Chapter to appear in The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media, edited by Chris Atton. New York: Routledge. This manuscript is not intended for direct citation.

Whats left? Towards an historicized critique

of alternative media and community media

James F. Hamilton

Alternative media and community media have always confronted sizeable challenges.

Yet maybe these challenges should now succeed. This sentiment may seem a bit unusual,

coming as it does from someone who has written and argued for years on behalf of

alternative media and community media, so let me be clear. My admiration for the

commitment and creativity of these varied projects and the people who engage in them

(and who study and write about them) remains undiminished. I make the opening point

not about the projects and people so much as about conceptions of alternative media

and community media, whose dated pedigree is being revealed most starkly today by

commercial social media. Consider for a moment how many long-standing goals of

alternative media and community media they seem to meet, such as virtually open access

(granting users literacy skills), no direct financial cost to users, real-time interactivity,

mobility, seamless scalable reach from the local to the global, and multimedia capability.

Given these features, it would seem that social media have forever rendered conventional

conceptions of alternative media and community media as a means by which regular

people can communicate outside the constraints of the media industries quaint if not

delusional. After all, given what social media can do, who in their right mind would

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prefer mimeographed underground newspapers or public-access channels on local cable

television?

However, all is not as it seems. While these technical goals have been met, digital

communications also enable unprecedented levels of data monitoring by national

intelligence organizations (Greenwald 2013). And the larger problem of sustaining

progressive-left coalitions with traction in todays world remains as difficult as ever, as

the recent experiences of Egypt, Libya, Syria and others suggest. While digital

communications have changed how these efforts take place, they have not been any more

decisive.

The increasingly questionable relevance of established conceptions of alternative media

and community media given present conditions provides the impetus for this chapter. It is

a first step into a critical inquiry of conceptions of alternative media and community

media, with an eye towards retheorizing the practices they label and generate. This

exploratory effort starts to recover and clarify what constituted alternative media and

community media as distinctively progressive-left practices. The chapter does not argue

in favour of going back to an ostensibly better or purer time, but of recovering its

contributions more fully so as to remake them today. Due to space limitations, such an

expansive topic can only be sketched, but future work can probe more fully the argument

suggested here.

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Dilemmas

While the practices labeled as alternative media and community media have never

been more important, these received concepts should never delimit or fix the practices.

As historical products themselves, these concepts were formulated in a pre-digital media

landscape and in a specific historical context. The intentions driving them continue to be

exceptionally relevant in todays world of ever-expanding wealth disparity, social

inequality and looming ecological catastrophe. However useful they have been, they have

had from the start a key shortcoming, which is in defining these practices as media,

thus as kinds of technologies or tools, betraying their relation to the study of mass

communication and mass media and to the media-effects tradition such study

legitimates (Williams 1980: 50-53). The problem in turn with defining media as tools is

that they can be used by anyone for any purpose. To define alternative media and

community media as neutral tools, easily appropriated for virtually any purpose, is not

only to dilute their relevance and usefulness for progressive-left social change. It is to

define the use itself as the distinctly undemocratic media-effects effort to get people to do

what communicators want them to do (Hamilton 2008: 3-4).

One way this can be seen is in the many examples of neoliberal or radical-right

incorporation of alternative media and community media (Downing at al. 2001: vii-viii;

Atton 2004: 61-90; Mazepa 2012). A US example that spans the 1960s to the 2000s is

that of conservative agitator Richard Viguerie, who used what he calls alternative

media (in this case, direct mail rather than conventional media relations and political

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advertising) to usher in the conservative revolution of the 1980s by ostensibly delivering

as he puts it power to the people (Viguerie and Franke 2004: 1). In yet another US

example, conservative political prankster James OKeefe characterizes his work in

progressive-left terms as a guerrilla war to expose fraud and save democracy (OKeefe

2013: 6). In addition, this self-styled radical-right warrior uses tactics inspired by US

labour and community organizer Saul Alinsky, whom Conservapedia brands as a

communist while also disparaging the degree to which the enemies of conservatism and

Christianity (or indeed any Religion) have practiced without end Alinskys rules

(OKeefe 2013: 6; Alinsky 1971; Conservapedia).

