That Seventies Struggle: Jefferson Cowie's Stayin Alive

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1970s have come to be seen as a pivotal time in the transformation of American society. In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s were “the last days of the working class” because the social compact that had brought unprecedented affluence to American workers since World War II was demolished to clear a path for more cutthroat forms of neo-liberal capitalism. Cowie also presents a superb class analysis of the music, movies, and popular culture of the 1970s, and thus Stayin’ Alive stands among the most innovative books to have developed from the intersection of cultural studies and labor history, exemplified by the scholarship of Stanley Aronowitz, Lizabeth Cohen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and George Lipsitz.

The early 1970s was a time of great promise for the American labor movement, particularly as younger workers had been influenced by the counterculture and the movements for peace and racial justice. Cowie discusses a series of strikes and upsurges of the rank and file led by younger, more anti-authoritarian workers, like the Lordstown autoworkers strike of 1972 that was called an “industrial Woodstock.” The movements for racial and sexual equality presented an especially significant opportunity to connect identity politics with social class, and Cowie identifies several moments when these possibilities could be glimpsed in the insurgencies of farm workers, textile workers, and office workers.

However, these political alliances based on the interrelations of class, race, and gender would not endure. As chronicled in the second chapter, their failure was encapsulated in the McGovern campaign of 1972, which never received the full support of organized labor, with many union leaders taking umbrage at the delegation’s racial and sexual diversity and countercultural spirit. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon had been courting white working class voters by emphasizing cultural values in place of economic interests, employing the “new southern strategy” to attract George Wallace supporters along with those besieged by anti-war protests and social deviance. Nixon further exploited working class populism by representing himself in opposition to the stereotypical image of Northeastern liberal elites, as the champion of hard-working taxpayers who are victimized by a coalition of parasitic underclasses and privileged know-it-alls.   

            A key strength of Stayin’ Alive is Cowie’s discussion of how popular music and Hollywood films did not simply reflect the social changes of the 1970s but became objects of struggle in their own right. Country music, for example, moved to the center of political struggle as forces from both the Left and the Right sought to be aligned with the authenticity conferred by the white working class. Countercultural musicians including Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead had begun recording country-themed albums in the late 1960s, and the hybrid of “country rock” was a key component of the record industry’s expansion during the 1970s.  Just as some New Left radicals had been trying to infiltrate factories and proletarian neighborhoods, musicians like Jackson Browne and The Band romanticized the historical struggles of working class America in song.

            Nonetheless, these progressive, countercultural sentiments did not stick as signifiers of working class authenticity, which would be more effectively pulled in the rightward direction of nationalism and patriarchy. Cowie begins his fourth chapter with the story of Merle Haggard’s performance at the White House for Pat Nixon’s birthday in 1973, a somewhat awkward cultural collision between the administration and an ex-felon turned country star, but one where Haggard performed his reactionary anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee” to the great enthusiasm of the Republican elite. In turn, if some progressives did symbolically align themselves with white working class culture, many others on the Left have accepted these reactionary images of intolerant hardhats and ignorant Joe Six-packs, whose ideological development is traced by Cowie from the anti-hippie killing spree in the 1970 film Joe to the definitive symbol of working class bigotry in the character of Archie Bunker.    

            Scholars of public policy often remark that the Nixon Administration now looks surprisingly liberal, as new legislation and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created for the protection of workers, consumers, and the environment. In the later years of the 1970s, however, labor would be knocked into a defensive position with the beginning of a protracted campaign to undo the economic democracy established during the New Deal and after World War II. This reversal of fortunes in the class struggle is covered in the fifth and sixth chapters in great, if sometimes tedious, detail.

            Cowie is at his best in the seventh chapter, which returns to the analysis of music and popular culture. Here we find Bruce Springsteen singing about racing in the rustbelt’s de-industrializing streets at the same time that emerging punk bands like the Ramones and Devo were personifying delinquency and social decline from the blue-collar environs of Queens and Akron. Meanwhile, on screen we see a disgruntled cabdriver scowling at the signs of social decay surrounding him in Times Square, an Italian-American boxer who miraculously arises from the mean streets of Philadelphia to stand toe-to-toe with the cocky African-American champion, and a disco dancer who flees the confines of his ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge for the glamorous Saturday nights of Manhattan. In the last of these, whose signature soundtrack gives Cowie’s book its title, the lead character’s escape was a prophetic microcosm of the direction that American society would take as factories closed, finance capitalism grew, and working-class urban neighborhoods were remade into post-industrial playgrounds of commercial leisure.

Karl Marx's Theory of Alienation

Do you remember the scene in Alien where that guy’s chest explodes, blood splatters everywhere, and then a little creature raises its head out of his chest, looks around, and then scampers away to plot its attack on the entire crew of the spaceship?



For Marx, alienation is what happens when a force that is intrinsic to humanity, or a power that resides within our species, transforms into something monstrous which threatens to destroy our lives. If you haven’t Alien, or if you have seen Alien but the thought of that scene makes you so sick that you might not be able to continue reading this chapter, then maybe you could think of Goethe’s Faust or Shelley’s Frankenstein—two literary works closer to Marx’s time, and to which he sometimes alludes—to grasp the horrors of a world that was created by human beings yet has taken on an objective power that seems unstoppable and even uncontrollable in its quest to destroy humanity.



Marx’s notion of alienation was developed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which engaged Hegel’s philosophy to conceptualize how human powers and social creations appear to take an objective form that enchains and seems to rule over the people who have collectively produced them. Marx advanced long lines of philosophical and theological inquiry and applied them to the burgeoning capitalism of his time, and he concluded that alienation severed the individual from society, unjustly appropriated the products of human labor, and put people at the mercy of social forces they could not change, control, or even understand.





Marx argued that under capitalism people are alienated in four relationships that he deemed fundamental to human existence: in relation to the products of their labor and social activity; in relation to productive activity itself; in relation to their essential humanity or “species being”; and in their social relations with other people. Marx contended that in each of these four relations, people living under capitalism are stripped of their essential human needs and capacities for creative work and social connection. All labor involves objectification, but in a capitalist society,

[T]he object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

Labor necessarily entails objectification, as it involves people transforming nature into useful things, but in an alienated state, workers do not own, and cannot make use of, the objects they produce. On the larger scale of society as a whole, alienation pervades in the sense that humanity appears to be dominated by a system of things that have been socially created but maintain an objective sense of immutability. Thus, the worker becomes “a slave of the object” (e.g., the “invisible hand” of the market) and is made dependent on a seemingly objective system that “enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject.”
As the products of labor are expropriated and assume an alien objectivity that confronts and enslaves humanity, people also become alienated from their creative power for productive activity, which Marx believed was essential to human nature. In the form of wage labor, work becomes merely a means of survival:

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.

