Selling It

"Anti-capitalists, in Heath and Potter's view, have long failed to understand this development. They have mistakenly seen capitalism as a system that sells conformity rather than individualism. And so they have failed to spot something important: that the counterculture of the 60s and its successors have simply been examples of prosperous westerners seeking social distinctiveness, as Veblen predicted. From hippies to punks, from organic farmers to ravers, rebellious subcultures are always entrepreneurial--both in their daily activities and in their overriding concern to set themselves apart in the great modern marketplace of tastes and styles. And all the debate and worry about 'selling out' that has attended the growth of such groups, the authors argue, has been a way of avoiding an uncomfortable truth: that everyone involved was instinctively capitalist long before the corporate sponsors came calling."

Andy Beckett reviews Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture in a 2005 issue of The Guardian.