Capitalist power in the twenty-first century does not travel only through tanks, warships, and armies. It also travels through copyright, algorithms, supply chains, and popular culture. And that is precisely why Taylor Swift can sometimes tell us more than a military map about how empire works today. Taylor Swift does not build empire. But the Taylor Swift phenomenon offers us a remarkably clear glimpse of what the imperialisation of cultural life can look like today. This essay is not asking anyone to delete their playlists. A Marxist critique of culture should not collapse into a moral purity test of consumption, where individuals are expected to prove their innocence by avoiding every product touched by capital.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51