There's a price to everything:
For being too sick,
For grieving too long,
For being the wrong fit,
For being too many.
Your days are numbered,
Your time to earn finite.
Unlike the bills:
The food,
The roof,
The water,
The energy.
Constantly clawing at you.
Waiting to drag you down,
Should,
you,
slip.
No way to sit back and earn for you;
That's the master's right.
You can be sure, that what ever they do,
It won't keep them up at night.
A bit late this one, have been a bit busy. This is the final theme I’ll be doing as part of the ALE collective’s quarterly topics. We’re moving more to a collaborate-by-topic mode from here on out… and on that note check out Sinan, Jamie and Npart’s new collaboration the Peace at Home podcast.
As for this poem, not much to explain really. Understanding where you fit in the working world is probably one of the most important realisations people can have IMO. When you boil everything down, if you need to go out the door to live, you’re in the labouring class. A great many tricks have been pulled over the years to make us feel like we can build our way out of this, e.g. private pensions and stocks and shares ISAs, but at the end of the day it’s small beer. Most people never have the kind of money to earn more than fraction of the return a proper capitalist gets. We don’t so much see a share of the pie as crumbs from the table.
I think one of the sad things about the pandemic is that it’s ripped the mask off of who really “generates value” and yet we’ve made zero effort to so much as rebalance who sees the return. Indeed, matters are worse. Here in the UK we’re squeezing working people more than ever, via their bills, their wages, their jobs and even their tax. No one in electoral politics even dares to suggest a fix now either…
