Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

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.

There’s always got to be a trapdoor that allows the capitalist to access a profit greater than the original investment.

As I say this, I wonder if I’m describing capitalism or the paranoia that life within capitalism produces.

The defining feature of capitalism, he suggests, is not the breeding of money, but the hoarding of money for that purpose.

“Our heavily redacted history has meant the loss of many options,” writes Marilynne Robinson. One of those options being a society that understands itself as valuing people above capital.

A speech by Lenin is playing from a loudspeaker while his words scroll across a screen in front of us. He’s saying things like: We must stop the spread of global capitalism before all the wealth of the world is held by a very few. That seems reasonable, Ivana remarks wryly. But now that all the wealth of the world is held by a very few, it is no longer a revolutionary sentiment. It’s just an artifact in a museum.

And to be coronated queen under capitalism is to claim a domain that comes, as Marx put it, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”