by John Hamer
‘You’re about as fair-speakin’ a man as I’ve met for some time’, said Harlow, winking at the others.
‘Yes, mate’, said Philpot. ‘Anyone would agree to that much, it’s as clear as mud.’
‘Now’, continued Owen. ‘I am a capitalist; or rather, I represent the landlord and capitalist class. That is to say, all these raw materials belong to me. It does not matter for our present argument how I claimed possession of them, or whether I have any real right to them; the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessities of life are now the property of the Landlord and Capitalist class. I am that class; all these raw materials belong to me.’
‘Good enough’, agreed Philpot.
‘Now you three represent the Working Class; you have nothing – and for my part, although I have all these raw materials, they are of no use to me – what I need is – the things that can be made out of these raw materials by work; but as I am too lazy to work myself, I have invented the Money Trick to make you work for me. But first I must explain that I possess something beside the raw materials. These three knives represent – all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. And these three coins…’ – taking three halfpennies from his pocket – ‘…represent my Money Capital’. ‘But before we go any further...’, said Owen interrupting himself, ‘...it is most important that you remember that I am not supposed to be merely a capitalist, I represent the whole of the Capitalist Class. You are not supposed to be just three workers – you represent the whole Working Class’.
‘All right, all right’, said Crass, impatiently. ‘We all understand that. Git on with it’.
Owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks. ‘These represent the things which are produced by labour, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. We will suppose that three of these blocks represent a week’s work. We will suppose that a week’s work is worth one pound and we will suppose that each of these halfpennies is a sovereign [a gold coin worth one pound – a significant sum 100 years ago – JH]. We’d be able to do the trick better if I had real sovereigns but I forgot to bring any with me’.
‘I’d lend you some…’ said Philpot regretfully ‘…but I left me purse on our grand pianner’.
As by a strange coincidence, nobody happened to have any gold with them, it was decided to make shift with the halfpennies.
‘Now this is the way the trick works…’
‘Before you goes on with it…’ interrupted Philpot, apprehensively, ‘…don’t you think we’d better ‘ave someone to keep watch at the gate in case a slop [police officer] comes along? We don’t want to get runned-in, you know’.
‘I don’t think there’s any need for that’, replied Owen. ‘There’s only one slop who’d interfere with us for playing this game and that’s police constable Socialism’.
‘Never mind about Socialism…’ said Crass irritably. ‘…git along with the bloody trick’.
Owen now addressed himself to the working classes as represented by Philpot, Harlow and Easton.
‘You say that you are all in need of employment and as I am the kind-hearted Capitalist Class, I am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you Plenty of Work. I shall pay each one of you, one pound per week and a week’s work is that you must all produce three of these square blocks. For doing this work you will each receive your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with and the things you produce will of course be mine, to do as I like with. You will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done your week’s work, you shall have your money’.
The Working Classes accordingly set to work and the Capitalist Class sat down and watched them. As soon as they had finished they passed the nine little blocks to Owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages.
‘These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can’t live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you’ll have to buy them from me. My price for these blocks is – one pound each.’
As the Working Classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and consumed one third of the produce of their labour. The Capitalist Class also devoured two of the square blocks and so the net result of the week’s work was that the kind Capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of the things produced by the labour of others and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three pounds in money and in addition, four pounds-worth of goods. As for the Working Classes, Philpot, Harlow and Easton, having each consumed the pound’s worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were then in precisely the same condition as when they started work – they had nothing.
This process was repeated several times. For each week’s work the producers were paid their wages. They kept on working and spending all their earnings. The kind-hearted Capitalist consumed twice as much as any one of them and his pile of wealth continually increased. In a little while – reckoning the little squares at their market value of one pound each – he was worth one hundred pounds and the Working Classes were still in the same condition as when they began and were still tearing into their work as though their lives depended upon it.
After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted Capitalist, just after having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools – the machinery of production – the knives, away from them and informed them that owing to over-production, all his store-houses were now glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.
‘Well and wot the bloody ‘ell are we to do now?’ demanded Philpot.
‘That’s not my business’, replied the kind-hearted Capitalist. ‘I’ve paid you your wages and provided you with Plenty of Work for a long time. I have no more work for you to do at present. Come round again in a few months and I’ll see what I can do for you’.
‘But what about the necessaries of life?’ demanded Harlow. ‘We must have something to eat’.
‘Of course you must…’, replied the Capitalist affably. ‘…and I shall be pleased to sell you some’.
‘But we ain’t got no bloody money!’
‘Well, you can’t expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn’t work for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something. You should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty’.
