Ask The Man Who Cuts the Golden Silk

The books are piling up as the time-sands of the working days trickle away through a giant hourglass. The pressure of the day job is easing. Only a day or two to go. I’ve been preparing for this over a couple of weeks now. Long evenings and weekends engrossed in volume one of Capital, Ludovico Silva’s Marx’s Literary Style and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I had a vague idea that there was a book of Walter Benjamin’s writings somewhere on the dozens of book shelves. I found it surprisingly quickly, Illuminations with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. I re-read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

The word, concept, idea, that created a line of thought of was aura in relation to a work of art. This concept of aura accompanied me on a walk along the shore. The light was bright and luminous, particles of gold that fell upon the waves as they pushed up to the grey-green concrete sea defences. The sea was creamy, playfully splashing back and forth and bubbling over the rusting stairs that lead from the promenade to the beach.

The idea of aura walked around with me in the supermarket. Christmas commodities piled up, festivities of the calendar of consumerism. The intrinsic waste built into the system of commodity – profit – production is once again revealed. Unwrapped presents, thrown away at the land fill site on Christmas day.

I explain to the woman on the till that I had a few beers in the pub last night and am feeling a little the worse for wear. She laughs from head to foot, ‘one more glass’, she says, holding her hand up, ‘why did I have it?’ She’s no longer a shop worker, she’s a mate on a night out.

A day or two later, at lunchtime, I go to a big department store to buy some gold silk cloth. A metre or so will do. I feel it’s physical quality. There is some sparkly gold cloth but that’s nearly four times the price.

I turn it over in my hands, watching how the light sparkles as it bounces off the tiny golden sequins. They flash light, cosmic glitter,a sparkle from the rays of the sun; a thousand light years away in all directions, what’s there? Out in space, but planet earth is in space too. It’s worth remembering that hard empirical fact. I will buy a couple of metres of the sparkling cloth in the new year. Hopefully it will be in the sale.

The man who cuts the cloth with a large pair of tailor’s scissors has dreadlocks, held back with a head band. ‘What do you want this for?’ he asks curiously.

‘As a background, I’m going to take photographs of other things on top of it. Probably books. And I have some red silk and I might cut up the gold and create a slogan’.

‘Like for a protest?’ he asks.

‘Yes, there’s a lot to protest about’.

He looks up and something sparks across that cutting table. Solidarity? It has to start somewhere.

These tit for tat conversation open up a lot of stuff.

He gives me a historical overview of the different types of textiles and patterns in west Africa and the Caribbean and how some of them came about. As he describes this he ceases to be a shop worker and comes alive.

I really need to go back to work but this is far more interesting, and indeed important. I relax and decide that I have all the time in the world. My body flops and I listen carefully to what he’s saying.

I don’t know how we start to talk about housing but he explains that he grew up in a one bedroom flat with his mum and dad and brothers and sisters.

‘And then we got a three bedroom flat and we thought that was fantastic’.

I tell him I’m planning a trip to Paris to look at the housing built in Suresnes by the socalist mayor Henri Sellier in the 1920s.

Even those words sound revolutionary. A socialist mayor pushing through the building of working class housing. I want to introduce Henri Sellier into the conversation. Not because of appearing clever. But because we must create a new socialist tradition. And that requires a history. Let’s look to the fantastic housing built in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, London and many other cities. Let’s use that as partial models of what is needed. Let’s celebrate the achievements of earlier waves and phases of socialism.

‘And it’s still standing and still used as housing. Proper working class housing’.

He pauses to take care to cut the cloth in a straight line.

‘Have you ever been to New York?’ he asks.

‘They have some good housing there’, he adds, ‘but some of it is terrible’.

‘That’s partly the difference between the European and north American traditions’ I suggest.

He folds the piece of cloth carefully. First in half, and then in half again. He smooths the cloth with his hand until he is satisfied with its appearance.

Another customer arrives and he leaves with her for another part of the floor. He raises his hand in a peaceful wave as he walks away.

I’ve started to re-read volume one of Das Capital. I read it some years ago and only gained the most vague ideas of the key arguements. Chunks have been read in the intervening period plus various commentaries. But this is different. I can’t explain it properly; partly because I don’t fully understand the ideas. But I am gaining flashing brilliant insights into the commodity, money, value, magnitudes of value and much else.

My understanding has changed from a rather one-dimensional and dry set of words into something that is multi-dimensional and isn’t really about a book. It’a about the totality of the world around me, the difficulties (and rewards) of being against everything, and how Marx is a philosopher of the reality of capital, the commodity and capitalist society, and of social reality itself.

