Letter: Radical Sixties

Thursday 19 March 1998 00:02 GMT

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THE IMPORTANCE of the single year 1968 has always been greatly over-rated, compared with the truly significant social and cultural (though not political) transformation of the entire period 1958-1973 ("the long Sixties").

James Maycock's evocation of the Grosvenor Square demonstration of March 1968 ("Flower Powerless", 17 March) performs a useful service in drawing attention to how ambivalent the utterances of leading rock singers were; there never was a unified "counter culture" lined up in dialectical opposition to "bourgeois society". Maycock might also have mentioned the dogmatic tosh being spouted by Tariq Ali about capitalist crises and the imminence of revolution.

C'etait magnifique, but it wasn't revolution. Meantime the true revolution - in living standards, values, relationships - was affecting everyone.

ARTHUR MARWICK

The Sixties Research Group

The Open University

Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

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