How To Escape The Rat Race And Drive Political Change
Those of us on the left face a conundrum: How can we survive and thrive in a hyper-capitalist system we realize is dystopian and broken without selling our souls?
The answer, effectively, is that nobody can. We all live in capitalism; its power is such that every leftist impulse gets coopted, monetized, marketed, and measured. Think of Che Guevara t-shirts or your favorite leftist YouTuber. The capitalization of leftism can be lucrative.
And everybody’s got bills to pay, ultimately.
Yet many of us approach the trappings of capitalism with disdain. We’re seriously burned out from our jobs. We have little energy left to fight for progressive values. Those of us with high-wage privilege are bogged down with mortgages or student loans and grasping for a vanishing middle-class lifestyle. An even greater number of people living among the precariat are so overburdened they don’t have the bandwidth to fight at all.
Those of us who can fight do so to try to raise the minimum wage — a federal minimum that hasn’t been raised in a record 12 years — for tens of millions. Some of those who would benefit from it vote Republican; they love their racism, xenophobia, and fascism more than their personal economies.
