1. What is the "countercultural idea"? What is wrong with it?

2. You describe the book as a "left-wing critique" of countercultural thinking. How is it different from a "right-wing" critique?

3. Your book is hostile to the idea of "culture jamming." Why? What is wrong with it?

4. Are you suggesting that practices such as downshifting, energy conservation, eating organic produce, and engaging in local environmental activities are useless?

5. Even if the revolution is not "right around the corner," isn't it worthwhile to always remember that a more equitable, just, and ecologically sound society is possible? Isn't utopian thinking just another way of shooting for the best, even if we will inevitably fall short?

6. In your book, you admit that there are problems with many aspects of global consumer culture, from excessive advertising, the decline of local culture and traditions, and increasing inequality. How can we fix this? What are your solutions?

7. For decades now, leftists everywhere have been committed to variations on the idea that we should "think globally, act locally." Now you come along and say that what we really need is the exact opposite. This seems bizarre… what could be wrong with local action?

8. Are you in favour of globalization, the market economy, and free trade? If so, how can you consider yourselves "leftists"? Isn't the anti-globalization movement the best hope for progressives worldwide?

9. Are you saying that art and music that challenges the status quo cannot have political impact?

10. Political questions aside, what's wrong with wanting to be cool?

The countercultural idea arises out of the critique of the so-called "mass society" of the '50s. According to this view, the modern era begins with the introduction of mass production on the factory floor. This allows us to produce great wealth, but it brings with it some unfortunate social consequences. It requires that both workers and consumers conform to the tyranny of the machine: that workers become like robots, enslaved to repetitive tasks, and that consumers come to accept the cookie-cutter homes, cars and appliances that are spit out in ever-increasing quantities by the factories. Thus modern society requires the repression of everything that is spontaneous and individual, whether it be sexual pleasure, artistic creation, or even just individual self-expression. In order to get people to accept this, a massive propaganda effort must be undertaken - spearheaded by corporate advertising. As a result, the entire culture has become dominated by the ideology of consumerism, designed to encourage acceptance of the industrial system.
The problem with modern society, in other words, is not that there is class hierarchy, or social inequality. The problem with society is society itself - the fact that we are forced to obey rules, conform to the dictates of mainstream society, and to consume the generic products of the industrial system. Thus it is not enough to argue for reform of this or that aspect of the political or economic system; one must reject the culture in its entirety, and form a counterculture.
One of the signature marks of countercultural thinking is the idea that any form of resistance or rule-breaking, no matter how tangential to the political or economic system, represents a threat to the system. Thus doing things like refusing to wear a suit, growing your hair long, getting a few piercings, listening to loud music, or doing some recreational drugs came to be seen as politically radical gestures - as a refusal to bow to the tyranny of mainstream society. Of course, more than 40 years of this sort of rebellion do not seem to have brought "the system" to its knees. In fact, consumer capitalism seems to be doing better than ever, despite decades of such radically "subversive" gestures.
This is where the second major component of the countercultural idea comes in - the theory of "co-optation." The fact that none of this cultural rebellion ever seems to change anything doesn't prove that it is useless; what it proves is merely that the system is extremely good at "co-opting" dissent. The consumer society is adept at taking the symbols of rebellious youth, mass-producing them, and selling it back in the form of "rebel chic." In so doing, it evacuates these symbols of their subversive content, and thus neutralizes the incipient rebellion. It is only when these efforts at co-optation fail that the "violence inherent in the system" will be revealed.

In our view, there is no such thing as co-optation. What countercultural rebels call co-optation is in fact just competitive consumption, instigated and exacerbated by the rebels themselves. This is why rebellion of this sort has become one of the major forces driving consumer capitalism in the past 40 years. The reason the system never changes is that cultural radicalism is not genuinely radical. Mass production does not require conformity, and the capitalist system is fundamentally indifferent to grey flannel suits and biker jackets. Countercultural thinking has created a massive diversion of progressive energies into politically and economically irrelevant pursuits.

