Having and Being Had

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

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

Investment isn’t any more of a sin, I think, than gambling. But when shareholders profit at the expense of the workers who produce those profits, it’s a means of extraction. An economy of extraction is what we’re retiring on, those of us who get to retire.

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.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.

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

“No aristocrat ever contemplated the loss of feudal privileges with more sorrow than a member of this class would regard his descent into ordinary labor where the reward was only the pay.”

The range of words for work was more expansive, Komlosy notes, before work came to be defined by paid employment in the nineteenth century. “Much of what once was assumed to be work was later excluded from the category as it became increasingly focused on gainful employment.”

“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.

While leisure has gone out of fashion, a new class has emerged—a class of people who don’t work for money. They are paid, but payment is not the point. They work for a sense of fulfillment, for the rewards of the work itself. Pay is incidental, though it serves, Galbraith notes, as an “index of prestige.” And prestige, along with respect, is a sour