Having and Being Had

She was underscoring the fact that some people get to call their work art and others have to just do their work.

How can we hope to change anything, she asked, “if we don’t rebel in the everyday?”

A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.

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.

Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work. I need another word.

my evidence suggests that the stories we tell ourselves about money are full of white lies—not harmless, but white.

I was intrigued, as a child, that a bottle could also be a woman. She had a job, this woman, holding syrup. But when it was all poured out, when she was empty and her job was done, she became something else.

We didn’t have mothers and grandmothers teaching us about capital. But here’s the thing—she circles her womb with her hand—we are capital. We are the means of production. I had three children, she says. I’ve been the means of production. Now I want to own the means of production.

“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.”

But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.