On class warfare

[gominokouhai]

I think I've figured out how to destroy the Conservative Party. How to make their tiny inbred brains asplode so that we can move into their disproportionately huge Knightsbridge houses, roll around in all their leftover money, and ultimately become the very things we hate and thus let the cycle begin anew. It's ideologically unsound but it's a vocation, at least.

The trick is to make the Big Society actually work.

Nothing will make that oleaginous Etonian fuckface and his waxen-fizzoged fourth-form fag (I am convinced that Gideon Osborne is secretly an Auton) more angry than the sight of poor people getting on with their lives and being relatively comfortable. It is our moral duty to see that this is so. With any luck, we can make them all die from a combination of gout and hypertension. Let's let the retired colonels seethe themselves to death at the sight of poor people being happy.

The Big Society is, as everyone knows, a giant lie intended to make poor people suffer. Let's call their bluff.

Let's help those of our friends who need medical care. Let's set up charities and trusts for the disabled and the mentally ill. Let's generate community-based work programs directed at the unemployed with the goal of beautifying our townscapes. Let's do these things, not out of a sense of love for our fellow men (although feel free to do that if that's your bag; in which case, groovy), but because it will drive Cameron and his ilk into a full-on rage.

In ten years time, we'll be living in flower-bedecked, well-tended communities with neighbourly values and a functional system of socialized healthcare. They'll have gorgeous glass and steel towers in central London, but there'll be nobody there to clean their toilets or look after their children or work in their Starbuckses.

The societies that we form will actually work. Theirs will be hate-filled, conspicuous-consumerist hellholes full of rich people who sneer at their neighbours and fear everyone else. We will have good coffee and clean toilets. They will have large bank balances. Let's see which of us sleeps warm and cosy at night. And when they come crawling to us because they have terrible liver diseases brought on by overconsumption which we know how to treat, we shall say: sorry, you can afford private healthcare, thus you're not eligible.

Their children will be spoiled brats with an aristocratic sense of entitlement. Our children will know how to make stuff and do stuff. And when the class war finally comes between our two societies, it will be be fought by people who know how to shout orders on one side, and people who know how to make guns on the other. I predict it will last about twenty minutes.

Let's do it.

My editrix informs me that I should make the following clear: when I say fag above I'm talking about the public-school sense and not with any reference whatsoever to homophobia. (Interesting, however, that the word fag is a homonym.)

While I'm at it I should probably point out that the good coffee in the socialist utopia described above almost certainly won't come from the former Starbucks workers previously mentioned, unless they can learn new skills on departing the Starbuckses (although the clean toilets possibly will). Good coffee by definition comes from other, non-Starbucks, coffee shops.

Comments

Of course...

[zornhau]

...eventually we'd have a mess of different charities. We'd crave economies of scale, and worry about accountability and joined up thinking. Also, those of us who earn good money at our jobs might think it more efficient just to pay some money based on our earnings, rather than do the manual work ourselves.

So we'd lump all the charities into one, and each locality would vote people onto the board. Since the board would now be in charge of a lot of different charitable operations, they'd do a lot of talking, or "parleying", so we'd call the institution the "Parleying Place". And the committee would need to have an executive sub committee to do the "governing".

Re: Of course...

[gominokouhai]

Yes, that's implicit. Thing is, ours would be better. Even if power corrupts and it ends up just as bad, it would be ours.

Re: Of course...

[zornhau]

Or we could just try to get control over the existing one.

[gominokouhai]

This is how you do that.

[spudtater]

One starbux, many starbuxen.

> when I say "fag" above I'm talking about the public-school sense and not with any reference whatsoever to homophobia

Clear to anybody from the UK, but perhaps not to transpondians, so well caught.

In seriousness, though, there are two downsides to a charity-driven society. The first is the arbitrariness. Centralised services at least try to divvy out funds fairly. Charities depend on advertising to our better natures, which leads to lots of money going to crippled puppies, but not so much to support for ex-convicts. ...unless you collect centrally and then divide up fairly, which as zornhau points out is simply reinventing the system.

The second downside is the introduction of a parallel economy, and this is the reason that I scratch my head at the Tories' support of charity. Charities pay people little or no money, get massive tax breaks, and sell products and services at cut-rate prices. Charities can run second-hand shops (in which not necessarily everything is in fact second hand) and massively undercut GAP. They can open cafes and undercut Starbux. They can run health clinics and undercut BUPA. Everything they do works to devalue the pound, which I would have thought would be absolutely against Tory policy.

But perhaps the Tories are counting on charity to further lever apart society. The "Real" economy for them, and the charity economy for the plebs. And since the charity economy is so undervalued, they can kick it around economically.

Unless we introduce the "charity pound", and refuse to exchange it with the "real" pound. What would that do?

I no longer know where this comment is going, so I'll just let it trail o...

[gominokouhai]

> the introduction of a parallel economy

That's pretty much what I was getting at, I think. Let's do what they do, and let's do it really, really well out of spite.

> Unless we introduce the "charity pound", and refuse to exchange it with the "real" pound.

We could all move to Lewes maybe? Julia Indelicate comes from there, so at least there'd be good music.

[spudtater]

Wait, did I mean devaluation? Or deflation? Or disinflation perhaps? Economics is hard.

Alternative currencies would be an essential part in creating the service gap you describe in your post. Otherwise the rich City Bwankers could just walk in and say "I demand that you stop treating all your current patients and focus solely on my needs, by virtue of this thick wad of £100 notes which I found down the back of my sofa". Kinda like they do right now, come to think of it.

Yay Lewes. Local currencies would make an ideal framework for an alternative economy. Administered by a friendly building society, perhaps... with favourable rates against other local currencies, but decidedly unfavourable ones against the "Real" pound.

Is it really possible to conduct an internal currency war? No idea. No doubt the Tories would try to legislate against it once they got wind of what was happening... but legislation is only effective if people cooperate.

(Mind you, the currency issue would be moot in the case of services administered along socialist lines instead of capitalist. So perhaps the health system example above is misleading. But I remain sceptical that socialism can meet all of our service needs — not to mention our need for goods.)

I'm overthinking this...

[gominokouhai]

> I'm overthinking this

Yes you are, but isn't it fun?

[(Anonymous)]

Local currencies have worked quite well in some cases before. But ultimately central gvt and bankers see them as a threat and shut them down. I have more info at home.

[spudtater]

> I have more info at home.

You didn't see me, roight?