A quick review. At last a horror film that doesn't dish the monster/gore money shot in the first half hour. As an aside, I can see a shift in pop culture away from torture porn (the recent abiding form of horror being Guantanamo Bay). These days vampires seem to be on the rise (True Blood, Daybreakers, New Moon etc). They have a number of simple associations: aristocracy, parasitism, simultaneous attraction and repulsion, syphilis (bite marks on the neck being the visual metaphor for pock marks)... If this is the case we need to chew over what this means more broadly.
Paranormal Activity is actually closer to a thriller. Not perfect in its writing (the demon's motivation, like the demon itself, is not really fleshed out; although it is suggested we don't get to see why his activity spirals), the performances and particularly the framing of the story as found footage are very effective. If you like turn of the screw fear you will enjoy Paranormal Activity.
One other thing. The haunting is done by a demon, not a ghost, hence, for one thing, the haunting follows the female lead about. It's a different and interesting angle. Belief in ghosts is a product of human alienation. Demons are first known to appear in the works of Plato (which doesn't mean he invented the concept). At the time they were simply regarded as spirits, not neccesarily good or bad.
Demons feature in most religions and are generally regarded as evil. They have a variety of resonances. A common overlap is they tend to either target individiuals and torment or engulf their victims. While demons are not portrayed as human, i.e. ghosts, they certainly another variation on alienated humanity, this time with the emphasis on human will and desire being posessed by a natural or even higher power.
Capitalists are often portrayed as vampires. Could the symptoms of their system (inflicted on their working subjects) be protrayed as demons?
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
More on the Future Legend
I knew these people. I knew them in my bones… and they knew me.
I used to work in news photography. I left school at eighteen, worked several years in bits of the local press: standard stuff. I also had a more offbeat portfolio. There was a bit of personal stuff, art I suppose, I won’t bore you with it, but it was mostly social concern stuff (housing issues, political campaigns, strikes) that I’d managed to sell on to some of the nationals and the lefty press.
I’d been doing freelance for about a year when I hooked up with this geezer who I knew from the Graun called Callum. He wanted to do some background work on the far right. They’d begun marching again under a variety of names, EDL, SDL, SIOE and so on.
So they took me on the payroll full-time. I’d go to a few of the marches, take some photos… make some notes. It was the usual mayhem, just like the old days really, when the Anti Nazi League took on the NF; lots of running and shouting in the streets… placards… lots of stand-offs. Despite what you think there was very little full-on violence.
These new demos the fash were usually smaller in number, and usually got the worst of it. They denied they were fascists. This was the story. They were caught on camera and film too many times, giving salutes and yelling racist shit. The mainstream nazis tried to deny they were part of this as well but this was a hardcore operation. All their members kept turning up to these demos and joining in the fun.
So they didn’t like what we were doing. We were showing them up for what they were. I remember Callum getting loads of abuse and threats by email. What really made it all start, though, was when they realised who I was. I remember getting an email from the main office. My name and face had gone up on Stormfront. I used to be one of them, back in the day, see? I’d explain but… anyway… Since word got out I was covering their demos they were looking for me so I could be dealt with once and for all.
I’m stuck in hospital with this super-flu. They were quarantining people. I was calling home every night for about a week. It was all miserable, boring, most of the time sitting up in bed reading or watching TV. The first twelve hours or so I remember not having a drip. I couldn’t eat or drink. I could hardly keep stuff down. It was a nightmare.
Of course then these riots start happening. Everyone in the hospital was talking about them, staff and patients. It felt like a bubble had burst, you know? Like someone had yawned in the middle of Shakespeare. There was rightness to it. Yet people were getting caught up. Some of the staff went missing. I remember this guy down the hall, what was his name, I forget. Anyway, this guy, old boy, was expecting to be released. He’d had a close shave, almost died, but was now fully recovered and waiting for his daughter to come pick him up. She never came.
Then it came on the news, Morning Lane Tescos had been looted. That was a bit of a giggle.
I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, as you would. I remember getting up. It was early the following morning, just after dawn. I’d had another rough night and was feeling a bit weak. I went for a walk up and down the ward, just to stretch my legs. I didn’t notice at the time but there was no nurse on duty.
I could see out of the window funny looking groups hanging around in the car park and at the gates. They seemed to be stopping people going in an out, giving them a hard time. I watched for a bit. There were fights. An ambulance came in to the hospital. One group tried to grab the patient off the gurney, while beating up the paramedics.
I was then I clocked what was going on. Despite how I felt, I had to leave. I went back to my bed grabbed as much stuff as I could. I had some clothes and some money but no shoes, just these slippers, and no phone either. There was staff changing rooms on the wing I remember. I reckoned I might be able to nick some decent boots or something.
While I was weighing up the odds I could hear shouting at the end of the ward, outside the door. I just ran as fast as I could down the other end. Lucky for me there was a fire escape. Of course the alarm went off. Standing at the top of these stairs I didn’t really notice. Down below there was a huge swarm of people, maybe 2-300. They were organised, not police or army, but organised, rounding up the nazis and kicking seven shades of shit out of them.
-------------------
The second night everyone was out. Half the neighbourhood had been arrested. The feds came down in this huge sweep, took who they could and got the hell out. The police are vicious bastards.
They thought we’d give in but the second night barricades went up. We knew they were gonna come back for more. Everyone helped make them. They brought, like, bits of old furniture, wheelie bins, paving slabs and stuff. Burned out cars were always good to build around. One guy on my block, I swear down, he burned his own car just to get busy.
We fought them back until about midnight, when they cleared out. There was all this stuff about the nazis joining them. I didn’t see any that night. I didn’t think they’d come up our way, although some people I know swear they did. Plain clothes guys with batons and stun guns and that.
Anyway, after we’d won we were all so happy we didn’t want to leave. It was a party. Everyone started breaking out the music and the chanting. The streets were ours, man.
Then something amazing happened. A few of us heard there was this meeting. We went down to the bridge by Finsbury Park station. It was massive, I tell you, thousands. I couldn’t believe it. People were discussing what they were going to do next. I remember this old guy, must have been in his fifties, got up and said we should march to the nearest police station and free all the people inside.
People liked this. We all went down to the Islington cop shop, we reckoned that was the nearest. I never got inside, but people just smashed their way in. They didn’t just carry the people out but their weapons, the computers, the files and that. The place was totally cleaned out.
-------
I used to work in news photography. I left school at eighteen, worked several years in bits of the local press: standard stuff. I also had a more offbeat portfolio. There was a bit of personal stuff, art I suppose, I won’t bore you with it, but it was mostly social concern stuff (housing issues, political campaigns, strikes) that I’d managed to sell on to some of the nationals and the lefty press.
I’d been doing freelance for about a year when I hooked up with this geezer who I knew from the Graun called Callum. He wanted to do some background work on the far right. They’d begun marching again under a variety of names, EDL, SDL, SIOE and so on.
So they took me on the payroll full-time. I’d go to a few of the marches, take some photos… make some notes. It was the usual mayhem, just like the old days really, when the Anti Nazi League took on the NF; lots of running and shouting in the streets… placards… lots of stand-offs. Despite what you think there was very little full-on violence.
These new demos the fash were usually smaller in number, and usually got the worst of it. They denied they were fascists. This was the story. They were caught on camera and film too many times, giving salutes and yelling racist shit. The mainstream nazis tried to deny they were part of this as well but this was a hardcore operation. All their members kept turning up to these demos and joining in the fun.
So they didn’t like what we were doing. We were showing them up for what they were. I remember Callum getting loads of abuse and threats by email. What really made it all start, though, was when they realised who I was. I remember getting an email from the main office. My name and face had gone up on Stormfront. I used to be one of them, back in the day, see? I’d explain but… anyway… Since word got out I was covering their demos they were looking for me so I could be dealt with once and for all.
I’m stuck in hospital with this super-flu. They were quarantining people. I was calling home every night for about a week. It was all miserable, boring, most of the time sitting up in bed reading or watching TV. The first twelve hours or so I remember not having a drip. I couldn’t eat or drink. I could hardly keep stuff down. It was a nightmare.
Of course then these riots start happening. Everyone in the hospital was talking about them, staff and patients. It felt like a bubble had burst, you know? Like someone had yawned in the middle of Shakespeare. There was rightness to it. Yet people were getting caught up. Some of the staff went missing. I remember this guy down the hall, what was his name, I forget. Anyway, this guy, old boy, was expecting to be released. He’d had a close shave, almost died, but was now fully recovered and waiting for his daughter to come pick him up. She never came.
Then it came on the news, Morning Lane Tescos had been looted. That was a bit of a giggle.
I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, as you would. I remember getting up. It was early the following morning, just after dawn. I’d had another rough night and was feeling a bit weak. I went for a walk up and down the ward, just to stretch my legs. I didn’t notice at the time but there was no nurse on duty.
I could see out of the window funny looking groups hanging around in the car park and at the gates. They seemed to be stopping people going in an out, giving them a hard time. I watched for a bit. There were fights. An ambulance came in to the hospital. One group tried to grab the patient off the gurney, while beating up the paramedics.
I was then I clocked what was going on. Despite how I felt, I had to leave. I went back to my bed grabbed as much stuff as I could. I had some clothes and some money but no shoes, just these slippers, and no phone either. There was staff changing rooms on the wing I remember. I reckoned I might be able to nick some decent boots or something.
While I was weighing up the odds I could hear shouting at the end of the ward, outside the door. I just ran as fast as I could down the other end. Lucky for me there was a fire escape. Of course the alarm went off. Standing at the top of these stairs I didn’t really notice. Down below there was a huge swarm of people, maybe 2-300. They were organised, not police or army, but organised, rounding up the nazis and kicking seven shades of shit out of them.
-------------------
The second night everyone was out. Half the neighbourhood had been arrested. The feds came down in this huge sweep, took who they could and got the hell out. The police are vicious bastards.
They thought we’d give in but the second night barricades went up. We knew they were gonna come back for more. Everyone helped make them. They brought, like, bits of old furniture, wheelie bins, paving slabs and stuff. Burned out cars were always good to build around. One guy on my block, I swear down, he burned his own car just to get busy.
We fought them back until about midnight, when they cleared out. There was all this stuff about the nazis joining them. I didn’t see any that night. I didn’t think they’d come up our way, although some people I know swear they did. Plain clothes guys with batons and stun guns and that.
Anyway, after we’d won we were all so happy we didn’t want to leave. It was a party. Everyone started breaking out the music and the chanting. The streets were ours, man.
Then something amazing happened. A few of us heard there was this meeting. We went down to the bridge by Finsbury Park station. It was massive, I tell you, thousands. I couldn’t believe it. People were discussing what they were going to do next. I remember this old guy, must have been in his fifties, got up and said we should march to the nearest police station and free all the people inside.
People liked this. We all went down to the Islington cop shop, we reckoned that was the nearest. I never got inside, but people just smashed their way in. They didn’t just carry the people out but their weapons, the computers, the files and that. The place was totally cleaned out.
-------
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Our dumb decade
Commander Bob Broadhurst "inadvertently misled" parliament by saying there were no plainclothes police officers present at the G20 protests where there were actually 25 (and one was caught on film getting stuck in with the riot police). It's a sign of our times, the motif of our dumb decade, people in power either accidentally lie or just don't have the faintest idea what's going on in the organisations they nominally run.