The problem with the "right-wing" critique of counterculture is that it buys into the basic narrative of countercultural thinking, and therefore reinforces the very tendency that it tries to attack. Take, for example, the debate over school uniforms. For countercultural rebels, the school uniform became the symbols of everything that was wrong with the education system. The purpose of schools, they argued, was to machine-tool the minds of the young to meet the needs of the factory system, to stamp out all traces of individuality and creativity, and to instill all of the habits of discipline and conformity that were the functional prerequisites of the factory system. The uniform was part of this project, in that it served to erase the student's identity, persuade him that he was just a cog in the machine. It was merely a part of a larger technology of social control.

This led quite naturally to the conclusion that, in order to free the minds of students, the first step would be to free their bodies by allowing them to express themselves as individuals in the way they dressed for school. From there, one could go on to promote greater creativity, to encourage them to question authority, and so on. This would be a good thing, they argued. Right-wing defenders of the school uniform essentially agreed with the underlying analysis, they simply objected to the conclusion. Abolishing school uniforms would lead to a breakdown in discipline, they predicted, and encourage all sorts of unwanted subversive thinking. This would be a bad thing, they argued.
From our vantage point (as the beneficiaries of this abolition) it seems easy to see that both sides were wrong. Eliminating school uniforms did not make us more creative, or more loving, or more freethinking. And it certainly did not lead to wholesale revolution against the system of industrial production. But neither did it lead to the collapse of Western civilization, as right-wing critics had predicted. For the most part, it didn't do anything. The only real consequence is that it led to rampant consumerism, as children became increasingly competitive in the clothing that they wore. This is another nice example of how countercultural rebellion, far from posing a threat to the system, has become one of the major forces driving consumer capitalism.

As a program for political action, culture jamming follows directly from the countercultural idea. If the entire culture - including the political, economic, educational, and media institutions - is an integrated and self-reinforcing system of coercion and conformity, then any refusal to conform can "jam" the system, throwing a spanner into the machinery of repression. As a result, any form of non-conforming behavior comes to be seen as a political act, with political consequences: dying your hair green, getting a nose ring, dressing like a slob, listening to alternative music, and so on.
In his book Culture Jam, Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn notes that the culture jamming impulse arises out of a simple desire to do something, not because it is considerate or expected, but because it is "spontaneous" and because "it feels right." So he suggests taking a pair of scissors and chopping a credit card in half, leaving wasteful packaging on the counter at the store where you've just shopped, or yelling "How about opening another teller!" while standing in line at the bank.

This sort of behaviour might make you feel better, even if just for a few minutes, and it is certainly true that many of us could do with cutting up a credit card or two. But this is hardly political, and it is certainly no threat to "the system." Not only does this leave the system intact, it actually makes it stronger by reinforcing the attitudes of rebellious non-conformity that drive consumerism in the first place. Worse, the culture-jamming idea fails to adequately distinguish between dissenting and deviant behaviour. Like civil disobedience, political dissent is a good-faith objection to a specific aspect of the prevailing set of rules, but it is not opposed to the very idea of rules. Deviance, on the other hand, occurs when people disobey the rules for self-interested reasons. If you are unsure of the distinction, think of the difference between Martin Luther King and Charles Manson.

One unfortunate effect of countercultural thinking is that it erases the dissent/deviance distinction. In the end, culture jamming (or what used to be called "sticking it to the Man") can become just a fancy term for anti-social behaviour. This is why one of the most popular forms of countercultural political protest is the street party. As Naomi Klein argues at the end of No Logo, one of the most exciting aspects of the anti-globalization movement is the way "the Reclaim the Streets parties go on all night." Again, this is not political action, it is just people fighting for their right to party. The Beastie Boys called that bluff two decades ago.

