Mulling Over the Manifesto, Part 3

Usufruct, not Usury

Work for nothing. 
Take all you have, and be poor.

This is Part 3 of my project of taking my sweet time working through the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry.  To go back to previous posts, click here.

The last movement of the poem that I reflected upon was so rich that I ran out of room to discuss it all.   It feels very fitting that the short but powerful phrase above gets an entire post all to itself.

 I’ve wondered and wondered about, and around, and at this line over and over again.  What, exactly, did he mean by it?  What does he intend by phrasing it this way?  

Love of money may seem to be at the core of Mr. Berry’s warning in the first stanza . . . but it’s not exactly love of money.  It's the unbridled desire for ever-growing piles of money; it’s love of the idea that, if I have plenty, I can leverage that plenty to get even more.  The name of this addiction to ever-growing money is usury.  In many other writings, Mr. Berry has been clear in his condemnation of usury as a practice explicitly forbidden by many major religious traditions, including Christianity and Judaism, for good reason.  And yet, the entire world economy of so-called “developed nations” is built on the never-ending application of interest-bearing money to drive never-ending extractive growth!   

There are two different levels where we could train our attention to usury at this point: the macro or the micro: the abstract vs. the personal. Mr. Berry’s poem is clearly and intentionally written at the personal level.  He doesn't spend time in this particular poem dwelling on the very real and ever-increasing world-scale damage that occurs and is still occuring when many of us choose to live in ignorance and constant desirous consuming.   However, one of the many things that I admire so much in Mr. Berry is that he also can very effectively and knowledgeably write at this macro level.  I find it interesting that in 1975, just two years after publishing this poem, he published the book that made his name much better known in many circles, The Unsettling of America.  In that book, Mr. Berry did explicitly describe and call out the soil-depleting small-town-hollowing economic and farm policies of the United States at that time.  He’s been fighting a battle against these policies and for sane policies ever since. Along with his friend Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, he’s advocated for a 50 year Farm Bill to replace the every-five-years short-sighted pork-barrel special-interest agribusiness-driven farm policies that have continued unabated since he wrote that book.  We still haven't found a way to break this terrible trend, and the land and the people are suffering for it. Mr. Berry introduces the idea of usufruct as a more life-affirming biblically-grounded organizing principle. Usufruct applied to the entire world is the notion that since everything belongs to God, including our own bodies and every capacity and gift that we possess, right down to our very breath, we cannot claim to own anything, but are only temporary users and caretakers and stewards of the Gift. Usufruct puts the ownership where it rightfully belongs: out of human hands. We therefore have no right to damage the gift, or wall it off, or hoard it, and we have no right to extract more of it from less fortunate others.

Returning to the personal level of this poem, given all of this, Mr. Berry says that we should “work for nothing.”  What might this mean? 

“Work for nothing” could mean “work for no predetermined reward, monetary or otherwise”, or simply “don’t work for wages.” So, one can do work that is volunteer, or pro-bono.   This is the kind of work that is done by folks in churches, non-profit organizations of all kinds and many others who give of their time and skills for causes or motives that are neighborly and well-meaning.  I’m quite convinced that this, and not the monetized, market-driven work that characterizes our economy, is the work that actually makes the world go ‘round. And I do think this is part of what Mr. Berry means.  But I think he means even more than that. 

 I think he actually means, quite literally, work for nothing.  I think he means, work for the sake of the work alone, without any attachment to what the outcome of the work will be, nor for the sake of what we might get back for our work.  Work, in other words, with no expectation of reward of any kind, except the reward that comes through doing the work itself.  This is key.  If we work in this way, then we could revive a love of work that, unfortunately, many of us have lost today.   Work today as we’ve reduced and corrupted it almost always implies something distasteful, something coerced or forced, something that we don’t really want to do but which must be done for pay, or benefits, or survival, or some other kind of gain or advantage.   If we are no longer compelled to work, but want to work; if we go to our work joyfully because we understand ourselves to be doing what we were meant to do in the world; this further breaks the cycle of “wanting more of everything ready made.” What a revolutionary concept this is! Inspired deeply by this idea, I’ve been slowly but steadily turning more and more of my own work into that kind of work (this Substack being one example of that!).  Without letting go of the (very real) need to be responsible with the money and resources and advantages we have, I am constantly trying to push the boundary of “working for nothing”.  We need to stop imagining that the purpose of life is to avoid work, or to leverage our work for maximum profit and leisure, and come to a very deep realization that good work is a gift and a birthright of being a human person with a body on earth. We were made to do good work!  Knowing and experiencing this can inoculate us against all the really terrible work that is out there under the guise of “good jobs”. Even if the job entails work that we like, there are all kinds of ways that compelled, compensated work corrupts and ruins the work by bringing in elements of scarcity into what should be an abundance. 

