What can this TikTok star and anti-capitalist teach you about money? It starts in Fresno

There was a lie Madeline Pendleton was told growing up in Fresno: That the city was a horrible sink hole of a place and in order to have good life, you needed to leave.

“When we talk about people who left Fresno, we talk about them with reverence,” says Pendleton, a TikTok celebrity and entrepreneur whose life is chronicled in a new book, “I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

It’s available Jan. 16 through Doubleday.

People urged her to leave the city and eventually she did.

“I was lied to,” she says.

“Life isn’t some glorious amazing thing the second you leave Fresno.”

The book is partly a financial how-to, built off the following Pendleton has gained doing Q&A videos about her life and business on TikTok. Her account has 1.7 million followers.

The book is also a memoir, following Pendleton’s path from Fresno (where she grew up in poverty) to an art school in San Francisco (after she ran away to live with a drug dealer in Santa Cruz) and eventually to Los Angeles, where she found herself precariously employed; out of college without any real work experience and saddled with student loans.

Then, her boyfriend committed suicide.

Tunnel Vision clothing

It was a turning point for Pendleton. She found herself shell-shocked and unable to function enough to continue looking for the freelance work that had been sustaining her.

“I was living every day by the dollar,” she says.

She began pouring all her time into Tunnel Vision, a clothing brand she started with a friend in 2014. She operated the business out of a 300-square-foot apartment. Orders were packed on a folding table she kept in the corner, with shipping materials that were stored in the oven. She was still only hacking out a living, $20 or $30 at a time, she says, but the business was growing and when she could, she would offer work to friends in similar situations, “even if it was $50 a day.”

The business is a souvenir, she says, of surviving the experience of capitalism.

It’s the joke in ,the book’s title. I survived capitalism and all I got was this lousy T-shirt company.

It’s also an example of how a company can operate with anti-capitalist principles and ethical business practices. Tunnel Vision sells vintage clothing, along with in-house designs that are made, sweatshop-free in small-batch runs. Each of the dozen employees, including Pendleton, makes the same amount of money for a day’s work, regardless of the position.

There’s paid time off and flexible working conditions and an inherent trust among the employees.

“I don’t work any harder than anyone else in this room,” Pendleton says.

Surviving capitalism

To be clear, Pendleton doesn’t see herself as financial guru, or even as someone particularly special.

“I don’t think I have a unique story,” she says. She wasn’t the only person to get taken in by a for-profit university or to find herself struggling after the great recession, “working long hours for bosses who treated you as disposable, with no relief in sight.”

In parts, the book reflects that. These are the conversations Pendleton has had with friends about seemingly simple, maybe even obvious things, like how much to spend on groceries.

“Some people don’t have these conversations,” she says. For them, the book can serve as a baseline, a place to start.

Nor does Pendleton see herself as some kind of up-by-the-boot-straps success story. Poverty, she says, is a policy decision, and people have the right to feel frustrated, because from what she’s learned, the system doesn’t care.

“The goal is to survive as long as possible,” she says.

“Given all that. There are things you can do to improve quality of life that have little to do with money.”