I am friends with two socialists and have been for a while. One is a full-blown Marxist, who would love nothing more than a rifle and barricade to cower behind. Ironically, when I saw him in a recent amateur production of Les Misérables, it was clear he was the only person not acting. As the rest of the cast moulded their faces into stoic frowns, he could be seen smiling at the prospect of liberating the working man. The other is the diet version of the first: a passionate Green Party activist who, if presented with the big red button, would pause for thought and invariably temper his demands. He would never admit this, but Andy Burnham would probably make him happy enough (even if he keeps a poster of Marx on his bedroom wall).
Bizarrely, I met my comrades working at a private school and over the last five years they have done their level best to radicalise me into thinking capitalism badly needs a course of Ozempic. Parroting the same lines about the pain capitalism causes and the media’s tendency to demonise socialism has formed the backdrop of my relationship with them. They are true fan boys, even changing the itinerary of our holiday to Berlin to include a tour of the “Museum of Capitalism” and a visit to the canal where Rosa Luxemburg’s body was dumped. Whilst the rest of the city basked in the afternoon sun, I stood in a museum sniffing soap that smelled of sweat, listening to my friends compete with the guide over who could recall the most Marx and Engels quotes. They are maniacs, and I love them for it. However, whilst I worked at the school, they were unable to shift me over to their side.
How can a grown man resist radicalisation, you may ask? The first place to start is with my profession. As a teacher of history, I spent part of each week discussing the failure of the communist project in Russia and became convinced that extensive state control would be resisted by populations and likely lead to economic collapse. The second was my economic position. At the time, I was renting my house out, receiving a salary, and being fed wads of private tuition money. When the monopoly board works for you, it works for you. Thirdly, my job liked capitalists. This became very clear when one of my friends unionised the workforce against a backdrop of anger and ridicule from the management. Although I did speak up at times in union meetings, I knew that my journey around the board would run more smoothly if I ignored their ideas. A mix of presumed knowledge and material comfort kept me in place.
However, this has been dismantled over the past year, mainly because I have left the school, which has removed both the financial and social incentives it provided. This may feel like a damning admission of character. And it is. To be clear, the money I received kept me in the centre, and now that it’s gone my politics has shifted leftwards. My material conditions have played a significant role in shaping my outlook, and a change in circumstances has caused me to reassess my former assumptions, bizarrely taking aim at my former self. However, although this is the case, it’s not everything and I will elaborate further with a tale of two roofers.
A few years ago, I received a phone call from a tenant explaining that the roof was leaking. I was taking a games session at the time and left to confirm their claims. On arrival, I saw water running through the ceiling of my bathroom and agreed that the roof was, in fact, leaking. I called a roofer. He told me that the replacement three tiles would cost £500, justified by the need to source materials from Portsmouth. I accepted. The work was completed within a couple of hours, apparently without any expedition to Portsmouth, and the tax was later deducted from rental income. The following day, I recouped most of the cost through a few hours of private tuition, and at the weekend my wife and I flew to Spain, the roof repair feeling as inconvenient as the journey there. It was something I had to deal with.
A couple of weeks ago, I met my new neighbour en route to putting the bins out. In our first interaction, I decided to discuss my concerns about loose mortar around the valleys on my roof. Having lived through a similar issue, he explained that the solution lay with a man who was both, “cheap and good”. As I recently put the entirety of my savings into the house, I was relieved at the recommendation. The roofer arrived and worked with enthusiasm, only to produce work which appeared play-dough-esque. I tentatively raised my concerns and was met with ridicule over my lack of expertise. In need of counsel, I went back inside to speak to my wife. She explained she didn’t know what to do, but that we couldn’t afford to pay £300 for substandard work. After consulting ChatGPT about what good mortar work should look like, I returned and repeated the points as my own. A good argument followed, and he eventually left, conceding that the workmanship was poor. I went back inside with the £300 intact, relieved that I had kept a month’s worth of food shopping in my pocket. My wife congratulated me on my bravery and I felt a deep relief that we might break even at the end of the month.
You may feel these scenarios are different because one roofer did a good job and the other did not. But that misses the point. The difference lies in the constraints. In the first case, I did not meaningfully interrogate the cost or quality. Although possibly untrue, I am fairly sure I left the tenants to appraise the work. In the second, I could not afford not to. My tolerance for uncertainty had narrowed. I now have to operate outside of my former sensibilities. I cannot simply think “fuck it” and move on. In certain situations, the loaf is on the line, where once it was only crumbs.
I feel this, in a diluted form, when buying petrol, changing energy suppliers, or when anything unexpected carries a cost. There is a common assumption that money distorts judgment through excess, but its absence can be just as distorting, increasing the volume of everyday decisions and breeding a permanent feeling of fragility. I am aware of my relative position in this, and I do not claim hardship in any absolute sense. If you spoke to someone half way up a tower block with 50p on the meter they would invariably laugh at my plight and point to the obviousness of the conclusion. But it is still worth emphasising that proximity to constraint changes how decisions feel, even when the decisions themselves are small.
So why attempt this awkward link between socialists, roofers, and financial insecurity? Because this cocktail has helped me understand something about how perception is shaped. When life is stable and comfortable, it’s difficult to understand the dangers of currents. The same is true of distant wars or famine. You can understand them, but you do not feel them. And imagining a feeling is not the same as feeling it.
This, I think, helps explain why wealth so often correlates with political preference. Not because people lack principle, but because experience shapes what feels urgent or real. This appears common knowledge in a background sense, however, the extent to which politics is downstream of proximity is underplayed as an explainer of our ideological tastes.
Although this is interesting to me personally, it has limited broader significance. It does not provide a programme for change. It does, however, suggest something modest: that policy is most persuasive when it is felt rather than explained or promised. If public life is to shift in any direction, people need to experience positive changes in their everyday conditions, however small. – A lesson I have understood from the opposite direction.
What I have probably learned, then, is not a new ideology, but a narrowing of distance between argument and experience. When the margin for error shrinks, abstract positions become harder to maintain. You begin to understand arguments not because they are more convincing, but because they start to resemble your life.
Tomorrow's Chip Paper 