For Marx, the appropriation and transformation of nature through labor is essential, and our capacity to thoughtfully design and produce is not simply necessary for survival but also a vital means for developing and expressing the creative powers of our species. People lose touch with the abilities that distinguish humanity from the other animals, and are thus alienated from what Marx called “species being.”

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

In arguing that people are alienated from their species-being, Marx is saying that people lose touch with their humanity and the abilities that differentiate us from animals; people are therefore alienated from nature in general. Finally, people become alienated from one another in the relationships that comprise the social world, as the relations between humanity, nature, and labor are replicated in the competitive rather than cooperative relations between people in society. It is necessary to recall that for Marx these are all thoroughly social relationships, and so in some sense the fourth vector of alienation, alienation from society, is a cumulative effect of alienation from the products of humanlabor, productive activity, and the humanity of our species-being:

An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

Alienated not only from their own labor but the labor of everyone else in society, people living under capitalism are awash in things that have been socially created but appear to possess a mysterious and supernatural aura that Marx likens to religious delusion. As he put it,

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where Marx developed the concept of alienation, were not published until 1932. Shortly before then, however, Georg Lukács was able to excavate the centrality of alienation in Marx’s thought by reading Capital through the prism of Hegelian philosophy. Lukács’ reinterpretation of Marx and the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts allowed subsequent Marxist theorists to further utilize the concept of alienation in their critiques of capitalist societies during the twentieth century.



For many years the orthodox Marxists of the Communist Party denied the significance of alienation in Marx’s thought, and they were supported by scholars of structuralist, analytic, and positivist persuasions who noted that Marx dropped alienation from most of his writings after 1844. But as Lukacs and many others noted, the conceptual traces of alienation are evident throughout Marx’s later works, particularly in the discussion of commodity fetishism in volume one of Capital. Alienation was an especially important concept for the “Western Marxists” so called because of their concentration in Western Europe and North America, and because of their opposition to the “orthodox” Marxism of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, who undertook many efforts to censor and diminish the role of alienation in Marxist thought.



Alienation, and its related concepts of reification and commodity fetishism, was vital to the critical theory that developed from the Frankfurt School in the decades before and after World War II. Thus, Horkheimer’s critical theory and philosophy developed as a critique of intellectual fragmentation and objectification, Adorno’s condemnation of popular music and the culture industry exposed the extension of alienation from work to leisure time, and Marcuse lambasted a one-dimensional society where alienation is evident in everything from the creation of false needs to the instrumental reason of technocratic thinking.



The Marxist theorists Erich Fromm and Henri Lefebvre further developed the concept of alienation by applying it to the consumer culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Fromm was a practicing psychoanalyst who was associated with the Institute for Social Research, relocating with them from Frankfurt to New York after the Nazi takeover, until the Institute parted ways with Fromm in late 1939. Fromm mixed Marx’s concept of alienation with Freudian psychoanalysis and even Zen Buddhism in developing a trenchant critique of the “social character” shaped by post-war capitalism and the consumer culture. Unfortunately, Fromm’s work has since been forgotten and is rarely included in contemporary discussions of the Frankfurt School. Henri Lefebvre was a Marxist sociologist and philosopher who is best known for his theorizing of geography and urban space, but his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life also dissects capitalism’s colonization of leisure time and private life from the perspective of alienation. Lefebvre used the concept of alienation in a thoroughly dialectical manner that presupposed a struggle for dis-alienation, thus establishing a theoretical foundation for the study of productive activity and resistance among consumers.



For Fromm, alienation is evident in consumer culture through forms of living that are based on having rather than being. Fromm conceptualized being and having as opposing “modes of existence,” so that the more one has the less one is, and vice versa. The most basic form of the having mode is to define the self through the commodities that one does or does not possess, and this range of commodities includes not only physical objects but also services, experiences, ideas, and people. Of course Fromm recognized that people must have things to survive, but the simple fact of possession is not what defines “the having mode of existence,” where “what matters is not the various objects of having, but our whole human attitude. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts.” For instance, the ascetic who repudiates the pleasures of consumption and leisure is still behaving within the having mode of existence, for Fromm notes that “in the very attempt to suppress having and consuming, the person may be equally preoccupied with having and consuming.” Those who live in the having mode are preoccupied with the possession of things, or the possession of experiences and relationships that become objectified into commodities. Fromm cited a number of non-materialist examples of the having mode, like how people enslave themselves to religious or ideological dogma, or how tourists attempt to “capture” a moment by taking a picture or video recording of it. His bestselling book, The Art of Loving, argued that love is debased when it becomes a commodity, an object exchanged through the personality market that concludes when two people take possession of each other, instead of being understood as a verb that involves an active, continuous process of loving that is most intense between two people but also extends beyond to further social and natural relationships.



Fromm conceptualized the being mode, on the other hand, in terms of experience, activity, development, and relatedness. Fromm’s notion of being is closely linked to the capacity for productive activity that Marx associates with species-being. Such forms of productive activity realize human faculties and talents in the process of growing and renewing oneself and giving up one’s egocentricity and selfishness. “Nonalienated activity,” Fromm wrote, “is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce.” Fromm went to great lengths to distinguish this kind of productive activity from what he called mere “busyness,” where a person appears active but is actually being acted upon by external or internalized forces and is therefore in a condition of alienation. Conversely, a person can be active while appearing to do nothing (e.g., daydreaming, reading, meditating) as long as they are the subject of their action. The extent of alienation in consumption can therefore be measured by the amount of passivity among consumers. Generally speaking, Fromm concluded,"We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate and consume them."



Concomitant with the triumph of consumer capitalism after World War II, Fromm developed Freud’s notion of character—the forces which underlie and motivate a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior—into a sociological concept of “social character.” Among these forms of social character, Fromm distinguished between productive and non-productive orientations that correspond to modes of being and having. The productive orientation allows individuals to overcome alienation to the extent that they are loving and creative in everyday life, developing their intellectual, physical, emotional, and sensory powers in ways that relate them with society and nature while preserving their unique individuality.



Fromm clearly believed that a socialist society would enable more people to develop a productive orientation of being, but also that individuals living in the being mode could be found in the capitalist society of his time, although he did not attempt to explain how this form of social character could survive under capitalism. He did, however, analyze the various forms of social character with a non-productive orientation that are facilitated by capitalism, including a shift in social character that accompanied the transition from older forms of industrial capitalism to the consumer culture of his time. The capitalism of the nineteenth century, Fromm observed, favored a “hoarding orientation” that stressed saving rather than spending and an “exploitative orientation” driven to acquire or steal without giving or sharing. Freud, as Fromm noted, originally identified these traits in the “anal character” of bourgeois society. The consumerism of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, on the other hand, gave rise to a “receptive orientation” and an accompanying “marketing orientation.” In the receptive orientation, “the aim is to receive, to ‘drink in,’ to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were.” In the marketing orientation, people become “a thing to be employed successfully on the market,” such that “qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of ‘the personality package,’ conducive to a higher price on the personality market.” The hoarding, exploitative, receptive, and marketing orientations are all variations on modes of having rather than being. The shift from hoarding and exploitative to receptive and marketing orientations also parallel the transition described by David Riesman, Fromm’s friend and colleague, from an “inner-directed” to “other-directed” social character. For Fromm, the “craving for acceptance” that defines the other-directed person “is indeed a very characteristic feeling in the alienated person…due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves—because they are not themselves.”



