Late Stage Capitalism

I really should start an anti-Entrepreneur channel. Listen folks, even if you make every single piece of art yourself, your tee shirt company? You aint selling without significant capital upfront. Can you drop 30k on an IG ad? I sure as fuck can't that's what I make in a fuckin' year. That nets you a single ad with 100k likes on IG, keep in mind likes =/= sales. Can you write compelling blog posts? Can you establish a personal brand? Do you not realize how soulless it is to have a "personal brand", to commodify yourself?

You know how much I make from my site a month? Less than $200 a month, and that's with a blog, a website, branding, a discord, networking with other artists, leveraging influencer friends, etc. I once donated 100% of my profits to my friend's trans healthcare fund, a whopping $150 dollars!!

This is peak neoliberalism though, extreme atomization, individualism, the idea that anyone can "be a business owner". It's bootstraps to an extreme. I often tell people if we didn't live in a capitalist hellscape I wouldn't be selling my art on tee shirts, I'd be content with just making the art. My goal has always been to link up with other artists to create cool art, and artists are getting fucked raw right now. 1099? Nah, here's a an upfront check cut to you for a single commission at a time. How the fuck do you even organize that? For all the failures of the situationalists, we are long gone from the days of collective art movements, it's every motherfucker and his dog for himself.

The entire thing creates a contradiction internally for me. I want to make art, I want to make art people can enjoy, I spend hours and hours learning my craft, and for what? To peddle tee-shirts while the world burns? It's fucking wack dude. Maybe it's the booze tonight but man, this one hit home. I have had this internal debate so many times, does it make me less of a Marxist to sell tee-shirts? Am I going against my own principles as I attempt to make my name know as an artist? Even if I attempt to carry a revolutionary spirit within my art, do these actions not negate that? Can one truly detourn a super structure as deeply capitalist as a "brand". I do not know, but I know that rent is always due, always increasing and things are ever bleaker.