On the day after the election, when we still weren’t sure what the outcome would be, I was having a casual text message conversation with a friend about Marxism and the refusal of work. (Like I said, casual.)
“Are you becoming anti-capitalist?” she asked. “Because I think I am, but I’m not sure how to reconcile that.” Like me, she owns her own business.
To which I replied, “I am anti-capitalist, but I also acknowledge that I live in a capitalist system.”
If you’ve been around here for a while, you might find it weird to hear me describe myself as anti-capitalist. After all, I’ve spent over a decade trying to convince artists and makers of the importance of profit. I literally teach artists and makers how to make money and grow their businesses. I’ve been championing artists and makers embracing a business mindset since before I even started this website.
So hearing me describe myself as anti-capitalist might seem a bit confusing. Unless you are a member of Artists and Profit Makers, that is, where I frequently question capitalist mindsets around work and worth that come up in the forums. But even then, the name of the group literally has the word profit in it.
But here’s the catch. When it comes to being anti-capitalist, it’s not profit that I’m opposed to, per se. It’s exploitation.
Because the story of capitalism is a story of exploitation, from labor to resources, from slavery (the ultimate exploitation of labor) to environmental destruction. The story of capitalism is also one of racism and patriarchy, encompassing everything from slave labor to underpaid labor to unpaid care labor, all of which fall disproportionately on the shoulders of people of color and women.
When I say I am anti-capitalist, these are the things I oppose.
When I encourage artists and makers to embrace profit, I’m not being hypocritical. Instead, I’m keeping an eye out for the ways capitalism actually encourages us to exploit our own labor at any given moment. Because as I mentioned in my last post, we (artists and makers) can’t solve the problems of capitalism by exploiting our own labor. And capitalism is so sneaky when it comes to exploiting our labor and making us feel good about it, in so many ways, but mostly by making our sense of self-worth tie deeply into the idea of the Protestant work ethic.
By encouraging artists and makers to embrace profit, I’m actually being radical and revolutionary. I’m asking artists and makers to create some margin for themselves in their pricing, something that can help lift us out of the edge of precarity, a condition into which capitalism has pushed many, and in which artists so often find themselves.
I’m also, through my profit-focused pricing strategy, encouraging artists and makers to price in a way that enables them to not have to work ALL THE TIME. In doing so, I’m drawing on a tradition of work refusal, which demands less work for more money.
This is different from the ways that capitalism strives for more work out of less money, which it does by exploiting people and resources, and by privileging technology at the expense of humanity. When I tell artists and makers to price their work higher, I do so as an alternative to trying to grow your business by exploiting the labor of others. Which doesn’t mean never hiring anyone, it simply means not hiring anyone (whether that person is an employee or a contractor) at too low or exploitive wages.
But mostly, I teach a profit-focused pricing strategy to keep artists and makers from trying to grow our businesses by exploiting ourselves.
Perhaps you’ve seen the graphic from Adam J. Kurtz that goes something like “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life you’ll work really fucking hard all the time without any separation or boundaries…” It seems to float around Instagram every so often, with lots of creatives vigorously nodding in agreement.
But I refuse to accept that one. I refuse to believe that the only way to build a business as a creative is to subject ourselves to the same exploitive practices that capitalism uses on us.
Of course, this does bring some challenges for artists and makers. As I mentioned in my last post, paying ourselves more inevitably means charging higher prices, which can feel like we are just part of a greedy, capitalist system. But that’s only because capitalism has trained us to believe that things should be cheap, which is reinforced by capitalism’s exploitation of labor and resources.
Charging more for your work doesn’t make you a greedy capitalist, it makes you someone who is actively resisting capitalism’s foundation of labor exploitation.
Still, as someone who teaches business, you might feel like there are some contradictions in my work when I claim to be anti-capitalist.
Take Instagram as an example.
My relationship with Instagram could best be described as love-hate-hate-begrudgingly come to terms with sometimes using it.
When I first learned about Instagram, back in its early days, I was thrilled. “Finally,” I thought. “Here’s a truly visual social media platform that artists and makers can get behind.” And some days, when I’m making connections and interacting with my peers and customers, I still love Instagram.
But mostly, I hate it. I hate all the changes that have happened since it was purchased by Facebook. I hate the way it makes me feel when I get sucked in to endless scrolling. I hate the way it seems to have sucked all the air out of the room when it comes to other marketing strategies.