As a therapist who practiced psychoanalysis for more than 50 years, Fromm was especially concerned with the consequences of alienation and consumerism for mental health. “The average man today may have a good deal of fun and pleasure,” he observed in the middle of the 1950s, “but in spite of this, he is fundamentally depressed.” For Fromm, depression was synonymous with the boredom resulting from an inability to develop one’s creative potential, and therefore with a general state of alienation. The alienated individual then turns to entertainment and consumption to compensate for this inner sense of emptiness and powerlessness, but Fromm notes that “covering up a symptom does not do away with the conditions which produce it.” In the most extreme cases, the quest to quell the anxiety and fill this inner void leads to pathological forms of consumption like eating disorders, alcoholism, and drug addiction. As with social character, Fromm recognized that multiple forms of mental illness could arise from an underlying condition of alienation. He observed that many individuals experienced “a pervasive sense of guilt,” which he found surprising given the generally secular thrust of the culture, because people found themselves caught between the demands of the social system and their own humanity, “for being a person and for being a thing.” In other cases, he diagnosed the growing sense of narcissism among people whose capacity for love could only be only turned inward, so as to disconnect them from relationships with other people, society at large, and nature.



For the most part, Fromm drew pessimistic conclusions that were similar to those of other German émigrés associated with Frankfurt School. But even in the 1950s, he did note that “there are signs that people are increasingly dissatisfied and disappointed with their way of life and trying to regain some of their lost selfhood and productivity.” He then began to write about the millions of people he observed who “indulge in any number of ‘do-it-yourself’ activities” and here Fromm included a range of practices that mix production and consumption to varying degrees—painting, gardening, adult education, listening to good music, building houses or boats. But Fromm then concluded by insisting that although these trends might be promising, they should not delude people into accepting the mythologies of post-war America that “we have already passed the peak of alienation and are now on our way to a better world.” Likewise, Fromm saw only limited signs of hope in the aftermath of the social movements and cultural revolts of the late 1960s. Writing during the 1970s in his final book, To Have or To Be?, Fromm observed that the counterculture had reoriented the consumptive practices of many young people to a mode of being:"Among these young people we find patterns of consumption that are not hidden forms of acquisition and having, but expressions of genuine joy in doing what one likes to do without expecting anything ‘lasting’ in return."



Alienation also figured prominently in Henri Lefebvre’s three volumes of The Critique of Everyday Life, published between 1947 and 1981. However, while Fromm and other German intellectuals linked to the Frankfurt School expressed a deep pessimism about post-war society and the consumer culture, Lefebvre used alienation in dialectical movement with “disalienation,” which presented new possibilities for revolution in everyday life. Over the course of the twentieth century, Lefebvre was at the center of many pivotal cultural, political, and intellectual movements, including the avant-garde of Dada and Surrealism, the uprisings of May 1968, and the development of postmodernism. As Lefebvre wrote in the second volume, “absolute alienation and absolute disalienation are equally inconceivable. Real alienation can be thought of and determined only in terms of a possible disalienation.”



Lefebvre’s intellectual roots were formed between the two world wars as he mixed Marxism with the insights of Dada and Surrealism. The interwar avant-gardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous action could disorient the dominant ideology in which social conventions appear as natural and inevitable. They also allowed Lefebvre to imagine a new type of society where life itself would be a work of art, constituted by desire and creativity. Along with Andre Breton and many of the other Surrealists, Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1928. But while the Surrealists’ relationship to the Party was volatile and short-lived, Lefebvre stayed on and served as one of its most prominent intellectual spokesman throughout the next three decades, despite the fact that his ideas often conflicted with their interpretations of Marxism that favored “scientific” notions of objective determination. Like Georg Lukács, Lefebvre argued for a more philosophical and humanist reading of Marx that extracted the Hegelian residue in the concepts of alienation, reification, and class consciousness.



Beginning with the first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life, written in 1947, Lefebvre suggested that capitalism was commoditizing not only labor but leisure, family, sexuality, the body, and the imagination. He emphasized that, “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work. . . So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work.” Like the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre observed that Western societies were becoming increasingly oriented around consumption and commercial entertainment, but while these apparatuses of the culture industry promised relief from the workplace, in reality they represented an extension of alienation in everyday life. Lefebvre sought to theorize the junction of instrumental rationality and mass culture through the term “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”



His dialectical method also allowed him to theorize the struggle and resistance that occurs within the processes of consumption, as consumers may seek to overcome alienation by turning consumption into creative activity and/or a basis for social relationships. But Lefebvre recognized that the consumer’s quest for disalienation could also create “an even greater alienation”: “Leisure activities ‘disalienate’ from the effects of fragmented labour; however, when they are entertainments and distractions, they contain their own alienations.” Theorizing in this dialectical and “relativized” fashion, Lefebvre comprehends alienation and disalienation as contradictions that “characterize concrete situations, taken in movement and not considered in a motionless way along fixed structural lines.”



Nonetheless, Lefebvre refused to succumb to the pessimism and despair which engulfed so other Marxists in the decades after World War II. From Lefebvre’s perspective, the consumer culture did not represent the triumph of “false needs” because leisure, pleasure, and self-expression are all essential human faculties. What are false are not the needs which capital promises to fulfill, but the commodities and signs which are supposed to realize them. Lefebvre wrote, “They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance.” Although their diagnoses of post-war society were otherwise quite similar, Lefebvre thus felt compelled to differentiate himself from Herbert Marcuse: “Can terrorist pressures and repression reinforce individual self-repression to the point of closing all issues? Against Marcuse we continue to assert that they cannot.” As early as 1962, Lefebvre had identified young people as a potentially revolutionary agent of social change: “Everywhere we see them showing signs of dissatisfaction and rebellion…It is they who continue the uninterrupted dialogue between ideal and experiment.” In May 1968, the speculations of Lefebvre and the like-minded Situationist International momentarily came to fruition as young people seized the streets of Paris while general strikes and mass demonstrations involving millions nearly toppled the French government.



After 1968, Lefebvre pursued his study of social space and cities, including his most renowned work, The Production of Space. Otherwise, however, Lefebvre’s influence was negligible once post-structuralism and postmodernism came to dominate the French intellectual scene. He did maintain an indirect presence through his student Jean Baudrillard, whose earliest works on the semiotics of consumer culture bear traces of Lefebvre’s thought. But unlike Baudrillard and so many other post-1968 French intellectuals, Lefebvre never renounced Marxism or his utopian hopes for revolution once postmodern ideas became fashionable.

