ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
78
Finding their roots in the Old Left, the anti-war, civil rights, women’s, and
Situationist movements were able to circumvent degrees of abstraction and
romanticization that undermine the potential of the radical ecology and
mainstream
environmental movements
today.
Indeed,
the
SI was not
constrained by a backward-looking critique of modernity, a critique that
juxtaposed an idealized rural past to an inherently flawed and fallen city.
Instead, they proposed a reclamation of all that was liberatory within the
modem city,
a celebration of self-determination and poetry that could
reinvigorate an urban life eviscerated not by ‘modernity’ and ‘technology’, but
by state bureaucracy and capitalism. Bypassing a regressive anti-modernism,
the new social movements offered a bold expression of social desire: a
demand for new liberatory structures infused with sensuality and empathy
rather than a sentimental plea to return to a pre-fallen world.
FEMiNiST Eros: SECONcl-WAVE DESiRE
While the theme of desire was articulated within ‘mixed’ movements of the
New Left, it was steadily being developed by an emerging radical feminist
movement as well. Like social
anarchism,
feminists
of the New Left
demonstrated the need to transform the qualitative as well as the quantitative
dimensions of society. Departing from their liberal feminist predecessors and
contemporaries, a new breed of radical feminists sought more than just
material and institutional justice and equality with men within the present
society. In addition to justice, they demanded a free society in which women
could create themselves anew on a qualitative level, innovating new forms of
aesthetics, political organizing, theory, and sensuality.
As we have seen earlier, the second wave of feminism emerged within
the context of the New Left, which at its inception was dominated by a
needs-oriented approach to social change. And, while an anarchist dimension
emerged within the New Left, there also flourished the influence of Marxism,
Maoism,
and
other forms
of socialist thought, yielding a rationalized,
instrumental approach to politics that alienated many women within the
movement. While leftist politicos fought for the satisfaction of material need,
women were often told that the more qualitative changes that they sought
were irrelevant to the ‘big work” of revolution.
Women grew critical of the contradictions between the New Left’s values
of equality and the hierarchical structures that characterized a majority of New
Left organizations. The new student movement, positioning its materialist goals
within the realm of necessity, often rationalized the deployment of hierarchical
and authoritarian means to execute its plans for achieving justice.
Here the
relationship between needs and authority surfaced as the preoccupation with
filling urgent ‘necessary’ needs led to an ends justifies the means approach to