CHAPTER SIX

THE BLACK AESTHETIC AS A CONSUMER GOOD

The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which made Martin Luther King Jr. a leader of the civil rights movement, and the 1960 sit-ins at Woolworth’s, which made silent, nonviolent “witnessing” an effective political tactic, were local attempts to desegregate the dollar. They were radical renditions of the politics of “more,” new instances of consumer culture. Neither Dr. King nor the students from North Carolina A & T cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn when they deployed black consumers as the shock troops in the war against white supremacy (nor did César Chávez celebrate consumer culture as he meanwhile used boycotts of nonunion produce to enfranchise the United Farm Workers). Even so, Du Bois read the future right.

Voting rights remained a crucial issue in the 1960s and beyond, becoming a vital form of leverage against white supremacy, but, in a brilliant reprise of the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement succeeded because it aimed to redistribute representational power by using, not ignoring, the corporate-controlled media of mass communication. The movement worked, in other words, as a “war of position,” a form of cultural politics, by urging the kinds of changes that come before and after elections. The original spokesmen for Black Power, for example, acknowledged measurable electoral gains, but also said, “No one should think that the mere election of a few black people to local or national office will solve the problem of political representation.”

The civil rights revolution was, in fact, televised. It succeeded because its constituents—leaders and local people alike—exploited photos and moving pictures to show us how brutal racial segregation could be in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. But the soundtrack was more important. The civil rights movement succeeded because a national audience exploited the technologies of music to listen in on the revolution—the technologies that made the difference between black and white audible, first as a color line worth hearing, then as a borderline worth crossing.

This is a way of saying that the black aesthetic became the mainstream of American culture, and thus the principal challenge to institutionalized racism, insofar as it became a consumer good. And that sounds almost grotesquely demeaning of the revolutionary struggle for black equality. Do I really mean to claim that the civil rights movement was the furthest outpost of the politics of “more”? Well, yes, I do, but I want to modulate—and maybe even amplify—the claim by saying that African American music was the crucial medium in the redistribution of representational power accomplished by the movement, and by saying that the technologies of twentieth-century music are extreme instances of the “reification” or commodification of social life we (rightly) associate with consumer culture. Here I follow the lead of Harold Cruse, who suggested long ago that the intellectual promise of the Harlem Renaissance was based on the new possibilities of “mass communication” (in the 1920s, that meant the phonograph and the radio)—based, in other words, on what both C. Wright Mills and Daniel Bell identified in the 1950s as the new significance of the “cultural apparatus.” I also follow Cruse’s lead in assuming that the black aesthetic is not the property of any racial group, but rather the place where Americans of all kinds imagine, depict, record, and renegotiate the color line.

Let me work backward in this list of claims. To begin with, I’m suggesting that the music that matters in the twentieth-century United States is African American in origin. It’s a hybrid music born of a confrontation between European forms and African styles, so it’s a music that always lets us hear the color line dividing the Americas as a boundary in question, in motion. This music came of age in ragtime, blues, and jazz in the miraculously compressed moment of innovation between the late 1890s and the early 1920s, from Scott Joplin and W. C. Handy to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. Thereafter it shaped all other musical composition in the Americas, even as its origins were muted in the late 1920s and after by the ascendance of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley—muted, I mean, by the white composers who superimposed European harmonic modes on the blues idiom. It resurfaced in the explosive form of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, and since then it’s radically changed the way the world listens.

I’m also suggesting that the reification or commercialization of this music is precisely what made it successful in redistributing representational power, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, and then again in the 1960s. On the one hand, its status as a commodity with mass-market appeal allowed it to be sold to an entire continent, so that it finally crossed the color line of so-called race records and became a consumer good available to every audience, white as well as black, North as well as South (meanwhile, of course, it conquered the world). On the other hand, the expensive recording technologies that made the music reproducible were not incidental, disposable vehicles of delivery—these machines actually infused, even determined, the nature of the sounds the nation and then the world could hear. As Andrew Ross has pointed out, popular American music discovers and conveys “‘black’ meanings, precisely because of, and not in spite of, its industrial forms of production, distribution, and consumption.”