The concept of alienation depends on a certain view of human nature and, as Lefebvre reminds us, the prospect that humanity can become “disalienated.” After a wave of intellectual interest in the humanism of the young Marx that accompanied the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s, the concept of alienation has largely been abandoned in cultural theory. But as an array of psychological disorders continue to increase as the consumer culture becomes more entrenched and pervasive, it is conceivable that the critique of alienation may prove useful once again.

One New York, Many Americas, and an Uncertain Future

There were at least three or four variations of American culture on display this weekend in New York, on Friday at Fashion’s Night Out and Saturday in the various ceremonies and protests around September 11. Friday night’s festivities spotlighted the culture that has emerged and become dominant over the course of several decades—a consumer culture that is paced by fashion’s cycles of instant gratification and planned obsolescence.

What has become the dominant American and global culture is a completely commercialized culture based in artifice, frivolity, and disposability, traits which the fashion world has always exemplified to the point of self-parody.Fashion makes the human necessity for clothing into a commodity fetish, thereby mocking the notion of use value in favor of pure exchange value inflated to spectacularly outrageous prices.

Today's fashion world collapses the conflicts that characterized the culture wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, and yet it is unabashedly elitist and exclusive, restoring an aristocratic culture of idol worship for celebrities and their lives of leisure. Though not democratic, it is certainly diverse, a culture that celebrates difference and ambiguity, especially in matters of gender and sexuality. Its aesthetic standards of beauty are synonymous with youth, and embodied by women with notoriously freakish genetics. Fashion is therefore at the center of capitalism’s consumer culture, and it is fueling the cultural changes that multiply the potential postures for individual identities, bodies, styles, and sexualities.

The following day, America’s residual cultures reemerged and argued tirelessly with each other in the streets of New York to commemorate the ninth anniversary of September 11, and to protest, and counter-protest, the proposed construction of a Mosque/Islamic cultural center near the original site of the World Trade Center. The area around Ground Zero became a political, religious, and ideological warzone engaging evangelical Christians, defenders of civil liberties, right-wing tea-baggers, left-wing conspiracy nuts, Muslims not only from the Middle East but from New York ghettos, apocalyptic doomsayers, xenophobic nationalists, and liberal multiculturalists into a bewildering fray of endless argumentation and accusation.

Forgive me for sounding like a Hilton or Kardashian, but one thing all these groups had in common was their lack of fashion and general unattractiveness. Caroline and I were secretly curious to check out the anti-Mosque crowd, and after having been at Fashion’s Night Out on the previous evening, one couldn’t help but notice how white, old, frumpy, and ridiculously out-of-place in New York City these people looked in comparison. The sense of fear and ignorance was overwhelming and made me angry after only a few minutes, but the crowd also provoked some unexpected feelings of pity within me. I mean, these people were just so ugly, and they looked so outdated in every way.

A number of journalists have written about how the Tea Party movement is recruiting among people who have lost their jobs and/or their homes in the economic recession and are pissed off but confused about who to blame. Walking with them on September 11th, I wondered if there wasn’t also a story about how they had also been rejected and rendered useless within the symbolic economy of fashion, consumption, and the body. The crowd waved their flags and bared their crosses in a predictably ugly manner, and they also carried a palpable sense of persecution and melodramatic claims to victimization—Caroline’s favorite image was of Jesus’ nailed and bloody wrist with salt being poured into the open wound, while mine was a tee-shirt that claimed the WTC site was “sacred ground” and implied that building a Mosque would make it a “symbol of conquest” for Islam.

In general, their ideological complaints about government, President Obama, Islam, terrorism, and the alleged persecution of Christian Americans are far too illogical, unfounded, and incoherent to be analyzed on their own terms. The feelings they express, on the other hand, are very clear: anger, fear, and an overarching claim to victimization. These people are yesterday’s news, and at some level they seem to know it. Their patriarchal institutions of marriage, family, and compulsory heterosexuality have collapsed from within; their “traditional” values are routinely violated by their most vocal proponents; their investments in God and country are rapidly losing their value under global capitalism; a generation of capitalists have stolen their money while openly mocking their work ethic; their ideal of small-town community has been reduced to nostalgic simulation.

There was a wide-ranging sense of paranoia and apocalyptic fantasy on all sides on September 11th, with the exception of the police and fire departments that clearly enjoyed their day of recognition and ceremonial tribute. We stopped to watch what sounded like an argument between a guy in a “9/11 Truth” shirt and an anti-Mosque tea-bagger over whether September 11 was the inside work of the Bush administration. Their vocal exchange had the loudness and ferocity of an argument, but it also looked like an emotional bond was forming between these men as they each mourned the growth of omnipotent powers and made their claims to victimhood.

And the tea-baggers weren’t the only ones clinging to outmoded values and obsolete ideas, either. Liberal defenders of multiculturalism, civil liberties, and religious freedom formed a counter-protest of their own with a predictable mix of signs, slogans, and passé style. These people clearly hadn’t learned the lessons of Fashion’s Night Out: their ideals of democracy, citizenship, and political activism are irrelevant in the global capitalism of the twenty-first century and amount to little more than decidedly unglamorous styles of posing and posturing.

Returning home to Caroline’s place at 141st and Broadway took us into West Harlem and yet another enduring form of American culture, one that has been shaped by poverty, violence, and widespread social deviance since masses of black people starting coming to New York during the Great Migration of World War I. Outside the window of Caroline’s apartment, we watch elderly Puerto Rican and Afro-American men playing dominos and heard them yelling at each other in mixtures of Spanish and English as money was won and lost. Groups of dark-skinned youths openly smoke blunts in the street without giving a second thought to getting busted. Young children yell and run up and down at the street at 2 o’clock in the morning with minimal parental supervision.

For nearly one hundred years, this neighborhood has nurtured and preserved a culture of defiance that white authorities have treated as pathological insofar as they have been unable to completely domesticate and assimilate its impoverished inhabitants. Today, the signs of gentrification are only just beginning to appear: one minute Caroline and I are watching a young man clowning in the streets to a beat that only he seems to be able to hear, and the next minute we are approached by a white woman walking a golden retriever who asks if we’ve seen the litter of poor little kittens scampering around the street lately.

With its beats, rhymes, and air of defiance, the street culture of Harlem is in a far better position to be recognized and integrated through commercial exploitation into the symbolic economy and culture of our future. The occasion of September 11th summoned the anger and fear of a people in decline, but if the tragedies of the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that we must beware of the ugly little people in decline who come outfitted in flags and crosses to cover over their secret racial fears and sexual hang-ups. These people who literally feel “left behind” have fantasies of the apocalypse on their collective mind, and although they are probably destined to become the laughingstocks of history, we shouldn’t doubt their resolve to turn their version of the end of the world into a reality before they slide, kicking and screaming, into social insignificance.

