The real reas­on left­ists are so up­set about the Pep­si ad is that it puts all their purely per­form­at­ive, feel­good protest ac­tions on blast.
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Of course, this is hardly the first time an os­tens­ibly an­ti­cap­it­al­ist move­ment has been ef­fort­lessly re­cu­per­ated by cap­it­al­ism. My per­son­al fa­vor­ite has to be the AXE Peace ad­vert from 2014, which took an­ti­war im­agery from the pre­ced­ing dec­ade and offered it back up in the form of a body-spray. Wells Fargo sponsored a Black Lives Mat­ter event last year in which it even praised the Black Pan­thers, but then re­jec­ted a cus­tom-de­signed deb­it card fea­tur­ing a fist and the text “Black Lives Are Im­port­ant.” This des­pite the fact the bank­ing com­pany was just sued for ra­cial bi­as in deny­ing loans to black and Latino fam­il­ies.

Love it or hate it, one must give the devil its due: Global capitalism has proved far more resilient than either its harshest critics or most fer­vent champions ever expected. You have to ad­mire its per­verse abil­ity to in­cor­por­ate everything that pur­ports to op­pose it in­to it­self while also adding a price-tag.

“Com­mun­ism is not rad­ic­al,” the Marx­ist poet and play­wright Ber­to­lt Brecht once told his friend, the crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin. “It is cap­it­al­ism that is rad­ic­al.” Here Brecht prob­ably had in mind the re­mark Len­in made some twenty years earli­er, ur­ging com­mun­ists to be “as rad­ic­al as real­ity it­self.” The real­ity to which he im­pli­citly re­ferred to was none oth­er than that of cap­it­al­ism. And per­haps he’s right — we’re still much too harm­less.

“Real­ist­ic dis­sid­ence is the trade­mark of any­one who has a new idea in busi­ness.” — Theodor Ad­orno, The Cul­ture In­dustry