For the most part, yes. Our major concern is with how countercultural thinking has reduced much of the political agenda of the left to individual consumer activism. When someone mentions "environmentalism," most people think of recycling, conserving energy, or riding a bike. Yet these sorts of strategies just promote "the exploitation of the moral by the immoral," by making it easier for the majority of population to keep throwing away whatever they like, leaving their air conditioner on all summer, and driving their SUVs. The only real solutions to environmental problems are ones that are compulsory for the entire population. And that necessarily requires using the power of the state to punish those who fail to comply. Yet the left has become unduly cautious of this sort of strategy, precisely because so many feel that there is something suspicious or unhealthy about the use of state power.

Downshifting is a more interesting case. A lot of people seem to think that, in the same way that the best strategy for combating alcoholism is to avoid alcohol, the best strategy for combating consumerism is to avoid consuming. Thus Adbusters magazine has managed to turn their annual "Buy Nothing Day" into a global phenomenon, currently celebrated in over 55 countries. The problem is that cutting back your spending, without cutting back your income does absolutely nothing to combat consumerism. Your total income gets spent, whether you like it or not. Either you spend it, or else you put it in the bank, who then loans it to someone else who will spend it. This is not an accident - total spending and total earnings in the economy always add up to the same amount, because your spending is someone else's income, and your income is someone else's spending. That's because the economy is fundamentally a system of exchange. So the only way to make a dent in that is to withdraw from the economy completely, which means neither providing services nor consuming them. Yet somehow, an annual "Earn Nothing Day" doesn't have the same ring to it.

The author photo on the inner flap of the book was taken in the back alley behind Joe's house. It features two pieces of graffiti that just happened to be there: one says "subvert," the other says "defy the state." This provides a nice illustration of the baleful influence of countercultural thinking. We think the problems that environmentalists, anticonsumerists, feminists, and leftists generally are trying to draw our attention to are quite real, and very serious. But if being subversive requires defying the state, then what institutional resources remain available to fix all these problems? Since the '60s, the left has been unduly attracted to an ideal of "spontaneous harmony," whereby social problems will all magically disappear through some global transformation of consciousness. In our view, this is about as useful as waiting for the second coming of Christ (remember "new socialist man"?). In practice, fixing these problems is going to require old-fashioned politics - not cultural politics, performance art, or postmodern literary theory.

A more equitable, just, and ecologically sound society is always possible, and it is certainly something worth shooting for. But the problem with utopian thinking is that it can make better the enemy of the good. For example, studies have shown that when entering a crowded parking lot, the most efficient strategy is simply to take the first available space that you see. You wind up walking a bit further to get to the mall entrance, but the extra time that it takes is generally less than what you would spend in the car circling, looking for a better space. Yet people constantly pass up perfectly good parking spots, because they are looking for better ones, closer to the door. This is what it means to make better the enemy of the good.

We think countercultural thinking has led the left to make this error, time and time again. We call it the cardinal sin of the counterculture - passing up perfectly good policy initiatives, ones that would lead to tangible improvements in people's lives, because they are not "radical" enough, or because they "buy into the logic of the system." Theodore Roszak, in his book The Making of A Counter Culture (which introduced the term "counterculture" into general circulation), at one point criticizes political activists for proposing "merely institutional" solutions to social problems. In his view, what our society needs are "deeper" solutions - cultural or psychological ones. We reject the implicit social theory here - that culture is "deep" while institutions are "superficial." In fact, we think that institutional solutions are usually the only effective ones, whereas cultural solutions tend not to be solutions at all.

One can see the influence of this sort of thinking very clearly in Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine. A lot of people who liked this film failed to notice that Moore actually comes out against gun control (using the spurious argument that Canadians have all sorts of guns, and very little gun crime - he fails to mention that Canada has relatively few handguns, and extremely strict gun control laws). Gun control, in his view, is a "superficial" solution. What we really need to do is address the "deeper" cultural issues, namely, the "culture of fear" that supposedly exists in the United States. And in order to understand this culture, we need to reexamine the history of slavery, the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, etc. etc. In other words, he passes up on gun control - a simple piece of legislation that would obviously reduce the level of gun violence in the United States - in favor of a total transformation of American culture and consciousness - a "solution" that, realistically, is not going to happen in our lifetimes, and even if it did, would not necessarily generate any improvements.
It would be harder to find a more clear-cut instance of someone making better the enemy of the good.

