Having and Being Had

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.

“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.”

The women imagined themselves in service to the poor, but the poor served them.

“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.”

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

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

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

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

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