Born Into Bondage

Are we free? Our lives are spent at the beck and call of an employer. We are obliged to perform this service if we are to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. What service we are allocated to perform is determined wholly by the market, itself the plaything of the billionaire class. The reach of our employers goes beyond the office, to control what we are allowed to say and do outside of work hours, as well as wholly determining those. If we make things outside of work, our bosses own them too.

No, we are not free.

This is not a free country. This is a country of slaves and masters.

The social democratic contract which held for the post-war years posited a kind of catholic original sin. We were born poor and without property. But if we committed ourselves to 50 years of servitude to the whims of the market, we could save enough to get out from under the landlord’s rule and purchase a few years of actual freedom at the end of our lives. We could earn our freedom with good (for the market and its owners) deeds.

The rocky stairway to freedom

That contract no longer holds. The neoliberal world takes a more protestant view: those worthy of freedom are predestined into it. Those born with property are free, and those without are forever slaves. Blessed are the landlords, for they will inherit the earth.

The median working income in NSW is $55,328 a year. The median house price in Sydney is $1,027,962. So even if a worker paid no tax, no rent, and no living expenses, it would take more than 18 years of median income to buy the median house. In order to pay for the median house over a 50 year working life, a worker would need to save $20,559 a year, or nearly half their after tax income. Hope you enjoy living like a permanent student, subsisting on ramen for your entire life!

If you don’t own your property, you’ll never retire. The full age pension is $843.60 per fortnight, or $421.80 per week. The median rent in Sydney is $520 per week. Even if you downsize, the first quartile rent is $420 per week. So you’ve got $1.80 every week to spend on everything else, including food. I hear dirt is cheap.

The rolling hills which you won’t be able to see because you can’t afford a bus ticket.

For millennials and zoomers, only those blessed with rich parents will ever retire. Will ever be free of the yoke of serfdom. For the rest of us, a few years of actual freedom might be possible only with exceptional fiscal discipline and luck. Even if we do, we’ll be doing so in an overheating hellworld wracked by the conflict which climate change will inevitably create.

So we are faced with a choice. If we do everything right – live like paupers, get lucky and thread the needle – it might be possible to get a few years of actual freedom once our bodies and minds have been sucked dry by capital. Or the slaves overthrow their masters. Communism is our retirement plan.