A few years back I fancied myself as an investor. Very briefly and naively and not really that sincerely, I hasten to add. I had a little excess money and nothing good to do with it, so I started to explore the mysterious world of stock exchanges. It was, and still basically is, like a foreign language to me: as packed with acronyms and esoteric terminology as the unrelated field I had worked in for years, and not nearly as welcoming. I tried to get my head around market capitalisation, share volumes, director dealings, sectors and portfolios; the AIM, the FTSE, the RNS, EPS...all to little avail. I tried to wade through the obvious scams of latter-day snake oil salesman promising to make me thousands a day in the hope that perhaps I might stumble upon some nugget of useful advice I could use to my actual advantage.
Nope. While in theory the markets are something "anybody" can invest in, they hardly seem to be set up to guide the curious gently into the echelons of obscene wealth. Like a Las Vegas casino with no windows or clocks on the walls, designed that way to throw your sense of time and self off kilter, the stock market felt like the proverbial snake pit. Coincidentally enough, the trading floors of many international stock exchanges seem often to be windowless as well.
Going back a few years more and I fancied myself a communist. Not a proper a communist, not really, just the kind of communist you call yourself when you're a teeanger and you read The Communist Manifesto one evening and wonder why they haven't taught you much about this captivating little polemic more in school, and wonder some more whether that vague sense you have there's something very, very wrong with the world might not entirely be by accident.
You grow up in a middle-middle-class Methodist household, attend a private school your parents would be no means be able to afford were it not for a scholarship paid for by the church, and encounter contemporaries considerably more "well off" than you. Here are kids who don't seem to know what it is to have parents who sometimes tell you that they "can't afford" something. None of this matters in any overt way, but there's something about the way the more affluent ones conduct themselves that sticks with you. A certain...confidence, what today might be called a sense of "entitlement" or "[insert adjective here] privilege" viz. their place in the world. It's never explicitly arrogant - it's too polite, too English for that - it's just...there. Everywhere. You start to feel a little of it yourself. To feel that there really is a kind of order to society, that's real, yes, but not natural. An order that is what it is, and maybe always has been, but could be so many other ways, too.
There's a phrase you start to hear a lot: "just put it on the bill." There's something you need for school: paper and pens, folders, stationery, books, chocolate, uniform, computer game magazines (it's the 90s), more chocolate, but you don't have the cash for it yourself. Your parents, quite rightly in retrospect, have rationed your cash for the term, but still, there's stuff you need. Or "need" (which is the same thing). Just put it on the bill, someone says. Your parents will pay for it at the end of term. So you do, and that's that. Money becomes someone else's problem.
Of course, this isn't substantially different to the ordinary experience of being a child of ordinary enough middle class parents. You can't just have anything you want, no questions asked (though it seems like some kids can, and you find yourself hating them, secretly) but anything you need, or "need"? Not a problem. Just put it on the bill.
You start to feel like all of life might be like this. That "the real world", whenever you eventually land there, might be nothing to fear. Just a place where there's a normal life waiting for you to live, and die, and happily forever after.
And that's all there really is to say about that.
Back to the present, and you find yourself dipping into Marx again:
"The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
"If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?
This week, the share price for Oxford Biomedica, which had been languishing around 4 - 6 pence per share for as long as I'd held a modest 8,687 shares in it (total value £680) suddenly leaped up to 9 pence, and even almost touched 11 pence early yesterday, before starting to settle down at around 10 pence per share this morning. I sold my shares at around 9 pence each on Tuesday morning, netting myself £737, or £57 profit. This, of course, in the world of the stock market, is virtually nothing. Still, there they were: the strangely vivid fantasies of obscene, unearned wealth and what I might do with it. What better versions of me might do with it, and what much, much worse versions of me might do too. I imagined how I might turn £737 into ten or a hundred times that through clever investments and well timed day trades through the Shareprice app on the bus. The secret millionaire. Ridiculous, vulgar, unrealistic and totally contrary to the spirit of all I really know would really fulfil me in life. But there such thoughts were, brought back to the surface of my mind as naturally as bubbles to the surface of the fishbowl. Money, I know, is neither good nor bad in itself: it is, as Marx indicates, the crystallisation of power. And what is power but opportunity, possibility?
There are so many more questions that need to be asked.
There are so many more questions that need to be asked.
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