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375 On the crudest level, the lives of American intellectuals and artists are defined by one basic problem: how to reconcile intellectual or creative autonomy with making a living. They must either get someone to support their work—whether by selling it on the open market or by getting the backing of some public or private institution—or find something to do that somebody is willing to pay for that will still leave them time to do their “real work.” How hard it is to accomplish this at any given time, and what kinds of opportunities are available, not only affect the individual person struggling for a workable life, but the state of the culture itself. This tension between intellectual work and economic survival is thoroughly mundane and generally taken for granted by those who negotiate it every day; but to look at the history of the past thirty years or so is to be struck by the degree to which the social, cultural, and political trajectory of American life is bound up with this most ordinary of conflicts. During that time, the conditions of intellectual work have radically changed, as a culture operating on the assumption of continuing—indeed increasing—abundance has given way to a culture of austerity. In the 1960s, prosperity and cultural radicalism were symbiotic: easy access to money and other resources fueled social and cultural experimentation, while an ethos that valued freedom and pleasure encouraged people’s sense of entitlement to all sorts of goods, economic and political. For many of us, the “excess” of the ’60s meant the expansion of desire and fantasy, but also (and not coincidentally) of money and time. I (a child of the hard-working lower middle class) found it relatively easy to subsist as a freelance writer in New York. With a fifty-dollar-a-month rent-regulated East Village apartment, I could write one lucrative article for a mainstream magazine and support myself for weeks or Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity 376 THE NINETIES even months while I did what I liked, whether that meant writing for countercultural publications that couldn’t pay or going to political meetings. When I did have jobs, I didn’t worry overmuch about losing them, and so felt no impulse, let alone need, to kiss anyone’s ass. There was always another job, or another assignment. At one point, while I was living with a group of people in Colorado, the money I made writing (sporadically) about rock for the New Yorker was supporting my entire household. Throughout this period, cheap housing was the cement of cultural communities . It allowed writers and artists to live near each other, hang out together. It invited the proliferation of the underground press and alternative institutions like New York’s Free University, with its huge loft off Union Square, where just about all the leftists and bohemians in town congregated at one time or another. Prosperity also financed travel, and with it the movement of ideas; encouraged young people to avoid “settling down” to either careers or marriage; and even made psychotherapy, with its ethos of autonomy and fulfillment, a middle-class rite of passage subsidized by medical insurance. This climate of freedom in turn fomented dissident politics—which, contrary to much recent and dubious rewriting of history, included class politics. Although the distinctive quality of the ’60s social movements, from ecology to feminism, was their focus on the kinds of concerns that surface once survival is no longer in question, economic issues were by no means ignored. Criticism of capitalism and economic inequality was part of mainstream public debate. There was significant liberal pressure to extend the welfare state, while at the same time the new left was challenging “corporate liberalism” and its social programs as fundamentally conservative, a way of managing inequality rather than redressing it. Since the early ’70s, however, the symbiosis has been working in reverse: a steady decline in Americans’ standard of living has fed political and cultural conservatism , and vice versa. Just as the widespread affluence of the post–World War II era was the product of deliberate social policy—an alliance of business, labor, and government aimed at stabilizing the economy and building a solid, patriotic middle class as a bulwark against Soviet Communism and domestic radicalism—the waning of affluence has reflected the resolve of capital to break away from this constraining alliance. In 1973, as the United States...

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