Ultimately, the counterculture sees politics as a real-life version of The Matrix: it is a great winner-take-all battle between the totalizing forces of mass conformity and the revolutionary individualism of the enlightened rebels. This individualistic utopianism relies quite heavily on the idea of spontaneous harmony, which holds that social problems will all magically disappear once we achieve the necessary global transformation of consciousness.
We think that, in addition to being impossible, this would be entirely unwelcome. We both agree with the argument familiar to readers of Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls that human values are irreducibly diverse, and that this pluralism with respect to conceptions of the good life is, on the whole, a positive thing. What it means, though, is that we need to drop our romantic hope for a final revolution, followed by some dimly imagined utopia.

We remain firmly convinced that the political left has correctly identified most of the big problems with contemporary consumer culture. In fact, the reason why we are billing this book as a "left-wing" critique of countercultural thinking is that we agree that these are all problems. Where we disagree is over the diagnosis of the cause, and therefore over potential solutions.

It is certainly true that we are seeing the decline of local culture and traditions around the world. There is something rather depressing about going to Hong Kong or Paris or Buenos Aires and seeing everyone eating the same food, seeing the same movies, and wearing the same brands as those of us here in Canada. Yet this complaint is actually well over a hundred years old, and to a large extent there is not much we can do about it. If we want to have Chinese restaurants here, we can't really complain about China wanting hamburgers. At the very least, any workable solutions would require far more governmental coercion and interference than most of us would be willing to tolerate.

As for advertising, it really does seem like there is too much of it around, obnoxiously intruding into our schools, our bathrooms, and our cellphones. In our book, we suggest that one way of dealing with this would be to make advertising less than 100% tax deductible as a business expense. Change the tax code and ad budgets will fall accordingly. But we need to realize that this will come with its own costs. Advertising works as a sort of partial public good, subsidizing goods and services that would otherwise not exist, or which would be terribly expensive. For example, one recent estimate holds that without advertising, a weekday copy of the London Times would cost 25 British pounds, or about CDN$55.00. If we want to eliminate advertising, we will have to accept some combination of less choice, fewer services, higher prices, higher taxes, and user fees.

As for issues such as poverty, inequality, AIDS, alienation, and terrorism, these are obviously serious problems. But we must keep in mind that these are not the result of some giant technocratic apparatus of conformity and repression. Rather, they are very complicated phenomena, with no single cause or set of causes. Consequently, there is no simple solution, and it will take a great deal of time, effort, money, and ingenuity to solve them, or even bring them to heel. We believe that however we solve these problems, it will not be through culture-jamming, through stylistic rebellion, through anti-globalization protests, or even through virtuous consumption and local action. It will be by accepting (and perfecting) the market economy in conjunction with the welfare state, working through national and international organizations, and making the best use of globalization by adopting good practices and good ideas, wherever they may be found.

We are both powerfully impressed by the so-called prisoner's dilemma as a general explanatory model for understanding why the world is as screwed up as it is. We explain all the details in the book. Essentially, the prisoner's dilemma shows how two individuals, acting in their own self-interest but bearing no malice toward one another, can wind up producing an outcome that is collectively disastrous. Yet even when they recognize that their actions are self-defeating, they have no incentive to stop. In our view, almost all environmental problems, most of the pathologies of globalization, and the most unattractive features of the market economy are all essentially forms of the prisoner's dilemma.

The cause of the prisoner's dilemma, however, is not individual greed or avarice. Often it is merely the decentralization of decision-making that can lead individuals into these sorts of collective action problems. Local governments, for instance, often get locked into these sorts of dysfunctional behavior patterns, when they compete with one another by offering tax breaks to businesses, or by offering cheap land to developers. Bureaucrats also create these sorts of problems as they seek to offload responsibilities onto other departments. There is no tendency towards "spontaneous harmony" in human affairs. The mere fact that we all share the same "global" evaluation of how we would like things to be does not mean that any of us are willing to take the steps necessary to get things that way.

