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"What's this?" The grubby farmer picked up the ten pound note and sniffed it, then turned it over. The strong midday sun glinted off the silver thread which ran through the middle. A dirt-encrusted fingernail traced the fine line.
"Money." At the blank stare, I elaborated. "Payment. For the food, you know?"
"For the eggs, milk and flour?" Eagerly, I nodded and prepared to scoop up the wares into my woven basket. A strong brown hand stopped me.
"What the hell are you giving me paper for? I can't give my children paper to eat!"
"It's money! Ten pounds - it's more than enough." I eyed the eggs and milk hungrily as they were returned to the churn and the cart.
"What can I use it for? Can I feed my cows on it? Don't waste my time - come back when you've got something I want." He turned his back to me, and handed my food to somebody else, in exchange for a bolt of thick woollen cloth.
And that's how it had been all month. I was starving, and so was my family. A painful lesson it had been, to learn that all my studies and my great `career' stood for nothing in a world where money had no real value anymore. There was nothing I could make and sell. There was nothing anybody wanted from me anymore. And there was nothing - not one thing - that I could do about it, because I couldn't compete for tools, land, labour.
So much for the utopia of a world without money. Currency, they had said, was the root of all evil and after the last, huge crash of the world's economic systems had brought post modern capitalism to its knees, they had gleefully done away with it. And after all the world's paper had been bonfired, and the coins smelted down into weapons and tools, we had realised that it hadn't been money that had destroyed the world we knew. It had been our own possessiveness, our own greed. Money was just the material we had hidden behind for so long.
At the end of the day, none of it mattered. I couldn't save my family. I hadn't had the tradeables to save my eldest daughter from the meat market last week, and she'd been taken by a local feudal lord and put to work in his fields and in his bed. My wife was ill, and I couldn't trade my labour for medicine. I was just one of millions of people who were slowly fading because we'd placed our faith in money, a dying religion if we had but known it. Our only hope was to find a `protector', someone who would accept our servitude - our slavery - in return for food and shelter.
The world is run by those who have. Those who have not, survive not.
I picked up my empty basket, and prepared myself for the long walk back into feudalism.
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