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.

We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

James Guthrie writes, “that ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”

“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.”

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

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

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.

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.

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