Sir Kier Starmer, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, hath proclaimed across the Kingdom that there shall be a reduction in the pay given to the feeble and the sick. He hath come to this decision amid a time of great plenty; that new title 'billionaire' is claimed by three thousand men across the globe, five-and-fifty of whom live in our United Kingdom itself. The time has come to impose tithes on the great Robber-Barons of the world: Amazon, Meta, Google - and yet, as we have come to expect, the great burden of taxation falls hardest on the peasantry.
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| Sir Starmer's Knighthood |
For many years now, we have laboured under the weight of ever-growing levies: the Water Lords, the Energy Lords, and the Land Lords demand from us poor vassals a monthly stipend, in exchange for the continuation of our own lives. There are those who still maintain that such taxes are voluntary arrangements within a system of Free Trade - that we are 'free to choose' which Lord will provide our water for us; such an illusion is as noxious to our health as any snake oil sold by a con-man could ever be. For what 'competition' is possible when water, once held in common, is now given over to ten-and-seven Lords, and those of us who live in their domain must choose either to drink the local Lord's water, or no water at all? This is predation, not competition.
When we sell wares at market, the Platform Lords take a portion of our profit for themselves. When we purchase our necessities, when we create artistic works, when we endeavour to learn more about God's great Kingdom of Earth, the Platform Lords are present, able to extract from us something more valuable even than those Marks and Pounds which they poach from us continuously: they take substance from our Souls, and call it 'Data'.
Every man, woman and child hath our own personal town crier in the palm of our hand, delivering to us on behalf of the Lords whichever superstition they feel will most entice us to remain within the boundaries of their Platform fiefdom. As well as informing us, this micro-Mephistopheles marks us - noting how attentive we are to his information, and relaying our responses to others across the Kingdom. From this dry record of our attentiveness, the Platform Lords are able to release a waterfall of wealth, one whose waters never slow, never stop, only increase as more substance from our Souls rains down. With such abundant flows of wealth, those odd fellows sometimes named 'Tech Giants' have been able to kill Capital.
Other powerful families were also responsible for the murder of Capitalism; the strange foster-family called Government, now headed by that aforementioned Knight, Sir Starmer, played a major role. Every time Capital collapsed, crashing like a dragon under the weight of its hoarded gold, Government would be there to launch it back into the air; though gold is what kept bringing the dragon down, Government called upon wizards to conjure great towers of gold, to lift the dragon back into the sky. This worked, but at the cost of the dragon's increasing laziness: after the great crash of Two Thousand and Eight, the wizards conjured towers of gold so tall that the dragon would scarcely feel the need to fly ever again. It now sits atop the towers, occasionally flapping a wing of investment in some small business or other, but otherwise stagnating, fattening, dying.
Government's familial bonds were always stronger with Capital than with the 'working class' (those who now form the peasantry); no wizards are called upon to deliver wealth to the poor, the hungry, the weak and the sick; no miracles or magic are demanded by Government to allow us to fly, or even to help us to stand. We are left, instead, at the mercy of those Barons and Lords, who, sensing the new permanence of their own sovereignty, reign over us with a complacent violence.
Our lives are no longer governed by the God with an 'invisible hand' - rather, the visible fists of Warlords, Bailiffs, Police and Catchpoles keep us resigned to our conditions. The world order is one of trade wars, as opposed to competition, and those regions without access to self-increasing wealth are turned rapidly into hinterlands - derelict, irrelevant and shuttered. Those with the most powerful weaponry brandish it proudly, demonstrate its glorious land-winning capacity through genocidal crusades, and suppress those of us within their own domain who wish to combine our labour force. Even the word 'Reform', once the proud rallying-cry of the masses advocating justice and fairness, has metamorphosed into a perverse acceptance of the feudal order, a call for the wealthy and the heavily-armed to rule over the vulnerable and the marginalised with an iron fist.
Now that there is no need to compete, no need to jostle among themselves - in other words, now that the rich have unified themselves into Monopolies - they have no need to keep investing in their own improvement, nor to hide their true nature and intention behind the delicate positioning of 'public relations'; there is no perceptible threat to the reign of the New Lords. Because of this, the powerful can declare tariffs on each other, extort money from the disabled, increase the tithes on water, energy and housing, all with full confidence that no great opposition can rise against them. Apart from where the laws of Capital still reign, we peasants have been denied access to that great weapon, the Boycott, as wealth can now be extracted from us as we simply speak to one another inside a Platform fiefdom. And to boycott such utilities as water would require more co-operation than our feud-fraught society can currently muster; so we must pay whatever gross sum the Water Lords decide is necessary for us, knowing that if we don't, Government will send its Bailiffs (the Police) to bludgeon us until we can produce the money.
Some loud advocates of social justice currently petition Government to impose large taxation measures on the richest in our Kingdom; such petitioners are to be admired, and their demands are valid ones. To yank money from the pockets of the peasantry at a time when Robber-Barons hold billions, using their stolen wealth to increase the price of all property, expand the number of homeless by tens of thousands a year, and generally immiserate and cannibalise the very Government that lifted them into their position, is no less than unholy. Taking money from the hands of the wealthy, and giving it to the poor, for our medicine, literacy, and food, is a vital first step in conquering the evils which dominate our era.
But we should not expect this sort of action from Sir Kier Starmer, the Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. We can wash our hands of him. He has already proven willing to aid the crusading Israel in its genocide, and has no scruples about extorting the poor for his own war effort.
It is time to gather, to assemble, to recognise that these violent delights partaken in by the Lords of the world are evidence of their complacency - and as such can palpably have violent ends. The time is nigh for a new common movement of the peasantry, of the serfs, of the vassals and the debt-slaves. Too many of us suffer the daily indignity of servitude for the powerful, but their certainty that we shall continue to serve them, their dependence on our fealty, is their great weakness.
On Capital's grave we shall haunt its Neo-feudal successor with the spectre of Communism, and after a long, dark night, we shall rise to the dawn of a new system.
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