Sharing this interesting essay for the interest of our readers. RM
 |
| Pictured left to right: Tom Morello and Boots Riley |
On the Aesthetic Economy of Anti-Capitalist Pop Culture and the Exhaustion of Radical Appetite
On the 22nd of May, I Love Boosters, a film about shoplifters will open in American multiplexes, distributed by a company owned by the same class it purports to satirize, reviewed ecstatically by critics employed at outlets dependent upon the very advertising revenues generated by the luxury fashion houses the film's protagonists are robbing. Boots Riley — organizer, rapper, filmmaker, and by any available measure a man of genuine political conviction — has made what Rotten Tomatoes already describes, as a raucous capitalist critique. The question worth pursuing, with rather more friction, is what exactly a capitalist critique accomplishes when the capitalist class itself is selling tickets to it.
The rope, Marx observed, that the capitalist will sell to his own gallows executioner has long been the wittiest summary of capital's infinite capacity for recuperation. What Marx could scarcely have anticipated — though the Situationists, to their credit, spent considerable energy imagining it — was the degree to which the rope would be woven, in the twenty-first century, into the very aesthetic fabric of dissent itself, marketed not as a tool of execution but as a fashion accessory. Riley is acutely aware of this paradox; he has spoken openly about the compromise of distributing his work through multinational entertainment corporations, arguing that occupying the terrain of mass culture is itself a form of organizing, that there is no commune in the woods sufficiently distant from the circuits of exchange-value to constitute a clean political position. He is correct, and the argument is not without force. What it fails to address is the distinction between occupying a terrain and being domesticated by it.
The film centers on a crew of women, working-class Bay Area boosters, stealing luxury fashion and redistributing it at street prices — an act that the film frames, with evident delight, as a form of primitive accumulation in reverse, a redistribution from the fashion houses that extract Chinese labor to produce garments that the women who make them could never afford to buy. Riley understands that satire can embed messaging in the whimsy, and there is genuine craft in the architecture of I Love Boosters: its cinematographic lushness, its score, its deployment of surrealist excess as a vehicle for political rage. What the film's admirers have been slower to examine is the political metabolism of that deployment — the question of whether surrealist excess, routed through a Neon Co. distribution deal and arriving in theaters where the concession stand charges twelve dollars for popcorn, constitutes a vehicle for rage or a container for it.
There is a long and unresolved argument within Marxist cultural theory about the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and political mobilization — an argument that runs, with various complications and reversals, from the Frankfurt School's suspicion of the culture industry through to the Birmingham School's insistence on working-class cultural agency, and has never reached a satisfactory conclusion precisely because it cannot be resolved at the theoretical level. The resolution, if it exists, would have to come from empirical evidence about what people actually do after consuming radical art: whether they walk out of the theater into a changed political relationship with their own conditions of existence, or whether they walk out feeling, as one early reviewer put it, boosted — a sensation that, on examination, turns out to be indistinguishable from the sensation produced by a very good cocktail. The hangover, in both cases, leaves the world structurally unchanged.
The Minnesota general strike of January 2026 offers, by pointed contrast, a case study in what it actually takes to convert class rage into collective economic disruption. It required a federal immigration siege, the extrajudicial murder of Renee Good by ICE agents, negative-twenty-degree temperatures, and a convergence of labor unions, faith organizations, and community networks that had spent months building organizational infrastructure — and it shuttered over seven hundred businesses across a single metropolitan area for a single day before the state apparatus mobilized to contain it. The lessons drawn by organizers from that episode were not about the galvanizing power of cultural production. They were about base-building: about the erosion of organic working-class cultures by decades of suburbanization, economic decentralization, and neoliberal atomization, about the gap between the existing progressive activist base — already radicalized, already organized — and the tens of millions of workers who remain outside any organizational structure capable of translating anger into collective action.