The unemployed looked blankly at each other, but the rest of the crowd only laughed. And then the unemployed began to abuse the kind-hearted Capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled-up in his warehouses or; to be allowed to work again and produce some more for their own needs; and even threatened to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. But the kind-hearted Capitalist told them not to be insolent and spoke to them about honesty and said if they were not careful, he would have their faces battered-in for them by the police or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at Featherstone and Belfast.
‘Of course…’, continued the kind-hearted Capitalist, ‘…if it were not for foreign competition I should be able to sell these things that you have made and then I should be able to give you Plenty of Work again, but until I have sold them to somebody or other or used them all myself, you will have to remain idle’.
…Philpot held out his cap for [charitable] subscriptions… and the kind-hearted Capitalist was so affected by the sight of their misery that he gave them one of the Sovereigns
he had in his pocket; but as this was no use to them, they immediately returned it to him in exchange for one of the small squares of the necessaries of life, which they divided and greedily devoured. And when they had finished eating, they gathered around the philanthropist and sang, ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ and afterwards Harlow suggested that they should ask him if he would allow them to elect him to Parliament.” ‘The Great Money Trick’ from ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell, 1910
It is this very system that leads to those who ‘have’ living in greater and greater opulence whilst those who ‘have not’ are consigned, at best, to being wage-slaves for their entire lives. A small percentage thus benefits from every possession they could possibly ever want or need whilst a rapidly increasing under-class of the permanently deprived, live in tent-villages or even in their cars and in cardboard boxes on the filthy streets of our cities. In America it has recently been reported that of the one million homes currently being repossessed each year, and growing, the banks that now ‘own’ them are literally burning and demolishing tens of thousands of them each month in order to maintain the balance of supply and demand in their favour and thus artificially fix house prices at grossly-inflated levels. Yet another example of how twisted and sick the system has become.
And what is the world’s greatest consumer feeding-frenzy now inflicted upon us by those who enslave us? None other than Christmas, that wonderful festival of love, warmth and family bliss. Christianity commandeered an originally pagan festival, ‘Yuletide’ and imposed its own version of events upon it and slowly by degrees, this supposed festival of ‘love one another’, has been manipulated into becoming an orgy of consumerism. Originally, Christmas was a time for families, a time of quiet contemplation, celebration and rest and a time to think about and where possible, help those less fortunate than ourselves. Now it is a living nightmare for millions. Bombarded for weeks on end by ruthless and incessant advertising and coerced and harried into buying ridiculously expensive gifts and toys by the huge propaganda mill that usually starts turning around early October, many parents borrow money at extortionate interest rates simply to buy their children throw-away consumables and soon-to-be-obsolete electronic gadgets. The result of this action usually results in their struggling all through most of the following year paying-off their debts to banks and corporate interests. The only alternative to this for many is a feeling of extreme guilt throughout what is supposed to be the happiest time of the year, because they have been unable to buy what their children most wanted. This is emotional blackmail of the highest degree and engineered solely for the purpose of making huge, obscene amounts of money for the Elite few.
“How can we, as a nation, wrestle our economy from the grip of greedy corporations when we play into their hands every year? Why do we buy their lies this time of year while rejecting them the rest of the year? How can we stop the cycle of debt? How about this: a nationwide boycott of Christmas purchases. Boy, wouldn’t that put a crimp in corporate profits.” Barbara H. Peterson, farmwars.info, November 2011
Significantly, this huge spend-fest every November / December becomes more and more desperate and frenzied with each passing year as more and more corporations become utterly dependent on Christmas-time profits and as their desperation increases, the effects of this are felt by us all in the shape of their concerted assault on all five of our senses in an attempt to convince us to spend, spend, spend.
The main waste-product of all this craziness is humanity itself. When people are forced to live and work in an utterly destructive, soulless system, it causes extreme distress and misery. As humans our potential is limitless, bounded only by the extent of our own imaginations, but under the present regime we are little more than manufacturing and consuming machines, slaves to the system and as demonstrated in the excerpt from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists above, a medium by which those who ‘own’ us body and soul, can perpetuate their ‘cycle of profitability’ by using we humans as the manufacturers and then in turn, the consumers of those manufactured goods.
This cycle has been responsible for the destruction of the human spirit and the cause of most illnesses, which are, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, mainly psychologically induced and I include in this all the so-called physical ailments, which are exacerbated by poor, destructive western diets, high in fat and sugar and low in essential vitamins and nutrients. Thus, ‘the system’ in conjunction with science and religion has combined to ensure that billions are tired of living and yet terrified of dying.
