There is an old saying, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. It is a very good saying, but not for the reasons you may think. If you are a working class woman or man it might strike you as a perfectly logical statement, money is not part of nature’s endless bounty but must be striven for with the sweat of your labour. Money, the saying is designed to portray, is a finite resource to be carefully looked after and when it’s gone, it’s gone (until the next pay day maybe).
Money, however, isn’t like that at all. Unlike nature, whose resources must be husbanded and carefully tended, money is a mass produced, manufactured, resource, and, in these days of digital money, is an arbitrary and infinite resource. There is always money for wars and bankers bonuses and government expenses and programmes to oppress the poor costing billions of pounds to set up and maintain. The problem of money isn’t that it is limited; the real problem is that it is highly restricted.
As far as the working class are concerned the message of money is that it isn’t there for them. Working class people serve a function, to be a labour pool and that labour pool is vital to the survival of everyone, including the rich. Working class people produce everything of value in the world and because they are so vital they are oppressed and kept in slavery by restricting their ability to live by paying them a pittance by those who have historically grabbed the land and its resources and pose as its owners.
Working class people value money through labour, what they earn is measured and restricted by the actual hours they work. But that has nothing to do with the value of money, unless all people value it by the same standard and the same amount, which is clearly not the case. A banking CEO picking up his annual bonus of £30 million has clearly not earned that money in any kind of working class way. He is receiving an arbitrary reward far in excess of anything he could in reality produce in goods or manufacturing. He isn’t being rewarded for his labour, he is being rewarded for his inflated sense of worth within the money market, to look after his own. If that same CEO started a factory he would likely advertise for workers at minimum wage even and despite profits that might allow him to pay far in excess of the minimum wage and he would do so to ensure that workers came back Monday morning because without their labour the CEO would have no business and therefore no soaring profits. There are no eye watering bonuses for hard working people, only more oppression, mean pay slips and more labouring.
Maggie Thatcher smashed the Unions and David Cameron embarked on the most vicious war on the poor in history and is driving us back to a the kind of conditions that prevailed during the Industrial Revolution until labour organised itself and we began to see some small improvements. For working class people money is the means through which we are enslaved and the hardest thing of all is getting enough people to see it and to stand up to the slavers. When working class people say they need money they are called greedy, selfish and as displaying a sense of entitlement. When rich people want more money they are treated as worthy and we are meant to be obsequious, polite and respectful towards them.
Give over! We are worth better than this not least respect but mostly self respect. To get a better deal we have to fight for it, it will never, ever, be offered.
Keith Lindsay Cameron
Join us in helping to bring reality and decency back by SUBSCRIBING to our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ1Ll1ylCg8U19AhNl-NoTg and SUPPORTING US where you can: Award Winning Independent Citizen Media Needs Your Help. PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH https://dorseteye.com/donate/