legal abortions, gay rights and decent treatment of ‘illegal’ immigrants and refugees, and in other ways targeting men on both sides of the Iron Curtain to paste.
The Orange Alternative mobilized the power of absurdity. On walls whitewashed by authorities to cover up anti-state slogans during strikes and martial law in early 1980s Poland, Waldemar Fydrych and his comrades painted small red dwarf figures. The police beat him up for this outrage before asking, “What is it with midgets?” “I want a revolution,” he replied, bruised but deadpan. ‘A revolution of dwarves.’
Riots are a joyful event if you do it right, argued a 1960s West Berlin group called Fighters of the Erupting Sado-Marxist International.
Fydrych and his friends handed out red paper hats to passersby, while others danced, played guitars and sang: “We are the dwarfs/ Hop sa sa/ Hop sa sa/ Our houses are covered in mushrooms.” “Anyone who does not take off their special hat must show their identity papers,” a police officer said into a megaphone. Once again the police lost the plot.
Häberlen’s suggestion is that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was made more likely by such micro-demonstrations of state folly. He might be right. But flower power and cross-border liberation can turn into oppression – and worse. In a chapter on street violence and terrorism, Häberlen concludes that rather than imagining a different world, people like the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction in Germany and the Italian Red Brigades “began to reflect the state, its language and institutions.”
Häberlen straddles the sliding scale of countercultural protest – from putting flowers in soldiers’ guns on the one hand to political murder on the other. In the middle he finds the euphoria of fighting in the street. Riots are a joyful event if you do it right, argued a 1960s West Berlin group called Fighters of the Erupting Sado-Marxist International. Their greatest pleasure was destroying what made life unbearable: “Commodities, cars, concrete traffic, fragmented time…”
Much of its focus is on Germany, meaning there’s a long, moving analysis of Berlin’s techno scene, for example, but nothing on the almost contemporary British rave culture of the 80s, although the latter was no less antinomian.
Some of his analysis feels a bit worn and symbolic. Chapter 11, for example, is about women’s and gay movements, which bring together different forms of struggle. That said, his analysis of the women’s peace camp in Greenham, which opposed the deployment of cruise missiles in Berkshire from 1981 to 2000, is beautiful and moving, not only for its analysis of nonviolent political protest, but also for its realization that these feminists were doing something have done. extraordinary in Thatcher’s Britain, creating a strange space where women could try out practical alternatives to living beyond the warring ideologies of the Cold War superpowers.
He is also very good at squatting and writes passionately about those who have moved into abandoned buildings in neighborhoods near the Berlin Wall and experimented with collective living. In Kreuzberg this meant setting up long tables on the street for communal meals, abolishing private rooms and undermining the traditional bourgeois family. Hell for some, a vision of heaven for others.
What is the legacy of these movements? On the one hand, Häberlen rightly points out that, far from overthrowing capitalism, they helped it mutate and survive because their anti-hierarchical ideas helped change work culture. Instead of offering keys to executive washrooms, companies are now inspiring loyalty with supposedly democratic bean bags and breakout zones.
And yet there is still something inspiring in the aspirations of many countercultural protests, Häberlen argues. As? “A world without sexist and racist discrimination, a world that protects and values nature instead of exploiting it for profit, a world in which residents have the right to their city, to affordable housing and public space.”
He has a point: imagine cities without locks on bikes, cars or front doors, with public spaces where you can take a seat without having to buy things and where you might meet people outside your echo chambers. A dream perhaps, but one that still sounds worth fighting for, even beautiful.
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Beauty is on the streets: protest and counterculture in post-war Europe by Joachim C Häberlen is published by Allen Lane (£35). In support of the Guardian And Observer Order your copy at Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply