Ep. 11 Are We the Problem?

IN THIS EPISODE

"The institution isn't failing in spite of us. It's failing because we keep it going the way it is."

In this deeply personal and reflective solo episode, Aparna and Lars hold up a mirror to the white-collar workforce. Diving into the works of sociologist Musa al-Gharbi (We Have Never Been Woke) and cultural theorist Catherine Liu (Virtue Hoarders), they break down two uncomfortable frameworks: Symbolic Capitalism and the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).

If you deal in symbols, ideas, and knowledge from the neck up, you are likely part of this class. But here lies the contradiction: while white-collar progressives fiercely perform moral goodness, they are often deeply allergic to the structural economic changes that would actually cost them their material safety. From language policing to the commodification of trauma culture, Aparna and Lars unpack the distractions we use to avoid real class solidarity.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH

What are you avoiding, and who are you protecting with that avoidance?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

Track Your Discomfort: Notice when you over-index on righteousness or jargon. Ask yourself: is your reaction serving a collective movement, or just your own moral ego?

Build Consciousness, Not Just Literacy: Move past performative "diversity literacy" and build deep race and class consciousness by understanding how systemic policies actively protect wealth hoarding.

Start Outside If You Can't Inside: If labor organizing doesn't feel feasible at your desk job yet, plug into local mutual aid networks where real resource redistribution is happening.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi

Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the PMC by Catherine Liu

Jason Hickel's research on economic democracy and degrowth

Get on the Job and Organize by Jaz Brisack

CONNECT WITH US

Visit us at https://www.circleback.club/

Aparna on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnarae; aparnarae.com

Lars on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien; https://www.larsgallien.com/

Full Transcript

Aparna: Someone read a piece I wrote recently and shared this in response, and the piece was on progressive philanthropy. He hits the nail exactly on the head. Verbatim: "Please, please, I beg of you, don't reach for the easy exit by qualifying it. 'She's only talking about American nonprofits,' or 'It's only about emergency response,' or 'It's about traditional giving.' Don't find a reason this doesn't apply to you. Sit with what she's saying. The institution isn't failing in spite of us. It's failing because we keep it going the way it is."

Lars: "Don't find a reason this doesn't apply to you." That note is basically this whole episode.

Aparna: That note is basically this whole episode.

Lars: Welcome back to the Circle Back Club. I'm Lars Gallien.

Aparna: And I'm Aparna Rae, and today it is just us.

Lars: It's just us, no guests, nowhere to hide. Although I hope you know from this podcast we are not trying to hide at all. Today's episode is structured around two core concepts that we will be defining as we spend our time together. The first is symbolic capitalism, which is coined by a sociologist who we love named Musa al-Gharbi, whose work we've referenced throughout the season. We highly recommend reading his book, We Have Never Been Woke. The second term we're gonna focus on is the professional managerial class, or PMC for short, popularized by cultural theorist who we love, Catherine Liu, who is another person we just have learned so much from. If you're listening to this episode and you participate in white-collar work, you are probably a symbolic capitalist and part of the professional managerial class. Our intention today is to hold the mirror up and talk about what is real for us.

Aparna: Because the question for us today isn't just what is wrong with the system, it's what role each one of us is playing in keeping it exactly as it is.

Lars: Super chill. Super chill. So before we go anywhere, let's check in. Aparna, how are you sitting in this? This is a different episode for us in a couple different ways. How does it feel?

Aparna: Honestly, I would say a little exposed. We knew we were gonna record this episode all the way in December when we planned the arc of the first season, and I've been saving quotes everywhere. I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos until late at night. Every time I pull on a thread, I find myself in it. I'm in this framework, and I am a symbolic capitalist, and honestly, that's actually really uncomfortable for me to sit with.

