Having and Being Had

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 lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

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

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.

The hardest part of working isn’t the work, my mother tells me, it’s the passing. She means passing as an office worker—dressing the part, performing the rituals of office life, and acting appropriately grateful for a ten-hour shift at a computer.

“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.”

“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.

I know now that this is how it is with work—sometimes the contract is revised while you’re on the job, already undressed.

Credit creates the illusion of equality, in that we can all buy the same things on credit, but we can’t all pay the debt back.