The repulsive rise of the ‘socialist socialites’

You guys, have you heard of this super-cool new fashion trend? It’s called communism! It’s like this really cool vibe. You get all your food and rent for free! You’re encouraged to steal from expensive supermarkets! You even get to hang out with the coolest rich kids and travel to places like Cuba (where they have the best hotels), and sail the Med to Palestine (perfect place to rock your keffiyeh). Everyone on TikTok is talking about it!

It seems that Gen Z and some Millennial rich kids are really digging communism at the moment. Though I’m now a crabby middle-aged Gen Xer with sore feet and a desire to be in bed by 10pm on a Friday, I once had some pretty commie-friendly ideas. But I’m still rather alarmed that young people across the media landscape have suddenly turned into well-coiffed, moisturised and manicured Stalins.

These people are utterly decadent. Their main political gripes are that they are expected to pay for things, and that there are people in the world who are richer than they are – even though they are pretty rich themselves.

This leads to a jarring combination among these self-styled communists of louche entitlement and cold-blooded immorality. Take 18-year-old fashion influencer Ella Devi. She raised eyebrows earlier this week when she posted a snobby comment about the dress worn by the wife of the US secretary of war, Jennifer Hegseth, to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She said it looked like a dress that was for sale on Temu, the super-cheap Chinese online retailer. In response to media criticism, Devi fired back on TikTok with a reference to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ‘I’m a student of Gramsci and Givenchy… don’t play with me.’ Oh my, Rosa Luxemburg has really had a glow-up, hasn’t she?

These cosseted commies are constantly lecturing the rest of us from up on high. Speaking on a New York Times podcast last week, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and livestreamer Hasan Piker (I know, him again) sat down with Nadja Spiegelman to talk up this hot new trend, ‘microlooting’. This is what you or I know as ‘shoplifting’, but that doesn’t have enough aura for these minted mini-Maos.

Well-fed, impeccably dressed and coiffed, and sitting in a studio that looks like it was the subject of a J-Lo rider circa 2002, the trio justify stealing from shops in the following terms: ‘We live in a society where there are billionaires’, Spiegelman says, as if the very fact of rich people existing was an unquestionable moral affront. ‘If the laws don’t feel moral’, she continues, ‘do you start to question your own sense of having to abide by them?’. ‘Of course’, Tolentino replies.

Very pleased with themselves, the thievesome threesome name-check famous-in-this-demographic thinkers like author Mike Davis, alongside Friedrich Engels. This gave me an amusing flashback to sitting in a friend’s anarchist book shop and café in 1997, smoking a joint and drinking a mug of cheap red plonk, nodding seriously to something or other as if any of us sheltered students had a single fucking clue. We were talking about the exact same things as Tolentino or Piker, but our platform was each other. The difference is, these people have the imprimatur of the New York Times, the most famous media corporation in the world, America’s paper of record.

‘I think it’s great that the valence of property is kind of on the table as something to be toyed with in terms of direct action’, says Tolentino. That’s a pretentious way of saying that Comrade Tolentino reserves the right to relieve you of your belongings, if you fit into her ‘enemy’ category. And with commies, we all know that the ‘enemy’ category has a bad habit of expanding to include just about everyone.

Piker is more famous for being a massive Hamas fanboy. But he is also a totalitarian ideologue, albeit one of questionable intellectual acuity. ‘I believe in the power of organised labour and labour militancy and building these structures of power’, he announces, as if no one has ever come up with the idea of trade unions before. He then goes on, as these decadent leftists always do, to attack American workers, claiming they ‘are totally oblivious to this political language’. He says the working classes ‘lack the political education’ and ‘lack the class consciousness to recognise their position in society and lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organised disruption’.

In other words, Piker thinks regular, working Americans are the problem. They’re just too deaf to the jargon, or ‘political language’, possessed by the likes of him, who’ve never dug a hole or done a 12-hour shift on their feet.

It’s unintentionally hilarious that most of the discussion revolves around stealing from Whole Foods. This is possibly the most bougie, aspirational, elite food grocer to ever exist. To put this podcasting experience in a British context, imagine a bunch of Sloane Rangers sitting around discussing the liminal semiotics of shoplifting avocados from Waitrose, and expecting to be taken seriously by their rich daddies who pay their bills.

Spiegelman cites a frightening statistic: 40 per cent of Gen Z thought the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down on a Manhattan street in 2024, was ‘morally justified’. Indeed, the accused, Luigi Mangione, has since been lionised by young, hip lefties – people, that is, who are insulated from even the whiff of actual work, while also being supremely confident that their glib and murderous suggestions are morally correct.

The rich-kid commies would argue that they are only advocating theft from big corporations or the killing of the rich. Meanwhile, people like Thompson, as Piker chillingly claims, are committing ‘social murder’. Social murder, as any undergraduate course on the English Industrial Revolution will tell you, is a polemical concept in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. It attributes moral responsibility for the preventable deaths of society’s least well-off members to whole social systems. This is a fine topic for a university debate, but in the real world, it is the slipperiest of slopes.

Language like ‘social murder’ is taken out of its abstract context and then used to justify the terroristic targeting of individuals in the cold light of day. Wealthy targets, once alerted to their vulnerability as CEOs across America now undoubtedly are, can pay to protect themselves. So who ends up being caught in the crossfire of these post-grad, leftist terrorist campaigns, when high-value targets are out of reach? Ordinary people.

One silver lining to this dismal historical ignorance: if the day ever comes that these idiots get the communist paradise they are so clearly dreaming of, they will probably be immediately hauled off to the gulag for being bourgeois running-dog counter-revolutionists or something.

There’s no Whole Foods in the labour camps, you guys! Hope this helps.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.