I can see why Tim Barker thinks that my career as a contrarian is over. Here I am defending consumer culture — in his terms, “the culture of capitalism” — so how can I be speaking truth to power? As he knows, the power to which I have been speaking all these years is the left-liberal historiographical establishment, not the imperialist warmongers (although, for the record, I have tried in my own diffident, academic way to criticize both capitalism and imperialism). My goal, all along, has been to unsettle the assumptions that regulate the thinking of the academic and the larger Left, to let us see capitalism, socialism, consumerism, and democracy — also pragmatism, feminism, and the corporation — differently. Not complacently, differently. But now, in this trade book, I’ve become just another shill for corporate capitalism and its cultural attendants?

It seems so. To judge from Barker’s review, I’ve unsettled nothing; at any rate none of his leftist assumptions were dislodged or even remotely disturbed by my polemic. So I have to wonder why his review is so forgiving, so benign, so friendly. This is the journal called Jacobin, where the harmless Ezra Klein gets flogged for being a liberal, right? Why then doesn’t the young radical excoriate the old apologist, the guy who’s “defending the culture of capitalism”? I’m not begging for punishment, mind you, although I have a professional interest in male masochism (no, really). I just want to know why Barker lets me off the hook.

There are three possible explanations of this clemency. First, I’ve got some residual left-wing credentials. It’s true, I remain something of a Marxist, and go beyond David Harvey or Robert Brenner by “claiming that the re-investment of profits is no longer even necessary for economic growth,” and arguing for redistribution on these unique grounds, where capitalists and their criteria are simply superfluous; it’s also true that I have urged the Left to adopt FUCK WORK as its slogan; finally, it’s true that I’m an enthusiastic supporter of and occasional participant in Occupy Wall Street. Second, I do “address the argument that consumerism is a barrier to social change,” apparently to Barker’s satisfaction because he doesn’t contest my conclusions. Third, I am “uncannily optimistic,” and so cannot be blamed for my political idiocies, not any more than a naive bandmate can be blamed for his unrealistic dreams of a record contract.