Comrades Cardi and Britney have shown how celebrities should respond to coronavirus

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She’s finally here: Comrade Britney has arrived. Whilst her fellow celebs were busy crooning John Lennon songs into their iPhones to comfort the plague-infested plebs, Spears posted on her Instagram on Tuesday calling for strikes and wealth redistribution – a seeming repudiation of the US’ government’s craven response to coronavirus, which has so far amounted to billion-dollar bailouts for corporations and open contempt for the working classes.

We should have seen it coming. Ever since a freshly-shaved Spears took an umbrella to a paparazzo’s car one February night in 2007, it should have been clear that she would rise to become a hero of 21st century socialism.

Queer people twigged earlier. Like her divas forebears, it was not simply glamour or fame which crowned Spears as a gay icon, but her embattled, messy, vengeful, flamboyant, survival-mode, car-crash femininity – the kind that tries to steer a safe path through the treacherous terrain of patriarchy before giving up, and ploughing straight into the nearest Wendy’s. You can be beautiful, successful, strategic, Spears told us – but ultimately, the system which mines female bodies for marketable content always wins. Spears’s chaotic biography details for us that society’s problems unfold from structures of power, not individual insufficiencies. A carnival of humiliations is exposed, the struggle to survive it is rendered glamorous, survivable, iconic. (For more details, see the chapter one of the Communist Manifesto). She was ripe for a socialist awakening, whether we were ready to see it or not.

She was forced to navigate a life as a brainless avatar of male desire, to carve out some autonomy from within a role as nubile, Disney-approved tween fantasy. She failed – flamboyantly, purposefully, publicly. “I’m tired of everybody touching me,” she declared, buzz-cutting her blonde locks.

Since her breakdown, Spears has lost custody of her kids and been strongarmed into a “conservatorship” agreement that hands control of her financial, legal and professional life almost entirely over to her father, who receives $10,000 per month for his trouble. Recent reports suggest she’s been on strike against this arrangement, refusing to produce new music, – twirling and smiling for a man who has by all accounts colluded in a legal settlement which strips her of all autonomy, all ownership over her work. Like many bosses, his chief contribution is to withhold the value of their work and dictate the contours of their daily lives. Perhaps it’s little wonder Spears feels an affinity with striking workers across the US.

Of course she came through. The undercover radicalism of Britney’s oeuvre powered us through the end of history with, the late nineties-early noughts period when jeans were low-rise and interest rates sky high and there was, we were told, no alternative to capitalism. She was hinting at her leftist loyalties all along. ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’ stands as a painful meditation on eternal recurrence and the tragedy of observing politics within the framework of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”. ’I’m a Slave 4 U’ takes its cue from the Hegelian dialectics, whose focus on the mutual dependency of the master and the slave has been hugely influential on feminist thought; in the infamous video, she commands and then discards the phallic symbol of a Burmese python. Later, after the crash of 2008 exposed the raw contradictions of market capitalism, Spears’s work took on a more explicitly Marxist tenor; her 2013 anthem ‘Work, Bitch’ skewered the hollow, alienating promises of material redemption flogged by the American Dream.

No wonder, then, that it should have been Britney Jean Spears to take to task the craven recklessness and cronyism of Atlantic governments, merrily letting a pandemic carve a havoc-path through their populations to bump up the Dow Jones

At the other extreme, you get PR stunts so monumentally naive and glib that they tip into the realm of performance art. I’m thinking of Gal Gadot, who recently corralled a shark-eyed cult of celebrity pals to do the one thing that will really address this crisis: sing. From within the bosom of their multi-million dollar houses, they invited to “imagine no possessions”, in an off-key peace anthem was orchestrated by an actor who famously Instagrammed her way through the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict with hashtags such as #coexistance and #loveIDF. This is the anti-politics of the Hollywood Hills set, where all human suffering can be healed by good vibes and green juice. A world built on a fuzzy intuition about the benefits of being nice to people, with the distant benevolence of a prince waving from his tower at the peasants below; The kind of world in which lockdown means reconnecting with your ayurvedic yoga practice, rather than personal calamity. Politeness without justice, flourishing without resources, peace without change.

Money does that: insulates you from crisis, turns disaster into inconvenience. And whilst class and capital won’t immunise you from a virus which brooks no difference between one warm-blooded host and the next, it sure as hell helps you get tested early, treated effectively and quarantined luxuriously. And sometimes endless wealth and adulation pumps you so full of hot air you become untethered from the realities of most people’s lives and float off into space.

This was called out in magnificent style by the rapper, style icon, thought leader, and all-round working class hero Cardi B, who took her fellow celebrities to task for paying to get privately tested while symptom-free; for forgetting that for most people, quarantine means losing their jobs and healthcare. Cardi’s got no time for lockdown romanticism, spending it bored out of her mind, crying into her cereal and yelling at the pentagon. Like Spears, she has leftist form: a former sex worker and early advocate of Bernie Sanders, she’s thrown her weight behind the Medicare For All campaigns once decried as swivel-eyed Marxist fantasism, now one of the only things which might prevent a public health catastrophe of historic proportions. Put ‘Money’ in the socialist canon right next to ‘The Internationale’.

Of course, no celebrity comradeship can deliver us from corona turmoil. But public figures wield outsized power to shape an urgent conversation about what this crisis means for our society, as contradictions sharpen and cultural norms melt and warp in the panicked heat of socio-economic upheaval. Some try to foist blame on individuals; others blind themselves to the struggles of the working classes forced to choose between eviction and infection. Some prop up a sham universality which claims “we’re all in this together”, indulge in dead-end distractions and glossing over the culpability of political leaders. As the crisis bites deeper, it will be ever more important to keep a clear focus that universal healthcare, workers rights and wealth redistribution are the only possible responses. We need to reject the pat aphorisms and smiling patricianship, and demand a fair deal for working people. In a world of Gal Godots, be a Cardi or a Britney.