Switch to any street in the Metropolis of the Underclass. A man in a suit with a clipboard comes down the street, just doing his job, and he’s after your “arrears” on the Council Tax, the Water, the Gas, the Phone. Either way he’s only after one thing. Our money or, put another way in more accurate terms, food out of the mouths of starving children or the last push of the Mother into prostitution or the last push of the Father into mugging or robbery just to put food on the table.
In our search for the most prolonged effects of “Civilisation”, we go to the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Salford, Manchester. The pasty, stunted adolescents waiting in vain through all the teenage years, robbed even of the right to puberty by massive and all-pervasive pollution, they look like what they ate and what they enjoyed – very little of either. They grew up starving because the Money Man was always at the door. The Imperial Monkey Man. Here, the Have Nots start to look very different from the Haves. Over generations the species is dividing.
The Imperial Monkey brings with him a lie. The lie is that people owe him money. Utilities are appropriated by the Elites, the price is set way above its actual value and the charge is legitimized as a Bill. Until such time as they care to justify the charge and recognize the difference between what we owe and what they would like us to pay, the difference between these figures is not owed. It is simply demanded by the Monkey. He is a Monkey because he will not recognize reason. Instead he will only do as he is commanded.
I saw the Man one day while I was talking to the children as he came out from their mother’s house. The money he comes to claim from the mother’s allowance means less food and less clothes. So goes the simplest poverty line equation. On the other side of the poverty line lie all the things that aren’t rent and food and bills. Decent clothes, medical expenses, cleaning materials (imagine the house inside), hobbies of any sort including TV; holidays, week-ends away, nights out, travel of any sort really – all these are essential if you’re talking about living with dignity. Dignity should not be beyond anyone’s reach.
All these things become privileges of the majority. But only the stuff of dreams for all those 15 million people on the poverty line. It’s like being in prison – you get a key to the door but you don’t get to go anywhere, ever. The poverty line is a life sentence because they took the future away – the capital and the knowledge and the time for it to yield the wealth and independence of those who have now had everything stolen from them.
Fifty pounds remains after fuel deductions to buy food and clothes. When shoes wear through there is crisis and worry and stress. And marijuana to escape the nightmare of the present without end. Drugs are the door marked “The Only Way Out”. But deep in the darkness there is another door that we cannot yet quite see.
I was friendly with the mother back then and I didn’t have much myself in money or time once I’d done battling for my own future. But if I could help I did. But the Monkey Man doesn’t. He hurts her children to save his. Maybe I should hurt his to help hers but my desperation is not yet that severe, I am not driven to be that type. It is not my children that are starving. It is not my brother that killed himself when they sanctioned his “benefits”.
We must be very careful when we discuss radicalization. On the one hand it may come from within, on the other it may come from without. It may come from within if it is mental illness, psychotic absence of empathy, a predisposition to extreme fundamentalism. But it comes from without when people are confronted with extreme injustice, dispossession, privation – inequalities that lead to being unable to put food in the mouths of starving children. A kleptocratic State must take responsibility for radicalizing its people.
Weapons only come out when negotiations fail. Witness the decades of political struggle for Home Rule in Ireland and all the divisions that were sown by the British State to prevent it. The “troubles” in Northern Ireland as they are so euphemistically described by the Press, is that point that arrives when attempts to secure justice have been exhausted by all other means.
Alternatively, we can ignore the last resort. Instead we can accept injustice, do nothing other than what they wish …wait quietly and endlessly in the darkness while they call us names to justify our dispossession.
Outright armed revolution is a messy business, a last resort that costs the lives of thousands when confronted by the armed power of the state, bought with our money to defend them against us. Fortunately for us, buried in the darkness, the frame of a door is emerging from the gloom.
The poor Imperial Monkey has no choice. He is obliged to take what he can. Let’s take a look at his plight in the next chapter.