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The following post is the second part of an article which was originally published as ‘Repo Man’ in The Idler 42: Smash the System. It follows on from yesterday’s post.
It’s a frank look at why low-income families like mine can suddenly find themselves struggling with debt. It does however have a happy ending 😉
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Meet the ‘Crunch Bunch’
(or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Recession)
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PART TWO
I am the first to admit that I have never been good with money; I’m one of those terribly old-fashioned individuals who sees money merely as a means to an end; something that we’re currently forced to endure in order to provide for our families and friends . But with the rise of the dominant puritan ethic money became an end in it’s own right; nowadays money is used simply to generate more money. Usury has gone from being a criminal act to being the corner-stone of our socio-economic system. This, in turn, has lead to actions that most of us find unethical, if not reprehensible. If usury were not the norm we could never accept a situation where £500 billion of public money is used to bail out the banks when, according to The Joseph Rowntree Trust, just one hundredth of that money – £5 billion – could end child poverty in the UK by 2020. In order to elevate usury from a criminal activity to something that was not only acceptable, but desired, greed had to become the norm and poverty had to be treated like a social disease. Indeed with the progression of the puritan revolution the poor have become ever more deeply ostracised my mainstream society. From the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which created the terror of the Victorian Workhouse to the modern obsession with ‘chavs’, ‘neets’ and ‘hoodies’, society is taught to fear ‘the great unwashed’. Even more importantly, if the rich were to be comfortable in their position of privilege, the poor must be blamed for their own impoverishment.
I guess it was this attitude towards impoverishment which swayed the magistrate’s decision to award GE Money a repossession order on our house. I had actually been through several evictions as an activist during the 1990s anti-roads protest movement, but now, having a wife and four children, I was facing something altogether different. I decided to jump before I was pushed. My first – and only – priority was to my family, they needed a roof over their heads and as little disruption to their schooling as possible – we had to find a place to rent.
As usury and the monetary system crept into every aspect of human life we began to confuse ‘money’ with ‘value’. We seem to have reached a point where the only value we see in an item is that which is written on it’s price tag. But, as we can see from the nylon leopard print ‘Prada’ jogging suit which sells for £600 in Harvey Nichols, charging a large sum of money is not necessarily enough to guarantee an items intrinsic worth.
The true nature of value can be found in the words of William Morris – who’s own attitude towards money is made crystal clear in his utopian classic, ‘News from Nowhere’. Morris said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” It is an item’s ‘usefulness’ and/or ‘beauty’ – beauty, of course, is a form of spiritual usefulness – which creates value. Usefulness alone gives us an items intrinsic worth; money is simply a crude – and wildly inaccurate – way of balancing the ‘value’ of items that are to be exchanged. But this system demands that everything in life be uniformly quantifiable in economic terms – in other words this system does not reflect the real world. A friend of mine once tried to set up a LETS scheme in a wealthy part of Sussex. LETS is a form of bartering whereby you collect LETS cheques by doing work for someone; I paint your house for 50 LETS and then pay you 20 LETS to cut my grass. It is a system that, quite literally, turns time into money. The LETS system has it’s uses – especially during times of economic uncertainty – but it still relies on the myth of uniformity. My friend persuaded a professional Opera Singer to join the scheme. The singer was thrilled and she couldn’t wait to get started. She was having a new kitchen fitted and she explained the scheme to the carpenter. He said “So let me get this straight. You want me to build you a kitchen and you’re going to sing for it?”
I found a house that was within walking distance of where I worked, this would save me money in transport. It was near a junior and comprehensive school for the kids and was a mile and a half away a large supermarket (my wife and I now use backpacks and reusable carrier bags to do the weekly shop – it’s cheap and healthy and I can guarantee that you’ll have the best tasting cup of tea ever if you walk a mile with your shopping first!) The move would help us save money, but in order to rent a house you have to have a bond as well as your first month’s rent. We were already poor so we were forced to rob creditor Peter so that we could pay landlord Paul. This meant that the move got us into even more trouble with the money men. But in truth was I was already past the point of no return with those guys; I had made a leap into the unknown – and I was beginning to like it.
The day that you realise that true value exists only in usefulness or beauty (spiritual usefulness) is also the day you free yourself from the power of others. When we buy the latest ‘mod-cons’ we are actually allowing others to steal knowledge from us – and knowledge is the key to real value.
A vast amount of personal debt is generated by our perceived need to own the latest technology or ‘must have’ item in order for us to fully function in the modern world. The more complicated these items become the more alienated we are from the knowledge needed to produce them. This is great news for the capitalists, but it costs the rest of us a lot more than just money. The enclosure of knowledge is as damaging to today’s society as the ongoing enclosure of land has been to common people throughout history. The money men are currently in a mad dash to claim ownership – through patents, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyrights – of every little scrap of human knowledge; from traditional crafts to genetic information, nothing is safe. It is one thing to reap rewards for something you have invented, it is something entirely different to try and ring-fence the sum of human knowledge just to make a few quid.
