This age of thieves
Sep. 18th, 2004 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbAlthough its influence endures in the number of misguided intelligences that still use its basic assumptions, often without consciously knowing what it is that they are using, I think we can say without too much dispute that twentieth-century Communism is dead. The work of burial and dissection goes on; there still are waves of protest and controversy when some prominent person writes a book denouncing - decades after it last was a real political force - the crimes of Marxism, and, more importantly, the strange condition of two-faced blindness, of unselfconscious and, one might say, sincere hypocrisy, of its Western supporters. (The last such was KOBA THE DREAD by Martin Amis.) It is true that there has never been a Nuremberg for Communist crimes, and that plenty of people have made the transition without doing anything to pay for the crimes they committed or consented to; but whatever the opposite party may have been, certainly if victory is measured by an enemy's defeat, its victory is complete.
Much, perhaps too much, has been written about the success of Communism among Western intellectuals and elites; indeed, to follow the most recent historiography of the success of Communism outside Russia, one would think that it was all a matter of rich men hob-nobbing with celebrated critics after visits to succesful art exhibitions. But that was not what struck me - struck me painfully, with a clarity that resonated from my own life and experience - when I recently visited some old-fashioned red revolutionary websites. What struck me was what we have lost, how people could allow themselves to think and feel when, not just Communism, but the whole revolutionary left continuum - trades unionism, socialism of various colour, cooperativism, communism, anarchism - were a reality.
This is not mainly an issue of the intellectual classes at all. What made the revolutionary left powerful was that it actually belonged to the classes it championed. It awoke them to the unquestionable fact that it was their work that built and ran the society at whose bottom they lived; and the equally unquestionable fact that they were as human as the richest boss, and not one whit less valuable. It taught them to respect themselves; it taught them to educate themselves. It branded the owners of the factories in which they worked with one simple name that explained, perhaps too simply, but in an easily understood and not altogether undeserved way, the employer's role in the motion of work and money that shaped society: "thief". The old socialist, unionist, anarchist songs, did not speak in the refined language of "exploitation" and "added value": they simply declared that the person who has not made a contribution to the making of a thing, and who yet takes most of the money made out of it to himself, is a thief. And so he is.
The websites I visited were full of those old songs, songs written not by classically trained composers or clever chanteuses in the smoky clubs of Paris, but by the workers themselves; songs in English, in French, in Italian, some of which I had sung myself as a boy - for I grew up in an atmosphere of watered-down Marxism, and in a tradition of continuity with all the areas of social revolt from the co-operative movement to anarchism. That it was in fact a comfortable middle-class world says a lot about things that a lot of people have already said a lot; but I was not thinking of my own childhood. I was thinking of the values that those songs - which I had absorbed so unthinkingly thirty years ago - handed down; I thought of what the working class had been, and what it is now. And I could have wept.
What social revolution meant to the working class was self-respect. It meant that they were as good as the next man; and it implied that they were to live their lives accordingly. Unionized or socialist or anarchist workers set their faces against drunkenness, against disorder, against ignorance; educated themselves; indeed, they made as much of a fetish of respectability as any lower-middle-class household ever did. It was on these grounds - on the grounds of their personal and group honesty, self-respect, hard work - that they challenged the ruling class; that they challenged its right to skim off the profits of their hard work for its own pleasure.
That was then; perhaps it was never completely so; but it certainly was the trend across Europe from the 1880s to the 1940s, when co-operative societies, popular education colleges, and popular sports clubs, sprung from one end of Europe to the other. And this is now. And what a dreadful now it is. The self-respect that the working man had had, not handed down to him by some superior kindness, but claimed himself against all the powers of the world as a right, is not only dead but forgotten. The worker creeps apologetically into a place of work that it has never even occurred to him to regard as his; does his bidding without interest, ever under the threat of the sack; and goes away again. It does not even occur to him to think that work is something he does for his boss; no, to employ him is a favour that the boss does to him - a favour that may be rescinded at any time.