I’m suggesting, moreover, that this reified music—blues, then rhythm and blues, then rock ’n’ roll—was the crucial medium in the twentieth-century redistribution of representational power that made the black aesthetic the mainstream of American culture. I don’t mean that the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches, the demonstrations, and the voter-registration drives were unimportant or secondary in representing African Americans as active citizens willing to assert their rights. I mean instead that the wide distribution of this new music in the 1950s and 1960s, from the gospel choirs to Motown and everything in between, suddenly allowed for white middle-class identifications with black styles of being in the world, including the style of “departure” or “dissent”—and thus allowed for (they didn’t guarantee) political majorities in favor of racial equality, not to mention cultural revolutions in Eastern Europe.

To my mind, it’s not a particularly controversial claim, but the retort is by now familiar: these weren’t authentically black or dissenting styles because they’d already been diluted or distorted by white producers looking to turn a buck by selling records to a mass audience. The assumption at work here is that authenticity in African American music, as in anything else, is a result of abstention from the corrupting demands of the market and the profit motive—abstention from the commercialized forms of entertainment we associate with consumer culture. This assumption informs even the most serious and insightful analysis of popular music, just as it informs the most serious and insightful criticism of consumer culture as such. For example, in Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (1987), still the best book on the subject, Christopher Small insists that the commercialization of the music since the 1960s—its capitulation to the financial imperatives of the recording industry—defused its challenge to “the official values and the imposed identities of industrial society [a.k.a. capitalism].” His indisputable premise is that mass-produced and distributed recordings represent a small, commodified fraction of the popular music produced in any given moment.

And yet even Small acknowledges that without records and radio—the signature devices in the early age of mechanical reproduction, and both of them “desegregated” media as far as the listener was concerned—African American music would never have gained a foothold in the larger culture, simply because, unlike the classical European competition, it was (and mostly still is) a music without a written score: the reproducible recording, the disc itself, was typically the means of conveying the music from performer to performer, and for that matter from performer to listener (lyrics and tabs on the Internet now interact with YouTube to the same effect). It’s not that the artists and their audiences were always poor or illiterate; no, his point is that notation and transcription have been exceptional in this musical tradition because it’s animated by an improvisational style that demands constant interaction nological apparatus that produced and distributed the new sounds of blues in the 1920s and 1930s, then amplified them as rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s and 1960s, is not something external to the music. This apparatus was never a clear vessel, a mere vehicle, because the devices that deliver the sounds as a mass-market consumer good are inseparable from the making of the sounds themselves: as mechanical forms that determine as well as reveal musical contents—think of how a microphone changes the timbre of a voice, or how distortion changes the sonic range of a guitar—they’re already present at the creation.

To illustrate my point, and to set the stage for my argument about the politics of “more’” in the Velvet Revolution, let me address Small directly. He dismisses disco as “a mechanical music for a dehumanized age,” but he also suggests that hip-hop DJs from New York redeemed it in the 1970s by displaying “the black genius for humanizing the mechanical in surprising ways.” By this accounting, the expression of human being somehow excludes the external, material, technological forms of that expression; the content of human nature is self-evident—a given—so it endures, waiting for rediscovery, regardless of any outward, mechanical, or environmental changes. It’s a preposterous idea, and, more to the point, it undermines Small’s larger argument about how African musical forms have reshaped the content of European music, not to mention the content of modern social life. But once you claim that the mechanical is foreign to the human, the conclusion is obvious:

It will thus be clear that, whatever changes the recording of musical sounds has brought about, it has not changed the fundamental nature or social function of the musical act. The gramophone record or recording tape is an inanimate object containing coded information which can be turned into sounds by putting it into movement on the appropriate apparatus, but to turn those sounds into music, which is to say a performance, requires imaginative work on the part of the listener.