These and many other examples today bring to mind progressive-left commentary of the

1970s that addressed the theme of whats left?, a phrase that signified fears that the

reservoir of progressive-left intellectual resources had run dry, as well as doubts about

what counted as a left political position (Hobsbawm 2002: 275-276; but compare

Williams 1989a: 175, and Williams 1989b: 175-185). The phrases relevance today

comes from the ease with which the radical right incorporates progressive-left media

practice, as well as how transnational commercial social media deliver capabilities long

aspired to by the progressive left. It also comes from the degree to which self-styled

progressive-left media projects aspire to the size, design and operation of commercial

media projects. Whats left, indeed.

In this vertiginous situation, it is crucially important to revisit critically the theory,

method and practice of alternative media and community media. One way of doing this is

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to recover more fully the progressive-left bases of radical media practices in order to

reground each in the other. Granting the historical range, variety and international or

transnational extent of such bases and practices (Hamilton 2008), a fruitful time

regarding the US and Britain on which to focus is the decade of the 1960s. Three reasons

can be offered for doing so. First, media practices that emerged in this decade are cited

routinely as paradigmatic examples of alternative media and community media, such as

underground radical newspapers, hand-held film and video activist vrit documentary,

pirate radio, and radical theatre and public art happenings as street protest (Downing et

al. 2001). Second, radical movements of the New Left emerged in this decade, both in the

US and in Britain, which provided the cultural reservoir of resources and energy for these

media practices, and that persist today in many ways. Third, in this decade there emerged

two key intellectual formations of each respective New Left. In the US, the philosophy of

participatory democracy loomed large, while in Britain the radical historical

rehabilitation of past popular political action legitimized contemporary action, as the

participation and prominence of radical historians such as Edward Thompson attests

(Hamilton 2011).

Formations

What proved exceptionally difficult for the respective New Lefts was not which medium

to use and how to use it, but much more fundamentally how to formulate a workable

critical position vis--vis capitalist consumerism. In the US and Britain of the late 1950s

and early 1960s, dominant resources for this effort existed in two very different

philosophical positions. One position derived from liberalism, and can be expressed in

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1960s parlance as do your own thing. Its inadequacy as a critical position is due to its

relativism and the resulting inability to provide any grounds for valuing one programme

or position over another: all positions are equally legitimate. A second position derived

from vanguardism, expressed (perhaps too flippantly) as do our thing, or else. Its

inadequacy as a progressive-left stance is due to the fetishization of a revolutionary

orthodoxy and the narrow rigidity of its resulting prescriptions for society. Where

liberalism suffers from extreme individualism, vanguardism suffers from its command

politics and the very undemocratic restriction of meaningful participation to party elites.

Yet these positions did not exhaust all options. In addition to varieties of critical

European theorizing throughout much of the 20th century (Anderson 1976), what gained

most traction in the US New Left was philosophical pragmatism and, in the British New

Left, working-class radical socialism. These largely indigenous political-philosophical

responses to liberalism and vanguardism came about in the wake of widespread

recognition of the structural ills of laissez-faire capitalism (Westbrook 1991; Bevir 2011).

They sought to provide an open, non-dogmatic position (much the opposite of a

command politics), but one that enabled critique and concentrated action instead of

simply inchoate flashes of resistance.

Of greater relevance to this chapter than the emergence of these positions is their re-

emergence in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was the immediate need for strategies and

tactics that proved to be fertile ground for their renewed relevance as part of new

progressive-left politics worthy of the moniker new left. Newly visible and sizeable

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movements of progressive social change at the time included the civil-rights and anti-war

movements in the US and, in Britain, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as well as

opposition to the US-led war on Vietnam. As will be argued, intellectual work that

developed conceptions of participatory democracy as well as radical popular social

resistance reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic as an energizing horizon of

formative thinking and action.