The atomization of the workers may have been the result of single political changes (certainly, anyone who cares for the working class ought to paint Arthur Scargill's face on a punching-bag and practice on it daily); but it could never have gone as far as it has, and gone unchallenged, without the catastrophic change in popular culture - without the fact that the working class adopted, unthinkingly, a kind of popular culture that was handed down to them by the very capitalist giants that were the designated enemy and the thief. And this happened long before 1989, long before the triumph of the enemies of socialism; it had been happening for decades. Think: the time was when, to a working man, "popular culture" meant to go to evening classes and attend public lectures; to read socialist, anarchist, or atheist literature; to educate himself. Now it means the tabloid press and television; objects that not only deny that self-improvement is in any way desirable or feasible, but that, at the same time, offer for admiration and emulation a world of "glamorous" celebs that is by definition outside, above, and against, the world of the working class. In other words, they encourage the worker, either to settle down in a world of poor expectations, poor education, poor ambitions, or else to turn one's ambitions to a world of shallow desires, of wealth and consumption, of "glamour". Bill Watterson was right: when Marx said that "religion is the opium of peoples", he hadn't seen anything yet.
Part of the disaster arises from the sheer political success of the Socialist parties. When the Socialist parties started to populate local administrations, elected bodies, and eventually Parliaments, they moved their programs of social improvement from the sphere of co-operation and bottom-up action to that of State action and top-down provision. In the short run, results were usually excellent: from the mass building of public libraries to the erection of city milk companies to provide purified milk to children, the amount of good that state intervention did was enormous. But it bred into the (increasingly) former revolutionary movements a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation. When it became clear that something had to be done, the movements no longer organized their members to do it for themselves; they went and lobbied the state administration. From this expectation of State support, this effective dependency on the State, it was only one step to taking the same subservient attitude to private enterprise. The line was crossed when supposedly left-wing politicians started bragging about "creating jobs", as though work were a favour that came down from above upon the undeserving head of the worker.
The final end of this degeneration is the rise of Thatcherism. Thatcherites are mostly disenchanted left-wingers. Then there is the further stage of abjection that leads the very socialist movement itself to accept Thatcherism. I used to think that was a peculiar feature of Italian intellectual corruption, but the same horror has been perpetrated in Britain's once Labour party, without quite the baroque elaboration of bullying robbery of Craxi and his accomplices, but certainly with as much commitment to the brutalities of the unregulated market and a far more intense love of privatization.
Let us be clear about one thing. I am absolutely not nostalgic for Communism; nor yet for intellectual horrors such as anarchism. The connection between these movements and the worst episodes of modern history is neither casual nor infrequent. And by that I do not only mean Russian Communism: as one Italian wag said long ago, when Italy had her first Socialist Prime Minister (Mussolini), it was a national catastrophe. Fascism was born out of a rib, not so much of Communism proper, as of the wider revolutionary movement; indeed, Mussolini was, both socially and culturally, an absolutely typical and rather successful product of working-class self-improvement. There seems to be some horrible destiny whereby this movement of self-respect ends up in tyranny and mass murder. And incidentally, it bears a constant and murderous hatred for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, which I cannot accept either.
This is what I find so heartbreaking. The age I live in is an age of thieves; an age in which the triumph, not of freedom, but of "capitalism", is trumpeted from the rooftops; in which the principles of so-called free enteprise (actually an anti-competitive conspiracy of feudal big business powers) are bragged without doubt or shame, and as if they had anything to do with individual freedom - whereas what they really amount to is the disenfranchisement of the majority of the people and the effective neutering of democracy. Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
Much, perhaps too much, has been written about the success of Communism among Western intellectuals and elites; indeed, to follow the most recent historiography of the success of Communism outside Russia, one would think that it was all a matter of rich men hob-nobbing with celebrated critics after visits to succesful art exhibitions. But that was not what struck me - struck me painfully, with a clarity that resonated from my own life and experience - when I recently visited some old-fashioned red revolutionary websites. What struck me was what we have lost, how people could allow themselves to think and feel when, not just Communism, but the whole revolutionary left continuum - trades unionism, socialism of various colour, cooperativism, communism, anarchism - were a reality.