Into this gap, the anti-capitalist entertainment industry inserts itself with remarkable efficiency. The mechanism is worth describing precisely. A film like I Love Boosters performs genuine cultural work: it names the system, it represents working-class subjects as agents rather than victims, it produces aesthetic pleasure out of the materials of political fury. What it produces simultaneously — and what the distribution apparatus, the critical reception machine, and the streaming-era afterlife of such work all conspire to amplify — is the experience of having done something. The audience member who has spent two hours in the presence of a wickedly clever skewering of the moral rot at the center of the fashion industry has, in the most literal sense, purchased an emotional discharge. The rage has found an outlet. The outlet has been routed, carefully and profitably, away from anything that threatens the material organization of power.
Riley himself would resist this characterization, and not without justification. He has spent decades as a community organizer, and he has argued consistently that his films and his organizing are the same project — that the purpose of occupying mass cultural platforms is to reach workers who are not seeking out alternative things, who are not going to the punk DIY spots. The argument has the virtue of seriousness: it takes the question of audience seriously, it refuses the consolations of subcultural purity, it grapples honestly with the structural conditions under which political art must operate in a fully commodified cultural landscape. What it cannot fully account for is the transformation that work undergoes in transit — the degree to which the cultural apparatus that carries a film from Riley's political imagination to a nationwide multiplex release does not merely distribute the film but actively reframes it, strips it of its organizational context, and presents it as a product whose consumption is itself the endpoint. Riley arrives at the theater as an organizer who makes films. The audience encounters a film made by an organizer. The organizer is not in the room.
The Situationist concept of recuperation — the process by which radical challenge is absorbed into the spectacular order and converted into a vehicle for that order's reproduction — has been applied so frequently to so many cultural phenomena that it risks becoming a critical tic, a gesture of sophistication that itself requires no further argument. The recuperation of I Love Boosters, however, is worth examining with some precision, because it operates at multiple levels simultaneously. At the level of content, the film's shoplifters are coded as individualist entrepreneurs of a particular kind — the Robin Hood redistribution model, in which surplus extracted from the luxury class trickles down through the street economy, leaves the fundamental architecture of the commodity form entirely intact and is, in the rigorous sense, reformist rather than revolutionary. At the level of form, the surrealist excess that critics have celebrated as Riley's signature mode functions, in the context of multiplex exhibition, as spectacle in the Debordian sense: an accumulation of images that substitutes for lived experience rather than pointing toward it.
The popular culture of anti-capitalism has, over the last three decades, produced an extraordinary and largely unexamined body of work: from the hip hop of the early nineties, which named capitalist predation with a directness that no mainstream political discourse has matched before or since, to the prestige television of the Obama years (e.g. Breaking Bad, Orange Is The New Black, The Wire), which aestheticized inequality as a form of dramatic content, to the current moment in which streaming platforms actively commission radical satire as a premium content category because radical satire, it turns out, performs extremely well with the young urban professional demographic that determines subscription retention rates. The trajectory of this body of work, measured against the trajectory of American working-class organizational power over the same period, ought to prompt a reckoning. Union density in the private sector has continued its fifty-year decline. Real wages for workers in the bottom two quintiles have stagnated against inflation. The Minneapolis general strike — celebrated as the first of its kind in eight decades — mobilized tens of thousands in a single city under conditions of extraordinary political crisis and was contained within days. Meanwhile, the anti-capitalist popular culture industry has never been more productive, more critically acclaimed, or more widely distributed.
No exhibit in this particular prosecution is more instructive than Rage Against the Machine, whose four members have accumulated, between them, a combined personal fortune of somewhere in the vicinity of 105 million dollars — Tom Morello alone carrying an estimated net worth of 45 million, Zack de la Rocha 25 million, with Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk each holding 20 million of their own. The band that recorded "Killing in the Name," that performed at Coachella beneath a Zapatista Army of National Liberation backdrop, that built its entire artistic and commercial identity upon the proposition that the machine of corporate capitalism was an instrument of murder deserving nothing less than organized insurrection — that band has, in the aggregate, become a collection of multimillionaires whose wealth derives from the very industry whose logic they spent a decade meticulously dissecting. Boots Riley himself, the most organizationally committed of all the figures under examination here — the man who spent his early twenties loading luggage into the bellies of planes at Oakland airport as a Teamster, who founded a community organization before he made a film, who identifies publicly and without qualification as a communist — carries an estimated personal net worth of three million dollars, a figure that is simultaneously far more modest than Morello's 45 million and far more than the workers whose conditions of existence supply the raw material of every song The Coup ever recorded.
