I’ve been having discussions around adjacent topics with my (much more lefty, less priviledged) partner. Some thoughts, on the callous end:
Answer #1: Work with the system. Find some way for poorer and richer people to both gain from working together. This probably looks like commerce, like trade that both parties benefit from, and like indoctrinating/helping the members of your network acquire the skills and stances to be more “productive members of society”.
Offer richer people something they value in return. Richer people are likely to have less time for stuff; is there some way you can exchange the time of poorer people in exchange for something richer people want? In the normal neoliberal system, you have [personal assistants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant); would people in your network be happy to have that kind of job?
Offer both rich and poor people a way to engage in mutual exchange in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative or demeaning to poorer people, nor potentially risky for richer people. Risk for richer people might be: agreeing to a trade but then the other party being flaky, things becoming too personal, them being judged for not doing enough, etc.
Can you structure an exchange between poorer people and richer people as exchanging mentoring for loyalty? Poorer people get skills and a patron, richer people would get someone they can trust.
Some rich people are also neurodivergent, and have poor social skills. It’s possible that you have people in your network that could help with poor social skills.
For richer people, the neoliberal system is already working in their favour, so for many things they can hire someone to help them out. You could do the hard work of making a mutual aid society be *better* than the neoliberal alternative. For example, maybe a richer person could trade with the mutual aid society a whole, instead of with any one particular person? Maybe the mutual aid society as a whole can take jobs on platforms like Upwork, or Fiverr?
For programming bootcamps, sometimes you have the structure that the bootcamps are free, but that they get some fraction of participants’s salary after they get a job. Is that structure something you could consider?
Answer #2 would be something like subvert the system, ignore the system, abandon the system, think in terms other than trade. I don’t currently have any specific, actionable ideas of how this could look, and in the meantime, you might want to give a thought to ideas from Answer #1.
I’ve been having discussions around adjacent topics with my (much more lefty, less priviledged) partner. Some thoughts, on the callous end:
Answer #1: Work with the system. Find some way for poorer and richer people to both gain from working together. This probably looks like commerce, like trade that both parties benefit from, and like indoctrinating/helping the members of your network acquire the skills and stances to be more “productive members of society”.
Offer richer people something they value in return. Richer people are likely to have less time for stuff; is there some way you can exchange the time of poorer people in exchange for something richer people want? In the normal neoliberal system, you have [personal assistants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant); would people in your network be happy to have that kind of job?
Offer both rich and poor people a way to engage in mutual exchange in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative or demeaning to poorer people, nor potentially risky for richer people. Risk for richer people might be: agreeing to a trade but then the other party being flaky, things becoming too personal, them being judged for not doing enough, etc.
Can you structure an exchange between poorer people and richer people as exchanging mentoring for loyalty? Poorer people get skills and a patron, richer people would get someone they can trust.
Some rich people are also neurodivergent, and have poor social skills. It’s possible that you have people in your network that could help with poor social skills.
For richer people, the neoliberal system is already working in their favour, so for many things they can hire someone to help them out. You could do the hard work of making a mutual aid society be *better* than the neoliberal alternative. For example, maybe a richer person could trade with the mutual aid society a whole, instead of with any one particular person? Maybe the mutual aid society as a whole can take jobs on platforms like Upwork, or Fiverr?
For programming bootcamps, sometimes you have the structure that the bootcamps are free, but that they get some fraction of participants’s salary after they get a job. Is that structure something you could consider?
Answer #2 would be something like subvert the system, ignore the system, abandon the system, think in terms other than trade. I don’t currently have any specific, actionable ideas of how this could look, and in the meantime, you might want to give a thought to ideas from Answer #1.
Best of luck.