This is not mainly an issue of the intellectual classes at all. What made the revolutionary left powerful was that it actually belonged to the classes it championed. It awoke them to the unquestionable fact that it was their work that built and ran the society at whose bottom they lived; and the equally unquestionable fact that they were as human as the richest boss, and not one whit less valuable. It taught them to respect themselves; it taught them to educate themselves. It branded the owners of the factories in which they worked with one simple name that explained, perhaps too simply, but in an easily understood and not altogether undeserved way, the employer's role in the motion of work and money that shaped society: "thief". The old socialist, unionist, anarchist songs, did not speak in the refined language of "exploitation" and "added value": they simply declared that the person who has not made a contribution to the making of a thing, and who yet takes most of the money made out of it to himself, is a thief. And so he is.
The websites I visited were full of those old songs, songs written not by classically trained composers or clever chanteuses in the smoky clubs of Paris, but by the workers themselves; songs in English, in French, in Italian, some of which I had sung myself as a boy - for I grew up in an atmosphere of watered-down Marxism, and in a tradition of continuity with all the areas of social revolt from the co-operative movement to anarchism. That it was in fact a comfortable middle-class world says a lot about things that a lot of people have already said a lot; but I was not thinking of my own childhood. I was thinking of the values that those songs - which I had absorbed so unthinkingly thirty years ago - handed down; I thought of what the working class had been, and what it is now. And I could have wept.
What social revolution meant to the working class was self-respect. It meant that they were as good as the next man; and it implied that they were to live their lives accordingly. Unionized or socialist or anarchist workers set their faces against drunkenness, against disorder, against ignorance; educated themselves; indeed, they made as much of a fetish of respectability as any lower-middle-class household ever did. It was on these grounds - on the grounds of their personal and group honesty, self-respect, hard work - that they challenged the ruling class; that they challenged its right to skim off the profits of their hard work for its own pleasure.
That was then; perhaps it was never completely so; but it certainly was the trend across Europe from the 1880s to the 1940s, when co-operative societies, popular education colleges, and popular sports clubs, sprung from one end of Europe to the other. And this is now. And what a dreadful now it is. The self-respect that the working man had had, not handed down to him by some superior kindness, but claimed himself against all the powers of the world as a right, is not only dead but forgotten. The worker creeps apologetically into a place of work that it has never even occurred to him to regard as his; does his bidding without interest, ever under the threat of the sack; and goes away again. It does not even occur to him to think that work is something he does for his boss; no, to employ him is a favour that the boss does to him - a favour that may be rescinded at any time.
The atomization of the workers may have been the result of single political changes (certainly, anyone who cares for the working class ought to paint Arthur Scargill's face on a punching-bag and practice on it daily); but it could never have gone as far as it has, and gone unchallenged, without the catastrophic change in popular culture - without the fact that the working class adopted, unthinkingly, a kind of popular culture that was handed down to them by the very capitalist giants that were the designated enemy and the thief. And this happened long before 1989, long before the triumph of the enemies of socialism; it had been happening for decades. Think: the time was when, to a working man, "popular culture" meant to go to evening classes and attend public lectures; to read socialist, anarchist, or atheist literature; to educate himself. Now it means the tabloid press and television; objects that not only deny that self-improvement is in any way desirable or feasible, but that, at the same time, offer for admiration and emulation a world of "glamorous" celebs that is by definition outside, above, and against, the world of the working class. In other words, they encourage the worker, either to settle down in a world of poor expectations, poor education, poor ambitions, or else to turn one's ambitions to a world of shallow desires, of wealth and consumption, of "glamour". Bill Watterson was right: when Marx said that "religion is the opium of peoples", he hadn't seen anything yet.
Part of the disaster arises from the sheer political success of the Socialist parties. When the Socialist parties started to populate local administrations, elected bodies, and eventually Parliaments, they moved their programs of social improvement from the sphere of co-operation and bottom-up action to that of State action and top-down provision. In the short run, results were usually excellent: from the mass building of public libraries to the erection of city milk companies to provide purified milk to children, the amount of good that state intervention did was enormous. But it bred into the (increasingly) former revolutionary movements a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation. When it became clear that something had to be done, the movements no longer organized their members to do it for themselves; they went and lobbied the state administration. From this expectation of State support, this effective dependency on the State, it was only one step to taking the same subservient attitude to private enterprise. The line was crossed when supposedly left-wing politicians started bragging about "creating jobs", as though work were a favour that came down from above upon the undeserving head of the worker.
