Rebel Sell

Why The Culture Can't Be Jammed

Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780006394914
• eBook ISBN:
  9781554689187
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

With the popularity of Michael Moore, Adbusters magazine and Naomi Klein's No Logo, it's hard to ignore the growing tide of resistance to our corporate-controlled world. But do these vocal opponents of the status quo offer us a real political alternative?

In this lively blend of pop culture, history and philosophical analysis, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that this countercultural opposition to "the system" has not only been unproductive but has helped to create the very consumer society that radicals oppose. This thought-provoking book will enrage and entertain today's countercultural rebels and their opponents on the political right.

PART I

1 The Birth of Counterculture

Early on the morning of April 8, 1994, the electrician arrived to start work on a new security system being installed at an upscale home overlooking Lake Washington, just north of Seattle. In the greenhouse, he found the owner of the cottage, Kurt Cobain, lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. Cobain had taken a lethal overdose of heroin, but, for good measure, had decided to finish the job by blowing off the left side of his head with a Remington 20-gauge shotgun.

When the news of Cobain’s death spread, very few were surprised. This was the man, after all, who had recorded a song called “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” As frontman of Nirvana, arguably the most important band of the 1990s, his every move was followed by the media. His previous suicide attempts were a matter of public record. The note lying beside his body didn’t leave much room for interpretation: “Better to burn out than fade away,” he wrote. Nevertheless, his death generated a small cottage industry of conspiracy theories. Who killed Kurt Cobain?

In one sense, the answer is obvious. Kurt Cobain killed Kurt Cobain. Yet he was also a victim. He was the victim of a false idea—the idea of counterculture. While he thought of himself as a punk rocker, a man in the business of making “alternative” music, his records sold in the millions. Thanks in large part to Cobain, the music that used to be called “hardcore” was rebranded and sold to the masses as “grunge.” But rather than serving as a source of pride to him, this popularity was a constant embarrassment. It fed the nagging doubts in the back of his mind, which suggested that he had “sold out” the scene, gone “mainstream.”

After Nirvana’s breakthrough album, Nevermind, began to outsell Michael Jackson, the band made a concerted effort to lose fans. Their follow-up album, In Utero, was obviously intended to be difficult, inaccessible music. But the effort failed. The album went on to reach number one in the Billboard charts.

Cobain was never able to reconcile his commitment to alternative music with the popular success of Nirvana. In the end, his suicide was a way out of the impasse. Better to stop it now, before the last scrap of integrity is gone, and avoid the total sellout. That way he could hold fast to his conviction that “punk rock is freedom.” What he failed to consider was the possibility that it was all an illusion; that there is no alternative, no mainstream, no relationship between music and freedom, and no such thing as selling out. There are just people who make music, and people who listen to music. And if you make great music, people will want to listen to it.

So where did the idea of “alternative” come from? The idea that you had to be unpopular in order to be authentic?

Cobain was a graduate of what he called the “Punk Rock 101” school of life. Much of the punk ethos was based on a rejection of what the hippies had stood for. If they listened to the Lovin’ Spoonful, we punks would listen to Grievous Bodily Harm. They had the Rolling Stones, we had the Violent Femmes, the Circle Jerks and Dead On Arrival. If they had long hair, we would have mohawks. If they wore sandals, we would wear army boots. If they were into satyagraha, we were into direct action. We were the “un-hippies.”

Why this animus toward hippies? It wasn’t because they were too radical. It was because they were not radical enough. They had sold out. They were, as Cobain put it, the “hippiecrits.” The Big Chill told you everything you needed to know. The hippies had become yuppies. “The only way I would wear a tie-dyed T-shirt,” Cobain liked to say, “would be if it were soaked in the blood of Jerry Garcia.”

By the beginning of the ’80s, rock and roll had been transformed into a bloated, pale imitation of its former self. It had become arena rock. Rolling Stone magazine had become a complacent corporate sales rag, dedicated to flogging crappy albums. Given his attitude, one can only imagine Cobain’s embarrassment when he was asked to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. His compromise: to do the shoot in a T-shirt that read “Corporate rock magazines still suck.” Cobain persuaded himself that, in so doing, he was not selling out, he was simply going undercover: “We can pose as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system to start its rot from the inside. Sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game, compromise just enough to call their bluff. And the hairy, sweaty, macho, sexist dickheads will soon drown in a pool of razorblades and semen, stemmed from the uprising of their children, the armed and deprogrammed crusade, littering the floors of Wall Street with revolutionary debris.”

One can see here quite clearly that, while Cobain and the rest of us punks may have rejected most of the ideas that came out of the hippie counterculture, there is one element of the movement that we swallowed hook, line and sinker. This was the idea of counterculture itself. In other words, we saw ourselves as doing exactly the same thing that the hippies saw themselves doing. The difference, we assumed, is that, unlike them, we would never sell out. We would do it right.