We know better than this. Small does, too. The “social function” of musical acts was changed profoundly by recording technology, mass production, and mass distribution via radio in the 1920s. Hereafter such acts didn’t merely commemorate the content and mark the outer limits of a local or regional community—as live performances tend to do, particularly when ritualized as concerts. Instead these acts questioned the content and stretched the limits of every listening community. The “nature” of musical acts was also changed profoundly by the same technologies, for reasons I’ve already suggested; at the very least “the” human voice was made new by its microphonal equipment.

But now look at musical acts from the demand side, as Small wants us to. The “imaginative work” of listening that turns sounds into music—the imaginative work of consumption that eventually made the black aesthetic the mainstream of American culture—couldn’t be done on African American music outside the Southern United States before the advent of mechanical reproduction and mass distribution. Until a reified recording technology produced and delivered this music, this commodity, to a wider buying public—in the 1920s—the listening that made the new sounds into intelligible music outside the South was impossible. In other words, until the black aesthetic became a consumer good sold in a mass market as popular music, it couldn’t change the distribution of representational power by giving African Americans the cultural credentials they needed to speak for the future, for the people, for the nation.

In concluding, Small confronts the “basic question,” What is the appeal of African American music in view of its “obvious inferiority” as measured against its classical European competition? The two most durable answers, he notes, have been the ignorance of the benighted people, who can’t tell good music from bad, or the cynical machinations of profit-driven mass media, especially record companies, television networks, and radio stations. These answers often go together (the ignorance is the result of the machinations), and their political origins and effects are completely unpredictable; writers on both the Left and the Right excel at denouncing the decline of cultural standards legible in the popular preference for, say, Iggy Pop over Igor Stravinsky.

Small answers the basic question by citing a “mixture of attraction and fear in white people”—attraction to the freedoms embodied in the improvisational attitudes and the physical complexity of African American music, and fear of the very same things (the latter being, of course, what William James called “fear of emancipation from the fear-regime”).

We see it in the minstrel show, which defused fears of the very attractive black culture and of its subversive potential by presenting it as laughable; we see it in the commitment to jazz of many young middle-class whites in the 1920s and in the panic-stricken response to it of the guardians of public morals and public [sic] music; we see it in the similar response in the 1950s to the advent of rhythm and blues under the name of rock’n’ roll; . . . [and] we see it in the persecution of rock musicians in totalitarian countries. The list could go on, but the pattern is too clear and consistent to be accidental. The greater the commitment to the values of industrial society and its associated high culture, the greater is the fear of African-American culture and African-American music.

Really? It’s an appealing argument, in part because it has precedents and corroboration from distinguished scholars of both minstrelsy and the Harlem Renaissance, and in part because it accords with our notions of the rebellion contained—in both the inclusive and the exclusive sense of that word—by rock ’n’ roll. But it runs aground on the shoal of a simple fact: “industrial society,” a.k.a. advanced capitalism, enthusiastically sponsors the values of consumer culture as well as “high culture.” The market as organized by the recording technologies, advertising, and mass distribution of advanced capitalism doesn’t block access to African American culture or music (if it did, there’d be no argument about the cynical machinations of profit-driven mass media); instead, it presents and delivers the black aesthetic as a consumer good accessible to all buyers. So Small’s argument works better in the absence of capitalism. To illustrate this irony, I now turn to the politics of “more” as it developed in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

THE VELVET REVOLUTION AND THE “CONSUMER SOCIETY”

A great deal of earnest nonsense has been produced by close study of the revolutions that rocked Eastern Europe between 1975 and 1992—perhaps because they seemed such spontaneous, almost accidental events. They looked mysterious, inexplicable, mundane, and yet somehow glorious, too. The Left in the advanced capitalist nations didn’t quite know what to make of it all. On that side of the political divide, people typically said, “We like trade unions, and we identify with ‘dissident’ intellectuals just like ourselves, but do we want ‘actually existing socialism’ to disappear?” Meanwhile the Right congratulated itself on winning the Cold War, maybe even ending History.