The final end of this degeneration is the rise of Thatcherism. Thatcherites are mostly disenchanted left-wingers. Then there is the further stage of abjection that leads the very socialist movement itself to accept Thatcherism. I used to think that was a peculiar feature of Italian intellectual corruption, but the same horror has been perpetrated in Britain's once Labour party, without quite the baroque elaboration of bullying robbery of Craxi and his accomplices, but certainly with as much commitment to the brutalities of the unregulated market and a far more intense love of privatization.
Let us be clear about one thing. I am absolutely not nostalgic for Communism; nor yet for intellectual horrors such as anarchism. The connection between these movements and the worst episodes of modern history is neither casual nor infrequent. And by that I do not only mean Russian Communism: as one Italian wag said long ago, when Italy had her first Socialist Prime Minister (Mussolini), it was a national catastrophe. Fascism was born out of a rib, not so much of Communism proper, as of the wider revolutionary movement; indeed, Mussolini was, both socially and culturally, an absolutely typical and rather successful product of working-class self-improvement. There seems to be some horrible destiny whereby this movement of self-respect ends up in tyranny and mass murder. And incidentally, it bears a constant and murderous hatred for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, which I cannot accept either.
This is what I find so heartbreaking. The age I live in is an age of thieves; an age in which the triumph, not of freedom, but of "capitalism", is trumpeted from the rooftops; in which the principles of so-called free enteprise (actually an anti-competitive conspiracy of feudal big business powers) are bragged without doubt or shame, and as if they had anything to do with individual freedom - whereas what they really amount to is the disenfranchisement of the majority of the people and the effective neutering of democracy. Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:13 pm (UTC)I don’t know where else to ask you, so I’ll ask you here. I hope it is okay.
You see, I have this idea of writing the Hades/Persephone myth into a story, but I need a lot of background information. I know the myth, but I don’t know all the symbolism in the story. What does the pomegranate symbolize?, for an example. I can guess, but I would prefer facts. So, in my journal I asked if there was someone who knew good sides, books etc about the symbolism.
And then
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:19 pm (UTC)I hate it when stuff like this happens.
Sorry, for the problems.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:25 pm (UTC)In other words, they encourage the worker, either to settle down in a world of poor expectations, poor education, poor ambitions, or else to turn one's ambitions to a world of shallow desires, of wealth and consumption, of "glamour".
Yes. It takes the attention away from what ought to be the most important task of today, to remove the barriers between the rich world and the poor. IMO that's what socialism is (or should be) about today - eliminating the differences between rich and poor, international solidarity.
What we need now is an ideology not for the working class, but for the class that was never allowed to work. Those who have been pushed aside by society. But what do you do when this class no longer cares? Bread and circus - it has been like that ever since the Romans; give it to the people and it will take their attention away from what really matters.
I haven't given up on Socialism just yet. Honestly, I can't see an alternative, at least not for the class I belong to.
Hope you get more replies to this, I'd like to see what others have to say.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:37 pm (UTC)If you liked this, tell others where to find it. I could do with a few more readers.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:43 pm (UTC)If you liked this, tell others where to find it.
Will do.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 05:40 pm (UTC)An excellent post, I have to say, and I have to admit I hesitated when it came to writing a reply- mostly because I'm not very good at discussing politics and politics-related subjects. Other than that I am probably far too young to have a definite opinion on Communism- these times I hardly even remember, the stories I've heard from my parents and their families, the lies of politicians, a lot of different, usually contradictory facts hammered into me during high school history lessons etc.- they are very different and my view on the matter is blurred. The fact that Poland is currently governed by the same people that were a part of the pseudo-Cummunist government before 1989 does not help, either.
It is true that there has never been a Nuremberg for Communist crimes, and that plenty of people have made the transition without doing anything to pay for the crimes they committed or consented to;
Well, they still are the poloitical elites in Poland.
It taught them to respect themselves; it taught them to educate themselves.
