I am taking a step back from Coping With Capitalism. This community has been held together by care, curiosity and the willingness to show up. I am extremely grateful to all who have contributed to this publication.

As this chapter closes, I am choosing to recalibrate. To rest. To listen deeply to the world around me and respond with care.

I want to encourage you to do the same. To think deeply, act with intention, trust your intuition, and practice liberation. Start where you are.

Until we meet again,

Shawn

Goodbye Coping With Capitalism was originally published in Coping with Capitalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Postwar Bohemia and the Left’s Humanist DNA

In the U.S. after World War II, a loose constellation of artists, writers, and activists gathered in cheap lofts and coffeehouses — from Greenwich Village to San Francisco’s North Beach. They called themselves Bohemians: cultural outsiders who believed that freedom began with lived experience, not institutional authority.

Two ideas defined this moment on the American Left.

First was cultural pluralism. Influenced by existentialists like Sartre and Camus, Bohemians rejected the idea of a single moral framework governing everyone. Art, poetry, music, and communal living were experiments in authenticity — ways of discovering meaning without permission.

Second was radical individualism. Liberation wasn’t supposed to flow from parties or platforms, but from personal agency. Beat-era touchstones like Howl and On the Road celebrated lived truth over doctrine, placing the self — not the state or the market — at the center of resistance.

This humanist worldview fed directly into early feminist and reproductive-rights movements. Figures like Betty Friedan framed bodily autonomy as an extension of Bohemian ethics: the body belongs to the self. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, it wasn’t just a legal victory — it was understood as a moral one.

Health, too, was imagined differently. Back-to-the-land movements, herbal medicine collectives, midwifery networks, and publications like The Whole Earth Catalog and Our Bodies, Ourselves treated care as communal knowledge, not a commodity. Medicine was cultural, local, and participatory.

When the Left Turned Toward Expertise

By the 1970s, the New Left began moving from the streets into institutions. Universities established Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies departments. While these programs preserved attention to lived experience, they also introduced something new: metrics. Funding, legitimacy, and survival increasingly depended on enrollment numbers, grants, and publications.

Two crises accelerated this shift.

First were public-health outbreaks — measles, pertussis, and others — that pushed local governments to defer to epidemiologists. Policy decisions began to hinge on statistical thresholds rather than democratic debate.

Second was AIDS. When biomedical authorities initially ignored the crisis, groups like ACT UP responded with a new kind of activism: confrontational, data-literate, and relentlessly technical. They demanded trial transparency, accelerated approval pathways, and measurable outcomes. It worked.

The lesson stuck: political change could be won faster through expertise and evidence than through culture and critique.

Something subtle but profound changed. Personal narrative and pluralism began to lose ground to technical authority.

The Rise of the “Medical Left”

By the 1990s, identity politics had been translated into administrative categories — legible to courts, universities, and bureaucracies. At the same time, digital technologies gave governments, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies unprecedented access to health data.

The declaration of “evidence-based medicine” formalized a new moral standard: what counted wasn’t judgment or context, but datasets.

Progressive causes followed this logic. Abortion access, equal pay, and parental leave became policy problems defined by compliance rates and statistical benchmarks. Once something could be tracked, it was treated as solved — even if lived experience said otherwise.

Health care moved to the center of left-wing politics. The Clinton administration’s universal health-care push framed justice in actuarial terms: coverage rates, cost curves, preventive-care indices.

A distinctly medical-materialist Left took shape, built on three pillars:

• Economic dependency on insurers, HMOs, and pharmaceutical firms
• Policy filtered through private-sector metrics, like cost containment and risk adjustment
• Success defined by financial indicators, not community wellbeing

Bohemian aesthetics lingered, but the substance of politics had shifted. Meaning gave way to measurement.

COVID and the Triumph of Industrial Medicine

The pandemic pushed medical materialism into every corner of public life. Mandates were justified by models and thresholds. Progressive leaders reframed these measures as extensions of bodily autonomy — recycling a humanist value inside a technocratic framework.

Two consequences followed.

