Having and Being Had

It also offered an opportunity for me to think about the intersection between my social capital and my cultural capital. One is tied to the other—I would not know who I know without what I know, and I could not know what I know without who I know—and both are tied to economic capital.

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

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

could also have said that it’s a critique, an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance.

“Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power.” Capitalism, she writes, was a counterrevolution.

Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.

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