The Great Recession failed to produce a sixties-style counterculture

Evidence

The sorry state of cinema was one example of how the crisis gave financial institutions greater control over culture. This was not an obvious outcome at the time. At least on paper, the Great Recession seemed ripe for the emergence of a sixties-style counterculture. Grassroots leftist action, however, struggled to coalesce into a unified movement until Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in late 2011. Earlier that year, Canadian anti-commerce magazine Adbusters called for a protest on Wall Street to begin on September 17. Hundreds heeded the call, occupying nearby Zuccotti Park for two months, their cramped quarters echoing with the constant beats of drum circles. The movement inspired allied protests across the United States and around the world. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Core to Marx’s contrarian thesis: crisis-era cultural opportunity was captured by finance rather than counterculture. The reader must grasp this causal claim to argue the four-period structure.
• QUESTION: Is OWS itself a counterculture? Marx frames it as arriving too late and weakly — but the reader’s counter-case might treat OWS as an unrecognized signature of the era.