Either way nothing happens and they keep their job.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Actually Existing News
Here's something, the police are now making arrests simply to get people onto their DNA database. Also, 3/4 of young black men are on the database (despite young black men not making up 3/4 of all criminals). Someone should tell Jack Straw this.
It's indicative of the general police mentality. The kind of mentality where officers interrupt a showing of a gangster film in order to count attendees. Crime is not an act, crime is a thing, a being, often a person. A black man is often crime, people watching the wrong film might be crime, someone expressing a political opinion could be crime.
But you just don't know, do you. So you have to gather information. But there is never enough information. The police are in the early stages of a stasi-like psychosis. In a developing state capitalist world, civil society may under threat.
It's indicative of the general police mentality. The kind of mentality where officers interrupt a showing of a gangster film in order to count attendees. Crime is not an act, crime is a thing, a being, often a person. A black man is often crime, people watching the wrong film might be crime, someone expressing a political opinion could be crime.
But you just don't know, do you. So you have to gather information. But there is never enough information. The police are in the early stages of a stasi-like psychosis. In a developing state capitalist world, civil society may under threat.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Not your usual chit-chat
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Fiction
It's a long short-story called Sons of Becker. It's mostly a mystery. It could be rewritten as a supernatural crime story, but it would have to be considerably lengthened. It could run as either (or neither). Anyway....
The first house I ever stayed in at university was a 9-bedroom mansion, someone, I can’t remember, told me it was an Edwardian palace. It was a lovely place, surprisingly cheap for semi-swanky North London, a three-story building with a courtyard and driveway out the back, leading to a little cottage behind some trees.
The cottage was where our landlord lived, although I never saw him. I did once go down to the cottage. There was a large railway line out the back down a steep embankment, about a 50-foot drop.
It was about three in the morning. We’d been having a party. A few of us had taken some lines and were still energetic and talkative. We decided we’d give everybody else a rest, let them crash. One guy, I remember, had taken some acid, and was currently spiralling down a psychic plughole. I went to get a few beers from the fridge and saw him huddled by the sink muttering:
“It’s normal… It’s normal. It’s just… normal”.
I felt a pang of guilt as I told him earlier that he had sharks eyes. Poor thing.
My housemates were already outside. They took the beers and we all strolled down to have a look at the trains rolling by. At that time it was mostly freight.
We walked down the path to the landlord’s house. There was his car, a big sporty thing. I don’t know much about cars. It looked like one of those classic cars, Austin Powers-type machines. His tenants rarely saw him. He seemed to be making a good deal of money off us though.
There were five of us. The landlord’s house was dark. Trying to be quiet but probably failing, we gathered up some logs and tires and sat at the top of the precipice, drinking and nattering.
After what felt like half an hour we heard the crunch of feet, several pairs. I assumed it was more people come out to join us. There was the clunk of doors and a sudden revving. We went back round the front of the house to look. The landlord’s car was clean gone.
I had moved into the house later than all the others. I had started the year in halls and intended to stay there. Unfortunately I was stuck next door to a horrible, racist Dutchman. If the top volume treatments of Slayer and Agnostic Front weren’t enough, he liked to lurk around the common room, eating pork snacks, making offensive jokes and passing comment on the Indonesians living on the floor above.
He only ever said these things in front of other white people. When we were all together he was sweetness and light. One time, however, I was boiling up a rice supper, when in he strolled. Passing behind me he made a comment about having a particular Indonesian guy sent to Guantanamo Bay. I told him to shut up. He was very quickly upset.
“You fucking what? Who the fuck you telling to shut up?”
I told him that just because I was white didn’t mean I wouldn’t be offended.
He approached me. “I fucking knock you down! Fucking Red!”
I guessed then that his Bernard Manning act had been for my benefit. I squared up to him and asked him to try. After a few moments staring I felt sure he wasn’t going to and got back on with my supper. Before I knew it he came charging back into the room. He had gone away to get his 6-inch bowie knife.
He bowled in, pressed me against the nearest wall and held the knife to my throat. He was yelling in Dutch. Another Dutch student told me later it was mostly nazi epithets. I was scared but tried not to show it.
I don’t know whether he really wanted to cut my throat or not. Luckily for me several people came running into the room because of the commotion. The Dutch nazi thought better of whatever he had in mind and withdrew to his room, making more threats and insults.
He was gone the following day. None the less I decided I wanted to live somewhere else.
I answered an advert on an NUS notice board: housemate wanted. I was interviewed by five of the eight other housemates. It was a style and manner I soon got used to. My interview was actually quite ramshackle, a few questions, who was I, where from, what course, any personal habits, would I like a cup of tea etc? It was late afternoon, people were dropping in an out the house all the time.
This was the handle. Nine rooms meant nine housemates each with dozens of friends meant it was an open house. The TV would go on most mornings at half nine and would only go off the following morning at about two to three o’clock. It dawned I was being held back so each of the housemates could get to meet me in turn.
There was Melanie, a small shorthaired brunette woman. She had a free afternoon and was there for the duration. She was half-Italian, although not a trace of it in her voice. Her brother had just left college and go could no longer go back to Italy without being drafted into national service.
Abbey was also in and out quite regularly. She was down to earth and practical, very good with electrical equipment and wiring, which was handy, as everyone else seemed to be a flake. She was also from the richest family in the house, although I never asked exactly how wealthy.
There was a mix of religions in the house, two Christians and one Hindu. One of the Christians was a guy named Alex. He was active in the Salvation Army, a persistent but tactful proselytiser. He was also a randy sod, a bit of a bottom feeder to at nightclubs. If ever he got too pushy about the good news I’d just remind him about the last person he slept with.
Then there was Matthew, although he was much less observant. Matt was a Liverpudlian lad taking sports studies. He had worked various bars in Merseyside over the years and had various horror stories about footballer’s antics, all of which were totally true.
The Hindu guy, Salman, was actually a member of quite a narrow sect. Salman was a quiet guy. All it took was the mention of any aspect of Islam to bring out a roaring chauvinist. He sometimes set of quite violent, polarising arguments in the house.
Finally there was Tania, the white witch, who made it a two all draw. One of the first things she did was make a birth chart for me. It turned out I was triple Mercury, a great communicator destined for greatness. I couldn’t have been more flattered. It turned out she had lived in the house the year before (she was a second year) and had actually met the landlord.
His name was Mr Hoogstraten, a pale, thin guy, bald as an egg. According to Tania he was well dressed, generally spoke in a whisper and carried a large white (pristine) handkerchief. He had dark, dark aura but, fortunately kept himself to himself, so there were no problems.
Which was nice to know. But where was the last housemate?
“Sorry?”
“Well, you’ve kept me here to meet all your other housemates” I said. “But we’re one short”
One short? Tania pondered for a moment. “Oh, Liam, he’s not around. If fact he’s hardly ever around”.
“He’s a vampire. He only ever comes out at night,” Matthew added from in the kitchen, cooking his favourite, cheese and chips.
“Ah, I see… Well” I said, deciding to go for it, “I’ve met almost everyone then. Am I moving in then?”
“Yes, we’d… that’d be great,” said Melanie. She turned to Tania, “let’s sort out the details”. Then to me, “first, though, cup of tea?”
Around the time I moved in a strange and fascinating story started hitting the newspaper headlines. A number of places were hit, warehouses, banks and jewellers across London, by a rather unusual gang.
The original raid was on a West End jeweller. It was in broad daylight, five men and one driver all of whom looked identical. They were dressed in what must have been very elaborate masks of the former tennis star Boris Becker.
It was a stunning robbery, a one-minute job that left police and press seemingly flabbergasted. They must have had help on the inside. They must have, although the staff checked out completely innocent.
The police put out an appeal for information. £400 grand worth of merchandise was taken. There were lots of pictures of the stolen jewellery and a couple of enigmatic stills from CCTV. The gang were dubbed the Sons of Becker.
In the next few weeks there were several more dramatic robberies. Six men dressed as Eddie Murphy looted an upscale city bank. Oscar Wilde and four handsome rent boys cleaned out a building society. The cast of Friends took down two betting shops in one day.
The police admitted to being baffled. They did not want to make the link because, well, it was preposterous. That didn’t stop the newspapers, TV, radio and all the other outlets from speculating. London was ablaze with rumour, conjecture and rock solid friend-of-a-friend explanations. Everything from a genetic experiment gone wrong to the revenge of a demon plastic surgeon to a conceptual art piece that could be explained by coded adverts in Loot magazine.
My room was on the second floor of the house. It was a lovely spacious thing. Everyone used to comment on how tidy I was. What they didn’t know was I had very little to make a mess with. My books, CDs, player, radio, clothes and my lamp, that was it.
My window was large and faced out backward, onto the driveway and the trees. It was also east facing, so every morning I’d get a nice blast of warmth and light while the others cuddled under their duvets. It was a calm area. Once the TV was off and everyone had retired it was a quiet house. If I were awake at night occasionally I’d hear dim rattle of trains passing by. Once in a while the landlord’s car would drive in and out, I would see the beams through the trees.
Only, of course, one night I started hearing muffled noises and light banging coming from the next room. I lived opposite Liam’s room. Despite having lived at this place for nearly two months I had not bumped into the chap. It was getting on for four in the morning.
The noise was definitely coming from Liam’s room. At first I thought it was that kind of noise and tried to tune out. There was a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. But it went on, intermittently quite loud and… something was off. I eventually realised, it was too irregular and distressed. Not love but hate, well, maybe not hate, but certainly enmity… and more than one man’s voice. What was going on?
I almost plucked up the courage to go see when the noise stopped and I did my best to go back to sleep. The following day I asked the others about what they heard coming from Liam’s room. It seemed everyone else had been out asleep.
A few nights later I had a similar experience. It was a Thursday night. A lot of the gang were out at a student night. Alex and I stayed home though. The previous night we’d taken an LSD/Ecstasy combo and gone to the SU bar to play some pool. I had been getting into drug fiction, Beat Generation, Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, and felt like giving the psychedelic experience a try.
I persuaded Alex to join in. Matthew was originally going to come along too. He was the one who actually scored for us. The plan was to take the stuff University before sunset before going to a suitable gig round Koko or the Electric Ballroom.
The plan sort of went totally completely wrong. Not bad, but wrong. We bundled into one of bars in ULU. We’d taken a pill each about half an hour earlier in the bus on the way down (very stupid). Neither of us felt anything immediate. Once there, Alex hit on playing a game of pool, nice colours and angles. He got the cues from behind the bar. I put down the money. He racked up. I think he was coming up as he spent ages, with a fascinated look, trying to fit the balls into the right order.
So I bent down to take the break off shot. I felt this quick dizziness and trembling in my knee. I made a bridge with my left hand but totally missed putting the cue in, banged my chin on the table and burst out laughing. Things went downhill from there.
The LSD was much stronger than I ever imagined. The game took half an hour to finish. I don’t remember who won. We staggered about for while, looking for a table. I didn’t want us to seem too conspicuous. It was a loud bar. The music sounded unusually good, despite being the usual Friday night handbag disco tat.
