Wealth & Money Quote by Brian Harris

Harris builds his case like a courtroom closing argument, but the real craft is in the pronouns. “Us all” is a velvet rope: it pretends inclusivity while quietly selecting who counts. When he appends “the creators of wealth,” he’s not just describing workers; he’s staking a moral claim that production equals legitimacy. That move reframes socialism’s central subject from exploitation or ownership to output, as if the core political question is simply “Are we making enough?”

The sentence is engineered around a tidy contradiction: socialism “encouraging…to produce less through strikes” while also making “us all demand a higher level of our own product.” The subtext is that labor militancy is indulgent and self-defeating, an attempt to have comfort without cost. Strikes, in this framing, aren’t leverage in a bargaining relationship; they’re treated as sabotage of the common store. Harris borrows the language of collective responsibility to argue against collective action.

The context cue “since 1945” matters. Postwar Britain and Western Europe saw the welfare state expand alongside strong unions, nationalization, and periodic industrial conflict, then the 1970s stagflation and “winter of discontent” narratives that right-leaning writers used to indict labor power. Harris’s line rides that current: it converts a complex economic era into a moral fable about wanting “more” while doing “less.” It’s persuasive because it reduces systemic questions (productivity, capital investment, management, global shocks) to a personal vice, then recruits the reader into the “we” who has allegedly been wronged.