A Saturday shift at the food co-op and an afternoon in the largest bookshop on earth, with a socialist doing sums
I Bought Das Kapital for Nine Dollars and an Oat Latte for Seven
I have had a day of commerce and I am confused about my principles. This morning I worked an unpaid shift bagging lentils at a member-owned grocery. This afternoon I spent forty-one dollars in a bookshop the size of an aircraft hangar. This evening I am sitting on my bed, surrounded by purchases, with a calculator. The sums do not flatter anybody, least of all me.
Morning: The Co-op
I belong to a food co-operative. Of course I do. It is a small shop in the south-east of the city, owned by its members, of which I am one, having paid a share. If you work a few hours a month you get a discount. So every other Saturday I put on an apron and stand at the bulk bins.
The bulk bins are where Portland keeps its soul. There is a wall of clear tubes, each with a lever, holding things I had never seen sold loose: seven sorts of lentil, five of rice, quinoa in three colours, nutritional yeast, which is yellow flakes that taste of cheese and regret, and a substance labelled textured vegetable protein that looks like gravel. You bring your own jar. You weigh the jar first, write the weight on it with a wax pencil and then fill it. There is etiquette. I have seen a man asked to leave for using a plastic bag.
My job is to refill the tubes, sweep up the spilt oats and answer questions. Today’s questions: is the tahini local. Is this honey ethical, with respect to the bees. And, from a child of about five, why is the peanut butter machine so loud. That last one I could answer.
I like it there enormously. A shop owned by the people who use it, where the woman on the till has a vote on what is stocked. It is a small working model of the thing I spend my days theorising. It is also, I noticed while pricing cashews, about a third dearer than the supermarket on the main road, and its members are, to a first approximation, people who can afford that. The family from my own building shops at the discount place by the motorway. I do not blame them. I checked the price of our rice and went a bit quiet.
Afternoon: The City of Books
Then across the river to the bookshop. If you have not heard of it: it occupies an entire city block downtown, several floors, something like a million volumes, new and second-hand shelved together. The rooms are colour-coded and they hand you a map at the door. I have been lost in it for whole afternoons. I once went in for a single pamphlet and came out after dark with a history of the potato.
It opened in the early 1970s and it is still independent, which in this century is a small miracle. Its staff have been unionised for a quarter of a century, with the dockworkers’ union of all people, which I find romantic. You can look it up at powells.com.
I went to the economics shelves in the room the map calls Purple. And there, between a guide to day trading and a memoir by a central banker, was a hardback of the first volume of Capital. Good translation. Someone’s pencilled notes in the margins for the first sixty pages and then, abruptly, none, which is the most honest thing I have ever seen in a book. Nine dollars.
I bought it. I already own two. I am aware of what that makes me.
The Shelf Next Door
The thing that got me was what I saw on the way to the till. A table by the stairs, beautifully arranged. Tote bags printed with the faces of revolutionaries. A mug bearing a line about workers and chains. Socks with a hammer and sickle pattern. A scented candle called Dissent. Eighteen dollars for the candle.
I stood there holding my nine-dollar Marx and had the thought he would have had. The system is so good at this that it can sell you your objection to it, in three colourways, with a gift receipt. Somewhere there is a factory where people on very low wages are stitching his beard onto socks. He wrote a chapter about that. It is around page sixty.
I did not buy the candle. I want that noted. I did look at the socks for some time.
The Latte
Then I went to the cafe in the shop to start reading, and ordered what I always order, and the young man said seven dollars and twenty-five cents. For coffee with oat milk. Then he turned the little screen round to face me, and it asked whether I would care to add a tip of twenty, twenty-five or thirty per cent.
I am from Tottenham. A cup of tea in the caff on the high road was, when I left, one pound twenty, and if you had tried to tip, the woman would have asked what was wrong with you. I stood there doing arithmetic with a queue behind me. I pressed twenty-five, because I know what he earns and what his rent is. Nine dollars and six cents. More than the book.
So here is today’s finding. In the city of Portland in the year 2026, the complete critique of the capitalist mode of production costs less than the drink you have while not reading it.
The Reckoning
I have the day’s receipts on the duvet. One unpaid shift, valued by the co-op at a discount of four dollars. One Marx, nine. One history of the Oregon lumber strikes, fourteen. One book of poems I bought because the cover was nice, sixteen. One latte, nine and change. One bus fare each way.
My mum worked out on the back of an envelope, the last time I was home, how many hours on the shop floor each of my ideas had cost her. She was laughing when she did it. Mostly.
I do think the thing I believe is true: that the people who do the work should have the say and the surplus. I also think a person holding that view should be able to add up, and should notice when her politics have become a set of shopping preferences. The co-op is real. The bookshop’s union is real. The candle is a warning.
For the Paper
My editor at The London Prat got all this in a voice message from the bus and replied with one line: write the receipt. So the piece is exactly that. An itemised bill, headed Revolution, Sundry Expenses, with each line priced, a service charge, a suggested gratuity and at the bottom the words thank you for shopping.
The paper’s essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not says the form should do the work, and a till receipt is the most deadpan form there is. The guide to running a satirical website adds that numbers in a joke must be real ones, so every price is what I paid. A reader who doubts the latte may apply the UK satirical news checklist and then come to Portland and weep.
It goes on the London satirical news page, converted into pounds for full horror, and on Bohiney in dollars.
I am going to read chapter one now, with a cup of tea I made myself, which cost about four cents. The diary is kept on this site, and everything else is over here.
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Author: admin
