Baffled

Thus in the '90s, unchecked capitalism became cool. At the same time, all those cutting-edge companies with their nonhierarchical management styles helped create an abyss between the rich and the poor unique in the First World. For those without stock portfolios and stuck in insecure jobs paying stagnant wages, it made little difference whether the new breed of CEOs wore gray flannel suits or hip-hop gear.

Unlike many other lefty critics of American capitalism, Frank actually studies the inner workings of the business world, and his research yields some of the book's most astute insights and terrifying observations. The sections that focus on business literature and changing methods of corporate organization continue the project of Frank's first book, "The Conquest of Cool."

"The Conquest of Cool" is essentially about '60s advertising men, but it's also an argument about the role of the counterculture in contemporary capitalism. Frank rejects the notion that corporations simply co-opt the pure, authentic styles of the street. Instead, he maintains that while the '60s counterculture flattered itself with the idea that its hipness undermined "square" mainstream society, its values actually dovetailed in many ways with those of the admen. Citing the historians Warren Susman, William Leach and Jackson Lears, Frank wrote in "The Conquest of Cool," "[T]he prosperity of a consumer society depends not on a rigid control of people's leisure-time behavior, but on exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness to enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values of thrift and the suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier variety of capitalism."

Charting the "Creative Revolution" on Madison Avenue -- in which marketing campaigns gave up embarrassing '50s earnestness in favor of the irony and audacity we all know and love today -- Frank said, "What happened in the '60s is that hip became central to the way capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public." That idea is at the core of almost everything else he's written, and in 2000, with brand-name sneakers selling themselves as agents of self-actualization, insouciant young tech millionaires lionized in fawning magazine profiles and endless commercials set to au courant dance music or classic punk, it's hard to doubt him.

A good part of "One Market Under God" has Frank explaining the way the digital economy has parlayed hipster cred into cultural legitimacy. "Business wanted us all to know: It had changed. It had become cool. It had become sensitive, youthful, soulful," he writes. "Business was no longer wearing pinstripes or tuning in to the old boys' network. In decades previous, perhaps, business had rewarded the well-born and pompous, but now everything was different. In the '90s business was a truth-device; a friend of humanity; a powerful warrior for global democracy; a righteous enemy of pretense and falsehood."

Everyone has seen business' attempts to convince us of these notions through ads and journalism; Frank has had the infinite patience to wade through swamps of marketing literature to see how business convinces itself. This is one of the book's great services -- it's incredibly jolting to come face to face with the awesome, almost Wagnerian idiocy of the writings of, say, Tom Peters and then realize that people with power over your life take this shit seriously. "Now," he quotes Peters, "-- the people who lift 'things' (the ... rapidly ... declining fraction) are the new parasites living off the carpal-tunnel syndrome of the computer programmers' perpetually strained keyboard hands."

Peters isn't alone in trying to cast the working class as a new privileged elite while painting the real elite as somehow oppressed. Frank quotes a Wired manifesto stating, "The rich, the former leisure class, are becoming the new overworked. And those who used to be considered the working class are becoming the new leisure class." It's stunning to realize that would-be architects of our economy consider unemployment or underemployment "leisure."

In addition to cheerleaders like Peters, business has also been helped, Frank writes, by its putative opponents, the self-described radicals of university cultural studies departments, where scholars devote themselves to analyzing the "subversive" elements in pop culture. Frank's indictment of the way cultural studies reinforces the status quo mirrors the argument Russell Jacoby made in last year's penetrating "The End of Utopia." The cultural studies professors both writers reprove tend to regard any criticism of consumer society as elitist, since it questions the taste and intelligence of ordinary consumers. Jacoby quotes cultural studies professor Alan Wolfe: "[W]hatever the literati once denounced, cultural studies will uphold: romance novels, 'Star Trek', heavy metal, Disneyland, punk rock, wrestling, Muzak, 'Dallas' ... If shopping centers were for an earlier generation of Marxists symbols of the fetishism of commodities, then contemporary advocates of cultural studies ... find them "overwhelming and constitutively paradoxical." These academics may regard themselves as latter-day Marxists, but this position ensures that they'll forever be defending the market.

Next Page: Cyberlibertarians: Stooges for capital?

• View blog reactions