Kaufman and participatory democracy

As only one of many contributors to the emergence and character of the New Left in the

US, the work of philosopher and University of Michigan faculty Arnold Saul Kaufman

(1927-1971) proved to be formative (Wiener 1991: 232; Westbrook 1991: 548-550). By

using the philosophical pragmatism of Dewey to reject distinctions between means and

ends, and between culture and society, Kaufman argued that open-ended, non-dogmatic

but creative and effective social change consists of understanding means as also ends, and

that both means and ends were best seen as the practice of participatory democracy

(Dewey 1927).

Debates that informed the New Left in the US in its formative years were conducted

largely through sociology, a discourse that, as a Labour Monthly reviewer of the 1960

compilation Out of Apathy claimed, was all the rage at the time (Nandy 1960).

Academic figures such as radical sociologist C. Wright Mills loomed large, particularly

by 1962 with the drafting and circulation of the Port Huron Statement (Tilman 1984;

Gamson 2005; Hayden 2005; Geary 2009; Trevio 2012). However, in addition to figures

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such as Mills, Tom Hayden and others of the New Left in the US drew upon philosopher

and University of Michigan faculty member as well as teach-in creator Arnold

Kaufman and his concept of participatory democracy as the manifestation of radical-

democratic social change (Rothman 1972; Hayden et al. 2006; Hilmer 2010; Hayden

2012).

Although seeing himself as working within the liberal tradition from J.S. Mill onwards,

Kaufman also drew upon Marx in an unlikely pairing that mirrored not only the severe

defects he saw in liberalism as manifest in the postwar US but also the experimental,

innovative times in which he worked (Rodewald and Wasserstrom 1972: 9-12). Although

different in many ways, both Dewey and Marx put great importance on direct

participation, something that traditional theories of representative democracy dismissed

as too unwieldy in all but the smallest groups and, even if engaged in, too intellectually

taxing for most people. To these criticisms, Kaufman argues that participatory democracy

is a necessary if not essential supplement and complement to representative democracy,

not its replacement. And, while certainly no Pollyanna when it came to recognizing what

some people are capable of, Kaufman nevertheless argued that, ultimately, participation

contributes to individual personal development, while nonparticipation stifles it

(Rodewald and Wasserstrom 1972: 15-16.)

Kaufmans conception of direct participation was central to his sense of a workable

process of radical democracy, one that remained as open as it was inclusive. In this, he

echoed Dewey, who placed participation centrally in his conception of democratic social

- 9 -

order. To escape the no-win choice between liberalism and vanguardism (and the

drawbacks of each), Dewey regarded direct participation not as a means to a goal, or a

neutral tool or tactic, but as both the means and the goal. This point needs to be

emphasized. What matters for Dewey is not achieving specific goals through the

application of neutral techniques and tools (and thus the separation of means from ends),

but achieving the process as a way of concretely addressing ever-changing problems.

Expanding on this point, Visnovsky (2007) argues that, for Dewey, participatory

democracy is a high cultural, moral and spiritual ideal first, and a procedure, a method, a

technique second.[] It is a process first, and a [political] state second. It is a value in-

itself first, and an instrument second.

Kaufman not only valorized broad-based popular and direct deliberation. He also

emphasized it as a necessarily creative activity, a feature that characterizes social protest

throughout the 1960s. To do so, Kaufman refused foundational distinctions between ideas

and actions, or what today we might call culture and society (Williams 1958). Recalling

his writing on this topic helps clarify this point. In 1954, Kaufman had already launched

his scholarly writing career while at the College of the City of New York (Eddins 1972:

4). An article published in The Journal of Philosophy lays out what Kaufman calls the

instrumental function of political theory, which viewed ideas as action in

contradistinction to a positivist position which kept them separate (Kaufman 1954).