"On Becoming a Punk Rock Sociologist"

I've been asked to write an autobiographical essay for an anthology about punk and academia. No idea when it will see the light of day, or more accurately the dust of the library, so I'm putting it here too.

I was born in Long Beach, CA and raised in the adjacent city of San Pedro, graduating from San Pedro High School in 1988. I’d like to be able to tell you all about how I was influenced by our hometown heroes, the Minutemen, or Black Flag or the Descendents or any of the other hardcore bands that emerged from the nearby cities of Los Angeles’ South Bay at this time. I can imagine a really good story about how the radical politics and do-it-yourself ethic of the local hardcore scene would inspire me to become the Marxist sociologist I am today. However, that story would be a lie, because the truth is that my paths to both punk rock and radical sociology were never that direct or linear, and I’m just not that cool.

In high school I was a devout partisan of thrash metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and a couple dozen others with a more limited following. By the second half of the 1980s the California hardcore scene had fizzled out. There was this one punk dude who had “Minor Threat” written on the jacket he wore to school every day, but I didn’t know anything about them because the only people I hung out with were other longhairs and stoners. Still, there was a lot of punk influence in thrash metal, which was less about devils and dragons and more about indicting real world authorities, creating a local scene with indie record labels, and maintaining a veneer of authenticity that mocked the posturing and pomposity usually associated with heavy metal.

My headbanging roots notwithstanding, I almost voted for George Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote in, until my mother talked me out of it at the last minute. Like many other metalheads, I was personally rebellious but my half-baked political views amounted to nothing more than simple, knee-jerk libertarianism. I was entranced by power, enthralled by violence, and envious of wealth, and I also hated people I thought were weak or dependent, so it probably isn’t surprising that I almost voted for Bush.

I had begun college during that fall of 1988, as my parents were eager for me to leave my troublemaking metal friends behind and move north to attend San Jose State University. It wasn’t long before I found myself in classes taught by veterans of the New Left. One of them was Professor Douglas Dowd, who had been part of the Monthly Review editorial team with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and cofounded the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Dowd would typically begin his classes in Microeconomics with some thoughts about Marx or Ricardo before launching into a series of tirades that indiscriminately covered everything from the wastefulness of capitalism to the insanity of war and nationalism to the cruelty of child labor. This 70-plus year-old man would yell and point and curse and then stop suddenly, look out the window, and silently shake his head while muttering something about the insanity of our world. Many of the students in class were horrified and stopped attending after the first two weeks, but I was captivated. One day Dowd recited the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and asked the class if that sounded like the kind of world any of us would want to live in, and I was the only student to raise my hand. “Then you’re a God-damn Communist!” he shouted at me.

O.K., so I guess I’m a Communist now. This was admittedly a major political about-face, but to this day I think my metal roots and cultural rebelliousness prepared me to embrace this stigmatized, marginalized political identity. I had grown up in a working-class seaport with a vague sense that the world wasn’t right, and now I was engrossed in my education to try and understand why. I was listening to the Bay Area’s progressive radio station KPFA and reading everything I could get my hands on, especially Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My identity and style morphed from headbanger to something like a retro countercultural radical as I became absorbed in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and anything else I could read or watch about the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society, and the counterculture.

I enrolled in a social theory class the following semester, and it was there that I read Marx for the first time and met my friend Mike Roberts, who today is also a sociology professor at San Diego State. Mike and I started a left campus organization and worked on publishing a newspaper that was unfortunately sabotaged by some other students just before it was about to be printed. Our social theory professor, Talmadge Wright, had also started a group called the Student Homeless Alliance that we became involved with. This was late 1990, and the United States was gearing up for our first war with Iraq, so Mike and I began working with other campus activists to create an anti-war coalition and organize an anti-war demonstration. I experienced my first 15 seconds of fame when my speech commencing the demonstration was sound-bitten for the local TV news.

At this time I knew a lot of people who were into punk rock, but my tastes hadn’t progressed that far yet. Some of my friends regularly made trips up to Berkeley to go to the Gilman Street club, but I never went. They played Dag Nasty, Green Day, and Big Drill Car for me but I absolutely hated all that melody. I thought it was cool that Bad Religion could reference Noam Chomsky and the like, but to this day their singer’s voice drives me crazy. One of my roommates was really into Fugazi, and although they’ve since become one of my favorite bands they just didn’t compute to me at that time. What my metal years had prepared me for was grunge and the whole Sub Pop/Seattle scene, so of course I took to Mudhoney and Soundgarden almost instantly. And then more locally there was Primus, Mr. Bungle, Psychefunkapus, the Limbomaniacs, and a bunch of other bands that formed a metal-funk-punk scene in the Bay Area.

By now my career goals had changed such that I wanted to go to graduate school and hopefully grow up to be a tenured radical like my professors. UC Santa Cruz was known to have a lot of Marxist and radical faculty members, especially in the sociology department, and so I transferred there in the fall of 1991. I did an internship with Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of Marxist ecology founded by James O’Connor, and worked with the Bay Area activist Frank Bardacke on a project about farmworkers. Other than that, however, there were a lot of people who talked radical politics at UC Santa Cruz but there wasn’t a lot of action, a possibly intentional result of the campus’ relatively isolated location in the mountains of central California. I joked with friends: what if a bunch of students demonstrate in the forest and there is no TV crew there to film them, do they make a sound? My only brush with revolution was accidentally getting hit in the side of the head with some sort of firecracker on the night of the Rodney King riots as the Santa Cruz students marched into town and trashed the local police department headquarters.

Nirvana’s Nevermind came out during my first semester at Santa Cruz. I remember that for weeks I would walk around the dorms and count how many rooms were blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or some other song from the album. I knew it was a really big deal when the dreadlocked hippie kids who spent all day playing hacky sack and, as far I knew, listened to nothing but reggae and the Grateful Dead were suddenly talking about how much they wanted to see Nirvana when they came to San Francisco. The next two years or so would represent the pinnacle of the alternative rock/Lollapalooza era. Then the questions began: Did Nirvana sell out? Is alternative the new mainstream? Did I really just see a runway model wearing Doc Marten’s? Does anyone know anyone who likes to be called “Generation X”? Did that douchebag on the TV really just tell me that the new Subaru Impreza is just like punk rock?

At Santa Cruz I took a great class in the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, read the Frankfurt School for the first time, and wrote research papers about the Black Panthers, American foreign policy, and the Wobblies. But by this time I had also been introduced to cultural studies, both in my courses on mass media and popular culture and in my conversations with activists who were influenced by identity politics and postmodernism. My relationship to cultural studies, as I discuss in more detail below, has always been deeply ambivalent. In the context of all these questions about alternative culture and Generation X, I could see that the issues raised by cultural studies about youth subcultures, hegemony, and resistance were still very pertinent and could not be ignored. I was especially taken with Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place, which as anyone who’s read it knows is loaded with pomo jargon but still raised what I thought were prescient questions about postmodern society, the ironic cynicism of youth culture, and the role that these had somehow played in maintaining the hegemony of conservatism.

