“To protect my position, my corner, my lair,
while we out here, say the hustler’s prayer.
If the game shakes me or break me
I hope it makes me a better man,
take a better stand.
Put money in my mom’s hand,
get my daughter this college plan
so she don’t need no man.
Stay far from timid.
Only make movies when ya heart’s in it,
and live the phrase ‘sky’s the limit.’”
- Christopher George Latore Wallace (1997) [1]
In our constantly reinterpreted and adapted anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-Statist critique of the modern world, we the so-called “radical Left,” scorn bankers, romanticize poverty, and vandalize the machines that convert our hourly labors into paper bills. We have a de facto antagonism toward those who earn above the average, and with good cause, as much of this is due directly to the hierarchy of the boss-worker relationship. We hate “the rich” and the “one percent.”
Though this essay does not seek to apologize for the management and owning class, it does attempt to pose a more challenging question about our relationship to work and survival: What about those of us who make our way through capitalism by exploiting not our neighbors or coworkers, but the outside margins of ‘less than fully regulated’ economies? What about those who seek to work less, yet earn more because they choose to operate in a sphere of employment that exists in between legal and illegal, regulated and unregulated, socially accepted and stigmatized?
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