THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
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However, despite these promising. expressions of social desire, by the
end of the decade the social potentiality of this renewed desire remained
unfulfilled. Between the early sixties and the Woodstock years, crucial tensions
inherent within the new social movements in both the U.S, and in Europe
came to the surface. Tensions between ‘individualism’ and ‘individuality’,
tensions between an ardent egoism and a sense of selfhood grounded in a
wider social consciousness and commitment emerged, making the movement
susceptible to commercial appropriation. There is, indeed, always a tendency
for social desire to Break off from the social and political project, expressing
itself through cultural practices that emphasize individual satisfaction over the
political project to liberate society as a whole. The tendency toward ‘me-ism’,
so endemic to liberal capitalism in general, makes any qualitatively oriented
social movement potential grist for the capitalist mill: the potential desire for
social and political opposition is too often corralled into the desire for
pseudo-oppositional fashion, music, and other expressions of life-style.18
In the case of anarchism, this tension may be attributed, in part, to an
historical and unresolved relationship to the social contract theory of such
classical liberals as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and to the individualistic
existentialism of Nietzsche. While social anarchism emphasizes the idea of an
individual dependent upon and constitutive of a social whole, there exists
among some anarchists, a liberal and existential tendency to view the
individual as prior to, or independent of, the collective. And paradoxically, the
individualist tendency within anarchism resonates with the liberal capitalist
subject: an individual committed to promoting its own self-interest and
pleasure. Hence, challenging the Marxian emphasis on production and need,
an anarchist impulse surfaced within the new social movements in the U.S. and
Europe, giving rise to a renewed expression of social desire. However, as the
decade wore on, the dialectic of need and desire was upstaged by the dialectic
between individualism and cooperation, a dialectic that yielded finally to a
grossly commodified Woodstockian counter-culture based on individualistic
cultural indulgence.
Yet, while the new social movements of the sixties were unable to fully
actualize their potential to sustain and elaborate a truly politicized expression
of social desire, they did achieve some remarkable feats. Critical of modern
post-war society, the new social movements offered an approach to qualitative
questions that was quite progressive in nature. Instead of blaming ‘humanity’,
or a failed consciousness for social and cultural malaise, figures like James
Baldwin, Murray Bookchin, and groups like the SI identified problems of
economic and political structure, while ^attending to qualitative themes of
desire, creativity, and love’.