Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

“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.”

Within a year, I had rolled up my mattress and moved my boxes to Iowa, where I found my furniture on the street.

IKEA, the third largest consumer of wood in the world, has made furniture into something that gets used up. It is furniture for the apocalypse. But what I like, what makes me laugh a little about “for people, not consumers,” is the implication that consumers are not people.

A professor, she has an annual household income over $90,000, which puts her in the top 20 percent of earners in the richest country in the world, ever in human history. She knows that she belongs to an economic elite, but she doesn’t feel rich. 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.”

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.

the sense that all of this—the brick the roses climb, the lath and plaster, the copper pipes, the oak floors, the coal room, the cracked slab on which it all rests—is a gift. Not to me, but to the future. The house is just passing through my hands. It’s not a purchase, it’s a husbandry. I’m in service to the house. The truth of this is married to the other truth, that the house serves me.

The money in our savings account was not money, in my mind, it was time. All those dollars were hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working. It seemed like a waste to spend time on property.

Nami just quit her job and I’m jealous. I would gladly trade this gravy boat to quit my job, but I would also have to trade this house.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

the illusion of not needing other people. “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.

The Landlord’s Game, the game that became Monopoly, was designed in the early 1900s to expose the problems with an economic system in which property owners “win” by impoverishing renters. The game was informed by the theories of Henry George, who proposed that profits made from a natural resource, like land or coal or oil, should be distributed equally among everyone. No individual, he argued, should build a fortune by laying claim to a collective resource. George believed that everyone was entitled to profit from their labor, but that profits made from the ownership of property should be heavily taxed.

The woman who invented the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie,

Darrow took the game Magie designed, but she drew most of its distinctive features, including the continuous loop of play, from Zohn Ahl, a game played by the Kiowa people of Oklahoma. “It is bitterly ironic,” writes Philip Winkelman, “that this gift of the Kiowa to America and to the world should result in the daily reenactment of the reduction of opponents to abject poverty through the parceling up and exclusive ownership of land.”

Real economic systems don’t behave in accordance with theory. They are shaped by our politics and policies. “Markets are constructed by people,” Appelbaum argues, “for purposes chosen by people—and people can change the rules.” We don’t have to privilege accumulation over distribution. But that is the rule that governs our everyday lives—our work and our play.

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

All artists are hustlers, my mother used to say. We have to be. This was an essential part of my education as an artist. As was “The Dead” by James Joyce.

The opening line of the song, I want my MTV, was sung by Sting. It was a marketing slogan repurposed as art mocking marketing, delivered by a millionaire musician.

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 kept the silverware because 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.

She didn’t want to become the person that having money might make her—she wanted to stay in the fray.

To be at leisure, to live a life of study and contemplation, was to enjoy true freedom. But that freedom depended on the work of women and slaves.

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

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.

Not what i learned in AP European History — that Luther objected to good works, which were the literal buying of god's favor. I think protestants on the other hand believe your work, not your wealth, is proof of your value.

The 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.

if the price of every item reflected its social cost, then a lot of things should be much more expensive—bottled water, online shopping, bullets. The social cost of some things is their very cheapness.

Beef. Travel. Tech. Cars & gas. Diamonds. But its not the consumers who should pay that price, it's the companies who create them.

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. Or the other way around. The meanings of labor and work are reversed in Andrea Komlosy’s Work: The Last 1,000 Years. Both words can be traced back to Latin, she writes, which gave every Indo-European language two words for work. In Latin, labor meant arduous toil, and the word laborare came from the swaying of slaves under heavy loads. Opus, which became our work, was creative and productive. This work was satisfying, a source of pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.

Witches were old women who could no longer produce children, midwives who facilitated birth control, childless women who remained unproductive, loose women who refused to be held as property, and prostitutes who sold themselves. Witches were, notably, poor. Among their recorded crimes were cursing the people who refused them food. 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.” Women in medieval drawings and stories were headstrong, rough, and lusty. They rode men and lashed them with whips. They married five husbands, one after another, and would happily take a sixth. Women were insatiable and domineering, or so they appeared in the cartoons of that time. But after the witch hunts, on our side of history, women were drawn as meek and weak. And a new ideal woman emerged: “sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination.” A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.

Helple-e-ess...

The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable. It is, as the composer chronicled, a series of difficult questions. Attending to those questions demands both work and labor. Maybe I need another word. Casting about, I come up with service. We’re in service to the art, I tell my student, bent to it. There’s pleasure in this posture, in being bettered by the work. It isn’t the pleasure of mastery, but the pleasure of being mastered.

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” Gertrude wrote, “you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

but he does not mention the toil introduced by the computer. The endless filling of little boxes, the esoteric software systems, the repetitive stress, the physical toll of sitting all day staring at a screen.

“Daily meaning as well as daily bread,” Terkel writes, is what people are looking for in work, “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

If you’re the employee, which it’s better not to be, the goal is to maintain your composure when the assistant manager tells you what to do. If you can, you should find a way to manage the assistant manager—try to make the assistant manager work for you. If you’re the assistant manager, who always initiates the game, the goal is to act like you’re in charge and tell someone to do something they were already going to do, as if it was your idea, so they’ll feel like they’re taking orders.

We don’t get out of living with what everyone else lives with, I think, just because we own houses now. We can’t buy our way out of shootings. I’m impatient with this conversation and with her illusion of safety.

Then, as now, the work of invention, of making something new, and of generating change was more highly valued than the work of maintenance.

If we could think about value differently, we could modify our economic system so that something of value to our entire society, like the well-being of our children or the preservation of our environment, would also have economic value.

“If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled,” one survivor recalled of the moment the ship hit the iceberg. Perhaps we should all keep a memento of the Titanic, just to remind ourselves of how safe disaster feels.

“Women have always been poor,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. Denied education, excluded from professions, and unable to own property, even rich women were poor, in a way.

Aristotle didn’t consider productive work a moral duty the way the Church would later. Time spent working, he argued, is time not spent on things that improve a person, like the pursuit of truth through study.

Capitalism, Lewis Hyde writes, is “the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth.” The defining feature of capitalism, he suggests, is not the breeding of money, but the hoarding of money for that purpose.

Every year, I’m required to fill out a form for the university that lists my contributions and accomplishments. polish shoes file nails coordinate tops and bottoms / lipstick control no / screaming I’m bored because / this is whoring away the hours of god’s creation. I list the classes I’ve taught, the theses I’ve mentored, the committees I’ve served on, the essays I’ve published, the talks and lectures I’ve delivered. But is this poem on my list? What I want to report is that I’ve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.

Art unmakes the world made by work.

I’ve just come from a meeting with my boss’s boss, who explained to me that artists don’t want secure jobs. They prefer flexibility, he said. Why can’t they have both? I wondered.

But the idea that the commons cannot be regulated, I know, is the interpretation of that essay favored by free-market capitalists.

You’re taking up the whole road, a woman in a large SUV once yelled out her window at John, who was riding his bike along the shoulder. Cars make you stupid, in the way wealth makes you stupid. In the way any sort of power makes you stupid, really.

The gift exchanges Hyde writes of, the Kula of the Massim and the potlatch of the Kwakwaka’wakw, are from far away and long ago. But those exchanges serve as metaphors for the practice of art—the gift the artist is given by art and the gift the artist gives in making art—which happens in the here and now. And in the here and now, we can’t seem to speak of anything, art or our own children, in terms that aren’t drawn from capital investment.

“I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write,” Alexander Chee observes. “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion.”

The room of A Room of One’s Own is what might be called a literal symbol in the terminology of poetry. A literal symbol allows for layers of meaning, as it stands for what it is and for something else, too.