Some myths die hard. One can see the same cycle repeating itself in hip-hop. The countercultural idea here takes the form of a romantic view of ghetto life and gang culture. Successful rappers must fight hard to retain their street cred, to “keep it real.” They’ll pack guns, do time, even get shot up, just to prove that they’re not just “studio gangstas.” So instead of just dead punks and hippies, we now also have a steadily growing pantheon of dead rappers. People talk about the “assassination” of Tupac Shakur, as though he actually posed a threat to the system. Eminem claims his arrest for possession of a concealed weapon was “all political,” designed to get him off the streets. It’s the same thing all over again.

This wouldn’t be so important if it were confined to the world of music. Unfortunately, the idea of counterculture has become so deeply embedded in our understanding of society that it influences every aspect of social and political life. Most importantly, it has become the conceptual template for all contemporary leftist politics. Counterculture has almost completely replaced socialism as the basis of radical political thought. So if counterculture is a myth, then it is one that has misled an enormous number of people, with untold political consequences.

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The idea that artists must take an oppositional stance toward mainstream society is hardly new. It has its origins in 18th-century Romanticism, a movement that went on to dominate the artistic imagination throughout the 19th century. It found its highest expression—and most enduring commercial success—in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, a celebration of alternative “bohemian” lifestyles in Paris. In those days, “real” artists had to die of consumption (tuberculosis, that is), not heroin overdoses or drive-bys. But you get the idea.

The key to understanding early Romanticism is to appreciate the impact that the discovery of the New World, and in particular the Pacific Islands, had upon European consciousness. Before these encounters, Europeans simply assumed that humans had lived, throughout all of history, in hierarchically organized class societies. Kingship, aristocracy and class domination were simply a part of the natural order. St. Thomas Aquinas summed up the received wisdom when he wrote, back in the 13th century,

Everything that happens in nature is good, because nature always does what is best. The standard form of government in nature is the rule of one. If we consider the parts of the body, we see that there is one part that moves all the rest, namely the heart. If we look at the parts of the soul, we find that there is one faculty that rules the rest—reason. The same is true of bees, who have but one queen, and of the universe as a whole, which has only one God, who has created and governs all things. This is not without reason, since a plurality is always derived from a unity. Since the products of art imitate the works of nature, and since a work of art is the more perfect, the more closely it resembles the works of nature, the best government for a people is necessarily the government of one.

Five hundred years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau could agree with the first line of this passage—that everything in nature is good—but disagree with all the rest. Thanks to the discovery of the New World, thinkers like Rousseau knew that there were people who lived without social hierarchy, without landed aristocracy or monarchy, and sometimes even without settlements or cities. It didn’t take long to infer that this was in fact the “natural” condition of mankind, and that the major world civilizations, with their elaborate social hierarchies and systems of privilege, represented a terrible distortion of the natural order.

Thus Rousseau concluded that all of society was a giant fraud, a system of exploitation imposed upon the weak by the strong. The emergence of civilization, he argued, “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality, changed straightforward usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the entire human race to labor, servility and misery.”

As far as sweeping indictments of society go, this one is right up there. After reading it, Voltaire was moved to write to Rousseau: “I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never has such cleverness been used to show that we are all stupid. One longs, upon reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I go off in search of the savages of Canada, because the illnesses to which I am condemned render a European doctor necessary to me.”

Yet despite the broad scope of his claim, Rousseau’s intention was not actually to condemn “the human race” or to recommend a return to savagery. As his work on the social contract made clear, he was not opposed to social order itself, or to the rule of law. He was opposed to the specifically hierarchical form that this order had taken on in his own society. It was the perversion of the natural order into class domination that angered him.

In other words, despite the sweeping nature of his indictment, Rousseau’s critique was directed against a specific class enemy—the aristocracy. Furthermore, he regarded the general population—the masses—as a natural ally in the struggle. The social upheavals that his thought inspired, up to and including the French Revolution, were not anarchic uprisings against society at large. They were aimed quite specifically at the ruling classes. (Which is why, by the end of the 18th century, almost the entire French aristocracy was either dead or in hiding.)

Even 19th-century anarchists were not really anarchists in the modern sense of the term. They were not opposed to social order, nor were they individualists. In many cases, they did not even want to smash the state. They simply opposed the coercive imposition of social order and the militarism of the early modern European nation-state. Mikhail Bakunin’s “Revolutionary Catechism,” one of the founding documents of political anarchism, calls for nothing more radical than voluntary federalism as the principle of national organization, along with universal suffrage of both sexes. Bakunin, the famed anarchist, was actually one of the first to call for the creation of a “United States of Europe.”

So while society may have been roundly condemned as a rigged game, no one was in doubt about who had rigged it against whom. The goal of radical political activists and thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries was not to eliminate the game, but to level the playing field. As a result, radical politics throughout the early modern period had an overwhelmingly populist character. The goal was to turn the people against their rulers.

