No, you can’t eat Taylor Swift
Toward a deeper understanding of our Capitalist nightmare
I don’t know a lot about Taylor Swift.
I’m not sure if she’s a good person, if I would entrust my children to her care, or even if she sparks joy. But I know enough about her to know that we can’t eat her.
Here’s why.
Workers of the world unite!
There’s a growing awareness that there is something deeply disturbing about Capitalism and what it’s doing to our planet and our lives. So many of us have a deep nagging sensation that something is tremendously unfair here. Our lives seem to be ordered by forces that appear bright and happy on the outside, but are sincerely nightmarish and disturbing once we peek behind the curtain.
Not all of us are going to go on to learn German so we can read Das Kapital in Marx’s mother tongue. But I’d love to see a growing knowledge base about the core mechanics of how Capitalism is grinding our souls to dust. A lot of us are a little vague about what we’re resisting.
For example, I was recently scanning a Reddit board whose members were debating whether we needed to eat Taylor Swift. Some commenters pointed out that Taylor wasn’t the only musician to be concerned about. One offered up Rihanna “for being a billionaire in general and especially for predatory subscription marketing.” Another offered up Harry Styles “for his ridiculously overpriced nail polish line.”
Regulating predatory or manipulative sales tactics is helpful, but it doesn’t address the core issue. And if the critique is that Harry Styles sells “ridiculously overpriced nail polish” and people purchase it, it seems like we’re completely missing the mark.
Because selling luxury goods or making a huge profit doesn’t qualify a thing as Capitalist.
As long as we believe our battle is about pushing successful businessmen to be more charitable towards those of us who are less responsible or industrious, we’re off track. The narrative of the less capable envying the success of the gifted and hardworking is what Capitalists are using to discredit the Left.
But that’s not what we’re actually horrified about.
What is capital anyway?
Capitalism isn’t primarily a problem with how things are sold (Rihanna’s allegedly predatory subscription marketing) and it’s not a problem of how much profit is made selling things (Harry Styles’ allegedly “ridiculously overpriced” nail polish line).
Capitalism is a soul-consuming nightmare because of how things are made.
In Capitalism, “capital” refers to the wealth and resources used to make goods and services, like money, factories, machinery, and worker’s skills, knowledge, and labor. But the name is misleading because money, tools, and labor are part of all economic systems.
What sets Capitalism apart is private ownership. If a factory is owned by its workers and they have wonderful ideas, inventions, and profits, it’s not Capitalist. It becomes Capitalist when someone who contributes no value or labor to the factory gets those profits: Owners and investors.
Capitalism, at its heart, is the systematic skimming of value from the labor, skills, and creativity of other humans while offering nothing in return.
Capitalism, at its heart, is the systematic skimming of value from the labor, skills, and creativity of other humans while offering nothing in return. Which — in the end — is the systematic skimming of time, hopes, dreams, health, and life itself from other humans.
While offering nothing in return.
For example, when you go to work and produce 100 widgets a day, but are only paid enough to afford one widget for that day’s work, your labor and life are being extracted from you for the benefit of someone else. 99% of your energy just benefited someone who contributed nothing to the process. You are being exploited.
Taylor’s version
You don’t have to like Taylor Swift, but she is a laborer. She wrote and recorded her first six albums through the record label Big Machine Label Group, who signed her as a 14-year-old child. Taylor provided the labor to write and record those six albums. Big Machine Label Group, as the owners of the rights to those albums, kept 85–90% of the profit from the records, contributing nothing to the artistry or work involved creating or recording them.
When Swift become more wealthy, more powerful, and more mature, she fought back against the exploitation of her labor by re-recording those albums and offering her version of them for sale in the open marketplace.
Even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts. Universal Music Group, the current parent company of Taylor Swift’s record label, profited $1.69 billion in 2022. That’s money that didn’t pay artists, didn’t pay for marketing, didn’t pay for record production, didn’t pay for publicists, didn’t pay for lawyers. $1.69 billion extracted from workers (musicians) with no value provided in return.
I don’t have a need to protect Taylor Swift from critique. She absolutely has tremendous unearned privilege under the Imperial Nightmare Code that we’re all living under. Intergenerational wealth and whiteness and conventionally attractive privilege. A just and fair tax system would never allow any one human to accumulate this much wealth.
Even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts.
But even today, Taylor Swift still only gets 50% of the profits from her music. The rest is vacuumed up by shareholders sitting on their yachts.
And it doesn’t really sound like she’s trying to squeeze a profit out of the labor of her backup dancers and truck drivers. Swift’s wealth is primarily the result of people voluntarily paying her for the delight, joy, and catharsis (or perhaps escapism and numbness) they find in the music she writes and performs.
I’m not saying that she’s a role model for the revolution. You can ask for more from Swift, but you can’t eat her. Because she’s a worker. And if we’re going to survive this Fascist-Capitalist-Environmental apocalypse looming in front of us, we need to figure out how to strategically target where trillions of dollars and trillions of hours of our lives are being siphoned off.
And it isn’t by Taylor Swift.
Eat the Rich
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
Karl Marx elaborated that this might look something like the workers (proletariat) taking the factories, offices, patents, and copyrights of corporations (seizing the means of production).
Capitalism is such a runaway mindfuck at this point that 8 rich guys control more money than the poorer half of the planet, almost 4 billion people.
But Karl Marx wasn’t looking at the same death grip on the means of production that we are today. Capitalism is such a runaway mindfuck at this point that 8 rich guys control more money than the poorer half of the planet, almost 4 billion people.
Capitalism is a rapidly evolving social virus that transmits wealth from the poor to the rich, then uses that wealth to shore up, improve, and reinforce the process. Capitalists buy politicians, write their own tax codes, and own the newspapers and TV stations that report on the world around us.
They are more than happy to burn the ecosystem to the ground, drive workers into early graves, and provoke global wars if it means they can wield more power. Their dragon-treasure-hordes of human health, hopes, and dreams generate their own weather and outlive the individual billionaires who tend to them. Amazon will outlive Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg’s children will inherit his billions of dollars, and entire nations will scrape by with fewer resources than these individual men we keep crowning as golden gods.
It is dramatically worse than it has been at any point in human history. Medieval emperors conquering kingdoms couldn’t hold a candle to this scale of wealth seizure and hording.
I don’t know how workers can reclaim the wealth that we’ve created from these dragons hoarding it while our world burns. 150 years of attempting to seize the means of production haven’t gone very well. And smug proclamations that we should directly revolutionize the revolving revolution in a direct action while reading theory don’t feel particularly clarifying to me.
But I do believe that correctly defining a problem is at least half of solving it. I can think of three things I’d like enthusiastic Leftists to understand as they survey the world around them.
- We have to understand the difference between millionaires and billionaires.
Millionaires aren’t a problem. If all of the wealth in America would divided equally, every family of 3 would be worth a little under 1.5 million dollars. Feel free to do the math.
The problem is billionaires. Capitalists who can siphon off unimaginable amounts of money from the general public. A million minutes ago was the height of the COVID pandemic. A billion minutes ago was the height of the Roman empire. Feel free to do the math.
2. We have to understand that generosity, charity, and the non-profit industrial complex are not going to solve this.
Begging billionaire Capitalists to be more benevolent is like petitioning dictators to be more merciful. The problem isn’t that the dictator isn’t nice enough, the problem is that there shouldn’t be a dictator in the first place.
There are no offerings that will ever appease these gods of greed.
We have to remember that philanthropy and the nonprofit industrial complex primarily serve to launder Capitalist’s public image and shift the blame for a crumbling quality of life from the failure of a vampiric economic system to the failure of common people to be generous enough.
3. And we have to understand the difference between workers and owners.
The average NFL player makes a bit under $1 million a year. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys is bringing in $300 million a year. NFL players are regularly suffering significant damage to their brains and risking their lives in their labor. Owners are risking an unprofitable investment that the bank could seize from them.
You don’t get to eat the millionaire athlete. You get to eat the team owner.
John Boyega was paid between $100,000 and $300,000 for his work on The Force Awakens. Disney shareholders made over half a billion dollars off his work.
You don’t get to eat the millionaire actors. You get to eat the studio shareholders.
Rich men sunning on their yachts have made hundreds of millions of dollars off of Taylor Swift, starting when she was 14-years-old.
You don’t get to eat Taylor Swift. You get to eat those parasites.
