In the long-run, capitalism will always triumph for one reason: It actually responds to people’s desires – even the people who call themselves enemies of capitalism and want to see it torn down.
My favorite case-in-point of this phenomenon is the famous and ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt.
Spend some time walking down a major city street anywhere in the country, or stroll through a college campus on a summer day, and you are bound to see some guy or gal sporting the likeness of the famous communist revolutionary. Che has been an enduring symbol for leftist activists, despite his bloodthirsty record of violence and inhumanity.
I’ve heard plenty of libertarians and other advocates of liberty lament the continued popularity of Che’s image; they list off his atrocities and hideous social views with aplomb.
But anger at the endurance of the Che t-shirt misses a crucial point: That it represents the ultimate power of capitalism.
It is the power to transform the most potent symbols of opposition to itself, into commodities that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. In other words, capitalism has turned its foe into another product to be sold within its own system.
The market does not have feelings and does not care about what the symbol of Che represents (if it represents anything). Symbols are just signifiers, brands even, and those can be bought and sold.
Every time some armchair leftist or college brocialist dons the image of Che, they are in fact neutering the ideology they purport to believe in.
When the young people, who Che might in another time have tried to galvanize to violent rebellion, buy shirts and other paraphernalia with his visage they are tacitly buying into the capitalist system. When Che and his ilk became fashion symbols, rather than political symbols, they were utterly defeated. Better than killing them or reducing their monuments to rubble, turning them into pieces of memorabilia was the ultimate insult and final defeat.
That is the beauty of the free market: It can transform an intractable enemy into harmless kitsch.
Supporters of liberty and the free market might understandably be irritated by America’s youth running around with the image of a monomaniacal war criminal blazoned on their chests, but they should bite back their bile and instead rejoice.
As Che has become a popular image, the image of the revolutionary has lost all the symbolic power it once might have claimed.
A couple of generations ago, radical socialism was a common part of the zeitgeist of the American youth, with college campuses serving as breeding grounds for genuine radicalism and acting as the chief apologists for the totalitarian regimes of Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China.
Today, a lot of “leftishness” is still there, but it has been beaten into a feeble identity politics that is hopelessly incapable of achieving anything of substance.
People on the political right often rail against the liberal bastions of academia, and they are not completely wrong to do so. To be sure, the political products of the academic world, such as President Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren, serve as cautionary tales to voters thinking about giving real power to the scions of the ivory towers. But they are nowhere near as threatening as the sorts of firebrand spokespeople produced by the hallowed halls of academia only a few decades ago.
Socialism in America, and around the world, has had to respond and adapt to the overwhelming power of the free market. In the marketplace of ideas, socialism is outdated and doomed to go out of business. In response, socialist thinking has shifted, softened, and come to accept at least parts of the capitalist system as essential to maintenance of prosperity.
We should call that a tentative victory for liberty, if not a total one. Even the most entrenched socialist parties around the world have had to accept the reality of markets.
Capitalism is the only serious game in town. What’s left of true radical leftism is just empty and deflated symbols, like t-shirts featuring half-forgotten political dissidents.
John Engle
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Sadly I can’t support this argument. Buying things with anti-capitalist symbolic value doesn’t negate the symbol because of how it was procured. If I am not mistaken, the author argues that we shouldn’t worry about the consumer choice indicated by this transaction (Buying the shirt) because the very nature of this action undermines the statement that the individual is trying to make. However, it seems to me that this line of reasoning would lead to us being unconcerned with any form of anti-capitalist action, from the use of symbols to protests, because such action was undertaken in a market environment. Of course, to take it to an extreme, this would imply that we need not worry about individuals buying, say, bomb-making materials for the intention of destroying a bank (and thus deal a physical wound to the capitalist system and also send a message of opposition and rebellion) merely because the bomb materials were purchased on the capitalist market. Obviously, we should be concerned if people were to take such an action, no matter how they obtained the bomb.
Simply put, this entire article seems to be a re-hashing of that classic argument used against socialism; that capitalism provided the very goods used to protest capitalism, most commonly in reference to IPhones. Often the proponent of socialism is accused of hypocrisy to boot, something I guess the author would agree with.
There are many good arguments against socialism and for capitalism. “Ha ha capitalism made your [insert good used to protest capitalism here], you hypocrite” is not one of them.
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