I’m surprised somebody so market-negative would not find the term “social capital” absurd and distasteful. To look at it as capital would mean to see it as fungible, transferable, etc. Aren’t those all reasons why we want to get away from the transactional economy and build something less alienating and more alive and diverse?

There’s some stuff I could say anecdotally about kids growing up in entrepreneurial families, but I’m not sure it would contribute to the discussion. Suffice to say, as a freelancer myself, I understand why people would perceive me as privileged, but it’s only from looking at my situation by covering up one eye. Is it privileged to have to beg your clients to pay you for services rendered? To wonder where your next paycheck will come from? To have to account personally to the tax authorities for all their meaningless bullshit rules? Yes, I choose that worry over the worry of being fired, and I’m grateful for it, but it does not make it less of a worry.

I’ll never have an employee as long as I live, and I think that’s where some of this so-called social capital has the most opportunity for redistribution. Indeed, as a Wobbly one of the things I’d like to see the labor movement do is cultivate a more entrepreneurial sense of overthrowing capitalism, if that’s not a total contradiction. Instead of taking over existing workplaces, form some of your own. In my industry of software development, the costs have never been lower, but people still choose security when mounds of money could be made just by striking out on your own and undercutting the big firms. I convert this surplus of sorts into the need to work less whenever possible, but getting people to understand that we have a choice of the kind of lifestyle associated with how we provide is surprisingly tough.