I wrote a senior thesis under the direction of Professor Herman Gray about the media coverage of the movement against the Gulf War and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in the spring of 1993. I was on my way to graduate school and chose to enroll in the sociology program at UC San Diego because it advertised itself as having a strong emphasis in culture, which had quickly become my main field of interest. My first two years of graduate school were a rude awakening. I had chosen to study sociology because as an undergraduate it seemed so interdisciplinary and open-ended, like it was the best of all possible homes for my combination of interests in critical theory, radical politics, social history, and cultural studies. But as a graduate student I quickly discovered that professional sociology was a different animal altogether.

In time I learned that the sociology department at UC San Diego had indeed specialized in culture at one point in its history, but in recent years there had been a major shift toward historical-comparative sociology, and those faculty always seemed to be repeating the mantra that they were trying to make the program more “professional,” “competitive,” and “rigorous.” Yuk. Moreover, what the department did offer in terms of culture was mainly rooted in the apolitical traditions of microsociology like symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Double yuk. Fortunately, critical theory and cultural studies had made strong inroads in UCSD’s departments of Communication and Literature, and in Ethnic Studies I discovered Professor George Lipsitz, who would serve as a de facto mentor in my study of neo-Marxist theories of culture.

San Diego was home to a bustling alternative music centered at a club called the Casbah, and I began going to shows there on a regular basis. After the success of Nirvana and other grunge bands, the major labels had gone scouting for new alternative rock acts to sign, and San Diego was one of a number of cities that was pegged as a potential “next Seattle.” Seven San Diego bands had signed with major labels during this time, and everyone from Rolling Stone to Details to the E! television network had done feature stories about the local scene. Beyond the hype, I discovered that there was indeed an exciting and musically diverse scene, and I instantly became a fan of the spastic noise of Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, and Heavy Vegetable, the retro punk of Rocket From the Crypt, and the cyborg prog-rock of Three Mile Pilot.

I was beginning to envision a dissertation project that brought together the cultural studies focus on music and subcultures with the sociological methods of ethnography and the neo-Marxist inquiry into the place of culture in post-Fordist capitalism. How all those pieces of the puzzle actually fit together would be something I would have to figure out along the way. Unfortunately, most of my sociology professors were vocally unsupportive of this idea. I had impressed many of them with my self-motivated interest in social theory, but for them music was a frivolous concern without any real sociological import. When I told the professor in my field methods seminar what I planned to do, he replied with a snarky tone, “It sounds like you’re just going to hang out with your friends.” Another one begged me to do something else—anything else, really—because I was “too close” to my project, and he eventually removed himself from my committee when I refused.

In actuality, I didn’t have any friends inside the scene, and rather than being “too close” I constantly felt like an outsider because not only was I not a musician, I was this geeky grad student who had all these esoteric theoretical and political questions about music and the scene. Lots of people told me that my project sounded like “fun,” and it was fun to go shows and hear live music in what I thought was a great scene, but it was nerve-wracking as hell to approach these people in a club and awkwardly ask them if we could arrange an interview. Let’s just say I found myself drinking a lot of “liquid courage” during those years.

Getting into the local scene enhanced my political consciousness, not because the bands themselves were concerned with political issues (most of them weren’t), but because I could see how they had formed a community based on creative work and participation. It wasn’t a dogmatic scene of the sort advocated in the pages of Maximumrocknroll, and therefore a great variety of musical styles and influences could be thrown together without apology. And so I began to see the form of democratic cultural production as more significant than the content of any particular political protest or “message.” This understanding of “punk” as a method of production rather than a specific style or sound opened up whole vistas of possibility and informed my belated musical education. Maybe I can explain it this way: Drive Like Jehu led me back to Fugazi and then even further back to Wire and then forward to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and then back again to the Gang of Four and Television. See, I told you my path to punk was ass-backwards.

While the Casbah and other local nightclubs were becoming a second home for me, I was still suffering from quite a bit of intellectual homelessness on campus. I was getting a lot more out of the graduate courses I was taking in other departments, so I stopped enrolling in sociology seminars after completing my minimum amount of required coursework and came very close to dropping out of the program. I took a position as a teaching assistant in an interdisciplinary freshman-level writing course, where the levels of overwork were legendary. Before long I had become heavily involved with the effort to unionize the academic student employees at the University of California and would be elected to serve on the strike committee as we planned a number of strategies for work stoppage. This took me further out of the bounds of the sociology department, as my social circle was now mainly composed of humanities students who were involved with me in organizing the T.A. union. Intellectually, however, I never embraced the kind of cultural studies that is practiced in the humanities, where meaning is mainly located in the “text” and acts of resistance are conceived as symbolic matters of reading and style. I was still fundamentally concerned with social process, and the Marxist in me still sought to link culture back to social structure. My experiences in the music scene redoubled these convictions: resistance was a matter of how people organized their community and engaged in creative work, not what people wore, how they cut their hair, or what they sang about in their lyrics.

My intellectual homelessness was glaringly evident and became a huge liability when I went on the job market for the first time in the fall of 1999. It seems that what transpired in my graduate program was something like a microcosm of what was happening in American sociology in general. There has been a great expansion of interest and research in culture among American sociologists since the 1980s, but these cultural sociologists have taken great pains to distinguish and insulate themselves from the broader field of cultural studies. The studies of popular culture and media, much less popular music, are very few and far between. American cultural sociology is significantly more conventional, eager to be accepted within the mainstream of the discipline, and rarely engaged with questions of power and resistance. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what one of the leading proponents has to say in its favor: “American cultural sociology is conservative rather than revolutionary in its academic program, unlike the British cultural studies model which has attempted to transgress disciplinary boundaries and create a completely new academic and discursive field.”

No matter what kind of theoretical and methodological spin I try to put on it, my work reeks of cultural studies simply because it is has the word punk attached to it. I sent out over 100 job applications during my first 3 years on the market without landing a single on-campus interview. I nearly gave up on the idea of an academic career on several different occasions, but a lack of other marketable skills and job experience made me feel trapped, and I still had a deep intellectual passion, not necessarily for sociology but for understanding social processes and contributing to social change. Fortunately I was able to hang on as an adjunct instructor of sociology at UC San Diego, as my courses on popular culture and youth attracted very high student enrollments; I taught a total of nearly 1,000 students during my final year there in 2001-02.

