The vibe I get is if Americans do it, it’s less scary than what foreigners do. Americans did try having little utopian socialist societies out in the wilderness. It’s how large swaths of Ohio were settled by whites and it’s how the city of Dallas was founded.

Going out into the woods to have a little communal town isn’t politically threatening, so that type of leftism gets sold and commodified. You’ll also see bands like RATM play at huge festivals. You’ll see movies with anticapitalist themes or critiques, like anything by Ken Loach, maybe stuff like the Truman Show or even Barbie or the Lego Movie. But that’s as far as it goes, vague feelings. The Matrix movies are some of the highest grossing films of all time and they’re commodified backwards and forwards.

I don’t see much in the way of making a consumer identity out of genuine Marxism, or any kind of anarchist mutual aid group. No one’s selling an identity of doing shelter work. No one’s selling an identity of promoting the causes of revolutions in the third world, the average westerner still thinks that makes you insane.