The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala or the Met Gala is an annual event hosted by the aforementioned museum in Manhattan, New York City, which to a loony leftie such as myself – is the very definition of bourgeois decadence. Gaudy costumes galore feted by the ‘influencers’ within the super-wealthy, with access at around $30,000 a ticket. Regular days to go to the Met Museum is around $25 for viewing at hours between 10am to 4pm. Taking attention away from Lil Nas X’s Saint Seiya cosplay was New York Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $30,000 mostly white dress emblazoned with “TAX THE RICH” in bright red paint covering her back and rear. This of course, got sections of the Right a bit riled up. At least the sections that take themselves too seriously, particularly the conservative PAC which wants to have her fined for wasting taxpayer’s money, and believe it or not – I don’t think there even half as pissed off as they make out. Of importance to me is the reaction on the Left to this, which seems to be divided from “slay queen!” (do people still say that?) to calling bollocks on this stunt. Of course, a lazy person like myself is gonna give my two cents on this.
One thing needs to be clear: It really doesn’t matter whether AOC paid for the dress herself or not, or for the tickets – it’s still a $30,000 dress, and if not for the Met Gala giving a ticket to her, it would still cost $35,000 to receive one to go. It is rich people nonsense that I don’t fuck with and wouldn’t want to even I became wealthy. This defence from AOC supporters around it not being her (or taxpayer’s) money, or her friend designing (and putting the slogan on) misses the point so completely, I wonder if they were aiming for it. The issue, fundamentally – is about optics, and what it means for radical politics.
Make no mistake. This was performative. It was virtue signalling. But that in of itself isn’t the issue. Where some of the critics of AOC’s presence go wrong is in the notion that performance shouldn’t exist in politics. This is nonsensical, wrong-headed and unreflective. Think of the history of protests, and of in current ones, quite often – rely on performance. Think of the Extinction Rebellion protests, think of sit-ins, hell think even of Shia Lebouf. There’s a reason why they’re called demonstrations. Of course, Ocasio-Cortez’s presence at the Met Gala was not a demonstration, but performative politics doesn’t always take the form of demonstrations – there’s of course literally political performance art, like that of the ‘Artist Taxi Driver’. But when people really complain about performativity, as in AOC’s dress stunt, their concerns are around three principal aims of performativity:
- What does it signal?
- Whose interests does it represent?
- What does it disrupt?
The last is probably the most important because it allows the space for new conversations around a political issue. The critics of the AOC Met Gala stunt on the Left are correct in saying that AOC’s advocates grossly overestimate what it disrupts and what conservation it generates. It cannot be said that it challenges the status quo, because raising tax is not down to talking to, or posing in front of super-wealthy celebrities to “start conversations” about whether people in their tax bracket should pay more. It is for politicians like her to decide on what the tax should be raised to. Believe me when I say nobody was talking about whether the US top marginal tax should go back to pre-JFK levels, or about capital gains tax at that gala. So it fails on its own social democratic aims (if they were indeed her aims), and it’s sad that so many on the left, including commentators like Owen Jones, used such a cretinous line of argument to defend this. It would be more honest to say that AOC just wanted to have fun, and hang out with rich folks and finesse the Right while doing it. I would’ve accepted that, not this “start a conversation” dog bollocks. Joe Biden, obviously well-known for his socialism, had already made it part of his platform (with of course a nebulous concept of “fair share”). The real conservation that should be had on this, is whether on the Left have become overly reliant on individualist performative acts, over collective action.
Many on the radical left had accused AOC’s dress stunt as some sort of recoup of radical politics and a clear example of ‘capitalist realism’. Capitalist realism is a term coined by the late critical theorist Mark Fisher, is used to describe implicit acceptance – if not endorsement – of capitalist ideology, or the logic of the current social and economic relations produced under late capitalism. The problem with this line of argument, is that in spite of right-wing hysteria and the increase in popularity of left-wing politics – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not actually in this instance, co-opted any radical politics. Social democrats talk about taxing the rich all the time. Hell, there are varieties of conservatives who are quite happy to see the rich “pay more tax”. Social democrats do not seek to abolish capitalism, but make interventions through state power to make capitalist relations more amenable to labour. The “TAX THE RICH” slogan is consistent within the politics AOC espouses. Indeed, it is now consistent with the politics the Democratic Party now claim. What it doesn’t say is how much America’s wealthiest should be taxed. Biden accepts the existence of billionaires, while AOC does not – or at least she says she doesn’t. House Democrats themselves seem to be fairly reticient of even Biden’s tax plan, so really the only thing that AOC could be signalling to – is them.
That said, it is not incorrect to point out the ineffectual nature of this even if this was the case, since Establisment politicians do not respond to public shaming in the same way. That is to say, they are largely shameless as a result of the experience of being career politicians. There is a conversation to be had about the horizon of social democratic ambitions lowered in response to neoliberalism or even to a history of capitulation to the power of American capital, if that’s what AOC’s critics are advocating. The bottom line is, if the radical left already dismiss AOC as a faux-radical, ‘pseudo-leftist’, then what she wears to a billionaire gala – and what slogan she puts up – shouldn’t made the radical left angry, rather we should be indifferent about it. And identify that the capitalist realism is not in sloganeering which falls within social democratic politics while hobnobbing with glitterati, since that had existed ever since social democrats were a serious electoral force – but in our reaction and overreaction to said sloganeering and our dependence on a culture of what my good friend calls “celebrity left”.
Mark Fisher, in his investigation on how ‘capitalist realism’ emerged, was not focused so much on individual actions – though that was there, but in our collective malaise, the mental health crisis linked to the rise of neoliberal political consensus, our reliance on self-care in response to the atomisation of society that neoliberalism created – essentially ‘the privatisation of stress’, the new emergent decentralized bureaucracies to manage our productivity, and the impotence of serious resistance to the conditions neoliberalism created. He diagnosed everything from popular culture, to education, to work, and ultimately to modern protest strategies and tied movie quotes and film scenes to our social relations metamorphosed by neoliberal capitalism. Capitalist realism is a term used to describe a systemic issue, not to brandish individual failings. Much of the complaints about AOC’s slogan weren’t just criticizing for co-option, but paradoxically, lazy and toothless sloganeering. But surely the question should be – if radical politics on the left is about building power through collective struggle, why does it matter what a socdem politician wears? Why is so much of politics and political discourse dependent on using or viewing popular politicians espousing left-wing stances individually do? And not about the coherence in strategy and tactics in leftist politics? It’s quite telling that this tale obscured almost completely the action done by police abolitionists, who to put it bluntly – got their asses kicked by the NYPD, despite demonstrating peacefully. However, this peformance if you will – by black autonomists was not enough to overcome the spectacle of a white dress and three words of red paint, worn by someone who supposedly wasn’t supposed to be there.
It really shoudn’t be about AOC, or what you would do, or what slogan one politician uses. The problem of performance on the left should be solved collectively, and emphasis should be on what it disrupts and conversations on the new possibilities that we can work towards.
See also:
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Capitalist realism
- “progressive-neoliberalism”
- ‘Champagne socialism’
- The ‘aristocratic embrace’ of Ramsay MacDonald
- Modern social democrats and “celebrity left”
- The left needs to have fun too
- The left and ‘g-checking’
- Social media and the online Left
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