Working-Class Youth Counterculture Essay

Resistance, as exhibited by these youth cultures is not simply as straightforward as a rejection of mainstream culture, or as forms of symbolic stylistic expression. By appropriating a Neo-Marxist way in looking at youth culture, this paper identifies social inequality and class differences fuelled by the exigencies of the capitalist free market as the key difference between the working-class youth subculture and middle-class youth counter-culture, and that the various forms of resistance exhibited by the two cultures perpetuates the capitalist ruling class.

In order to truly understand why and what youth subcultures and counter-cultures are resisting against, we must first identify how the capitalist ruling class maintains its position within the dominant society. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, together with Karl Marx’s class-consciousness and Louis Althusser’s interpolation of ideology as a theoretical framework, media theorist cum sociologist Dick Hebdige argued that mainstream society’s norms and values emanates from

As such, a subculture can have its own system of beliefs, norms and values, but it is generally able to coexist within the larger framework of the dominant culture. Memberships within specific subcultures tend to consist of youths with shared socioeconomic status, coming from the working-class. Feeling alienated and neglected by societal standards, these working-class youths come together and develop a sense of collective identity. While subcultures may stand out from society due to its difference in beliefs and mannerisms, it is not at odds with society, sharing the “same position (vis-a-vis the dominant culture), the same fundamental and determining life-experiences, as the ‘parent’ culture from which they derive”, thus remaining “like other elements in their class culture – subordinate and subordinated” (Clarke et al.