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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 178 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Woodstock
The highly hyped and over-priced event last month desperately tried to recreate the spirit of the original Woodstock, which took place 25 years ago in August 1969.
Then, the most famous of all music festivals drew up to half a million people, making it the third largest city in the state of New York at the time. For three days and nights hundreds of thousands of young people listened to the musical greats of the era – Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who.
Woodstock was only one of around 40 music festivals organised that year. The decade had seen an explosion of social unrest and political organisation as civil rights protesters, anti-war campaigners and student activists rocked the US establishment.
In the summer of 1968 the revolutionary Black Panther party was selling over 100,000 copies of its newspaper, while opinion polls showed it had the great respect of over a quarter of the black population in the US, and over 43 percent of blacks under 21. Hundreds of thousands had marched in demonstrations against the war.
So where does Woodstock fit into all this? In a very important sense it was a continuation of protest. It was an overtly anti-Vietnam War festival. The peace and love message carried by musicians and audience alike could be a political starting point from which to attack the US state.
Hundreds of thousands of young people gathered together with no police or state troopers and there was no violence, no one was attacked or murdered. People walked around naked and no one was raped; drugs were openly used in great quantity but nobody died of an overdose. It was a gesture of challenge to the rules of morality which govern society.
Compared to Woodstock ’94 it was in a different league. Anyone who went in 1969 identified in some way with the dissatisfaction abroad then.
But in another very important sense Woodstock, and the other music festivals organised that year, were signs of the protest movements losing their way, a retreat into counter-culturalism. For many of its backers, Woodstock showed that you didn’t have to challenge the system, you could simply ‘drop out’ of it and create your own. You didn’t need political ideas here. When Abbie Hoffman, a leader of the Yippies who argued for revolution, tried to give a speech he was shoved off stage to – according to Rolling Stone – the cheers of the crowd.
The idea that you could create your own environment without challenging the system was severely jolted within months of Woodstock. The Altamont rock festival ended in violence and the death of an 18-year-old black man, stabbed to death by security guards. Less than a year later, on 4 May 1970, a student protest at Kent State University ended when National Guards shot and killed four unarmed students and injured nine others.
Woodstock was a great gathering of young people in protest, a token of their wish to live in a different sort of world. But although they are important, it takes more than tokens to create that world.
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