Neither side got it right because these revolutions were informed, motivated, and inspired by the politics of “more,” in two related senses. First, conventional “oppositional” politics, as conducted by a party system organized around public events, electoral campaigns, and programmatic debates—or as commandeered by armed guerillas—were irrelevant to the outcome. These weren’t wars of maneuver; they were wars of position. Second, the symbolic meanings of consumer goods—the significance of jeans, genres of music, even styles of hair, but also the prices of basic necessities—became central figures in the rhetoric and strategies of revolution. The constituents of this unarmed revolution didn’t want to overthrow the state; they wanted more leisure, more art, more music, more time away from work—just enough exemption from necessity—to do something unimportant like read a novel or write a play or strum a guitar. They wanted to inhabit a consumer culture. Their desires produced revolutionary political change.

They were up against a system that couldn’t quite accommodate the strange, subversive values embodied in consumer culture because that system had displaced the market and thus couldn’t accredit consumer demand (by the 1980s, every Soviet satellite was borrowing in the West to import “essential” consumer goods that couldn’t be procured locally because the State Plan hadn’t allowed for their production). Economists in the Soviet Bloc understood the dilemma long before it acquired a cultural presence and a political standing in the late 1970s and 1980s. The “Prague Spring” of 1968, which Western observers interpreted as a daring challenge to the Kremlin, was actually a lame effort to reorganize the Czech economy (not the society) in view of lagging growth. It failed because it couldn’t go far enough in the direction of what economists on the scene called “marketization”—by which they meant modifying the State Plan with market incentives and markers (prices). The Soviet tanks officially ended the experiment in August, but it was already botched by the early summer of 1968.

Throughout Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, economists were noticing a disturbing trend toward stagnation, and urging both political and economic reform (marketization) as the indispensable means of reinstating growth. Among these economists were Istvan Friss of Hungary, Wlodƶimierz Brus of Poland, and Radoslav Selucky of Czechoslovakia, each a public intellectual who urged political change as the condition of economic progress (Brus’s arguments about how socialism required markets—and vice versa—were first published in 1961, and became, via Selucky, the theoretical rationale for the Prague Spring). They argued that mere additions to the capital stock and the labor force had worked to increase per capita incomes (and thus consumer spending) in the nineteenth century, in the age of industrialization—they called this pattern “extensive growth”—but couldn’t do so in the late twentieth century.

For something new had happened: the advanced capitalist countries had made the transition to a consumer-oriented pattern of “intensive growth,” where a capital-saving formula amplified the effects of laborsaving machinery. In the West, these economists showed, inputs of capital as well as labor per unit of output kept falling, thus leaving more income available for mass consumption; but in the Soviet Bloc, these inputs of capital (investment) kept rising, according to the Plan, thus leaving less income available for consumption. On this comparative basis, they argued that standards of living as measured by consumer spending would continue to decline in the Soviet Bloc unless it somehow copied the West and made the transition to “intensive growth.”

The Prague Spring was the first facsimile of the necessary transition (although there were earlier hints of it in Hungary). It was, however, a “technocratic” fix according to the reformers themselves (including Selucky). It addressed the economic problem of consumer demand in new, imaginative, market-oriented ways, but it didn’t, and probably couldn’t, address the key political question of how to limit state command of economic decisions, which in practical terms meant how to limit the power of the Communist Party. So the great discoveries of the 1960s in Eastern Europe were that a consumer-oriented pattern of “intensive growth” had become the obvious alternative to economic stagnation in the Soviet Bloc—and that the pursuit of this alternative would require massive political change. In other words, the “marketization” of resource allocation required the democratization of the political order: “genuine economic pluralism is impossible without unlimited political pluralism,” as one belated reformer put it. Translation: If democracy needs markets to work effectively, markets need democracy to work properly.

