The word “subsistence” is usually taken to mean something substandard, like “brute living” or “bare survival.” The “subsistence farmer” is gaunt and knobbly, like the stick with which he scratches the ground. A subsistent life involves acquiring a taste for cat.
These are lies and should be burnt. “Subsistence” is the act of maintaining one’s substance; an act which keeps the human person chugging along as the human person. And while a hungry belly may be a central part of the human figure, man is more than his most insistent organ. As Jesus Christ put it, “man does not live on bread alone.”
Thomas Aquinas, a late priest with a habit for taking Christ seriously, says “that which subsists is said to be ‘this particular thing.’” (I, Q. 75 a. 2) The “particular thing” that we call “man” is a rational, social, political, and erotic creature, not just a belly. Maintaining such a marvelous substance cries for far more than a life of brute survival (a life which, by definition, is proper to brutes, not men). A subsistent life is one which seeks to live neither in excess nor deficiency of the kind of substance one is. A man thrilled by the subsistent life springs out of bed with the prayer “that today I would be this particular thing that I am and none other!” — a prayer sung by every beetle crawling about Creation, if we had the ears to hear it.
The subsistence motive is characterized by the desire for a limit — to have what one needs, and no more; to be what one is and no less. It is incomprehensible why, as the late historian Karl Polanyi notes, “the forms of industrial life in agricultural Europe were, until recently, not much different from what they had been several thousand years ago” unless we posit a real desire for limitation that shushed the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit which we now take as the natural spirit of mankind. Indeed, to scratch a pre-liberal economy is to uncover a whole set of taboos, ceremonies, rituals, manners, and moral precepts which worked to foster the desire for subsistence — to conserve people in their being, to maintain the social order, and to catechize people in the logic of the book of Proverbs: “[G]ive me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me.” (30:8)
Obviously, the rallying cry “give me neither poverty nor riches!” has no truck with Americans. A presidential candidate would not gain much by taking it for a slogan, however droll the yard signs. In the 19th century, our economists re-described man as a being without the subsistence motive, replacing him with a being invested with a “profit motive.” In this vision, man does not simply desire to subsist, but to “gain,” or as Ludwig von Mises will later put it, to always strive for “the substitution of a more satisfactory state of affairs in place of a less satisfactory state of affairs” within a universe of scarce resources.
Obviously, profit-motivated men existed before modernity. Equally as obviously, they were more often condemned. Jesus’ parable of the rich fool mocks the man who seeks “the substitution of a more satisfactory state of affairs in place of a less satisfactory state of affairs” by building bigger storehouses to amass his crops. Jesus demanded that people be content, directing the “profit motive” towards that heavenly homeland in which riches are abundant, spiritual, and never won at the expense of one’s neighbor: “Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in heaven that does not fail” (Luke 12:33).
Obedience to these demands explains why the Middle Ages gained and profited in spiritual, artistic, intellectual, and other immaterial fields while remaining “frozen” in terms of their production within the field of scarce material goods; settling on custom, repetition, and distribution within agriculture and the trades rather than on growth and gain. They could live with a theological conclusion like that of Thomas Aquinas: “[T]his is forbidden, namely to amass riches beyond the needs of one’s person or office."
An economic system like capitalism (which relies on “the profit motive” to amass material wealth into the hands of the few who own the means of production) cannot exist alongside a subsistence economy without conflict. Men who would maintain a limited life cannot profit an economic system which thrives on the production of new consumer desires for new consumer goods. Within capitalism, rest is condemned; a static GDP is death; a business that does not grow is a failure; a town that does not need the latest round of commodities is backwards; all is striving forward or all is failing; we scarcely have the language to describe a social order in which growth and progress are not considered good in themselves, but only insofar as they serve the maintenance of this particular, limited thing we call “man.”
People who are content with what they have do not work harder, spend more money, or buy more things unless they are made to be discontented. Marx saw, quite rightly, that the capitalist order relies on the evangelical spread of discontent; on the continual transformation of subsistence communities (which maintain and conserve a material status quo) into market economies (which are orientated towards the attainment of greater material profit). This is why the “need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.” Once the subsistent life of the English peasant was transformed into that of an opportunity-pursuing wage-earner, English capitalists began to transform the subsistent communities of Asia and South America into the same industrial order into which they had cajoled, cudgeled, and convinced the majority of their own country.
