Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs recently wrote, ‘How do commies sustain the illusion that they’re edgy rebels when everyone celebrates them and cheers them on?’ He was referring to Hasan Piker’s appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party red carpet – a man who has said ‘America deserved 9/11, dude’, and is widely perceived by his fanbase as a controversial outsider defying the establishment. Yet there he is on the red carpet; CNN produces a documentary about him which steers clear of his more inflammatory remarks – such as insisting that ‘doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happen on 7 October, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me’. The title of the CNN video? ‘Progressive social media star’.
This is not an exception. We now have an overpopulated class of celebrities and pop-culture figures who enjoy the best of both worlds: celebrated as brave dissidents by their audiences and the media, while in reality embodying the very system they claim to oppose – whether judged by their education, their careers or the way they earn their money. How this class, particularly in Hollywood, came into being is economically interesting.
The American film industry is still, broadly speaking, a market system – not an anarcho-capitalist utopia, but certainly not akin to the state-directed cultural production of the Soviet bloc, where littérature engagée was subsidised and the engineers of human souls were tasked with shaping public taste. As Leon Trotsky once wrote, ‘the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise’. Yet today, while Hollywood remains formally market-based, the link between consumer and producer appears increasingly attenuated.
The classic defence of capitalism rests on the power of consumers to shape outcomes. The well-known Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, once described the market economy as the ‘sovereignty of consumers’. But in recent years, this is the last phrase one would use to describe Hollywood. How many Oscar-winning films from the past five years have most people actually seen? How many are likely to endure, to be watched decades hence, rather than serving primarily as vehicles for approved cultural messaging or box-ticking exercises in diversity? There is a tension here that demands explanation.
Is this market failure? Monopoly? Something else entirely? In many ways, it vindicates Joseph Schumpeter, who, in my view, offered the most serious account of capitalism’s possible demise. Unlike Marxist theories, Schumpeter did not believe capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions or through any quasi-metaphysical laws of history. Rather, it would be undone by its own success. Capitalism, he argued, is a system of creative destruction: entrepreneurs drive growth by sweeping away old, inefficient modes of production and replacing them with new ones. But precisely because it is so successful, it generates a class of people who come to resent it.
As Schumpeter put it, ‘the capitalist process by its very success tends to raise the economic and political position of groups that are hostile to it… shifting of economic activity from the private to the public sphere, or, as we may also put it, toward increasing bureaucratisation of economic life’. Prosperity creates the conditions for an intellectual class that benefits from capitalism – appearing on magazine covers, accumulating wealth and status – while simultaneously cultivating hostility towards it, not least because anti-capitalism carries social prestige. Capitalism, in this sense, sows the seeds of its own destruction. It does not collapse in misery, as socialism so often has, but in comfort – undermined by those who have grown weary of its success.
Another name for this class might be the virtue tyrants. For them, practicality and reality are secondary to moral posturing. They operate within closed circles, where dissent is not merely mistaken but immoral – how, after all, could one defend an exploitative system? Yet capitalism is not a dictatorship of virtue. To blame it for the vulgar tastes of consumers is like criticising a waiter for the quality of the food: it is merely the mechanism through which preferences are expressed.
The problem is that the new arbiters of culture are not entrepreneurs in the classical sense. Entrepreneurs bear the costs of failure; their losses discipline them. The new elite faces no such constraint. Their power lies not in the commanding heights of industry, but in culture, where being right or wrong matters less than appearing virtuous to an approving audience that chants ‘death, death to the IDF’ while standing in front of Khamenei’s picture.
Dear Andy Burnham, Firstly, I must congratulate you on your new role. I am sorry that I have not written to you sooner and I know that you’ve technically been in post for a while now. In my defence though, you did go away almost immediately after taking office. The reason that I am writing […]
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every […]
Channel 5 has announced that it is preparing to dramatise the Peter Murrell embezzlement scandal. The 90-minute film will be made by Wonderhood Studios, whose most recent work was the well-received ‘Downfall’ about Huw Edwards. Not much is known about the production as yet, but those hoping for a deep dive into the complexities of […]