First, individualism became suspect. Personal liberty was rebranded as a threat to collective safety. Cultural practices once protected by pluralism — alternative schooling, ritual practices, nonconforming lifestyles — were socially pathologized.

Second, the Left fractured. Data absolutists clashed with organizers who understood why many communities distrust medical institutions. The unified health front cracked, and the right exploited the divide.

Even as figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed Medicare-for-All, the machinery meant to deliver it — insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers, analytics firms — remained intact. Progressive rhetoric expanded, but the infrastructure stayed corporate.

Why This Shift Matters

What’s been lost isn’t concern for health — it’s who defines it.

Where Bohemian humanism emphasized lived experience and cultural diversity, medical materialism centralizes authority, data, and compliance. Autonomy once meant self-determination; now it often means adherence to sanctioned protocols.

The danger is political, not just medical. Once governance is framed as a permanent public-health emergency, surveillance and restriction become easier to justify — far beyond medicine. We already see this logic spreading into areas like online regulation and even climate policy, where metaphors of illness invite technocratic “treatments” with enormous social consequences.

Without democratic control of data and clear limits on medical authority, the Left risks trading its humanist roots for a managerial politics it once opposed.

A Way Forward: Social Democracy

The old Bohemian ethos doesn’t reject medicine or science — it rejects their monopoly on meaning.

A renewed left-wing health politics would rest on three principles:

Healthy boundaries
Treat personal data as private property. Protect democratic institutions from being overridden by permanent emergency logic.

Medical plurality
Guarantee real choice in care. Combine evidence-based guidelines with citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, and support for cooperative and holistic clinics outside profit-driven systems.

Democratic process
Clearly define what qualifies as a public-health emergency, establish transparent thresholds for limiting liberties, and — crucially — set exit points for restoring them.

Health policy should be shaped with communities, not imposed on them.

Conclusion

From Beat poets to biostatisticians, the American Left has traveled a long road. Its commitment to bodily autonomy remains — but the source of authority has shifted from culture and community to corporations and agencies.

Naming medical materialism as the fault line clarifies what’s been lost — and what might still be recovered. If the Left is to renew itself, it must remember that numbers can inform politics, but they should never replace the human experience that once gave it life.

If you enjoyed this cultural autopsy, consider supporting the observer writing about them here.

From Free Spirits to Metrics was originally published in Coping with Capitalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rethinking the role of aesthetics in fashion

Ever since I was young, I had a deep obsession with fashion; being a Y2K baby meant that I loved Bebe, Baby Phat, Guess, and Von Dutch. Now I view fashion through a much more critical lens; it’s definitely a love-hate relationship, for sure. If you think about it long enough, you will realize that trends and aesthetics are mere products of the consumerist late-stage capitalist hellscape we live in. Recent trendy aesthetics, such as “old money” or “mob wife,” are centered around the fetishization of wealth and are laced with sexist ideals of what women should be. Even the minimalist “clean girl” look that once dominated social media at its height carried heavy sexist undertones. The clean girl look that set the standard in pop culture circa 2023 to 2024 and was followed primarily by white women who already embody the beauty standard (think Hailey Bieber). But the idea nonetheless that women should appear minimal in bland clothing or “clean” with undetectable makeup is diminishing. Incorporating the rising cottagecore aesthetic into social media content has been a huge focal point for trad-wife influencers. The takeaway is that aesthetics and subcultures are driven by the socioeconomic standards of society we live in right now.

The wider picture

Capitalism is making the fashion industry ugly, placing a priority on providing an endless cycle of new trends that spawn clothing items so quickly that we can barely keep up. Trends are designed to be quick and ever-changing because the more money we throw, the more corporations profit. Did you ever buy the hottest new makeup product that everyone was raving about on social media, then you forget about it, and it collects dust on your vanity? I know that I have. But the truth is that behind these products, there are real people who toiled to make them; they aren’t just things that come and go. When micro-trends designed for profit expire, the remains of them end up in landfills. Waste colonialism is the practice of Western capitalist countries exporting plastic and other types of waste under the guise of “recycling.” Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines have become huge spots for illegal dumping. The consequences for the people are disastrous as it worsens poverty and has the potential to spread diseases.