Thinking globally is therefore not much of a solution to anything, because people still respond to incentives, and as long as the incentives remain local, the chances of a collective action problem blocking any progressive efforts are very high. Thus the primary consequence of "think globally, act locally" has been rampant NIMBYism. Everyone wants public transit, but would prefer that the subway not run under their house. Everyone wants shelters for the homeless, but would prefer that they not be next door. Everyone wants integrated neighborhoods, but they would prefer that they move in here, rather than the other way around.

The fact is there is only so much that can be achieved at the local level. While it is true that the local level of politics is usually the more responsive to democratic participation, and more open to change, that is also in part because so little can actually be done at that level. In the United States, the focus on local action has meant that the left has managed to form a few progressive enclaves (mostly in university towns), but has completely failed to assert itself as a force at the national level. So local environmental activities, for instance, are fine - if you want to clean up your local environment. But as a program for solving the big environmental problems that we collectively face, the "think globally/act locally" slogan is completely unhelpful. Most of the big problems - acid rain, groundwater pollution, global warming - will not be affected by local consumer-based action. They require large-scale international institutional cooperation, which can only be achieved through long, difficult political negotiations.

The political left has a tendency to talk about The Market, or Capitalism, as if it were a single totalizing force, for which the cultural system of conformity and repression is a functional prerequisite. On this view, cultural uniformity must be imposed in order to secure the discipline of the assembly line, and to ensure a sizeable market for a lot of homogenous mass-produced goods.

This is a mistake. The free market is not a system of coercion, it is a mechanism for trade. What is valuable about a system of open trade is that it is tremendously efficient, allowing the best - that is, least wasteful - allocation of society's resources. Under proper conditions, the market economy provides the conditions for a win-win scenario, in which those who engage in trade are better off than they were before, while no one else is worse off than they were before (for more details, see Joe's book The Efficient Society).

We should be in favour of free trade between nations for the same reason that we have it within nations: it expands the size of the market, it increases productivity, allows for greater specialization and division of labour, and ultimately increases wealth. Business owners who support domestic protection often appeal to nationalism, or to the desire to protect jobs, but more often than not they are simply trying to protect their own interests at the expense of the national welfare. Sure, they may save a few jobs, but the savings are usually short-term, and always result in higher domestic prices for goods.
Just because we accept the principles behind the market economy and free trade does not mean that we endorse the package of low taxes, massive privatization, deregulation, and foreign control that characterizes the "neo-liberal" revolution of the 1980s. To put the point simply: there is nothing simple or natural about markets, and they are certainly not an institutionalization of greed. To function properly, markets require a great deal of governmental support, oversight, and regulation.

What makes us "leftists" is that we think the left is correct in pointing out the many failures of the global market economy. There are problems with inequality, environmental degradation and despoliation, corporate malfeasance, child labour and sweatshops, excessive advertising, and so on. Yet in many cases the problem is caused not by the market but by market failure, and what we should be pushing for is the perfection of the market, not its overthrow. In fact, most of the problems associated with globalization are actually collective action problems that were common on a national level in the 19th century, but were either fixed or mitigated by the development of the welfare state. There is no reason to think that a similar solution would not be best at the international level (and no reason to think that there are any better alternatives). Thus there is no contradiction in pushing for both freer trade and a more robust welfare state, to mitigate the harshest effects of the market and to make sure that the most unfortunate are not left behind.
Ultimately, "globalization" is a red herring, and the anti-globalization movement is making a disastrous error in opposing increased trade between nations. Globalization simply means the integration of more and more countries into the world economy, and this should be welcomed. Nobody seriously supports economic autarky, although there is a legitimate and ongoing debate about the conditions and timing of liberalization. What people should be opposed to are the bad practices that often accompany (or are simply revealed by) globalization, but not globalization itself.

