A-Infos (en) Canada, Anarchist Journal, Linchpin #1 - Culture>> Poking Holes In History + Counter Culture And The Left

Poking Holes In History - After visiting the Hamilton Workers’ Art and Heritage 
Centre, Alex D finds that writing History is as much a site of class struggle as 
the shop floor. Remembering the resistance and victories of working class people 
that have come before us reminds us that a better world is possible and helps us 
imagine how together we might bring about this better world. Even in defeat, our 
struggles are never truly defeated as long as the memory of resistance is 
preserved. From it we can draw lessons that will shape our strategies and 
tactics in future struggles against exploitation, poverty and oppression. This 
is why those who get richer everyday off our work wish to erase the memory of 
our struggles. And so our history textbooks and museums tell us that history is 
made by our rulers, the supposedly great Prime Ministers, big industrialists and 
other rich white men.

But our struggles have poked holes in this lie. An important example is the 
trade-union run Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton. Located in 
the historic North End working class neighbourhood, the WAHC is the only 
national organization dedicated to preserving workers' history and culture. The 
building itself has a rich working class history, from 1858 to 1995 it served as 
a federal customs house, a home, a school and textile factory. Inside, the main 
attraction is the gallery space where historical and contemporary exhibits 
developed by the WAHC are displayed. Current exhibits include: Punching the 
Clock: Working in Canadian Factories from the 1840s to the 1980s and Made in 
Hamilton Industrial Trail which takes you through the history of working class 
life in Hamilton in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The WAHC also organizes traveling exhibits across the country. A number of 
exhibits are currently on the road including "...and still I rise!" A History of 
African-Canadian Workers in Ontario, 1900 to Present. Virtual displays are also 
available and can be accessed at www.virtualmuseum.ca (enter WAHC in the search 
engine). The exhibit Highway Workplace: The Canadian Trucker's Story is 
currently available online. Other activities and services offered include 
educational group tours at $3.00 per person; inter-active educational programs 
for students in elementary and high school; a research service that helps union 
locals write down their history; and space rental for events and meetings.

A visit to the WAHC reminds us that it has always been us, the working class, 
who have built and nourished our communities and made them decent places to 
live. And we are also reminded of the awesome power that we have when we 
organize together to resist those who exploit and oppress us.

DIRECTIONS>> WAHC is located at 51 Stuart Street, Hamilton, Ontario. Public 
visiting hours are from 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Saturday. Staff can be reached at 
905.522.3003 or by email at wahc@wahc-museum.ca
------------------------------

Counter Culture And The Left

The Rebel Sell authors set themselves the task of attacking an idea of counter 
culture they see at the heart of social movements, so is that why the cover has 
a summit protester in gun sight wonders James Redmond

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed 
(Harper Collins, 2004)

Potter and Heath are right that counter cultural rebellion can sometimes suck 
energy away from making "concrete improvements in people's lives," by providing 
excuses for not engaging mass society but their counter cultural imagination is 
limited to MTV, Adbusters, a host of mainstream Hollywood movies, the authors' 
own dashed ex-punk background, Kurt Cobain 's suicide notes and anything mall 
rat in between.

And despite their stated central preoccupation they ignore well articulated 
differences between “sub cultures” and “counter cultures.” You see sub cultures 
hang under the mainstream's belly, dependent on it and lacking a real critique. 
Counter cultures at least try to foster alternative values and ways of being to 
replace a dominant culture - so one contains at least some revolutionary 
purpose, the other doesn't. This failure to distinguish gives the authors an 
easy job of ripping into a series of piss poor straw men.

There is no discussion of the very real and needed role of counter cultural 
forms in political movements. How could they have overlooked the IWW's folk song 
tradition, the working man's clubs of the UK and Ireland or the foot ball 
leagues and community groups of pre-Nazi German social democracy - were these 
too just "pseudo rebellions" to be ignored?

Alongside this historic blind sight, they completely skip the well trod over 
subjective reasons for engagement in counter cultures. Still funnily enough they 
note how an awful lot of school yard bullying stopped once they and their nerdy 
friends went punk. Counter cultures can be a very ordinary thing, a form of self 
defence or de-marcation of space, you only have to think of struggles around 
silly work uniform rules or piss ant fussy supervisors having their authority 
eroded by a shop floor black humor.

Really the book does contain some great pop culture writing, but the attempt to 
weave it into a general theory of counter culture falls a little flat, even if 
their reason for writing it comes from a decent impulse, that is; movements that 
define themselves by being on the margins of society, will stay there.

Much of the weight of their book is just a re-hash of Thomas Frank's quip that 
"ever since the 1960's hip has been the native tongue of advertising." The 
authors claim to "shatter central myths" turns out to be just restating the 
obvious with much weaker conclusions. They themselves do not want to "eliminate 
the game, but level the playing field" and so call for traditional social 
democratic measures to over come market failures. They even suggest bans on 
cosmetic surgery, ignoring how thwarted society really is by contemporary forms 
of alienation in their call for a rewind to the '50's.

Face it anything that opens with the claim that Adbusters selling Blackspot 
sneakers was a “turning point for western civilization” is bound to piss you off 
along the way. With sky scrapers of argumentation erected on foundations of 
sand, the Rebel Sell smacks of a pair of grad student academic enfant terribles 
- the perfect stuff for drunken conversations, mindlessly frustrating yet deeply 
challenging to your own steadfast opinion.

CHECK EM OUT>> Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self (on google 
video..) which looks at the harnessing of new lifestyles created in the 1960’s 
to brands that sell dreams over products and Thomas Frank’s book The Conquest of 
Cool, the original political economy of hip.
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