Deindustrialization transformed consumer culture and the symbolic meaning of possessions decades earlier

Evidence

More importantly, I have also been at pains to make clear the strong continuities that run throughout the work over the whole period. Thus, important aspects of Stuart’s later work on the “New (Post-Fordist) Times” of the 1980s can be seen to be foreshadowed in some of his early and prescient observations on consumer culture and its effects on the preexisting class structure and on the traditional labor movement. In “A Sense of Classlessness” (1958) Stuart had already recognized that the decline of the old manufacturing industries was associated with a transformed consumer culture, with a new range of domestic interests—in homemaking and interior decoration, for example—and with a whole host of new spending habits, involving cultural shifts in “attitudes to things and people, whereby possessions such as a new car, a new house[,] … a TV set” acquire quite new symbolic meanings. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 55 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Stuart demonstrates how much Hoggart’s book belonged to the opening of a new conjuncture, which would ultimately lead to the emergence of postindustrial class structures, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity, lifestyle, hedonism, and consumption. … Here he traces the debate about affluence back to the 1950s, noting that as early as 1959 the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell questioned whether, as a political force, Labour could possibly survive “the coming of the car, the telly, the washing machine and the fridge.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 121 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Hall’s 1958 essay already predicted post-Fordist consumer culture’s class effects (similarity 0.89)
• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital (similarity 0.86)
• Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar consumer affluence shook Labour’s class base and fueled revisionist debates (similarity 0.81)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms (similarity 0.80)
• Fordism reorganized society and culture, not just production. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Hall’s 1958 essay already predicted post-Fordist consumer culture’s class effects #corroborates (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 55
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms #exemplifies (0.65)
• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital #expands (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 121
• Cultural change can follow institutional change rather than precede it #expands (0.55) — , the-rod-and-the-child-BOOK, 2237