Vimes' 'Boots' Theory

A small sneak peek from a chapter included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945, edited by Caroline Edwards. 

"[...] 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. Put simply, the poor are so poor because their great-great-great-etc.-grandparents were told by men with swords that the fields, forests and pastures where they had always grown, gathered and hunted were actually somebody else’s property. Nowadays, no matter how hard they work on the land, or in the mill, or at the factory, it never pays as well as merely owning it. 

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. [...]"