Lars: I feel that so deeply. I'm really grateful for all the paradigm shifts that happen in my life where all of a sudden I'm seeing the world differently, and being introduced to symbolic capitalism is absolutely one of them. This feels like a confessional: I am a symbolic capitalist. It is true. I exist in the symbols of knowledge work and have 15 years inside of corporations. I know the language, the signaling, the importance of my network as my capital, and also the belief that we are good and that we are doing good, and how important that belief is to existing. The other side of it is moral credentialing. We are credentialing ourselves through this bubble of goodness that we're trying to create, which I think is really interesting because I've always been aware of it. I've always known moral credentialing. But there's a Russian doll effect with our position in this work, and that's something that is uncomfortable and important. So, here we are.

Aparna: I want folks to sit with the phrase "moral credentialing." We'll dig into that in a little bit, but I thought it would be important, Lars, that we define some terms first because these are not casual concepts. I wanna start with Musa al-Gharbi. He describes symbolic capitalists as people who work in fields like education, finance, consulting, media, tech, law, human resources—work that primarily deals in symbols, ideas, knowledge, narrative. Essentially, people with desk jobs. These are workers like us who gain their capital through the symbolism of prestige, credentials, social connections, to maintain their power and influence. What they know and who they know is the capital.

Given that symbolic reliance on access to capital, this is a class of workers who also tend to define themselves in terms of doing moral good, and people who should be trusted with this moral good. We are, right? You and I, and so many of our listeners, in al-Gharbi's framings, we're the Americans most likely to self-identify as feminists, anti-racists, environmentalists, and my least favorite word these days, progressives. We are not lying when we say those things; we generally mean them. I know you and I mean them, and so do many of our listeners.

Here's the cultural contradiction that he names so precisely, which is why I think you and I have both been obsessed with his writing: while we believe in all of those things, we also want to be very comfortable. A lot of us have dreamt of climbing the ladder, you and I have both climbed it, and having a great deal of material safety. I hear conversations in our social circles about making and saving your first million. We believe that our preferences and our expertise should count for more because of our performance of goodness.

Lars: Ooh. Let's take a breath. We're gonna be offering a lot of paradigm shifting, and maybe it's something you already know. We're gonna pause and just ask a simple question, so be with us. Try to be in your body and not your head, because you might say, "I'm not a symbolic capitalist. I'm not a capitalist." You may wanna have a pushback.

Question: How important is demonstrating your knowledge and network to gaining access to capital? For me, that's my entire life—knowledge and network, so check. How important is it for you? Second, how important is showing people that you are good to the success of your career? I can answer that too: extremely important, always has been. So be with that; be with those questions. Maybe I'm a symbolic capitalist. Cool, what does that mean? Why are we talking about this?

There are these two drives that we're existing in: the pursuit of goodness to rid inequality, the belief in equity, and preserving or having elite status, preserving our position and what we have. Those two things are fundamentally incompatible. When they come into conflict, we're asking which decisions do we actually make for ourselves and our networks? As Musa al-Gharbi puts it in a plain way, symbolic capitalists tend to pursue social justice actions that don't cost us anything, don't risk anything for us, and don't require us to change our lifestyles, our plans for our children, or for our families. What the push is, and what we're asking ourselves, is where is the moral positionality without the introspection or interest in real mutuality? Which would mean that we change, that we compromise, and that we share resources with each other. It's the Black Lives Matter sign in an affluent, majority-white neighborhood. What we're asking is: who is that symbol for, and how do you versus the community you claim actually benefit from it? What we are talking about is a particular type of avoidance if we're not asking who are we actually serving?

That's the question. Again, for us, as you're digesting that, when you are demonstrating your goodness, who is it directed to? Is it to the people in your same socioeconomic network, or is it to the people who maintain your access to capital, or is it outside of that? I can answer this question for myself: my goodness has been primarily directed to the people who I share a socioeconomic class with, period. Aparna?

Aparna: It's the truth. Same, right? It's who you're getting work from, who is gonna say your name in rooms. Who is not saying my name in any room is the grocery store person that I see every week. It's not the folks that come help us with yard maintenance and gardening. It's not those people; it's not for them.

