I have a chapter included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945, edited by Caroline Edwards, which looks at Terry Pratchett's Night Watch and Making Money. It touches on a brilliant nugget from Men at Arms.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
I write in the chapter:
[...] Here it is worth noting that Vimes’s “Boots” theory is wrong. At least it is overstated: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.” This is not the reason but a reason, and a minor one at that. Vimes leaves out the basics: primitive accumulation, extraction of surplus value, return on capital.
Vimes argues that “the reason that the rich were so rich… was because they managed to spend less money.” In other words, he thinks the rich stay rich because they can afford to invest in quality, long-lasting goods, while the poor are trapped in a cycle of buying cheap things that break. This is true in a narrow sense, but it’s not the big reason why wealth is so unequally distributed.
The big reason is: the rich own capital, and the poor do not. Vimes leaves out history. Land and resources were hoarded, often by force ("primitive accumulation"), and the unfairness was passed down through generations, often getting bigger and bigger ("accumulation"). Long ago, people who had farmed, hunted, and gathered for centuries were suddenly told—by men with swords—that the land was no longer theirs. Instead of living off it, they now had to work for those who claimed to own it. That was the beginning of a system that still exists today.
Under capitalism, workers create more value than they’re paid for—this extra value goes to the owners, not the workers. And once someone owns land, factories, or businesses, they can make money simply by having them (as well as whatever they get from working), while workers have to keep working just to survive. No matter how hard they labour, they will never earn as much as those who sit back and collect rent, interest, and dividends.
So while Vimes is right that being poor is expensive in the short term, he misses the bigger picture. The poor aren’t poor just because they can’t afford durable goods. They're poor because of capital accumulation. And once wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, it stays there—not because of clever shopping, but because of ownership itself.
Back to the chapter:
However, if Vimes’s theory were to have captured the main reason for poverty, then neoliberalism would have an easy and effective solution: improved financial inclusion. This is precisely what Vetinari and Moist oversee in Making Money. New paper fiat currency is inserted into the money supply as micro-loans. In this respect, the idea that “to back the currency [...] [y]ou just needed the city” is slyly equivocal. On the one hand, “the city” suggests the people of the city, workers and entrepreneurs like Dibbler, as well as the communities and material infrastructures in which they are embedded. Ankh-Morpork is a city-state, and “the city” also suggests the government: Vetinari backing the currency with his sovereign power to detain. Finally, the City is also the colloquial term for the UK’s financial services sector, including investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HBSC. Dibbler may be free to participate in the city that “turns worthless gold into … everything,” but his freedom depends upon “the Silence of the Law,” and that silence depends on his usefulness to the Discworld version of financialisation. [...]
