A fragmentation and unity of machines. Machines in individual locations, factories separated from one another, in competition to produce the means of life. The widespread standard of TCP/IP, proprietary software systems that cannot be integrated, producing replication and barriers to data sharing, oligarchic control of DNS servers, fibre optic networks. The lines of computing code work in cooperation and opposition.
A fragmentation and potential unity of people. Parts of urban England, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Rotherham, Maidstone, Newhaven, and many others, run down, dilapidated, crushed by a political indifference, exhausted people living in housing that would not be deemed fit for pigs and cattle. Landlords act without restraint, loan sharks and bailiffs demanding sexual favours in addition to escalating rates of interest.
A desperation, a miasma in the air, poverty traps. A poverty that corrodes the soul and leaves the spirit torn and ragged. An endless assault of rising prices, rising costs of living, unsympathetic and means testing state bureaucracy. And there in the distance, millionaire politicians, claiming to be for the poor, pushing their own agendas, dog whistling, finger pointing, scape goats, brought into a million living rooms through the television garbage of GB News, the uncontrolled and authoritarian rabble rousing of social media, the power of a tiny group of unelected individuals playing dangerous games with jet sprays of vitriol.
Cost cutting, government austerity, wage freezing, management bullying, daily indignations in the workplace. Endless repetition of mind numbing labour processes, constant pressure to work faster, an endless stream of management instructions which have to be obeyed. Obedience, repression; life force being turned into the cold harshness of alienation. The dominance of management ideas, anti-union atmospheres, the personal compromise of labour-selling.
Those who keep poking blood covered sticks into this shattered dream have no answers or solutions. But they see here a potential force, partly lumpen, partly broken, partly always for reaction, that will do their bidding, will help with their own self-enrichments and political advancements. All sorts of hidden interests have become involved, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, far-right ideologues funded by US billionaires; far right US billionaires themselves. Mass communications are global. The entry level is low, money buys immense amounts of social power. Dream-realities formed and washed away, rinsed, repeated cycle, a billion bytes and bits of pixelated content, 16 billion transistors on a single microchip, messages at almost the speed of light.
Into this gloom real figures appear; Farage, Trump, Putin, Musk, Mohammed bin Salman, Netanyahu, Orbán, Johnson, Truss. A global elite that must work hard to deny their own elitism. Media amplification, spam-and-thin bread ideologies. Johnson imagines he’s being funny with quips about water melon smiles and letterboxes, Teresa May introduces a hostile environment against people who are fleeing hostile environments she could never comprehend.
Farage has his pockets filled by secret hands. Someone puts a wad of notes in the top pocket of his best new suit. Whose hand is this? It is surrounded by haze and smoke. Another hand opens the jacket by the lapel and tucks a thick roll of money into the inside pocket. Whose hand was that? It’s quickly withdrawn before a witness statement can be recorded. Corrupted hands with filthy finger nails put more bundles of notes into the pockets on either side. But the lights fade before we see their faces. Farage is getting richer. Soon he’ll be selling shares in his hatred enterprise.
Musk pours petrol on the fires that an incoherent mob have started. Echoing conspi-racist theories of space lasers and deranged lizards. False gods, a new prophet of an old doom, the one the world heard once before in the concentration camps and murder blocks of the 1930s. Among Musk’s many weaknesses is that he has no knowledge of Ceaușescu’s final moments.
Musk fears the workers in the Tesla factories, the workers in the vast global networks of distribution, the port cities. Farage fears for his own money-value. His fortune’s now tied to the rise or fall of the hatred index.
Putin fears himself and dreads the probing questions of the psychiatrist. Trump fears the image he sees reflected in the mirror, he fears the day his mask will fall.
I’m walking along one of the main roads from the docks. A ferry is unloading. Articulated lorries built in the USA, Sweden, Brazil, China and Japan.
Drivers from Belarus, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Italy, Spain, England. When they have a moment they stand together on the beach, drinking beer, talking in a myriad languages, sharing stories and nostalgia of their homes and families. They all look the same. The same haircuts, the same clothes, the same trainers, the same way of standing. They drink beer in the same way, all the way from Warsaw to San Francisco and back again with everywhere in between, regardless of which way round the globe the theory and practice might move. The internationalisation of the worker phenomena creates an international workers idiom.
A few miles off the shore in the channel, car carriers, container ships, bulk carriers, tankers of oil and liquid natural gas. Crews from Ukraine, Russia, India, Bangladesh. A constant convoy of ferries to and from France, crews from Malaysia, Ireland and the Philippines.
A secret integration, part of the hidden transcripts which the followers of X don’t know.
In this landscape picture in front of me, a square mile or so of immediate visibility, a global workforce. It is both collective and in competition, simultaneously social and isolated, cooperative and atomised. Which way will it go?
The bloodied stick pokes and prods; fragmentation, division, faction, friction, hatred; of the poor against the poor. The price of hatred rises.
The kaleidoscope of history is turned more rapidly in such times. The sparkling and glittering fragments, an infinity of differences, are thrown into upheaval and confusion; for a moment they hang in the air, suspended for a long moment. Now they come together in a new formation, a dazzling pattern on the streets, of defiance, defence and unity.
Here is where the worm of change must live, for only underground in this rich soil can the seeds be planted that will grow into the harvest of the revolution.
Commodity Fetishism 
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