by Mindy Clegg
I think about this Le Guin quote often, especially in the current political climate. Far too many of us have embraced a kind of learned helplessness in the face of what are undoubtedly some of the most difficult and thorny of issues to face our species in our history. These overwhelming problems—climate change, systemic gun violence, exploitation of labor and resources, the rise of authoritarianism, and so on—are all byproducts of the modern neoliberal capitalist system. The current globalized socio-political-economic system seems so entrenched and solutions feel so impossible that many of us have given up trying to solve them via government regulation. Instead many of us embrace a cynical nihilism. We shrug our shoulders and accept that this is the only possible world, maybe pushing back against the worst edges of these problems, focusing on symptoms rather than the disease. Le Guin’s quote from a speech at an award ceremony offers us a different direction—that change can emerge out of the world of popular, mass produced culture. In recent years, our media seems more divided since the rise of cable TV and then social media. But the increasingly centralized corporate control of mass media has limited alternative voices and increased divisions among us. Many feel that there is no way to create a counterweight, given corporate capture of government regulation. Since the 1970s, many of us no longer see government regulation as a workable solution to dealing with various social problems. But given how many of these problems are a byproduct of unfettered capitalism, a strong, robust regulatory state designed to enhance the rights of the public can help solve these problems. But in order to ensure that does not become tyrannical itself, we also need strong independent, non-commercial cultural production to ensure the voices of the marginalized are heard. What does this look like and has it happened before? Absolutely. Let’s see some of this history to understand what is possible.
Some of the major events of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to the collapse of the liberal consensus, a contested historical concept of a shared liberal vision during the postwar period.1 The liberal consensus meant a shared belief in a robust progressive tax system, government regulation, support for organized labor, and a strong welfare state. But it was also meant a shared sentiment among many Americans of a strong sense of faith in large, liberal institutions, both public and private. Activists of the era sought to improve our institutions and make them more truly democratic. The postwar Civil Rights movement is one example. The argument made by organizations like the NAACP or SCLC rested on getting America to live up to the premise of Constitutional guarantees. Much the same of an early LBGQT+ rights organization, the Mattachine Society even as it started out as a communist organization. It should be noted that both the Black civil rights organizations and the Mattachine society went along with the purges associated with the a Red Scare of the era, making them more moderate organizations by the 1950s. But they believed that historical wrongs could be corrected by fighting within the system to improve it. That sense of faith in institutions started to change by the late 1960s, especially during the tumultuous year 1968. Starting with the events of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the year spiraled downward from there, with the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, various unrest at home and abroad, crackdowns by the Soviet Union across the Eastern Bloc, and so on. From there, public trust in our government eroded over the next few years across the political spectrum. President Johnson declined to run for a second full term, in part due to the growing anti-war movement. In 1971, a widespread government surveillance program was uncovered known as COINTELPRO, adding fuel to the anti-state fire. Many consider the Watergate scandal to be a turning point for many Americans, though I’d argue that President Ford’s pardon for disgraced former President Nixon might have been the final straw for many. These few short years made many feel like the government could no longer be trusted to work for the people. On the right, it gave space to more libertarian, small government, and often racist candidates to gain traction. Many on the right leaned hard into the “culture war” issues. On the left, the preference moved to building alternative institutions and having less engagement with the political establishment. The malaise that started in the 1970s was really bipartisan and remains with us today.
Cultural production matters in a mass mediated society, as it helps to shape the shared reality and values in that society. Many see the mass media as hegemonic, tyrannically shaping the tastes of the masses with little input from them. But the mass media has always been subject to a kind of push-pull effect between the public, other institutions (the government, other industries), and the elites who came to dominate these mediums. There certainly is an impulse to promote hegemonic common sense in the hopes that the public embraces those hegemonic ideals, as theorists such as Antonio Gramsci argued from a materialist perspective. But we might do better to think of cultural production and power in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s more nuanced field theory. If we take the recording industry as one example, we can see how the industry has evolved since its founding at the beginning of last century. The emergence of sound recording technology certainly allowed for music to become a commodity. As a commodity, it changed the nature of our relationship to music. It became a less of a social relation connected to community building and more of a status symbol to be collected, as David Suisman argued about the emergence of the recording industry.2 The early recording industry was subject to a wave of expansion and contractions in those early days. The expansions allowed for new companies to enter the market, with the contractions enabling corporate consolidation to the benefit of entrenched interests. But the commodification of music was not the only outcome of the rise of sound recordings technologies, as people do not always use technologies in officially sanctioned ways. Evan Eisenberg argued that it allowed for both new forms of musical expression not possible in live settings and new ways of building community across vast distances.3 Since the 1970s, a new wave of indie record companies inspired by punk rock took that even further, seeking to maintain their autonomy in a commercialized industry bent on destroying alternatives. Alan O’Connor’s work shows how hardcore punks took the idea of a community built around the production of popular music and created an indie, DIY landscape for non or at least less commercially oriented music production. These labels often centered the artists and fans rather than endlessly seeking a profit.4 So alternative models of mass cultural production exists. We can in fact build on that, by centering people over profits.
This was precisely the sort of solutions furthered by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow in their recent book about what has happened to cultural production in the 21st century.5 See Doctorow’s speech about enshittification and some solutions to it above. The chokepoints they discuss was designed for a few corporations to dominate the production and distribution of culture, ensuring that only the holder of the chokepoint fully benefits. It screws over both the producer and the consumer. Many people today express deep dissatisfaction with cultural production in our modern economy. Many of us seem to understand how media manipulation works, even in the more complex era of social media. We know we’re being played. At the very least it seems that plenty of people express views that seem to embrace that idea, on both the left and the right, with one viewing the problem as corporation control and the other focused on government being too heavy handed with regulation. Giblin and Doctorow argue that the problem is monopolistic corporate domination coupled with the post-Reagan era of massive deregulation—the very gutting of the old New Deal Order itself. I find myself in agreement with this analysis, as it fits best with the evidence we have. In the second half of the book, they offer some solutions—greater government regulation with robust enforcement, but also active engagement on the part of the public, both in building alternatives to corporate culture and in helping to shape government regulation. I can’t help but think that both authors here drew on the history of punk production in their analysis, even if it’s not explicitly stated. Punks in the 70s and 80s did precisely what Ursula K. Le Guin suggested, imagining an alternative that people could embrace and build on. We are all the better for that and we can draw on that to forge robust alternatives to our current system. And why not – we have nothing to lose but our chains, right?
Footnotes
1 For an example on the discussion of the liberal consensus see, Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan (eds), The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered: American Politics and Society in the Postwar Era, (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2017).
2 For this history, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
3 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
4 Alan O’Connor, Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DIY, (Baltimore, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). I talk about
5 Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).