[Culture As Politics]
I have never thought of myself as particularly political, and during my year at Pittsburgh my political consciousness neither increased nor decreased from previous years. I participated in a day long march from the University area to the Golden Triangle, along with many of the history department's faculty members and thousands of other persons. But the major political change for me was a change in the nature of my political consciousness. I had always thought of politics almost exclusively as political party activities, and--under the intellectual impact of the liberal Pitt faculty--I came to realize politics as a culture, of which party politics was a small component. I would not say that my understanding of this was complete; it was, at best, begun. I did not have the life-experience and contact with different cultures to realize what fully politics was. Nonetheless, S_ H_ and D_ M_ in particular, considerably widened my sense of how power was distributed in society. I recall many conversations about subcultures. D_ was interested in the cultures of laborers, and speculated analytically about creation of culture among miners at the mine face. These work-generated cultures would then manifest themselves in social activities and practice, as reference values, organization of the miners attitudes generally. Eventually, such cultures showed themselves in political partisan and voting behaviors.
I suppose that the best label for my own cluster of political values would be "democratic socialist;" more or less as defined by Michael Harrington, whose writings articulated pretty precisely my political sense in the late 1960s. I think I recall M_'s views accurately in his seeing socialism as growing organically out of work and ethnicity. I suppose that was a modified Marxism; at all events, I was powerfully impressed by this sort of political analysis. My own political values were reinforced, and my understand of history greatly deepened.
Later, much later, as I have begun to lecture about political history, I would come to understand that my concern about the basic importance of values in society and an individual's life was an internalization of the conservative reaction against liberalism [communism?] after WWII. I did not understand this in the 1960s, even though I realized that concern about values was a major part of left-liberal reaction against the war [against communism and fascism?] and in extending economic democracy to underprivileged groups. Kenneth Kenniston's two books on committed and uncommitted youth and the protests of the 1960s were avidly read by me when they came out and the concern about values was central to them.
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Politics Is A Window
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