As my contract with UC San Diego and a long-term romantic relationship both came to an end at virtually the same time, I found myself living with my mother and collecting unemployment in late 2002. I was ready to give up on academia once and for all when I miraculously got a temporary position at the University of Kansas that began in the Spring 2003 semester and lasted through the 2003-04 school year. I sent out another heap of job applications but still couldn’t land a satisfactory tenure-track position, so I accepted another temporary appointment at Colgate University for 2004-05.

In 2005 I finally landed a tenure-track position at Florida Atlantic University. It’s not a prestigious school by any means, but it’s a good place for a punk like me: lots of older, “non-traditional” and working-class students, many of whom have roots in the Caribbean. Securing a permanent academic home has afforded me the time to finally finish turning my dissertation into a book titled Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis which will be published by New York University Press in 2009. Meanwhile, American sociology continues to aspire to the status of a science along the lines of economics and political science while attempting to avoid the stigma of the humanities conferred by cultural studies, and so there is no reason to expect that the study of punk or any other form of music will be moving into the center of the discipline any time soon. But somehow this feels like the appropriate place for a punk rock sociologist: screaming from the margins, denouncing the mainstream, and maybe—just maybe—developing the new ideas that are destined to shake up the establishment.

Straight Outta Immokalee: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Last spring we organized a trip out to Immokalee, a patch of swampland in the center of southern Florida where great numbers of tomatoes are picked by immigrant workers who toil under the most horrifying conditions of exploitation. Our tour would be guided by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (www.ciw-online.org), a community-based worker organization that has been working since 1993 to increase wages, improve working conditions, and put an end to modern-day slavery (yes, slavery, see below) in Immokalee. In 2001 the CIW launched a national boycott of Taco Bell that called on the fast food giant to take responsibility for the human rights abuses that occur as tomatoes are being picked for its “restaurants” (a generous term for Taco Bell, I know). They were eventually victorious in their “Boot the Bell” campaign when students at 25 colleges and high schools—including Duke, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, UCLA, and the University of Michigan—successfully pressured their administrations to kick Taco Bell off campus. In 2005 Taco Bell finally capitulated and agreed to meet all of the CIW’s demands to raise wages and improve working conditions. Since then the CIW has also won a two-year battle with McDonald’s and entered into comparable agreements with Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods.

Needless to say, I find the CIW’s example tremendously inspiring in this time of global capitalism when it seems like corporations have absolute power over both workers and consumers and we are always being told that organized labor is a thing of the past. On Saturday our group was joined by a number of students from the University of South Florida and Outward Bound, totaling about 50 in all, at the CIW community center. The CIW is planning to launch a new campaign that targets the food service corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass) which are awarded contracts to feed students on college and high school campuses across America. Toward this end they have created the Student/Farmworker Alliance (www.sfalliance.org) which seeks to educate students who can then pressure their administrations in the manner that was so successful in the “Boot the Bell” campaign. A similar movement arose in the late 1990s calling itself Students Against Sweatshops, where students exposed the brutal conditions typically involved in making the clothing and apparel that display their school’s logo. These movements have proven successful because students are such a coveted demographic of consumers, and today’s corporations and universities are especially sensitive about protecting their image and brand names.

After a short presentation the CIW organizers took us out on a tour of Immokalee. Of course everything had a Third World feel to it, but it was also a bit like stepping back into the 19th century. Immokalee isn’t a “community” so much as it is an old-fashioned labor camp. After a trip to the parking lot where masses of prospective workers come every morning before 5 AM hoping to be picked up for work in the fields, we are taken on a walking tour of the residential area where some 20,000 people live in a 9 block area of rusted mobile homes and dilapidated shacks. The great majority of workers do not own cars, so they must live close to the parking lots where the buses pick them up for work. Our guide points to one of these decrepit trailers and informs us that between 10 and 15 people are typically living in one at any particular time. Most only have 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom, so people usually just throw down a mattress wherever they can, and if you need to cook something or take a shit then you’ll probably need to get in line. They rent for about 400 dollars per month because all of the trailers are owned by two families who can take advantage of their monopoly to jack up the rents. It’s the same story at the grocery store, where price gouging is routine because people don’t have the option to shop around when they’re on foot or riding a bicycle. With this in mind the CIW has recently established a little cooperative store that sells staples like tortillas and corn oil at wholesale prices, thus forcing the grocery store to lower their prices a bit.

Relatively speaking, the people living in the trailers are probably the lucky ones in Immokalee. Over the past several years the CIW has exposed 7 cases of slavery involving about 1,000 workers. The most recent case decided in December 2008 involved a family who would lock their workers in shacks and box trucks at night and tie, chain, and beat them if they tried to leave. The members of this Navarette family were convicted and are due to be sentenced in federal court. The CIW says that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that slavery is in fact rampant. It’s not hard to see how it happens: workers can be taken miles away from civilization into the Everglades, without a phone or a car, and so if you do escape, where are you going to run? Most of the workers are immigrants from Guatemala, southern Mexico, or Haiti, they don’t know anything about what little rights they do possess, they don’t speak English and frequently can’t even communicate with each other because they speak regional dialects, and of course the fear of deportation can be used against them in almost any situation.

Walking through Immokalee was depressing, to say the least. Far removed from either coast, it had already gotten oppressively hot in March, and periodically a dry wind would sweep through and smack our faces with dust and dirt. I tried to imagine what it would be like working in the fields in this baking sun, getting paid 40 fucking cents for every 32 pound bucket of tomatoes I could gather, meaning that I would need to pick 125 buckets of tomatoes—that’s two and a half tons—just to make 50 bucks. But when we got back to the CIW community center I felt a renewed sense of energy and hope. I reminded myself that these people had taken on some of the most powerful corporations in the world and actually won a little something for themselves. The CIW had created a community radio station and a couple of little kids were running around and playing like they were on the air. The CIW told us about how they had started hosted meetings for women’s groups and how the center would be packed every Saturday night when they showed movies on their projector. In other words, this isn’t just a labor movement, it’s a culture in the making. They don’t have any illusions about what they’re up against, but the collective sense of courage and

The U.S. Social Forum and the Next Left

I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to get when I left for Detroit to attend the U.S. Social Forum. Yet I came away surprised, because even though I found the expected sources of frustration and some new ones as well, I discovered a greater number of reasons for hope and optimism about the resurgence of the Left in the U.S. For four days the city of Detroit was the hive for a swarm of non-governmental organizations with a largely youthful and substantially black and Latino constituency of some 15,000 community activists, cyber-anarchists, and radical pedagogues. It can be difficult to watch and listen to the growing pains of this movement of movements, but compared to other Leftist conventions, meetings, and events I’ve attended off and on over the past two decades, this current multitude certainly represents an advance in both theory and practice. The U.S. Social Forum makes capitalism the nucleus of its analyses in ways that the politically correct Left never approximated in the 1990s. Its several hundred workshops and panels consider the myriad ways in which that class and labor conflicts intersect with the inequalities of racism and sexism, thus generating a more dynamic analysis that transcends the previous divisions between identity politics and Marxism. But the even more significant developments are in the demography of the members, how people are getting organized and mobilized, and the communities they are trying to rebuild in participatory and sustainable directions. I’m used to national Left conventions being unholy meeting grounds where the militant misfits of graduate school join with postmodern primitives in dreadlocked drum circles, and while those two populations were still out in full force in Detroit, they were joined by a third contingent of young people of color whose presence has noticeably multiplied with community organizing around urban issues and the use of digital media to fight the power. This is starting to look more like a global movement, or at least one that reflects America’s increasingly global culture. It is only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential, and it can grow by more leaps and bounds if it sheds some of the Left’s old baggage and builds a new, more inclusive, and truly popular culture.

