[instituteOfEconomicAffairs] Socialists usually despise marketing, which they see as hoodwinking people into buying tripe they neither need nor truly want. And yet – nobody does it better than them.Who would have thought that it would be so easy to not just rehabilitate communism, but to actively rebrand it as hip, cool and edgy?
It was not planned. Earlier this month on Good Morning Britain, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar yelled “I’m a communist, you idiot! […] I’m literally a communist!” at host Piers Morgan. The clip went viral. A couple of hours later, Sarkar had become a minor national celebrity. As she puts it: “Before, I’d maybe get recognised a couple of times per week; now it’s most places I go. […] But everyone’s unerringly lovely and just wants to chat about politics.”
Following in her wake, her Novara colleague Aaron Bastani has also been touring the studios, explaining how communism had never really been tried, and how ridiculous it was to associate it with real-world approximations such as… well, all of them.
T-shirts with the slogan “I’m literally a communist” have gone on sale. “Communism is now all the rage!”, a triumphant Owen Jones declared on his Guardian video channel. And he is right.
Sarkar and her fellow Corbynistas have found, or rather, stumbled across, a way to Make Communism Cool Again. Fair play to them. But given that we won’t be able to eat coolness after the revolution: have they also found a way to make it work?
The answer, as you may have guessed, is no. There is remarkably little substance behind the hype.