Just wanted to post, belat­edly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excel­lent inter­view with Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself non­plussed by the skep­ti­cism with which what seems an utterly uncon­tro­ver­sial, even triv­ial, claim is too often met—that cap­i­tal­ism will come to an end.

The fail­ure of this phase of cap­i­tal­ism, pre­sag­ing maybe wider prob­lems and fail­ures of cap­i­tal­ism, is that end [of his­tory], again, posing the ques­tion what it means for some­thing to come to an end. Cap­i­tal­ism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feu­dal­ism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vec­tors of a declin­ing system in ways that allow us to grasp the speci­ficity of our own sit­u­a­tion, to gauge, as it were, the var­i­ous levels and dimen­sions at which a system can be con­tin­u­ing for­ward and then other levels at which it might be flat-​lining. And so I think we’ll have very com­plex prob­lems of both thought and polit­i­cal prac­tice in this coming period.

But I would encour­age every­body not to think about the his­tor­i­cal prob­lem of the future of our way of life: cap­i­tal­ism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve con­di­tions in the here and now and to think about alter­na­tives to it. Every­thing, as we know, all modes of social life, even­tu­ally come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accus­tomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while cer­tainly true of every­thing that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might some­how be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increas­ingly be con­fronted with evi­dence that that is not the case.

Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle,