Soon after what I call my “radicalization,” in which I began to see capitalist operation at work, I was faced with a seemingly neverending existential dilemna. It felt like everything I have worked for 20 years was useless in the face of markets, the elite 1%, and capitalism as a whole. By dedicating endless, tiring hours to getting A’s, I was reinforcing the system that trapped me.
Every day felt like I was making a decision: do I choose to appeal to my own happiness or appeal to the happiness of the market and the “man:? It may sound like a miniscule problem, but even as I reflect on it now and write about it, it absorbs me. I am nowhere close to solving this dilemma, and I have realized that it is not just a problem I face; it is generational, and I can see my peers suffering around me, too.
This dichotomy is what I have begun to call the “politics of success.” It is the constant dialogue occurring in the minds of young adults trapped in a capitalist society. It is the never-ending decision making, split between valuing oneself and valuing our investment in the state. Even when we no longer want to value the system, it is hard to function from outside it.
Even when deciding whether we want to attend college or not, we are engaging with the “politics of success.” We are told we have two choices: to pursue higher education, have thousands of dollars of loans to pay for the rest of our lives, and thrive in a corporate setting, or work at McDonalds and live in our parents basements. Not only does this shame people who may want to live their lives doing the latter, or those do not have the financial or physical ability to fit into the “traditional” narrative of success, it reduces the value of education and knowledge. If we are all obtaining our Bachelor’s Degree, does that not mean that we all have paid thousands of dollars to be virtually the same workers? Clearly, the value of our labor means more to the knowledge economy than our own desire to learn and succeed.
To gain the knowledge necessary to fight the system, we must have productive conversations to learn new tactics to fight. We must replace the master’s tools in our toolboxes with our own radical strategies. We must learn to combat capitalist definitions of success.
