A glorious failure
Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day! From Henry
Dear Comrade,
I am writing to you from the reading room at the Marx Memorial Library. It's a hot day in London in late April and the sun is streaming in over the dusty shelves and lighting up the deeply homo-communist mural on the wall opposite me, it depicts the worker of the future sweeping aside the chaos of capitalism. Banks, churches, parliaments shatter in front of his bare chest. 100 years ago tonight one million miners were locked out of work by rapacious bosses and the general strike began.
I am reading the beautifully hand drawn and copied pages of the Newcastle Workers' Chronicle, with its hammers and sickles, and constant apologies for the lack of paper to print it on as newsprint was requisitioned by the government during the strike to stop work like this circulating. One headline reads: 'They have challenged our right to live and we can do no more than accept their challenge.' Another says 'Are U a SCAB?' On the 10th of May 1926 they wrote: 'The Past belonged to the Boss, The Future belongs to the workers.' Each column begins 'dear comrade.'
For nine days the most beautiful example of solidarity flourished. 2 million workers struck in solidarity. All docks, railways, mines and power stations were stopped. One in ten workers were on strike and hundreds of thousands more had to be restrained from joining the action by their unions which insisted that only the key industries need to strike to grind the economy to a halt. Print-workers refused to produce the lies of the capitalist press. Busses were tipped into the Clyde. 500 miners marched to Glasgow University to fight the students of the GUU who were scabbing. Fascists organised strikebreaking but were defeated everywhere by mass pickets.
All too often when we think of the strike it is through the lens of its eventual betrayal. But at the start of May 1926 the question was asked, who really runs this country. And the resounding answer was the workers. The world was --briefly -- turned upside down.
There's plenty of time to remember the defeat and betrayal. But it is important sometimes to think about those millions of brave men and women standing together in so much dignity and risking their own selves for the chance of a world held in common.
The Signal, the Communist newspaper of the Railwaymen wrote: 'If you fight one by one, you will be licked, if you fight all together you will win, what are you going to do?'
***
The fact is we can't ever do anything alone. We can't live alone, we can't survive alone/ We can't understand things on our own. Humans are incapable of it.
We can't fight alone, or even make sense of what we are fighting if we have to rely only on our own eyes. Standpoint epistemology is just as useless as divine truth. We can only make sense of things through the collective. We can only work out what is happening together, through dialogue, opposition, dare I say it the dialectic! Meaning is made by the people. So this constant lonely consumption of the news is not just pacifying, it destroys meaning. As you say.
Capital's enshitification of everything here takes the form (as ever) of atomisation and alienation. It's like cars. Cars are terrible. They carve up our cities, they destroy the planet, they kill children, they are expensive, inefficient, illogical, 95% of the time they are idle. We have inventions like the bus, the tram, and the train that do the work faster, better, more effectively.
They do the work better that is, if the work is getting people where they want to go. But if the work is in fact extracting surplus value, then nothing beats the car. We can sell one car per person (compared to one train for every 30,000 people in a car-free system that presumed the same travel capacity required). A car lasts 12 years, where a train lasts 40. Really the car is a machine that extracts surplus value, and happens -- as a by-product -- to move people around.
While the car extracts value from the worker and captures wages from the buyer, It leaves us alone, sealed in, separated from each other and the city, placed above and apart from our fellow humans -- and in power over them, with our hand (or rather foot) on a trigger that could kill. Road rage is not a symptom of the frustrations of driving, it is a sign of the dehumanisation, the othering, the isolation that the car creates.
In a traffic jam folk lose their minds. In a stopped train they hand out biscuits to each other.
The car is the single most obviously shit invention.
Yet our whole world is built around it, and sacrificed to it.
Similarly the smart phone holds us captive. It's not really a tool for communication, it's an advertising-platform that they've glued to our hands. A propaganda and pacification tool they've made addictive. Maybe we can also organise drinks or a meeting on it. So what. It is there to show us the interior design we need, the clothes we need, the weight-loss drugs we need, the unmitigated, visceral horror that will befall us if we resist. Any human connection is incidental.
