[throwaway894345]

If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO.

And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).

What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.

As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I want to add that my final paragraph above really describes the fundamental flaw with countercultures if you believe they are a vehicle for political change. They are really premised on the idea that it is possible to make a set of personal, individual choices and that if enough other people make similar choices you can build a sort of parallel society to mainstream culture. If you believe in them as a mechanism of political change, you tend to imagine that parallel society serving as an example/lesson to mainstream culture and being adopted by it.

As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.

[bitwize]

Thing about 60s/70s counterculture is, it didn't become the culture. Rather, its members were recruited by mainstream culture with the promise of wealth and the good life, to betray the values they espoused as youths.

Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"

[PaulDavisThe1st]

This is not really true. While there were a few hippies who moved to wall st., the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population were hippies (or their cousins). The "older adults" who made up the 80's/90's culture were, for the most part, the "young adult" members of mainstream culture in the late 60s/70s.

It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).

[throwaway894345]

> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?

[undersuit]

Not ally, but ingratiate.