This is where I think the work of Dr. and Professor Catherine Liu comes in. She writes about the professional managerial class. Honestly, when I read her book, which conveniently is sitting on my desk right now—I'll just hold it up for people that are watching this podcast, Virtue Hoarders. I got this book maybe three or four years ago, and I think it really broke my head. One of the things that she talks about is that the professional managerial class has abandoned the working classes, not out of malice, but out of vanity, out of this obsessive cultivation of self. She argues that the PMC has replaced real solidarity—which means you're willing to give something up for the collective good—with self-improvement, and has replaced collective politics with a sort of therapeutic self-actualization. I could talk all day long about the influencer culture, especially in the last 5 to 10 years around self-improvement, self-actualization, and self-leadership with zero grounding in the collective. It's just me, me, me all day long.

Lars: Right, and that makes sense. Think about it: who is the professional managerial class? They are the workers who don't own the means of production. We're all mad at the bad billionaires, the owners, that's a place where we can go. But we control the production process and the mainstream culture of capitalism. We sit between the owning and working class. That's a really important part of the PMC engine, and probably why "me, me, me" is really important because it feels pretty precarious. Just to bring in and geek a little bit on the somatics part of this, take a second: what does that feel like? My job is to be between billionaires who are profiting off of our labor and the working-class people who are experiencing the worst K-shaped economy there is. We sit in the middle of that.

What emotions do we have access to in this? What does that feel like in our bodies? What I see is we're angry at billionaires, that's clear. We're looking up and we say, "Tax the rich, at least the very rich. Maybe not us."

Aparna: No, definitely not us, right? Because we've talked about how in Washington we just passed a millionaire's tax, which only impacts about 20,000 people in the entire state. It's not actually the majority of the state, and the ultra-wealthy are not having it. If you're making a million dollars a year, you can pay a little bit more.

Lars: Please help. So we're looking up and we're angry. We have access to that emotion. What are our emotions around the working class? Because what I don't hear PMC peers yelling is, "Tax the corporation." I don't hear PMC peers yelling, "Raise the minimum wage." Of course, not all, there are people who care, I hear you. But I will tell you as an example, living in the Bay Area, the amount of Teslas I see with signs that say, "I bought this before I knew Elon Musk was bad." There are literally 5,000 versions of this sticker. An entire economy has been made based off of the moral credentialing that is really like, what are you saying? More than anything, we need to say to our community, "I know Elon is bad." Who does that serve besides yourself? There is this obvious protective energy to sit in this positionality without looking down or looking across. There is a holding.

Which is why the episode with Giulio Brunini was so important—and you all should listen to it—where he talks about why somatics and corporations are important to us maintaining our humanity. There is a reason why we've built an entire professional culture around the management of discomfort, the performance of emotional fluency that doesn't actually require you to feel anything, which is pretty isolating. That has a big impact on us and can be really frustrating for people who are constantly chasing being good, not making a mistake, or saying the right thing. I come from those people; those are my people, that's what we care about. As I'm saying it, I feel this tightness in my body, this stiffness, which is like, "LOL, of course we can't dance. You expect us to be able to dance?"

Aparna: That—I mean, I think that's maybe just because you're white.

Lars: Because of this, that's what I'm trying to say: bro, we're stiff. I think I have some decent moves despite my ancestral conditioning. But the point is obsessing over this specific PMC performance has a real impact on our health, our relationships, and our sense of self, which you can get from this entire season of the Circle Back Club. But yeah, that's the point. It makes sense, it feels weird, we're weird.

Aparna: We are a little bit weird. I think that what passes as emotional intelligence in corporate spaces—you've named it, Giulio named it very loudly in that episode, though not actually loudly because he's very soft-spoken—emotional intelligence is just a form of avoidance. It's the appearance of feeling without actually sitting with the discomfort.