The question for the disillusioned reformers after 1968 was not whether but how to make this kind of political change. They eventually decided on a “war of position,” which relinquished the idea of “opposition” or “dissent,” and instead cultivated a cultural politics. Poland was the exception to this rule, at least in the sense that Solidarity became an institutional thicket by 1982, including trade unions, intellectual interest groups, and finally a political arm with electoral pretensions. But even in Poland, Vaclav Havel’s ideas about the crucial importance of prepolitical activity as the medium of resistance to Soviet rule became gospel truth, having circulated after 1978 in mimeographed samizdat (clandestine) format throughout Eastern Europe.

By all accounts, Havel, a playwright and essayist, was the most charismatic and influential intellectual in Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s and 1980s (and judging by the literary awards he received in the West, perhaps he was the most influential intellectual on the planet by 1980); no one was surprised as he became the DJ of the “Velvet Revolution” that lifted his country out of its Soviet orbit after 1989. The turning point in this career was not the Prague Spring, when he was a bit player; it happened a decade later, when he became the spokesman for Charter 77, a human rights group formed in protest of the state’s prosecution of a rock group called Plastic People of the Universe. Then in late 1978, he wrote a long essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” the samizdat manifesto that made him famous throughout Europe, and meanwhile made him dangerous enough to be jailed by the Czech government. Here he argued for a political consciousness—or rather an attitude—grounded in “areas of life that [have] nothing to do with politics in the traditional sense of the word.”

Like Gompers, like Gramsci, and like Du Bois, Havel knew these were the areas of an unofficial second culture, a “hidden sphere,” an “independent life of society,” a set of “parallel structures”—parallel to the state—that composed a civil society, the middle term between state, family, and individual: “Culture, therefore, is a sphere in which the parallel structures can be observed in their most highly developed form.” This society, this culture, was both beyond the reach of the state (the totalitarian Right) and invisible to those still fighting a “war of maneuver” (the socialist Left), because the seizure of state power was never its goal. Like Gompers, like Gramsci, and like Du Bois, Havel assumed that “political reform was not the cause of society’s reawakening but rather the final outcome of that reawakening.”

Havel’s premise was that a “post-totalitarian society” had emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s, in both East and West; so the former stood as a “warning” to the latter, as the harbinger of an ugly future: “In the democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics.” Like Small, Havel sometimes called this post-totalitarian political order an “industrial society,” or a “technological society,” as a way of suggesting that its suffocating bureaucratic routines cut across any differences between capitalism and socialism.

And like most recent theorists of “late capitalism,” Havel also equated industrial society and consumer culture. He broadcast this indictment as follows: “The Soviet bloc is an integral part of the larger world, and it shares and shapes the world’s destiny. This means in concrete terms that the hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society. . . . In other words, what we have here [in Eastern Europe] is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social, intellectual, and psychological consequences.” Indeed, Havel claimed that industrial society—whether Socialist or capitalist, East or West—was inert, passive, “soporific, submerged in a consumer rat race,” because its constituents had been “seduced by the consumer value system.” The “general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity” was a self-evident truth, already beyond argument.

Havel notwithstanding, the revolution in Czechoslovakia was fueled by the same politics of “more” that ignited the workers’ revolts in Poland of the 1970s—food price increases were the spark every time—and fanned the flames of perestroika in the heart of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s, more consumer goods were, in fact, more available in the Soviet Bloc because the authorities kept trying to meet consumer demand by borrowing from the West to import scarce items like children’s clothes (they could do so because Soviet oil revenues skyrocketed after 1973). But they couldn’t keep up, because, as Steven Kotkin puts it, “Although people had more, they were demanding more on the basis of wider horizons.” And those horizons were, of course, the distant, wavering lines they could see on TV series imported from the West, which they watched for clues about material life (as well as entertainment), looking into the refrigerators with the actors as if they were on the scene. Those horizons were the confident bass lines they could hear on taped music imported from the Americas, which they listened to for ways of being in a world elsewhere (as well as enjoyment), wondering what way of life could make sense of this noise. Those horizons were the sights and sounds of consumer culture.