I got the notion, though, that we had to leave. We were waiting for a couple of guys from the SWSS group, Pete and Dan. They’d texted to see what people were up to. I’d replied saying we were in ULU.
Alex was trying to order a pint from the bar. I was sitting down at a table eating some crisps and looking at my fingers wiggle about. I heard and then felt a warm wave crash through the bar. I think it was in time with the crescendo of a song playing. After the wave receded I could hear Pete and Dan talking, clearly, above the crowd, the music and the noise… but I couldn’t see them.
Instead I could see, at the far end of the bar, groups of people (although I couldn’t make out their faces) wearing luminous jackets. I couldn’t tell if they were police or ambulance or security or… what. Either way I felt like we oughtn’t to hang around. They were talking, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of them sounded Dutch.
I had to drag Alex away from the bar and the nice young woman behind he was talking too. I didn’t want to tell him what was going on but he didn’t seem to understand. I whispered sharply in his ear:
“Pigs, Alex, they’re onto us”.
Alex panicked and ran out the door. I followed but could barely keep up. What the people in luminous jackets made of it all I don’t know. I caught up with Alex somewhere on a traffic island in the junction between UCLH and Euston Tower. Alex had stopped, suddenly. He was breathing heavily, bent over, gripping a set of railings, muttering a prayer. I asked if he was alright. He puked violently for what seemed like ages (looking back the colour of his guts seemed amazing, not to mention the sound of the traffic stirring and the lights all around).
Both of us eventually calmed down. Alex felt like he needed some fresh air, so we walked most of the way home.
I eventually came down (or felt a bit more normal) about an hour before dawn. The house was quiet. Alex felt better for the air, although there was something about the Winter X Games that freaked him out a little. I think the snow was a touch bright.
I stayed up, though, and watched the learning programmes, a documentary about Mars followed by something on tropical plants with some excellent shots panning through foliage, then a French language lesson, which I mostly ignored. I eventually felt a bit tired and decided to climb the stairs.
On my floor I bumped into someone, a tall, apparently young man carrying what looked like a rucksack. He was leaving Liam’s room, closing the door behind him.
“Hello there”, said I, wanting to sound surprised but friendly.
“Hi” said the man, looking up. I could see his face now, blond, short hair, slightly heavy with a trimmed beard. He didn’t seem so tall now.
Small pause. “You must be Liam”, I said. I was standing at the top of the stairs, blocking.
“Uh, yes” said the man, as if he was just catching on. His hair seemed to be changing colour, darkening, lengthening and curling slightly. His face seemed to be shifting. He looked almost like… Matthew. Another pause, both of us stock-still. Liam took a deep breath. “I must be going”, said Liam with surprising force. He started walking towards me.
“You off somewhere, at this time of the morning?”
I leaned to and gave a forgiving shoulder, but Liam still managed to barge past me.
“Busy” said Liam, jogging down the stairs, a bit loud, “meeting someone, must go now”. I don’t know if it was me, but he sounded like Alex.
Puzzled though I was, Liam was quickly gone. I was curious. I checked on Liam’s door. It was unlocked… but I thought better of it and carried on to my room. I spent the next two hours lying on my bed travelling through time.
A few days later we the house were having a big night in. The plan was TV, pizza and booze, and maybe the odd joint for those who’d partake.
The booze and the food and the company were fine. The TV was a bit of a let down, very little on, and we’d just got digital so there was no excuse. We ended up watching one of those crime appeal shows. It was full of gruesome cases, murders, robberies and rapes, all sensationalised. Then came the biggest case of the night.
The Sons of Becker were still on the loose. A number of new robberies were attributed to them. They were now holding an estimated £6 million of stolen money and goods. But their spree had taken a sinister new twist.
They had kidnapped a Russian billionaire’s daughter. There was a ransom video sent to the billionaire that had never been seen before. The presenters warned us it was a disturbing watch, and it was.
The video began with the young woman sitting on a chair in what looked like a small bedroom. She seemed unharmed and unmolested; she was not even tied down, which was odd. She was clearly frightened, wide-eyed and breathing heavily. There was something deeply uncanny about the setting, like I had seen it before.
A man appeared swiftly and silently in shot. He sat behind her on what I suddenly noticed was a bed and placed a hand on the poor woman’s shoulder. She began to speak.
Watching this, all of us, silently, Tania interjected, “have you…?”
“What?” I asked.
“Does this look…? Have you…?”
“Maybe we’ve seen this before”, said Salman, cutting across.
“Maybe we know the, the woman”, said Alex. All were equally doubtful.
The woman spoke, delivering the terms of the ransom. She spoke clearly, evenly and without emotion or error. The man sitting behind her was wearing an expensive looking suit and bowler hat. His face was covered in a thin white cloth, pulled over tight. You could see the point of his nose and the outline of his lips… they were moving, he was mouthing her words.
The statement went on for about 30-40 seconds. The room was dimly lit, apart from a bright light on the man and woman. In the background there were very specific objects, a small TV on a table, a CD tower, posters on the wall, Arsenal, Zoo magazine. Very specific, very identifiable… almost like the kidnappers wanted the world to know where they had been. It was all very specific, very… familiar.
Tania then grabbed my arm:
“This way, come”.
“What?”
“Just come… Come on!” she addressed the second part to the rest of the room.
We went up to my floor, Salman and Alex followed. Tania led us bursting into Liam’s room. There we found the chair, the bed, the TV, the CDs and posters and a video on a tripod. Before we had a moment to be amazed there were gasps and epithets from the front room.
“Fucking hell, look at this!” yelled Matthew from the front room.
“No!” I replied, “Look at this!”
“Come now, NOW! Look at this”.
I charged back down the stairs, leaving guys upstairs. It turned out police now knew the true faces of the gang. They were showing them in e-fit. It was us.
The first house I ever stayed in at university was a 9-bedroom mansion, someone, I can’t remember, told me it was an Edwardian palace. It was a lovely place, surprisingly cheap for semi-swanky North London, a three-story building with a courtyard and driveway out the back, leading to a little cottage behind some trees.
The cottage was where our landlord lived, although I never saw him. I did once go down to the cottage. There was a large railway line out the back down a steep embankment, about a 50-foot drop.
It was about three in the morning. We’d been having a party. A few of us had taken some lines and were still energetic and talkative. We decided we’d give everybody else a rest, let them crash. One guy, I remember, had taken some acid, and was currently spiralling down a psychic plughole. I went to get a few beers from the fridge and saw him huddled by the sink muttering:
“It’s normal… It’s normal. It’s just… normal”.
I felt a pang of guilt as I told him earlier that he had sharks eyes. Poor thing.
My housemates were already outside. They took the beers and we all strolled down to have a look at the trains rolling by. At that time it was mostly freight.
We walked down the path to the landlord’s house. There was his car, a big sporty thing. I don’t know much about cars. It looked like one of those classic cars, Austin Powers-type machines. His tenants rarely saw him. He seemed to be making a good deal of money off us though.
There were five of us. The landlord’s house was dark. Trying to be quiet but probably failing, we gathered up some logs and tires and sat at the top of the precipice, drinking and nattering.
After what felt like half an hour we heard the crunch of feet, several pairs. I assumed it was more people come out to join us. There was the clunk of doors and a sudden revving. We went back round the front of the house to look. The landlord’s car was clean gone.
I had moved into the house later than all the others. I had started the year in halls and intended to stay there. Unfortunately I was stuck next door to a horrible, racist Dutchman. If the top volume treatments of Slayer and Agnostic Front weren’t enough, he liked to lurk around the common room, eating pork snacks, making offensive jokes and passing comment on the Indonesians living on the floor above.
He only ever said these things in front of other white people. When we were all together he was sweetness and light. One time, however, I was boiling up a rice supper, when in he strolled. Passing behind me he made a comment about having a particular Indonesian guy sent to Guantanamo Bay. I told him to shut up. He was very quickly upset.
“You fucking what? Who the fuck you telling to shut up?”
I told him that just because I was white didn’t mean I wouldn’t be offended.
He approached me. “I fucking knock you down! Fucking Red!”
I guessed then that his Bernard Manning act had been for my benefit. I squared up to him and asked him to try. After a few moments staring I felt sure he wasn’t going to and got back on with my supper. Before I knew it he came charging back into the room. He had gone away to get his 6-inch bowie knife.
He bowled in, pressed me against the nearest wall and held the knife to my throat. He was yelling in Dutch. Another Dutch student told me later it was mostly nazi epithets. I was scared but tried not to show it.
I don’t know whether he really wanted to cut my throat or not. Luckily for me several people came running into the room because of the commotion. The Dutch nazi thought better of whatever he had in mind and withdrew to his room, making more threats and insults.
He was gone the following day. None the less I decided I wanted to live somewhere else.
I answered an advert on an NUS notice board: housemate wanted. I was interviewed by five of the eight other housemates. It was a style and manner I soon got used to. My interview was actually quite ramshackle, a few questions, who was I, where from, what course, any personal habits, would I like a cup of tea etc? It was late afternoon, people were dropping in an out the house all the time.
This was the handle. Nine rooms meant nine housemates each with dozens of friends meant it was an open house. The TV would go on most mornings at half nine and would only go off the following morning at about two to three o’clock. It dawned I was being held back so each of the housemates could get to meet me in turn.
There was Melanie, a small shorthaired brunette woman. She had a free afternoon and was there for the duration. She was half-Italian, although not a trace of it in her voice. Her brother had just left college and go could no longer go back to Italy without being drafted into national service.
Abbey was also in and out quite regularly. She was down to earth and practical, very good with electrical equipment and wiring, which was handy, as everyone else seemed to be a flake. She was also from the richest family in the house, although I never asked exactly how wealthy.
There was a mix of religions in the house, two Christians and one Hindu. One of the Christians was a guy named Alex. He was active in the Salvation Army, a persistent but tactful proselytiser. He was also a randy sod, a bit of a bottom feeder to at nightclubs. If ever he got too pushy about the good news I’d just remind him about the last person he slept with.
Then there was Matthew, although he was much less observant. Matt was a Liverpudlian lad taking sports studies. He had worked various bars in Merseyside over the years and had various horror stories about footballer’s antics, all of which were totally true.
The Hindu guy, Salman, was actually a member of quite a narrow sect. Salman was a quiet guy. All it took was the mention of any aspect of Islam to bring out a roaring chauvinist. He sometimes set of quite violent, polarising arguments in the house.
Finally there was Tania, the white witch, who made it a two all draw. One of the first things she did was make a birth chart for me. It turned out I was triple Mercury, a great communicator destined for greatness. I couldn’t have been more flattered. It turned out she had lived in the house the year before (she was a second year) and had actually met the landlord.
His name was Mr Hoogstraten, a pale, thin guy, bald as an egg. According to Tania he was well dressed, generally spoke in a whisper and carried a large white (pristine) handkerchief. He had dark, dark aura but, fortunately kept himself to himself, so there were no problems.
Which was nice to know. But where was the last housemate?
“Sorry?”
“Well, you’ve kept me here to meet all your other housemates” I said. “But we’re one short”
One short? Tania pondered for a moment. “Oh, Liam, he’s not around. If fact he’s hardly ever around”.
“He’s a vampire. He only ever comes out at night,” Matthew added from in the kitchen, cooking his favourite, cheese and chips.