Yes, and when they did, they blended in with those they hated and fought in the first place. A lot of them would never openly admit where they came from. Humans are all about self-preservation and survival. We recognise and label certain patterns. Very few of us ever consider the Ideas of any of the "sides" that are currently fighting each other. Ther rest sees them only as the winning side and the losing side, and they take their place according to what their survival instincts tell them. They were the working class, they got educated, got some chances to become equal to those they hated all their lives- to finally be safe in the society they lived in. When this safety became reality in a way, of course not for all of them, they blended in. They didn't want to change it, to fight for more, to try to ensure that all members of their class got the same.
What social revolution meant to the working class was self-respect. It meant that they were as good as the next man; and it implied that they were to live their lives accordingly.
Self-respect? Yes. As good as the next man? Yes. As for the 'live their lives accordingly' part- here (Poland, that is) the events that ended round 1989 meant that the people can finally get the same things that the people of the Western countries could. That the borders will open and we'll be able to know everything, to travel, to get to know all those things that we were denied all these years. And yes- "those things" are exactly what you've called the world of "glamour" and shallow desires. The working class vanished from the political map once again, because now they're too much engaged in the rat race to notice anything else. They're like these old horses with flaps covering their eyes, so they can only see what's ahead, a scrap of reality in which the "thieves" are waving the carrots of "fame", "wealth", "power" in front of their noses. But they can never see any smaller roads, any other possibilites, any ways to change their situation or status. They do what they are told to do- The worker creeps apologetically into a place of work that it has never even occurred to him to regard as his; does his bidding without interest, ever under the threat of the sack; and goes away again.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 05:41 pm (UTC)It does not even occur to him to think that work is something he does for his boss; no, to employ him is a favour that the boss does to him - a favour that may be rescinded at any time.
Seeing as the unemployment rate in Polands is over 20% now- how can one expect the people to behave in any other way? They will tolerate abuse, lower payment, overtime for which they get no money at all etc. They just want to keep their jobs, because they know that if they start to whine or protest, there are 30 others already fighting for their place.
a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation.
A plague in my society, that is. People still think that the state "is obliged" to provide them certain things. When they don't get them, they say it's an outrage. That it's the state's *duty* to give them what they need, to help them and take care of them. If the state fails to do so, they don't do anything. Even though they could get these things by themselves, they're just too lazy to do it. Or maybe lazy is not te right word. The though that they could do it themselves does not even cross their minds.
They suddenly start saying things like how it was great during Communism. How everything worked, how everyone had a flat, a job, how doctors were easier to get to- and so on. They develop a kind of false nostalgy, they vote for the ex-members of the former system's government, thinking they will solve all their problems. And when they don't, the people feel tricked, they are angry, they are miserable. But still they do nothing. I personally believe that this kind of anger and feeling of hopelesness has its limits. That one day it's going to burst. But of course I migh be wrong-
And I can't say much about Thatcherism, simply because I know nothing, or hardly anything about it. I agree that what most people now call "Communism" has really very little in common with the original ideology. The tyranny, abuse of all kinds- it all worked under the mask of equal chances, of self-improvement that theoretical Communism offered. But theoretical Communism is an utopia, be it then or now- it can never work out.
Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
To this I of course don't have an answer. I think that what we see today means, sadly, that there is no other alternative. One way or the other- it's still a tyranny of some kind. Living outside it is impossible. Living your life how you yourself want it, trying not to take a side, trying to stay away from both of these alternatives- it is, I guess, impossible. But then I never claimed that I am right.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 01:52 pm (UTC)I've never said that it's their fault. 'Cos in fact it doesn't matter- blaming them, or blaming anyone else for the matter, does not change anything. It's high time people stopped looking for someone/something to blame. And yes, I agree that lazy was not a good word to use.
Equal chances? Perhaps not. But some people were given chances that they would never otherwise have. They would never get education or their wealth if it wasn't for that system. Nothing is all Good or all Bad- even Communism. My family is a great example of that.
~m
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 02:16 pm (UTC)other things than butchery happened, that's all. Do you think I'm proud of it or something- I'm not. I lost family members then, too. Some were sent to Siberia. Some had all their possessions taken away
from them. Others got educated and made a lot of money for their hard work. How am I supposed to judge it, then? I don't want to judge it. I feel far too confused about it all to do that. I'm not saying that I
consider your opinion wrong- it's different, it's yours. That's all.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 02:39 pm (UTC)I understand your being confused, but I think you will eventually come to see that nothing excuses what Communism was built on.
