Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life and, by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start instead with the very small things. —DAVID GRAEBER

In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful. “The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde writes. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”

The dresser is simple and Shaker in its design. Shakers believed that the end of the world was near, which would seem to be an argument for temporary furniture, but making something built to last was, for them, an act of prayer. “Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live,” Mother Ann Lee told her brethren, “and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”

“The ease of self-invention that IKEA enables is liberating,” Lauren Collins writes, “but it can be sad to be able to make a life, or dispose of it, so cheaply.”

My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries by Elizabeth Chin. She writes, “People are so completely and so powerfully alienated that they are reduced to things; in the meantime, the things they produce and the things they purchase have acquired all the livingness that people have lost.”

She feels stretched thin by the work of paying her bills and cleaning her house. She doesn’t want to pay a woman to clean her house, that’s too intimate, but she pays a woman to wax her legs in the pink privacy of a nail salon’s back room. She lives a life of contradictions and she’s caught between her own contradictory desires. She wants more and less at the same time, just as I do.

“What I really want, really really want, is to work less,” she writes. But she also wants an antique rug.

“One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism,” she writes, “is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people.”

“A metaphor is all this really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.” A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

Consumption was the opposite of production in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.

I wanted it. I wanted to paint the kitchen Moir Gold and I wanted to plant a garden in the backyard. I wanted to make something mine. What I wanted, more than anything, was the illusion of permanence the house provided. The solid foundation, the bricks that wouldn’t blow away, the sense of security. That was a fantasy, I knew, but it felt real.

“While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

The very rich, her study revealed, are uncomfortable with being rich. If they are assholes, they are uneasy assholes. They try to hide their spending from their nannies, cutting the tags off new clothes and peeling the labels off expensive bread. They don’t boast about their wealth, but about their thrift. They talk about looking for good deals and driving old cars.

This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

What I understand, after reading a book called Understanding Class, is that class is hard to understand. Nobody agrees on what it is, not even the people who study it.

“Class boundaries,” Wright insists, “especially the property boundary, continue to constitute real barriers in people’s lives.”

barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class, according to one way of thinking about class. While members of the middle class acquire education and skills, for instance, we exclude others from acquiring education and skills. Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing. Conveniently, we don’t tend to think of these barriers as a means of protecting our class status, but as necessary measures to gauge intelligence or ability or commitment or excellence or hard work.

The middle class includes small-business owners who are both capitalists and workers, salaried managers and supervisors whose financial interests are entangled with the corporations they serve, and educated professionals who have enough capital to make investments. This is a middle class with capitalist aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting allegiances and internal contradictions.

Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired, like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

At the top were the elite, who had the most of all three kinds of capital, and at the bottom were the precariat, who had the least of everything. In between were three varieties of middle class, along with two different working classes.

In his heart, John tells me, he’s trash. It’s what he comes from and it’s what he is. But he knows that he doesn’t live like trash. He’s gone from a childhood on the South Side to an adulthood on the North Side. John’s father worked in a factory and didn’t go to college. His family owned a house, like mine. And both of our mothers didn’t have their own income until they left our fathers. Our mothers weren’t in the same class, exactly, but they were in the same boat.

The economic lives of an entire generation of Americans, all nearly my age, have been tracked by researchers who just released their findings, which I’m reading about in the New York Times. An animated chart illustrates the fate of fifty thousand white children, girls and boys, from different income levels.

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.

I couldn’t tell the difference between credit and wealth. If I had a better eye for class, I would have seen that I was surrounded by people subsisting on credit, living precariously and passing as middle class. Credit creates the illusion of equality, in that we can all buy the same things on credit, but we can’t all pay the debt back.

Marx would not work as a “wage slave,” and he saw what this would mean for his daughters. They would have to marry well or become servants. So Marx pretended at a bourgeois life. His girls were given lessons in art and riding and music, and they hosted a ball in the new house. All this, Marx wrote to Engels, was in the interest of “securing their future.” A proletarian life would be quite all right for him, he insisted, “if the girls were boys.”

Art, for me, has always been a thing to do, not a thing to buy.

We had money, John concedes, but we spent it on this house. Now we live in our money.

So, she says, is this what we do now? We just keep earning money and replacing this stuff with better stuff?

You should look into the etymology of scholastic, Vojislav suggests. I can’t imagine why. We’re talking about work, about my job at the university. It’s from the Greek, he says, and it means “to be at leisure to study.” The Greeks didn’t value work like we do—work was for slaves and women—but they did value study. The word he wants to call my attention to, I know, is leisure.