“Ah, I see… Well” I said, deciding to go for it, “I’ve met almost everyone then. Am I moving in then?”
“Yes, we’d… that’d be great,” said Melanie. She turned to Tania, “let’s sort out the details”. Then to me, “first, though, cup of tea?”
Around the time I moved in a strange and fascinating story started hitting the newspaper headlines. A number of places were hit, warehouses, banks and jewellers across London, by a rather unusual gang.
The original raid was on a West End jeweller. It was in broad daylight, five men and one driver all of whom looked identical. They were dressed in what must have been very elaborate masks of the former tennis star Boris Becker.
It was a stunning robbery, a one-minute job that left police and press seemingly flabbergasted. They must have had help on the inside. They must have, although the staff checked out completely innocent.
The police put out an appeal for information. £400 grand worth of merchandise was taken. There were lots of pictures of the stolen jewellery and a couple of enigmatic stills from CCTV. The gang were dubbed the Sons of Becker.
In the next few weeks there were several more dramatic robberies. Six men dressed as Eddie Murphy looted an upscale city bank. Oscar Wilde and four handsome rent boys cleaned out a building society. The cast of Friends took down two betting shops in one day.
The police admitted to being baffled. They did not want to make the link because, well, it was preposterous. That didn’t stop the newspapers, TV, radio and all the other outlets from speculating. London was ablaze with rumour, conjecture and rock solid friend-of-a-friend explanations. Everything from a genetic experiment gone wrong to the revenge of a demon plastic surgeon to a conceptual art piece that could be explained by coded adverts in Loot magazine.
My room was on the second floor of the house. It was a lovely spacious thing. Everyone used to comment on how tidy I was. What they didn’t know was I had very little to make a mess with. My books, CDs, player, radio, clothes and my lamp, that was it.
My window was large and faced out backward, onto the driveway and the trees. It was also east facing, so every morning I’d get a nice blast of warmth and light while the others cuddled under their duvets. It was a calm area. Once the TV was off and everyone had retired it was a quiet house. If I were awake at night occasionally I’d hear dim rattle of trains passing by. Once in a while the landlord’s car would drive in and out, I would see the beams through the trees.
Only, of course, one night I started hearing muffled noises and light banging coming from the next room. I lived opposite Liam’s room. Despite having lived at this place for nearly two months I had not bumped into the chap. It was getting on for four in the morning.
The noise was definitely coming from Liam’s room. At first I thought it was that kind of noise and tried to tune out. There was a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. But it went on, intermittently quite loud and… something was off. I eventually realised, it was too irregular and distressed. Not love but hate, well, maybe not hate, but certainly enmity… and more than one man’s voice. What was going on?
I almost plucked up the courage to go see when the noise stopped and I did my best to go back to sleep. The following day I asked the others about what they heard coming from Liam’s room. It seemed everyone else had been out asleep.
A few nights later I had a similar experience. It was a Thursday night. A lot of the gang were out at a student night. Alex and I stayed home though. The previous night we’d taken an LSD/Ecstasy combo and gone to the SU bar to play some pool. I had been getting into drug fiction, Beat Generation, Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, and felt like giving the psychedelic experience a try.
I persuaded Alex to join in. Matthew was originally going to come along too. He was the one who actually scored for us. The plan was to take the stuff University before sunset before going to a suitable gig round Koko or the Electric Ballroom.
The plan sort of went totally completely wrong. Not bad, but wrong. We bundled into one of bars in ULU. We’d taken a pill each about half an hour earlier in the bus on the way down (very stupid). Neither of us felt anything immediate. Once there, Alex hit on playing a game of pool, nice colours and angles. He got the cues from behind the bar. I put down the money. He racked up. I think he was coming up as he spent ages, with a fascinated look, trying to fit the balls into the right order.
So I bent down to take the break off shot. I felt this quick dizziness and trembling in my knee. I made a bridge with my left hand but totally missed putting the cue in, banged my chin on the table and burst out laughing. Things went downhill from there.
The LSD was much stronger than I ever imagined. The game took half an hour to finish. I don’t remember who won. We staggered about for while, looking for a table. I didn’t want us to seem too conspicuous. It was a loud bar. The music sounded unusually good, despite being the usual Friday night handbag disco tat.
I got the notion, though, that we had to leave. We were waiting for a couple of guys from the SWSS group, Pete and Dan. They’d texted to see what people were up to. I’d replied saying we were in ULU.
Alex was trying to order a pint from the bar. I was sitting down at a table eating some crisps and looking at my fingers wiggle about. I heard and then felt a warm wave crash through the bar. I think it was in time with the crescendo of a song playing. After the wave receded I could hear Pete and Dan talking, clearly, above the crowd, the music and the noise… but I couldn’t see them.
Instead I could see, at the far end of the bar, groups of people (although I couldn’t make out their faces) wearing luminous jackets. I couldn’t tell if they were police or ambulance or security or… what. Either way I felt like we oughtn’t to hang around. They were talking, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of them sounded Dutch.
I had to drag Alex away from the bar and the nice young woman behind he was talking too. I didn’t want to tell him what was going on but he didn’t seem to understand. I whispered sharply in his ear:
“Pigs, Alex, they’re onto us”.
Alex panicked and ran out the door. I followed but could barely keep up. What the people in luminous jackets made of it all I don’t know. I caught up with Alex somewhere on a traffic island in the junction between UCLH and Euston Tower. Alex had stopped, suddenly. He was breathing heavily, bent over, gripping a set of railings, muttering a prayer. I asked if he was alright. He puked violently for what seemed like ages (looking back the colour of his guts seemed amazing, not to mention the sound of the traffic stirring and the lights all around).
Both of us eventually calmed down. Alex felt like he needed some fresh air, so we walked most of the way home.
I eventually came down (or felt a bit more normal) about an hour before dawn. The house was quiet. Alex felt better for the air, although there was something about the Winter X Games that freaked him out a little. I think the snow was a touch bright.
I stayed up, though, and watched the learning programmes, a documentary about Mars followed by something on tropical plants with some excellent shots panning through foliage, then a French language lesson, which I mostly ignored. I eventually felt a bit tired and decided to climb the stairs.
On my floor I bumped into someone, a tall, apparently young man carrying what looked like a rucksack. He was leaving Liam’s room, closing the door behind him.
“Hello there”, said I, wanting to sound surprised but friendly.
“Hi” said the man, looking up. I could see his face now, blond, short hair, slightly heavy with a trimmed beard. He didn’t seem so tall now.
Small pause. “You must be Liam”, I said. I was standing at the top of the stairs, blocking.
“Uh, yes” said the man, as if he was just catching on. His hair seemed to be changing colour, darkening, lengthening and curling slightly. His face seemed to be shifting. He looked almost like… Matthew. Another pause, both of us stock-still. Liam took a deep breath. “I must be going”, said Liam with surprising force. He started walking towards me.
“You off somewhere, at this time of the morning?”
I leaned to and gave a forgiving shoulder, but Liam still managed to barge past me.
“Busy” said Liam, jogging down the stairs, a bit loud, “meeting someone, must go now”. I don’t know if it was me, but he sounded like Alex.
Puzzled though I was, Liam was quickly gone. I was curious. I checked on Liam’s door. It was unlocked… but I thought better of it and carried on to my room. I spent the next two hours lying on my bed travelling through time.
A few days later we the house were having a big night in. The plan was TV, pizza and booze, and maybe the odd joint for those who’d partake.
The booze and the food and the company were fine. The TV was a bit of a let down, very little on, and we’d just got digital so there was no excuse. We ended up watching one of those crime appeal shows. It was full of gruesome cases, murders, robberies and rapes, all sensationalised. Then came the biggest case of the night.
The Sons of Becker were still on the loose. A number of new robberies were attributed to them. They were now holding an estimated £6 million of stolen money and goods. But their spree had taken a sinister new twist.
They had kidnapped a Russian billionaire’s daughter. There was a ransom video sent to the billionaire that had never been seen before. The presenters warned us it was a disturbing watch, and it was.
The video began with the young woman sitting on a chair in what looked like a small bedroom. She seemed unharmed and unmolested; she was not even tied down, which was odd. She was clearly frightened, wide-eyed and breathing heavily. There was something deeply uncanny about the setting, like I had seen it before.
A man appeared swiftly and silently in shot. He sat behind her on what I suddenly noticed was a bed and placed a hand on the poor woman’s shoulder. She began to speak.
Watching this, all of us, silently, Tania interjected, “have you…?”
“What?” I asked.
“Does this look…? Have you…?”
“Maybe we’ve seen this before”, said Salman, cutting across.
“Maybe we know the, the woman”, said Alex. All were equally doubtful.
The woman spoke, delivering the terms of the ransom. She spoke clearly, evenly and without emotion or error. The man sitting behind her was wearing an expensive looking suit and bowler hat. His face was covered in a thin white cloth, pulled over tight. You could see the point of his nose and the outline of his lips… they were moving, he was mouthing her words.
The statement went on for about 30-40 seconds. The room was dimly lit, apart from a bright light on the man and woman. In the background there were very specific objects, a small TV on a table, a CD tower, posters on the wall, Arsenal, Zoo magazine. Very specific, very identifiable… almost like the kidnappers wanted the world to know where they had been. It was all very specific, very… familiar.
Tania then grabbed my arm:
“This way, come”.
“What?”
“Just come… Come on!” she addressed the second part to the rest of the room.
We went up to my floor, Salman and Alex followed. Tania led us bursting into Liam’s room. There we found the chair, the bed, the TV, the CDs and posters and a video on a tripod. Before we had a moment to be amazed there were gasps and epithets from the front room.
“Fucking hell, look at this!” yelled Matthew from the front room.
“No!” I replied, “Look at this!”
“Come now, NOW! Look at this”.
I charged back down the stairs, leaving guys upstairs. It turned out police now knew the true faces of the gang. They were showing them in e-fit. It was us.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Dude, where's my hegemony?
Lenin did not invent the party of a new type. The vanguard party is an old concept. In fact it is the only concept. Vanguard and party are a virtual tautology. Whoever heard of a rearguard party?
Across the political spectrum you find minorities organised around distinct points of view. Regardless of what they regard as their means or end a party is formed to win the maximum amount of support for a set of ideas, and after support comes acceptance… and so on.
A party whose outlook and actions does not accord with objective development in society is unlikely to thrive. This is tested both under political freedom and repression. What Is To Be Done is about Lenin trying to translate the Social Democratic model to Russian conditions at the turn of the 20th century and winning Russian socialists to that perspective. His opponents, he argued, blatantly disregarded the conditions in Tsarist Russia (while, at the same time claiming objectivity).
Antonio Gramsci’s considered breakthrough was the concept of hegemony. While he certainly developed it enormously, he credited its invention to Lenin.
A slight diversion: so many people from different political backgrounds have plundered Gramsci’s work you have to feel sorry for him. He’s not quite a decent as George Orwell (who, in my opinion, largely deserves his foul fan club).
He is the Good Marxist, the one who wised up to the western working class, the Good Working Class, who would never dream of overthrowing the state and instituting their own power… no, never. Gramsci was the Good Marxist who told socialists to become teachers and journalists and TV commissioners in order to win hegemony.