Thank you, and yes- I very well may come to see that. But nothing I could read or hear other people say will make me see it in 20 minutes. I still need to form my opinions on many subjects, the past of my country being one of them. So I guess any further disussion on the subject is quite pointless. :/ I see your point, though, you've given me a lot to think of.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 03:19 pm (UTC)So much of what you say rings so tragically true.
As an aside: should you ever feel moved to post on the subject, I'm interested in why you call anarchism an 'intellectual horror'. I'm not arguing with it - I don't know enough about the matter to do that - but I have a friend (who perhaps exemplifies your picture of the self-improving working class) who is very intellectually committed to it so I've heard a fair bit of the other side of the story, albeit in a form I've found rather hard to relate to.
a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation
This is key, I think. And - unfashionable though it is to say it - that is one area in which Thatcher had a point, though in her focus on self-reliance instead of state provision she completely failed to understand the importance of co-operation. It seems to me that she polarised UK politics in the eighties into a false dichotomy - anyone with any social conscience to speak of was against Thatcher and therefore, it seemed, had to be pro a form of 'socialism' where you got to be bossed about by the state rather than by a private employer. Growing up with Thatcherism on the one hand and a religion that eschewed materialism and championed social justice on the other left me with the belief that 'business' was somehow evil per se. I had no understanding of the difference between large and small business, of how local enterprises run by local people are so essential to keeping wealth within an economy, of giving a place its unique identity (sadly, as the New Economics Foundation keeps reporting, more and more places in Britain are losing this).
I read somewhere that many people in the green/anticapitalist movement are 'second or third generation displaced working class' - ie those who lack access to capital and who are not brought up with an understanding of how to wield the levers of power, but who have grown away from the traditions of working class solidarity. That description really struck home for me. So many white-collar workers like to think of themselves as 'middle class' - and working conditions have undoubtedly improved markedly in areas of health, safety and welfare - and yet in terms of power, in terms of who makes the decisions and who gets the wealth, the term 'wage slave' is more apt than most people like to admit. The difference now is that those who are aligned to the values of the system are allowed to climb the ranks. Because it's possible for a number of individuals to move from 'poor' to 'rich', we have our myth of a classless society - the fact of individual success fosters the myth that everyone can do well if only they work hard enough (neatly sidestepping the physical limits to economic growth) and draws people's attention away from the continuing economic structures that ensure that the poor will always be with us (and will reap a declining share of the available wealth).
And added to that, there is that opium of the masses. Life is comfortable for most on a day to day basis. (Let's conveniently ignore the stress of having to spend hours a day commuting, the mounting credit card bills, the huge numbers of people who are clinically depressed.) The barriers to freedom in modern Britain are not obvious unless you knock against them. Most people find it comfortable to cushion those knocks by letting all their little compromises mount up; those who would rather change the system than compromise are the ones who don't fit in anyhow. And for the 'displaced working class', it's so difficult to know how to begin to change things. The old working class traditions are weakened and alien, which makes it difficult to use past social change as a model to guide the future. (I'd be very interested in your thoughts on whether there are useful lessons to be learned there.)
(tbc...)
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 03:20 pm (UTC)And I, too, have learned some of the old socialist songs, and what shone through for me is the sense that yes, there can be change.
And there was.
As I'm sure you know, there is a long tradition of resistance in the UK, of working to build Jerusalem in our (wish-it-were) green and pleasant land, and there are people resisting and working for positive change, including many within 'the system'. And the green parties are becoming successful enough that it's becoming harder for the powers that be to fob off their alternative vision as a mere 'single issue'. Whether they will become more powerful, and whether they retain their links with their roots if they do, is another matter - the signs from Germany are not good. But perhaps that's just part of the process, part of the dynamics of power. I used to have some kind of metaphysical belief that 'Things can only get better', but there will always be those who have various forms of power and want more - there will probably always be a need for people to actively engage in the struggle to make our societies better. And from what I've seen, it's those who are actually engaged in the struggle who are the most optimistic.
I should take that to heart and get more engaged myself...
Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
No, it is not 'necessary'. But hope is not a belief - it is a choice.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:40 pm (UTC)Your essay pre-dated both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street. Since you linked this entry to