Help, you’re trapped (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less than you produce. Give the surplus to your boss. Survive on your wage. Spend it on buying back what you and the other wage slaves have produced. No wages left. Need money. So . . . get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less that you produce . . .  Repeat until you die or are thrown on the scrapheap.

That is your life. You call it being employed. “Luckier” than the poor sod next door: he’s unemployed, forced to look for a boss to exploit him. Employment is exploitation It's legalised robbery: you produce the goods and services and others, who possess the means of producing, get rich. Employment is a trap. You're in it.

The sole reason for workers being on earth is to be employed—robbed—trapped. Without us there would be no surplus value produced. If it could be created without us perhaps we would be culled like seals. But we are necessary to the system. Out of the hole which capitalism has dug for us comes profit. Lots of lovely profits to keep the rich rich. Aren’t they lucky to have us?

But you never asked to be in this trap. Tough luck. It was an act of birth. “Sorry. Mrs Bloggs, but you've given birth to a wage slave" Workers are those who own virtually nothing worth selling except ourselves: our mental and physical abilities, our work. (That’s why we’re called workers—because we’re forced to work ) “Well done, Lady Fotheringdale-Smythe, you’ve given birth to a healthy baby parasite, no sooner out the womb than the inheritor of five company directorships and a trust fund worth more than Worker Bloggs will earn in his lifetime as a wage slave.” No trap for baby capitalist. Well, somebody has to mind the Caribbean beaches while the rest of us look after the factories and offices.

Illustration by George Meddemmen 

You want to get out of the trap and be like the loafers who live off the surplus? Easier said than done, wage slave. You might try robbing a bank. The prisons are full of wage slaves who tried escaping from the trap only to book themselves into a cell. Or do the lottery. There’s always a hope that the fifteen-million-to-one odds will go your way. And that is precisely the function of the lottery: to offer hope to the trapped. Pay a pound and purchase your illusory crack in the cell wall.

Or you can grin and bear it. Most do. Some don’t. Suicide is always an option. (At least it’s not illegal any more.) Or drugs. Yes, the shop doorways are full of kids who thought they could have a little Ecstasy within the trap. Or you could always turn to religion and screw up your mind without shooting drugs. Pie in the sky when you die. But what about life before you die? You're not here to live, wage slave You're here to produce profits. Living is something you can attempt in your own time.

In this trap your time is rarely your own. Most of it is spent being employed. That’s what you're here for. That’s what gives you the right to go home at night and prepare to work the next day. A slave couldn't go home. Slaves belonged to the boss. Slaves had no rents or mortgages to think aboul. You do, sucker. No sooner are you let off the employer’s chain it ’s back home to a place that you must rent or borrow money to live in. You’d probably prefer to live somewhere else. The trap can get a little cramped. That’s the luck of the draw: if you were one of the one percent who own and control the earth's resources you would have had a stately home, or a mansion at the very least, to pass away your idle hours in. But your idle hours are all too few. Unless you’re unemployed in which case you’re forced to be banging on the exploiter’s door begging him to legally rob you. And then it’s back to doing time for the profit system.

You work as you work because you're trapped. You live where and as you live because you’re trapped You travel in a lousy car in congested traffic or in overcrowded public transport on which you pay to go to be exploited because you’re trapped. Your children are born into the same trap as you’re in and they are sent to school to learn how to be trapped. You are well and truly trapped in the profit-grinding machine of this rotten social system And your bosses call it freedom.

And in a way you are free, because like every trap there is a door. The fact that those pointing the way out are labelled loonies or troublemakers might lead you to stay put. You might even be scared of the freedom which lies beyond the cage. At least in the trap you get your wage, just like a dog on a lead gets its bone. You are free to accept your bone to chew on. Tory bones. Labour bones. Green bones. Trotskyist bones. Hie well-adjusted inmate likes his bone.

Steve Coleman