Poverty and things
So.
Update: stuff is getting increasingly dicey.
As per usual, here’s the transcript:
just reiterating:
I don’t want donations or tips.
I need job.
We live in a capitalist post-industrial dystopia, and I need to keep building my Reputation and/or get something steady. Please direct me towards any possibilities.
My skills/qualifications:
- MA in anthropology
- professional experience in food systems and food sovereignty
- ongoing decolonial personal and professional advocacy
- specializing in global systems of collapse and Global North-Global South exploitation
- skilled in public speaking
- is fairly pretty looking (femme) and expressive (can do camera work)
- has clear enunciation and a pleasant enough female-coded voice, capable of a neutral US accent and can learn accents quickly (can do voice work)
- writes pretty ok fiction (can write/ghostwrite)
- does halfway decent doodles and watercolor paintings and knows How To Canva and (pirated) Photoshop
- can cry a lot
Help a penniless fool out. Suggestions welcome.
This was supposed to be funny.
I need to update my LinkedIn profile.
But anyway. We see here, my stubborn insistence on being treated like a human being.
Because there’s a line between my acting like an entitled jerk, and respecting myself, and it’s a clear line. The line is the fucking minimum: I am a person, and I exist, and it’s OK that I exist.
Because yes, I’m losing the ability to Say No again (see this article), and thus the ability to feel human. But I’d like to hold on to the sense of dignity and fucking humanity I’ve managed to develop over the past couple of years.
Because that’s the thing of it.
Poverty dehumanizes us.
It turns us into things to even ourselves.
First, let’s look at how “poverty turns us into things.”
Yes, I’m deconstructing my own sentence, but bear with me. This is going to take a while.
So.
“Things.”
What is a “thing” here, in this conversation?
In the hyper-patriarchal context of Roman law, ownership is “usus, fructus, et absus,” use, fruits, and abuse — what one does with one’s property, nonhuman animals, and enslaved individuals (as well as to a slightly more limited extent, their wife/wives and young children) are no one’s business but the patriarch’s. He (always he) can do whatever he wants with what he owns; he can use and abuse — even destroy, and the fruits of what he owns are his to use and abuse as well, unless otherwise constrained by other laws written by other patriarchs.
There is no acknowledgement of the interiority of what is not the patriarch, which is to say that there is no mention of the relationships, agency, thoughts, feelings, capacities and needs of what (not who) the patriarch owns. What the patriarch owns, whether it be a shovel, a horse, or a human being, are things.
Things have no context, they are only themselves. And in themselves, they only have utility. Otherwise they are interchangeable. And when their utility is spent or no longer considered valuable, they are disposable.
This idea has been elaborated on and has become the basis of many European nations’ systems of Civil Law and exported to these nations’ colonial possessions. It underpins many of the structural concepts that buttress modern society. It influenced thinkers such as René Descartes (of cogito ergo sum fame) and Francis Bacon (of “ultimate and infallible knowledge of the universe can be acquired through inductive reasoning” fame), who have gone on to form the bases of many Westerners’ (and, by dint of history, colonized peoples’) ways of thinking and understanding the world.
So what does this imply? That for many of us with Western-style educations and extensive exposure to Euro-American literature, media, and thought, “things” constitute what is not I. Things are context-less, interior-less, and inherently valueless unless given value by the “I.”
And unless I can analyze and inductively reduce an individual Thing until it becomes a part of me and my understanding of the universe, what is “not I” is “other,” and what is “other” does not fully exist in the same way that “I” exist, and thus does not merit the same consideration and basic respect as what has been assimilated into “I.”
Brown person’s post-colonial aside:
Though it long predates both Descartes and Bacon (who are just examples anyway), the “I/not-I” dichotomy is, to my understanding, the underlying logic that engendered the Papal Bulls that constituted the Doctrines of Christian Discovery that sanctioned the colonization of the “Enemies of Christ” outside of Europe.
Following this thread, colonized peoples were “not I” until we were assimilated, as far as our black and brown savage (or our yellow barbaric) selves could be assimilated (see: Canadian Residential Schools, US Indian Boarding Schools, and the imposition of Western educational and political systems in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania). And even then, we could only be as human, as worthy of being considered an “I,” as our capacity to mimic the White Man could allow.
Anyway.
Poverty turns a person into a thing to themself.
Because a thing has no context, no interiority, and no inherent value, poverty un-persons the person so that we see ourselves for what we lack: money.
Value.
Money is value.
According to the logic of the ever-hungry, ever-assimilating Market that pervades and permeates everything that we experience in our modern lives, the Market is Everything. And as humans are primarily social animals, Everything is Society — other people.
I am speaking from a deeply anthropocentric viewpoint here, and I haven’t even begun to touch upon the personhood of ecosystems, nonhuman animals, and other beings.
And one can only participate in the market if they are also part of “people;” a person themself. And “people,” to be considered such in the world of the Market, must create value.
One can only determine whether or not they create value through how much their earn — the outward indicator of value within the individual.
If one doesn’t earn very much, then they don’t create much value.
Then they are not, in themself, particularly valuable. Recall the “money is value” statement I had made earlier.