Lars: Yeah. Aparna and I have been really impacted by a conversation with Catherine Liu—we'll include this in the show notes—and she's talking about this other layer around commodifying and profiting off of trauma culture within the professional managerial class. Anytime we say trauma, this can mean a lot of different things to people, and we really recommend listening to and reading her work directly. She's even writing a book about this right now. She talks about how we've fallen into this trap of credentialing ourselves through talking about trauma. Again, we're building on the same pattern of how are we serving ourselves? Yes, trauma happens and should be named. She's saying to be human is traumatic and uncomfortable, and there is a lot of discomfort in being a human. Because it's become a tool of access, we also conflate discomfort with trauma. People have become really fluent at speaking their own language of suffering, but have no capacity to be in a relationship with anyone whose suffering is different from theirs. We end up in the identity of the trauma itself, which she actually talks about alongside trauma culture and identity politics altogether, as it really is pushing us away from any form of discomfort. We're protecting the symbol above actual connection.

Aparna: She actually says in that video you sent me that people just don't have empathy. She's talking about the PMC, and she's talking about the ultra-wealthy. When she says it in the video, I actually had to stop and replay it because I was like, "What do you mean people don't have empathy?" But Lars, you've also said this in an earlier episode, for which we got quite a bit of flack on social media, where people were like, "What do you mean people don't have empathy?"

Lars: Yeah, and how can you practice empathy within this embodied context? Discomfort is deep in the body. PMCs are described as mental workers or knowledge workers; our capital is produced from the neck up—it's all head, baby. Real solidarity and empathy—

Aparna: I wanna switch gears a little bit. What is it that we are avoiding? For sure we're avoiding our actual feelings. Famously, I tell people I don't cry, and there's not a lot of crying that happens. One of my really dear friends is like, "It's just better to get it out." We are also avoiding the discomfort of our own complicity. We are avoiding the bodies we live in, which, if we sat in them for long enough, would tell us that something is wrong. A quick pause for our listeners: What are you avoiding, and who are you protecting with that avoidance?

Lars: Super ooh-wee. Okay, we're avoiding. As someone who has done a fair amount of avoiding in my life, we know that in order to sustain avoidance, we need some distractions, right? There is a reason why we stay here and don't ask ourselves these questions. Just to be clear, these are not bad-faith distractions.

Aparna: I love a good distraction. Let's start with distraction number one: trauma culture. We named it, but let's be a little bit more specific. When everything is trauma—when a difficult meeting is trauma, when an unwanted email is harm—we really lose the ability to distinguish between discomfort and structural violence. Who does that actually serve?It serves the people who benefit from having a workforce fluent in a kind of self-care, which you know I've said is just selfishness, and a workforce that is allergic to collective action.

Lars: Yeah, or we don't even know what collective action looks and feels like, and that's also the point of this episode: we have to be taught, we have to practice. The challenge for us—and definitely me, I am part of every single topic we're talking about today—is that we build the skills of tracking our responses to discomfort. When are we over-indexing on righteousness, and who is our reaction ultimately serving? If it comes back to serving yourself and not the collective, you may want to ask yourself, "Is this a distraction?"

Aparna: It's probably a distraction. The second of the three distractions is identity politics. Please don't come at me with pitchforks; I wanna be very careful here because it's important to distinguish between identity politics as a living political tradition and identity politics as it is deployed in corporate and even nonprofit spaces, which al-Gharbi talks about in his book. I know there is an example from his book that hit you really hard, and I wasn't even present to it until you brought it up.

Lars: It just keeps coming back to me, and it's a good example to contextualize this: when is there a displacement or a disconnect from what we're really trying to get after? Musa—

Aparna: Oh, we're on a first-name basis now? Okay.

Lars: I hope to be someday. Musa al-Gharbi talks about who actually participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Through the research that he's anchored in, what we saw is that the people most involved in that movement were not working-class people, who are the humans most impacted by this. Rather, it was people who sit closer to symbolic capitalists, those with access to the socioeconomic benefits of education and network. His critique was exemplifying the way language policing was a huge part of the organizing dynamic. For many of us who've been in organizing spaces, you know what this dance is—actively tracking as a large process who was using the correct terminology about a given identity as you're organizing. To hold that mirror up for us, he is saying that a working-class person walking into that space would feel incredibly alienated because language policing and this form of identity politics pulls us away from the class struggle. This way of engagement is not centering class struggle; it's centering how to be right and do things the right way.