But it is not merely geographical expansion which allows the transformation of subsistence into the search for profit. There is subsistence in the life of the person; in the family; in thought, prayer, and festival. There is subsistence wherever a person receives a good without coveting more or fearing that it may be taken away from him. There is subsistence wherever there is rest, limit, and enough — a man happy with his breakfast, a woman content to re-read a favorite book, a community content to work together to maintain the peace that exists between their members rather than “grow their economy.” It is a simple truth, but true nonetheless: Resistance to capitalism is founded on the establishment of centers of contentment.
Now it is with much perplexity, nail-biting and scoffing that we have watched our liberal institutions take up definitions of “gender” which encourage an infinite subdividing of our neighbors into new and novel gender identities. But even as we are alarmed, we need not be confused. Within the subsistence tradition, gender is a gift, one given concomitantly with existence itself — “male and female he created them.” To believe this particular description is to rest, for if gender is given then it is not a state to be achieved, purchased, or striven for. To the profiteering eye of the capitalist economy, substantive gender is a fertile ground for the expansion of production; a subsistent holdout yet to be transformed into a market; a possible object of labor, striving, progress, and growth.
Gems like Judith Butler, brilliant and incisive as they are, are mistaken in culling any revolutionary romance from their description of gender as a series of performative acts which only ever appear as something substantive. By transforming gender from a received gift into a human achievement, predicated upon certain kinds of activities, our dearest queer theorists did the good work of their capitalist god, transforming a subsistent reality into a scarce commodity. “The origin of gender is not temporally discrete precisely because gender is not suddenly originated at some point in time after which it is fixed in form,” says Butler somewhere in Gender Trouble. “In an important sense, gender is not traceable to a definable origin because it is itself an originating activity incessantly taking place. No longer understood as a product of cultural and psychic relations long past, gender is a contemporary way of organizing past and future cultural norms, a way of situating oneself in and through these norms, an active style of living one’s body in the world.”
Now gender is something done, and indeed, something we fear might be left undone. It is a purchasable commodity, achievable by acting, dressing, and consuming in ways which the powers of the earth can suggest, encourage, enforce, and profit by. New corporations, media outlets, medical facilities, social workers, law offices, factories, and technologies have already conglomerated to create a new industry, that of the manufacture and maintenance of gender, ensuring that capitalism imperializes yet another foreign country, producing in its naive inhabitants the fear of a loss of a good that they previously rested in as a gift, and ensuring their increased consumption.
In fact, the capitalist order should receive a trophy for this more recent acquisition, as it is not this or that field of subsistence, but the human person itself that, from birth, arrives as a naked being, uncloaked by any gift of gender that would make it “this particular thing,” reliant entirely on power and its products for the attainment of what it is. Now, every high-schooler that discovers that he exists outside of the male-female binary gets to support the regime; every anxiety-ridden mother gets to siphon off her labor and property into medically and spiritually managing her child into some definite gender identity; every insecure cisgender denizen gets to perform his gender-achievement by shopping for the appropriate products; the body becomes money’s canvas and begs to be painted. It is no wonder that our neoliberal institutions, from the E.U. to the U.N., have welcomed and celebrated the very queer forms of gender and sexuality that were supposed to be so rebellious to their institutional squareness. They are one more source of economic production and growth.
When Jesus Christ asks, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’” he does stray from his parable of the rich fool. Rather, in affirming a gendering that is concomitant with creation, he provides a principle of resistance to the profit motive which would turn us to acquisition rather than thanksgiving and increase the power of those men from whom we acquire our gender identity. The Christian, in maintaining the doctrine of an originally given differentiation, practices a queer form of gender, indeed, the queerest yet to grace the books; one which suffers the gift of being male or female rather than empowering and divinizing the powers of this earth as the source of all gendered being. The resistant, rebellious and romantic elements of queer theory, gender theory, and the broader LGBT+ movement are better achieved by and consummated in conversion to Christ’s Holy Church; the slavish, conforming elements are best destroyed by the same; to press this point is essential to the creation of a social order in which we are not divided into a state and market-managed spectrum of identities, but united in charity.