I have absolutely no idea how it should be done properly and what are the intentions behind it, but i do have 33,5 years of first hand experience. It appears that you need money. Money is a symbolic unit of trade and storage of value. You have to “earn” it. The common way to do this is to trade your time and effort for it with people who have it and need your time and effort and skill set. The problem is, if no one needs those things, in many places you’re just left with out money. In some places they give you just enough to survive on even if you have no “work” opportunities. The “free money” usually comes with a burden of shame.

Having a coffee at the local artesan bakery can be a nice break from the grudging realities of late capitalism. How should we approach this kind of small scale capitalism, where the owners of the business work there and everything is locally produced? It’s better than corporate capitalism, isn’t it? Or is it just a comforter to keep us from exploding? I want to eat my pulla.

With money people usually purchase or rent things that are necessary for a comfortable life, like housing, clothes and food. People who have more money also spend it on things that make life more comfortable for them like cars and entertainment. Under capitalism housing, clothing, health care and food are not guaranteed for all people.

Money appears to be a complicated issue. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but it appears that it comes from borrowing. People lend it out and it somehow multiplies? It grows interest too. There are these big human institutions, “nation states” that play some role in it, but “banks” and “finance sector” are somehow even more important in all this. For most regular persons, the main thing about money is scarcity. There’s never enough. When you get more you need more.

Why is this weird system still in place? “Capitalism”, capital is the main driving force behind this moment of human planetary model of organisation. Yet i don’t even know what it actually is. I only have clues. Capital is not value, because a lot of value is not exchangable for capital. Or it can be named as other kinds of capital, like “cultural capital”. I’m an artist, so my job is to produce cultural capital. But cultural capital doesn’t always translate to regular capital, which has monetary value, which is needed for subsistence.

Bread and tartaletti for the people!

Old school capitalism was based on the appropriation of labour. People worked at factories etc to make surplus value for the owner of the factory or other business. They were compensated with a little money of their own. There was an owning class, the bourgeois, who made the profits, and the working class, the proletariate, who did the work. This is nuts, right? Why would anyone take a deal like this? That’s why there was (is) a middle class! That’s people who fall between these categories and work as a sort of watershed and bumper that takes the edge of the apparent conflict. The working class can dream of becoming a part of the middle class, the middle class can dream of becoming a part of the upper class, the upper class can remain confident they will never fall below the middle class and the middle class will do anything to hold on to their privileges. The middle class gets to own some things, like their own houses. Also there is a whole system of violence to uphold this as the status quo.

That was old school industrial times, or so i’ve gathered with my limited knowledge of things. Now most people don’t work in factories or menial jobs anymore. Those are largely automated or outsourced to other countries, out of our eyes. That creates whole new classes i suppose. Also whole new international class conflicts, only better hidden and controlled. But when one suffers and another one profits, there’s always conflict, whether it’s open or not. Here in northern Europe, we don’t trade in work as much as we used to. We trade in information, supposedly. Only there is no trade, really, only extraction. A trade would require compensation.

Everyday things become objects of consumer fetishism. But boy, riding my sweet bike to the artesan bakery makes me forget my grudges.

We are no longer workers, we are “consumers”. The things we buy are “products”. The communists say that the workers should own the means of production. I own my computer and camera and instruments that I use for making art. But the people who made those things work in factories owned by capitalists. On local scale i’m rather poor, but on a global scale, i’m comfortably middle class. What does my owning the means of cultural production make me? Middle class or liberated worker? A cliché has it that no one is liberated until everyone is. Late stage capitalism also gets the classes mixed and leaves us confused with where we stand. When there are no traditional jobs left, we have to become entrepreneurs, our own bosses, running our lives like a business, with the capitalist logic of growth and continuous development. Thus we get invested in the benefits of capitalism and become unable to confront it.

I get my money from occasional artist grants (a lot of unpaid work in applying and a small percentage of success, also an art degree is almost mandatory, i have two and some 20000€ in student debt, so this is not a feasible option for many), small fees from teaching or performing, but mostly from unemployment fees from the nation state “Finland”. I do artistic work almost every day, but it is generally not compensated. In the eyes of bureaucracy i’m unemployed. Different types of work are considered unequally in all stages of capitalism. Work coded “feminine” is worth less than “masculine” work. Ugh that’s a whole issue. House work and regenerative work mostly goes uncompensated. So does art work.

Usually the more a type of work makes sense, the less it’s compensated. This is called alienation.

We are consumers and we consume, we are a new class of consumers maybe. The left on the internet say the only ethical consumption under capitalism is eating nazis and cops. They appear to be right, but how are we supposed to live when there are quite many objections to upholding a lifestyle of cannibalistic class enemy diets and leading a somewhat satisfying life outside of prison?

For a younger me, this has been an issue of a lot of anxiety. It has appeared that the options are to conform or live in a dirt hole eating tree roots. Revolt, resist and something, has been said too. I tried that and got really depressed and anxious and burned out. It’s a lot of stress to try to take responsibility of changing everything.

I don’t know how to live in late stage capitalism. It’s like a game you have to play your whole life and you never consented to start it. You have to fill endless expectations you have no control over. You need to obtain money one way or another.

When in doubt, solidarity for the working classes and people working for liberation go a long way. Stay with the trouble is Donna Haraway’s newest slogan. When we live under capitalism, we take part in it, but we can sabotage it here and there. Culture is at the root of human organisation, so cultural work has ramifications for the future. Taking part in what we can without hurting ourselves. We didn’t choose to live in this situation, but we can choose some parts of what we do with it.