🗣️Ok so Luke Savage’s recent Jacobin article "Art for the 99%" put into words something many of us creatives already feel but don’t always name: capitalism makes it brutally hard for working-class and poor people to pursue the arts!! A study by Professor Karol Jan Borowiecki at the University of Southern Denmark confirms this with actual data: examining U.S. census records going back to 1850, Borowiecki found that every $10,000 in family income makes you 2% more likely to pursue a creative career. Translation: someone born into a $1M household is ten times more likely to become an artist than someone from a $100K family. That tracks with my own life. Growing up, my family never made more than $100K. My mom, the breadwinner, only hit six figures right before retirement. Still, I believed that if I worked hard enough—mastered my craft, became the best artist I could—that doors would fly open. And yet, people with wealth moved ten steps ahead, not because they were necessarily more talented, but because they had leisure time and startup capital to take creative risks, work on cool projects, meet the right people and get their work out to the masses. Of course, even artists from wealrh can still end up broke—because creative labor is undervalued. But naming this reality matters. It helps us stop blaming ourselves for structural barriers, and it points us toward collective solutions. Artists need to stop carrying this burden alone and start fighting together for a different economic system. Capitalism, at its core, runs counter to what it means to be curious, to expand our consciousness outside of profit motives, to make art to liberate and to create with abandon #artistsonwhistlr #Anticapitalist #affirmations