Life in Late Capitalism

Tom Frank's still preaching to the masses about market populism and the conquest of cool. Here's an excerpt from a piece he wrote for The Age today:

If our fragmented society has anything approaching a master narrative, it is more of a master conflict. We are in constant struggle - not against communism, but against the spirit-crushing, fakeness-pushing power of consumer society. And we resist by watching Madonna videos or by consorting with more authentic people in our four-wheel-drives, or by celebrating consumers who do these things.

The social theorist, Daniel Bell, declared that the conflict between the enforced efficiency of the workplace and the hedonistic blow-off of our leisure time was one of capitalism's most devastating "cultural contradictions". But now we know better: the market solves its own problems, at least superficially. Criticism of capitalism has become, in a very strange way, capitalism's lifeblood. It's a closed ideological system, within which criticism can be at least symbolically addressed and resolved.

The larger corporate picture of the '90s wasn't about revolution, smashing rules, empowering the individual, taking it to the max, and so on. It was the era of great media monopolies, of the rise of Microsoft, of runaway conglomeration in banking, broadcasting, advertising, publishing and many more areas - and of the withering of the labour movement and the death of the idea of a powerful, redistributionist state.

Accompanying these changes was the intrusion of corporate power into more and more aspects of everyday life. People worked harder and longer in the '90s than in previous decades; they saw more ads on more surfaces than before; they ran up greater household debts; they had less power than at any time in the past 50 years over the conditions in which they lived and worked.

In such an environment our anger mounted. And from the eternally outraged populist right to the liberation marketers of Madison Avenue, those who prevailed in the past decade have been those who learnt to harness this anger most effectively.