How many times does Gramsci have to say, “I am a Leninist”, for it to sink in?
The concept of hegemony is built in to Lenin’s life and work. It is, therefore, built into the Social Democratic tradition. In WITBD Lenin talks about forming a vanguard of socialists and purposive workers in order to propagate socialism to the wider working class. It is a variation on the story of the Communist Manifesto.
But Lenin wasn’t just concerned with winning more and more workers to socialism. If anything was fundamentally different about Lenin it was his grasp of the actuality of the revolution (the fundamental point of Lukacs’ appraisal). Unlike, say, Karl Kautsky, the revolution was something real for Lenin. It was real and approaching fast. The actions of socialists were key to preparing the working class, hastening the day of outbreak and bringing the process to a successful conclusion.
In discussing the difference between (what Gramsci described as) corporative and hegemonic politics, Lenin insisted on the vanguard status of the party within the working class, as well as the vanguard status of the working class within the revolution to overthrow Tsarism.
The only meaningful difference between early and late Lenin was the clear idea about what was to come after the insurrection. It makes sense with hindsight that the party (and the section of society behind the party) leading the insurrection has to form the government. In leaving that question open Lenin was hedging his bets while, in building his organisation, shifting the odds in favour of the working class.
Winning hegemony over the rural and urban middle classes might have preoccupied people like Lenin and Gramsci. They lived in a place and time where the middle classes dominated numerically. A peasant army swamped the first out-and-out working class revolution, Paris in 1871. It was a bitter and bloody lesson, which some attempted to avoid; hence reformism and syndicalism.
The core capitalist countries are now dominated numerically by wageworkers. What is to become of the concept of hegemony? Well, we’re not living through a revival of Bordigism, no one is saying let’s just put our head down and charge. The first rearticulation of the idea should be through the range of class politics and thought.
The capitalist class is generally united and coherent. Thus it is able to hang onto power without resorting to much disguise or proxy. The classes below are, by definition, not united. However coherent sections of each class might be, it is very hard for them to present an effective united front.
There will naturally be a range of distinct viewpoints within each class. We touched on this a little earlier. The effect of the Paris Commune was to split working class politics into various forms, reformism, syndicalism, anarchism, and revolutionary socialism. The capitalist class’s dominance means that the working class will accept portions of its ideology, creating a spectrum of parties.
The more the working class can present a consistent united front the more this process will be reversed. The anti-war movement in Britain was a clear but modest example of this. The movement not only managed to produce huge manifestations it also created a formal alliance that, at its peak, involved something in the region of 50,000 activists in 500 branches.
These 50,000 activists were a minority of the population. Despite their being deliberately excluded from mainstream politics, they came to dominate the debate about and the conclusions drawn from the war. They reversed the flow of hegemony, broke the unity of the capitalist class and so halted their war drive. Despite the persistence of the current amorphous war, it is a conclusive quagmire, with most thinking politicians looking for a way out.
There was another minority within this minority. Opponents within and without the coalition insisted it was a front for socialists. They were relying on a cold war reaction to turn people away from opposing the war. This never has been the case, especially at the coalition’s height. An organisation with 50,000 active members that can mobilise millions more people cannot be a simple front for a few thousand socialists. What the socialists did was hegemonise the politics within the coalition by being the clearest active and coherent minority.
The theory of hegemony should operate within a class as a means of uniting it. This means finding ways of uniting minorities on certain principles in order to achieve definite action.
Let’s project a bit. What would a revolution in Britain involve? It would certainly have a giant organised working class as its motor and transmission. This would mean the strike movement would be at its heart, fighting to establish working class control over the conditions and aims of work.
The part of the working class that provides public service would naturally link in wider sections of society. Though universal health provision, comprehensive education and welfare might seem a bit bedraggled they are still valued by wide sections of the population, broader than simply the organised working class. A public sector strike is a deeply political event, hence the trade union leaders desperation to quash all forms of radicalism in the public sector (the logical conclusion being the Unison leadership transforming the organisation into a virtual business union).
The drive toward privatisation of public service links is part of the general ruling class drive to raise profit rates. This leads us nicely into war and imperialism. Britain is a major (if not ultimate) centre of imperial power. The British state is a key player in the Long Game, to control the Middle East oil spigot, divide the Eurasian continent and contain Russia and China.
This will be a factor in any revolution. Not only is Britain’s participation in war oppressive, it is wasteful, costing money and lives, and diverts huge amounts of intellectual effort away from solving genuine social problems. The war has warped and perverted democracy, as we know it. It has also degraded race relations in Britain.
The targeting of radical and/or political Islam has led to an inevitable singling out of Muslims in general. Despite Islam not being a race, British Muslims are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities, which makes Islamophobia in practice a form of racism. You cannot encourage one form of racism without encouraging it in general. The latest rise of British fascism has been based upon the government’s war drive. Fascism means equal opportunity bigotry and violence. It is a threat to all.
The last effect of neo-liberalism in Britain has been the revival of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. The Labour and trade union traditions survived particularly well in the large urban centres of Scotland and Wales. This meant, during the 80s and 90s, despite having different languages, different social and political cultures, and (in the case of Scotland) different laws and legal systems, the Scots and Welsh got English government regardless of how they voted.
Despite devolution, once the Labour Party went over to the neo-liberal consensus opting out of English politics meant going over to nationalist parties who put on a Social Democratic face. A great social upheaval would likely spur on Scottish and Welsh nationalism.
This is a set of reasonably educated guesses. The ultimate point is there are a number of social and political concerns (sometimes spilling across class) in modern Britain; a revolutionary movement would have to work hard to plait these together to bring the revolution to triumphant conclusion.
Across the political spectrum you find minorities organised around distinct points of view. Regardless of what they regard as their means or end a party is formed to win the maximum amount of support for a set of ideas, and after support comes acceptance… and so on.
A party whose outlook and actions does not accord with objective development in society is unlikely to thrive. This is tested both under political freedom and repression. What Is To Be Done is about Lenin trying to translate the Social Democratic model to Russian conditions at the turn of the 20th century and winning Russian socialists to that perspective. His opponents, he argued, blatantly disregarded the conditions in Tsarist Russia (while, at the same time claiming objectivity).
Antonio Gramsci’s considered breakthrough was the concept of hegemony. While he certainly developed it enormously, he credited its invention to Lenin.
A slight diversion: so many people from different political backgrounds have plundered Gramsci’s work you have to feel sorry for him. He’s not quite a decent as George Orwell (who, in my opinion, largely deserves his foul fan club).
He is the Good Marxist, the one who wised up to the western working class, the Good Working Class, who would never dream of overthrowing the state and instituting their own power… no, never. Gramsci was the Good Marxist who told socialists to become teachers and journalists and TV commissioners in order to win hegemony.
How many times does Gramsci have to say, “I am a Leninist”, for it to sink in?
The concept of hegemony is built in to Lenin’s life and work. It is, therefore, built into the Social Democratic tradition. In WITBD Lenin talks about forming a vanguard of socialists and purposive workers in order to propagate socialism to the wider working class. It is a variation on the story of the Communist Manifesto.
But Lenin wasn’t just concerned with winning more and more workers to socialism. If anything was fundamentally different about Lenin it was his grasp of the actuality of the revolution (the fundamental point of Lukacs’ appraisal). Unlike, say, Karl Kautsky, the revolution was something real for Lenin. It was real and approaching fast. The actions of socialists were key to preparing the working class, hastening the day of outbreak and bringing the process to a successful conclusion.
In discussing the difference between (what Gramsci described as) corporative and hegemonic politics, Lenin insisted on the vanguard status of the party within the working class, as well as the vanguard status of the working class within the revolution to overthrow Tsarism.
The only meaningful difference between early and late Lenin was the clear idea about what was to come after the insurrection. It makes sense with hindsight that the party (and the section of society behind the party) leading the insurrection has to form the government. In leaving that question open Lenin was hedging his bets while, in building his organisation, shifting the odds in favour of the working class.
Winning hegemony over the rural and urban middle classes might have preoccupied people like Lenin and Gramsci. They lived in a place and time where the middle classes dominated numerically. A peasant army swamped the first out-and-out working class revolution, Paris in 1871. It was a bitter and bloody lesson, which some attempted to avoid; hence reformism and syndicalism.
The core capitalist countries are now dominated numerically by wageworkers. What is to become of the concept of hegemony? Well, we’re not living through a revival of Bordigism, no one is saying let’s just put our head down and charge. The first rearticulation of the idea should be through the range of class politics and thought.
The capitalist class is generally united and coherent. Thus it is able to hang onto power without resorting to much disguise or proxy. The classes below are, by definition, not united. However coherent sections of each class might be, it is very hard for them to present an effective united front.
There will naturally be a range of distinct viewpoints within each class. We touched on this a little earlier. The effect of the Paris Commune was to split working class politics into various forms, reformism, syndicalism, anarchism, and revolutionary socialism. The capitalist class’s dominance means that the working class will accept portions of its ideology, creating a spectrum of parties.
The more the working class can present a consistent united front the more this process will be reversed. The anti-war movement in Britain was a clear but modest example of this. The movement not only managed to produce huge manifestations it also created a formal alliance that, at its peak, involved something in the region of 50,000 activists in 500 branches.
These 50,000 activists were a minority of the population. Despite their being deliberately excluded from mainstream politics, they came to dominate the debate about and the conclusions drawn from the war. They reversed the flow of hegemony, broke the unity of the capitalist class and so halted their war drive. Despite the persistence of the current amorphous war, it is a conclusive quagmire, with most thinking politicians looking for a way out.
There was another minority within this minority. Opponents within and without the coalition insisted it was a front for socialists. They were relying on a cold war reaction to turn people away from opposing the war. This never has been the case, especially at the coalition’s height. An organisation with 50,000 active members that can mobilise millions more people cannot be a simple front for a few thousand socialists. What the socialists did was hegemonise the politics within the coalition by being the clearest active and coherent minority.
The theory of hegemony should operate within a class as a means of uniting it. This means finding ways of uniting minorities on certain principles in order to achieve definite action.
Let’s project a bit. What would a revolution in Britain involve? It would certainly have a giant organised working class as its motor and transmission. This would mean the strike movement would be at its heart, fighting to establish working class control over the conditions and aims of work.
The part of the working class that provides public service would naturally link in wider sections of society. Though universal health provision, comprehensive education and welfare might seem a bit bedraggled they are still valued by wide sections of the population, broader than simply the organised working class. A public sector strike is a deeply political event, hence the trade union leaders desperation to quash all forms of radicalism in the public sector (the logical conclusion being the Unison leadership transforming the organisation into a virtual business union).
The drive toward privatisation of public service links is part of the general ruling class drive to raise profit rates. This leads us nicely into war and imperialism. Britain is a major (if not ultimate) centre of imperial power. The British state is a key player in the Long Game, to control the Middle East oil spigot, divide the Eurasian continent and contain Russia and China.
This will be a factor in any revolution. Not only is Britain’s participation in war oppressive, it is wasteful, costing money and lives, and diverts huge amounts of intellectual effort away from solving genuine social problems. The war has warped and perverted democracy, as we know it. It has also degraded race relations in Britain.
