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...Oz 28, the School Kids issue, with its notorious comic strip of a priapic Rupert Bear and full page photo of a miniskirted schoolgirl captioned "jail bait of the month" ?

"The case of Schoolkids Oz", a well informed and thoughtful historical essay by David Buckingham, has certainly helped me think about this particular moment in British history. I agree with the author that the legacy of the Oz trial and the British counterculture more generally is mixed; we can look back and see both appalling sexism and a laudable sexual emancipation, protoneoliberalism and a cooperatavism that deserves re-examination and perhaps celebration or even revival.

We might also pause to consider the progressivism of today. As we look back with distaste at the promotion of "jailbait of the month", can we be confident that some of the campaigns and rhetoric of progressives today will not prompt a similar recoil in future decades?

#RichardNeville #Oz #OzSchoolKidsIssue
#Progressivism #Counterculture

https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/children-of-the-revolution-the-hippy-counter-culture-the-idea-of-childhood-and-the-case-of-schoolkids-oz/the-case-of-schoolkids-oz/

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I read Neville's "Play Power" in my early teens. It was at once a guide to the British counterculture for curious outsiders and a manifesto for a cultural revolution.

Much of it was superficial and silly; as International Socialist David Widgery pointed out soon after its publication, capitalism was unlikely to be shaken to its foundations by people tampering with coin operated electricity meters.

Yet the book's central contention - that the joy and creativity of play, stifled by the regimentation of dull jobs, bourgeois mores, and shallow materialism, could be regained for us all by a sociocultural revolution - impressed me then and has never quite left me.

Of course, I now recognize both the sources of Neville's thought -- Rousseau, Schiller, and Marx refracted through Marcuse and his followers -- and also its limitations. Nevertheless, the course I have chosen in my own life, in which I have shunned the business and "success" path, perhaps can be traced back to that reading of "Play Power". In addition, my current political outlook, although broadly social democratic in outlook, still tries to see beyond a horizon of redistribution and the successful operation of public services to envisage a transformation of authority relations at work, less time in employment, with those free hours providing opportunities for creativity, culture, and new kinds of living and loving... some of the spirit of "Play Power" still lives on in me!

But not all of it does. As the author of this piece on "Play Power" notes, the book celebrates the adult Neville's having sex with a fourteen year old girl . One can imagine the horror with which such a brazen admission would be greeted today. As an adult who has no interest in having sex with fourteen year olds and who disapproves of those adults who do take sexual advantage of minors, I consider this change in the culture to be positive overall.

In the light of this shift in attitudes, how are we to think about ...

#RichardNeville #PlayPower

https://psychogeographicreview.com/play-power-by-richard-neville/