- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 November 2000 01.35 GMT
Nowadays, McKay may be less optimistic. The goals of the postwar British counterculture - radical political change, protection for the environment, liberalisation of the drugs laws - seem as far away as ever. Meanwhile its methods - informal organisation, word-of-mouth communication, ingenious direct action - have been most successfully employed of late, in Britain at least, by conservative interest groups such as truck drivers and farmers. At the same time, for a majority of the population, this country is increasingly prosperous; consumer and career choices have probably never been so wide; what used to be scorned by hippies as "straight" society has seldom looked so enticing.
And as damp squats have become developers' opportunities, and drug chat has become standard syntax in advertisements, so it has begun to seem that the counterculture, far from undermining capitalism and the old hierarchies of class and wealth, has in fact reinvigorated them. Richard Branson, who once lived in a houseboat and sold records by longhaired Germans, is now Britain's best-known businessman. The organisers of illegal raves in the late 80s now run record labels for large corporations. As early as 1993, the Henley Centre estimated that the British dance music industry was as lucrative as book or newspaper publishing.
The ability to improvise and think irreverently are valuable commodities, now, in the restless global market. Britain's status in the world is increasingly tied to the frequency with which it throws up, packages, and exports rebellions such as punk. And if the mainstream has grown so inclusive and anarchic, then how can the counterculture define itself? When today's graffiti artist is tomorrow's sponsored muralist, the very notion of a counterculture can seem almost quaint.
It was much easier to spot dissent in the early postwar years. The "wild public festival spirit" Nuttall sensed on the first Aldermaston CND protests, the absurd costumes and raucous music, was not completely new; it echoed British revolts since the Civil War and earlier, with their vivid glee in mocking and overturning the dominant order. What made British rebelliousness different from the late 50s on was that a national media now existed: converts could be won, and opponents could be alerted.
By the mid-60s, complete dissenting lifestyles were available. The American journalist Tom Wolfe found one by following a London office boy on his lunch hour: "Larry Lynch cuts in the doorway at 79 Oxford Street there is a vast black room heaving with music a lot of boys and girls in this kinetic trance, dancing by themselves The point is simply immersing yourself for one hour in The Life, every lunch hour." Wolfe noted the customised clothes, the swallowing of specific pills, the desire to create a separate world in a forgotten place in the city. This pattern would be repeated by punks in the 70s, ravers in the 80s and 90s, even today's nightclub purists.
Amid Wolfe's giddy detail, however, there were also hints that the counterculture could be tamed. The lunchtime disc jockeys had career plans. There were a few slightly older dancers, with an entrepreneurial eye on the fashions. And at the end, everyone went back to the office. Challenging the established order full time and sober has proved a harder occupation.
Communal living experiments had been tried in Britain, again, since at least the Civil War, yet by the early 70s the staples of this existence - the wet encampments, the wheezing travellers' vehicles, the squatted terraces - had become widely familiar. In the 80s, the right to live like this at all was questioned and roughly eroded by the Conservative government. Anyone who doubted that a counterculture still existed during Mrs Thatcher's boom years had only to see the pictures of policemen smashing up the Peace Convoy at Stonehenge.
When the Conservatives weakened in the mid-90s, the counterculture enjoyed perhaps its period of greatest British influence. Ideas about animal rights, opposition to bypasses, and anxiety about the free-market society Thatcher had created, all spread far beyond the inky bulletins of professional protesters and into the everyday conversation of more conventional Britons. For a time, it seemed that dreadlocked activists might be seen as principled rather than perplexing.
No longer. Anti-capitalist gatherings, like the recent May Day demonstrations, are once more mostly scorned by the press. To be taken seriously, it seems, protests have to happen in Prague or Seattle. The counterculture's hedonistic impulses, meanwhile, seem to have evolved into little more than a new set of dumb leisure appetites.
Yet when the next recession comes, or the mainstream culture stagnates, and these narrow islands seem stifling again, the old rebelliousness will re-emerge. The British counterculture anyway, is part of a worldwide network these days. And plenty of Britons still share its suspicion of today's ever-expanding corporations. The doorway of 79 Oxford Street is still there, too; maybe someone will stash their tools for uprooting GM corn in the basement.
