Ask a Crow

NB: we channelled a visitor from another time and space to answer these questions –  please meet Stone Telling! 

“Hoarding Equals Poverty

Giving Equals wealth”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

Dear CAW,

I have heard that the revolution starts at home and my community talks about it a lot. The polycule I live with, and the wider community that we are part of really work at undoing the many interlocking structures that aim to destroy us … BUT every time I try to talk about class and money with my more wealthy roommates, specifically about figuring out a way to share resources that goes beyond being “equal” or even so-called equity, I hit a wall. Why is talking about how we share money or even talk about class in a straightforward way so bloody hard? I’d love some advice on how to approach this issue.

Dear hitting a wall,

We want to start off by saying that you (and your crew) are not alone in this. Most collectives crumble because they are not willing to be fully transparent about money and resources. 

If you create a co-housing situation with the idea of sharing resources and keeping each other afloat, it can crumble when someone thinks they have more, deserve more, or can dictate resource use to others. It can show up with the use of shared items or spaces as well as in determining how people contribute to financial needs. 

To try to answer this we can start by considering some possible reasons that people don’t share money. And then we’ll get into how we can approach this issue in a way that is actually generative when it comes into our relationships. 

The immediate reason people don’t share resources is possibly their own fear of becoming destitute and falling through the cracks. The stigma of poverty is so gigantic in our culture that people who are seen to fail at working and making a living are barely seen as people at all. 

The capitalist logic that imbues our relationship to money is that we must always save for a rainy day. If you don’t need it now, you might need it tomorrow. And it’s true that unpredictable catastrophes happen: job loss, illness, and accidents. There is a stereotype that the wealthy are thrifty, intelligently saving their money, while the poor spend wantonly on negligible pleasures and vices. (It turns out that being rich costs much less than being poor. Also we could question what saving means, but that’s beyond our purpose here.) 

So when someone does give another person money, they often feel they have a say in how the other person spends it. After all, it’s an extension of their body. Money sharing is thus very often conditional on how you, the borrower, will be using the money. Is it something important, serious, real? Or are you going to buy a six-pack? Because that’s not necessary. 

And even if the lender says they don’t care how you spend it or need not to know, most of us have internalised this kind of shame so we do it to ourselves –  we feel even more shame when we think we use it "frivolously" because after all wasn’t it our bad decisions in the first place that got us in this position to need to borrow money. Of course this idea of “bad decisions” is more bullshit lies about what causes poverty.

But the stinginess doesn’t only come from a disapproval of people’s apparent vices. It can also stem from ableist fears of  chronic illness and disability. Someone might help out a friend in need, but if that need seems endless, they might soon recoil at providing that support. This experience is pretty typical for those of us who are sick or disabled, to the extent that most of us internalize a feeling that we are supposed to deal with our issues alone and don’t even ask for help in the first place. 

Next, there is this assumption in polite bourgeois culture that you never ask what another person makes. You don’t ask how much they pay for their apartment. There are so many aspects of money that are mystified and the convention of keeping each other in the dark is also the political or social obstacle to us organizing or collectivizing. 

Some people grow ashamed when they get a raise or know they make more than someone else–and this can be more intense if you think that this other person is doing work that clearly deserves more pay or is chronically undervalued. Probably most frequent is a sense of competition that we feel when we hear someone is making more money than us at a job that we don’t feel is as worthy. I would say though straight away that if you are deeming another working person’s job unworthy then there is something worth reflecting on. (I don’t mean CEOs, or bankers, or corporate lawyers, etc.)

A friend just told me about a person who became indignant when she heard that a workers doing dangerous manual labor were better paid than her as a teacher, even though she had gained these higher degrees. And she also believed that her ideas of radical politics made her work more important. I don’t need to get into any reason why one job should be paid a certain amount based on skill, danger, usefulness, whatever. For most of us, we have limited options and we make our best choice. This contradiction of saying you want everyone to be free and then believing your work matters more — well that’s just bullshit.

But the deepest ideological structure that can be an obstacle with sharing money though is the idea of property. When people don’t actually own property as land (or house), then their money is the property they do have. Property is completely bound up with selfhood (in French you can see the ideological tangle quite clearly in the etymology: the root propre can work as an adjective to mean one’s own or to be clean). Property creates privacy, a sense of one’s self, and it also protects us from the uncleanliness of not owning. Money becomes an object that stands in for this–even as a total abstraction, like a number in a bank account. 

It is difficult to imagine how to hit this one head on though, since it could easily devolve into accusations and defensiveness.  If the commodity is a fetish, then money is the taboo in relation to that fetish. The best way to worship the things we need and want works is by pretending that we don’t have to do anything to get them. When you are going to buy something, you may think about the hours of work it costs to get the thing. But once you begin to use it, you likely don’t keep that calculation in your head. As money works through this illusion, it vanishes once it’s spent. Furthermore, if you take an anti-capitalist view that imagines a world without money, you could easily just dismiss money as unimportant even if your bank account is well padded and you have what you need.

Against this (self-) possession are the communal dreams of sharing resources. It is quite possible for this dream to exist at the same time in the same person with the deeply held belief that one’s money is one's own only. We can dream of different freedoms from within our own cages without feeling able or willing to break out of them.  

A friend once criticized a woman using food stamps for her food for her and her kid at the farmer’s market because she perceived this woman as white and privileged based on her appearance. Therefore, the friend decided she was most likely not in need of this support. She said that if this woman was able to get food stamps, it somehow took away from someone else who was more in need. 

It’s simply not true that one person’s use of state resources somehow takes away from another person’s access. There’s more than enough in this world and we want everyone to take and get what they need! If your basic needs are met, it’s more likely that you will feel able to share. If I have money for food, then I know I have money to give to people when they ask me. 

But many (or most) of us live in precarity, where our income is unpredictable. If you are doing gig work, for example, it is hard to figure out what you can share. There are lean times and flush times. With it always changing, you need to have some backup funds for when you can’t find work.

So how do we rethink our social relations around need and want so that they don’t reproduce the moralistic feelings of righteousness or shame? Of deserving or undeserving? 

It may sound silly, but even starting by talking openly about these ideas and structures goes a long way. If we normalize not hiding financial issues, then we start to reframe our relations to money away from privacy, and more towards knowledge sharing, which can then lead to resource sharing. 

The way we like to live life is: when you have money, spend it—including spending it on the people around you. Normalize giving money away. We easily get caught up in the preciousness of this fleeting resource or the precarity we experience, but it feels way better to buy someone dinner. Doing this regularly might also help you imagine that, when you are in need, there is likely someone who will want to help you.

In the case of roommates, it can be pretty normal for us to divide the rent based on the size of our rooms—and that division often comes from the resources that people have. We can carry this into other parts of living together. If someone is able to contribute more, that can help relieve someone who can’t. And if the tables turn, then it will become normal for this relationship to reverse. Again, if you feel able to say what you need with the expectation that you will be heard, it becomes possible for people to put themselves in the position of aid. Ultimately, this approach can create an environment where everyone is thinking about how they can contribute to a communal thriving. When we know there is a safety net through others around us, we are way more willing to be generous. 

Yours,

Stone Telling