Another serious by-product of extreme consumerism is the huge increase in crime. We are all programmed from birth to see our success or failure as people, in terms of the abundance or lack of material possessions we have accumulated. She lives in a tiny, rundown house, therefore she is a failure. He has a high-powered job, holding the power of life and death over hundreds, with a huge salary and therefore he is a success. Is it surprising therefore when more and more people turn to crime to further their own Elite-seeded ambitions of self-aggrandisement, by taking things that are not theirs and even worse, by actually killing people to acquire more money or possessions?
In early August 2011 England was rocked by violent rioting and looting in many of its major cities. The large-scale riots fuelled by a combination of a corrupt, broken society and disaffected youth broke-out countrywide and thus threatened the well-being of us all. Not through fear of being physically attacked or being actually caught-up in the mindless violence, but simply due to the fact that this is exactly what the government wants as an excuse to further curb our freedoms in the guise of ‘security’, in effect, to enslave us for our own protection. This is borne out by many independently corroborated reports of both police and fire-services actually being ordered to ‘stand-down’ and let the mayhem continue unhindered. There was also talk of military intervention and curfews, but fortunately these did not come to pass, at least on this occasion but they will in future, only time will tell. In any event, they have certainly now been ‘set-up’ in the public’s minds as a future possibility by the actions of the mob in conjunction with the policy of police non-intervention. These are classic ‘problem–reaction–solution’ tactics as usual, of course.
The looting, thievery and lawlessness that the British PM, David Cameron condemned at the time is simply the reflection at street-level of British society of what is taking place on a much greater scale in the upper echelons of government, commerce and the economy. Despite their pinstripe suits and upper-class accents, we have been subjected to decades of looting and thievery of economic and financial resources by the corporate and banking Elite, aided and abetted by a long succession of alternating, corrupt Labour and Conservative governments. The taxpayer bailout of corrupt, failed banks initiated by the former Labour PM, Gordon Brown and now overseen by Cameron, paid for in large part by austerity from public spending cuts, is but the latest manifestation of the official theft from the majority, to further enhance the already outrageous wealth of the Elite.
Cameron and his gang of super-rich criminals are currently advocating £100 billion in public spending cuts to pay for the criminal enterprise known as British banking. This is racketeering on a scale that looters in our inner cities could only stand in-awe of and indeed, as we see, only attempt to emulate it on a much smaller, albeit far more visible, scale. Where is the mainstream media condemnation of all this upper-class, ‘white-collar’ crime? They are certainly not slow in condemning the ‘mindless violence’ perpetrated by the ‘have-nots’ in our society and calling, almost in unison for totally disproportionate sentences for those found guilty and this attitude is now unsurprisingly reflected in the attitude now prevailing amongst the unthinking ‘sheeple’.
“The cause of this mayhem cannot be traced to any legitimate political grievance; it is almost entirely the product of a diseased culture, fostered by multinational corporations and the celebrity-obsessed entertainment industry that brainwashes young p
eople to aspire to lifestyles they can never possibly attain. The social decline of young people becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result of constant media fascination with demonising youngsters and presenting them with a putrid diet of ‘heroes’, vacuous footballers and drug-addled musicians, whose behaviour makes impressionable kids think that life revolves around being constantly trashed, engaging in amoral sexual conquests and proving their manhood by pointless displays of animal-like aggression. MTV-manufactured rap icons, movies and video games have trained an entire generation of disadvantaged kids to grow up as wannabe gangsters, marauding around town with their jeans half-way down their thighs in huge mobs intimidating the public. Rampant consumerism is also to blame. Deprived kids on benefits cannot afford the iPods and laptops they are told they must own to be accepted by their peers, so an opportunity like this cannot be wasted. Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy.” Paul Joseph Watson, prisonplanet.com, 10th August 2011, commenting upon the British riots of August 2011
This prevailing system of extreme consumerism, conditions us all and especially the more impressionable among us, to believe that we need to indulge in regular, ongoing ‘spending sprees’ in order to be accepted and to ‘feel good’ about ourselves. But in times of high unemployment and economic depressions, more people are denied the opportunity to ‘succeed’ through their own efforts and even to be able to feed their families adequately, let alone partake in the so-called luxuries of life. Is it such a shock then that in this situation the dispossessed turn to crime to satisfy those artificially engendered wants or needs? Resentment at being cast-aside by the system is rife today and this then leads to resentment of anything and anyone. In this state of mind, people have murdered defenceless old ladies for the few pounds in their purse, their inherent reasoning being that the state and society has no respect for me so therefore why should I have any respect for anyone else?