Taking that example and bringing it to the central question he's asking us: are we talking about class or not? This is not saying that class and race are not intertwined; this is late-stage racialized capitalism, so obviously there is nuance here for us to talk about. The way for us to reframe and be clear is to ask: how is the politic being used? As white-collar workers, we need to be practiced at identifying when identity politics has been decoupled from the material reality of who has what and why. Again, coming back to whose interests are we actually serving? Unfortunately, in corporations, it can end up just serving profitability and individual gain, when we are fiercely and strategically trying to undo that. Our liberation cannot be sold, and as long as it is, the system will remain and only we will gain as those sitting in this middle space.

Aparna: No subscription services for collective liberation.

Lars: Fortunately not. We're grooving in these questions, and all of these, Aparna and I have to ask ourselves and answer. We are with you in this. We're talking about identity politics. The question for you is: what identity is most important to you? Obviously, there's no wrong answer. Second question: Is class analysis part of your understanding or care for this identity? Who are you leaving behind, and why?

Aparna: I have shared with you about some people I know in my community here in the Pacific Northwest who are wealthy—they've grown up wealthy—and they've come to America and really positioned themselves as a person of color and owning an identity of discrimination. They own an identity of being under-resourced when they have never once in their life been under-resourced. It feels so hollow to be in their presence, to read their writing, to see them in places and spaces talking about how hard it is to be a person of color in the United States without actually owning up to the fact that they have never once gone hungry. They've never had a house that's dirty because someone comes and cleans their home, you know? They've never really suffered, but they're so deeply steeped in that identity.

It brings me to my third distraction—and I want to be really careful because I know the pitchforks come out when I say this—picking favorites from minoritized groups to make capitalism and all of the evils that come from it palatable. Women certainly have been used for this. Right now, I see very prominent women like Mel Robbins and Reese Witherspoon hawking AI to other women, encouraging women to upload their bank statements or medical records into an LLM. No, thank you, that's a really bad idea. People of color, queer folks—I don't want the BeyHive to come for me, but there are a lot of people who think Beyoncé stands for collective liberation, and I'm just like, well, Beyoncé stands for Beyoncé and being a billionaire. She's not coming to save anybody.

Lars: I just found out that Sam Altman is gay.

Aparna: Your text message when you found that out—I laughed out loud.

Lars: It's not that Sam has used his identity to create any gain in positionality, and I didn't even know that he was. But wow, was that a surprise.

Aparna: So is Peter Thiel, and these people are building surveillance technology to surveil and harm queer and trans folks.

Lars: He met his future husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub. I wonder what that makes me feel. Blegh. Anyways—

Aparna: I'm sorry.

Lars: It's okay. I'm out of words.

Aparna: He is out of words. Where do we go from here? This is my peak symbolic capitalist moment: I learn new things, and then I have to show them off. I'm like, "I learned a new concept, I know a new framework, I read a report." You know this about me, it's really sad. Once you praised me for having incredible recall around random reports. You know what I would actually like to have really incredible recall around? Knitting, or things that I have to watch a YouTube video to do. Cooking certain things, gardening. I'm like, which plant gets the eggshells and which plant gets the coffee? I don't know, but I would like to know without having to go to YouTube.

But there is a new thing that I learned pretty recently, and I wanna share that with folks: the concept of a moat. There is an elder in philanthropy who brought this concept to me and I said to her, "Oh, this sounds like gatekeeping," which is another jargony term many people are familiar with. She says, "No, a moat is not like gatekeeping. A moat is way worse." A moat is a thing that's hard to breach. You cannot breach an invite to Davos. You cannot breach a grant structure designed only to reward the kind of organizing that poses zero threat to the funding organization or their living donors. I've really been sitting with this concept of a moat, and I'm wondering if you will help make the connection between that and al-Gharbi's points around redistribution and pre-distribution.