The gradient between Riley's three million and Morello's 45 million is, in its way, the most honest thing this entire apparatus has produced: it measures, with some precision, the degree to which the system rewards the scale of the aesthetic product rather than the sincerity of the political commitment. Riley is worth three million dollars because he made two films and an Amazon series. Morello is worth 45 million dollars because he made the anti-capitalist guitar solo the defining sound of the nineties arena rock that Epic Records needed to sell to a generation of suburban teenagers who wanted to feel insurgent without becoming inconvenient. The market, as always, rewards the more efficient vehicle for the management of discontent. The question of whether any of this constitutes hypocrisy is, in a sense, the wrong question, because it substitutes a moral judgment about individuals for an analysis of the system that produced them. De la Rocha is, by all available evidence, a man who has spent his adult life in a state of authentic political anguish about the conditions his music describes. The hypocrisy charge, satisfying as it is, lets the system off the hook by locating the problem in the character of individual artists rather than in the machinery that converts their political fury into catalog assets.
What Rage Against the Machine actually demonstrates is something more damning than hypocrisy and more useful than moral condemnation: it demonstrates the capitalist machine's extraordinary appetite for its own critics, and its capacity to reward that criticism handsomely on the condition that the criticism remain aesthetic rather than organizational. Epic Records signed a band whose debut album contained a song that ended with the repeated instruction to "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" — an instruction directed at the corporate structure within which the album was being recorded, manufactured, and sold. The band performed at Lollapalooza, the premier commercial vehicle for the mainstreaming of alternative culture in the nineties, and became one of the most politically charged bands ever to receive extensive airplay from radio and MTV. They sold more than 20 million records worldwide. The machine they raged against did not suppress them, did not ignore them, did not co-opt them in the pejorative sense that implies bad faith. It purchased them, promoted them, made them rich, and absorbed their rage into the spectacle as a particularly exciting product line. The critique of the machine became content for the machine, and the machine's balance sheet was indifferent to the content's message.
There is, in this entire landscape, one episode that functions as a kind of photographic negative of everything described above — an episode that, precisely because it is so rarely discussed in the same breath as the question of political art's relationship to the commodity form, deserves to be examined with some care. In September 1993, Fugazi — the Washington D.C. post-hardcore band fronted by Ian MacKaye, who had co-founded the independent label Dischord Records as a teenager in 1980 — played a sold-out three-night stand at New York's Roseland Ballroom while touring behind their album "In On The Kill Taker," which had just given them their first entry on the Billboard 200. The music industry had, in the wake of Nirvana's "Nevermind" staggering commercial success, dispatched every available A&R representative into the independent music world in search of the next Nirvana, and Fugazi, by any available metric, were the most significant independent band in the country yet unsigned. Into their dressing room at the Roseland walked Ahmet Ertegun, the founder and president of Atlantic Records — the man who had signed Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Ray Charles, who had built the most storied roster in the history of American popular music — and he made the band an offer. "Last time I did this," Ertegun told them, "was when I offered the Rolling Stones their own record label and ten million dollars." Fugazi listened with what witnesses described as polite attention, and declined without deliberation.
The offer was, in a technical sense, consistent with an earlier exchange MacKaye had conducted by telephone with an Atlantic Records representative, in which he had stated, with evident amusement, that the band would require five million dollars and guaranteed complete creative control before they would consider signing to any major label. "Is that your final offer?" the representative had asked. "No," MacKaye replied. "Make it ten million dollars." The joke contained, as MacKaye has made clear in every subsequent account of the episode, a serious proposition: that there was no figure at which the transaction was available, because the transaction was by definition corrupting. "Control was what we most dearly valued," he said, "and we knew that once we got into that, it'd be compromised. Once you're an object of investment, people will do everything they can to maximise their returns. When you think about it, that term, the Year That Punk Broke — it has an ironic double meaning. In some ways, 1991 was the year that broke punk."
