Karl Marx 🤝 Taylor Swift
Marxist Theory Show & Tell episode out now!
What do Karl Marx and Taylor Swift have in common? Well they both have massively influenced millions of people, and we talk about them both in this week’s episode of AP Taylor Swift. That’s right, we are back with another literary theory! This time we are putting on our “Marxist Theory” glasses to discuss how social class, power dynamics, and concepts of ownership affect how we view Taylor’s music.
Want a refresher of the songs we discuss in the episode? Check them out below!
A huge and sincere thank you to everyone who listened, rated, and reviewed our podcast! We are overwhelmed and overjoyed by the response, and we appreciate your love and support. (Haven’t reviewed us yet? Go on, we’ll wait!)
Want to check out our book recommendations? Head to our Bookshop page!
And, if you’re looking to get a little more extra credit…keep reading for a closer look at the song in our latest episode.
This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought To You By Jenn
Ok ok, so “Marxist Theory” is something that may have caused a strong reaction in some of you. Maybe you are all in and ready for revolution. Maybe you saw “Karl Marx” in the subject line and are ready to read this and start a different kind of fight.
One of my favorite things about critical theories is that they are the perfect playground. You can put on your “feminist theory” glasses and look at the gender roles in a piece of art, and then you can turn around and put on your “ecocriticism” glasses and analyze the role nature plays in that exact same piece. Your daily life is likely informed by some of the same philosophers and artists who are the cornerstones for these theories, which is great! But the joy of being students is we get to try things on and play with things that are maybe a bit uncomfortable or new. So regardless of your personal convictions about politics, the economy, or society as a whole, let’s put on a new pair of glasses and have some fun.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever been mine.” Or are you?
One of the bigger issues in Marxism is the idea of private property. Marx himself doesn’t mince his words when he discusses why he believes private property is a major issue.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us.
Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism
Now, regardless of what you think about private property, it is an interesting question around language. What are the implications and effects of using the language of ownership? Specifically, what is the impact of using this language in situations where the “owned” entity is not an inanimate object? When we see a dog wagging her tail and looking up lovingly at the person next to her, we say, “oh look how much she loves her owner.” Or in the Taylor Swift classic, “Mine,” she sings directly, “You are the best thing that’s ever been mine.”
We’ve talked about this several times on the podcast, but it’s worth saying again: Taylor’s intentions here don’t really matter. Maybe she thought it was a fun turn of phrase or maybe she was actually trying to make a statement. Regardless, she could have communicated this message several different ways (“You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me” for example), but using the words “thing” and “mine” have specific connotations. And this is where critical theory is fun! By putting on our Marxism glasses, we notice these elements of the lyrics that we maybe wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
In my personal opinion as a former teacher, this is the point where you can stop worrying about what Marx (and other philosophers who followed in his footsteps) thought about private property. If you are interested, by all means go read more and do more research! But the first value of this critical theory is that it has brought up parts of this text that we wouldn’t have necessarily noticed otherwise, and now we get to think about it more. What do you think about using the same language to discuss owning an inanimate object to describe your human partner? Is it romantic? Is it weird? How does the dynamic of ownership play a role in the rest of the song? These are genuine questions, and we would love for you to leave a comment below with your thoughts!
The house always wins
Another idea associated with Marxism is the concept of “false consciousness.” There are a million different examples of this, but I think the world of Las Vegas and casinos is a great example. Shiny lights, machines dinging, stories of people winning big all create this narrative that anyone can win if they are just lucky enough. But we know statistically that the house always wins. If you go into the casino planning on not winning a lot, but just having fun, that’s one thing. If you go in buying into this narrative and believing today is your lucky day, you are experiencing false consciousness.