We look at it alone. scrolling. Hours a day. Days a month. Weeks a year. Trapped in a silent, solo hell of adverts and distress, violence, and distraction.
Once this solo hell at least showed us 'content' made by our friends. Then it showed us 'content' made by strangers. Now it shows us 'content' made by machines.
We have to fight back against any and every invention and development that separates us. It is so dangerous to be tricked into thinking we are alone. The general strike may have been a failure but it is a glorious failure and like all bold steps in the right direction it shows us something vital for our future: That it is only through unity, solidarity, togetherness that we can get anything of worth.
***
What monster then is this phone that fills our time with nothing, feeds us slop, gruel, run-off, and yet won't let us look away. Are we like narcissus, cursed to stare forever at an image that cannot love us back, alone with ourselves, wasting away while we're transfixed by the grim reflection in our little dark mirrors. How much worse that the reflection now is barely human. A multi-coloured, moving refraction of a prompt entered by some distant digital serf.
***
Th excellent Paul Haworth says: "The Internet has turned evil. Every single platform is some way along the path to far-right fascist. AI is crushing all markers of what it is to be human, eradicating the pleasure from making art.
Now is the time to make physical, human, flawed, immature, unresolved, grungy art."
***
As you say, thinking together, making together, being in conversation, even with those that see things very differently from us. Especially with those who see things very differently from us. Is the cure. People have said before that poets can't drive. Maybe the opposite is true that drivers can't write poetry. Certainly the more time we spend on our phones the less able we are to think together.
(I know that you drive! But it can only be because you're such a great poet and such a bad driver)
***
The answer to all of it is each other.
***
Someone tried again to shoot Donald Trump. They missed again. The attacker couldn't bear to allow a rapist to continue to be his president. The would-be assassin, Cole Allen, is a Christian, he wrote:
Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
***
Meanwhile the only president worth listening to (and also someone who took up arms against capitalists as it happens) Gustavo Petro gathered a coalition of the willing together in Santa Marta this week to try and begin a genuine transition away from the necro-politics of climate change. He said:
'The Amazon rainforest is burning. Without it we reach a point of no return. The wars we are seeing are driven by desperate geopolitical strategies around fossil resources. We are heading toward barbarism, toward fascism. The question that needs to be asked is whether capitalism can truly adapt to a non-fossil energy model...'
The world at war, incipient fascism, the climate emergency are all one question.
The conference is taking place in Santa Marta, where Bolivar died. His final words were "all who served the revolution have plowed the sea." He believed his life's work, liberating the Americas and establishing a Gran Columbia to stand against the imperialists, to be a failure.
Another account of his death has him say:
“Damn it! How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?”
I do not think he or Petro or you and I are ploughing the sea. But undoubtedly we are trapped in a terrible dystopic labyrinth.
***
And while some in Santa Marta try to avert catastrophe, in Aberdeen we sail full speed toward it. Ithaca is an oil company based there and it has paid its main shareholder, the Israeli company Delek group, $1 Billion in dividends in the last five years. It's going to start paying Israel even more if the Rosebank oil field that it owns is opened up for exploration. But wait didn't public pressure mean the government banned new drilling in Rosebank? Well they did, but now that is being reviewed because the war started by Israel has created so much instability in the oil supply that more oil will need to be extracted by this british-israeli company. Same players, same winners, same losers. Same charred earth.
***
The Marx Memorial Library opened in the 1930s as a place to protect socialist knowledge in the face of fascist book burning. How beautiful. What institutions do we need now to protect our tradition from techno-fascism?
***
I'll leave you with this from Cassie Blanton, who is clearly in the same maze as us. But in the end isn't that the first vital step, being lost in the labyrinth together.
'They're shooting people lining up for bags of flour
You don't need the permission if you've got the power
And everybody knows that we're living in a death cult
But nobody wants to talk about what you should do if you're living in a death cult'
With love, and every wish for a happy birthday this May 1st! And with so much grattitude that I have you to talk to about what we should do when living in a death cult. I'll see you on the march and at ours after!
Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day!
H xxx