Lars: If we are hoarding, what do we need to be doing? We need to redistribute. What does that actually mean? A deliberate transfer of income, wealth, property, and power from one group, let's say the PMC, to another, say working-class people. What al-Gharbi is saying to us is that symbolic capitalists love to take from the rich. There is some transfer happening between the top owning class to the professional managerial class, but we are much less reliable about actually giving to others—we, the PMC. We give to an institution or a nonprofit, but sparingly when you look at the data.

At the same time, we have this longstanding fantasy that if we tax people like Elon Musk hard enough, we can solve the world's problems without any imposition on people like us. Coming back to us, the listeners, the people who are part of this: do you think we will actually solve class inequality through taxing billionaires? Do you want economic inequality to change without your wealth being impacted? This is not a judgment, these are just the questions we need to be asking ourselves. I will say firsthand, of course I have wanted that in my life, and I've seen small and big ways that my self-protection has existed. It's uncomfortable, and it's by design. We are people who genuinely want good, but remember that this section is about what is distracting us. Wanting things to be exactly this way is another form of distraction.

Aparna: There is a young female influencer making content for younger millennials and Gen Z around building wealth, and she built her social media empire paying $4 an hour to workers in the Philippines. All across the US, certainly in places like the Bay Area and the Seattle area, there are all of these conversations about restaurant owners who are fighting minimum wage increases. I think about examples like that a lot because taxing the ultra-wealthy isn't gonna change that. You just wanna find a way to outsource what you think is the burden of paying living wages.

There's another author I wanna bring in—I actually found his work even before Dr. Catherine Liu's—Jason Hickel. He's got a really great accent, so if you listen to him on podcasts, A+. His work is very useful to make sense of all these concepts we've been talking about, and he says that capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic. Recently, AOC did an interview—and I know people have a lot of beef with AOC for lots of different reasons—but one of the things she says is nobody can earn their way into becoming a billionaire. Becoming a billionaire requires cheating. You have to pay people less, you have to manipulate markets, you have to spend money on lobbying to get certain laws passed that take accountability and responsibility away from you for providing even a minimum of humane working conditions.

We constantly see stories about Amazon warehouse workers peeing in plastic bottles because they don't get breaks or the bathroom is too far away. Or something so horrible and heinous—at least every year there's a moment where somebody has passed out or died on the warehouse floor, and the managers tell workers to just work around that person's body, which is horrible. Under capitalism, production—the sum of what is getting made and sold, products and services both—is controlled by the interests of capital: the billionaires, the ultra-rich, the CEOs, the philanthropists, the VCs. Workers rarely get a voice or even the financial benefit of generating all of that wealth.

The result is overproduction of profitable things. The example that always comes to me, and I joke about this a lot, is buying another $25 lipstick because it's made by a South Asian woman and I should be supporting women of color-owned businesses. I don't need another lipstick. But there is a chronic underproduction of things that we actually need: renewable energy, better public transportation, affordable housing. His research from a couple of years ago says that we could meet the basic needs of everybody in the world with 30% of current production and resource allocation, which to me was wild. That would mean producing things that we need, not producing a bunch of garbage that's gonna end up in a landfill by way of a yard sale, Goodwill, and value misallocation. In his paper that came out in 2025, he said that capitalist growth systematically misallocates resources towards countries that already have more than enough, while half of the countries in the world have too few resources to even meet basic needs. I just want folks to sit with what that's saying: half of all countries in the world, the people who live in them don't have access to enough food, clean drinking water, or stable housing. They probably don't even live in permanent housing, which is kind of wild.

Lars: At the same time, because we are the professional managerial class and symbolic capitalists, we are distracted.

Aparna: That is a distraction. We are distracted by the performance of our own goodness. I am working really hard on shedding that. So let's talk about what do we need to do differently?

