The Scrapbook is old enough to remember when socialism was popular the first time. It went out of fashion when even liberal intellectuals noticed that it produced only misery wherever it was tried, but now it’s popular again. An avowed socialist captured the hearts of young voters in 2016 (and nearly captured the nomination, too); the phrase “late capitalism” is everywhere in our political and academic writing; and liberals now routinely use the language and concepts of Marxism as though these were the latest insights rather than the vestiges of a world-historical disaster.
Take Elizabeth Bruenig, one of the Washington Post’s young columnists. She recently earned just derision from the right for a column provocatively titled “It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” “Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist,” she wrote, “I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.”
A socialism “aimed primarily at decommodifying labor”—of course!
More recently, Bruenig has characterized “corporate boycotts”—like the decision by several large corporations to pull ads from Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show after the host ridiculed the Parkland high school activist David Hogg—as “capital strikes” in which corporations control public discourse. And corporations stop “labor” from exercising a similar kind of control through right-to-work laws and anti-union court decisions. This “effort to limit the ability of labor to exert the same kind of control over politics and discourse as capital itself does . . . adds a dimension of social and political imbalance . . . to the already-existing material imbalance between capital and labor in a capitalist society.”
Readers could be forgiven for thinking we pulled this passage from a leader in the Manchester Guardian circa 1932. But Bruenig is very modern, and in earnest. On Twitter April 8, she suggested that “the whole campus-outrage permanent news cycle is a racket. . . . Triggering the libs is a business decision, and in a particular segment of the media ecosystem, it’s a lucrative, status-building one.” Alas, what Bruenig seems to think is a fresh approach to politics—attributing every cultural phenomenon one dislikes to the desire for dominance on the part of wealthy capitalists—is a dreary, inhuman, and discredited one.
Even so, we’ll readily admit that capitalism has its problems. For one thing, it tends to produce a glut of sophistry.
