The Class Dimension of Hip Rebellion
Given that hipsters typically come from the “professional middle class,” how are we to make sense of the interest they have in objects that have a working-class aura about them: things like Pabst beer, trucker hats, and secondhand work shirts? I present two ways of interpreting these objects: as markers of “cool” within status games played by hipsters and as acknowledgment of a kind of solidarity between hipsters and the working class. In both cases, the class dimension is covered over in the consciousness of hipsters. With an awareness of the class dimension of what hipsters do, perhaps we can reconfigure hip rebellion so as to increase the likelihood that people attracted to it will channel their rebellious urges in anticapitalist directions. One direction they should be encouraged to go in is that of learning how to work with working-class people to transform capitalist social arrangements, which is what leftists from the professional middle class must do as well.