On Capitalism-ing as an Anti-capitalist

This week’s post is a little different.

Usually these posts are designed to offer helpful author tips or provide a way to think through common scholarly writing issues. As I’m sure is clear, I do this both because they could be useful for you and also because they are useful for me, raising business visibility. Sometimes that feels a little gross to me, but then I remember, how can people find you if they don’t know you exist? And if they don’t find you, then how can you work with them?

I can just about get behind those questions, but they also speak to a much more fundamental issue, one that is usually submerged but constantly at play: working with you on your professional needs also fills my professional needs. Or, to be even more explicit about it, as a person working independently in US American late-stage capitalism, my professional needs are fundamentally business needs.

To “succeed,” I’m often encouraged to think of myself not as a person providing services, part of a collective, mutual effort to create something new, exciting, and hopefully radically useful in this world, but as a business, a structure designed to make money. And honestly other than provide me with much-needed and -deserved security (which we all deserve, as a start), what’s the good in that?

How can I, the person, do work that is engaging and useful for others without being overly influenced by the pressure to create, market, and polish me, the corporation? Where are those lines, and how can I balance them, since, as the title outs me, I think capitalism is one of the main problems facing us all?

That tension is what this post is about. I don’t know that I have good answers, but here are some thoughts for this just-after tax day.

How do you navigate when your values and the practical imperatives of life don’t align?

For many of us in late capitalism, this is a very real and pressing concern, underlying our lives. And it’s definitely a main struggle for me.

I want to help people write material that they’re excited about and that hopefully can do active good in this world, for them and for others. And I’d like to eat, maybe even go to a fancy dinner sometimes. (I also have a thing for shoes, because, pretty and functional!)

But in order to do that, so much else has to happen, responding to the working pressures of capitalism. Call it “businessing” or, as my friend Laura does, “capitalism-ing,” it’s a contradiction that I find increasingly untenable.

As I enjoy pretty things, sometimes it can be alleviated by the pleasure of design. Lately, that has meant new business cards that match my new upgraded website and that feature my own floral photography and the joy that beautiful colors, crisp lines, and flowers can bring.

For these cards, it was also important to me to prioritize direct, simple language that says exactly what I need and nothing else, but in a way that (I hope) is still inviting and accessible. I’m not always going to get it right, and perhaps these cards don’t strike that balance for others, but that is my hope. As is my enjoyment in them, as physical objects and objects of communication and form.

Taking moments of joy in the less problematic trappings of businessing seems to me an important act, as they have to be done anyway. (I’m also aware that this section’s answer to how to capitalism without being pro-capitalism seems to be to buy something, but like, I said, it’s complicated.) However — and here’s the ickiness at the heart of my post’s title — I can only be excited about business cards for so long until it’s time to start thinking about why I need them.

The first, to reach out to people and give them something tangible to remember me and my services by, is part of forming a community, a network of people whose different skills, values, interests, and capabilities can influence and help each other when needed. And that, I am heartily behind.

In addition to the financial incentive, forming robust communities — intellectual, professional, personal — can only help us.

In this way, as an independent editor, I’m really lucky. The editing community, as far as I have experienced it, is welcoming, helpful, and interested in building each other up. It operates from a position of collaboration, mentorship, and referral, sending each other resources and potential clients. And turning to each other for advice and help with the very practical issues of being a business as well as a professional. As collaborators rather than competitors.

But that’s where the second function of business cards comes in: to make the person stand out amid a sea of other people performing the same services, competing for clients, based in a scarcity mindset fundamental to our current moment. It’s hard at times to resist the lure of comparison and this sense of success or failure, to not feel worried if someone else has more clients than me, or books coming out, or is even just having a more exciting week.

Practically, sure, there is probably a finite set of potential clients at any time and absolutely a finite (and dwindling) amount of institutional resources to help scholars afford the very real professional help that academic editors can give them, just as for scholars, there’s a distinct limit to the amount of jobs, good and bad, and a tight window in which to make your way to one, or so it seems. And put that on top of the other stressors of life (child and elder care, student and personal debt, skyrocketing housing and food prices, the desire for some fun sometimes, etc.), it can be hard to remember that the people we are being tempted to think of as competitors are actually our community.

And communities are our strength, how we keep us safe and make revolutions — and books — possible. Less radically, they’re also how we learn and develop our ideas, in conversations with colleagues, students, and other interested people. It is through these exchanges that we bring to the surface those ideas and manuscripts that someone like me is here to help with. At least that’s what I hope, more and more every day.