The Velvet Revolution was no exception to this rule. In fact, Havel admits as much in explaining the origins of Charter 77 and the subsequent political itinerary of Czechoslovakia. Here, for example, is the narrative he offers in “The Power of the Powerless,” that pathbreaking essay in his underground oeuvre:

Undeniably, the most important political event in Czechoslovakia after the advent of the Husak leadership in 1969 [after the Soviet invasion and the end of the Prague Spring] was the appearance of Charter 77. The spiritual and intellectual climate surrounding its appearance, however, was not the product of any immediate political event. That climate was created by the trial of some young musicians associated with a rock group called “The Plastic People of the Universe.” . . . Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life. The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom and thus as essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection, the freedom to write, the freedom to express and defend the various social and political interests of society.

In short, Charter 77, the Czech equivalent of Poland’s Solidarity—the “parallel structure” whose members would dominate the nation’s post-Soviet government—was founded in response to the arrest and trial of four men who had formed a rock band called Plastic People of the Universe.

There was enough irony in the name of the band to alert knowledgeable listeners to the subversive possibilities of the music: not to worry, it said, we’re just pretending to be hapless consumers. But its genealogy and Havel’s explanation of Charter 77 suggest that the detonating event in the Velvet Revolution was the reflexive defense of what had become both a common good and a consumer good—the black aesthetic embodied in rock ’n’ roll.

The Plastics got their name and their aura from their affiliation with the obvious and the esoteric. To begin with, the name recalled a song, “Plastic People,” recorded in 1967 by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. It mixed bemused spoken dialogue with the already classic rock sound of “Louie, Louie,” changing tempo, timbre, melody, whatever, following the CIA through Laurel Canyon and telling listeners to “watch the Nazis run your town.” The song’s paranoia was pointed, ironic, and hilarious—that is, perfectly suited to the wary, weary temperament of the Prague Spring and its aftermath.

The name of the band also recalled Andy Warhol’s multimedia project of 1966–1967, the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” which featured the Velvet Underground as the house band. The voices and the music on these occasions sounded like Bob Dylan had wandered into a disco, at least until John Cale turned up the amp and sped up the sound toward the end of a song; before then, it was all slide guitar verging on the plunky feel of a banjo, nasally vocals coming and going like strange weather over major chords as the strobe meanwhile lit up the dancers in their cages. If you listened closely enough, you could hear the entire history of North American music in these ragged performances. That was probably the point, and it wasn’t lost on the Plastics.

But this name, Plastic People of the Universe, came from yet another world elsewhere. This was the world delivered to the band by its manager, Ivan Jirous, an art historian, cultural critic, and close reader of Roland Barthes, the French semiotician who treated plastic—the signature material of postwar capitalism—as a wondrous, lovely, but also “disgraced material,” as the cartoonish lack of substance that defined consumer culture: “So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible . . . it is less a thing than the trace of a movement . . . because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets or jewels.”

The quick-change artistry of the Plastics was antiauthentic; it was mostly earnest make-believe except in the context of official Soviet sincerity, in that belated parental space where everything gets done for your own good because you don’t know any better, where you pretend to understand the rules and that gets you by. They knew they were already disgraced, “imitation materials” as Barthes put it, practicing the kind of artifice that “aims at something common, not rare,” something reproducible, not unique, something that was already circulating beyond the local ambit of their sound system. At the outset, the band got its avant-garde standing from its imitative abilities—from its covers in English of songs by the Velvets and the Fugs (the translations were the work of the Canadian Paul Wilson, who was recruited by Jirous, who meanwhile promoted the band in much the same way Warhol had promoted the Velvets). The Plastics copied the Velvets’ early droning sound from bootleg tapes smuggled into Czechoslovakia, they copied the Fugs’ strident yet playful lyrics using the same illegal sources, and they copied the dress code and attitudes of rock ’n’ roll as played in Greenwich Village, ca. 1968, from album covers and Wilson’s wardrobe.

