On Wealth 1919

The Pleasing Hallucinations of Wealth

The dominant world obsession these days is wealth. Everybody worships at its shrine. Everybody talks about it. Everybody chases it, dreams about it and hope to seizes it. He who has it longs for more, and usually leads a life of misery in trying to add to his holdings. And at the same time those who have it also turn heaven and earth to blow it in while they hang on to it and increase its bulk. It sometimes looks as though the world had gone wealth-mad, and that modern civilization was little better than a large-sized crazy house. Men lie for wealth, fight for wealth and die for wealth, oftentimes entirely oblivious of the fact that they, as individuals, never have any of it, and can never hope to get any. Those who do not have it are, as a rule, miserable because of the want of it. Those who have it in the greatest measure often appear to not only be equally as miserable, but frequently more coarse, vulgar and disreputable than those to whom it is an entire stranger.

It is the proud boast of these most glorious days of ruling class blood, slaughter and devastation, that fortunes are being accumulated more rapidly and are assuming a far greater magnitude than ever before. It seems that the human blood and butchery business is either a most profitable one, or it acts as a powerful and paying stimulus to other lines of business effort to voluminously pour forth the figurative flood, that spells wealth gotten for nothing, in the great and beneficent scheme of uplift and sanctification known as finance, trade and commerce.

Wealth Has Not Increased at All

There is not a whit more wealth in the world to-day than when the curtain was raised upon this delightful ruling-class performance in Europe in the gladsome days of 1914. In fact, there is less now than there was then by just exactly the number of possible producers of the requisite things in life who have been massacred during the delectable and glorious circus. For there is no wealth possible outside the men and women who produce the food, clothing, shelter, and other needed things, those slaves of modern capitalist industry who toil and sweat in feeding to a fascinating fatness the vulgar and conscienceless rulers of the modern world and bedecking them and theirs with all the gewgaws and frippery that their narrow vanity and sordid souls may fancy.

There is no property except slaves. The working people of the earth constitute the sole property of the ruling class. There is nothing outside that property that can feed, clothe and otherwise provide for the owner. The test of property is to provide sustenance for its owner without effort upon his part. It is the slave alone that can do the trick. It is, therefore, to the slave alone that the term property can truthfully apply. Were it not for him, property, in the commercial acceptance of the term, would not and could not exist. There would be nothing on earth that could bring to its owner a profit. There would be nothing to be rated in terms of finance, trade and investment.

Only an Accumulation of Figures

Now, as to the accumulation of wealth, there is none. The production of food, etc., of each year or less period, is consumed as fast as it is produced. There is never any surplus, that is taking it year by year. Everything is used up as fast as it is produced. There is no accumulation, except of figures; the product of labor is taken by rulers and masters and passed along the channels of trade and commerce, so-called, until it has been consumed by the workers, the masters and other parasites and supernumeraries camped along the luscious trail. It is taken holus-bolus from the workers who produce it for the very simple reason that there is nothing either on earth, in the heavens, or hell itself wherewith to make payment.

There is nothing conceivable that enters into the exchange of the market, except the products of labor. There is nothing measurable in terms of exchange outside of those products. Therefore, there is nothing, and there can be nothing with which to make any payment, either to the working man or anyone else. Products are taken from the slaves who bring them forth and nothing is given in return. As there is nothing with which to make payment to the workers who have produced these things, for the reasons already set forth, by the same token there is nothing with which to make payment to those who subsequently divide the plunder among themselves and call it business.

The working man, the producer, receives a promise to pay, which is nothing but an order upon the warehouse for sufficient food, etc., to enable him to refortify himself with energy so that he may be able to continue upon the morrow to produce wealth that is to be taken from him for nothing, the same as the day before. It is just the same as is done without any pretence of democracy, liberty or payment, by the owners of horses and mules in dealing with those useful four-legged slaves.

The Workers “Bluffed”

That which is not of necessity fed to the wage slaves and the working farmers (these are but modified wage slaves, their slavery being very thinly disguised under a fancied ownership of their land and tools) is passed from hand to hand through business channels until it is consumed as already related. It is sort of skidded along, the ways being greased with the same sort of promises to pay that were used to hocus pocus the producer into believing that he had been paid for what he did in the first instance. After the stuff has all been consumed, the grease still remains in the shape of a most imposing array of figures upon bank ledgers, stocks, bonds, bills, mortgages and other clever contrivances of financial deception and ruling class legerdemain. This imposing array of figures is fervently worshipped by the devotees of great wealth, and it is but fair to say that by far the greatest number of these devotees are to be found among the silly asses who have produced all of the real wealth, the food, clothing, etc., and been muleted out of it, as were the stone gods of pagan times worshipped by the fools of those days.

The Most Grotesque Hallucination of the Age

After one year’s production has been thus disposed of, and the figures representing the magnitude of the year’s plunder have been added to those previously accumulated, there usually occurs what is jocularly termed the “cutting of a melon.” This really amounts to nothing but a division of the figures accumulated during the year among the players according to the duly recorded paper bluff they individually are able to put up. While it appears to be a most solemn and imposing performance to Henry Dubb, this “melon cutting” is a most mirth-provoking comedy to any one who is not wilfully, persistently and mathematically blind.

After cavorting thusly around the grotesque circle of one per annum’s financial flimflam, and having gotten neatly away with the season’s swag, with no trace left but the figures, all that is necessary to properly open up the succeeding year’s cycle is to use just enough of the accumulated grease (figuratively speaking, of course) to bamboozle the slaves for about one payday and these same slaves will immediately recoup the masters for the expenditure, and all down through the glad new year there will come forth an array of entirely new figures (termed surplus value) to mount up on top of previous accumulations, and thus swell the magnitude of the wealth of the world, still figuratively speaking, to be sure. But that this accumulation of figures is an accumulation of wealth, or has any connection whatever with wealth accumulation, is one of the most grotesque hallucinations of this highly intellectual age of things ludicrous, paradoxical and grotesque. It is, however, a most prevalent hallucination. Nearly everybody totes it around with him. Very amusing! Very much so, indeed!

E. T. Kingsley