Yasmine Modaresi (she/her) // Crew Writer
Cameron Skorulski (he/him) // Illustrator
So, you’re a sheltered rich kid, and you’ve realized that the Gen Z population is really left-wing. You hear students debating the best ways to enact Gramsci’s war of position in the lunch hall, and while you disagree, you also don’t want to exude the air of a bourgeoise snob. Maybe, you desire to take your deceptions even further and interject yourself into far-left campus discourse. It’s all possible if you brand yourself properly.
The good news for you is that most people who are theoretically left-leaning are complacently testing the waters before they actually start partaking in political activism. So, branding yourself as a baby commie might be one of the most effective ways to tell the campus “I’ve read Marx… I didn’t understand too much but I’m here for it.”
Once you’ve mastered the art of not out right giving yourself away, move on to performative activism and style curation:
- Master the aesthetic: real socialists do their best not to support big corporations, opting to shop at small local businesses or secondhand stores. As someone with rich parents (or, a “comfortable” home life, as y’all like to say), shopping for actual secondhand clothing might seem a bit too revolutionist for your liking. In this case, try to find designer brands that scream ‘distressed’, ‘punk’ and ‘revolutionary’—think Che Guevara t-shirts, which tend to cost more than the average blue-collar worker’s weekly wage.
- Curate your social media: Be unapologetically left-wing on your social media. Since you’re only a fake leftist, you don’t have to make real calls for community organization in support of workers’ rights or have any links to policy reformations on your accounts. As a rich kid, you should have time to become ridiculously well-read, which means random left-wing quotes strategically spread throughout your posts, and maybe a picture of you wearing a shirt with Karl Marx on it. Be idealistic, vague and diverse in the quotes you include.
- Engage in performative activism: Repost the work of real activists. Show up to protests and have a friend take candid pictures of you hanging out there. Do you need to actually be organizing? No.
- Finally, and probably most importantly, learn to manipulate. At some point down this road of performance, gonna pick up on your act and call you out. This is where being manipulative and cunning comes in. Did you get called out about all the expensive clothing you wear? Well, guess what, that’s your personal property. Since it isn’t private and you’re not profiting off of it, there’s nothing unethical about owning it—in fact, it’s expensive because it wasn’t made by child labourers! Did someone call you out for not volunteering with underprivileged communities? You’re wielding your privilege to create your own non-profit organization.
If you follow all of these steps and improvise along the way, you’ll probably get away with branding yourself as a socialist without ever actually putting your money where your mouth is and helping your community.