As far as one is not valuable, they cannot participate in society. And if they cannot participate in society, they cannot be an “I,” a part of the great “I” that is society as articulated by The Market.
And when I say “one” or “they,” I am referring to myself. In this context, I am alone in the universe but subject to its laws, where the universe — because I am Homo sapiens sapiens and thus a social animal- is composed of the elaborate rules and structures created by other H. sapiens sapiens; particularly those who have a lot of power and privilege: society. Anthropocentrically speaking, of course.
And I need money to participate in society.
I need money to buy food for myself, I need money to buy potable water, I need money to travel from Point A in my Global South metropolitan megacity to Point B, I need money to use the pay toilet in the malls I must enter in order to buy the supplies and medicines that keep me alive. I need money (to pay for the internet and the electricity and the working computer) to write this article.
I need money to survive.
And if I cannot “earn” that money myself in exchange for my body’s labor, if I must depend on someone else to “give” me that money without “generating value” in and of myself, I am not a self (“Self” here being the patriarchal “I” or “ego” of the Roman Law that my queer, femme-presenting, non-White ass has arrogated upon themself, despite all Western “logic” to the contrary).
I am not an “I.”
Because I am not an “I,” I am not part of the Market.
Because I am not part of the Market, I am not part of society.
Because I am not part of society, I am, to reiterate, a thing.
Without the capacity to generate value, I am useless in and of myself. I am as fungible as coin: a body to be fed into the Great Machine as fodder for its continued existence as The Great I of Western Society.
I do not exist as a Self (see what I did there?).
As an inherently valueless thing, incapable of generating value for The Great I, I may as well be garbage, and just as inert.
It would be better if I didn’t exist; it would hurt less.
But no.
I am me.
I am.
Beyond the confines of anthropocentric (cis hetero) Patriarchy, Colonial Hegemony, Modernity, and the Market (which are all deeply entangled and in many ways articulate the same Thing), I exist.
That is good and beautiful and, at the minimum, it’s OK.
It is what it is.
And because this existence as a subjective self is repeatedly and categorically denied by the poverty that generates my incapacity to participate in The Great I, I must insist that I exist.
For me.
Because in the face of all of the structures and confines delineated above, no one else will. In fact, the more I insist, the more it is denied me and actively taken from me.
But to be a full human being, living on this living planet, I must insist that I exist, and that the rest of the world exists, that it is fully itself and that there is more to the universe than what can be Known (and thus assimilated) through inductive reasoning and the doubt of what is not-I.
Nice thought, right?
After all, can’t I just shrug off the confining structures of AnthropocentricPatriarchyColonialHegemonyModernityTheMarket and live insistently and joyfully in the entangled and complex Being that is Gaia (or Mother Earth or the Universe or God or whatever)?
Obviously not.
The hungry, tentacular horror that is AnthropocentricPatriarchyColonialHegemonyModernityTheMarket has consumed the entirety of the physical world I know. And because I am a human animal who needs, at the minimum, other human animals, if not the ecosystems our human animal selves are part of, whom can I escape this Great Assimilation with?
Given the layers and layers of conditioning that we are raised in, subjected to, and breathe, could I even ask other people to insist on their existence as well? If I were to respect myself as a Self, I need to respect them as Selves too, and only they can insist on themselves in their own time, at their own terms.
Besides, where could I go?
As mentioned, the parameters of my physical world are constrained. The Market is Everything.
Everywhere I have access to, things are owned and bought and sold.
And in my poverty, as I have repeatedly mentioned, I am a thing.
I could escape into the hinterlands and mountainous interiors of my home’s “Global South frontier,” (a loaded term, I know) to learn from and entwine myself with the bounty of my fellow Beings, but eventually, by dint of the insistence of The Market’s exponential capital growth and its accompanying development aggression, those “frontiers,” through the justifications of Anthropocentrism, Modernity, Colonial Hegemony, and Patriarchy, would be consumed too.
But I need to eat.
And I need money to buy the ingredients for the food I want to prepare (for instance: peanut butter and sliced white bread + assembly through the physical labor of my relatively healthy body = sandwich).
I am inescapably, physically, epistemologically, ontologically, part of AnthropocentricPatriarchyColonialHegemonyModernityTheMarket.
I am trapped.
I cannot not need money.
So I do what I must to get it.
In the introductory screenshot at the beginning of this piece, I outline where I could offer “value” in exchange for money. As a joke. Because I know doing so will not actually get me anywhere.
(And yes, my decolonial — and thus destructive/decivilizational- orientation is “valuable” within the confines of a civilization slowly (failing to) come to terms with its own collapse.)
And I (ironically?) beg the internet-at-large to see that value, so that I could be snapped up into the Great Assimilation and exchange the skills, knowledge, and personhood I bring to the labor I could generate for money, so that I could be valuable in myself.
So that I could then use that symbolic self-value (the money. I mean the money. Money is value. Money is Selfhood.) to continue to survive as a human animal. Or hell. Just as an “animal,” even in the nonhuman, anthropocentric sense.
After all, at my poverty levels, I’m a fungible thing.
And I’m panicking.
Because I need to eat.
If I don’t eat, I eventually die.
Then I can no longer insist.
Then I can no longer be.
