[Full Article] How to Transform Pop Culture into a Tool for Resistance

One thing has been true for thousands of years: humans love to be entertained. In modern society, entertainment is all around us whether that’s the music we love, sports teams we root for, or movies & TV that we watch at the end of a long day, and together it creates the popular culture that we all participate in. But when it comes to changing society, what is the role of pop culture? Is it mostly a distraction, or could it actually be a useful tool for resistance?

It’s easy to write off pop culture as a distraction. We may have traded gladiators for sports teams, but the idea of “bread and circuses” still holds true in many ways - keep people entertained so they spend less time focused on the problems. Nowadays, there’s plenty of art and entertainment that have political themes in pop culture and are hugely popular like Star Wars’ “Andor” which depicts resistance to imperial forces, “One Piece” that explores the continual fight against inequality, “Squid Games” which discusses the intense pressures of capitalism, or (recently) Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance which called attention to the inequities of US colonization in Puerto Rico. Despite the overt political themes, none of these seem to actually radicalize people in the way that’s needed to turn passive viewership into concrete action.

In many ways, this is by design. Mark Fischer writes in Capitalist Realism about capitalism’s way of commodifying the aesthetics of resistance and selling it back to us, creating the illusion of progress while nothing real gets achieved and reinforcing capitalism as the default mode of society. It’s true that no piece of art or media, no matter how political, will launch a revolution, but we would argue that that’s not what art is meant to do. The power of art is to be able to communicate messages that break through layers of propaganda and programming and make people feel something in a world that’s designed to make us numb. In politics, art doesn’t have to be limited to wheatpasted posters, zines, and campaign videos. We would argue that all art, even what we see in pop culture, can be tools to push forward our movements if we want it to be.