Lars: Yeah, and also just what do we want? Jason Hickel's research talks about this transformation—a meaningful structural change in how economies are organized. When asking who wants this, 72% in the United States say yes, we want an eco-socialist transformation, and 82% in the United Kingdom. This is not a fringe position. The people who are telling you that material structural change is unrealistic are wrong about polling. If people want this the most, they are protecting something other than us. And that's good news for us, and also the point of this episode: we do want change. Even when we're stuck in this position, we want change, and whether it's being fully felt in your system or not, knowing that there is avoidance means there is something we all need, and we have to trust that.

Aparna: The first thing we're gonna say is that we need to get serious about organizing, and I wanna be really specific about what that means because that word gets used pretty loosely. This week, I was really lucky to spend some time with an author and my personal hero, Jaz Brisack. They're 28 years old; they have "salted" at Starbucks, which means they got a job specifically for the purpose of organizing a store. They've organized in a lot of different industries and they've been teaching an organizer school here in Seattle this week. They also wrote a book called Get on the Job and Organize. Things that I've learned from them and their book—and what, Lars, you and I have also learned from Jennifer Pan, whose episode we both listened to on NPR's Code Switch recently—is that decades of multiracial labor organizing data tells us that unions have done more to advance the material wellbeing of people. You actually pointed out to me that it's important to say that we need to be advancing people's needs agnostic of identity. Unions have done more to advance the material needs of the people who work in them, regardless of race, gender, or other aspects of identity, than any DEI program anywhere. Not some unions; unions as a structure of collective power have delivered what billions of dollars spent every year on DEI have not, and I would say will not.

Lars: When we talk about why, there are a couple of things that feel important to name. One, when we organize together, whether it is in a union or not, what we are saying is that we trust each other to know what we need, and it gives us the room to actually participate. As a tech worker said to me recently at the May Day march, it's negotiation—there is dignity when we get to participate, when we get to sit next to each other and say, "I need this. Can you help me have access? The person next to me needs this. How can we help each other get access?" That in itself, outside of formal unionization, is a value we should be living and breathing into our lives. This is not a statement against DEI strategy necessarily, but rather saying that if what we really want is job security, fair wages, better working conditions, and maintaining human dignity, labor organizing is the best path. For those in white-collar jobs where that doesn't feel feasible, start with a conversation. Just be honest about what you need and get involved in efforts outside of your socioeconomic cluster. Be curious and learn. Go back to that question we asked around identity and class and start to fill in your own gaps. We can absolutely break our patterns; we have to. It starts with just talking to each other. What do we care about? Move towards it.

Aparna: I spent a day this week with Jaz and their team at the Union Hall, and somebody asked me, "You're not in a union, what are you organizing towards?" I was like, "My personal mission is to radicalize every tech worker I know." That's it. One of the things that we can do—and Glenn Block on our episode from a couple of weeks ago said this as well—is if you don't feel like you can do this at work, do it outside of work. So much of that is about developing real race and class consciousness, not diversity literacy. A lot of us have diversity literacy, but race and class consciousness means understanding the history of how race was constructed to serve capital, especially in North America and Western Europe. It means understanding who built the material conditions we benefit from, who was excluded from accumulating wealth across generations, and who is still excluded. It means understanding that the gains of working-class white workers historically have come at the expense of workers of color, and it's still happening. The gains of white women have come on the backs of women of color. None of this is accidental; it is a policy outcome. It means that at some point, we have to be willing to redistribute and work in ways that actually cost us something.

