Hilton’s Canopy by Hilton London City created controversy driving for authenticity, and food and beverage revenue, by branding its bar after European socialist anarchists. The socialists were outraged by using their history to sell $18 drinks to “wanky City types.”

Cocktails had names like “the Russian Anarchist” and told the story of Peter Kropotkin who fled Tsarist Russia for London to pursue his ideas, and “Why Work?” after a series of anti-capitalist essays.

The cafe was named after the historic Freedom Press anarchist publisher down the road in Whitechapel. The bar’s menu was even made to look like a copy of Freedom Press, the anarchist journal published since 1886, with “Anarchist Weekly” written on the top of the page. It offered, “Anarchy, coffee, drinks and comfort food”.

There was just one problem. Freedom Press – still an anarchist collective publishing books and running a bookshop in Whitechapel – say they were never consulted about any of this and are furious about it.

…Seeing the cafe as just the latest example of gentrification of the formerly working-class district, they added: “Surely these people weren’t actually boneheaded enough to wholesale rip off our name, photos and even the introduction to our history page on our own website for some mindless, dust-chewing corporate branding exercise?”

Hilton was forced to remove the edgy socialist branding from its capitalist endeavor. Even their website description as “a gathering place for writers, radicals, entrepreneurs and artists – a breeding ground for concepts that would go on to change the world” has been removed. The name ‘Freedom’ has been removed from the cafe’s name, and the “anarchist newspaper style menu had been replaced with a generic one.”

The hotel blames third party consultants, as though they had no part in approving the branding of their own cafe.

The Canopy by Hilton brand aims to offer guests unique experiences inspired by the local neighbourhood. It was this brief that was given to a third party consultancy group of global repute, who were charged with creating a café and bar concept with references to the locality. In response, the agency proposed the Freedom Café and Bar concept, inspired by the local Freedom Press Publishing House.

Canopy London City is extremely disappointed to learn that the consultancy did not approach Freedom Press Publishing House for their consent prior to creating the food and beverage concept. As a result, Canopy London City have established contact with Freedom Press Publishing House with a view to finding a mutually agreeable resolution as soon as possible.

A decade ago a German bank began issuing the Karl Marx Mastercard because “there are some things money can’t buy. Especially if you abolish all private property.”

In 2015 Newark airport got the OTG rendition of CBGB’s, the legendary punk rock music club in New York’s East Village that opened in the 1970s. One of the most important music venues in Manhattan, it was an important stop for the B-52’s, Blondie, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, and the Talking Heads.

In the airport version you’d order on iPads amidst “a flatscreen TV showing a sports match” while they were taking “our memories [and] merchandizing them back to us at a significant mark-up.”

Last year Marriott added a hotel to its portfolio called “The Socialist” with four classes of service (from rooms to suites) and very non-egalitarian room rates, promising to provide “privileged access to the surrounding city.”

Its website boasts that “within lies an interior of exquisite materiality” by which they certainly refer to dialectical materialism. By staying in a class conscious property while promoting socialism, you’re heightening the contradictions of capitalism.

Meanwhile the W South Beach used to display the image of Che Guevara as art.

Guevara helped set up Cuba’s secret police and forced labor camps, was responsible for the execution of thousands of political prisoners, and tortured prisoners (including children). He called himself “Stalin II” (though felt Soviet totalitarianism didn’t go far enough and preferred North Korea as a model). Yet associating with Guevara, like “The Socialist” in Copenhagen, makes one hip, trendy, and somehow ‘in’ on the postmodern joke… like Argentines who years ago took to wearing a Che t-shirt that read “Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,”