Every social epoch fosters certain distinctive kinds of `social character' — a widely shared constellation of values and self-identity. Today, as the crises of capitalism become more and more evident, we have also witnessed the emergence and diffusion of the `carnival character' for whom public rituals of moral transgression express a critique of capitalist culture — and at the same time, the transformation of political critique into a profitable commodity serves to reproduce the very conditions that elicit critique. Whereas for Bakhtin, the peasant carnival served to sustain feudalism, today, as Marcuse first suggested, the commodification of `de-sublimation' serves to reproduce capitalism.
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