Lars: Coming back to Musa al-Gharbi, who says that symbolic capitalists pursue justice through paths that don't cost us, risk anything, or require us to change our lifestyles. The question we're bringing in today is: are we willing to change that? Not in a guilt-spiral way, but in a structural way. What are you willing to give up? I want to role-model that this is a question where I have a lot to learn. Answering what I am willing to give up is not a simple question. Maybe a better question might be: what do I need to be able to share more with others? What do I need to share and rely on others more? What do I need to release my idea of a specific form of class safety? There is something that needs to be filled. It's not just "I give up" and that's it; there's an entire relational dynamic that needs to change in our lives to actually answer that question. You probably shouldn't answer the question alone. Similarly, with redistribution, I can understand it at a high level, but the depth of economic planning participation that's needed—the way leftists who have studied this in depth understand what economic participation looks like—is a place where I'm also learning alongside you. Local mutual aid is a really good place to start. Listening to people saying what they need and responding to it is a really good place to start. We need to get out of our heads and get outside together—I'm speaking to myself too as I say that. We can do that; let's take those steps.

Aparna: I love that. But I'm gonna ask people to come back into their heads for the last little thing, no pun intended with all of the head comments. The last thing we wanna chat about is AI. We're not gonna do a whole episode on this because there are lots of great conversations happening already with AI ethicists, and I encourage folks to find them. But also, please stop making dumb little art on Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT. You're giving your data to other companies. We have to have some serious conversations about what is happening to our white-collar workforce right now. AI is not a productivity tool for your team; it is a structural reorganization of who gets paid for what. We are not exempt, and a lot of us have been feeling that for the past year. We are next, and if we do not understand that, we are gonna be blindsided in exactly the way working-class Americans were blindsided by de-industrialization and offshoring over the last 20 or 30 years.

Lars: That's really the frame we want to leave you with: the institution isn't failing in spite of us, it's failing because we are keeping it going. This is the moat that we built. It was Karan writing about philanthropy at the start of this episode. It is also true about our organizations, our industries, and our comfortable insistence that the right language, the right hires, or the right grant will be enough.

Aparna: The right rant.

Lars: The right grant.

Aparna: And it won't be. We know it won't be enough, and I think some of us have known that for a little while.

Lars: Well, shall we rapid fire?

Aparna: Let's rapid fire, yeah.

Lars: It will be themed for today, and I hope you know where our source material was. Aparna, Catherine Liu or Musa al-Gharbi, who would you want to co-host an episode?

Aparna: Catherine Liu. Her depth is just incredible, unmatched, and her affect is amazing.

Lars: Symbolic capitalism or professional managerial class, which label are you more willing to put on yourself?

Aparna: It used to be PMC—I was very comfortable sitting in that. But now, symbolic capitalist, because capitalism names the structure. PMC names the class, and I wanna get more comfortable locating myself in the structure.

Lars: What is one thing white-collar workers could do tomorrow that actually costs them something?

Aparna: Give to an organization they did not personally select as a changemaker. Move your money.

Lars: One thing we are not doing enough on this show?

Aparna: Talking about money, specifically who has it, how much, and how they keep it. We've not had any money conversations.

Lars: These are my confessions. If you're sitting in discomfort right now, I wanna say that is the right response. That is your nervous system telling you something that is true, so don't feel like you need to manage it. Stay in it for a minute; we're with you. This is our open door.

Aparna: "The institution isn't failing in spite of us." Karan said that, and I keep coming to that because it's the sentence that dissolves the distance. There is no "them" building the moat; we're right here with the shovels.

Lars: Thank you for being with us today.

Aparna: Resources from this episode, as always, are in the show notes, including links to al-Gharbi's Substack, specifically his pieces on smart people and tribalism, and on redistribution and pre-distribution. Jason Hickel's work on capitalism and economic democracy, and Catherine Liu's YouTube conversation on the monetization of trauma. All of these are well worth your full attention.

Lars: If this episode landed for you, send it to a person in your life who uses the most justice language but maybe has never been to an organizing meeting. Be the invitation for them. We look forward to seeing you next week on our final episode of season one, which is unbelievable to say. This is a special episode because we are hearing from you all. So many amazing white-collar workers shared with us what dignity means to them at work, for real. We are leaving you all with a hopeful path ahead that we have all that we need to make this change.

Lars: We just need to create it together.

Aparna: Thank you for being with us, and we will circle back for one last time this season next week.