The rented house was a virtual paradise compared to the squalid little cave that had cost us so much money and worry over the years. There is, of course, the constant threat of having to move at the landlords discretion, but this has to be weighed against not having to pay for every little thing that goes wrong – like the windows, guttering, leaky roof and boiler that had played a large part in our debt crisis. Unfortunately there was also the matter of the debts we still owed. I juggled some debts, paying as and when I could, but there were some that I ignored altogether. One was a demand for council tax on a house that, in my mind, had already been handed over to GE Money by the Magistrate’s Court. I genuinely couldn’t afford to pay, but I probably could have avoided going to court if I’d really wanted to. In truth I was beginning to find the whole situation somewhat farcical. As expected the magistrate decided in favour of the council. The bailiff who knocked at my door went by the wonderfully Dickensian name of Bill Sturch. He was a nice enough bloke who went through the motions with the air of a man who dreamed of having a better job one day. The thing to remember is that bailiffs don’t really want the hassle of carrying your goods to their van, if you don’t have the money they’ll write a ‘Walking Possession Order’, which is a list of goods that they will take if you don’t settle the debt within a given time-scale. As long as you make payments you shouldn’t see the bailiff again (the best advice with regard to bailiffs in the UK can be found at www.insolvencyhelpline.co.uk/debt_basics/bailiff-guide.php ). Unfortunately this meant I was giving more money out when I was already flat broke. Life goes on, but life doesn’t wait for you to get back on your feet. I had to find a new way to live
The realisation that knowledge was more important than money in turn helped me to realise that, in our throwaway society you can have everything you desire simply by replacing all the ‘mod-cons’ with all the ‘made-cons’.
The best way to avoid debt is to ‘Do-It-Yourself’ rather than ‘Buy-off-the-shelf’. It’s relatively easy to grow your own food, there’s already a huge movement back to allotments and, as allotments get harder to find, many people are turning their hand to guerilla gardening (see www.guerrillagardening.org), but there’s no reason to stop there. I’m wasn’t much of a gardener, guerilla or otherwise, so I focused on other skills and have used them in exchange for freshly grown food.
I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time at Access Space in Sheffield a few years ago where they use ‘end-of-use’ computers to provide people with free ICT training and equipment. People who visit Access are taught how to ‘upcyle’ a computer using GNU/Linux and Free Open Source Software (FOSS); studies have shown that this can effectively double the usable lifespan of a computer. Upcycling is a process conceived by German chemist Micheal Braungart and architect William McDonough whereby end-of-use, disposable materials (especially items that are usually considered ‘waste’) are transformed into objects that have a greater usefulness – which, in turn, creates greater value. Braungart and McDonough argue that the present industrial system, one which “takes, makes and wastes”, can become more sustainable through a system of “lifecycle development”. But we don’t need to wait around for business and industry to finally get their act together, we can already turn the existing “take-make-waste” principle on its head by taking their waste and making something new from it, thereby retro-fitting a ”lifecycle development” policy to any old junk we can find. What’s more we can save ourselves a small fortune in the process.
The utter wastefulness of consumerism means that there are no end of available materials which can be used for upcycling and with landfill taxes and the new Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive – which makes it more expensive to get rid of electrical goods – many people are only to happy to let you take their ‘rubbish’ – some companies will even pay you to take it away. Some projects – like turning an old X-Box into an ‘Ultimate Multi-Media Centre’ or an old laptop into a ‘Home Server’ are high-tech and geeky, but upcycling isn’t an altogether new idea; many people still remember the ‘Rag-Rugs’ their grandmothers used to make (rugs made out of old sackcloth and torn strips of rag). There are thousands of upcycling projects to be found on the internet, from a greywater filtration system made from old bathtubs to a passive solar shower made from the backs of old fridges, the Upcycler – or Uppie – is limited only by their own imagination. As the Tory imposed cuts bite deeper more and more people will realise just how wealthy we can really be once we turn our back on money.
The Uppie ‘upcycles’ everything that they possibly can in each and every aspect of their daily life; they live by Henry David Thoreau’s maxim “Never buy what you can make.” Indeed Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ may be considered a primer for Uppie living, but despite having sympathy for Thoreau’s wish to “live deliberately” the Uppie is not anti-consumer or anti-technology, rather we seek to take back control of our lives by utilising (and openly sharing) technological, engineering and artistic skills to avoid the excesses of blind consumerism; this has a positive effect on our personal health, the health of the planet and the health of our bank balances. In fact the thrifty, creative Uppie can be seen as the antithesis to the greedy, ultra-consumerist Yuppie; ironically the Uppie is in a position to be financially more secure than the Yuppie ever was.
In case you’re wondering how much of an Uppie I’ve become I’m using an upcycled laptop to write this article, I get all my eggs from a friend who’s website I’m building using upcycled ICT equipment, I wear 100% upcycled clothes – nowadays I believe that all designer labels are made from 100% pure wool, that’s to say they are a covering for sheep – I’m using a stack of old tyres to grow a tower of spuds and am about to start work on building a bike from spare parts that I find at the side of the road. In short, I’m enjoying the wealth that my poverty has opened my eyes to.
Escaping the mind forged manacles of debt is not an escape from poverty (that day will be decided by society, not individuals), but it is a welcome and necessary step away from the dangerous mythologies of consumerism that are currently causing widespread misery and anxiety. I am presently in the ridiculous situation of having to save up enough money to pay for my own bankruptcy, but at least the term bankrupt no longer holds any fear for me. Once I have finally put my old, consumer lifestyle behind me I will work to collate and distribute Uppie projects and concepts in any way I can – in the meantime if you’d like any tips then why not check out the following sites…
And if you’d like to become an Uppie feel free to get in touch for further tips 😉
SPIDERSCRAWL 