The popular souvenir of coronations etc. is a decorated pottery mug, and for last month’s royal jubilee a not-too-tawdry one cost about 80p. That is one-fiftieth of the common sort of net wage. On 5th June The Observer mentioned some more expensive souvenirs. Harrods had sold “a silver fruitbowl supported by a silver Lion and Unicorn rampant and bearing the Jubilee hallmark” for £8.750; Asprey’s had “a silver cigar box with an engraving of the Palace of Westminster on the lid and a lining of Macassar ebony” for £4,750. On the one-fiftieth principle, these would be bought from disposable incomes of £437,500 and £237,500 any week.
Doesn’t it make you angry? This is the flesh on the bones of statistics of the distribution of wealth. Fat smirking politicians and industrialists rise from banquet-tables to pronounce that the sun will set on civilization if the workers’ greed for another £5 a week is not contained. Meanwhile the privileged ten per cent (who are there applauding) live with an unstinted prodigality which speaks contempt for the millions whose labour provides it all. Perhaps the High Street mugs were devised as an upper-class joke, like sweets for the sweet.
Pelf on parade
Look down the advertisement columns and notices in The Times on any day: 8th June. There are houses to let in London—£140 a week, £225 a week; or a flat at £90. For those who prefer the country, a house at Purley is advertized at £75,000 (which used to be the amount of the top football-pools win, the worker’s dream of riches); or at Wentworth (“on the edge of the 17th Green of this renowned golf course”) for £100,000; or Windsor, £85,000. Servants are essential. “Responsible cheerful nanny required to take full responsibility for 4 mth-old baby”; “One experienced Butler & 2 domestics and a qualified cook”; “mother’s help/housekeeper” (£20 to £25 a week).
This is not pre-1914, the world of Upstairs, Downstairs: it is 1977, in the epoch of the Social Contract. Nor does the working-class kind of racial prejudice get in the way. Agencies offer “Best Filipino domestics”, and “experienced maids, couples, housemen” (English-speaking) “from Philippines”. It would be interesting to know the wages paid—and to hear these householders titter at the naïveté of Enoch Powell and the National Front. There are other services too. Working-class children of “low attainments” go down; upper-class ones go up to Oxford and Cambridge, with the help of the tutors and coaching establishments that advertize in The Times.
Then the endless luxury expenditures. What about a piano for £2,200, or a mink coat at £2,900? A pair of ornamental stone griffins for the gateposts, £2,000? The reports of auction sales which go on all the time—oriental rugs, pictures, gewgaws at several thousands each; wining and costly dining; prolonged cruise holidays; the waiting lists for public schools whose annual fees are more than the majority earn. Contrast this with the self-congratulation of the ruling class at workers possessing colour televisions, refrigerators and cars; “you never had it so good” (sotto voce: “you undeserving swine”). Yet the total at cost of practically any worker’s possessions would be no more, and probably much less, than two or three thousand pounds—say, his year’s wages; it would not buy one article the upper class thinks worth having.
Get it right
It is mistaken, however, to think of this as injustice or maldistribution. Reformers who believe that have been trying to change things for a hundred years. They have failed because they are wrong. The monopoly of wealth comes from rhe ownership of the means of production and distribution. In the capitalist system, a single class owns them; and wealth takes the form of commodities—articles produced for sale at a profit. Take away the greater part of the owners’ money in taxation, and they still have the means of going on acquiring more. Moreover, because their activity constitutes “the economy” everything is done to facilitate and protect it.
The majority, the working class, because they do not own the means of living can get nothing beyond wages and salaries. The price of labour-power, like the prices of all other commodities, expresses its value: what is required to produce and reproduce it. This is what makes have-nots of nine out of ten, while the owning class are haves. There is no point in calling it unfair; it is capitalism, and cannot be changed while the system continues. If the revenues were not spent on ostentation and indulgence they would still be there, extracted from the labour of the working class.
Oh yes, anger is in order. But let it be turned in the proper direction: not at the pudgy hands which place the mouldy cheese on the spike, but at the existence of the trap itself. There is an alternative. The trap is class ownership; it can be ended and replaced with common ownership of the means of living. Make a new social system on that basis. The fat of the land will not vanish but increase, and who will get it? The owners—everybody'
Robert Barltrop
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