What we have to be concerned with, in this definition, is not the question of the “authenticity” or organic wholeness of popular culture. Actually, it recognizes that almost all cultural forms will be contradictory in this sense, composed of antagonistic and unstable elements. The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed once and forever. This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia. Today’s rebel folksinger ends up, tomorrow, on the cover of the Observer color magazine. The meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate. What matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an oversimplified form—what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.

Almost every fixed inventory will betray us. Is the novel a “bourgeois” form? The answer can only be historically provisional: when? which novels? for whom? under what conditions?

We can be certain that other forces also have a stake in defining “the people” as something else: “the people” who need to be disciplined more, ruled better, more effectively policed, whose way of life needs to be protected from “alien cultures,” and so on. There is some part of both those alternatives inside each of us. Sometimes we can be constituted as a force against the power bloc: that is the historical opening in which it is possible to construct a culture which is genuinely popular. But, in our society, if we are not constituted like that, we will be constituted into its opposite: an effective populist force, saying “Yes” to power. Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply “expressed.” But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.

The welfare state was always a compromised social formation—corporate profits and the public good, privatized “affluence” and collective social provision pulling in opposite directions. It depended on the continuing growth of private capital to create the wealth that the state then redistributed. However, the redistributive impact of the welfare state cannot be underestimated: it proved one of the most successful peaceful social transformations of modern times. For this reason, it was seen by its conservative opponents as an unwarranted intrusion by the state into the prerogatives of capital, private property, and the “free” individual and as an attempt fundamentally to shift the balance of social forces toward the working classes and the poor. They determined to reverse this damaging initiative and to destroy the consensus that developed around it. Some would argue that this long vendetta is still working its way through the political system today.