Kaufman recognizes that ideals and hopes exist not just in minds, but in the world and in

action taken. The accretion of private, personally significant meanings to abstract

ideals such as freedom energizes activists to take action in the world (Kaufman 1954:

- 10 -

6). In an influential essay published six years later, Kaufman expands this point by

referring to an argument by US pragmatist philosopher William James, a contemporary

of Dewey. In his paraphrase, Kaufman argues that making an effort to achieve a possible

good depends on our belief in the possibility of that achievement (Kaufman 1960: 283-

284). No guarantee exists that any particular goal will be achieved. However, what is

guaranteed is failure if one were never to believe that a goal might be achieved, even if

only in part. As Kaufman argues, pessimism, while it protects us from disappointment,

blinds the individual to possible lines of advance. Thus, it is necessary to encourage

and renew mans [sic] efforts to improve himself [sic] and his [sic] world, not wither the

will to try, by subjecting it to a bombardment of sophisticated and somewhat cynical

arguments which never actually prove the extreme conclusion they either affirm or, more

likely, insinuate (Kaufman 1960: 283-285).

Finally, Kaufman emphasized the necessity of a continually critical approach to

formulating and enacting programs of social change, one that would subject the

manifestation of ideals and hopes to continual empirical validation and revision, rather

than encase them in the armour of unquestionable orthodoxy. He argued that it is not

enough simply to assert and work toward a normative goal. Necessarily vague

abstractions need to be specified in the form of statistical indices derived from

empirical investigation. Empirical measures need to be designed to accurately evaluate

whether these ideals have actually been achieved and to what degree their achievement

corresponds with their intention (Kaufman 1954: 11).

- 11 -

By working through liberalism, pragmatism and Marxism to reach new insights and

syntheses, Kaufman came to propose a social theory that avoided the problems of

liberalism and vanguardism. He put his work to the test not only in the classroom, but on

campus and nationally (Eddins 1972: 4). That much of its persuasiveness seemed to be

lost by the late 1960s in the rise of street riots, nihilist drug-fueled gratification and

paranoia in the days of rage is not to detract from it or its contribution to the now long-

running debate about how to concretely realize participatory democracy (Gitlin 1987:

285-408; Hilmer 2010). While efforts on the other side of the Atlantic took a very

different form, they embodied a similarly popular, holistic and critical approach.

Hobsbawm and radical popular culture

While clear lines between the New Left in the US and the New Left in Britain are

impossible to fix or set exactly, a useful way to distinguish them nevertheless is to note

the form of intellectual work that sustained each. In the US New Left, Millss, Kaufmans

and others critiques tended toward philosophical, theoretical arguments and abstract

logical-structural analyses, a tendency that Kaufman sought to change later in his life

(Wasserstrom, Robischon and Furth 1974). By contrast, finding more of a home in the

British New Left was concrete radical historical work that, while grounded in theoretical

reflection, stressed the creative, lived making of critical positions that were equally

worldviews, and organizational and cultural forms of practice. Its relevance to the times

was its affirmative redefinition of popular political action of the past and by implication

its validation of emergent, contemporary popular political action.

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Much of this work in Britain was done by academic Marxist historians, which is not

surprising given the centrality of historical analysis in Marx. Yet this work was refracted

through an indigenous working-class radicalism as well as an Anglo historicist

empiricism. As a result, rather than mechanically legitimize party orthodoxy, such work

prized rigorous use of documentary evidence to open up new understandings of past

processes and their relevance for the present.

