Gateways

A Bulgarian shopkeeper who gave me a box to recycle paper, a physiotherapist from Kerala who described the history of the Communist Party there, a Rumanian woman on the street who explained she has always worked and paid her taxes and doesn’t care much for the way some people go on about immigrants, an African bus driver who informed me I was at the wrong stop, but if I jumped on his bus, he’d take me round the corner for free to where I needed to be, a delivery driver from Poland who told me he speaks three European languages fluently, a Filipino woman carefully and thoroughly washing the floor of the A&E department where I spent 14 hours waiting to be seen.

These are gateways, introductions to the global division of labour and it’s all around us; in cities, towns and villages, in the local shops, on public transport systems, throughout the health service, in offices and factories, on the agricultural land, at construction sites and universities. Abstract labour is universal and there is no separation of raw labour power into race, gender, sexual orientation, political, religious or philosophical beliefs.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a guide; this car has 35 percent labour from China, 35 percent labour from Africa, 10 percent labour from Eastern Europe and 20 percent labour from South America. There could be further overviews. 20 percent of the labour describes itself as Catholic, 30 percent as Muslim, 40 percent as atheist and 10 percent as other. 70 percent of the labour describes itself as left or centre-left politically and thirty percent as conservative or right. If these guides were applied to all commodity production we’d have a better idea of what’s really going on.

Travelling to France on the ferry never feels like international travel. It’s just over the water of the Narrow Seas and can be clearly seen on a bright day. I walk to the ferry terminal aware that I must be there 90 minutes before departure I am chided for arriving at 92 minutes before departure time and that I only have ‘two minutes to spare’. Passports are now endlessly checked despite the immense technical advances of the past 30 years. But it’s not technology that’s the issue here; it’s state control, and state repression.

As the bus takes us to the ship we pass concrete faced military police, border control, local police, port police, port workers in high viz orange jackets and trousers; they alway move deliberately, at the speed of the slow rising and falling of the tides. Our passports are scanned and the images and numbers matched against the databases of the secret state, monitoring, controlling, watching, tracking, recording. A well-built seafarer takes my suitcase off the bus. I’m getting old, but assistance for this condition is sporadic and uneven.

I’m one of the first people on board and look around for somewhere to sit, on the edge of the crowd, in a corner, half out of sight. One of the ship’s officers comes over to say ‘good morning’ and we chat about holidays and the state of the town and several other topics in-between He tells me that the ship was built in China and that he spent three months there watching it being created.

‘What are the Chinese shipyards like?’ I ask him

‘Big, really big, and security everywhere, you’re checked in and out all the time, not allowed to take photos or take your phone out’

The ship is built with a large proportion of Chinese labour. Perhaps 70 percent? The raw materials will include metals and ores and minerals from the global raw materials markets. Somewhere there will be an inventory of procurement and that inventory would make interesting reading. It would describe how a global division of labour is in operation. I sit in the lounge by the window imagining the ship half built, full of workers welding, riviting, following precise instructions, having their worked checked for snags and defects, the cold days of winter in the shipyards, hot sun, when the days won’t end.

The officer tells me that once the ship had been completed, it was sailed to Britain through the China Seas, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal the Mediterranean and then into the Channel.

When you travel slowly as a foot passenger you slowly discover a little of the stories of the other people without cars. A French man who is on a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Roma. He started yesterday and walked from Canterbury, across the Downs to Dover. He told me that he had been very ill a year ago and it made him reconsider life. He retired. And now he enjoys each day and the small events that make up the day. The cups of tea, the casual conversations in the street, the intimacy of talking to close friends, feeling the ground under each feet, standing on the earth and looking at the sky and the moving clouds.

When we’re dropped off at the terminal in Calais we wait for the Baladin bus to take us to the town. The French port worker wears blue-black boots and a smart uniform. Her blond hair blows across her face. She speaks to me and the pilgrim in English even when he keeps telling her that he’s French. She just smiles at him and then she smiles at me and we all laugh and no-one can remember what she was trying to explain in the first place. It’s like arriving somewhere on a bus and being greeted by Marianne Faithful.

At the station I bought a ticket to Paris and then walked around Calais for half an hour and bought a baguette, cheese and a large iced bun. The woman serving up this fare gives me a big thumbs up when I manage the whole transaction in French. She speaks with the deep, growling local accent. There are no violins or flutes in the tones, everything is double bass and kettle drums. I should like to live in Calais for a few months and learn this particular version of French and find out what makes the people tick and discover if they might reveal their secrets and then I could write a book about it all; the modern Balzac. But for now, I must take the train to the capital.

