Performativity, Popular Finance and Security in the Global Political Economy

Abstract

Throughout the fall of 1954 and into 1955 and 1956 the US Advertising Council managed a complicated public service campaign it called People’s Capitalism . Buoyed by the earlier successes of its Our American Heritage campaigns of the early 1950s (which featured the Freedom Train, a portable public service advertisement that criss-crossed America), the Council trained its attention onto more explicitly geopolitical topics. ‘It was felt,’ the Council emphatically claimed, ‘that a dramatic rebuttal was needed of the communist claim that the common man must turn to communism to be “saved”‘ (The Advertising Council 1956: 9). This confrontation with the communist threat did not, however, inspire a campaign directed explicitly against the Soviet Union. Rather, the Council sketched its dramatic response by targeting the practices and habits of America’s own working and middle classes. Its campaign, consisting of radio, print and television advertisements, paid particular attention to the ownership of capital and attempted to dramatize the ways in which the American economy and its productive enterprises were owned and controlled by its great mass of workers. The campaign was conceived, the Council reports, ‘as a way of dramatizing the fact that in the US of today the people both supply much of the capital and receive the benefits’ (The Advertising Council 1956). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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