Dissent Commodified

The 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival has certain pundits in a misty-eyed nostalgic funk for the days when youth culture came of age, challenging conformity, standing up for individuality, and making awesome music before it all got so commercialized.

The memory it brought back for me came from the late Trader Monthly magazine, a chronicler of the truculent way of the trading pits and possibly the definitive opposite of the Aquarian spirit. Leafing through an old issue a while ago, I happened across "Cash of the Titans," an accounting of the nation's most successful speculators, in which images of the billionaires were tastefully rendered by none other than Peter Max, the artist once beloved of the Now Generation for his psychedelic posters.

Perhaps this coming together of peace, love and accumulation brought a curse to the lips of Woodstock's earnest memorialists. For me, it was a reminder of how seamlessly counterculture and business culture have meshed; how neatly '60s cultural radicalism fit into structures it was supposedly against.

By this I do not mean to refer to the many rock stars who have been knighted, or the Cadillacs their music has been used to promote, or the maddening ubiquity of classic rock, which I am starting to suspect is required by some secret agreement to be played over the PA system of every hardware store in the nation until the day the last boomer takes his final toke.

I am not talking about "selling out." What I have in mind is something grander: that business embraced the carnival it saw in the muddy hills of upstate New York in 1969 not merely because it wanted to sell things to kids but because coolness, nonconformity and soulfulness expressed something deep and true about capitalism itself.

Consider the TV commercials with which Enron used to insist that we question authority, that we use "the chosen word of the nonconformist" and "ask why." Or the TV commercials in which Washington Mutual, before its collapse, told the world how it came up with its brilliant ideas: By running proposals by a captive panel of old-school snob bankers; when this country-club set disapproved, turning up its nose in a way you have learned to hate from a thousand iterations of the same cliché, the unpretentious people from WaMu knew they were on the right track.

Think of all the dying industrial cities that have sought to revive themselves by persuading Jennifer and Jason Hipster to relocate their transgressive selves to fake bohemias those towns have constructed. Or all the popular business books narrating this "revolution" or that, declaring the end of the "Organization Man" model, and instructing us to respect the outside-the-box thinker, the maverick with the creative spark.

And while the tuned-in and the well-heeled chew whole-grain foodstuffs produced by the hemp-wearing people of authenticityland, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, the maker of Wonder Bread and Twinkies--those symbols of what the counterculture disdained--emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year. As did Chrysler and General Motors, makers of the tailfinned monsters Woodstock Nation disdained in favor of Volkswagen vans.

We commemorate Woodstock as the symbolic moment when it began, when the youthful uprising against conformity and soullessness was supposedly pure and untainted. In truth, the counterculture critique was never all that shocking. The reason our advertising people and management theorists love it is because it was in many ways so utterly superficial.

After all, if the essential problem with our civilization is conformity, it is an easy problem to solve. It merely requires that new and more authentic products appear all the time and that old products to be showered with scorn, cultural operations that consumer society performs incredibly well. If the problem is a lack of respect for creativity, management theorists stand ready to plaster our cubicles with posters hailing entrepreneurship and risk-taking.

Then there are the interesting political byproducts of all this. When commercial culture started to work by laughing constantly at the squareness of Middle America, it brought lots of Middle Americans to a state of simmering rage. They have remained there ever since, a "silent majority" that has rebelled more or less constantly since the late '60s, although not in a way that will ever convince the makers of commercial culture to stop disrespecting their values.

As we remember those poignant early days when Boomers took on the establishment, let us also remember that any establishment is lucky to have an opposition like this one.

Read other articles in the Opinion Journal:
Immigration Out of Sight
Why AT&T Killed Google Voice
The Death Book for Veterans

Comments

[ezeflyer]

The creativity of the sixties was not based on buying stuff, but making useful things out of society's leftovers, bartering, and working to live, not living to work. In at least one SF demonstration, we burned money.

