Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?

The tiny dresser sits atop my dresser, which is from IKEA.

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.

I’ve discovered a brand of paint that I can’t afford. But I could buy it. To afford something like paint, for someone of my class, is to announce your values, most often, not your financial capacity. I can’t admit to valuing paint that costs $110 per gallon. But I find this paint unbearably luminous, and undeniably better than any other paint.

These are not aspirational whites—these whites can afford to be modest.

I send a swatch of Sulking Room Pink to Robyn, knowing she’ll appreciate the name. “To sulk” in French is bouder, the source of boudoir, a woman’s private room. A room of one’s own,

We put the Restoration Hardware catalogs near the fireplace and sit on them.

“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.”

I’m reading 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 wants more and less at the same time, just as I do.

When she visits her godparents and sees the rug, she can’t think about anything else. She wants them to offer the rug to her, but they don’t.

“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.”

We still use the math of that time to subtract what is consumed at home from what is produced at work.

“We should think about how far we want to extend the metaphor,” Graeber warns. Yes, we consume fossil fuels, in the “eat up, devour, waste, spend” sense of the word. But we don’t consume music. Music becomes part of us, as food does, but it isn’t destroyed in the process.

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.

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.

They weren’t wizards, just gamblers who could tolerate major losses.

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive,” John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is.

I’ve been reading the psychologist Paul Piff, who quotes Jesus in a paper titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Piff and his team of researchers found that the rich are more likely than the poor to cut off other vehicles when driving through intersections. And they’re less likely to stop for pedestrians. They’re more likely to cheat in a game, and more likely to think of greed as good. But money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, 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. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

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 ...

We don’t have to privilege accumulation over distribution.

I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I’m too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

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

Class is like race in this way, John says, it’s written on your body. But I can’t see it, so I don’t know how to read it.

The musician breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working. It’s queer, in that it’s a transgression.

The middle class, in this approach, lies between the capitalists who have control and the workers who are controlled. 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.

The results identified seven distinct classes. 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.

I have passed through several classes in my adult life, including the precariat. But I don’t believe that to be true. I have always remained, more or less, in the class into which I was born.

this what we do now? We just keep earning money and replacing this stuff with better stuff?

Pay is incidental, though it serves, Galbraith notes, as an “index of prestige.” And prestige, along with respect, is a source of satisfaction for the members of this class. They like to be well paid, but the suggestion that they are motivated by money would insult them.

the New Class should be spending some of their pleasurable work hours, he argues, thinking of ways to make work more pleasurable for everyone.

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.

I knew what a service it was to have a body to draw from, and I preferred work that felt like service.

There was another model who worked with me sometimes, a man who was nearly ninety. During the summers, he and his wife traveled around the country in their RV, visiting museums where he studied the masters. Not to learn to paint or sculpt, but to learn the poses. He was the carpenter’s hammer, he told me, or the nail. He had a binder full of Polaroids of the poses he had mastered. There he was, an ancient David, a wizened Augustus, a grizzled Thinker.

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.

Opus, which became our work, was creative and productive. This work was satisfying, a source of pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.

“YOU’RE BORN NAKED AND THE REST IS DRAG.”

Doing drag is an act of treason, he tells a journalist.

I found it funny that she thought I had an inclination for the sort of work that involved seeing a broomstick as a penis, but now here I am, reading Caliban and the Witch, underlining: “the myth of the old witch flying on her broom . . . was the projection of an extended penis, symbol of an unbridled lust.”

The burning of women, the enslavement of Africans, and the theft of indigenous land were all, Silvia Federici suggests, part of the same process. Capitalism, she writes, has always depended on theft and violence.

Thousands of women were tried, stripped and shaved, tortured with needles, hanged, and burned. The witch hunts, Federici argues, weren’t about superstition or religion so much as they were about suppressing the rebellions of women.

In feudal Europe, peasant women lived under the authority of a lord, who claimed possession of them. But they had a kind of economic power that women wouldn’t have again for hundreds of years. Peasant women were often partners in holding land, and they could inherit property. The work they did in their homes and gardens was considered real work with real value. They produced cloth and soap and medicine. Later, as cities grew, women worked in hundreds of professions, as smiths, butchers, bakers, ale brewers, and retailers. But then, during the transition to capitalism, they lost the right to make contracts and represent themselves in court. Not carrying a baby to term became a crime punishable by death. And when married women earned money, their wages were paid to their husbands. Their work, unpaid and compulsory, was now to produce more workers.

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. Amon...

They set fields on fire to protest the enclosure of the commons as private property.