Immigrants are victims of predatory fast-fashion factories

In the US, it is important to note that immigrants do make up more than 15% of the manufacturing workforce. Immigrant workers are subject toHuman Trafficking Labor Fraud. It lures immigrants in with promises of high-paying jobs, but they end up working for very meager pay and in exploitative conditions that can even involve sexual enslavement. Employers can also sponsor immigrants with documentation status and exploit their fears about losing it.

Employers also take advantage of immigrants who have undocumented status, as it gives them free rein to use against the workers by having them arrested and or deported for speaking out against cruel working conditions. Rebecca Smith, who works with the National Employment Law Project, wrote a study that delved into cases in which the threat of deportation was used against workers who voiced concern about their safety and attempted to unionize. It’s important to understand this now, as ICE raids are ongoing, so we can empathize with the plights of immigrants who are actively being dehumanized by the far-right. At the end of the day, this conversation is not just about clothes but rather how production under capitalism is dependent on exploitation and marginalization.

Fast Fashion is becoming faster and more reckless

In 2017, a Los Angeles Times report followedNorma Ulloa, a garment worker in LA who sewed and labeled shirts for Forever 21. She toiled six hours a week for 11-hour work days and finished around 700 shirts daily. Despite this, she was paid 6 dollars an hour; her wage claim was one of almost 300 since 2007 by workers who claimed they were severely underpaid by Forever 21. These workers are working in sweatshops, which is essentially modern-day enslavement, and are undocumented as the factories employ subcontractors who take advantage of workers’ undocumented status.

Pre-2007, a notable lawsuit took place against Forever 21 by 33 workers who claimed that they sewed, ironed, and or packed Forever 21 clothing 6 days a week, ranging up to 12 hours daily for significantly less than the minimum wage. Despite Forever 21’s long-lasting popularity and ability to be at the top of fast fashion brands for young people, it is going bankrupt and closing over 300 stores in the US. Telling us that fast fashion is getting quicker, faster, and even more unethical.Over the last few years, I feel like I have seen an increasing number of microtrends that are becoming more and more short-lived.

The most popular and recognizable fast fashion brands amongst Generation Z are H&M and Zara, and personally, I know that Fashion Nova is very popular as well. H&M factory workers have reported wage cuts for arriving slightly late, unethical sick leave practices, restrictions on using the bathroom, and fainting in the factories. According to Clean Clothes Campaign, “the average total wages per month before overtime at the three platinum suppliers in the researched period of time were US$172.51. Despite H&M’s Fair Wage Method project, initiated in 2013 and since then rolled out to 20 of the brand’s strategic suppliers in Cambodia, the platinum suppliers are below the stipulated industry median (US$178/month) in terms of wages.” When researching, I found western legacy media framing to be very generous towards H&M by framing this issue as a sole problem with Myanmar’s coup and that the company was phasing out operations out of the goodness of their heart. Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, in his book titled Inventing Reality, discussed how capitalist legacy media exists to legitimize the status quo. That phenomenon can be seen here: capitalist legacy media purports an oversimplified narrative framing H&M’s despicable business practices as somehow inconsequential.

Zara has been accused of producing clothes in Argentinian sweatshops; the employees reported that they were forced to work over 13 hours a day and could not leave the factories without permission. According to British Vogue, watchdog Juan Gomez Centurion reported that workers who had no documentation were being held against their will; “we found men and children who lived in places where they worked. They were not registered, and they were living in terrible conditions. They had no official documents and were held against their will, they were not allowed to leave their workplaces without permission.”

Through a NYT investigation, Fashion Nova was found to have been using dozensof factories in LA that paid workers illegally low wages. Some workers were found to have been receiving a little over 2 dollars an hour, and the factories collectively owed 3.8 million dollars in back wages. Workers reported that they worked in extremely dirty conditions, including cockroaches and rats spotted. Now more than ever, it is essential to resist dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants and fight for justice. Fast fashion is one of the many evils that come from the late-stage capitalist reality we exist in.

Fast Fashion Relies on Dehumanization was originally published in Coping with Capitalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.