The targeting of radical and/or political Islam has led to an inevitable singling out of Muslims in general. Despite Islam not being a race, British Muslims are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities, which makes Islamophobia in practice a form of racism. You cannot encourage one form of racism without encouraging it in general. The latest rise of British fascism has been based upon the government’s war drive. Fascism means equal opportunity bigotry and violence. It is a threat to all.
The last effect of neo-liberalism in Britain has been the revival of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. The Labour and trade union traditions survived particularly well in the large urban centres of Scotland and Wales. This meant, during the 80s and 90s, despite having different languages, different social and political cultures, and (in the case of Scotland) different laws and legal systems, the Scots and Welsh got English government regardless of how they voted.
Despite devolution, once the Labour Party went over to the neo-liberal consensus opting out of English politics meant going over to nationalist parties who put on a Social Democratic face. A great social upheaval would likely spur on Scottish and Welsh nationalism.
This is a set of reasonably educated guesses. The ultimate point is there are a number of social and political concerns (sometimes spilling across class) in modern Britain; a revolutionary movement would have to work hard to plait these together to bring the revolution to triumphant conclusion.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
High intellectualism
If this blog is known for anything (in fact it's known for nothing) then it's lists. Have you ever wondered what to call yourself when engaging in flame war? Well, nothing quite beats Internal Bulletwound or Randy Newman, however, here are a list of names drawn from The Simpsons that you might want to hide behind when you're being a big old meanie about the DDR:
Lenny Leonard
Dewey Largo
Pops Freshenmeyer
Sideshow Raheem
Emily Winthrop
Brandine Spuckler
Jasper Beardley
Johnny Tightlips
Lois Pennycandy
Hank Scorpio
Howard K. Duff VIII
Wendell
Mindy Simmons
Jerry Rude
Cowboy Bob
Serak the Preparer
Toshiro the Apprentice Chef
Chester J. Lampwick
Handsome Pete
Space Coytote
Sherry Bobbins
Laszlo Panaflex
Big Daddy
Trent Steele
Tab Spangler
Lyle Lanley
And so on... until you get bored.
Lenny Leonard
Dewey Largo
Pops Freshenmeyer
Sideshow Raheem
Emily Winthrop
Brandine Spuckler
Jasper Beardley
Johnny Tightlips
Lois Pennycandy
Hank Scorpio
Howard K. Duff VIII
Wendell
Mindy Simmons
Jerry Rude
Cowboy Bob
Serak the Preparer
Toshiro the Apprentice Chef
Chester J. Lampwick
Handsome Pete
Space Coytote
Sherry Bobbins
Laszlo Panaflex
Big Daddy
Trent Steele
Tab Spangler
Lyle Lanley
And so on... until you get bored.
Monday, November 09, 2009
The scum also rises
There are people who are desperately worried about the state of free speech. They seem to be particularly worried about free speech for racists, I might opine that's all they seem to worry about. Meanwhile, on planet earth, free speech does not exist in a vacuum.
If a nazi puts out continual provocations and incitement to racial hatred in a forest and no one is around, does it matter...? The fact is nazis are not lurking in forests but on our TV screens, on radio and on our streets. We have groups such as the BNP and gangs such as the EDL specifically targeting British Muslims for violent approbation. Even if not one member of those groups has ever specifically harmed another human being (and they have), the effect they have is just the same.
For example: the students at City University in London who have been subject to gang attacks. This kind of event exposes racism and fascism for what it it (many times better than all the slots on Newsnight and Question Time). It's just unfortunate that, in giving nazis the chance to make fools of themselves, we are not playing with politics or abstract notions of liberty but people's lives.
If a nazi puts out continual provocations and incitement to racial hatred in a forest and no one is around, does it matter...? The fact is nazis are not lurking in forests but on our TV screens, on radio and on our streets. We have groups such as the BNP and gangs such as the EDL specifically targeting British Muslims for violent approbation. Even if not one member of those groups has ever specifically harmed another human being (and they have), the effect they have is just the same.
For example: the students at City University in London who have been subject to gang attacks. This kind of event exposes racism and fascism for what it it (many times better than all the slots on Newsnight and Question Time). It's just unfortunate that, in giving nazis the chance to make fools of themselves, we are not playing with politics or abstract notions of liberty but people's lives.
The plot thins
Actually there's no plot whatsoever. A clever trevor has dug up another mix of Carnival of Light. They're clever enough to have included excerpts from other alleged versions of the song leaked before. The whole thing gets over cooked when they chuck in a remix of Revolution 9, which was made nearly 18 months later.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Where now for workers' struggle after post strikes suspended?
In particular:
Royal Mail have, of course, been fighting a ruthless class war. Well done to every postie who recognised this and has resisted so far, who has carried the deadweight of their leadership (more concerned with propping up the Labour government), who has put the CWU at the forefront of the fightback against the recession.
The deal agreed shows that if you fight you can win concessions. But if the strikes were kept on and extended the government and Royal Mail management could have been beaten outright. The solves nothing substantial and gives the bosses a chance to recuperate.
This dispute is not over.
A Royal Mail source quoted in the press today gets it wrong when they say, “The stumbling block to a solution was a small group of union activists in London who seemed to think they were fighting a class war. They were being driven on by the Socialist Workers Party.”
But it is true that the stumbling block was the defiance of the great majority of postal workers and wider solidarity – and the SWP is proud to have played its part in that.
Royal Mail have, of course, been fighting a ruthless class war. Well done to every postie who recognised this and has resisted so far, who has carried the deadweight of their leadership (more concerned with propping up the Labour government), who has put the CWU at the forefront of the fightback against the recession.
The deal agreed shows that if you fight you can win concessions. But if the strikes were kept on and extended the government and Royal Mail management could have been beaten outright. The solves nothing substantial and gives the bosses a chance to recuperate.
This dispute is not over.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Lenin Rediscovered... reviewed
I am just coming to the end of Lars T Lih’s book Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? in context. I am currently reading through his translation of the pamphlet.
My first piece of advice is don’t read it. Not because it isn’t good. This piece of exegesis is over 700 pages long, nearly 4 times the size of the book it is commenting on. It also has a very simple premise, which it repeats over and over again (rather Lenin-like). If you have the time and the patience you would want to read this book, but only if. The best follow-up might be to replace the exegesis with 20-page intro, summarising Lih’s argument.
What Is To Be Done is not a path-breaking document. It is not a sketch of a party of a new type. It is in the best traditions of the Second International.
Connected to this, WITBD is not a pessimistic document. It does not argue for conspiracy versus a mass movement. This should be obvious to any casual reader, let alone someone acquainted with Lenin’s life and works.
Lih puts this down deliberate misuse of polemical passages and some linguistic ambiguities in early translations, largely by Cold War intellectual warriors. For example what was translated as conspiracy did not mean conspiracy but underground organisation, the organised knack of not getting arrested. The word divert, used in a controversial passage, is actually closer to stray away from.
The word spontaneity/spontaneous appears lots of times in the text. Lenin used the word because it was key to a polemic with another Russian Social Democrat. Lih examines Lenin’s opponent and finds his argument to be quite messy.
What is taken to mean spontaneity/spontaneous was given about 6 different shades of meaning by Lenin’s opponent and another 2 by Lenin himself. When Lenin argues about combating spontaneity he is actually arguing to combat chaotic and diffuse movement as an end in itself. Go right to the other end of Lenin’s literary career and you find him arguing with the left in the Communist International about not squandering energy and resources through lack of organisation and discipline. WITBD is part of a consistent argument.
The controversial, supposedly career-defining passages, Lih puts down to Lenin’s polemics with other Social Democrats (WITBD was originally intended as a non-polemical pamphlet). Due to Lenin’s rhetorical inversion of his targets’ language he makes some unfortunate choices.
The section I will concentrate on is the ‘divert’ section. Here Lenin is arguing with a declared Economist, who argues that the working class movement will travel along the path of least resistance, i.e. struggle for immediate material gain, and no amount of effort from ideologues, i.e. orthodox Social Democrats, will be able to divert it/cause it to stray from that path. Lenin on the other hand says effort by Social Democrats can and will have an effect.
Lenin’s pseudonym for Economism is usually translated as Trade Unionism. Lih argues that he meant something closer to trade-union-only-ism. This is the idea that the working class only needs trade or industrial unions, while the political arena should be left open. A common philosophy all over the world, at the start of the Twentieth Century in Russia people who argued this usually meant that the job of overthrowing Tsarism should be left to Liberals or Populists.
It then makes sense when Lenin argues that trade-union-only-ism leads to the “ideological enslavement” of the working class. Without notions of Social Democracy this is where the working class will end up. Social Democracy, of course, did exist and will, therefore, win the working class away from the trade-union-only-ists. An optimistic statement, no?
This is in keeping with the overarching story of the Second International. The international was based on Marxism and The Communist Manifesto. The story told there is of the union of socialism with the working class movement. The French Revolution produced both elements, but in the first half of the 19th century they remained separate. The Manifesto is not just addressed to workers of the world but to socialists of the world. It calls on each group to unite with the other.
The model for this process was the spread of awareness. Marxism is the most advanced social science yet developed. It took two people a tremendous of time and effort to perfect. By necessity they were intellectuals from a bourgeois background.
Think about the amount of intellectual effort that led up to The Manifesto, the critique of Hegel, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Theses on Feuerbach, The Paris Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy. After the manifesto you have the giant Critique of Political Economy, best known as Capital. Someone working 12 hours a day on a spinning wheel or lathe could not have written this volume.
It was, however, written from their point of view. Karl Marx saw the working class as a class that struggled collectively. It was striving after socialism in practice. It then should have no trouble in absorbing and embodying it in theory. But how?
The job of socialists would then be to bring this science to advanced and purposive workers who would then propagate its ideas throughout the class. The vanguard concept was embedded in socialism from the beginning. Lenin did not invent it and it was not considered a problem until Lenin was considered a problem.
WITBD represents continuity not a break in socialism.
My first piece of advice is don’t read it. Not because it isn’t good. This piece of exegesis is over 700 pages long, nearly 4 times the size of the book it is commenting on. It also has a very simple premise, which it repeats over and over again (rather Lenin-like). If you have the time and the patience you would want to read this book, but only if. The best follow-up might be to replace the exegesis with 20-page intro, summarising Lih’s argument.
What Is To Be Done is not a path-breaking document. It is not a sketch of a party of a new type. It is in the best traditions of the Second International.
Connected to this, WITBD is not a pessimistic document. It does not argue for conspiracy versus a mass movement. This should be obvious to any casual reader, let alone someone acquainted with Lenin’s life and works.
Lih puts this down deliberate misuse of polemical passages and some linguistic ambiguities in early translations, largely by Cold War intellectual warriors. For example what was translated as conspiracy did not mean conspiracy but underground organisation, the organised knack of not getting arrested. The word divert, used in a controversial passage, is actually closer to stray away from.
The word spontaneity/spontaneous appears lots of times in the text. Lenin used the word because it was key to a polemic with another Russian Social Democrat. Lih examines Lenin’s opponent and finds his argument to be quite messy.