What MacKaye understood that Morello and Riley have consistently declined to apply to their own situations, is that the concept of creative control within a structure of financial investment is non-existent — that control is precisely what investment purchases, because investment creates obligation, and obligation shapes output, regardless of the contractual language surrounding it. You cannot, in MacKaye's formulation, be an object of investment and simultaneously a subject of political commitment. The two conditions are structurally incompatible.
What makes the MacKaye episode genuinely instructive rather than merely edifying is the totality of the practice that surrounded it — a practice that extended far beyond the single dramatic gesture of refusing Ertegun's ten million dollars. Dischord Records, which MacKaye co-founded at nineteen years old to document the Washington D.C. hardcore scene and which he has operated without corporate distribution or outside investment for more than four decades, set its CD prices at eight dollars across the board at a time when the industry standard retail price was 17 to 20 dollars. Fugazi's concert tickets were capped, for the duration of the band's active career, at five dollars — later creeping toward ten in some markets — at a moment when the average arena rock ticket had already begun its inflation toward the figures that now routinely exceed 200 dollars for the kind of acts that came of age proclaiming their opposition to commodity culture. Every show was all-ages, managed without agents, without managers, and without the Ticketmaster infrastructure that the band refused to use regardless of the venues it locked them out of. The Dischord profit model split revenues sixty-forty with artists after recouping modest recording costs of around 6,000 dollars per album, with no advances and no contracts — a structure so antithetical to the industry's standard debt-creation model that it is worth pausing to appreciate how radical, in practice rather than in rhetoric, it actually was. Riley has spoken movingly about the impossibility of building a clean model outside consumer capitalism. MacKaye built one anyway, and ran it for forty-five years and still counting.
The contradiction resolves itself, under examination, rather cleanly: anti-capitalist popular culture has become one of the primary mechanisms by which the American system manages the class rage that its own contradictions generate. It does so without conspiracy, without coordination, without any individual bad actor making a cynical calculation — it does so structurally, because the cultural apparatus that produces and distributes mass entertainment is itself a capitalist enterprise whose survival depends on converting every available form of human experience, including the experience of fury at capitalism, into a commodity with a market. Riley is not a cynical actor. Neon Co. is a business. The critics who will praise I Love Boosters on May 22nd are employees of media organizations with advertising relationships. The audiences who will feel boosted walking out of the theater are workers whose organizations have been systematically dismantled over decades. The system has arranged these elements with the precision of a well-designed machine, and the machine's output is not revolution but content.
The consumer of this content deserves a reckoning that polite cultural criticism has been reluctant to provide. The person who buys a ticket to I Love Boosters, who streams the Rage Against the Machine back catalog while commuting to a job they resent in a system they profess to despise, who posts the "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" lyric as a caption to an Instagram story before returning to a life organized entirely around the logic that lyric claims to repudiate — that person is not a passive victim of a system that has cleverly redirected their energies. That person is an active participant in the most elegant mechanism capital has yet devised for its own perpetuation: the conversion of the revolutionary impulse into a consumption preference, a matter of taste, an identity marker distinguishable from all other identity markers only by the particular brand of righteousness it licenses. To consume anti-capitalist culture as a substitute for anti-capitalist action is a transaction whose terms the consumer understands, however imperfectly, and whose comfort they have chosen, however unconsciously, over the discomfort of actual organizational commitment. The audience member who walks out of I Love Boosters feeling boosted has purchased something real with their sixteen dollars: they have purchased the right to feel, for the duration of the film's runtime and some comfortable margin thereafter, like the kind of person who understands what is wrong with the world. What they have surrendered in exchange for that feeling is the obligation to do anything about it. The system accepts this trade with the serene indifference of an institution that has been making it profitable for thirty years.
No comments:
Post a Comment