If I were a car I would fail the MOT. Those magazine questionnaires designed to determine your susceptibility to a heart attack usually have me as a prime candidate for a coronary. Still, you have to be fit to be as unfit as I am.
This particular day my normally low blood pressure was pushing a maximum darts score, one hundred and eighty. What reason could there be? What stress was there in meeting with some other members of the working class who were going to decide my suitability as a prospective fellow wage slave? Being a materialist, superstition holds no sway with me. Therefore, the good luck wishes from my workmates prior to my departure for the interview were, I felt, unlikely to influence its outcome. However, as I approached the meeting place the omens took a decidedly dodgy turn.
In my part of the world there exists a myth that local government officials and councillors work in surroundings that surpass the opulence of Louis XVI's Palace of Versailles. The envy of the local populace extends to what is believed to be the high rewards of a council sinecure, coupled with a workload found generally only within the capitalist class. Get a job with the council, it is said, and you're set for life. Which is, of course, what I was trying to do.
Security guard
The offices failed to live up to lotus-eater expectations. Local folk-lore had definitely got it wrong. As I manoeuvred my car around the crowded bombsite passing itself off as a car park, I was, I decided, taking part in some clandestine initiative test. If at first you don't succeed, give up. Exiting from the vehicle assault course, I spotted, through the bucketing rain, a space! What sort of world is it where human happiness is finding an empty car park space? Nemesis was at hand in the form of a middle-aged, Scottish security guard. ‘You can't park there ", he said, “it's private property”.
I was now faced with a real dilemma. I could either plead with him to let me leave my car where it was, or I could stay and explain to this fellow member of the working class why it was a waste of his life to be protecting fifty square foot of this planet for someone who probably spent more on one suit than the Scotsman earned in a month. My interview was now ten minutes away. What would you have done? It was Hobson's choice. After all. we live in a capitalist society where most of the wealth is owned by a small minority. But that wealth is produced for them by the majority, you and I, who receive less back in wages and salaries than the value we produce. So if you don't own a factory or an oil company, or if your daddy's not a newspaper magnate, you have to go out and sell your labour power, get a job, in order to live. Even Socialists have to eat, so with a guilty conscience I pleaded with the guard to let me stay. Of course, he wouldn't have been doing what he was paid to if he had let me, so it was off again in search of another space. I reckon it would have been easier to have found a socialist in the Labour Party.
Selling his labour power is not a problem that the Master of Lovat, the Honourable Simon Augustine Fraser is ever likely to have. Earlier in the year he put up for sale an 11-mile stretch of the Beauly river, along with surrounding 30,000-acre deer forest, hunting lodge and two other houses. If you had fancied a bit of huntin' and fishin' you would have needed between twelve and fifteen million pounds in order to become one of the propertied class. The Hon. Simon, described by the agent handling the sale as an “entrepreneur with worldwide interests", was handed the estate by his father, the 17th Baron Lovat, 20 years ago. The river had been in the Fraser family for 700 years. Local people, whose opinion counts for nowt. expressed unhappiness at the sale. They believed that it would be sold to a Middle East sheikh, since they were the only people able to afford those kind of prices.
Although the reason given for the sale was that Fraser was “now aware of what it is worth and feels that now is probably the best time to cash in", it was probably the cost of all those Scottish security guards needed to guard the property that was the real reason.
Loads of money
We. the working class, should really be grateful that we don't have the sort of problems that beset the land-owning members of the capitalist class. Our problems, paying the rent; feeding the children; keeping on the right side of the boss and fighting for a pay rise, pale into insignificance when compared to theirs. Imagine the angst that a local viscount suffered recently following his decision to sack two workers with 27 years service between them. As he rightly said, farming on the urban fringe of the Black Country had become a total nightmare. He explained that trespass and vandalism were becoming interminable in this part of the world. Barns were being burned down, machinery damaged and stock let out. How much more sensible, therefore, to let 600 acres lie fallow in return for eighty pounds a year an acre under the Ministry of Agriculture's “set aside" scheme. The scheme's aim is to reduce food production and preserve farmland. Still, Lord C has another 1000 acres with which to provide employment for the labouring class. Where would the working class be without their "betters" to provide for them?
"Who wants to be a millionaire?", asked Frank Sinatra in the film High Society. Well, Grace Kelly for a start. Underneath all that wealth, the big houses, the cars, the yachts, the rich are just like you and me. the film says. Except they have loads more money and the social power which being a member of the capitalist class confers. Who wants to be rich and miserable, when you can be poor and miserable? Aren't you chuffed that as a member of the working class you have an opportunity denied to the rich?
As the newspaper piece says, local people are being given a unique opportunity to drive £l million monorail trains! A £24 million computerised monorail system soon to open at a massive local shopping complex is in urgent need of drivers and security officers. The security head of the complex says. "These most unusual jobs will provide a unique opportunity to drive or guard monorail trains". I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't inundated with requests from Middle East sheikhs who can't wait to guard monorail trains. There it is again. The need for security guards. Perhaps this is where I should be seeking employment. I believe that some companies pay as much as £2.50 an hour, for only 60 hours a week.
Offered for sale
There's no doubt about it. Capitalism provides the working class with loads of opportunities that socialism couldn't. Capitalism provides the opportunity to live m a cardboard box: starve in both the First World and the Third World; live with the threat of chemical and nuclear war; have polluted rivers and seas; and turn rainforests into deserts. But whilst the things seen on television or read in newspapers may raise a momentary tut of sympathy, the demands of day-to-day survival in capitalism manifest themselves as a hundred minor irritations every day.
We live, as we are constantly being reminded, in a free market economy. Commodities are produced, not because there is a need for them, but because they will make a profit for the owner of the means of production of that commodity when it is sold on the market. In the same way that you buy a gallon of petrol, a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread, the employer buys your labour power—your ability to work—for an hour, a week or a month. The only ones who aren't paid weekly are those who derive their wealth from the surplus value which the working class as a whole produces. So, do you enjoy your work because you really like it or because you have no choice? Do you like offering yourself for sale like a used car? Do you like suffering the indignity of explaining every action of your life to some smug interviewer? Do you like the indignity of the umpteenth refusal because you don't quite measure up to what they're looking for? Do you like being made to feel rejected, inadequate and a failure? Or do you like to have your success as a human being measured solely in monetary terms?
Your problem—and mine—isn't lack of money. It's capitalism. It isn’t the working class which is inadequate and a failure, it's capitalism. In a society where work is a four-letter word, the effort involved in supporting a society that makes wage slaves of most of us could be directed at achieving socialism—where work becomes a pleasure, not a drudge, and where the planet belongs to us all.
Dave Coggan
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