I was sitting at Cup A Joe on Friday, taking in caffeine and Hillsborough Street, when I saw a larger-than-life-sized image of a girl’s face fly by on the side of a truck. The face was of Belle Knox, aka the Duke University freshman porn star, on an advertisement for six shows she’s doing this weekend at the Men’s Club of Raleigh.

I’d known that in the last couple of months, the phenomenon of Belle Knox had grown in prominence in both the national media and the adult-entertainment industry. It was only when I felt Knox’s presence beyond Internet stories and on that truck in front of me that it sunk in just how much, in the last couple of months, she had gone from an enigma interviewing with The Chronicle under pseudonymity, to a salient part of our recent cultural history.

Her phenomenon was not just restricted to the media spectacle and cultural presence. The fact that her presence was in an advertisement goes to show that her phenomenon has also developed in an economic context. The way her market phenomenon spread thus spoke to the nature of late capitalism, i.e., post-industrial capitalism. In the age of pervasive communicational and informational systems, culture is merely information uprooted from any particular place and parched of the meaning that comes from such a link. The nature of late capitalism in this context of postmodernity is that the circulation of information is central to its generating profits.

Now, that truck also reminded me that Knox is also from the region; though she has performed in New York City, she isn’t going around having shows in every random American town, which led me to think about the fashionable ethic of supporting one’s local economy.

I realize that the Men’s Club in Raleigh is owned by a conglomerate based in Colorado and that Duke University, to which most of Knox’s own earnings in the foreseeable future will go, isn’t a “local business” in the usual sense of the term. My point, however, is that the same economic workings that both fed and drew on Knox’s cultural phenomenon and thus unearthed, so to speak, that resource from the locality where it lay only with latent market potential until then are the same, single economic workings of late capitalism that also foster “local economies.” Whether we’re talking about local beer or local record labels, these artifacts are there because there was something about that locality that allowed it to be the point—in the delocalized and deterritorialized reservoir of a culture whose commodification late capitalism deals in—at which the culture could take the form of a commodity in consumption, rather than a commodity in circulation.

Capitalism in the United States today works by mining cultural information and happenings. Its bottom line is the creation and mediation of networks in which local goods are as much a part of that process as is Belle Knox performing at an adult club in Raleigh.

Though not restricted to late capitalism, there is a further question about how the prevalence of local goods could be like Knox’s show in Raleigh, for which I’ll have to resuscitate the by now beaten-to-death debate that Knox sparked about whether porn, and sex work in general, is empowering for women or not. Here’s a position in the debate: Sex work is empowering in that it’s work, and economic self-determination, for any oppressed group, is always empowering. Now, achieving this economic self-determination by using, of all things, one’s physicality and sexuality in a patriarchal society that’s oppressive to non-male physicalities and sexualities, can be empowering to the person exercising it. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the empowerment for this person, by taking place within the confines of a certain (patriarchal) standard of who can seek empowerment through these means, maintains the logic of the structure. Thus, though empowerment for women of a certain bodily and racial standard is enabled, oppression is maintained for many others.

If this position is accepted, the point is: Capitalism, late or not, could not have drawn profit from the Belle Knox phenomenon—whether in Raleigh or elsewhere—without help from existing systems of domination. Likewise, the viability of many kinds of commodities, including those being sold locally, depends on such oppressive systems, which should be thought about before conscientiously choosing to patronize a business just because it’s local.

Buying local, in the institutional market framework, supports one dominating structure in a very direct way. Each time we participate in the economy, we’re paying taxes and a disproportionate amount of our tax money goes to the military budget. So, each time I buy a beer at the Big Boss Taproom, even though it’s local, I’m funding the American war machine. From this point of view, the goal shouldn’t be to support the local economy, but to withdraw from the economy—local or not—altogether. Homebrews are an obvious example of this, which—putting aside for a second the privilege of having the capital for this activity—not only have the effect of enabling communities to stop contributing to a hegemonic structure, but also better fulfill other purported benefits of buying local: building community, and not burning the fuel that would otherwise go toward long-distance transport.

But many of us do not have the privilege to be able to homebrew and change our lifestyle in other ways so as to not rely on institutional market channels. Also, buying local (also requiring some level of privilege) doesn’t affect the prevailing exploitative economic system, particularly in its present form: The larger-than-local economic workings of information circulation—propped up by other arguably oppressive structures—that facilitated the conditions to bring about the show at the Men’s Club this weekend, and which constitute the crux of late capitalism, are essentially the same workings that bring us local goods. Buying a local t-shirt is going to meaningfully affect the economy just as much as going to see Belle Knox strip.

So then, if we all can’t brew our own beer and if capitalism today is totalizing, then how can we act for economic betterment? The answer is simple and unoriginal. Capitalism seems inescapable like never before, and it may now be able to encompass everything and capitalize on anything such that specific (local) consumption choices lose their power. But the essential thing about the capitalist mode of production—i.e., the extraction of surplus value from labor—remains. So, the best way to act toward economic justice is to understand this exploitation, and meet the structure head on: by engaging in, with an unironic embrace of the traditional term, class struggle.

Send your thoughts to Ishan at [email protected].