And I particularly hate the way it, like many other social media platforms, is built on the unpaid labor of the creatives who use it. I hate that Zuckerberg gets rich while we don’t.
Still, as someone who has built a decent following on the platform, I begrudgingly still use it to connect with people who are interested in my work. And I still teach other artists and makers to use the platform as part of their marketing strategy, though I am very adamant that it can’t be the entirety of that marketing strategy.
I can see how my use of the platform and teaching people to use the platform while also being incredibly critical of the platform may seem like massive contradictions at best, and at worst, they represent the kind of behavior that some might label as hypocritical or even selling out.
But I have come to realize that these contradictions are not so much contradictions as they are a product of the ways my beliefs intersect with my own lived experience and the realities of the artists and makers I work with. Because at the end of the day, we all live and work within a capitalist system.
And what I’ve come to realize is that I can teach artists and makers how to “succeed” within current systems while also being critical of those systems.
I call this Critical Pragmatism, and it’s the idea that you can have values and beliefs that critique our current systems, while at the same time acknowledging that you have to live and work within that them.
As I said to my friend, “I am anti-capitalist, but I also acknowledge that I live in a capitalist system.”
It’s taken me a while to come to terms with this Critical Pragmatism, as it can so often look like a contradiction. But in order to do my best work, which is helping artists and makers make more money so that they can bring more art into the world, I need to stop worrying about these contradictions, and instead acknowledge and accept them.
This means that sometimes I’ll share strategies for how to use Instagram as a marketing tool, and sometimes I’ll be inherently critical of the exploitive practices of Instagram as a platform.
I’ll talk about the importance of profit to making art or share personal finance strategies for artists and makers, while also acknowledging that capitalism is a deeply flawed system that should probably be rethought from the ground up.
I can be critical of our culture of burnout, overwork, and productivism (the idea that we are only worthy when we are producing), while also sharing the mindsets I use to be more productive. Because ultimately, I aim to be more productive so that I can have more time to be utterly unproductive, to cultivate a life outside of work. And because being more productive when it comes to making money gives artists and makers the space to make work that might not have as much commercial valuable or be more difficult to sell, but that ultimately makes the world a richer place.
And this idea of Critical Pragmatism is something that all socially conscious and ethically minded artists can embrace.
As a culture, we have come to think that everything is black and white. All or nothing. In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I spoke with artists who doubted whether their work was of any value. One felt guilty for working in her studio and wondered whether her time would be better spent at the protests in Seattle. But the problem was she was approaching this from an either or situation.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can be engaged in art and social justice. You can take a week or two off from your work to go join protests, without feeling like you need to quit making your work entirely. You can give yourself permission to not work all the time. But of course, you can’t do that if your prices are so low that a week or two off from your business will literally drain all your cash reserves.
This is where Critical Pragmatism comes in. You can structure your business to support you and your art in a way that gives you time and space for resistance. You can charge more so that you can work less, giving yourself more time to read thoroughly researched ideas, rather than just skimming clickbait on Facebook. You can set yourself up so that the sales of your art support you and your family, because you understand that, for all its flaws, all of us still have to make our living in a capitalist system.
In her book Having and Being Had, Eula Biss writes about the contradictions of being a writer and making art in a capitalist system. She ponders prestigious grants she has received funded by institutions whose money came from some of capitalism’s more seedy practices. She struggles to carve out time to write, as an academic and mother, who must work and pay bills. And ultimately, she decides to buy herself time to write by accepting an advance for what would ultimately become that book, in order to buy back some of her teaching time to focus on writing.
Ultimately, Having and Being Had becomes an excellent example of Critical Pragmatism in action. A book that isn’t afraid to challenge the tenants of capitalism while also acknowledging the ways that the capitalist system aided in its production.
And as artists and makers, I think that’s a model we can all embrace.
We can challenge capitalism while acknowledging that we live in a capitalist system. We can charge enough to pay our bills and give ourselves a margin, without feeling guilty about that. We can be hyper-vigilant for the ways that capitalism infiltrates our psyche and causes us to exploit our own labor, whether that’s undercharging, overworking, or not giving ourselves permission to rest.
We tend to think of resistance as all or nothing. But with a system as pervasive as capitalism, full out resistance borders on the impossible. Critical Pragmatism gives us a way forward, one that lets us question and confront, while still meeting our needs as artists, makers, and humans who have to live and work in a capitalist world.