It’s not that Americans deny the existence of social conflict. In fact, we’ve got our hands full these days, and with a most exciting battle: a full-on “culture war,” a pitched struggle for lifestyle liberation from the dark forces of dance-floor prohibition and church-herding authoritarianism. We’ve got commentators who are ready to paint the entire history of the century in terms of our glorious, irresistible progress toward full enjoyment of lifestyle, with only a few brief interruptions in the unhappy Thirties and Cold War Fifties. We’ve got an entire academic pedagogy devoted to the notion that symbolic dissent—imagining, say, that the secret police don’t want us to go to the disco, but that we’re doing it anyway—is as real and as meaningful, or, better yet, more real and more meaningful than the humdrum business of organizing and movement-building. We’ve got a whole phalanx of cultural critics who are ready to declare victory for the lifestyle left, to describe the defeat of Bob Dole as a great victory in the war against stodginess. But most importantly, we’ve got an enormous segment of corporate America that has declared its “radicalism” and is busily inventing all sorts of colorful new products that will free us from mass society.

It’s this last point that’s most important. The culture war is a contest largely fought out between square corporate ideologues and hip corporate ideologues. According to legend, labor proved its unfriendliness to the lifestyle cause back in the Sixties and removed itself treasonably from the struggle to found irony nation. The result, 30 years later, is that our serious cultural conversation looks a lot like our daily newspaper strike coverage: Labor is just not in the picture; the culture war never leaves the confines of the free-market faith. Its more far-sighted partisans, like Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice, have given up the pretense altogether, correctly understanding the cozy cultural combat of recent years as little more than the victory dance of American capitalism. Where the business order goes, the culture war follows. Like the fight between Coke and Pepsi, the culture war is the American Way, extending its noisy battles over whatever local concerns are this year’s target of the new global order and transforming dissent into yet another prerogative of affluence.

The tradeoff between lifestyle and labor has been so direct that it’s hard to imagine that these two features of contemporary American life—one triumphant, one in total eclipse—aren’t connected in some cosmic fashion. It’s as though the revolutionary legacy of the Sixties somehow effaced the revolutionary legacy of the Thirties; as though workers had to be put back in their place so that rebel lifestylers could take their pleasure properly; as though urban deindustrialization had to happen so the rest of us could enjoy our authentic-proletarian conversion lofts in peace.

The culture wars have also helped to make plausible the otherwise bizarre fantasy common in contemporary management theory: that information-age capitalism has made moot what the Victorians gently called “the social question.” Ad-man Dru suggests that by means of “disruption”—his dramatic term for strategic attacks on social convention—lifestyle marketers have permanently replaced the extra-corporate left altogether. For Dru audacity is more than just the quality we admire in such figures as Martin Luther King, George Bernard Shaw, and Robert Kennedy—it’s the secret to brand success. Dru blithely presents a catalog of successfully disruptive brands that says more about the decline of the labor left than a dozen PBS specials about Rush Limbaugh: “The great brands of this end of the century are those that have succeeded in conveying their vision by questioning certain conventions, whether it’s Apple’s humanist vision, which reverses the relationship between people and machines; Benetton’s libertarian vision, which overthrows communication conventions; Microsoft’s progressive vision, which topples bureaucratic barriers; or Virgin’s anticonformist vision, which rebels against the powers that be.” The Body Shop owns compassion, Nike spirituality, Pepsi and MTV youthful rebellion. We used to have movements for change; now we have products.

Full essay from Baffler No. 9, 1997: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/when-class-disappears