I grew up in a liberal wannabe leftist bubble in Western Massachusetts.  Middle class women wore no makeup makeup and were virtuous in jeans and polar fleece.  People went hiking.  People recycled and didn’t eat meat.  I had to read a People’s History of the United States at my hippie dippie unschooling program, but I remember mostly a sense that if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t buy clothes or makeup or shave my legs, if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t consume, if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t be like the bad (read: poor) girls who highlighted their hair, and wore orange foundation and ice blue eyeshadow.  The revolution would not be televised because good earth loving bourgeois types don’t own televisions, and it wouldn’t be a revolution per say, because one had to be committed to nonviolence.  To me this co-opting of revolution by smug men who eat organic and wear sweaters is capitalism at its most insidious when they take the most liberal words of the most liberal of “radical leftist” thinkers, and create the perception that that is what leftism is, that that is what opposing capitalism looks like.   The furthest their revolution goes is a dour, unadorned, anti-aesthetic sense of moral superiority and an occasional polite state sanctioned protest.

 They hold themselves above us, we unvirtuous, we consumerist, we high fructose corn syrup swilling proles.  They tell us their, for us unattainable, ascetic puritanical method of revolution is the only revolution that could be, while capitalism promises us what only communism can deliver, pleasure, material plenty, comfort, if only we devote ourselves to it.  Is it any wonder there are working class complaints of liberal elites?  Is there any wonder that when they talk down to us as if they are a part of a tradition that is rightfully ours that we believe it is not for us?  That we leave the books they’re afraid we’ll read well and thoroughly shut?  Is it any wonder that their dismissal of our dream of a new TV or something pretty to relieve the greyness of our lives sends us running to listen to the false promises of capital?

It is the most effective anti-revolutionary scam imaginable, a keep out sign on theory and history that belongs to us, those with too big hair and too much makeup, we eaters of processed foods, we consumers of “environmentally unsound” beauty products.  How intellectually starved and morally bankrupt must one be to fail to see the contradiction, how can a man in his polar fleece vest, with his activist tourism vacations and his free range children be, to fail to see that the legacy of Haymarket belongs to us and not him?  How can he fail to see that his attempt to lead and teach the “underprivileged” is a bourgeois imposition, that his consumer activism, and children’s biodegradable wooden toys are part of the problem, and that the girl in hoop earrings with bright highlights is the solution?