Being a Class Traitor Gives My Life Meaning

I’m in my Friedrich Engels era. Hit me up, radical Marxist sugar babies!

Author

Clara Lim
March 20, 2025 • Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of my newsletter readers said: “I’m surprised you got a job.” Haha! How lovely to be typecast as perpetually unemployed.

In the last 4 years I explored alternatives to white-collar employment; I investigated freeganism, working in “unskilled” labour, running a home business, and doing a “mixed-collar” combination of freelance work. Looking back, the main benefit of this extended fooling around is that I am now fairly sure I can survive without a real job. Excellent! I can’t be held hostage by employment.

After the Marxist catharsis of my previous post, I am now very pleased about my new job. I am enjoying WFH PMET privilege like never before: my schedule is almost entirely self-determined, yet I get paid a regular salary.

The money is what excites me the most. Since I’ve been fucking frugal for 10 years, a big chunk of my income is completely superfluous. With this money I can do a lot of things I couldn’t do earlier. I’m not talking about the obvious stuff, like upgrading from hostels to hotels (although I love it haha). More thrilling is the fact that I now have a few grand every month to spend on - as I lamely described to Sudhir from Jom - “things that make Singapore more interesting”.

Basically, I’m in my Friedrich Engels class traitor era. Hit me up, radical Marxist sugar babies!

Truth be told, this ~angel investor~ shit grossed me out for a second, until I read about Saul Alinsky’s Proxies for People. Alinsky’s tactic, which today is known as shareholder activism, involves buying company shares and using shareholder rights to exert pressure on corporations. Alinsky first used it in 1967 to pressure Kodak to hire unemployed black people, and then again in 1970 under Chicago’s Citizens Action Program to address corporate pollution.

What’s interesting was that shareholder activism wasn’t only about getting companies to behave. It was also a way for the middle class to participate in civil society. Alinsky believed that the middle-class needed organising as much as the poor. Despite having more resources, an unorganised middle class is just as disenfranchised, powerless, and in need of the life-changing satisfaction of becoming part of a community. (“Holy shit, I matter?”)

My fascination with physical spaces continues. Following Casual Poet Library investigations, I checked out Azadghei (punk record store, neighbours with a jamming studio and gig venue), Sides (Singapore’s only kinky bar/playground, seems a wonderful place to bring straight dates as litmus test) and later I’ll be going to Wares (people’s library).

I think the key to running a physical space is to think of it as a limited time only experiment. "Limited time" because good things don't last: your rent will go up, your building sold en bloc, etc. And "experiment", rather than "business", because while trying to make money from a physical space is a lost cause, using it to test-drive community organising ideas is most definitely not.

I feel energised when I meet people who do things in the fringe, especially things that aren't economically rational. Beginning to get a sense of what middle-class resistance looks like. Playful subversion?

Before I go rest my eyes, I want to dump 2 semi-related bits here:

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, introduced to me by an academic practising her own covert resistance from within. Here are 2 quotes from The University and the Undercommons:

In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

The other is about cult favourite Simone Weil, who interests me but I haven’t read her work. From the Wikipedia page:

Weil participated in the French general strike of 1933, called to protest against unemployment and wage cuts. The following year, she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a labourer in two factories, one owned by Alstom and one by Renault, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class.

In 1935, she began teaching in Bourges and started Entre Nous, a journal that was produced and written by factory workers. Weil donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavours.

And then there’s this whole Simone Weil & Marx thing which demands further investigation!

“Marx’s truly great idea,” she wrote, was “that in human society as well as in nature nothing takes place otherwise than through material transformations.” It followed that to effectively meet our fundamental obligation required we uncover “the material conditions which determine our possibilities of action… conditions… defined by the way in which man obeys material necessities in supplying his own needs, in other words, by the method of production.”