What is taken to mean spontaneity/spontaneous was given about 6 different shades of meaning by Lenin’s opponent and another 2 by Lenin himself. When Lenin argues about combating spontaneity he is actually arguing to combat chaotic and diffuse movement as an end in itself. Go right to the other end of Lenin’s literary career and you find him arguing with the left in the Communist International about not squandering energy and resources through lack of organisation and discipline. WITBD is part of a consistent argument.
The controversial, supposedly career-defining passages, Lih puts down to Lenin’s polemics with other Social Democrats (WITBD was originally intended as a non-polemical pamphlet). Due to Lenin’s rhetorical inversion of his targets’ language he makes some unfortunate choices.
The section I will concentrate on is the ‘divert’ section. Here Lenin is arguing with a declared Economist, who argues that the working class movement will travel along the path of least resistance, i.e. struggle for immediate material gain, and no amount of effort from ideologues, i.e. orthodox Social Democrats, will be able to divert it/cause it to stray from that path. Lenin on the other hand says effort by Social Democrats can and will have an effect.
Lenin’s pseudonym for Economism is usually translated as Trade Unionism. Lih argues that he meant something closer to trade-union-only-ism. This is the idea that the working class only needs trade or industrial unions, while the political arena should be left open. A common philosophy all over the world, at the start of the Twentieth Century in Russia people who argued this usually meant that the job of overthrowing Tsarism should be left to Liberals or Populists.
It then makes sense when Lenin argues that trade-union-only-ism leads to the “ideological enslavement” of the working class. Without notions of Social Democracy this is where the working class will end up. Social Democracy, of course, did exist and will, therefore, win the working class away from the trade-union-only-ists. An optimistic statement, no?
This is in keeping with the overarching story of the Second International. The international was based on Marxism and The Communist Manifesto. The story told there is of the union of socialism with the working class movement. The French Revolution produced both elements, but in the first half of the 19th century they remained separate. The Manifesto is not just addressed to workers of the world but to socialists of the world. It calls on each group to unite with the other.
The model for this process was the spread of awareness. Marxism is the most advanced social science yet developed. It took two people a tremendous of time and effort to perfect. By necessity they were intellectuals from a bourgeois background.
Think about the amount of intellectual effort that led up to The Manifesto, the critique of Hegel, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Theses on Feuerbach, The Paris Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy. After the manifesto you have the giant Critique of Political Economy, best known as Capital. Someone working 12 hours a day on a spinning wheel or lathe could not have written this volume.
It was, however, written from their point of view. Karl Marx saw the working class as a class that struggled collectively. It was striving after socialism in practice. It then should have no trouble in absorbing and embodying it in theory. But how?
The job of socialists would then be to bring this science to advanced and purposive workers who would then propagate its ideas throughout the class. The vanguard concept was embedded in socialism from the beginning. Lenin did not invent it and it was not considered a problem until Lenin was considered a problem.
WITBD represents continuity not a break in socialism.
Further Legend
I was terrified, if I’m honest. Things had been coming to a head, you know? It just seemed like the world was falling apart. Something had to give.
It’s typical; I remember a few weeks beforehand my husband told me a friend of working on the buses was stopped by the police and, literally, yanked off the bus mid route and charged with reckless endangerment. The company had, apparently, been carrying out health checks. A whole bunch of people had been suspended. It just so happened that they were all active union members.
Another of our friends, Guy, was killed. He was a carpenter. He made fine furniture. He was also in some semi-pro bands, covers and that, although he wrote a few songs, which… well I liked them.
My husband and I, we met in sixth form. Guy was there too, so we knew him for a long time. He was almost like a member of the family. We did want him to be a Godfather to Lilly, but said he didn’t believe in all that stuff and, you know, we didn’t mind. That was just him.
He had taken to looking after his old Mum. She was getting on and starting to not, not cope with life, if you get me? Times were already quite tough. She was living in an old terrace off Colombia Road. She had already been burgled once, when the bastards came back for more. They took her pearls and her wedding ring, beat her up and left her with a black eye and broken ribs.
So Guy, bless, him, he sold up his business moved in next door. That was about, ooh, a year before it all started. We only found out much later that he was struggling to make ends meet. He was getting a carer’s allowance, although he was giving most of it away to his Mum.
She was living on her husband’s private pension. He’d died about five years prior, when times were good. Five years later most of that pension had dwindled. There was almost nothing left.
By the time Guy was killed the gas had already been disconnected, they were behind on their mortgage (can you believe it, poor woman still owed money on her home) and there were final reminders on all the other bills. It seemed Guy was going out of his mind when he shot a bailiff with the black market pistol he had bought as self-defence.
He might have survived if he had called the police, come clean on the spot. Instead he barricaded him and his mother in the house. Their fate was sealed. When the police eventually broke in they shot him and narrowly missed her, although she died in hospital later that night.
We know this because there was records found in an old police station nearly a year later. At the time though we got very little out of the police. They were busy. They had to deal with cases like this every day. All they said, by way of explanation was that he shot at a police officer, wounding him in the left thigh, leaving him crippled. Guy was guilty of attempted murder of an officer and so, as far as they were concerned, he got what was coming to him.
I mention this because, toward the end, this stuff was commonplace. We’ve come so far and been through so much since… It seems like another lifetime. Yet I remember being so afraid. If what happened to Guy could… if it could happen to Guy it could happen to anyone. It felt like we were going mad, driven out of our minds.
------------------------------------
We’d sort of heard about the riots on the first night. It was an observation, then a rumour. There was an awful lot of noise and lights coming from the north. Loads of police vans were spotted heading in the same direction. I remember counting at least three police helicopters zipping across the sky at top speed.
Lilly was away from home. Her school had been shut down after a few of the staff and kids fell ill, although she didn’t seem to be coming down with anything. So we sent her off to stay with her Nana in Wales, although she dragged her feet every step of the way. That was hard… Then my husband was suspended from work after he tested positive, which was even harder.
He was taken into Homerton Hospital for observation. I remember going to visit and having to step into a sterile suit and mask. Once he started showing symptoms I was prevented from seeing him, which was… I know that it was nothing to do with the staff there… They were struggling to cope as it is. He was allowed a call home once a night. I used to wait up until about 9.30. The phone would ring every night on the dot, until that is the riots broke out.
I was sitting at home. I’d been working that day down the charity shop. I’d been a tiring day. There’d been some officers in that afternoon making routine checks, asked standard questions. It must have been a slow day as they were there for half-an-hour.
I was watching TV, waiting for my call, when I saw a news item about disturbances in a London suburb. It turned out it was Haringey, although it turned out you had to guess. I recognised some of the shots, stand-offs on Tottenham High Road, looting in Wood Green shopping centre.
I saw something strange in the broadcast. Despite the outrage of the reporter, the commentary, I saw this clip of police with riot shields, batons and dogs charging a group of youngsters, teenagers. They retreated a little and the police eventually stopped. Then, ripping through the crowd came a flying wedge. Kids, totally fearless, armed with bats, snooker cues and iron bars giving as good as they got.
The police line fell back, and back, and back. It was then that I noticed myself nodding and smiling.
It’s typical; I remember a few weeks beforehand my husband told me a friend of working on the buses was stopped by the police and, literally, yanked off the bus mid route and charged with reckless endangerment. The company had, apparently, been carrying out health checks. A whole bunch of people had been suspended. It just so happened that they were all active union members.
Another of our friends, Guy, was killed. He was a carpenter. He made fine furniture. He was also in some semi-pro bands, covers and that, although he wrote a few songs, which… well I liked them.
My husband and I, we met in sixth form. Guy was there too, so we knew him for a long time. He was almost like a member of the family. We did want him to be a Godfather to Lilly, but said he didn’t believe in all that stuff and, you know, we didn’t mind. That was just him.
He had taken to looking after his old Mum. She was getting on and starting to not, not cope with life, if you get me? Times were already quite tough. She was living in an old terrace off Colombia Road. She had already been burgled once, when the bastards came back for more. They took her pearls and her wedding ring, beat her up and left her with a black eye and broken ribs.
So Guy, bless, him, he sold up his business moved in next door. That was about, ooh, a year before it all started. We only found out much later that he was struggling to make ends meet. He was getting a carer’s allowance, although he was giving most of it away to his Mum.
She was living on her husband’s private pension. He’d died about five years prior, when times were good. Five years later most of that pension had dwindled. There was almost nothing left.
By the time Guy was killed the gas had already been disconnected, they were behind on their mortgage (can you believe it, poor woman still owed money on her home) and there were final reminders on all the other bills. It seemed Guy was going out of his mind when he shot a bailiff with the black market pistol he had bought as self-defence.
He might have survived if he had called the police, come clean on the spot. Instead he barricaded him and his mother in the house. Their fate was sealed. When the police eventually broke in they shot him and narrowly missed her, although she died in hospital later that night.
We know this because there was records found in an old police station nearly a year later. At the time though we got very little out of the police. They were busy. They had to deal with cases like this every day. All they said, by way of explanation was that he shot at a police officer, wounding him in the left thigh, leaving him crippled. Guy was guilty of attempted murder of an officer and so, as far as they were concerned, he got what was coming to him.
I mention this because, toward the end, this stuff was commonplace. We’ve come so far and been through so much since… It seems like another lifetime. Yet I remember being so afraid. If what happened to Guy could… if it could happen to Guy it could happen to anyone. It felt like we were going mad, driven out of our minds.
------------------------------------
We’d sort of heard about the riots on the first night. It was an observation, then a rumour. There was an awful lot of noise and lights coming from the north. Loads of police vans were spotted heading in the same direction. I remember counting at least three police helicopters zipping across the sky at top speed.
Lilly was away from home. Her school had been shut down after a few of the staff and kids fell ill, although she didn’t seem to be coming down with anything. So we sent her off to stay with her Nana in Wales, although she dragged her feet every step of the way. That was hard… Then my husband was suspended from work after he tested positive, which was even harder.
He was taken into Homerton Hospital for observation. I remember going to visit and having to step into a sterile suit and mask. Once he started showing symptoms I was prevented from seeing him, which was… I know that it was nothing to do with the staff there… They were struggling to cope as it is. He was allowed a call home once a night. I used to wait up until about 9.30. The phone would ring every night on the dot, until that is the riots broke out.
I was sitting at home. I’d been working that day down the charity shop. I’d been a tiring day. There’d been some officers in that afternoon making routine checks, asked standard questions. It must have been a slow day as they were there for half-an-hour.
I was watching TV, waiting for my call, when I saw a news item about disturbances in a London suburb. It turned out it was Haringey, although it turned out you had to guess. I recognised some of the shots, stand-offs on Tottenham High Road, looting in Wood Green shopping centre.
I saw something strange in the broadcast. Despite the outrage of the reporter, the commentary, I saw this clip of police with riot shields, batons and dogs charging a group of youngsters, teenagers. They retreated a little and the police eventually stopped. Then, ripping through the crowd came a flying wedge. Kids, totally fearless, armed with bats, snooker cues and iron bars giving as good as they got.
The police line fell back, and back, and back. It was then that I noticed myself nodding and smiling.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Future Legend
Yo, yo, yo motherlickers. Those of you with memories (one or the other of this blog's two readers) will remember an unfurling piece of fictional nonsense about the endoftheworldasweknowit (and it felt fine). I've rewritten and rejigged it and given it a name, and am now typing up some mock first hand accounts (ala Studs Terkel) from some of the survivors. Here's the first:
I was there. I saw it happen. I knew it would, eventually… everybody thought so.
