Social Activism In The 1960s And 1970's

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Recommended: Conformity and counterculture in 1950s America

The 1960s and 1970s were a period of counterculture in the Western world and a time in which anti-establishment sentiments flourished. This cultural phenomenon first sprouted in the United States and the United Kingdom and quickly spread throughout the Western world between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. This generation is often regarded as the protest generation, where people battled the government for issues such as civil rights, women’s and gay rights and the end of the Vietnam War. Simultaneously this period saw the emergence of new intellectual movements of social revolutionaries, such as the New Left and the Situationist International, which developed in response to the political and economic crises of this time. Part of the development …show more content…

In this essay I want to analyze how capitalism, in this case in the form of the American entertainment industry, has manifested itself in society and become the ultimate weapon of social oppression. I will argue that the American entertainment industry is the embodiment of the capitalist system of oppression because it provides people delightful relief from their daily worries while simultaneously binding them forcefully with the capitalist shackles of consumerism. The first part of this essay will provide an overview of the theories used. The second part will use these theories to analyze how the entertainment industry works as an oppressive mechanism. The essay will also briefly touch upon the subject of how the age of technology has enforced this mechanism and made the entertainment industry even stronger and …show more content…

In his book One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964) Marcuse argues that the advanced industrial society has created a system of false needs that incorporated people in the capitalist system of consumerism through tools like the media and advertising. Marcuse forcefully criticizes this system of false needs because he believes that it is a new form of social control. He argues that this system creates a “one-dimensional” universe of thoughts, behavior, and satisfactions that takes away the possibilities for critical thought and oppositional ideas and behavior. Furthermore Marcuse argues in his book that the system we currently live in is actually authoritarian because it forces people to behave in a certain way; that is to conform to the capitalist system. Non-conformity is not an option because we are all consumers. The way this system is set up will lead people to act irrationally, according to Marcuse, since they will work more than necessary to satisfy their basic needs and look for social relations through commodities. Additionally, there is a never-ending creation of new products, which constantly produces new “needs” and forces people to work harder and harder so that they can keep consuming. This way people become trapped in the system of

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