Leisure meant something different in ancient Greece. It was the opposite of being busy but it wasn’t rest or play. It was time spent on reflective thought and wonder.

When time is money, as it is now, free time is never free. It’s expensive.

The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen writes that leisure is a form of conspicuous consumption, with time being what is consumed. The upper class is exempt from ordinary employment under capitalism, he observes, just as the aristocracy is exempt from manual labor under feudalism. Leisure is how a class that doesn’t have to work displays its status.

Weber proposed that early Protestants believed they must work to accumulate wealth as proof that they were in God’s favor. This was a departure from the Catholic notion of good works—service done for others to earn salvation. Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in seventeenth-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners who wanted them to do steady work for wages. “A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money,” Weber argues, “but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”

protestant ethic describes the moralizing of work and the privileging of property, not, as I used to think, the belief that work is, in and of itself, good.

ask the economist if he can explain to me what capitalism is. The botanist leaves to get a drink. Capital, he begins, is a means of production. That much I already know. And capitalism is a system in which one builds wealth by owning a means of production. Like a factory, he says, or a cow.

I think he’s wrong on this, but we’re talking about fossil fuels now. Oil and coal are capital, he says, and we need to leave that capital in the ground. We should not mine it, sell it, buy it, or burn it. But people already own it. A journalist recently observed, he says, that the last time we walked away from an accumulation of capital this significant was Emancipation.

Work, Lewis Hyde writes, is distinct from labor. Work is something we do by the hour, and labor sets its own pace. Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labor is transformation. “Writing a poem,” Hyde writes, “raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors.” This list reveals to me my problem. I want to give my life to labor, not work.

Many jobs demand both work and labor, in Hyde’s sense. The labor of teaching, which I love for its transformative power, is accompanied by ordinary paperwork and the work of being an employee, which is more toilsome than the work of teaching. Bureaucracies have a way of making work out of labor and—as I observed on parents’ night, when J’s kindergarten teacher listed the corporations that supplied her with branded coursework—a teacher can be robbed of her labor and left with mostly work.

workers alienated from their labor.

The hardest part of working isn’t the work, my mother tells me, it’s the passing. She means passing as an office worker—dressing the part, performing the rituals of office life, and acting appropriately grateful for a ten-hour shift at a computer.

That was long before his drag race. Now he wears pink suits with secret stitching inside that reads: “YOU’RE BORN NAKED AND THE REST IS DRAG.” We’re all performing, he wants us to know, but some of us are following the script more closely than others, and some of us have been given easier parts. Easier parts with better pay.

Doing drag is an act of treason, he tells a journalist. Drag, he tells another journalist, is his way of saying f-you to a male-dominated culture. And so, I wonder, who is he working for? For himself? For liberation? For the women whose clothes he has revealed as costumes, the wearing of which is a kind of work?

She had written a book, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, and she was full of fairy tales. It was a source of great hilarity what she told us about the witch’s broomstick, that it symbolized a penis. In some tales, she said, witches rode not broomsticks, but men. And back in the time when those tales were told, a man who woke in the morning aching or sweaty might say that a witch had been riding him.

“the myth of the old witch flying on her broom . . . was the projection of an extended penis, symbol of an unbridled lust.”

The witch hunts, Federici argues, weren’t about superstition or religion so much as they were about suppressing the rebellions of women.

Women protested food shortages in the streets of seventeenth-century France and Spain. And women carried pitchforks and scythes in riots against English landowners. They tore down fences and dug up hedges at night. They set fields on fire to protest the enclosure of the commons as private property. While women participated in real rebellions—class rebellions—the witch hunts were fueled by an imagined conspiracy among women, in league with the devil. “The witch,” Federici writes, “was the communist and terrorist of her time.”

I became an employer when I became a mother—I

“For century after century most women expected either to be servants or to keep servants,” Alison Light writes in her book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. And “giving or taking orders was the most common relationship between women.” That remained true in England even through the 1930s, when unmarried women were looking for jobs as shopgirls or teachers instead of as servants.

“How many slaves work for you?” asks a website that will quantify the forced labor that produced my appliances, my clothes, my one gold ring, my leather shoes, my stereo, my phone, and my computer. Fifty is the answer. That includes the Uzbek children who picked the cotton for my clothes and the Congolese children who mined the tantalum for my electronics.