A Funeral

Strange dreams; dreams are always strange.

In the English countryside, early November days, the medieval period comes alive once more. Here and there, cottages in the misty late afternoon. Low cut tress, copper hues, dried blood red, dark green tones as life fades from the summer leaves. Winter trees appear, dark shadows, the starkness of boughs and branches silhouetted against heavy layers of lead-grey clouds. The peasants are in the fields, the final gleaning before the soil hardens with ice and food becomes a privileged hope.

Everything is now sprayed with the outcome of the grotesque pantomime enacted with billion dollar funds in North America. Parliamentary democracy has never been the dominant norm throughout the world. Now the world wobbles like a jelly. The inane manic laughter of the far right with their skull like grins. As they bully their way into more power, their dreams of camps and liquidations grow stronger.

I’ve imposed a news embargo. What’s the point? Nothing is gained by immersion within this ghastly charade. I do not want to see or hear anything about billionaires who have bought immense political influence with money power. I know that governments are generally useless. It’s plain to see that what really happened in Amsterdam will never be accurately reported by the right wing media. They were chanting slogans about killing children and destroying schools. It’s becoming normalised, the movement towards hate. The hate rain will fall harder.

The news is generated by an auto-cue that can’t be switched off. The words are generated by the software machine, ironed out flat with bigotry and prejudice. At the core of all of this is the movement of capital, the accumulation of capital, the power of capital; but it doesn’t always make clear and obvious expressions. And the history of capital is only partially recorded.

For some of the left (not all, it’s a mistake to create a broad category of ‘the left’) a formula is written out. Here is the prescription, take five of these a day. A mechanical materialism of wages and interest rates and the cost of living and the number of strike days. There is little in much of this that addresses the psychology of masses of people, of the underlying philosophy of everyday life. There is a vague reference to the Spectacle without a sense of what this Spectacle might actually contain and how a revolutionary current could emerge within it.

Theories of alienation, of the mysteries of the commodity, of the general conditions of exploitation are over there, in the esoteric books, only to be read by the Masters of the Dialectic. There is a lack of study and practice into the arts of subversion in relation to the domination of commodity production and the commodity form.

Millions of people sitting at identical desks, in front of identical monitors and computers and keyboards. Filling in spreadsheets, thinking that they craft presentations, writing reports (some of which are essential to the process of production). All devices linked together with Transmission Control Protocols/ Internet Protocols. Packet switching, data packets moving almost at the speed of light. A global internet connected with copper wire, fibre optics, microwaves, radio transmission, DNS servers, satellites and sub-sea cables. Everything is monitored. Logging into systems, opening a file, changing a file, moving a file, deleting a file. Work instructions through flow systems, engineering schedules, architectural drawings, final as-builts, Gantt charts, project plans, Prince II, Oracle databases. Changing time, chasing money. Both are tightly controlled.

This is where the real mystification swirls around; but these should be among the objects of study. Alienation can be physically felt in the offices and factories and the warehouses and ships and lorries. But where are the proletarian poets to tear the words from their souls and mix those words into the pages of the Grundrisse that lie scattered on the ground, blowing in a cold wind through the streets? A million hands move as one. Ten million, one hundred million, swipe through controlled barriers and gates. The coercion and control of labour.

The grip of corporate power, technically proficient (in some ways), bureaucratically inefficient. Nepotism and injustice, coated with a thick choking paint of well-being and the stale fumes of management training sessions to tell us what we already know in a distorted form. The appropriation of the fight against injustice into something sugar-coated. It makes me feel sick.

The ennui of factory production, the soul of living people converted into plastic shapes, excess, meaningless, exhausting. The aching limbs and minds of the workers in the shopping centre retail. Everyone must now wear a label, a process of commodification of your life, of your inner life, or your soul. You will be flattened out, turned into a cubic box shape. It makes it easier to stack you up; transport costs will fall.

Profligate arbitrary individuality (a term I think first used by the German art critic Karl Scheller in the 1920s). A social type, a phenomena of personality; excessive, attention seeking (reflecting a key characteristic of the commodity-image-object), the personal brand, the seeking of an individuality that is crushed within the processes of production, consumption and distribution. The commodity-image-object is essentially meaningless, nothing more than the shape of capital-in-time, a particular form of consumption. Signifiers of use-value and exchange value. If a person is a commodity then their value will fall with the degradation of the currency. As a commodified human, the exchange value sucks out the life. A shell remains. A shell that shouts and screams and can be easily eliminated.