But in the second half of the 20th century, radical politics took a significant turn away from this pattern of thought. Instead of treating the masses as an ally, the people began to be regarded, to an ever-increasing degree, as an object of suspicion. Before long, the people—that is, “mainstream” society—came to be seen as the problem, not the solution. Whereas the great philosophers of the Enlightenment had railed against “obedience,” as a slavish disposition that promoted tyranny, radicals began to view “conformity” as a far greater vice. The story of this remarkable reversal provides the key to understanding the origins of the myth of counterculture.

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With the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, there was a gradual elimination of aristocratic privilege in Europe and, above all, in the United States. But rather than abolishing class domination altogether, the effect of these revolutions was primarily to replace one ruling class with another. Instead of being peasants, ruled by an aristocracy that had control of all the land, the masses were gradually transformed into workers, ruled by capitalists who controlled the factories and machines. As the nascent market economy began producing wealth on an unparalleled scale, money quickly became more important than either land or lineage as the basis for privilege.

There could be no mistake about the hierarchical nature of this emerging society. In the 19th century, capitalism seemed to be clearly in the process of dividing society into two antagonistic classes. The division between rich and poor was as stark as it is in many underdeveloped countries today. Most people had to work for a living. This meant a life of dangerous toil under unbearable conditions in the factory, combined with grinding poverty at home. Then there were those who lived off the work of others, enjoying fabulous returns on their invested capital. There was not much in between.

Yet while it seemed obvious to contemporary observers that the masses had traded one form of exploitation for another, there was one key difference between the form of class domination that emerged out of the bourgeois revolutions and the aristocratic hierarchy that preceded it. Unlike the peasants, who were literally coerced into staying on the land and working for its lord, the working classes were formally free to do whatever they wanted. They were no longer tied to the land; they were free to move as they liked, to live where they liked and to take any job that was available or that appealed to them. Thus the class domination that existed in capitalist societies appeared to have an entirely voluntary character. When workers were injured at the factory or in the mine, the owner could evade responsibility by saying, “Nobody forced them to take the job. They knew the risks when they signed up.”

There was no shortage of critics lining up to condemn the exploitation and suffering caused by early capitalism. But these critics were forced to confront a fundamental problem. If conditions were so terrible, why did the working classes tolerate them? Revolutionary socialists began arguing that workers should simply seize control of the factories where they worked. Yet the working classes were surprisingly reluctant to do so. This required some explanation. After all, since it seemed to be clearly in the interest of the working classes to take control of the means of production, what was stopping them?

This is where Karl Marx stepped in, with his famous critique of “ideology.” The problem, Marx argued, was that the working class was the victim of an illusion, which he referred to as “commodity fetishism.” Rather than perceiving the economy as a set of essentially social relationships between individuals, the market gave it the appearance of a system of natural laws. Prices and wages moved up and down, seemingly at random. Losing your job seemed to be a matter of bad luck, like getting caught in a rainstorm. The ups and downs of the market were determined by forces completely outside anyone’s control. So if wages dropped or the price of bread went up, there appeared to be no one to blame.

In Marx’s view, this objectification of social relationships had gone so far that workers had become alienated from their own activity. They saw their own labor as merely a means to the attainment of other ends. Capitalism had created a nation of clockwatchers. Marx argued that the working classes were unwilling to engage in revolutionary politics because they were completely caught up in this nexus of false ideas. Commodity fetishism and alienated labor provided the ideology of capitalism. All of this was wrapped up in a bow by traditional Christian religious doctrine, which promised workers paradise in the afterlife, on the condition that they behaved themselves here and now. Thus, religion was the “opiate” that kept the imposed suffering from becoming unendurable.

Given this diagnosis of the problem, the role of the Marxian social critic was not necessarily to get directly involved in the organization of the working class. Communists and socialists were often greeted with suspicion on the factory floor. The workers needed to be “radicalized” before they could be organized—through the cultivation of class consciousness. This meant freeing them from the grip of bourgeois ideology. The mindset of the workers needed to be changed, so that they could come to see where their own interests lay. Only when freed from the mental cage in which they were imprisoned could they begin to saw away at the bars of the real cage that society had constructed around them.

The working class, unfortunately, turned out to be a terrible disappointment. Rather than agitating for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, workers tended to focus more on incremental gains, such as higher wages and medical benefits. From the Marxist perspective, this sort of “reformism” didn’t address any of the fundamental issues; the workers were just redecorating the cage in which they were imprisoned. But once they came to see their situation more clearly, they would inevitably rise up.

Yet as the 20th century wore on, this diagnosis of the problem became increasingly unpersuasive. For example, the initial reluctance to give workers the vote was based upon the assumption, universally shared among the ruling classes in Europe and America, that if you let the people vote, the first thing they would vote for would be the dispossession of the propertied classes. In other words, they would use the vote to seize the property of the wealthy. Yet this is not what happened. Workers voted for reform, not revolution.

After the Russian Revolution, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss this peculiarly altruistic behavior on the part of workers as the effect of “commodity fetishism.” How could the workers possibly believe that capitalism was natural and unal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• P.S.
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Publisher