Having pointed to the sacredness of human work (and the potential corrupting power of “good pay and benefits”), Mr. Berry takes it even farther: “Take all you have, and be poor”.  Without falling into a romanticism of poverty, I do think it’s instructive to draw on whatever experience one has to imagine choosing some elements of “poverty on purpose”.  Someone who is poor has to make choices, sometimes hard ones, to prioritize that which is most important.  We typically think of greater wealth as taking us pleasantly further and further away from that demand.  Having extra money means we can make easier choices, or even choose not to do certain things but pay someone else to do it for us.  So, is Mr Berry saying to voluntarily take up some of those hard choices, to “do without” and “make do”?  Yes, I think so, but, again, I think he’s saying more than that.  He has written quite a lot about the idea of thrift, and I think he’s definitely invoking that idea here in this line.  Thrift is a rich concept for him, that intertwines with the above understanding of work. It means something like, “Have everything you need to do your work well (your work that you are doing not for imagined gain, but simply because it is your work, work that you feel called to do in your family and community). But don’t have or want anything that shortcuts your work, or extends your work beyond limits you can’t keep a handle on, or sidelines you to being a spectator to your life and work.”  That’s quite a long description, and I’m sure Mr. Berry himself has said it much more eloquently somewhere.

We often think of poverty as an unmitigated evil to be eradicated, and certainly this is true in the case of the grinding poverty that the usury-based money system imposes on so many people, precisely so that the rest of us can live with far too much.  In fact, and with deep irony, the usury-based money system keeps even those of us that are well-off strapped into constant debt, too. 

However, consider this: The poor are unique in that they have no power of coercion.  They have no retirement accounts, no leveraged assets, no slaves.  They are responsible only for themselves and have no reason for pride of position, or to be unnecessarily puffed up.  Is this what Mr. Berry means?  That we should strive to live with “all that we have” in such a way that we find our own nourishing work, and do it freely, and abdicate as best we can from the destructive and grotesque advantages that accrue to anyone who has extra money in our economy?  I think so.  This is a hard thing, and not one that I find easy to fulfill in my life.  Trying to extract oneself from the many ways that having money naturally brings you more money is very, very hard to do (and yet, no matter how much you have, you don’t feel like you have enough!).  One thinks, for example, about one’s retirement accounts: money just sitting there, gathering more money, through usury.  In Sacred Economics Charles Eisenstein has written the definitive exploration of this usury-based money system, for those who want to read deeply about why is it is set up this way, and what we can each do to transform it from usury into something more like usufruct. I have a quotation from Mr. Eisenstein below to end this essay.

These are my best thoughts right now about what Mr. Berry has meant by these lines.  It comes back to me over and over again as a seven-word mantra worthy of carrying around with me in my daily living.  I think that if more of us embraced something like “voluntary poverty,” or “thrift,”  a lot of the power of the machine that is keeping so many people involuntarily poor would be lost. Working toward this goal would be good work indeed.

We will move on more deeply into Mr. Berry’s vision for a working, care-taking free human being next time as we fill out the landscape of his manifesto of sanity in a world of madness.

"In the old days, military power and forced tribute were the instruments of empire; today it is debt. Debt forces nations and individuals to devote their productivity toward money. Individuals compromise their dreams and work at jobs to keep up with their debts. Nations convert subsistence agriculture and local self-sufficiency, which do not generate foreign exchange, into export commodity crops and sweatshop production, which do. (10) Haiti has been in debt since 1825, when it was forced to compensate France for the property (i.e., slaves) lost in the slave revolt of 1804. When will it pay off its debt? Never. (11) When will any of the Third World pay off its debt and devote its productivity to its own people? Never. When will most of you pay off your student loans, credit cards, and mortgages? Never."
Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics
https://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-6-the-economics-of-usury/

Photo of print artwork on my mantlepiece from Watkahootee Print Shop