I used to be a computer programmer, one of the safest jobs imaginable. I’d been working at a City Firm for several years. It was part of the Canary Wharf complex, one of those real paper shuffling, magic tricks with money companies.
I started there as a temp. I remember, a couple of weeks after I started my Wife and I were invited to a barbecue with friends (she was my fiancée back then). I was asked about my new job, where it was, what I was doing and so on.
But what did the company do? I realised then that I didn’t really know. It wasn’t apparent and I’d never stopped to ask. It turned out the company was a financial agency. It specialised in converting debt into financial packages and selling them on to investment firms. Companies, actual productive companies got to spread their risk while the investment firms were able to diversify their portfolios. It all worked so long as everybody paid up what they owed.
Except, of course we know now, it was a game of pass the parcel… or really it was musical chairs. My job was quite safe. Everyone in the office used quite high-tech packages, the latest computer equipment, but no one knew how they worked. I did and so I was always in demand. But the company eventually went broke.
It was just before the stock market crashed. No one, none of us, the regular drones had any idea what was going on until a few weeks before. It turned out the company itself was running on finance. Usually the Directors were hardly ever seen round the building. They started coming in more and more, making long and sometimes fraught sounding calls from their office. There was a parent company in New York, and a sister company in Frankfurt. By the end both were on the phone almost daily.
The Directors had been borrowing money from investors to cover running costs, including our wages. Debts mounted while the credit rating began to sink. The life support was turned off and the company simply died, like that. I still haven’t been paid my final month’s wages.
So I was one of the first to be laid off in the great wave of unemployment. I didn’t deserve it. I know that. But I can’t help feeling in some way I did. I didn’t dedicate myself to anything particularly useful. At least, I couldn’t say the people I worked for added anything to society.
There were a few nice people at work, pleasant folk, but I hated the general atmosphere there. The way senior staff would talk about people, about life in general was terrible. Sexist, racist, homophobic brutes, everybody who wasn’t them didn’t have an excuse, they were just useless scum.
Lots of people went along with it, laughed at their bosses’ jokes. I just kept my head down and tried not to stand out. I remembered, on my first day signing on, how the managers and directors used to talk about dole scroungers, filth to be washed away. I thought of myself as a liberal guy and used to cuss them, internally.
But, waiting to see my advisor, I sat and looked around and was surprised to see how young and normal looking a lot of the claimants were. They looked like interns, office juniors, smart young people who used to come to London for work, who passed through the office all the time. Even I used to look down on the unemployed.
I did work again after being laid off. I managed to find a few months temping here and there, as well as some cash-in-hand work, delivering papers. It was nothing like the good old days though. I had to make frequent trips to the jobcentre.
In the beginning it was fairly normal. As the illness set in life seemed to change. The government changed the rules so, you used to come in once a fortnight to get your book stamped, now you had to come in every week. There weren’t any new staff laid on or centres opened. Queues began to form.
Then it got round that dole offices were breeding grounds. Facemasks came in, then the random searches. I remember more than once people being whisked off the streets or getting yanked out of the dole queue. The police soon had regular checkpoints up and around town.
After about a month and a bit the agencies and gang masters started coming down to the dole offices, bold as brass, and started picking people out the queues and offering day work on great rates. I knew a few people who went with them, some actually got work, a lot simply got mugged or had their wages lifted.
Despite this there were a lot of desperate people. The gang masters arriving would always cause chaos and bad noise. The police did nothing. I remember getting very confused and upset by this. The first time I saw this I tried to remonstrate with a nearby officer, plead for him to intervene. He told me to go away then threatened to have me arrested.
The gang masters were usually well dressed. Sometimes if a guy or a group of guys happened to walk past and looked like a recruiter groups would head off after him, begging and, if he was on his own, threatening.
The other type of person you’d get was the rich kids, students, city folk and the like. There was a lot of anger and fear put about then. The papers were full of stories about the great unwashed, scroungers and mobs, Typhoid Mary’s draining the system. I heard about groups of kids in masks who’d come down to dole queues, GP offices and second hand stores anywhere where they’d likely find poor, sick people, and start throwing their weight around. I only saw it happen once. That was the time it kicked off.
A group of what looked like students (one of them I remember had a UCL rugby top on) came down to the queue. It was a Wednesday. I was due to sign. They didn’t have facemasks on, the kids, which was illegal by that point. Officially you had to wear them outdoors, in public spaces at all times. Generally though you wore it round you neck until you saw a police officer and then it was up quick.
The kids went up and down the queue. They said were looking for two people to clean their house. One of them, the leader it seemed, had a wedge of cash that he waived about. He went up to a few people in the queue, usually Black or Asian, and started recruiting them by putting fivers in their pocket.
No one wanted to take up the offer, it seemed. There was a bit of pushing and some staring down between people, tension but no violence. There was a bit of cursing and swearing from the kids before they gave up and started to walk off.
Someone then broke from the line. I turned to see three lads, they looked to be Somali to me, running off after the students. The students weren’t interested though, pushed them away and kept on walking. A few more people followed after them. Pretty soon the students were surrounded with people begging, they couldn’t escape. I turned away for a moment but then heard what sounded like one of the students yell, “f-off you f-ing p-s”, something like that.
Then there was a scream. I looked up. One of the Somali lads had fallen to the floor, clutching his chest. The students were off, heading down the road at top speed. It was clear the poor boy had been stabbed. Pretty much the whole queue ran over to help. Some chased off after the students.
About twenty seconds later half a dozen police cars and one van pulled up, officers started pouring out and arresting the crowd.
That’s how it started.
I was there. I saw it happen. I knew it would, eventually… everybody thought so.
I used to be a computer programmer, one of the safest jobs imaginable. I’d been working at a City Firm for several years. It was part of the Canary Wharf complex, one of those real paper shuffling, magic tricks with money companies.
I started there as a temp. I remember, a couple of weeks after I started my Wife and I were invited to a barbecue with friends (she was my fiancée back then). I was asked about my new job, where it was, what I was doing and so on.
But what did the company do? I realised then that I didn’t really know. It wasn’t apparent and I’d never stopped to ask. It turned out the company was a financial agency. It specialised in converting debt into financial packages and selling them on to investment firms. Companies, actual productive companies got to spread their risk while the investment firms were able to diversify their portfolios. It all worked so long as everybody paid up what they owed.
Except, of course we know now, it was a game of pass the parcel… or really it was musical chairs. My job was quite safe. Everyone in the office used quite high-tech packages, the latest computer equipment, but no one knew how they worked. I did and so I was always in demand. But the company eventually went broke.
It was just before the stock market crashed. No one, none of us, the regular drones had any idea what was going on until a few weeks before. It turned out the company itself was running on finance. Usually the Directors were hardly ever seen round the building. They started coming in more and more, making long and sometimes fraught sounding calls from their office. There was a parent company in New York, and a sister company in Frankfurt. By the end both were on the phone almost daily.
The Directors had been borrowing money from investors to cover running costs, including our wages. Debts mounted while the credit rating began to sink. The life support was turned off and the company simply died, like that. I still haven’t been paid my final month’s wages.
So I was one of the first to be laid off in the great wave of unemployment. I didn’t deserve it. I know that. But I can’t help feeling in some way I did. I didn’t dedicate myself to anything particularly useful. At least, I couldn’t say the people I worked for added anything to society.
There were a few nice people at work, pleasant folk, but I hated the general atmosphere there. The way senior staff would talk about people, about life in general was terrible. Sexist, racist, homophobic brutes, everybody who wasn’t them didn’t have an excuse, they were just useless scum.
Lots of people went along with it, laughed at their bosses’ jokes. I just kept my head down and tried not to stand out. I remembered, on my first day signing on, how the managers and directors used to talk about dole scroungers, filth to be washed away. I thought of myself as a liberal guy and used to cuss them, internally.
But, waiting to see my advisor, I sat and looked around and was surprised to see how young and normal looking a lot of the claimants were. They looked like interns, office juniors, smart young people who used to come to London for work, who passed through the office all the time. Even I used to look down on the unemployed.
I did work again after being laid off. I managed to find a few months temping here and there, as well as some cash-in-hand work, delivering papers. It was nothing like the good old days though. I had to make frequent trips to the jobcentre.
In the beginning it was fairly normal. As the illness set in life seemed to change. The government changed the rules so, you used to come in once a fortnight to get your book stamped, now you had to come in every week. There weren’t any new staff laid on or centres opened. Queues began to form.
Then it got round that dole offices were breeding grounds. Facemasks came in, then the random searches. I remember more than once people being whisked off the streets or getting yanked out of the dole queue. The police soon had regular checkpoints up and around town.
After about a month and a bit the agencies and gang masters started coming down to the dole offices, bold as brass, and started picking people out the queues and offering day work on great rates. I knew a few people who went with them, some actually got work, a lot simply got mugged or had their wages lifted.
Despite this there were a lot of desperate people. The gang masters arriving would always cause chaos and bad noise. The police did nothing. I remember getting very confused and upset by this. The first time I saw this I tried to remonstrate with a nearby officer, plead for him to intervene. He told me to go away then threatened to have me arrested.
The gang masters were usually well dressed. Sometimes if a guy or a group of guys happened to walk past and looked like a recruiter groups would head off after him, begging and, if he was on his own, threatening.
The other type of person you’d get was the rich kids, students, city folk and the like. There was a lot of anger and fear put about then. The papers were full of stories about the great unwashed, scroungers and mobs, Typhoid Mary’s draining the system. I heard about groups of kids in masks who’d come down to dole queues, GP offices and second hand stores anywhere where they’d likely find poor, sick people, and start throwing their weight around. I only saw it happen once. That was the time it kicked off.
A group of what looked like students (one of them I remember had a UCL rugby top on) came down to the queue. It was a Wednesday. I was due to sign. They didn’t have facemasks on, the kids, which was illegal by that point. Officially you had to wear them outdoors, in public spaces at all times. Generally though you wore it round you neck until you saw a police officer and then it was up quick.
The kids went up and down the queue. They said were looking for two people to clean their house. One of them, the leader it seemed, had a wedge of cash that he waived about. He went up to a few people in the queue, usually Black or Asian, and started recruiting them by putting fivers in their pocket.
No one wanted to take up the offer, it seemed. There was a bit of pushing and some staring down between people, tension but no violence. There was a bit of cursing and swearing from the kids before they gave up and started to walk off.
Someone then broke from the line. I turned to see three lads, they looked to be Somali to me, running off after the students. The students weren’t interested though, pushed them away and kept on walking. A few more people followed after them. Pretty soon the students were surrounded with people begging, they couldn’t escape. I turned away for a moment but then heard what sounded like one of the students yell, “f-off you f-ing p-s”, something like that.
Then there was a scream. I looked up. One of the Somali lads had fallen to the floor, clutching his chest. The students were off, heading down the road at top speed. It was clear the poor boy had been stabbed. Pretty much the whole queue ran over to help. Some chased off after the students.
About twenty seconds later half a dozen police cars and one van pulled up, officers started pouring out and arresting the crowd.
That’s how it started.
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