ABSTRACT
When John Lennon first sang Revolution in 1968, one of the most culturally rich periods of recent history, his message disappointed many who considered themselves revolutionary. Lennon was complaining about ‘minds that hate’ and demanding to be counted out if the talk was about the ‘destruction’ of the institutions. ‘You better free your mind instead.’ Thus, another key figure of the ’68 movement, John Hoyland, responded to Revolution by writing an open letter to Lennon which was published in the October 27 issue of the Black Dwarf. This letter firmly states that a ‘repressive, vicious, authoritarian system’ must be ‘ruthlessly destroyed’. And this is, the letter continues, not a matter of ‘spiritual undernourishment’. Thus Lennon is advised to look at the society around him and ask himself: why? ‘Now, do you see what was wrong with Revolution? That record was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary.’ To which Lennon answers with another ferocious open letter that starts with ‘Dear John’:
As such, the ‘Dear John’ letters embody a disjunctive synthesis of two camps within the ’68 movement: a left wing radicalism that emphasizes ‘destruction’ and a hippy spirituality that preferred ‘love’. ‘Minds that hate’ versus ‘all you need is love’; hatred without love versus love without hatred. And the rest is, more or less, a well-known history of hostile backlash against radicalism. Thus, since 1968, the radical nihilist aspects of May ’68 have repeatedly, like an obsessive compulsive ritual, provoked a bitter, moralizing critique that invokes the impossibility of ‘revolution’. But, on the other hand, the critique of May ’68 has been assimilated, domesticated and thus accommodated by a consumer capitalism that can effortlessly trade in ‘alternative’ life-styles, even perversion, as long as it sells. In a sense, therefore, the political hatred of the event went hand in hand with its digestion in consumerism. A revamped search for authority coupled with a reduction of May ’68 to a hedonistic, carnivalesque pseudoevent.
