‘Good Money for Someone, Not Teachers'

This chapter argues that for teachers, the question of the distribution of value was framed in terms of where value was distributed to, but excluded matters of who it was that was doing the distributing, and how they came to lay claim to this value in the first place. This chapter revisits the notion of fetishism as structural effects appearing as inherent or natural properties of things, and argues that within teachers’ discourses, capital is constructed as something outside of their social relations, as a ‘thing’ able to accumulate value by nature of an inherent quality it possesses in itself, and as a matter if not totally occluded, then seemingly unrelated to matters of value production and distribution. In discussing the unjust distribution of value and issues of exploitation within their workplaces, teachers constructed themselves in relation to other factions of the labour force, and to oppositional groups defined along ethno-national lines. They struggled, however, to construct relations along labour-capital class lines, often resorting to nominalised stand-ins for those in the role of capital, or occluding capital as a class altogether.