The coercions of capitalism — structural and personal — are part of your writing, teaching, and scholarly process and not an “excuse” you should be afraid of using for “failing” your targets.

Amid all this, here is how I hope to help: I want you to write what you want, in the way you want, to get the results you want and need (and also then pay me in a way that works for me, since I don’t live or work outside capitalism either). And I can’t imagine helping you do that in a humane way without opening and keeping space for the whole person — including these pressures that we try to shrug off as irritants that we’re not strong or focused enough to work through unimpeded. .

When my authors talk to me in coaching sessions or revisions meetings, they tend to downplay the very real structural and personal coercions that push on their lives from all sides and shrug them off as excuses for why they haven’t fulfilled their writing goals, haven’t measured up to another metric or project management check in. Or maybe they send me an academic meme about the illusion of free time with a shamed apology underneath. I get it, I really do, but there’s no need for this. (Although the memes are really funny and I’m always up for more!)

We are all differentially subject to specific pressures that capitalism inflicts (or else this post wouldn’t have to be written at all). And it is common to minimize or sublimate them, personal and societal. Even with my closest friends, I tend to downplay them, shrug them off, because they’re such an ongoing fabric of life. They’re yet another set of things that we’re told to absorb and just live with, the rising tidewater mark of an increasingly untenable set of requirements professionally and personally — different for each of us and impacting each person differently, but all there, all valid, all coercions. They’re very real, if mostly held silently, and I will always have your back in relation to them, in whatever way is appropriate and desired.

If I’m going to have to capitalism as a business, then I want to be doing work I can believe in, with people I believe in.

I suppose that’s the simplest answer I can work from. When you get down to it, editing is a relationship of trust, one that works best when the author and editor experience the elusive sense of “fit.” For me, a significant element of fit is shared or complementary ethos, at its most basic.

I don’t need you, future clients and/or friends, to have the same politics as me (and many days, I’m not even sure what exactly mine are myself). It’s not that reductive or exclusionary. But I will not work on material that I consider potentially harmful or that is advocating for ways of being, thinking, or acting that run contrary to my basic principles. And I want to help you do work that is consonant with yours — even, at its best, celebratory of them.

Finally, I will be transparent about who I am, how we work together, what is happening as we do it, and what I do and do not understand about your ideas, the pressures you are working with, and your needs and hopes. Because again (and slightly differently), if you don’t tell people who you are, how can they know if you’re someone they can trust and work with?

Do I think we should reform the system, including the neoliberal university’s structural callousness and exploitation of workers, overextension of scholarly duties and administrative requirements, lack of remunerative and fair jobs, pressures in the general publishing structure that can make people (authors, editors, publishers) scramble through the whole process, the precarity of people like me who fill in these gaps without institutional or social safety nets, unless we can turn ourselves from scholars, editors, and coaches also into business mavens, the much-vaunted American small-business owner (or, in a term I absolutely hate, “solopreneur”), supposed to self-start and innovate out of the neglect, destruction, and coercions of late capitalism, especially the US American version?

(These are, of course, only a few issues at play.)

Sure, let’s work on reforms if they can in any way help mediate the unlivability of all this, as we figure out ways to dismantle it and rebuild something more humane, on the small and huge scales.

I'll prioritize you, the person, over capitalist pressures, because capitalism is the worst.

I don’t think this should be a radical position, but it seems to be at this point: I want you and me and people I’m not mentioning or can’t even imagine to have better lives. In fact, let’s get really dreamy and say, good lives.

To live as people, not products. To not be trapped by white supremacy, unequal access to life-sustaining elements that we’ve decided to call “resources,” statist and extra-statist border limitations, denigration of their very existence because of who they are or seem to be to someone else. To be seen and understood and heard, and to get to refuse, reject, create, and correct. To not be killed for daring to exist. To flourish.

I’ll keep trying to make this happen, however it makes sense for me as a person to do so.

As an independent editor, the best way I can figure out to do this, so far, is to center the people and the creativity at the heart of the services I’m offering and the intellectual, political, and personal worlds they add to (hopefully).

From a business perspective — to keep my rates sensible and practices clear, fair to both of us as people and laborers, given what capitalism takes of us.

As a collaborator, to hear your coercions and hopes and desires, and, to the best of my ability, understand and foreground them, while still keeping you on track in your writing goals, however that might be. To admit when I am wrong freely and without rancor, and to make better things and help more with that new knowledge.

If you want, you’ll even get a book or two out of it. Probably with a pretty cover, although that’s totally out of my hands. Life is a collective endeavor, after all.