Art can have certainly have a political impact, but only in the most mundane way. Benefit concerts, political songs, and events like "Fashion Cares" can raise money and help increase public awareness of issues like AIDS in Africa or political repression in Tibet. What we reject is the idea that alternative music or avant-garde art is actually subversive, in the sense that a song could be so radical, a work of art so "out there," that it will actually help us resist, jam, or even overthrow the conformist tyranny of the capitalist machine.

What this ignores is the fact that what passes as "alternative" culture is for the most part simply the result of coolhunting. People want to distinguish themselves from the masses through what they wear, the art they like, the music they listen to. So they keep on the lookout for the next new look, the next new sound. Yet the masses want to be cool too, so if they start dressing that way or listening to that band, it suddenly becomes mainstream, and the coolhunt begins anew. In evaluating the political impact of art or music, one should adopt a simple rule of thumb: If everyone liked this art or listened to this band, would it be a good thing or a bad thing? If the answer is "bad thing," then what you are looking for is not subversion, but a form of status attained through the consumption of alternative culture.
What the countercultural rebel is looking for in art, music, and fashion is something that cannot be co-opted, "a look so extreme it will never be mainstream." At the heart of this dream is the counterculture's conviction that "the system" maintains its grip over society by taking art or music that has genuine subversive potential, draining it of its political content, and selling a harmless version back to the masses as pseudo-rebellion. In fact, what's really going on is that consumers are competing with one another to be radical. When too many people figure out what is radical, then it becomes mainsteam, forcing those at the top of the hierarchy to search for some new, more radical look. This is what creates the eternal cycles of obsolescence that drive the market for music, clothes, fashion and art.

It is true that there are forms of music, art, and fashion that are so extreme that they won't catch on, but it is not because they are subversive. It is because they are bad, criminal, or disgusting. For example, in the summer of 2003, the SAW Gallery in Ottawa ran an exhibition entitled Scatalogue: 30 years of crap in contemporary art. The gallery candidly admitted that Scatalogue was motivated entirely by an anxious desire to avoid that most horrible of artistic fates, the mainstream. Their catalogue said: "Today, one can jump from an alternative space to a hip commercial gallery and come into contact with the exact same art. Has self-censorship seeped into artist-run culture by way of conservative, popular programming? Our personal belief is that the alternative culture we have taken decades to build, with sweat (a lot of it) and conviction, is turning onto itself by emulating what larger institutions are doing." One can see the concern here: they are worried about a loss of distinction. It does not appear to have occurred to the curators that if an artistic trend admits of a 30-year retrospective it is certainly mainstream, no matter how disgusting it might be.

There's nothing wrong with being cool. Lord knows we try. But it's important that we not be under any illusions about what we're doing when we participate in the quest for cool. We are essentially engaging in old-fashioned status competition, under a different name. When most people think of "keeping up with the Joneses," they think of '50s-style status competition, with suburban homes, white picket fences, and shiny new Buicks. In other words, they think of forms of status competition that they themselves have little or no stake in. This reaffirms their conviction that consumerism is something that other people do. Yet "keeping up with the Joneses" can also mean living in a loft downtown, going to cool clubs, and listening to the latest "underground" band.

What makes all these patterns of consumption competitive is that they are all organized around the pursuit of goods that are valued for their exclusivity. This means that, in principle, not everyone can enjoy them. Once too many people figure out which clothes, music, or cars are cool, this starts to make them uncool. This forces the real insiders to move on to something new, in order to preserve their distinction. Thus the perpetual cycles of obsolescence in consumer culture, far from being a cynical plot on the part of corporations, is actually driving by competitive behavior among consumers. And cool is the major form of competition in contemporary urban society.
So while it's fine to be cool, we should all recognize the wanting to be cool is just another form of social striving, like wanting to join an exclusive golf club, to have the nicest front lawn, or to drive a BMW.