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That's the thing. If you're just a few people who are the producers and researchers as well as the hosts, overhead for a podcast like this is basically nil.
Even in America, there are places where you can live comfortably without having the income of a celebrity. Southeast Europe and Iraq are even more so. And all of the hosts had moderately successful YT channels and professional careers before starting the podcast together. Their Patreon currently brings in $250k a year.
Whenever I hear influencers say "your donations and subscriptions help us keep going", I always get a wave of doubt. Through thrift and collective living practices and a bit of good planning, I am aiming to retire well before 50, on a low-wage job (never made more than $40k in a year). Any leftist who claims to be an authority on how the economy works should prove it by making its currents work for themself, then extricating themself from the market as much as they can, keeping a standard of living that it's possible for everyone to have, and giving all the rest to radical projects or direct aid. Ultimately, if you're an effective leftist, you give way more to the world than you receive, and if you need to be bringing in money past the point where income stops correlating with better well-being, then you're not all that great of a leftist.
Bootstraps leftist ideology lmao
In a way, unironically yes. Autonomous development, as opposed to Grifter Leftist ideology or Social Democracy For Just Me with extra steps.
If you aspire to lead a country to socialism, you should at least be able to put something on a smaller scale into practice which is consistent with your ethics. It is literally scientific socialism: making experiments about how to materially advance a socialist prospect, as opposed to aesthetics of science and flimsy claims made ex post facto about history.
What is building a vanguard party in general if not bootstrapping it? You start completely out of power, and you find a way to power. You're going to need a bunch of intermediate steps, and those will require you to strategize and sweat. If you believe that the masses will just suddenly get behind you when they see you have the right ideas, you're a lib. Depending on spontaneous revolutionary fervor and allegiance is miraculous, wishful thinking. Every revolution must be built, it does not fall into your lap or just get seized at one discontinuous moment.
Spend your life oriented around the patterns of begging, or beat the capitalists at the game of production/self-sustenance. We know the latter is possible because we developed as a species without capitalism. Nut up or shut up.
Living on a commune with your comrades is bootstrapping now?