A red poppy dangles from the coat lapel of a woman who passes me in the crowd at Kings Cross Station. Even if production is ramped up now there will be a huge shortage in the aftermath of the next war. The speed of the world market is accelerating, the machines whirr faster, the loading time of the ships and trains must be decreased. There is a Balm in Gilead but it is being overwhelmed by the screaming of the false prophets. If this is a reflection of the Book of Revelation, at which paragraph have we arrived?

A giant poppy dominates Kings Cross station. Lest we Forget. Lest we Forget Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine; oh, I didn’t realise, these are the wrong sort of wars. ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right…’ I saw something in the media of a military bulldozer covered with the soft toys taken from the bedrooms of where the children once lived. Before their bedrooms where destroyed, along with their mums and dads and brothers and sisters and school books and hidden boxes where they keep the important trinkets that children collect. All gone. In high explosive bombs and rockets and fire. The rubble must be turned to dust and the dust blown out to the warm blue sea. It doesn’t look right. Perhaps if I see it and say it something will be sorted. I phone the government and try to explain but they slam the phone down.

The train from Kings Cross runs fast up through North London. I miss my house there. I look to see if the roof is visible but it’s gone. I wondered if my sleep dreams would be different. They are becoming increasingly dark.

In the countryside the cottages and hearths of the peasants and the villains have been replaced by poor quality houses of orange brick and orange roof tiles, full of orange colour people. Behind the lace curtains, fifty shades of madness. Capital concentrated in steel hulk warehouses. Inside these boxes high specification engineering; components for guided missiles and cluster bombs. The instruments of death, manufactured in the English countryside.

I was thinking of my friend a lot on the train journey. The first time we met was in the canteen where we both worked. He came across to the table, a look-a-like for David Thomas of Pere Ubu. A big coat, a big personality, a real presence. It is a rare for such magic to be conjured up in the realm of office life. He joined the revolutionary socialist movement. He was a good organiser and a talker to people. He had an astonishing honesty which a lot of people respected and wish to encounter more often. Revolutionary movements would do better if they absorb such stuff. It is better for the psychology of those involved and it improves the standard of politics. The world becomes more understandable. Of how flawed we all are, of what we fear, of what we hope for. The inner life comes out and surely that’s also a revolutionary process of sorts?

I was at the bar in the Samuel Pepys in Mare Street. Friday night. I always liked to go home first after work. Eat, sleep, change. Discard the working week, become free of wage-slavery. I was really hoping that he’d come in. We rarely arranged anything formal. The spontaneity and element of surprise were part of the fun.

It was just great, one of the best things, the quality without a name when he came through those curious double doors. Long black hair down to his waist. A yellow t-shirt with an unbuttoned blue denim shirt over it. Black baggy trousers. He was looking ruddy, smiling, pleased to see everyone and we were all pleased to see him.

By the time the evening finished it was so crowded I thought my feet would leave the ground. We became involved in other conversations. Standing in the corner with a beautiful girl all dressed in black leather, rings and chains, heavenly perfumed, laughing with bright red lips, so close we could have kissed. I wish I’d asked her.

The kaleidoscope of the crowd changed again, a discussion about the possibility that the speed of light is not constant over time. Someone stops me and asks if I can roll him a cigarette. He explains he’s a hunter-gatherer. He’s studying anthropology at University College London. Someone passes and tells me I look like John Lennon. A Polish girl with blonde hair who is always smartly dressed. I really like her but always become tongue-tied in her company and it feels like we talk about delayed buses rather than things that might spark us off. It’s a tough bar crew with a lot of back up among the freaks, drops outs and odd balls that crush into every available space. Some rowdiness, one of them leaps over the bar armed with a police truncheon. Someone in a bright shirt gives me some snuff. He’s a retired post-man and always comes down on a Friday night. The samba punk band Bloco Vomit are playing. I go to watch them. In between songs I’m having an entertaining chat with a famous actor in a television soap series. He’s good fun.

More people in the swirl, a bus driver from Ghana, a mathematician, a road sweeper, designers, drug dealers, artists, anti-fascist street fighters with proven record, office workers, drivers, a plumber with a dubious reputation. We’re back together again at the bar, so close in time and space and ideas and emotion and attraction. The night should never end. I wish it hadn’t ended. I wish I was back there in that time and space. I wish he was here with me now.

He moved away and we drifted apart over the rivers and seas. I hadn’t thought about him for a while. One afternoon I was playing Reel Around the Fountain on the guitar and for some reason it came into my imagination that we were once again in his kitchen and he was singing the words. It was a powerful memory picture. Later that day, I learned that he’d died.

The funeral was unbearably sad. We dressed the coffin and held on to it, not wanting to leave him. And then we stood in a circle holding hands and sang.

Remember to breath. Sometimes I forget.