Socialism is when... *describes capitalism*
PART 1: Our biggest fears of a Soviet dystopia are becoming true under capitalism.
“In capitalist society, work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.”
—Paul Lafargue, “The Right to be Lazy”
“Work sucks, I know.”
—blink-182, “All the Small Things”
Another dull day at the office, and I’m sitting at my desk staring glassy-eyed into my work-issued MacBook, dredging my soul for inspiration to finish writing ad copy for some big business that’s trying to sound “relatable.” Then an interesting headline pops into my news feed, because in the lord’s year 2019, every headline during the Trumpenreich qualifies as “interesting” or “bombshell” or “big if true” until it all blurs together into what feels like a bad acid trip. An international firestorm, but surprisingly, not caused by our “very stable genius” president rage-tweeting us to the brink of nuclear genocide while scarfing down his seventh Quarter Pounder of the day. No, the Houston Rockets general manager expressed support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and the Chinese government swiftly whipped the NBA like a red-headed mule. I sigh, lean back in my chair, and stare out the window as the cicada sound of fingers clacking on the keyboard fills the air around me.
There is always an article, and so naturally there is an article. In this one, though, a bunch of vainglorious and unaccountable leaders shamble atop of global capital. And from that commanding position, they do what they do—pursue endless blowsy feuds, scheme and carp, watch television and go on television, and when the opportunity presents itself, blithely undermine our freedom of expression and self-determination. Far above the struggle and insecurity of everyday life, our growing dependence on Chinese markets has already had censorial effects on Hollywood production. It is one thing to see so much of our popular culture narrowing and flattening to suit various billionaires’ crude and idle whims, but it’s something else to realize how much of it is in large part determined by a contradictory farce. When China was first designated the World’s Sweatshop, Bill Clinton pitched Americans on the idea of “engagement”—we were supposed to liberate developing countries by exporting our democracy. Instead, we’re importing Chinese autocracy.
For all the ways in which the toxic runoff of inequality can currently be felt in the culture, it is among the most enervating to come to terms with how much the cheesy churn of unaccountable shareholders and the curdling peeves of business execs distorts our politics. It’s like a soft dictatorship that invariably shapes the culture in ways that reflect their own values or anti-values. American capitalism is gilded and blustering and fragile, but it also has a Soviet-esque quality to it—with all its pointless and repressive bureaucracy, bastardized collectivism, ceaseless propaganda, and generalized burnout. But if you ask a Republican what they hate about socialism, most of the time, they’ll either vaguely gesture towards something currently happening under capitalism. Our workforce has ballooned with what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” There are plenty of industries that function as glorified paper-pushing, like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. It’s like Kafka crafted an economic system as a joke, and then the Western world said: “This, but unironically.”
An email notification banner flashes across the top right corner of my screen and interrupts my internal monologue. A Big Pharma client wants to replace the phrase “enjoy your moments” in an Instagram caption with “the potential to possibly have more moments.” Whenever I read this garbled business-speak, I wonder if corporate lawyers are this tedious during cunnilingus because it’s the only conceivable way these dorks could make this world slightly less insufferable. This unfortunate ping is also another hideous reminder of the moral quandary I face as a copywriter who supports Medicare-for-All; I see all this money dumped into marketing that could otherwise be spent on something far more streamlined and ambitious, like, bankrolling someone’s insulin treatment on GoFundMe.
The sky outside my office window is covered in a bog of bleak mist, the color of a sweaty gym sock. It’s hard to tell if I’m depressed or jaded or nihilistic, or if a certain amount of time on the career path blurs the three until it’s all indecipherable. Shouldn’t our lives be more exciting than this? My 9-to-5 has curdled into an indiscriminate slog of meetings, projects, and requests to “please give this a look.” Modernity is draining in its mundanity. Yet somehow, when the evenings roll around, I’ve fallen into a cagey dissemblance and my brain has deteriorated into applesauce. These are hours we could otherwise have for fun, sex, hobbies, or anything other than humming along to the Belichickian phrase, “Do your job.”
One day in 1935, Alexei Stakhanov hewed 102 tons of coal during a six-hour shift in a Ukrainian mine. A giddy Soviet government transformed this feat into a full-assault propaganda campaign, valorizing workers and emphasizing traits like cleanliness, neatness, and preparedness — not too dissimilar to Jordan Peterson lectures, except slightly more intelligible to native English speakers. In America, we’re conditioned to #RiseAndGrind and lust for Monday mornings, fueled by a cult of performative workaholism that’s impossible to escape. But for what? Productivity and corporate profits are at all-time highs, and wages have stagnated since the ‘70s. You’ll hear the adage “work builds character” from warehouse managers and boomer dads, but it’s worth considering whether our jobs really build character or if they’re more likely to induce anxiety or a pent-up sense of homicidal rage.
Even after the HBO satire Silicon Valley turned the vacuous mission statement “making the world a better place” into a recurring punchline, lizard-brained LinkedIn influencers and sociopathic CEOs still cheerlead the virtues of work with high-minded messaging about innate creativity and boundless possibility. Steve Jobs set the bar for exhorting this gobbledygook as he dressed like an adjunct slam poetry professor, speaking about humanity with flair while rolling out new iPhones that wouldn’t even work with the charger you already own. Now the world is littered with ket-brained tech bros who fancy themselves as “visionaries” because they secured VC funding for designing an app that makes bitcoin mining sustainable. Spotify, a music streaming platform, says its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity” while ripping off artists and funneling their excess profits into military-grade AI weapons. WeWork, a company that provides shared workspaces for startups, wants to “unleash every human’s superpowers.” Dropbox, which lets you upload and email files, says its purpose is “to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.”
We Americans, in all our freedom-humping geniusness, let loose a rampant, deregulated vampirism that has unleashed calamities that reshaped our nation — opioid epidemics, Trumpism, The Big Bang Theory, the backpack kid dance, Taco Bell Cantina, all that stuff. If capitalism fosters human creativity, then why does the American economy produce an extremely limited demand for artists, musicians, academics, researchers, or scientists, but has a seemingly insatiable appetite for corporate lawyers and rehashing the same Marvel superhero movie every six months? Well, if a small group of unelected and unaccountable shareholders control most of the wealth, and if capitalism equates wealth with power, then what we call “the market” is merely a reflection of the desires of the 0.01%, and what we call “democracy” is just a facade to conceal their self-interests. It may not be as overt as Literal Stalinist Totalitarianism, but this is imposing a privatized tyranny on us all.
Many of my favorite thinkers are/were copywriters, and most of us spend a lot of time worrying about what the hell we're doing.
I was pretty lucky. For at least the back half of my career, most of my clients were nonprofits. Then again, don't get me started on the Nonprofit/Industrial Complex.
Thanks, Sam, needed that. I just got lauded for top sales at my corporate retail job. The next day I was pulled from the floor, put before two HR mall cops, and grilled for two hours over a small deposit error. I am now on an indefinite leave while they spend four to five digits on a two digit loss. All after offering to just pay the difference. Corporations do not even know what makes and loses money anymore, and that’s scary.