In this essential contribution to new histories of capitalism, Joshua Clark Davis offers a novel perspective on a much-explored era of American history by focusing on the ways in which business and activism thrived in concert in the 1960s and 1970s. Those whom Davis dubs “activist entrepreneurs”—the term's acknowledged anachronism does not detract from its concise usefulness—“re-envisioned the products, places, and processes of American businesses” (p. 6). Rigorous research and skilled writing helps Davis avoid either claims of unfettered success or simplistic declension tales. Instead of providing one-tone answers, the book illustrates a long-term shift in priorities, showing how surviving businesses came to respect profit and expansion over original aims of community engagement and the maintenance of “free spaces”—safe zones where people could gather to exchange ideas, organize, and consolidate otherwise diffused political power.
Davis's examples include African American bookstores, “head shops” selling drug-related accessories, and natural food stores, each of which has its own chapter. Such businesses were forged in the service of activism, but over time, many of those aims diffused into vague rhetoric designed to assuage consumer guilt. The birth, growth, and massive mainstreaming of Whole Foods Market best illustrates this process, even prior to the company's recent sale to Amazon resulting in “a neoliberal offspring that its forbears would not recognize as legitimate” (p. 5). Similar dilution of original purpose afflicts the other examples of activism to varying extents. While sacrifices of activist aims recur in each of his examples, Davis also assesses objective gains, such as increased African American representation in white-owned bookstores and a considerable increase in women-owned businesses. Ultimately, From Head Shops to Whole Foods argues that these efforts did affect aspects of American capitalism even after most of the pioneering businesses were gone—but mostly through inert fragments such as appropriated language of uplift, the proliferation of certain products, and the pronouncement of nonpolitical social goals.
Most chapters center on the products or types of businesses. Groceries, books, and drug accessories are the focus of three chapters, basically embodying environmentalist aims, black liberation activism, and the movement to legalize marijuana, respectively. Davis recounts a dizzying array of activist businesses, a method that demonstrates well without extensive commentary the incohesiveness—and sometimes fatal disagreements—within the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis does default to the shorthand term “counterculture” without critique, perpetuating an understanding of ’60s-era opposition as somewhat monolithic, a portrayal inconsistent with his otherwise nuanced portrayal of organizers who frequently clashed over issues of class, race, and gender.
Chapter 4, “The ‘Feminist Economic Revolution’: Businesses in the Women's Movement,” deviates from the product-centered format by including an array of feminist businesses, while focusing on feminist credit unions as most instructive of the economic goals of some second-wave feminists. Here more than elsewhere, the cross-class and cross-race conflicts confronting all of these movements are brought into relief. Laudably, this chapter's broader canvas clarifies Davis's intention of centralizing the activists and causes themselves, while also calling into question the comparatively narrow focus of the surrounding chapters. Arguably, the omission of black theater companies, printing presses, film production, and fashion lines limits any exploration of the relationship between capitalism and black liberation movements. Overall, though Davis's choices underscore the need for more scholarship on the topic and reflect his keen understanding of the subject's historiography. For example, queer businesses of the 1970s seem an omission here—but these do have some existing academic coverage; Alexandra Chasin's Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (2000) presents a similar narrative of success in profits obscuring and diminishing activist aims. Davis's examples well support his overall claims about the corporate erosion of clear political aims, provide previously overlooked case studies, and do not pretend to be exhaustive.
Davis concentrates the book's most forceful analysis in the final chapter before a brief conclusion, titled “Perseverance and Appropriation.” While Davis often gives measured responses to the underlying questions about the effects of capitalist engagement on radical political action, here he lands firmly on an ultimately damning conclusion: the corporations most directly influenced by 1960s and 1970s activist entrepreneurs “have little interest in collaborating with social movements to challenge and dismantle economic, racial, or gender power structures” (p. 237). Grassroots efforts to populate trade with alternative models of exchange have dissipated. While the legacy of activist businesses does resonate somewhat in structured designations such as benefit corporations or in the small but resolute growth of the so-called solidarity economy, those ideals persist primarily as the essentially toothless rhetoric of “social good” adopted by massive corporations such as Apple and Walmart in the interest of profits and divorced from concrete political action.
Through analysis and contextualization, Davis adeptly shows the ways in which capitalist endeavor, social activism, and popular cultural expression in this era often relied on each other for maximum efficacy, even while forcing compromise. In doing so, he provides a level of clarity often missing in academic debates about co-optation and collusion during the 1960s and 1970s. With its careful assessments and various perspectives, From Head Shops to Whole Foods is a brilliant and necessary answer to Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1998). Davis attends closely to the economic structures affecting each interrogated endeavor. Business association archives help ground the work in economic evidence, while oral interviews and activist organizations’ documents provide important cultural and political context. To anyone conversant with the rise and decline of either the broader economy or social movements of the era, it will come as no surprise that most categories of activist businesses lost numbers and profits after the mid-1970s. A valuable take-away point of the book is the precise connectivity of these factors, by which a broad path was cleared for the corporate adoption and dominance of the ideological rhetoric that remains today. With its admirable concision, convincing conclusions, and accessible writing, this book is essential reading for students of capitalism, social movements, and popular consumer culture in the late twentieth-century United States and today.