But they were licensed by the Czech government—they were part of the Prague Spring. As in Russia, where every factory had its own in-house band by the late 1960s, the Czech authorities didn’t treat rock ’n’ roll as decadent or subversive; they saw it as a weird consumer good imported from the West in response to the insistent demands of people who wanted “more.” They revoked the Plastics’ license in 1970 as part of a larger crackdown on participants in the Prague Spring—but the band played on into the 1970s without interference from the state, covering the Velvets and the Mothers and the Fugs in English until 1972 (when Wilson left the group), and then using the poetry of Egon Bondy, the banned Czech philosopher, as the lyrical content of its original music. The three remaining band members and Jirous were arrested in 1976; all four were convicted of “disturbing the public order” and sentenced to prison terms of eight to eighteen months. Their crime wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. The authorities weren’t singling out the music, bizarre as it was; they were trying instead to silence Bondy once and for all.

In any event, however you catalog the crime, the music came from the farthest Western outpost of consumer culture. The Mothers, the Velvets, and the Fugs were avant-garde bands, to be sure, but they had recording contracts, they played concerts, and they sold lots of mass-produced records made with industrial technology (I know; my sister bought them). If the records hadn’t circulated worldwide as consumer goods, the Plastics would never have been able to copy the music, the attitudes, and the styles these industrial artifacts made both audible and reproducible. So when Havel invoked the “freedom to play rock music” as a basic human freedom and cited the Plastics, he was actually invoking the freedom to listen to the new sounds imported from the headquarters of both capitalism and consumer culture; for without its audience, which appeared en masse and in public—and not just in Czechoslovakia—the band would never have drawn the attention of the authorities. In 1976, this basic freedom meant access to the consumer good that was the black aesthetic embodied in rock ’n’ roll. No less than the constituents of the Velvet Revolution, then, and no less than Gompers and Du Bois, Havel was demanding that a consumer society of free time, leisure, and play be released from the deadening constraints of industrial society. Despite his theoretical opposition to consumer culture, he was preaching, and practicing, the politics of “more.”

Søren Kierkegaard, one of Havel’s (and Bondy’s) favorite philosophers, once said, “We live forward, but we understand backward.” The aphorism, at once painfully obvious and insightful—you’ve heard it before in this book—alerts us to the strange possibility that Havel might have been right when he asked whether the Eastern European experience of the 1970s looked like the future of the Western democracies. I don’t mean the feverish rhetorical questions that conclude “The Power of the Powerless,” where he cites Martin Heidegger, another favorite philosopher, to mourn the “ineptitude of humanity face to face with the planetary power of technology.” I mean this very pointed question: “And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies?”

Eastern Europe was far behind the United States in the 1970s, and still is when judged by those “external measures.” But the late twentieth-century revolutions there do make me think we might understand our contemporary predicament backward; they do make me think that the two fundamental questions raised there are immediately relevant to our own time and place. Those questions are, Can we make the transition to “intensive,” consumer-led growth by embracing the politics of “more,” by fighting a prepolitical “war of position”—in other words, can we break the grip of a mindset that insists, on principle, that rewarding saving and investment rather than consumption is the key to growth? And, beyond that, Can we use markets to limit state command of economic decisions?

No matter how we answer, our very own perestroika is upon us. No matter how we answer, the politics of “more”—the consumer culture etched in the “age of surplus”—looks like a usable past. Economic change since 2007 amounts to a crisis, to be sure, but, like the Great Depression of the 1930s in the West and the stagnation of the 1960s in the East, it’s also an opportunity to rethink the sources of growth. More important, it gives us a second chance to solve what Keynes called the real, the permanent, problem of humankind—and that is how to use our “freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for [us], to live wisely and agreeably and well.”