Postwar prosperity’s promise of universal extension was structurally impossible.

Evidence

While capital may have been able to buy off a section of the working class (particularly those whom it valued in white-collar, managerial and professional positions) (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013), there was (and is) no way to extend this prosperity to even a fraction of the world’s population, though this promise was (and is) among the key legitimations of global capitalism (Benjamin 2007, 99–110). As critics clamour for a return to this “Golden Age,” let us recall that it did not provide enough of a sense of social security, equality or sustainability to entice even the first generation of middle-class youth. It was this generation, born to relative prosperity, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed whole new repertoires of resistance to demand a world beyond the turgid and unjust global condition of their purportedly gilded epoch (see Katsiaficas 1987). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 519

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Golden Age lacked enough security/equality to entice even its first middle-class youth’ is a striking inversion — nostalgia for an epoch its own beneficiaries rejected, a strong angle for an essay on left nostalgia.