We cannot discuss this in detail here but we can see the broad contours of this shift much more clearly in retrospect. There was a postwar boom, with rising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift was much more limited than the prophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue that it was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and provoked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the neoliberal revolution, and the “new world order”). In fact, affluence did not represent “classlessness” as such: rather, it marked the early stages of that long transition (not yet completed) from the older, tiered, socially embedded class structures and Protestant ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, “post-industrial” class structures, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity lifestyle, hedonism, and consumption. Underlying this was the prolonged shift from nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, via the apotheosis of the “high noon” of imperialism, the First World War, the failure of the proletarian “moment,” and the interwar Depression, to the great surge of power represented by the concentrations of corporate capitalism, the managerial revolution, and Fordist economies of scale of the late twentieth century. Mass society, mass culture, mass consumerism, and mass markets were integral aspects of this historic shift: precisely how to understand their real interdependencies remains one of Cultural Studies’ unfulfilled tasks—probably lost forever in the hyper-theoretical and post-political climate that came to prevail. Of course, in the immediate decades after The Uses of Literacy , the shape of things was to be dominated by the historic compromise of the welfare state and the social-democratic consensus. But by the end of the 1970s—and massively reorganized on a global scale—the forces we were trying to understand began to return to the stage with unstoppable force and did, indeed, change the world.