Since then, some boomers were seduced by consumerism, others were coopted by the establishment opinion makers and still others were intimidated into conforming.

Most boomers are becoming dependent on the system they improved and some are still hippies at heart, surviving thanks to changes they wrought which as always, oligarchs and their conservative useful idiots are bent on undoing.

[henryberry]

From one who grew up in the Baby Boom generation: The Baby Boomers, or counterculture generation as they were called in the 60s, simply tried to replace one conformity with another. And they were largely successful. Yuppies replaced the corporate drone. Recreational drugs replaced alcohol. Sex...well, that wasn't replaced, just talked about more openly. Many joined the counterculture to try to end the draft since they might be called up and sent to Vietnam. The counterculture was made up mostly of college students--and it appealed to many of these because it lowered or abolished eucational standards, thus making it easy for them to get a degree by not having to do anything intellectually demanding. The Baby Boomers found identity and cohesiveness as a group around self-interest and adolescent stances against the status quo. Frank's article doesn't even suggest any of this. There are ordinary sociological explanations and analyses of the Baby Boomers. It's impossible for an entire generation to be nonconformist, creative, or original.

[pfc1369]

Thanks for that summary of all the trite conventional wisdom on the matter, you absorbed it well.

[henryberry]

If the wisdom (your word, though I wouldn't call it that) is conventional, why isn't it more generally recognized and admitted. If you're from the Baby Boom generation, I guess you're disappointed that I might not find you automatically noncomformist, creative, or original--despite how you might see yourself and hope others would see you. If you're not from the Baby Boom generation, it seems to me that you've absorbed its myth that it was the most nonconformist, creative, and orginal generation ever. And you're disappointed to realize you myth is inaccurate or incomplete.

[StephCaster]

When I saw the article title, "Dissent Commodified", I thought of the astro-turf opposition to health care reform: "angry" "demonstrators" bought and paid for by corporate dollars and "organized" by corporate front groups. Oh, and don't forgot -- reported on ad nauseum by corporate media (when authentic left demonstrators engage in confrontive behavior, it is ignored or used to scare -- when right-wing astroturfers do it, it is reported as representative of popular sentiment.)

[yodaveg]

As Shakespeare observed--no, wait, it was Mel Brooks--"We mock the thing we are to be."

When the developmental stage of separation was acted out as generational rebellion, it was inevitable most would outgrow it. It was not an era of individualism but of conformity—and thus easy to for cultural critics to lampoon and marketers to co-opt.

Real individualism--that is, the allegiance to one's self-created values, ideas and behavior--was not born in the 60's. It's as old as humanity, requires courage, and it was perhaps best described in Emerson's essay "Self Reliance":"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

I'm not saying the counterculture movement embodied by Woodstock was bad. It helped overcome oppression and repression, and it helped end an unjust war. And the music rocked, man. But the only conformity it rejected was it its parents values.

[ProfessorDuh]

Sorry, poor Middle America is not the font of homespun wisdom and virtue. Middle America is a benighted sucker who didn't get the number of the corporate truck that just ran it down.

[vooter]

Mr. Frank should keep in mind that the '60s also saw the birth of the PIRA. Perhaps an American PIRA will be coming soon? Time will tell...

[pfc1369]

Is PIRA a common acronym?

Care to translate?

[ADunafraid]

I love when baby boomers pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for what their parents did. From the time baby boomers have come of age and taken over this country in the late 70's early 80's all they have done is stolen prosperity from future generations.

Hey boomers your parents and grandparents were responsible for the great medical and technological breakthroughs of the 20th century that benefited mankind (sanitized public water, iodine in salt, penicillin, highway system, bridges, going to the moon, nuclear energy, etc.).

Boomers saw the one so called mistake of their previous generation and fixed it. That mistake was not making enough money. So they overpriced land to burden their children, overpriced new medicines to create obscene profits for medical companies, started deficit spending to transfer wealth from future generations to the current, overpriced higher education, reduced funding of lower education, exponentially raised health care costs to make it unobtainable, eliminated workers benefits for future generations.

