[This survey of counterculture protest in late 20th century Europe
offers readers a look at a set of movements that are fondly
remembered, but that also deserve to be far better known. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PLASTIC PEOPLE, PEDAL POWER AND THE STRENGTH OF PROTEST  
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Stuart Jeffries
November 20, 2023
The Guardian
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_ This survey of counterculture protest in late 20th century Europe
offers readers a look at a set of movements that are fondly
remembered, but that also deserve to be far better known. _

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_Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War
Europe  _
Joachim C Häberlen
Allen Lane
ISBN-13: 978-0241479377

“Human sacrifices are made daily to this idol of the idiots: car
power,” went the statement issued in 1965 by countercultural Dutch
anarchists and performance artists calling themselves the Provotariat.

Long before Ulez, 15-minute cities
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and Just Stop Oil, the Provos (nothing, it hardly needs saying, to do
with Irish republicanism) were trying to end what one of them called
“the asphalt terror of the motorised masses”.

The Provos argued Amsterdam city centre should be closed to cars and
an armada of bicycles all painted white
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should flood the city. The bikes would be unlocked to provide the
“first free communal transport”.

The initiative clearly didn’t compute for Amsterdam’s cops. They
argued that “the bicycles were not locked and therefore invited
theft” and removed them.

These and more happenings served, in that ugly verb, to problematise
authority and consumer society, argues Joachim C Häberlen in this
amiable and vast history of countercultural European agitators
including the feminists of Greenham Common, the enragés of Paris
’68, Prague’s Plastic People of the Universe
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and, my favourites, Poland’s dwarf-fetishising Orange Alternative.
Karl Marx was out of date, thought many of these groups: it wasn’t
religion that was the opiate of the masses, but consumer capitalism in
general and the cult of the car in particular. “Choking carbon
monoxide is its incense,” argued the Provotariat.

Indeed, the traditional heroes of Marxism, the proletariat, were no
longer fit for revolutionary purpose, argued Herbert Marcuse, doyen of
the New Left in his 1964 bestseller _One-Dimensional Man_. Subaltern
groups – people of colour, women, gay people, hippies and anybody
yearning to live beyond the strictures of white supremacist
heteronormative capitalist norms – could step into the breach the
working class had left.

It was these groups, Häberlen argues, who revolutionised Europe by
fighting for legal abortions, gay rights, decent treatment of
“illegal” immigrants and refugees, and otherwise stuck it to the
man on both sides of the iron curtain.

The Orange Alternative mobilised the power of absurdity. On walls
whitewashed by the authorities to cover up anti-state slogans during
strikes and martial law in early 1980s Poland, Waldemar Fydrych and
his mates painted little red dwarf figures. Police beat him up for
this outrage before asking: “What is it with dwarves?” “I want a
revolution,” he replied, bruised but deadpan. “A revolution of
dwarves.”

Fydrych and his friends distributed paper red hats to passersby while
others danced, played guitars and sang: “We are the dwarves/ Hop sa
sa/ Hop sa sa/ Our houses are under mushrooms.” “Anybody who
doesn’t take off their special hats must show their ID papers,”
said a police officer into a megaphone. Once more the cops had lost
the plot.

Häberlen’s suggestion is that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was
made more likely by such micro-demonstrations of state silliness. He
may well be right. But flower power and transgressive liberation could
mutate into oppression – and worse. In a chapter on street violence
and terrorism, Häberlen concludes that rather than envisioning a
different world, the likes of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction
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in Germany and Italy’s Red Brigades
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“began to mirror the state, its language and institutions”.

Häberlen is good on the sliding scale of countercultural protest –
from putting flowers in soldiers’ rifles on the one hand to
political murder on the other. In the middle, he finds the euphoria of
fighting in the street. Rioting is a joyful event if you are doing 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 his focus is on Germany, which means, for instance, there is a
long, gripping analysis of Berlin’s techno scene, but nothing on its
near contemporary Britain’s 80s rave culture, though the latter was,
if anything, no less antinomian.

Some of his analysis does feel a bit threadbare and tokenistic.
Chapter 11 is about women and gay movements, for instance, shoehorning
different struggles together. That said, his analysis of Greenham
women’s peace camp, which from 1981 until 2000 opposed the
stationing of cruise missiles in Berkshire, is wonderful and touching,
not just for its analysis of non-violent political protest, but for
realising that these feminists did something extraordinary in
Thatcher’s Britain, creating a queer space where women could try out
practical alternatives to living beyond the feuding ideologies of cold
war superpowers.

He’s very good too on squatting, writing passionately about those
that moved into derelict buildings in neighbourhoods near the Berlin
Wall and experimented in collective living. In Kreuzberg, this
involved putting up long tables in the streets for communal meals,
abolishing private rooms and undermining the traditional bourgeois
family. Hell for some, but a vision of heaven for others.

What is the legacy of these movements? On one hand, Häberlen rightly
points out that, far from overthrowing capitalism, they helped it
mutate and survive, since their anti-hierarchical ideas helped change
work culture. Instead of offering keys to executive washrooms,
companies now instil loyalty with putatively democratic beanbags and
breakout zones.

And yet there is still something inspiring about the aspirations of
much countercultural protest, argues Häberlen. Such as? “A world
without sexist and racist discrimination, a world that protects and
values nature rather than exploiting it for profit, a world in which
residents have a 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 being
required to buy stuff and where you might encounter people beyond your
echo chambers. A dream, perhaps, but one that still sounds worth
fighting for, even beautiful.

 

* Protest
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* Counterculture
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* Postwar World War II Europe
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