The ideas move and shift like the sea. Here’s a line of waves that will hit the shore with a thud and then dissolve into a hiss of the backwash. The whole sea heaves. Off shore, large heavy, dull-coloured waves move with immense strength. A sunbeam bounces across the water in a million splashes of golden flares. There are unseen currents, only a few feet under the surface. How they will pull the sea apart is unknown but they are one of the forces to change the whole. This is how I’m beginning to see theories of capital.

On the train on the way to work I read Marx’s Literary Style by Ludivo Silva. I read it earlier this year and enjoyed it immensely. It’s the combination of Silva’s ideas and his literary style that make it such a pleasure. It complements Capital perfectly.

Another volume that’s arrived in my book orbit is The Arcades Project. I wasn’t sure about this. Indeed I ordered it and then cancelled the order an hour later. Do I really want to be reading Benjamin? I raised this with a couple of people who both said that he’s always rewarding to read; and one person said it’s worth reading his prose as if its poetry. Perhaps it was this encouragement that I needed.

I re-ordered the book and it arrived yesterday. As soon as I picked the parcel up from the Post Office I opened it with the edge of a key. I pulled it out of the box and flicked through a couple of pages while the person behind the counter pretended to be indifferent to what I was doing. A glance here, a flick through another fifty pages or so, the turning of another page. I knew, just knew, that this was the right decision and that this will not be a book to be read from cover to cover (when do I ever do that anyway?) but to be consulted on a regular basis. It’s not really one book; it’s its own self contained library, a collection of potential books in one volume.

Perhaps it’s reading all that Marx but the office looked different. Boxes of sweets on the tables and the cabinets at the ends of rows of desks. There’s a Christmas tree and cards and bits of tinsel. Packets of snacks have been opened and people help themselves as they walk past. There are only two orange chocolates left in a clear plastic tray. They were once part of a much bigger collection.

Bright white neon light. People wearing all-in-one headphone and microphone pieces staring at talking heads displayed on monitors. A map of London has been printed in full colour and lies next to a guillotine which has been used to trim its size. This is the world of work and all that it represents and it is rarely fully captured. Where are the new poets of the proletariat?

Then there’s a presentation. Someone is leaving. Everyone gathers round. For a few moments the relations of production are suspended. People sit at their desks, swivelling their chairs round to be part. Some are leaning on the white painted walls, others have arms folded on various tables and pieces of MDF furniture. For a moment we are a collective; the sense of atomisation negated.

The instruments of production are still; unable to move without human agency. Keyboards, monitors, laptops, computers all silent, unable to travel even an inch or two on their own. Their seeming ‘life’ ends as soon as the human muscles, brains, nervous systems, fingers, limbs, consciousness, luxury senses, move away. They are again just pieces of plastic with copper wires and silican chips.

The presentation ends, a round of applause. We go back to our desks.

Out across London, red lights on the tower cranes, the white light through a million office windows. A long train moving slowly from the east – perhaps the port of Felixstowe. It is a collection of containers of the global shipping and distribution firms with their logos painted on the sides; Maersk, CosCo, China Shipping, OOCL, Hamburg Sud.

Just in time component parts of the car industries of the west Midlands. Thousands of iPads and smartphones. Jeans, trainers, shoes, woollen jumpers, dinner plates, raincoats, precision manufactured pieces for aircraft engines, packaged pleasures, can and tins and boxes.

Further east, war in Ukraine grinds to a muddy bloody stalement. South of this conflict the continuation of war crimes in Gaza by the Israeli army. Bombing hospitals, stripping prisoners, preventing aid and medicine.

I was walking to the shops a couple of days ago and heard someone calling my name. A friend and near neighbour was sweeping the steps outside her house she was waving to attract my attention. It was lovely to see her. We stopped and chatted.

She became quiet and serious and explained that she is haunted by an image of girl covered in blood and dust and grime, crying, held in the arms of a man who is asking for help, his face despair. Israeli bombs, made in the USA, continue to hit the hospital where they seek safety and medical help. Is the world such a place now that these things happen? Any decent person is haunted by these images. There amongst the Christmas glitter, the horror.

The Chinese economy is slowly down. Enormous stresses and strains as the property developers of Evergrande and Country Garden are unable to pay their debts. A potential collapse of land values, the destruction of formations of capital, a crisis of confidence in money and gold. Here we go again. The capitalist crisis for which they will seek to make us pay in filthy trenches and bombed out cities.

In the 50,000 factories of the Pearl River Delta, in the accumulations of workers in the Foxconn fabrication plants, in the automobile industries of North and South America, with the construction, oil workers and technical workers of the middle east; there lies immense potential power.

Weaving cloth, harvesting crops, smelting metals, joining wires together to create information systems, laying brick upon brick and fitting panels to steel frames, pressing the button that starts the train, the key that starts the lorry engine, the bringing into motion the powerful engines of a ships. Taking the scissors and cutting a fine straight line through the textiles.

That’s what the man who cuts the golden silk is part of.