Yeah, anticapitalism’s become just another commodity.
If Disney or any of these other film studios were truly leftist, they’d be co-ops with workplace democracy, their IPs would be in the public domain, and they wouldn’t be churning out all these cynical, artless cash-grab sequels, reboots, remakes, etc. in the first place.
Agreed. But the term “leftist” is now mostly a vague term, causing people to talk passed each other. Some people use it strictly to refer to various forms of socialism, implying public ownership of means of production - basically a primarily economic term. I gather that’s close to what you mean here (although worker co-ops obviously can exist under umbrella capitalist economies).
But nowadays the term is also thrown around as a general synonym for “progressive” or just a blanket term describing a cluster of beliefs centering around equity-based social justice. But I think the number of people supporting equity-based social justice is probably way larger than those who identify as socialists. Anyway, modern corporations often release messaging broadcasting support for various relevant social issues. They’ve updated the language of their messaging to parrot the vocabulary of the left. It’s not entirely a farce, just like 95% a farce. Large corporations are huge and consist of countless departments and sub-departments. There are certainly many people (including executives) working at these corporations that support equity-based social justice, and push internally for policy changes, while resigned (reluctantly or not) to the reality of shareholders and profit margins. Most large American corporations generally really do try to diversify their workforce via hiring policies that seek to replicate population percentages of minority groups as percentages of the workforce. (The consulting firms they hire instruct them to do this - or at least say they’re doing it.) This is mostly a PR tool to manage public image and redirect attention away from any number of hilariously evil practices, like operating sweat shops in Asia, giving obscene bonuses to executives, and/or regularly laying off large swathes of their work force to appease shareholders.
But, at the risk of getting too controversial for a Star Wars forum, I feel that the American “left” has largely abandoned economic change in order to focus mostly on identity politics. Marx is probably turning in his grave, but it seems class tensions alone are insufficient to generate any sustainable mobilization in the Western world. Identity politics, on the other hand, has the power (and corporate backing) to generate significant public interest and funding, and so has obviously been co-opted by corporations as a PR tool. And the majority of social movements or NGOs that were once focused primarily on economic change have seen where the wind is blowing, and have shifted focus to social issues instead, to better secure funding - often from large corporations. (The modern “Occupy” movement, for example, no longer protests the corporate greed or the excesses of capitalism, but instead protests immigration issues and ICE.) Now most “leftist” messaging (corporate or otherwise) is all about supporting Black-owned businesses and hiring women/minorities, instead of actually uniting the proletariat or even just promoting some form of economic democracy. (The average person in the US doesn’t even know what a fucking worker co-op even is.)