This Popular-Front approach can be seen clearly in the radical history journal Past and

Present and later in the History Workshop Journal (Editorial Collective 1976; Taylor

2008). Past and Present was expressly a non-dogmatic, open journal of critical historical

work judged, in co-editor Hobsbawms words more recently, not by the badge in the

authors ideological buttonhole, but by the contents of their articles (Hobsbawm 2002:

230). Its inaugural editorial statement from 1952 quoted French Annales historians Marc

Bloch and Lucien Febvre by stating that the journal would practice critical-historical

scholarship not by means of methodological articles and theoretical dissertations, but

by example and fact (Past and Present 1952: i). To do so from the start, the editorial

board put into place various organizational means of providing a visible guarantee

against Marxist domination, as a retrospective account ironically put it to poke fun at

feverish fears at the time of the Red menace active at a miniscule academic journal

(Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm 1983: 9).

Despite differences between logical-abstract arguments and concrete historical work,

American radical social theory and radical historical work shared key ways of

- 13 -

overcoming the drawbacks of liberalism and vanguardism. For example, the editors of

Past and Present argued as Kaufman did against distinguishing ideas from actions, and

culture from society. They did so by critiquing two common approaches to historical

work. On one hand, they criticized doing history wholly inductively as a laborious

accumulation of fact that somehow produces a photographically exact reconstruction of

an objective past, because doing so relegates culture to being only a by-product or

symptom of an already constituted society (Past and Present 1952: iii). On the other

hand, the editors also critiqued doing history through a philosophical idealism that

treats history simply as merely the subjective [pattern] we put into it from the present,

because doing so ignores the real, concrete social conditions that constitute social life

(Past and Present 1952: iii). In contrast to these two extremes, culture and society had to

be addressed holistically and concretely, although with due recognition to

inconsistencies, multiplicities and incompleteness (del Valle Alcal 2013: 75-80). Similar

to efforts by American radical social theorists who sought to address pressing, current

problems rather than engage in abstract speculation for its own sake, the editors of Past

and Present sought as well to meld the study of the past with the present on behalf of

efforts to make a better future. They argued that history cannot logically separate the

study of the past from the present and the future, for it deals with objective phenomena,

which do not stop changing when we observe them (Past and Present 1952: iii).

One can see this perspective put to use in Hobsbawms study of primitive or archaic

forms of social agitation (Hobsbawm 1959: 1). The book draws its examples from

western and southern Europe, especially Italy, examples that are archaic in form, based as

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most are on kinship and honor instead of abstract political ideology, but that take place in

the modern 19th and 20th centuries. For all the qualifications regarding the books

tentative nature and limited scale and scope, it addresses historically the general

processes by which popular resistance coalesces and activates. Understood in this broad

way, many New Left readers faced with the challenge of social change in the early 1960s

recognized the parallels between what they faced and what Hobsbawms various

primitive rebels of the book faced. The task both within the cases of the book and the

New Lefts generally was to, as Hobsbawm quotes Gramsci, transform the inchoate

strivings against intrusive new systemic pressures into an effective expression of these

aspirations in favor of greater equality and control over ones lives (Hobsbawm 1959:

10). Due to this relevance, the book resonated with many unintended readers at the time.

Hobsbawm notes in his published memoir that, in the early 1960s, he was astonished

and a little baffled to be told by a colleague from the University of California, Berkeley,

the epicenter of the student eruption, that the more intellectual young rebels there read the

book with great enthusiasm because they identified themselves and their movement with

my rebels [emphasis original] (Hobsbawm 2002: 250).

This resonance was due in no small part to the valorization of the creativity of popular

experience through its emphasis on pre-political people who have not yet found, or only

begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world

[emphasis original] (Hobsbawm 1959: 2). The book also places culture and lived

experience on centre stage in a concluding chapter on ritual in social movements as a

means of consolidating and effectively expressing an emerging movements aspirations.

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Finally, the book makes clear that these inchoate strivings were made into social

movements by the participants themselves, a contention that Thompson would develop

later in his influential historical study of the making of the English working class

(Thompson 1963).

From media theory to social theory

A legitimate objection to the above account of key intellectual projects that supported the

two New Lefts in the 1960s might very well be but where is alternative media or

community media in all this? Such an objection is of course accurate. But the absence of

media as standalone, isolated concerns is precisely the point to be underscored. The value

of this work in its day is precisely in not essentializing and not ghettoizing as separate

and isolated concerns the use of particular media tools. Intellectual work done by

Kaufman, Hobsbawm and countless others of the respective New Lefts both within and

outside the academy gave shape to the radical needs and questions of the day, providing

not prescriptive step-by-step plans about which media tools to use and how, but an open

horizon of creative possibilities of thinking and acting, including radical communications

practice.

This horizon displays at least three characteristics. First, it places popular participation at

the center of progressive projects, in order to prevent elite and undemocratic direction.

Second, it argues in favor of holistic conceptions of intellectual work that merge means

and ends, and holistic conceptions of society that understand culture as a constituent,

material social process. Third, it emphasizes the need for a fully critical project, one that

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requires at all points and at all times a confrontation between theory and practice. Most

importantly for the argument of this chapter, it refuses to separate, isolate and ghettoize

media practice as alternative media and community media. Rather than propose a

standalone theory about the effectiveness of a particular communications medium or kind

of message, this horizon understands cultural practice broadly as constituent of human

life and action in the world (Williams 1975). These efforts of the early 1960s deserve

attention today, not because they have the answers, but because of their effort to critically

rethink new possibilities for a workable radical democracy. In their creative retheorizing

and responsiveness to their own pressing conditions along with the degree to which they

enabled significant social movements of the day, these efforts are a high-water mark of

progressive-left thinking of the past 60 years. As a result and perhaps paradoxically, this

horizon, which did not isolate media as an exclusive or pre-eminent concerns,

nevertheless enabled and supported the emergence of what are seen as paradigmatic

alternative-media and community-media practices.

Such a horizon informs activist work today, which continues to reformulate what

progressive-left social challenge can be, and what alternative media and community

media theory and practice might be replaced by within a broad program of progressive

social challenge. For example, experimentation in direct participation as a means and

goal can be seen in the recent Occupy movements. In a Boston encampment in 2011,

thousands of people camped out in tents, all arranged in rows, even marked with street

signs. One of the protester-residents reflected that weve created this intentional

community where we take care of everyone in this community, and you have a voice. So

- 17 -

for us, living this process was the best example that we had of what our fix was (Smith

2011). And radical historical work is again relevant in such ways as the New Putney

Debates held in London during Fall 2012, which occurred in the 365th-year

anniversary of the original Putney Debates of 1647. As inspired by the Levellers and

the Diggers demands for social justice, civil rights and equal access to the land, this

2012 version sought to focus on the challenges facing us now and what is needed now

for a more just and equal society (Occupy London 2012). Compare this to technology-

centred conceptions of social change that all too easily fit commercial and state interests

and concerns (Li and Bernoff 2011; Shirky 2009).

It is time for scholars of alternative media and community media to catch up with times

and with current practice, and to continue to reformulate, recalibrate and reconceptualize

what radical-democratic cultural work might yet be and become. While posing no answer

even in the times of their formulation, the transatlantic experience of the 1960s New

Lefts discussed here provides a compelling exemplar of efforts to do so.

Further Reading

Kaufmans most prominent work is The Radical Liberal, New Man in American Politics

(New York: Atherton Press, 1968). A useful examination of the intellectual substance of

the US New Left at the time is Massimo Tedori (ed.), The New Left; a Documentary

History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Radical historical work of relevance in

addition to what is cited here includes George Rud, The Crowd in History; a Study of

- 18 -

Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); and

(although appearing later than the time period discussed here) Christopher Hill, The

World Turned Upside Down; Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London:

Temple Smith, 1972).

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York: Random House.

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Bevir, M. (2011) The Making of British Socialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Couldry, N., Curran, J. (2003) The Paradox of Media Power, in Couldry, N. and

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del Valle Alcal, R. (2013) A Multitude of Hopes: Humanism and Subjectivity in E.P.

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