And so I’m on the Friday afternoon train to Paris. I should have thought. It’s full of other people going there too. And at each stop, Boulogne, Etaples, Abbeville, Amiens, more people get on than leave.

Two young women sit opposite me and spend some time taking things out of a big yellow bag, arranging them on the table and then putting some things back. By the time they finish there are four or five novels laid out, a laptop, a notebook, a pen, a mobile phone. One of the books is by Milan Kundera but I can’t make out the title. A man gets on at one of the stations and sits across the aisle. It’s only when we hear the sound of meowing that we realise he is carrying a cat in a black basket. The cat presses its face up against the cage that keeps it held in check. We all look at it. It meows again. We stare at it a little longer. The cat gets bored with annoying us and goes to sleep.

Through the lush green countryside. It’s as if overnight the chestnut trees have come to life again, growing enormous leaves and sprays of creamy flowers. Hawthorn is a particular signifier of spring and the unfolding of the world into the summer. It was once a tradition to decorate the home with hawthorn on the first of May and there are still beliefs in England that the hawthorn must not be harmed.

The train passes through villages and small towns and farms scattered over the rolling hill countryside. Freshly ploughed and harrowed fields, flooded meadows, dense clusters of what might be just about the last remnants of the northern European rainforests; bursting with ideas that stand defiantly outside the relentless expansion of capital and commodification of the soul.

My plan in Paris is to study The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and as preparation I’ve been reading Marshall Berman’s commentaries, a collection of essays brought together in Adventures in Marxism. They are lovely and generously intellectual pieces to read. Berman has chutzpah and a joyous enthusiasm, a non-doctrinaire approach, a scholarly accessibility. He brings Marx so alive that his words dance about all around you, with a pulsating vibrancy that is full of dazzling colours and won’t-sit-still ideas.

He wrenches Marx’s concepts away from the stuffy do-by-me interpreters and ties them to explosive fireworks. The idea of ‘development’ is no longer some dry dirge in an economics text book; it becomes the development of the individual in a dialectical relationship with the communal, the communitarian, the communistic. It is about human development, our human development, social human development. Not in some life-style meditating-in-a-retreat type way, but the unleashing of our individual potential and the potential of the whole world.

Berman explores what Marx meant by wealth. Not a collection of ridiculous things; a golden toilet seat, a bloated SUV, a thousand pairs of shoes, a dozen luxury apartments, none of which are lived in. Wealth for Marx is about human life, the passion and enjoyment of the senses (including consciousness), the unbearable lightness of being, the feeling of being alive. The world in Berman’s hands positively starts to fizz with revolutionary potential and in that sense, Berman more than many other people really brings Marx alive.

Revolutions take different forms. There are constant revolutions in the means of production, but that doesn’t affect most of us day to day. Few on the left could say much about the re-tooling of the global car industries or developments in making microchips. There are political revolutions but most of us don’t experience that sort of thing, most of the time.

What Marx did, and Berman reminds us, is to see how the revolutionary dynamics that capitalism create are all around us in daily life, both the destructive and constructive forces. And we can learn and develop ways of seeing that will help us stand outside and above the drab and dreary oppressions of capitalist ideology, to see it as if we were observing something deep in space. That our commentary can be developed, and with that the wealth of our ideas.

The train is running through the outer suburbs of Paris. Huge sheds where trains are cleaned and maintained, the TGV maintenance workshops. A fierce industrial pride of a thousand working lives. The tower cranes of the construction sites, the warehouses full of goods and packages, the office blocks of La Defense, the factories and the luxury goods workshops, the fashion houses, the shopping centres and the museums and art galleries. We’re slowing down. The women opposite me are packing everything back into the yellow bag. The cat pretends to look indifferent but is secretly very pleased to be coming back to Paris. It meows once again just to let us know its there.

Everyone is getting off the train at once, a big collection of people, each a gateway to another world. The Bulgarian shop keeper is coming to Paris to see a friend, the African bus driver has a ticket burning in his pocket to a party, the Romanian woman I met in the street is going to do some shopping in the Galerie Lafayette. The Polish delivery driver is feeling alive in a smart new suit and city shoes. A small child runs towards the Filipino woman with her arms wide open and a face full of laughter and love and joy. Through the crowds on the platform I see my friend from Kerala. We link arms and walk out of the Gare du Nord. To join the Revolution.

The next Radical Walk is on Thursday 16th May, Canary Wharf & Marx’s Literary Style