The Northern Crown

It was as if I had stepped through several measured years of time. From Lisson Grove in 1981 until now. As if it was a single step. If I was to make that step again, it would be in a different way. But I guess a lot of the shapes, colours, formations, informations and responses of the luxury senses would be the same.

I didn’t know anything about packet switching then. Or how fascism really started. I was surrounded by the accumulation and expansions of capital but the great topic of discussion revolved around an abstraction, turned into a moralistic and illusionary force; the working class. And people continually emphasising how working class they were. As if it mattered.

Those conversations are of a different time; time is not a force, only a measure. But somehow those conversations have atrophied. And capital has continued to accumulate and expand. The industrialisation and urbanisation of China has taken place. Some people have bored of proving their working class credentials and sit in swivel chairs, in offices, frustrated, empty and discontented with their middle manager lives.

If nothing else, reading Fourier in the 1980s would have saved so many people from becoming dis-disillusioned with illusions. Parts of Fourier are absurd, unpleasant, drenched with immense ego. Within his bold assertions are magical ideas and descriptions of a world that never was, but might have been, or perhaps will become.

The criticism is of the general and the specific. Of the full frontal presentation of ‘civilisation’ and what is imagined is hidden in the corners. It is all exposed. Fourier isn’t just the first to declare a total and complete opposition to the world of the bourgeoisie; he declares the life, social relations, material reality of the bourgeoisie to be a cruel absurdity. If the starting point is the commodity, and the commodity is a cruel absurdity, what then?

There is a sense that after reading Fourier it is impossible to look at the world again, in that safe lens, where everything fits and can be explained with categories of ‘logic’ and ‘discourse’ and ‘narrative’. Fourier with his quill pen and ink bottle takes on the whole world. He doesn’t win. He could not possibly beat the bourgeoisie in 1808 with the publication of the Theory of the Four Movements. But this is to miss the point. A great deal is achieved merely through the acts of opposition. Some of which may appear to be random.

Competition gets into the heads of everyone. Anthropological research suggests that ‘competition’ as an emotion, a state of being, a tension, simply did not exist in many, if not the majority, if not all pre-capitalist societies. Private property is unknown, cannot even be comprehended in some precapitalist societies. And yet now, here it sits, competition, somewhere inside the being of millions of people. Like an ulcer, burning them up inside and creating a sense of queasiness.

Productive relations of subjugation and coercion are not eternal states for all times and all places in human societies. The implications and impact of coercion and non-autonomy on productive workers seem to be less studied (and talked about) than sensational tropes which attract attention and anger in equal measure. The relationship between the subjugation and coercion of productive workers (and their dependants) and the inner life, consciousness, subconsciousness and everyday life are unclear.

Marx was a great student of reality, working with his wife Jenny and Friedrich Engels, in an attempt to create a literary style which could explain the multi-dimensional, contradictory, character of capitalist society.

It is the extraordinary characteristics of the commodity and of capital that Marx describes. It is here that he transcends being a sociologist or philosopher or economist. He does something that no-one had really done before or has done since. There isn’t really an -ism to describe that; and hence the loose and inaccurate and personalised term ‘Marxism’ is used. It would be clumsy, but more accurate to describe this as un-capital-ism.

Capital is at the core of this and Marx wrote much more about capital than he did about the working class. According to David Harvey he used the word capital much more than he used the word capitalism. I don’t remember that there was much discussion about capital in those endless conversations about the working class. That is a political issue of leadership. Leadership being a necessary function of a revolution.

Except, or because, or if; a revolutionary socialist leadership cannot be authoritarian, coercive dogma. Well, it can’t be if it’s really serious about a revolution.

Surely leadership is being an advocate; a suggestive person, someone who puts the interests of the working class first and foremost? That 90 percent of leadership is about listening? And not playing to an imagined gallery where the ghost of Lenin and Trotsky sit, but speaking to an audience where echoes of Lenin and Trotsky (and many others) might be found?

Not someone who orders and controls and demands obediance?

I wonder whether we are all now in a pre-revolutionary situation because a great deal appears to be stripped back. Now we look, closely, the number of revolutionaries is small. They are disorganised. But they are here. This is where the real revolutionary leadership is being cooked and baked. It’s hot, intense, but some survive the heat. Unknown, beneath the moralistic radars of so-called revolutionary parties.

