Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness

Evidence

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

We cannot discuss this in detail here but we can see the broad contours of this shift much more clearly in retrospect. There was a postwar boom, with rising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift was much more limited than the prophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue that it was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and provoked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the neoliberal revolution, and the “new world order”). In fact, affluence did not represent “classlessness” as such: rather, it marked the early stages of that long transition (not yet completed) from the older, tiered, socially embedded class structures and Protestant ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, “post-industrial” class structures, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity lifestyle, hedonism, and consumption. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 162 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital (similarity 0.93)
• Deindustrialization transformed consumer culture and the symbolic meaning of possessions decades earlier (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar affluence and mass culture threatened Labour’s class base (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar affluence triggered a neoliberal counter-surge rather than classlessness (similarity 0.82)
• Hall’s 1958 essay already predicted post-Fordist consumer culture’s class effects (similarity 0.81)
• Postwar consumer affluence shook Labour’s class base and fueled revisionist debates (similarity 0.81)
• Hoggart’s book about class entered the Labour Party’s affluence debate and electoral politics (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 121
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms #expands (0.70)
• Postwar affluence triggered a neoliberal counter-surge rather than classlessness #expands (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 162