Buying Off the Working Class

The simplest and most enduring insight in the Marxist tradition is that, while individual workers have virtually no power in our society, the working class has enormous power over capitalists when it acts in unison to withhold its labor. The rich are functionally dependent on everyone else’s compliance. Without it, their profits would evaporate, their property would become worthless, and they would be reduced to ordinary citizens, ending their charade of dominance.

Almost immediately, however, we arrive at the thorny matter of politics. We imagine what workers could achieve through solidarity and militancy, but such states are not easy to achieve. There are many countervailing pressures, both material and ideological, that prevent workers from coming together to assert their power. Already in the early twentieth century, socialists were concerned about one particular obstacle: workers with a little extra money seemed to really enjoy buying stuff, which perhaps dampened their enthusiasm for revolution.

By the postwar years in the United States, it seemed to many leftists that capitalism in developed countries had graduated from the “dark satanic mills” phase of the Industrial Revolution to the “punch card and lunch pail” phase, to deleterious effect from a revolutionary standpoint. Workers appeared quite content to devote their free time and money to the acquisition of commodities advertised through new media like television. “The discovery of the ‘affluent worker’ in the 1960s . . . seemed to put a definitive end to any realistic hope for a workers’ uprising,” writes the Marxist sociologist Matthias Zick Varul.

Many on the New Left consequently became concerned with anti-consumerism, which Varul describes as “a vanguard movement of an enlightened few trying to wean the intoxicated masses off their addiction to consumption.” This tradition on the American left remained unbroken from the debut of the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, which promoted a frugal and sustainable countercultural lifestyle, through the peak popularity of the pop-anarchist magazine Adbusters, which famously sold a shoe without a corporate logo in the early 2000s.

There is, no doubt, a grain of truth in the consumerism thesis, or the theory that consumerist culture can only deaden the masses’ will to social transformation. From a purely psychological perspective, it seems intuitive that plying people with fantasies of transcendence through personal consumption will reduce the allure of collective confrontation. And we all know what it feels like to invest our earnest hopes for belonging, love, security, or self-respect into a purchase, possessed by a fantasy that some new outfit or home upgrade will finally satisfy our basic emotional needs, which it never does or can. It would be more productive to address those needs through large-scale social change, and since we have finite energy, there are no doubt real trade-offs.

Nevertheless, the consumerism thesis maps imperfectly onto historical reality. The 1950s were the platonic ideal of American consumerist society — and yet they were also the peak of union density in the United States, with over one-third of Americans belonging to a union. And these unions were not idle: there were 42,476 work stoppages over the course of the decade, including hundreds of major strikes per year. The 1959 steel strike alone involved workers at nearly five hundred different employers spanning over fifty cities. Half a million workers struck for 116 days, shuttering nearly every steel mill in the United States.

The same society clamoring for state-of-the-art kitchen appliances was engaged in ferocious militancy against the capitalist class. Indeed, 1959 was also the year of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, where Richard Nixon argued for the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism in a model suburban home stocked with a dazzling display of consumer products. “Our steelworkers, as you know, are now on strike,” Nixon said to Nikita Khrushchev during the debate. “But any steelworker could buy this house.” The iconic 1950s were a time of high disposable income, high consumption, and high militancy all at once, suggesting more complex dynamics at work than the consumerism thesis suggests.

The Paradox of Consumerism

Historical paradoxes like this one become less vexing when we accept that two different processes can be happening at once. A society can simultaneously be shopping and striking. The same individual people, in fact, can be enraptured by fantasies of betterment through consumption and enraged by the offenses of inequality. I am. Aren’t you?

According to some left-wing theorists, these impulses aren’t as opposite as they might appear. In his socialist critique of anti-consumerism, for example, Varul argues that capitalist consumer society paradoxically instills in people a quite emboldening sense of individual choice and entitlement to happiness. People get a little money in their pocket and start thinking about what they might like to do with it, which inevitably leads to rumination on who they might like to become — a luxurious daydream of personal development not afforded to the worker whose paycheck covers basic necessities and nothing more.

Consumerism is alienating. It hijacks our intimate desires for recognition and self-respect and channels them into the acquisition of material goods, inert symbols of the good life, which can easily become a cheap substitute for the real thing. That said, consumerism can also be enlivening, engaging us in an autonomous process of self-formation. It “contains the imperative of self-expression, self-development, i.e. incorporates as an aspiration what Marx predicted that communism would achieve,” writes Varul. It’s provocative but rings true. The actual subjective experience of being a young teenager at the mall is not one of hypnotic stupor. It is one of vivid selfhood, wide awake and blooming with a novel sense of personality and agency.

Commodity consumption, in addition to being potentially numbing, can also heighten self-awareness, inflame a sense of entitlement, and expand the desire for recognition and fair treatment. This, as socialist political theorist Ishay Landa argues, creates a problem for capitalists, since the now-emboldened worker-consumer experiences relentless exploitation and humiliation in the labor market, plus the gross indignities of wealth inequality. The consumer is free and empowered, but the worker is not — a contradiction that creates tension within the individual. “Mass consumerism becomes a Trojan horse within the capitalist framework, precisely because this system can only imperfectly accommodate it,” Landa writes.

In other words, the same class that profits from consumerism is also instilling expectations that it can’t fulfill. And that’s a dangerous game.

In Their Wildest Dreams

What do we make, then, of Staley’s remark to Epstein that the Americans with the most reason to revolt have been effectively subdued by Super Bowl commercials showing “hip blacks in hip cars”?

He was perhaps overconfident. Like many left-wing anti-consumerists, Staley assumes that narcotic consumer culture can only ever be a depressant to militancy. He neglects its stimulant qualities. He has not heeded the warning of the twentieth-century liberal sociologist Daniel Bell, who described a “revolution of rising entitlements” in which the public’s appetites in the consumer realm were beginning to transform into increased expectations in the political and social arena.

With his reputation tarnished by his close association with Epstein, Staley has had a rough start to 2026. But if he was able to take his mind off his personal troubles long enough to watch this year’s Super Bowl, he would have seen the paradox in action, as Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny treated America to a perfect amalgam of glitzy celebrity consumerism and defiant self-respect in the face of ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutality against immigrants and American citizens.

If Staley’s perspective were correct, the nation’s most aggressively consumerist annual event would have had the sole effect of placating and distracting Americans from the crises currently turning public opinion against the ruling class. Instead, crowds across the country broke into chants of “F*ck ICE” during Bad Bunny’s marquee performance. And nestled in between ads for pickup trucks and weight-loss drugs, a group of survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse ran a hard-hitting PSA drawing maximal attention to the scandal currently plaguing Staley and large swaths of the global economic and political elite.

The masters of the universe fantasize that they have bought off the working class with consumer goods and celebrity spectacles. Unfortunately for them, it’s not that simple.