I flew to Detroit on Thursday morning, June 24. My trip was not off to a good beginning: I had made a late reservation and got stuck in a middle seat, and I booked a nonstop flight but this came with the Devil’s bargain that a foul fog of flatulence would accumulate over the course of my three-plus hour flight. The cabbie who picked me up at the airport was absorbed in the Slovakia vs. Italy match of the World Cup, insisting that I watch the final minutes of the game on his mobile phone while he drove me downtown. These were the only minutes of the World Cup I actually watched, and although it was a virtual shootout with a score of 3-2 and apparently entailed the upset and elimination of a major international contender, the white-bread American part of me was still entirely bored. I checked-in at the hotel and began walking to Detroit’s Cobo Exhibition Hall, where I was greeted by a huge bronze statue of the boxer Joe Louis and a moderate number of people milling about, occupied with their laptops and cell phones, or flipping through the program schedule for workshops to attend. A friend and I were firing off texts at one another about our present locations, leading me upstairs to the press briefing room in one of the media centers, a cavernous and chaotic room where perhaps a dozen people worked on desktops while a tangled mass of wires and backup devices lay in waiting on adjoining tables. Inside the press briefing room, a panel was being conducted in Spanish about neocolonial economics in Latin America, and my friend was one of perhaps ten people who were filming, with maybe twice that number in the audience. We split when the Q&A began and walked over to a local bar & grill to grab a bite to eat and make plans for the days ahead.

My buddy spent most of the next two days filming and uploading footage for the People’s Media Campaign. He begins trying to explain that they an offshoot of the official conference that follows a more de-centered encuentro model, and therefore were engaged in a conflict with the official media center where the press briefing had been, but at a certain point all the sectarian in-fighting must have made my eyes glass over. I would spend my time wandering around various parts of the conference hall and taking pictures, looking through the book exhibits, engaging in a few conversations, watching graffiti artists at work, and sitting in an amphitheater listening to rappers. The fusion of Leftist politics and hip hop culture—not just in music, but the revival of graffiti art and break-dancing as well—was one of the most striking features of the U.S. Social Forum. Over the past 20 years or so, hip hop has become a truly global form of popular music and culture that nearly everyone in the world can adopt to speak to their perspective and experience—the most memorable performance I witnessed was by a Lebanese feminist and peace activist local to Detroit. Hip hop has supplanted, in this regard, folk music and more recently rock, the latter of which seems to be in danger of being wholly converted into reactionary white people’s music if the Left cannot reclaim its place in previous social struggles. Whereas rock music was a central element in peace marches and fundraising around the abortion issue at least through the 1990s, guitar-oriented music was noticeably absent from the U.S. Social Forum.

I attended and participated in a few workshops, and tried to get in to a couple more that filled the convention room beyond capacity. My friend and I went with hundreds of others to hear the plenary speakers and watch them projected on large screen TVs in the main exhibition hall. But in my opinion the most significant event was on the final night of the conference, when the younger participants convened for a dance party at the so-called Leftist Lounge, a labyrinth of interconnected clubs fashioned out of industrial space in the motor city’s gutted downtown. It was in these remnants of warehouse and storage space that we danced the night away as a tribe of tribes and not only a movement of movements, the beats and rhythm uniting thousands of bodies in an atmosphere of collective effervescence, with the posters of revolutionaries and radical activists haunting the rafters and beams overhead. If it sounds disparaging to say that the best part of a radical political convention was its dance night, this is only half of my intent. From an intellectual perspective, the analyses of American society and global capitalism offered in the speeches and pamphlets at the U.S. Social Forum are disappointingly simplistic, don’t seem to seem to have advanced much in the past 20 years, and are lagging behind the rapidly changing realities and possibilities of our time. From an activist perspective, there is a promising amount of networking and a necessary degree of cheerleading, but in the digital age most of this no longer needs to be done in face-to-face settings. But from a cultural perspective, the dance party at the Leftist Lounge was inspiring because if the Left is going to take power in this day and age it must also build what Michael Denning has called a “cultural front,” and it is precisely in this crucial area of cultural struggle that the Left has been most deficient since the end of the 1960s.

At a time when commercial entertainment and media permeates seemingly every pore of social life, Stephen Duncombe has recently argued, the Right has learned to fit its politics within the culture of spectacle and fantasy, while the Left continues to focus its resources on the increasingly irrelevant tasks of presenting facts and exposing lies, making logically sound arguments, and trying to tell people the truth. Outside of the Leftist Lounge and the appropriations of hip hop, this shortage of cultural weaponry was quite noticeable at the U.S. Social Forum. For example, at a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have gained huge audiences of young people in large part by skewering the Right, it is disheartening not to see the Left nurturing our own cadre of political comedians, and this forum certainly could have benefited from a healthy dose of humor to balance the usual onslaught of movement moralizing. Likewise, digital technologies and software have radically democratized the ability for anyone to make short films that might bridge the experimental and the political, and yet there was nothing of this sort to be found here either. And of course the biggest elephant in the room—totally absent from the workshops and panels—is religion and spirituality, for the great absurdity of our time is that the Right has effectively hitched Jesus Christ to its agenda of greed and militarism, and that the Left has sat back and left them do it without recalling his teachings on equality, peace, and love. Hardcore activists are loathe to admit it, but there is no chance of building a powerful Left in American society if we cannot divorce compassionate spirituality from institutionalized religion while responding to people’s needs to find meaning in their lives through faith in a power greater than themselves.

Having been out until 3 AM, we slept late into Saturday morning, which only offered a truncated schedule of panels and workshops on the forum’s final day. We browsed the book and information tables one last time, talked with some anarchists from San Francisco, went to get something eat, people watched downtown, and finally just sat in the grass to read. One more expensive cab ride to the airport later, I was checking in for my Saturday night flight back home. Also on my flight was a large contingent of young black people who had also attended the U.S. Social Forum. In a clearly audible and irreverent tone, two of the young women declared that ours was now a “soul plane,” and with just enough joviality to assuage the other passengers, another group seated in the rear of the plane began a chant about taking back first class. At that time I giggled to myself with the feeling that despite all its frustrating shortcomings, the best days of this movement are yet to come.