Natural Wealth

Yes, we don’t talk much about ‘socialism’—it sounds old-fashioned. Comical men in flat caps, beer and sandwiches, that sort of thing. We’re modernizers. But we’re as committed to helping the deserving poor as ever. If you prefer, call it socialism, but a socialism that unites us nationally rather than dividing us by class. The politics of envy is over; the politics of community has finally begun.

Don’s shared his experience with us before about the Marxists of old. These fanatics used to divide us all into ‘working-class’, and ‘bourgeois’, as they called it (that means the middle classes). They’d use all sorts of fancy-sounding jargon that ordinary people couldn’t understand, like ‘exchange value’, ‘dialectics’, ‘commodity fetishism’—yes, I know it sounds horrible! A bit like those modern artists who try and fool you into thinking they’re cleverer than you—and make a lot of money out of it, thank you very much! And a lot of people got hurt. These so-called ‘intellectuals’ simply promote their own vanity at the expense of ordinary people like you and I.

Now we’ve mostly got over that sort of nonsense. People are far more concerned about their real identities than some sort of spurious nonsense about class, though this has, as we all know, led to a different kind of extremism and the threats we currently face. Yet some of the old rhetoric of class remains; some of the old wreckers are still around, stirring up discontent and impossible dreams. I’m not just thinking of the tired old Trots and Stalinists, propping up the homophobic, wife-beating fascists on the ‘peace’ marches. Take the recent strikes by the fire brigade, Metrolink drivers, and so on, happily now pacified. That prehistoric sort of industrial action is actually action against the customers in a service industry—that is, yourselves. But, further, it is in times like ours potentially treasonous. Happily, we’re applying the lessons we’ve learned in the War on Terror to the wider war on all behaviour that threatens social order. Hence, legislation is being drawn up to tackle such antisocial behaviour as withdrawing labour in services that are essential to the community, supporting strikers in unconnected enterprises, causing a public nuisance by demonstrating in a disturbing manner or manner likely to cause offence against the will of the community. The new laws will enable direct control of essential public services by OfCare, with encouragement from OfPax, when dealing with recalcitrant and antisocial workers in this sector, who still cling to the dinosaur politics of envy.

And Rob, you seem to be resurrecting the old cliché that labour is the source of profits. It’s based on a complete misunderstanding of the word ‘exploitation’, which I use in an entirely benevolent sense. Your labour is not the source of wealth. Nature is the source of all wealth, and all the stakeholders of an enterprise—from the lowliest labourer to the larger shareholders—are involved in communally extracting that wealth. I really think, for your own sake, you’d be wise to participate in those Anger Management classes again.