Imagine, if you will,
standing at a bar. Not difficult,
but I hope I haven’t put the idea in your head in such a way that you will now
depart before having read what is to come (although in fact, your time is probably
better spent that way than this.
Off you pop then, if you must, but when you get there raise a glass to
me). Imagine now (if you are
indeed still here) that you get talking to someone at that bar. A stranger to you, someone you’ve not
met before as far as you can remember, but perfectly affable. You chat for a while, perhaps about
football, or the state of the nation, or perhaps about nothing at all. One of those rambling conversations
encompassing the world, and everything within it, that the bar of a pub will
engender. Imagine, finally, that
at a certain lull in your talk, said stranger hands you a few pounds. You accept gratefully, but acknowledge
inwardly that in fifteen minutes or half an hour, you will have to reach into your
pocket and hand him an equivalent sum, and that this back and forth could go on
all night. Imagine it. Go on. It’s insane.
And yet, as any seasoned
drinker could tell you, this is, in a certain sense, what is going on all the
time in pubs up and down the country.
Except, as any seasoned drinker could go on to tell you, that it’s
not. This is important. Let me explain.
What the scenario above
demonstrates is that money and beer are not directly equivalent, that
exchanging pints is not the same thing as exchanging money. Or in other words, economics, as it is
commonly sold to us, is bollocks.
It is true that money, in
our current system of social organisation, acts as a kind of tax on the
pleasure principle, that when one is poor the evening is measured by the amount
of time it takes to consume the money one has. Money thus operates as a means of imposing a degree of
restraint on pursuits that would otherwise get out of hand very quickly (this,
it pains me to say, may not actually be a bad thing). The fact remains however that the pint occupies a different
space than the money that allowed it to be purchased.
If I buy you a beer, it
cements a friendship and, further, exhibits solidarity towards the environment
we both joyfully inhabit. And if
you take money out of that equation, it will still mean basically the same
thing.
Giving cold cash rarely
means anything at all, and if it does, it expresses – as it creates - a power
relationship. If I give you money,
I’m basically patronising you. I’m
saying I have something you want, and in my infinite goodness I deign to bestow
it upon you. Money is patronising,
but beer is respect, and if a beer is allowed to become totally divorced from
its price, then the power in money, insidious and unnatural as it is, is
neutralised. At least in any situation
that counts.
Granted, the connection to
cash makes the buying of beer a sacrifice, but it is, in most cases a sacrifice
that will be returned. I buy you a
drink, you buy me one. There is,
it’s true, an obligation involved, but it’s an obligation that is not
rigorously enforced: occasionally, by the necessity that money imposes, one
half of the equation is out of balance.
Over time, however, these equations will find a way of balancing out. If it’s not me tonight, then it will be
somebody else some other time.
Ultimately, as long as you don’t give in order to receive, then things
will find a way to work themselves out.
It’s only people who keep accounts who lose their bar room karma.
In other, more succinct
words, you could take money out of the equation, and the beer would still mean
the same thing. You could not take
the beer away and leave only the money, because the entire point of the
exchange would disappear into a meaningless vortex of paper and coin.
And this, I think, is the
point. In any society that rewards
the rich and punishes the poor, there will inevitably be an attempt to justify
and make natural the structures which support that system. The attempt to make any exchange that
isn’t based on the idea of accumulation and naked self-interest seem unnatural
reflects a structural desire to reduce human fellow-feeling, to atomise society
and isolate the individual, such that he has no point of reference save the
dogma transmitted through advertising and economic policy.
Enough has been said about
potlatch and similar systems amongst students of anthropology for it need to be
repeated here; but the pub – at least on the side of the bar I habitually
frequent – is another example to add to the list of functioning, spontaneous,
and existent alternatives to the basic social structures we are forced to inhabit.
Right then. Enough of the theory: I’m off to quaff
for the salvation of mankind.
Cin-cin.