By mistake I got out of the lift of a different office floor to the one I work in. It was confusing. The layout is exactly the same. The people looked vaguely familiar. These office environments are creating types, social phenomena, expressions of certain things. No one talks about capital at work in the Marxist sense. The term capital is used in relation to capital spending and revenue streams.

It seems a grand assumption to use the word ‘writer’. Is there a definition? This is clearly writing, but does this make me a writer? That is a social category rather than a description of a technical function? I sometimes vaguely think of myself as a writer but is this an ambition? Fourier argued that ambition was one of the four affective passions.

But I write. Not in the sense of ‘I must be at my desk at six o’clock in the morning’, or ‘I can only write in my writing room in the garden’ (ha ha ha – you should see where I live), or, ‘I aim for 1,000 words a day’. It doesn’t work like that at all for me. For days there is nothing. There are several ongoing research projects. At the moment these include good quality low cost housing, office blocks, luxury apartment development, the general history of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Without warning some writing happens. As now, on the train on the way home after a day at work. It hasn’t been planned, not even an inkling during the day. Except for a thought that lasted a moment or two this morning as I walked through the shopping centre. The word ‘demising’ had been encountered in an article in the Financial Times I read on the train. A communication from a large capitalist corporation to employees it was sacking. ‘We are dimising you’, the missive ran.

As I walked through the shopping centre to an anonymous office block, this word stuck with me. ‘Demising’. ‘Demystify’ came next, and then ‘demisting’. It appeared that the people who were opening up the shops and the security guards who were standing around in soul-crunching boredom, and the person in a red shirt who was pulling a large steel basket filled with boxes. They were all demising, de-misting, misting, vaporising. Low pay, tedium and boredom, aching legs from standing all day, the invisible whip of management emails and sarcastic remarks. The general ideology of retail, distribution and consumption.

Fourier described the five senses of touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste as the luxury passions. Are shopping centres and office blocks and privatised transport systems environments in which the luxury passions can be realised?

A meeting of union representatives at the Trades Council. The discussion was measured and in depth, covering the state of local union branches and the mood inside workplaces and industries in relation to the local and national disputes. It was full of what people were saying in specific workplaces, why one school had come out on strike and not another, what the mood was like among different sections, how the management have been behaving, what the threats and issues are. It was temperate and measured, and lacked much rhetoric, just a flourish here and there to keep the meeting going.

A sense of solidarity and camaraderie. Outside, the endless line of lorries, reefers, containers, flat bed trailers, driving to and from the port. A mighty force of workers. Organise.

Walking home in heavy rain, the streets flooding, neon light drowning in the pavement puddles, two young women, both carrying brightly coloured umbrellas, singing, ‘You were always on my mind’. Organise.

I measure out my shopping in the supermarket talking to the check out worker. It’s half past eight, another 30 minutes until the store closes and then longer until she’s finished her shift and finally got home. The conversation is about everything and nothing at all. It is saturated in elemental working class solidarity. Organise.

We’re repeating lines from a hundred years ago, over and over again. Is it in words and new sentences that the revolution will appear? Words have changed but the meaning is still the same. Is it to be a revolution in how we speak, what ideas we hold, new strategy and tactics? Where is this revolution, what will it look like, when will it be, how can it happen?

It is as if we are all trapped in some material that surrounds us, thick, cloying, but we cannot fight our way through it. Perhaps the revolution comes all at once, perhaps there isn’t enough preparation going on, perhaps it’s not preparation of the exact class of categories?

The rain falls more gently now. The big thick brush of grey colour is receding. Over the tops of the cliffs, a white light that cannot be penetrated, over towards the sea.

Towards the sea.

A nacreous sea along the south coast. A blue so light it can barely be discerned. It is more a wash of light. Where the horizon might be is a mist which both rises from the water and drops from the sky. There are no waves. The sea is so still and silent as if it is made of light blue mercury, a solid mass of polished quartz. The day feels as if there will be no night. That the sun is motionless in the sky. Planet earth will no longer be in orbit.

When will the Northern Crown appear?