Stop making woodstock and the 60's out to being more than it was. It was a generation of kids who enjoyed getting high and having sex that just so happened to have wise leaders that were their parents age who organized them to create social change in their drug enhanced mindset.

[smileatfear]

Stop whining and complaining. This whole divide and conquer the generations, brought to you complements of the repub party and other right wing disasters like the wall street journal and bought by suckers like you is getting annoying. Every generation stands on the shoulders of the generation before it. And the generations are a continuum. Do you really think that somebody born in 1964 and labeled a "boomer" is generationally different than somebody born in 1965 and labeled "generation x?" If you're mad at your parents than you need to work it out with them, although if you're having toddler temper tantrums like the one in your post above, I could understand why your parents aren't exactly fond of you.

[listeningpost]

It's also worth noting that while the Boomers were the foot soldiers, the definitive leaders of the counter culture were their elders:
Martin Luther King, Jr.; January 15, 1929
Eldridge Cleaver August 31, 1935
Ken Kesey; September 17, 1935
Betty Friedan; February 4,1921
Malcolm X ; May 19, 1925
Gloria Steinem; March 25, 1934
Jerry Rubin(July 14, 1938
Abbie" Hoffman (November 30, 1936
Angela Davis; January 26, 1944
Dr. Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920
Allen Ginsberg; June 3, 1926
Jerry Garcia August 1, 1942
Bobby Seale October 22, 1936
Bob Dylan; May 24, 1941
John Lennon, October 1940
Jimi Hendrix; November 27, 1942
Harvey Milk; May 22, 1930
Ram Dass; 1931
Daniel Berrigan, born May 9, 1921
R. Crumb; 1943
Andy Warhol; 1928
Bill Graham; 1931

[pfc1369]

Oh, come on.

Many were "elders" by a couple years, in a strict definition of Boomer, starting in '45.

[TheBaffler]

For an expansion of Frank's ideas on this subject, I highly recommend his book The Conquest of Cool, and Commodify Your Dissent, a collection of pieces from his great magazine, The Baffler.

http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cool-Business-Counterculture-Consumerism/dp/0226260127/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250763819&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250763853&sr=1-1

[chilifan]

Mr. Frank, you sure seem to think you know all about what people were like and what they felt and did when you were, what 4 or 5 years old? Don't you work for Rupert Murdoch?

You're from that wonderful generation that was so clever, they actually paid corporations to wear their products proudly displayed on their person. NIke and little alligators were all the rage and the great music of, um, Air Supply.

Woodstock was a phenomenon. During a time of war, there was actually a huge, disorganized group of people with none of the creature comforts, no cell phones, no technology, bad weather, lack of toilets and little to no security, and they managed to have a good time, get along and no one got hurt. There was actually something we quaintly call "Peace" for a few days, which seemed impossible at the time.

Today, you can't even go to a dance class without worrying about getting shot. Blame daddy and mommy all you want for your problems, that's the new American way! You have never had to worry about being drafted to fight an insane war. What has your generation accomplished? Apart from spending money on yourselves and saving nothing? We had Woodstock, you had Nike.

[Eric8]

Yeah, critical theory is making a comeback or maybe this is just a small blip on the endless superficial redundancy that dominates American intellectuals. I would go further than "The One-Dimesional" man reference and say that it is us, as subjects, who have been commodified, both internally and externally. We have essential become products, commodities, that must sell on the open wage-labor market; we must use social networking to sell ideas, images, and views of ourselves to corporations; are environments have become entirely structured around us engaging in some sort of socio-economic existence that is seen as a style, an appearence. The guy or gal wearing Jeans with nicely tucked in polo, is a fashion statement, not a worker who makes seven dollars an hour slinging corporate merchandise to bored housewives. The 60's was really about the rise of mass nihilism, expertly depicted in Warhol's soup paintings, and the ultimate death of the radical individual. Going to a concert is supposedly some transcendent event? please, its just a concert. But corporations saw it for what it could be; a way to a new form of life, a life of meaningless reverberation with insignificance becoming significance. Why do people travel around the world and see it as the ultimate form of an experience? Rather than seeing a political victory as life-changing. All life today is dead, the living-dead.