This metaphor is exactly the one that we see in “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” with lyrics such as “the whole school is rolling fake dice” and “you play stupid games you win stupid prizes.” Again, with our Marxist glasses on, we can quickly focus in on these lyrics and how they inform the overall narrative. In this song, the setting is a high school where things feel not quite right to the speaker. “The damsels are depressed” and “where are the wise men” do not paint a happy picture. By using this critical theory, we can focus in on the false consciousness at play here as the speaker looks around and realizes things are not what they should be, and they start to wonder what to do about it (run away? stay and fight?).
I don’t want to take away from our discussion that we had on this week’s episode (so go listen!), but I wanted to bring it up here because I think this is maybe the concept I have found the most interesting recently. Again, regardless of your personal political or economic opinions, I think we’ve all had those moments where we start to question the narrative we’ve been fed. Maybe it’s the 500th time we saw some magazine talk about a famous person’s diet and workout plan as if you could also achieve the exact same results as them even though you have different genetics and don’t have the same access to personal trainers, meal services, aestheticians, etc. Or maybe it’s when your company reported record profits but are telling you they don’t have the money to give you a raise this year.
Of course life won’t always be fair, but if you can see and name those moments, it can at least help you stop questioning your own sanity and figure out a new path forward. I think that’s the first step to be able to go from “And I don't want you to (Go) / I don't really wanna (Fight) / 'Cause nobody's gonna (Win)” to “And I'll never let you (Go) / 'cause I know this is a (Fight) / That someday we're gonna (Win).”
“Maybe she was born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline”
Humans have been talking about nature vs. nurture for a very long time, but Marx discusses it very specifically from a social class point of view.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Politic Economy
In other words, Marx is positing that it is our social class, our surroundings, what we have to do to be able to eat food and exist, that determines how we see the world and how we navigate it. It’s an interesting concept because, although we are all human, it is pretty clear that people of different social classes experience the world completely differently. While this actually a pretty serious thing to think about, as I am writing this all I can think about is that one scene from Arrested Development where Lucille Bluth has no idea how much a banana costs.
Something that this show (and this moment in particular) does incredibly well is demonstrates that reality gap between social classes, which is also a core theme of our third song from this episode - “the last great american dynasty.” Again, our conversation on the podcast does a great job diving into this (and spoiler alert: our deep dive next week is into this song as well!), but I wanted to spend a little time here digging into the difference between a million and a billion dollars.
Maybe you’re in the “eat the rich” camp or maybe you think that CEOs and founders deserve the money they have. Regardless of your opinions, being able to better grasp the impact of these numbers that are thrown around is helpful for putting any conversation into perspective. So here are a few ways to think about it!
First, let’s look at it visually. This image assumes one square equals $50,000 and then uses that as the base to show the difference between a million and a billion.
Another way to think about it is in time. If we use seconds as a comparison to dollars, one million seconds equals around 11.5 days. One billion seconds is around 31.5 years. Since we mentioned him in the episode, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is around $160 billion which equals approximately 5,070 years.
The only other thing I’ll say on this is that money is one element, but Marx (and any discussion around social class) has to also take into consideration how money and power interact with each other. I once had a professor say that the difference between Julius Caesar and the other wealthy men in Rome is that Caesar knew how to translate his money to power, the others were happy to just remain comfortable. I think Marx would maybe point out that the majority of Rome didn’t have an option to do either.
“I had a marvelous time ruinin' everything”
On a personal note, I think one of the things that has inspired me to remain a Swiftie after all of these years is that Taylor doesn’t really accept the status quo. She was told that not being able to own her masters was a normal and standard thing, but she rejected that narrative and stepped out of the false consciousness to do something about it. She changes genres and really just owns her career. This wasn’t always true, and I’m sure she’s had plenty of missteps along the way. But growing up with Taylor means that I am seeing a woman around my age make these massive, career-altering decisions and also watching her succeed wildly. How could I not cheer for her?
Critical theories help us understand, navigate, and question the world around us. Whether that results in you affirming the opinions you already had or sends you on a path towards more questioning and learning, I’m grateful that you are here with us, playing along, and hopefully having as much fun as we are!