[smileatfear]

Many of us refuse to let ourselves be defined as "consumers." You don't have to buy, you know. If you need something you can almost certainly get it from a garage sale or resale shop. Grow your own food or buy it locally. Don't get cable TV - you don't need it. And there are libraries for books, newspapers, and computer access. If you think life today is dead it is because you have bought into this hyper consumerism. You have caught affluenza. Step out of it, help your neighbors and enjoy what you have. It's not life that is dead, it's you.

[IGNSTHMD]

Afflenza isn't the whole of it

there is status quo
government
patriarchy
media
and what about social reinvention i.e. 60's self esteem, 70's community, 80's indulgence, 90's coming of age, 00's patronized

all the while materializm is creeping up and there is a struggle between control and nature

[Seán O'Nilbud]

yeah well I was standing in a queue in the bank the other day and they were playing Blackened by Metallica as their musak, not a cover the original. Digest that.

[Antifascist-08]

Are you sure it wasn't someone's cell phone ring?

[Seán O'Nilbud]

It wasn't a radio station either it was the corporate playlist.

[UpperWest]

Frank's analysis is reductivist (if that is a word). The '60s were not just Woodstock. They were the '63 March on DC, the Vietnam war and opposition, Medicare and Civil Rights Acts, Women's liberation, the beginnings of gay liberation, drugs, assassination.

The unleashing of all of this provoked a 30 year backlash fueled primarily by racism and jingoism -- a 30 year attempt to put the genie back into the bottle, culminating in the reactionary Bush administration and now the impotent fury of the lumpenproletariat at the victory of the forces of liberation unleashed in the '60s.

[FearlessFreep]

Reductionist?

[DasBoot]

You are making good points. However, part of the sixties was also reading Marx and Marcuse and their criticism of capitalism. People like Chomsky to this day see the Vietnam war mainly as the result of capitalist imperialism. Thomas Frank simply talked about the critique of capitalism that became part of white middle class counterculture, the co-operatives, communal living, etc. And he is amazed how effortlessly the system and the hippies adjusted to each other. The culture wars were in many ways just a distraction from this confluence.

[DI-1957]

And what do you think Chomsky is wrong about? Capitalist Imperialism? Like Iraq, probably Iran, probably Venezuala.

[DrP]

Philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a great novel entitled "Boomeritis," which presents in a fictional format (with a main character loosely based on himself). In the book, he exposes the problems with the Boomer generation, primarily that of believing that everyone is entitled to his/her own opinions and worldviews, and therefore it is wrong to criticize bad ideas and policies. (Boomers just want love and peace for everyone) The Boomers, today's adult generation, allowed the rise of the neo-cons and rolled over and played dead for the Bush Administration.
It's time to get gutsy and fight for the progressive agenda. No more sitting around high making peace signs.

[smileatfear]

I just love when people talk as though 76 million people can all be defined as one, as in "Boomers just want love and peace for everyone." Or "boomers rolled over and played dead for the Bush administration." I won't even go into why those comments are so ridiculous and wrong, you'll figure it out when you grow up. Sorry to hear that all you're doing is sitting around and making peace signs and waiting for somebody else to get "gutsy" and fight for progress, but now you know why your generation hasn't accomplished much. Stop waiting for somebody else.

[noneIn2008]

It is tough with the internet. In the good ol days we could just repeat the talking points of the DNC and RNC. We did not need to deal with divergent opinions.

[smileatfear]

??? As in - there were no differences of opinion regarding women's rights, war and the draft, civil rights, abortion and birth control back before the internet? As Barney Frank would say - "just what planet do you inhabit when you're not visiting this one?"